Uncle took me with him to the toy store, where I helped select an express wagon, with tin rims, front wheels that turned this way and that, and the name, “Champion,” in red letters on its sides. Uncle rode me home in it, and seemed to enjoy the drag it gave him up hill. “There,” he whispered when we reached our door, “don’t tell your aunt that I rode you. She might not like it, Al, lad!”
The next morning Pat and Tim called at the house for me. They had been generously kept at home that day to show me their “pickings.” I felt a trifle puffed up over the gaudy appearance of my new wagon, for my companions’ was a crude, deep box with odd baby-carriage wheels, and it was named, by a black smudged tar sign, “The Shamrock.” But I did not long exult, for Tim, a little undersized fellow of fourteen, said, manfully, “Now, Priddy, if we shows yer things, yer got to divvy up, see!”
“What?” I asked.
“Got to square up,” he said, and with no more ado he placed himself in my new wagon. When we were out of sight of the house, Pat gave him the handle of “The Shamrock,” and placed himself in the depths of that dilapidated wagon, and I was told to “Drawr us. Yer th’ hoss. See?”
So Pat and Tim took me to the “pickings.” In our excursions we visited buildings that were in the process of reshingling, when we piled our wagons to abnormal heights with the dry, mossy old ones. We went on the trail of fires, where we poked among the fallen timbers for half-burnt sticks. There were skirmishes in the vicinity of coal-yards, at the rear of the sheds, where, through breaks and large, yawning cracks, pieces of coal sometimes dropped through. We scouted on the trail of coal wagons through cobbled, jolt streets, and managed to pick up what they lost. We adventured on dangerous spurs of railroad track, on marshy cinder dumps outside mill fences, and to the city dumping-grounds for loads of cinders, coal, and wood.
After a washing rainstorm, in the night, my aunt would say, “Now, Al, there’s been a good rain, and it must have washed the dust off the clinkers and cinders so that you might get a good bagful of cinders. You’d best go before someone else gets ahead of you.” True enough, I would find them in the ash heaps, as black as seeds in a watermelon, the half-burnt coals, which I loaded in my bushel bag and carried home in my wagon at five cents a load. If I returned with my bag empty, there was always some drastic form of punishment given me.
Pat and Tim Led Me to the Charles Street Dumping Ground—Which
Was the Neighborhood Gehenna
Life on the city dumping-grounds was generally a return to the survival of the fittest. There was exemplified poverty in its ugliest aspect. The Charles street dumps were miniature Alps of dusty rubbish rising out of the slimy ooze of a pestiferous and stagnant swamp, in which slinking, monstrous rats burrowed, where clammy bullfrogs gulped, over which poisonous flies hummed on summer days, and from which arose an overpowering, gassy nauseation. On a windy day, the air was filled by a whirling, odorous dust of ashes. It stirred every heap of rubbish into a pungent mass of rot. When the Irishmen brought the two-horse dump-carts, and swung their load on the heap, every dump-picker was sure to be smothered in a cloud of choking dust, as sticks, hoes, rakes, and fingers, in mad competition, sought whatever prize of rag, bottle, wood, or cinder came in sight. This was the neighborhood Gehenna, in which the Portuguese, Irish, and Polish dwellers thereabouts flung all that was filthy, spoiled, and odorous, whether empty cans, ancient fruit and vegetables, rats from traps, or the corpses of pet animals or birds.
Pat, Tim, and I, in our search for fuel, met quite a cosmopolitan life on those ash-hills. There they were, up to their knees in filth, digging in desperation and competition, with hungry looks and hoarse, selfish growls, like a wolf pack rooting in a carcass: the old Jew, with his hand-cart, the Frenchwoman, with her two-year old girl; the Portuguese girls and the Irish lads, the English and the American pickers, all in strife, clannish, jealous, pugilistic, and never free from the strain of tragedy. Pat and Tim could hold their own, as they were well-trained street fighters.