Blue Grass Warrior
1
Zigzag Master
2
Tipperary Birdcatcher
3
Royal Traveler
4
Barrister
5
Comfort
6
The betting was scrambled for the second heat, Comfort and Barrister withdrawn by their owners. Grooms started their rubdowns of the horses as soon as they left the track, and a keen-eyed steward, by chance and nothing more, noted that a long white marking in Zigzag’s nose had taken a shape different from what it had been at the start of the race; whereupon the overheated animal was examined and found to have been dyed. Under interrogation, owner Abner Swett professed ignorance. But it was quickly learned he was the brother-in-law of Jeremiah Plum, the patriarch of the notorious Plum family, which was famed throughout northeast Christendom for dyeing stolen horses to prevent them from being identified and reclaimed. Before the day was out we would all learn that Zigzag’s record had been fabricated as well, that his true name was Wild Pilgrim, and that he was a four-year-old with so many victories that he would have been at least a co-favorite (at much lower and less profitable odds) with the Traveler or the Warrior had his true history been known. The Pilgrim had beaten the Traveler twice, and so only Maud’s Warrior was feared as his competitor on this sunbright noonday, which was why John’s investigation into the doping of the Warrior focused on Abner Swett of Watervliet, a man of irregular values.
As the horses were about to enter the track for the second heat, a carriage drawn by a single horse, and another horse and rider behind it, came onto the track from a gate at the top of the stretch, and at moderately high speed they approached the finish line, there slowing enough for the crowd to view them in full detail. In the carriage, an old demi-landau gilded like Obadiah’s masterwork, and with the letters M.C. painted on the door, rode a Negro wearing women’s clothing, including an unmistakable copy of Magdalena’s hat with a scarlet plume rising from it, the plume and the Negro waving to the crowd as they passed. Behind him, clad only in long white underwear and a woman’s red wig, and riding backward and belly-up in the pose well known to multitudes from newspaper advertisements and theater posters-Maud as Mazeppa — rode another Negro, who also waved at the crowd and showed them his backside, to which was pinned a large green shamrock. Then, with a trick rider’s expertise, he righted himself, and the two Negroes galloped down the track and out the gate by the far turn before anyone had the wit to stop them.
In the upper gallery, while the crowd exploded with laughter, Magdalena fell unconscious in Quinn’s arms.
Soon after the mockery of Maud and Magdalena, the second heat of the Griswold Stakes was run. Three horses were entered: Blue Grass Warrior, Tipperary Birdcatcher, and Royal Traveler. They finished in that order, the Warrior winning by a length, the Traveler a far third. After crossing the finish line, Maud’s horse stepped into a hole in what seemed like a perfectly smooth section of the track, twisted its left foreleg, and broke it. The jockey pulled him up and the Warrior stood with his leg bent and dangling. Track handlers went to him and wrestled him down onto his side atop a tarpaulin; then they strapped him into the tarp and dragged him away. After discussing the matter with Maud, John McGee went to the barn where they had taken the Warrior and personally fired two bullets into the animal’s brain.
QUINN AGAIN PERCEIVED inevitable death in the dangling leg of Blue Grass Warrior, just as he had seen it in 1863 during the second day of a week of violence now known as the New York Draft Riots. Rioting was entering into a crescendo on that day as Quinn and John McGee turned a corner onto Ninth Avenue, heading for the house where Joshua was waiting out the riots with another man, a newly arrived fugitive slave.
Quinn himself had arrived only a week earlier, back from the battle of Vicksburg to write his personal tale of that ordeal, and having done that, he rested, sipping lager and communing with other ink-stained wretches at Charlie Pfaff’s Cave at Printing House Square about the nuances of war correspondency, literature, and Charlie’s German pancakes. Quinn’s time spent with the lower orders at the Five Points worked against his need for rest, and a doughty Tribune editor tracked him down and assigned him to roam the Five and assess the rampant resentment to the draft, the first list of conscripts having just been released by the federal government.
In the Five Points and other like slums of the metropolis there was all but solid opposition to the war and to the race of people whose plight had brought it about. Also in the Five Points, Quinn found that the Copperhead politicians, great friends all of John McGee, were viewed as heroic figures. Denizens of the Five, “outscourings of humanity, the dregs of Europe” commonly called, abided in harmonious squalor with the city’s criminal element, and numbered, in all, perhaps eighty thousand in a city of eight hundred thousand, a statistic with wicked potential.
Given the normal antisocial elements of such a group, its antipathy to the war and to the government waging it, given its natural thirst for vengeance, the balance of social madness, in retrospect, can be viewed as easily tippable with the imposition of a hateful law. Such was the conscription law, drafting men for the first time (volunteers and bounty seekers had heretofore sustained the army’s needs), but exempting from service anyone able to pay the government three hundred dollars. We need not elaborate on the crystalline injustice of this to the poor man in general, and in particular to the poor Irishman (a quarter of the entire city was Irish), mired in generational denial and humiliation as he was, and for whom free Negroes meant a swarm of competitors for the already insufficient jobs at the bottom of the world.
And so in the heat of a midsummer weekend in July 1863, while Lee was licking his wounds from Gettysburg, the first polymorphic mob, estimated at ten thousand, drank itself into a frenzy in the greengroceries, the dance halls, and the dives of its choice, then took to the streets with baleful intent: Burn the draft office, burn the Tribune, that abolitionist rag, and pillage and destroy all that is not of us.
John and I found that mob as we turned the corner onto Ninth Avenue. The screaming that greeted us was horrendous, a battle already engaged between fifty policemen and the uncountable rioters who, in this moment, were led by a gigantic bare-chested, one-armed man, and at his side a young man I’d seen haranguing a crowd at the Five Points two days earlier. I remembered him at that time screaming anti-Negro invective at a crowd, urging rebellion, riot, revolution, no draft, and concluding with huzzahs for Jefferson Davis.
This younger man now fought like a pit bull, felling policemen with his club and with the force of his rage; and beside him the giant flailed outward with his enormous bludgeon, an extension of his Herculean right arm, cracking heads and backs with a vehemence, his own head and body remarkably invulnerable to clubbings by police truncheons.
The mob moved relentlessly forward, the police valiant but unequal, routed and forced to flee for their lives as we watched. I do not know how they found Joshua’s house. Perhaps they saw a Negro face in a window, or perhaps a neighbor was aware that Joshua had been there in recent days. But they singled out the house, beat open its doors, and swarmed inside.
“If he’s still in there, he’s dead,” said John.
The howling of the mob grew fiercer, more shrill, a wordless yawp of animal frenzy, the mob hearts all linked now in a single feral pulsebeat as they sensed a quarry and a kill. And then, from a second-story window in the house, a man screamed in triumph words I could not understand, but the mob could, and it responded with a roar. The man gave a signal and the mob obeyed. It moved backward into the street and was rewarded with a Negro (not Joshua) being pitched headfirst out the window, whereupon the mob closed in over him and I saw no more of what was done.