Dennis Lehane
The given day
for Angie,
my home
When Jesus comes a calling, she said,
He’s coming ’round the mountain on a train.
Cast of characters
Luther Laurence — houseman, athlete
Lila Waters Laurence — Luther’s wife
Aiden “Danny” Coughlin — Boston police officer
Captain Thomas Coughlin — Danny’s father
Connor Coughlin — Danny’s brother, assistant district attorney, Suffolk County
Joe Coughlin — Danny’s youngest brother
Ellen Coughlin — Danny’s mother
Lieutenant Eddie McKenna — Danny’s godfather
Nora O’Shea — domestic help for the Coughlin household
Avery Wallace — domestic help for the Coughlin household
Babe Ruth — baseball player, Boston Red Sox
Stuffy McInnis — Ruth’s teammate
Johnny Igoe — Ruth’s agent
Harry Frazee — owner, Boston Red Sox
Steve Coyle — Danny Coughlin’s patrol partner
Claude Mesplede — alderman of the Sixth Ward
Patrick Donnegan — boss of the Sixth Ward
Isaiah and Yvette Giddreaux — heads of Boston chapter of the NAACP
“Old” Byron Jackson — head of the bellmen’s union, Hotel Tulsa
Deacon Skinner Broscious — gangster, Tulsa
Dandy and Smoke — enforcers for Deacon Broscious
Clarence Jessup “Jessie” Tell — numbers runner, Luther’s friend, Tulsa
Clayton Tomes — houseman, friend of Luther’s, Boston
Mrs. DiMassi — Danny Coughlin’s landlady
Frederico and Tessa Abruzze — Danny’s neighbors
Louis Fraina — head of the Lettish Workingman’s Society
Mark Denton — Boston Police Department patrolman, union organizer
Rayme Finch — agent, Bureau of Investigation
John Hoover — lawyer, Department of Justice
Samuel Gompers — president of the American Federation of Labor
Andrew J. Peters — mayor of Boston
Calvin Coolidge — governor of Massachusetts
Stephen O’Meara — Boston police commissioner until December 1918
Edwin Upton Curtis — O’Meara’s successor as Boston police commissioner
Mitchell Palmer — attorney general of the United States
James Jackson Storrow — Boston power broker, former president of General Motors
Babe Ruth in Ohio
Prologue
Due to travel restrictions placed on major league baseball by the War Department, the World Series of 1918 was played in September and split into two home stands. The Chicago Cubs hosted the first three games, with the final four to be held in Boston. On September 7, after the Cubs dropped game three, the two teams boarded a Michigan Central train together to embark on the twenty-seven-hour trip, and Babe Ruth got drunk and started stealing hats.
They’d had to pour him onto the train in the first place. After the game, he’d gone to a house a few blocks east of Wabash where a man could find a game of cards, a steady supply of liquor, and a woman or two, and if Stuffy McInnis hadn’t known where to look for him, he would have missed the trip home.
As it was, he puked off the rear of the caboose as the train chugged out of Central Station at a little after eight in the evening and wound its way past the stockyards. The air was woolen with smoke and the stench of butchered cattle, and Ruth was damned if he could find a star in the black sky. He took a pull from his flask and rinsed the vomit from his mouth with a gargle of rye and spit it over the iron rail and watched the spangle of Chicago’s skyline rise before him as he slid away from it. As he often did when he left a place and his body was leaden with booze, he felt fat and orphaned.
He drank some more rye. At twenty-three, he was finally becoming one of the more feared hitters in the league. In a year when home runs in the American League had totaled ninety-six, Ruth had accounted for eleven. Damn near 12 percent. Even if someone took into account the three-week slump he’d suffered in June, pitchers had started to treat him with respect. Opposing hitters, too, because Ruth had pitched the Sox to thirteen wins that season. He’d also started fifty-nine games in left and thirteen at first.
Couldn’t hit lefties, though. That was the knock on him. Even when every roster had been stripped to its shells by the players who’d enlisted in the war, Ruth had a weakness that opposing managers had begun to exploit.
Fuck ’em.
He said it to the wind and took another hit from his flask, a gift from Harry Frazee, the team owner. Ruth had left the team in July. Went to play for the Chester Shipyards team in Pennsylvania because Coach Barrow valued Ruth’s pitching arm far more than his bat, and Ruth was tired of pitching. You threw a strikeout, you got applause. You hit a home run, you got mass eruption. Problem was, the Chester Shipyards preferred his pitching, too. When Frazee threatened them with a lawsuit, Chester Shipyards shipped Ruth back.
Frazee had met the train and escorted Ruth to the backseat of his Rauch & Lang Electric Opera Coupe. It was maroon with black trim and Ruth was always amazed by how you could see your reflection in the steel no matter the weather or time of day. He asked Frazee what it cost, a buggy like this, and Frazee idly fondled the gray upholstery as his driver pulled onto Atlantic Avenue. “More than you, Mr. Ruth,” he said and handed Ruth the flask.
The inscription etched into the pewter read:
RUTH, G. H.
CHESTER, Penna.
7/1/18 — 7/7/18
He fingered it now and took another swig, and the greasy odor of cows’ blood mixed with the metallic smell of factory towns and warm train tracks. I am Babe Ruth, he wanted to shout off the train. And when I’m not drunk and alone at the back of a caboose, I am someone to be reckoned with. A cog in the wheel, yes, and you bet I know it, but a diamond-crusted cog. The cog of cogs. Someday …
Ruth raised his flask and toasted Harry Frazee and all the Harry Frazees of the world with a string of lewd epithets and a bright smile. Then he took a swig and it went to his eyelids and tugged them downward.
“I’m going to sleep, you old whore,” Ruth whispered to the night, to the skyline, to the smell of butchered meat. To the dark midwestern fields that lay ahead. To every ashen mill town between here and Governor’s Square. To the smoky starless sky.
He stumbled into the stateroom he shared with Jones, Scott, and McInnis, and when he woke at six in the morning, still fully clothed, he was in Ohio. He ate breakfast in the dining car and drank two pots of coffee and watched the smoke pour from the stacks in the foundries and steel mills that squatted in the black hills. His head ached and he added a couple of drops from his flask to his coffee cup and his head didn’t ache anymore. He played canasta for a while with Everett Scott, and then the train made a long stop in Summerford, another mill town, and they stretched their legs in a field just beyond the station, and that’s when he first heard of a strike.
It was Harry Hooper, the Sox team captain and right fielder, and second baseman Dave Shean talking to the Cubs’ left fielder Leslie Mann and catcher Bill Killefer. McInnis said the four of them had been thick as thieves the whole trip.
“’Bout what?” Ruth said, not really sure he cared.
“Don’t know,” Stuffy said. “Muffing flies for a price, you think? Tanking?”
Hooper crossed the field to them.
“We’re going to strike, boys.”