The Powder Monkey

There was something stirring him from sleep. It was something mingling with the warm, June breeze coming through his bedroom window. It was his mother. It was the scent of lilac from the soap his mother had always used in her bath. It roused him to semi-consciousness and he stretched and squirmed on the soft, eiderdown mattress while his mind reconciled the lilac with something else in the pit of his stomach: his mother was dead. Dead from the ravages of "The Fever" that had swept the Point toward the end of last summer, when the marshes surrounding the Point stagnated and provided a stench singular to tidewater areas. But, this sweet, flowery odor was comforting to Michael Dooley, Jr. As he opened his eyes, it quelled the sinking feeling in his stomach and brought a smile to his lips.

The peal of St. Patrick's burst into his ears and welcomed the new day. It was exactly six o'clock and time to pray. Ever since the 25th of March, the Annunciation, old Archbishop Carroll had requested the people of Baltimore to pray the Angelus. Years before, when the country first broke free from England, Bishop Carroll had declared the United States under the protection of the Blessed Virgin; and now, the aging shepherd, sensing conflict with England again, was reminding Our Lady of the special compact. Father John Francis Moranvillé, the French-born pastor of St. Patrick's, gave particular instructions at last Sunday's Mass that the Angelus would be said fervently throughout the Point. He was looking directly at Michael when he had given those instructions from the pulpit. Michael plopped onto his knees.

"The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary..."

It wasn't the hard, cool planks of his bedroom floor against his skinny, knobby knees that turned his attention away from the prayer his lips were forming, but the prospects of the day. First, breakfast. Before his mother died, Father John had sent a young girl to help with domestic chores in the Dooley house. She would arrive shortly after lifting her knobby, thirteen-year-old knees off the hardwood floor of St. Patrick's Free School, where, as an orphan, she had lived since losing her parents to an earlier fever epidemic. Her name is Jessica Farmer. Her father was a caulker and her mother a seamstress. Father John had taken care of her ever since with the help of a strident group of women known as the St. Patrick's Benevolent Society. The society, in which Michael's mother, Teresa, was prominent, raised funds for the orphanage and free school.

Jessica, along with having a quick mind for study, also had quick feet. Michael heard her enter the unlatched door into the house and scamper across the living room into the kitchen, and then out the back door to the chicken coop. An abrupt cackle signaled that she had succeeded in pushing over a hen's bottom to snatch two warm, fresh eggs underneath. Jessica had prayed her Angelus fervently for she was a mature, serious girl. Then she had run the five blocks from the orphanage on Apple Alley to the Dooley house on Thames Street before Michael had even finished his morning devotion. But, Michael was still organizing the day's schedule in his head, while shifting his weight from one knee to the other in an attempt at preempting the sharp pang he received from spending too much time thinking on the day's events and not enough time being fervent.