After a while, the cobbled road gives way to dirt, and the dirt to mud. With every step the mud gets thicker until the sludge squelches over my bare feet. It’s up to my ankles by the time we reach a five-way crossing. The Five Points. There’s a tavern and a butcher and a brothel, it looks like. This place smells of unwashed bodies and of waste and decay. There’re Irishmen here all right. Huddled in doorways and standing in the streets. But not just Irishmen. A man as dark as coal sits on a stoop, his bright white eyes track us as we walk. Another man stands behind him, the color of peat. I can’t help but stare.

Someone puts his hand on my arm and calls my name. I’m wound so tight I spin round with my fist back ready for whoever it is. But I hesitate, as my brain catches up with my body, realizing he knows my name. Then I see who’s got my arm. Ennis Flanagan. He left Cork a year before I did with his wife and their two little ones.

He hugs me like we’re brothers. “Henry O’Toole. Jesus, Mary and Holy Saint Joseph, it’s Henry bloody O’Toole.”

I hug him back, happier than I can say to see a familiar face. “Ennis Flanagan.”

“Wait till the Missus sees you. And you won’t recognize the boys. Growing like weeds and tough as teeth.”

“All of you made it, then?” I ask. “All four?”

“Aye. Luck of the Irish, we had. And Saint Christopher protecting us besides.”

I mean to hide my bitter jealousy, but he notices my silence and possibly the clenching in my jaw. He understands what I’m not saying and claps me on my back.

“Where’re you staying?” he asks.

I shrug. “Nowhere yet.”

He pulls me around and leads me toward a shabby alley. “You can come back with us then.”

“Have you got room for a fifth?”

“Fifth? We’re ten to a room, you daft bastard. You’ll be lucky eleven.”

Ennis works at a window factory. He got the job when an accident killed two men and injured ten more. The Swedes and Poles and Germans threw up a fuss, so they let the Irish and the Negros in, paying half of what the other men got. But it’s a job.

I can’t find any work at all.

After the first week, the Dead Rabbits approach me offering a spot on their fire brigade. “What you do,” they tell me, “is you set the fire yourself, see. So, when you’re the first gang on the scene putting it out, you get the fire brigade money.”

I tell them setting fires to put them out is even more daft than digging ditches to fill them in again. And anyways, what kind of man makes his living by burning people’s houses down?

By the second week, I see how things are with the gangs here, and I realize it might have been a mistake to turn the Dead Rabbits down. I avoid them as best I can, because, although I don’t think they see me as an enemy, it’s clear I’m not a friend. And I still can’t get a job. Folks hiring take one look at me and know I’m Irish. I don’t stand a chance. It’s not my black hair or blue eyes that give me away. It’s the hungry, half-starved look of me, and the rags I wear and no shoes on my feet. It’s only the Irish fresh off the ships who walk around like that.