“How could you tell?”

“They started singing near the end.”

“No shit? ‘Danny Boy’?”

Joe nodded. “And ‘Kilgary Mountain’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”

“You don’t hear that one a lot.”

“Only when Dad’s really snockered.”

Danny laughed and put his arm around him and Joe rocked against it.

“You go native, Dan?”

Danny kissed his forehead. Actually kissed it. Joe wondered if he was drunk.

Danny said, “Yeah, I guess so, brother.”

“You love Italians?”

Danny shrugged. “I got nothing against ’em. You?”

“I like them. I like the North End. Just like you do.”

Danny bounced a fist lightly off his knee. “Well, good then.”

“Con’ hates ’em, though.”

“Yeah, well, Con’s got a lot of hate in him.”

Joe ate the rest of his second frankfurter. “Why?”

Danny shrugged. “Maybe because when he sees something that confuses him, he feels like he needs an answer right then. And if the answer ain’t right in front of him, he grabs onto whatever is and makes it the answer.” He shrugged again. “I honestly don’t know, though. Con’s had something eating him up since the day he was born.”

They sat in silence for a bit, Joe swinging his legs off the edge of the stone table. A street vendor coming home from a day at Haymarket Square pulled over to the curb. He climbed off his cart, breathing wearily through his nostrils, and went to the front of his horse and lifted its left leg. The horse snuffled softly and twitched at the flies on its tail and the man shushed it as he pulled a pebble from its hoof and tossed it out onto West Broadway. He lowered the leg and caressed the horse’s ear and whispered into it. The horse snuffled some more as the man climbed back up onto his cart, its eyes dark and sleepy. The vendor whistled softly and the horse clopped back into the street. When it dropped a clump of shit from between its flanks and cocked its head proudly at the creation, Joe felt a smile spread across his face he couldn’t explain.

Danny, watching, too, said, “Damn. Size of a hat.”

Joe said, “Size of a breadbasket.”

“I believe you’re right,” Danny said, and they both laughed.

They sat as the light turned rusty behind the tenements along the Fort Point Channel and the air smelled of the tide and the clogging stench of the American Sugar Refining Company and the gases of the Boston Beer Company. Men crossed back over the Broadway Bridge in clusters and other groups wandered up from the Gillette Company and Boston Ice and the Cotton Waste Factory and most entered the saloons. Soon the boys who ran numbers for the neighborhood were dashing in and out of those same saloons, and from across the channel another whistle blew to signal the end of another working day. Joe wished he could stay here forever, even in his school clothes, with his brother, on a stone bench along West Broadway as the day faded around them.