Memorial Bridge Read Online Free PDF

kindly light of the early evening.
    When the train jogged off Archer Avenue to turn due south onto the branch of tracks that ran down Halsted, the Elevated began its slow descent to the level of the street, and Cassie strained to get a last glimpse of the distant city. Between the jagged rooflines of tenements and warehouses she saw flashes off the sheen of the south fork at the point where it met the old canal, the Illinois and Michigan, that joined the waters of the lake and the Mississippi thirty miles away. She'd read in one of the books her supervisor had given her—Ellen Flynn thought she should be educating herself—that the linking of those two great waterways was what had made Chicago happen in the first place. The city would have developed in a straight band westward, straddling the canal, if the whole water system hadn't been made suddenly obsolete by the invention of the railroad. You just never know. Trains had come into Chicago mainly from the south, so it was southward the city went. The
South Side, Cassie's world, was built around the railroad, and that seemed fitting, since it was the Irish enclave, and most Irishmen, including her own father, had made their way west from Ellis Island as laborers on those railroads. Cassie Ryan was quite aware that her part of Chicago, instead of straddling water which never tired of flowing, straddled iron which never moved. She herself was more like water than iron, but she could not imagine that she would ever leave her family, her neighborhood or her parish behind. But neither could she imagine that Halsted Street and North La Salle would be the boundaries of her world forever.
    "We Feed The World," the huge billboard read as the train—now the streetcar, not the El—crossed Thirty-ninth Street, into the yards district. The big sign had been there on top of the five-story corner building for as long as Cassie could remember. It was the slogan of Armour and Company, but South Siders generally took it as their motto. Cassie could not read that sign anymore, though, without immediately dropping her eyes to the Halsted sidewalk where the ragged line of men in torn jackets and battered hats always waited. It was the laborers' line outside the Armour jobs office; the men there now were hoping for something on the night shift. Cassie saw them as a hiring agent might: desperate, unsteady men, half of them cradling brown paper bundles, the bottles they brought with them everywhere. We Feed The World, she thought harshly, not for the first time, but who feeds us?
    When Cassie stepped off the streetcar onto the island in the middle of the broad avenue, she took a deep breath, as if daring the stench of her own neighborhood to offend her nostrils. She chided herself for even noticing it, but that was the great disadvantage of leaving St. Gabriel's each day. For years stockyard odors had bothered her no more than the smells of her own body. She looked across at the Stone Gate and beyond. The chimney-ridden yards even then at the end of the day were pumping clouds of burnt offal into the wind.
    Above the street noises she heard the sound of a voice on the air, someone calling her name. She turned toward it, knowing right away that something was wrong.
    Cassie had six brothers and sisters, only two of whom were still at home. But her family was bigger than that, even, for in the flat upstairs lived her aunt and uncle and their four young daughters, the eldest of whom, Molly, was standing on the far curb now. She was waving
frantically. Molly was thirteen. She was still wearing the white blouse and blue skirt of her uniform. Why hadn't she changed clothes after school? One tail of her blouse overhung the front of her skirt.
    Molly cried Cassie's name again and stepped from the curb into the street. But immediately an automobile screeched to a halt just short of her. The driver honked violently and Molly jumped back. A beer truck swerved away from her, cutting off a car in the next