The Flaming Corsage Read Online Free PDF Page A

time now in Black Jack’s saloon was the lull before the
invasion at six when the lumber mills’ whistles would blow the twelve-hour workday into oblivion, and those handlers with money to quaff would move single-mindedly into liquid pleasure. The
remains of the bean soup simmered in the pot on the woodstove behind the bar, half emptied by the lunch crowd; the ham was getting down to the bone; the bread growing stale; but soup, ham, and
bread would all be eaten by six-thirty, and the hell with food after that hour, was Jack’s dictum.
    Edward, when marriage became a possibility, had thought of Jack for his best man, and his visit here today was to tell Jack of his proposal to Katrina, and the resistance he was meeting from her
parents. Finding Maginn here was a surprise. Maginn, now reporting for The Argus , was at the end of the bar behind his new mustache, his suit hanging loosely on his lanky frame. He was
talking to Jack, pumping him about the invitation he’d received from his newfound friend, the President of the United States, to go fishing. The election poster for Cleveland and Hendricks
dominated the wall of the back bar.
    “He telling his White House fish story?” Edward asked.
    “He’s telling about the letter,” Maginn said.
    “He wants the mountains,” Jack said. “Trout he wants. ‘Pick any place in the Adirondacks,’ he tells me.”
    “And what did you pick?”
    “North Creek. They got trout up there big as dogs. They jump out of the water to shake hands.”
    “That’ll be some circus, fishing with the President,” Edward said.
    “No it won’t,” said Jack. “We won’t tell anybody where we’re gonna light. He don’t want a circus, he wants to fish.”
    “I know how important the President is,” Maginn said, “but did you hear this young lad here may soon be stretched on the holy rack of matrimony?”
    “No,” said Jack. “Is that true?”
    “It could be true,” Edward said. “But there are things to be done.”
    “Buy the bed and spread the sheets, he means,” said Maginn. “He’s marrying up. Beautiful, smart, and rich. Altogether too much for him.”
    “Too much for me, but just enough for Maginn, if he could only get his hands on her.”
    “Who is she? Not Ruthie.”
    “No, not Ruthie,” Edward said.
    “Does Ruthie know?”
    “No. It’s Jake Taylor’s daughter Katrina. I proposed. She hasn’t said yes yet.”
    “Jake Taylor? That royal son of a bitch. What’s Emmett say to that?”
    “He doesn’t know about it either, but he won’t relish it.”
    “He wouldn’t, after Davy.”
    “Davy?” said Maginn.
    “My father’s brother,” Edward said. “Jake’s goons beat him so bad when he tried to organize the lumber handlers, all he can do now is shovel sawdust.”
    Edward and Jack had courted the same girls (Ruthie was the last), fished, hunted birds, and played baseball together, lived in houses back-to-back, went to school together, and grew apart only
when Edward left the Christian Brothers school and moved into Lyman’s home downtown to be closer to Albany Academy.
    “Jake’s family’s Protestant,” Jack said.
    “Very true,” said Edward. Jack’s look judged him a traitor.
    “Where’s the wedding gonna be at?”
    “I haven’t even talked to her parents yet.”
    “You worry about them?”
    “She does.”
    “There’s no problem,” Maginn said. “Why should a mudhole mick from the North End have any problem marrying into one of Albany’s first families?”
    “Who’s a mudhole mick?”
    The voice came from a table where two men had been eavesdropping on the presidential talk. The bigger of the two came over to Maginn. He wore a sweater and a cap, had the slouch of a man whose
back had lifted too much weight, and his drooping right eye gave him a permanent squint. Edward knew him as Matty Lookup, a lumber handler and ice cutter on hard times, suspected of breaking into
Benedict’s lumber office in the District and stealing