as the men alongside it began shoveling horse manure from the pavements into the maggoty wooden bed. Sometimes the shit stood in pyramids like cannonballs, sometimes in delicately balanced coproliths, or in mounds like brittle meringue and fresh paddies spread over the cobbles and trolley tracks. Where the stuff lay on the macadamed roadway, it could be scooped up efficiently and tossed onto the growing heap, but often the more obstinate turds had to be prized from fissures and sinkholes and flung into the wagon like clay pigeons sprung from traps. A few of the men, between shovelfuls, pulled slab bottles from their reefer pockets and took deep drafts to stave off the cold; then they would reel and occasionally break into sentimental song (“She is more to be pitied than censured…”), some teetering and falling face forward into the slush where they were left to lie. Without the benefit of spirits, Shmerl nevertheless found the exercise bracing, itself sufficient to warm his bones, and the stench of excrement, mitigated by the frosty air, was no worse than the odor of anguish in the Oyzers’ shop. Hauled by a brace of stilt-legged plug horses that Old Man Levine had constantly to cajole, the wagon rolled as far as the East River wharves, where its contents were unloaded onto freight scales before being dumped into a garbage scow. The skipper of the scow exchanged some salty small talk with the contractor, handing him his commission as a gang of sparrowlike urchins crept from the shadows to leap atop the piles of drek. Hovered over by mewling seabirds, they picked through the shit in a futile search for trophies worth salvaging.
When the night cart returned near dawn to the wagonyard, Levine dismounted his squeaky vehicle to dole out their token wages to the stalwarts who’d survived the dung circuit. The laborers dispersed in their several directions, leaving Shmerl to totter alone in the odorous yard, chewing his chapped lower lip. “What’s a matter, you froze?” asked the shambling old contractor of the greenhorn, who replied with unguarded candor, “I dunno where I should go,” just before he crumpled to the ground from exhaustion. Examining him with a blood-rimmed eye, Levine grunted it wasn’t his problem; then, a soft touch for both animals and oddballs, he relented, scooping up Shmerl and half-walking, half-dragging him to an uninsulated tarpaper shack where he could sleep. The shack, hung with horsetack and bridles, abutted the stables, and in exchange for cleaning them, for watering the crow-bait horses and strapping on their feedbags, for delivering the tribute money to the Jewish Black Hand in their headquarters behind Sam Schnure’s saloon, and for shoveling shit, Shmerl could have the run of the rickety outbuilding. On top of that (and depending on the weekly levy imposed by the Yid Camorra) he would receive a salary of around two dollars a week. With his wage plus the chickpeas and potato peels he foraged from the Hester Street market—he was, after all, a seasoned scrounger—Shmerl was able to keep himself alive and relatively fit, as well as to sock away a little something for a rainy day. In most respects the wagonyard regimen was even more punishing than the sweatshop, but unlike the sweatshop it had its rewards.
For instance: Shmerl would sleep through the mornings and wake to perform his appointed duties, which were generally completed by early evening. Then his time until the dead of night was his own. He would stroll into streets whose mercantile tenor had begun to take on by that hour a more recreational mood, the cafés filling with drones from the factories who shed their torpor on the spot, transforming themselves into poets and firebrands. Among their ranks were the artistic young ladies in their tulip-shaped walking skirts, whose ordinarily drawn faces appeared flushed with public and private passions. Admiring them through plate glass, Shmerl thought that, given his own double life (for he was a drek shlepper with the soul of a dreamer), he had much in common with these zealous young people, though he lacked the self-assurance to mingle among them. Besides, temptation was itself a form of idolatry—or so he told himself before finally turning away from the cafés and dancehalls to go meet the nightwalking crew.
Once, during a twilight constitutional, lonely and full of a yearning he dared not name, Shmerl ventured as far afield as the Bowery, amazed as always that he could see so much of the world in