The Ballad of James McKenna

Day Nine: Picture Prompt

Day Nine
         Picture Prompt
Word Count: 814

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It is night when Jimmy steps out into the streets, desperate for some air. Inside, the factory workers have crowded, sloshing alcohol and songs about, draining whatever they'd earned that day down their drunken throats. He might have joined them, but he didn't know Italian and that might have made things awkward. There was a sharp disconnect between immigrants like them and sons of immigrants like Jimmy, one that was more than just language or religion. It was a sense that this was a borrowed land, a place where you came and your troubles stayed behind (except the ones you shouldered as you stepped onto America's not-so-golden streets), as opposed to a home-grown, roots-deep sort of feeling. The Italians, fresh off the boat and into the bar as some of them were, had memories, strings tied to their hearts and attached to a place far away.

Jimmy has no such strings and no such memories, only stories and a sense of a green isle, long lost and never seen.

The stars above him were beautiful, shining white and blue in the ink-black sky. Here in New York, only the strongest managed to break through, those not too weak, those whose determination outshone the blinking lights and (in the poorer sections of town) smoking fires of the dread city. It was perhaps apropos, then, that they shone on New York; so like the city itself, so like its denizens. Only the strongest survived here, where the city itself threatened to break the weak and the faint at heart.

Jimmy wonders if he is one of those; strong enough to survive here in the great city. He is an Ohioan, born in a still-small city, the largest in the area but still a blip when compared to the great cities of the North. And while Chicago seemed perfectly willing to accept him into its bosom, shifting its sprawling urban skirts and adding him to the gears and cogs of life in Second City, the fire had destroyed much, leaving more than enough work for anyone willing to do it. Here in New York...well, New York was as the great tail-eating Snake, who never began and never ended. It would only die when the world died with it.

There is a small glass of whiskey in his hand, and Jimmy smiles, thinking of Nate's face as he sips at it for the first time. His partner is upstairs now, asleep, the soporific effects of brandy having worked their way through his limbs and into his head. It is different for Nate, who has always had the best, whose family has been in America since before she was born. No one questions Nate, the Southerner, the white plantation owner who gave it all up to forge the nation he saw in his dreams. Nate is an idealist. But then, so is Jimmy.

It isn't easy being the son of immigrants; perhaps it is even harder than being an immigrant. They have each other, pushed together and unified by their opposition, the dreams and the reality twining within one another and amongst them, buoying their spirits, amplifying their prayers. There is a community there, based upon their shared memories of home and their dreams of a new future. It is a community that Jimmy doesn't share. He has no such memories, after all. No such stories to tell. His stories are all of an apartment in Cincinnati, all their father could afford on his factory salary. At least it was a clean apartment, and they had fresh food to eat and good clothes on their backs, hard-earned by his mechanicler father.

Owain would go out of a night and drink, too, singing songs and swapping tales of the Emerald Isle. A part of the community of immigrants.

He passed along his tales and his songs, of course, but Jimmy didn't really understand them. He couldn't. For him, they were just songs, they were just stories, pieces of entertainment meant to pass the time. He had no memories, no experience. Jimmy heard the suffering of his forefathers, and the joys of his mothers, but they were not his sufferings and not his joys. They belonged to someone else. Someone who'd lived them and seen them. Someone come to this borrowed land.

Someone far away, with memories of a homeland, with visions of a future in a new world, where the streets are paved with gold.

His father has given him machines, too. And these Jimmy understands. Work songs, gear songs. Cog songs. So Jimmy stands outside, staring at the stars, listening to the breathing of the mechanical city, sharing his memories and his joys and his dreams with them.

And then, closing his eyes, Jimmy raises his glass, toasting the night air, celebrating the song and the rhythm within him. Because it is with them that he belongs.