Free River of the Brokenhearted by David Adams Richards

she did not pay the mortgage. Worse, there were men from another picture house trying to stop her tonight. (She did not call them a mixture of Orange bastards and Catholic scum as she was known to call them in private.) Drawing a breath, she continued, she was hoping Estabrook would chaperone her to the Catholic houses, for they might be willing to loan her money, and they would not dare stop him.
    Both men were silent for a time after she finished speaking. Both amazed that she had swum the river. It showed tremendous character—and a little insanity.
    “Well, who holds your mortgage?” Beaverbrook asked.
    “The Royal Bank.”
    “And have you been tardy in your payments?”
    “Never.”
    “Then who told you you could not renew such a mortgage?”
    “Mr. Harris, sir.”
    “And who is Mr. Harris, Janie?”
    “Manages the bank here, Max,” Estabrook said. “And who would give a man like that a position here?” Beaverbrook asked.
    Janie and Estabrook were silent.
    “Well, this is bad behaviour,” Beaverbrook said. “Your client’s going in the night to beg money, swimming a river. We will straighten this out, won’t we, Janie—you and I—we will straighten it all out.”
    “Yes, sir,” Janie said.
    “Churchill loves pictures. Do you, Janie?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You see, you’re just like my friend Churchill.”
    She knew that to answer flippantly would lose her the patronage she seemed to be acquiring. So she only nodded and stared straight ahead, feeling something biting her Irish heart.
    “Come with me, Janie girl,” Beaverbrook said. “As much as you might want to, you won’t be swimming back. And you’ll have your money—damn right you will.”
    It was after midnight, and the men who had manned the bridge—those brave fellows, my grandmother would sometimes call them—had dispersed but for a handful of hardliners. It had turned to fog, and the boy who had exclaimed he had seen her arms moving in the water was now curled up on the side of the bridge road, making himself a bed. The fifteen dollars he had already spent fifteen times over was now drifting away in his sleep, toward Estabrook’s boom.
    Then he heard “Let it pass,” and he jumped up, to see automobiles coming straight toward him—a huge black Packard with side lanterns and a car in front of it and a car behind. People—and the boy would remember this forever—whom he had believed and looked up to as men of tremendous worth now stood aside like children, and the cars passed by.
    At first he thought it was Joey Elias. Then he heard the name Janie McLeary and thought, rubbing sleep from his eyes, Ah, they have her. Then he thought of the fifteen dollars. But no one made a move for her.
    She sat in the back seat of a great car, with a fellow she seemed bigger than, and stared ahead—only now and again glancing from side to side quickly to see who it was on the bridge, as poor Mary, Queen of Scots, might have done on the way to the axeman in February of 1587. The plots were equally diabolical.
    Janie looked straight at the boy now. He had never seen her before, but realized it was Janie King, sitting beside a man he recognized as Lord Beaverbrook.
    A cheer went up on all sides as they followed the car.
    “Good for her, she got across,” the man who had spit his wad closest to her face said, as if he himself had nothing to do with trying to stop her. She might have heard it, for she looked back through the window at him, and then the car itself seemed to jump a gear and disappeared into the fog. The boy walked behind it, his hands in his pockets. The night was cool. He longed for bed.
    Beaverbrook mentioned Janie King to Hoyt, the head of the Royal Bank of Canada, while Hoyt was in England. It was told in the company of Bennett and Churchill one evening that year. Churchill loved the story of the girl who swam the wild river—the outcast. He had become one himself by that time because he was considered a warmonger, out of