Eileen Toomey: CANARYVILLE GIRLS • Cleaver Magazine

Second Place, Duality Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2024

This short gem manages to tell us almost nothing, and yet everything, about the girls of the title, capturing the complex dance between person and environment. The descriptions of what these girls pass on their way to McDonald’s bring all of our senses to life. We like and fear for these girls in all of their scrappiness and joyfulness. Like us, they know little and much. —Clifford Thompson, Contest Judge

Eileen Toomey
CANARYVILLE GIRLS

When I was thirteen my friends and I walked from our neighborhood to the nearest McDonald’s. It was two miles away cutting through an area of Chicago that once housed The Old Union Stockyards and later became an Industrial Park. Flanked by factories and dry storage: Sweetheart Cup, where Sharon’s mother worked, Allen Brothers, Moo and Oink, Gordon Foods, Millard Refrigerated Distribution Center, Chiappettie’s Lamb. Canaryville boys on stolen Huffys roared down piles of debris, past demolished kill sheds and chop floors. City lots one block deep, punctuated with jutted gray monzogranite factory tors emitting ammonia, chlorine, carbon dioxide, and Budweiser caps. We were neighborhood girls rising from garbage heaps.

In its heyday, Chicago’s Union Stockyards housed 475 acres (enough space to hold 2,000 football fields) of cattle, hogs and lamb. The live animals were shipped here from farms all over the country. The Stockyards worked like the assembly line, but in reverse. Animals came to be disassembled, packaged and distributed. A certain smell, not quite death, filled the air. Sometimes cattle cars rattled by Graham School. You’d smell them and hear them before you’d see them. Little lamb tails or calves or cows smashed up against the crates. Black eyes shining like marbles. I never looked too hard, my mother reminding me to just be happy that I wasn’t a steak.

“…the area’s physical environment and economic life were shaped by meatpacking from the 1860s until the industry’s decline in the postwar era. Canaryville’s name may originally have derived from the legions of sparrows who populated the area at the end of the nineteenth century, feeding off stockyard refuse and grain from railroad cars, but the term was also applied to the neighborhood’s rambunctious youth, its ‘wild canaries.’”¹

We didn’t know that a refinery fire had twisted along this route way back in 1910, the spirit of the dead firemen who could’ve been our grandfathers spitting back at the animal grease flames. The hydrants were turned off because the winters were so cold. Twenty-one firemen died in the Union Stockyards Fire that night cleaning up after Swift and Armour, the largest number of firemen to perish in one single event until 9/11. Not a moment for grace before the support wall crumbled, not a plaque or memorial until 2004.

We split a pack of Newports, five cigarettes per girl. Beneath the rush of tractor trailers on the Pershing Road overpass, stepping through cement and weeds, Ruffles bags, a half-empty Mountain Dew and its tank green liquid spew. We had nothing else to do but to walk to McDonalds with our crumpled dollars. I turned to Jess and we did a quick MaryMac, smacking our hands together, lit cigs between grins. The sun beat down between city saplings singeing Farrah Fawcett swoops. Candy bar wrappers crunched like leaves beneath white Converse shoes scrawled with pen: Best Friends Forever. Disco Sucks. Freebird.

White girls at the CTA bus stop, wearing shorts under Catholic school uniforms, a weekend full of french fries and truck exhaust tucked in our bellies. Hurry up, hurry up, Jess urged as we ran across Pershing Road holding hands. The prairie returns in sneaky ways, chemicalized and compromised, growing funny and strong girls between cracks in the sidewalk. The deep taproot is so hard to extricate— one tendril for friendship, one for the golden arches.

Look at me! Look at me! we say. Go fuck yourself!

Eileen Toomey has been published in The Rumpus, Cleaver Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and various literary magazines. Her poem “Immunotherapy” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. Eileen is a book inc writer and an instructor at Project Write Now, a non-profit writing organization, located in Red Bank, NJ. She is currently working on a memoir about her childhood in the working-class neighborhood, Canaryville, on Chicago’s south side. You can find links to her publications and social media accounts at https://bookinc.org/member/etoomey.