Exile on Bridge Street (16 page)

Like an old bear I hear him grumble deep in his chest, then he keeps walking without a response. Through the crowd we go north, back toward our territory. Silently, him and I.

Up the road, I speak to him as we walk quickly through the tenement neighborhoods, back toward Baltic Street. “He'd never fight clean.”

“I'm off to tell Dinny that you'll not again go to Red Hook with me,” he responds solemnly. “I'll kill the man next time and it'll be a bloodbath afterward.”

“So why doesn't Dinny come down here for each ship with Lumpy, The Swede, and Vincent and his men like he does all the other territories?”

“Lovett's filled with the pride. He wants to be treated special like. Like better than other dockbosses. Only t'ing happens when ye treat a man special is he wants more. Nature o' men, 'tis. But dere's only so much Dinny'll allow, so he sends me fer talking with captains as I'm good at, and den the job's done. But dat feckin' Lovett, he'd love to glom himself the reigns o' dis gang. But he's in no position fer it, is he?”

“I wouldn't think so.”

“I'll tell Dinny o' yer plight with the place fer yer mudder,” he mumbles while staring ahead. “I'm a man o' me word—ye know it, don't ye?”

“I do.”

“Not just a man o' me word but I love ye, Poe, I really do. God knows ye'll go to yer heaven up there when the time comes. Not to werry, I'll not allow Dinny to bring ye down with me to the Red Hook again.”

“Not to werry,” he says, just like Mam had said to me one year ago with the tears in her eyes when I left her. “Not to werry,” it is again, but it's worry I see on the face of my friend Tommy Tuohey walking next to me. The first time ever I'd seen it on him. Sure there was fury on his face, but bedfellows are fury and fear, as I know. And as I see Tommy Tuohey with fear it brings a turning in my stomach.

I do not argue with him on this point, though, but keep my mouth shut to it. And for the rest of the morning we meet other ships at Harry Reynolds's Atlantic Avenue and Baltic Street with The Lark and Big Dick until lunch when I begin the long walk back to Warren Street and Sadie, happy to be alive. Happy for another day. I feel the Saint Christopher in my pocket that my mother gave me. It feels familiar there and I rub it with my thumb, holding the back of it with my index finger as I walk. It isn't much, this charm, but it's the feeling it gives me that means more.

“William!”

I hear a woman's voice as I come round the block at the layers of stoops along the Warren Street sidewalks.

“William!”

I look up to the yelling of my name and I can see Sadie. She is waving her arm out the third floor window with Vincent at the bottom of the stoops looking up at her.

“William!” Sadie yells one more time. “Yu got a letter from Ireland.”

My ears pop open and I take to the wind. Running as fast as I can. Past children playing in the street. Past Boru, Mr. Campbell's horse and past Vincent, who leans against the metal railing with his cap tilted over an eye. Up the stairs I am, three at a time.

Sadie quickly hands it over inside the parlor and L'il Dinny stares with his mouth open as I run through the door.

“Weeyum,” he tries saying my name as his mother does, then asks me a question with his palms open.

“I was goin' to send Vincent wif the letter, but it was already late in the day,” Sadie explains.

“No worries,” says I, as I take it from her. “It's already been opened?”

“Came like 'at, William.”

I sit down on a chair in the parlor and read as fast as I can.

“What's it say, William?”

I keep reading.

“Is yu da alive?”

“She doesn't know for sure where he is,” I say. “My brother Timothy is back home on the farm, though. Da went into hiding.”

“Is yu muva safe?”

“She seems to be,” I say, then look up to Sadie. “But my da told my brother to tell her that she needs to go to New York with me as soon as she can, with my sisters. That maybe one day she can come back but things are only to get worse before better.”

“Oh no,” Sadie says. “There's war comin' to Ireland?”

“Doesn't say,” I respond, thinking about things. “If the British are opening the mail. . . . Wait, this says July 1916 on it. Four months old.”

“It'll all be fine,” Sadie says. “We just need to wait for the war to give way for 'em to come to New Yoork is all. Ya gotta keep savin' money, William. And maybe now's a time to fix up 'at place over off Prospect Park, eh?”

“No,” I say, putting the letter down. “There aren't many commuter ships, if there are any, crossing the Atlantic, and there won't be for a long while. High risk of being sunk, so she can't come anytime soon.”

Sadie looks down.

“The British have been to the farm,” I say, putting the letter down, my fury muted in the company of Sadie.

Concerned, Sadie looks away, over toward L'il Dinny, “And?” she asks.

“She just says that they took Timothy away for a few days and when he came back the doctor told him to get rest and that he would heal up soon enough and that my Mam just had a few bruises and they took some livestock and a horse.”

“Oh my.” Sadie puts her hand over her mouth.

“They'll be back too, she says.”

“William, they'll be all right, d'yu understand me? D'yu? William? Yu 'ave to keep at it 'ere where yu can make money for'm, William. When the day comes, yu'll be ready. Yu'll 'ave a place for'm to stay, the whole lot of 'em, the whole fam'ly, William. I'll make sure they's comfortable, I will too. They'll lov'it 'ere, they will. I promise yu, William,” she begins crying, then tries to stop but then L'il Dinny starts crying too when he sees his mother and next thing I know, my eyes are like sacks of salt water until I grunt them away, squeeze my fists.

I pull the tears from my eyes and whip them onto the floor. Standing up, I reach into my pocket and grab for the pencil next to the Saint Christopher. Into my room, I close the door behind me and write a letter to my mother that I'll not share with Sadie. That I'm on my way to Ireland, stowing on an Atlantic crosser as soon as I can and that I'll bring enough guns and ammunition with me to take down England by myself. Gritting as I write, the lead snaps and I crumple the paper, throw it against the wall. Pacing about, I pick up the paper and open the window where I see Vincent below, looking up. With matches I burn the letter and throw it into the air.

“William?” Sadie knocks gently. “Do yu wanna talk, William?”

I don't answer.

“Yu spoke wif Emma recently?”

But I don't want to talk and I don't want to think of Emma McGowan either. It's been three months since I saw her and a guilty feeling comes up to me every time I think of her. That I should have at least tried to keep in touch, but I didn't and now she probably thinks me just like any other male—a big void. Like all the other men in her life, dead or disappeared.

Sitting with my head in my hands, I think for a bit. Lie down and look at the ceiling until the anger passes and changes and finally turns. Whittling the pencil down with a knife, I bring a point to the lead again and write to my mother to tell her that I love her and I've a home for us here in Brooklyn one block from Prospect Park.

CHAPTER 11

The Old Wall

I
AM
CHOSEN
AMONG
FIFTEEN
OTHER
men of the bar to follow Dinny and Red Donnelly. Looking at me as if he does not know me, The Swede pats my coat to make sure my pipe is in it. The Lark and Big Dick are chosen as well, and pushing off the mahogany with us, we all come out the front door of the Dock Loaders' Club in a cluster, armed. Crossing John Street, Tommy Tuohey horseplays with Vincent by messing up his dark brown mane. Like children, we are. Walking through the old rowdy neighborhood, clowning like we do. Throwing rocks into the water as we walk down the bulkhead through the main rail yard of the Jay Street Terminal, we call out. Yelling like boys. And among the waterfront masts and derricks of shore-head boats, scows, and steam lighters, Cinders Connolly and Philip Large wave at us as we pass. Between us and the ships moored in the slips are chains of locomotive-pulled, covered hopper cars being filled with grain and raw sugar for the refineries close by. And there are also giant open hopper cars for transporting coal and ore. Slowly sliding through the angular waterfront yard that is lined with crisscrossing and curving rail ties, the rail cars connect to the floating bridges hauling them into the terminal across the waterway. The rail tracks travel out of the windy train yard along the East River and into the Belgian brick streets among tenements and storehouses and over sidewalks.

As we stride in our great bunches, we see school children walking in single-file lines toward Mass at St. Ann's for the Feast of Teresa of Ávila of the Discalced Carmelites. Among the children are the older boys and girls.

“There she is,” Vincent says pointing with one hand into the crowd of kids, the other hand on my shoulder. “See her?”

And I do. I see Emma McGowan smiling at me and quaintly, among the other girls, she waves at me excitedly.

“Oh my beautyful colleen,” The Lark sings out in a silly voice, holding his heart with his two-fingered hand. “I wanna roll around the purple heather wit' ya. Will ya roll around wit' me, lassie? Will ya go?”

The girls scream in laughter as I push The Lark away from me. I smile at her too, though, as she looks back over her shoulder entering St. Ann's.

We then pass the Jay Street Terminal freight house and the Kings County Electric Light and Power Company building and finally the succession of Atlantic White Lead Company buildings on both sides of the street with their blind brick façades squared off and windowless. A long stairwell reaching up to a single, half-opened door has a man watching us contemptuously from on high. Above him is a succession of smokestacks that seem to stand guard over the old, rough-cobbled neighborhood of east Irishtown like medieval sentinels. I always felt there was something majestic about the old neighborhood with its row houses barely distinguishable from its factories. And as I'm looking up at the sentinel smokestacks, thinking, I run into Big Dick.

“Pay attention, ya muck,” he says, grabbing me by the head happily, then letting me go as I push him away. “Look how stout he is, the kid—hard-bitten to the core.”

Others laugh at me, and with Dago Tom, Johnny Mullen, and Happy Maloney next to me, we look up as Dinny turns round, a water tower atop another painted masonry building behind him. Down the way are five blocks long of seven-foot-high brick wall between us and the Navy Yard beyond.

“Sometime ago,” Dinny says as we stop our pranking to listen. “When the neighborhood and the gov'ment was at strong odds, they posted snipers for the boys that climbed this wall. They were lookouts, them kids. But they were much more. They were survivors. And we are their offspring. The offspring of children that survived a great, great hunger the likes o' which the world'll never come to understand. Or care to. Who somehow came away still alive, barely, after a famine came to the countryside, which our enemy wielded against us, and summoned their god and their laws alongside, like weapons to kill us, to send us into exile on ships that were more like pine-box coffins, understand?” Dinny looks at each of us.

I look round as well at the faces of these men I stand with here in the street. Notice their strict attention to Dinny Meehan and the dignity he inspires.

“From our own home, by foreigners. And if these children hadn't made the trip themselves across the ocean, then they were the sons of an exiled child. Or daughters. The marines . . . they used to march outta the Navy Yard here. That's why there were lookouts posted on the wall here. Even in New York, they couldn't get our people to live by their law—still can't. Here in Irishtown they never talked. If there was a dispute, the gangs enforced the neighborhood's way. No one went to the police. But if someone was arrested? The whole neighborhood surrounded the patrolman screamin' at him, peltin' him, ran alongside his wagon and stood outside the police station for days chantin' and chantin' until he was let out. They couldn't get Irishtown to abide by their law here in America, and no wonder. The foreigner's law never served 'em back home, or here. Only starved and sent 'em away. Ignored 'em when their babies and mothers withered and died. Starved. Evicted in the winter, a pauper's death. And here it was more o' the same. Called 'em animals, savages. It's no wonder the people o' Irishtown ignored their law here, but the soldiers and their officers o' the Navy Yard and the law they enforced hadn't a care what our people'd been t'rough. . . . Still deny it,” Dinny looks down, then back up at us. “We don' want no problems today. Red just wants to show us somethin' in there. We don' want no fights, but the men in there gotta remember who we are. Remember who they are. So instead o' goin' t'rough the gatehouse, we'll make our own entrance then. From our neighborhood, into theirs.”

He turns his back to us and walks across the russet-yellow paving stones of Little Street. Takes off his cap and throws it over the Navy Yard wall.

Dance Gillen smiles and looks at me, “No second thoughts now.”

Cinders Connolly and The Swede boost Philip Large up and others for they are tall enough to reach the lip on their own and one by one we scale it like invaders, stand atop.

“Like a city on its own,” I say, looking inside the Navy Yard as we jump down on the other side.

Along the dry docks, levels upon levels of scaffolds reach as high as the smokestacks and surround multiple vessels that are raised above the water level. The underbelly of the warships exposed awkwardly, whole steel panels removed and open below the ship with many men working on them secretly like midwives prepping for childbirth. To our right is a large building, which, from the smell of the smoke coming from it, must be a coal plant where energy is stored for the plenty of steam engines in the yards. There are some six piers jutting into the horseshoe basin where cranes reach deep into the tramp steamers and lighters and barges, delivering war materials into them to be sent Europe-way. For England and for France. Floating piers with chains of train cars are being pulled by tugs with their noses in the air, propellers churning deep in the water behind them.

Jumping down one by one, the tint of hand-held hammers and the pound of steam-powered hammers upon rivets into ten-inch-thick sheet metal echoes in our ears. Puddles rippling at each blow, we walk across freight tracks where dump cars swivel and drop loads into rivet castles, which are next to triangular sand piles tall as three men. We come by many shops and smitheries for pipe and copper, foundries for brass and iron, a rigger and flag shed, and a machine shop. From muddy corners come three and four rats from slushy pools of dirt and sawdust. Next to the long lumber stacks, debarked and naked of their natural color is the Navy Yard's own firehouse with a pump-well inside the stable doors and the naval prison behind where men hold onto the bars above and stare disheveled and mourn-faced at us below.

“There's a revolution happenin' here,” Red Donnelly yells toward Dinny as he leads the way. “Ain' got nothin' to do wit' rivets either. What no one wants is rivets, damnit,” he says smiling. “We don't need no rivets to patch holes in the warships. There's cases and cases of 'em here. Piles of 'em. Not needed. Thing o' the past, rivets. Or soon will be. C'mon.”

Men above on their scaffolds stop working, look down to us. Talk amongst themselves of us as we pass in the mud and tracks below. At the head is Dinny and his enforcers, the dockbosses and the rest of us following.

“It's right over here at this dry dock,” Red motions, excited to show Dinny. “Here, look at this.”

We see a man sitting on a stool in the dirt with orange and yellow sparks bursting around him. He is pointing something at a transport ship called the SS
Tyninghame
. Some sort of blast had ripped a large hole in it, opened the side of her, and clearly visible to us is the boiler room within. The man is holding some sort of concoction that has a flame coming out of it, causing the flares to blow in all directions, hissing out in the mud and elsewhere. He is wearing a mask and helmet and his entire body is covered with some alien suit.

Risking burning, Red goes up and touches the man on the shoulder, who pulls up the mask. When we see the person who is causing such ruckus we are kicked by the oddity.

“Fookin' woman,” Dance says.

“Ya remember when the
Rochambeau
and the
Ancona
were sabotaged by the Hun?” Red yells toward Dinny, pointing at the woman. “They was fixed right here in the Navy Yard with this machine. It's called a welding machine, right? The
Craigside
had five fires in the hold. Fixed in record time and back out on the water. The screw steamer
Assuncion de Larrinaga
was afire at sea, patched and gone. The
Samland
too. All of 'em. A small bomb blew out the boiler and hull, then welded back together faster than any sheets and rivets could ever be replaced. Sent back to the war. And cheaper too. It's technology like this place has never seen. And so easy a woman can do it.”

Dinny's face is stone still, though he has questions, “Cheaper for who?”

“Well . . .”

“Cheaper labor?”

“Yeah, that. Cheaper for the gov'ment to fix, too.”

Dinny nods.

“Problem is,” Red continued. “These men . . . and women. They know what they got. They got somethin' that's valuable. That's really needed.”

A worker in overalls and sage eyes surrounded by some twenty others walks up to us. The leader reaches for Dinny's hand, takes his hat off.

“This's Henry Browne,” Red introduces.

“Just want ya to know we wanna work wit' ya,” Browne says to Dinny.

“Me?”

“Well, you yeah. Together.”

“Who am I?”

The man looks at Red, who nods.

“I don't know ya name,” he says with humility. “No, sir. But I want ya to know that we're willin' to be open to workin' together. I mean, we're workers and we can take care o' ourselves and whatnot, but ya know. . . . We need power. A union needs to be able to back its threats, ya know? We need yous. Thos Carmody says that if we all . . .”

“Who?” The Swede interrupts. “Who'd you say said somethin'?”

“Carmody?” Browne says, again looking at Red.

“I told ya,” Red says to Dinny.

“Whad this guy just say? Thos fookin' Carmody?” The Swede demands.

Browne is confused at the reaction, especially when he looks at Dinny's face, who does not show surprise.

“You seen Thos Carmody lately?” The Swede asks the Orphan.

“Yeah,” he shrugs.

“Like lately? The last couple few weeks o' somethin'?”

The man is concerned. “I saw'r 'em yesterday.”

“Goddamned fookin' asshole . . .” The Swede says, his face red and his hands pulling at his own hair.

“Jimmy,” Dinny says to The Swede, calming him.

“Hey, get back to work, Henry,” a man yells toward our two groups. “You and ya men. Back to work now.”

A crank siren starts its blaring and ten men come jogging out from the marine barracks, ten more out of their quarters next to the naval prison with rifles.

“Where in the hayell did these guys come from?” says a uniformed man with an accent I've never heard. “I mean to tell ya, they ain' come from no gatehouse, did they? I reckon not. You men need to cl'are out from this premises im-mediately, this here's fed'ral property and you is trespassing . . .”

With a look at us, Dinny tells us not to fight back.

“We'll give ya'll one chance before bullets will fly,” the disciplined man continues yelling into the air without locking eyes with any of us. “We'll escort ya through the gatehouse or to the brig—ya'll can make that decision on your own, but that there's your two choices.”

“Henry,” Dinny says, shaking the man's hand again. “Thanks for ya time and comin' over to meet wit' us.”

Quietly, we allow the marines to walk us through the newly paved concrete and the mud, over the freight rails. There are armed men ahead, behind and on both sides walking in perfect stride and with all sorts of colorful accents from different parts of the country, yet bellowing out in unison, “Left, left, left . . .” and staring in some deep distance as if their minds had been cleansed. Somehow we had managed to be herded into filed lines, though Big Dick jokingly pushes The Lark from behind, who almost falls.

From shutter windows and open doors and scaffolds above, the workers watch closely. Watch us to see what we're like, what we'll do. The many of them immigrants themselves who live in the neighborhoods. Quite a few of them connected to Red and Dinny, but most have been brought on within the last couple years, business being good with the war as hungry as it is.

“Look at 'em, boys,” Dinny says. “Just look at 'em. Don' let 'em forget. Show 'em who we are.”