Light of the Diddicoy (2 page)

As Gilchrist finishes his gathering, The Swede and Cinders Connolly immediately begin reorganizing the men for tribute, ordering the stevedore's table be righted and breaking the circle into a line.

Supported by Dago Tom and Dance Gillen, Gilchrist abandons the injured and steals under the Manhattan Bridge for the headquarters of the White Hand where they and many others report to Dinny Meehan on the second floor of 25 Bridge Street just above a whiskey dive called the Dock Loaders' Club.

T
HEY MAKE ALL MALES BETWEEN THE
ages of eighteen and forty-one step out of the line to be saved for the conscription. I lean up the plank and onto the
Teutonic
. Men with the choppy language resembling the landlord's pay taker corral us like cattle. They are stewards, and they are English, and they shove us down the dark stairwells of the ship with swinging oil lamps by their ears.

“Get along niy, 'urry up niy!” They say with tall ruddy smiles over the rat-haired heads.

“Slime,” one of them counts the passengers by grabbing them by an arm and pushing them toward the stairwell. “Glad to see y'off. Slime. Glad to see y'off. Slime. Glad to see y'off. Slime . . .”

Another young official up ahead of him laughs at his wit and throws an echo down the long hall, “At's a way Currington. Oi Whatley! See 'ow Currington's countin' the 'eads 'ere, would yu! Funny innit?”

“Slime. Glad to see y'off. Slime . . .”

I too am swung by the elbow toward the stairwell and counted, “Slime!” Behind me I hear a man threaten the officials not to touch him and an affray breaks out with a piercing whistle that summons the meanest in the Anglo stewards. They rap the rebel on the head as he stands his ground with a few wild swings he'd been saving for them. A group of women go to yelping as he is dragged back where from he come and out of sight.

There is only one entrance and we are funneled like heads of beef from the planks and thin hallways and through tumbling metal stairwells in the dark to the stern dorm. To the back of the big girl. And as we are last to board, we are not split by gender nor age. It's the size of a ballroom, lacking the ornaments and chairs and tables and musicians and dancers. Steel walls, iron floors and not a single facility in sight save piss pots. Not even a sheet for a woman's privacy. By the time we fill the hall with some ninety souls there's nary enough cots for the amount of us and so I go without and sit instead against the great unpronounced tin wall. By placing my ear on it, I can hear the gentle laps of salt water touching off on the opposite side and wonder how loud the sounds will become when far out and into the deep.

After some great wait, a backfire explodes somewhere below us and toward the bow. I hold the Saint Christopher in my fingers and feel as though my life is in God's hands as I am such a stranger to this great floating vessel. Little do I know that for the rest of my long life I'd be a stranger in strange places, filled with my green, West Ireland memories of childhood.

Hidden men yell at one another like apes as they stoke a fire in the belly of her. From somewhere, propellers turn over, kicking off the rust and spinning begrudgingly in the salt. A great horn blows above our blindfolded ears outside with a trembling in my chest. Voices above seem to be sarcastically saluting the people of the land as we lurch backward to our staggering. Mothers filled with the ignorance of the Old World and the superstitions against anything mechanical yelp again at the sudden movement and hold on to each other in their fear. Old men too who've never seen yet even an automobile in their long lives, now in the hold of a great and mysterious metal monster about whose whim they haven't a clue. After some thirty minutes of passengers bogging their strange good-byes outside, we must finally give leave of the shore and head south. The waves at the iron wall behind me now spanking and echoing through the chamber dorm.

The sea is hidden. And to us, doesn't exist. The great expanse of it is nothing more than rivets and squares of iron sheets and slats along the whole of the room like the blank canvas of the art of the forgotten. An old highwayman is gumming a potato he's hidden in his humble packs. Chewing as lines and muscles in his temple and pate flex like iron cords to crush the tuber in his gnawing gate, leaning off his cot with legs wide out and swaying with the expanse of the ship as if he'd made countless journeys like it in his days.

Eight hours go by, my stomach turns with hunger until a child hardly out of infancy hands me a share of bannock bread, “Me mam says 'tis fer ye,” and runs off among the other steerage crew before even I can thank her. But I say it anyhow for it is only right to give thanks, particularly to those who give when take is in the need.

By now, the fireman's castle is ablaze at sea and the iron sheets become too hot to lean on. Devils of men bellow out from somewhere we cannot see. “Feed that bitch!” I hear a man proclaim in the tin distance. “Feed 'er! Feed 'er! She's a hungry one! Shovel ye're mightiest boys! Feed that bitch and give'r what she wants for the love of ye!”

I peel off my coat and wool sweater and yank down my tie in order to free the sweat that accumulates on my back and chest. Not wholly understanding why there is such a great blaze on board, I tremble with the thought of a ship fire at sea and just when I feel we are all to die by the flame, she moans a great sigh through the pulse of the deep in an abyssal ecstasy. So deep and so long you'd think it's a mother dragon receiving the bulbous, tyrannical cock of a sex-crazed wandering wyvern bullmale from some arcane and wretched lore. I stare ahead with a crazed look upon me, ears dedicated to defining all the cryptic sounds around us.

Now growing angry, the
Teutonic
pushes forth through the froth. I can hear the men again feeding and stoking in some mysterious contest, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” We pierce the water at a pace of twenty knots. The width of the sea gulps at us in hopes of devouring our negligible souls for its evil quota. The Atlantic foam sucking at us in its great vaginal drink far worse than could ever be imagined in the old seafaring songs of my peat-fire childhood. Never at rest am I, as the hull of the cruiser staves on, flexing and bobbing and oscillating afloat, incising the folds and rocking through the brine as the ancient deep barely acknowledges our shafting it.

“T'ink dis here's bad, do ye?” the man with the potato calls. “Ye'd a try it back den when a clipper's all ye had. The creakin' o' swolled wood and the swayin' fore an' aft. T'ink dis here's bad, do ye? Nar! Hell I'd take dis over a coffinship any day.”

Listening intently to the water, I try to distinguish the sounds of a U-boat. I hadn't a single idea what a U-boat would sound like underwater of course, but any sound that comes to mind brings a flash of anxiety to me anyhow. My palms are so wet I wipe them on my thighs and knees so that my pants have the look of being soiled. My jaw sore from grinding, nails raw from biting. An hour later and I see the potato man with his nose to the air, shaking his head.

“Smell a storm,” says he in my direction.

Sure as anything, we next hear the crack of the cloaked sky above as the Atlantic crosser makes her way into the teeth of it, or so we are led to believe. All of us sit in wait, warbling our eyes up like owl heads to feed our ears. Billowing rippled waves of some imagined proportion lap and lick like holy fires on the stretch of mankind, forcing the vessel's long genuflecting and seesawing.

Children and drab-dressed women are sent flaying off their backsides with legs and feet asplayed in the air and are sucked into a corner where loose remains gather like storm water sent fleeing for the sewer collect. The floor quickly changes to the color of the inside of our stomachs. Now the pinkish viscid innards spread along the steel bottom and soon enough we all are sliding in it, skittering off the slippery sheet and slamming against the wall, potato man among us. The cots too, as they are not secured to the floor, go flying toward the collects with the open-legged peasant women and clumsy children holding tight on their kin.

Screams of panic echo off the steel faceless walls. When the ship pitches high into the air, the inevitable down-splash of its great tonnage sends the population across the room but with nothing to grab on to. As the diving and swaying becomes longer, the force of ninety humans and their scattered belongings and fifty cots all slam against the uncaring steel with accumulating power. I see a woman completely unconscious with blood lines trailing from her ear and three of her brood holding on tight to her as if they don't realize she is dreaming a dream from her concussion.

Along with everyone else, I lose track of my bag that holds my life's worth inside it. As I look around for it and between being sent to opposing sides, I see boys around my same age stick their hands into others' belongings and pull out coins, stuffing them into their own pockets. Two men begin berating each other and stand in the center of the moving floor gummed with mucus and previous meals. One punches the other and they pull on each other's clothes for balance and dominance. Fighting and fighting in their beleaguered state like two cats that have been tied by their tales upside down and next to each other, brawling and hissing as if the other is to blame for their condition.

When the lightning finally passes, the swells calm too and soon all are slogging through the half-inch puddle to collect our soiled rags. A week goes by like this and only three times do the doors open with the mean stewards yelping for us to queue up as we grab for our cups. The soup is no more than water and stock, leftovers no doubt. I wait in line looking ahead impatiently and with only three in front of me the ship tilts deep into the sea as I drop my cup. I scramble for it before another can snatch it, but when I return to queue I see that the barrel holding the soup has tipped over and without cleaning the spillage, the stewards double back and lock the doors behind them. Some children around me scoop up the stock mixed with the dried vomit as their mothers cry out at the state of their lot. I look for the sweet child with the thoughtful mother and the bannock shares, but cannot find her. When I come to my place along the wall it is then I see my belongings have disappeared entirely, hungry eyes staring at my dismay like hidden hyenas protecting their earned pilferings.

Without normal sleep nor food and feeling the ship slowing, in a sudden four doors are opened above that I had yet to realize were even there. Appearing from them are the Englishman officials and their yelling.

“Out! Out! Out! Out yu goes!”

“Where are we?” One man calls up to them.

“Out! Get out!”

And so we again funnel obediently toward the single-door exit leaving behind us unclaimed trash, upturned cots never used for sleep, sopping blankets and overturned piss jars and rancid fecal buckets where somehow flies had made their way into the steerage hold or had created life itself from the stink of the third class.

A few hours later, I wait in line but for what I do not know. The ship backs away from us. There is land on either side in the distance of the island house packed with fellow ragged travelers pale with the sea's nausea and a childhood of peasantry. I give my name. “Liam.”

“Whole name,” he demands.

“William James Garrihy, born 1901, Clare, Ireland.”

“Calling or occupation?”

“Laborer.”

“Name o' relative or friend ya joinin'?”

“My uncle, Joseph Garrihy.”

He hands me back some papers and that's when I find out someone misheard me and therefore changed my name. I am Garrity now. They then take my clothes so they can see the whole of me; sunken belly poked, tongue pulled and genitals picked up with a flat stick and my face flushed in embarrassment.

“Where ya off ta den,” Another man says as a matter of occupation.

“Water Street.”

“Brooklyn o' Manhatt'n?”

I thought of the two words. Brooklyn sounds more familiar. “On ‘at ferry ova dere, g'ahead.”

I
SHIFT IN MY SEAT AND
take from my old man's pipe here, the discomfort weighing on me. It is not an easy task to write of my own life when the humility of my people pulls at me. The tradition of telling stories is a social one, where I come from. But I have become an American over these many years. And though I think as a traveling shanachie, I feel to write as an American does.

Richie Lonergan hops in his stride. He hikes his left leg forward, all the while keeping a strong and equal pace down the tenement low-risers of Johnson Street toward the waterfront in the middle of the night. As he is known, his face is chiseled and without expression like a young stone-faced white Indian among the coarse escarpments of his landscape. His bony cheeks reddened from the cutting winter wind and blond hairs flaying out the side of his cloth cap, Richie pushes on emotionlessly into the night. With fifteen years behind him, the boy is an experienced Brooklynite. Impassive is his wont, he keeps at pace under the elevated tracks. Above him, they are adjoined southward from the Sands Street Station House. He passes under the view of a couple trolley watchtowers like a city varmint mingling in its business among the trash and rails under the eyes of uncaring subway standers.

Through the littered train yard he limps. On a wooden leg with an empty shoe nailed to it, he goes without a fear in him. Jumps on a hitch between an old rusted-out train that lay forgotten for over a year, he then emerges into the waterfront neighborhood: a place most New Yorkers only notice from a train window, as yet another slum down by where the ships let off. When he gets to Hicks Street, he swings to the right and waves one arm in the air for balance but soon slows to cut through a tract of browned winter grass near Middagh Street scattered with the rustling rubbish from the restless night.

When upon he come to the old brick building that houses the picture frame factory, he flattens his back along its side to hide himself in the shadows, to rest a moment and calm his breath. The boy can hear the hearthy laugh and hearty lilt of old William Brosnan, head patrolman at the Poplar Street Station. The station stands opposite the factory by way of back doors, separated only by a thin garbage-strewn lot. As young Richie stands erect upon the brick wall, a long glim of yellowed light appears where Brosnan flicks the ash off his black cigar. Through the crack in the door Lonergan hears Brosnan's brogue as he chews the fat with patrolmen Culkin and Ferris of the local Bridgetown beat, the old Fifth Ward.

What brings Richie Lonergan out this night is a homeless laborer at the picture frame factory who spends his nights there for a portion of his earnings. Dumbly leaving his bicycle out back, Richie eyeballs it from around the dark corner. Richie inches closer to the back door of the factory, closer also to the lawmen of the Poplar Street Station across the way. His breath cools in the smoky cold, and he pulls the cap down tighter over his flat-stone cement eyes and sandy hair. He feels the wind biting at his ears and imagines that the yellow glim of light gives off a warmth. And if it is only his imagination, at least that somewhat warms him even. The boy hadn't the thought to beat his way out of a bad situation, but if pressed, he can summon the cudgel from his pant leg and put a man to God's path if he steps between him and his take. Copper badge or not, though he prefers not for it's a long bit on Blackwell's Island for a teenager to do a thing as that. True too that Brosnan knows him since he was only a child and had more than once put the manacles on him. Even monikered Richie the name the papers love to flap him with, Pegleg. For it was Brosnan himself who'd first responded after the trolley sliced the bottom of Richie's leg off when he was only of eight years fetching bread for his poor old Ma. Brosnan and Bill Lovett too, who helped calm the squirming child that stared at his own blood and limp leg lying motionless between the tracks. An accident so deeply set in the back end of his youth that he rarely thinks on it himself, though others always seem to wonder and whisper about it.

Richie peers around the brick building and hones in on the bicycle, then listens implicitly to the sounds animating the night; the clopping in the distance of old nags pulling their loads along the rocky cobblestones to deliver fish and vegetables and the like for the morning's market; the plucking of standup pianos in local saloons where suds wet the insides of late-night merchant marines and happy barkeeps; the bellowing of old Brosnan again laughing brusquely, mixing in a few jokes before again to blast open an uprooting bellow on the other side of the glimmer at the back door. Richie hears too the rumbling tracks above like rolling thunder in age-old lores where gods show their disapproval of mortal sins by the distant cannonades and clapping above. When the time seems right, Richie limps to the back of the factory, dragging his wooden leg behind, clicks the kickstand back on the bicycle, and walks to the front as though the bike were his from the get-go and nary a nerve jingled in the boy's body nor mind. Unable to ride the thing himself, he pushes it all the way back up Hicks Street against the wind. Through the rail yard he goes limping all the way toward the Lonergan first-floor room on Johnson Street, a wooden frame, pre–Civil War tumbledown that creaks when the wind rings up.

Richie reaches out to open the door, then maneuvers the bike and his leg through the sleeping troupe of ten or eleven sheetless children lying askew on the parlor-room floor. Their light-haired heads dark and wet from the body's oils and fallen asleep they have, exactly where their heads lay now.

Mary Lonergan's back is bent over the bucket of dishes beyond the sprawled children, her hands already wrinkled and sore from the late-night scrubbing job at a Crown Heights mansion. It isn't until Richie drops the bike with a rattle among the others that Mary turns round.

“And what are ya supposin' we do with all dese bikecycles you keep findin' in the middle o' the night, Richie? Are ya makin' a collection?” she shoots off in her Brooklyn brogue.

“Nah, rentin' 'em.”

Across the left side of Mary's face is an old scar from hot grease that had been thrown across her. Under her left temple the hair has been scalded away and was never to grow again and her left shoulder too was spotted with burns that had eaten the pigment from her skin to leave the side of her a pale color. In 1904, when Richie was three years old, his father took a pan of grease off the fire and threw it on her in a fit of anger. It even made the papers but that was only for a day. The scars are there still.

“I know da plan, Richie.” She lays a fist on her hip. “But do you think ya can get up a little earlier now an' again to rent'm out to the kids that need them durin' the day? Ya've got a collection now; next step is the rentin' part you keep spakin' of.”

“Where's Paps?” he answers.

“Don't know, saloon I s'pose.”

“Anna?”

“Sleepin' in the back room, God let 'er rest. The sweetest darlin' of a girl, she is. Spent the whole of a day at St. Ann's prayin' for me,” Mary whined her voice a bit at the end to accentuate that Anna was praying for her poor old mother. “No one hears a t'ing in this werld, not even a poor mother with starvin' chicks. But Anna does. Ignore and ignore, that's what they do. The evil is in the ignorin', write it down fer it's the truth. Doesn't matther it's yer dyin' breath, they'll just give ya the blindeye. Yer last dyin' wish'll go unheard and then off ya take to the groundsweat with ya, and fer the goin' price too. That's the cure fer ya.”

“Why she prayin' for ya, Ma? Wha' happened?” Richie could tell she had been thinking and plotting all day.

“Yer fadder's a loogin,” Mary threw a washrag on the draining board. “He's made enemies of every boxer from here to Hell's Kitchen, he has. No future in promotin' or nothin' o' the sort. We're doomed!” she cries out and turns her back, half acting. “We're doomed to a life o' peasantry, Richie. Ye're da son of a scrubberwoman and a punchy ex-gangster and ex-boxer from the Lower East Side. We won't go nowhere an' with all these childers, Richie?” she spread her arm out motioning along the floor.

“Ma, stop cryin',” Richie hated when she used old words like that, “peasantry.”

“I went by the Dock Loaders' Club t'day . . .”

“Again,” Richie finished her sentence.

“Yeah, they won' let me in, but Bill Lovett was there and he said he'd send a message to Dinny about helpin' out widda openin' costs fer ya own bikecycle shop, God bless that young man Lovett. Ya know he's a big dockboss for Dinny Meehan now? Did ya know that?”

Richie turned around.

“Even though McGowan's the rightful dockboss in the Red Hook, Bill's proved himself by fillin' in with honor,” she continued. “Only twentyone year old and he's showin' his colors as a dockboss, God bless'm. Ran out all them I-talians that tried takin' over the Red Hook after McGowen got sent up for a jolt . . . Saved Dinny Meehan a war against 'em, ya know he did. And Lovett's got just the temperament fer such a place as the Red Hook. But I known it from the day that bhoy was born into those rookeries on Cat'erine Street. That bhoy had swagger and he had a lot of it too. He's a good one, that Lovett. Always cared 'bout ya too since the accident . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .”

“Since before even too, he has, Richie. He always looked out for ya. He's got the ol' can-do, Lovett. And he was the first one there when the trolley got ya and he wrapped his tie ‘round ya leg so's it wouldn't bleed out.”

Mary stopped speaking as she blushed and the warmth hit her throat, tears blurred her eyes. She had the highest of expectations of Richie since he was her first and since he had everything it would take to lead her family out of the Bridge District slums. He had the fight in him and he had the nerve for it. He had followers and most important, he had the name: Lonergan, known on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn as a name to put the fear in people. And Brady too, Mary's maiden name and the surname of her famous brother, Yakey Yake who ran things in the old days on the docks by Catherine Street: a man who could turn on a dime, but fought mostly not for pleasure, but to give bread to his people, his family. Who kept the Eastman Gang and the Five Points Gang at bay. Yakey Yake was also the man who employed John Lonergan as one of his main soldiers that she married at his courting. But when Yakey Yake died of the consumption in 1904, things quickly went awry for the Lonergan family.

Most of the time Mary was quietly proud of her Richie as he fought through his childhood injury, but there were other times when she hid from him and couldn't stop thinking how far along he'd be if that accident had never come to them. She couldn't let him see the terrible disappointment that overcame her when she thought of it. Gathering herself in front of him, she continued.

“Richie, ya've five bikecycles in a pile among the children here and four out on loan. That's a lot o' bikecycles. With ya own shop on Bridge Street, ya can quit the cutpursin' gimmick at the Sands Street station and become a legitimate retailer. A real businessm'n. Out of all me children, you got what it takes to be somethin' more'n anyone, Richie. Somebody! Ya fifteen now, Richie. A man o' da werld. Even Anna likes the idea and swears she'd help. Ya know how she looks up at ya, Richie.”

Through his sternness, Richie looks at his mother with a shade of concern.

“Ya know Richie, people talk. They do, and they're sayin' one day the gang could be all Lovett's. Can you imagine the take fer us if ya was his right hand? Like the Romans we'd live! O' course he's too young yet and that Dinny Meehan's a smart one too, him bein' as long-lastin' as he has. And Bill's only got the Red Hook now and who knows what'll happen when they let McGowan out. But that Bill Lovett's a wild one and he'll give Dinny more to chew on, true 'tis.”

Richie stared, fidgeted.

“What do I know, anyhow? Just an ol' sow with no hopes.

All I want is children that don' go starving their youthful days away. Ya know more'n I do, Richie. Ye'll do as ye t'inks fit, ye'll do . . . Fine then, what do I know? Nothin'. I'll be washing other people's floors while yer own fadder dips his finger into me sugar jar for a drink and a long-shot at the policy wheel.”

Without a response Mary continued, but with less anger, “I know ya got yare own gang, Richie. They're good lads too. Who says ya gotta dump 'em? Nobody says. But if I know one t'ing that's good for all o' us it's that if ya gotta go on the lam or upstate fer a stint—God forgive me fer sayin' it—Dinny'll make sure we got food on the table. He will too,” she pointed a finger at her son. “Ye'll be good to be in debt with Dinny Meehan. He takes care o' his. I may be a woman, but I'm the sister of Yake Brady and the wife o' his meanest man, John Lonergan. I know what a debt is to the like o' Dinny Meehan. Ya'll owe him, I know it. And ya're a loyal man, Richie Lonergan. Honorable man! But t'ink o' yer mother. T'ink o' Anna and the childers. Best chance we got, the gangs. Always has been fer our like.”