Light of the Diddicoy (21 page)

“Uncle Joseph,” I say with as much persuasion I have. “You have to help me. I have to get my mam and sisters here. Do you remember Abby and Brigid? Do ye? They were just tykes back before you left for New York.”

He winces while looking away, bobs his head.

“Uncle Joe, I'll join the ILA and be your best man here. Please help me, though. There's a war coming. You know what the Brits do when you stand up to them. I'm afraid for the girls' fate, Uncle Joe. My da sent me here for a reason. When they had that funeral for O'Donovan Rossa in Glasnevin last year, it was then my da decided to send me here. And send me here only to bring my mam and sisters he did, after the uprising . . .”

His face went sour, “Why ye so werried about that? Ye didn't come all this way to werry, did ye? This is a new life, kid. No more farmin'. No more wet shoes all day and all night. No more barren country and small town minds. This is New Yark, kid. We're home now and there's a lotta money to be made here in arganizin'. I'm clearin' t'irty dullers per week just in recruitin' alone. I met King Joe too, the vice president o' the ILA and he says T. V. O'Connor wants to meet me too! Congratulate me for takin' over for Thos Carmody here in Brooklyn. Why don't ye work wid me, kid. Let's do somethin'. Ye know there's a rumor o' a million dullers bein' sent our way by the Germans fer a general strike. We might do it, ye know! Can ye imagine Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey longshoremen strikin'? We got a great opportunity here. The shippers and the stevedorin' companies would have no choice but to raise our wages to whatever we demand. They can't stop the war effort because they don't pay the longshoremen a right wage! They'll have no choice. Its big money, kiddo! Our day is comin'! Forget about the past and the old and the women. They're a burden on ye, and they'd burden me too. I'll not help ye bring them here. . . . Just send'm money here and there and leave'm far from us, bhoy.”

Then I see Petey Behan and the others outside the bar talking with the same bouncer that greeted me. I turn to my uncle desperately. “What happened with my da? Uncle Joseph, I need to know what happened to my da. Did he join the uprising? Is he in hiding? What happened! Won't you please help me get Mam here.”

Disgusted that I am unaffected by his recruiting speech, he turns his back to me and looks away. I can hear men laughing with a sinister accent behind and to the side of me. A second later, he turns back round, “Yer da's dead! A dead man! Killt en Dooblin like all de other Fenians o' the auld world. Dead! Yer ma an' sisters too! Ye heared me? Dead! All of 'em!”

He turned again to the tender and sits coolly.

There was only one other moment in my life when everything stood still: the moment my first child was born and, of course, at this very moment here. I can picture it as I sit here at the typewriter punching words out in front of me, pausing now. Closing my eyes: the darkness of the bar pervaded much of that night. There was almost no light in there at all, no electricity at all along the old waterfront of the time. None. Just darkness. Like a forgotten time so long ago. Happily forgotten in the darkness and the fading of ancient memories. I can hear the clanking of bottle to glass though, the old man behind the bar with his big, bushy mustache from another century, the smell of pipe-smoked tobacco, and the cheap clothing of immigrant labormen huddling in the tiny bar shoulder to shoulder. I can see my uncle's bald spot too, his back turned to me in true dishonor. And I remember too, that urgent feeling to prove my own honor. “Mystifying,” I say aloud, shaking my head. These men with broken beaks and broken backs lining up for a drink long after the shape-up whistle had rung out in the morning. It's always mystified me. The humble beauty of it. They were all wounded in some fashion, physically and more. I can hear them singing in that silent moment. Their well-journeyed souls unkempt and uncared for. I knew then that I was alone in the universe. Like a man knows and finds out along his own travels. And I knew that no one was allowed to live alone in such a place as New York where every other saloon you walked by had a piano man plucking the same old nostalgic tune, “The Sidewalks of New York.” Standing still in my memories, I cry at the loneliness of the place. At the contest of it where oftentimes loyalties were more powerful than family. My friends were now my family, and family is survival. It really was that simple. The clan mentality, clans existing to fight together for survival in an unforgiving circumstance.

I look up.

The bouncer starts walking toward me through the din of sounds and right behind him sneak Petey and the others. Some other drunken longshoremen start yelling that the kids are storming the place. The bouncer turns around and I know that in any second all hell is about to break out.

In one motion, I stand up and yank my left elbow down, pushing my uncle Joseph's head to the bar, then I rip out my knife as I'd practiced many times over, and reach back. I reach back farther. Reaching back so far and so high that I probably looked like a baseball pitcher for the Brooklyn Robins. When I come down, I hear a gunshot in the air. But that doesn't stop my momentum. I come down so hard with that knife, just like Harry the Shiv had told me, going straight for the neck. The knife comes in so deep that I can feel the hilt of the blade press squarely against his skin. It had gone through the back of his neck, out the front and stuck into the mahogany bar with a banging sound. Maybe more like a deep thud on the bar that makes the drinks around us jump in a scare.

Then I remember seeing Timothy Quilty decking men twice his age, left and right. He was a real puncher, that kid. Every man he hits goes to the ground. Another gunshot rings out and next thing I know, Matty Martin grabs me by the collar as I stand over my dying uncle, stuck to the bar by the knife in his neck. Just for good measure, Petey Behan comes up from under the darkness or someone's armpit and sticks his own blade into my uncle's side, reaching out from below. Another gunshot rings out from Matty's snub .38 and down goes another man. A riot breaks out, but no one can see who the enemy is, and with everyone drunk to the gills, it takes many of the men several moments to realize what is happening. Some smart ones start stealing drinks from underneath the tables where they hide, like it isn't such a big surprise to be suddenly overcome with a shooting brawl in the place. Others just start punching anyone around them to protect themselves as they've been ready for a rollick after their third drink anyhow. Now they jump at the commotion and give a licking to anyone around them.

A bottleneck is created since there is only one exit. Men start to realize that those who came in shooting and stabbing are trying to make it out the same exit as them. This fact puts a spook in them. Finally, someone throws a chair through the front window with a big splash. I look back one more time at my uncle who is alone in the room save three men that lay on the ground either knocked cold, or dead. The old scrag knows he is dying and doesn't have a say in it. Stuck to the bar, I see him reaching back with the tips of his fingers for his chair so he can sit and wait it out in peace, I supposed.

When we finally make it outside, Matty yanking on my collar, I see the remarkable faces of Cinders Connolly, Petey's big brother Joey Behan, Dance Gillen, and Dinny Meehan. When they see me and Matty exit the saloon among the chaos and the mayhem, they motion to each other. “They're all out, the boys are out!”

Flame throwings being his expertise, Cinders has lit the rag that sticks out of a glass bottle of gasoline, then runs toward the bar and whips it inside the open front window. Behind him come Joey Behan and his, then Dance sprints up with the biggest smile I've ever seen on his dark face with the last as Dinny is directing traffic. After Dance throws his flaming bottle, which explodes with a big huff inside McAlpine's Saloon, he screams at the top of his lungs and tackles two or three frantic men running from the flames. The force that he uses in hitting men is so vicious and comical that he can bring four men to the ground with the punishing blow. Stomping on one after another, I run by him a little dazed.

Connolly comes running up to Matty and myself and asks where my uncle is and what has passed. Matty speaks up and tells about how I'd speared him like a fish.

“Is 'e dead? Dead?” Connolly frantically asks.

“Dead, oh he's dead a'right!” Matty laughs. “Real dead!”

When the fireworks begin, the Whitehanders all start yelling in congratulatory tones, then heel-toe it out of there in a big hurry. I'm not sure if it was the rollick in the air and the rumpus among us, or just an anger that comes bursting out of me, but at that moment I search for Petey Behan among the running crowd and the blazes. When I find him, I sprint full speed at him, just like Dance Gillen does, and I tackle Petey with a thump.

“That's what'll happen with you too, you son of a bitch, you!” I scream and batter him for a good few punches until his big brother grabs me. “Don't ever . . . !” I scream, but can't get all the words out. “Ever . . . ! I'll give you one of these real hard if you ever think of putting yourself over me again!”

“Jesus Dinny, why the hell's this kid gone crazy abusin' Petey?” Joey asks while holding me as tight as he can so I don't kill his little brother right then and there.

But I have grabbed ahold of the coat by the collar and refused to let it loose. I see Petey's eyes light up in anger. He yanks at my hand while his brother tries pulling me away.

“Let it go, kid!” the older brother yells in my ear.

Cinders Connolly, suddenly on my side yells also, “You let it go, Petey.”

“Fuck no,” Petey grits, then yanks at my hand again.

I have that coat so firm in my hand that it's the death grip. I'll not let it loose no matter if Dinny himself demands it of me. I yank back hard while in Joey Behan's hold, and soon I can hear the alpaca's seams come loose at the shoulder.

“Let it go!” Petey yells and takes a swing at me, which lands on my arm.

I kick up at him as his brother tries pulling me backward and soon enough the coat gives way, tearing into pieces.

“Ya're a fookin' asshole!” Petey yelps, throwing down half of the useless coat.

Dinny Meehan smiles and in a moment we are all running back up north for the Bridge District as Cinders Connolly looks back in awe at the flaming night sky.

“W
AKE UP
!” D
INNY BELLOWS, ENTERING THE
room. “Wake up boyos, time to get up! Let's go, we gotta big day in front of us. You're official kiddos now! Wake it up!”

He jumps on the bed where huddled close are myself against the wall, Timothy Quilty and Matty Martin in the middle, and Petey Behan straddling the edge. We are sleeping as quietly as growing young teenage boys do, but with our boots still at the ready. All four of us. The previous night our apparent initiation and with congratulatory drinks at the Dock Loaders' Club afterward, we drunkenly agree that killers sleep with their boots on, so we keep them laced.

It's true. We are Whitehanders now. Like real men. I not nearly as thrilled as the others of course, and as the pitter-pattering of the rain at the sill argues against Dinny's exuberance, I try to turn to the wall.

“Let's go, let's go!” Dinny yells, pushing on our chests and slapping our faces in the dark morning.

I open my sandy eyes and look up to Dinny holding a candle to his face in the darkness, standing above me on the bed. His smile has never been wider. He bounces on the bed and Petey falls off, still asleep.

“We got places to be, boys, now get yourselves up,” Dinny encourages.

As Matty and Tim get out of bed, I see Vincent Maher appear with a wooden box in his hands. He whispers to The Swede and an approaching Dinny that it was outside on the stoops, empty and wet.

“Ybor Gales,” Dinny reads the smeared but colorful papering around it.

Before The Swede cusses Lovett, Dinny hushes him so as not to let the young ones hear of dissension in the gang. But I know it means Lovett got the job done. And in his way, sends the message that he, Bill Lovett and his own crew, take the credit for it. Without tribute to Dinny's hand. It means that Lovett's act is seen as bravery and daring among his own men, traveling to Dinny's home to make a point about his gang's accomplishment. It means treachery to The Swede though. To Dinny, a demand for honor by the old ways. The ways that Dinny too honors.

“He's got disrespect,” The Swede mumbles, pointing at the box in Dinny's hand.

Unfazed, Dinny looks away. “He knows what sway is.”

I hear them whispering, The Swede angrily, but act as though I can't.

“It's all about the Leighton brothers,” The Swede growls. “As long as Pickles sits in Sing Sing and Darby's eighty-sixt, he'll never get wit' us. Even after givin' it to McGowan like they did.”

“He'll never be wit' us,” Dinny whispers while looking over at me. “Just have to keep him weak.”

I'm the last out of bed, but when I finally raise myself I head to the bathroom and open the door where standing three wide over the toilet and pointing their peeing puds at it are the sleepy-eyed young gangsters little Behan, Martin, and Quilty. In a rush, Sadie shoves a piece of toast on my chest with egg stuffed in it, scruffs my hair a bit, then doubles back and looks at my face. “Y'even look bigger, William.”

It is the first time she ever called me William. And it wasn't until that very moment that I realized I was taller than her, as I must have grown three inches in the four months that I'd been sitting at her table.

Next thing I know and we're all sprinting down the stairwell with a cluttering, then striding with a furious pace up Henry Street in the cold, rainy morning air with the gray sky above none too happy neither. Since most of us have holes in our boots, we jump the rain-dotted puddles from the cobblestoned street to the broken-paved sidewalk. Little Petey screws on his tough face again while Quilty, the tallest of the kid clan, dangles behind wiping the sleep from his eyes.

Dinny is surrounded ahead of us by Vincent Maher and The Swede who have apparently been up since even earlier apprising Dinny of the situation ahead of us. When we get to Tillary Street and take a right toward 25 Bridge Street instead of a left toward the water, I start hearing a strange sound. A big, rumbling sound. The sound of many men speaking at the same time in the distance. A clamoring of voices and as we come upon the Sands Street station and cross Adams, then Jay Street, it becomes apparent that there is something very large on the agenda for the morning.

Between the yells of the many, I hear Chisel MaGuire with his shrill voice barking at the heels of the crowd until it again booms in the distance. As we near the corner to Bridge Street, I see Dinny look back to me among the shoulders of The Swede and Vincent Maher. There is sadness in the look of Dinny as he glances back at me. I know that. But that was Dinny. A man smarter than all the rest, yet haunted by all the responsibility behind it. But now that I'm old and knowing, I recognize that in his look was a hope for help from me. Sure I was young. Too young to help much, but there was a powerful need in him, Dinny Meehan. It was too much for one man to hold down an entire gang and long stretches of territory with multiple enemies. Too much. But I had young thoughts then. But not too young to see the sadness in his glance. Then he is gone around a brick-faced corner while Petey and Matty follow up ahead. As Tim and I round the corner behind the rest, I can't believe what I am seeing. The voices cheer so loud it sounds like a stadium of fanatics. Chisel MaGuire has pointed at us as we come around the corner and announces, “There's Dinny Meehan! There he is!”

The rain comes down in a mist on the Dock Loaders' Club which is flooded with men waving fists and sticks and hooks and shovels in the morning air for the leader of the White Hand Gang's arrival. It must be below thirty degrees, but that doesn't stop three hundred, maybe three hundred fifty men from jumping up and down wildly, ready to go to war. Their breathing smokes in the cool air as they scream. With the misty rain, they receive the best cleaning they've had in months. Red Donnelly, Gibney the Lark, Big Dick Morissey, Harry Reynolds, Philip Large, Dance Gillen, and a few others wait at the edge of the mass of men to help Dinny wend through the revelers to get to the makeshift podium where Chisel has been antagonizing the crowd into a blood-thirsting fervor. But the podium is nothing more than a couple crates stacked in front of the saloon.

Cinders Connolly emerges from the excited men and stops us before we follow Dinny and his protectors into the crowd and tells us to wait at the periphery and before long Richie Lonergan and Abe Harms appear to stand among us. Cinders gives me the firm shake that men give each other and pats me on the shoulder with a smile.

“All is well witcha den? It ain't nothin', doin' what ya did, ya know? Things like what ya did ain't easy gettin' over.”

I nod to him and yell in his ear, “This is my family now!”

As he smiles at me, I see behind him Bill Lovett and Non Connors smoking big fat cigars. Frankie Byrne and his old gang too, Jidge Seaman and Sean Healy. There are so many faces of men I have worked with in the past month, yet I never realized they are part of the overall gang. Some of their commitments to it so loose that I hadn't thought them loyal to Dinny. Many of them are nothing more than laborers and longshoremen, or truck drivers, warehousemen or pier house superintendents, factory managers, and the like, but they all report eventually to Dinny Meehan. All jump at the chance to repay him for his helping them get jobs in the neighborhood. It takes me a long while to understand the web Dinny spins in Brooklyn quietly from the center of the waterfront here at 25 Bridge Street underneath the Manhattan Bridge.

Cinders takes a moment to point a few of the men for the younger ones, though I've met most of them already. There is the brothers Whitey and Baron Simpson among the crowd, the drug addict Needles Ferry, the truck driver from Cleveland James Hart, and men that stand in the background waiting for Dinny to call upon them like Quiet Higgins, Happy Maloney, and Gimpy Kafferty, Fred Honeybeck, Johnny Mullen, Eddie Hughes, and best friend Freddie Cuneen, Dago Tom Montague, Timothy Quilty's big brother James who stands next to Petey's big brother Joey Behan, Joseph Flynn before his arm got blown off in the Great War, and Mr. Leighton the manager of the Kirkman Soap factory. Tanner Smith too has come from Greenwich Village with six or seven of his men including Lefty and Costello. I even see the Dock Loaders' Club patron tender Paddy Keenan among the crowd and of course Lovett and Connors and the rest along with Mickey Kane, Dinny's cousin, tagging along as their new helper.

“You see that guy over there?” Cinders whispers in my ear, pointing. “That's Garry fookin' Barry and his lone crony James Cleary. Don't ever trust 'em. He's a fookin' psychopath, that one. He used to run the Red Onion Gang. Trouble, nothin' but. If he comes up on ya, just play dumb.”

“Right.”

“Listen, William.” He bends down to whisper as Petey Behan looks over at me with a jealous smirk. “Dinny likes ya. That's all. Just stick it out wit' the youngsters here for a while. That's what Dinny wants. Stick it out for a bit. He knows ya ain't no murderer, but runnin' things ain't always killin', right? It just ain't. It's a small part o' things, right? Just stick it out and don't say nothin' to no one?”

I nod.

“Keep ya gob shut, right?”

“Okay.”

“Got it?”

“I do.”

“Good. So, for the time bein', you need to understand that Richie is the leader of the young ones. Richie?” Cinders calls him over.

“Richie, this here is yours.” He points at me. “You do what he tells ya, William. Dinny gives an order, it goes through Richie. So whatever Richie tells ya, treat it like its Dinny sayin' it. That goes for all o' yas. So whatever Richie tells yas, that's the word then, got it?”

“Yeah,” we all agree.

“Right then, here comes Dinny, listen up,” Cinders said looking toward the Dock Loaders' Club through the mist.

The crowd cheers as Dinny Meehan steps up on the crates. The Swede, Maher, Gibney, Big Dick, Tommy Tuohey, and a few others stand next to him waving their palms toward the ground to dull the cheers. After a few minutes the crowd calms a bit, argues with itself for a moment, stammers for balance in the tight-shouldered pushing, a few more laughs and then quiet. It becomes so quiet I can hear the clacking of old draft horses again clopping on the wet Belgian brick streets and even a tugboat
hoo-hooing
in the East River distance. Under Dinny's patient stare, a man would cough here and there and a train slows for the big loop at the Sands Street station beyond. Then there is a single laugh until finally, nothing.

“Who's gonna tell us how to work?” Dinny yells at the top of his lungs.

The crowd answers with a booming roar, waving their fists and crowbars in the air. The pitch is so great and so sudden that it scares me half to heaven and Cinders laughs as my knees buckle.

“Who's gonna tell us where we're gonna work?”

“No one,” they answer.

“They've been tryin' to tell us what to do since before Cromwell even.”

Grumblings are returned.

“Outsiders!”

Grumblings again.

“Foreigners' laws!”

A cold silence is returned.

“Do they care if ya live or die?”

“Nah,” a couple men reply close to me. “They don' care. Nah.”

“Do they care if ya children got food on a plate?”

“Nah.”

“Do they care if ya mother's got a proper grave to settle in? Do they?”

Silence again.

“The green grass stains around her mouth during the Great Hunger!” Dinny turned his face away to avoid the tears, which did more to motivate these men than anything he could ever think to say to them. “We don't forget!”

“Nah.”

“We don't!”

Again, a brooding silence.

“Our blood's on the Constitution! Antietam too!”

The crowd surges in pride like a giant wave. Men shift in the sea of bodies and fall to the ground, punching one another to give themselves some space, fighting the current. Before they can turn their anger upon one another, Dinny breaks in again.

“We built these bridges! These buildings! These rail tracks and these roads!”

“Yeah!”

“We even built the canal that made this city what it is today! Are we gonna let Joe Ryan and their I-talian cronies tell us how the game is played?”

“Hell no!” some shouted.

“We work for the ILA pencil pushers?”

“No!” We all shouted.

“We gonna work for Frankie Yale an' the Black Hand?”

“No!”

“The Dock companies an' the shippin' companies givin' us orders?”

“No!”

“Remember what they told us back in black ‘47 when the blight doubled back?”

The crowd became quiet again.

“Remember!” Dinny said, pointing his finger at all of them, reminding them in their bones and in their blood. “Let the Irish prosper by their own exertions, they said!”

Mouths and eyes opened, shoulders hunched with weapons lying across them. The men listened. All of them. In them.

“Now that we are livin' by our own exertions . . . they don't like that either! From Dock Street down to Imlay, any man waiting to unload ships this morning is either workin' for Frankie Yale or waitin' for Joe Garrity and the ILA to give them direction!”

A few men in the crowd laugh. I scratched my neck, look up.

“What are we waitin' for fellers!” Dinny yells, the veins in his neck turning blue. “Those boys need direction, let's go and give'm some!”

The crowd bellows and surges toward the waterfront in hysterics. Some men are overcome by the crowd and fall at full speed on their faces, trampled by the rush. Petey Behan starts running wildly and immediately separates himself from Richie, Abe, Tim and Matty, and myself. We look at each other and start running too.

The waterfront tenements came alive, opening their second-and third-floor windows at the early morning ranting. Old men, young boys, and their mothers and grandmothers wipe the sleep from their faces to see through the cool misty rain as the dockmen run below and through the concrete avenues with their bale hooks and picks searching for union sympathizers. Reminding the old-timing men of the days back in old Irishtown when law was enforced by the gangs. Below windows, the cacophonous mob sweeps along the John Street piers between the Navy Yard and the Vinegar Hill docks to once again attack the Italians and the union followers. The hordes of enraptured men filled with war, deep in them, are pushed and crowded to the edge of the street and sidewalks. Scraping their weapons along the tenement skin and the shining cobblestones slick with rain and bursting with orange sparks, the mob becomes ravenous with the pride and the sense of honor.