Light of the Diddicoy (3 page)

I
SLEEP ON AN OLD SOFA
with springs that have pierced the cushions through and right off I am taken with a fever from the long trip and the new weather and all. For close on two weeks I remain inside and become a burden to my uncle Joseph who tells the truth about things with the drink in him. A scarecrow of a man with his spindly legs, bony hips, and hunching shoulders, he seems to have a right opinion about it all whether someone asks him for it or not. I don't remember much of him from home though, as he'd made his way to New York back in 1908 for the labor work in the building of the Manhattan Bridge. Wasn't around much when he was in Clare anyhow.

I realize that he is a figure among other men, but I am unsure of his crew's place along the docks in Brooklyn. Most of his men are Irish, true, yet I see in all of them a bit of the outsider. With broken beaks and loose teeth, suits that are torn at the seams, sunken eyes, and a hungry look on their mugs, I know that to the bottom of them they are ill at ease. And the more I look on my uncle Joseph for the assurance I need, the more my stomach sags and slides with uncertainty.

Every morning except Sundays he gets up and walks from the brick tenement on Water Street next to the Sweeney factory with his crew of ragged cullies. They then go left on Hicks Street and line up with the rest of the laborers waiting for a ship to rest on the slips to request work. Sometimes they jump a trolley as far down as the barge port at the basin or load a truck off the Baltic Terminal or a train along the Jay Street freight tracks.

Uncle Joseph and his men haven't endeared themselves with the Dinnies who are in charge on the docks and run things from 25 Bridge Street, so they find getting work difficult. It is all quite confusing to me, gangs and docks and such, since I only hear about things secondhand from my uncle and his followers, but the Dinnies are often the topic.

“The Swede an' them put a few good men down at the Fulton Street Landing the other day,” Uncle Joseph says puffing from the cutty among his crew. “Four of 'em. I-talians. Just lookin' fer work s'all they was after. Put a good beatin' on 'em too I heared.”

His stroppy crew of listeners nod dolefully, and I decide I'll steer clear of the like of the man they call The Swede.

Looking at me then, Uncle Joseph speaks, “Feckin' banditry 'tis. Well then . . . We'll get ours too, but right by the werkin' man t'will be.”

In time, I wake with them. Out seeing the city for the first time and walking from Water Street through pier neighborhoods in the morning under the drooping laundry lines and the blur of faces about. Behind the loping of my uncle and the others, we come under the two bridges and down the dock-train arteries of the Columbia Street piers. Bumping into strangers as I look up, nary a pardon to be heard. Families of fifteen are jammed into third-floor windows to peer out the fetid flat for a respite of air. Some tenements holding ten or twenty rooms shoulder-to-shoulder along the streets with tenants shoulder-to-shoulder inside them. An endless stacking of shacks and rowhouses and redbrick buildings at every curve and corner. The Bridge District, heavily industrialized with the crack of tool smiths and cigar rollers, linen makers, dye makers, tie makers, and seamstresses, all singing foreigners' songs by the open shudders. And then there are metal box makers and corrugated-cardboard-box makers and ship-container makers and warehousing units aplenty and gas companies competing for heads and police stationmen leaning back on their heels in the morning cut, suited up in their blue tunics and sidecocked caps.

The sound of the city goes ringing in my ears all at once: the dinging of distant tugs under the bridges, the sounding off of the booming barges, the clopping of horse buggies and drays. The city's orchestra of working-class harmonies mixing with the buzz of automobiles, the winching chains pulling up buckets on the coal wharfs, the
cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo
of elevated trains above and the scraping of their brakes on high. Too there is the tenor of arguments upstairs and next door, the soliloquies of the poor pierced by the soprano of the women victims sonorous in her sorrowful dispirit, ancient in their dialects and tongues. There are wild dogs tearing away at metal garbage cans on the sidewalks, footsteps on the creaking stairwells. I hear the drunken beratements of street men who it would seem yell at the paperboys, who themselves bellow from the street corners clamoring of the previous day's headlines in the brume of the late dawn's shuffling. Babies just able to walk and young children are playing with a long stick and a tiny ball in the street and they run shoeless most of the time, jumping over mud puddles with hardly a mother or father to be found standing over them. They play improvised games like stoopball or Kill the Carrier, a form of hurling where a child holding a stick is chased down and tackled by all the others, on the pavement no less. And spilling in their mischievous masses onto the stairwells and in front of draft horses pulling a man and a dilapidated cart, slowly scuffling through the neighborhood to get to the next at first blush of morn.

At every street crossing it seems another elevated track appears above with long stairwells filled with travelers stomping up and down like human conveyer belts. Grocers and tobacconists stand in their doorways smoking under the shadows speckled with the lattice-light of the trellis-framed Els and somehow live among the creaking and the screeching and clicking and hammering of trolleys swooshing and grumbling by all day and night. They converse with the men who sell apples from their horse-pulled drays at the end of the sidewalks and admonish the rag-picking children who walk by shoeless and the low-placed homeless who splay their junk wares on the pavement for possible buyers. And when a train comes to a halt above, a small army of ten-year-old bootblack boys run up the station stairwells for customers exiting like a gang of brothers, though they are supposed to be competing against one another for nickels and for dimes.

A day or so earlier a fire below the street had flames jumping from each of the sewers, blowing manholes in the air after a gas leak flooded the pressurized underground. A pre–Civil War wood-framed building had collapsed over the sidewalk and into Pierrepont Street some three months before I arrived, and lay there still untouched. Only the oncome of winter has halted the advance of weeds, now receding in the rubble. Children gamble openly against a brick wall below the brownstone stairwells, laying down the money they've garnered from some underhanded racket for a chance to double it playing craps and faro. And bigger kids come by with rapacious intentions and punching the wee ones to extract their own sort of protection money, preparing themselves for the big show on the docks later in life as it's the Dinnies who are the heroes on the lips of these shorn-headed, floppy-hatted lads.

The first liner I ever see fall into dock, scraping its keel against the wooden pier with a swoosh and a gulp, is a Scandinavian girl named The Halkinnean full with a load of crated birch shingles weighing close on seventy pounds each. The flag has gone up in the waterfront steam, the old signal for labormen to gather. And the whistle from the pier house blows as men amble out of their tenements and from the saloons for the need to work. No more than a skinny stripling standing in line with larger men of much might, I am lost among the crowd and quickly can't find my uncle. As I look around in a fright, I hear the callings of the cattle pushers.

“To Pier Six wit' ya's!” They yell. And quickly the hopefuls begin running up the cobblestoned street, a rough road lined with freight tracks along the pier houses that break the waterfront view, “Run! Go! Who's the best among ya!”

As we pile into the landing at Pier Six, a new voice yells at us to run north again. “Up to da bridge'n back, first ten mens guaranteed woik!”

Scrambling, men in dirty suits with broken shoes and hats in their back pockets fight amongst one another for the lead. Their suit ties are in tatters and dirt-rimmed collars flap mistakenly over their bedraggled coat as they take to the wind in hope of winning work for a day. Unknown faces spilling strange languages from their gobs and with eyes empty and bellies falling out of them with hunger to summon strength from their deflated reserves, they clamber with patchwork humility in the early-morning gales. Some men cheat and turn around for the final stretch before making it to the bridge. They are met then with shoulder bumps that put their faces in the ground and kicks that leave them moaning heavily in the cobble mud. Eventually we are led by the Dinnies all the way back where we started and lined up again. Breathing heavy. Breathing deeply with our hands on our knees, we look for the Dinnies and quickly straighten up to show how we are not in the least affected by the sprinting and fighting.

“On the line! Fix ya'self on the line, ya bunch o' spalpeen layabouts,” I hear one of the Dinnies yell out.

“Get there! Get there. Quick, quick . . .”

“Ya nothin' but a bunch a rotten navvies!”

“Shape-up boyos, who's the man of the men here?”

“Who's the bee's knees, then?”

As I look up, four of the men barking at the mass of hopefuls push themselves through the group and make a separation to reveal their leader. And in he come. From the grimace of his toughs they clear the way for the chieftain of the dock clans.

Look at the man. Mid-twenties he strides across the face of us with a prominent stare and a fixed grin as his cronies shrink behind him, arms crossed. He does not have a happy grin though. This grin is that of a man staring into the sun. This man who emerges from the parting crowd, he who knows that each pale staring face that peers upon him is desperate for work, does not give the glaring eyes a notice as it's he who looks upon our shoddy like to see how much work can be wrung from us. How hard we'll give. He looks in each face. In each eye and if he finds fire, he moves on. If he finds passivity, moves on. If he finds reason, he chooses. But reason without muscle of course, he moves on.

Lost in the crowd as was I, one of his sluggers approaches and grabs me by both shoulders, pushes me between two men that know each other in line. After a moment, one of them elbows me behind him so he can be on the side of his buddy and I having to force myself back into line again from behind.

The man with men parting around him is, of course, Dinny Meehan, leader of the White Hand. And though it was many years ago, I remember it as if it were happening now and right out in front of me.

It was then, as Dinny Meehan strode through the dock aisles, that I finally figured out that the group called Dinnies were really his own: Dinny's men, that is. And along the line he stalked like some rogue general inspecting his indigent battalion of scamps and scallies queued up as well as they could but stung with the hunger and the cold.

He stands there in my mind as if it were today. Bold and humble, a man of his time and mine. He is standing there ahead of me, scanning the bodies and the faces of the hopefuls in line. Erect like a gypsy traveler appraises a piebald vanner mare with a keen, scrutinizing eye before arguing price. He even asks to see some of the men's teeth and if they possess all the digits on their hands. Behind him, a pier reaching out into the East River becomes filled with a backing ship and four guiding, noisy tugs. This man Meehan did not walk with the gruff demeanor of his roughneck toughs who make order on the labor lines. Instead, he answers his men's questions with a nod or a softly spoken “Nah,” or a gentle “Yeah.”

His clothing, though a bit patchy, clings to his muscled shoulders, chest, and upper arms and down toward his flat stomach and punchy legs. His boots are soiled, as are all the other men's, and he has the face of a hardened laborman with a wide jaw and the small ears of a fighting dog. His brown hair falls back over the top of his head without the spit or oil some use, though shocks of it are left over his temple and down close to his ear on one side. His eyes though, that's what made Dinny Meehan. His eyes are a very intelligent green and made of a nice shape both mean and understanding.

At the time, no one had to tell me who the tribe-head here was. He carried the weight of the responsibility of things on the Brooklyn docks in his eyes, he did. As had all chieftains among their clan in the olden days back home when they ran wild through the glens, heathers, bogs, and boreens.

Up and down the line bark his boyos. Attacking a loosened piece or a scowling laborman here and there. Hissing at them in the morning wind. Pushing them off balance if they sneer too much. The dockboss of the Baltic Terminal was John Gibney, “the Lark.” His right-hand man standing behind him is the slick-haired Big Dick Morissey with the chest of a black ape and the forearms of an anchor chain. Also there, tightening up the line, is the gangly white-haired dooker with the long arms and club fists, the one everyone calls The Swede. And finally Vincent Maher, a handsome masher who was a bit younger than the rest and who smirks with the sport of a skirt chaser yet walks with the same authority as a man in the inner circle of Meehan's larrikins.

From behind with a scare and pushing passed me without mention of a pardon is another taller sort that doesn't have the shoulders of Big Dick or the vulgar bearing of The Swede. This man who leapt through the line from behind me came straight to the ear of Meehan and overhearing him as I did, was taken by the fellow's accent, which can't be mistaken for anything other than that of a true Irish traveler. A native of the country roads of Ireland where they claim no territory as their own and wobble about in covered wagons pulled by gypsycobs from riverside to horse fair. This traveler, Tommy Tuohey is he, a type I knew all too well as coming from the clans of fist fighting and knavery who sleep their drink off under the big aimless pale starry and mooned sky. With logistics at hand, Tuohey speaks to Meehan as he'd just come from a meeting with the captain of the ship for a rundown on the goods to be unloaded and an estimate on manpower.