Light of the Diddicoy (4 page)

“Fer de sake of an eerly day Dinny, sexty-two strongmen could give de ship to rest, giverteek, moraless,” said the man so quickly that I barely understand him myself.

Meehan nods to Tuohey. Then appearing from another place was Eddie Gilchrist who was good with numbers, though a bit on the soft side. His spectacles at the end of his nose clumsily, Gilchrist looks up and mumbles under his breath as he gathers quickly the difference between the money offered by the shipowners, money needed by the stevedoring company, and how much take the gang would get from the sixty men.

For the dockmaster's final line-walk, the others snap to attention and look forward into the distance, pushing their chest out and standing tall on their feets. When he comes upon me and my youthful, bony physique, he snorts quietly and grabs my arm, wrapping his hand around it entirely. Looking in my eyes, Meehan quickly looks away again without changing the posture on his face a bit. Then moves on and picks the fellow next to me and a few others for the job. Gibney the dockboss walks behind Meehan and every here and there whispers into his ear about a man having put a dollar in his pocket to get picked, then the man emerges from the line and stands among those who would work that day.

My uncle Joseph is against the idea of paying to work, and so is his crew. Consequently he and his are rarely chosen. Across the gaggle he looks at me with a scowl as the line falls apart. Some throw their gripes in the air while the firm-eyed Meehan with all his cronies about him gives his back to us.

The Swede stands and stares into us as the others around him walk toward the ship. He dares any of us to step forward, waits for someone to back up their crying out against the old rules that still have life here on the docks of Brooklyn.

And as soon as The Swede begins to turn back toward the dock, a man runs from among us with a pistol in hand and lets off a wild shot into the gangsters. Everyone ducks except me since I don't recognize the sound of a gunshot. The Swede acts quickly, turns round and pushes the running man off balance and lands on him knee first, then rips the gun from him. Tuohey, Gibney, Morissey, Maher and others land on the man too while Dinny Meehan rolls up his sleeve to look upon his bloody forearm, wounded by the shot.

“It's nothin',” he promises, then waves his men back toward the ship. “Bring 'em over here.”

I stare as the groups of men walk in opposite directions, those heading to the docks for work, and those heading back to the saloons. The man with the gun is taken from our lot and dragged screaming. He is apparently insane, soft on the brain, or both. His fate is not for us to know or ask, however.

“Starker,” Uncle Joseph explains. “Hired by the shippin' companies or maybe the New York Dock Company, who knows. Anodder who wants Dinny Meehan dead.”

“That's a good thing, is it not?”

He looks at me. “They kill union guys too, anyone for the dime. Labor sluggin' has loyalty to no one but the dime.”

I wonder if the police are to be summoned, but told that no such law exists along the waterfront. The Poplar Street station is only called upon when a body is found by those who believe in police law.

“Up the street inland, the law is there for most people,” a crony of my uncle mumbles while the starker is pulled away by his collar. “Here, no one wants to know what passes in the dark.”

We turn round, and without work my uncle and his men curse the gang again. Days go on like this and the only time I ever get work is when multiple ships arrive simultaneously and no other men are to be had. Weeks can go by without working a single day while the same groups of men are picked. Some complain that they haven't the money to pay the gang to be among the chosen and if they did, they'd still have to pay tribute at the end of the day. This would leave them with a small take.

Too many men, not enough ships and jobs. Even in a place like the Bridge District that is highly industrialized. Still, it isn't near enough, as more ships unload the human cargo of pilgrims and defectors and escapees of foreign and obscure hostilities every day. Spilling into the overflowing neighborhoods and exasperating an already desperate circumstance. My uncle and his men explain to me that a few years earlier, many gangs used to war with one another for the right to work. For labor work. But Dinny Meehan brought all the gangs together and since then, it is the White Hand that controls the labor racket.

When we do get picked for loading or unloading, the work is backbreaking and strains my young thin muscles to a burning never witnessed in my body. I am often overcome with the need to drop my carry under the great strain in my shoulders and neck. Winded too, as we are made to run, and the sweat underneath my shirt freezes when it's cold enough. One time Gibney the Lark kicked me to the ground for my lagging in the line. Already tired from the work, I fall like a pile of bones and use the time as a resting point while the others laugh it up at my expense. At the end of the day, when the stevedoring company passes out envelopes that contain my earnings, Gibney and his right-hander Big Dick, show up again with some other fellows and demand a portion. I willingly hand it over. Having heard the story of the four Italians who were dragged off by ambulance cars, I'm not concerned about the morality of it. After taking my portion, Gibney and Big Dick simply turn round and force upon the next victim.

“Have a little dignity, bhoy,” my uncle Joseph angrily whispers. “Don't look so feckin' scared when ye hand it over. Show'm yer honor. Give'm the eye. Are ye wid us or not?”

“I am.”

O
NE NIGHT ON A
S
ATURDAY
I sleep on the sofa while white snow shimmers out the sooty kitchen window. It falls slowly, peacefully into the foreground of the bridges and masts and elevated tracks in the air among the stacked factories and tenements and brownstoned buildings leaning over the East River. The dark Water Street shack shakes when the stringed freight cars drop their loads of raw materials to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Rail brakes moan through the halls when ship containers full of paint cans are delivered at the Masury & Co. factory and clicking echoes travel through the air shafts when torpedoes are transported to the E.W. Bliss building up and down Plymouth Street a block away.

In good spirits after a bout with the drink, Uncle Joseph brings over a few men to the tenement for a shindy. That Saturday, the bottom-floor room was to cackle with voices and was lit with elongated, blooming flames in the dark from sucking pipe matches. With the drink in them they are blurts, much louder now than on the piers where I last saw them.

When I am woken by the drinking roars, they hand me the hooch for a swig; and, set to waking the fireplace too, they throw broken pieces of wood from the stairwell banister. Cursing Dinny Meehan and all the toughs who follow him, they resort instead to lines about worker-friendly environs and the right of men to organize.

“Fair bein' fair!” they demand. “Civility of the worker's rights!” I watch them from my springy sofa pounding their fists on the kitchen counter with their boorish denunciations and their lavish proclamations. Crooning the melodies of the abject and summoning the war cries of that time and place.

“Emma Goldman says . . .” and “Gene Debs is a man we'll vote fer . . .”

It was the pookas lived here too. I'd heard them as they were still fresh in my old country thoughts. The shanachies who storytell from village to village had always told me that the Irish are cursed by them, which explains why we are always on the bottom of every rung and wrangle, no matter the city we reside. Once we show a bit of success the pookas come and haunt us and whisper good-for-nothings in the ears of all. Next thing you know the whole shabang is overcome with unrest and back we go to the starving bottom of the rung, having to work day and night to wrangle every gimmick we can just to hold our lips above the water. That's what the shanachies say at least. And though I had no idea what they speak of, pookas and wrangles and such, I am beginning to get a sniff of it as I listen to my uncle Joseph and comrades.

I can see that hungry look in his eye, Uncle Joseph. He has the stare of a scrag by the way his thin hairs flap over his baldspot, skinny neck and sunken cheeks with the opaque pallor of a half-dead man. He comes upon me close and breathes his boozy pan in my face, “Yer makin' progress now among us, bhoy. The men'r noticin' ye as well. They are too! Ye've a fine werk et'ic 'bout ye.”

Impressionable as I am, the compliments open me up. I want to cry, I really do because the struggle I am going through internally is a difficult one.

“Not ye to werry, Liam,” he says. “We've got ye in our sights as well. We all see ye, don' t'we fellas?”

“Sure do,” they agree.

“Right that.”

“T'ing is,” he continues, one arm around me on the sofa and pointing at me with the hand that is wrapped around a bottle. “We need guys like ye. Sure we do! We need ye here in Brooklyn. Young strong bucks like yerself. Able bodied and minded. The werld was made fer de like o' ye. An' the International Longshoremen's Association needs good lads like ye. Ye're comin' in at the right time, ye are. I'm goin' to introduce ye to a man's gonna help us all, name's Thos Carmody. He was sittin' right here just a few week ago. Oh yeah, that's a man can get things done, he'll have ye up an' runnin' with a union card an' all. He told us of the German plot, didn't he men?”

“He did!” They agreed.

“The English, they call him the Hun, but what's an Irishman got against the Germans? Nothin', that's what. One million dullers fer a strike in Brooklyn, that's what they're ready to pay us, bhoy. Thos Carmody an' the ILA, they're ready to pay us fer refusin' to work and make weapons for the English to buy. And guess who's to lose power from us strikin', guess?”

“I don't know.”

“Dinny Meehan and his band of pikeys 'n tinkers, that's who.

We'll take'm down. With no work and full bellies, the ILA's ready to finally take'm down. Are ye wid us, bhoy?”

“Sure.”

He points to my cup, “Put a hole in that, kiddo, and have another drop.”

I drink and drink, not realizing the brew is so powerful. It's poteen, of course. Handmade in the tub; what we call back home “pu-cheen,” the rare ol' mountain dew. Though the taste of it is awful, the feeling is wondrous and with the mingling of compliments and the potion in the drink, I become overwhelmed with the happiness. One of the men asks if I am cold in the bones. Standing over the fireplace, he pulls a hot poker and stuffs it into a full glass of ale, takes a sip for himself, and hands it over to me. I nibble on the hot brew a couple times until I am encouraged to take bigger slugs. Within moments I am not only warmed to the core, but happily dizzy from the drink too.

I speak openly about the docks and my new life for the first time. Words flow from me as they hadn't in all my life flowed before. Realizing it all as a big adventure, I see it as one day to be a great story for recounting to my childhood friends in Clare, if I ever am to see them again. Uncle Joseph encourages more and more, and next thing I know I'm at a pitch of excitement what with all the new sights and smells of Brooklyn fresh in my mind. Standing from the sofa and waving my arms about uninhibitedly. It all comes rushing into my mind's sight as articulate as the greatest of writers, or so I feel: the view of the canopy of bridges from our neighborhood connecting us to the mystical place called Manhattan. Manhattan! With its huge buildings erect and virile and austere across the East River from the docks along Columbia Street or right out the kitchen window of our Water Street room. It all makes perfect sense to me now and I am out of my mind with fervor and optimism.

Another of my uncle's friends who'd been sitting in the kitchen with his legs propped akimbo onto the boiler played an old song on his “tenement house piano,” as they used to call it. Though it is no more than a simple penny whistle, it is good sounding. The music, the bitter weather, the smell of firewood, and the drink give me to thinking. And then I think again of the vantage point at the docks and its southern skyline of Lady Liberty standing tall over the water and so very proud too, my eyes foam up with dewy-eyed nostalgia. Now drunk, the fairytale comes alive. I realize then that my struggle is that of any other boy becoming a man and if a boy my age doesn't struggle, then he may never become a man. Unable to scoff at my own sentimental epiphanies, I continue forth in my dream-drunk conclusions.

By the time all my thoughts are emptied, the room begins to spin in my head and a fierce sweat comes upon me. My stomach is light and airy and not understanding the predicament, I stand up and burst forward with all the liquor that covered the remnants of my thin dinner splashing onto the wood floor in front of me out of a sudden.

“Ye feckin' ungrateful lil' muck!” Uncle Joseph bellows and abuses.

I'd fallen to the ground among my own retching. Above, Uncle Joseph punches upon my head and face, my reactions to block them are slowed and incompetent, limp. I can't remember all the things he says as he punches and kicks, but I do remember him gnashing and spitting in his fit.

“Yere fadder ain't but Fenian swine from old and stupid ways!”

His boys stand up from their chairs and pull pipes from their faces at the spectacle.

“And yere mother's a country óinseach,” Uncle Joseph kicked, pulling me up by my hair. “An' ye're the child of a great ignorance! Can't even see the opportunity of yere life in front o' ye, ye beggar's spawn!”

Dragging me to the door like they did the insane starker on the docks, he opens it and throws me by the collar down the wooden stoops onto the icy pavement out front. When I try and rise, he leans down and punches with a closed fist onto my cheek by my eye. I fall back again and again he drags me across the sidewalk to the gutter by a lightpost, spits in my direction, and turns round.

“Ye don' wanna listen to me? Go an' beg ye're way t'rough life, ye shanty Irish!” As the door slams shut, I can hear him slurring at his followers inside. “That goes for the each of ye, too . . . .”

I can tell that he is angry about other things, but that matters not now. All of this means but one thing; I'd not return to Water Street again. Sent to the snow and the cold and the freezing December night air, disheveled and drunken I wander confusedly, and vomit more in the muddy snowbanks at the edge of the pavement. The ice sheets along it slide the world from under my feet. Dumb from shock, I hadn't even considered the idea of grabbing for my coat on the way out. After a very long hour in the whipping winds that come jettisoning off the East River, my ears begin to sting and my face is frozen in place with tears stuck to my swollen cheek. Gathering balance from the corners of buildings, I begin simply trying to open one door after another regardless of consequence. Finally, at a six-story tenement house on Montague Street, a door is open just a crack to allow a frozen stranger's entrance. Not much cooler inside the halled inner walls, I can feel a bit of heat coming from the bottom of a door on the first-floor. I huddle my frozen hands close to the warm breeze from the floor and finally resolve to lay my entire body along it to fall asleep like a wrecked ship among its own shambles.

A week goes by and I have disappeared from the docks altogether. Uncle Joseph being the connection, I forgave the thought of searching for work there. I lay my head at night in a disowned building along with a huddle of other abandoned children off the Flatbush approach to the Manhattan Bridge. Windows boarded and front door bolted, we steal up a hole in the flooring to gain access from beneath where the smell of old death and winter dirt mix. In the night wind, the wooden two-story building shifts in the air and creaks at the whim of the night gales. Not fearing the danger in it, we light some extra coals and floorboards in a barrel upstairs until one night when the barrel itself burns through the floor and falls to the lower level with an awful crash. We peek down the hole surprised by it all as embers fly below, leaving us cold for a night, scrambling for warmth.

I get by with eating dirty snow for water and stealing bread from horse carts and peanuts from the pockets of sailors that stammer from saloons and into view of a pilfering child. I still owned a dollar bill, so when I do buy a can of beans or so I slip longbread in the back of my pants slyly. I learn to conserve energy and plan out my thin meals, thoughts consumed only on how best to steal. It was many a night I slept on the wooden floor of that shack with a great emptiness in me and from it I come to see the immortal cunning of the thief and his relation to American ingenuity. An art form of necessity and urgency and competition. Breeding it in the child, they do. Bred in these children that sleep next to me with their faces pressed against the cold wooden floor and no sheet to cover them, no pillow for their eggshell heads. Some no more than five and six years of age huddled together motherless in the wintry night.

In a different language it's said where I come from, “The well-fed cannot understand the hungry.” And so, not a soul wonders about me or stops to ask a question or offer help, only pitiless smirks and “I'll fan ya ears, kid, ‘less ya beat it quick.”

I am regularly shooed by shopkeeps even when stealing is not on my mind, like they sense the hunger in my eyes and body language. Where empathy is with them I couldn't know. Back home, my da would sometimes let a hungry wanderer stay with us a day or two and collect free meals so long as he helped about the house and farm. A common thing among the country Irish. But here a wanderer is leered at and cruelty lives in the locals' eyes and in their stance like a mad child's grudge. I swore to my mother's soul never to lose what I learned from my family of mercy, empathy. No matter where I am to live.

I nick a wool coat with a big collar at a restaurant in Borough Hall and inside the pockets are a pair of heaven-sent gloves. Yule tidings for a lost winter gamin. Toward nightfall I wander back to the Flatbush orphanage, wind whipping in the ears. It is a brumal and barren hungry night wherein the streets are hollowed out by the promise of a piercing frost. My face feels dry and cracked. My groin is frozen and there is loneliness in the whistling cold and the dry-freeze of my thoughts. One of the kids at the makeshift orphanage is named Petey Behan. He has short legs with a long torso and some power in his shoulders, thin hips, and a box face with a mouth that never stops its blathering.

“Me and Pegleg an' some others are extablished,” he boasts. “We gotta a couple gimmicks that're gonna pay out soon, ya know? You guys should come meet'm, Pegleg. We gotta gang and we're lookin' to expand, but ya gotta be tough. If ya ain't tough, don't think about it. Pegleg's a killer, he'll kill ya. I seen 'em kill one feller. I did too.”

“Really?” Two other kids gaped as the light from the fire lit their faces orange in the dark.

“Yeah,” Behan says. “Beat 'em wit' his own fists and then shot 'em with a gun right in the face. An I-talian kid that thought he could steamroll Pegleg into sellin' junk for him. Just kilt 'em dead. The cops caught up to Pegleg too, but they let'm go.”

“They let'm go?”

“Yeah, they couldn't make it stick. My brother's a Whitehander too.”

“He's one of Dinny's?”