Light of the Diddicoy (9 page)

U
NDER THE KIND NURTURINGS OF
S
ADIE
Meehan and her soups, I begin to gain weight again. Even more appreciable than her care for the rounding of my pointy bones and the filling of my tight skin is her nursing of my person back to health. The way she accepts me so quickly and seems to know how best to comfort a homeless child when the greatest distrust was blossoming in me like a cancer or a virus, well, she made me back into the good. I not being the type to request food without earning it, she calms my guilt and says only that it'll be far from her to wait for a humble, starving child to ask.

“No, no Liam, s'not a way to live loike 'at. A boy's gota ate. An'e 'asta ate a lot'a catch up on los'toime!”

And me feeling bad for hearing her cockney and thinking that anyone with such an accent can't be trusted.

“Yu've such a good way 'bout yu Liam. Yu'll turn out oo'roight, sure o' it!”

To make me feel better though, she sends me downstairs on minor missions such as the baker's or Mr. Cohnheim's the butcher.

“Don't let'm sell yu the meat's already been groinded, aye Liam,” she points at me. “We'll pay de extra for a flank, den tell'em to groind i'up in front o' yu, got 'it' en?”

“Alright.”

“But be noice wif'em, 'e's always been good t'us since even before Dinny was 'ooy is now, but God only knows what 'ey put in'at stuff to cut a profit.”

Full of energy, I stomp down the stairway hall skipping steps as I go as she wishes me not fall in my hurries.

“Where ya goin'?” Vincent Maher asks as he stands on the stoops outside the Warren Street brownstone smoking and watching out.

“Cohnheim's!” I yell, running along the sidewalk of the rowhouse stoops on my mission.

I sit at the table in the middle of the afternoon eating meat. Eating carrots. Eating potatoes and eating stews with meat, potatoes and carrots too. A young man in his heaven has meat all day long, right and left. And with a beautiful woman serving it up and her smile and a pat on the head. And so I was, a young man in his heaven. Chewing and chewing and with my mouth bursting with the pinched taste of salt-cured meats and the brine of fish sautéed with butters and the tenderest chicken and onions and peppers and garlic and corn and peas and gravy! Gravy! Where did gravy come from? Some genius for certain. Brown gravy poured over a potato and heaving unrelentlessly onto the steak which barely complains and who'd have thought gravy and potatoes and meat and carrots and corn would mix so well like an orgy of lovers overcome with the passion and the satisfying of each other's inner needs without a hint of jealousy?

“Deeblooooga,” L'il Dinny says as he watches my concentration from his highchair.

“I know it,” I say playing along.

“Chikanongkaya?”

“It sure is,” says I as Sadie laughs.

Grasping a fat-fingered gob of mish-mashed foodstuffs and offering me a bite he asks, “Blabligruandikkka?”

“Thanks but no thanks,” I say to him respectfully.

“‘E loikes yu Liam.”

And just when I'm feeling so fat I can hardly breathe Sadie strikes up a match and a song, “'Appy Birfday to yu, ‘Appy Birfday to yu . . .”

I can't believe my happiness and I can't believe it's true. Sadie there standing over me and L'il Dinny with a real cake and with icing too. Fifteen candles swayed as she swung around in the sunlit kitchen and dropped it proudly in the center of the table.

“Bababababaaa, baaa,” L'il Dinny tries to keep along with the song while staring at us wonderingly from his highchair throne.

Though I can't possibly fit another piece of food in my belly, Sadie slices a grand piece and plops it in front of me. Even L'il Dinny is impressed with the size of it and within five minutes he is wearing more of it on his face than he's able to swallow.

And it's L'il Dinny who's a miniature monster in his own right. If only this world was smaller he would have us all at his will, he would. Smashing his toys to the ground and tossing them across the room menacingly with his big head and bright eyes and round shoulders and full belly protruding over the cloth around his savage legs. Loving the attack, I let him win and knock me to the ground because I want him to feel strong and confident just like Sadie makes me feel.

But Dinny, the man who Sadie calls her husband and the man I barely remember as the leader of the dock gang hardly shows his face. Leaving so early in the morning that the courtyard roosters on Bond Street are caught unawares as he walks past them, and returns so late at night when I'm already fat'n happy that I put a lid on the day in the back room with L'il Dinny in the crib next to me snoozing away.

Sundays and we're off to St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church on Gold Street back up in the Bridge District with merchant marines and deckhands and sailors of all stripes strewn across the pavement from a long Saturday night with the drink. We take the trolleys like everyone else, Sadie and L'il Dinny with his head out the window and me too, all of us dressed like country charmers. The swoon of Father Larkin's prayers echoing off the arches sadly, I stare up at the columns and rows of the gentle people on the balcony who find God even in a place like Brooklyn where once I thought for sure there was none.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui . . .”

And though I am trying to think of God and all that he's brought me, there's only one thing I can think of and that's the purity of the American girls that are sitting, kneeling and standing all around me. (Kneeling I think is my favorite.) They sit close with their mother and closer to their father and I don't know exactly what I'd like to do with them, but I'm willing to feel my way through it together if they'd like. I pretend that Sadie is my wife and I have loads of experience. Proof being the young child between us, but that's all blather, yet still I have to hold the bible over my lap to hide my excitement, though the guilt of it touching me is too much so I exchange it with the songbook.

“Where ya goin'?” Vincent Maher asks me from the stoops outside the Meehan brownstone.

“Cohnheim's,” I say.

“Shit kid, when ya gonna get ya fill, huh?”

And that's when I start to think. Start to think that it must mean something I am in the grand Meehan home. Of all people in this new world, to be sitting in such great comfort and care as this. Can't be just luck and it was true I allow myself believe good things are in store for me because of it. That good things for me are coming here in America. But my childhood was spent earning what I keep and at this third-floor flat where the man of the family is rarely home and his wife is serving a stranger, I can no longer go on accepting charity. My father had worked off land, and his father too before him and back many moons. Every generation that our plot got smaller, my family had to work harder to keep up. In such poverty, we become humble in our humiliation and we gave great thanks for everything we had. More thankful than any king could ever be. And as I'd find out soon Brooklyn is full of kings, but I'd make a terrible one, for a king can't show so much thanks, as he'd soon be seen as filled with the weakness.

“Is Dinny holding me here for some reason?”

“‘E's always got'a plan, loove,” Sadie said opening the window in the kitchen.

There'd always be something in the peaceful for me at that brownstone. It was set off far enough from the waterfront and the elevated trains so the city noises were set to a low hum. Every now and then could be heard the dinging of a trolley in the distance and gentle clopping of Boru, Mr. Campbell's old horse from the stablehouse across the street who washed him with a handbrush and a wooden bucket below our fire escape. The appreciation I feel for Sadie, and in a distant kind of way for Dinny too, is something I haven't felt since I left home with my mother standing in the doorway with wet and blazen eyes. After seeing a bit of the world I am beginning to place her in it. And although her place in the world is not such a dignified one, being ignorant and being a peasant, she still stands in my mind as the most dignified woman in the world. Sadie too, even if she does live in the slums of a city.

Sadie leans on the window with her palms on the sill, arms straightened. L'il Dinny napping in the backroom and the dishes washed after lunch.

“Why not go'n 'elp Mr. Campbell scrub Boru, I know yu loove 'orses. 'Ere, bring'em 'tatoes for us.”

“I will,” I said looking down as she pulled a few potatoes from a pan. “Did you know that when I was out there, you know, wandering around the city . . . One day I came across a dead horse on the street? Just dead and left there. Some kids played around it and one of them told me the butcher was on the way. It looked certain that poor old girl had been mistreated. Real bad. The people here . . . why are people so cruel? To each other. To everyone.”

“It's a tough toime s'all,” Sadie started to softly cry by the breeze in the window. “People just tryin' to get by enough, to feed 'emselves.”

“Why did you leave London?”

“Can't live in London, the Irish, for at the start in England we're not wanted.”

“And here we are? New York?”

“It's the labor 'at's needed, innit? Labor, aye? New Yook's growin' fast innit? Needs men to build it.”

“How did Dinny know my father was a Fenian? How could he have known that?”

She stood from the window, “Dinny knows a lot'a 'fings 'bout people just by listenin' to'em. Watchin'em. 'E's a good card to 'ave in ya pocket, Dinny Mee'an. A good 'and indeed.”

“Hmmm . . . What was McGowen like?”

“McGowen? The man 'oo just died?”

“He was killed.”

“Aye,” she admitted without wanting too. “Well . . . Ol' frienda Dinny's. Ran the Red 'ook 'til they sent'm upstate. . . .”

“I mean what was he like? I saw him dead there in his coffin.”

“Some fings we don'talk on much, Liam. But'e was a good young man, suppo'ted his fam'ly loike'e should,” It was the first time I saw her uncomfortable.

“Who killed him?”

“G'on an' 'elp wif Boru 'en, Liam. G'on 'en.”

I just looked at her, unknown to me that I was pushing and pestering her.

“Where ya goin'?” say Maher.

“Help wash Boru.”

“Hey!”

I turned round.

“You been two months up dere, ya freeloadin'?”

“Well . . .”

“Ya like girls o' what?”

I raised my eyebrows at that.

“Any time ya wanna girl, just ask me. I know a lotta'em. See . . .”

“Vincent!” We heard from above.

Vincent Maher looked up.

“Don't be fillin' the poor boy's moind up wif yu buggerin, leave'm be. Liam g'on now, ‘elp wif Boru.”

“Ya gonna come out from unda dat skirt soon, kid,” Maher mumbled as I was backing away.

Up above Sadie looked at me and Vincent. Closed the window.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I
AM AWOKEN
at 4 a.m.

“Liam,” the deep voice in the room opens my eyes to the surprise of Dinny Meehan above me in the dark, fully dressed in vest and coat and tie and ready for work.

“C'mon, time to wake up. Let's go.”

I raise myself from the bed and move to slip on my shoes when Dinny drops a pair of boots next to me, then walks from the room in the dark. I knew without asking that these were the boots of McGowan.

“'Ave some bu'a an' bread, boys,” Sadie said.

“No thanks,” Dinny says.

Sadie takes my hand and forces two pieces of buttered bread in it, closes my fist. And that was that. As we close the front door, I look back on Sadie who quickly turns round back toward the kitchen so as not to allow me to see her. And so, out of the nest.

Vincent Maher on the stoops looks up, smiles. Half a block away The Swede appears from the crowds of morning travelers and joins us. Another block and Cinders Connolly is there and as we stand on Atlantic Avenue underneath the Fifth Avenue El, Red Donnelly and Harry Reynolds and John Gibney and Big Dick Morissey walk up. It is early March and the morning bites into us, and as the men begin noticing me, they nod under the
chu-chumming
of the train passing over us. Connolly shakes my hand generously and with a smile and Gibney comes upon me with a quick shake too though his hand feels strange in mine. As I look down at our hands grasping each other's I notice Gibney has no fingers other than a pinky and a ring finger on his right hand. When I look up at his face he smiles a great toothy grin, so sarcastic is the cemetery smile lined with astray and amiss stones and the goofy bulging eyes on him that I can see why they call him the Lark.

“Some say he's got more fingers dan he do tooths,” Morissey jokes in a baritone voice.

“You don' like my handshake?” Gibney demands angrily, pulling me close to him, face on face.

“It's only that . . .”

“Don' listen to that fookin' yoke of man, kid,” Connolly offers. “He'll lark ya all day long if ya let'm.”

Tommy Tuohey then came on.

“This is Liam Garrity, he's gonna be wit' us for a while,”

Dinny said. “He's from Clare.”

“Clareyeah?” Tuohey mumbles.

“What part was you born in, Tommy?” Gibney asked knowing the answer before asking.

“Born-under-da-big-blue-sky-is-where,” Tuohey said so fast that Gibney and Morissey laugh.

“Coulda been anywhere, eh Tommy?” Morissey says.

“Giverteek, moraless.”

Back in those days most men dressed the same as the next and in a place like Brooklyn it was hard to tell the difference between he who was well-to-do and he who is half-starved. The poorest and most destitute man still presenting himself with honor because of the pride, for no one wanted to look poor. And because of all this sameness no one can tell the difference between a gangman and an everyday laborman. Except maybe the way he acts. Walking toward the piers and waterfront, the Lark and Big Dick goof it up, bouncing off each other and pretending to brawl. Running in to passersby and knocking over metal garbage cans in the process. Dinny stops and tells them to pick up their messes and “make 'em neat, just like they was before ya tumbled 'em.”

Older men bent by many lean years look upon us and steady themselves on the stoops and metal stair rails, chewing the fat with neighbors while pulling from cuddy pipes under their graying walrus moustaches. Thin women who've lost their warmth and were hollowed out by giving all they had for so long a time appear in the windows above whipping faded clothes in the cool March air, then pinning them on pulley lines that cross the street above us to the other tenements across them.

“Tommy,” Big Dick calls over as we stride along. “How do ya say ‘Kiss my ass' the old way?”

“Kiss-me-arse, the-auld-way?”

“Nah, just kiss my ass.”

“Kiss-me-arse?”

“Yeah, how do ya say it?”

“Pug-mahone, ye-feckin'-sausage-ye,” Tommy answered.

“Wha'?”

“Pug-ma-hone, I-say,” to which I confirm when Dinny looks over to me.

“Pug mahone?” Big Dick laughed. “I killed a man named Pug Mahone once.”

“Nah,” Gibney giggled. “That yoke was Pug McCarthy, the pugilist.”

“Oh yeah,” Big Dick mumbles under his breath, then yells out with a booming voice up to the third and fourth floors. “Pug mahone! Pug mahone! All ya's!”

Next thing I know the flabby one they call Lumpy, Eddie Gilchrist the accountant shows. And then a few moments later peeling off toward their territories were Gibney, Big Dick, Donnelly, Reynolds, and Connolly while Dinny, Maher, Gilchrist, Tuohey and The Swede, and I walk across Atlantic Avenue to the Columbia Street piers. Then taking a left while walking with a quick pace as the sun struggles through the morning dark we go. So quick a pace I can barely keep up.

I am unable to stop myself from watching The Swede walk with his great strides, meaty hands and long head. Others on the street notice too, but it seems most have seen him regularly and so the shock of his dangling height and gaunt scowl has mingled into commonality though he looks a circus traveler or a hovering apparition to my eyes with his thin face, white hair, and shouldery span.

We pass shopowners unloading trucks for the day's selling, the poor in their homeless morning routine of scratching the scruff off their heads, and the ladies scurrying about perfectly ignoring everyone around her. They all stand at attention when the like of Dinny Meehan and The Swede leading a pack of gamey-looking larrikins like ourselves amble by. They all seem to know the gang, but are trained to look the other way as we pass.

Vincent Maher winks at the younger lasses and tips his cloth cap like the sarcastic nuisance of a gentleman he is. Tommy Tuohey in his chummy seriousness spitting on the sidewalk and not taking a notice of the citizenry jumping to the stoops to allow our passing respectfully. And me with the floppy boots and Eddie Gilchrist trying to keep up with his lumpy limp and breaking into a jog to catch our heels with the foolish charm he has and the open-mouthed stare. But I don't know why I walk with them, though I am not inclined to question things as I am in no place in life to be thinking I know better. So I go then without a peep from me.

But for The Swede, he can't stay calm too long and yells at a man sneaking and peeking inside the back of a truck after the men unloading it disappeared inside the retailer it was parked in front of. The man jumps out of his shoes in fright, looks angrily to the ground while pulling his cap over his eyes. Maher laughs as it seems a lot of the other boys think him funny, but I don't see him that way myself in his ballyragging ways.

“Where are we going?” I whisper to Maher.

He laughs, “Cohnheim's! Nah, we're jus' goin' down to see a stevedorin' man about the Red Hook. See, been three different dockbosses runnin' things over the past few mont's an' he ain' happy,” Maher counted on his fingers as we walked. “McGowen who's dead, Lovett who's in the workhouse right now, and Tuohey now that he's been fillin' in since Bill shot a man for pullin' a cat's tail.”

“Workhouse?”

“Not-what-yer-t'inkin'-bhoy,” Tuohey said. “Here-in-the-statesa-workhouse-is-like-a-jail.”

“Oh,” I agreed, barely understanding him.

“What's a workhouse in Ireland?” Maher asks.

“Where they used to send people to die of the famine fever,” I answer.

As we come upon our destination I am amazed at the size of the building we are walking into. It isn't so tall, but the width is massive and made almost entirely of cinder blocks. It must have been as wide as twelve streets. Overlooking the water on its back side, the New York Dock Company's main building off Imlay Street was a sign of Brooklyn's dominance in importing for the entire Northeast, not to mention its heavy exporting from the manufacturer's and factories that produce goods in the neighborhood and sent to Europe or up the Hudson River to the Erie Canal for the west.

We are rushed through the lobby and onto an elevator, then frisked by two large men. I look over at Gilchrist, who is not at as much unease as myself. It all seems normal, so I allow the men to search my private areas without a fight. They are called Wisniewski and Silverman. Neither are as tall as The Swede, but pretty close. Wisnewski just looks like a piece of meat, but Silverman watches us closely through his sunken eyes. Staring at me for a moment, I'm sure he quickly learns that I'm a harmless one.

“Well, well,” a fat man who holds the majority of his weight in his midsection and is dressed like a London banker from the previous century welcomes us into his grand office. “Ol' Dinny Meehan and his band of miscreants. Welcome then, yes. Come on in. Would you like a drink, boys?”

“No, we wouldn't,” Dinny said, “But thanks for askin'.”

“Sure, sure,” the fat man says, then points at me with limp wrist and an uncomfortable, sardonic smile. “Who's the stranger?”

“He's wit' me, not to worry,” Dinny answers.

I quickly learn that a handshake is not needed for my introduction and though he has an Englishman's accent, I can see that he pretends to be more of a snob than his American background suggests.

“Jolly good then, let's have a seat, shall we? And how are you, Mr. Gilchrist, still counting those numbers in your head?” he asked at first with a genuine smile, then finished his sentence in a mocking tone.

“Yeah,” Lumpy says innocently.

“Have you ever seen one of these, Edward?”

The fat man points with ruling class pride to a machine sitting on a table behind his large desk, “It is a thing of the future, surely. It is called a Dalton Adding Machine, Edward. It does all the work for you. All you have to do is type in the numbers and it regurgitates the answer for you. Isn't it a smash?”

Gilchrist looks with interest at the machine's black and green body where thirteen little push-button fingers stick out with black and red pads on them. He then looks up at the fat man as if he's been spooked.

“Don't be scared of it Edward, it couldn't harm a fly,” the fat man then points to the seat he wants Gilchrist to sit in. “Good, then,” he bellows while rubbing his soft fingers together. “Mr. Swede, how are you, sir?”

No answer.

“Always a delight, how about you, Vincent?”

“I'm fine, thank you, sir,” Maher replies.

“How does a Mick get a name like Vincent anyhow, can you say?” The fat man laughs aloud. “I am kidding, you know. Surely you do. . . . Must have something to do with being a papist, how would I know anyhow?”

Vincent's face turned from respectful to confused, but the man walked right past him and continues his talking.

“Come sit down fellows. Over here, we have some chairs for everyone.”

Behind the fat man is a large window with a view of the Atlantic Basin and masses of ships docked next to each other on the piers. Behind the basin in the distance across the Buttermilk Channel is Governor's Island where warships dock. At the front and center of his desk among neatly organized and polished trinkets I notice a gold-rimmed rectangular name plate:

J
ONATHAN
G. W
OLCOTT
VI
V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
, W
AGE AND
L
ABOR
N
EW
Y
ORK
D
OCK
C
O
.

“Mr. Meehan, is there truth to the rumor that you no longer will allow cranes to operate in some territories?” Wolcott asked. “There is a lot of money in those cranes. I will have you know.”

“I've seen men get kill't,” Dinny said. “A man got kill't at the Baltic Terminal not long ago 'cause the boom hit 'em in the head. As far as I see it, men need jobs. Not cranes. Cranes don' have kids.”

“Mr. Meehan,” Wolcott said, sitting forward. “I have always seen you as a man of some intelligence. You know that. Mr. Swede? He knows that, doesn't he, Mr. Swede? But I think you may have a touch of the Luddite in you.”

“What the hell is that?” The Swede demanded.

“Luddite? It means he doesn't approve of change, Mr. Swede. New things? Technology?”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Dinny mumbled.

“Oh, how dreadfully obvious an allusion. And I shall say, that mentality is going to get you in trouble, dear sir,” Wolcott said, then leaned back and showed a sarcastic frustration. “Oh, the whole lot of you then too, I dare say. May I tell you of a trip I only just weeks ago made? To a place called Japan, have you heard of it Mr. Meehan?”

Dinny refused to answer.

“Well then, I promise to make it brief, while at holiday on that most intriguing island nation, I noticed there lived a subgroup among them . . . Below the very dignified culture of the Japanese. Yes, subgroup we can call them. They are considered clever thieves. And I may venture, that's what you are as well, Mr. Meehan and here is what so reminded me of your own, eh . . . community I suppose one could name it. Stealing from those who work and earn for their livings. From people like me. Living off the hard work of others, they do. With a great cunning. Just like you and your band of tinkers, Mr. Meehan. So clever you are, in fact, I allow myself to indulge in some sort of friendship ritual with you, don't I? Yes. Even paying you for services, hither and yon. For services you should be doing on your own. Very clever indeed. This Japanese subgroup are violent too. And unbearably fertile, as similarities go. For the Japanese ruling class, they too have a similar fate as the American, eh . . . ‘swells,' to use your diction. True it is impossible to even consider any form of eradication. Not only due to the disgusting fertility rates, but because people are infatuated, even fascinated with your evil practices and trickery and transience. Fascinated why? Oh I believe people appreciate the base in all of us as entertaining.”