Light of the Diddicoy. Eamon Loingsigh

      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,