Light of the Diddicoy. Eamon Loingsigh

      “I’m not.”

      “Oh yeah? Wha’s ya name?”

      “Liam Garrity.”

      “Garrity?”

      “Garrity.”

      “Joe a relation o’ yours?”

      “Uncle, but I swore him off as he did me.”

      “You got nowhere to go?”

      “Not yet.”

      “How old are ya?”

      “Still fourteen.”

      “‘Still fourteen,’ he says,” laughing at me, then looks around.

      “What are ya, right off the boat?”

      I don’t answer.

      “Listen, come wit’ me. Ya hungry? Come wit’ me. I gotta be somewhere an’ ya can come wit’. C’mon,” then grabs my arm and walks me quickly through the cobbles toward the sidewalk.

      After a few minutes of walking I ask his name.

      “‘What’s my name,’ he says,” again making fun and repeating.

      “Guy, just call me Guy.”

      “Guy?”

      “Yeah, or Patrick Kelly, like everyone else around here.”

      I would get to know him quite well over time, his real name was Vincent Maher and he walked me into a flower shop and dropped some coins on the table, left with a bouquet. “Ya ever been to a wake?”

      “Uh . . . I have.”

      “Good, le’s go.”

      “What if I don’t want to?” I stop.

      “C’mon, only one better place to catch a girl, dat’s a weddin’.

      Wakes? They get all lathered up about ’em, girls do. And dis guy dat died’s got t’ree sisters. T’ree of ’em, let’s go. They got scoff there.”

      “Scoff?”

      “Fooooood, shit kid, ya don’ know nothin’ do ya? I can tell ya hungry, though, as there ain’t a lick a manhood on ya, fookin’ scrawny as ya is. Jus’ follow me kid, I’ll take care o’ everythin’, don’t ya worry. C’mon.”

      “Who died?”

      “A guy.”

      “How’d he die?”

      “Screw got’em.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Shaddup.”

      As we walk away, he takes off his trench coat and drops it over my shoulders. A few minutes later and we come upon a throng of half-frozen men and women and their children standing in the street in front of a wood-framed, four-story tenement. Maher grabs me by the lapel and pulls me through it as most step aside when they see him and his side-cocked cap. We thump up a thin stairwell together, dark as a forgotten cave. The dusty steps creak in their blackened wood and Maher whispers down, reminds me to keep my mouth buttoned. On the second floor the banister is gone other than some shardlike stalagmites sticking up from the planks. I hold onto the wall instead where I feel the rotted and exposed studs and downstairs I can hear the hum of the crowd reflect from the entrance and up through the stairwell. We hear keening coming from behind a closed door above us and the hushing coos of loved ones like pigeons on a wire. When we make it to the third floor we take a left and pass the doorless lavatory. Maher knocks lightly with a knuckle, then checks up the stairwell toward the top floor in the black.

      I huff from the stairs, not so much from being winded but because my body is beginning to give way for not having slept in some two days. And for the hunger, which leaves me only with emaciated energy. With no bed or rest in the coming, my stamina is discouraged though the food is just behind the door, so I am told. Beginning again to dream with eyes open, my thoughts are tumbling from one topic to another and nothing much seems so real or connected, though I try with all I have not to reveal my mind’s unsound movements.

      “Who is it?” whispers a man from behind the door.

      “Maher.”

      The door opens and a giant leaning figure stands in our path. I know right off who it is from the white hair and the scary look on him. “Who’s the kid?”

      “C’mon, would I bring any touts around here? I needa talk to Dinny ’bout this one. Let us in.”

      The Swede bends down from the door frame to whisper in the dustwood hallway, his neck arteries seizing in blue and red, “Ya fookin’ stoopit, ya not gonna bring no fookin’ stranger in here . . . who says ya could. . . .”

      “Listen, lemme talk wit’ ya a second, c’mere,” Maher says as calm as anyone could be under such a threat. “Stay there,” he whispers back to me, then disappears behind the door with The Swede.

      Two minutes and the door opens up violently.

      “Put ya hands up,” The Swede says walking from the door and confronting me.

      “Sheesh,” Maher mumbles.

      The Swede pushes me against the wall and cups his large hand into my loins and squeezes, then searches underneath me in the back, pats my chest and thighs, his hands easily wrapping around my reedy waistline.

      When we come in the door to the kitchen I can’t find the scent of food, instead only of fresh-cut wood and flowers that can’t quell the rattles in my shrunken belly. I am told to take the coat and hat off and we then walk softly into the opening to the diminutive parlor. Supported by four tattered wooden chairs, there is a long yellow pine coffin stretched under the drapeless window reaching into the middle of the room. Topper shut.

      Dinny Meehan glances at me directly in the eye then gave attention back to the woman whose faint hands he holds between the span of his brawny shoulders. She snuffles and her nose and cheeks are blushed with the cry. His gentle confidence attempting to assure her of a sanity in this world, he whispers to her in the sunlight dust. Stacked behind them in the close-shouldered room are thickets of bursting bouquets contrasting the dull grays and dark colors of the parlor. Maher adds his to the confection, gives a distant hug to the mother of the dead. The only light in the entire flat comes from the cloudy window and the dull glim of the gray Christmas Eve day outside.

      Three sisters sit on the faded and torn navy blue sofa by the coffin, the youngest on the arm and a widow sat looking out the window in a long stare under an awning bower of lilacs and assorted flowers, her two fatherless dawdlings running from the back room to the kitchen unattended. Six broad men stand at varying heights at the women’s opposite like high-rises wedged together in a dumbstruck skyline, hat in hands, thin black ties between tight jacket lapels. The Swede at the pinnacle, his long needle face topped with white feathers like a towheaded city savage. I recognize others from the docks, the pavee fighter Tommy Tuohey among them.

      Maher and I take our place in the room’s saturnine reserve cast by a dead man’s presence. At my side, a pair of eyes look at me in the hush. It is Harry “The Shiv” Reynolds, who I know as the dockboss at the Atlantic Terminal known chiefly as the bloodculler of Columbia Street’s bulkhead. My stomach makes a curling sound and I am overcome with a terrible cramp in my bowel. Reynolds looks at me again, then steadies himself.

      The Swede leans over us and looks out the window, his attention caught by a gaggle of brown trenchcoated men accumulating around a two-horse dray that stops out front, mingling among the crowd below.

      “Everybody get away from the window.” The Swede breaks the reserve.

      The widow refuses to acknowledge, the mother shrieks knowingly, Maher takes a pan from the kitchen and puts it over his head while peering down street level, Meehan gently pushes the sisters toward the foot of the coffin in the middle of the room.

      “Four