Light of the Diddicoy. Eamon Loingsigh

it, what did you say?”

      “I . . . heard it coming up here, broken shoe on the horse. Like glass, I heard it on the cobbles before we come up.”

      Dinny Meehan walks over to me with his eyebrows pushed down, interested. “How you know it’s broke? Was it broke when you walked past?”

      “Not yet.”

      “Did ya hear it break?”

      “I didn’t, but . . .”

      “Go look then, go look out the window,” he says, rushing me over.

      “Is it broke?” Vincent Maher asks.

      “Looks so . . . it is. It shattered off the hoof. I can see it did.

      That man has another shoe hanging out of his back pocket. Hoof knife and pincers too. He’s a horsefarrier,” I say looking back.

      “Not a gangman?”

      “I . . . I don’t know that, but I can tell you he’s no blacksmith, that’s for sure.”

      Dinny Meehan turns to Maher, “Tell ’em all to come back up. It’s nothin’.”

      “Yeah,” Maher agrees and shoulders around the mother and crowd toward the door, then thumps down the stairs.

      Meehan puts his hands in his pockets, looks me over. His handsome face built around the pose of a chieftain’s stolid stance. Under dark brown brows and hairline, his green eyes shone like archaic stones in the window room’s dull shine.

      “You from Ireland?”

      I nod.

      “Farm boy?”

      Nod.

      “How do you get stronger shoes? So they don’ break so easy?”

      I shrug. The room had lost interest and some of the men itch their faces nervously while the widow stares out the window. Her tiny daughter stands between her and the coffin with uncombed hair partially covering her eyes, ears stuck out of the light blond strings like a gnome with pursed, wet lips and large eyes. She seems smaller than a normal five-year-old.

      “G’on, say it,” Meehan presses, putting his full attention on me.

      I look around but only Meehan’s face waits. “Well, to break down the iron ore you have to smelt off the rock and slag to keep the iron. Flux it,” I gulp.

      “Like potash?”

      “Potash is a flux, it is. Or charcoal even. So, you have to scrape off the gangue or turn it to gas in the heat. Then you have to forge it. Bend it to your need when it turns orange but if there’s too much carbon in it, it won’t bend . . . too brittle. It’ll just snap off, doesn’t connect to anything either but you can cut away the iron in the shape of a shoe or if you have a mold. It’s lesser quality and it makes bad shoes, especially cobble-walkers like you have here. Muscular perch-erons have too much weight for bad shoes. You need wrought for them, cast iron won’t make it. Sounds like glass on the pavestones, that’s what I heard downstairs.”

      Dinny Meehan watches me speak. Not so much to listen to what I say, but to see me.

      “You ever worked with iron?” I asked.

      “No . . . my father worked in a soap factory in Manhatt’n, off Washington Street. He was from Ireland. Uncle was a gang leader. Ruffians, back in them days.”

      I didn’t know how to answer that, but managed to ask him what year his father came over.

      “1847, when he was a babe.”

      Without answering I look at him again and put it together in my mind all those stories I heard of how bad a year it was in Ireland, 1847.

      “Your father works with horses?” he asked.

      “Some, he does a lot of things. Sells peat too. Mends thatch, carpentry.”

      “You Joe Garrity’s nephew?”

      “I am.”

      Looking at Maher, “He tells me ya still fourteen.”

      I nod.

      Over the next two hours some four or five hundred men, women, and children wait their turn to give respect to the dead. Snaking up the stairwell, they keep as quiet as they can while the neighbors downstairs and next door stand in their doorways smoking, watching. A woman with a great scar on one side of her face appears with many children and strides out from the line to shake Dinny’s hand. Mary Lonergan then grabs hold of the mother of the dead, and with a great and awkward bawling, wails for her. Mother McGowan is patient, though I can feel that Mrs. Lonergan is seen as the lowest of the neighborhood mothers. Still in line are her children, some fifteen of them in line along the wall sniffling and digging in their dirty noses. The five at the end though are teen boys from the neighborhood led by their limp-legged leader, the eldest Lonergan. The shortest is Petey Behan of the Flatbush orphanage who still wears my coat.

      A large man who walked quickly passed everyone in the stairwell elbows in through the kitchen with his bowler cap in hand and a fitted, gentleman’s suit over his paunchy midsection. I couldn’t have known who he was, but later I would. He was Mr. McCooey from the Madison Club who handed out favors for Democratic votes at the Elks Club down in Prospect Heights where all the Democratic backslappers entertain themselves with violin players and operatic arias and such. He gave respects to Mother McGowan and the widow, shook Dinny’s hand without planting his feet, and quickly made his way back from where he’d come. The boys in the gang called their like “Lace Curtains.” While they called the gangs on the docks “Famine Irish.” And looking back over at the Lonergan clan, I could see why.

      After McCooey is gone, a beautiful woman in a plain dress and a small boy on her hip exits the line after crossing herself over the dead man. She drops her shawl behind her head and comes to Dinny Meehan’s side with a kiss on his cheek, then looks upon myself with warmness. He whispers to her from above and she smiles at me while the boy stares in silence, then crawls up her shoulder in a sudden fit of discomfort.

      When the crowd has gone entirely, an unlabeled whiskey bottle has somehow made its way onto the top of the coffin and is passed from mouth to mouth. A story about the dead man was at first muttered, then turned to a round of laughs. The dockers become animated and John Gibney’s face turns red while Big Dick Morissey flicks him in the back of the head.

      “Ya lucky ya dead, you,” Gibney points down into the dead man’s face. “’Cause I was gonna get even wit’ ya when ya got outter the Sing Sing, ya fookin’ arsehole.”