Light of the Diddicoy. Eamon Loingsigh

with only a meal as their immediate mark. I remember how clear they were to me, standing like statues in my mind, the thin faces with paper passes in palm stand blank and disenchanted with patchy beards and shrunken features and tubular breasts and tumorous growths and black fingernails and crippled feet deformedly ornamented by undermined sandals like a parade of pilgrims crossing the desert if only to summon God himself in the absence of His resources and with a will to survive at least long enough to enter the shrine, America.

      The farthest I’d ever traveled previous was to sell peat over in Ennis or through the earth’s skullpate known as The Burren for the horse fair up in Ballinasloe. A long ways as far as I knew. My father had just arrived back from the greatest of graveside orations and the displays of rebelpoets at Glasnevin. And when the dawn is come for change and you know it, you must prepare or be swept in by it. Great change is on the wing. Rebellions among wars.

      Da nods his head at my departure up the plank, a simple handshake and I am gone to life by him as he turns back into the land. His eyes narrow under the cap and brow like a man hiding feelings. And I suddenly find that no longer will I follow his long shadow round the farm, the turf-creel on his shoulder, the scent of gorse in the air. Older by a year, brother Timothy tips at me nervously. Mother and two sisters stayed back in Clare having said good-byes there to leave the men for the day’s ride through the countryside, out in the long hills and stretches of rock-strewn fences where old and forgotten territories are marked like dead dog’s piss in aged farm hay.

      “Not to werry. Hardest t’ing he ever had to do, send ye away such. We’ll give to what comes of it,” Mam is tear-smirched in the doorway, sorrowed by the life of things that are far from her control. “May trouble be always a stranger to ye. . . . Whence I gave birth wid’ ye some fourteen year ago, I t’ought den and still do now dat ye’d be one day a man to open the door fer many. Take dis, den. Put it in yer pocket and touch it when ye please. Ye’ll be grand wid it. Safe keepin’, not to werry.”

      The Saint Christopher is not much more than a tin imprint and once upon it had a hole where to thread a string to tie round the neck, but since then it’d broken entirely. I place it in my pocket. Feel the imprint of his face on my thumb and forefinger. And that was that, Mam gives my wake with hopes to follow, her teary face blushed with a constant cry from the deaths of her two infant sons, Sean and Colm, born and died before Timothy even. And why does Timothy get the farm and I the Saint Christopher? And I think now that surely it’s because his birth and survival was the answer to Mam’s praying so hard. Mine was much less, but who has the understanding in their early years to ponder on such things except artists or rich people who are so often one in the same. And maybe the old, such as myself typing away here before I go. But little does she even know that emigrating during the Great War is likely another dead son in the wait. Only luck can make it across the sea lanes with the sea wolves dug in for war, where the Lusitania was sent to the dregs just north of Queenstown in Kinsale, just south of five months early upon. Saint Christopher or not, the German has his way on the seas and the war never means to kill a single Irish but then again a dead Irish, incidental or not, won’t change the course of things. The Irish and the sea songs though, they are fraught with the romance of death. Not a song I plan to sing, but what word have I in it? Old songs sung by the stink of peat back famine way. Back when times was worse, true. But why I am to suddenly go, no one is to rightly know. Not I. Not Mam either, but Timothy says for soldiering I’m too young yet and I hate him when all I see are the backs of he and Da walking over the hills for drilling with the Volunteers. My Mam says for traveling it’s Abby and Brigid that are too young yet. So it’s me who goes then.

      “When ye can rub yer own two coins togedder, then ye can elect yer destinations,” says my Da, who with one arm pulls down the blackthorn from its chimney home; then he and I and Timothy too go off through the fields for the country train to the port city solemnly. Out from the farm. Out to the world with me.

      CHAPTER 2

       Four Italians

      IT’S A LATE AFTERNOON AT THE Brooklyn side of New York, 1915, some week or so before I am to arrive. The motile current of a cast-iron gray October sky slowly shifts in its expanse above the Bridge District where there are barge horns moaning like giant creatures groaning in the waterway distance. Across the East River the canopy of bridges opens outward to reveal the step-stone skyline of Manhattan pushing close on the shoreline’s edge. A glass gust turns ears to ice, tilting heads to shoulder and spinning loose papers and dust into pirouettes of refuse along the freight tracks cut into the Belgian bricks. Reaching out into the gray-green suffused shipping lanes below the immense stride of the Brooklyn Bridge stanchions, a floating pier wobbles with the weight of a tied ship at its berth. And under the cold shadow of a Dutch African freightliner at the Fulton Ferry Landing, see a gaggle of some one hundred men come to rest upon a day’s hard working. The vessel rising in the East River from the shedding of its cargo, lines of impatient and hungry men now wait their turn for an envelope.

      A group of young herding roughs who steer the docks in the neighborhood, “Dinnies” as they are known, taunt the itinerants out of their lazy babbling. Lashing them with tongues, gnashing at them they scatter in a scuttling rush, for the fierce pace demanded by the wartime economy has no time for the laggard and no patience for the immigrant laborer. Now come to bear defrayment, these laborermen wait in a single-file line and upon receiving an envelope from the stevedoring company that employs them, are met by the gypsy-toothed smile and brawny, leaning figure of the one known as Cinders Connolly, the Fulton Street Terminal’s dockboss.

      Tall in his beam he is, and with a grand smile across his pan, he barks his demands along the labor line trailing from hull to plank to train. Here spit in the wide hand and rubbing it into his knuckles as he come to the end of the stevedore’s table to collect his tribute from the men, Connolly is flanked by the flat face of the foolmute Philip Large, his right-hand man. Short on stature with round, raindrop eyes and stubby arms, Large shifts his head on the neck like a beast of burden and is known to break a man’s back if his hooks are screwed in. Along with three or four other Dinnies what support them, Connolly and Large are the Fulton’s enforcers for the Bridge District gang called the White Hand.

      Among the crowd funneling in a motley shuffle toward the stevedore’s line are four Italians shown early for work and picked out of need for numbers. With three ships docking at once in the morn’s whistle, the four untried immigrants were brought upon. Loafing as they could, they offered passive stares back at the Dinnies who barked at their ears. Whispering in tongues with words understood only in the ancient villages of Calabria, did they. The Dinnies only hearing whispers, and a whisper’s not right as it’s known there’s more to hear in a whisper than a scream. Chuckling too, in foreign jokes. Sensing dispute, Connolly nods for The Swede and a runner is off.

      Darkness besetting them here, the cold shafts of the new city gives these guests a shiver scarcely felt in their own past. Hungered and proud for their work, they are readying a return to their train station hotel and the unsettled families that await them as they shuffle to the stevedore’s table in queue. Three of them are brothers with the sunken, bony cheeks of the peasant traveler. The last is a cousin who is short but healthy in his paunch and rich in certainty. Together, they speak with agility and mirth, but are misunderstood by the violent riverside natives as the brassy mettle of salty immigrants, ignorance and remiss.

      It is the squat one who the brothers turn to for advice. The lone cousin with the round shoulders and wide face, bow lips and half-dozing, half-daring eyes. He pushes to the front when Connolly points at the envelopes. Not understanding a word, Giovanni Buttacavoli directs the cousins to walk with him around Connolly and Large. Politely as he come, Connolly steps in front of the four and motions again at the envelopes.

      “Time to pay up, fellers,” Connolly says as he pats down the foreigners for weapons while Large and others stand at the ready. “Nothin’ personal, we all pay tribute. Ten percent, then on your own ways ya go. Whadda ya say? Easy, ain’t it?”

      Not a word knowing, Buttacavoli tilted his head and lowered his brow as Connolly strangely patted down his thighs.

      “I already