Light of the Diddicoy. Eamon Loingsigh

All of us sit in wait, warbling our eyes up like owl heads to feed our ears. Billowing rippled waves of some imagined proportion lap and lick like holy fires on the stretch of mankind, forcing the vessel’s long genuflecting and seesawing.

      Children and drab-dressed women are sent flaying off their backsides with legs and feet asplayed in the air and are sucked into a corner where loose remains gather like storm water sent fleeing for the sewer collect. The floor quickly changes to the color of the inside of our stomachs. Now the pinkish viscid innards spread along the steel bottom and soon enough we all are sliding in it, skittering off the slippery sheet and slamming against the wall, potato man among us. The cots too, as they are not secured to the floor, go flying toward the collects with the open-legged peasant women and clumsy children holding tight on their kin.

      Screams of panic echo off the steel faceless walls. When the ship pitches high into the air, the inevitable down-splash of its great tonnage sends the population across the room but with nothing to grab on to. As the diving and swaying becomes longer, the force of ninety humans and their scattered belongings and fifty cots all slam against the uncaring steel with accumulating power. I see a woman completely unconscious with blood lines trailing from her ear and three of her brood holding on tight to her as if they don’t realize she is dreaming a dream from her concussion.

      Along with everyone else, I lose track of my bag that holds my life’s worth inside it. As I look around for it and between being sent to opposing sides, I see boys around my same age stick their hands into others’ belongings and pull out coins, stuffing them into their own pockets. Two men begin berating each other and stand in the center of the moving floor gummed with mucus and previous meals. One punches the other and they pull on each other’s clothes for balance and dominance. Fighting and fighting in their beleaguered state like two cats that have been tied by their tales upside down and next to each other, brawling and hissing as if the other is to blame for their condition.

      When the lightning finally passes, the swells calm too and soon all are slogging through the half-inch puddle to collect our soiled rags. A week goes by like this and only three times do the doors open with the mean stewards yelping for us to queue up as we grab for our cups. The soup is no more than water and stock, leftovers no doubt. I wait in line looking ahead impatiently and with only three in front of me the ship tilts deep into the sea as I drop my cup. I scramble for it before another can snatch it, but when I return to queue I see that the barrel holding the soup has tipped over and without cleaning the spillage, the stewards double back and lock the doors behind them. Some children around me scoop up the stock mixed with the dried vomit as their mothers cry out at the state of their lot. I look for the sweet child with the thoughtful mother and the bannock shares, but cannot find her. When I come to my place along the wall it is then I see my belongings have disappeared entirely, hungry eyes staring at my dismay like hidden hyenas protecting their earned pilferings.

      Without normal sleep nor food and feeling the ship slowing, in a sudden four doors are opened above that I had yet to realize were even there. Appearing from them are the Englishman officials and their yelling.

      “Out! Out! Out! Out yu goes!”

      “Where are we?” One man calls up to them.

      “Out! Get out!”

      And so we again funnel obediently toward the single-door exit leaving behind us unclaimed trash, upturned cots never used for sleep, sopping blankets and overturned piss jars and rancid fecal buckets where somehow flies had made their way into the steerage hold or had created life itself from the stink of the third class.

      A few hours later, I wait in line but for what I do not know. The ship backs away from us. There is land on either side in the distance of the island house packed with fellow ragged travelers pale with the sea’s nausea and a childhood of peasantry. I give my name. “Liam.”

      “Whole name,” he demands.

      “William James Garrihy, born 1901, Clare, Ireland.”

      “Calling or occupation?”

      “Laborer.”

      “Name o’ relative or friend ya joinin’?”

      “My uncle, Joseph Garrihy.”

      He hands me back some papers and that’s when I find out someone misheard me and therefore changed my name. I am Garrity now. They then take my clothes so they can see the whole of me; sunken belly poked, tongue pulled and genitals picked up with a flat stick and my face flushed in embarrassment.

      “Where ya off ta den,” Another man says as a matter of occupation.

      “Water Street.”

      “Brooklyn o’ Manhatt’n?”

      I thought of the two words. Brooklyn sounds more familiar. “On ‘at ferry ova dere, g’ahead.”

      CHAPTER 4

       Mary’s Eldest Son

      I SHIFT IN MY SEAT AND take from my old man’s pipe here, the discomfort weighing on me. It is not an easy task to write of my own life when the humility of my people pulls at me. The tradition of telling stories is a social one, where I come from. But I have become an American over these many years. And though I think as a traveling shanachie, I feel to write as an American does.

      Richie Lonergan hops in his stride. He hikes his left leg forward, all the while keeping a strong and equal pace down the tenement low-risers of Johnson Street toward the waterfront in the middle of the night. As he is known, his face is chiseled and without expression like a young stone-faced white Indian among the coarse escarpments of his landscape. His bony cheeks reddened from the cutting winter wind and blond hairs flaying out the side of his cloth cap, Richie pushes on emotionlessly into the night. With fifteen years behind him, the boy is an experienced Brooklynite. Impassive is his wont, he keeps at pace under the elevated tracks. Above him, they are adjoined southward from the Sands Street Station House. He passes under the view of a couple trolley watchtowers like a city varmint mingling in its business among the trash and rails under the eyes of uncaring subway standers.

      Through the littered train yard he limps. On a wooden leg with an empty shoe nailed to it, he goes without a fear in him. Jumps on a hitch between an old rusted-out train that lay forgotten for over a year, he then emerges into the waterfront neighborhood: a place most New Yorkers only notice from a train window, as yet another slum down by where the ships let off. When he gets to Hicks Street, he swings to the right and waves one arm in the air for balance but soon slows to cut through a tract of browned winter grass near Middagh Street scattered with the rustling rubbish from the restless night.

      When upon he come to the old brick building that houses the picture frame factory, he flattens his back along its side to hide himself in the shadows, to rest a moment and calm his breath. The boy can hear the hearthy laugh and hearty lilt of old William Brosnan, head patrolman at the Poplar Street Station. The station stands opposite the factory by way of back doors, separated only by a thin garbage-strewn lot. As young Richie stands erect upon the brick wall, a long glim of yellowed light appears where Brosnan flicks the ash off his black cigar. Through the crack in the door Lonergan hears Brosnan’s brogue as he chews the fat with patrolmen Culkin and Ferris of the local Bridgetown beat, the old Fifth Ward.

      What brings Richie Lonergan out this night is a homeless laborer at the picture frame factory who spends his nights there for a portion of his earnings. Dumbly leaving his bicycle out back, Richie eyeballs it from around the dark corner. Richie inches closer to the back door of the factory, closer also to the lawmen of the Poplar Street Station across the way. His breath cools in the smoky cold, and he pulls the cap down tighter over his flat-stone cement eyes and sandy hair. He feels the wind biting at his ears and imagines that the yellow glim of light gives off a warmth. And if it is only his imagination, at least that somewhat warms him even. The boy hadn’t the thought to beat his way out of a bad situation, but if pressed, he can summon the cudgel from his pant leg and put a man to God’s path if he steps between him and his take. Copper badge or not, though he prefers not for it’s a long bit on Blackwell’s