Light of the Diddicoy. Eamon Loingsigh

chew on, true ’tis.”

      Richie stared, fidgeted.

      “What do I know, anyhow? Just an ol’ sow with no hopes.

      All I want is children that don’ go starving their youthful days away. Ya know more’n I do, Richie. Ye’ll do as ye t’inks fit, ye’ll do . . . Fine then, what do I know? Nothin’. I’ll be washing other people’s floors while yer own fadder dips his finger into me sugar jar for a drink and a long-shot at the policy wheel.”

      Without a response Mary continued, but with less anger, “I know ya got yare own gang, Richie. They’re good lads too. Who says ya gotta dump ’em? Nobody says. But if I know one t’ing that’s good for all o’ us it’s that if ya gotta go on the lam or upstate fer a stint—God forgive me fer sayin’ it—Dinny’ll make sure we got food on the table. He will too,” she pointed a finger at her son. “Ye’ll be good to be in debt with Dinny Meehan. He takes care o’ his. I may be a woman, but I’m the sister of Yake Brady and the wife o’ his meanest man, John Lonergan. I know what a debt is to the like o’ Dinny Meehan. Ya’ll owe him, I know it. And ya’re a loyal man, Richie Lonergan. Honorable man! But t’ink o’ yer mother. T’ink o’ Anna and the childers. Best chance we got, the gangs. Always has been fer our like.”

      CHAPTER 5

       The Shapeup and The Starker

      I SLEEP ON AN OLD SOFA with springs that have pierced the cushions through and right off I am taken with a fever from the long trip and the new weather and all. For close on two weeks I remain inside and become a burden to my uncle Joseph who tells the truth about things with the drink in him. A scarecrow of a man with his spindly legs, bony hips, and hunching shoulders, he seems to have a right opinion about it all whether someone asks him for it or not. I don’t remember much of him from home though, as he’d made his way to New York back in 1908 for the labor work in the building of the Manhattan Bridge. Wasn’t around much when he was in Clare anyhow.

      I realize that he is a figure among other men, but I am unsure of his crew’s place along the docks in Brooklyn. Most of his men are Irish, true, yet I see in all of them a bit of the outsider. With broken beaks and loose teeth, suits that are torn at the seams, sunken eyes, and a hungry look on their mugs, I know that to the bottom of them they are ill at ease. And the more I look on my uncle Joseph for the assurance I need, the more my stomach sags and slides with uncertainty.

      Every morning except Sundays he gets up and walks from the brick tenement on Water Street next to the Sweeney factory with his crew of ragged cullies. They then go left on Hicks Street and line up with the rest of the laborers waiting for a ship to rest on the slips to request work. Sometimes they jump a trolley as far down as the barge port at the basin or load a truck off the Baltic Terminal or a train along the Jay Street freight tracks.

      Uncle Joseph and his men haven’t endeared themselves with the Dinnies who are in charge on the docks and run things from 25 Bridge Street, so they find getting work difficult. It is all quite confusing to me, gangs and docks and such, since I only hear about things secondhand from my uncle and his followers, but the Dinnies are often the topic.

      “The Swede an’ them put a few good men down at the Fulton Street Landing the other day,” Uncle Joseph says puffing from the cutty among his crew. “Four of ’em. I-talians. Just lookin’ fer work s’all they was after. Put a good beatin’ on ’em too I heared.”

      His stroppy crew of listeners nod dolefully, and I decide I’ll steer clear of the like of the man they call The Swede.

      Looking at me then, Uncle Joseph speaks, “Feckin’ banditry ’tis. Well then . . . We’ll get ours too, but right by the werkin’ man t’will be.”

      In time, I wake with them. Out seeing the city for the first time and walking from Water Street through pier neighborhoods in the morning under the drooping laundry lines and the blur of faces about. Behind the loping of my uncle and the others, we come under the two bridges and down the dock-train arteries of the Columbia Street piers. Bumping into strangers as I look up, nary a pardon to be heard. Families of fifteen are jammed into third-floor windows to peer out the fetid flat for a respite of air. Some tenements holding ten or twenty rooms shoulder-to-shoulder along the streets with tenants shoulder-to-shoulder inside them. An endless stacking of shacks and rowhouses and redbrick buildings at every curve and corner. The Bridge District, heavily industrialized with the crack of tool smiths and cigar rollers, linen makers, dye makers, tie makers, and seamstresses, all singing foreigners’ songs by the open shudders. And then there are metal box makers and corrugated-cardboard-box makers and ship-container makers and warehousing units aplenty and gas companies competing for heads and police stationmen leaning back on their heels in the morning cut, suited up in their blue tunics and sidecocked caps.

      The sound of the city goes ringing in my ears all at once: the dinging of distant tugs under the bridges, the sounding off of the booming barges, the clopping of horse buggies and drays. The city’s orchestra of working-class harmonies mixing with the buzz of automobiles, the winching chains pulling up buckets on the coal wharfs, the cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo of elevated trains above and the scraping of their brakes on high. Too there is the tenor of arguments upstairs and next door, the soliloquies of the poor pierced by the soprano of the women victims sonorous in her sorrowful dispirit, ancient in their dialects and tongues. There are wild dogs tearing away at metal garbage cans on the sidewalks, footsteps on the creaking stairwells. I hear the drunken beratements of street men who it would seem yell at the paperboys, who themselves bellow from the street corners clamoring of the previous day’s headlines in the brume of the late dawn’s shuffling. Babies just able to walk and young children are playing with a long stick and a tiny ball in the street and they run shoeless most of the time, jumping over mud puddles with hardly a mother or father to be found standing over them. They play improvised games like stoopball or Kill the Carrier, a form of hurling where a child holding a stick is chased down and tackled by all the others, on the pavement no less. And spilling in their mischievous masses onto the stairwells and in front of draft horses pulling a man and a dilapidated cart, slowly scuffling through the neighborhood to get to the next at first blush of morn.

      At every street crossing it seems another elevated track appears above with long stairwells filled with travelers stomping up and down like human conveyer belts. Grocers and tobacconists stand in their doorways smoking under the shadows speckled with the lattice-light of the trellis-framed Els and somehow live among the creaking and the screeching and clicking and hammering of trolleys swooshing and grumbling by all day and night. They converse with the men who sell apples from their horse-pulled drays at the end of the sidewalks and admonish the rag-picking children who walk by shoeless and the low-placed homeless who splay their junk wares on the pavement for possible buyers. And when a train comes to a halt above, a small army of ten-year-old bootblack boys run up the station stairwells for customers exiting like a gang of brothers, though they are supposed to be competing against one another for nickels and for dimes.

      A day or so earlier a fire below the street had flames jumping from each of the sewers, blowing manholes in the air after a gas leak flooded the pressurized underground. A pre–Civil War wood-framed building had collapsed over the sidewalk and into Pierrepont Street some three months before I arrived, and lay there still untouched. Only the oncome of winter has halted the advance of weeds, now receding in the rubble. Children gamble openly against a brick wall below the brownstone stairwells, laying down the money they’ve garnered from some underhanded racket for a chance to double it playing craps and faro. And bigger kids come by with rapacious intentions and punching the wee ones to extract their own sort of protection money, preparing themselves for the big show on the docks later in life as it’s the Dinnies who are the heroes on the lips of these shorn-headed, floppy-hatted lads.

      The first liner I ever see fall into dock, scraping its keel against the wooden pier with a swoosh and a gulp, is a Scandinavian girl named The Halkinnean full with a load of crated birch shingles weighing close on seventy pounds each. The flag has gone up in the waterfront steam, the old signal for labormen to gather. And the whistle from the pier house blows as men amble out of their tenements