Light of the Diddicoy Read online

  “But what fault it’s mine dese stupid wops. . .” one navvy pleaded.

  “Give ’em back now!” The Swede explodes in the man’s face that silences all and screaming down into the backing faces of the obedient, “Now! Now! Now!”

  Gillen grabs two laborers coatwise and shoves them back to the table while Tommy Tuohey claps his mitts, “Back-up, bhoys!” and tosses backward five and six at a time as the hungry trip among themselves to let go their pay.

  Standing above all else at six feet and five inches, The Swede stomps on the pier planks waving his gangly, muscled arms and clubbed fists in front of the stevedore’s table as they all rise from their seats in awe at his roaring and his convulsing, “I’ll beat ya alive! Back up! Now! Back up! Back!”

  “Back-up, bhoys,” Tuohey repeats. “Back-up, ye feckin’ sausage!”

  Pushing faces back so the circle widens, kicking with boots at men with blatting disgust, The Swede makes his territory. Makes it a circle around the untried four Italians. The fighter’s circle. Spitting at its edges, daring a cross of it; until finally in his comfort, puffs his long trunk and the angular slant of his splayed chest and shoulders for a grunt in the air that of a bull ape’s summoning.

  “AAAAaaawwwwwwhhhhhhh!”

  All quiet on the Fulton Terminal it was after that. Even the tugs and barges on the water hastened their bleating. The drays stopped struggling over the cobbles. The trains on their tracks and on the Els and bridges disappeared and Dago Tom stopped pleading in the foreign burr.

  “Pay up, or pay up! This is what’s said! Final!” The Swede moaned like a giant spider-ghost into Buttacavoli’s face as the words echoed thinly into the windy air. “Ya wanna take this neighborhood, ya gotta kill us all. See us? All o’ us? Takes more’n four o’ yas. ‘Til then, pay up! Rules is rules. Tribute, now!”

  A Calabrian’s patience and honor having been beckoned and then split by the rush of waterfront wind through face and coat from under the bridges into the gaggle of labormen assembled. Buttacavoli shivered, blinking his eyes yet still decided. Summoning the firmness in the roots of his honored society, he softly protests the lack of respect afforded him for space. Calmly, and in the middle of the ancient circle, he places his envelope in coat and folds his arms.

  In an athletic attack, The Swede leans into a long right cross that explodes under the jaw of Buttacavoli, whose arms and legs straighten and stick in place as he is felled. Yet as he goes down, a left-handed fist lands and quickly blats with a thud to jolt Buttacavoli’s defenseless, white-eyed face. To the dock he slaps, stiff as a tree slams to forest floor.

  The crowd quickly surges into a rollicking fervor and bellows as advancing soldiers into blood. Still in one motion, The Swede kicks one of the brothers in the gut and pounds him with strides of clubbed fists. As the brother comes to the ground himself, he receives the boot and the lace of labormen taking their turns. One of which snaps his head back so violently that the crowd bucks in excitement. Amidst the affray, Philip Large hooks another scurrying brother by the waist from behind and dead-lifts him high, slamming him backwards on his head, and in the middle of a ravenous circling crowd of wild dogs feasting on live bloodied prey. Fancied by the chaos, the dockworkers are brawling and elbowing and snapping at one another from the murk and bedlam for their own meat-seeking kicks. The stevedore’s table upended, Tuohey grapples the last terror-stricken Calabrian and holds him tight while Cinders Connolly takes potshots off the skull, laughing all the way. As The Swede finishes up with his second, he asks with respect for Connolly to step aside among the flailing turmoil, cracks his right hand into a tight fist and spears the last in the throat with a force that sends Tuohey backward a step, who then gave the fool to the ground to have. Struggling for air this last brother too receives the dockloaders’ work boots to face and lips.

  And the men of the piers had a wild time of it, hooraying The Swede. His gaunt face standing firm among the facile cheers and with his clubs still clenched at his hips to show all the stance of justice meted out down here on the Brooklyn docks he proclaims, “A message to Frankie Yale!”

  “Go back to Sackett Street, ya fookin’ guinea wops!” Another agrees.

  But little do they know, and less do they care, that these four were fresh off the boat and not at all known among the Brooklyn coscas: the Camorra of Navy Street, the Cosa Nostra of Sackett and Frankie Yale’s down in Bay Ridge and Coney Island.

  Behind The Swede, Dance Gillen jumps in the air feet high, stomping Italian face and gullet simultaneously. Holding his hat in hand, while a flounce of half-curly African hair spills over his forehead and temple, he comically loses his balance, hence the moniker Dan the Dock Dancer, aka Dance Gillen.

  The dock men tear at the immigrants’ clothes. A broken-faced watch is pulled and so too a meaningless letter tossed aside like feathers off a fowl’s carcass. Some foreign coinage jingles uselessly on the pier and falls through the wharf slats to the water below. Strange hairy charms used for summoning luck and good travel are plucked and cast too.

  Emerging from the crowd is Eddie Gilchrist, the gang’s accountant hard at work. Forcing himself upon the devouts bent down over the prostrate victims, Gilchrist rifles through each Italian’s coat pockets alongside them. He rummages for the envelopes or else demands them from a scavenger who beat him to it. Gilchrist is supported by Connolly and Tuohey. As a matter of superstition, Gilchrist refuses to reach into the coat of Buttacavoli, whose chattering teeth bite deep into the meat of his flabby bottom lip, convulsing in a fit from the blows to head. And so instead Connolly dips his fingers in cautiously, as the others stare at the flailing foreigner. Then hands over this last envelope slowly and with only his fingernails touching it.

  As Gilchrist finishes his gathering, The Swede and Cinders Connolly immediately begin reorganizing the men for tribute, ordering the stevedore’s table be righted and breaking the circle into a line.

  Supported by Dago Tom and Dance Gillen, Gilchrist abandons the injured and steals under the Manhattan Bridge for the headquarters of the White Hand where they and many others report to Dinny Meehan on the second floor of 25 Bridge Street just above a whiskey dive called the Dock Loaders’ Club.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ship to New York

  THEY MAKE ALL MALES BETWEEN THE ages of eighteen and forty-one step out of the line to be saved for the conscription. I lean up the plank and onto the Teutonic. Men with the choppy language resembling the landlord’s pay taker corral us like cattle. They are stewards, and they are English, and they shove us down the dark stairwells of the ship with swinging oil lamps by their ears.

  “Get along niy, ’urry up niy!” They say with tall ruddy smiles over the rat-haired heads.

  “Slime,” one of them counts the passengers by grabbing them by an arm and pushing them toward the stairwell. “Glad to see y’off. Slime. Glad to see y’off. Slime. Glad to see y’off. Slime . . .”

  Another young official up ahead of him laughs at his wit and throws an echo down the long hall, “At’s a way Currington. Oi Whatley! See ’ow Currington’s countin’ the ’eads ’ere, would yu! Funny innit?”

  “Slime. Glad to see y’off. Slime . . .”

  I too am swung by the elbow toward the stairwell and counted, “Slime!” Behind me I hear a man threaten the officials not to touch him and an affray breaks out with a piercing whistle that summons the meanest in the Anglo stewards. They rap the rebel on the head as he stands his ground with a few wild swings he’d been saving for them. A group of women go to yelping as he is dragged back where from he come and out of sight.

  There is only one entrance and we are funneled like heads of beef from the planks and thin hallways and through tumbling metal stairwells in the dark to the stern dorm. To the back of the big girl. And as we are last to board, we are not split by gender nor age. It’s the size of a ballroom, lacking the ornaments and chairs and tables and musicians and dancers. Steel walls, iron floors and not a single facility in sight save
piss pots. Not even a sheet for a woman’s privacy. By the time we fill the hall with some ninety souls there’s nary enough cots for the amount of us and so I go without and sit instead against the great unpronounced tin wall. By placing my ear on it, I can hear the gentle laps of salt water touching off on the opposite side and wonder how loud the sounds will become when far out and into the deep.

  After some great wait, a backfire explodes somewhere below us and toward the bow. I hold the Saint Christopher in my fingers and feel as though my life is in God’s hands as I am such a stranger to this great floating vessel. Little do I know that for the rest of my long life I’d be a stranger in strange places, filled with my green, West Ireland memories of childhood.

  Hidden men yell at one another like apes as they stoke a fire in the belly of her. From somewhere, propellers turn over, kicking off the rust and spinning begrudgingly in the salt. A great horn blows above our blindfolded ears outside with a trembling in my chest. Voices above seem to be sarcastically saluting the people of the land as we lurch backward to our staggering. Mothers filled with the ignorance of the Old World and the superstitions against anything mechanical yelp again at the sudden movement and hold on to each other in their fear. Old men too who’ve never seen yet even an automobile in their long lives, now in the hold of a great and mysterious metal monster about whose whim they haven’t a clue. After some thirty minutes of passengers bogging their strange good-byes outside, we must finally give leave of the shore and head south. The waves at the iron wall behind me now spanking and echoing through the chamber dorm.

  The sea is hidden. And to us, doesn’t exist. The great expanse of it is nothing more than rivets and squares of iron sheets and slats along the whole of the room like the blank canvas of the art of the forgotten. An old highwayman is gumming a potato he’s hidden in his humble packs. Chewing as lines and muscles in his temple and pate flex like iron cords to crush the tuber in his gnawing gate, leaning off his cot with legs wide out and swaying with the expanse of the ship as if he’d made countless journeys like it in his days.

  Eight hours go by, my stomach turns with hunger until a child hardly out of infancy hands me a share of bannock bread, “Me mam says ’tis fer ye,” and runs off among the other steerage crew before even I can thank her. But I say it anyhow for it is only right to give thanks, particularly to those who give when take is in the need.

  By now, the fireman’s castle is ablaze at sea and the iron sheets become too hot to lean on. Devils of men bellow out from somewhere we cannot see. “Feed that bitch!” I hear a man proclaim in the tin distance. “Feed ’er! Feed ’er! She’s a hungry one! Shovel ye’re mightiest boys! Feed that bitch and give’r what she wants for the love of ye!”

  I peel off my coat and wool sweater and yank down my tie in order to free the sweat that accumulates on my back and chest. Not wholly understanding why there is such a great blaze on board, I tremble with the thought of a ship fire at sea and just when I feel we are all to die by the flame, she moans a great sigh through the pulse of the deep in an abyssal ecstasy. So deep and so long you’d think it’s a mother dragon receiving the bulbous, tyrannical cock of a sex-crazed wandering wyvern bullmale from some arcane and wretched lore. I stare ahead with a crazed look upon me, ears dedicated to defining all the cryptic sounds around us.

  Now growing angry, the Teutonic pushes forth through the froth. I can hear the men again feeding and stoking in some mysterious contest, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” We pierce the water at a pace of twenty knots. The width of the sea gulps at us in hopes of devouring our negligible souls for its evil quota. The Atlantic foam sucking at us in its great vaginal drink far worse than could ever be imagined in the old seafaring songs of my peat-fire childhood. Never at rest am I, as the hull of the cruiser staves on, flexing and bobbing and oscillating afloat, incising the folds and rocking through the brine as the ancient deep barely acknowledges our shafting it.

  “T’ink dis here’s bad, do ye?” the man with the potato calls. “Ye’d a try it back den when a clipper’s all ye had. The creakin’ o’ swolled wood and the swayin’ fore an’ aft. T’ink dis here’s bad, do ye? Nar! Hell I’d take dis over a coffinship any day.”

  Listening intently to the water, I try to distinguish the sounds of a U-boat. I hadn’t a single idea what a U-boat would sound like underwater of course, but any sound that comes to mind brings a flash of anxiety to me anyhow. My palms are so wet I wipe them on my thighs and knees so that my pants have the look of being soiled. My jaw sore from grinding, nails raw from biting. An hour later and I see the potato man with his nose to the air, shaking his head.

  “Smell a storm,” says he in my direction.

  Sure as anything, we next hear the crack of the cloaked sky above as the Atlantic crosser makes her way into the teeth of it, or so we are led to believe. 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.
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br />   “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.