Light of the Diddicoy Read online

  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 Island for a teenager to do a thing as that. True too that Brosnan knows him since he was only a child and had more than once put the manacles on him. Even monikered Richie the name the papers love to flap him with, Pegleg. For it was Brosnan himself who’d first responded after the trolley sliced the bottom of Richie’s leg off when he was only of eight years fetching bread for his poor old Ma. Brosnan and Bill Lovett too, who helped calm the squirming child that stared at his own blood and limp leg lying motionless between the tracks. An accident so deeply set in the back end of his youth that he rarely thinks on it himself, though others always seem to wonder and whisper about it.

  Richie peers around the brick building and hones in on the bicycle, then listens implicitly to the sounds animating the night; the clopping in the distance of old nags pulling their loads along the rocky cobblestones to deliver fish and vegetables and the like for the morning’s market; the plucking of standup pianos in local saloons where suds wet the insides of late-night merchant marines and happy barkeeps; the bellowing of old Brosnan again laughing brusquely, mixing in a few jokes before again to blast open an uprooting bellow on the other side of the glimmer at the back door. Richie hears too the rumbling tracks above like rolling thunder in age-old lores where gods show their disapproval of mortal sins by the distant cannonades and clapping above. When the time seems right, Richie limps to the back of the factory, dragging his wooden leg behind, clicks the kickstand back on the bicycle, and walks to the front as though the bike were his from the get-go and nary a nerve jingled in the boy’s body nor mind. Unable to ride the thing himself, he pushes it all the way back up Hicks Street against the wind. Through the rail yard he goes limping all the way toward the Lonergan first-floor room on Johnson Street, a wooden frame, pre–Civil War tumbledown that creaks when the wind rings up.

  Richie reaches out to open the door, then maneuvers the bike and his leg through the sleeping troupe of ten or eleven sheetless children lying askew on the parlor-room floor. Their light-haired heads dark and wet from the body’s oils and fallen asleep they have, exactly where their heads lay now.

  Mary Lonergan’s back is bent over the bucket of dishes beyond the sprawled children, her hands already wrinkled and sore from the late-night scrubbing job at a Crown Heights mansion. It isn’t until Richie drops the bike with a rattle among the others that Mary turns round.

  “And what are ya supposin’ we do with all dese bikecycles you keep findin’ in the middle o’ the night, Richie? Are ya makin’ a collection?” she shoots off in her Brooklyn brogue.

  “Nah, rentin’ ’em.”

  Across the left side of Mary’s face is an old scar from hot grease that had been thrown across her. Under her left temple the hair has been scalded away and was never to grow again and her left shoulder too was spotted with burns that had eaten the pigment from her skin to leave the side of her a pale color. In 1904, when Richie was three years old, his father took a pan of grease off the fire and threw it on her in a fit of anger. It even made the papers but that was only for a day. The scars are there still.

  “I know da plan, Richie.” She lays a fist on her hip. “But do you think ya can get up a little earlier now an’ again to rent’m out to the kids that need them durin’ the day? Ya’ve got a collection now; next step is the rentin’ part you keep spakin’ of.”

  “Where’s Paps?” he answers.

  “Don’t know, saloon I s’pose.”

  “Anna?”

  “Sleepin’ in the back room, God let ’er rest. The sweetest darlin’ of a girl, she is. Spent the whole of a day at St. Ann’s prayin’ for me,” Mary whined her voice a bit at the end to accentuate that Anna was praying for her poor old mother. “No one hears a t’ing in this werld, not even a poor mother with starvin’ chicks. But Anna does. Ignore and ignore, that’s what they do. The evil is in the ignorin’, write it down fer it’s the truth. Doesn’t matther it’s yer dyin’ breath, they’ll just give ya the blindeye. Yer last dyin’ wish’ll go unheard and then off ya take to the groundsweat with ya, and fer the goin’ price too. That’s the cure fer ya.”

  “Why she prayin’ for ya, Ma? Wha’ happened?” Richie could tell she had been thinking and plotting all day.

  “Yer fadder’s a loogin,” Mary threw a washrag on the draining board. “He’s made enemies of every boxer from here to Hell’s Kitchen, he has. No future in promotin’ or nothin’ o’ the sort. We’re doomed!” she cries out and turns her back, half acting. “We’re doomed to a life o’ peasantry, Richie. Ye’re da son of a scrubberwoman and a punchy ex-gangster and ex-boxer from the Lower East Side. We won’t go nowhere an’ with all these childers, Richie?” she spread her arm out motioning along the floor.

  “Ma, stop cryin’,” Richie hated when she used old words like that, “peasantry.”

  “I went by the Dock Loaders’ Club t’day . . .”

  “Again,” Richie finished her sentence.

  “Yeah, they won’ let me in, but Bill Lovett was there and he said he’d send a message to Dinny about helpin’ out widda openin’ costs fer ya own bikecycle shop, God bless that young man Lovett. Ya know he’s a big dockb
oss for Dinny Meehan now? Did ya know that?”

  Richie turned around.

  “Even though McGowan’s the rightful dockboss in the Red Hook, Bill’s proved himself by fillin’ in with honor,” she continued. “Only twentyone year old and he’s showin’ his colors as a dockboss, God bless’m. Ran out all them I-talians that tried takin’ over the Red Hook after McGowen got sent up for a jolt . . . Saved Dinny Meehan a war against ’em, ya know he did. And Lovett’s got just the temperament fer such a place as the Red Hook. But I known it from the day that bhoy was born into those rookeries on Cat’erine Street. That bhoy had swagger and he had a lot of it too. He’s a good one, that Lovett. Always cared ’bout ya too since the accident . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .”

  “Since before even too, he has, Richie. He always looked out for ya. He’s got the ol’ can-do, Lovett. And he was the first one there when the trolley got ya and he wrapped his tie ‘round ya leg so’s it wouldn’t bleed out.”

  Mary stopped speaking as she blushed and the warmth hit her throat, tears blurred her eyes. She had the highest of expectations of Richie since he was her first and since he had everything it would take to lead her family out of the Bridge District slums. He had the fight in him and he had the nerve for it. He had followers and most important, he had the name: Lonergan, known on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn as a name to put the fear in people. And Brady too, Mary’s maiden name and the surname of her famous brother, Yakey Yake who ran things in the old days on the docks by Catherine Street: a man who could turn on a dime, but fought mostly not for pleasure, but to give bread to his people, his family. Who kept the Eastman Gang and the Five Points Gang at bay. Yakey Yake was also the man who employed John Lonergan as one of his main soldiers that she married at his courting. But when Yakey Yake died of the consumption in 1904, things quickly went awry for the Lonergan family.

  Most of the time Mary was quietly proud of her Richie as he fought through his childhood injury, but there were other times when she hid from him and couldn’t stop thinking how far along he’d be if that accident had never come to them. She couldn’t let him see the terrible disappointment that overcame her when she thought of it. Gathering herself in front of him, she continued.

  “Richie, ya’ve five bikecycles in a pile among the children here and four out on loan. That’s a lot o’ bikecycles. With ya own shop on Bridge Street, ya can quit the cutpursin’ gimmick at the Sands Street station and become a legitimate retailer. A real businessm’n. Out of all me children, you got what it takes to be somethin’ more’n anyone, Richie. Somebody! Ya fifteen now, Richie. A man o’ da werld. Even Anna likes the idea and swears she’d help. Ya know how she looks up at ya, Richie.”

  Through his sternness, Richie looks at his mother with a shade of concern.

  “Ya know Richie, people talk. They do, and they’re sayin’ one day the gang could be all Lovett’s. Can you imagine the take fer us if ya was his right hand? Like the Romans we’d live! O’ course he’s too young yet and that Dinny Meehan’s a smart one too, him bein’ as long-lastin’ as he has. And Bill’s only got the Red Hook now and who knows what’ll happen when they let McGowan out. But that Bill Lovett’s a wild one and he’ll give Dinny more to 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.