Читать книгу Light of the Diddicoy - Eamon Loingsigh - Страница 12

ONE NIGHT ON A SATURDAY I sleep on the sofa while white snow shimmers out the sooty kitchen window. It falls slowly, peacefully into the foreground of the bridges and masts and elevated tracks in the air among the stacked factories and tenements and brownstoned buildings leaning over the East River. The dark Water Street shack shakes when the stringed freight cars drop their loads of raw materials to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Rail brakes moan through the halls when ship containers full of paint cans are delivered at the Masury & Co. factory and clicking echoes travel through the air shafts when torpedoes are transported to the E.W. Bliss building up and down Plymouth Street a block away.

In good spirits after a bout with the drink, Uncle Joseph brings over a few men to the tenement for a shindy. That Saturday, the bottom-floor room was to cackle with voices and was lit with elongated, blooming flames in the dark from sucking pipe matches. With the drink in them they are blurts, much louder now than on the piers where I last saw them.

When I am woken by the drinking roars, they hand me the hooch for a swig; and, set to waking the fireplace too, they throw broken pieces of wood from the stairwell banister. Cursing Dinny Meehan and all the toughs who follow him, they resort instead to lines about worker-friendly environs and the right of men to organize.

“Fair bein’ fair!” they demand. “Civility of the worker’s rights!” I watch them from my springy sofa pounding their fists on the kitchen counter with their boorish denunciations and their lavish proclamations. Crooning the melodies of the abject and summoning the war cries of that time and place.

“Emma Goldman says . . .” and “Gene Debs is a man we’ll vote fer . . .”

It was the pookas lived here too. I’d heard them as they were still fresh in my old country thoughts. The shanachies who storytell from village to village had always told me that the Irish are cursed by them, which explains why we are always on the bottom of every rung and wrangle, no matter the city we reside. Once we show a bit of success the pookas come and haunt us and whisper good-for-nothings in the ears of all. Next thing you know the whole shabang is overcome with unrest and back we go to the starving bottom of the rung, having to work day and night to wrangle every gimmick we can just to hold our lips above the water. That’s what the shanachies say at least. And though I had no idea what they speak of, pookas and wrangles and such, I am beginning to get a sniff of it as I listen to my uncle Joseph and comrades.

I can see that hungry look in his eye, Uncle Joseph. He has the stare of a scrag by the way his thin hairs flap over his baldspot, skinny neck and sunken cheeks with the opaque pallor of a half-dead man. He comes upon me close and breathes his boozy pan in my face, “Yer makin’ progress now among us, bhoy. The men’r noticin’ ye as well. They are too! Ye’ve a fine werk et’ic ’bout ye.”

Impressionable as I am, the compliments open me up. I want to cry, I really do because the struggle I am going through internally is a difficult one.

“Not ye to werry, Liam,” he says. “We’ve got ye in our sights as well. We all see ye, don’ t’we fellas?”

“Sure do,” they agree.

“Right that.”

“T’ing is,” he continues, one arm around me on the sofa and pointing at me with the hand that is wrapped around a bottle. “We need guys like ye. Sure we do! We need ye here in Brooklyn. Young strong bucks like yerself. Able bodied and minded. The werld was made fer de like o’ ye. An’ the International Longshoremen’s Association needs good lads like ye. Ye’re comin’ in at the right time, ye are. I’m goin’ to introduce ye to a man’s gonna help us all, name’s Thos Carmody. He was sittin’ right here just a few week ago. Oh yeah, that’s a man can get things done, he’ll have ye up an’ runnin’ with a union card an’ all. He told us of the German plot, didn’t he men?”

“He did!” They agreed.

“The English, they call him the Hun, but what’s an Irishman got against the Germans? Nothin’, that’s what. One million dullers fer a strike in Brooklyn, that’s what they’re ready to pay us, bhoy. Thos Carmody an’ the ILA, they’re ready to pay us fer refusin’ to work and make weapons for the English to buy. And guess who’s to lose power from us strikin’, guess?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dinny Meehan and his band of pikeys ’n tinkers, that’s who.

We’ll take’m down. With no work and full bellies, the ILA’s ready to finally take’m down. Are ye wid us, bhoy?”

“Sure.”

He points to my cup, “Put a hole in that, kiddo, and have another drop.”

I drink and drink, not realizing the brew is so powerful. It’s poteen, of course. Handmade in the tub; what we call back home “pu-cheen,” the rare ol’ mountain dew. Though the taste of it is awful, the feeling is wondrous and with the mingling of compliments and the potion in the drink, I become overwhelmed with the happiness. One of the men asks if I am cold in the bones. Standing over the fireplace, he pulls a hot poker and stuffs it into a full glass of ale, takes a sip for himself, and hands it over to me. I nibble on the hot brew a couple times until I am encouraged to take bigger slugs. Within moments I am not only warmed to the core, but happily dizzy from the drink too.

I speak openly about the docks and my new life for the first time. Words flow from me as they hadn’t in all my life flowed before. Realizing it all as a big adventure, I see it as one day to be a great story for recounting to my childhood friends in Clare, if I ever am to see them again. Uncle Joseph encourages more and more, and next thing I know I’m at a pitch of excitement what with all the new sights and smells of Brooklyn fresh in my mind. Standing from the sofa and waving my arms about uninhibitedly. It all comes rushing into my mind’s sight as articulate as the greatest of writers, or so I feel: the view of the canopy of bridges from our neighborhood connecting us to the mystical place called Manhattan. Manhattan! With its huge buildings erect and virile and austere across the East River from the docks along Columbia Street or right out the kitchen window of our Water Street room. It all makes perfect sense to me now and I am out of my mind with fervor and optimism.

Another of my uncle’s friends who’d been sitting in the kitchen with his legs propped akimbo onto the boiler played an old song on his “tenement house piano,” as they used to call it. Though it is no more than a simple penny whistle, it is good sounding. The music, the bitter weather, the smell of firewood, and the drink give me to thinking. And then I think again of the vantage point at the docks and its southern skyline of Lady Liberty standing tall over the water and so very proud too, my eyes foam up with dewy-eyed nostalgia. Now drunk, the fairytale comes alive. I realize then that my struggle is that of any other boy becoming a man and if a boy my age doesn’t struggle, then he may never become a man. Unable to scoff at my own sentimental epiphanies, I continue forth in my dream-drunk conclusions.

By the time all my thoughts are emptied, the room begins to spin in my head and a fierce sweat comes upon me. My stomach is light and airy and not understanding the predicament, I stand up and burst forward with all the liquor that covered the remnants of my thin dinner splashing onto the wood floor in front of me out of a sudden.

“Ye feckin’ ungrateful lil’ muck!” Uncle Joseph bellows and abuses.

I’d fallen to the ground among my own retching. Above, Uncle Joseph punches upon my head and face, my reactions to block them are slowed and incompetent, limp. I can’t remember all the things he says as he punches and kicks, but I do remember him gnashing and spitting in his fit.

“Yere fadder ain’t but Fenian swine from old and stupid ways!”

His boys stand up from their chairs and pull pipes from their faces at the spectacle.

“And yere mother’s a country óinseach,” Uncle Joseph kicked, pulling me up by my hair. “An’ ye’re the child of a great ignorance! Can’t even see the opportunity of yere life in front o’ ye, ye beggar’s spawn!”

Dragging me to the door like they did the insane starker on the docks, he opens it and throws me by the collar down the wooden stoops onto the icy pavement out front. When I try and rise, he leans down and punches with a closed fist onto my cheek by my eye. I fall back again and again he drags me across the sidewalk to the gutter by a lightpost, spits in my direction, and turns round.

“Ye don’ wanna listen to me? Go an’ beg ye’re way t’rough life, ye shanty Irish!” As the door slams shut, I can hear him slurring at his followers inside. “That goes for the each of ye, too . . . .”

I can tell that he is angry about other things, but that matters not now. All of this means but one thing; I’d not return to Water Street again. Sent to the snow and the cold and the freezing December night air, disheveled and drunken I wander confusedly, and vomit more in the muddy snowbanks at the edge of the pavement. The ice sheets along it slide the world from under my feet. Dumb from shock, I hadn’t even considered the idea of grabbing for my coat on the way out. After a very long hour in the whipping winds that come jettisoning off the East River, my ears begin to sting and my face is frozen in place with tears stuck to my swollen cheek. Gathering balance from the corners of buildings, I begin simply trying to open one door after another regardless of consequence. Finally, at a six-story tenement house on Montague Street, a door is open just a crack to allow a frozen stranger’s entrance. Not much cooler inside the halled inner walls, I can feel a bit of heat coming from the bottom of a door on the first-floor. I huddle my frozen hands close to the warm breeze from the floor and finally resolve to lay my entire body along it to fall asleep like a wrecked ship among its own shambles.

A week goes by and I have disappeared from the docks altogether. Uncle Joseph being the connection, I forgave the thought of searching for work there. I lay my head at night in a disowned building along with a huddle of other abandoned children off the Flatbush approach to the Manhattan Bridge. Windows boarded and front door bolted, we steal up a hole in the flooring to gain access from beneath where the smell of old death and winter dirt mix. In the night wind, the wooden two-story building shifts in the air and creaks at the whim of the night gales. Not fearing the danger in it, we light some extra coals and floorboards in a barrel upstairs until one night when the barrel itself burns through the floor and falls to the lower level with an awful crash. We peek down the hole surprised by it all as embers fly below, leaving us cold for a night, scrambling for warmth.

I get by with eating dirty snow for water and stealing bread from horse carts and peanuts from the pockets of sailors that stammer from saloons and into view of a pilfering child. I still owned a dollar bill, so when I do buy a can of beans or so I slip longbread in the back of my pants slyly. I learn to conserve energy and plan out my thin meals, thoughts consumed only on how best to steal. It was many a night I slept on the wooden floor of that shack with a great emptiness in me and from it I come to see the immortal cunning of the thief and his relation to American ingenuity. An art form of necessity and urgency and competition. Breeding it in the child, they do. Bred in these children that sleep next to me with their faces pressed against the cold wooden floor and no sheet to cover them, no pillow for their eggshell heads. Some no more than five and six years of age huddled together motherless in the wintry night.

In a different language it’s said where I come from, “The well-fed cannot understand the hungry.” And so, not a soul wonders about me or stops to ask a question or offer help, only pitiless smirks and “I’ll fan ya ears, kid, ‘less ya beat it quick.”

I am regularly shooed by shopkeeps even when stealing is not on my mind, like they sense the hunger in my eyes and body language. Where empathy is with them I couldn’t know. Back home, my da would sometimes let a hungry wanderer stay with us a day or two and collect free meals so long as he helped about the house and farm. A common thing among the country Irish. But here a wanderer is leered at and cruelty lives in the locals’ eyes and in their stance like a mad child’s grudge. I swore to my mother’s soul never to lose what I learned from my family of mercy, empathy. No matter where I am to live.

I nick a wool coat with a big collar at a restaurant in Borough Hall and inside the pockets are a pair of heaven-sent gloves. Yule tidings for a lost winter gamin. Toward nightfall I wander back to the Flatbush orphanage, wind whipping in the ears. It is a brumal and barren hungry night wherein the streets are hollowed out by the promise of a piercing frost. My face feels dry and cracked. My groin is frozen and there is loneliness in the whistling cold and the dry-freeze of my thoughts. One of the kids at the makeshift orphanage is named Petey Behan. He has short legs with a long torso and some power in his shoulders, thin hips, and a box face with a mouth that never stops its blathering.

“Me and Pegleg an’ some others are extablished,” he boasts. “We gotta a couple gimmicks that’re gonna pay out soon, ya know? You guys should come meet’m, Pegleg. We gotta gang and we’re lookin’ to expand, but ya gotta be tough. If ya ain’t tough, don’t think about it. Pegleg’s a killer, he’ll kill ya. I seen ’em kill one feller. I did too.”

“Really?” Two other kids gaped as the light from the fire lit their faces orange in the dark.

“Yeah,” Behan says. “Beat ’em wit’ his own fists and then shot ’em with a gun right in the face. An I-talian kid that thought he could steamroll Pegleg into sellin’ junk for him. Just kilt ’em dead. The cops caught up to Pegleg too, but they let’m go.”

“They let’m go?”

“Yeah, they couldn’t make it stick. My brother’s a Whitehander too.”

“He’s one of Dinny’s?”

“Yeah, kinda. He’s done work wit’ both the Whitehanders and the Jay Street Gang back before the Jay Streeters agreed to work wit’ the Whitehanders. He had to do a job once too, my brother. Him and Wild Bill Lovett together, they stole a bunch o’ stuff from a warehouse and then sold it to someone in Manhattan. Like a real job, ya know. They made real good money doin’ that. My brother said he got twenny dollars pullin’ that off. And he did it with five other guys who all got twenny dollars too. Dat’s what we’re gonna do, me and Pegleg an’ us. So if yas wanna real job, just ask me. But ya gotta be tough, see. If ya ain’t got tough, ya better go’n get it.”

Lying across the hardwood floor with the rest, I shared bits of bread with a thin four-year-old that refused to speak. Unable to close her own mouth, or unaware it was open, she just looked at my hand every time it disappeared inside my pocket, then poked me on the leg for more bits.

Appearing from the dark and standing over me, Behan says to me, “Hand over the coat, it’s my place to be askin’ for it.”

I look up at him. “This is my coat.”

Next thing I know he’s dragging me across the entire room by the collar and trying to shake me free from the thing with a couple kicks to my side and some more shaking. Instead of fighting back, I let it slide through my arms and look up.

“I was the first one here,” he says, making a big scene of it in front of the little ones. “I got rights to charge rent and seein’ as though I know y’ain’t gotta a penny to ya name, I claim dibbies on this here coat.”

I watch him disappear to a corner farther away from the glim of the dying flame in the barrel. The wee one I was just feeding then realizes I have no more bread and gets herself up to find a corner to sleep in too. Eventually I do the same.

The week before Christmas and wandering through the maze of buildings by daylight, I walked around a snowy corner and was surprised by a man running for his life, striding desperately past me. On his coattails are two others whom I recognize immediately from the docks: Tuohey the pavee fighter and The Swede whom you never can forget once you put eyes on him.

“Ya fookin’ better run, Leighton,” I hear The Swede yell as the three men continue running toward the middle of the street, moving to the opposite sidewalk. “I catch ya and ya pay for ya brother’s ills!”

A main thoroughfare is Fulton Street. It has a terminal and used to be the road that lead to the Fulton Ferry for the Manhattan crossing. In 1915, though, it was next to the Empire Stores, the port warehousing structure scurrying with workers winching pallets of tobacco through the iron-shudder windows above. It ran parallel with the Brooklyn Bridge where the three-story Sands Street train station fed the elevated trains that snaked through the neighborhoods and across the bridge to Park Row, in Manhattan. A city on its own, Sands Street station also housed Richie “Pegleg” Longergan’s gang of cutpurses and pickpockets. With such dense commuter transience, it was the perfect headquarters for a gang of teenage thieves. Of course, among this gang was Petey Behan. Himself the thief of my much-needed coat.

A week or so after that, I am wandering over by Jay and York streets on the east side abutment to the Manhattan Bridge with the belly falling out of me in hunger. After long bouts of fasting in the desolate wind and dry crisp air, it begins to seize up in me. I can feel my eyes in my face glowing with visions. New splendors come across my mind and just as soon as they swirl beautifully around my imagination they disappear, and I became enraged under faulty logic. No money and no plan, I am alarmingly unafraid of my fate and when reason does come over me, my stomach turns in concern while my eyes light up in fear.

I go back to Water Street ready to grovel back into my uncle Joseph’s good standing and a woman answers the door.

“Don’t know any Joseph Garrity, child, must o’ moved out,” and the door closes.

At Front Street just a few blocks away, I see playing among the garbage and muddy puddles in the cobblestones a motley band of eight or nine shanty children, parentless in the long misshapen shadows of late afternoon. A few of them have their feet dangling in the sewers where the excrement of neighbors mingles in the mud and whatever else accumulates in the rectum of the streets. Remarkable though was, next to the ragged kiddies, a lounging horse that had finished her last breath and lay there on her side retired from her slavery. With a gaping mouth, staring eyes, and a mountainous rib cage in the air with a thin layer of skin over her, the old girl was a daunting figure there in the road sprawled aside the impervious imps and refugee nurslings. The eldest boy stands over the others with a cap over his eyes and his hands in his pockets keeping at a stern stare on me, shoulders hunched under two floppy suspenders. A bit younger than myself, he is the most like a parent among them and orders the others around, ballyragging them for saying dumb things. I feel sad for the beast and believe he does too, so I ask him whose draft horse it was.

“Well it ain’t yours is it?”

The youngest, barely able to speak, spoke up to me, “The butche’s on he’s way ter pick up da ol’ nag and make a . . .”

“Shaddup!” the eldest says to the nursling, then motions for me to keep moving.

The child looks up behind him to the eldest and scowls. The type of scowl a four-year-old shouldn’t know how to cast just yet.

“G’on, don’ get ya’self thinkin’,” the eldest reiterates.

A day or so later and still without even bits of food in me I go back to Borough Hall and wander around some more. Hoping maybe someone will see me this time. I think of a plan. Rather, of needing a plan. Needing to come up with some sort of resolution where my daily routine will be more fruitful. A plan is a fine idea. If only I can get something to eat so I can think more clearly so I can make this plan. Snowflakes begin to populate the air like floating crystals. It’s all dreamy inside me and I stare ahead while my thoughts turn soft again, lucid. I allow myself this purposely. Irresponsibly. Without the wool coat, I stuff my hands deep into the pockets of my trousers and shiver obviously, significantly. It is Christmas Eve, so I say a prayer and think about the warm choruses sung on such a night at the church of Clooney back home to celebrate the birth of Christ together. I think about my mother too, and sisters so far away.

Moments later I am overcome with distress. Distraught by pookas whispering in my ear and cursing the fact of it being so cold. I walk with a wild pace looking around everywhere for loose morsels or opportunity like a gull circling behind the ferry’s foam. I walk myself right out of Borough Hall and toward Columbia Heights. When I see a lazy dray with a cover over the back, I sneak up behind it regardless of consequence and rip open the sheet.

“Hey! The fuck’s wrong wit’ ya?” the driver belches.

I look at him with cat’s eyes and scurry off.

“Kid!” I hear a yell from across the street, then see a young man crossing the cobbles in my direction. “C’mere, yeah. C’mere. What ya doin’?”

He looks healthy, fit. Maybe twenty-two years old. Handsome and with his cap over one eye and a toothpick out the other side of his mouth, he walks with a rhythm. I recognize him, but can’t remember from where. I stand still, hoping he can lead me to some food.

“Yeah, ya stealin’ in my neighborhood widout me knowin’ first? Is that it?”

I look at him.

“Ya ain’t gonna answer me?”

“I’m not.”

“Oh yeah? Wha’s ya name?”

“Liam Garrity.”

“Garrity?”

“Garrity.”

“Joe a relation o’ yours?”

“Uncle, but I swore him off as he did me.”

“You got nowhere to go?”

“Not yet.”

“How old are ya?”

“Still fourteen.”

“‘Still fourteen,’ he says,” laughing at me, then looks around.

“What are ya, right off the boat?”

I don’t answer.

“Listen, come wit’ me. Ya hungry? Come wit’ me. I gotta be somewhere an’ ya can come wit’. C’mon,” then grabs my arm and walks me quickly through the cobbles toward the sidewalk.

After a few minutes of walking I ask his name.

“‘What’s my name,’ he says,” again making fun and repeating.

“Guy, just call me Guy.”

“Guy?”

“Yeah, or Patrick Kelly, like everyone else around here.”

I would get to know him quite well over time, his real name was Vincent Maher and he walked me into a flower shop and dropped some coins on the table, left with a bouquet. “Ya ever been to a wake?”

“Uh . . . I have.”

“Good, le’s go.”

“What if I don’t want to?” I stop.

“C’mon, only one better place to catch a girl, dat’s a weddin’.

Wakes? They get all lathered up about ’em, girls do. And dis guy dat died’s got t’ree sisters. T’ree of ’em, let’s go. They got scoff there.”

“Scoff?”

“Fooooood, shit kid, ya don’ know nothin’ do ya? I can tell ya hungry, though, as there ain’t a lick a manhood on ya, fookin’ scrawny as ya is. Jus’ follow me kid, I’ll take care o’ everythin’, don’t ya worry. C’mon.”

“Who died?”

“A guy.”

“How’d he die?”

“Screw got’em.”

“What’s that?”

“Shaddup.”

As we walk away, he takes off his trench coat and drops it over my shoulders. A few minutes later and we come upon a throng of half-frozen men and women and their children standing in the street in front of a wood-framed, four-story tenement. Maher grabs me by the lapel and pulls me through it as most step aside when they see him and his side-cocked cap. We thump up a thin stairwell together, dark as a forgotten cave. The dusty steps creak in their blackened wood and Maher whispers down, reminds me to keep my mouth buttoned. On the second floor the banister is gone other than some shardlike stalagmites sticking up from the planks. I hold onto the wall instead where I feel the rotted and exposed studs and downstairs I can hear the hum of the crowd reflect from the entrance and up through the stairwell. We hear keening coming from behind a closed door above us and the hushing coos of loved ones like pigeons on a wire. When we make it to the third floor we take a left and pass the doorless lavatory. Maher knocks lightly with a knuckle, then checks up the stairwell toward the top floor in the black.

I huff from the stairs, not so much from being winded but because my body is beginning to give way for not having slept in some two days. And for the hunger, which leaves me only with emaciated energy. With no bed or rest in the coming, my stamina is discouraged though the food is just behind the door, so I am told. Beginning again to dream with eyes open, my thoughts are tumbling from one topic to another and nothing much seems so real or connected, though I try with all I have not to reveal my mind’s unsound movements.

“Who is it?” whispers a man from behind the door.

“Maher.”

The door opens and a giant leaning figure stands in our path. I know right off who it is from the white hair and the scary look on him. “Who’s the kid?”

“C’mon, would I bring any touts around here? I needa talk to Dinny ’bout this one. Let us in.”

The Swede bends down from the door frame to whisper in the dustwood hallway, his neck arteries seizing in blue and red, “Ya fookin’ stoopit, ya not gonna bring no fookin’ stranger in here . . . who says ya could. . . .”

“Listen, lemme talk wit’ ya a second, c’mere,” Maher says as calm as anyone could be under such a threat. “Stay there,” he whispers back to me, then disappears behind the door with The Swede.

Two minutes and the door opens up violently.

“Put ya hands up,” The Swede says walking from the door and confronting me.

“Sheesh,” Maher mumbles.

The Swede pushes me against the wall and cups his large hand into my loins and squeezes, then searches underneath me in the back, pats my chest and thighs, his hands easily wrapping around my reedy waistline.

When we come in the door to the kitchen I can’t find the scent of food, instead only of fresh-cut wood and flowers that can’t quell the rattles in my shrunken belly. I am told to take the coat and hat off and we then walk softly into the opening to the diminutive parlor. Supported by four tattered wooden chairs, there is a long yellow pine coffin stretched under the drapeless window reaching into the middle of the room. Topper shut.

Dinny Meehan glances at me directly in the eye then gave attention back to the woman whose faint hands he holds between the span of his brawny shoulders. She snuffles and her nose and cheeks are blushed with the cry. His gentle confidence attempting to assure her of a sanity in this world, he whispers to her in the sunlight dust. Stacked behind them in the close-shouldered room are thickets of bursting bouquets contrasting the dull grays and dark colors of the parlor. Maher adds his to the confection, gives a distant hug to the mother of the dead. The only light in the entire flat comes from the cloudy window and the dull glim of the gray Christmas Eve day outside.

Three sisters sit on the faded and torn navy blue sofa by the coffin, the youngest on the arm and a widow sat looking out the window in a long stare under an awning bower of lilacs and assorted flowers, her two fatherless dawdlings running from the back room to the kitchen unattended. Six broad men stand at varying heights at the women’s opposite like high-rises wedged together in a dumbstruck skyline, hat in hands, thin black ties between tight jacket lapels. The Swede at the pinnacle, his long needle face topped with white feathers like a towheaded city savage. I recognize others from the docks, the pavee fighter Tommy Tuohey among them.

Maher and I take our place in the room’s saturnine reserve cast by a dead man’s presence. At my side, a pair of eyes look at me in the hush. It is Harry “The Shiv” Reynolds, who I know as the dockboss at the Atlantic Terminal known chiefly as the bloodculler of Columbia Street’s bulkhead. My stomach makes a curling sound and I am overcome with a terrible cramp in my bowel. Reynolds looks at me again, then steadies himself.

The Swede leans over us and looks out the window, his attention caught by a gaggle of brown trenchcoated men accumulating around a two-horse dray that stops out front, mingling among the crowd below.

“Everybody get away from the window.” The Swede breaks the reserve.

The widow refuses to acknowledge, the mother shrieks knowingly, Maher takes a pan from the kitchen and puts it over his head while peering down street level, Meehan gently pushes the sisters toward the foot of the coffin in the middle of the room.

“Four o’ ya come wit’ me, rest stay here,” The Swede says and instead of naming his followers, points to each as they shoulder toward the kitchen door.

“Just a broken shoe,” I whisper to Vincent Maher.

“Whad ya say? Kid, whad ya say?” Meehan answers for Maher.

Shaken by the room’s attention, I look down.

“Say it, what did you say?”

“I . . . heard it coming up here, broken shoe on the horse. Like glass, I heard it on the cobbles before we come up.”

Dinny Meehan walks over to me with his eyebrows pushed down, interested. “How you know it’s broke? Was it broke when you walked past?”

“Not yet.”

“Did ya hear it break?”

“I didn’t, but . . .”

“Go look then, go look out the window,” he says, rushing me over.

“Is it broke?” Vincent Maher asks.

“Looks so . . . it is. It shattered off the hoof. I can see it did.

That man has another shoe hanging out of his back pocket. Hoof knife and pincers too. He’s a horsefarrier,” I say looking back.

“Not a gangman?”

“I . . . I don’t know that, but I can tell you he’s no blacksmith, that’s for sure.”

Dinny Meehan turns to Maher, “Tell ’em all to come back up. It’s nothin’.”

“Yeah,” Maher agrees and shoulders around the mother and crowd toward the door, then thumps down the stairs.

Meehan puts his hands in his pockets, looks me over. His handsome face built around the pose of a chieftain’s stolid stance. Under dark brown brows and hairline, his green eyes shone like archaic stones in the window room’s dull shine.

“You from Ireland?”

I nod.

“Farm boy?”

Nod.

“How do you get stronger shoes? So they don’ break so easy?”

I shrug. The room had lost interest and some of the men itch their faces nervously while the widow stares out the window. Her tiny daughter stands between her and the coffin with uncombed hair partially covering her eyes, ears stuck out of the light blond strings like a gnome with pursed, wet lips and large eyes. She seems smaller than a normal five-year-old.

“G’on, say it,” Meehan presses, putting his full attention on me.

I look around but only Meehan’s face waits. “Well, to break down the iron ore you have to smelt off the rock and slag to keep the iron. Flux it,” I gulp.

“Like potash?”

“Potash is a flux, it is. Or charcoal even. So, you have to scrape off the gangue or turn it to gas in the heat. Then you have to forge it. Bend it to your need when it turns orange but if there’s too much carbon in it, it won’t bend . . . too brittle. It’ll just snap off, doesn’t connect to anything either but you can cut away the iron in the shape of a shoe or if you have a mold. It’s lesser quality and it makes bad shoes, especially cobble-walkers like you have here. Muscular perch-erons have too much weight for bad shoes. You need wrought for them, cast iron won’t make it. Sounds like glass on the pavestones, that’s what I heard downstairs.”

Dinny Meehan watches me speak. Not so much to listen to what I say, but to see me.

“You ever worked with iron?” I asked.

“No . . . my father worked in a soap factory in Manhatt’n, off Washington Street. He was from Ireland. Uncle was a gang leader. Ruffians, back in them days.”

I didn’t know how to answer that, but managed to ask him what year his father came over.

“1847, when he was a babe.”

Without answering I look at him again and put it together in my mind all those stories I heard of how bad a year it was in Ireland, 1847.

“Your father works with horses?” he asked.

“Some, he does a lot of things. Sells peat too. Mends thatch, carpentry.”

“You Joe Garrity’s nephew?”

“I am.”

Looking at Maher, “He tells me ya still fourteen.”

I nod.

Over the next two hours some four or five hundred men, women, and children wait their turn to give respect to the dead. Snaking up the stairwell, they keep as quiet as they can while the neighbors downstairs and next door stand in their doorways smoking, watching. A woman with a great scar on one side of her face appears with many children and strides out from the line to shake Dinny’s hand. Mary Lonergan then grabs hold of the mother of the dead, and with a great and awkward bawling, wails for her. Mother McGowan is patient, though I can feel that Mrs. Lonergan is seen as the lowest of the neighborhood mothers. Still in line are her children, some fifteen of them in line along the wall sniffling and digging in their dirty noses. The five at the end though are teen boys from the neighborhood led by their limp-legged leader, the eldest Lonergan. The shortest is Petey Behan of the Flatbush orphanage who still wears my coat.

A large man who walked quickly passed everyone in the stairwell elbows in through the kitchen with his bowler cap in hand and a fitted, gentleman’s suit over his paunchy midsection. I couldn’t have known who he was, but later I would. He was Mr. McCooey from the Madison Club who handed out favors for Democratic votes at the Elks Club down in Prospect Heights where all the Democratic backslappers entertain themselves with violin players and operatic arias and such. He gave respects to Mother McGowan and the widow, shook Dinny’s hand without planting his feet, and quickly made his way back from where he’d come. The boys in the gang called their like “Lace Curtains.” While they called the gangs on the docks “Famine Irish.” And looking back over at the Lonergan clan, I could see why.

After McCooey is gone, a beautiful woman in a plain dress and a small boy on her hip exits the line after crossing herself over the dead man. She drops her shawl behind her head and comes to Dinny Meehan’s side with a kiss on his cheek, then looks upon myself with warmness. He whispers to her from above and she smiles at me while the boy stares in silence, then crawls up her shoulder in a sudden fit of discomfort.

When the crowd has gone entirely, an unlabeled whiskey bottle has somehow made its way onto the top of the coffin and is passed from mouth to mouth. A story about the dead man was at first muttered, then turned to a round of laughs. The dockers become animated and John Gibney’s face turns red while Big Dick Morissey flicks him in the back of the head.

“Ya lucky ya dead, you,” Gibney points down into the dead man’s face. “’Cause I was gonna get even wit’ ya when ya got outter the Sing Sing, ya fookin’ arsehole.”