Читать книгу Light of the Diddicoy - Eamon Loingsigh - Страница 9

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.

“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.”