Exile on Bridge Street (36 page)

CHAPTER 32

Cinched by Blood

F
EBRUARY
, 1919

T
HE
R
EVERE
S
UGAR
R
EFINERY
LOOKS
LIKE
some metallurgic rendition of a Roman oculus dome but for the great mechanical arm protruding from the top, elbowing down toward the seawall and jetty below. On the dock jutting out even further into the Erie Basin is tied an empty ship ready to be loaded by some one hundred Italian longshoremen in the blustery, slanting snowfall. Been almost two years since they were invited by Dinny Meehan to cross the Gowanus Canal and have since taken over the south terminal of Red Hook.

With the Italian language muttering and laughing in the distance, Darby Leighton stands against a brick wall and watches them, snow gathering on his shoulders. A wandering introvert compelled to make his own way in a communal world, he stands out on the periphery, always. Looks out at them gathered along as if amassed for war on the Red Hook bulkhead, open-stance and proud. Short men and flabby-muscled, unlike the tall and wiry Irish that long ruled here, the Italian cannot work long hours in the elements. The snow here coming down too heavy and the angular wind biting bitter and stinging their southern ears. But they are willing to work for less. The stevedoring company and the ship's captain not complaining there. Italians roosting in the old territory of the incumbent Irish. And holding the same union card as any man in The White Hand.

“Dinny Meehan,” Darby says, shaking his head, then leans and spits and turns round, goes back north. “Sold us outta south Red Hook.”

* * *

“R
ICHIE
?” M
ATTY
M
ARTIN
WHISPERS
,
WITH
THE
cold Atlantic Basin and whitened Governor's Island behind. “Richie, Darby's out there wantin' to talk wit' ya.”

From Commercial Wharf, Richie looks beyond Truck Row lined with tire tracks through a dirty snow, past the twin New York Dock Company buildings where a man is smoking a cigarette against a warehouse wall, hat over his eyes.

“I vill distlact Kane,” Abe Harms says and walks toward the pier house.

With the waterfront wind at his back, Richie limps across a slushy Imlay Street east toward Van Brunt, and when he reaches Darby Leighton, they wordlessly walk around a corner, wide-legged due to the icy pavement.

“Bill's back,” Darby says, a bilious and steamy smoke running quickly over his shoulder. “Connors too.”

Richie does not answer.

Darby Leighton's face is weatherworn and his lips chapped and white. His eyes are black and sunken and has aged much more than the six years it's been since the trial of 1913, when his brother Pickles took the fall in the killing of Christie Maroney, and when Dinny took his cousin Sadie as bride, and finally when he, Darby Leighton, was banished from The White Hand forever.

“Ya heard anythin' about Dinny'n them gettin' released yet?” Darby asks.

“Nah.”

“Come close to me,” Darby says, opening his coat to a .45 tucked in his belt.

Richie comes closer, takes the gun as he looks over his shoulder and Darby's too.

“Gillen'n' Kane,” Darby whispers.

“Ain't seen Gillen t'day. Prolly up wit'. . .”

“Then Kane.”

The bright wind washes across Richie's face, illuminating his gray-blue eyes where under the left one is an open scar, blood dried from the arid air. The left of his sullied white collar is stained a browned red too from some unspoken affray of late. He sucks in his stomach to nudge the gun into his own belt and closes his coat.

“Bill wants to know who ya really are,” Darby says, then walks toward the sound of ringing pulley chains from the grain elevators north of the basin, vaporous steam running again over his shoulder.

Richie ambles back through the slush to the piers. As he enters the dark pier house, he sees straight through the arched pier door across the water toward Manhattan. Abe Harms and Mickey Kane are talking with their backs to Richie in front of the doorway. The Statue of Liberty reaching over Governor's Island ahead. Richie's wooden leg pegs the pier floor at every other step as he approaches the door and the light. Harms and Kane look back, hands in pockets. Kane looks again out onto the water, his broad upper body and the clothes that cover his athletic frame ripple in the gusting flood of glacial air whipping toward him. Whips too into Richie's face as he looks to Harms, who nods in agreement at his approach. Richie slants the .45 up under the back of Kane's neck toward his skull.

“The fuck?” Kane says.

Bursting out of an open fissure in Mickey Kane's forehead and right eye are three spouts of blood, a large dollop of twirling brain and shattered bone matter, all lobbed and issuing into the churning Buttermilk Channel as Kane's faceless body crumples to the flooring, flops out the pier house door. And with a flaccid plopping into the icy water, he is dead and gone to time and memory, never to be found.

Hearing the hammer blast of a .45, the other teenagers, Martin, Petey Behan, and Tim Quilty, enter the pier house as Richie turns round without comment, gunsmoke at the end of his arm, Harms at his side.

Bleating and maaing like sheep and oxen in the countryside, the moiling current of barges, transport steamers, tugs, and converted warships that feed the city here traverse the sea lanes coming to, leaving New York Harbor. Great buildings on the islands and adjoining lands watch over their circulating like the blood of life
pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum
. The heart of it all the men and women who want for better lives—if not in their generation, or the next, no matter. Still wanting, regardless, for the summer of life, and cinched in their day by both the pure blood of the old world, and the hope for a new and better world only imagined yet.

* * *

T
HE
GREAT
SILENCE
OF
OUR
STRUGGLE
coursing through the memory in your blood, only. For the stories of the things we'd done were not told by our children, or their children. Like the shame of victimization, starvation, and loss being none too inspirational for the present, we perhaps do not exist to you. The past being so easy to forget in America, for it is known. The future a treasure of unknown hope. Our fathers and grandfathers, like their fathers and grandfathers, speaking to us in our blood the horrific acts committed upon them and the horrific acts committed in return.

And me now with my mother here. My sisters too. Thankful to have them away from the bloody war of independence and the following civil war coming to Ireland. Thankful to have them in my reach. But yet still now coming to New York are great disturbances, too. And it's a war is what I'd brought them away from, but what is coming can't be called anything less than a war. Mickey Kane's death will cause a stirring among many other things stirring in the city. The murder of a blood heir. The last heir. Dinny Meehan is now alone. He knows it. Sadie knows it. Harry Reynolds knows it too, yet no one else does at the time. Not I. Not Beat McGarry nor The Gas Drip Bard. No one but those three: Dinny, Sadie, Harry. That he is the last of the Meehans now and forever, because the boy is not his. The boy cannot be his, for Dinny Meehan does not exist to anyone at all, at all.

“I don' know no one by that name,” Vincent Maher had said, bowing his head.

“Never heard o' the man. He live around here?”

“Ya don' know no one named Dinny Meehan,” Cinders Connolly told me when I was jailed. “Just don' say nothin'. . . . We're all Patrick Kelly.”

“There are ghosts of our past, ye know,” Mr. Lynch from the old County Clare protective declared. “They live among us too. Ye t'ink they don't? Even if they are mostly just remembrances. They live on. Within us all.”

Once seen as a force of benevolence where the needs of many weren't being met, he hid in the silence of things to help our people here. To free them. To quell the rattles of hunger. And to be ourselves, alone, by creating and fashioning an existence and a territory within the boundaries of the enemy's deeded properties like fighting, wandering gypsies. Within the dominant culture like animals in a trance of instinct brawling each other in a human's world. Dinny Meehan now known for who he is, or who he is perceived, the nous, or the faculty of our old-world ways exposed. He will be perceived again this time as a force of malevolence. The trinity only completed with a horrific cleansing. A blood cleansing. A division assembled by the old Anglo-Saxon ascendency in New York that conquers. Always has conquered. And he will remind us, Dinny will. Speak to us in our blood of the clashing of the early morning's night and the bright of day, in that constant position of change, the inequitable polemic where we live, hovering between the darkness of the past and the unknown future.

And I owe him. I owe Dinny Meehan, the man what raised me in my father's absence. Brought my family across the great flood of the Atlantic Ocean. We all owe him, and he will summon me, as he will summon us all for a rising against an enemy we cannot defeat. Summon our honor. To break our strength. He will always summon us, against time and change. He will make us remember that outsiders and foreigners are no more than invading gangs too. Police gangs. Union gangs. Corporate gangs. Italian gangs, and the gangs of traitors among us. He will not let us forget the egg of our discontent, forever being a great hunger thriving. That we were starved from our real mother's tearful reach, her scent still in our noses, her milk forever on our lips. When he finds his last blood heir has been killed, he will summon us. He will assume our promise to him, and he will make us kill again, and we will die too. The blood sacrifice, a martyr's wish. Dinny Meehan and his green-stone eyes, gentle and knowing and wet with the aura of timelessness, will throw his great weight against it all. For him, the poetry of the past is endlessly repeating itself in the now. The poetic, oceanic unsettled air in his hair always.

“They can never kill me off,” he told me.

They can never kill him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to: Katherine Cesario, Mandy Keifitz, John Smart & family, the Moody family, Dennis Sullivan, Dennis Lynch, Dan Lynch, Jill & James McNamee, Jenna McNamee, Todd McNamee, Jessica Lynch-Goldstein & family, Kit & Tom Leppert and family, Marilyn Rogoff-Lynch, Judy Steele, Jeannine Edwards, Peg & Bob Edwards and their eight boys, Patricia Meehan, Julie Meehan, Patrick Lanigan, Peter Quinn, Terry Golway, Malachy McCourt, T. J. English, Colin Broderick, John Duddy, Larry Kirwin, James Terrence Fisher, Richard Vetere, Tyler Anbinder, Maura Mulligan, Kevin Baker, Terence Donnellan, Tom Deignan, Terrence McCauley, John Lee, Jennifer Richards, Kevin Davitt, Maura Lynch, everyone at Irish American Writers & Artists Inc.,
Fultonhistory.com
, Charles Hale and everyone at Artists Without Walls, Sheila Langan, John McDonough and WBAI Radio-NYC, Conor McNamara & Meredith Meagher, Ireland's Great Hunger Museum, Theresa Nig Loingsigh, Levi Asher at
litkicks.com
, John Malar, Owen Rodgers, Michael James Moore, Nick Mamatas, Stacey McCuin, Alex Resto, Rocky Sullivan's of Red Hook, Marie Flaherty, Laura Motta, Andrew Cotto, Declan Burke, Fiona Walsh, Steve Mona, Tara O'Grady, Sean Carlson, Jim McGlynn, Jimmie Buchanan, and Patricia Carragon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E
AMON
L
OINGSIGH
'
S
FAMILY
EMIGRATED
FROM
C
OUNTY
Clare, Ireland in the late nineteenth century. His greatgrandfather was a sandhog, digging for the New York City subways and opened a longshoremen's saloon in Greenwich Village in 1906 at 463 Hudson Street, which stayed in the Brooklyn-based family until the late 1970s. Loingsigh is a trained journalist that has written extensively on Irish American history. His work includes the novels
Light of the Diddicoy
and
Exile on Bridge Street
(both Three Rooms Press)—which comprise Volumes One and Two of the Auld Irishtown Trilogy. He is also the author of the novella
An Affair of Concoctions
and the poetry collection,
Love and Maladies.
He lives in Brooklyn.

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