Light of the Diddicoy

THREE ROOMS PRESS
NEW YORK

The tribe of auguries,
These vehement unkempt visionaries . . .
The men stride upon dirt paths, their glinting weapons sided,
Guard well the motley chariots wherein their kin do dwell
And stare long upon the harrowed horizon far off in Hell
At brood on the gloomy regret childish hope once confided.

—C
HARLES
B
AUDELAIRE

I am come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow;
Who have no treasure but hope,
No riches laid up but a memory of an ancient glory
My mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my mother was born,
I am of the blood of the serfs.

—P
ADRAIG
P
EARSE

It seems to me that we can never have a complete settlement of world conditions until the Anglo-Saxon begins to realize that he is not of a superior race but that all races are equal.

—E
DWARD
J. F
LYNN
,
Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt

I cannot forget
That old home I left
In that town of great renown,
I long to go back
To that old-fashioned shack
In dear old Irish Town.

—A
LDERMAN
P
ATRICK
L
ARNEY
,
Brooklyn Eagle, 12/22/1940

F
OR
 M
ARY
 R
EGINA
​ L
YNCH
,​ 
NÉE
S
ULLIVAN
/G
RAMMA
1917–2012

Chapter 1: Glasnevin Rebelpoets

Chapter 2 : Four Italians

Chapter 3: Ship to New York

Chapter 4 : Mary's Eldest Son

Chapter 5: The Shapeup and The Starker

Chapter 6: McGowan's Wake

Chapter 7: Upstairs, Under the Bridge

Chapter 8: The Souper

Chapter 9: Eating Meat

Chapter 10: NY Dock Co.

Chapter 11: The Code

Chapter 12: The Runner

Chapter 13: The Divvy

Chapter 14: A Hard Pragmatist

Chapter 15: The Village & the Rising

Chapter 16: A Tug and an Envelope

Chapter 17: On the House

Chapter 18: Ybor Gales

Chapter 19: Fifty Dime, Done

Chapter 20: McAlpine's Saloon

Chapter 21: Donnybrook in Red Hook

D
OWN UNDER THE
M
ANHATTAN
B
RIDGE OVERPASS
there once roamed a gang I fell in with. A long time ago it was, when I was young and running. It's all I had, this life. Just as yours is yours. Don't let yourself think mine is anything different, anything better. I won't have it that way. It was just a life, and there you have it. But like so many born on the isle of Ireland, I am to die far from home. Though such a grief has since let me alone, as bitterness only cuts into the bone, I'm at ease with it in my age. But to go 'way with all these memories, well, I rush them out here for you to breathe them in. To read with your senses as I lay here in the brood of the night, broad awake to recite my beads, not so dutifully. Because when dying it's no longer duty, it's prayer. So here I am to send a story you true and fair. About blood. And honor. About the code of men, and about empathy too.

This story will both begin and end on a ship as any good run or reel should, but we'll start you here for good measuring.

Cobh wasn't called Cobh when I left it. Queenstown, and a great Atlantic crosser allowed myself and far too many others aboard in the swirling mist. Among the high masts two giant round silos breathed into the air above, black exhaust due from the belly of the iron woman's coal-fired furnaces within. Her long reach a mile wide in black and red faded paint as she sat three-quarters full already from her port in Liverpool on stop to pick up itinerant thirds in the country that made her back in ‘89. Six-inch black iron gun heads reached from what was once a leisurely deck for more distinguished passengers of another era, ghosts now. The Great War changing and altering all of life as we know it. And just above the rusted anchorhold in sea-weathered letters, a degraded font from that bygone time,
RMS Teutonic
.

Not a day for celebrants, it is the offing of the peasant ceremonial here. Lacking pomp and cheer, instead the heavy request of need and necessity fills their eyes. The hunger of orphans and their low caste beheld in their beams, bony travelers huddling for lands of hope and honey. Desperate for their utopia somewhere far off, they are. A utopia dreamed up by the imaginations of the falling and those without promise. As was true to the time it was the motley beaten Celts, pushed to the western edge of Europe and beyond. Into the sea. Their hopes are as humble as their tattered belongings, with only a meal as their immediate mark. I remember how clear they were to me, standing like statues in my mind, the thin faces with paper passes in palm stand blank and disenchanted with patchy beards and shrunken features and tubular breasts and tumorous growths and black fingernails and crippled feet deformedly ornamented by undermined sandals like a parade of pilgrims crossing the desert if only to summon God himself in the absence of His resources and with a will to survive at least long enough to enter the shrine, America.

The farthest I'd ever traveled previous was to sell peat over in Ennis or through the earth's skullpate known as The Burren for the horse fair up in Ballinasloe. A long ways as far as I knew. My father had just arrived back from the greatest of graveside orations and the displays of rebelpoets at Glasnevin. And when the dawn is come for change and you know it, you must prepare or be swept in by it. Great change is on the wing. Rebellions among wars.

Da nods his head at my departure up the plank, a simple handshake and I am gone to life by him as he turns back into the land. His eyes narrow under the cap and brow like a man hiding feelings. And I suddenly find that no longer will I follow his long shadow round the farm, the turf-creel on his shoulder, the scent of gorse in the air. Older by a year, brother Timothy tips at me nervously. Mother and two sisters stayed back in Clare having said good-byes there to leave the men for the day's ride through the countryside, out in the long hills and stretches of rock-strewn fences where old and forgotten territories are marked like dead dog's piss in aged farm hay.

“Not to werry. Hardest t'ing he ever had to do, send ye away such. We'll give to what comes of it,” Mam is tear-smirched in the doorway, sorrowed by the life of things that are far from her control. “May trouble be always a stranger to ye. . . . Whence I gave birth wid' ye some fourteen year ago, I t'ought den and still do now dat ye'd be one day a man to open the door fer many. Take dis, den. Put it in yer pocket and touch it when ye please. Ye'll be grand wid it. Safe keepin', not to werry.”

The Saint Christopher is not much more than a tin imprint and once upon it had a hole where to thread a string to tie round the neck, but since then it'd broken entirely. I place it in my pocket. Feel the imprint of his face on my thumb and forefinger. And that was that, Mam gives my wake with hopes to follow, her teary face blushed with a constant cry from the deaths of her two infant sons, Sean and Colm, born and died before Timothy even. And why does Timothy get the farm and I the Saint Christopher? And I think now that surely it's because his birth and survival was the answer to Mam's praying so hard. Mine was much less, but who has the understanding in their early years to ponder on such things except artists or rich people who are so often one in the same. And maybe the old, such as myself typing away here before I go. But little does she even know that emigrating during the Great War is likely another dead son in the wait. Only luck can make it across the sea lanes with the sea wolves dug in for war, where the
Lusitania
was sent to the dregs just north of Queenstown in Kinsale, just south of five months early upon. Saint Christopher or not, the German has his way on the seas and the war never means to kill a single Irish but then again a dead Irish, incidental or not, won't change the course of things. The Irish and the sea songs though, they are fraught with the romance of death. Not a song I plan to sing, but what word have I in it? Old songs sung by the stink of peat back famine way. Back when times was worse, true. But why I am to suddenly go, no one is to rightly know. Not I. Not Mam either, but Timothy says for soldiering I'm too young yet and I hate him when all I see are the backs of he and Da walking over the hills for drilling with the Volunteers. My Mam says for traveling it's Abby and Brigid that are too young yet. So it's me who goes then.

“When ye can rub yer own two coins togedder, then ye can elect yer destinations,” says my Da, who with one arm pulls down the blackthorn from its chimney home; then he and I and Timothy too go off through the fields for the country train to the port city solemnly. Out from the farm. Out to the world with me.

I
T'S A LATE AFTERNOON AT THE
Brooklyn side of New York, 1915, some week or so before I am to arrive. The motile current of a cast-iron gray October sky slowly shifts in its expanse above the Bridge District where there are barge horns moaning like giant creatures groaning in the waterway distance. Across the East River the canopy of bridges opens outward to reveal the step-stone skyline of Manhattan pushing close on the shoreline's edge. A glass gust turns ears to ice, tilting heads to shoulder and spinning loose papers and dust into pirouettes of refuse along the freight tracks cut into the Belgian bricks. Reaching out into the gray-green suffused shipping lanes below the immense stride of the Brooklyn Bridge stanchions, a floating pier wobbles with the weight of a tied ship at its berth. And under the cold shadow of a Dutch African freightliner at the Fulton Ferry Landing, see a gaggle of some one hundred men come to rest upon a day's hard working. The vessel rising in the East River from the shedding of its cargo, lines of impatient and hungry men now wait their turn for an envelope.

A group of young herding roughs who steer the docks in the neighborhood, “Dinnies” as they are known, taunt the itinerants out of their lazy babbling. Lashing them with tongues, gnashing at them they scatter in a scuttling rush, for the fierce pace demanded by the wartime economy has no time for the laggard and no patience for the immigrant laborer. Now come to bear defrayment, these laborermen wait in a single-file line and upon receiving an envelope from the stevedoring company that employs them, are met by the gypsy-toothed smile and brawny, leaning figure of the one known as Cinders Connolly, the Fulton Street Terminal's dockboss.

Tall in his beam he is, and with a grand smile across his pan, he barks his demands along the labor line trailing from hull to plank to train. Here spit in the wide hand and rubbing it into his knuckles as he come to the end of the stevedore's table to collect his tribute from the men, Connolly is flanked by the flat face of the foolmute Philip Large, his right-hand man. Short on stature with round, raindrop eyes and stubby arms, Large shifts his head on the neck like a beast of burden and is known to break a man's back if his hooks are screwed in. Along with three or four other Dinnies what support them, Connolly and Large are the Fulton's enforcers for the Bridge District gang called the White Hand.

Among the crowd funneling in a motley shuffle toward the stevedore's line are four Italians shown early for work and picked out of need for numbers. With three ships docking at once in the morn's whistle, the four untried immigrants were brought upon. Loafing as they could, they offered passive stares back at the Dinnies who barked at their ears. Whispering in tongues with words understood only in the ancient villages of Calabria, did they. The Dinnies only hearing whispers, and a whisper's not right as it's known there's more to hear in a whisper than a scream. Chuckling too, in foreign jokes. Sensing dispute, Connolly nods for The Swede and a runner is off.

Darkness besetting them here, the cold shafts of the new city gives these guests a shiver scarcely felt in their own past. Hungered and proud for their work, they are readying a return to their train station hotel and the unsettled families that await them as they shuffle to the stevedore's table in queue. Three of them are brothers with the sunken, bony cheeks of the peasant traveler. The last is a cousin who is short but healthy in his paunch and rich in certainty. Together, they speak with agility and mirth, but are misunderstood by the violent riverside natives as the brassy mettle of salty immigrants, ignorance and remiss.

It is the squat one who the brothers turn to for advice. The lone cousin with the round shoulders and wide face, bow lips and half-dozing, half-daring eyes. He pushes to the front when Connolly points at the envelopes. Not understanding a word, Giovanni Buttacavoli directs the cousins to walk with him around Connolly and Large. Politely as he come, Connolly steps in front of the four and motions again at the envelopes.

“Time to pay up, fellers,” Connolly says as he pats down the foreigners for weapons while Large and others stand at the ready. “Nothin' personal, we all pay tribute. Ten percent, then on your own ways ya go. Whadda ya say? Easy, ain't it?”

Not a word knowing, Buttacavoli tilted his head and lowered his brow as Connolly strangely patted down his thighs.

“I already tol' yas, pay up,” Connolly showing snarl, this time touching the lapel of Buttacavoli with his pointer and waving his arm behind. “I gotta lotta guys I gotta tend to, now hurry it up. Ya holdin' up the line here.”

Backing Connolly at his right, Philip Large stares in his dullness at the feet of Buttacavoli. A tug is heard bleating out on the East River and too, a train passing on the Brooklyn Bridge above echoes its clickety-clacking off the black ice water. Large moves his mouth around from irritation. The passing of long moments make him seize. The tension annexing inside him bursts up and forces him to pass a
maa
ing oxen bawl from his throat to release it. This gawking sound is frowned down by the Italians. They hear it only as weakness, unskillful constraint.

The line of men with pocketed hands that've already received their envelopes and are waiting behind the four Italians is bottled up, and so they air their grievances of it. At the ripe of impasse after his hoarse baying, Large tries timidly to bring his arms together to cross but his jacket being too tight behind, drops them to their natural position wide from his stocky, bovid build.

Whether by confusion or obstruction, Buttacavoli and the three brothers gently refuse to comply. Declined, Cinders Connolly peers over his shoulder coldly. Across the way, listening with great intent, is the man everyone calls The Swede. With a long face upon him and a tow head, The Swede stares with a gaunt scowl at the proceedings as he is perched on the bow's edge of a bobbing tug knotted to the wharf just north the brick face of the Empire Stores and the old Fulton Ferry.

Allowing the dockboss Connolly and Large the fair prospect of collecting their own tribute, The Swede sits. Though he sits, there was reason for his being summoned from 25 Bridge Street by a runner when it got apparent these four immigrants were to be troublesome.

From the tug he pierces the cast in front of him. Beside him stand Tommy Tuohey, a pavee fighter from the boreens of the Old Country, and the dark-skinned mauler, Dance Gillen. These Whitehanders, headed by The Swede, wait while some seventy men bottle behind the line waiting to pay tribute. With nary a blink, The Swede first motions for Dago Tom Montague, a half-Italian who grew up in the neighborhoods.

A cold chill runs through the thick uncombed hair of Buttacavoli as those behind him grumble, casting slurs. He finds there is coordination among the locals. Not one to give in to low-class thieves dressed as grown orphans with atrocious manners, he stands chin up. In his land, a brute is met with refined grace. Not even an enemy knows your thoughts and when revenge is struck with blood, a shrug is all that comes upon the face of the victor when blame come his way. When a half-breed with a terrible accent sputters in his language of needing to pay a portion of their earnings, Buttacavoli lowers his daring eye and opens his legs, straightening his stance. Asking elegantly why he would have to do such a thing, he flicks his fingers and turns his head away. His brothers agree. No one takes family money, and again make around Connolly and Large.

The Swede unfurls his limbs and stands in his long span from the tug loosening his tie with a knuckley fist and a groaning sigh.

“They from Navy Street o' Red Hook? What? Bay Ridge?”

“Not sure, maybe jus' immigrants,” Dago Tom shrugs.

“No such thing, coincidence!” The Swede snarls back.

“They wanna invade us? See wha' happens.”

Stamping to the front of the line he elbows through the insolent Italians, past Connolly and Large. Berating with abuse the laborers waiting to give tribute, “Every damn one o' yas who got'n envelope an' ain't paid they shares yet, give it back this very second!”

“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.