Light of the Diddicoy (22 page)

In the Bridge District there aren't many union men, so not a victim is to be had. Underneath the Manhattan Bridge the crazed wash into the heavily industrialized Fulton Ferry Landing between the bridges like a rushing wave between the buildings. Traveling below the Brooklyn Bridge in their throng, snaking between Front and Water Streets, we continue our surge north of the Sands Street station and below the elevated tracks. Looking back down Poplar Street where the police station is housed, I notice the building stands quiet and aloof, almost lonely. Its windows closed and doors shut tight as if it is sleeping with its back turned. A vacant confederate, it too has made way for the law of the White Hand in the Bridge District.

As we rush through Brooklyn Heights and reach the docks at the Baltic Terminal, I can see ahead fifteen men speaking with a ship captain under a docked barge in the background. The ship lies deep in the water with its heavy load awaiting its berth. The men are shrugging shoulders trying to figure out what has happened with the gangs that organize the labor lines. When they hear the mob running in their direction, they drop their newspapers and whatever they have in their hands and run for cover. Finding labor sympathizers is a simple equation for us since they weren't informed of the gang's meeting that morning at 25 Bridge Street. And since they aren't made aware of the gang's meeting, they are assumed to be in with the ILA. This marks them, and when the crowd overturns every garbage can and searches every alley to uncover hiding places, their beatings are received with the full energy and force of the hungry crowd.

From there we travel down Columbia Street from pier to pier searching out victims. Still hungry for blood, the running band of angry men moves quickly toward the south. There it finds more men to beat. Everyone wants a turn, so the ILA men who make their home in these areas receive the worst of it.

Our main destination is Red Hook, though, where there are many Italians found on this rainy morning wondering where Wild Bill Lovett and the undercover ILA boys are and where they also cannot find Strickland, the pier house super and the men who work with Il Maschio. When the rumors circulate that McAlpine's saloon had been torched and Joe Garrity had been hung on the bar to dry himself out, their faces turn from olive colored to a pale white.

And when they hear the rumor of Il Maschio's being shot nine times, they wonder what next to do. Standing in front of the New York Dock Company's large facade as three ships await their unloading, one hundred or more Italians speak among themselves fearfully, angrily. Some want to run when they hear the White Hand is on its way. Others are filled with the pride and want to make a stand to defend their neighborhood with pipes in their hands and brassies too.

Then come a few crazed, sprinting men from the alleys around Antonio Calandra's blacksmith shop screaming for the bloody murder. Behind them is a rumbling crowd of wild Irishmen come to claim their territory like ancient clansmen carrying cudgels in the air and screaming with the force of hurricane winds to enforce their shillelagh law once again. The rain coming down on us gently like the mists of the Old Country, we overwhelm the Red Hook pier fronts. Though there is no green grass to be found and no heathers or bogs, the White Hand clan runs like Irishmen once again. Through the cobbled streets and the docks just inside the Brooklyn anchorage we rush with excitement blooming on our faces like the oncome of spring yet again.

And here is where the hunger of the crowd would be satiated. Prideful Italians and a hundred unwitting immigrants of many stripes stand around almost unfazed. As I come around the corner, Richie Lonergan skipping to keep up with the rest of us, I see our boys rushing with violence in their voice at the dumb crowd of Red Hook natives who somehow seem unaware of the gathering current rushing toward them. Like a tsunami smashing into a seawall the Whitehanders blast into the longshoremen who barely attempt to defend themselves. For the first time ever, I see Philip Large with a smile on his dumb face as he sprints headlong into a gaggle of Italians. I can see the ripple of men affected by his puncturing them, like a bowling ball blasting pins in every direction. Screaming like a train's whistle, Dance Gillen runs into the crowd with nothing more than his closed fists and his wool hat in his back pocket. He picks out a victim, punches him twice, pulls the man's jacket over his head and keeps at the wailing on his upper body. Done with this one, he takes the man by his jacket and slings him around in a circle, letting him loose so that the man is flung with a great momentum, rolling right over the pier and into the water where a ship stands silently, two bearded Russian sailors standing on the deck above laugh and point into the crowd while they pull from their pipes.

Big Dick Morissey goes through the crowd picking men up over his head and slamming them to the ground like a bag of bony rag dolls. Gibney the Lark drags a man from the crowd by his collar while smoke from his stubby cigar plumes above his head in the cold rain. Letting him loose at the edge, he kicks the man with a boot on his shoulder into the Buttermilk Channel Harry Reynolds referees the brawling and any time he sees one of ours getting beat, he jumps in with an elbow and a knee, punching with the butt of his knife down into the round eyes, then slashing across their faces for a lifetime's remembrance of the day. Chisel MaGuire fares well in the chaos too, rummaging through the pockets of wounded men; he makes a small fortune in pickings. As he bends over, the patch on his broken-bottomed trousers revealed, leaves of dollar bills fall out of the pockets of his old-styled coattailed suit as he shoves more in one by one, top hat pushed down hard over his eyes so it isn't knocked off of him.

Striding through the crowd is Dinny Meehan who is amazingly athletic with his fists and feet. I can see that he has had training in the art of boxing and outclasses any opponent he faces. A simple jab from him and men flop to the ground as if shot with a bullet in the brain. The Swede follows him along and distributes punishment accordingly, yanking men to the ground by the backs of their collars and stomping them with his giant booted feet. Tommy Tuohey too, he has his fists covering his face and punches men at the length of his arm, catching heads with a blow hard enough to make a man's hat fly in the air. Also among Dinny's henchmen is Vincent Maher, who doesn't much enjoy the donnybrook as the others, being that his nature is more of a shooter and a masher. Though that doesn't stop his fun, throwing elbow bones in whipping circles and ripping the pants down off men and stepping on them so they can't run away.

Richie Lonergan hops after a man he just punched while Abe Harms chases the victim down and tackles him from behind. When Richie catches up to them, he pounds the Italian with hammer fists across the side of the face until the victim stops moving. He challenges others to a one-on-one fight, but none are game for it as they know it's not a fair fight these Irishers wish for. Thwarted, Richie yells and stomps his stump on the ground in anger with his teeth gritting and lips folded back like a rabid hound.

Bill Lovett too, he kicks a man with his boots and then throws five, six, seven punches in a row without a response. For a moment he becomes winded, then the energy from his outrage gushes up and out of him like combustive explosions again. He's lost his hat somewhere and so his ears bend out from his small head. With all the excitement, they have turned a deep red. He and Non Connors tag-team one man after another, beating them with their fists and kicking them into relaxation.

Following those two is Mickey Kane who is handy with his fists too, and behind is the rest of Lovett's gang, Frankie Byrne, Jidge Seaman, and Sean Healy. Tanner Smith and his boys punch their way through the crowd as well, enjoying the old pastime of ginzo hunting and union bashing. Dance Gillen finds more victims in Lovett and Connors's wake. Holding his hat in hand and jumping in the air to earn his moniker, stomping on face and gullet simultaneously.

For me, I feel I don't have a stomach for the violence and stand away from it all to watch. I've had my fill with it as my uncle's memory starts to take hold in my mind, which seems a great distance from the way I see myself in time. I hold the pencil in my pocket and pretend to write what I see so to keep my mind away from the guilt of not joining in and the guilt of thinking myself a murderer. I do wish to be like the rest, but don't seem to have the spirit they do and the abandonment they display. This haunts me as I stand among the others and I do everything in my power to hide it from the like of Petey Behan.

So watch I do with a terrible fixation on these young men, this communal tribe that can only see other groups of men as invading tribes. Unable to see the modernity in the world because they can't see the modernity in themselves. Blood is what they feel. Rushing through their own veins. And the blood they see in the ownership of these docks and in the honor of their last remaining hope. Their blood, their family names, their mothers and grandmothers all arrived in Brooklyn like gypsies who run from a storm or a war. The shame in it. The utter shame in it. Rushing over the Atlantic from the hunger and so devastated, they hold the deepest fears for anything organized, for it is everything that is organized that starved them from their feather-wind hills and their heathers and the beloved boreens of motherland and the grandeur of the memory of their triumphant ancestral cycles.

The Anglo-Saxon. I know it now. I know it like they know it in them. This gang and the ferocity of the fierce communal lives they hold on to. Held together by their king, Dinny Meehan. Disturbed into the depth of them. So deep it's like it no longer exists for them. It's now the way for them. Holding on by the bloody fingertips before their like is felled from this earth and the modern man, the industrial Anglo-Saxon, with his fraudulent honor, has his way by making extinct this band of primordial thieves and ancient pavee fighters to clear the way for the rule of their invisible laws and their patriotism to business and the sardonic, feminine, treacherous manners they somehow support without even the faintest odor of honor. But it's us that have been called the names, like the Protestant Irish jackeens who call us Shanty Irish and the American Anglo-Saxon who called us Famine Irish. Even as no Famine Irish ever called themselves such for it should never have been called a famine, my da always reminded, but a mass removal by the means of nature all those with a tradition to oppose the rule of their foreign invader. Plenty of food existed in Ireland. Exported cash crops to India and everywhere else. Exporting too the rebels and gypsies and low-blooded, low-meaned, secretive, tribal rural slave-Irish in my own sad county of Clare. Banished to the ditches for a frozen, starved, and slow death and in shallow hillside graves in Ennistymon and its cholera-infested workhouse or exported onto coffin ships with grass-stained mouths for the harbor of New York and the ports of Quebec and Boston and the like where our rag-clothed, sunken-eyed children by the hundreds were unloaded onto carts sent directly to the cemeteries if not dumped into the choppy cold Atlantic's hungry, sucking grip.

I hear Richie Lonergan scream for blood again for he cannot find a man to fight him fist to fist. Philip Large has a man on the ground and is yanking the head off of his body with the energy of a devil so upset by his fate that he cries with the burning of his shoulder muscles, round biceps and blue-veined neck maaing like a beast overburdened with fear and work. Blood is everywhere red, and hardly any of it cut out with knives or bullets. Culled instead from muscle and the crack of tight knuckles raining down on defenseless faces with the pulsing of rage to turn the corporeal force into slamming tonnage. But soon there are not many Italians and immigrants left to receive their ferocity and the Whitehanders begin to stand among the bodies and broken bones and red-tinted puddles and cement smears. Three hundred or more of them rise slowly from the war front and their victims to look for their chieftain.

Dinny Meehan leans his elbow back over the platform of a boxcar, his closest culchies and diddicoys around him. Chin as high as a saddleless Comanche brave into his undoing, yet surrounded above by the steel and fluxed ore of edifices hanging over him like spires erected for a new era and a great beginning. I see him, Dinny Meehan, and I believe he sees those monuments beyond only as great cemetery stones instead. Made by the hands of men, they stand for his need to work and to feed others and the honor of those come before him. Blacking out a reality, living by the honor of the old ways and the olden days when we arrived, like myself, with no words for what is called “electricity” that blossoms a New World's light in a dark room without the need for paraffin or the tallow that for centuries lit our faces. The chandler murdered mysteriously, and from afar and without a war once ever being offered by the feminine men who learned to tame and orchestrate the shock of a lightning strike into the finger of a wall. Stunned by progress, Dinny is. Stunted by the duress of everyday survival and the struggle of maintaining his way beyond even New York's standard when all the gangs that ran Manhattan five, ten years earlier were bitten by the manacles of law and replaced by the slow ascension of the New York progressives led by a new man from the fish markets of the Lower East Side sent up to Albany by the old Tammany Tiger to show the Protestants what it means to be a man of great empathy, yet he, Dinny Meehan stands unmoved by the clicking of time. In the dock slums, he collects gangs like an entrepreneur sweeps upon struggling companies: the Jay Street Gang, Frankie Byrne Gang, Swamp Angels, Red Onion Gang, the Marginals and the remnants of the old Yake Brady Gang and the rookies of the Lonergan crew all under his White Hand umbrella, and for what? To fight all other city tribes for something old, something remembered. To keep it in the family, protect the neighborhoods even as they are flooded with new cultures of human cargo from great liners unloaded at his piers.

“We've never had to be so organized before,” I remember Harry Reynolds telling me, and it's true, for the walls are closing in, time clicking. But I've only one thing on my own mind, and that's to get my mother and sisters to New York and out of the way of the coming war in Ireland. I'll never again speak of my uncle Joseph, and never again recover either, though it's no great strain for me to see the theater in the dying of one part of family to give the life to another. It's in the stories of the shanachies over and over, and I now own his life and what little honor he summoned. Here now showing itself true in the blood and the life of me. All for family, I say. Just like Dinny Meehan. And though he uses me, I'm to do the same for I only do what I learn and plenty there is to take in under the skyscrapers and bridges and Els of New York down by the waterfront, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass and upstairs at 25 Bridge Street.