Light of the Diddicoy (23 page)

And so a pyre was built that morning, and not for the death of the diddicoys and their king, but instead for the revolt against all other tribes in a display of love for the beauty and the dancing of Dinny's mind within the blaze of original barbarity. Amid the flailing weapons and fists in the air, the wounded bodies strewn about and the war-pitched screaming of his ancient soldiers, Dinny looks up at the facade of the strange New York Dock Company walls. With cunning I couldn't have foreseen, he orders his men to the torch and to his light. Cinders Connolly comes first, leading the way and running himself across the dock with a barrel of gasoline on a wheeled hand-truck, wounded Italians limping from his way. One after another Dinny's boys soak down the Red Hook truck-holdings of the Dock Company, the pier houses, the docks and wharves, floating piers, and warehousing units. They pull up the freight tracks that commandeer the goods from overseas barges with sledgehammers and crowbars at the beat of the clicking trolleys above and the sea horns of harbor freights and screeching pier house whistles. Turning over truck trailers like protesters against time itself, then break any available window by the tossing of dornicks and rushing here and about, left and right like Viking marauders sprinting on concrete flatlands.

Before the match is struck, I imagine Wolcott himself looking down at us from his extravagant office above. Dinny looking up and when he does, Bill Lovett and Non Connors push through the throng surrounding Dinny. With knuckles freshly glistening from toothy scars, Lovett pulls an Ybor cigar from his vest. Hands it to Dinny.

“Get back!” Cinders yells, pulling on a paper cigarette he is to fling.

“Done,” says Dinny as he looks at Connors.

And then we run.

Rene Schwiesow, Levi Asher, Rose K. Murphy, Jade Johnson, Donna Svennevik, Rudy Wilson, Angela Baggetta, Keith & Tracy Brodeur-Kellogg, Jeremy Douglass, Terry Shoosmith, Tom Tryniski at Fultonhistory.com, Everyone at NYC Munical Archives, Tom Varley, Cuimhneamh an Chlair, Tomas MacConmara, Sophie Ward, Annie Silverman, Greg Trupiano & Lon Black, Anna Caulfield, Jessa Crispin, John Lee and everyone at the Irish American Writers & Artists Inc., Samantha Samel & the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Rebecca Baird-Remba and Emily Nonko at Brownstoner, Guy Denning, Marcia Ely & the Brooklyn Historical Society, Wolf & Paddy Kennedy, Nick Mamatas, Alex Resto, Russell Granger, Ivy Marvel & the Brooklyn Public Library, John Kearns, Jennifer Richards & Over the River, Malachy & Alphie McCourt, Gerry Regan & The Wild Geese, Tom Deignan, Timothy Gilfoyle, Tyler Anbinder, John Manbeck, Peter Quinn, Timothy Gager, Tim Pat Coogan, Mandy Keifetz, Emily St. John-Mandel, Ron Schweiger, Owen Rodgers, Peter Carlaftes & Kat Georges, TJ English, Mary Pat Kelly, Tara O'Grady, Sean Carlson, Brian Merlis, Beth Spinelli at the NYC Police Museum, Isabela, Marcelo and Lourdes Lynch, Jeannine Edwards, Peg & Bob Edwards and their eight boys, Marilyn Lynch, Dennis Sullivan, Jay Moody, Dan Lynch, Dennis Lynch, Jessica Goldstein, Timothy Lynch, Aunt Kit & Tom Leppert, my Grandfather James Lynch and of course to “Gramma” who both kept alive the stories of an Irish-American childhood in early 20th Century Brooklyn.

Eamon Loingsigh's family emigrated from County Clare, Ireland in the late nineteenth century. His great-grandfather 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, as well as the novella
An Affair of Concoctions
and the poetry collection,
Love and Maladies.

Three Rooms Press | New York, NY