Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

  O’Connor scoffs, “A smart politician always chooses to run for election with the wind at his back,” he nods toward the fat-tongued smile of King Joe, then looks shame-faced at Thos. “Ye’ll give Lovett inside information about Meehan’s doin’s from yer informant, but I want ye to play on both sides o’ the fence until this fight, Thos. Are ye goin’ to be safe to hold with the hare and run with the hounds?”

  “I know how the game’s played,” Thos says. “But we’ll need to be able to move fast after the fight. I need a pack o’ ILA men to support Lovett in case war breaks out.”

  “Ye got it,” O’Connor points a knuckle at Thos.

  Vaccarelli throws up his hands, “Aren’t we gonna talk about this foolishness wit’ the dry laws?” He turns to O’Connor, “Do they really think Italians will go wit’out wine? The Irish wit’out whiskey? The Hun wit’out beer?”

  “Curse o’ Cromwell’s Puritanism all over again,” Thos answers. “Probably a blessin’ in disguise though. We own the ports an’ piers.”

  “What’s that got to do wit’ anythin’?”

  “We’ll import liquor. Shit, Irishtown’s famous for its home-brew. Ever heard o’ the Whiskey Wars o’ the 1860s an’ 70s?”

  “Nah,” Vaccarelli keeps a quizzical stare at Thos until he stands. “I gotta head off.”

  “Famous last words,” Thos mumbles.

  O’Connor stands from the table too, “Ye goin’ to see Meehan tomorrow, Thos?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ye’re not nervous he’ll know ye picked Lovett over him?”

  You would tip Meehan off, wouldn’t you? Now that you know I caught you.

  Thos turns a cruel eye at the president, “Why would I be nervous o’ that?”

  “If someone were to talk to Meehan, then—”

  “Let that someone talk,” Thos breaks in. “It won’t

  matter.”

  Vaccarelli cuts in, “What do ya mean it won’t matter?”

  Thos lights a handrolled, “What we’re dealin’ wit’ down in Brooklyn? It don’ make the kinda sense we’re used to. They got a different sort o’ logic, the Meehan Irish do. When I first met Dinny Meehan I never understood half the decisions he made. But that’s alright. What ya don' understand now, ya will later. Life an’ death? Success an’ failure? Murder an’ martyrdom? The Irish down there live somewhere between those idears, understand? They seem to violate the laws o’ mortality, even. They die off, yet survive. . . Like roaches.”

  “An’ like yerself, Thos,” O’Connor says.

  Thos’s hand shakes under the table, Is that true? Yes, I suppose it is.

  “But if Meehan were to find out ye picked Lovett over him, he might—”

  “He already knows,” Thos shakes it off. “Dinny Meehan always knows.”

  Vaccarelli throws his hands up again, “Fookin’ superstitious barbarians. Their spookt, them lot.”

  As O’Connor and Vaccarelli walk out, Thos draws on the paper cigarette with leopard’s eyes fixed on the deck of cards.

  Time to play, Bill. The cards are stacked in your favor now.

  Thos struggles to sit up and stumbles until King Joe catches him as the band in the ballroom strikes up America the Beautiful.

  “Thos, ya can’t even get up? What’s wrong wit’ ya?”

  As King Joe wraps Thos’s arm round his shoulder to hold him up, Thos reaches his other hand between the buttons in his shirt to feel his own heartbeat, but it is not there. Vaccarelli is right, I’m heartless. That is what is wrong with me.

  “Can ya stand up on ya own, Thos?”

  But he cannot. Thos sits and slumps on an untapped barrel of beer close by the door.

  Weaker, even weaker now. The time draws nigh.

  He pulls his hand away from his heart and reaches into a coat pocket, and with a shaking hand he unfurls a crumpled piece of paper and reads it, Tanner’s hiding out, but his time is due, call us.

  The Risen

  Sometime round the same year the Brooklyn Navy Yard was established in 1801, a Mr. Jackson stipulated in his will that the family property could not be sold until after his son, Josiah died. The property was located a few blocks southeast of the Navy Yard and could have been auctioned for a fortune, but for his father’s will. Josiah’s ten children, however, did not have to abide by the will of their grandfather. And so they eagerly awaited Josiah’s death. But Josiah had a different kind of will, and his was legendary. To spite his eager children, Josiah Jackson lived to a ripe old age. The decades-long impasse left the property south of the Navy Yard vacant, which led the good Christian Anglo-American inhabitants who lived in elegant homes and decadent manses surrounding the area to moniker the lots: “Jackson Hollow.”

  By late 1847, in what seemed an overnight invasion, thousands upon thousands of shoeless, starved and choleric Irish immigrants appeared like ghosts to haunt in Jackson Hollow. Devastatingly malnourished, these human ghouls were unable to travel too far from where the ships berthed them at the banks of the East River.

  As they had in Ireland after the potato went black and the English evicted them, they dug holes in the earth called scalps, or scalpeens to guard against the weather. Soon enough Jackson Hollow became a full-fledged Catholic shantytown in the Protestant city’s center.

  The surnames of these ragamuffin, raggle-taggle refugees were common enough; Connors, O’Connor, Keenan, Kane, Carmody, Cleary, Quilty, Connolly and Donnelly, to name a few. Lovett and Lonergan too. Meehan, Maher and Morissey, Maroney, Maloney, Mullen, McGowan and McGuire. Gibney and Gillen, of course. Ferry, Ferris, Finnigan and Flynn, Barry and Burke and Byrne and Behan and on and on, and on-and-on.

  The newspapers described the residents of Jackson Hollow as “Squatter Sovereigns,” because they refused to leave or to assimilate into the Anglo-American culture, clinging instead to their despicable Catholic faith mixed with old-world Celtic paganism. To disburse the occupants from this “wretched shantytown,” it was oft invaded by police who wore the tunics of London Bobbies and the Jackeen Constabularies of Dublin. It was reported that the police, “rooted them out” of their “pig-dem” where hogs and dogs and goats and cows lived side by side with the scores of Irish Catholic immigrants, and where “the cradle is seldom empty.”

  To fight them off, gangs of pride-struck, stick-wielding young Irishmen were formed to violently hold the border against the tunics, such as the aptly-named Jackson Hollow Gang. When the tunics came out in force and breached Jackson Hollow’s defenses, every single member of the gang gave the police the same name: Patrick Kelly. And so they were Patrick Kelly, all of them. And none.

  Over time, the Irish squatters moved along the waterfront to unload the many cargo schooners, barques and brigs. Willing to assume the backbreaking manual labor the Anglo-ascendency refused, the Irish refugees then formed longshore gangs to protect their jobs against outsiders and to fight for better wages against the ship owners and the local businesses that received the goods.

  Beat McGarry loves to tell that story. In the darkening street he raises his arms to the low rise tenements and tumbledown shacks lined along the Navy Yard wall. “From the start Irishtown, this same neighborhood, was the headquarters. An’ the Irish have never stopped comin’ to Brooklyn. We’ve always welcomed people like ya, Liam. But our origins are sacred to us. They bring us back to who we were, an’ to the place that we should never have left but for the cruelty in men’s hearts.”

  But I am in no mood for Beat’s stories. My nerves are in rags. Consumed, I am, by what it was that attacked me on the pier. What if it attacks again? How do I know when it comes? What are the signs of its arrival? Who was it?

  But everything keeps getting in the way. One thing after another. A couple hours ago, after divvying up the day’s earnings The Swede and I sat on a table in the Dock Loaders’ Club. A shock of pain pulsed through me when he poured vodka on the gash along my knuckles. As the alcohol spilled over the table and onto the floor I picked up the opened letter that bore
terrible news from Ireland.

  “Be careful,” I moan.

  “What? Ya read it so many times already ya gotta have it memorized by now. Stay still. I gotta wrap ya hand now.”

  That was when little Whyo Mullen stood next to us with humiliation coloring his face. Go away, I thought when the lad approached. Go away so I can ask The Swede of my attacker.

  “Mr. Swede,” he said, eyes at his shoes. “Poe, will yaz come wit’ me?”

  But The Swede was focused on wrapping my hand and gives a side-mouthed response, “What for?”

  “Not too tight,” I said.

  “Um—” the lad stammered, his eyes searching for words.

  “It’s gotta be tight to stanch the blood,” The Swede mumbled. “It needs pressure. Look how deep the cut is. It should be stitched up first.”

  “Um, my ma’s havin’ a baby.”

  We both turn to the boy, “A baby?”

  “I didn’t know she was with child,” I said.

  “Me neither. Ya sure she’s pregnant?”

  Behind him, Will Sutton appeared with a stifled grin just as Whyo found his courage, “She didn’ tell nobody ‘cause. . . ‘cause my dad’s been dead longer than. . . Do I really gotta say it?”

  The Swede’s mouth hung open, “So how’s she pregnant?”

  Just then Vincent walked by with a shrug and a sly smile, “It’s a miracle.”

  Whyo’s mouth frowned at that, “The baby’s comin’ too early, my Ma says. But it’s still comin’. An’ she don’ wanna be alone.”

  As has been the case since long before my arrival, the whole of Irishtown shows up in force when a child comes into the world. Mrs. Mullen will never be alone in Irishtown. On the yellowed cobblestones of Hudson Avenue we gather, two thousand strong to lend our support to Mrs. Mullen whether it’s to welcome in a new life, or say goodbye.

  “Not lookin’ good,” Cinders nods toward the tenement where the Mullens live across the street while a hundred conversations rise out of the gathering night. “But the way I see it, if anythin’ makes sense, that child’s gotta survive on the day we find out Liam’s father passed.”

  The letter had come all the way from Tulla to the Dock Loaders’ Club. Da is dead. My father. My family. Dead. Miko O’Dea, my childhood friend had gotten confirmation from Major General Michael Brennan of the East Clare Brigade that my father had died, “while imprisoned by foreigners.”

  The war in Ireland hasn’t even started, and he’s gone already. The letter described how he’d been detained recently during an arms raid at a barracks somewhere in the back arse of nowhere, County Clare.

  An Irish soldier’s death, I surmise, tucking the letter into my coat. Most like, he was tortured for information. And most like, his secrets went to the grave with him. I make a sign of the cross in hopes of better luck for Miko and my brother. Timothy is head of the farm now. Sometimes destiny does come true. As much as I hate to admit, we are both growing into the images our father had painstakingly sculpted.

  As darkness wins, the wind flaps through the clothes hung on lines above Hudson Avenue as I look round the many silhouettes of natives below, Ireland isn’t the only place that has secrets.

  “Beat?” I tap him the old fellow on the shoulder.

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you ever felt so bad, so alone that. . . that—”

  “The world goes dark?”

  My eyes go wide, could he too know what I experienced alone on the pier? Has he seen himself from a distance as I had? Has he had someone use his mouth to speak? His eyes to cry?

  “Sure, this one time I forgot to give my granddaughter breakfast. She she said she was hungry, I felt like two pennies half-spent. Anyhow, we used to have our own laws, ya know. Back in the olden times they were known as the Brehon, the laws were—”

  But I turn away when I realize my question goes unanswered. I thought maybe he knew, but Beat knows little-to-naught. Still, he prattles along.

  A few minutes later he snaps his fingers in front of my face, “Liam, are ya listenin’ to me?”

  “What?”

  “Why aren’t ya wit’ ya own fam’ly if ya father just passed?”

  I shrug.

  “Oh, ya scared to tell them?”

  “I’m not scared of anything, unlike you. You’re the coward. You and Thomas Burke, the empty suit. I’m out on the docks fighting and you just tell stupid stories about Jackson Hollow.”

  “Stupid stories?”

  “Maybe they’re not, but you make them sound stupid.”

  “I do?” His head spins, jowls quivering. “I was once a dockboss too, ya know. Before Christie the Larrikin—”

  “No you weren’t.”

  “I was too!”

  “Who was the leader back then?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “He didn’t have a name?”

  “No, it was Sean Dream.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s not a name, it’s a description. Listen Liam, ya should go to the Bard in ya sorrow. Don’ go to Father Larkin at St. Ann’s, he’ll banish ya to a decade o’ the rosary. The Bard would greet ya wit’ open arms. He has things to say to ya, he told me. I’ll leave ya to grieve, then.”

  Beat skulks off through the crowd with his pride in his throat as Cinders leans on a skinny tree between slate slabs in the sidewalk.

  “Whad ya say to him?”

  “Nothing, he’s just an idiot that doesn’t know anything.”

  Cinders looks me up and down, “Is that what it is?”

  Down the block, where Hudson Avenue turns into Navy Street by the entrance to the Navy Yard, Johanna Connolly née Walsh exits the Culkin tenement. As she steps down the stoops she sneaks a peek our way, but walks in the other direction.

  “What’s she found out so far?” I ask as Vincent and The Swede come to stand with us on the sidewalk above the crowd.

  Cinders mumbles his concern, “Strangest thing. Apparently a letter came about a house up in Peekskill that Patrolman Culkin is sellin’. When Doirean asked about it, he flew off the handle.”

  “What do ya mean?” The Swede asks.

  “Brosnan had paid for it an’ Doirean never knew a thing about it, see?” Cinders reaches behind him and rubs a knot out of his neck. “The strange part is that letter had been sent upstate to Peekskill, opened, then slipped underneath the door of the Culkin home. Culkin was livid, but no one knew who delivered it to Brooklyn. There was only one clue, the letter ‘H’ was written on it. Whoever’s behind it wanted Doirean to find out.”

  The Swede and I exchange a glance, but neither of us want to say what we think.

  Cinders says, “I’m gettin’ nervous. For a little guy, Culkin’s got a big temper. Johanna says he’s a monster. He hit Doirean the other day. Dragged her into the kitchen by her hair. She’s fookin’ big wit’ child, ya know? What happens if he finds out Johanna’s married to the White Hand, huh? Yesterday Father Larkin shows up outta nowhere an’ Johanna had to run out the backdoor before he saw’r her there.”

  “Speak o’ the devil, all dressed in black,” Vincent says as the priest elbows through the crowd and ascends the steps of the Mullen tenement.

  “Why haven’t yez taken the poor women to hospital? She’s not a farm animal, is she? But yez’ll never change, will yez? Right up to the bitter end ye’ll go wit’ yer Pavee traveller ways. The whole slew o’ yez’re but shanty Irish!”

  “Father, father!” Mrs. Lonergan screams down from a window above. “Come quickly! It’s the baby!”

  Father Larkin gives one last smirk at us and spins on his heel.

  The Lark, Big Dick and Red Donnelly shoulder through the crowd and approach us on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry about ya loss, Liam.”

  One-by-one they tuck envelopes into my coat pocket, shake my hand and offer good will.

  “How’s ya Ma an’ sisters doin’ after the hard news?”

  “Don’ ask him that,” Cinders chuck
les. “He’ll send ya scurryin’ off like he did Beat.”

  Red blurts it out anyway, “Ya ain’t told them yet?”

  “Why not keep your mouth shut so I don’t have to shut it for you, like Richie did.”

  “Gee Liam, why ya ballyraggin’ me for?”

  Cinders leans in to my ear, “Ya ever open up that bank account, like I told ya?”

  “I did. That was good advice and I took it. It’s in my mother’s name too, but she doesn’t know about it yet.”

  “She don’? Well, she will. . . if ever the time comes. Here’s hopin’ it never does,” Cinders tilts his head low with a solemn glare and takes a swig from a flask, then passes it to me.

  Maybe he knows. Maybe I can speak with Cinders about what I saw on the pier.

  But just as I am about to ask, the crowd begins to cheer. Up on the stoops of the Mullen tenement, Chisel Mcguire is taking bets as a circle opens up in the street.

  “They’re not fighting, are they?”

  The Swede looks at me incredulously.

  “When Mrs. Mullen is trying to give birth?”

  Vincent smiles and points with a paper cigarette, “It’s ya righthand too, looky there.”

  “Dance!” I yell through the crowd, but he is busy dodging punches from Freddie Cuneen.

  The fight spills through the street as Freddie is thrown against iron handrails along a stairwell. He jumps at Dance, who tosses him aside into a gaggle of scattering children. When Dance finishes him off, bloodying Freddie’s left eye and ear, Chisel runs up to him, hands him a wad of cash and raises his hand for all to celebrate.

  “Dance, come here,” I yell.

  He gathers himself, and from the street he looks up to where we stand on the sidewalk.

  “What are you doing fighting today? It’s disrespectful.”

  “It ain’t. I honor them. I honor the birth o’ that child wit’ a fight, especially if it turns out to be a boy. A newborn needs more than a woman’s love. It needs to know brutality too,” he raises the money in his bloody fist. “This is for the Mullens. I won it for them.”

  I point along the crowd and give voice to the anger that boils within, “We have to come together as friends or we’ll die together as enemies. Didn’t you hear anything we told Bill Lovett? We can’t shake hands if our fists are clenched.”