As we come out from its arches, a gang of workers are clearing debris without noticing us and just as Reilly is to direct us on our next move, a wobbly, rusty train takes over our ears as it passes by above the street. Reilly waits with an air of importance and competence, one arm on Cinders’s shoulder, the other on an elevated’s girder like a man whose time is in great demand. As the chain of overhead cars slowly ambles north toward the Brooklyn Bridge and the Sands Street Train Terminal on the Myrtle Avenue El, Reilly explains, “Dinny wants the boys to go to the Lonergan bicycle shop and wait.”
“That means stay there,” Cinders says to us, wiping back the hair off his forehead as men drop broken bricks and worn timber joists from a scaffold on the third floor of the courthouse onto the bare pavement. “Stay there until notice. I’ll get wit’ Dinny and The Swede and send word for ya.”
Reilly shakes hands with Cinders and heads back into the courthouse where all the other sleekly dressed men are heading, leaving us out for the wind. Leaving Cinders Connolly to the street too, and although he is about the same age as Reilly, the two men couldn’t look more differently, as Cinders is dressed as a laborman like myself and the other boys with hard, scarred hands and a face that the weather makes its own.
“Richie?” Reilly calls back.
Richie limps up the cement stairs and in some strange sacerdotal edict, Reilly puts his hand on Richie’s shoulder, the ordained standing a step lower and looking up to the bishop of the Adams Street Courthouse. After a moment of whispering Reilly shakes Richie’s hand and nods at him with a resolute but fabricated dignity, then sends the boy back to us. With private messages for Cinders and Richie, I await my turn, but Reilly simply turns round and disappears within the archway. No messages for me from Dinny.
After some goodbyes, I watch Cinders run up the stairwell to the Adams Street Train Station above as the rest of us walk toward Bridge Street and the bicycle shop. I look up at Cinders as he disappears in the crowd along the raised train platform, his long strides and dark gray suit with workers’ boots and big smile leaving me to the other teens.
“Lovett’s still in,” I hear Richie tell Harms up ahead of us, who whispers something back that I can’t hear.
To my side, Petey Behan is talking with Timmy and Matty. “You think Bill Lovett’s gonna be all right wit’ everything? No, he ain’t. Non Connors, his righthand man, takin’ it as the lamb? Just like Pickles Leighton took the fall for Dinny back in 1913? Nah, that shit ain’ gonna fly. Bill an’ Non Connors go way back and so do we. Back before Bill started payin’ tribute to Dinny. I know Dinny set up Non. And I’ll bet Brosnan’s in on it too. We all know it. Dinny don’ want Bill gettin’ too strong as the dockboss down in Red Hook, so he removes pieces. That’s what all this is about. Ain’t it?”
I look over to them and see Petey looking at me as he speaks. It’s not long ago that him and I were at odds, fighting over a stolen coat that brought us to blows the same night my uncle was killed.
“Just wait,” Petey says to the other boys, though staring toward me as we walk across York under the Manhattan Bridge abutment. “It’ll all come around too, won’ it, Liam?”
“What?”
“Yeah, ya think it’ll all be all right now, don’t ya? Like nothin’ happened,” he says walking next to me and looking up into my face. “Like ya jus’ gonna take away one o’ our best guys an’ we won’t do nothin’ about it, right?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say. “Dinny and Bill Lovett put aside their differences, Petey. For the good of all of us, we gotta stick together, just like Dinny says. I don’t know what’s going on with Non Connors, but they’ll let him go.”
“No, they won’t,” Petey says. “It was planned well ahead of our takin’ back the docks. Planned with Brosnan and the tunics too. Dinny wants Lovett weak. You know that, I know that.”
Up ahead of us, Richie and Harms slow down and watch. I look at Richie in hopes he’ll put a stop to Petey’s ballyragging me, but he just watches with his dead eyes on the corner of Adams and York.
“Ya think Lovett don’ know what you do?” Petey says to me. “Ya walk around like ya some kinda royalty’r somethin’. Tellin’ everybody what we do. Ya’re a fookin’ tout, ya know that?” Then turns round. “He’s a fookin’ tout, Richie.”
“Do we have secrets here?” I shout back awkwardly, looking at Richie too. “No, we don’t then. So what’s a tout without a secret? I don’t know what’s going on with Non Connors, but why not let it all shake out first? That’s your problem, Petey—you talk too much. Your mouth is going to get you hurt one day.”
Petey looks up at me from his wide neck and shoulders. He shakes in anger and I can see his fists clenching.
“Go on, boys,” a grocer woman says with a broom in her hand.
I back away from Petey and try going round him, but he won’t let me, keeping me at bay with his left hand on my chest, his right fist held down behind him. I swipe at his left hand in anger and we stand chest to chest in front of the grocer woman, who calls back to her sons inside. Petey pushes up to his toes to get his face closer to mine while I lean into him. Bitterness fires inside me with my pumping heart and I imagine grabbing his throat and kicking him wildly. We then push each other away, but somehow I am punched in the mouth with a swiping swing that doesn’t have much power behind it. The grocer woman yelps for her boys to hurry and when they come out of the store they stop to find Richie Lonergan’s face, who they know very well and are in no hurry in confronting.
I feel at my mouth and there is a bit of blood on my fingers from it. And I feel the eyes staring at me too. All of them. Petey is at the ready with his fists and teeth clamped closed while the others turn toward me too, Timmy, Matty, and Abe Harms. Richie stares down the brothers from the grocers and I know quickly that I am in a bad place. Outnumbered and with no help at all, my loyalty tied closely to Dinny Meehan, theirs to Bill Lovett. The divide among us now feeling greater than it ever has been.
Feeling alienated by the Lonergan crew, I look away angrily. It’s all too much for me, and if I’m to think clearly, I don’t long to choose Dinny’s side at all, even though he’s vowed to help me get my mother and sisters to New York. Greater on my mind than any of it is what is happening in Ireland, my true home. The great country I was born to defend. My mind turns away from all of these demanded loyalties in Brooklyn to defending the motherland, particularly when she calls for me at her greatest time of need in this springtime of her awakening, 1916.
And with Petey ready to fistfight me and everyone staring, I decide right here and now that I am not for Brooklyn in the first place. Any of it. And that I am to be back home, to my birth land where the earth is always under my feet instead of cement and brick.
“Fuck off,” I yell to Petey, point at him and Timmy and Matty and Abe and Richie. “The whole lot of you. I don’t need any of this.”
I turn and sprint. Back across York Street and jump ahead of a slow-moving trolley. I refuse looking back. Just run with tears of fury coming off my eyes. The shame of my uncle’s death and of being jailed and alienated by everything else. The only things that slow me are McGowan’s old boots that Dinny gave me, and the heavy thoughts weighing me down. The thoughts somehow pushing up from a dream I’d had of the small crack I saw on the cement floor of the jail cell. That the crack opened into a great fissure that separated us by a flood, which opened into an ocean. Sent us to different sides, forcing us all to choose. I keep running, though, as fast as I can. All the way to Sands Street do I run, thinking in my head that I need nothing of the gang, having chosen my side. They don’t care about what is top on my mind. Don’t give a single care about my family caught in the coming troubles of war back home. My mother, who looked at me with the hopes of the Savior Himself when I left, is now the only person on my mind.
I couldn’t have known it at the time, but I know now that she hoped for me to save her from the coming storm. She knew it was coming. Somehow she knew. She
always knew things. She felt it coming last October, 1915, when I left Ireland. I’m sure of it. I can see it on her face now, in my memory. As I sprint along the sidewalks and storefronts, running and running, I think of her. Harder and harder I run to drive out my fury. And I think of her. My own mother. Caught in a rebellion among a war and no one seems to have the worry or the care of it. As I run up to the third level I think of her more. She looking up to me in a hope and I not doing a thing about it. And being sent into a jail for some reason that has nothing to do with the urgency of needing to get my mother and sisters out from the bloodshed they’ll be faced with. To do the job my father sent me to do.
When the news broke a few days earlier of the Easter rebellion in Ireland, Dinny and I were with Tanner Smith in Greenwich Village. We’d passed a place called the County Claremen’s protective, an Irish organization helping new immigrants from County Clare. So it’s there I’ll go for help. Among the gray clouds and the charcoal-blue sky, I look down from the Brooklyn Bridge trolley out into the big East River below. I think of my family and I think of fate. I think of my connection to my country and I think of who I am. And who I am going to be one day. That I wasn’t born to be a foreigner to my own land like the rest. And especially not when it is my mother that calls for me. A deep and unnerving pain, her calling. I know too much of my land to forget her. To leave her forever. I know now what I was born for. The same reason she bore all her sons. To defend her; not for exile. To lend my body to her struggle. Our struggle; not New York’s. To join the East Brigade of County Clare, Fifth Battalion with my brother and father and be a man now. A man of fate. To answer the calling of my flag, the Tricolour, that was made with glory and humility by French seamstresses after their own revolution. Made for the men that planned a rebellion in Ireland during the Great Hunger when the soul of her had hit the lowest bottom. A bottom that lives in all of us for all time because of the horror of eviction and shallow graves and emigration and the witnessing of our own Mother Ireland being brought to an undignified bowing. To her knees begging for her children. Praying for a mercy that was held against her by the theater of words and promises, the cruelty of slight and neglect. The silence that revealed their disdain. My own mother bent and humiliated.
Again my eyes are filled with the tears of rage. Here she is. She who has given so much of her to her sons as she sits by the hearth pondering them. The mother in need now. And during the blossoming of my fighting years. I am fifteen and ready. My brother Timothy a year older than I. The two of us strong for her, for I know that she would not grudge us for going out and breaking our strength and dying for her. That she would know us faithful. That we fight for her. And if I am to give my own life for her, would I not be spoken of among my people for generations? That I’ll be remembered forever. Alive forever. Speaking forever, I’ll be heard. Forever.
And won’t it be said I am blessed for having the chance to give my blood in a protest against her mistreatment? And what of my father, who has longed to die for Ireland and is now given his chance? What of him, I’m not sure. And that of my sisters either. Clare is a long way from Dublin where the rebellion is taking place, but my worry is the whole of the land will be brought to its knees again by the flying of the butcher’s apron above Ireland.
I am done then. I am leaving Brooklyn behind me forever. Forget Brooklyn as no more than a mistake in my life. It’s not for me. To start anew now and to realize my missteps, is the best thing for me. I go now to see the Claremen’s protective in Greenwich Village for my passage back home. Leave Brooklyn behind me.
CHAPTER 2
Pulcinella
MAY, 1916
THE MAN KNOWN ROUND AS “WILD BILL” Lovett, pale and thin and hard with the street-rearing of old New York City behind him already, steps out from the Doric columns and the long shadow of the Fifth Avenue Court inland of the Red Hook docks. With a hand of knuckles now scabbed over, he drops to his head a wool cap where hidden within the inner lining is a razor ring. He looks down from the top of the steps onto the street moving in front of his eyes. Carts and drays and sidewalks traversed by groups of whisking dresses grubby and browned along the hems. Men clopping along in work boots and leaning forward toward their destinations with old-country hats of various styles and the worn wool suits that hug the lifting of hard labor day in, day out. A filled-to-capacity, four-car trolley clanks through the middle of the cobblestones between the street that is walled in by masonry and brick buildings on the one side, the other is the sullied and grimy façade of the Fifth Avenue Court—this neighborhood’s Parthenon satellite of Anglo-American law shadowing Lovett here.
Released, today it is his twenty-second birthday, though there will be no celebrations. Looking out over the South Brooklyn streets, the cruelty in his eyes hidden within a gentle face and protruding ears. His body is slight and not tall; he gives everything he has to prove to men larger than him what great things loom inside, as Bill Lovett does not have it in him to follow others. And so, there is that great cruelty in his eyes betraying the innocent features. The lips red as if painted. The cheeks blushed by the cool air and the wing-like fawn ears all giving him the appearance of a young angel. The Italian laborers of Red Hook who fear not only his temper, but the violent men loyal to him, call Lovett “Pulcinella,” a clown-like figure of their own lore. Standing among the courthouse pillars, it’s only been a few days since he and Non Connors and others shot and killed three Italians and a pier house manager on Imlay Street at the foot of the New York Dock Company’s headquarters. The news quickly traveling through the Italian Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods that Il Maschio—Frankie Yale’s Black Hand connection on the docks—was gunned down by Lovett and The White Hand. The Irish clown of the Red Hook docks, Pulcinella, whose cherubic appearance betrays the depraved man inside, had laid down his law in the neighborhoods in which the Italian lives in great numbers.
But to see his eyes is to know him. And to know him is to know it better to be away from him. He is a grandson of the exiled. His family’s past smothered in the shame of a horrendous starvation and a grueling journey never recounted. Left only to the imagination of storytellers like those that told me, who tells you now.
Shoeless and emaciated, his grandparents landed in Brooklyn in 1848 from their native County Kerry and took to begging for scraps. His grandmother six months with child, face gaunt and pale. Weakened and choleric, her motions were slow and mouth stuck in an open position, eyes staring forward and unresponsive, stomach bulbous and half-covered by a fraying sack dress. Catholic, they could not find steady work in New York. One week after arriving, the police pushed them off the vacant lot where they slept without roof or cover. The local newspapers wrote that, “An extensive colony of Irish people who had settled on the vacant lots . . . which . . . from the number of pigs and dogs there, is known as ‘Young Dublin.’” The same article described the area as a “pigdem” and wrote that the police had “rooted” them out.
Along with thousands of other newly landed Irish, Lovett’s grandparents dug a hole in a foothill on a piece of land called Jackson Hollow just south of the Navy Yard. The police left them there since ownership of the property was in litigative dispute between the heirs of Samuel Jackson. Soon there was a baby, the eldest sister of Bill Lovett’s unborn father. The baby breaking in a shallow, rain-puddled cranny on a night untamed dogs roamed Jackson Hollow, sniffing new mother’s blood in the air. And so, they blocked off the entrance of their scalpeen home with long sticks and branches taken from trees that once grew all over Brooklyn. They stole a chicken from a child by beating him with their fists and running away with it. Then stole a pig too from another family. And a goat and slaughtered them all with sharpened rocks. When challenged by another starved Irishman for thieving, Bill Lovett’s grandfather rose from their dirt hole with one fist clenched, hair falling out from malnutrition and only rags covering his groin and chest. The two men challenged each other in Gaelic, holding their sticks. One died.
&n
bsp; In their generation, no Irish spoke about such things as the shame of destitution on their name. The embarrassment of want being the bane of pride. But Bill Lovett knew nothing of his family’s struggle in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan when they arrived, for it had never been told him, yet the story thrives in him as it thrives in all the men I knew in Brooklyn. Told by the storytellers come out of Irishtown like The Gas Drip Bard, who gave way to Beat McGarry and finally down to myself, here. Giving allegories about innocence and cruelty. The backdrop of our story can be seen on each and every face that washes up. The innocence of appearance and in the cruel and inhuman eyes of Bill Lovett now as he steps quickly at a swift angle down the wide stoops of the Fifth Avenue Courthouse toward yelping children holding newspapers above their heads.
“Irish rebels to be executed, read it here!”
“Local gang men released after recent rampage, only one charged!”
“No mercy for those of the Easter rebellion, get it now!”
He drops a coin on one of the boys and flips through the April 29, 1916 morning edition, leaning on one leg propped on the bottom step of the courthouse. On page three he sees a small headline, “Brosnan made a detective for work breaking up gangs, jailing its leader John ‘Non’ Connors,” and below reads the reporter’s summary, “Brosnan vows to keep light of law along dark waterfront goings-on.”
“Meehan and Brosnan,” Lovett mouths and crumples the paper, dropping it on the ground by the feet of the newsies.
Adjusting his cap and immediately turning west toward the water, he crosses the street with purpose as the windswept faces of Frankie Byrne and two others, who had been awaiting Lovett’s release on the corner of Union and Fifth Avenue, look toward him and wait for his order.
Exile on Bridge Street Page 3