And that is what I need. The anger wells up when I realize yet again he had punched me in the mouth. He had kicked me by taking my coat last year during winter. Wore it as a prize for taking my honor and continues pushing me and pushing me until he had punched me in the mouth that very morning. My fists tighten.
“Yeah.” I hear Vincent yell from above.
“Dere he is! Get ’em, Poe.”
We close in on each other and I measure his head, leading with a right hand that must have missed. I chase after him until we meet in the center, chest to chest, swings on swings, some going over shoulders, others landing in ribs and still more popping on an ear and dotting an eye until I find myself on the ground looking up as the crowd jumps and pushes Red Donnelly aside above me. The Swede then attacks them, pushing them back.
“Get back.”
I feel a great winding in me that seems to suck all of my energy away. I can’t catch my breath and struggle to my feet, panting and hurt, though I don’t realize my nose is bleeding until it itches strangely and when I rub along the nostrils, find it wet and not in its normal shape. I feel death in me. Or a terrible fear. Defeat now taking the weight away from my anger, I now feel as though I stand against death and take one more deep breath and jump over Richie Lonergan’s shoulder to get at Petey and grab ahold of his shirt collar and won’t let go no matter how much Richie pulls at my hand.
“That’s right, Liam.” I hear Vincent.
“Get ’em, boyo.” Tommy encourages. “Don’ leggo o’ dat feelin’.”
And with many men joining in the affray, I finally wheel Petey out of his celebration and sling him across the fighter’s circle, tackle him while he is on one knee trying to get up. I punch and punch, but I am picked up high by The Swede and put on the other side of the circle while the others help Petey up.
“Fight like it’s a fight, kid,” The Swede points and yells in my face. “A fight, not a tacklin’ match.”
Again, I am overcome with wind in me and put my hands on my knees as The Swede tells me to go back at it. As Petey closes in, I keep my hands upon knees and watch him. He swings at me and I duck and the both of us tumble to the ground with my face in his chest and arms wrapped close around him so he can’t get a clear punch to my face. Still though, I am so winded that I feel the quit in me. My muscles are strained to the limit and I shake in a strange, hungry feeling that comes over me, stealing away my courage.
Again The Swede is breaking us up and I can feel the paving stones scraping the skin off my left arm and shoulder, my head rolling on the ground too.
“Let go, kid,” The Swede yells, yanking at my arms.
“Let ’em go, kiddo,” I hear Tommy, at which time I immediately release my grip, then kick up my legs to push him away before he gets a free shot in.
“Stand up.”
My mouth by now is wide open, trying to catch my breath, while I feel my nose is plugged from the inside of it. The bottom part of my face entirely covered with blood. More of it dripping from my nose to the back of my throat, I spit a glob of it on the pavement and see for the first time my own blood in the mud, mixed with the rain water and the Belgian bricks and the yelling voices and the struggle of life on my shoulders. My thoughts pulse in an intensity with this realization, and so I put my fists above my face and walk to the center again as the crowd cheers on seeing the quit in me had not won over.
I remember again my length being a weapon and the moment Petey gets close, I snap his neck back with a quick left. Then again, while backing up into the mesh of men being held in check by the dockbosses. I know I can’t do it again, so I wait for him to come closer again and hold my right hand in wait this time. When he fakes a swing, I throw the right as hard as I can, emptying out my energy, but I miss and as I stumble to gain my balance, I can feel the incredible shaking in my legs. Petey punches me across the cheek with an off-balance left and I let go of my own fists and grab at his shirt again, throwing him away from me, though he doesn’t fall. Any break I get from his onslaught is a moment in heaven as gaining my breath becomes the most important thing. I find myself on the ground again with muffled cheers, sitting on my duff and looking up.
“Get up, Liam.” I hear someone yell.
“Get back in there.”
As I roll to one side to get myself up, I spit again and the blood I see with my eyes, mixed with the blood I taste again gives me some sort of energy that is not at all physical, but only the grind of emotion in a body completely evacuated of strength.
I swing weakly at Petey as he catches me in the ribs, then again on the top of my head as I try to duck. I push him away, but again he paws at me with a smacking sound to my lips and yet another thud comes to my head as I fall into the crowd, caught by Cinders Connolly with one hand before my face smacks into the cobbles.
From what I am told, I got up from the ground two more times after that only to get sat again. I did not lose consciousness entirely, though I can’t quite recall all that happened afterward. Slowly coming back into reality, the men all have their arms around me as I sit at one of the immigrants’ tables inside the Dock Loaders’ Club. Even Chisel MaGuire shakes my hand with Tommy at one side, Cinders on the other and a tableful of whiskey shots bought for to celebrate a man’s coming up.
“Looky dat nose on ye,” Paddy Keenan says. “All lamped up like.”
“Look like a monkey’s bollocks,” Tommy smiles. “The brutality of it.”
“Gargle this down then,” Paddy says, handing me another shot. “No slap-arse farmer now, eh, kid?”
“He’ll buck ’emself up and we’ll keep werkin’ on his scrap skills.”
After quite a bit more celebrating and drinking, Petey comes up and stands over me with Richie and Abe Harms and Matty and Timmy behind him.
“Good fight, Liam,” Petey says sternly, puts a hand out for shaking.
I reach up and shake it as hard as my beat muscles allow. My nose broken and I lost the fight, but my dignity intact. I feel a petting across the top of my head, then a pat on my shoulder. I look up and see Dinny Meehan there. At least I think it is Dinny. But it is not. It’s Harry Reynolds instead, who, in the face looks quite a bit similar to Dinny.
“Ya comin’ up,” Harry says. “It’s the smart thing to do, considerin’ the circumstances. Ya gotta be pragmatic in these hard times. Ya doin’ well.”
“Harry? Did you see it? The fight? I thought you’d left.”
“I’m here. I saw it,” he says.
I squint at him, focus, but then change my mind again. It actually is Dinny Meehan. Not Harry after all.
“Dinny?” I say, wiping the blur from my eyes.
But Tommy and Paddy and Richie and Petey and everyone else look at me with castigating glances, half-smiling smirks, “Who’s that?”
“Harry and Dinny,” I say under my breath, shaking my head in a befuddled state, falling backward in the chair. “Harry and Dinny and . . .”
CHAPTER 5
Abattoir and Exodus
JULY 1916
“SADIE!” DINNY YELLS FROM A BACK room of the Meehan brownstone on Warren Street, then stands in front of her and I; wearing an undershirt, his broad arms and heavy chest block my view of Sadie.
“Yes?” she asks.
“Nevermind. . . . Ya remember each stop, yeah?” Dinny asks me while putting three envelopes on my chest.
“I do.”
“Make sure ya tell her she’s pretty and . . .”
“The young man knows what to say,” Sadie says, moving in front of him with a smile. “But the most important fing is to listen, William. Always listen to a gal, if nuffink else. Ask questions, then listen and show that yu like the person she is—’at’s more important. Now come ’ere so I can finish up on the sides.”
Sadie pulls my ear down and I can feel the cold scissors on the side of my head. She was the one that nursed me back to health after my uncle left me for the streets last year. She was the one that gave me life again and also who ste
pped up in my mother’s absence. Good Sadie. Sadie Leighton, cousin of Pickles, and Darby, who’d come to Brooklyn as youngsters before she had arrived from the Irish enclaves of East London, eventually allowing herself to be won over by Dinny Meehan, becoming his wife. Bearer of her husband’s many secrets, many sins, and his son too, L’il Dinny. She looks at me and smiles, then runs water over her hand from the sink, which is always colder in the mornings, then mixes the cool water with petroleum jelly and runs her fingers through the top of my head.
“Yu gonna look so much be’a after this, William,” she says, concentrating on my hair. “Got a bit scruffy, yu did.”
“Do you think me good-looking?” I ask.
“O’ course,” she smiles. “And wif ’is new ’air style, yu’ll knock ’er down. More important than looks is personali’y, yu know. Gals like a man wif personali’y more’n they like ’is looks.”
I feel my nose, which is bent and painful.
“Still a bit swollen,” Sadie says looking at it with my head in her hands. “It’ll get be’uh, just give it some time. This cut though, in yu eyebrow ’ere. It’s a deep one. ’At’ll be a scar no doubtin’ it. Look ’ere, Dinny got yu a coat for today, put it on, eh? And ’ere’s some flowers for the lucky lass too.”
I stand in front of the foggy mirror in the kitchen with my puttied hair, shaved on the sides and the back, bruised face, new coat, and a fistful of lilacs and dandelions and carnations and lily of the valley for decoration.
“A real gentleman wif a New Yoork ’aircut too.”
“But I don’t know if I like Anna Lonergan,” I whisper to Sadie.
She stands next to me in the mirror, adjusts my tie. She blows some hair off my shoulder and gives an awkward smile. I can tell she does not agree about this matching either, but won’t say it. Though she knows that I can see it on her. Gives me her thoughts by the look on her face, purposely.
I look to her, “Did you used to care for Vincent like you do me?”
Sadie laughs, “Vincent didn’t need much lovin’. Full o’ vinegar, ’at one. Carryin’ on like ’e knew sumfin’. Prancin’ like a roosta’ in the coup, cursin’ an’ all. ’E never needed much from me. Just a mum for a bit ’til ’e grew ou’a needin’ one.”
I was third in line, Vincent being just ahead of me. It’d become a tradition: Dinny finding street gamins, bringing them to his home to raise, turning them into his family with Sadie’s nurturing. All three of us were so different though, myself being consumed with the idea of bringing my mother and sisters to New York. Vincent intent on sacking as many girls as he could and . . . I turn to Sadie again, “What was Harry like when he was brought in. He was first right?”
“Ma,” L’il Dinny interrupts, tugging on her in front of the mirror.
“Oh look,” she says sarcastically. “The rattlin’ in ’is belly begins and ’at’s when ’e comes to realize ’ow much ’e looves ’is mum, eh?”
She bends down and picks him up and as I watch them doting over each other, I eventually come to understand that she is not going to answer the question on Harry, instead quickly changing the topic.
“Did yu know Dinny’s got two sista’s in Albany?”
“Uh, no I didn’t know . . .”
“We’re not movin’ to Albany,” Dinny interrupts from the bathroom.
“Just a visit’s all I ask for, Dennis . . .”
“Let’s go,” Dinny appears in the kitchen, waving me out.
Outside in the predawn shade, Vincent looks up from the stoops as Dinny hands me one more envelope, though this one is empty. “Listen. Ya listenin’? I need ya to go to the corner o’ Bridge’n Tillary before the bike shop, yeah? Take the streetcar to the stop at Adams, walk east on Tillary but don’t go south o’ there, that’s Camorra, south o’ there.”
“All right.”
“When ya get to the Tillary Street Abattoir, ask for Feinberg. David Feinberg, and give’m that envelope. Just tell ’em it comes from Bridge Street and he’s got one mont’ to pay. He’ll know who’s sendin’ ya. One mont’, that’s all ya gotta say,” Dinny explains, holding up one finger. “Then go to the bike shop wit’ the flowers, got it?”
“I do, but it’s empty,” I say holding the envelope.
“S’posed to be, a’right? A’right, ya look good. Everythin’s good,” he says. “Ya feel good?”
“I think so.”
Vincent chimes in, “A bull don’ go runnin’ after one cow, remember that. He walks down and gets ’em all.”
“He just means relax, is all,” Dinny says, then pulls out a piece of plumber piping and opens up the new coat I am wearing, fits it into a newly stitched area that holds it perfectly. “Ya won’ need it, but just in case. Ya got quite a bit o’ dime on ya.”
“Nice hair,” Vincent says, smiling. “Now ya look like one o’ us.”
“Big day, let’s see what ya can do,” Dinny says. “What I tell ya about things?”
“What?”
“What I tell ya?”
I search, “Don’ quit?”
“Right,” Vincent agrees. “Don’ fookin’ quit, that’s all ya gotta know. Show up everyday. Do it. . . . I been there. Where you are now? I been there. Ya just gotta fight through shit. Ya wanna quit, ya don’t. Keep goin’.”
Next thing, all I see are their wide shoulders walking away. Through darkness beneath the washing halo light of the low lampposts, turning collars to the damp and cold and dropping down onto the narrow cobbles, they walk toward the water again as most of the city is deep at sleep.
It is May and the rains begin to descend from the cement gray sky and down onto New York kicking up city dirt in the morning and coal dust, opening the cakes of crusty mold between walls and windows and summons the scent of street oils with the river’s brine churning too, lumping up in the nostrils. A smell I’d never had back home. A smothering thing for the first few minutes of a downpour as it stirs in the sinuses and in the mouth. But as I come to Bridge and Tillary, a different odor comes on me. A great smell of carrion rot and the iron in blood from a fresh kill. Here there is a small field with fenced pens and a long, wooden, one-story edifice darkened by the rain. The abattoir is on a raised plain of ground and below pink streaks run from it through the street where the rainwater and the sanguinary viscera mix together, descending as if the slaughterhouse itself is bleeding or weeping ruddy tears. Low-hunched dogs circle the structure with eyes of great suspicion, nosing the air for the blood in it. With flowers in hand, purple and yellow and white bulbs that offer color to the dusky grays and the blacks in my view, the wind and rain falling on my new haircut, I tilt my head to keep the drops from my eyes and jump over pink and red puddles. Hitting a pocket of air thick with the smell of death, I stop in the street and gag uncontrollably from the belly up. Though nothing comes of it, my mouth waters with sputum and the horrible taste in the air.
I look up and see a man wearing boots to his thighs and a cutlass in his hand. He is at his work as thoughtlessly as any other man of labor, and he holds a sheep from behind, between his knees, raises its head, and slices open the neck. Held up by the fleece atop its head, the animal wiggles uselessly until it is flung in a pile of others for immigrants that consume hogget and mutton. The gaggle of live sheep watch the man at his work, baaing mawkishly and seeing their brethren slain, and still willingly step forth for their own turn. Ready to die or ignorant of it, I can’t tell. But the look in their eyes angers me and I think of the words of one of those dead rebelpoets in Dublin who himself so happily gave his own blood to stir that of the many, “the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield.” His sacrifice inspiring an entire generation of men and women, fathers and mothers, and even myself as I’d have willingly given my blood too had I not been blockaded. But these animals die for nothing. Don’t care either, and I hate them for it, as it scares me deeper than anything else in the world—dying for nothing at all. Just dying like they don’t mean anything, like a
child dying with no mother or father to cry for them, bury and honor them.
The sad-eyed beeves of cattle and the fretful instinct in the face of the fowls and swine lead me to the notion of death being everywhere around me. I can smell it and feel it as it calls for me, for all of us. I stand there in the street with the staggers, this hell and all the thoughts of death surrounding me.
“What ya lookin’ for?” says the butcher in his long boots.
“Feinberg,” I say, walking up to the pen with my flowers.
He looks me over until I say, “Bridge Street.”
He tells me to wait, slops through the deep red puddles and disappears inside the flooded house. Up close, I see piles of viscera to one side, offal on the other. A loose-necked sheep hangs upside down and is peeled from hind to head by another man who looks sideways at me; he is Hebraic in his features, with a great skepticism in the eye that no foreday rain could purify by ablution.
The blood-slaked ground here on Tillary Street warms the cold heart of Brooklyn too, for everywhere people fight and kill for their place so that they can feel the pride of victory in the comfort of kin meeting ends. Dignity. New clothes. Good neighborhood. Status among other men. Food in stomachs, and through organizations—legitimate or not, split most often along ethnic lines—we war against each other for sway and command in a place that can’t support the many of us. Particularly so on border neighborhoods there are violent paroxysms, such as this neighborhood where the Irish in the north and west meet the Jew from the east and the Italian of the south in a city still dominated by the governance of the old Anglo-Saxon ascendency above us all.
Eventually a smallish, balding man of some sixty years emerges from the fetor of the body’s blood in the showery breeze.
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