“What if I don’t want to?” I stop.
“C’mon, only one better place to catch a girl, dat’s a weddin’.
Wakes? They get all lathered up about ’em, girls do. And dis guy dat died’s got t’ree sisters. T’ree of ’em, let’s go. They got scoff there.”
“Scoff?”
“Fooooood, shit kid, ya don’ know nothin’ do ya? I can tell ya hungry, though, as there ain’t a lick a manhood on ya, fookin’ scrawny as ya is. Jus’ follow me kid, I’ll take care o’ everythin’, don’t ya worry. C’mon.”
“Who died?”
“A guy.”
“How’d he die?”
“Screw got’em.”
“What’s that?”
“Shaddup.”
As we walk away, he takes off his trench coat and drops it over my shoulders. A few minutes later and we come upon a throng of half-frozen men and women and their children standing in the street in front of a wood-framed, four-story tenement. Maher grabs me by the lapel and pulls me through it as most step aside when they see him and his side-cocked cap. We thump up a thin stairwell together, dark as a forgotten cave. The dusty steps creak in their blackened wood and Maher whispers down, reminds me to keep my mouth buttoned. On the second floor the banister is gone other than some shardlike stalagmites sticking up from the planks. I hold onto the wall instead where I feel the rotted and exposed studs and downstairs I can hear the hum of the crowd reflect from the entrance and up through the stairwell. We hear keening coming from behind a closed door above us and the hushing coos of loved ones like pigeons on a wire. When we make it to the third floor we take a left and pass the doorless lavatory. Maher knocks lightly with a knuckle, then checks up the stairwell toward the top floor in the black.
I huff from the stairs, not so much from being winded but because my body is beginning to give way for not having slept in some two days. And for the hunger, which leaves me only with emaciated energy. With no bed or rest in the coming, my stamina is discouraged though the food is just behind the door, so I am told. Beginning again to dream with eyes open, my thoughts are tumbling from one topic to another and nothing much seems so real or connected, though I try with all I have not to reveal my mind’s unsound movements.
“Who is it?” whispers a man from behind the door.
“Maher.”
The door opens and a giant leaning figure stands in our path. I know right off who it is from the white hair and the scary look on him. “Who’s the kid?”
“C’mon, would I bring any touts around here? I needa talk to Dinny ’bout this one. Let us in.”
The Swede bends down from the door frame to whisper in the dustwood hallway, his neck arteries seizing in blue and red, “Ya fookin’ stoopit, ya not gonna bring no fookin’ stranger in here . . . who says ya could. . . .”
“Listen, lemme talk wit’ ya a second, c’mere,” Maher says as calm as anyone could be under such a threat. “Stay there,” he whispers back to me, then disappears behind the door with The Swede.
Two minutes and the door opens up violently.
“Put ya hands up,” The Swede says walking from the door and confronting me.
“Sheesh,” Maher mumbles.
The Swede pushes me against the wall and cups his large hand into my loins and squeezes, then searches underneath me in the back, pats my chest and thighs, his hands easily wrapping around my reedy waistline.
When we come in the door to the kitchen I can’t find the scent of food, instead only of fresh-cut wood and flowers that can’t quell the rattles in my shrunken belly. I am told to take the coat and hat off and we then walk softly into the opening to the diminutive parlor. Supported by four tattered wooden chairs, there is a long yellow pine coffin stretched under the drapeless window reaching into the middle of the room. Topper shut.
Dinny Meehan glances at me directly in the eye then gave attention back to the woman whose faint hands he holds between the span of his brawny shoulders. She snuffles and her nose and cheeks are blushed with the cry. His gentle confidence attempting to assure her of a sanity in this world, he whispers to her in the sunlight dust. Stacked behind them in the close-shouldered room are thickets of bursting bouquets contrasting the dull grays and dark colors of the parlor. Maher adds his to the confection, gives a distant hug to the mother of the dead. The only light in the entire flat comes from the cloudy window and the dull glim of the gray Christmas Eve day outside.
Three sisters sit on the faded and torn navy blue sofa by the coffin, the youngest on the arm and a widow sat looking out the window in a long stare under an awning bower of lilacs and assorted flowers, her two fatherless dawdlings running from the back room to the kitchen unattended. Six broad men stand at varying heights at the women’s opposite like high-rises wedged together in a dumbstruck skyline, hat in hands, thin black ties between tight jacket lapels. The Swede at the pinnacle, his long needle face topped with white feathers like a towheaded city savage. I recognize others from the docks, the pavee fighter Tommy Tuohey among them.
Maher and I take our place in the room’s saturnine reserve cast by a dead man’s presence. At my side, a pair of eyes look at me in the hush. It is Harry “The Shiv” Reynolds, who I know as the dockboss at the Atlantic Terminal known chiefly as the bloodculler of Columbia Street’s bulkhead. My stomach makes a curling sound and I am overcome with a terrible cramp in my bowel. Reynolds looks at me again, then steadies himself.
The Swede leans over us and looks out the window, his attention caught by a gaggle of brown trenchcoated men accumulating around a two-horse dray that stops out front, mingling among the crowd below.
“Everybody get away from the window.” The Swede breaks the reserve.
The widow refuses to acknowledge, the mother shrieks knowingly, Maher takes a pan from the kitchen and puts it over his head while peering down street level, Meehan gently pushes the sisters toward the foot of the coffin in the middle of the room.
“Four o’ ya come wit’ me, rest stay here,” The Swede says and instead of naming his followers, points to each as they shoulder toward the kitchen door.
“Just a broken shoe,” I whisper to Vincent Maher.
“Whad ya say? Kid, whad ya say?” Meehan answers for Maher.
Shaken by the room’s attention, I look down.
“Say it, what did you say?”
“I . . . heard it coming up here, broken shoe on the horse. Like glass, I heard it on the cobbles before we come up.”
Dinny Meehan walks over to me with his eyebrows pushed down, interested. “How you know it’s broke? Was it broke when you walked past?”
“Not yet.”
“Did ya hear it break?”
“I didn’t, but . . .”
“Go look then, go look out the window,” he says, rushing me over.
“Is it broke?” Vincent Maher asks.
“Looks so . . . it is. It shattered off the hoof. I can see it did.
That man has another shoe hanging out of his back pocket. Hoof knife and pincers too. He’s a horsefarrier,” I say looking back.
“Not a gangman?”
“I . . . I don’t know that, but I can tell you he’s no blacksmith, that’s for sure.”
Dinny Meehan turns to Maher, “Tell ’em all to come back up. It’s nothin’.”
“Yeah,” Maher agrees and shoulders around the mother and crowd toward the door, then thumps down the stairs.
Meehan puts his hands in his pockets, looks me over. His handsome face built around the pose of a chieftain’s stolid stance. Under dark brown brows and hairline, his green eyes shone like archaic stones in the window room’s dull shine.
“You from Ireland?”
I nod.
“Farm boy?”
Nod.
“How do you get stronger shoes? So they don’ break so easy?”
I shrug. The room had lost interest and some of the men itch their faces nervously while the widow stares out the window. Her tiny daughter stands between her
and the coffin with uncombed hair partially covering her eyes, ears stuck out of the light blond strings like a gnome with pursed, wet lips and large eyes. She seems smaller than a normal five-year-old.
“G’on, say it,” Meehan presses, putting his full attention on me.
I look around but only Meehan’s face waits. “Well, to break down the iron ore you have to smelt off the rock and slag to keep the iron. Flux it,” I gulp.
“Like potash?”
“Potash is a flux, it is. Or charcoal even. So, you have to scrape off the gangue or turn it to gas in the heat. Then you have to forge it. Bend it to your need when it turns orange but if there’s too much carbon in it, it won’t bend . . . too brittle. It’ll just snap off, doesn’t connect to anything either but you can cut away the iron in the shape of a shoe or if you have a mold. It’s lesser quality and it makes bad shoes, especially cobble-walkers like you have here. Muscular perch-erons have too much weight for bad shoes. You need wrought for them, cast iron won’t make it. Sounds like glass on the pavestones, that’s what I heard downstairs.”
Dinny Meehan watches me speak. Not so much to listen to what I say, but to see me.
“You ever worked with iron?” I asked.
“No . . . my father worked in a soap factory in Manhatt’n, off Washington Street. He was from Ireland. Uncle was a gang leader. Ruffians, back in them days.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, but managed to ask him what year his father came over.
“1847, when he was a babe.”
Without answering I look at him again and put it together in my mind all those stories I heard of how bad a year it was in Ireland, 1847.
“Your father works with horses?” he asked.
“Some, he does a lot of things. Sells peat too. Mends thatch, carpentry.”
“You Joe Garrity’s nephew?”
“I am.”
Looking at Maher, “He tells me ya still fourteen.”
I nod.
Over the next two hours some four or five hundred men, women, and children wait their turn to give respect to the dead. Snaking up the stairwell, they keep as quiet as they can while the neighbors downstairs and next door stand in their doorways smoking, watching. A woman with a great scar on one side of her face appears with many children and strides out from the line to shake Dinny’s hand. Mary Lonergan then grabs hold of the mother of the dead, and with a great and awkward bawling, wails for her. Mother McGowan is patient, though I can feel that Mrs. Lonergan is seen as the lowest of the neighborhood mothers. Still in line are her children, some fifteen of them in line along the wall sniffling and digging in their dirty noses. The five at the end though are teen boys from the neighborhood led by their limp-legged leader, the eldest Lonergan. The shortest is Petey Behan of the Flatbush orphanage who still wears my coat.
A large man who walked quickly passed everyone in the stairwell elbows in through the kitchen with his bowler cap in hand and a fitted, gentleman’s suit over his paunchy midsection. I couldn’t have known who he was, but later I would. He was Mr. McCooey from the Madison Club who handed out favors for Democratic votes at the Elks Club down in Prospect Heights where all the Democratic backslappers entertain themselves with violin players and operatic arias and such. He gave respects to Mother McGowan and the widow, shook Dinny’s hand without planting his feet, and quickly made his way back from where he’d come. The boys in the gang called their like “Lace Curtains.” While they called the gangs on the docks “Famine Irish.” And looking back over at the Lonergan clan, I could see why.
After McCooey is gone, a beautiful woman in a plain dress and a small boy on her hip exits the line after crossing herself over the dead man. She drops her shawl behind her head and comes to Dinny Meehan’s side with a kiss on his cheek, then looks upon myself with warmness. He whispers to her from above and she smiles at me while the boy stares in silence, then crawls up her shoulder in a sudden fit of discomfort.
When the crowd has gone entirely, an unlabeled whiskey bottle has somehow made its way onto the top of the coffin and is passed from mouth to mouth. A story about the dead man was at first muttered, then turned to a round of laughs. The dockers become animated and John Gibney’s face turns red while Big Dick Morissey flicks him in the back of the head.
“Ya lucky ya dead, you,” Gibney points down into the dead man’s face. “’Cause I was gonna get even wit’ ya when ya got outter the Sing Sing, ya fookin’ arsehole.”
The mother laughs at Gibney, then cries again. I see Maher talking to the youngest sister of the dead man as she sits on the arm of the sofa. She looks up at him, nervously enjoying his attention, and notices how honorable the wife of Dinny Meehan is treated. And the widow still stares out through the window while the gnome child taps on her knees.
Dinny nods, then points to the coffin with his lips to a few of the guys after The Swede came back in. When they make for moving it off the chairs the mother explodes, dives onto the top of it as it is lifted. The dead man’s sisters begin their chorus and the small children stop their running to stare upon the spectacle.
“Nah, nah, nah!” the mother keens and wails. “Nah, let’m stay here den! Not to take’m ’way from me! Not to! My bhoy, my bhoy! Nah . . .”
Meehan reasons with her, though not expecting to persuade. He tries faintly to block her from the yellow pine and whispers.
“Open it up!” she cries. “I want to see him one last time . . .”
Meehan whispers.
“Not wert’ a shite to me, I wanna see’m. Don’ care how bad he looks. Haven’t seen me own bhoy’s face since they sent’m up in the stir six month ago. Open it up! Open!”
“Ma, please be . . .” the eldest daughter attempts.
“Not!” She stamps and shrieks, leaving a stern and shaking silence. “Open it!”
Placing it back on the chairs, a crowbar is summoned. Soon the sound of spliced nails being ripped from deep in the pine rings slices through the parlor air and the gray glim of dancing dust by the window swirls around the mother’s face and blue and red shining eyes.
The head is dented on one side, the darkened hair matted with a dried fluid, eyes swollen but shut. The shock of death still painted on the face though the crust of blood has been wiped away. Silently the mother bends. The eldest daughter holding the back of her sack dress so as not to allow the breasts to show in the eye of men. She kisses the dead man, her only son. Kisses his swollen cheek and smells him. Smells him deep in her. To remember him. As the babe inside her twenty-three years ago. As the smell of hope as he toddled around the barren, one-room tenement as a child. As the smell of the household’s provider as a teenager running with the gangs.
“He t’ought of us first,” she said aloud, teeth clenched. “Became a man before his time. Found earnings the only way there is out there for it to be found.”
She crosses herself as she rises. Immediately the men push forth with the lid and again she wails, pushes them back.
“Dinny Meehan.”
“Yes.”
“Knife.”
Harry Reynolds hands Meehan a blade, who then comes to the side of the mother. The Swede bends down and pulls back the lifeless wrist. Vincent Maher holds a small broken-handled English tea cup below as Meehan slices. The blue vein opens to drip a mixture of coagulated redness into the cup. Filling it up to the top, it is handed to the mother whereupon she drinks a proud swig, then closes her eyes and tears under the gray shine from the window, over her son. She then hands it to Dinny Meehan. “Drink fer your bhoys. Fer me son’s strength.”
Dinny Meehan offers his palm for her to place the handleless cup and gulps down the rest with a slow toss of his head. The mother watches his face to see if he will grimace. He does not. Dinny comes again to the side of the mother and places one hand on the back of her wrist, his other hand draped over her shoulder and whispers. She nods and leans into him, then Dinny nods toward Cinders Connolly and Maher and they begin to untie the boots from the dead man and pu
ll them off carefully. The lid is then dropped and the men line up the nails, passing the hammer around to punch them back in place. The mother falls to her knees as it is lifted away. She bows her head among the empty chairs, takes a deep breath, and sings a song never sung before. A melody made by a mother. Then it evaporates in the dusty air.
Soon enough all the men are gathered in the dank stairwell with the coffin pointed downward. It too has no handles and takes five men to negotiate the angles in the thin, steep steps. Outside a priest appears by the morgue dray, Father Larkin from St. Ann’s.
“I t’ought t’was 2 p.m. dat McGowan’s wake was to begin, I was told so?” He grouses, Gibney and Morissey laugh, and me thinking that here in America the priest is lied to and his power over minds brushed aside.
The coffin is put in the back of the dray as Father Larkin blesses it in a rush. Moans can be heard from the third-floor window above. Out from the small mouth and thin lips I can see the priest’s breath in the air as he looks high, rushes up to their aid.
We follow the morgue dray through the slush of melting snow and up ahead of me are men fanned out unevenly in their sulky trench coats and wool caps. The moving guard is a motley army and instead of the soldier’s crack of polished boots on the cobbles I hear the squish of wet peasant footwear. A bell jingles in the distance from an old China clipper in the harbor. The procession of slum soldiers stare in the windows above and down the street ahead and looking over at Maher with his slyly tilted cap and strutting march I see a thin, long pistol move from his coat pocket to his belt where his trench coat obscures it. I notice too the shine of a long knife in the palm of Harry Reynolds and a cudgel somewhat longer than a hurling stick at the end of Gibney’s arm.
For me, I stare at the halved carrots the driver has in a linen cloth for the nag and swallow my own spit into the emptiness as the snow gently rains in our faces, the wind against the guard and the dray. The silence on the street is fantastic. Out on the water, barges dump their horns in the air like moaning dinosaurs and the trolley bells and clacking elevated tracks play beyond our clearing. But where we walk the onlookers honor the dead and the mourning. This man’s memory is known here by one and all as hats are taken down generously, crosses made from forehead to chest, mouths kept closed. Shopkeeps, grocers, and tenement-window dwellers above nod sullenly. Factory workers and warehousemen open their iron shudders to pay respects in the cold air. Some children and grown men toss flowers on the coffin, shake Meehan’s hand honorably. Too among us are The Swede and Big Dick Morissey and Connolly and the one they call Red Donnelly and Tuohey the tinker and many others. We stride between the brick walls and wooden shacks icily through the neighborhoods from cobblestone to sidewalk until a few large policemen come from the side of us and attack Cinders Connolly, hold him by his arms.
Light of the Diddicoy Page 6