Light of the Diddicoy

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Following those two is Mickey Kane who is handy with his fists too, and behind is the rest of Lovett’s gang, Frankie Byrne, Jidge Seaman, and Sean Healy. Tanner Smith and his boys punch their way through the crowd as well, enjoying the old pastime of ginzo hunting and union bashing. Dance Gillen finds more victims in Lovett and Connors’s wake. Holding his hat in hand and jumping in the air to earn his moniker, stomping on face and gullet simultaneously.

  For me, I feel I don’t have a stomach for the violence and stand away from it all to watch. I’ve had my fill with it as my uncle’s memory starts to take hold in my mind, which seems a great distance from the way I see myself in time. I hold the pencil in my pocket and pretend to write what I see so to keep my mind away from the guilt of not joining in and the guilt of thinking myself a murderer. I do wish to be like the rest, but don’t seem to have the spirit they do and the abandonment they display. This haunts me as I stand among the others and I do everything in my power to hide it from the like of Petey Behan.

  So watch I do with a terrible fixation on these young men, this communal tribe that can only see other groups of men as invading tribes. Unable to see the modernity in the world because they can’t see the modernity in themselves. Blood is what they feel. Rushing through their own veins. And the blood they see in the ownership of these docks and in the honor of their last remaining hope. Their blood, their family names, their mothers and grandmothers all arrived in Brooklyn like gypsies who run from a storm or a war. The shame in it. The utter shame in it. Rushing over the Atlantic from the hunger and so devastated, they hold the deepest fears for anything organized, for it is everything that is organized that starved them from their feather-wind hills and their heathers and the beloved boreens of motherland and the grandeur of the memory of their triumphant ancestral cycles.

  The Anglo-Saxon. I know it now. I know it like they know it in them. This gang and the ferocity of the fierce communal lives they hold on to. Held together by their king, Dinny Meehan. Disturbed into the depth of them. So deep it’s like it no longer exists for them. It’s now the way for them. Holding on by the bloody fingertips before their like is felled from this earth and the modern man, the industrial Anglo-Saxon, with his fraudulent honor, has his way by making extinct this band of primordial thieves and ancient pavee fighters to clear the way for the rule of their invisible laws and their patriotism to business and the sardonic, feminine, treacherous manners they somehow support without even the faintest odor of honor. But it’s us that have been called the names, like the Protestant Irish jackeens who call us Shanty Irish and the American Anglo-Saxon who called us Famine Irish. Even as no Famine Irish ever called themselves such for it should never have been called a famine, my da always reminded, but a mass removal by the means of nature all those with a tradition to oppose the rule of their foreign invader. Plenty of food existed in Ireland. Exported cash crops to India and everywhere else. Exporting too the rebels and gypsies and low-blooded, low-meaned, secretive, tribal rural slave-Irish in my own sad county of Clare. Banished to the ditches for a frozen, starved, and slow death and in shallow hillside graves in Ennistymon and its cholera-infested workhouse or exported onto coffin ships with grass-stained mouths for the harbor of New York and the ports of Quebec and Boston and the like where our rag-clothed, sunken-eyed children by the hundreds were unloaded onto carts sent directly to the cemeteries if not dumped into the choppy cold Atlantic’s hungry, sucking grip.

  I hear Richie Lonergan scream for blood again for he cannot find a man to fight him fist to fist. Philip Large has a man on the ground and is yanking the head off of his body with the energy of a devil so upset by his fate that he cries with the burning of his shoulder muscles, round biceps and blue-veined neck maaing like a beast overburdened with fear and work. Blood is everywhere red, and hardly any of it cut out with knives or bullets. Culled instead from muscle and the crack of tight knuckles raining down on defenseless faces with the pulsing of rage to turn the corporeal force into slamming tonnage. But soon there are not many Italians and immigrants left to receive their ferocity and the Whitehanders begin to stand among the bodies and broken bones and red-tinted puddles and cement smears. Three hundred or more of them rise slowly from the war front and their victims to look for their chieftain.

  Dinny Meehan leans his elbow back over the platform of a boxcar, his closest culchies and diddicoys around him. Chin as high as a saddleless Comanche brave into his undoing, yet surrounded above by the steel and fluxed ore of edifices hanging over him like spires erected for a new era and a great beginning. I see him, Dinny Meehan, and I believe he sees those monuments beyond only as great cemetery stones instead. Made by the hands of men, they stand for his need to work and to feed others and the honor of those come before him. Blacking out a reality, living by the honor of the old ways and the olden days when we arrived, like myself, with no words for what is called “electricity” that blossoms a New World’s light in a dark room without the need for paraffin or the tallow that for centuries lit our faces. The chandler murdered mysteriously, and from afar and without a war once ever being offered by the feminine men who learned to tame and orchestrate the shock of a lightning strike into the finger of a wall. Stunned by progress, Dinny is. Stunted by the duress of everyday survival and the struggle of maintaining his way beyond even New York’s standard when all the gangs that ran Manhattan five, ten years earlier were bitten by the manacles of law and replaced by the slow ascension of the New York progressives led by a new man from the fish markets of the Lower East Side sent up to Albany by the old Tammany Tiger to show the Protestants what it means to be a man of great empathy, yet he, Dinny Meehan stands unmoved by the clicking of time. In the dock slums, he collects gangs like an entrepreneur sweeps upon struggling companies: the Jay Street Gang, Frankie Byrne Gang, Swamp Angels, Red Onion Gang, the Marginals and the remnants of the old Yake Brady Gang and the rookies of the Lonergan crew all under his White Hand umbrella, and for what? To fight all other city tribes for something old, something remembered. To keep it in the family, protect the neighborhoods even as they are flooded with new cultures of human cargo from great liners unloaded at his piers.

  “We’ve never had to be so organized before,” I remember Harry Reynolds telling me, and it’s true, for the walls are closing in, time clicking. But I’ve only one thing on my own mind, and that’s to get my mother and sisters to New York and out of the way of the coming war in Ireland. I’ll never again speak of my uncle Joseph, and never again recover either, though it’s no great strain for me to see the theater in the dying of one part of family to give the life to another. It’s in the stories of the shanachies over and over, and I now own his life and what little honor he summoned. Here now showing itself true in the blood and the life of me. All for family, I say. Just like Dinny Meehan. And though he uses me, I’m to do the same for I only do what I learn and plenty there is to take in under the skyscrapers and bridges and Els of New York down by the waterfront, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass and upstairs at 25 Bridge Street.

  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 h
orns 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.

  SPECIAL THANKS

  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.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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.

  Books on Three Rooms Press

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  Hidden Wheel

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  Tales from the Eternal Café

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  Light of the Diddicoy

  Richard Vetere

  The Writers Afterlife

  DADA

  Maintenant: Journal of

  Contemporary Dada Art & Literature (Annual poetry/art journal, since 2003)

  SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGY

  Have a NYC: New York Short Stories Annual Short Fiction Anthology

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  Peter Carlaftes

  A Year on Facebook

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  Madeline Artenberg &

  Karen Hildebrand

  The Old In-and-Out

  Peter Carlaftes

  Triumph For Rent (3 Plays) Teatrophy (3 More Plays)

  TRANSLATIONS

  Patrizia Gattaceca

  Isula d’Anima / Soul Island

  (poems by the author in Corsican with English translations)

  George Wallace

  EOS: Abductor of Men (poems by the author in English with Greek translations)

  Gerard Malanga

  Malanga Chasing Vallejo

  (new English translations of selected poems of Cesar Vallejo, with additional notes and photos)

  POETRY COLLECTIONS

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  Atrium

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  DrunkYard Dog

  I Fold with the Hand I Was Dealt

  Joie Cook

  When Night Salutes the Dawn

  Thomas Fucaloro

  It Starts from the Belly and Blooms

  Inheriting Craziness is Like a Soft Halo of Light

  Patrizia Gattaceca

  Isula d’Anima / Soul Island

  Kat Georges

  Our Lady of the Hunger Punk Rock Journal

  Robert Gibbons

  Close to the Tree

  Karen Hildebrand

  One Foot Out the Door Take a Shot at Love

  Matthew Hupert

  Ism is a Retrovirus

  David Lawton

  Sharp Blue Stream

  Jane LeCroy

  Signature Play

  Dominique Lowell

  Sit Yr Ass Down or You Ain’t gettin no Burger King

  Jane Ormerod

  Recreational Vehicles on Fire Welcome to the Museum of Cattle

  Lisa Panepinto

  On This Borrowed Bike

  Angelo Verga

  Praise for What Remains

  George Wallace

  Poppin’ Johnny

  EOS: Abductor of Men

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