Light of the Diddicoy (18 page)

“Yeah, they got churches over there, like in Bedford or something. Real good neighborhoods. Well, there are good neighborhoods among the bad, like always. The thing is kid, ya gotta work hard for something like that.”

“I don't have a problem working hard.”

“I know ya don't, I see that in ya. It's a good thing too. But ya gotta have ya honor. If ya don't, ya don't go nowhere, see? Honor's important here. It's all ya got as a man, ya know,” Dinny continued, as the cool spring night air whisked through us in the back of the car. “People might respect your work ethic, but . . . you haven't done anything yet beyond that.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“Liam,” he said, sitting back. “Everyone knows now. Petey Behan stole that coat from ya and ya didn't do nothing to get it back. Nothin'. You might not realize it, but something like that can haunt a man for years. They'll hold it against ya. Cross your line everyday. Anythin' ya got. Everything. No way you can continue to live like that around here,” he says assuredly. “No way. You can't let that happen. No way you can let that happen and expect to live a normal life. Ya don't got honor, ya go and get it. No one hands it out. Ya go and get it. You can't never let people do nothin' to you. Ya gotta make a stand. Draw a line and don't ever let no one cross that line again without a punch and an earful from ya. That's just the nature o' things.”

I kept thinking.

“I'm here for ya though, kid. I want ya know that. I'm not ya father. I wouldn't pretend that to be. No way. But I'm here for ya. I can help you. I wanna help you. And let me tell ya, it's not easy to find someone who's willing to help you.”

“I know that to be the case,” I said. “And I thank you for . . .”

“Ah,” Dinny said sitting back again. “All ya gotta do is draw that line. Make a big deal out of it, ya know. A big deal. Then anyone crosses that line and ya rap 'em. Hard, ya know what I'm sayin'?”

“I do.”

“Take a right on Hudson,” Dinny says, tapping on the driver's shoulder.

“Right, right,” the driver answers waving his hand to us without looking back.

“Dinny,” I say, reaching into the left side of my trousers and pulling out the nine-inch knife and keeping it low. “Harry Reynolds gave me this.”

Dinny looked at the knife in my lap, then looked up into my eyes.

“He taught me a few things.”

“Yeah, but ya ready to use it?”

The car stops and we get out on Hudson Street where many saloons are filled and spilling over sidewalk and cobbles. A huge bonfire is whipping in the middle of the road, blazing high while chairs and all sorts of combustibles are being thrown into it. The fire attracts onlookers from the surrounding neighborhoods: it is generally known that the Tammany Democrats often make such a commotion to rally prospective voters and cook off free chicken, pigs, and cow meats for the masses and for their votes. But it's not Tammany puts this together. Even I could see that this blaze and chaos is thrown together on a whim.

As we walk around the high fire, I hear men hooting loudly and strong congratulations being shouted into the air. No longer do we find fashionably dressed men and women. They're now replaced by the woolen sweaters and wool hats of the immigrant working class that I am so used to seeing in Brooklyn. Among the crowd I see a tall Free State Irish flag waving wildly in the air on the back of horse-drawn buggies and out of tenement windows too, and saloons. Young men carrying newspapers with the evening editions are working overtime. Bellowing as they run through the drinking crowds of hurraying festivities. A cheering assembly has gathered around a man that stands on the back of a hay wagon. After saying something we can't quite hear, he throws his hat in the air and the crowd all do the same, yelling at the top of their lungs about something which only succeeds in scaring me almost out of my own shoes.

Sliding through the chaos, I see a shopwindow that has something painted on it, which grabs my attention right off: “T
HE
C
OUNTY
C
LAREMEN'S
E
VICTED
T
ENANTS
P
ROTECTIVE AND
I
NDUSTRIAL
A
SSOCIATION
.” I wonder what on earth all that means, so I stop for another read and figure it must be some group that helps immigrants from Clare find jobs in New York who've been evicted from their land back home.

“Come on!” Dinny yells through the cheers. “There's no time for dilly-dallyin'. This place has gone bugs.”

We come into a displaced crowd of men lined up along the wall of a saloon. They are gathered around a barrel that fills their glasses with beer. Some of the men have two fists full of beer glasses. Dinny walks up to them and as they recognize him, they jump up for greetings.

“It's a Meehan come back ‘round for a drink on this finest o' nights,” says one.

“Ol' feller, welcome, welcome,” says another who proudly pats him as he walks by and yet another brings him a drink and heartily shakes his hand.

“What's the rumpus here?”

“The Volunteers and the Citizen Army stormed Dublin, raised the tricolor up high at the GPO. It's a fact,” a man says.

“Kid,” Dinny interrupts as I am thinking on what the man just said. “This is Tanner, Tanner Smith. He's a ol' friend o' mine that . . .”

“What happened?” I ask to Tanner, interrupting Dinny. “I didn't quite . . .”

“The kid's from Ireland?” Tanner asks Dinny. “True thing kid, read the papers. True thing. The IRB Volunteers and Connolly's army took it over; the GPO, Stephen's Green, Liberty Hall. All the fookin' British was at the races for da holiday. No one expected it.”

“Are they armed?”

“Sure they are.”

“But . . . what are they going to do about it? Have the British said they'll go away?”

“Nah,” Tanner said. “They're condemnin' it. Gonna send troops to put it down. What part ya from, kid?”

“He's from Clare,” Dinny answers for me.

“Is that right? Another Clareman, eh? Welcome to the American capital o' County Clare: Greenwich Village!” he announces with his arms in the air, a few passersby agree with him too.

“But they already took over the GPO?”

“Yeah, yeah, here. Read the papers yaself, kid,” Tanner says as he hands me the paper from his back pocket. “They're sayin' it's the biggest thing since 1798.”

I looked at him when those magical numbers came to his lips. “Since Wolfe Tone?”

“Dat's what they're sayin',” Tanner says, looks at Dinny. “Kid knows hist'ry, uh?”

I am reading the newspaper and I can feel the world shrinking. Pulsing. Breathing, I
RISH
R
EBELS
C
APTURE
D
UBLIN
I
N
S
TREET
F
IGHTING
, then I skip down under the headline, “England is face to face with the Fenian element's yearning to see their Ireland freed, twelve British soldiers dead thus far.” Every word seems unreal as it describes the men and their surprise rebellion as a true threat to the empire.

This threat immediately gives the rebels the pride and the honor my people have so lacked for so long. Standing up to an empire. The only pride I had ever felt in my lifetime of Ireland and our people came from the men hiding behind the drink and from the stories my father told of Emmet and Wolfe Tone, the United Irishmen and the Young Irelanders. These were never real men to me, they were like saints. Like ghosts or parts of my own self that even I didn't believe. Reading these words in the newspaper there, those men start to come alive again inside me. Make some sort of sense to me for the first time, as if I never truly believed they were real until this moment.

And when I read the proclamation these young rebels posted up at the GPO for all Dubliners to read, some of the words glow in my imagination, like “dead generations,” and “summons her children to her flag,” and “we declare the right of the people of Ireland to the owndership of Ireland,” and “we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives . . . to the cause of its freedom,” and finally, finishing this poetry made from real life and written in their own blood certainly, this ultimate dare of a document describes their revolt as an “august destiny.”

“1916, they'll always remember this year,” I say, continuing to read as drops of tears fall from my eyes to the newspaper.

Tanner and Dinny watch me among the chaos of the city street. I read of America disapproving of the Irish rebels and their acts meaning they stand with the Germans against the allies. This is proven by Sir Roger Casement's arrest for the scuttled German boat carrying arms for the rebels.

“We don't concern ourselves with a war between empires!” I hear a man yelling from a cart addressing a crowd. “Not with King nor Kaiser do we stand!”

I look around more and there are men with their faces in their hands, crying in elation. Old men with silver beards and country hats leaning against the walls and affected so deeply by the surprise attack in Dublin that their legs shiver uncontrollably. They hug one another in tears, a very rare thing for Irishmen to do. I see women throwing paper out their windows above the saloons. Throwing their aprons too. Throwing anything into the bonfire. Everything. Men with tin whistles under their mustaches sing old songs. Very old songs that are so upbeat and happy that it makes the tears turn to cheers, tilts back the drink in them. When the men with tin whistles happen upon a reveling fiddler, they ask in each other's ears what tunes they know, then stand with their backs against the Hudson Street saloons and play the rebel songs I remember as a child. The same songs my father hummed as the muscles in his shoulders swelled from the pulling of peat from the soggy ditches and bogs outside our home and the songs he whistled as we traveled from our farm to Queenstown (he always called it Cobh, though) just six months earlier where I boarded the ship for New York.

“Fookin' Cath'lic moiderin' scum!” I hear a man yelp.

“The surprise of it, eh? Hit 'em when they're busy on the continent. On our holiday! Easter!” Tanner yells.

“Ya thinkin' about ya father?” Dinny asks.

“Yeah.”

“Well, the way things sound, the Brits won't allow this to go unpunished,” one of the men named Costello says. “Doubtful they'll lay down and let Home Rule take place now. There's gonna be battles for some time.”

I looked at Dinny, who says to me, “We need to think about gettin' ya family over here, kid. Ya mother and sisters at least.”

“I should go home,” I say. “Back to my family. To fight. Ireland needs her sons right now. I've only been here since October last and . . .”

“Wait, wai', wai', wai'.” Dinny steps closer to me, away from Tanner. “Ya father sent ya here for a reason. He didn' know the Fenians was gonna strike again? He didn't? Shit, he knew. And that's exactly why he sent ya here when he did. To get away from what's comin', a new war.”

I looked at him strangely, as he seemed attached to using that same outdated word again, “Fenian.”

“You been readin' the paper about these guys? The Clan na Gael papers here in the city? These men're ready to die. They wanna die. Ready to throw themselves against the empire, ready to be martyred.”

“And I am too!” I say.

“Ain't the point, kid. Ya father sent ya here so ya could bring the rest o' the fam'ly to New York. You don' see that? Ya mother. Ya two sisters. He wants them in New York. That's why he sent you here.”

I look at Dinny, then think about the Claremen's association down the block and the Hibernians who can help get them here. And then on the letters I'd sent which were never replied. Probably thrown in the trash by my uncle. Over the next hour or so, I remain in shock about everything that has just passed, connecting things in their new forms. All the while, Dinny tells me not to worry, then turns around and keeps talking business with Tanner. I had a hard time paying attention between all the excitement, the beer and my worries. Dinny shows Tanner his scar from being shot by a starker, “One o' the Droppers.” Dinny explains.

On the topic of starkers, Tanner explains how the Jews in Greenwich Village have taken over the labor slugging and Tanner's gang is laying low until the right time. Dinny offers assistance and they both agree that when the time comes, they'll break the longshoreman strike that was inevitably going to come, being as though May Day was upon us. Dinny would provide two hundred, maybe three hundred men on top of Tanner's gang and together they would restore the Irish to prominence on the docks of Greenwich Village and work together to keep the docks in Irish American hands.

“You seen Thos Carmody around?” Dinny asks him.

“Sure, what about 'em?”

“Wolcott paid us to kill 'em.”

“Kill Thos Carmody? The ILA recruiter? King Joe's guy? Why? He's been down in Brooklyn o' somethin'?”

Dinny nods, “You see'm much.”

“Yeah, I see'm.”

“I need 'em done.”

“Yeah?”

“Don't know where to find 'em around here. You want back in? You wanna job?”

“Looky there, Dinny Meehan offerin' me a job. Tables've turned, haven't they?”

“You take care o' that for me and it's three hundred dollars.”

“Three hundred?”

“Done, like done,” Dinny says, making sure Tanner understands.

“It's a risk on me, but we'll do it, the Marginals.”

Dinny pulls out a wad, hands it over. “Welcome back to the gimmicks.”

“Thanks Din, we'll work together good too. Like the ol' days. Except you're the big shot now.”