Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

  for Katie

  who brought me back to life

  DIVIDE THE DAWN:

  FIGHT

  by Eamon Loingsigh

  SHANACHIE51 PRESS - NEW YORK

  For questions, comments or concerns - artofneed@gmail.com

  Main Characters

  Meehan’s White Hand

  Dennis Dinny Meehan - Leader

  James The Swede Finnigan - Enforcer

  Vincent MasherMaher - Enforcer

  Liam Poe Garrity - The Thief of Pencils

  Dockbosses

  Harry The Shiv Reynolds - Atlantic Terminal

  James Cinders Connolly - Fulton Ferry Landing & Jay Street Terminal

  John The Lark Gibney - Baltic Terminal

  Cute Charlie Red Donnelly - Navy Yard

  Dan Dance Gillen - Atlantic Terminal

  Others

  Beat McGarry - Old gang member, storyteller

  Thomas Burke - Downstairs neighbor of Liam Garrity

  Tanner Smith - Westside Manhattan leader of the Marginals

  Whyo Mullen & Will Sutton - Ten year old Irishtown moppets

  Lovett’s White Hand

  Wild Bill Lovett - World War I vet

  Lieutenants

  Richie Pegleg Lonergan - Anna Lonergan’s brother, killed Mickey Kane

  John Non Connors - World War I vet

  Joseph One-arm Flynn - World War I vet

  Frankie Byrne - Longtime Lovett follower

  Trench Rabbits

  Darby Leighton - Banished Whitehander

  Abraham Abe Harms - The mole in Bill’s ear, former Richie Lonergan Crew member

  Petey Cutpurse Behan - Former Richie Lonergan Crew member

  Matty Martin - Former Richie Lonergan Crew member

  The Law

  Detective William Brosnan - Longtime Irishtown cop

  Patrolman Daniel Culkin - Son-in-law of Brosnan, Doirean’s husband

  Patrolman Ferris - Culkin’s partner

  Captain Sullivan - Police Captain at Poplar Street Station

  Commissioner Enright - New York Police Commissioner

  The Black Hand

  Sixto The Young Turk Stabile - Owner of The Adonis Social Club, Harvard grad

  The Prince of Pals Frankie Yale - Owner of The Harvard Inn, Coney Island

  Lucio Lucy Buttacavoli - He of the aquiline nose

  Stick’em Jack Stabile - Sixto’s father, former owner of The Adonis

  The Waterfront Assembly

  Jonathan G. Wolcott - President

  Amadeusz Wiz the Lump Wisniewski - Muscle

  Garry fookin’ Barry - Wolcott’s chosen leader, former Whitehander

  The International Longshoreman’s Association

  Thomas Quick Thos Carmody - Treasurer, New York

  T.V. O’Connor - President

  King Joe Ryan - Vice President

  Paul Vaccarelli - Vice President

  Other Mains

  Anna Lonergan - Richie’s sister, Mary & John’s daughter

  Sadie Meehan née Leighton - Mother of John, wife of Dinny, cousin of Darby

  Mourning Mother Mary - Mother of fifteen, including Anna & Richie

  Ligeia Guida DeSantis - Italian immigrant, fiancé of Darby

  Doirean Doe Culkin - Brosnan’s daughter, Culkin’s wife

  Maureen Moe Egan - Former best friend of Doirean Culkin

  Grace White - Prostitute at Adonis Social Club

  Kit Carroll - Prostitute at Adonis Social Club

  Charles Pakenham - Reporter

  Father Larkin - Irishtown Priest at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church

  Dead Reilly - Irishtown attorney

  The Leech Vandeleurs - Brooklyn landlord

  Eleanor Allerton - President ,Woman’s Christian Temperance League

  *For all other characters, go to back of book

  Special Thanks

  The Cesario family, the Meehan family, Jade Visos-Ely, Rochelle Deans,

  T.J. English, OpenX

  ~The Hearse Song or The Worms Crawl In was a popular song during World War I, credit unattributable.

  ~Dear Ol’ Skibberreen was written by Patrick Carpenter in The Irish Singer’s Own Book (1880)

  ~Lyrics to God Save Ireland was written by Timothy Daniel Sullivan (1867)

  ~Down by the Glenside (The Bold Fenian Men) was written by Peadar Kearney (1916)

  Divide the Dawn is a work of fiction, though many characters retain original names and monikers. Many scenes are based on historical events. Still, the work is a product of the author’s imagination.

  artofneed.com

  Cover art by Guy Denning (guydenning.org)

  Cover design by Martin Beckett (martinbeckettart.com)

  Map by Tim Paul (timpaulillustrations.com)

  Copyright 2020, Brooklyn, New York

  ISBN: 9798622209321

  Ebook ASIN: B0848R85PF

  Eight Becomes Seven, None One

  TULLA, IRELAND

  Feb. 1908

  Down the hilly and slanted fields of childhood I run through the realm of the Otherworld. The great gray mist has brought us the shanachie storyteller, but if I don’t get back by dark my Da will massacre me, so he will.

  It is here in the fog that the deities and the dead generations relive life’s eternal struggles through us. Over the ages their unending battles transform into the mythical and our own difficulties are but mere images of their like. The shanachie is a witness to the past himself, so I know it’s true. He told me. The heroic vows, promises and honor pledges, the loyalties and bitter vengeances all become symbols, runes, stories resurrected in us. To be shown again in our day.

  Out of breath I scamper through the foggy dusk, though the way home is well-worn into the muscle of my memory. For I am led by a sense of the land and the people before me, you understand. But even so, the wet weighs down my clothes. And the earth sucks at my boots to slow me, but still I must hurry for it’s almost dark.

  The thick mist had fallen over us two days past and many in the swaths of farms round Tulla fear a great blight again. What else could it mean? But I know it’s the Otherworld because the shanachie has come to us! The seer! right here in West Ireland this very day. We know him to be such because the mist is his door, you see. The threshold to crossover into our world to give us what he’s seen.

  I plummet down the rounded hillocks and in my hurrying I almost run right out of the floppy farm boots. Our family’s region has long been here in the lowlands between the Maghera mountain bogs to the north, and the Moylussa peaks in the south where the browned February rushes and ling heather cover the deep peat. But nothing slows me because I have the excitement loaded up inside.

  This land, the land of our people was once thick with oak forest and woodlands, but was cleared away by the English. Not only was our virgin timberlands given free to our ancient enemy for their long ships and reconstruction after the great London fire, but the land was cleared to remove the Irish rebels’ hideouts too, my own ancestors the woodkerns and descendants of the Fianna. Everything is done for the benefit of the English, my Da says. But he taught myself and Timothy, my older brother, the secrets of our ways. For one, when traveling through the farmlands and the countryside we aught never trek along the roads and boreen lanes. Like the old days we keep to the countryside. It’s long in us, the old ways. I suppose that’s because things haven’t changed much here in seven hundred years.

  Along rivulets and rain-dappled lakes where crannog ruins lay listless in the gloaming I run as straight as the crow flies. I hop over the low stonewalls that partition the small acreages to ancient properties that people once bitterly fought over, but have been left empty for generations. When I come to a narrow dirt lane I
peer in both directions and cross quickly into the lines of conifers and low hazel trees and the alder and rowan brush. In these parts we were once known for our cider. Although demand has waned, the odd apple tree still slouches forlorn and forgotten. And as I run, a long and silver-colored branch lashes at my face with a lone apple at the end of its reach.

  “Hello Mr. Cudmore, Mr. Ryan,” I yell out to the two aging countrymen who hadn’t seen me canter through the low haze between their farms.

  “Helloooo Liam,” they offer back, blinded by the graying mist but knowing my shrill voice, even with a mouthful of apple. “Get yerself home bhoy, almost black now. If I know yer father he’ll have yer arse in a—”

  I continue on as there’s no time to answer. Through tussocks of moor grass I can think only on how best to convince Da on my plan of going to see the shanachie. Emerging again from the rushy pastures to a tree line of willow and birch scrub with their drooping winter catkins, I cross another boreen behind Father Daly’s carriage that trots along in the ethereal fog without his noticing me.

  At Mass Father Daly says the heroes and the dead generations are in heaven above for eternity. But the farmers say they are preserved beneath our feet in the boglands forever. The storytellers though, they assure me that the dead generations of the Otherworld descend in the mist and the storms or even through the portals in the ancient burial grounds. But since it’s so often the adults speak of them I am assured at least that the dead watch me. So when I scramble behind Father Daly without his notice I imagine it gives them a chuckle up there. Or down there. Or in there. I’m only seven years old so I’m not really sure where they mingle, but between their souls above or the bodies below or the ghosts in the mist, I can certainly feel their lingering eyes amidst the deep fog. But it makes me want to be a good boy because nothing I do happens that they can’t see anyhow. Even through the fog.

  Along my way are the Poor Law Roads, or at least that’s the local name for them. Rude rock paths strewn aimlessly along sloping cottongrass, left during the Great Hunger. Others call it the road works scheme. Some plan hatched in the comfort of London to put the Irish to work so we didn’t get free handouts because we were feckless, the English said. But many died of the famine fever and the elements right there while breaking the stones alongside the rocky roads that trail off mysteriously as if the world had suddenly come to an end. They’re odd to me, those patchy stone roads, for the Irish of East Clare never quit on a job until it’s finished. And done right.

  Finally I come to the scariest part of my journey when I walk between the old brick walls of the disused Tulla Union Workhouse and the soggy banks of Garruragh Lough. On this day I have no time to climb the ten-foot rock walls and stare upon the old haunted, three-storied edifice. So I jog through without hesitation.

  A year earlier, the guardians of the dilapidated Workhouse voted to use it as an auxiliary asylum, since both the Tulla and Scariff districts’ lunatics were overcrowding their facilities. I myself think it’s a silly idea to put lunatics in a house full of ghosts. But no one asks children about that queer plan and I’ve found it difficult convincing grown ups of anything. Even when its obvious the insane won’t feel at home with the unsettled spirits of a starved people.

  Some people say they hear the Workhouse itself moan at night, begging us for food. In 1847, back when the potato went black on the vine and the English used the calamity to move us off the land, it was built because the landlords had evicted everyone from the local farms. That’s when people lived in scalpeens, if not on the roadsides, starved and choleric. And the children my age were green at the mouth from eating grass, their mothers gaunt and boney.

  The Tulla Workhouse was built by the English foreigners. It was called the Soup School at first, to attract all the hungry with the name of it. But it never lived up to that name, no it didn’t. And instead it became a place for the people of Tulla to die. My uncle Joseph says there must be two thousand bodies in unmarked graves round the back of the building where you can still see humps in the ground when you look over the rock wall. I even heard Father Daly during his homily quote from the 1901 census that the population of Tulla is still nowhere near what it was before the hunger came.

  “Mam,” I yell as I run across the fields. “Mam, guess what?”

  With my two baby sisters Abby and Brigid forever lingering behind my mother’s dress with big, watchful eyes, Mam turns round to see, “Liam! For the love o’ god, it’s dark. Yer father—”

  “Mam, there’s a shanachie at the O’Dea farm,” I reel off, half out of breath. “I worked with him all day and he’s a real storyteller and he knows how to thatch roof with a needle better than Miko, and tomorrow after Mass everyone is going to the O’Dea farm to listen to him, can we go?”

  But she just smiles.

  In County Clare it did my mother little to no good being the smartest girl in her class. It hadn’t even landed her the eldest male in the Garrihy family until my father’s older brother suddenly “fell off his trolley,” it was said. Which meant he went mad and left my Da and Mam the Garrihy family plot. Before that stroke of bitter luck, they were forced to sub-let a room behind the O’Dea farm. Two sons were born and died there. Sean and Colm were their names, I’m told. But their deaths put my parents in debt paying for proper graves in the old cemetery. Mam never speaks of them, but the boys weigh heavily on her heart because I see her cry when she kneels in front of the candles and prays at St. Mochulla’s church on the hill. And everyone says her vibrant eyes had dulled a bit in their memories. Maybe she thinks they watch her all the time, too.

  “Liam child,” she says, still trying to capture all the words I throw at her. “I don’t know if we can go see this storyteller-man. We’ll have to ask—”

  “Bhoy!” Da yells from the turned field he’s tilled with Timothy and uncle Joseph.

  But before I run off, my mother gives me a bottle of milk, “Here ye are, give it to the man, yeah?”

  I run with the bottle of milk and hand it up to him. Da takes off his cap with the vapor coming out of his mouth in the cold and takes a long pull of the milk right out of the bottle. Timothy and uncle Joseph and I watch and wait, until finally he speaks.

  “Why’re ye late?” He looks at me through sharp cheekbones, a twisted blackthorn tree looms behind him like a dark shadow over the field.

  He stands over me awaiting an answer. I think of lying, but he is a severe man. And it’s not just me who says it. Six months prior Dierdre, the farm dog, had become fat with pups. My sisters and I snuck into the barn where she lay during her gestation and gave her extra dinner scraps mixed with milk. Mam warned us not to get too close to the notion of Dierdre’s motherhood, but dared not tell us why. When Dierdre gave birth, Abby, Brigid and I watched as she licked her pups clean of the blood, squirming against each other to suckle on her belly. Abby even cradled one that slept trustfully in her arms and gave them names. The next day, Da took Timothy and I to the barn. He put the pups in a sack and walked us to the closest river and had me toss them in like stones.

  No, I cannot lie to my father. He would have the truth from me. But that does not stop me from hating him.

  When he was my age, Da went by night to burn the landlords’ property and maim their cattle; a longstanding tradition in the West. In the times of past they were called Moonlighters and agitated for the right to own their property. Some people called it the Land War, though my father said we’d been fighting for centuries and it was for freedom in general, not just about the land.

  Looking up at him I try to start from the beginning, but I feel nervous and it comes out all wrong, “I was talking with Miko O’Dea and, I mean we were working on their thatch roof while we were talking, and he told me—”

  “Here by dark is the rule,” Da interrupts. “Ye’ll give up a week’s worth o’ yer mother’s sweet bread, an’ lucky it’s only that and not the belt. Now listen here bhoy, we’re finally able to buy the farm legally.”

  “O
h, oh that’s good,” I say.

  “It’s a waste o’ time,” Uncle Joseph bleats from behind like a sullen goat.

  Da glances over his shoulder, “I s’pose ye’d think that, seein’ as though ye haven’t farm nor family.”

  Uncle Joseph is a thin and spindly man with a slope in his shoulders and a large bald spot for a man in his early thirties. Though small of stature, he is bitter of tongue, and my father has often been summoned to the local pub late of a Saturday evening to quell a drunken quarrel his younger sibling had inspired. But Da is strangely tolerant with his brother’s sour talk of late, ever since the announcement of my uncle Joseph’s intentions to emigrate to New York. They are building a new bridge there, the Manhattan Bridge it’s to be called, and it’s cheap Irish labor they need. These are to be the last days we would see uncle Joseph, though we secretly count them with endurance.

  “I’m just like Liam there,” Uncle Joseph says, standing some three inches shorter than my father. “Born the youngest son and without land. Not our fault, is it Liam?”

  “I, well—”

  “Liam bhoy,” Da says. “We’ll be headed to the Maghera bogs to pull the peat and sell it every Sunday. It’s been generations we’ve fought for the right to buy our land, and the day has come. But it’s the money we need now. We start tomorrow morn.”

  “Start tomorrow?” I say, almost in tears.

  “Yes,” Da turns back toward the house with Timothy on his heels.

  “I want to listen to the shanachie at the O’Dea farm tomorrow,” I blurt out with all the courage I own.

  “A shanachie?” Timothy turns round. “Who said he was a shanachie? He’s just an itinerant laborer. Pavee traveller, more like.”

  I want to tell my brother to shut his gob and to stop tripping over Da’s heels, but I just grit at him and tell the truth of it, “Miko says the man is a true storyteller—”

  “Miko is twelve years-old,” Timothy says.

  “That’s four years older than yourself.”