My fists are balled up and Miko has the look of fear in him as we both turn back to our own mothers.
“In her dyin’ breath, she held me. Summonin’ that last bit o’ strength she had, she produced one last song. As she sung I was taken away by a fascination that I had never seen or recounted in this world. I could hear somethin’ in that song that I hadn’t before. An’ fer good reason. T’was not me mother who was dyin’. . . T’was me! An’ this was the prophecy, so listen as ye must an’ ye may see. Listen close an’ listen well, fer within these words is the true story to tell,” he looks above with the words falling from his mouth as if a spirit had overtaken him:
T’is dawn,
When the darkness o’ the past
An’ the light o’ the future clash,
Dividin’ them in the amber flash o’ song,
Where death gives life to the seein’,
A hero is born to provide our well-bein’.
Summoned from a dead heaven,
In their calumnies,
Five archons make him known as the demiurgic son,
An’ come together with his three orphans,
Until eight becomes seven,
An’ none becomes one.
But just as they create him,
So too do they destroy him.
For t’is at dawn
that this keenin’ song’s
Lonely croon lifts our hero,
Like the risin’ o’ the moon.
An’ so the people o’ Irish towns everywhere chant aloud,
‘My soul is pure, a cloud in a mountain shroud.’
And then the itinerant shanachie stands from his chair as we children gape at him. In a trance he walks through us, and we struggle to make a path for him. Then he walks through the mothers and finally past the fathers, all of us watching in awe.
“But what does all of that mean?” I yell to the man as he opens the door to the whining wind. “Why are there five archons, and why are there three orphans? And how do they lift the hero?”
“I have already told ye child, ask yerself. . . ‘What is an Irish hero?’”
“But why don’t you just tell us?”
He stops and looks through a mesh of gray eyebrows, “O’ the five archons I can say that they have always represented our enemies. But when the souls o’ our people turn, it is ourselves who become the enemy. An’ of the three orphans ye ask? O’ the three orphans I say that one will beatify him. . . One will betray him. . . An’ one will become him.”
“Is that why eight turns to seven, because one becomes him?”
“No,” he turns his face back to the crowd and lowers an eye to me, “Garrihy is yer name, is it not?”
“It is,” says I.
“Ye,” he smiles. “It’s ye who must see with the inner eye of an auld man havin’ the gift o’ vision. An’ seein’ as ye can the age-old struggle to survive in this ever-changin’ darkness to day, ye must find the five an’ the three, fer ye are the witness of a laoch an’ will one day be a man to open the door fer many. An’ on yer journey to find, ye must also resist. They will demand ye to change. They will even change yer surname. But the anchor o’ honor is weighted heavily in ye, child.”
“But how did you survive when your mother sang for you? When so many others didn’t?”
“Meself?” The itinerant man lifts the hood of his cloak over his head, but no shame blots his face. “How much o’ ye can truly survive after such a tragedy? Survive? I did not.”
He slowly closes the door behind him, which was immediately opened again by my uncle Joseph who berates the old man for scaring the wits out of the children. But he is yelling into mere air, he is. For outside the door there is no one at all, at all.
We rush outside to look for him and find that the great mist had broken and the giant night sky was again starry and alive.
“I told you all and none of you would listen!” I scream through the black fields. “He comes with the magic mist and goes when it lifts.”
Man, woman and child search for him, but gone, is he. To time and memory. Never to be seen again.
The Veil
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Feb. 1919
Dawn, and three of us appear gently as if from a blank past. Out of the night we come to the corner at Nevins Street and look down Warren Street to the long bed of snow, white, thigh-high and unblemished.
“Liam? Do ya think Mickey came here?” Thomas Burke whispers.
“Maybe,” I mumble, then look to Harry Reynolds. “Let’s just fix the window and get out of here.”
The storm that thrashed New York the past five days had finally wearied. Heavy snow had come slanting down in a driving wind to turn Brooklyn a heavenly hue. But at this hour the city has not begun to dig itself out. Even the trolley rails remain buried, and the street cleaners have yet to show.
Like the Great Blizzard of 1888 it was, so the newspapers report. Many of the ramshackle, pre-Civil War buildings had collapsed under the weight of snow and the pressing wind with children and the aged trapped inside. Whole families falling prey to a homeless night in the frenzied storm. The recent coal shortage means if they don’t tumble down in their tenements, then they’d freeze inside them. In Green-Wood Cemetery a hundred trees have been felled and the police have confirmed thirty-seven dead so far.
Mickey Kane can be added to that number. Though many say he is but missing. The wise among us, however, know that he is not only dead, but that it was no accident. “Stay behind,” Harry says with a glance round the corner.
In the distance there is an echo of words, but they are hard to hear.
Are we being watched? I wonder.
I can feel someone. Something. Up in the windows or on the roof. In the sky. Yet no one is there. No one.
Then why do I feel I am being watched?
“They let us starve,” the echo simply says. “They let us starve.”
It must be my own thoughts that I hear, I realize. I have heard those words many times before.
I had lived on this block for three years with Dinny and Sadie Meehan, but it had never been this quiet. Here, now, a cool peace floats after the storm like a child who naps deeply after a great and teary-eyed tantrum. But I know, we three know, the quiet will not last. I can see it in Harry’s eyes and smell it in Burke’s fear.
Holding the rough wet brick wall for balance, the icy snow crunches under-boot and hugs at my legs. I take a deep breath and find Harry’s eyes for a moment, then to the untouched, bright white morning snow between the buildings. The row houses and brownstones stand wet in the air above with little whitecaps atop the metal handrails and doorknobs and cornices. And the bare ivy vines that snake along the brick facades are coiled with frost and look like white slithering bones strung up on the walls in some strange message. As a wedge of whiskey-colored light sneaks through the buildings at our left shoulders, the three of us look on the scenery with foreboding.
“I don’ see nobody,” Burke whispers again, then exhales and looks to his own breath as if to assure himself that he truly is alive. “We should go back.”
Harry’s mouth twitches and his head slightly turns to the side to hear. He is a stern man of twenty-seven years and few words. I should know, he has been my mentor ever since my last mentor, Tommy Tuohey was murdered.
Though Harry has the countenance of etched stone, I know that his curiosity is piqued. He should not be here, Harry shouldn’t. Of all places Harry should be, the Meehan brownstone while Dinny is incarcerated is the very last. If I know this, Harry certainly knows that his presence here and now means he will assuredly endure Dinny Meehan’s swift consequences. If ever Dinny is released, that is.
Between Dinny and Harry there is a mystery. No one will tell me the real story. And I’ve asked. Though I have heard tell of something bad that Harry did in the year 1913. That was when Dinny was last manacled by Detective Brosnan in the streets and jailed, until recently.
Although he is here to help
the Meehans in their time of need, somewhere else in Harry’s mind there is a curiosity long buried in him. I can see it in his eyes. In coming here for the first time since his treachery, while again Dinny Meehan is jailed, Harry Reynolds has dared step out of his years-long servitude.
A cool, gentle wind gathers and softly sucks a lace curtain out of the broken window in the Meehan brownstone on the third floor.
“We should go back,” Burke whispers again. “No one’s been around here. Anybody wit’ a mothball o’ sense could see that if we leave, everyone’ll be better off.”
Harry’s eyes narrow without regarding Burke’s pleas. I believe he senses something too. Though he is not quite able make out what it is. Normally the chaos of the waterfront rings in our ears. Even from this distance between Nevins and Bond streets. But now the quiet reigns. It’s as if we had fallen asleep during a cacophony of sound and suddenly awakened because it stops.
The Meehan room upstairs is empty. Sadie is safe in hiding now. Before the storm, with Dinny in jail and his enemies harassing her, Sadie and their son L’il Dinny were forced to run. They came to me on Eighth Avenue for help. And when their wide, hopeful eyes swung up to mine, I was honored they’d called on me. So I sent them to Long Island where they’d never be found. As luck would have it, they fled just in time. When the snow endlessly fell amidst the lashing wind to spring death out of winter’s biting breath, Dinny’s cousin Mickey Kane had disappeared. And Wild Bill Lovett, returned from the Great War where we were all told he’d been killed, had swept down on us in much the same way.
If Harry spoke more he would say it’s a fool’s fancy to believe in coincidence. Back in 1917 when Dinny quashed Bill’s revolt, he replaced him with Mickey as the dockboss of the highly profitable Red Hook territory. Now Bill has come with the driving snow as Mickey has gone. Rolling down in it to take Red Hook back by storm.
No, Mickey Kane is not disappeared. And this spectral stillness we sense is merely the peace before another storm, the gang war. Worse yet, since Bill took the life of Dinny’s kin, a primal, old-world call can be summoned. Dinny may in fact declare a Blood Feud now. And from there, one of them must die.
“Harry?” Burke says. “Let’s go home. Jesus on the cross, Harry. We should go before somethin’ happens.”
Harry says no word. But across the whitened street I see Boru. The old draught horse waves his long face out of Mr. Campbell’s stable door with smoke tumbling from his nostrils. The light of life appears anew in me, and like a boy again, I run.
“Liam,” Burke calls to me.
I high-knee it through the snow, holding the Frommer M.12 pistol inside my right pocket, a lead pipe stitched inside of my coat.
“There you are ol’ bhoy,” I say to Boru, who whickers at my approach.
He seems both sad and happy to see me. His eyes look away, then back into mine. They are distant and detached, yet emotional.
I wish his mouth knew how to smile, I think.
But he puffs and stamps in place, then smells the back of my hand for food and the memory of my scent with his big, dry nostrils that grab at the air.
“I knew you’d remember me,” I pet his face and run his whiskers through my palm and notice his mouth again, wise and slightly downturned.
“I love you Boru,” I tell him with the whole of my heart out.
Across the street I point at the Meehan brownstone and ask him, “What have you seen, bhoy? Tell me what you’ve seen. Has anybody come by Dinny and Sadie’s room lately? Yeah?”
A man’s voice reverberates off the buildings, “Nobody’s been over there in the last few days. Not since the storm.”
I search above for the voice, but Harry comes up from behind me with Burke and has already spotted Mr. Campbell who peers down from a window adjacent the steeple of the stable house. He has a blanket over his head like an old monk.
“Dinny can’t help us no more, can he?” Mr. Campbell asks, but we don’t answer him on that.
Mr. Campbell then looks down to Boru, “The horse. I’ve had to spread his feed out over the last few weeks. Help a man feed his horse? Can yaz? Maybe a few dollars for myself? There’s no food here an’ the coal shortage has kept the pot-belly stove barren an’ the fireplace dark. It’s colder than Trevelyan’s heart in here.”
Two more heads pop out of windows above when they hear Mr. Campbell, and even more across the street. As Boru rests his long face on my shoulder, I wrap my arm back round his ears and kiss close to one of his faraway eyes.
“You hungry?” I ask him. “You are, aren’t you?”
Harry digs into his wallet. He takes out a few bills, reaches over the half-open stable door and slips them into Boru’s headstall. Mr. Campbell quickly ducks under the window and disappears. The sound of descending footsteps ring through the wood-framed tenement until he reappears at Boru’s flank.
He steps into the breaking light and says, “We’re goin’ hungry. Dinny’s been gone awhile now. He gettin’ out o’ what? There’s rumors that—”
The words freeze in Mr. Campbell’s throat when he sees what Harry has spotted.
Across the way, toward the corner of Bond and Warren streets three men stand and glare at us. One holds a gas can. For a moment we stare at each other, the three of them and the three of us as Mr. Campbell slips away. The silence is only broken by the rhythmic nickers deep in Boru’s throat.
The man who holds the gas can is a giant with thinning hair, thick shoulders and a broad forehead. The one next to him has a face so disfigured that it seems to have been torn in two and sewn back together. When I catch the eyes of that one, a shutter runs up through my spine.
I know those eyes, I realize.
Even from across the street and through the inflamed and festering scar, I recognize him. On the night of the explosions on Black Tom’s Island those eyes appeared out of some dark, wretched hole. An assassin with a knife and Dinny Meehan in his sights. He had failed, like all those who’ve tried to kill Dinny. But the disconnect in those brutal eyes had reminded of something deep and terrible inside myself.
“Who are they?” Burke’s words break the cool silence. “I don’ wanna kill nobody.”
I hear a click at the end of Harry’s extended arm that holds the ten-round .32 pocket pistol. From Harry’s queue I pull out the M.12 and hold it at my thigh threateningly as they stand one building away from the Meehan brownstone.
Between them and us is the stone-white snow ablaze in a bright tremor under the new sun. As if the morning sighs, a delicate breeze moves among us. When it touches my face, I hear the three men mumble amongst each other without breaking focus on us.
“Don’ do it Harry,” Burke says.
The scarred man yells toward us in a nasally voice, his eyes inert and sullen, “Eighth Avenue!”
The giant looks to his comrade and says something we cannot hear.
“Shaddup,” the scarred man mumbles at the giant, then yells back toward us. “Liam, Burke. Yay live on Eighth Avenue. When I kill Dinny Meehan an’ take—”
A gunshot rings out. I duck instinctively and Boru bucks and whines in fear. Across the street the giant and the third fellow pick up the man with the disfigured face who had taken a bullet in the shoulder. Harry wades through the snow toward them, his weapon smoking and pointed. I follow as Burke cowers by the drifts.
“Ya can’t kill me!” The man declares. “I am Garret Barry! Yaz cannot kill the destined one. I am your leader! Garret Barry! Garret Barry!”
The giant takes Barry over his shoulder, drops the gas can and quickly strides through the snow back from where they had come up Bond Street. The third man takes cover and follows in a crouch until all three disappear round the corner.
“They’re gone,” Burke concludes quickly.
“Stay behind,” Harry rounds the corner onto Bond Street with his pistol lowered until he lands in a squatting position with his back against the side of a stairwell. “C’mon Liam.”
“They must be Bil
l Lovett’s,” Burke says.
“I know the big man,” I say, as Harry looks at me. “I met him once. At the New York Dock Company when I went there with Dinny. He was in Wolcott’s office. I remember the man because he’s so big. A Polish fellow, is he.”
Harry nods and looks round the corner again, “Wisniewski’s his name. Amadeusz Wisniewski. Garry fookin’ Barry’s the one who caught the bullet and the last guy’s James Cleary, Barry’s lone crony.”
“I thought Garry Barry was dead,” Burke pulls down nervously with both hands behind his head like a petulant child not wanting to hear any more words. “He was dead, right? The Swede an’ Big Dick Morissey killt him wit’ Dance Gillen, from what was said, at least. That’s what I heard.”
“I heard that too, but he don’ seem dead,” Harry says.
“Jesus on the cross,” Burke sits in the snow behind the stairwell, mouth open. “He knows where my fam’ly lives. He called it out to us. Liam? He knows where we live. He called it out to threaten us. To threaten your mother an’ sisters an’ my fam’ly. Eighth Avenue, he said. Ya heard him.”
“I heard him,” I say.
“He’s going there now,” Burke stands up.
“Get down,” Harry grits his teeth and pulls him by a sleeve. “He’s not gonna go there now.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know,” Harry stares at him, then peeks over the stoops to make sure they’ve gone.
Divide the Dawn- Fight Page 3
