Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

“Ya think they’re dead, but then they show up,” Burke mumbles to himself, then peers up to Harry. “These guys, they work wit’ Lovett now?”

  “Nah.”

  “Well who are they wit’ if they ain’t wit’ us or Lovett?”

  Harry looks away distressed in hopes Burke will end his blathering.

  Half-tilted in the snow by the sprays of Barry’s blood, a gas can comes into focus.

  “Were. . . Were they here to burn down the Meehan home?”

  “Seems that way,” I say.

  “But, I don’ understand,” Burke squats again with his back to the stairwell. “If they don’ work for Lovett, what are they doin’? What does it mean?”

  “It’s not supposed to mean anythin’, it’s just supposed to be what it is,” Harry says.

  “This is gettin’ to me,” Burke shakes his hands and scratches at his neck with nails. “Maybe Mickey Kane will come back? Maybe?”

  “Burke,” I growl, but I don’t know what to say next other than, “You’re getting on my wick. Mickey’s dead, alright?”

  “So was Bill,” Burke pleads. “So was Garry fookin’ Barry.”

  Harry leans down and grabs Burke by the neck with his left hand, “I’m tellin’ ya to shaddup right fookin’ now. Don’ talk no more. Ya never saw Lovett dead. Or Barry. So ya don’ know if they ever really were dead, got it?”

  Harry let’s him drop, but Burke looks into the distance and whispers to himself, “I never saw Mickey dead either.” Then to me he speaks, “I’m not in it for this, Liam. I just wanna work. I got fam’ly, I don’ need this shit. I gotta son wit’ the palsy an’ I’m out here doin’ this shit wit’ guns? Ya know what happens if I die? They’ll separate my wife from the kids an’ put them all in the poorhouse. That’s what they do when people can’t pay rent an’ go homeless. I didn’t want any o’ this. I don’t wanna die. I can’t die.”

  “Dinny will be there to help you and your family,” I say.

  “Dinny’s in jail,” Burke implores.

  “I’ll be there for them then. If you die, I’ll adopt your son Joseph and take care of him. I’ll take care of all the kids, I’ll be eighteen soon.”

  Burke gives a fearful smile in my direction then looks to Harry, “For months I came for the shape-up at the Atlantic Terminal an’ ya never once chose me.”

  “Ya’re too small an’ scrawny. Ya’re a fookin’ sniper’s nightmare,” Harry says. “We didn’t know ya then. . . an’ ya had scared eyes.”

  “It wasn’t until I got lucky and Liam moved upstairs that I could get regular work.”

  “We brought ya in because we wanted to help ya fam’ly an’ ya son Joseph ’cause we knew no one else would,” Harry says. “When ya accepted work wit’ us, ya knew that it meant bein’ a soldier, not just a laborer. Now the time has come to defend our hold an’ ya say ya never got into it for this?” Harry shakes his head. “Why’s it always the desperate that turns into the coward?”

  “I’m scared o’ everyone,” Burke looks at Harry with big eyes. “I’m scared o’ everyone.”

  Harry drags Burke by the back of his coat toward Warren Street, “I told ya to stop talkin’. I don’ want ya to go home wit’ a broken face, but I’ll do it if ya keep talkin’.”

  “Hitting him isn’t going to make things better,” I yell at Harry.

  Harry quickly turns to me, “Either is gratifyin’ his fears. We need to be ready. Do ya understand what’s happened? Do ya? Mickey was the future for us. Bill knew that.”

  “I know,” I say defensively.

  “Now this?” Harry broods and points toward Bond Street in the direction where Garry Barry and the others had disappeared.

  Burke and I don’t have an answer for him.

  In response, he gathers himself, stands upright and pockets the pistol. As a matter of duty, he pushes through the snow and stands in the middle of Warren Street. He then raises his handsome face and yells into the watching windows, “All o’ ya that saw what happened here this morning, remember who we are,” the voice echoes off the tenements in a mournful, yet confident resonance. “We are the White Hand. The hand what feeds yaz. If the tunics come here askin’ questions about what happened, do not bite us. Ya give them silence, but if they ask who was here an’ why there is blood, ya tell them it was Patrick Kelly did this. We’re all Patrick Kelly, remember it. . . Clouts for touts, the old way.”

  Out his window Mr. Campbell nods in harmony with Harry’s words, knowing very well our codes and that the name Patrick Kelly stands for all of us, and none of us. The only name anyone in Irishtown ever gives the police.

  Harry then pushes toward the Meehan brownstone and leaves Burke by the abandoned gas can in the snow.

  Above I look closely at the broken window in the Meehan brownstone. The reason we came here in the first place.

  “Come on,” I say to Burke, who sits dumbly in the snow.

  I make him stand-watch at the bottom of the stairwell inside the brownstone where it is warmer, but I don’t dare give him the M.12.

  “Just yell if you see anybody,” I tell him over a shoulder as I walk up to the third floor in the darkness with Harry. We leave him on the third step as he stares into the window light amidst the shimmer of dust, slump-shouldered.

  I had climbed these stairs many times while living with the Meehans, but never had I walked up them with Harry Reynolds. Oddly, he too had lived with them here once. Years before I had, the first of the three orphans Dinny and Sadie took in, raised and trained to become loyal gang members. I was the last, the homeless immigrant whose name was changed at Ellis Island from Garrihy to Garrity. Now we walk up them together as if brothers.

  I still have the key and when the door swings open a flood of memories rush through me. Everything in the room seems shrunken, though it’s me who has gotten bigger. My boots clop on the wood floor and the round carpet. The same round carpet where L’il Dinny looked up at me for the first time on Christmas Eve, 1915. He was only two years old then.

  Inside, the fireplace is empty and hanging within it is the pot where Sadie used to make her soups that warmed me and brought me back from a great hunger and weeks of homelessness after my uncle Joseph put me out to the street in a drunken rage. I peer into the kitchen where Sadie cut my hair just days after I was beaten by Petey Behan, my nose all lamped up and the scar that slices through my left eyebrow to this very day was red and gleaming and open under her care.

  Dear Sadie, the mother who nourished me in my own mother’s absence. I hope you’re alright out there. I hope you’re safe.

  I miss her so much, but I’m happy I can help by cleaning her home while she’s out.

  She’s not out, she’s in hiding, a voice in my head corrects.

  Harry stands by the door to the Meehan bedroom and reaches into his coat for his pistol, gravely aware to any sounds inside. He holds it in his hand, a gentle finger caresses the trigger while he lays an ear to the door, then opens it. But there is no one inside. Afterward we signal to each other in the cold quiet when all rooms are cleared.

  In the kitchen a large rock had found its way under the small dining table where once Sadie and L’il Dinny sang me the American Happy Birthday song. The rock had traveled through the front window that faces Warren Street. Thrown by Sadie’s own cousin, the shadowy Darby Leighton and the evil Anna Lonergan. It was they who had berated Sadie from below for hours while Dinny languished in jail. Afraid, Sadie picked up the child and left with only what she could carry and came to me.

  Glass litters the floor by the open window, fresh snow has settled on the ledge and the curtain is slowly being drawn out by a gentle wind.

  A pigeon gargles a throaty cooing sound from within the room. It had brought in a loose collection of sticks and brambles and made a nest on a table in the corner where a candleholder had once resided, but now lay sideways on the floor. The belly-weighted bird flaps all of a sudden and smartly flies across the room and directly through the broken window as if it had don
e so many times. With it gone, I wet a rag in the sink and rub out the droppings from the floor and the table.

  Harry watches until he turns back round to measure the window. Although his face is deadpan and distant, I know that he is a true friend because of all the things he has taught me, and the many hours he spent helping me renovate the room on Eighth Avenue before my mother and sisters arrived from Ireland. But his concern worries me. Harry Reynolds does not suffer anything without good reason.

  My breath mists due to the cold air of the room as I look down at the circle of sticks. With one quick swipe, the nest crumbles apart and breaks the silence in the room with the clangor of hollow, metallic sounds when they land in the bottom of the garbage can.

  Sadie had left in such a hurry that the table still has plates of food on it and there are dishes in the sink. So I clean it all up. Afterward I walk into the room that L’il Dinny and I once shared. My old bed is smaller than I remember it. And L’il Dinny had outgrown the crib, but still it sits in the room as if awaiting a new baby. Dinny and Sadie had always wanted a large family, but no more children came for them. I change the sheets on the crib and make sure there are no creases and that the pillow is fluffed and ready as if doing so might help bring a new child to the Meehan home.

  At least their home will be clean when they come back, I smile, proud of my work.

  Harry walks in and looks at the crib. In the doorway his face hardens as he stares at the floppy animal toy in the corner. He then lowers his dark eyes under hard brows.

  “It’s been a long time since you were here. In this place, right?” I say, half-joking, half-prodding.

  “Six years,” he answers.

  “Longer than I’ve even been in New York,” I feign innocence. “Why don’t you, um, why don’t you ever come back here?”

  He pivots away and walks toward the parlor, “We better be goin’.”

  “I can tell Dinny that it was just me and Burke that came here,” I say, following him.

  Harry disparages me with a glance, “Ya know as well as I never to lie to the man.”

  I nod admittedly, then ask more questions since he is talking now, “Dinny and The Swede and Vincent. . . they’re not getting out anytime soon are they?”

  When he doesn’t respond, I turn and place my palms on the sill, as Sadie used to, and stare across the street at Boru and speak my mind whether Harry answers or not, “The Dock Loaders’ Club and Irishtown and the terminals and all the territories and the hundreds of families that depend on us. . . We’re going to lose it all. We’ve never been this vulnerable. Bill and his men down in Red Hook, they’ll see opportunity and attack us. We’ll have to fight them without Dinny, and without his enforcers. It’s all right though; I’m ready to fight. Tommy Tuohey taught me how to brawl like a Pavee gypsy after Petey beat me up, so I’ll be ready. But I’ll have to give this gun to someone else,” I turn round and drop it on the table. “I won’t kill anyone, Harry. I made a vow never to kill again after,” I swallow hard at the memory. “After what I did to my uncle Joseph. And I mean to keep it. I do.”

  But to speak with Harry is like throwing a rock into the swirl of a current; he takes it in, but gives nothing back. He opens the front door for me to walk through and looks back into the Meehan room. He won’t admit it, but I know that he has fond memories of the place as I do. But what those memories are, and what he had done to deserve Dinny’s disdain churns in the depths of him, never to be salvaged.

  We come out the front of the brownstone with Burke and look toward Bond Street again, then to Nevins. Our tracks lead to Boru through the thigh-high snow, then to where Garry Barry, Wisniewski and Cleary ran from us. The bloody trail puddles in some of the foot spoors.

  With troubled eyes, Burke shies away from my gaze.

  “No one will ever take your family away,” I assure him. “I won’t let them.”

  He gives an unbelieving smile, “Ya told me once that maybe our ancestors are always wit’ us, Liam. Informin’ us. Watchin’ us. But maybe ya’re wrong. Maybe it’s our offspring. Maybe our children and their children an’ beyond who will one day be able to peer into the past. To see us. Maybe they’re watching us now,” he raises his eyes past the tenements and up to the blue of sky, then back at me. “Don’ ya think that’s more likely?”

  “I hope not,” I say.

  At Harry’s approach, Burke lowers his eyes and shuffles from his way.

  “Wolcott,” says I to Harry. “If Garry Barry is with Wisniewski, it means he reports to Wolcott, the president of the Waterfront Assembly. Why would Wolcott reach out to the lowliest, wretched piece of trash like Garry fucking Barry? How would they have even come to work together?”

  “Same way we came to make a deal wit’ the International longshoreman’s Association and the I-Talian Black Hand, I s’pose,” Harry says. “Everyone’s choosin’ a side an’ wit’ Dinny locked up an’ less shippin’ contracts now that the war’s over, Irishtown’s up for grabs.”

  “We have Irishtown,” I say proudly. “Dinny, The Swede and Vincent will get out soon. We just have to hold on until then.”

  “Hold on, eh?” Harry looks at me with those taciturn eyes. “We once had Brosnan an’ the police at the Poplar Street Station in our service, now that’s Wolcott’s too. How long do ya think we can hold on wit’ both Wolcott an’ Lovett comin’ after us?”

  “We have to get in touch with Thos Carmody of the ILA and Sixto Stabile of the Black Hand,” I say. “We have to call on our allies. Now is the time.”

  “They’re all comin’ for us. All o’ them,” Harry leans close and finds my eyes. “I wouldn’t count our allies loyal either. The ILA is like all the unions; just tryin’ to hang on, an’ everyone knows I-Talians keep their enemies closest to them, right? Listen to me, ya have to leave Brooklyn. Liam, are ya listenin’? Because all o’ this what’s happenin’? It’s all goin’ in a straight line and it’s real easy to see where it’s gonna land, if ya’re lookin’. Are ya lookin’ Liam? Because ya need to look wit’ ya own eyes now. Not through mine, see?”

  “I know, I know, I can feel it too,” I say. “I can feel it in the air, I truly can. But it’s not so easy to just pick up my family and leave when—”

  Harry shakes his head, “Ya have to leave here, don’ be stupit. We’re all in danger. Everythin’s changin’, but we’re not. This ain’t a matter o’ fixin’ broken windows, Liam. Ya could get hurt. Ya could die. We can’t afford to take care o’ everybody like we used to, an’ right now all the people we care for in Irishtown need more help than ever before. Best thing is for yaz to leave.”

  “But Dinny helped me when I needed help,” I say. “So did yourself, Harry. And I’m no poltroon—”

  “What are ya then?”

  “I—”

  I don’t know, you’re supposed to tell me that, Harry.

  Harry raises his voice, “Take ya mother an’ sisters an’ leave here. T’day!”

  I look away, I have failed him somehow. He doesn’t trust that I can help in the coming wars. He doesn’t think I’m ready.

  “But Dinny wants me to stay,” I cross that imagined line between he and Dinny.

  Harry’s head seesaws slowly up and down while he stares into my eyes, regarding me with a willingness to listen.

  “My mother and sisters wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him and everyone else in the gang. I’m staying. We are staying. I will honor those who helped my family. I will. And you can’t stop me.”

  “It's not just that. There are things—” He looks for my eyes. “Things ya don’ understand. Things none o’ us understand.”

  “Like what?”

  But Harry has turned and walks with his back to me. Walks through the snow toward the rising sun at the east-end of Warren Street. And in the breaking light I can see a shape in the sky that reveals itself slowly. I blink to make sure I see it right. It is not the sun, but a morning moon that had been there all along without notice.

  I am Co
me

  The stoicism in Darby Leighton’s eyes betray the curiosity above as he stands in the hip-deep snow amidst a slew of some fifty onlookers at Red Hook’s North Terminal.

  Up there, Bill Lovett’s body is kept amidst a snow bank on a bench along the railing of an overlook roof of the pierhouse. His arms and feet are crossed. His lips are a cyanotic, plum-blue. Next to him, an old torch that has hung unused for many years on the upper pierhouse wall is upside down, unused and weatherworn.

  “Is he alive?” A man in his fifties with a droopy face whispers close to Darby’s good ear.

  Many had shown early to see if it was true, only to be left wondering how a man can sleep in fifteen-degree weather, while on the bench Bill Lovett reposed like a winter king. Rumor had spread quickly north from the windy Irish shacks along the terminals and up to Brooklyn Heights, eventually reaching Irishtown, that Wild Bill’d come back when Mickey Kane disappeared.

  Among the onlookers Darby watches as Bill’s men mumble to each other. They are dressed in strange pelts over military uniforms.

  “Wake him up ya’self,” Non Connors says to the one-armed Joseph Flynn and flicks a cigarette over the railing.

  Flynn looks down to a slew of men where Darby Leighton looks back up to him. Flynn then walks over to Bill, “Can’t sleep all day soldier, sun’s up.”

  Darby and the others shuffle to the stairwell like slack-jawed sightseers while neglected dogs weave through them. A shit brown hound rubs its mangy coat against Darby’s leg and sniffs his fingertips for food. Darby pulls his hand away and rubs the cold off of it against his trouser-leg, then looks round his old haunts.

  When Mickey Kane was dockboss here in Red Hook, only true Whitehanders were chosen for work when ships arrived. And so the castoffs, who have gathered here today, whispered about the old days when Wild Bill Lovett was boss in this territory. When the rumors of Bill’s reappearance came to them it could scarcely be believed. It was as if they had summoned him from the dead by their hopes.

  Darby’s windburnt face tilts when he overhears the mumble of men. He then searches round him for their moving lips. Deaf in one ear, it is difficult to put the words together in his mind without seeing their mouths move and their facial expressions.