Divide the Dawn- Fight

by Eamon Loingsigh

  “Ye was born under a wanin’ gibbous,” Aunt Rose had told him through brown teeth and whiskey breath. “Ye will be a healer. Maybe a spiritual healer or even a teacher. Ye may cure ignorance or heal the soul, but yer message will not always be well-taken, nay, t’will oft-times be too difficult fer yer students to hear the words an’ the visions.”

  Darby believed her then, though he could not see the evidence over the course of the next twenty-odd years of his life.

  A teacher? I don’t know who I am now. And at this moment I cannot even feel my body from the cold or hear my own footsteps from being half-deaf.

  He kept fond memories of his Aunt Rose, who travelled with him from London. His own mother, he never knew. But Aunt Rose had shown him kindness, humored his innocence and spoke with him at length as no other grownup had ever done. He even remembers crying to her once as she held him at her soft bosom. Though all that was before she abandoned him and Pickles to the Brooklyn streets when he was but five years old.

  In the sky the morning moon stares back at him.

  Who am I? Why am I here? Please tell me. Bill needs to know. He needs to know what I know in order to win. I must teach him, even if he refuses to heed me. Is that why I am here? Should I kill to become his Fifth Lieutenant?

  “Kill, kill!” the men sing, but the lyrics catch in Darby’s throat when he tries to join the melody. The staccato chant reminds him of stabbing motions. And it reminds him of Pickles, of course, his psychopathic brother. “Kill, kill, kill!”

  Up ahead the last turn comes into view.

  We’re almost there.

  Anxiety creeps over Darby’s skin. The thought of blood and death shoots another pulsing surge of dread, startling him.

  In truth, I should be with Colleen Rose, Darby wipes his cold nose with a sleeve.

  He had told his fiancé Ligeia that he was going out to celebrate the birth of their daughter with his older brother Frank. But that was many hours ago. And Ligeia feared being left alone. She had travelled by her lonesome at sea from Southern Italy, stopping at strange ports with strange languages. And at the end of seven grueling months, the ship at last fell into the New York Harbor.

  But loneliness hung over her like a dark cloud from the day she was born. In telling her story to Darby, Ligeia spoke in absolutes and with hand gestures that eloquently accented her points as when she declared her berth at Ellis Island here in New York the very first day of her life. Her new life. The horrors before that, in Italy, she could only hope to forget. Here in America, Ligeia is a pretty face among many pretty faces. But in Italy she was an ugly family secret, exposed, hounded and forced away.

  And now, after giving birth, she rests at Long Island College Hospital with no one by her side. Unmarried and with broken English.

  I should be with her, Darby shakes his head. But I will make us a steady income first. Then I will be there for her and our little Colleen Rose. I must provide, as a father should. But if it were to be found out that Ligeia is Italian, Darby hears his teeth clack together. No, please not that.

  “Ginzo hunt!” The bantam Petey Behan calls out. “Beautyful mornin’ for a ginzo hunt!”

  Darby’s stomach churns as he side-eyes Abe Harms.

  “Here t’day, gone tomato!” Flynn quarks in laughter. “Hey Frankie, when was the last time ya killt a I-talian?”

  “It was only a dago,” Frankie Byrne answers with a half-smile.

  At Coffey Street Bill is at the head of the van and is the first to cut to the right at building’s edge. His lieutenants and the rest round it in a wide tide of men with waves of snow crashing at their thighs.

  “Terror,” Abe touches Darby’s arm and smiles. “It was the Conquest of Gaul when Julius Zaesar zaid that it is dread of the unknown that inspires terror. And all this time the White Hand thought we were coming for them today. . . But it is zurprise that will win us back Red Hook instead.”

  Up ahead a small outpost of less than twenty Italian longshoremen are huddled and linger by an engineless barge on the water. Caught unawares, they lazily turn when they hear the chants a block away. But when it is realized that the men are coming for them, a few bow up their chests and grab for broken gear shifters and long shards of glass.

  Until one of them yells, “Pulcinella!”

  And with that word they scatter and break apart, but can go nowhere but north.

  “Guinea-negroes on the run!” Connors yells and sprints ahead.

  The fastest of Bill’s men split off in a sprint and close in on them, supported by yellow, shit-brown and black dogs twirling tails high and yawping chattily at the Italians. Connors leads this group as Bill takes a cache of men to cut off the south. Flynn takes the lead of the largest band to assault the belly of the enemy and push all the way back to water’s edge to cut the enemy in two. Darby does not share the happy savagery the lieutenants, Trench Rabbits, Lonergan Crew and howling hounds enjoy. He follows Flynn up the middle and haplessly swings his broom handle ahead of him, hitting nothing but air. He even feigns a swing at a man he has no intention of hurting. Darby realizes that the little mole takes note of him again. Abe then presses on and joins an assault to take down and subdue the lone rowdy Italian man with enough dignity to go down swinging. Though the round, olive-skinned man is beaten like all the rest by Bill’s boys, he is not so badly bloodied for the sake of respect. When the man is fully restrained Abe kicks him in the ribs and glares at Darby.

  Where Coffey and Van Dyke streets end on the water, a small inlet opens at the elbow of Red Hook. There, a pier slices through the middle of it out beyond the bulkhead. When Flynn’s assault force reaches water’s edge overlooking the inlet, the Italians are rounded, bound and forced to the ground. From the south Bill’s men drag more through the snow. All prisoners then have their ankles strung to their wrists behind their backs and forced to sit along the coping of the bulkhead on their knees. Minutes later the baying of hounds intensifies until Connors and his group appear with more bound and bloodied prisoners and sat next to the rest. There the prisoners’ feet hang off the edge of the bulkhead and behind, the water churns and bulbs up to wet them. Fearful, they look back over their shoulders with foreboding.

  A frightened mutter comes to Darby’s ear from a prisoner, “Pulcinella il morto.”

  On their knees the whole lot of them peer in fear at Bill with his dark gun-powder eyes, cherub ears and sheep’s carcass over an Army uniform. With the murderous Lovett ahead, the channel churns behind hungrily, eager to swallow the prisoners whole.

  “Pulcinella il morto è tornato” Darby hears.

  “Stop sayin’ that,” Connors pushes a man over the seawall and holds him there by the thread of his coat. “I hear that word one more time an’ I’ll let ya go.”

  The man screams as the current reaches up to his hips, the rest of them stare with round, pale faces until Connors and Byrne pull him back up to his knees.

  Flynn and Lonergan have unfastened the small engineless barge from the bollards and tossed the mooring lines into the channel and wave it off, “Go to the North Terminal o’ Red Hook, or fuck off somewhere else,” Flynn cackles in laughter. “Yaz came to the wrong terminal. As o’ t’day, the Black Hand’s gone from all o’ Red Hook. This is

  Irish White Hand again.”

  “Do you speak for both the Black Hand an’ the White?” A sailor cups his hands and yells across the bow.

  “Nah, Wild Bill Lovett,” Flynn answers. “The true leader o’ the White Hand.”

  The sailor stares back with a confused look as the current pulls his barge out to the choppy harbor with nothing to power them.

  Inland, Bill follows the footpaths through the snow from the dock to the street where the Italian longshoremen were loading automobile trucks. Five teamsters watch as Bill tracks the footprints closely and raises his eyes up to them. The teamsters scatter and jump into their trucks and turn over the engines in haste.

  “Ya want I should stop them?” Frankie Byrne asks Bill.
“We could sell the goods in local stores for half price.”

  “We ain’t river pirates,” Connors sneers.

  “Go get me one o’ them trucks,” Bill cuts in. “An empty one. An’ make the driver wait here, but don’ beat him so bad he can’t drive, uhright?”

  Bill turns back and walks toward the dark-haired prisoners as five of his men rush past him to stop one of the teamsters.

  Bill walks past Darby and the toothy smiles of the Shit Hounds and points at the men along the seawall, “Who among yaz speaks English?”

  Fret-faced Italians look at each other, then back to Bill. One of them outright cries and sniffles and pleas with strange sounding words. Even as Darby’s wife-to-be speaks the same language as these men, he does not know their words. It is Ligeia who has spent day and night learning English instead.

  “Bring that one here, the crier,” Bill points to the ground in front of him for the crier to be laid.

  Connors and Byrne pick the man up by the upper arms and pull him through the snow, his knees drag behind. They turn him round to face his countrymen so they can see his tears and fear.

  “Darby?” Bill looks round him.

  Darby’s stomach turns as he comes forward.

  “The fuck ya got in ya hand, a dustbroom?”

  Darby shows him, “Broom handle.”

  “Dustbroom Darby,” Bill deems him with a crack of a smile on his blue lips. But Bill’s snickering stirs a sodden cough in his chest that outlasts the chuckles his jape inspires. He bends and gags three, four times until he culls up a mouthful of red and green spittle and discharges it in front of the prisoners. After which, Bill gazes into their scared eyes as long lines of bloody slather dangle from his open mouth and swings in the gusts off the southern Buttermilk Channel.

  With a nasally, sickly chortle, Bill wipes the slaver with a single finger and whips it away while leaning on the fearful prisoner’s shoulder, “I thought I asked a question. If I don’ get a answer I’m gonna shoot a guy to show yaz how serious I am. Who the fuck among yaz has English?”

  “I could speak it,” A hogtied man says with a thick South Brooklyn accent.

  Bill comes to Darby’s good ear, soft peach fuzz brushes against his cheek, “When I point at ya, ya hit this man in the knuckles wit’ that dustbroom. Ya do what I say. Show me what ya can do an’ we’ll talk.”

  The crier’s hands are connected tightly by a rope to his ankles. Darby grips the broom handle, then loosens it.

  Can I do this?

  The crier gazes with kitten eyes at the broom handle, then turns away in sadness when he hears the voice of Pulcinella.

  “Translate this,” Bill announces while walking along the line of bound prisoners on the bulkhead. “Ya will leave here this day an’ never return. This is the territory o’ the White Hand, led by me, Bill Lovett.”

  The translator busily chatters behind Bill, “Dice che dobbiamo partire oggi e. . .”

  “Understand somethin’. Since the 1840s this territory’s been Irish,” he turns sharply when he reaches the last bound man. “Only when a weaklin’ gave it to yaz as the price o’ turnin’ me out did yaz receive this territory. The price o’ peace, so ya thought. It was a three-way deal between ya Prince o’ Pals Frankie Yale, Dinny Meehan an’ Thos Carmody o’ the ILA union. Ya may have thought the war wit’ the Irish was over when ya made that deal. I am here to tell yaz that it’s peace that’s finished. An’ the war is back!”

  Flynn smiles and scratches his chin with the barrel of his revolver. Bill turns and points at Darby as behind him the translator trails off. Darby’s teeth clack and clap in his head as he grips the broom handle. As he rears back and holds it behind him, Darby catches the prisoner’s eyes and hears the pleading tone of holy invocations in Latin. He grits his teeth to make the clatter stop and hears the call of prayer while between buildings the wind wheezes. He then lowers the broom handle and slaps at the hands softly, without so much as a peep of pain from the prisoner.

  Bill’s ears turn red in fury, “Not like that!” He charges Darby, yanks the broom handle from his grip and elbows him from his way. “Like this!”

  Bill rips the broom handle downward as if it were a war hammer until a crack echoes through the wood.

  “Ayoooo!” the prisoner yowls and flops on his side, wiggling in pain like a fish on a cast line. The shit-brown hound’s dander goes up with the excitement and bites at the Italian’s pant leg and tears rabidly back and forth.

  Flynn laughs uncontrollably, caw-caw-caw-caw, while Connors sneers with disgust at the crier.

  “That’s a good puppy,” Abe mutters.

  “The peace ya paid for has expired!” Bill proclaims, high on the pain he’s inflicted as the translator translates in an echo of foreign words. “Dinny Meehan’s in jail an’ Thos Carmody from the union? Well it just so happens that he fought in the Great War wit’ me and some o’ my men here. Fought valiantly too, an’ was injured like we was. An’ we talked about Brooklyn, me’n Thos did. What we was gonna do if we ever got back. An’ made a pact. So here it is, I declare war on ya fookin’ ginnea-wops—”

  Mid-sentence Bill looks at Darby and walks in front of him and snaps the broom handle across the crier’s knees. Irate, he hurls the handle over the other prisoners’ heads into the shaggy whitecaps that beard the choppy channel.

  “Ayoooo!” the crier screams again as the mutts growl, then snap at him until they turn on each other. Two of the animals bounce against one another’s chests and wriggle in the snow until the shit-brown hound asserts itself as the dominant while the yellow dog paws upward from the snow in supplication.

  “By the end o’ this day we will push ya people back across the Gowanus Canal. From this day on, if ya need work,” Bill points to the south. “Go to the BushbTerminal or the Grand Army Terminal, south o’ the Gowanus border. All o’ Red Hook an’ the North Brooklyn docks is Irish again!”

  Bill’s men hoot and throw their fists and weapons up.

  “But still yet,” Bill yells while men whoop and clap sticks and cudgels against the side of a building. “I don’ believe yaz understand me well enough. I don’ think yaz know what I’m sayin’.”

  Bill pulls up his sheepskin pelt to reveal a large handgun as a glint of cold sunlight flashes off the barrel across Darby’s eyes.

  “This man here wants to be my lieutenant,” The translator trails behind Bill’s English with Italian. “In my gang, death elevates a man to the heights he hopes to achieve. For only when ya own a man’s life does his soul strengthen ya.”

  Richie Lonergan and Frankie Byrne shoo the mutts that guard the crier and right him back on his knees. They hold him still as the dogs snap at him. Then they blindfold the man and stand back amidst the rest of the gang men.

  In some ceremonial change over, Bill clicks his heels and turns the .45 caliber in his hand. He holds the barrel in his palm over his forearm, and hands it over to Darby Leighton with a demeanor of officialdom.

  “This is ya day come,” Bill announces. “The day ya take the future in ya own hands. Today we will reclaim all o’ Red Hook. Tomorrow Irishtown. Many men will die when we assault the South Terminal at the Erie Basin, but one must die now. To show yaz. To make yaz understand that I am not just some Pulcinella-clown, but the man to take Brooklyn, one o’ yaz must give ya life. Yaz need to know deep in ya. Not by words, but by blood as blood feeds hearts and minds. An’ now,” Bill turns. “Darby Leighton, a new father who has shed the shadows o’ his past, wantin’ nothin’ more than to take part in the feast o’ his own future for the right to feed his family; this man will make blood an’ stand at my side as my Fifth Lieutenant an’ soon-to-be dockboss, wit’ all the attendin’ incomes an’ graft.”

  Bill steps back as Darby holds the frozen gun loosely in hand. All eyes are on him.

  This is for us Ligeia. And you Colleen Rose, Darby warrants.

  Behind the Italian he takes a stance with his right foot between the prisoner’s feet, arm extended. He
feels Bill’s eyes on him; red-rimmed and black and angry. Then raises the gun and rests it on the back of the man’s head.

  “Aspetta, cosa sta succedendo? Ho una famiglia,” the man says into the air blindly. “Ho una figlia, figlia, figlia.”

  “He says he has a daughter,” the translator speaks out from the bulkhead.

  “Ya shaddup!” Connors answers him. “Nobody told ya translate that.”

  Darby’s eyes go soft and glass over with water when the wind blows in them. His mouth nervously twitches as he licks quickly at his dry lips.

  The sly and glottal words of Abe Harms comes to Darby’s good ear, “Do it. You know how, my little friend, yez.”

  Pangs of hunger bleat at the inside of Darby’s stomach. And throughout his body rings a deep and feverish shiver. His eyes are heavy with lack of sleep and all he can think of is a warm bed with Colleen Rose between him and Ligeia. He imagines himself lift the baby when she has fallen asleep to gently place her in the crib just steps away from the glow of a soft-crackling fireplace.

  If I don’t kill this man, that day will never come. I must win work on the docks and with the coal shortage and this wretched long winter. . .

  “Figlia, figlia,” Darby winces at the man’s rhythmic pleading. His teeth chatter on as if he has no control of them while his eyes waggle back and forth yet again. Hunger has left his mouth dry and his tongue with the taste of cardboard. The .45 feels like a heavy piece of ice in his hand, burning it. He pulls back the hammer.

  “Fookin’ hell, Dustbroom Darby’s fookin’ slower than a turtle swimmin’ backward in molasses,” Flynn cackles, caw-caw.

  “Get it over wit’!” Bill yells as a mutt drops its ears in sadness upon hearing his new master’s angry voice and tucks tail through the snow.

  Twenty frozen Italians watch from the bulkhead, hogtied and half-hung over it. The translator swallows and licks his lips to speak out in English. Richie Lonergan stares at him with a peg in the snow. His father John eggs at Darby impatiently, “C’mon, c’mon.”