Free Light of the Diddicoy by Eamon Loingsigh Page A

say, but to see me.
    â€œYou ever worked with iron?” I asked.
    â€œNo . . . my father worked in a soap factory in Manhatt’n, off Washington Street. He was from Ireland. Uncle was a gang leader. Ruffians, back in them days.”
    I didn’t know how to answer that, but managed to ask him what year his father came over.
    â€œ1847, when he was a babe.”
    Without answering I look at him again and put it together in my mind all those stories I heard of how bad a year it was in Ireland, 1847.
    â€œYour father works with horses?” he asked.
    â€œSome, he does a lot of things. Sells peat too. Mends thatch, carpentry.”
    â€œYou Joe Garrity’s nephew?”
    â€œI am.”
    Looking at Maher, “He tells me ya still fourteen.”
    I nod.
    Over the next two hours some four or five hundred men, women, and children wait their turn to give respect to the dead. Snaking up the stairwell, they keep as quiet as they can while the neighbors downstairs and next door stand in their doorways smoking, watching. A woman with a great scar on one side of her face appears with many children and strides out from the line to shake Dinny’s hand. Mary Lonergan then grabs hold of the mother of the dead, and with a great and awkward bawling, wails for her. Mother McGowan is patient, though I can feel that Mrs. Lonergan is seen as the lowest of the neighborhood mothers. Still in line are her children, some fifteen of them in line along the wall sniffling and digging in their dirty noses. The five at the end though are teen boys from the neighborhood led by their limp-legged leader, the eldest Lonergan. The shortest is Petey Behan of the Flatbush orphanage who still wears my coat.
    A large man who walked quickly passed everyone in the stairwell elbows in through the kitchen with his bowler cap in hand and a fitted, gentleman’s suit over his paunchy midsection. I couldn’t have known who he was, but later I would. He was Mr. McCooey from the Madison Club who handed out favors for Democratic votes at the Elks Club down in Prospect Heights where all the Democratic backslappers entertain themselves with violin players and operatic arias and such. He gave respects to Mother McGowan and the widow, shook Dinny’s hand without planting his feet, and quickly made his way back from where he’d come. The boys in the gang called their like “Lace Curtains.” While they called the gangs on the docks “Famine Irish.” And looking back over at the Lonergan clan, I could see why.
    After McCooey is gone, a beautiful woman in a plain dress and a small boy on her hip exits the line after crossing herself over the dead man. She drops her shawl behind her head and comes to Dinny Meehan’s side with a kiss on his cheek, then looks upon myself with warmness. He whispers to her from above and she smiles at me while the boy stares in silence, then crawls up her shoulder in a sudden fit of discomfort.
    When the crowd has gone entirely, an unlabeled whiskey bottle has somehow made its way onto the top of the coffin and is passed from mouth to mouth. A story about the dead man was at first muttered, then turned to a round of laughs. The dockers become animated and John Gibney’s face turns red while Big Dick Morissey flicks him in the back of the head.
    â€œYa lucky ya dead, you,” Gibney points down into the dead man’s face. “’Cause I was gonna get even wit’ ya when ya got outter the Sing Sing, ya fookin’ arsehole.”
    The mother laughs at Gibney, then cries again. I see Maher talking to the youngest sister of the dead man as she sits on the arm of the sofa. She looks up at him, nervously enjoying his attention, and notices how honorable the wife of Dinny Meehan is treated. And the widow still stares out through the window while the gnome child taps on her knees.
    Dinny nods, then points to the coffin with his lips to a few of the guys after The Swede came