LIGHT
OF THE
DIDDICOY
A NOVEL BY
EAMON LOINGSIGH
THREE ROOMS PRESS
NEW YORK
Light of the Diddicoy a novel by Eamon Loingsigh
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First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-941110-00-3
Copyright © 2014 by Eamon Loingsigh
Cover and interior design:
KG Design International
Three Rooms Press
New York, NY
The tribe of auguries,These vehement unkempt visionaries . . .The men stride upon dirt paths, their glinting weapons sided,Guard well the motley chariots wherein their kin do dwellAnd stare long upon the harrowed horizon far off in HellAt brood on the gloomy regret childish hope once confided.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
I am come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow;Who have no treasure but hope,No riches laid up but a memory of an ancient gloryMy mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my mother was born,I am of the blood of the serfs.
—PADRAIG PEARSE
It seems to me that we can never have a complete settlement of world conditions until the Anglo-Saxon begins to realize that he is not of a superior race but that all races are equal.
—EDWARD J. FLYNN, Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt
I cannot forgetThat old home I leftIn that town of great renown,I long to go backTo that old-fashioned shackIn dear old Irish Town.
—ALDERMAN PATRICK LARNEY, Brooklyn Eagle, 12/22/1940
FOR MARY REGINA LYNCH, NÉE
SULLIVAN/GRAMMA
1917–2012
Contents
Chapter 1: Glasnevin Rebelpoets
Chapter 5: The Shapeup and The Starker
Chapter 7: Upstairs, Under the Bridge
Chapter 15: The Village & the Rising
Chapter 16: A Tug and an Envelope
Chapter 21: Donnybrook in Red Hook
CHAPTER 1
Glasnevin Rebelpoets
DOWN UNDER THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE OVERPASS there once roamed a gang I fell in with. A long time ago it was, when I was young and running. It’s all I had, this life. Just as yours is yours. Don’t let yourself think mine is anything different, anything better. I won’t have it that way. It was just a life, and there you have it. But like so many born on the isle of Ireland, I am to die far from home. Though such a grief has since let me alone, as bitterness only cuts into the bone, I’m at ease with it in my age. But to go ’way with all these memories, well, I rush them out here for you to breathe them in. To read with your senses as I lay here in the brood of the night, broad awake to recite my beads, not so dutifully. Because when dying it’s no longer duty, it’s prayer. So here I am to send a story you true and fair. About blood. And honor. About the code of men, and about empathy too.
This story will both begin and end on a ship as any good run or reel should, but we’ll start you here for good measuring.
Cobh wasn’t called Cobh when I left it. Queenstown, and a great Atlantic crosser allowed myself and far too many others aboard in the swirling mist. Among the high masts two giant round silos breathed into the air above, black exhaust due from the belly of the iron woman’s coal-fired furnaces within. Her long reach a mile wide in black and red faded paint as she sat three-quarters full already from her port in Liverpool on stop to pick up itinerant thirds in the country that made her back in ‘89. Six-inch black iron gun heads reached from what was once a leisurely deck for more distinguished passengers of another era, ghosts now. The Great War changing and altering all of life as we know it. And just above the rusted anchorhold in sea-weathered letters, a degraded font from that bygone time, RMS Teutonic.
Not a day for celebrants, it is the offing of the peasant ceremonial here. Lacking pomp and cheer, instead the heavy request of need and necessity fills their eyes. The hunger of orphans and their low caste beheld in their beams, bony travelers huddling for lands of hope and honey. Desperate for their utopia somewhere far off, they are. A utopia dreamed up by the imaginations of the falling and those without promise. As was true to the time it was the motley beaten Celts, pushed to the western