“It’s nothin’,” he promises, then waves his men back toward the ship. “Bring ’em over here.”
I stare as the groups of men walk in opposite directions, those heading to the docks for work, and those heading back to the saloons. The man with the gun is taken from our lot and dragged screaming. He is apparently insane, soft on the brain, or both. His fate is not for us to know or ask, however.
“Starker,” Uncle Joseph explains. “Hired by the shippin’ companies or maybe the New York Dock Company, who knows. Anodder who wants Dinny Meehan dead.”
“That’s a good thing, is it not?”
He looks at me. “They kill union guys too, anyone for the dime. Labor sluggin’ has loyalty to no one but the dime.”
I wonder if the police are to be summoned, but told that no such law exists along the waterfront. The Poplar Street station is only called upon when a body is found by those who believe in police law.
“Up the street inland, the law is there for most people,” a crony of my uncle mumbles while the starker is pulled away by his collar. “Here, no one wants to know what passes in the dark.”
We turn round, and without work my uncle and his men curse the gang again. Days go on like this and the only time I ever get work is when multiple ships arrive simultaneously and no other men are to be had. Weeks can go by without working a single day while the same groups of men are picked. Some complain that they haven’t the money to pay the gang to be among the chosen and if they did, they’d still have to pay tribute at the end of the day. This would leave them with a small take.
Too many men, not enough ships and jobs. Even in a place like the Bridge District that is highly industrialized. Still, it isn’t near enough, as more ships unload the human cargo of pilgrims and defectors and escapees of foreign and obscure hostilities every day. Spilling into the overflowing neighborhoods and exasperating an already desperate circumstance. My uncle and his men explain to me that a few years earlier, many gangs used to war with one another for the right to work. For labor work. But Dinny Meehan brought all the gangs together and since then, it is the White Hand that controls the labor racket.
When we do get picked for loading or unloading, the work is backbreaking and strains my young thin muscles to a burning never witnessed in my body. I am often overcome with the need to drop my carry under the great strain in my shoulders and neck. Winded too, as we are made to run, and the sweat underneath my shirt freezes when it’s cold enough. One time Gibney the Lark kicked me to the ground for my lagging in the line. Already tired from the work, I fall like a pile of bones and use the time as a resting point while the others laugh it up at my expense. At the end of the day, when the stevedoring company passes out envelopes that contain my earnings, Gibney and his right-hander Big Dick, show up again with some other fellows and demand a portion. I willingly hand it over. Having heard the story of the four Italians who were dragged off by ambulance cars, I’m not concerned about the morality of it. After taking my portion, Gibney and Big Dick simply turn round and force upon the next victim.
“Have a little dignity, bhoy,” my uncle Joseph angrily whispers. “Don’t look so feckin’ scared when ye hand it over. Show’m yer honor. Give’m the eye. Are ye wid us or not?”
“I am.”
CHAPTER 6
McGowan’s Wake
ONE NIGHT ON A SATURDAY I sleep on the sofa while white snow shimmers out the sooty kitchen window. It falls slowly, peacefully into the foreground of the bridges and masts and elevated tracks in the air among the stacked factories and tenements and brownstoned buildings leaning over the East River. The dark Water Street shack shakes when the stringed freight cars drop their loads of raw materials to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Rail brakes moan through the halls when ship containers full of paint cans are delivered at the Masury & Co. factory and clicking echoes travel through the air shafts when torpedoes are transported to the E.W. Bliss building up and down Plymouth Street a block away.
In good spirits after a bout with the drink, Uncle Joseph brings over a few men to the tenement for a shindy. That Saturday, the bottom-floor room was to cackle with voices and was lit with elongated, blooming flames in the dark from sucking pipe matches. With the drink in them they are blurts, much louder now than on the piers where I last saw them.
When I am woken by the drinking roars, they hand me the hooch for a swig; and, set to waking the fireplace too, they throw broken pieces of wood from the stairwell banister. Cursing Dinny Meehan and all the toughs who follow him, they resort instead to lines about worker-friendly environs and the right of men to organize.
“Fair bein’ fair!” they demand. “Civility of the worker’s rights!” I watch them from my springy sofa pounding their fists on the kitchen counter with their boorish denunciations and their lavish proclamations. Crooning the melodies of the abject and summoning the war cries of that time and place.
“Emma Goldman says . . .” and “Gene Debs is a man we’ll vote fer . . .”
It was the pookas lived here too. I’d heard them as they were still fresh in my old country thoughts. The shanachies who storytell from village to village had always told me that the Irish are cursed by them, which explains why we are always on the bottom of every rung and wrangle, no matter the city we reside. Once we show a bit of success the pookas come and haunt us and whisper good-for-nothings in the ears of all. Next thing you know the whole shabang is overcome with unrest and back we go to the starving bottom of the rung, having to work day and night to wrangle every gimmick we can just to hold our lips above the water. That’s what the shanachies say at least. And though I had no idea what they speak of, pookas and wrangles and such, I am beginning to get a sniff of it as I listen to my uncle Joseph and comrades.
I can see that hungry look in his eye, Uncle Joseph. He has the stare of a scrag by the way his thin hairs flap over his baldspot, skinny neck and sunken cheeks with the opaque pallor of a half-dead man. He comes upon me close and breathes his boozy pan in my face, “Yer makin’ progress now among us, bhoy. The men’r noticin’ ye as well. They are too! Ye’ve a fine werk et’ic ’bout ye.”
Impressionable as I am, the compliments open me up. I want to cry, I really do because the struggle I am going through internally is a difficult one.
“Not ye to werry, Liam,” he says. “We’ve got ye in our sights as well. We all see ye, don’ t’we fellas?”
“Sure do,” they agree.
“Right that.”
“T’ing is,” he continues, one arm around me on the sofa and pointing at me with the hand that is wrapped around a bottle. “We need guys like ye. Sure we do! We need ye here in Brooklyn. Young strong bucks like yerself. Able bodied and minded. The werld was made fer de like o’ ye. An’ the International Longshoremen’s Association needs good lads like ye. Ye’re comin’ in at the right time, ye are. I’m goin’ to introduce ye to a man’s gonna help us all, name’s Thos Carmody. He was sittin’ right here just a few week ago. Oh yeah, that’s a man can get things done, he’ll have ye up an’ runnin’ with a union card an’ all. He told us of the German plot, didn’t he men?”
“He did!” They agreed.
“The English, they call him the Hun, but what’s an Irishman got against the Germans? Nothin’, that’s what. One million dullers fer a strike in Brooklyn, that’s what they’re ready to pay us, bhoy. Thos Carmody an’ the ILA, they’re ready to pay us fer refusin’ to work and make weapons for the English to buy. And guess who’s to lose power from us strikin’, guess?”
“I don’t