Exile on Bridge Street (3 page)

As for Non Connors, he was Lovett's right-hand man in the Jay Street Gang, and later down in Red Hook too. It was news to all of us that Connors was being called the leader of The White Hand by the newspapers, but it wasn't news to Brosnan and Culkin.

Brosnan continues reading, “Why his devotees call 'em ‘Non' is a mystery, but the deeply ingrained sense of contrarianism in his demeanor may help our readers see into the dark soul of the gang's chief,” Brosnan laughs aloud at the journalist's waxing on the fraudulent leader. “As it's these young men, teenagers even, that have it in them to disagree fer the simple sake o' disagreein'.”

“The simple sake o' disagreein',” Cinders repeats in a mocking whisper, looking at us boys. “That's why we fight, eh?”

“Shaddup,” Culkin says to Cinders daringly.

Brosnan pulls from the Irish-brand Na-Bocklish cigar in his mouth as I look up at his pensive face. The lines around his eyes pinching, jaw adjusts in worry as he looks at his son-in-law, the husband of his pregnant daughter and father of his only grandchild who is not wise enough to avoid challenging prisoners that own the streets he patrols. Not wise enough to know that Dinny Meehan and the long line of young men that follow him make enough booty off these fertile docks to feed every open Irish mouth in the breezy neighborhoods from the Navy Yard on down to Red Hook with enough left over to hire the best lawyer in Brooklyn: Michael “Dead” Reilly.

“What's the news in Ireland?” Cinders changes the topic while looking at me.

“Well the law's closin' in on them rebel bhoys in the GPO,” Brosnan says.

He goes on to describe the men of the Easter Rising as “damn fool Fenians” and that the people of Dublin are throwing the contents of their chamber pots on them as they are being marched through the streets as prisoners.

“Imagine the wreckage they've made o' the city, if ye can,” Brosnan says to Cinders through the bars. “It's burnin' as we speak. And fer what? The idiots've been offered Home Rule for Ireland the day the Great War ends and they go'n undermine it. Even the Irish papers're against 'em.”

I hold my tongue as I'm told. Even when a shoneen and a souper like Brosnan is at his boasting. Every Irish man and woman knows the British Empire's promises mean nothing. Home Rule for Ireland had been debated for many years to no avail and no one believed England would suddenly, willingly give up one of its colonies. Only a fool and a souper like Brosnan would say such things. Knowing my thoughts on the topic, Cinders watches me, though I make sure there's nothing to see on my face, even as it's about my own family Brosnan speaks, since my father and older brother are most assuredly involved in the rising, seeing as though they are proud Volunteers for the East Clare Brigade.

“What about out west?” I whisper.

“Out in the Irish countryside?” Cinders asks Brosnan.

“Few skirmishes,” Brosnan says passingly. “Mostly quiet.”

I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

“Don' worry, your Ma and sisters're fine,” Cinders says to me.

“You don't know that,” I say to him quietly and not as respectful as I should. “The British will come. And out there, there's no law holding them back from raping the countryside.”

Cinders watches me closely again, knowingly, then nods when I look back at him.

* * *

T
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LATER
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, then arraigned in front of Judge Denzinger and with our lawyer Dead Reilly talking for us and no witnesses, we are sent out of the courtroom with a callous brushing of the back of the judge's hand from above, perched upon his high bench. On the way out, a fat man with a long bushy mustache and a police tunic plops a fat finger on a piece of paper. “Patrick Kelly,” I sign, and we are released from the Adams Street Courthouse.

As we come out from its arches, a gang of workers are clearing debris without noticing us and just as Reilly is to direct us on our next move, a wobbly, rusty train takes over our ears as it passes by above the street. Reilly waits with an air of importance and competence, one arm on Cinders's shoulder, the other on an elevated's girder like a man whose time is in great demand. As the chain of overhead cars slowly ambles north toward the Brooklyn Bridge and the Sands Street Train Terminal on the Myrtle Avenue El, Reilly explains, “Dinny wants the boys to go to the Lonergan bicycle shop and wait.”

“That means stay there,” Cinders says to us, wiping back the hair off his forehead as men drop broken bricks and worn timber joists from a scaffold on the third floor of the courthouse onto the bare pavement. “Stay there until notice. I'll get wit' Dinny and The Swede and send word for ya.”

Reilly shakes hands with Cinders and heads back into the courthouse where all the other sleekly dressed men are heading, leaving us out for the wind. Leaving Cinders Connolly to the street too, and although he is about the same age as Reilly, the two men couldn't look more differently, as Cinders is dressed as a laborman like myself and the other boys with hard, scarred hands and a face that the weather makes its own.

“Richie?” Reilly calls back.

Richie limps up the cement stairs and in some strange sacerdotal edict, Reilly puts his hand on Richie's shoulder, the ordained standing a step lower and looking up to the bishop of the Adams Street Courthouse. After a moment of whispering Reilly shakes Richie's hand and nods at him with a resolute but fabricated dignity, then sends the boy back to us. With private messages for Cinders and Richie, I await my turn, but Reilly simply turns round and disappears within the archway. No messages for me from Dinny.

After some goodbyes, I watch Cinders run up the stairwell to the Adams Street Train Station above as the rest of us walk toward Bridge Street and the bicycle shop. I look up at Cinders as he disappears in the crowd along the raised train platform, his long strides and dark gray suit with workers' boots and big smile leaving me to the other teens.

“Lovett's still in,” I hear Richie tell Harms up ahead of us, who whispers something back that I can't hear.

To my side, Petey Behan is talking with Timmy and Matty. “You think Bill Lovett's gonna be all right wit' everything? No, he ain't. Non Connors, his righthand man, takin' it as the lamb? Just like Pickles Leighton took the fall for Dinny back in 1913? Nah, that shit ain' gonna fly. Bill an' Non Connors go way back and so do we. Back before Bill started payin' tribute to Dinny. I know Dinny set up Non. And I'll bet Brosnan's in on it too. We all know it. Dinny don' want Bill gettin' too strong as the dockboss down in Red Hook, so he removes pieces. That's what all this is about. Ain't it?”

I look over to them and see Petey looking at me as he speaks. It's not long ago that him and I were at odds, fighting over a stolen coat that brought us to blows the same night my uncle was killed.

“Just wait,” Petey says to the other boys, though staring toward me as we walk across York under the Manhattan Bridge abutment. “It'll all come around too, won' it, Liam?”

“What?”

“Yeah, ya think it'll all be all right now, don't ya? Like nothin' happened,” he says walking next to me and looking up into my face. “Like ya jus' gonna take away one o' our best guys an' we won't do nothin' about it, right?”

“I didn't do anything,” I say. “Dinny and Bill Lovett put aside their differences, Petey. For the good of all of us, we gotta stick together, just like Dinny says. I don't know what's going on with Non Connors, but they'll let him go.”

“No, they won't,” Petey says. “It was planned well ahead of our takin' back the docks. Planned with Brosnan and the tunics too. Dinny wants Lovett weak. You know that, I know that.”

Up ahead of us, Richie and Harms slow down and watch. I look at Richie in hopes he'll put a stop to Petey's ballyragging me, but he just watches with his dead eyes on the corner of Adams and York.

“Ya think Lovett don' know what you do?” Petey says to me. “Ya walk around like ya some kinda royalty'r somethin'. Tellin' everybody what we do. Ya're a fookin' tout, ya know that?” Then turns round. “He's a fookin' tout, Richie.”

“Do we have secrets here?” I shout back awkwardly, looking at Richie too. “No, we don't then. So what's a tout without a secret? I don't know what's going on with Non Connors, but why not let it all shake out first? That's your problem, Petey—you talk too much. Your mouth is going to get you hurt one day.”

Petey looks up at me from his wide neck and shoulders. He shakes in anger and I can see his fists clenching.

“Go on, boys,” a grocer woman says with a broom in her hand.

I back away from Petey and try going round him, but he won't let me, keeping me at bay with his left hand on my chest, his right fist held down behind him. I swipe at his left hand in anger and we stand chest to chest in front of the grocer woman, who calls back to her sons inside. Petey pushes up to his toes to get his face closer to mine while I lean into him. Bitterness fires inside me with my pumping heart and I imagine grabbing his throat and kicking him wildly. We then push each other away, but somehow I am punched in the mouth with a swiping swing that doesn't have much power behind it. The grocer woman yelps for her boys to hurry and when they come out of the store they stop to find Richie Lonergan's face, who they know very well and are in no hurry in confronting.

I feel at my mouth and there is a bit of blood on my fingers from it. And I feel the eyes staring at me too. All of them. Petey is at the ready with his fists and teeth clamped closed while the others turn toward me too, Timmy, Matty, and Abe Harms. Richie stares down the brothers from the grocers and I know quickly that I am in a bad place. Outnumbered and with no help at all, my loyalty tied closely to Dinny Meehan, theirs to Bill Lovett. The divide among us now feeling greater than it ever has been.

Feeling alienated by the Lonergan crew, I look away angrily. It's all too much for me, and if I'm to think clearly, I don't long to choose Dinny's side at all, even though he's vowed to help me get my mother and sisters to New York. Greater on my mind than any of it is what is happening in Ireland, my true home. The great country I was born to defend. My mind turns away from all of these demanded loyalties in Brooklyn to defending the motherland, particularly when she calls for me at her greatest time of need in this springtime of her awakening, 1916.

And with Petey ready to fistfight me and everyone staring, I decide right here and now that I am not for Brooklyn in the first place. Any of it. And that I am to be back home, to my birth land where the earth is always under my feet instead of cement and brick.

“Fuck off,” I yell to Petey, point at him and Timmy and Matty and Abe and Richie. “The whole lot of you. I don't need any of this.”

I turn and sprint. Back across York Street and jump ahead of a slow-moving trolley. I refuse looking back. Just run with tears of fury coming off my eyes. The shame of my uncle's death and of being jailed and alienated by everything else. The only things that slow me are McGowan's old boots that Dinny gave me, and the heavy thoughts weighing me down. The thoughts somehow pushing up from a dream I'd had of the small crack I saw on the cement floor of the jail cell. That the crack opened into a great fissure that separated us by a flood, which opened into an ocean. Sent us to different sides, forcing us all to choose. I keep running, though, as fast as I can. All the way to Sands Street do I run, thinking in my head that I need nothing of the gang, having chosen my side. They don't care about what is top on my mind. Don't give a single care about my family caught in the coming troubles of war back home. My mother, who looked at me with the hopes of the Savior Himself when I left, is now the only person on my mind.

I couldn't have known it at the time, but I know now that she hoped for me to save her from the coming storm. She knew it was coming. Somehow she knew. She always knew things. She felt it coming last October, 1915, when I left Ireland. I'm sure of it. I can see it on her face now, in my memory. As I sprint along the sidewalks and storefronts, running and running, I think of her. Harder and harder I run to drive out my fury. And I think of her. My own mother. Caught in a rebellion among a war and no one seems to have the worry or the care of it. As I run up to the third level I think of her more. She looking up to me in a hope and I not doing a thing about it. And being sent into a jail for some reason that has nothing to do with the urgency of needing to get my mother and sisters out from the bloodshed they'll be faced with. To do the job my father sent me to do.

When the news broke a few days earlier of the Easter rebellion in Ireland, Dinny and I were with Tanner Smith in Greenwich Village. We'd passed a place called the County Claremen's protective, an Irish organization helping new immigrants from County Clare. So it's there I'll go for help. Among the gray clouds and the charcoal-blue sky, I look down from the Brooklyn Bridge trolley out into the big East River below. I think of my family and I think of fate. I think of my connection to my country and I think of who I am. And who I am going to be one day. That I wasn't born to be a foreigner to my own land like the rest. And especially not when it is my mother that calls for me. A deep and unnerving pain, her calling. I know too much of my land to forget her. To leave her forever. I know now what I was born for. The same reason she bore all her sons. To defend her; not for exile. To lend my body to her struggle. Our struggle; not New York's. To join the East Brigade of County Clare, Fifth Battalion with my brother and father and be a man now. A man of fate. To answer the calling of my flag, the Tricolour, that was made with glory and humility by French seamstresses after their own revolution. Made for the men that planned a rebellion in Ireland during the Great Hunger when the soul of her had hit the lowest bottom. A bottom that lives in all of us for all time because of the horror of eviction and shallow graves and emigration and the witnessing of our own Mother Ireland being brought to an undignified bowing. To her knees begging for her children. Praying for a mercy that was held against her by the theater of words and promises, the cruelty of slight and neglect. The silence that revealed their disdain. My own mother bent and humiliated.