Light of the Diddicoy Read Online Free Page A

rags. A week goes by like this and only three times do the doors open with the mean stewards yelping for us to queue up as we grab for our cups. The soup is no more than water and stock, leftovers no doubt. I wait in line looking ahead impatiently and with only three in front of me the ship tilts deep into the sea as I drop my cup. I scramble for it before another can snatch it, but when I return to queue I see that the barrel holding the soup has tipped over and without cleaning the spillage, the stewards double back and lock the doors behind them. Some children around me scoop up the stock mixed with the dried vomit as their mothers cry out at the state of their lot. I look for the sweet child with the thoughtful mother and the bannock shares, but cannot find her. When I come to my place along the wall it is then I see my belongings have disappeared entirely, hungry eyes staring at my dismay like hidden hyenas protecting their earned pilferings.
    Without normal sleep nor food and feeling the ship slowing, in a sudden four doors are opened above that I had yet to realize were even there. Appearing from them are the Englishman officials and their yelling.
    â€œOut! Out! Out! Out yu goes!”
    â€œWhere are we?” One man calls up to them.
    â€œOut! Get out!”
    And so we again funnel obediently toward the single-door exit leaving behind us unclaimed trash, upturned cots never used for sleep, sopping blankets and overturned piss jars and rancid fecal buckets where somehow flies had made their way into the steerage hold or had created life itself from the stink of the third class.
    A few hours later, I wait in line but for what I do not know. The ship backs away from us. There is land on either side in the distance of the island house packed with fellow ragged travelers pale with the sea’s nausea and a childhood of peasantry. I give my name. “Liam.”
    â€œWhole name,” he demands.
    â€œWilliam James Garrihy, born 1901, Clare, Ireland.”
    â€œCalling or occupation?”
    â€œLaborer.”
    â€œName o’ relative or friend ya joinin’?”
    â€œMy uncle, Joseph Garrihy.”
    He hands me back some papers and that’s when I find out someone misheard me and therefore changed my name. I am Garrity now. They then take my clothes so they can see the whole of me; sunken belly poked, tongue pulled and genitals picked up with a flat stick and my face flushed in embarrassment.
    â€œWhere ya off ta den,” Another man says as a matter of occupation.
    â€œWater Street.”
    â€œBrooklyn o’ Manhatt’n?”
    I thought of the two words. Brooklyn sounds more familiar. “On ‘at ferry ova dere, g’ahead.”

CHAPTER 4
Mary’s Eldest Son
    I SHIFT IN MY SEAT AND take from my old man’s pipe here, the discomfort weighing on me. It is not an easy task to write of my own life when the humility of my people pulls at me. The tradition of telling stories is a social one, where I come from. But I have become an American over these many years. And though I think as a traveling shanachie, I feel to write as an American does.
    Richie Lonergan hops in his stride. He hikes his left leg forward, all the while keeping a strong and equal pace down the tenement low-risers of Johnson Street toward the waterfront in the middle of the night. As he is known, his face is chiseled and without expression like a young stone-faced white Indian among the coarse escarpments of his landscape. His bony cheeks reddened from the cutting winter wind and blond hairs flaying out the side of his cloth cap, Richie pushes on emotionlessly into the night. With fifteen years behind him, the boy is an experienced Brooklynite. Impassive is his wont, he keeps at pace under the elevated tracks. Above him, they are adjoined southward from the Sands Street Station House. He passes under the view of a couple trolley watchtowers like a city varmint mingling in its business among the