Exile on Bridge Street Read Online Free PDF

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.
    Again my eyes are filled with the tears of rage. Here she is. She who has given so much of her to her sons as she sits by the hearth pondering them. The mother in need now. And during the blossoming of my fighting years. I am fifteen and ready. My brother Timothy a year older than I. The two of us strong for her, for I know that she would not grudge us for going out and breaking our strength and dying for her. That she would know us faithful. That we fight for her. And if I am to give my own life for her, would I not be spoken of among my people for generations? That I’ll be remembered forever. Alive forever. Speaking forever, I’ll be heard. Forever.
    And won’t it be said I am blessed for having the chance to give my blood in a protest against her mistreatment? And what of my father, who has longed to die for Ireland and is now given his chance? What of him, I’m not sure. And that of my sisters either. Clare is a long way from Dublin where the rebellion is taking place, but my worry is the whole of the land will be brought to its knees again by the flying of the butcher’s apron above Ireland.
    I am done then. I am leaving Brooklyn behind me forever. Forget Brooklyn as no more than a mistake in my life. It’s not for me. To start anew now and to realize my missteps, is the best thing for me. I go now to see the Claremen’s protective in Greenwich Village for my passage back home. Leave Brooklyn behind me.

CHAPTER 2
    Pulcinella
    M AY , 1916
    T HE MAN KNOWN ROUND AS “W ILD B ILL ” Lovett, pale and thin and hard with the street-rearing of old New York City behind him already, steps out from the Doric columns and the long shadow of the Fifth Avenue Court inland of the Red Hook docks. With a hand of knuckles now scabbed over, he drops to his head a wool cap where hidden within the inner lining is a razor ring. He looks down from the top of the steps onto the street moving in front of his