Stonecrop Magazine

Tommy used to work on the docks, like our father and his father before him, generations of O’Leary men all the way back to Ireland. He was broad shouldered like them, his hands as wide as oars, rough and tan as the ropes that held the shipping boats fast. In his pockets he carried paperbacks, Steinbeck, London, Hemingway—men that spoke to his experience—wrapped in plastic grocery bags that were bound together with the thick blue rubber bands from Mexican asparagus. He read them at lunch while the old-timers smoked by the warehouse; he traveled to deserts and jungles, Alaskan tundra.  

Tommy used to grab a beer with us on payday, and then recede into the shadows, scribbling with a carpenter’s pencil on the cheap notebooks he bought from the Vietnamese grocery on the corner by our house. These first stories were derivative; misspelled tributes to those who came before. When they were finished, he’d burn them in the incinerator. The pages resisted the flame, ingrained as they were with memories of the sea, but eventually they succumbed, and he’d write another.  

Tommy used to sit up nights, arguing with himself just so he could hear the cadence. He went to parties and stood in the corner, watching how the women touched their hair when flirting; how our friends puffed out their chests, back straight, whenever they stood next to a townie. Tommy took night classes at the community college on Tuesdays and Thursdays, although Father laughed at him and even Mama suggested his time would be better spent getting to know the Morrison girl. He failed math, twice, and confided to me he didn’t know if he could do it. Then his workshop instructor told him he had an ear for naturalistic dialog, and he pushed himself even harder.  

Tommy used to work double shifts in the summer. He came home after dark, his overalls damp with sweat and ichor. He traded his notebooks and pencil for a laptop; got a studio within walking distance of the school. He said he still felt out of place sometimes—too big for the seats in the lecture hall, too lacking in culture—but then he’d walk into class and they’d talk about the theme of loyalty in The Call of the Wild, and he knew he was more at home that he’d ever been with us, no matter how many generations of O’Leary’s found dock work good enough for them, thank-you-very-much. 

Tommy published his first story four years ago; father called it fool’s gold. He published another not long after that, and moved inland to write fulltime. He doesn’t often write home. Father won’t reach out to him, no matter how much Mama cries, but I think he finally gets it. When the reporters come sniffing around, he lets the crew go to rest, and takes them over to where Tommy read his books. “Tommy used to work on these docks,” he says, and there’s pride in his voice.