Ironweed (28 page)

          He would enter the room and close the door and stand looking at her for a long time. Her hair would be loose, and fanned out, and pretty.

          He would, after a while, think of lifting her onto the bed, but decide there was no point in that, for she looked right and comfortable just as she was. She looked as if she were sleeping.

          He would sit in the chair looking at her for an amount of time he later would not be able to calculate, and he would decide that he had made a right decision in not moving her.

          For she was not crooked.

          He would look in the open suitcase and would find his old clippings and put them in his inside coat pocket. He would find his razor and his penknife and Helen’s rhinestone butterfly, and he would put these in his coat pockets also. In her coat hanging in the closet he would find her three dollars and thirty-five cents and he would put that in his pants pocket, still wondering where she got it. He would remember the two dollars he left for her and that she would never get now, nor would he, and he would think of it as a tip for old Donovan. Helen says thank you.

          He would then sit on the bed and look at Helen from a different angle. He would be able to see her eyes were closed and he would remember how vividly green they were in life, those gorgeous emeralds. He would hear the women talking together behind him as he tried to peer beyond Helen’s sheltered eyes.

          Too late now, the women would say. Too late now to see any deeper into Helen’s soul. But he would continue to stare, mindful of the phonograph record propped against the pillow; and he would know the song she’d bought, or stole. It would be “Bye Bye Blackbird,” which she loved so much, and he would hear the women singing it softly as he stared at the fiercely glistening scars on Helen’s soul, fresh and livid scars whitening among the old, the soul already purging itself of all wounds of the world, flaming with the green fires of hope, but keeping their integrity too as welts of insight into the deepest secrets of Satan.

          Francis, this twofold creature, now an old man in a mortal slouch, now again a fledgling bird of uncertain wing, would sing along softly with the women: Here I go, singin’ low, the song revealing to him that he was not looking into Helen’s soul at all but only into his own repetitive and fallible memory. He knew that right now both Rudy and Helen had far more insight into his being than he himself ever had, or would have, into either of theirs.

          The dead, they got all the eyes.

          He would follow the thread of his life backward to a point well in advance of the dying of Helen and would come to a vision of her in this same Japanese kimono, lying beside him after they had made sweet love, and she saying to him: All I want in the world is to have my name put back among the family.

          And Francis would then stand up and vow that he would one day hunt up Helen’s grave, no matter where they put her, and would place a stone on top of it with her name carved deeply in its face. The stone would say:
Helen Marie Archer
,
a great soul
.

          Francis would remember then that when great souls were being extinguished, the forces of darkness walked abroad in the world, filling it with lightning and strife and fire. And he would realize that he should pray for the safety of Helen’s soul, since that was the only way he could now help her. But because his vision of the next world was not of the court of heaven where the legion of souls in grace venerate the Holy Worm, but rather of a foul mist above a hole in the ground where the earth itself purges away the stench of life’s rot, Francis saw a question burning brightly in the air: How should this man pray?

          He would think about this for another incalculably long moment and decide finally there was no way for him to pray: not for Helen, not even for himself.

          He would then reach down and touch Helen on the top of the head and stroke her skull the way a father strokes the soft fontanel of his newborn child, stroke her gently so as not to disturb the flowing fall of her hair.

          Because it was so pretty.

          Then he would walk out of Helen’s room, leaving the light burning. He would walk down the hall to the landing, salute the night clerk, who would be dozing in his chair, and then he would reenter the cold and living darkness of the night.

                                       o          o          o

          By dawn he would be on a Delaware & Hudson freight heading south toward the lemonade springs. He would be squatting in the middle of the empty car with the door partway open, sitting a little out of the wind. He would be watching the stars, whose fire seemed so unquenchable only a few hours before, now vanishing from an awakening sky that was between a rose and a violet in its early hue.

          It would be impossible for him to close his eyes, and so he would think of all the things he might now do. He would then decide that he could not choose among all the possibilities that were his. By now he was sure only that he lived in a world where events decided themselves, and that all a man could do was to stay one jump into their mystery.

          He had a vision of Gerald swaddled in the silvery web of his grave, and then the vision faded like the stars and he could not even remember the color of the child’s hair. He saw all the women who became three, and then their impossible coherence also faded and he saw only the glorious mouth of Katrina speaking words that were little more than silent shapes; and he knew then that he was leaving behind more than a city and a lifetime of corpses. He was also leaving behind even his vivid memory of the scars on Helen’s soul.

          Strawberry Bill climbed into the car when the train slowed to take on water, and he looked pretty good for a bum that died coughin’. He was all duded up in a blue seersucker suit, straw hat, and shoes the color of a new baseball.

          “You never looked that good while you was livin’,” Francis said to him. “You done well for yourself over there.”

          Everybody gets an Italian tailor when he checks in, Bill said. But say, pal, what’re you runnin’ from this time?

          “Same old crowd,” Francis said. “The cops.”

          Ain’t no such things as cops, said Bill.

          “Maybe they ain’t none of ‘em got to heaven yet, but they been pesterin’ hell outa me down here.”

          No cops chasm’ you, pal.

          “You got the poop?”

          Would I kid a fella like you?

          Francis smiled and began to hum Rudy’s song about the place where the bluebird sings. He took the final swallow of Green River whiskey, which tasted sweet and cold to him now. And he thought of Annie’s attic.

          That’s the place, Bill told him. They got a cot over in the corner, near your old trunk.

          “I saw it,” said Francis.

          Francis walked to the doorway of the freight car and threw the empty whiskey bottle at the moon, an outshoot fading away into the rising sun. The bottle and the moon made music like a soulful banjo when they moved through the heavens, divine harmonies that impelled Francis to leap off the train and seek sanctuary under the holy PheIan eaves.

          “You hear that music?” Francis said.

          Music? said Bill. Can’t say as I do.

          “Banjo music. Mighty sweet banjo. That empty whiskey bottle’s what’s makin’ it. The whiskey bottle and the moon.”

          If you say so, said Bill.

          Francis listened again to the moon and his bottle and heard it clearer than ever. When you heard that music you didn’t have to lay there no more. You could get right up off’n that old cot and walk over to the back window of the attic and watch Jake Becker lettin’ his pigeons loose. They flew up and around the whole damn neighborhood, round and round, flew in a big circle and got themselves all worked up, and then old Jake, he’d give ‘em the whistle and they’d come back to the cages. Damnedest thing.

          “What can I make you for lunch?” Annie asked him.

          “I ain’t fussy. Turkey sandwich’d do me fine.”

          “You want tea again?”

          “I always want that tea,” said Francis.

          He was careful not to sit by the window, where he could be seen when he watched the pigeons or when, at the other end of the attic, he looked out at the children playing football in the school athletic field.

          “You’ll be all right if they don’t see you,” Annie said to him. She changed the sheets on the cot twice a week and made tan curtains for the windows and bought a pair of black drapes so he could close them at night and read the paper.

          It was no longer necessary for him to read. His mind was devoid of ideas. If an idea entered, it would rest in the mind like the morning dew on an open field of stone. The morning sun would obliterate the dew and only its effect on the stone would remain. The stone needs no such effect.

          The point was, would they ever know it was Francis who had broken that fellow’s back with the bat? For the blow, indeed, had killed the murdering bastard. Were they looking for him? Were they pretending not to look for him? In his trunk he found his old warm-up sweater and he wore that with the collar turned up to shield his face. He also found George Quinn’s overseas cap, which gave him a military air. He would have earned stripes, medals in the military. Regimentation always held great fascination for him. No one would ever think of looking for him wearing George’s overseas cap. It was unlikely.

          “Do you like Jell-O, Fran?” Annie asked him. “I can’t remember ever making Jell-O for you. I don’t remember if they had Jell-O back then.”

          If they were on to him, well that’s all she wrote. Katie bar the door. Too wet to plow. He’d head where it was warm, where he would never again have to run from men or weather.

          The empyrean, which is not spatial at all, does not move and has no poles. It girds, with light and love, the primum mobile, the utmost and swiftest of the material heavens. Angels are manifested in the primum mobile.

          But if they weren’t on to him, then he’d mention it to Annie someday (she already had the thought, he could tell that) about setting up the cot down in Danny’s room. when things got to be absolutely right, and straight.

          That room of Danny’s had some space to it.

          And it got the morning light too.

          It was a mighty nice little room.