Ironweed (4 page)

          Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen’s eyes put to Francis.

          “Didn’t mean to kill you,” Francis said.

          Was that why you threw that stone the size of a potato and broke open my skull? My brains flowed out and I died.

          “You deserved what you got. Scabs get what they ask for. I was right in what I did.”

          Then you feel no remorse at all.

          “You bastards takin’ our jobs, what kind of man is that, keeps a man from feedin’ his family?”

          Odd logic coming from a man who abandoned his own family not only that summer but every spring and summer thereafter, when baseball season started. And didn’t you finally abandon them permanently in 1916? The way I understand it, you haven’t even been home for a visit in twenty-two years.

          “There are reasons. That stone. The soldiers would’ve shot me. And I had to play ball—it’s what I did. Then I dropped my baby son and he died and I couldn’t face that.”

          A coward, he’ll run.

          “Francis is no coward. He had his reasons and they were goddamn good ones.”

          You have no serious arguments to justify what you did.

          “I got arguments,” Francis yelled, “I got arguments.”

          “Whatayou got arguments about?” Rudy asked.

          “Down there,” Francis said, pointing toward the tracks beyond the carbarns, “I was in this boxcar and didn’t know where I was goin’ except north, but it seemed I was safe. It wasn’t movin’ very fast or else I couldn’t of got into it. I’m lookin’ out, and up there ahead I see this young fella runnin’ like hell, runnin’ like I’d just run, and I see two guys chasm’ him, and one of them two doin’ the chasm’ looks like a cop and he’s shootin’. Stoppin’ and shootin’. But this fella keeps runnin’, and we’re gettin’ to him when I see another one right behind him. They’re both headin’ for the train, and I peek around the door, careful so’s I don’t got me shot, and I see the first one grab hold of a ladder on one of the cars, and he’s up, he’s up, and they’re still shootin,’ and then damn if we don’t cross that road just about the time the second fella gets to the car I’m ridin’ in, and he yells up to me: Help me, help me, and they’re shootin’ like sonsabitches at him and sure as hell I help him, they’re gonna shoot at me too.”

          “What’d you do?” Rudy asked.

          “I slid on my belly over to the edge of the car, givin’ them shooters a thin target, and I give that fella a hand, and he’s grabbin’ at it, almost grabbin’ it, and I’m almost gettin’ a full purchase on him, and then whango bango, they shoot him right in the back and that’s all she wrote. Katie bar the door. Too wet to plow. He’s all done, that fella, and I roll around back in the car and don’t find out till we get to Whitehall, when the other fella drops into my boxcar, that they both was prisoners and they was on their way to the county jail in Albany. But then there was this big trolley strike with shootin’ and stuff because some guy threw a stone and killed a scab. And that got this mob of people in the street all mixed up and crazy and they was runnin’ every which way and the deputies guardin’ these two boys got a little careless and so off went the boys. They run and hid awhile and then lit out and run some more, about three miles or so, same as me, and them deputies picked up on ‘em and kept right after them all the way. They never did get that first fella. He went to Dayton with me, ‘preciated what I tried to do for his buddy and even stole two chickens when we laid over in some switchyards somewheres and got us a fine meal. We cooked it up right in the boxcar. He was a murderer, that fella. Strangled some lady in Selkirk and couldn’t say why he done it. The one that got shot in the back, he was a horse thief.”

          “I guess you been mixed up in a lot of violence,” Rudy said.

          “If it draws blood or breaks heads,” said Francis, “I know how it tastes.”

          The horse thief was named Aldo Campione, an immigrant from the town of Teramo in the Abruzzi. He’d come to America to seek his fortune and found work building the Barge Canal. But as a country soul he was distracted by an equine opportunity in the town of Coeymans, was promptly caught, jailed, transported to Albany for trial, and shot in the back escaping. His lesson to Francis was this: that life is full of caprice and missed connections, that thievery is wrong, especially if you get caught, that even Italians cannot outrun bullets, that a proffered hand in a moment of need is a beautiful thing. All this Francis knew well enough, and so the truest lesson of Aldo Campione resided not in intellected fact but in spectacle; for Francis can still remember Aldo’s face as it came toward him. It looked like his own, which is perhaps why Francis put himself in jeopardy: to save his own face with his own hand. On came Aldo toward the open boxcar door. Out went the hand of Francis Phelan. It touched the curved fingers of Aldo’s right hand. Francis’s fingers curved and pulled. And there was tension. Tension! On came Aldo yielding to that tension, on and on and lift! Leap! Pull, Francis, pull! And then up, yes up! The grip was solid. The man was in the air, flying toward safety on the great right hand of Francis Phelan. And then whango bango and he let go. Whango bango and he’s down, and he’s rolling, and he’s dead. Katie bar the door.

          When the bus stopped at the corner of Broadway and Columbia Street, the corner where that infamous trolley was caught between flaming bedsheets, Aldo Campione boarded. He was clad in a white flannel suit, white shirt, and white necktie, and his hair was slicked down with brilliantine. Francis knew instantly that this was not the white of innocence but of humility. The man had been of low birth, low estate, and committed a low crime that had earned him the lowliest of deaths in the dust. Over there on the other side they must’ve give him a new suit. And here he came down the aisle and stopped at the seats where Rudy and Francis sat. He reached out his hand in a gesture to Francis that was ambiguous. It might have been a simple Abruzzian greeting. Or was it a threat, or a warning? It might have been an offer of belated gratitude, or even a show of compassion for a man like Francis who had lived long (for him), suffered much, and was inching toward death. It might have been a gesture of grace, urging, or even welcoming Francis into the next. And at this thought, Francis, who had raised his hand to meet Aldo’s, withdrew it.

          “I ain’t shakin’ hands with no dead horse thief,” he said.

          “I ain’t no horse thief,” Rudy said.

          “Well you look like one,” Francis said.

          By then the bus was at Madison Avenue and Broadway, and Rudy and Francis stepped out into the frosty darkness of six o’clock on, the final night of October 1938, the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land.

                                       o          o          o

          In the dust and sand of a grassless vacant lot beside the Mission of Holy Redemption, a human form lay prostrate under a lighted mission window. The sprawl of the figure arrested Francis’s movement when he and Rudy saw it. Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead. This one belonged to a woman who seemed to be doing the dead man’s float in the dust: face down, arms forward, legs spread.

          “Hey,” Rudy said as they stopped. “That’s Sandra.”

          “Sandra who?” said Francis.

          “Sandra There-ain’t-no-more. She’s only got one name, like Helen. She’s an Eskimo.”

          “You dizzy bastard. Everybody’s an Eskimo or a Cherokee.”

          “No, that’s the straight poop. She used to work up in Alaska when they were buildin’ roads.”

          “She dead?”

          Rudy bent down, picked up Sandra’s hand and held it. Sandra pulled it away from him.

          “No,” Rudy said, “she ain’t dead.”

          “Then you better get up outa there, Sandra,” Francis said, “or the dogs’ll eat your ass off.”

          Sandra didn’t move. Her hair streamed out of her inertness, long, yellow-white wisps floating in the dust, her faded and filthy cotton housedress twisted above the back of her knees, revealing stockings so full of holes and runs that they had lost their integrity as stockings. Over her dress she wore two sweaters, both stained and tattered. She lacked a left shoe. Rudy bent over and tapped her on the shoulder.

          “Hey Sandra, it’s me, Rudy. You know me?”

          “Hnnn,” said Sandra.

          “You all right? You sick or anything, or just drunk?”

          “Dnnn,” said Sandra.

          “She’s just drunk,” Rudy said, standing up. “She can’t hold it no more. She falls over.”

          “She’ll freeze there and the dogs’ll come along and eat her ass off,” Francis said.

          “What dogs?” Rudy asked.

          “The dogs, the dogs. Ain’t you seen them?”

          “I don’t see too many dogs. I like cats. I see a lotta cats.”

          “If she’s drunk she can’t go inside the mission,” Francis said.

          “That’s right,” said Rudy. “She comes in drunk, he kicks her right out. He hates drunk women more’n he hates us.”

          “Why the hell’s he preachin’ if he don’t preach to people that need it?”

          “Drunks don’t need it,” Rudy said. “How’d you like to preach to a room full of bums like her?”

          “She a bum or just on a heavy drunk?”

          “She’s a bum.”

          “She looks like a bum.”

          “She’s been a bum all her life.”

          “No,” said Francis. “Nobody’s a bum all their life. She hada been somethin’ once.”

          “She was a whore before she was a bum.”

          “And what about before she was a whore?”

          “I don’t know,” Rudy said. “She just talks about whorin’ in Alaska. Before that I guess she was just a little kid.”

          “Then that’s somethin’. A little kid’s somethin’ that ain’t a bum or a whore.”

          Francis saw Sandra’s missing shoe in the shadows and retrieved it. He set it beside her left foot, then squatted and spoke into her left ear.

          “You gonna freeze here tonight, you know that? Gonna be frost, freezin’ weather. Could even snow. You hear? You oughta get yourself inside someplace outa the cold. Look, I slept the last two nights in the weeds and it was awful cold, but tonight’s colder already than it was either of them nights. My hands is half froze and I only been walkin’ two blocks. Sandra? You hear what I’m sayin’? If I got you a cup of hot soup would you drink it? Could you? You don’t look like you could but maybe you could. Get a little hot soup in, you don’t freeze so fast. Or maybe you wanna freeze tonight, maybe that’s why you’re layin’ in the goddamn dust. You don’t even have any weeds to keep the wind outa your ears. I like them deep weeds when I sleep outside. You want some soup?”

          Sandra turned her head and with one eye looked up at Francis.

          “Who you?”

          “I’m just a bum,” Francis said. “But I’m sober and I can get you some soup.”

          “Get me a drink?”

          “No, I ain’t got money for that.”

          “Then soup.”

          “You wanna stand up?”

          “No. I’ll wait here.”

          “You’re gettin’ all dusty.”

          “That’s good.”

          “Whatever you say,” Francis said, standing up. “But watch out for them dogs.”

          She whimpered as Rudy and Francis left the lot. The night sky was black as a bat and the wind was bringing ice to the world. Francis admitted the futility of preaching to Sandra. Who could preach to Francis in the weeds? But that don’t make it right that she can’t go inside to get warm. Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold.

          “Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold,” he said to Rudy.

          “Right,” said Rudy. “Who said that?”

          “I said that, you ape.”

          “I ain’t no ape.”

          “Well you look like one.”

          From the mission came sounds made by an amateur organist of fervent aggression, and of several voices raised in praise of good old Jesus. Where’d we all be without him? The voices belonged to the Reverend Chester, and to half a dozen men in shirt sleeves who sat in the front rows of the chapel area’s folding chairs. Reverend Chester, a gargantuan man with a clubfoot, wild white hair, and a face flushed permanently years ago by a whiskey condition all his own, stood behind the lectern looking out at maybe forty men and one woman.

          Helen.

          Francis saw her as he entered, saw her gray beret pulled off to the left, recognized her old black coat. She held no hymnal as the others did, but sat with arms folded in defiant resistance to the possibility of redemption by any Methodist like Chester; for Helen was a Catholic. And any redemption that came her way had better be through her church, the true church, the only church.

          “Jesus,” the preacher and his shirt-sleeved loyalists sang, “the name that charms our fears, That bids our sorrows cease, ‘Tis music in the sinners’ ears, ‘Tis life and health and peace…”

          The remaining seven eighths of Reverend Chester’s congregation, men hiding inside their overcoats, hats in their laps if they had hats, their faces grimed and whiskered and woebegone, remained mute, or gave the lyrics a perfunctory mumble, or nodded already in sleep. The song continued: “… He breaks the power of canceled sin, He sets the prisoner free; His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood availed for me.”

          Well not me, Francis said to his unavailed-for self, and he smelled his own uncanceled stink again, aware that it had intensified since morning. The sweat of a workday, the sourness of dried earth on his hands and clothes, the putrid perfume of the cemetery air with its pretension to windblown purity, all this lay in foul encrustation atop the private pestilence of his being. When he threw himself onto Gerald’s grave, the uprush of a polluted life all but asphyxiated him.