Visions of Gerard (4 page)

“I pushed lil Carrufel”—It took place in the schoolyard, with throw-cards Gerard had contrived a card-castle at midday recess, the first grader knocked it down coming too close and curious, without reflection Gerard raged and pushed him, really mad, “Look what you done to my house—Nut!” then instantly repented and too late—Now he pouts to concede: “But it was my house—
mautadit fou
” (a form of dyazam fool, or, drazyam, or whichever, used by children and in fact everyone including prelates, congressmen and druggists)—“But when I pushed him he turned pale, he didn't know anybody was gonna push him at that moment and that was the moment that hurt him—
Ya venu blême comme une vesse de carême
(He got pale as a lenten fart)—His heart sank, and it's
me
that done it—It's a clear sin—My Jesus wouldnt have liked that watching from his cross”—He turns eyes up and around to the cross, where, with arms extended and hands nailed, Jesus sags to his foot-rest and bemoans the scene forever, and always it strikes in Gerard's naturally pitiful heart the thought “But
why
did they do that?”—Looking there at the foolish mistakes of past multitudes, plain as day to see, right on the wall—The massive silence enveloping the graceful gentle form of hip and loincloth, limbs and knees, and the tortured thin breast—And the unforgettable downcast face—“God said to his son, we've got to do this—they decided in Heaven—and they did it—it happened—INRI!”—“INRI—that means, it happened!—or else, INRI, the funny ribbon on the cross of the lover they killed—and, they put a nail through it”—Whatever mysterious thoughts that lie beneath in the bent heads of people and children in churches and temples century after century—“He's crying!” moaned Gerard, seeing it all.

Two other sins to confess: the deep sin of looking at Lajoie's and Lajoie could look at his, at the urinals, Wednesday morning, in the corner, for a long time—On purpose—Gerard blushes to think of it—He sees the strange image of Lajoie's, different, curlier than his, he twinges to urinate namelessly and twists in his knee rest with the horror of his shame, not knowing—Sin's so deeply ingrained in us we invent them where they aint and ignore them where they are—Across his mind sneaks the proposition to avoid referring to the priest—But God will know—And to mock the kindly ear of the listener Priest, who expects what there is, by removing one whit, a human sin divine to discover—“Poor Father Priest, what'll he know if I dont tell him? he wont know anything and he'll comfort me and send me off with my prayer, well it'll be a big sin to hide him a sin—like if I'd spit in his eyes when he's dead, like”—

The fortunate priest, Père Anselme Fournier, of Trois Rivières Quebec, the last of twelve sons but the first in his father's eye, pink-handed where he might have been horny-handed from the soil of Abraham, receives Ti Gerard in the confessional by sliding open his panel and bending quick ear obedient and loaded with long afternoon—Coughs revolve around the ceiling and sail and set in the pew sea, a knee-rest scrapes Sca-ra-at! with a harsh harmonizing
bang
from the altar where a worker creaks around with chair and candle snuffer—

“Bénit” is the only word, “bless,” Gerard hears as the priest quickly mutters the introductory invocation and then his ear is ready—Gerard can faintly smell the adult breath and that peculiar adult smell of old teeth in old mouths long at work—“Bz bz bz” he hears as his predecessor in the confessional, just let out, prays fast and furious his repentant penalty rosaries at the rear seat half on his way to run out and slap cap on and run screaming across dusk stained fields of stubble and raw mud, to gangs in clover dales wrangling with rocks—A bird zings across the reddening late sky and over the roof of St. Louis de France, as though the Holy Ghost wanted it—Saffron is the east, white is the west, where a bank cloud hides the thrower Sun, but soon it'll all girdle and engolden and be rich red gambling sunset splendor, again, as yesterday—No school tomorrow is the frost announcement in the field grass, in the quiet corners of the schoolyards—Gerard senses all this but his day's work is just begun.

“My father, I confess that I pushed a little boy because he made me mad.”

“Did you hurt him?”

“No—but I hurt his heart.”

The priest is amazed to hear the refinement of it, the hairsplitting elegant point of it, (“He'll make a priest” he inner grins).

“Yes, you're right, my child, it hurt his heart.
Why
did you push him?” he pursues in conclusion with that sorrowful tender sorriness of the priest in the confessional as tho and as much to say “When all is said and done, why do we sit here and have to admit the sinningness of man.”

“I pushed him because he had broken my little card-house.”

“Ah.”

“It made me mad.”

“You flew into a rage.”

“
Oui
.”

“You didnt think—He was younger than you.”

“
Oui
, just a little boy of the first grade.”

“Aw,”—regretfully the fine priest looks around at Gerard briefly, commisserating as tender heart to tender heart—Ah, a scene going on in the little church of dusk! And somewhere wars!

“Well,” to conclude, “you know your sin—You'll have to keep your patience the next time—Keep well your idea, that you hurt his heart if not his body”—admiringly—“you've understood it yourself. I am certain,” he takes trouble to add in spite of an overburdened afternoon of work in there, “that the Lord understands you.—And, there is something else you want to tell me.”

“Yes my father”—and this Gerard says feeling like a beast piling animality on animality,—“I—er—” he stammers, confuses, and blushes, and stops.

“I'm waiting, my little boy.”

Quickly Gerard whispers him the news about the urinal, Saturday Afternoon Confessions in St. All's had never heard a lurider admission it would seem from the stealth of his ps-ps'es.

“Ah, and did you touch his little dingdong?” (
Sa tite gidigne
).

Gerard: “
Aw non
!” glad he has a loophole and all because he never thought of it, mayhap—

“Well,” sighing, “I have confidence in you my child that you'll never do it again. And something else? anything else?”

Gerard instantly remembers still another sin, forgotten until then—“I told the Sister I had studied my Catechism, and no I hadnt studied it.”

“And you didnt know it?”

“Yes I knew it, but from another time, I remembered.”

(“Ah, that's no sin,” thinks the Priest) and closes up accounts with: “Very well, that's all? Well then, say your rosary and fifteen Hail Mary's.”

“Yes my father.”

The gracious slide door slides, Gerard is facing the good happy wood, he runs out and hurries lightfoot to the altar, fit to sing—

It's all over! It was nothing! He's pure again!

He prays and bathes in prayers of gratitude at the white rail near the blood red carpet that runs to the stainless altar of white-and-gold, he clasps little hands over leaned elbows with hallelujahs in his eyes—To be God, and to've seen his eyes, looking up at my altar, with that beholding bliss, all because of some easy remission of mine, were hells of guilt I'd say—But God is merciful and God above all is kind, and kind is kind, and kindness is all, and it all works out that the mortal angel at the altar rail as the church hour roars with empty silence (everybody gone now, including the last priest, Gerard's priest) is bathed in blisskindness whether it would be pointed out or not that other easier ways might do the job as well, which may be doubtful, snow being snow, divinity divinity, holiness holiness, believing believing.

All alone at the rail he suddenly becomes conscious of the intense roaring of the silence, it fills his every ear and seems to permeate throughout the marble and the flowers and the darkening flickering air with the same pure hush transparency—The heaven heard sound for sure, hard as a diamond, empty as a diamond, bright as a diamond—Like unceasing compassion its continual near-at-hand sea-wash and solace, some subtle solace intended to teach some subtler reward than the one we've printed and that for which the architects raised.

Enveloped in peaceful joy, my little brother hurries out the empty church and goes running and skampering home to supper thru raw marched streets.

“Did you go to your confession, Lil Gerard?”

“
Oui
.”

“Come eat, my golden angel, my
pitou
, my lil Mama's cabbage.”

I'm sitting stupidly at a bed-end in a dark room realizing my Gerard is home, my mouth's been open in awe an hour you might think the way it's sorta slobbered and run down my cheeks, I look down to discover my hands upturned and loose on my knees, the utter disjointed inexistence of my bliss.

Me too I'd been hearing the silence, and seeing swarms of little lights thru objects and rooms and walls of rooms.

None of the elements of this dream can be separated from any other part, it is all one pure suchness.

Would I were divinest punner and tell how the cold winds blow with one stroke of my quick head in this harsh unhospitable hospital called the earth, where “thou owest God a death”—Time for me to get on my own horse—

The Kat is up on the sink actually fascinated by the drip drip of the faucet, there he is with his paws under him and his tail curling down and his ruminative quickglancing face bending and earpricking to the phenomena, as tho he was trying to figure out, or pass the time, or make fun of us—But Mama has a headache, it's a cold windy night in Old February and Pa is out late at work (playing poker backstage B.F.Keiths maybe with W.C.Fields for all I know with my drawn yawp masque)—The winds belabor at the windows of the kitchen, Ma is on the couch on the newspapers where she's flopped in despair, it's about 9:30, supper dishes have been put away (tenderly by her own hands) and now she lies there head back on a kewpie cushion with an ice pack on her head—The woodstove roars—Gerard and I are at the stove rocker, warming our feet, Nin is at the table doing her “
devoir
” (homework)—

“Mama you're sick,” demurs Gerard with the gods, with his piteous voice, “what are we going to do.”

“Aw it'll go away.”

He goes over and lays his head against hers and waits to hear her cure—

“If I had some aspirins.”

“I'll go get you some—at drugstore!”

“It's too late.”

“It's only 9:30—I'm not afraid.”

“Poor Lil Gerard it's too cold tonight and it's too late.”

“No mama! I'll dress up good! My hat my rubbers!”

“Run. Go to Old Man Bruneau, ask him for a bottle of aspirin—the money is in my pocketbook.”

Together Gerard and I peer and probe into the mysterious pocketbook for the mysterious nickles and dimes that are always there intermingled with rosaries and gum and powder puffs—

Little Gerard runs and puts his muffcap and draws it over his ears and draws on his rubbers with that tragic bent over motion no angels who never lived on earth could know—A cold key in a tight lock, our situation, the skin so warm, thin, the night of Winter so broad and cool—So Saskatchewan'd with advantage—

“Hurry up my golden, Mama'll be afraid—”

“I'll go get your medicine and you'll be all right, just watch!

Gleefully he goes off, the door admits Spectre into the kitchen an instant and he slams it–I watch him tumble off.

Beaulieu Street going down towards West Sixth, 4 houses, to the Fire House, is swept by dusts—The lamp on the corner only serves to accentuate by contrast the lightlessness in the general air—The stars above are no help, they twinkle in a vain freeze—The cold sweeps down Gerard's neck, he tries to bundle in—He hurries around the corner and down West Sixth, towards the lights of the big corner at Aiken and Lilley and West Sixth where bleak graypaint tenements stand with dull brown kitchen lights under the hard stars—Not a soul in sight, a few cruds of old snow stuck in the gutters—A fine world for icebergs and stones—A world not made for men—A world, if made for anything, made for something dead to sympathy—Since sympathizing there'll not be in it ever—He runs to warm up—

Down at Aiken the wind from the river hits him full-blast with a roar, around the corner, bringing with it the odor of cold rocks in the river's ice, and the savor of rust—

“God doesnt look like he made the world for people” he guesses all by himself as it occurs in his chilled bones the hopeless sensation—No help in sight, the utter helpless-ness up, down, around—The stars, rooftops, dusty swirls, streetlamps, cold storefronts, vistas at street-ends where you know the earthflat just continues on and on into a round February the roundness of which and warm ball of which wont be vouchsafed us Slav-level fools as but flat—Flat as a tin pan—So for winds to swail across, a man oughta lie down on his back on a cold night and miss those winds—No thought, no hope of the mind can dispel, nay no millions in the bank, can break, the truth of the Winter night and that we are not made for this world—Stones yes, grass and trees for all their green return I'd say no to judge from their dead brownness tonight—A million may buy a hearth, but a hearth wont buy rich safety—

Gerard divines that all of this is pure division, a grief of separation, the cold is cold because there are two to know it, the cold and he who is en-colded—“If it wasnt for that, like in Heaven, . . .”

“And Mama has a headache, aw God why'd you do all this this suffering?”

En route back with the aspirins he hears a forlorn rumble in Ennell Street, it's the old junkman coming back from some over extended work somewhere in windswept junkslopes, his horse is steaming, his steel-on-wood-wheels are grinding grit on grit and stone on stone and wind swirls dust about his burlaps, as he smiles that tooth-smile of the cold between embittered lips, you see the suffering of his mitts and the weeping in his beard, the woe—Going home to some leaky rafter—To count his rusty corsets and by-your-leaves and tornpaper accounts and pile-alls—To die on his heap of mistakes, finally, and what was gained in emptiness you'll never find debited or credited in any account—What the preachers say not excepted—“Poor old man, he hasnt got a nice warm kitchen, he hasnt got a mother, he hasnt got a little sister and little brother and Papa, he's alone under the hole under the open stars—If it was all together in one ball of wool—!—” The horse's hooves strike sparks, the wheels labor to turn into West Sixth, the whole shebang sorrows out of sight—Gerard approaches our house, our golden kitchen lights and pauses on the cold porch for one last look up—The stars have nothing to do with anything.

In some other way, he hopes.

“There, your little hands are cold—thank you my child—bring me a glass of water—I'll be all right—Mama's sick tonight—”

“Mama—why is it so cold?”

“Dont ask me.”

“Why did God leave us sick and cold? Why didnt he leave us in Heaven.”

“You ‘re sure we were there?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

“How are you sure?”

“Because it cant be like it is.”

“
Oui
”—Ma in her rare moments when thinking seriously she doesnt admit anything that doesnt ring all the way her bell of mind—“but it is.”

“I dont like it. I wanta go to Heaven. I wish we were all in Heaven.”

“Me too I wish.”

“Why cant we have what we want?” but as soon as he says that the tears appear in his eyes, as he knows the selfish demand—

“Aw Mama, I dont understand.”

“Come come we'll make some nice hot chocolate!—”

“Hot chocolate! (
Du coco
!)” cries Ti Nin, and I echo it:

“Klo Klo!”

The big cocoa deal boils and bubbles chocolating on the stove and soon Gerard forgets—

If his mortality be the witness of Gerard's sin, as Augustine Page One immediately announced, then his sin must have been a great deal greater than the sin of mortals who enjoy, millionaires in yachts a-sailing in the South Seas with blondes and secretaries and flasks and engineers and endless hormone pills and Tom Collins Moons and peaceful deaths—The sins of the junkman on Ennell Street, they were vast almost as mine and brother's—

In bed that night he lies awake, Gerard, listening to the moan of wind, the flap of shutters—From where he lies he can just see one cold sparkle star—The fences have no hope.

Like, the protection you'd get tonight huddling against an underpass.

But Gerard had his holidays, they bruited before his wan smile—New Year's Eve we're all in bed upstairs under the wall-papered eaves listening to the racket horns and rattlers below and out the window the dingdong bells and sad horizon hush of all Lowell and towards Kearney Square where we see the red glow embrowned and aura'd in the new (1925) sky and we think: “A new year”—A new year with a new number and a new little boy with candlelight and
kitchimise
standing radiant in the eternities, as the old, some old termagant with beard and scythe, goes wandering down the darkness field, and on the sofa arms of the parlor chairs even now the fairies are dancing—Gerard and Nin and I are sitting up in the one bed of conclave, with a happy smile he's trying to explain to us what's really happening but by and by the drunks come upstairs with wild hats to kiss us—Some sorrow involved in the crinkly ends of pages of old newspapers bound in old readingroom files so that you turn and see the news of that bygone New Year's day, the advertisements with top hats, the crowds in Hail streets, the snow—The little boy under the quilt who will have X's in his eyes when the rubber lamppost ushers in his latter New Years Eves, one scythe after another lopping off his freshness juices till he comes to bebibbling them from corny necks of bottles—And the swarm in the darkness, of an ethereal kind, where nobody ever looks, as if if they did look the swarms ethereal would wink off, winking, to wink on again when no one's watching—Gerard's bright explanations about dark time, and cowbells—Then we had our Easter.

Which came with lilies in April, and you had white doves in the fields, and we went seesawing thru Palm Sunday and we'd stare at those pictures of Jesus meek on the little
azno
entering the city and the palm multitudes, “The Lord has found that nice little animal there and he got up on his back and they rode into the city”—“Look, the people are all glad”—A few chocolate rabbits one way or the other was not the impress of our palmy lily-like Easter, our garland of roses, our muddy-earth Spring sigh when all in new shoes we squeaked to the church and outside you could smell the fragrant cigarettes and see men spit and inside the church was all dormant and adamant like wine with white white flowers everywhere—

We had our Fourth of July, some firecrackers, some fence sitting pitting of sparks, warm trees of night, boys throwing torpedoes against fences, general wars, oola-oo-ah pop-works at the Common with the big bomb was the finale, and popcorn and Ah Lemonade—

And Halloween: the Halloween of 1925, when Ma dressed me up as a little Chinaman with a queu and a white robe and Gerard as a Pirate and Nin as a Vamp and old Papa took us by the hand and paraded us down to the corner at Lilley and Aiken, ice cream sodas, swarms of eyes on the sidewalks—

All the little children of the world keep quickly coming and going to the holidays that only slowly change, but the quality of the brightness of their eyes monotonously reverts—Seeds, seeds, the seed sown everywhere blossoming the fruit of our loom, living-but-to-die—There's just no fun in holidays when you know.

All the living and dying creatures of the endless future wont even wanta be forewarned—wherefore, I should shut up and close up shop and bang shutters and broom my own dark and nasty nest.

At this time my father had gotten sick and moved part of his printing business in the basement of the house where he had his press, and upstairs in an unused bedroom where he had some racks of type—He had rheumatism too, and lay in white sheets groaned and saying “
La marde
!” and looking at his type racks in the next room where his helper Manuel was doing his best in an inkstained apron.

It was later on, about the time Gerard got really sick (long-sick, year-sick, his last illness) that this paraphernalia was moved back to the rented shop on Merrimack Street in an alley in back of the Royal Theater, an alley which I visited just last year to find unchanged and the old gray-wood Colonial one storey building where Pa's pure hope-shop rutted, a boarded up ghost-hovel not even fit for bums—And forlorner winds never did blow ragspaper around useless rubbish piles, than those that blow there tonight in that forgotten alley of the world which is no more forgotten than the heartbreaking and piteous way Gerard had of holding his head to the side whenever he was interested or bemused in something, and as if to say, “Ay-you, world, what are our images but dust?—and our shops,”—sad.

Nonetheless, lots of porkchops and beans came to me via my old man's efforts in the world of business which for all the fact that ‘t is only the world of adult playball, procures tightwad bread from hidden cellars the locks of which are guarded by usurping charlatans who know how easy it is to enslave people with a crust of bread withheld—He, Emil, went bustling and bursting in his neckties to find the money to pay rents, coalbills (for to vaunt off that selfsame winter night and I'd be ingrat to make light of it whenever trucks come early morning and dump their black and dusty coal roar down a chute of steel into our under bins)—Ashes in the bottom of the furnace, that Ma herself shoveled out and into pails, and struggled to the ashcan with, were ashes representative of Poppa's efforts and tho their heating faculties were in Nirvana now ‘twould be loss of fealty to deny—I curse and rant nowaday because I dont want to have to work to make a living and do childish work for other men (any lout can move a board from hither to yonder) but'd rather sleep all day and stay it up all night scrubbling these visions of the world which is only an ethereal flower of a world, the coal, the chute, the fire and the ashes all, imaginary blossoms, nonetheless, “somebody's got to do the work-a the world”—Artist or no artist, I cant pass up a piece of fried chicken when I see it, compassion or no compassion for the fowl—Arguments that raged later between my father and myself about my refusal to go to work—“I wanta
write
—I'm an
artist
”—“Artist shmartist, ya cant be supported all ya life—”

And I wonder what Gerard would have done had he lived, sickly, artistic—But by my good Jesus, with that holy face they'd have stumbled over one another to come and give him bread and breath—He left me his heart but not his tender countenance and sorrowful patience and kindly lights—

“Me when I'm big, I'm gonna be a painter of beautiful pictures and I'm gonna build beautiful bridges”—He never lived to come and face the humble problem, but he would have done it with that
noblesse tendresse
I never in my bones and dead man heart could ever show.