Visions of Gerard (2 page)

Behold: – One day he found a mouse caught in Scoop's mousetrap outside the fish market on West Sixth Street—Faces more bleak than envenomed spiders, those who invented mousetraps, and had paths of bullgrained dullishness beaten to their bloodstained doors, and crowed in the sill—For that matter, on this gray morning, I can remember the faces of the Canucks of Lowell, the small tradesmen, butchers, butter and egg men, fishmen, barrelmakers, bums in benches (no benches but the oldtime sidewalk chair spitters by the dump, by banana peels steaming in the midday broil)—The hungjawed dull faces of grown adults who had no words to praise or please little trying-angels like Gerard working to save the mouse from the trap—But just stared or gawped on jawpipes and were silly in their prime—The little mouse, thrashing in the concrete, was released by Gerard—It went wobbling to the gutter with the fishjuice and spit, to die—He picked it tenderly and in his pocket sowed the goodness—Took it home and nursed it, actually bandaged it, held it, stroked it, prepared a little basket for it, as Ma watched amazed and men walked around in the streets “doin good for themselves” rounding up paper beyond their beans—Bums! all!—A thought smaller than a mouse's turd directed to the Sunday Service Mass necessity, and that usually tinged by inner countings how much they'll plap in th'basket—I dont remember rationally but in my soul and mind Yes there's a mouse, peeping, and Gerard, and the basket, and the kitchen the scene of this heart-tender little hospital—“That big thing hurt you when it fell on your little leg” (because Gerard could really feel empathetically that pain, pain he'd had enough to not be apprentice at the trade and pang)—He could feel the iron snap grinding his little imagined birdy bones and squeezing and cracking and pressing harder unto worse-than-death the bleak-in-life—For it's not innocent blank nature made hills look sad and woe-y, it's men, with their awful minds—Their ignorance, grossness, mean petty thwarthings, schemes, hypocrite tendencies, repenting over losses, gloating over gains—Pot-boys, bone-carriers, funeral directors, glove-wearers, fog-breathers, shit-betiders, pissers, befoulers, stenchers, fat calf converters, utter blots & scabs on the face of it the earth—“Mouse? Who cares about a gad dam mouse—God musta made em to fit our traps”—Typical thought–I'd as soon drop a barrel of you-know-what on the roof of my own house, as walk a mile in conversation about one of them–I dont count Gerard in that seedy lot, that crew of bulls—The particular bleak gray jowled pale eyed sneaky fearful French Canadian quality of man, with his black store, his bags of produce, his bottomless mean and secret cellar, his herrings in a barrel, his hidden gold rings, his wife and daughter jongling in another dumb room, his dirty broom in the corner, his piousness, his cold hands, his hot bowels, his well-used whip, his easy greeting and hard opinion—Lay me down in sweet India or old Tahiti, I dont want to be buried in
their
cemetery—In fact, cremate me and deliver me to
les Indes
, I'm through—Wait till I get going on some of these other bloodlouts, for that matter—Yet not likely Gerard ever, if he'd have lived, would have fattened as I to come and groan about peoples and in plain print loud and foolish, but was a soft tenderhearted angel the likes of which you'll never find again in science fictions of the future with their bleeding plastic penis-rods and round hole-machines and worries about how to get from Pit to Pisspot which is one millionth of a billionth of an inch further in endlessness of our gracious Lord than the earth speck (which I'd spew) (if I were you) (Maha Meru)—Some afternoon, Gerard goes to school—It had been on a noontime errand when sent to the store to buy smoked fish, that he'd found the mouse–Now, smiling, I see him from my overstuffed glooms in the parlor corner walking up Beaulieu Street to school with his strapped books and long black stockings and that peculiar gloomy sweetness of his person that was all things to me, I saw nothing else—Happy because his mouse was fed and repaired and safe in her little basket—Innocent enough comes our cat in the mid drowses of day, and eats, and leaves but the tail, enough to make all Lowell Laugh, but when Gerard comes home at 4 to see his tail-let in the bottom of the poor little basket he'd so laboriously contrived, he cried—I cried too.

My mother tried to explain that it wasnt the cat's fault and nobody's fault and such was life.

He knew it wasnt the cat's fault but he took Nanny and sat her on the rocking chair and held her jowls and delivered her an exhortation no less:

“
Méchante
! Bad girl! Dont you understand what you've done? When will you understand? We dont disturb little animals and little things! We leave them alone! We'll never go to heaven if we go on eating each other and destroying each other like that all the time!—without thinking, without knowing!—wake up, foolish girl!—realize what you've done!—Be ashamed! shame! crazy face! stop wiggling your ears! Understand what I'm tellin you! It's got to stop some fine day! There wont always be time!—Bad girl! Go on! Go in your corner! Think it over well!”

I had never seen Gerard angry.

I was amazed and scared in the corner, as one might have felt seeing Christ in the temple bashing the moneychanger tables every which away and scourging them with his seldom whip.

When my father comes home from his printing shop and undoes his tie and removes 1920's vest and sits himself down at hamburger and boiled potatoes and bread and butter of the prime with the kiddies and the good wife, the proposition is put up to him why men be so cruel and mice betrayed and cats devour the rest—Why we were made to suffer and be harsh in return, one the other, and drop turds of iron on brows of hope, and mop up sick yards and sad—“I'll tell you, Ti Gerard, little one, in life it's a jungle, man eats man either you eat or get eaten—The cat eats the mouse, the mouse eats the worm, the worm eats the cheese, the cheese turns and eats the man—So to speak—It's like that, life—Dont cry and dont bother your sweet lil head over these things—All right, we're all born to die, it's the same story for everybody, see? We eat the cow and the cow gives us milk, dont ask me why.”

“Yes, why—why do men make traps for little mice?”

“Because they eat their grain.”

“Their old grain.”

“It's grain that's in our bread—Look here, you eat it your bread? I dont see you throw it on the floor! and you dont make
passes
with the dust in the corner!”—
Passes
were the name Gerard had invented for when you run your bread over gravy, my mother'd do the soaking and throw the
passes
all around the table, even to me in my miffles and bibs at the little child flaptable—But because of our semi-Iroquoian French-Canadian accent
passe
was pronounced
PAUSS
so I can still hear the lugubrious sound of it and comfort-a-suppers of it,
M'ué'n pauss
, as you'd expect Bardolph to remember his cockwalloping heigho's of Eastcheap—My father is in the kitchen, young and primey, shirt-sleeves, chomping up his supper, grease on his chin, bemused, explaining moralities to his angels—They'll grow 12 feet tall in the grave ere the monstrance that contains the solution to the problem be held up to shine and make true belief to shine, there's no explaining your way out of the evil of existence—“In any case, eat or be eaten—We eat now, later on the worms eat us.”

Truer words were not spoken from any vantage point on this packet of earth.

“Why?
Pourquoi
?” cries lil Gerard with his brows forming woe and inabilities—“I dont want it to be like this, me.”

“Though you want or not, it is.”

“I dont care.”

“What you gonna do?”

He pouts; he'll go to heaven, that's what; enough of this beastliness and compromising gluttony and compensating muck—Life, another word for mud.

“Come, come, little Gerard, maybe there's something you know that
we
dont know”—My father always did concede, Gerard had a deep mind and deep things to think that didnt find nook in insurance policies and printer's bills—They'd never write Gerard a policy but in eternity, he knew we were here a short while, and pathetic like the mouse, and O patheticker like the cat, and O worse! like the father-cant-explain!

“Awright,” he'll go to bed and sleep it off, he'll tuck me in too, and kiss Ti Nin goodnight and the mouse be no lesser for her moment in his hands at noon—Together we pray for the Mouse. “Dear Lord, take care of the little mouse”—“Take care of the cat,” we add to pray, since that's where the Lord'll have to do his work.

Ah, and the winds are cold and blow forlorner dust than they'll ever be able to invent in hell, in Northern Earth here, where people's hopes though warm fail to conceal the draft, the little draft that works all night moving curtains over radiator heat and sneaks around your blanket, and would bring you outdoors where russet dawn-men with coldchapped ham-hands saw and pound at wood and work and steam with horses and curse the Satan in the air that made all Russias, Siberias, Americas bare to the blasts of infinity.

Gerard and I huddle in the warm gleeful bed of morning, afraid to get out—It's like remembering before you were born and your hap was at hand and Karma forced you out to start the story.

“Where is she the little mouse now?”

“This morning. The cat has shat her in the woods (
Le chat l'a shiez dans l'champ
)—with the little pipi yellow you see in the snow down there, see it?”

“
Oui
.”

“
Voilà
your fly of last summer, she's dead too—”

We think it over in motionless trance, as Ma prepares Pa's breakfast in the fragrant kitchen below.

“Angie,” says Dad at the stove, “that kid'll break my heart yet—it hurt him so much to lose his little mouse.”

“He's all heart.”

“With his sickness inside—Ah, it busts my head—Eat or get eaten—not men?—Hah!—There's a gang downtown would, if their guts were big enough.”

Gerard's feeling of the holiness of life extended into the realm of romance.

A drunkard under an ample tent was never more adamant concerning how his little sister should behave—“Mama, look what Ti Nin's doing she's going to school with her overshoes flopping and throwing her behind around like a flapper!” he yelled one morning looking out the window—It was one of those days when he was suffering a rheumatic fever relapse and had to stay in bed, weeks sometimes, some days worse than others—“Aw look at her!—” He was horrified—He refused to let her do it, when she came home at noon he had a speech worked out for her—“I'm telling you Gerard, you'll be a priest some day!” my mother'd say.

Meanwhile the kids at church did the sign of the cross some of them with the following words:

 

“
Au nom du père

Ma tante Cafière

Pistalette de bois

Ainsi soit-i”

 

Meaning

 

“In the name of the Father

My Aunt Cafière

Pistolet of wood

Amen”

 

There's my pa—Emil Alcide Duluoz, at that time, 1925 a hale young printer of 36, dark complexioned, frowning, serious, hardjawed but soft in the gut (tho he had a gut so hard when he oomfed it and dared us kids butt our heads in it or punch fists off it and it felt like punching a powerful basketball)—5:7, Bretonsquat, blue eyed—He had a habit I cant forget, even now I just imitated it, lighting a small fire in the ashtray, out of cigarette pack paper or tobacco wrapping—Sitting in his chair he'd watch the little Nirvana fire consume the paper and render it black crisp void, and understand, mayhap, the bigger kindling of the 3,000 Chillicosms—That which would devour and digest to safety—A little matter of time, for him, for me, for you.

Too, he'd take fresh crisp MacIntosh apples of the Fall and sit in his easy chair and peel em with his pocket knife, making long tassels around and around the fruitglobe so perfect you could have hung them like tassels' canopies from chandelier to chandelier in the Hall Tolstoy, the which we'd take and sling around and I'd eat em in like great tapeworms and they'd end up flung out in the garbage can like coils of electric wire around and around—After which he'd eat his peeled apple at the gisty whitemeat cutsurface with great slobbering juicy bites that had all the world watering—“Imitate the roar of a lion! Imitate a tiger cat! Imitate an elephant!”—Which he'd do, in his chair, for us, evenings in New England, Gerard on one knee, me on the other, Nin on his lap—That is, when ever there was no poker game to speak of downtown.

“And you my little Gerard, why do you look so pensive tonight? What's goin on in that little head?” he'd say, hugging his Gerard to him, cheek against soft hair, as Nin and I watched rave lip't and rapt in the happiness of our childhood, little dreaming what quick work the winds of outside winter would do against the timbers and tendons of his poor house.

In the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.

Gerard had birds that neighbor and relative could swear did know him personally, they came to his windowsill in the time of his long illnesses, especially Spring, when his rheum-rimmed eyes'd look out on fresh undefiled mornings like captured princesses in must towers—Vile visitations of bile'd turned him green, and white, in the night, his bedpan beneath the bed, but for the birds he had roses for words—“
Arrive, mes ti's anges
, Come my little Angels,” and he'd sow his (by Ma prepared) breadcrumbs on the sill and on the short slope roof up there where his sickroom was (a location for a room that forever frets my brain when in gray dreams I dream of houses, that location is always the one that makes me sink, somewhere to the north and west of misery, by peaks, mystery, gables)—Cherry blossom'd May brought him hundreds of gay birds with gloomy beaks that chattered on the roof around his crumbs—But he'd cry: “Why dont the little birds come to me?! Dont they know I wont hurt them?”

“Of course they dont, they cant know—for all they know you're a boy, and boys hurt birds.”

“And birds hurt boys?”

“And birds never hurt a boy, but the boy will stone his dozen and upset the nests of a dozen fledgelings in his nasty prime.”

“Why? Why is everyone so mean? Didnt God see to it that we—of all people—
people
—would be kind—to each other, to animals.”

God made no provisions for that winter.

The birds chatter, come come close at hand, he glees and jumps up and down at his pillow: “That one's coming, that one I'm tellin you, he'll end up in my hand!”

“I hope,” my mother'd say with wise eyes and unwisely in the night pray for it and worthily praise him—My father couldnt believe it.

“Ah, if I could buy him birds!”

“Just one little bird, just ONE,” he'd cry, as I sat in my little chair by the bed watching, fingering the crumb pan with little pudgy fingers so fat they called me
Ti Pousse
, Little Thumb.

“Come here, Little Thumb, look, the little grey bird, doesnt he look like he wants to eat in my hand and give me a little kiss?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldnt you like to kiss that little thing?”

“Yes.”

“Yes yes little bird come on.”

But a chance noise of breadtruck drives the whole flock away
kavroom
, for the next tree, where they jabber the new news—Tears come to Gerard's eyes, his lips form a fateful pout, a groan comes, it means “Ah what's the use—if I loved them any more they'd have honey and balm for breakfast and have beaks of gold, yet they avoid me like a rat dripping bacteria—like a falcon—like a man.”

“Gerard,” my mother'd explain, “dont make yourself sad about the little birds. Do you know why? Because God sees and knows you love them and he'll reward you.”

“In heaven I'll have all the birds I want.”

“Yes in heaven—and maybe on earth, have courage, patience.”

With his little belly he heaves a heigh ho sigh, ‘t'would be a good thing to be in that snowy somewhere and rosy nowhere where patience is just a word and no bellies burdenly pain. “Yes, in heaven there are birds, millions of birds, even smaller than these, big like butterflies, smaller, like ants, white like an angel—everywhere.” He'd turn to his drawing board propped on his lap and start drawing his dreary eternities and dreams of paradise. He was an amazing artist at the age of 8. He drew pictures that my old man actually disbelieved as his own when he saw them a-nights:

“Gerard did that?—look here!”

Ditto my father's friends—To prove it he'd draw right in front of them, boats sailing on the blue ocean (copied from the Saturday Evening Post), birds, bridges, lambies, people's hats—Also he had an erector set and built up impossible engineering marvels like vast complicated ferris wheels and race cars and the usual tote-cranes and trucks that were borrowed from the book of instructions—Heaving the book aside he'd of a sick morning (as I watch) whip up beautiful little baby carriages or baby cribs for Nin to put her dolls in at noon, all set with little draperies—I wonder if she still remembers these latter days as she stares at Television's rancid blight whole evenings in her home parlor, waiting to join him in Heaven—

For me he'd concoct delights at the drop of my saying it, “Make me a
ritontu
,” which is I dont know what, and he'd make a crazy construction and I'd play with it and try to unscrew it and chew the edges of it—

Then the birds would come flocking and singin in rollicking nations around our holy roof again, and he'd call for bread, and multiply it in crumbs, and sow it to the sisters who pecked and picked—

“
Vien, vien, vien
,” the picture of him hand outstretched and helpless in bed calling at the open window for the celestial visitors, enough to make my heart leap from a cold indifferent lair (of late)—

He never got his hand on a bird, naturally, and what transformation might have taken place in such a case I do not know—

Meanwhile Dr. Simpkins came and went with his oldfashioned satchel and his listen-tubes and pipes and pills and pumps and surprised us all by his gravity and inability to speak—He had no long hope for the life of Gerard.

I didnt understand anything that was going on, I was rosy plump Little Thumb
Ti Pousse
glad to be in the same world as Gerard.

One night we're on the kitchen floor with the Boston American, I remember distinctly the pinksheet Hearst evening news, on the front page is the photo of a woman who's murdered someone, I take my scissors and stab her right in the eye impaling the paper on the linoleum—“
Non non Ti Jean
never do that!” Didnt understand (as I remember myself) the glee, the mindless happy glee that went into that vigorous stab—But to Gerard the mindlessness was precisely the horror and the currency of a hateful hopeless world—“
Non, non
, never do anything like that,—Ah poor Ti Pousse, you dont understand—Look, take out the scissors, fix her eyes”—We smooth the ruffled paper, stroke the paper lady's eyes, brood over our sin, rectify hells, fruition good Karmas for ourselves, repent, go to confession—His lips tsk tsk and pout—Kissable Gerard, to kiss him and that pout of pain must have been as soft a sin as kissing a lamb in the belly or an angel in her wing—He gave me piggybacks to prove that other pastimes were better and that I was forgiven—He even let me “beat him up” in mock fights where we rolled on the linoleum and I screamed—