Visions of Gerard (6 page)

She lights her devotional candle.

“Comfort me in difficulties and thru the great favor which you enjoyed thru lodging in the house of Our Saviour, intercede for my family that we may always hold God in our hearts and be provided for in our necessities. I beseech thee to have infinite pity in regard to the favor I ask thee.” (State favor).

“If you please, my Lord, bless my poor little Gerard and make him well again, so he can live his little life in peace—and without pain—he has suffered so much—he's suffered enough for twenty four old sick men and he hasnt said a word—My Lord, have pity on this little courageous child, amen.”

“I ask thee, St. Martha,” she finishes reading the prayer, “to overcome all difficulties as thou didst overcome the dragon which thou hadst at your feet. Our Father—Hail Mary—Glory Be”—

And at that very moment ladies in black garments, scores of them, are scattered throughout St. Louis de France church, kneeling or sitting or some standing at the various special shrines, their lips muttering prayers for similar requests for similar troubles in their own poor lives and if indeed the Lord seeth all and saw all that is going on and all the beseechment in His name in dark earth-churches throughout the kingdom of consciousness, it would be with pain He'd attend and bend His thoughts to it—Some of the women are 80 years old, they've been coming to that basement church at dusk every day for the last quarter of a century and they've had manifold and O manifold reasons to loft prayer from that cellar, little chance they mightnt—

Amazing how the kids always scream with glee around the church at that sad hour of dusk.

And by God, amazing the bar standers and beer eaters bubbling at elbow bangs in speakeasy clubs around the corner, enough to make a man believe in Rabelais and Khayyam and throw the Bible and the Sutras and the dry Precepts away—“
Encore un autre verre de bière mon Christ de vieux matou
! Another glass a beer ya Christing old he-cat!”

“Well you're swearing like a dog on Christmas Eve!”

“Christmas Eve my—my you-know-what, if I dont have a glass a beer in my belly and two hundred others to boot it dont render
me
no merry in the Merry Christmas even if there was forty of your Christmases in the calendar the same bloody day I'm talkin to ya,” translation to that effect. “
Calvert, Caribou est sou
, Caribou's drunk!”

“Drunk? Come to my house, I got some whiskey there that'll make you fill your words with another kinda
marde
!”

The cussingest people in the world the Canucks in their cups, all you have to do is go to their capital and range up and down the bars of Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal to see some guzzling and some profanity.

“Gayo, sonumbitch, go shit!”

“Ah the bastat.”

A pretty Christmas they're having, there's a little tree in the corner with lights, and drunk under it—In comes the younger element, they'll have to take out papers to catch up with the old good swigglers and cussmakers—

My father, en route home, stops for a quick one himself in the company of his old friend Gaston MacDonald who has a spanking 1922 Stutz parked outside, with them is Manuel whose usual courtesy of driving Pa home tonight in the sidecar motorcycle has been set aside in favor of the Stutz and besides it's too cold and besides they're so high now the motorcycle trip would have been a fatality—

“Drink, Emil, amuse yourself, dammit it's Christmas!”

“Not for me, Gaston—with my little Gerard in bed it's not a hell of a pretty Christmas.”

“Ah, he was sick before.”

“Yes but it always tears my heart out.”

“Ah well, poor Emil, you might as well go throw yourself on the rocks in the river off the cliff in Little Canada . . . to crack . . . your spirit like that—look here, nothin you can do. Down the hatch!”

“Down the hatch.”

“You dammit Manuel I thought you was s'posed to be a drunkard?”

“Drunkards take their time,” says my father's assistant with a sly grin—

There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look—

“Poor dog there, look, Bolduc,—do you know that guy was the best basketball player at the YMCA in ‘18?—and ‘16, and ‘17 too!—They offered him a professional contract—No, his father didnt want it, old rocky Rocher Bolduc, ‘Stay in your store damn you or you'll never have it again'—today he's got the store, little candies for the children, licorice, pencils, a little stove near the corner, Bolduc spends his time in there with his sweater and his wife hates him and there was a time when he was the biggest athlete in Lowell—and a goodlooking happygolucky guy!”

And chances are Bolduc's wife is one of the black sorrowful ladies in the now-dark pews a few blocks up from the club—

My father has his drink, two or three of them, and wipes his mouth, and heads home, on foot passing thru the corner at Lilley and Aiken, stopping at the drugstore for his 7-20-4 cigars, then the bakery for fresh Franco-American bread that at home he'll slice on a wood board in the middle of the table slices big enough to write your biography on—

“Allo Emil—long time no see.”

“I'm pretty busy.”

“Still got your shop near the Royal?”

“I'm established there, Roger–business is going good.”

“The
anglais
aint givin you
marde
?” (the English)—“the Irish—the Greeks?—one thing me I like about bread, I do my business with the Canadians” (pronounced Ca-na-yen, the thick peasant pride and emphatic umph of it)—

My father is actually a complicated cosmopolite compared to Roger the baker—but he hands him a cigar.

“We'll see you at the bazaar?”

“If I have time—I'll pitch in a little in any case, for invitation cards, my little bit—”

And all the usual pleasantries, detailed styles, and panoramic shots of a complete social scene, Centerville in Lowell in 1925 being a close knit truly French community such as you might not find any more (with the peculiar Medieval Gaulic closed-in flavor) in modern long-eared France—

Emil comes home with his cigars and bread, and rounds the corner of Beaulieu just as the dusk clouds have fought their last war grim and purple in the invisibilities and here comes the evening star shimmering like a magic hanger in the fade-far flank of the retreat, and lights of brown and quiet flavor have come on in homes and he sees lil Nin and I wheeing with our sleds—

“In any case I got two of em in good health—but in my heart I cant be happy about anything, Gerard there are no others like Gerard, I shall never be able to understand where a little boy like that got so much goodness—so much—enough to make me cry, damn it—it's the way he's always got his little head to one side—pensive, so sad, so concerned—I'd give all the Lowells for the map of the Devil, to keep my Gerard—Will I keep him?” he wonders looking up?—seeing the same unsaying stars Gerard had stared at—“
Mystère
, it's a Christmas to make the dogs cry”—“Come my little kids!” he calls to Nin and me but we dont hear him in the heat of our play in the cold snow so he goes in the house anyway, with that sad motion of men passing into their domiciles, the pitifulness of it, specially in winter, the sight of which, if an angel returned from heaven and looked (if angels, if heaven, which is an ethereal crock) would make an angel melt—If angels were angels in the first place.

Christmas comes, Gerard gets a great new erector set, big enough and complicated enough to build hoists that'll carry the house away—He sits in bed contemplating it with his little sad sideways look, like the way the moon looks on May nights, the face tilted over—It's an expression, with his arms folded, that again and again says “Ah, but and but, look at that, my souls”—Nin gets a pickaninny doll, I remember distinctly finding it that Christmas morning on the mantle by the tree, and the little high chair that went with it, and Gerard promptly that week made a little doll house for his sister, subsidiary gifts from his own Santa Claus hands—Me, I had toys that I've forgotten cold, and it goes to show—

Then New Year's—

Then the bleak January, the friendless February with his iron fingers in your grill of ribs—

Gerard lay abed all the time, getting up only to go to the toilet or occasional wan visits to the breakfast table, where after dishes were cleared, he'd sometimes sit a half hour erecting structures high that I watched standing at the side of him, holding his knee I expect—“What you doin, Gerard?”

No answer but in the action of his hands and the working of his face as he thinks, and I marvel at my love for him—

Then he'd get tired and sigh and go back to bed and try to sleep, at midday, and I had no one to play with any more—I'd bring him drawingboards and crayons, he'd feebly rise to do my bidding—Sitting up, against pillows, legs out, in the white room, and white frost on the windowpane, and my mother watching us in the doorway—Her gleeful way of saying: “You're having fun now?” as tho everything was alright with the world and 50 years later she'll still be the same, and seen it all—

“Ti Pousse, Ti Pousse, Ti Pousse, how fat you are Ti Pousse,” he'd say to me, mockfighting and hugging me and stroking my face. “Little Cabbage, Little Wolf, Little Piece of Butter, Little Boy, Little Pile, Little Nut, Little Savage, Little Bad, Little Cryer, Little Bawler, Little Winner, Little Robber, Little Lazy, Little
Kitigi
—Ti Jean Ti Jean—
Ti Jean Louis le gros Pipi
—Little Fatty—you weigh two tons—they'll bring you in a truck—Little Red, Little red mug—Look, Mama, the beautiful red cheeks Ti Jean has—he'll be handsome little boy!—he'll be strong!”

I basked in all this just like you would expect someone who deserved it, to bask in eternal bliss—I was going to be made to appreciate it, like a Fallen Angel.

Lancing pain in the legs and vague pain in the chest wakes Gerard in the mid of night, he makes a soft groan and represses even that realizing we're all asleep, and Mama is exhausted—I lie in the crib across the room, lips to sheet—“Aw it hurts, it hurts!!” he groans, and grabs his pain, which wont stop—It comes on and off like a light.

“Lance, lance, lance, why is this happening to me, what'd I do? I confessed to the priest, I havent hidden anything—It's not that—Aw well, I guess it isnt worth it living—Ow—Oh Ow—” Hands to face, about to cry. Like a load of rocks dumped from a truck onto a little kitty, the pitiful inescapability of death and the pain of death, and it will happen to the best and all and most beloved of us, O—Why should such hearts be made to wince and cringe and groan out life's breath?—
why does God kill us
?—The only answer can be written without words.

And Gerard knows that. He remembers his whole life now. Nothing to do in the long pain night, but hurt. And think. It is the long night of life. And think. The morning he was born somehow there was gray rain and damp overshoes and rubbers in a dreary closet and a brown sad light in the kitchen and angry smirch of bepestered life-faces, and somehow from somewhere out, or in the center, Counsel coming to him, saying, “Dont do it—Dont be born” but he was born, he wanted to do it and be born and ignored the Counsel, the Ancient Counsel—

The pain knifes into his jerking flesh, he jumps in bed a little, and aside, to avoid, it fades away a bit—“To me, to me it's happening”—He knows it isnt happening to me otherwise I'd be thrashing in my crib—“It's happening only to me”—He hears Pa snore upstairs, the littler harmonious snores of probably Ti Nin and Ma—It's only happening to him and it's the middle of the night and the window leaks and rattles from that wind—Out on the cold canals of Lowell across the river, snow-swirls are turning in the moon—

“O, when will it stop—?”

“O my Lord, help me—”

A stab of pain—“Help me!” he involuntarily cries out loud—“Nobody could know how much it hurts—O my Jesus you've left me alone and you're hurting me—And you too, you were hurted—Aw Jesus—nothing to help me—nothing”—Stab of strange pain, it advertises as it comes and comes with quick and open robbery, and vanishes with your peace—“I'll have to die, I'll have to die!” steals the dark cant-help-it thought—“If it doesnt stop”—And “
It wont stop
” sneaks the other thought, coming with the pain as voucher—

“Throughout all that, throughout that snowy window and the cold night and the big wind, and my leg and everything else in the house, throughout all that there isnt something else?”

And ecstasy unfolds inside his mind like a flower and says Yes, and he sees millions of white dots, like, and in another instant his legs are stabbing again and he's opened his eyes to concentrate on the concentrating—Like a Roman Soldier left to die on a deserted battlefield and howling for mercy for three days running, without food or water, and finally dying, which is a remembrance of the great American Saint Edgar Cayce (according to him in an earlier transmigration) Gerard a petallish thing of 9 is left to face cold unhopeful bone antagonized deep by elements within itself that will to war and wreck it, he himself, his personal-soul, is but victimized, tyrannized, wracked, flung aside, suffered to be a loser in the dubious game of mortal well-being—Words cant do it—“I've been thrown to that!”—A thousand realizations come to him—“It's got to stop!” the constant human thought as pain continues to hurt—

Words cant do it, readers will get sick of it—

Because it's not happening to themselves—

 

“O Lord, Ethereal Flower,