“Have to pay my respects,” he'd say
and my mother never said,
“So you're going.”
I lurked on the sidewalk,
keeping out of sight,
which was easy to do,
because the men with cigars
took no notice
of my presence
or my existence.
At home, after my mother
hung his Best Suit in the closet,
having enclosed it first
in cellophane,
they sat in the kitchen,
my father in his rocking chair,
my mother at the kitchen table,
smoothing invisible wrinkles
from the blue tablecloth.
I stared at the pages
of Tom Sawyer.
My mother looked at my father
and my father picked up the Times,
shook it as if to drop
the words on the floor
and began to read.
Or maybe pretended to read
like me.
My mother's pinched fingers made small tents
on the tablecloth.
The newspaper rustled
as my father turned the pages.
“Work is sacred,” he declared
like a priest in the pulpit.
My mother continued
to make tents
and my father squinted at the newsprint
while I sat there
wondering
if I would ever solve
the mystery of my father.
“Arthur Colraine
has Saint Vims' dance,”
Alyrc Tournier announced.
I pictured Arthur
dancing madly, as a Gypsy violinist
blazed the air with music
near a campfire
like in the movies.
“Saint Vitus dance
is a sickness,”
Alyre explained,
indignant with his information.
In Arthur's kitchen,
I watched his mother
feeding a blue shirt
into the wringer of the washing machine,
her wrist bruised purple
from the times
she'd caught her arm in the wringer.
All Frenchtown women
wore those purple badges.
Tilting her head, she said,
“He's awake now,”
as if a secret sound
had reached her ears.
Entering the shadowed bedroom,
I saw Arthur's sunken face
as if painted on a piece of cloth,
his hands moving in the air,
wild birds flying,
his fluttering fingers
plucking at unseen harp strings.
If his hands were birds in flight,
his eyes were birds
trapped in cages,
swinging this way and that,
unable to escape,
not looking at me,
or anything else in this world.
He was no longer Arthur Colraine,
climber of trees like Tarzan,
amazing at arithmetic
in Sister Gertrude's classroom,
but a depraved stranger,
nameless,
an apparition,
and I fled the bedroom,
did not remember later
whether I said “Thank you”
to his mother.
Running down Fifth Street,
conscious of my hands,
I stopped in terror
—were they fluttering?—
had I somehow caught
that terrible affliction?
Pronounced cured at last,
Arthur Colraine
forever after
walked among us
alone and apart,
in the schoolyard,
on the sidewalks,
and one of my sins
is that I never
spoke to him
again.
In the confessional
at St. Jude's Church,
I knelt in turmoil,
only a shimmering curtain
protecting me
from the ears of my classmates
six feet away in the pews
while Father Balthazar,
ear pressed to the small screen,
urged me to
“Speak up, speak up.”
I recited my thin catalog
of sins:
talking during Mass,
swearing ten times,
disobeying my parents,
losing my temper,
routine disclosures
of sins that I wasn't even sure
I had committed,
but I had to confess
something.
Then the long pause,
hearing the rustling
of my classmates,
wondering if they had heard my whispers
as I had sometimes heard theirs.
Father Balthazar waited,
as if listening
for the sin
I could not find the courage
to confess.
“That's all,” I finally said,
wondering if priests could see
the stains on our souls.
I heard my penance:
“Recite ten Our Fathers
and ten Hail Marys
and promise to do better,”
his voice scratching at the screen.
Limp with relief
but hounded
by that unspoken sin
—those moist moments
in my bed at night—
I wondered whether
the sin of touching
and the sin of silence
obliterated my state of grace,
dooming me forever
to the fires of Hell
as I swallowed the white Host
that was the body of Jesus Christ
Sunday
after Sunday.
We never called them
birthday parties
but my mother always invited friends
for cake and ice cream,
the cake,
my favorite,
golden,
with butter frosting,
ice cream a dripping rainbow
of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry,
and candles to blow out,
my gift a flashlight,
silver
like a Buck Rogers ray gun.
I was dazzled by the light
it splashed
on walls and ceilings
and ran to the bedroom,
sending its radiance under the bed,
lighting up
the small gray ghosts of dust.
That night in bed,
Raymond snoring softly,
my father nodding in his chair,
a Chesterfield burning down
in the ashtray,
I flashed the tight
endlessly around the room
like a prison searchlight
or a beacon guiding ships
on stormy seas,
and fell asleep
like a lightbulb
going dark.
In the morning,
awaking before Raymond,
I sleepily tested
my newest treasure,
but no beam came forth,
the flashlight dead.
Not knowing that batteries
could be replaced,
I huddled in the sheet,
ashamed of my night's flagrancy
and realized
that nothing lasts
forever.
On a Saturday walk with Uncle Med
a sudden downpour
sent us scurrying for refuge
to St. Jude's Cemetery's old elm tree.
When the rain became mere dripping
as if the elm were weeping,
we waited for a rainbow
that never appeared.
Raymond asked if Uncle Med
knew where foe Latour was buried.
Over the damp gravel
he led us to the Edges,
and to a pathetic mound of earth,
a broken whiskey bottle,
not a stone, marking its spot.
Uncle Med said:
“Poor Joe, a nice guy.
We went to school together,
but he quit in the fourth grade.”
It amazed me that my uncle
had known a man who'd hanged himself.
Going past Marielle LeMoyne's grave,
Raymond asked:
“Did you know her, too?”
Resting his hand
on the head of the marble angel,
Uncle Med said:
“We all grew up together,
your father, too.
Marielle was a good girl,
wild sometimes,
could dance all night,
wore too much makeup,
but sweet,
a sweet young girl.”
That night,
I dreamed of Marielle LeMoyne
playing jackstones,
a young girl suddenly,
her skirt spread around her legs
as she sat on the sidewalk,
bouncing the small red ball
and grabbing a silver jackstone
with long pale fingers.
Uncle Med and my father
and someone I knew was Joe Latour
watched her play,
and they, too, were young
like Marielle.
One of them,
I could not tell which,
his face shadowed,
snatched the jackstone
from Marielle's fingers.
She began to cry,
tears dissolving her face,
her black flowing hair
suddenly turned red,
red like blood,
was blood,
flowing over her body,
as the boys,
shadows now,
ran away
with all her jackstones.
And I woke up.
In the night's stillness,
the B&M trains silent,
my thudding heart the only sound,
I vowed never to return
to St. Jude's Cemetery,
another vow
I did not keep.
Everyone made fun
of Omer LaFerge,
who stood like a balloon
at the corner of Fifth and Mechanic,
clicking his false teeth,
while kids gathered around him
as if he were a sideshow attraction
at the Captain Clyde Circus,
which came to Frenchtown every three years.
Kids poked at his stomach
or pinched his cherub cheeks
while Omer swayed back and forth
as if his shoes were made of lead.
He was offered hard candy
so that we could hear his false teeth
clicking
as he tried to chew,
spittle on his tips,
a smile on his face,
eager to please everyone,
ageless as a statue
waiting to be
defaced.
Then one day
he simply wasn't there
anymore.
I always hurried
by the house
where a bouquet of flowers
hung beside the front door
announcing that someone had died,
and a coffin
in the parlor
awaited the arrival of people
who would kneel,
murmuring prayers
in the suffocating scent
of other flowers.
The doorway flowers
were always white,
cupped in white baskets.
Even when they were removed
after the funeral,
I still hurried by that house,
my eyes averted.
One Easter morning
my father presented my mother
with a bouquet of white flowers,
which she placed on
the mahogany end table
in the parlor,
and whenever I walked by
I held my breath
so that I wouldn't inhale
the smell of death.
On le Jour de l'An,
that first day of the new year,
Pépère's sons and daughters
visited him in the morning
after Mass,
knelt before him
for his blessing,
the father and children repeating
the ancient ritual brought
from the old life
on the banks of the Richelieu River
in the Province of Québec.
I watched one winter morning
my father kneeling,
head bowed,
at his father's knees,
saw for the first time
the small oval of whiteness
at the back of his head.
In a burst of knowledge,
I saw that he was not ageless,
after all,
and would the someday.
Now, in August heat,
in the pantry,
as my father bent down
to remove
the brimming tray at the bottom of the icebox,
I saw that spot of baldness,
whiter, wider now,
his hair thinner,
revealing his pale scalp,
and I fled the tenement,
clattered down the stairs,
in sudden rushing panic
running to—
where?—
I was blinded
by the knowledge
that there was
no safe place
to run to.
Once every summer
the family spent a Sunday
at Moccasin Pond.
I sat squeezed between
my cousins Francine and Ernie
baskets on the floor
bulging with baloney sandwiches,
quart bottles of orange Kool-Aid
clinking in paper bags.
On the burning sands,
I hovered in my bathing suit,
straps biting my frail shoulders,
while my cousins frolicked,
splashing and diving,
pushing and shoving,
delighting in the freedom
from Frenchtown pavement.
I held back,
knowing that the instant
I removed my glasses
the world would blur,
the pond become a monster
lapping at my feet,
while my cousin Freddie called:
“Hey, Eugene, come on in,
the water's wet.”
I spent
the rest of the day
waiting
to go home.
My uncle Jules
limped through the streets of Frenchtown,
his right leg not synchronized
with the rest of his body,
walking as if trying to maintain
his balance
on a tilting sidewalk.
He was my silent uncle,
sat in the back pew at Sunday Mass,
converted the shed at Pépére's house
into a bedroom,
did not join the family
at the supper table
but took his pate
back to his room
to eat by himself.
He had been hurt
when prayers brought
three hundred pounds
of combs and brushes
down on him as he walked by,
the sound of his legs breaking
like gunshots
in the shipping department.
(My uncle Med told me all this
as we hiked up Ransom Hill
toward Pepper Point.)
Uncle Jules was seventeen years old,
waiting to be drafted any moment
and sent overseas
to the in the trenches in France
when the crates fell,
saving him from war.
That's what my pépère believed
and why he had spent hours
in St. Jude's Church
kneeling in prayer,
lighting candles,
rising each morning
for the five o'clock nuns' Mass,
gulping Holy Communion
like a starving man.
At the end of nine days,
the length of a novena,
the crates fell
in an avalanche of boxes.
Every year
on le Jour de l'An
Pépère waited in vain
for Uncle Jules to kneel before him,
seeking his Messing.
As the morning turned to afternoon
tears spilled from Pépère's eyes
like blood from wounds.
Everybody said
Officer O'Brien was a good cop.
His beat was Frenchtown
and he patrolled the streets
as if strolling in a park
but a deadly gun rode at his side
and a black billy club hung from his hip.
He kicked the behinds of kids
who misbehaved,
manhandled the drunks
who became unruly at the Happy Times
and sent them home to their wives.
His smile
was quick
but his black eyes could see
into your soul
and make it shrivel.
They said he had a scar on his shoulder
from a bullet fired
by a robber who'd held up
the Merchants' Bank downtown.
Despite the wound,
the good cop O'Brien
brought the robber down
with a tackle,
the sidewalk behind him
veined with his blood.
They also said he was in love
with Mrs. Rancoeur on Fifth Street,
whose husband often left town
for days at a time,
sometimes weeks,
and returned without explanation.
No one ever saw the good cop O'Brien
and Mrs. Rancoeur together.
He only tipped his hat to her
when she passed by on Third Street,
arms bundled with groceries,
her two children at her side.
“Rumors,” my father said,
shaking his newspaper
while my mother looked dreamy,
staring out the window.
“They're such nice people,” she said.
“Life is so sad sometimes.”
While my father