that I am sitting in my room in good Sunday clothes just home from a drive to Nashua, not doing anything, semi beginning to preside dully and absently over perhaps my slamdash hockeybang game which is a whole lot of marbles fighting over a little puck marble to kick it in the goal thereby killing two birds w.o.s. by making it also the official betweenseason Ceremony of racehorse-chipping, racehorse-desfinytng, things have to change in an organic picture of the world, my Turf was just like that, horses had to go through processes of prime and decay like real horses–but instead of really bothering (whether also it’s basketball or football game, football was a crude Pro iron smash thru the line, I ceased because too many of my racehorses were dying split in half in this carnage)—tired of games, just sitting there, over my pooltable, late red Sunday afternoon in Lowell, on the Boott Mills the great silent light shrouded the redbrick in a maze of haze sorrow, something mute but about to speak lurked in the sight of these silent glowing milk seen on dumb-Sundays of choked cleanness and odors of flower … with just a trace of the red earth grain by grain crawling out of the green and coming back into real life to smash the Sunday choke life, return earth to the issue, with it night later on … something secretively wild and baleful in the glares of the child soul, the masturbatory surging triumph of the knowledge of reality … tonight Doctor Sax will stalk–but it is still the hour when Sunday yet lives, 5 P.M. October, but the hour when red silence in the entire city (above the white river roar) will make a blue laugh tonight … a long blue sepulchral laff– There stands a great red wall of mystery–I get hungup looking at a speck of dust on a marble in a corner, my mind is blank, suddenly I remember when I was a little kid of five on Hil-dreth I used to make the Great Bird pursue the Little Man, the Little Man is running on two fingers, the Great Bird who has come out of eternity swoops down from heaven with his finger-beak and lowers to pluck him up … my eyes rounden in the silence of this old thought–unphoto-graphable moment– “Mende moi done cosse qui arrive (I wonder what’s happening)” I’m saying to myself– My father, having labored up the stairs, is standing in the door puffing, redfaced, strawhat, blue eyed, “Ta tu aimez ta ride mon Ti Loup? (Did you enjoy your ride my Little Wolf?)”
“Oui Pa-”
He’s going into his tragic bedroom for something–I’ve dreamt of that gray room—”daw chambre a Papa”—(‘n’ Papa’s room).
“Change ton butain” he says, “on va allez manger sur Chin Lee. (Change your clothes, we’re going to eat at Chin Lee’s.)”
“Chin Lee?!! O Boy!”
It was the ideal place on sad red Sundays… We drove, with Ma and Nin, in the old ‘34 Plymouth, over the Moody Street Bridge, over the rocks of eternity, and down Merrimac Street, in parlous solitudes of the Sabbath, past the church St. Jean Baptiste, which on Sunday afternoons seems to swell in size, past City Hall, to Kearney Square, Sunday standers, remnants of the littlegirl gangs who went to shows in new ribbons and pink coats and are now enjoying the last red hours of the show-day in the center of the city redbrick Sohtudes, by the Paige Clock showing Bleak Time,—to the snaky scrolls and beansprouts of the Chinese dark interior rich heartbreaking family booth in the restaurant, where I always felt so humble and contrite … the nice smiling Chinese men would really serve us that food of the smell so savory hung in the linoleum carpet hall downstairs.
2
THE VERY SKELETAL of the tale’s beginning– The Paquins lived across on Sarah in a Golden Brown House, a 2-story tenement but with fat owf-porches (piazzas, galleries) and purty gingerbread eaves and Screens on the porches making a dark Within … for long fly-less afternoons with Orange Crush… Paquin brothers were Beef and Robert, Big Beef of the ass-waddling down the street, Robert was a freckled earnest giant good intentioned with all, nothing wrong with Beef, freckled too, goodnatured, my mother says she was sitting on