Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [45]
“Is he dead?” I said to my mother. As in a dream we adjourn behind the dead man, who sits near the rail with his stare, holding his belly with his wrist, all slumped, distant, in the throes of that which is carrying him far away from us, something private. Another man vouchsafed an opinion:
“I’ll get an ambulance at St. Joseph’s here, he may be alright.”
But my mother shook her head and made that sneer you see the world wide around, in California or in China, “No, s’t’homme la est fini (no, that man there is finished) “— “Regard–Teau sur les planches, quand quun homme smeurt its pis dans son butain, toute part … (Look, the water on the planks, when a man dies he pees in his clothes, everything goes.)”
Indubitable proof of his death I saw in that tragic stain that in the moonlight was specialized milk, he was not going to be abight at all, he was already dead, my mother’s was no prophecy it was a known thing from the start, her secret snaky knowledge about death as uncanny as the Fellaheen dog that howls in the muddy alleys of Mazatlan when death has laid its shroud on the dead in the dark. I had intended to look at the dead man again–but now I saw he was really dead and taken–his eyes had turned glassy on the milky waters of the night in their hollow roar cold rock–but it was that part of the giant rocks below he chose to die his fixed gaze on–that part which yet I see in dreams of Lowell and the Bridge. I shuddered and saw white flowers and grew cold.
The full moon horrified me with her cloudy leer. “Regard, la face de skalette dans la Inner cries my mother– “Look, the face of a skeleton in the moon!”
2
THUMPING TREES IN THE WELD WOOD beyond the bridge rail, the forests of the rock bank of Merrimac, where oft I’d seen old Sax–heart urge his oiky-cloiky fly along the black sides, headed for a perfidy of dirt–in mists of raw March-wild glee–
The history of the Castle goes back to the 18th century when it was built by a mad seafarer named Phloggett who came to Lowell looking for a sea-like expanse of the Merrimac and decided on the Rosemont basin and built his old haunted rockheap on the top of the Centralville hill where it backsloped to its Pelhams and Dracuts (many’s the time we’d run around there Joe and me picking green apples from the ground by stone walls and finding rusty fenders to piss on in the heart of every forest)—a ruinous old bones of a house, with turrets, stone, entryways gothicized, a gravel driveway which was put in by its 1920’s occupants for roadsters of the Ripe–Old Epzebiah Phloggett, he was a seafarer, for all we know he was a slavetrader — He sailed from Lynn in the molasses and rum fleet-Retired he went to his Lowell castle–not known as Lowell then, and wild–nothing but the Pawtucket Indians sending up their calm wigwams at eve with a puff of smoke-Old Smogette Phloggett occasionally made hikes with his footmen to see the Indians, at the Falls–where the river left its shale shelf that has served it since before Nashua and now drops blonk into the wornaway rock–rock as soft as silk when you touch it in hot dry summers– Phloggett didn’t have much to do with the Indians, he occasionally bought a young squaw and brought her to the Castle and back again in a week– There was something evil in the bottom of his dirty old soul … some snaky secret Sax knew about later– He had a long old antiquarian telescope eye-glass that he unfurled on gray March