eight years and four, five months later in the sunk hot bed of July summer by which time the Wizard and his forces of Evil gathered from all over the world (expenses paid) (by Satan below) had had plenty of time to ruin the balance of the world with strokes of good luck, a particularly propitious May (having nothing to do with the sweet rose that flows so merry in the blue night from Weirs of the upper Marrocrock Roil in Manchestaire, the Aristook Falls, up-ledges near great granite Stone Face, Laconia, Franconia, Notch,—not the May of the Odyssey of the Rose but the May of Demter Hemter Skloom crisscrossing in the aerial sky over the gnomic ever-to-be-seen-from-all-parts-of-town Castle like a blue smoke shroud castle in the clear real air of Lowell–I remember opening my eyes from Giant Pillow Sleeps and seeing that gnomic shape atop the far gray river hill as if I could see through the walls of my bedroom at the river)—their work, so well done, they broke the fancy chain of reality and there was an earth tremor. All Lowell felt it. I was going to store before school in the dewcool March morning and there in the ground of the park where it was flattened from kid scuffle stands and marble piggly was a huge crack jagging across the earth, an inch thick. Up at Snake Hill the crack was three inches thick (by Saints of Red Sun) and almost thicker below– Some of us drove over to see, at the foot of Snake Hill near the old ironpickets and granite gate walls of the deserted castle groups of the Social Club gang huddled around kicking at the crack. Through the pines, up to the castle (in that selfsame door where Condu flew down to the Countess that opening night)—there stands Boaz the old caretaker, he’s turned the main hall of the castle his smoky shack for dogs and soul–huddles over a potbelly stove with wood in it, by the staircase, an old cot along the underpinnings, hanging Arabian Gypsy drapes of old hermit decoration, a Jean Fourchette of the Castle Solitudes instead of dump and smoke wrecks–a Saint, the old man was a red-eyed saint, he’d seen too much, there was a crack down his Tree, a Gulf in his cataracts—that first view of Sax as so ably reported by Sax himself made his hair turn gray overnight–muttering, he stood in the door looking down at Vauriselle, Carrufel, Plouffe and all of us earthquake investigators. No comment.
It was an incident worth noting–that abyss cracking open.
3
MY MOTHER AND I, bless her soul, raced from that scene of moony death on the damned bridge and rushed home. “Bien,” she said, “c’est pas’I diable pleasant (Well, it’s not the devil pleasant!)”—”Let’s get out of here”— Corner where that kid Fish had socked me in the face, there it was, ironic rejoinder to skeletal moons– At home my hair stood on my head. Something was somehow wreathy purple and gloomy about our house that night. My sister was in the kitchen, kneeling at the table funnies of dull supper weekdays, my pop was in his chair by the Stromberg Carlson radio (by the driveway, by the dog), the sandbank brooded its Doctor Sax secrets in banefuller night than ever– We told pop about the dying man … gloomy music played in my soul … I remembered the turning Th£r&se statue head, the fish heads cut off in the cellar, doors yawning open in the closet of night, black spiders crawling in the dark (huge black ones) (like I saw at the Castle when everything exploded), fantastic grooking clotheslines whiteshrouded in the night, washlined neighborhoods hung with sheets, ookeries in the elfin celt, the smell of flowers the day before somebody dies–the night Gerard died and all the weeping, yelling, arguing in the bedrooms of the Beaulieu Street house in the brown glooms of Uncle Mike’s family (Mike, Clementine, Blanche, Roland, Edgar, Viola, all were there) and my mother crying, in the yard the cousins are setting off our firecrackers against our wishes, it’s midnight my father’s harassed and worried “Alright Ti Jean and Nin can go to the Dudley’s,” (Aunt Dudley was there too, awful millings of broken relatives and excited-by-death relatives