Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize) - William Kennedy [70]
“He got a bum out of jail.”
“You’re so mean to yourself, Francis.”
“Hell, I’m mean to everybody and everything.”
The bleachers were all up, and men were filing silently into them and sitting down, right here in Annie’s backyard, in front of God and the dog and all: Bill Corbin, who ran for sheriff in the nineties and got beat and turned Republican, and Perry Marsolais, who inherited a fortune from his mother and drank it up and ended up raking leaves for the city, and Iron Joe himself with his big mustache and big belly and big ruby stickpin, and Spiff Dwyer in his nifty pinched fedora, and young George Quinn and young Martin Daugherty, the batboys, and Martin’s grandfather Emmett Daugherty, the wild Fenian who talked so fierce and splendid and put the radical light in Francis’s eye with his stories of how moneymen used workers to get rich and treated the Irish like pigdog paddyniggers, and Patsy McCall, who grew up to run the city and was carrying his ball glove in his left hand, and some men Francis did not know even in 1899, for they were only hangers-on at the saloon, men who followed the doings of Iron Joe’s Wheelbarrow Boys, and who came to the beer picnic this day to celebrate the Boys’ winning the Albany-Troy League pennant.
They kept coming: forty-three men, four boys, and two mutts, ushered in by the Fiddler and his pals.
And there, between crazy Specky McManus in his derby and Jack Corbett in his vest and no collar, sat the runt, is it?
Is it now?
The runt with the piece out of his neck.
There’s one in every crowd.
Francis closed his eyes to retch the vision out of his head, but when he opened them the bleachers still stood, the men seated as before. Only the light had changed, brighter now, and with it grew Francis’s hatred of all fantasy, all insubstantiality. I am sick of you all, was his thought. I am sick of imagining what you became, what I might have become if I’d lived among you. I am sick of your melancholy histories, your sentimental pieties, your goddamned unchanging faces. I’d rather be dyin’ in the weeds than standin’ here lookin’ at you pinin’ away, like the dyin’ Jesus pinin’ for an end to it when he knew every stinkin’ thing that was gonna happen not only to himself but to everybody around him, and to all those that wasn’t even born yet. You ain’t nothin’ more than a photograph, you goddamn spooks. You ain’t real and I ain’t gonna be at your beck and call no more.
You’re all dead, and if you ain’t, you oughta be.
I’m the one is livin’. I’m the one puts you on the map.
You never knew no more about how things was than I did.
You’d never even be here in the damn yard if I didn’t open that old trunk.
So get your ass gone!
“Hey Ma,” Billy yelled out the window. “Peg’s home.”
“We’ll be right in,” Annie said. And when Billy closed the window she turned to Francis: “You want to tell me anything, ask me anything, before we get in front of the others?”
“Annie, I got five million things to ask you, and ten million things to tell. I’d like to eat all the dirt in this yard for you, eat the weeds, eat the dog bones too, if you asked me.”
“I think you probably ate all that already,” she said.
And then they went up the back stoop together.
o o o
When Francis first saw his daughter bent over the stove, already in her flowered apron and basting the turkey, he thought: She is too dressed up to be doing that. She wore a wristwatch on one arm, a bracelet on the other, and two rings on her wedding ring finger. She wore high heels, silk stockings with the seams inside out, and a lavender dress that was never intended as a kitchen costume. Her darkbrown hair, cut short, was waved in a soft marcel, and she wore lipstick and a bit of rouge, and her nails were long and painted dark red. She was a few, maybe even more than a few, pounds overweight, and she was beautiful, and Francis was immeasurably happy at having sired her.
“How ya doin’, Margaret?” Francis asked when she straightened up and looked at him.
“I’m doing fine,” she said, “no thanks to you.”
“Yep,