Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [444]
Again he knelt, prayed in an exalting fervor, abjectly asking his God to spare his son from death, to give him back just Bill. If only Bill lived, he would take the loss of everything else with Job’s patience. He imagined Bill recovering quickly, their moving into a small flat, economizing, he and Bill fighting back to where they had once been. He saw himself coming around to a large building where he had a big contract, seeing Bill in paint-stained overalls, up on a ladder like it used to be. He saw a future of Bill and the other children with their kids, himself and Mary as happy grandparents, a family reunion, with him and Bill laughing as they talked about the hard times of 1930 and 1931, and how they had pulled through those days of hard times.
His mind cleared. He thought of his home, and wondered how Bill was. He knelt, rigid with the paralyzing conviction that Bill was dead. Again he beseeched his God for Bill’s life.
He arose, and with fear creating tremors in him he slowly walked to the altar, knelt before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, dropped all his small change in the slot for money, and lit eight candles to burn in honor of the Blessed Virgin as prayer and offering that Bill might be spared. He arose, turned, walked to the rear of the church, a corpulent old man, his body slack, his shoulders drooping, his abdomen sagging, his eyes heavy and baggy, suggesting sleeplessness, his loose face drawn in a fretting expression.
III
He stood on the church steps looking at the drab row of three-story brick apartment houses across the street. Looked old, not worth much. Probably run down inside, too. Nigger buildings now. He watched a stout shabby Negro woman across the street walking to the corner with a waddling gait, disappearing around the corner store.
The feeling of having nothing to do, no stone to turn, no help in his present difficulties, weighed upon him like something heavy. He stood indecisive and watched a street car cut across Michigan Avenue, followed by a succession of three automobiles. He smiled at a neatly dressed Negro boy of about twelve who passed him singing, and he thought that, golly, the eight-balls sure could be happy. He stared while a slender, pretty mulatto girl wheeled a baby buggy along the sidewalk below him. Nigger babies were cute little ducks. But they grew up into black dangerous buck niggers who flashed razors. He nodded, bewildered by his observation.
He descended the steps, got into his Ford, and without thinking of what he was doing drove north along Michigan Avenue, past the Carter School playground where black children romped and played in the same place and in the same way as his own kids had romped and played. He halted the car in front of the building he had once owned, approached it. With his hand on the knob of the outer entrance door, he realized with the pain of loss that it was no longer his building and that all the life, hopes, expectations lived in this building, these were all gone, and that he was now an old man on the verge of ruin, and when he went home tonight, he might find his oldest son . . . dead.
Jesus Christ, he agonizingly exclaimed to himself.
Nervousness accumulated in him, and feeling the need of doing something, he lit a cigar. He stepped back to his automobile, and drove northward. At Fifty-sixth Street he came to the sudden realization that he was driving heedlessly, and swerved, scratching a fender against the curb to avoid colliding into a Nation Oil tank truck. Shocked, he watched his driving, puffed on his cigar, turned west onto Garfield Boulevard. Turning north again, he saw by a sign in one of its windows that the bank of Abraham Clarkson was closed. Served Clarkson right because Clarkson was the shine who, in the old days, had refused to move from the neighborhood when no one had wanted a nigger in it, depressing real estate values and living among white people where he didn’t belong. He wouldn’t get out, even though his house kept getting bombed. Lonigan