Ironweed (20 page)

          “Good. Then let me get it into the oven right now. When Peg comes home we can peel potatoes and onions and Danny can go get some cranberries. A turkey. Imagine that. Rushing the season.”

          “Who’s Danny?”

          “You don’t know Danny. Naturally, you don’t. He’s Peg’s boy. She married George Quinn. You know George, of course, and they have the boy. He’s ten.”

          “Ten.”

          “In fourth grade and smart as a cracker.”

          “Gerald, he’d be twenty-two now.”

          “Yes, he would.”

          “I saw his grave.”

          “You did? When?”

          “Yesterday. Got a day job up there and tracked him down and talked there awhile.”

          “Talked?”

          “Talked to Gerald. Told him how it was. Told him a bunch of stuff.”

          “I’ll bet he was glad to hear from you.”

          “May be. Where’s Bill?”

          “Bill? Oh, you mean Billy. We call him Billy. He’s taking a nap. He got himself in trouble with the politicians and he’s feeling pretty low. The kidnapping. Patsy McCall’s nephew was kidnapped. Bindy McCall’s son. You must’ve read about it.”

          “Yeah, I did, and Martin Daugherty run it down for me too, awhile back.”

          “Martin wrote about Billy in the paper this morning.”

          “I seen that too. Nice write-up. Martin says his father’s still alive.”

          “Edward. He is indeed, living down on Main Street. He lost his memory, poor man, but he’s healthy. We see him walking with Martin from time to time. I’ll go wake Billy and tell him you’re here.”

          “No, not yet. Talk a bit.”

          “Talk. Yes, all right. Let’s go in the living room.”

          “Not me, not in these clothes. I just come off workin’ on a junk wagon. I’d dirty up the joint somethin’ fierce.”

          “That doesn’t matter at all. Not at all.”

          “Right here’s fine. Look out the window at the yard there. Nice yard. And a collie dog you got.”

          “It is nice. Danny cuts the grass and the dog buries his bones all over it. There’s a cat next door he chases up and down the fence.”

          “The family changed a whole lot. I knew it would. How’s your brother and sisters?”

          “They’re fine, I guess. Johnny never changes. He’s a committeeman now for the Democrats. Josie got very fat and lost a lot of her hair. She wears a switch. And Minnie was married two years and her husband died. She’s very lonely and lives in a rented room. But we all see one another.”

          “Billy’s doin’ good.”

          “He’s a gambler and not a very good one. He’s always broke.”

          “He was good to me when I first seen him. He had money then. Bailed me outa jail, wanted to buy me a new suit of clothes. Then he give me a hefty wad of cash and acourse I blew it all. He’s tough too, Billy. I liked him a whole lot. He told me you never said nothin’ to him and Peg about me losin’ hold of Gerald.”

          “No, not until the other day.”

          “You’re some original kind of woman, Annie. Some original kind of woman.”

          “Nothing to be gained talking about it. It was over and done with. Wasn’t your fault any more than it was my fault. Wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

          “No way I can thank you for that. That’s something thanks don’t even touch. That’s something I don’t even know—”

          She waved him silent.

          “Never mind that,” she said. “It’s over. Come, sit, tell me what finally made you come see us.”

          He sat down on the backless bench in the breakfast nook and looked out the window, out past the geranium plant with two blossoms, out at the collie dog and the apple tree that grew in this yard but offered shade and blossoms and fruit to two other yards adjoining, out at the flower beds and the trim grass and the white wire fence that enclosed it all. So nice. He felt a great compulsion to confess all his transgressions in order to be equal to this niceness he had missed out on; and yet he felt a great torpor in his tongue, akin to what he had felt in his legs when he walked on the glue of the sidewalks. His brain, his body seemed to be in a drugged sleep that allowed perception without action. There was no way he could reveal all that had brought him here. It would have meant the recapitulation not only of all his sins but of all his fugitive and fallen dreams, all his random movement across the country and back, all his returns to this city only to leave again without ever coming to see her, them, without ever knowing why he didn’t. It would have meant the anatomizing of his compulsive violence and his fear of justice, of his time with Helen, his present defection from Helen, his screwing so many women he really wanted nothing to do with, his drunken ways, his morning-after sicknesses, his sleeping in the weeds, his bumming money from strangers not because there was a depression but first to help Helen and then because it was easy: easier than working. Everything was easier than coming home, even reducing yourself to the level of social maggot, streetside slug.

          But then he came home.

          He is home now, isn’t he?

          And if he is, the question on the table is: Why is he?

          “You might say it was Billy,” Francis said. “But that don’t really get it. Might as well ask the summer birds why they go all the way south and then come back north to the same old place.”

          “Something must’ve caught you.”

          “I say it was Billy gettin’ me outa jail, goin’ my bail, then invitin’ me home when I thought I’d never get invited after what I did, and then findin’ what you did, or didn’t do is more like it, and not ever seem’ Peg growin’ up, and wantin’ some of that. I says to Billy I want to come home when I can do something’ for the folks, but he says just come home and see them and never mind the turkey, you can do that for them. And here I am. And the turkey too.”

          “But something changed in you,” Annie said. “It was the woman, wasn’t it? Billy meeting her?”

          “The woman.”

          “Billy told me you had another wife. Helen, he said.”

          “Not a wife. Never a wife. I only had one wife.”

          Annie, her arms folded on the breakfast table across from him, almost smiled, which he took to be a sardonic response. But then she said: “And I only had one husband. I only had one man.”

          Which froze Francis’s gizzard.

          “That’s what the religion does,” he said, when he could talk.

          “It wasn’t the religion.”

          “Men must’ve come outa the trees after you, you were such a handsome woman.”

          “They tried. But no man ever came near me. I wouldn’t have it. I never even went to the pictures with anybody except neighbors, or the family.”

          “I couldn’ta married again,” Francis said. “There’s some things you just can’t do. But I did stay with Helen. That’s the truth, all right. Nine years on and off. She’s a good sort, but helpless as a baby. Can’t find her way across the street if you don’t take her by the hand. She nursed me when I was all the way down and sick as a pup. We got on all right. Damn good woman, I say that. Came from good folks. But she can’t find her way across the damn street.”

          Annie stared at him with a grim mouth and sorrowful eyes.

          “Where is she now?”

          “Somewheres, goddamned if I know. Downtown somewheres, I suppose. You can’t keep track of her. She’ll drop dead in the street one of these days, wanderin’ around like she does.”

          “She needs you.”

          “Maybe so.”

          “What do you need, Fran?”

          “Me? Huh. Need a shoelace. All I got is a piece of twine in that shoe for two days.”

          “Is that all you need?”

          “I’m still standin’. Still able to do a day’s work. Don’t do it much, I admit that. Still got my memory, my memories. I remember you, Annie. That’s an enrichin’ thing. I remember Kibbee’s lumber pile the first day I talked to you. You remember that?”

          “Like it was this morning.”

          “Old times.”

          “Very old.”

          “Jesus Christ, Annie, I missed everybody and everything, but I ain’t worth a goddamn in the world and never was. Wait a minute. Let me finish. I can’t finish. I can’t even start. But there’s somethin’. Somethin’ to say about this. I got to get at it, get it out. I’m so goddamned sorry, and I know that don’t cut nothin’. I know it’s just a bunch of shitass words, excuse the expression. It’s nothin’ to what I did to you and the kids. I can’t make it up. I knew five, six months after I left that it’d get worse and worse and no way ever to fix it, no way ever to go back. I’m just hangin’ out now for a visit, that’s all. Just visitin’ to see you and say I hope things are okay. But I got other things goin’ for me, and I don’t know the way out of anything. All there is is this visit. I don’t want nothin’, Annie, and that’s the honest-to-god truth, I don’t want nothin’ but the look of everybody. Just the look’ll do me. Just the way things look out in that yard. It’s a nice yard. It’s a nice doggie. Damn, it’s nice. There’s plenty to say, plenty of stuff to say, explain, and such bullshit, excuse the expression again, but I ain’t ready to say that stuff, I ain’t ready to look at you while you listen to it, and I bet you ain’t ready to hear it if you knew what I’d tell you. Lousy stuff, Annie, lousy stuff. Just gimme a little time, gimme a sandwich too, I’m hungry as a damn bear. But listen, Annie, I never stopped lovin’ you and the kids, and especially you, and that don’t entitle me to nothin’, and I don’t want nothin’ for sayin’ it, but I went my whole life rememberin’ things here that were like nothin’ I ever saw anywhere in Georgia or Louisiana or Michigan, and I been all over, Annie, all over, and there ain’t nothin’ in the world like your elbows sittin’ there on the table across from me, and that apron all full of stains. Goddamn, Annie. Goddamn. Kibbee’s was just this mornin’. You’re right about that. But it’s old times too, and I ain’t askin’ for nothin’ but a sandwich and a cupa tea. You still use the Irish breakfast tea?”

                                       o          o          o

          The talk that passed after what Francis said, and after the silence that followed it, was not important except as it moved the man and the woman closer together and physically apart, allowed her to make him a Swiss cheese sandwich and a pot of tea and begin dressing the turkey: salting, peppering, stuffing it with not quite stale enough bread but it’ll have to do, rubbing it with butter and sprinkling it with summer savory, mixing onions in with the dressing, and turkey seasoning too from a small tin box with a red and yellow turkey on it, fitting the bird into a dish for which it seemed to have been groomed and killed to order, so perfect was the fit.

          And too, the vagrant chitchat allowed Francis to stare out at the yard and watch the dog and become aware that the yard was beginning to function as the site of a visitation, although nothing in it except his expectation when he looked out at the grass lent credence to that possibility.

          He stared and he knew that he was in the throes of flight, not outward this time but upward. He felt feathers growing from his back, knew soon he would soar to regions unimaginable, knew too that what had brought him home was not explicable without a year of talking, but a scenario nevertheless took shape in his mind: a pair of kings on a pair of trolley cars moving toward a single track, and the trolleys, when they meet at the junction, do not wreck each other but fuse into a single car inside which the kings rise up against each other in imperial intrigue, neither in control, each driving the car, a careening thing, wild, anarchic, dangerous to all else, and then Billy leaps aboard and grabs the power handle and the kings instantly yield control to the wizard.

          He give me a Camel cigarette when I was coughin’ my lungs up, Francis thought.

          He knows what, a man needs, Billy does.

                                       o          o          o

          Annie was setting the dining-room table with a white linen tablecloth, with the silver Iron Joe gave them for their wedding, and with china Francis did not recognize, when Daniel Quinn arrived home. The boy tossed his schoolbag in a corner of the dining room, then stopped in midmotion when he saw Francis standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

          “Hulooo,” Francis said to him.

          “Danny, this is your grandfather,” Annie said. “He just came to see us and he’s staying for dinner.” Daniel stared at Francis’s face and slowly extended his right hand. Francis shook it.

          “Pleased to meet you,” Daniel said.

          “The feeling’s mutual, boy. You’re a big lad for ten.”

          “I’ll be eleven in January.”

          “You comin’ from school, are ye?”

          “From instructions, religion.”

          “Oh, religion. I guess I just seen you crossin’ the street and didn’t even know it. Learn anything, did you?”

          “Learned about today. All Saints’ Day.”

          “What about it?”

          “It’s a holy day. You have to go to church. It’s the day we remember the martyrs who died for the faith and nobody knows their names.”

          “Oh yeah,” Francis said. “I remember them fellas.”

          “What happened to your teeth?”

          “Daniel.”

          “My teeth,” Francis said. “Me and them parted company, most of ‘em. I got a few left.”

          “Are you Grampa Phelan or Grampa Quinn?”

          “Phelan,” Annie said. “His name is Francis Aloysius Phelan.”

          “Francis Aloysius, right,” said Francis with a chuckle. “Long time since I heard that.”

          “You’re the ball player,” Danny said. “The big-leaguer. You played with the Washington Senators.”

          “Used to. Don’t play anymore.”

          “Billy says you taught him how to throw an inshoot.”

          “He remembers that, does he?”