Very Old Bones (15 page)

“Listen,” Francis said, “don’t knock it till you tried it,” whereupon Sarah ran up the stairs into the church and did not talk to either brother for three days,
after which time she raised the issue at the dinner table.

“Mama,” Sarah said to all assembled siblings, “Francis has something to tell you.”

“No I don’t,” Francis said.

“You’ll tell her or I will,” Sarah said.

“I got nothin’ to say,” Francis said.

“Then Peter will tell,” Sarah said.

“Not me,” Peter said.

“Will somebody tell me what this is about?” Kathryn Phelan asked. Her other children, Chick, Julia, Molly, and Tommy, looked bewildered at their mother’s question.

“It’s what Francis is doing,” Sarah said. But she could say no more.

“Sarah doesn’t think I oughta work for Katrina,” Francis said. “I think Sarah oughta mind her own business.”

“Why
not
work for her?” Kathryn asked.

“There’s more than work going on over there,” Sarah said.

“And what might that mean?”

“Are you going to tell her?” Sarah asked Francis.

Francis stared into Sarah’s eyes, his face crimson, his mouth a line of rage.

“Well?” said Kathryn.

“She put her arms around him,” Sarah said.

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Francis said.

“Why did she do that?”

“She likes the way I work,” Francis said.

“He’s lying,” Sarah said.

“How do you know?” Kathryn asked. “Did you see her do this?”

“Yes, and so did Peter.”

“I don’t know what I saw,” Peter said.

“Don’t lie,” Sarah said.

“Everybody’s a liar but Sarah,” Peter said.

“What were you doing watching over there?” Kathryn asked Sarah.

“I followed Peter. He’s the one who was watching.”

“You’re a lousy rat, Sarah,” Peter said. “A real lousy rat.”

“Never mind name-calling. I want to know what went on What is she talking about, Francis?”

“Nothin’. I work for her, that’s all. She’s a nice person.”

“She was naked,” Sarah said.

“Naked!” Kathryn said, and she stood up and grabbed Francis by the ear. “What’ve you been doing, young man?”

Francis stood and jerked his head out of his mother’s grip. “I walked into her room when she was dressin’,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

“He’s lying again,” Sarah said. “He was painting and she took her robe off and was naked and then she threw her arms around him and he did the same thing to
her.”

“Is that true?” Kathryn asked, her face inches from Francis.

“She’s a little crazy sometimes,” Francis said. “She does funny things.”

“Taking her clothes off in front of you? You consider that funny?”

“She doesn’t know what she’s doin’ sometimes. But she’s really all right.”

“He put his arms around her and they kissed for a long time,” Sarah said.

“You bitch,” Francis said. “You stinkin’ little sister bitch.”

Kathryn swung her left hand upward and caught Francis under the jaw. The blow knocked him off balance and he fell into the china closet, smashing its glass door, shattering plates, cups,
glasses, then falling in a bleeding heap on the floor.

Thirty-six years gone and here he is back again, Peter thought, and there is the china closet, and here we all are (Sarah will come down from her room eventually; she will have
to face the reality of his return), and here minus Julia are the non-conspirators, Molly, Chick, Tom-Tom, Orson, the added starter, about the same age I was when all this happened, and Francis, who
is no more repentant today of whatever sin than he was when Mama knocked him down with her left hook.

“I thought Sarah was comin’ down,” Francis said.

“She’ll be down,” Molly said. “She’s getting dressed for tonight.”

“You look pretty, Moll. Real, real pretty. You got a beau? Somebody sweet on you?”

Molly put her eyes down to her plate. “Not really,” she said.

“How about Sarah? She didn’t marry, did she?”

“No,” said Molly.

“I ran into Floyd Wagner down in Baltimore. I’m on my way to Georgia and old Floyd, he’s a cop now, was gonna arrest me. Then he seen who I was and instead of arrestin’
me he bought me a beer and we cut it up about the old days. He said he went out a few times with Sarah.”

“That’s so,” said Molly. “Sarah broke it off.”

“So Floyd said.”

“Never mind about Floyd Wagner,” said Sarah, descending the back stairs into the room. She was in total mourning, even to the black combs that held her hair, her dress a high-necked,
ankle-length replica of the recurring dress that Kathryn Phelan had worn most of her life, always made by the perfect, homemade dressmaker, Sarah. It was less a mourning garment than a maternal
uniform—black cotton in the summer, black wool in winter—that asserted that unbelievable resistance to anything that smacked of vanity, though not even that: of lightness, of elevation.
Her children and relatives had tried to sway her with gifts of floral-patterned dresses, colored skirts and blouses, but the gifts remained in boxes for years until finally Kathryn gave them to the
Little Sisters of the Poor.

Francis looked at Sarah and retreated in time. Here was the mother incarnate in Sarah, now fifty-one, a willful duplicate; and Francis remembered that Sarah had even wanted to call herself Sate
when they were young, because people called their mother Kate; but Mama would have none of that. Sarah would be Sarah, which was no hindrance at all to emulation, as this presence now proved;
uncanny resemblance, even to the combing and parting of the hair and the black-and-white cameo brooch that Kathryn always wore at her throat.

“Hello, Sarah,” Francis said. “How you been?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Sarah looks like Mama,” Tommy said.

“I noticed that,” Francis said.

“So you’re back,” Sarah said to Francis. “You’re looking well.”

“Is that so?” Francis said. “I wouldn’ta said so.”

“Francis can be a bearer,” Chick said. “I just thought of that. Then we only need one more.”

“Francis won’t be here,” Sarah said. “Francis isn’t staying.”

“What?” said Peter.

“He’s not staying,” Sarah said. “He’s not a part of this family and hasn’t been for over thirty years. Feed him if you like, but that’s all he gets out
of us.”

“Sarah,” Molly said, “that’s wrong.”

“No,” said Sarah, “nothing wrong except that he’s back among us and I won’t have it. Not on the day my mother is waking.”

“Right,” Francis said. “I seen her wakin’. I seen her dead, and now I see her again, not dead at all. Nothin’ changed here since I left the first time, and now I
remember why I left. Sarah’s got a way of joggin’ your memory.”

“Sarah doesn’t run this house,” Peter said.

“Right,” Chick said. “Absolutely right. Sarah don’t run nobody.”

“It’s okay,” Francis said. “Not a thing anybody’s gotta worry about. I’m a travelin’ man, and that’s all I am. Never counted on anything more than
seein’ she was really dead. I figure, she’s dead, I’m free. Know what I mean, Chickie pie?”

“No.”

“What’s gone’s gone, and I figure, good riddance. She wanted
me
dead is the way I figure it. Ain’t that right, Sarah?”

“You were dead for years. You’re dead now. Why don’t you go live in the cemetery?”

“You know, you turned out just right, Sarah,” Francis said. “Just like I knew you would. You ain’t got a speck o’ the real goods in you. You ain’t got one
little bit of Papa. You got it all from the other side of the family, all from that Malachi crowd. You’re somebody they oughta cut up and figure out, ’cause you ain’t hardly
human, Sarah.”

“You’re a tramp, Francis. You were a tramp when you were a child. You and your Katrina.”

Francis turned his eyes from Sarah and faced Peter, who could not take his eyes from Francis. Francis smiled, a man in control of his life. Oh yes.

“She remembers Katrina, Pete. Got a memory like a elephant, this sister of ours. You remember Katrina too?”

“Everybody remembers Katrina,” Peter said.

“Unforgettable lady,” Francis said.

“Don’t bring that old filth back in here,” Sarah said.

“Filth,” Francis said, “that’s Sarah’s favorite word. Where you’d be without filth I can’t even figure, Sarah. You and filth—some double play. Old
Floyd Wagner told me how you and him talked about filth all them years ago.”

“Make him leave,” Sarah said to the entire table.

“Floyd said the last time he saw Sarah . . .”

“Never mind anything Floyd Wagner said,” Sarah said.

“Sarah, let him talk,” Peter said.

“What about Floyd Wagner?” Chick asked.

“Old Floyd. He came to see Sarah one night and she threatened to stab him with a pair of scissors.”

“What?” Molly said.

“It’s a lie,” Sarah said.

“Floyd said she was afraid he might kiss her and start doin’ other filthy stuff, so she snatched up the scissors and told him to keep his distance or she’d stab him in the
belly.”

“Oh, you foul thing,” Sarah said, and she pushed her chair back and walked to the living room.

“Floyd swears it,” Francis said (and in the front parlor Sarah, standing beside the corpse of her mother, covered her ears with both hands to fend off Francis’s words).

“Floyd said he never did get to kiss Sarah, and after the scissors business he sorta lost interest.”

“I think we can change the subject,” Peter said.

“Suits me,” Francis said.

All eating, all talk at the table stopped. The front door bell changed the mood and, as Molly went to answer it, Chick said, “That’s probably Joe Mahar. He said he’d come
early.” And Chick too left the table.

Francis drank the last of his tea, popped his last crust of bread into his mouth, and smiled at Peter. “Always great to come back home,” he said.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” Tommy said, and he went up the back stairs.

“Just you and me, Pete,” Francis said, ignoring my presence.

Francis saw Molly, Sarah, and Chick talking to a priest in the living room and he could recognize Joe Mahar, whose name he could never have brought to mind if Chick hadn’t mentioned it,
but he knew he was the boy who had gone into the seminary with Chick out of high school. Joe had obviously carried it off, but poor Chickie pie came home after three years (the first year Francis
played for Chattanooga, blessin’ himself every time he came to bat, and them rednecks yellin’, “Kill the Irishman,” but he kept on blessin’ even though he didn’t
buy that holy stuff no more), and Chick’s return plunged Mama into the weeping depths of secularity. No priests in the Phelan family, alas. Mama never to know the glory of having mothered a
vicar of Christ.

“I see you got a new ceilin’ light,” Francis said, looking at the new fixture.

“Installed this afternoon,” Peter said. “How do you like it?”

“Nice and ritzy. Who picked it out, you?”

“Orson and I did, didn’t we, Orse?” And I nodded.

“You still doin’ newspaper work?”

“No, I make my living as an artist, such as it is.”

“Artist. By God that’s a new one. Artist. What kind of artist?”

“A painter.”

“That’s good,” Francis said. “I like paintin’s. My most favorite saloon had a paintin’ back of the bar. Only reason I hung out there was to look at it. Eased
my mind, you know what I mean?”

“What was it?”

“Birds, mostly,” Francis said. “Birds and a naked woman. Reminded me of Katrina.” Francis winked at Peter.

Peter laughed, shook his head at Francis’s philistinism. But it was an involuntary and unjustified response, and he knew it; knew that if Francis had set his mind to it he could have been
an artist, or a writer, or a master mechanic. Anything Francis wanted he could have had. But of course he never wanted anything. Artist of the open road. Hero of Whitmanesque America: I hear
America singing—about naked ladies.

“Peter,” Molly called, “Father Joe wants to know about the funeral mass. Just for a minute. He’ll be right back, Fran.”

Francis nodded at Molly, sweet sister, as Peter went to the front parlor. Francis looked at me and smiled. Alone at the table of his youth, made a hemispheric sweep of the room. No need to look
behind him at the china closet. He knew what that looked like. He saw only one thing in the room that surprised him: the picture of the family taken at Papa’s forty-fifth birthday party at
Saratoga Lake, where they had a camp that summer, the summer of the year Papa died. There was Francis at fifteen and Tommy as a baby. Francis would not approach it, not look closely at what was
then; better off without any vision of a past that had led to these days of isolation from both past and future. Gone. Stay gone. Die. Go live in the cemetery.

Francis got up and saw that only I was looking at him. He made a silent shushing motion to me, then found his hat and coat on the hallway wall hooks, where Molly had hung them. He went through
the kitchen and out the back door into the yard, and I followed him. We both looked at the dead automobile in the carriage barn, a 1923 Essex, up on blocks.

“That your car, kid?” he asked me.