Visions of Gerard Page 5

  “Well what are you doing Gerard! you’re sleeping!”

  “Well I was in Heaven.”

  “What?”

  “Yes Sister Marie, I’ve arrived in Heaven!”

  He jumps up and looks at her straight to tell her the news.

  “It’s your turn to read the catechism!”

  “Where?”

  “There—the chapter—at the end—”

  Automatically he reads the words to please her; while pausing, he looks around at the children; Lo! all the beings involved! And look at the strange sad desks, the wood of them, and the carved marks on them, initials, and the little boy Ouellette (suddenly re-remembered) as usual with the same tranquil unconcern (outwardly) whistling soundlessly into his eraser, and the sun streaming in the high windows showing motes of room-dust—The whole pitiful world is still there! and nobody knows it! the different appearances of the same emptiness everywhere! the ethereal flower of the world!

  “My sister, I saw the Virgin Mary.”

  The nun is stunned: “Where?”

  “There—in a dream, when I slept.”

  She does the sign of the cross.

  “Aw Gerard, you gave me a start!”

  “She told me come on—and there was a pretty little white wagon with two little lambs to pull it and we started out and we were going to Heaven.”

  “Mon Seigneur!”

  “A little white wagon!” echo several children with excitement.

  “Yes—and two white pigeons on my shoulder—doves—and she asked me ‘Where were you Gerard, we’ve been waiting for you all morning”‘—

  Sister Marie’s mouth is open—“Did you see all this in a dream?—? here now?—in the room.”

  “Yes my good sister—dont be afraid my good sister, we’re all in Heaven—but we dont know it!”—“Oh,” he laughs, “we dont know it!”

  “For the love of God!”

  “God fixed all this a long time ago.”

  The bell is ringing announcing the end of the hour, some of the children are already poised to scamper on a word, Sister Marie is so stunned everyone is motionless—Gerard sits again and suddenly over him falls the tight overpowering drowsiness around his heart, as before, and his legs ache and a fever breaks on his brow—He remains in his seat in a trance, hand to brow, looking up minutes later to an empty room save for Soeur Marie and the elder Soeur Caroline who has been summoned—They are staring at him with tenderest respect.

  “Will you repeat what you told me to Sister Caroline?”

  “Yes—but I dont feel good.”

  “What’s the matter, Gerard?”

  “I’m starting to be sick again I guess.”

  “We’ll have to send him home—”

  “They’ll put him to bed like they did last year, like before—He hasnt got much strength, the little one.”

  “He saw Heaven.”

  “Ah”—shrugging, Sister Caroline—“that”—nodding her head—

  Slowly, at 9:30 o’clock that morning, my mother who’s in the yard with clothespins in her mouth sees him coming down the empty schooltime street, alone, with that lassitude and dragfoot that makes a chill in her heart—

  “Gerard is sick—”

  For the last time coming home from school.

  When Christmas Eve comes a few days later he’s in bed, in the side room downstairs—His legs swell up, his breathing is difficult and painful—The house is chilled. Aunt Louise sits at the kitchen table shaking her head—“La peine, la peine, pain, pain, always pain for the Duluozes—I knew it when he was born—his father, his aunt, all his uncles, all invalids—all in pain—Suffering and pain—I tell you, Emil, we havent been blessed by Chance.”

  The old man sighs and plops the table with his open hand. “That goes without saying.”

  Tears bubbling from her eyes, Aunt Louise, shifting one hand quickly to catch a falling crutch, “Look, it’s Christmas already, he’s got his tree, his toys are all bought and he’s lying there on his back like a corpse—it’s not fair to hurt little children like that that arent old enough to know—Ah Emil, Emil, Emil, what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen to all of us!”

  And her crying and sobbing gets me crying and sobbing and soon Uncle Mike comes in, with wife and the boys, partly for the holidays, partly to see little Gerard and offer him some toys, and he too, Mike, cries, a great huge tormented tearful man with bald head and blue eyes, asthmatic thunderous efforts in his throat as he draws each breath to expostulate long woes: “My poor Emil, my poor little brother Emil, you have so much trouble!” followed by crashing coughs and in the kitchen the other aunt is saying to my mother:

  “I told you to take care of him, that child—he was never strong, you know—you’ve always got to send him warmly dressed” and et cetera as tho my mother had somehow been to blame so she cries too and in the sickroom Gerard, waking up and hearing them, realizes with compassion heavy in his heart that it is only an ethereal sorrow and too will fade when heaven reveals her white.

  “Mon Seigneur,” he thinks, “bless them all”—

  He pictures them all entering the belly of the lamb—Even as he stares at the wood of the windowframe and the plaster of the ceiling with its little cobwebs moving to the heat.

  Hearken, amigos, to the olden message: it’s neither what you think it is, nor what you think it isnt, but an elder matter, uncompounded and clear—Pigs may rut in field, come running to the Soo-Call, full of sow-y glee; people may count themselves higher than pigs, and walk proudly down country roads; geniuses may look out of windows and count themselves higher than louts; tics in the pine needles may be inferior to the swan; but whether any of these and the stone know it, it’s still the same truth: none of it is even there, it’s a mind movie, believe this if you will and you’ll be saved in the solvent solution of salvation and Gerard knew it well in his dying bed in his way, in his way—And who handed us down the knowledge here of the Diamond Light? Messengers unnumberable from the Ethereal Awakened Diamond Light. And why?—because is, is—and was, was—and will be, will be—t’will!

  Christmas Eve of 1925 Ti Nin and I gayly rushed out with our sleds to a new snow layer in Beaulieu street, forgetting our brother in his sack, tho it was he sent us out with injunctions to play good and slide far—

  “Look at the pretty snow outside, go play!” he cried like a kindly mother, and we bundled up and went out—

  I still remember the quality of that sky, that very evening, tho I was only 3 years old—

  Over the roofs, which held their white and would hold them all night now that the sun was casting himself cold and wan-pink over the final birches of griefstricken westward Dracut—Over the roofs was that blue, magic Lowell blue, that keen winter northern knifeblade blue of winter dusks so unforgettable and so cold and dry, like dry ice, flint, sparks, like powdery snow that ss’ses at under doorsills—Perfect for the silhouetting of birds heading darkward down their appointed lane, hushed—Perfect for the silhouetting presentations of church steeples and of rooftops and of the whole Lowell general, and always yon poor smoke putting from the human chimneys like prayer—The whole town aglow with the final russet adventures of the day staining windowpanes and sending pirates to the east and bringing other sabers of purple and of saffron scarlot harlot rage across the gashes and might ironworks of incomprehensible moveless cloud wars frowned and befronting one another on horizon Shrewsburies—Up there where instead of thickening, plots thinned and leaked and warrior groups pulled wan expiring acts on the monstrous rugs of sky areas with names in purple, and dull boom cannons, and maw-mouth awwp up-clouds far far away where the children say “There’s an old man sleeping in the north with a big white mouth that’s open and a round nose”—These mighty skies bending over Lowell and over Gerard as he lay knowing in his deathbed, rosar
ies in his hands, pans on papers by the bed, pillows under his feet—The sides and portion wedges of which sky he can barely see thru the window shade and frame, outside is December’s big parley with night and it’s Christmas Eve and his heart breaks to realize that it will be his last Christmas on our innocent mistaken earth—“Ah yes—if I could tell them what I knew—but when I start it stops coming, it’s gone, it’s not to talk about—but now I know it—just like my dream—poor people with their houses and their chimnies and their Christmases and their children—listen to them yelling in the street, listen to their sleds—they run, they throw themselves on the snow, the little sled takes them a little ways and then that’s all—that’s all—And me, big nut, I cant explain them what they’re dying to know—It’s because God doesnt wanta—”

  God made us for His glory, not our own.

  Nin and I have our sleds and mufflers and we have wrangled dramas with the other kids over the little dispositions of activity among snowbanks and slide-lanes, it all goes on endlessly this world in its big and little facets with no change in it.

  In the kitchen, before Pa gets home and in a quiet interim when Gerard’s asleep and we’re still sliding, Ma takes out her missal and unfolds a paper from it on which are written the words of the prayer to St. Martha:—

  “St. Martha, I resort to thy protection and aid and as proof of my affection and faith I offer this light which I shall burn every Tuesday.”

  She lights her devotional candle.

  “Comfort me in difficulties and thru the great favor which you enjoyed thru lodging in the house of Our Saviour, intercede for my family that we may always hold God in our hearts and be provided for in our necessities. I beseech thee to have infinite pity in regard to the favor I ask thee.” (State favor).

  “If you please, my Lord, bless my poor little Gerard and make him well again, so he can live his little life in peace—and without pain—he has suffered so much—he’s suffered enough for twenty four old sick men and he hasnt said a word—My Lord, have pity on this little courageous child, amen.”

  “I ask thee, St. Martha,” she finishes reading the prayer, “to overcome all difficulties as thou didst overcome the dragon which thou hadst at your feet. Our Father—Hail Mary—Glory Be”—

  And at that very moment ladies in black garments, scores of them, are scattered throughout St. Louis de France church, kneeling or sitting or some standing at the various special shrines, their lips muttering prayers for similar requests for similar troubles in their own poor lives and if indeed the Lord seeth all and saw all that is going on and all the beseechment in His name in dark earth-churches throughout the kingdom of consciousness, it would be with pain He’d attend and bend His thoughts to it—Some of the women are 80 years old, they’ve been coming to that basement church at dusk every day for the last quarter of a century and they’ve had manifold and O manifold reasons to loft prayer from that cellar, little chance they mightnt—

  Amazing how the kids always scream with glee around the church at that sad hour of dusk.

  And by God, amazing the bar standers and beer eaters bubbling at elbow bangs in speakeasy clubs around the corner, enough to make a man believe in Rabelais and Khayyam and throw the Bible and the Sutras and the dry Precepts away—“Encore un autre verre de bière mon Christ de vieux matou! Another glass a beer ya Christing old he-cat!”

  “Well you’re swearing like a dog on Christmas Eve!”

  “Christmas Eve my—my you-know-what, if I dont have a glass a beer in my belly and two hundred others to boot it dont render me no merry in the Merry Christmas even if there was forty of your Christmases in the calendar the same bloody day I’m talkin to ya,” translation to that effect. “Calvert, Caribou est sou, Caribou’s drunk!”

  “Drunk? Come to my house, I got some whiskey there that’ll make you fill your words with another kinda marde!”

  The cussingest people in the world the Canucks in their cups, all you have to do is go to their capital and range up and down the bars of Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal to see some guzzling and some profanity.

  “Gayo, sonumbitch, go shit!”

  “Ah the bastat.”

  A pretty Christmas they’re having, there’s a little tree in the corner with lights, and drunk under it—In comes the younger element, they’ll have to take out papers to catch up with the old good swigglers and cussmakers—

  My father, en route home, stops for a quick one himself in the company of his old friend Gaston MacDonald who has a spanking 1922 Stutz parked outside, with them is Manuel whose usual courtesy of driving Pa home tonight in the sidecar motorcycle has been set aside in favor of the Stutz and besides it’s too cold and besides they’re so high now the motorcycle trip would have been a fatality—

  “Drink, Emil, amuse yourself, dammit it’s Christmas!”

  “Not for me, Gaston—with my little Gerard in bed it’s not a hell of a pretty Christmas.”

  “Ah, he was sick before.”

  “Yes but it always tears my heart out.”

  “Ah well, poor Emil, you might as well go throw yourself on the rocks in the river off the cliff in Little Canada . . . to crack . . . your spirit like that—look here, nothin you can do. Down the hatch!”

  “Down the hatch.”

  “You dammit Manuel I thought you was s’posed to be a drunkard?”

  “Drunkards take their time,” says my father’s assistant with a sly grin—

  There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look—

  “Poor dog there, look, Bolduc,—do you know that guy was the best basketball player at the YMCA in ‘18?—and ‘16, and ‘17 too!—They offered him a professional contract—No, his father didnt want it, old rocky Rocher Bolduc, ‘Stay in your store damn you or you’ll never have it again’—today he’s got the store, little candies for the children, licorice, pencils, a little stove near the corner, Bolduc spends his time in there with his sweater and his wife hates him and there was a time when he was the biggest athlete in Lowell—and a goodlooking happygolucky guy!”

  And chances are Bolduc’s wife is one of the black sorrowful ladies in the now-dark pews a few blocks up from the club—

  My father has his drink, two or three of them, and wipes his mouth, and heads home, on foot passing thru the corner at Lilley and Aiken, stopping at the drugstore for his 7-20-4 cigars, then the bakery for fresh Franco-American bread that at home he’ll slice on a wood board in the middle of the table slices big enough to write your biography on—

  “Allo Emil—long time no see.”

  “I’m pretty busy.”

  “Still got your shop near the Royal?”

  “I’m established there, Roger–business is going good.”

  “The anglais aint givin you marde?” (the English)—“the Irish—the Greeks?—one thing me I like about bread, I do my business with the Canadians” (pronounced Ca-na-yen, the thick peasant pride and emphatic umph of it)—

  My father is actually a complicated cosmopolite compared to Roger the baker—but he hands him a cigar.

  “We’ll see you at the bazaar?”

  “If I have time—I’ll pitch in a little in any case, for invitation cards, my little bit—”

  And all the usual pleasantries, detailed styles, and panoramic shots of a complete social scene, Centerville in Lowell in 1925 being a close knit truly French community such as you might not find any more (with the peculiar Medieval Gaulic closed-in flavor) in modern long-eared France—

  Emil comes home with his cigars and bread, and rounds the corner of Beaulieu just as the dusk clouds have fought their last war grim and purple in the invisibilities and here comes the evening star shimmering like a mag
ic hanger in the fade-far flank of the retreat, and lights of brown and quiet flavor have come on in homes and he sees lil Nin and I wheeing with our sleds—

  “In any case I got two of em in good health—but in my heart I cant be happy about anything, Gerard there are no others like Gerard, I shall never be able to understand where a little boy like that got so much goodness—so much—enough to make me cry, damn it—it’s the way he’s always got his little head to one side—pensive, so sad, so concerned—I’d give all the Lowells for the map of the Devil, to keep my Gerard—Will I keep him?” he wonders looking up?—seeing the same unsaying stars Gerard had stared at—“Mystère, it’s a Christmas to make the dogs cry”—“Come my little kids!” he calls to Nin and me but we dont hear him in the heat of our play in the cold snow so he goes in the house anyway, with that sad motion of men passing into their domiciles, the pitifulness of it, specially in winter, the sight of which, if an angel returned from heaven and looked (if angels, if heaven, which is an ethereal crock) would make an angel melt—If angels were angels in the first place.

  Christmas comes, Gerard gets a great new erector set, big enough and complicated enough to build hoists that’ll carry the house away—He sits in bed contemplating it with his little sad sideways look, like the way the moon looks on May nights, the face tilted over—It’s an expression, with his arms folded, that again and again says “Ah, but and but, look at that, my souls”—Nin gets a pickaninny doll, I remember distinctly finding it that Christmas morning on the mantle by the tree, and the little high chair that went with it, and Gerard promptly that week made a little doll house for his sister, subsidiary gifts from his own Santa Claus hands—Me, I had toys that I’ve forgotten cold, and it goes to show—

  Then New Year’s—