After This (7 page)
He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems
of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the
street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him.
No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin
pajamas. “Thank you.”
“There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his
chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat.
He couldn’t have been more than twentyfive or thirty. “Take care of
your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself
down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain,
John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of
white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street
where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale
beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver
on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner,
not even that.
The wind was howling in long gusts, driving the rain straight
across his face, against his slippers and pants legs. He listened for
some sound of an idling motor, strained his eyes against the wind and
the rain to see some indication—a stain of red light or blue light,
perhaps—of the truck or car that must be waiting for the fireman on
the next block. But there was nothing he could see, or hear above the
sound of the wind and the rain and the shaking leaves. Across the
street the blue storm light briefly caught the blind windows of his
neighbors’ homes.
He stepped back and closed the door. His
fingers, too, where they
had gripped it, were wet. He dried them on his pajamas, then groped
for the closet door and found the flashlight he kept on the shelf there.
The living room was as it had been. He turned to the
opposite wall of the house. It would indeed fall straight, from the front
yard to the back, parallel to the house, and for the next few days his
children, all the neighborhood children, would crawl over its trunk
and up into its branches, like Lilliputians over a longhaired Gulliver,
until Mr. Persichetti down the street arrived with a newly purchased
chain saw and a borrowed truck, offering his services. Mr. Persichetti
was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired by the storm’s
destruction (he would say) to make better use of his days. The loss of
the tree, then—the lovely willow that had made them, ten years ago,
choose this house above any of the others—was all of the inalterable
change that the long day had portended.
In their room, the boys, who had been awoken by the pounding at
the door, watched silently as the beam of their father’s light moved
slowly up the stairs. For Jacob, the slow pace of the rising beam was a
comfort; there could be no immediate danger if his father walked so
steadily up the stairs. Michael felt only disappointment at his father’s
quiet return. But then their father stood in the doorway, the light
pooled at his feet, and told them, whispering, that they’d better get up
and come downstairs. He whispered the same to their mother, who
was already standing beside her bed, tying her robe at the narrowest
place left to her, high up on her belly and just under her breasts. He
lifted their sister from her bed and carried her downstairs over his
shoulder. Even in the peripheral light (Michael had asked to carry the
flashlight but his mother had taken it instead, and Jacob’s hand), it
was clear that she was only pretending to still be asleep—her eyelids
fluttered, there was the smallest shape of a smile. Herding them all
toward the basement, their father paused at the dining-room window,
pulled back the curtain and shone the beam through the window and
out into the darkness until it caught the yawning base of the doomed
tree.
After only a quick glimpse, a glimpse that was like a gulp of foul
air, Jacob pulled at his mother’s hand to draw her to safety. But
Michael lingered, and even Annie squirmed out of her father’s arms to
stand by the window, her two hands on the painted sill. The roots
reared out of the black ground, the trunk leaned and then
straightened, the long branches swung this way and that. Their
mother patted Jacob’s hand to soothe him. On their way through the
kitchen she took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and the
remaining paper cups from their picnic. They followed their father’s
flashlight down the wooden steps. It was a tunnel of light and it
seemed to draw all the surrounding shadows to its edge. Only Michael
walked alone although, at one point, as they made their way down the
stairs, he touched his fingers to the back of Jacob’s neck and made him
jump. They sat together on the old couch that was just the other side
of the toy-train table. Their mother between the two boys to avoid
trouble, Annie on her father’s lap. The washing machine and the sink
and the long string of the clothesline where she hung clothes in bad
weather were just behind them, each illuminated, however dimly, by
the blue light of the storm at the narrow windows. Around their own
circle of light, their mother said, “Let’s say an Angel of God,” the
bodies of her two boys pressed against her. “Angel of God,” they said,
following her voice. “My guardian dear, to whom God’s love, commits
me here, ever this night, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and
guide. Amen.”
And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then
what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like
something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees
up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms
around her father’s neck. “There went the tree,” he said.
the paper cups and carefully handed them to the children.
W
HEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE
said “during the war,” their children
imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand
passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what
might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a
storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the
world itself, had emerged from that shadow.
During the war, their father said, we sometimes slept in people’s
cellars. France, Belgium, into Germany. (The milk in the paper cups
smelled like candles, like the small votives they lit in church.)
Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed.
Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were
old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled
with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.
Once, three or four of them had taken shelter for the night, in the
cellar of an abandoned farmhouse—it was maybe late ’44 or early
’45—and when the sun came up (not a sun, really, as he recalled it,
only darkness turning to pale gray) they realized a new guy, a
replacement, had joined them during the night. He just appeared
among them, as if he had sprung from the dirt floor while they slept.
No more than nineteen or twenty. Anxious and poorly trained, the
way all the replacements were at that stage of the war. “Who the fuck
are you?” one of the guys said. (Although telling
said, “Who the blankety-blank . . .”) “Jacob,” the boy said. “Jake. From
Philadelphia.” Then he shook everybody’s hand, like he was joining a
poker game. Another Jacob.
Michael turned to his brother whose eyes were large and dark at
the edge of the light. He had hoped until now that his father’s story
pertained to him.
The two of them walked out of the cellar together, into the cold.
Jake seemed to think that John Keane, perhaps because of his age, was
of some superior rank, and it was possible that the kid was looking for
some advantage, sticking with him. Or it may have been only that the
other men, superstitious about replacements, had given him a wide
berth. It was a gray dawn, an overcast day, only the beginning of the
worst of it. There would have been the sound of boots breaking
frost—tramp, tramp, tramp. A smell of diesel fuel, which was
pervasive. Creak of army boots and canvas cartridge belts. Maybe
wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a
young man’s beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his
jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of
smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left
it dangling from his mouth as he, what?—opened a K ration? lit a
cigarette? The condemned man’s last. His bare hand was as white as
bone, as small as a child’s.
At one point during that cold day John Keane had said to the kid,
the other Jacob, “We’re a regular Gallagher and Shean,” and the kid
had surprised him by knowing more choruses than even his brother
Frank did, humming them softly under his breath, carrying the tune.
me a couple of bucks. I’m so broke, I’m nearly bent and I haven’t got a cent. I’m
so clean you’d think that I’d been washed in Lux.
Oh, Mr. Shean, oh Mr. Shean
(how did it go? Frank would
know),
to tell the truth I haven’t got a bean. Cost of living’s gone so high, why
it’s cheaper now to die.
Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.
frozen rain, and only learned he’d been hit after nightfall, when they
were pressed into foxholes, the taste of dirt and smoke like blood in
their mouths), What can I do for you? Not out loud, but in his mind,
like a prayer. Plenty of others had been killed, but this one had sprung
up out of the dirt floor, fresh faced and too young. He’d spent less
than twenty-four hours at his war. This other Jacob. What can I do for
you, John Keane had said in that foxhole in the Ardennes, in the
winter of ’44 or ’45, the worst yet to come—more death and the bitter
snow, shrapnel, three toes of his own lost to the cold. What can I do
for you? He’d said it like a prayer, it was a prayer, believing the kid
heard him because (he told his children) all of us are immortal or no
one is. You prayed to the dead or you let them go silent. What can I do
for you? he had said, in his mind, like a prayer, and later their mother,
in her hospital bed, their firstborn in her arms, grimaced and said,
“That’s a Jewish name.”
Michael grinned, turning to his brother whose mouth hung open,
dark as his eyes behind his raised knees.
already seeming to fade—as if the tree’s fall (or perhaps her husband’s
story) had abated something—Mary Keane pressed her two sons
against her sides. It was pleasant, to be in the basement like this, with
her family, in the middle of the night. She looked across Jacob’s dark
hair to her husband, who still had Annie’s thin arms wrapped around
his neck. She doubted, thinking back, that she had said, straight off,
That’s a Jewish name—or perhaps she did not doubt it as much as
regret it, since it had become, in the intervening
the war having become, in the intervening years, poor kid, mostly
forgotten.
him to mind tonight, that other Jacob. Was it the storm itself? The
banging at the door? The young fireman, appearing like a guardian
angel to warn them that the lights were out and trees were falling all
over the neighborhood?
this particular war story at all. Michael would surely use it against his
brother. There was always the possibility of bad dreams.
have said that he and the boy had sung vaudeville tunes together, in
the middle of a war. Gallagher and Shean. Mutt and Jeff. Catholic and
Jew. Fresh-faced replacement and aging veteran, tramping through the
cold, singing. He could have left it at that. He could have left out the
fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another
life entirely still before him. This one.
her rib cage, her husband and her daughter a mere arm’s length away,
and the storm turning from them even as the sun was surely
approaching, Mary Keane considered the wisdom of leaving certain,
difficult things unsaid. She considered the wisdom of the Blessed
Mother who, as the Christmas gospel told it, pondered everything in
her heart.
she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was
over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was
given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their
father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let
them linger.
T
HE TINY SPIDERS
that lived in the higher branches of the downed
tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of
the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright
