Of Time and the River (27 page)

I will go up and down the country, and back and forth across the country on the great trains that thunder over America. I will go out West where States are square; Oh, I will go to Boise, and Helena and Albuquerque. I will go to Montana and the two Dakotas and the unknown places.

It is the place of violence and sudden death; of the fast shots in the night, the club of the Irish cop, and the smell of brains and blood upon the pavement; it is the place of the small-town killings, and the men who shoot the lovers of their wives; it is the place where the negroes slash with razors and the hillmen kill in the mountain meadows; it is the place of the ugly drunks and the snarling voices and of foul-mouthed men who want to fight; it is the place of the loud word and the foolish boast and the violent threat; it is also the place of the deadly little men with white faces and the eyes of reptiles, who kill quickly and casually in the dark; it is the lawless land that feeds on murder.

“Did you know the two Lipe girls?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “They lived in Biltburn by the river, and one of them was drowned in the flood. She was a cripple, and she wheeled herself along in a chair. She was strong as a bull.” “That’s the girl,” he said.

It is the place of the crack athletes and of the runners who limber up in March; it is the place of the ten-second men and the great jumpers and vaulters; it is the place where spring comes, and the young birch trees have white and tender barks, of the thaw of the earth, and the feathery smoke of the trees; it is the place of the burst of grass and bud, the wild and sudden tenderness of the wilderness, and of the crews out on the river and the coaches coming down behind them in the motor-boats, the surges rolling out behind when they are gone with heavy sudden wash. It is the place of the baseball players, and the easy lob, the soft spring smackings of the glove and mit, the crack of the bat; it is the place of the great batters, fielders, and pitchers, of the nigger boys and the white, drawling, shirt-sleeved men, the bleachers and the resinous smell of old worn wood; it is the place of Rube Waddell, the mighty untamed and ill-fated pitcher when his left arm is swinging like a lash. It is the place of the fighters, the crafty Jewish lightweights and the mauling Italians, Leonard, Tendler, Rocky Kansas, and Dundee; it is the place where the champion looks over his rival’s shoulder with a bored expression.

I shall wake at morning in a foreign land thinking I heard a horse in one of the streets of home.

It is the place where they like to win always, and boast about their victories; it is the place of quick money and sudden loss; it is the place of the mile-long freights with their strong, solid, clanking, heavy loneliness at night, and of the silent freight of cars that curve away among raw piny desolations with their promise of new lands and unknown distances—the huge attentive gape of emptiness. It is the place where the bums come singly from the woods at sunset, the huge stillness of the water-tower, the fading light, the rails, secret and alive, trembling with the oncoming train; it is the place of the great tramps, Oklahoma Red, Fargo Pete, and the Jersey Dutchman, who grab fast rattlers for the Western shore; it is the place of old blown bums who come up in October skirls of dust and wind and crumpled newspapers and beg, with canned heat on their breaths: “Help Old McGuire: McGuire’s a good guy, kid. You’re not so tough, kid: McGuire’s your pal, kid: How about McGuire, McGuire—?”

It is the place of the pool-room players and the drug-store boys; of the town whore and her paramour, the tough town driver; it is the place where they go to the woods on Sunday and get up among the laurel and dogwood bushes and the rhododendron blossoms; it is the place of the cheap hotels and the kids who wait with chattering lips while the nigger goes to get them their first woman; it is the place of the drunken college boys who spend the old man’s money and wear fur coats to the football games; it is the place of the lovely girls up North who have rich fathers, of the beautiful wives of business men.

The train broke down somewhere beyond Manassas, and I went forward along the tracks with all the other passengers. “What’s the matter?” I said to the engineer. “The eccentric strap is broken, son,” he said. It was a very cold day, windy and full of sparkling sun. This was the farthest north I’d ever been, and I was twelve years old and on my way to Washington to see Woodrow Wilson inaugurated. Later I could not forget the face of the engineer and the words “eccentric strap.”

It is the place of the immense and lonely earth, the place of fat ears and abundance where they grow cotton, corn, and wheat, the wine-red apples of October, and the good tobacco.

It is the place that is savage and cruel, but it is also the innocent place; it is the wild lawless place, the vital earth that is soaked with the blood of the murdered men, with the blood of the countless murdered men, with the blood of the unavenged and unremembered murdered men; but it is also the place of the child and laughter, where the young men are torn apart with ecstasy, and cry out in their throats with joy, where they hear the howl of the wind and the rain and smell the thunder and the soft numb spitting of the snow, where they are drunk with the bite and sparkle of the air and mad with the solar energy, where they believe in love and victory and think that they can never die.

It is the place where you come up through Virginia on the great trains in the night-time, and rumble slowly across the wide Potomac and see the morning sunlight on the nation’s dome at Washington, and where the fat man shaving in the Pullman washroom grunts, “What’s this? What’s this we’re coming to—Washington?”—And the thin man glancing out of the window says, “Yep, this is Washington. That’s what it is, all right. You gettin’ off here?”—And where the fat man grunts, “Who—me? Naw—I’m goin’ on to Baltimore.” It is the place where you get off at Baltimore and find your brother waiting.

Where is my father sleeping on the land? Buried? Dead these seven years? Forgotten, rotten in the ground? Held by his own great stone? No, no! Will I say “Father” when I come to him? And will he call me “Son”? Oh, no, he’ll never see my face; we’ll never speak except to say—

It is the place of the fast approach, the hot blind smoky passage, the tragic lonely beauty of New England, and the web of Boston; the place of the mighty station there, and engines passive as great cats, the straight dense plumes of engine smoke, the acrid and exciting smell of trains and stations, and of the man-swarm passing ever in its million-footed weft, the smell of the sea in harbours and the thought of voyages—and the place of the goat-cry, the strong joy of our youth, the magic city, when we knew the most fortunate life on earth would certainly be ours, that we were twenty and could never die.

And always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished, and the word; the stone, the leaf, the door we never found and never have forgotten. And these are the things that we remember of America, for we have known all her thousand lights and weathers, and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life alone.

XV

Now at Cambridge, in the house of the Murphys on Trowbridge Street, he found himself living with the Irish for the first time, and he discovered that the Murphys were utterly different from all the Irish he had known before, and all that he had felt and believed about them. He soon discovered that the Murphys were a typical family of the Boston Irish. It was a family of five: there were Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, two sons and a daughter. Mrs. Murphy ran the house on Trowbridge Street, which they owned, and rented the rooms to lodgers, Mr. Murphy was night watchman in a warehouse on the Boston water-front, the girl was a typist in an Irish business house in Boston, the older boy, Jimmy, had a clerical position in the Boston City Hall, and the youngest boy, Eddy, whom the youth knew best, was a student at Boston College. In addition there were two Irish lodgers who had lived with them for years: Mr. Feeney, a young man who worked at Raymond’s, a department store in Washington Street, Boston, and Mr. O’Doul, a middle-aged man, unmarried, who occupied the front room upstairs just over the boy’s own room. Mr. O’Doul was a civil engineer, he drank very heavily, and he would sometimes be confined to his bed for days at a time with terrible attacks of rheumatism which would bend, gnarl, and twist him, and render him incapable of movement.

But in the Murphys the boy discovered none of the richness, wildness, extravagance, and humour of such people as Mike Fogarty, Tim Donovan, or the MacReadys—the Irish he had known at home. The Murphys were hard, sterile, arid, meagre, and cruel: they were disfigured by a warped and infuriated puritanism, and yet they were terribly corrupt. There was nothing warm, rich, or generous about them or their lives: it seemed as if the living roots of nature had grown gnarled and barren among the walls and pavements of the city; it seemed that everything that is wild, sudden, capricious, whimsical, passionate, and mysterious in the spirit of the race had been dried and hardened out of them by their divorce from the magical earth their fathers came from, as if the snarl and jangle of the city streets, the barren and earthless angularity of steel and stone and brick had entered their souls. Even their speech had become hard, grey, and sterile: the people were almost inarticulate; it is doubtful if one of them had three hundred words in his vocabulary: the boy noticed that the men especially—Murphy, his two sons, Feeney, and O’Doul—made constant use of a few arid words and phrases, which, with the intonation of the voice and a slight convulsive movement of the arms and hands, filled in enormous vacancies in thought and feeling, and said all that they could say or wished to say. Chief among these words or phrases was “YOU know?”. . . or “YOU know what I mean?”—words which were uttered with a slight protesting emphasis on “You,” a slight and painful movement of the hands or shoulders, and an air that the listener must fill in for himself all that they wanted to imply. For epithets of rich resounding rage, for curses thick and opulent with fury, in which he had believed their tongues were apt and their spirits prodigal, he discovered that they had no more to offer than “Chee!” or “Jeez!” or “Ho-ly Jeez!” or “Christ!” or “HO- ly Christ!” or occasionally “HO-ly Mary!” Finally, they made a constant and stupefying use of that terrible grey abortion of a word “guy”: it studded their speech with the numberless monotony of paving brick; without it they would have been completely speechless and would have had to communicate by convulsions of their arms and hands and painful croakings from their tongueless throats—the word fell upon the spirit of the listener with the grey weariness of a cold incessant drizzle; it flowed across the spirit like a river of concrete; hope, joy; the power to feel and think were drowned out under the relentless and pitiless aridity of its flood.

At first, he thought these words and phrases were part of a meagre but sufficient pattern which they had learned in order to meet the contingencies of life and business with alien and Protestant spirits, as waiters in European café‘s, restaurants, and dining- cars will learn a few words of English in order to serve the needs of British and American tourists—he thought this because he saw something sly, closed, conspiratorial, mocking and full of hatred and mistrust, in their relations with people who were not members of their race and their religion; he thought they had a warm, secret and passionate life of their own which never could be known by a stranger. But he soon found that this belief was untrue: even in their conversations with one another, they were almost inarticulate—a race which thought, felt, and spoke with the wooden insensitivity of automatons or dummies on whose waxen souls a few banal formulas for speech and feeling had been recorded. He heard some amazing performances: every evening toward six o’clock the family would gather in their dingy living-room at the end of the hall, Mr. Feeney and Mr. O’Doul would join them, and then he could hear the voices of the men raised in argument, protest, agreement, denial, affirmation and belief, or scepticism, evoking a ghastly travesty of all of man’s living moments of faith, doubt, and passion, and yet speaking for hours at a time, with the idiotic repetitions of a gramophone held by its needle to a single groove, a blunted jargon of fifty meaningless words:

“What guy?”

“DAT guy!”

“Nah, nah, nah, not him—duh otheh guy!”

“Wich guy do yuh mean—duh big guy?”

“Nah, nah, nah—yuh got it all wrong!—Not HIM—duh little guy!”

“Guh-WAN!”—a derisive laugh—“Guh-wan!”

“Watcha tryin’ t’ do—KID me? Dat guy neveh saw de day he could take Grogan. Grogan ‘ud bat his brains out.”

“Guh-WAN! Yer full of prunes! . . . Watcha tryin’ t’ give me? Dat guy ‘ud neveh take Tommy Grogan in a million yeahs! He couldn’t take Tommy duh best day he eveh saw! Grogan ‘ud have him on de floeh in thirty seconds!”

“HO-ly Ghee!”

“Sure he would!”

“Guh-WAN, Guh-WAN! Yer CRAZY! GROGAN! HO-ly Ghee!”

And this, with laughter, denial, agreement—all the appurtenances of conversation among living men—could go on unweariedly for hours at a time.

Sometimes he would interrupt these conversations for a moment: he would go back to leave a message, to pay the rent, to ask if anyone had called.

As soon as he knocked, the voices would stop abruptly, the room would grow suddenly hushed, there would be whispers and a dry snickering laughter: in a moment someone would say “Come in,” and he would enter a room full of hushed and suddenly straightened faces. The men would sit quietly or say a word or two of greeting, friendly enough in appearance, but swift sly looks would pass between them, and around the corners of their thin, hard mouths there would be something loose, corrupt and mocking. Mrs. Murphy would rise and come to greet him, her voice filled with a false heartiness, an unclean courtesy, a horrible and insolent travesty of friendliness, and her face would also have the look of having been suddenly straightened out and solemnly compressed; she would listen with a kind of evil attention, but she would have the same loose, mocking look, and the quiet sly look would pass between her and the others. Then, when he had left them and the door had closed behind him, there would be the same sly silence for a moment, then a low muttering of words, a sudden violence of hard derisive laughter, and someone saying, “HO-ly Jeez!”