Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  My father was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages.

  He could get a piece of machinery to work for him that would work for nobody else. But when he was put in charge of men their gears meshed to a stop; until somebody who knew how to get work out of men was sent.

  “You’re so damned smart, how come you don’t get to be foreman?” was my mother’s ceaseless accusation. Until it seemed to me that the highest condition of Man was being “Foreman.” I would hear her going at him when the bulb that lit our kitchen and the lamp that lit our door were the only lights foretelling the beginning of the winer workday.

  “Some men make theirselves Foreman”—a rattle of kettles was his reply, made in serving himself breakfast to show her how little kindness remained in the world.

  “If you’re so damned smart”—the slam of the kitchen door would cut her challenge off and send his footsteps hurrying down the stone toward the place where some men became Foremen.

  And others never became much of anything.

  The gas lamp burned above our door once more before his steps returned along the stone.

  “If you’re so damned smart”—she would be at him again before the kitchen door shut.

  There were no foremen on my father’s side. All the foremen and fore-women, all the heroes and heroines, belonged to my mother’s family. Of whom the most foremanlike was Uncle-Theodore-The-Great-Lakes-Sailor.

  He had had a fistfight with the ship’s cook along the deck of the steamer Chicora, but the captain had stopped it just when Uncle Teddy was getting ready to knock the cook overboard. Which one of the brawlers had begun the battle the captain didn’t care to hear: one of them would have to pack his gear and get off the Chicora, and that would be an end of the matter.

  Uncle Theodore packed and walked ashore at Benton Harbor; after shaking hands all around with everyone but the captain.

  He should have said goodbye to the captain too. On her next trip the Chicora went down with all hands, somewhere off South Haven.

  Down with all hands to leave not a trace on the unshaken waters. Not an overturned lifeboat nor a seaman’s blue cap. Not a cork, a clay pipe, a smudge of oil, or a dead cigar. Cutters scoured the waters for days, yet found no sign. Then the wind blew the memory of their names into winter; waves that freeze in midspill became their headstones.

  Till spring began and the waters flowed as though the Chicora had never moved upon them.

  But, a son of the Chicora’s fireman built a glass-bottomed boat in his backyard, determined to find the wreck on the lake’s shifting floor or go down himself, and named it the Chicago. Five days after he had put out, the Chicago capsized.

  Down went the brave son of the brave fireman to join the brave crew below the cowardly waves. Down went the Chicago, that determined vessel, determined to go all the way down.

  My mother spoke of these seafaring upsets as if that of the glass-bottomed craft were the greater disaster. But my father insisted that the youth who had followed his father had simply been one more glass-bottomed damned fool.

  “Not all the damned fools are at the bottom of the lake,” my mother observed. That sounded like a pointed remark to me.

  How having a relative who didn’t happen to go down with the Chicora made anyone an authority on shipping disasters my father said he failed to perceive.

  How a man could work six years for the Yellow Cab Company and not get to be Foreman was what my mother failed to perceive.

  How a man could get to be a Foreman when he had a woman who never let him rest was another thing my father said he himself failed to catch.

  If a man didn’t have a woman to inspire him he could never be a millionaire was how things looked to my mother.

  If a man had to be nagged into being a millionaire, he’d just as soon stay poor was my father’s decision.

  Some men couldn’t even be nagged into being a foreman, my mother implied.

  In a case like that she might as well save her breath, my father concluded, threw the cat off the davenport, and drew the Saturday Evening Blade across his face.

  “Don’t blame the cat,” my mother warned him.

  “What good is a cat that won’t hunt mice?” my father wanted to know.

  “You can’t blame a dumb animal for being handicapped,” she instructed him.

  “Handicapped?” my father wanted to know, throwing the Blade off his face and sitting upright—“since when is the cat handicapped?”

  “He can’t smell,” my mother reported smugly. “A cat can hardly be expected to hunt mice he can’t smell. How can he tell where they’re at?”

  “He could hunt a handicapped mouse,” my father resolved the issue. He always was one for fair play.

  My mother overlooked his solution. “The cat can’t smell because his whiskers were snipped when he was a kitten,” she persisted. “A cat whose whiskers are snipped can’t smell anything.”

  “How does he tell the difference between liver and mush?” my father asked quietly. For by now he understood that unless the cat were shortly found guilty of something he himself would be found guilty of everything. It was himself or the cat.

  “If the cat can’t smell because his whiskers are snipped,” he added thoughtfully, “he might try using his nose.”

  And drew the Saturday Evening Blade back across his face.

  My mother took it off, because she didn’t like instructing a person whose face she couldn’t see.

  “A cat don’t hunt purely by sense of smell,” she explained, as if the matter were urgent. “He measures a mouse hole by his whiskers, and if he doesn’t have anything to use as a measure, he’s helpless.”

  “That cat don’t look helpless to me,” my father observed. “I think he don’t hunt mice because he doesn’t care to take unnecessary chances, that’s all. Stop feeding him cream and he’ll hunt the milkman.” Then he put the Blade back across his face and pretended to snore.

  “Punishment is never the answer to anything,” my mother instructed both him and myself. The way she put me in front of her broom as well as the old man made me wonder whether she knew I was the one who’d snipped off the cat’s whiskers the winter before.

  For although this was all long before we knew that some creatures are more accident-prone than others, yet my mother, in her intuitive way, sensed that the cat’s real handicap was that it was accident-prone—when I was in reaching distance of it.

  But when the brute limped into the kitchen licking red paint off its hide, that was no doing of mine. Dipping a cat into a bucket of red paint was just something that hadn’t occurred to me. The stuff stuck pretty good, too. That cat was licking its forepaws all winter.

  My mother and father agreed this far: nobody could have done anything so idiotic as painting a cat except John Sheeley, a retarded kid who delivered our milk. He had already distinguished himself by locking himself into a bathroom with a six-year-old boy and shaving the kid’s head. It followed, by an iron logic, that nobody but John Sheeley would paint a cat. Not red, anyhow.

  I knew better, but I didn’t say anything. I was afraid to say anything. The kid who’d done it, the only kid who could have done it, the only kid mean enough to have done it wasn’t John Sheeley. It was Baldy Costello.

  Baldy was really mean and really bald. And really accident-prone. So much so that the Seventy-first Street trolley, that had never harmed a soul in all its endless runs between Halsted Street and Cottage Grove, suddenly ran this sprout down and chomped off two of his toes. Up to that moment the kid had not been a particular threat to society. But when the Seventy-first Street trolley singled him out like that, he became one. Doctors said shock had caused his hair to fall out. I think he never really wanted hair in the first place.

  No sooner would the word go from back porch to back porch that Mrs. O’Connor’s kitchen-money had been stolen than Baldy would be showing off in front of John the Greek’s with the front of his skull plastered with purple and green designs. He invested eve
ry penny he stole in “cockomanies”-decal papers. Either he was trying to divert attention from his baldness or was defiantly calling attention to a skull as naked as that of a man on his way to the electric chair.

  I never laughed at Baldy. I didn’t dare. Nobody laughed at Baldy. Nobody dared. Yet he must have felt that everybody was laughing at him.

  I was nailing a pushmobile together upon the promise of neighbor Kooglin, the local newspaper agent, that he would give me a paper route if I had a wagon or a pushmobile to make deliveries. On my first run with it, Baldy pushed me off and raced it down to the Seventy-first Street tracks and left it lying in the trolley’s path. I recovered it. On the next evening he waylaid me making my first evening-paper route, grabbed all my Abendposts, and scattered them down the alley. I ran after them in desperation, for the wind was on his side. It blew them apart faster than I could gather them, and when I went back to my pushmobile the wind had reached into it and blown half my Evening Posts after the Abendposts. I chased up and down the alley, crying in the wind, and finally, in a fright, abandoned paper, pushmobile, and all. When my father heard the story, at the supper table, his only word was for me to finish my supper.

  Then he took me back down the alley, picked up the pushmobile with one hand and, holding my hand with the other, assured me that Mr. Kooglin wouldn’t fire me, and Mr. Kooglin didn’t.

  A few years later Baldy Costello became one of the first men to go to the electric chair in Cook County. The conviction was for murder and rape.

  I told you that kid was accident-prone.

  Out of odd lore and remnants of old rains, memory ties rainbows of forgetfulness about the old lost years.

  Out of old rains, new rainbows.

  One such rainbow, for me, is a winter remembrance of two children, a seven-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl at a South Park Avenue window watching the winter sun go down. We saw the church across the prairie lifting its cross like a command; till daylight and cloudlight broke the sky wide, pouring an orange-red light. Triumph and doom shone down: The End and the Beginning.

  “Gawd’s blood is burning,” the girl instructed me in an awed whisper, genuflecting, and pulled me down beside her—“Pray! ”

  “Why? ” I wanted to know.

  “So you’ll see the face of Gawd.”

  “Is that the same as ‘God’?”

  I just wanted to know.

  “Don’t say ‘God,’” she warned me, “say ‘Gawd’—or you’ll never see His face.”

  If I missed His face tonight I’d catch tomorrow’s performance was my secret thinking. And though, in the winter evenings that followed, Ethel’s faith encouraged me to wait by the window to see His colors rage the sunset sky, yet I did not feel I had as much in common with Him as I had with the lamplighter who came after.

  Came riding a dark bike softly; softly as the snow came riding. God’s colors would begin to die on walk and tree and street when he would prop his ladder against the night to defend us all till day. The torch he touched to the filament, that came up hard as a green gem, then softly fanned to a blue flutter, gave me a greater sense of personal protection than Gawd’s incomprehensible raging.

  I followed the lamplighter with my eyes to see a line of light come on like many tethered fireflies. God’s colors passed, but the night flares burned steadily on.

  For we are very lucky

  With a lamp before the door—

  And Leerie stops to light it—

  I read in a book my sister had gotten for me at a library—As he lights so many more.

  My memory of that Chicago winter is made of blue-green gas flares across a shining sheet, ice so black and snow so white, it became a marvel to me to recall that, under that ice sheet, tomatoes had lately flowered.

  St. Columbanus kids stood around the ice pond’s rim with skates under their arms, for an inch of water was already spreading to the pond’s edges. When they tested the ice it squeaked the first squeak of spring.

  In March came the true thaw, running waters in running weather, when we raced the sky to school and raced it home once more. The St. Columbanus kids began lingering on the steps of their church—then the light, that had closed each night like a door behind their cross, began to linger too. To see what they would be up to next.

  Then the fly-a-kite spring came on, and I fled through the ruins of Victory Gardens pulling a great orange grin of a kite higher than the cross of St. Columbanus, with Ethel behind me.

  When it soared so high it no longer grinned, I anchored it and Ethel sent a message up I Love My Savior. I don’t know yet what had frightened that kid so.

  Yet that whole blue forenoon she stayed in continuous touch with the Virgin Mary, assisted by an unlikely assortment of angels, dead uncles, saints, martyrs, erring friends and, of course, Gawd. The kite went to work for the church. It became a Jesuit kite scouring Heaven for proselytes. Ethel ran home and came back with a cup of holy water to help it. I made no protest when she sprinkled me. She was older and infinitely wiser than myself.

  “I’m a Catholic now,” I announced that night at supper.

  “Eat your soup,” my mother instructed me.

  “Ethel baptized me.”

  “That takes a priest. Eat your soup.”

  “I want to see the face of Gawd.”

  “Eat your soup.”

  I ate the soup, yet I brooded.

  Nobody knew I was brooding until I looked at the bread pudding with distaste. Then it was plain something had gone wrong.

  So my sister ate it for me and helped my mother with the dishes while I sat on, bread-puddingless, till the last dish was stacked.

  Ethel burst into our kitchen. She was weeping with anger or disappointment—“I’m running away from home! I’m going to live with you!”

  My father looked at my mother for an explanation. My mother looked at Ethel.

  Her father had died without last rites and her mother had paid a priest a hundred dollars to keep her late husband from spending eternity in Purgatory. Now the priest, Ethel told us between sobs, had returned to tell the family that all the hundred dollars had done was to get the old man to his knees. It would take another hundred to get him out. But Ethel’s mother had answered, “If the old man is on his knees, let him jump the rest of the way,” and had sent the priest on his way. Her mother’s blasphemy had provoked Ethel’s decision to run away from home.

  Ethel’s mother opened the kitchen door, tossed in an armful of the girl’s clothing onto the floor—“And don’t come home!” she announced, and slammed the door on her pious daughter.

  The castout girl stood silently. Then her features began working.

  “He’ll never see the face of Gawd!” she howled her grief and love. “He’ll never see His face!”

  “Then let him look at His ass,” my father decided firmly.

  On weekdays I got a penny for candy and blew my nose into a rag. But on Sundays I got a dime and a clean handkerchief.

  Weekdays afforded only such mean choices as that between two yellow jawbreakers or a piece of chewing wax shaped like a wine bottle, containing a few drops of sugar water. But Sundays one chose between a chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry sundae.

  Sunday was for sundaes, and Ethel was my girl because I was the one with the dime. Ethel gave me orders on weekdays because she was closer to Gawd. Sunday was my day because I was closer to John The Greek.

  John The Greek’s was the place where ice cream came true. In John The Greek’s country, maraschino cherries lived atop vanilla ice-cream cones. There strawberries loved whipped cream and whipped cream loved pineapple and pineapple must have loved banana, for it ran down both sides of banana splits.

  It was all butter-cream frosting, there where caramels lived in candy pans and Green River fizzed beside marzipan. It was always root-beer and ginger-ale time at John The Greek’s; there it was always time for lemonade with a cherry in it. There where butterscotch and maple embraced as one.

  Ethel’s
church was St. Columbanus. Mine was The Store Where Ice Cream Came True.

  Even there Ethel couldn’t forget Gawd. That kid was dotty on Jesus. As soon as John brought us ice water she’d start sprinkling me. As the day was warm I didn’t mind the wetting. But as she’d already used Holy Water without doing any good, I couldn’t see how a couple of glasses of soda-fountain water would do any better.

  And as though that weren’t superstition enough for Sunday, she warned me not to step on a crack dividing the sidewalk. Gawd would strike me dead if I did.

  “Dare me.”

  “I dare you.”

  “Double-dare me.”

  “Double-dare and triple-dare you.”

  Wow.

  I came down with both feet flat on a crack and didn’t miss one all the way home.

  I had dared, double-, and triple-dared Gawd, and He hadn’t done a thing.

  My mother never entertained notions. With her, every notion immediately became a conviction. And, once she had one, there was no way either of prying her off it or of prying the conviction off her.

  I began addressing valentines, as our winter life began addressing spring, to bring to my second-grade teacher. There were forty-eight kids in that class, and Miss Burke was to call out the names on every valentine in a kind of election to determine who was the most popular girl and the most popular boy in the class.

  “Are you sending one to Mildred Ford?” my mother asked.

  That I had a valentine for every other kid in the class but none for Mildred, wasn’t because I had anything against her. It was just that I felt it would be better for her if I didn’t send any. Mildred Ford was the only colored kid in the Park Manor school, and I hadn’t sent for her I was sure. It was only that I felt it would be best for everybody if we proceeded more gradually toward integration. On a different holiday, in another school. Promotion to second-class citizenship, coming too suddenly, can leave a person unbalanced for the rest of his life.

  “Are you sending Mildred Ford a valentine?” my mother repeated.