I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  It’s a story I heard my father tell twice: once that evening as we strung the Bubble Lites on the Scotch pine, and then again, thirty years later, after he’d retired from his job at the foundry. He’d retired in Memphis, Tennessee, where he’d been transferred when the Harvester plant closed in Chicago. I was visiting after he’d had a stay in the hospital for the kidney ailment that would ultimately take his life. We were telling stories, laughing about all the crazy people from the old neighborhood, and I tried to get him to tell what he remembered about Poland. He was very young when, to use his phrase, “they came over on the boat.” Instead, he told the story about his father again, and when he reached the part about kicking at Teddy Kanik’s door, hands frozen to the funeral wreath, unable to knock, he broke into tears, something I’d never seen him do, excused himself, and rushed from the room.

  At my father’s funeral, when there might have been an opportunity to pay a few words of respect, that story set in the dead of winter returned to my mind. It was summer in Memphis—“a scorcher,” my father would have called it—and his story seemed even more foreign there. Not the actual feeling itself, but the recollection of an old feeling from childhood, one for which I still don’t have a name, returned: an inexpressible protectiveness toward my father, a concern that, despite his faith in hard work and practicality, he’d never wholly appraised the reality of the country we lived in. We shared a home, we shared a life, but there was a dimension separating us. He inhabited another America, a distant place like Dickens’s London or Goigol’s Moscow. He feared that we, his sons, would go wanting, and that fear had set him at odds with us. I thought of telling his Teddy Kanik story at the wake but wasn’t sure what the point might be; the story wasn’t a way he’d want to be remembered in public, or a way of saying goodbye. And yet the story itself diminished anything else I could think of to say, and so, to my shame, I left my father unprotected and sat silently and listened to the priest mouth the usual clichés.

  Mick had flown in from New York for the funeral toting a huge, bulging soft-sided plaid suitcase. Before his flight, he’d rushed to the Lower East Side to buy containers of pierogi and borscht, jars of herring, garlic dills, horseradish, kraut, links of fresh and smoked kielbasa—sausages my father loved and wasn’t able to eat in his last years because of his restricted diet. Mick knew that after the funeral a meal would be required. He stuffed in a bottle of wisniowka—a cherry brandy—and a bottle of 150 proof Demerara rum, then, at LaGuardia, checked the suitcase through to Memphis. Everything but the wisniowka and rum arrived broken and run together.

  The rum was for Mick’s private tribute. He’d worked as a bouncer at a strip club on Forty-second Street and lived with one of the dancers, a striking Puerto Rican woman who’d introduced Mick to Santeria. He’d become an initiate and wanted to become a santero. He wore his caracoles—a shell necklace no one was allowed to touch—and brought a thick black candle inscribed with esoteric symbols that he erected before our father’s tomato patch as if we had buried him in the back yard. It was an offering made to Oya, patron of whirlwinds and cemeteries, to ease the entrance to the world of the dead. Oya’s syncretic form, he explained, to ease our mother’s misgivings, was Our Lady of Montserrat. Beside the candle, he set a shot of rum; Oya, fiercest of the female orishas, liked her drink strong. In the humid, bug-roaring darkness of Memphis, the orange candle flame flickered eerily off the tomato netting until Moms went out and drenched it with a blast from the garden hose.

  The rum that Oya didn’t require Mick and I killed driving around at night between barbecue places and country bars in my father’s gold Chrysler. We ended up in a pool hall. My father had been a skilled pool player. Neither Mick nor I had inherited the gene. Maybe it was the similarity of our inept play, but people kept asking if we were twins. No, we told them, just brothers.

  After the funeral we served a meal of Memphis barbecue and Lower East Side Polish sausage to my father’s surviving brother and three of his sisters, who’d all traveled from Chicago. We said a brief prayer and downed a wisniowka in a silent toast to my father’s memory.

  I sat beside my aunt Olga, my father’s youngest sister.

  “When we were kids, your father kept us all going,” she told me. “One year, when we barely had enough to eat, he somehow managed to show up with a tree on Christmas Eve, because, he said, our family shouldn’t be without one. He was a good brother. He was a good guy.”

  “He never told me about that,” I said.

  She dabbed her eyes. “There’s a lot he didn’t talk about.”

  That was the first of times to come when missing my father took the shape of being startled that he was no longer there to answer a question regarding a past I knew so little about, to which he’d been my only link. I wished, with an intensity that ambushed me, that I could have asked him for the details on how he’d come up with the tree. It sounded like another story that might have made Charles Dickens proud.

  When, in her composition, Camille Estrada told how she’d seen Charles Dickens standing on Washtenaw, I too saw him, a familiar face among the crowd watching Tito Guízar ride by. Camille might have argued that if Tito Guizar could actually appear parading through Little Village behind the miraculous Virgin, then why not Charles Dickens? The appearance of the Mexican cowboy star, complete with stallion, sombrero, a guitar strapped across his back, was barely less remarkable than that of an old British writer would have been. Dickens was the man in a starched collar with a blue cravat that matched his worn, serious eyes; his auburn hair was thinning, his flowing beard was the kind one saw on hoboes who lived by the railroad tracks. That was how Dickens was pictured on the card in Authors, a game our family played. Dickens shared the deck with Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Tennyson, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne. At bedtime, our mother would read from those authors to Mick and me.

  “No wild stuff,” she’d caution, “this is reading time.”

  It was the closest thing Mick and I had to sacred time.

  On the Dickens card, beneath his likeness, four books were listed: Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol. Of those, Moms read Oliver Twist. We owned a set of 78 rpm records of a dramatized reading of A Christmas Carol starring Basil Rathbone, who was also Sherlock Holmes. My father had gotten a good deal on it at Maxwell Street.

  Camille had tried to summon up the authority of Dickens’s fiction to justify the true story of Ralphie she wanted to tell, a story destined to end with the hopelessly pathetic fact of a boy dying on Christmas Eve. On some level she must have asked herself, who would read A Christmas Carol a second time if Tiny Tim died at the end? She needed a rebirth, a resurrection. A year had passed without a single miracle. Although parishioners had prayed for the Blue Boy so long that it had become a habit, they were bound to give up praying to him. It would occur to them, as it had to me the one shameful time I prayed to Ralphie and asked him to help me make the basketball team, that if Ralphie’s wish to make his First Holy Communion hadn’t been granted, why would he have the clout to intercede for anyone else? Gradually, but sooner than had ever seemed possible, he would be forgotten.

  Camille needed to summon the timeless power of Dickens’s story in order to superimpose what remained of Ralphie’s spirit on the streets of Little Village. Her borrowing of images from Dickens wasn’t so different from the local spray-can artists who painted murals on the crumbling walls, as if Diego Rivera—like visions might shore up what urban renewal had not. There was a permanence to Dickens’s story that Camille aspired to. And in that, her tribute was not unlike the tributes of the gang bangers who sometimes tattooed an indelible blue tear at the outside corner of one eye in memory of a wasted homey. That was what Tony Bizzaro did after his brother, Peanuts, died.

  It’s about feeling, Camille had told me that one afternoon when we were Partners in Christ.

  She refused to settle for a tribute that took the shap
e of silence. She failed for want of accuracy, but not of feeling. Not for want of amor.

  I don’t know what became of Camille Estrada. After Christmas break that year in eighth grade, a rumor spread that beneath the blue cardigan buttoned to the top no matter what the weather, Camille was wearing falsies. Sister Lucy didn’t inquire about the matter directly. Instead, she asked Camille not to wear the sweater during class, it wasn’t part of the school uniform. Camille correctly observed that by eighth grade the uniform code wasn’t strictly enforced, and besides, she was cold. So Sister Lucy offered to move her to a desk beside the radiators. Camille thanked her politely and said that wouldn’t be necessary, in the future she would leave her sweater at home.

  But the following day, Camille still wore the blue sweater. After morning prayer, Sister Lucy reminded Camille that she’d promised to leave her sweater at home and asked her to hang it in the wardrobe—immediately. Camille remained seated, composed, silent, defiant. Sister Lucy observed that such behavior was hardly what she expected from the class valedictorian. The class went quiet. There’d never been a hint of confrontation between Camille and any of the nuns before.

  “I want you to remove your sweater now,” Sister said, taking a step down the aisle toward Camille.

  Camille replied softly in Spanish.

  “What did you just say?” Sister Lucy demanded. The previously inconceivable possibility that Camille might have just cursed her stopped her in her tracks.

  I, too, wondered if Camille had cursed. But later, Angel told me what she’d said was a proverb he’d heard his abuela use: “El hábito no hace al monje.” The habit doesn’t make the monk.

  Camille didn’t repeat the words. Almost wearily, she began unbuttoning her sweater, but Sister Lucy stopped her.

  “Camille, I want to speak with you in private. Please go to the principal’s office and wait there for me.”

  This time, Camille complied immediately. As she rose and left class without another word, the half-unbuttoned sweater gave us a flash of a bosom worthy of Marilyn Monroe. It didn’t look natural on her, but I remember thinking, What if those aren’t falsies Camille was concealing?

  “BB zizboombah!” Norky saluted, and Camille’s lips retracted in what may have passed for a smile.

  Afterward, we learned that, instead of the principal’s office, Camille had gone to our small school library, where a senile nun named Sister Angelica presided over the books. Camille didn’t demand her old illustrated novels back. She checked them out on library cards and left, never to return. That was the last time I saw her, but hardly the last time I thought about her.

  By junior year in high school, my earlier fascination with stories from Greek mythology evolved into an addiction to science fiction. I’d read on the bus to and from school, and sometimes late into the night, and each Saturday I’d stop for a new fix of sci-fi at the Gad’s Hill Library, which had also been my father’s neighborhood library. Sometimes, I’d imagine him going there when he was my age. He’d told me that as a kid he’d read every Hardy Boys mystery on the shelves but that, after reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie, he realized reading novels was impractical, a way for daydreamers to waste time. I decided to read every book in the science fiction section.

  One sleeting, gray afternoon, sitting at a window table in Gad’s Hill, reading Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, I came upon a story called “The Man,” about earth voyagers to a distant planet who just miss Christ’s appearance there. The captain vows to keep questing after the Man until he finds him. “I’ll go on to another world,” he says. “And another and another. I’ll miss him by half a day on the next planet, maybe, and a quarter of a day on the third planet, and two hours on the next, and an hour on the next, and a minute on the next. But after that, one day I’ll catch up with him!”

  There were no hooved Centaurians, but the idea of following Christ from world to world was so reminiscent of Camille’s story that I couldn’t help wondering if she’d stolen it. Or if, by seventh grade, her imagination was already the equal of Bradbury’s. I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she’d done penance for stories—stories that I’ll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She’d wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from dreams I hadn’t had as yet, and so I didn’t quite understand what she was after.

  “It’s about feeling,” Camille had insisted.

  I didn’t understand then that she was talking about risk.

  There’s a recurrent dream that visits me less and less frequently. I first had it after my father took ill. In the dream, I’m pulling the red sled, but not loaded with a Christmas tree. What I’m hauling is an automobile battery, just as we actually did once in winter when my father’s Plymouth died at the factory lot. Rather than spend money to have a wrecker come out and jump it, he unbolted the Atlas battery and caught a ride home with a fellow employee. He left the battery at a gas station to be recharged, and after supper we walked to the gas station with the sled. The grease monkey—as my father called mechanics—said he couldn’t guarantee the battery would hold a charge, and in this subzero weather the safest thing was to buy a new one. My father didn’t even bother to ask what he soaked for it.

  The old sled creaked when my father set the battery on it. He cautioned that we had to be very careful not to tip out the battery acid and told me to center the battery on the sled. I couldn’t even budge it.

  “You practice lifting that, sonnyboy, and you’ll become Charles Atlas.” He laughed. “Nobody will kick sand in your face.” Then he repositioned it and we began the long trek back to the factory lot.

  A curfew of cold had emptied the streets. It was probably approaching my bedtime—unusual for my father to have kept me out late, but that was how it happened, as if something important was going on. We crossed Rockwell, a border between blocks of apartment buildings and blocks of factories. Past Rockwell, the total absence of trees gave the industrial-strength streetlights a bluish glare that made the temperature seem to drop another few degrees. Even in summer the cracked, fissured sidewalks could be treacherous, as if a localized quake had occurred along these miles of truck docks, warehouses, and abandoned factories. Snow piled up unshoveled all winter. We took turns tugging the sled through the drifts and over mounds of dirty ice, one of us pulling, the other steadying the battery. I secretly wouldn’t have minded the sled tipping, as it repeatedly threatened to, because I wanted to see the reaction between battery acid and snow. Wind bored to marrow, and my feet in rubber galoshes and fingers in rabbit-furlined gloves went achingly numb. My face felt raw and chapped from the woolen scarf I’d raised like a mask, and I began worrying that the battery would be dead when we got to the car, that the engine wouldn’t turn over, and that we’d have to lug the battery all the way back to the gas station. I don’t remember a word of what we said as we walked, if we said anything at all, and yet there wasn’t a time when I felt closer to my father.

  In the dream, I’m tugging the sled alone, and, without my father along, the effort seems increasingly senseless. Knee-deep in drifts, navigating mounded ice, I glance back to make sure the load hasn’t tipped, and in the squint of streetlights realize that it’s my father, blue with cold and reduced to an ancient child the compressed weight of a battery, which I’m pulling.

  Who knows why certain humble objects—a bike, a sweater, a sled—are salvaged by memory or dream to become emblems of childhood? Childhood, an alternative universe expanding into forgetfulness, where memory rather than matter is the stuff of creation.

  At the end of each day at St. Roman, classes would be released in order of seniority, so Chester would have to wait for Ralphie’s class to let out. He’d wait for Ralphie on the corner by the church. If it was raining, he’d have an umbrella already opened. Chester was the only boy at school with something as sissyish as an umbrella. At least it was a black umbrella. Then, he and his brother, Ralphie, walked home down Washtenaw
together, engaged in their secret conversations.

  Once, the spring after Ralphie died, I was released early from detention because the April afternoon was darkened by the total eclipse of a thunderstorm. The corridors were empty, all the classes had already fled home. Outside, I noticed from a half block away that Chester stood on the corner waiting with an open umbrella. He must have stayed to watch the younger kids file out. And he was still there waiting after they’d gone. Although I saw Chester in school every day, I really hadn’t talked to him since Ralphie died. We’d paid our condolences as a class, but I’d been feeling vaguely guilty around Chester for not having said something on my own, though of course there seemed nothing to say. It was raining hard enough that when I held my history book over my head I could feel as well as hear the drumming rain. I didn’t realize until I walked past him that Chester was crying. Maybe he thought no one would notice in the rain. Or maybe he didn’t realize it himself, as he made no attempt to conceal his tears.

  “You’re getting soaked,” he said and gave the umbrella a little lift meaning that he’d share it.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I got my book, but thanks.”

  “All right,” he said and gave me the thumbs-up sign that probably he’d taught to Ralphie.

  I gave it back. And for no good reason, as I walked away, I felt forgiven for having prayed that one time to Ralphie as if death had turned him into something other than himself.

  How many others back then pretended to pray when what they were doing was crying in secret—in secret even from themselves? Or praying as an alternative to futile tears? Or perhaps, praying because they thought they should have cried or should continue to cry for what they’d forgotten or would forget. Praying because one grief connects with another, and feeling insists upon being expressed, even if only in secret as prayer. A prayer for the brother of whom one might have been a better keeper; a prayer for the father one might have loved more gently; a prayer prayed the way children do, as if making a wish, as if hot tears are streaking a wild, cold heart; a prayer for all of God’s blue boys.