Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  The man from public affairs pointed out one inmate after another. “That big one there? He kidnapped his own wife. You don’t even want to know the rest of that story. See those two under the TV? That old man and the other one? Uncle and nephew, only they never met each other till they got in here at the same time.”

  I nodded and listened. The uncle was no more than fifty, his graying hair tied back in a ponytail, his nephew a foot taller and half-black or half-Latino. The officer kept talking about them, about the good story their lives would make, but ten feet away from them sat someone I knew.

  He was thin. His hair was short, the color of old tea, and he was playing checkers or dominoes with a bald man. The one I knew said something, and I could see the chipped front tooth, that wise-ass mouth in a lined and pallid face.

  “’Scuse me.” I pointed down to him. “I know that guy.”

  “Who?” The public affairs officer followed my arm and finger. “Murphy? How do you know him?”

  Dennis Murphy, his pine branch flicking out and slapping the old woman in the face. “We’re from the same town.”

  “Yeah? Good story about him.” And the man from public affairs told me how two or three Thanksgivings ago, all four Murphy brothers were in at the same time, some awaiting a hearing or trial, others serving a sentence. “And Frankie, the bank robber—he’s dead now, by the way—he comes up and asks us since it’s Thanksgiving and all the brothers are together, would it be all right for their mother to bring them a turkey dinner? What the hell, we allowed it. We even had the kitchen make up some side dishes for them. So there’s Ma Thanksgiving Day, sitting down there at one of the big tables with all her boys. They had a good feed, too.”

  He laughed and shook his head. I stared at Dennis Murphy. Except for the desiccated hair and yellowed skin, the lines around his mouth, he’d changed little since we were teenagers and his brothers were in their twenties and the four of them would walk into house parties down on the avenues and do whatever they felt like, later cruising by my gas station booth on Winter Street looking for revenge.

  I followed the public affairs officer off the walkway for the rest of the tour, one concrete room and corridor after another. In the mess hall a gang of men in white jumpsuits were on a cleaning detail. They scrubbed tables and swept and mopped the floor, their faces hard, their bodies too, but they looked like boys to me, and when one or two of them glanced up at us—two men in suit jackets and pressed pants—in their eyes was the dull light of resignation, not, it seems, to the time they’d yet to serve, but to this, two village fathers walking by without a nod or a word, as if these young men were not right here in front of them, as if they never had been.

  IT WAS a weekend in April, the sun high in a cold sky, and Jeb and Sam and I wore sweatshirts and sweaters and had been digging for three hours. We were only down two and a half feet. Nearly halfway through the day, our mother showed up with water and sandwiches she’d made herself.

  One of the caretakers of the cemetery had cut into the grass the shape of the grave we were to dig: four feet wide, eight feet long, and we were to go down six feet. I’d brought two picks, two long-handled spade shovels, and two short. I’d brought work gloves and a jug of water, too.

  The cemetery was less than a mile from Pop’s house. There were nearly as many hardwoods and pine trees in it as there were graves, and most of those went back before the Civil War. Sam started in first with the pick, tearing up the brown earth, then he stepped back and Jeb and I began shoveling into a pile the clumps of dirt and leaf-rot and lingering turf. After ten inches or a foot of this, we hit rock and it took all three of us two hours taking turns with both picks to get through it. When we finally got back to dirt, we’d only gone down another foot and a half. We stopped and passed around the water jug. Not far off, someone was burning a trash pile, the woodsmoke drifting through the pines behind us. The air was still and cool, and high overhead a chicken hawk soared south toward the Merrimack.

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead. We went back to work. Less than an hour later, it was a sweet surprise to see Mom’s tired red Mitsubishi pull up to the cemetery gate, to see her walking toward us with a picnic basket and more water. She was wearing sweatpants and a black wool sweater, her hair blonde and gray. We hugged and thanked her. We dropped our pick and shovels, pulled off our gloves, and sat on the ground to eat.

  Two months earlier, just minutes after the coffin was done, she and Fontaine had walked down that long corridor carrying measuring tapes, scissors, a staple gun and staples, a roll of cording, and the beige satin sheet off Pop’s bed. While Jeb and I and our friends went home for a few hours’ sleep, my mother and wife lined the inside of Pop’s pine box with the same sheet he’d slept in the last night of his life.

  Now Mom was sipping her water, her eyes on the grave of her ex-husband. She was sixty years old. I’d been in her life since she was twenty. In the coming months she would lose her mother, then Bruce, but this recent loss was enough. Over eight hundred people had come to Pop’s funeral: his two older sisters from Louisiana, their grown daughters and sons, cousins of ours we barely knew. There were writer friends from his time in Iowa City, ex-girlfriends and two ex-wives, Peggy singing “Summertime” up in the balcony. There were hundreds of students from over the years, drinking buddies from Ronnie D’s, retired professors from Bradford, waitresses and bartenders and former cops. And there were his six kids from forty-year-old Suzanne down to twelve-year-old Madeleine. Pop had eaten life, and his death had left a cavernous, gnawing hole in the air we moved through.

  Many times over the years, my mother had told me that Pop had been the one love of her life. “He was a self-absorbed son of bitch, and we could never stay married, but he was the one.” She still had Bruce, her man of thirty years, but sitting on that grass with us she looked to me like a widow.

  The night of Pop’s death, Jeb and his building partner were coming over to watch a movie. Bob got to Pop’s first, heard the water running in the shower. He knocked on the bathroom door but got no answer. He opened it and found our father slumped under running water that had turned cold. Bob pulled him out and did what he could, but Pop was gone.

  A slight wind had picked up. It was sifting some of the dirt back into the hole, and it was hard not to think of those last moments, my father soaping himself on his shower bench, the hot water coming down, then whatever the first signs were, a final pain I did not want to think about him suffering alone. I stood and walked back through the gravestones.

  So many of the names were French or Irish. There was one with the image of an electric guitar etched into it. Beside that marker, another with a man’s name. He’d died in his early thirties, and next to his birth and death dates were the words: A Loving Husband and Father. But the H, u, and s of Husband had been chiseled away at the corners, the work, the caretaker lady later told me, of the dead man’s grieving girlfriend. I kept walking past stones that were spread farther apart. Beyond them lay a pile of faded memorial wreaths, plastic flowers, deflated balloons, and soggy teddy bears. Just west of it, in the shadow of a thick stand of blue spruce, lay the graves of babies.

  I turned around to get back to work. I could see Mom putting away what was left of our lunch. Sam and Jeb were already standing with their shovels. I took a different route back to them, and there it was carved into the back of a granite slab: CLEARY. I slowed and walked around to the front of it. There was my old best friend’s first name, his dates, born two years after me and dead at twenty-five. I called Jeb over, and he joined me and we stood there staring at the stone, the three of us together again, roaming downtown and the avenues. I looked back at our father’s deepening grave. Sam stood in it, swinging the pick down over his shoulder again and again, and there was the dirt alley and Cleary’s small asbestos-sided house, his mother drunk on the couch, his father’s big Chevy down in Boston. My once-a-month visits with Pop on the other side of the river when I’d tried to wash the smell off me—the dope, the alle
y dust, the trash of dumpsters we searched through for something to drink or break or eat. I took long showers and washed and dried my clothes. I tied my hair back as tightly as I could. At my father’s apartment, I tried to stand straight, my chest out, and speak as if everything was all right and under control. I tried my best to flush away our friend and all we did together. And now here he and Pop would lie in the same stretch of ground, any past secrets exposed and irrelevant.

  Mom waved goodbye from her car, and we three kept digging. After nearly eight hours we finally got down to six feet, the surface of the ground a couple inches above my head. Jeb gave Sam ten fingers to step in and he climbed out. He turned around and extended his hand and Jeb grasped it and Sam, still as strong as he’d always been, pulled him up and out of the hole.

  It was just me now. Sam offered his hand, but I said, “Wait, buddy,” and I lay down at the bottom of my father’s grave. It seemed so much deeper than six feet, the dark walls of earth at my sides and head and feet, a blue rectangle of sky so far above. I smelled clay and cool stone. I closed my eyes for just a second, but it was too dark, too eternally dark, and I stood and climbed fast out of that hole.

  WE HELD the burial on Fenway Park’s Opening Day. While thousands of fans streamed into those seats surrounding that green field in Boston, a small group of us gathered to lower Pop’s pine box into the earth. The sun was out, but it was cold enough you could see your breath in front of you. Sam had helped me find a Catholic priest who’d known our father. From the yellow pages I hired a bagpipe player, then called the local Marine Corps recruiting office in Lawrence. They sent a young captain and seven Marines, and while we gathered at the foot of Pop’s coffin and open grave, these eight young men in dress blues stood at attention alongside it. The captain was a handsome young Latino, his eyes shadowed beneath the visor of his head cover, his white-gloved hands stiff at his sides. The priest, graying and respectfully jocular, had finished a prayer and was talking about Pop, how even in a wheelchair he’d make it to Mass, how when he couldn’t a layman would drive out to his house to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was language from the church Pop had turned to and used his entire life, and I was glad they were out in the air over his body and grave.

  East Broadway lay thirty yards behind us on the other side of a chain-link fence. The priest was just finishing up, and I could hear it back through the trees behind me, a car coming fast down the asphalt, its engine upshifting and getting the gas. The priest was asking us to say the Lord’s Prayer, and I didn’t want to give this car any of my attention, but now it came into view as it sped west, a blue lowrider, the center of its spinning wheels a flash of chrome. A kid leaned out the passenger window and yelled at us: “Fuckin’ faggots!”

  Then they were gone, the driver downshifting for the drop of the hill through the trees. The priest smiled and shook his head: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” I began reciting the words with everyone else, but my tongue had become my beating heart and my hands had turned oily and light, and that old rage sat up inside me as if it had just lain down for a short nap. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” I didn’t move but saw myself running in my overcoat and suit to my car, starting it up and tearing down East Broadway through the pines. “On earth as it is in heaven.” They’d be a half mile ahead of me by now, maybe more. “Give us this day our daily bread.” These little punks with no respect for anyone, my eyes scanning for any flash of blue. “And forgive us our trespasses.” At the stop sign at the end of East Broadway, Charlie’s Variety Store across the street, I’d cut right and accelerate for downtown. Soon I’d be on River Street, on my left the rusted guardrail and bare trees, the Merrimack River flowing east, the boxboard factory on the other side, gray smoke unfurling from its stacks. I’d pass the hill street where the hospital used to be, the emergency room where they’d stitched up Sam’s chin and Vinny smoked under the awning, his eyes on me. Farther up the street, the base of Nettle Hill, Russ Bowman on his back in the classroom, his face getting punched over and over. Then I’d be on Water Street, Captain Chris’s Restaurant a gay bar now, that back kitchen where Charlie Pierce had sprayed me with scalding water and I’d gone after him, this killer of kids like me. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” No blue car yet, to my right the concrete retaining wall for the parking lot of the shopping plaza where Crazy Jack had yelled on a warm, crowded Sunday afternoon, How’s it feel to be a chickenshit?! Then the traffic lights at the intersection where ten years after that night at the 104 Club, a loaded .38 in my father’s Red Sox jacket pocket, Ben Wallace, drunk behind the wheel of a dented sedan, had seen me walking along the sidewalk and he revved his engine till the chassis vibrated and yelled, You still want to go at it, Dubis?! And I’d drive straight through the intersection, the Basilere Bridge to my right, Bradford shimmering on the other side, and if there was still no blue ahead of me, I’d head deep into downtown, on the river side the old Woolworth’s building, Valhally’s Diner, Mitchell’s Clothing Store where our mother had put clothes for us on layaway she still could not afford, past Casey’s Office Supplies and the post office in Washington Square, then the bars of Washington Street—the Lido, the Chit Chat Lounge, the Tap and Steve Lynch swallowing his front teeth. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” At the black trestle of Railroad Square, I’d turn right and upshift past the old leather tanneries, the berm of the Boston and Maine rail line to my left, the abandoned brewery coming up, the turn under the iron trestle for Lafayette Square, Devin Wallace straddling my chest, knocking my head against concrete again and again, the martial arts studio and Haffereffer Gas, the brown rush of the Little River flowing through drainage pipes beneath cracked asphalt, no blue yet, no blue, the shadow of another trestle above me as I downshifted up Winter Street, the booth where I pumped gas and waited for the Lynches and the Murphys to come get me, gone now, an empty concrete lot, a chain-link fence halfway around it, and before the Greek church there’d be the sharp left for the avenues, of course the avenues, still poor, abandoned cars on the sidewalks, but now I’d see satellite dishes screwed to the vinyl sides of some of the houses, now I’d see security lights and bred pit bulls. The lumberyard still there, the concertina wire coiled at the top of the fence and gleaming in this April sun, my brother and our dead stabbed friend passing me two-by-fours, and look, a flash of blue gunning up Fourth Avenue. “And lead us not into temptation.” And me following in my family car, an old used Toyota wagon, the booster seats of my two youngest still strapped in the back, their raging father in his suit and tie accelerating after the boys he’d been, hoping he’ll find them, hoping he won’t.

  “But deliver us from evil. Amen.”

  There was the young captain’s orders in the air, the report of seven rifles firing three times each. The acrid smells of hot brass and cordite. A sob from one of my sisters or my mother. Then the low mournful wheeze of the bagpipe, its nearly frantic search for the notes becoming “Amazing Grace,” the man in his kilt walking slowly off into the trees where we heard the last note without him, like some lovely echo we all one day leave behind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank Alane Salierno Mason, once again, for helping me to find the true book within the one I’d first written. I would especially like to thank my family for allowing me to write so openly from my memory of our mutual past: my sister Suzanne, a national leader in the field of domestic violence prevention; my brother Jeb, an inspired and inspiring architectural designer of homes and restaurants and public spaces; my sister Nicole, a professor and licensed therapist who works with families not so different from the one she came from; and my mother Patricia, who after thirty-five years working with and for the poor, is now, at age seventy-two, a newly certified Montessori teacher for young children. I am honored to be her son.

  And here’s to my father who, when I first began to write in my early twenties, told me not to do what he did. “Don’t wait till your mama and I
are dead before you write about us, son. Just go ahead and write.”