by Jack Kerouac
“Napoleon était un homme grand. Aussie le General Montcalm a Quebec tambien quil a perdu. Ton ancestre, Thonorable soldat, Baron Louis Alexandre L&bris de Duluoz, un grandpere–a marriez Tlndienne, retourna a Bretagne, le pere la, le vieux Baron, a dit, criant a pleine tète, ‘Retourne toi a cette femme–soi un homme honnete et d’honneur’ Le jeune Baron a retournez au Canada, a la Riviere du Loup, il avais gagnez de la terre alongez sur cette fleu–il a eux ces autres enfant avec sa femme. Cette femme la etait une Indienne–on ne sais pas rien d’elle ni de son monde– Toutes les autres parents, mon petit, sont cent pourcent Frangais–ta mère, ta belle tite mire Angy, voyons donc s’petite bonfemme de coeur,—c’etait une L’Abbé tout Frangais au moin quun oncle avec un nom Anglais, Gleason, Pearson, quelque chose comme ca, il y a longtemp–deux cents ans—”
Saying: “Napoleon was a great man. Also the General Montcalm at Quebec even though he lost. Your ancestor, the honorable soldier, Baron Louis Alexandre Lebris de Duluoz, a grandfather–married the Indian woman, returned to Brittany, the father there, the old Baron, said, yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Return to that woman–be an honest man and a man of honor’. The young Baron returned to Canada, to Riviere du Loup (Wolf River) he had been granted land along that river–he had his other children with his wife. That woman was an Indian–we know nothing about her or her people– All the other parents, my little one, are one hundred percent French–your mother, you. pretty little mother Angy, poor little goodlady of the heart–she was a L’Abbé, all French except for one uncle with an English name, Gleason, Pearson, something like that, it’s a long time ago–two hundred years—”
And then:—he would always finish with his weeping and woe–terrible agonies of the spirit—“O les pauvres Duluozes meur toutes!—enchain£es par le Bon Dieu pour la peine– peut Stre XenjerV—’Uikel weyons doner
Saying: “O the poor Duluozes are all dying!—chained by God to pain–maybe to hell!”—”Mike! My goodness!”
So I says to my mother “J’ai peur moi allez sur mononcle Mike (Im scared me of going to Uncle Mike’s …).” I couldn’t tell her my nightmares, how one dream had it that one night in our old house on Beaulieu when somebody was dead Uncle Mike was there and all his Brown relatives (by Brown I mean all gree-darkened in the room as in dreams)— But he was horrible, porcine, fat, sickfaced, bald, and green. But she guessed I was a slob with fear concerning nightmares, “he monde il meur, le monde il meur (If people die, people die)” is what she said—”Uncle Mike has been dying for ten years–the whole house and yards smell of death—”
“Especially wit de coffins.”
“Yeh, especially wit de coffins and you gotta remember honey Aunt Clementine has suffered all these many years trying to keep ends together… With your Uncle sick and lost his grocery store–remember the big barrels of pickles in his grocery store in Nashué–the sawdust, the meat– what with having to bring up Edgar and Blanche and Roland and Viola pauvre tite honfemme–Ecoute, Jean, ai pas peur de tes parents–tun n’ara plus jamais des parents un bon jour. (… and Viola poor little woman–Listen, Jean, don’t be afraid of your parents–you won’t have any more parents one fine day.)”
So one night, from the Phebe house, we walked Blanche (who later in such a walk insisted on bringing my dog Beauty because she’s afraid of the dark and as the little beast escorted her home it rushed out and got run over by Roger Carrufel of Pawtucketville who was somehow driving an Austin tinycar that night and the low bumper killed it, previously on Salem Street at Joe’s lawn door it got run over by an ordinary car but rolled with the wheels and never got hurt–I heard the news of its death at precisely that moment in my life when I was lying in bed finding out that my tool had sensations in the tip–they yelled it up to me thru the transom, “Ton chien est mort! (Your dog is dead!)” and they brought it home dying–on the kitchen floor we and Blanche and Carrufel with hat in hand watch Beauty die, Beauty dies the night I discover sex, they wonder why I’m mad—)—So now Blanche (this is before Beauty was bom, 2 years earlier) wants me and Ma to walk her home, so we go, a beautiful soft summer night in Lowell. The stars are shining in the deep,—millions. We cross the great darknesses of Sarah Avenue by the park, with hugetree sighs above; and the baleful flickering dark of Riverside Street and the Textile ironpicket shrouds and on to Moody and across the Bridge. In the summer-dark, far below, the soft white horses of the thrush-foam over rocks are surging in a Nightly Tryst with Mystery and Mists that Crash off Rocks, in a Gray Anathema Void, all raw-roar-roo … a wild Ionian sight and frightening– we turn at Pawtucket and move up past the gray tenement and the Hospital St. Joseph’s where my sister had appendicitis and the Funeral homes of the dark Flale there after you pass the curve of gooky rickety Salem curvacue-ing in–huge mansions appear, solemn, sitting in state on lawns, all behung with signs- “R.K.G.W.S.T.N. Droux, Funeral Director”–with hearses, lacy windows, warm rich interiors, dank chauffeur like hearse garages, shrubs around the lawn, the great slopes of the river and the canal falling away from the black lawn to grand darkness and lights of foam and night–ha river! My mother and Blanche are discussing astrology as they walk under the stars. Sometimes they lapse into philosophy—”Isn’t it a perfectly beautiful night Angy? Oh my fate!—” sighing–Blanche had tried to commit suicide from the Moody Bridge–she had told us among gloomy pianos–she played piano and told her moods, she was an elegant visitor to our house that sometimes my father found infuriating especially because she was teaching us so well–explaining Rachmaninoff’s Rustle of Spring and playing it–a beautiful blonde woman, well preserved–old Shammy had his eye on her, he lived in that old white house on Riverside across Textile iron-pickets under an immense 1776 tree and we always talked about Shammy as we passed at night the house where he lived with his wife (Sad Harmonies of Love Night Lowell)—
The Grotto–it Hugely Mooked ahead of us, to the right … that baleful night. It belonged to the orphanage on the corner of Pawtucket Street and School Street at the head of the White Bridge–a big Grotto is their backyard, mad, vast, rehgious, the Twelve Stations of the Cross, little individual twelve altars set in, you go in front, kneel, everything but incense in the air (the roar of the river, mysteries of nature, fireflies in the night flickering to the waxy stare of statues, I knew Doctor Sax was there flowing in the back darks with his wild and hincty cape)—culminating, was the gigantic pyramid of steps upon which the Cross itself poked phalhcally up with its Poor Burden the Son of Man all skewered across it in his Agony and Fright–undoubtedly this statue moved in the night— … after the … last of the worshippers is gone, poor dog. Before seeing Blanche in home to the horrible brown glooms of her dying father’s house–we go to this Grotto, like we often do, to get some praying in. “Wishing, I’d call it more,” Blanche said. “Oh Angy, if I could only find my ideal man.”
“What’s the matter with Shammy, he’s an ideal man.”
“But he’s married.”
“If you love him that ain’t his fault–you gotta take the bad with the worse.” My mother had a great secret love for Shammy–she told him and everybody so–Shammy reciprocated with great kindness and charm– When he wasn’t at the Club bowling or shooting pool, or home sleeps, or driving his bus, he was at our house having big parties with Blanche and my father and mother and sometimes a Textile student Tommy Lockstock and my sister —Shammy had a real affection for Blanche–
“But he’s only a truck driver,” she’d say. “There’s nothing really fine about him.” She probably meant he was just dumb and silent, Shammy was, nothing much troubled him, he was a goodlooking peaceful man. Blanche wanted Rachmaninoff in her teacups.
“Oh the irony of life.”
“Yeah,” my mother’d echo, “the iyony of life, oui”—and bundle along with Blanche’s arm in hers in coats for the latenight mist, and I, Ti Jean, walking beside them sometimes listening but most of the time watching the dark shadows in the night, from Sarah park to the Funerals and
Grottos of Pawtucket, looking for The Shadow, for Doctor Sax, listening for the laugh, “mwee hee hee ha ha,” looking for that lawn where G.J. and I and Dicky Hampshire wrestled, the place where Vinny Bergerac and Lousy threw popcorn at each other etc. and also wrapped deep in that dream of childhood which has no bottom and instantly soars to impossible daydreams, I’ve got the whole city of Manhattan paralyzed, I’m going around with a super-buzzing-current in me that knocks everything out of its way and also I’m invisible and taking money out of cash registers and striding along 23rd Street with fire in my head and making the elevated highways ring with my electricity, on steel and stone etc.— Across the street, just before we go in the Grotto, is the store Uncle Mike briefly owned before he got too sick and for a while Edgar ran it and one summer night I heard him say that new word “sex appeal” and all the ladies laughed–
As we’re turning from the sidewalk into the darkness of the Grotto (it’s about eleven o’clock) Blanche is saying “If he only’d made some money somehow, if he’d been rich like some men do with store,—instead the squalor of those years and that house, really Angy I was born for something much grander, don’t you feel it in my music?”
“Blanche I always did say you was a very great painist —there!—a great artist, Blanche, I understand you, when you make a mistakes on the piano I always know, it’s always been so–ain’t it?”
“You do have a good ear, Ange,” conceded the Princess.
“You damn tootin right–ask anybody if I ain’t got a good ear, Ti Jean, I tell you,” (turning to me) “a toutes les fois que Blanche fait seulement quainque un ti mistake sur son piano, pis je’ll sais tu-stiite, … Hah?”(Repeating what she said.)
And I jump up athletically to catch a branch of the overhead tree in answer and to prove my world is more action —so engrossed have we been in our conversation, we’re in the Grotto!—deep, too,—halfway to the first Station of the Ghost. The first of the stations faced the side of a funeral home, so you kneeled there, at night, looking at faint representations of the Virgin, hood over head, her sad eyes, the action, the tortured wood and thorns of the Passion, and your reflections on the subject become mirrored from the funeral home where a dull light fixed in the ceiling of an overpass rain garage for hearses shines dully in the gravelly gloom, with bordering dewy grassplots and shrubs to give it the well-tended look, and the drapes in the windows showing, incredibly, where the funeral director himself lives, in his House of Death. “This is our home” Everything there was to remind of Death, and nothing in praise of hfe —except the roar of the humpbacked Merrimac passing over rocks in formations and arms of foam, at 11:15 P.M. Among the shrubs of wild grotto and senary funeral home I know there in the green opulence of dollars and in the grotto sorrows of rocks and plaster … gravel croaked and on-led for persetury investigators in the wrong roil road to the flaminary immensities and up-fluge of the poor bedight-ed, be-knighted Crown and Clown of sorrowmary doom in This anyway-globe … the Jesus most admirable in his height–in all this Doctor Sax I knew, I saw him watching from a shroud in the bushes by the river … I saw him flit across the moonlit rocks of the summerriver to come and see the visitors in the Grotto. I saw him flit from Station with his cape now hanging from the orphan home walls with a keen eye on our doings… I saw him flit from Station to Station, from the backs of em, in terrible blasphemy prayer in the dark with everything reversed–he was only following to see me, it was later when the Snake was ready and Sax brought me to see, which was the final thing that happened and I covered my eyes for fear of what I saw–
We made the stations to the ultimate foot of the Cross, where my mother kneeled, prayed, and worked a step up. the cross-mount, to show me how some people did it all the way up–to the foot of the Cross itself, tremendous ascents to blasphemous heights in the river breeze and views of long land vistas– We tramped back arm-in-arm down the gravel path running thru the grotto dark, to the lights of the street again, where we bade Blanche adieu.
I always liked to get out of there …
And headed towards home– There was a full moon that night.
(The following full moon, August month the next, I had my bus pass stolen from me as I stood with it clasped behind me in the glittering lights of Kearney Square and a sad bully of the Lowell alleys rushed up and stole it and ran through the crowd. “The full moon,” I cried, “twice in a row–it’s giving me–death, and now I get robbed, O Mama, God, what you,—hey,” and I rushed in the terrible clarity of the August full moon to hide myself from it … as I ran home across the Moody Bridge the moon made the mad white horses foam all beautiful and close and shiny so that it was almost inviting–to jump in–everybody in Pawtucketville had the perfect opportunity to commit suicide coming home every night–that is why we lived deep lives—)
The full moon this night was the moon of death. We, my mother and I rounded the corner of Pawtucket and Moody (cattycorner across the home of the French Canadian St. Joseph’s parochial Jesuit brothers, my fifth-grade teachers, gloomy men in their black mid sleep now), and stepped on the planks of the Moody Street Bridge and headed over the canal which after a huge stonewall offered the rest of the waterbed dug in primord-rock to the river that dug it with its lovekiss tongues–
A man carrying a watermelon passed us, he wore a hat, a suit in the warm summer night; he was just on the boards of the bridge, refreshed, maybe from a long walk up slummy swilly Moody and its rantankling saloons with the swinging doors, mopped his brow, or came up through Little Canada or Cheever or Aiken, rewarded by the bridge of eve and sighs of stone–the great massive charge of the ever stationary ever yearning cataracts and ghosts, this is his reward after a long dull hot dumb walk to the river thru houses–he strides on across the bridge– We stroll on behind him talking about the mysteries of life (inspired we were by moon and river), I remember I was so happy-something in the alchemy of summernight, Ah Midsummer Night’s Dream, John a Dreams, the clink of clock on rock in river, roar–old gloor-merrimac figalitating down the dark mark all spread–I was happy too in the intensity of something we were talking about, something that was giving me joy.
Suddenly the man fell, we heard the great thump of his watermelon on wood planks and saw him fallen– Another man was there, also mysterious, but without watermelon, who bent to him quickly and solicitously as by assent and nod in the heavens and when I got there I saw the watermelon man staring at the waves below with shining eyes (“IFS meurt, he’s dying,” my mother’s saying) and I see him breathing hard, feeble-bodied, the man holding him gravely watching him die, I’m completely terrified and yet I feel the profound pull and turn to see what he is staring at so deadly-earnest with his froth stiffness–I look down with him and there is the moon on shiny froth and rocks, there is the long eternity we have been seeking.
“Is he dead?” I said to my mother. As in a dream we adjourn behind the dead man, who sits near the rail with his stare, holding his belly with his wrist, all slumped, distant, in the throes of that which is carrying him far away from us, something private. Another man vouchsafed an opinion:
“I’ll get an ambulance at St. Joseph’s here, he may be alright.”
But my mother shook her head and made that sneer you see the world wide around, in California or in China, “No, s’t’homme la est fini (no, that man there is finished) “— “Regard–Teau sur les planches, quand quun homme smeurt its pis dans son butain, toute part … (Look, the water on the planks, when a man dies he pees in his clothes, everything goes.)”
Indubitable proof of his death I saw in that tragic stain that in the moonlight was specialized milk, he was not going to be abight at all, he was already dead, my mother’s was no prophecy it was a known thing from the start, her secret snaky knowledge about death as uncanny as the Fellaheen dog that howls in the muddy alleys of Mazatlan when death has laid its shroud on the dead in the dark. I had intended to look at the dead man again–but now I saw he was really dead and taken–his eyes had turned glassy o
n the milky waters of the night in their hollow roar cold rock–but it was that part of the giant rocks below he chose to die his fixed gaze on–that part which yet I see in dreams of Lowell and the Bridge. I shuddered and saw white flowers and grew cold.
The full moon horrified me with her cloudy leer. “Regard, la face de skalette dans la Inner cries my mother– “Look, the face of a skeleton in the moon!”
2
THUMPING TREES IN THE WELD WOOD beyond the bridge rail, the forests of the rock bank of Merrimac, where oft I’d seen old Sax–heart urge his oiky-cloiky fly along the black sides, headed for a perfidy of dirt–in mists of raw March-wild glee–
The history of the Castle goes back to the 18th century when it was built by a mad seafarer named Phloggett who came to Lowell looking for a sea-like expanse of the Merrimac and decided on the Rosemont basin and built his old haunted rockheap on the top of the Centralville hill where it backsloped to its Pelhams and Dracuts (many’s the time we’d run around there Joe and me picking green apples from the ground by stone walls and finding rusty fenders to piss on in the heart of every forest)—a ruinous old bones of a house, with turrets, stone, entryways gothicized, a gravel driveway which was put in by its 1920’s occupants for roadsters of the Ripe–Old Epzebiah Phloggett, he was a seafarer, for all we know he was a slavetrader — He sailed from Lynn in the molasses and rum fleet-Retired he went to his Lowell castle–not known as Lowell then, and wild–nothing but the Pawtucket Indians sending up their calm wigwams at eve with a puff of smoke-Old Smogette Phloggett occasionally made hikes with his footmen to see the Indians, at the Falls–where the river left its shale shelf that has served it since before Nashua and now drops blonk into the wornaway rock–rock as soft as silk when you touch it in hot dry summers– Phloggett didn’t have much to do with the Indians, he occasionally bought a young squaw and brought her to the Castle and back again in a week– There was something evil in the bottom of his dirty old soul … some snaky secret Sax knew about later– He had a long old antiquarian telescope eye-glass that he unfurled on gray March mornings on the West balcony and pointed to the wild wide Merrimac as it ancestral plowed its original forest-trail thru the site of Now-Lowell–not a house–New England was alone in the woods of time. Where Dracut Tigers field now is, back of homeplate, in the shrubs and stub pines, a red man Indian stalked in the silent mom–the birds that luted in the dew, and pointed rosy eyes to the new Promised East, are now the birds that fritter on the branch of dust–ancestral voices in the mute mist of morning, without fanfare or cry, quiet, it was bound to be there a long time– Phloggett trains his telescope on these woods, on the hump-rise of the sandbank in its wild golden isle mid green,—the huge tree across the street from my Sarah Avenue house stood then with the same majesty and height above the solid grunchy vastness green of the Pawtucketville forest–no dream-skyscrapers sprung from Mt. Vernon Street-George Washington was a boy stalking deer in Virginia flat forests– In the Gaspé peninsula up north the first of the American Armorican Duluozes was wrangling with his squaw on the Wolf River morns–over by Pine Brook, in the 18th century, peaceful, tepees were pitched in the sward carpet of the spring, over the pine hill the crows cawed, a hunter came tramping home over the field–a young Indian boy dove brown and naked with his tuft-hair and red-stone bracelet into the cool pool of life–it was centuries later I came by there with Sebastian and Dicky Hampshire and we sang poems to the rising sun–African alligator adventures took place along Pine Brook (Slow Waters) clear to the Rosemont (Ohio River at its Cairo) junction with (Swift Waters) Merrimac in the drowsy afternoons of Indian children– Fellaheen singers with greasy manes and capes made mournful Hebraic cries along the merced walls of Cadiz, in the 18th century morn– The whole world, fresh and dewy, rolled to the sun–as it will tomorrow morning so golden-
