“ Francis Sarsfield has a memory that almost can be described as photographic” —so had run one line in the Vienna doctor’s report. When he read that, Sarsfield had known that
the doctor was a clever doctor. “ He suffers chiefly from an
arrest of emotional development, and may be regarded as a
rather bright small boy in some respects. His three temporarily successful escapes from prison suggest that his intelli
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gence has been much underrated. On at least one of those
three occasions, he could have eluded the arresting officer
had he been willing to resort to violence. Sarsfield repeatedly
describes himself as nonviolent and has no record of aggression while confined, nor in connection with any of the offenses for which he was arrested. On the contrary, he seems timid and withdrawn, and might become a victim of assaults
in prison, were it not for his size, strength, and power of
voice. ’ ’
Sarsfield had been pleased enough by that paragraph, but
a little puzzled by what followed:
“ In general, Sarsfield is one of those recidivists who ought
not to be confined, were any alternative method now available for restraining them from petty offenses against property. Not only does he lack belligerence against men, but apparently he is quite clean of any record against women and
children. It seems that he does not indulge in autoeroticism,
either—perhaps because of strict instruction by his R.C.
mother during his formative years.
“ I add, however, that conceivably Sarsfield is not fundamentally so gentle as his record indicates. He can be energetic in self-defence when pushed to the wall. In his youth occasionally he was induced, for the promise of five dollars
or ten dollars, to stand up as an amateur against some travelling professional boxer. He admits that he did not fight hard, and cried when he was badly beaten. Nevertheless, I
am inclined to suspect a potentiality for violence, long repressed but not totally extinguished by years of ‘humbling himself,’ in his phrase. This possibility is not so certain as
to warrant additional detention, even though three years of
Sarsfield’s sentence remain unexpired.”
Yes, he had memorized nearly the whole of that old doctor’s analysis, which had got his parole for him. There had been the concluding paragraphs:
“ Francis Sarsfield is oppressed by a haunting sense of personal guilt. He is religious to the point of superstition, an R.C., and appears to believe himself damned. Although
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worldly-wise in a number of respects, he retains an almost
unique innocence in others. His frequent humor and candor
account for his success, much of the time, at begging. He
has read much during his wanderings and terms of confinement. He has a strong taste for good poetry of the popular sort, and has accumulated a mass of miscellaneous information, much of it irrelevant to the life he leads.
“ Although occasionally moody and even surly, most of the
time he subjects himself to authority, and will work fairly
well if closely supervised. He possesses no skills of any sort,
unless some knack for woodchopping, acquired while he was
enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, can be considered a marketable skill. He appears to be incorrigibly footloose, and therefore confinement is more unpleasant to him than to most prisoners. It is truly remarkable that he continues to be rational enough, his isolation and heavy guilt-complex considered.
“ Sometimes evasive when he does not desire to answer
questions, nevertheless he rarely utters a direct lie. His personal modesty may be described as excessive. His habits of cleanliness are commendable, if perhaps of origins like Lady
Macbeth’s.
“ Despite his strength, he is a diabetic and suffers from a
heart murmur, sometimes painful.
“ Only in circumstances so favorable as to be virtually
unobtainable could Sarsfield succeed in abstaining from the
behavior-pattem that has led to his repeated prosecution and
imprisonment. The excessive crowding of this penitentiary
considered, however, I strongly recommend that he be released upon parole. Previous psychiatric reports concerning this inmate have been shallow and erroneous, I regret to note.
Perhaps Sarsfield’s chief psychological difficulty is that, from
obscure causes, he lacks emotional communication with other
adults, although able to maintain cordial and healthy relations
with small children. He is very nearly a solipsist, which in
large part may account for his inability to make firm decisions or pursue any regular occupation. In contradiction of
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previous analyses of Sarsfield, he should not be described as
‘dull normal’ intellectually. Francis Xavier Sarsfield distinctly is neither dull nor normal.”
Sarsfield had looked up “ solipsist,” but hadn’t found himself much the wiser. He didn’t think himself the only existent thing—not most of the time, anyway. He wasn’t sure that the
old doctor had been real, but he knew that his mother had
been real before she went straight to Heaven. He knew that
his nightmares probably weren’t real; but sometimes, while
awake, he could see things that other men couldn’t. In a house
like this, he could glimpse little unaccountable movements
out of the comers of his eyes, but it wouldn’t do to worry
about those. He was afraid of those things which other people
couldn’t see, yet not so frightened of them as most people
were. Some of the other inmates had called him Crazy Frank,
and it had been hard to keep down his temper. If you could
perceive more existent things, though not flesh-and-blood
things, than psychiatrists or convicts could—why, were you a
solipsist?
There was no point in puzzling over it. Dad had taken him
out of school to work on the farm when he hadn’t yet finished
the fourth grade, so words like “ solipsist” didn’t mean much
to him. Poets’ words, though, he mostly understood. He had
picked up a rhyme that made children laugh when he told it
to them:
“Though you don’t know it,
You 're a poet.
Your feet show it:
They're Longfellows. ”
That wasn’t very good poetry, but Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow was a good poet. They must have loved Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow in this house, and especially “ The
Children’s Hour,” because of those three little girls named
Alice, Allegra, and Edith, and those lines on the General’s
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boulder. Allegra: that’s the prettiest of all names ever, and it
means “ merry,” someone had told him.
He looked at the cheap wristwatch he had bought, besides
the wash-and-wear suit, with his last dishwashing money from
that Lake Superior summer hotel. Well, midnight! It’s up the
wooden hill for you, Frank Sarsfield, to your snug little room
under the rafters. If anybody comes to Tamarack House tonight, it’s out the skylight and through the snow for you, Frank, my boy—and no tiny reindeer. If you want to survive,
in prison or out of it, you stick to your own business and let
other folks stew in their own juice.
Before he closed his eyes, he would pray for Mother’
s
soul—not that she really needed it—and then say the little
Scottish prayer he had found in a children’s book:
“ From ghosties and ghoulies, long-leggitie beasties, and
things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us!”
The next morning, the morning before his birthday, Frank
Sarsfield went up the circular stair to the cupola, even before
making his breakfast of pickled trout and peaches and strong
coffee. The wind had gone down, and it was snowing only
lightly now, but the drifts were immense. Nobody would
make his way to Anthonyville and Tamarack House this day;
the snowplows would be busy elsewhere.
From this height he could see the freeway, and nothing
seemed to be moving along it. The dead village lay to the
north of him. To the east were river and swamp, the shores
lined with those handsome tamaracks, the green gone out of
them, which had given this house its name. Everything in
sight belonged to Frank.
He had dreamed during the night, the wind howling and
whining round the top of the house, and he had known he
was dreaming, but it had been even stranger than usual, if
less horrible.
In his dream, he had found himself in the dining room of
Tamarack House. He had not been alone. The General and
Father and Mama and the three little girls had been dining
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happily at the long table, and he had waited on them. In the
kitchen an old woman who was the cook, and a girl who
cleaned, had eaten by themselves. But when he had finished
filling the family’s plates, he had sat down at the end of the
table, as if he had been expected to do that.
The family had talked among themselves and even to him
as he ate, but somehow he had not been able to hear what
they said to him. Suddenly he had pricked up his ears, though,
because Allegra had spoken to him.
“ Frank,” she had said, all mischief, “ why do they call
you Punkinhead?”
The old General had frowned at the head of the table, and
Mama had said, “ Allegra, don’t speak that way to Frank!”
But he had grinned at Allegra, if slightly hurt, and had
told the little girl, “ Because some men think I ’ve got a head
like a jack-o’-lantem’s and not even seeds inside it.”
“ Nonsense, Frank,” Mama had put in, “ you have a very
handsome head.”
“ You’ve got a pretty head, Frank,” the three little girls
had told him then, almost in chorus, placatingly. Allegra had
come round the table to make her peace. “ There’s going to
be a big surprise for you tomorrow, Frank,” she had whispered to him. And then she had kissed him on the cheek.
That had waked him. Most of the rest of that howling night
he had lain awake trying to make sense of his dream, but he
couldn’t. The people in it had been more real than the people
he met on the long, long trail.
Now he strolled through the house again, admiring everything. It was almost as if he had seen the furniture and pictures and the carpets long, long ago. The house must be over a century old, and many of the good things in it must go back
to the beginning. He would have two or three more days here
until the roads were cleared. There were no newspapers to
tell him about the great storm, of course, and no radio that
worked; but that didn’t matter.
He found a great big handsome Complete Works o f Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, in red morocco, and an illustrated
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copy of the Rubaiyat. He didn’t need to read it, because he
had memorized all the quatrains once. There was a black silk
ribbon as marker between the pages, and he opened it there—
at Quatrain 44, it turned out:
' 'Why, i f the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air o f Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame— were’t not a Shame fo r him
In this clay carcass crippled to abide?”
That old Vienna doctor, Frank suspected, hadn’t believed
in immortal souls. Frank Sarsfield knew better. But also
Frank suspected that his soul never would ride, naked or
clothed, on the Air of Heaven. Souls! That put him in mind
of his sister, a living soul that he had forsaken. He ought to
write her a letter on this the eve of his sixtieth birthday.
Frank travelled light, his luggage being mostly a safety
razor, a hairbrush, and a comb; he washed his shirt and socks
and underclothes every night, and often his wash-and-wear
suit, too. But he did carry with him a few sheets of paper
and a ballpoint pen. Sitting down at the library table—he had
built a fire in the library stove also, there being no lack of
logs—he began to write to Mary Sarsfield, alone in the rotting farmhouse in New Hampshire. His spelling wasn’t good, he knew, but today he was careful at his birthday letter, using
the big old dictionary with the General’s bookplate in it.
To write that letter took most of the day. Two versions were
discarded. At last Frank had done the best he could.
“ Dearest Mary my sister,
“ Its been nearly 9 years since I came to visit you
and borrowed the $78 from you and went away again
and never paid it back. I guess you don’t want to see
your brother Frank again after what I did that time and
other times but the Ethiopian can not change his skin
nor the leopard his spots and when some man like a
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Jehovahs Witness or that rancher with all the cash gives
me quite a lot of money I mean to send you what I owe
but the post office isnt handy at the time and so I spend
it on presents for little kids I meet and buying new
clothes and such so I never get around to sending you
that $78 Mary. Right now I have $29 and more but the
post office at this place is folded up and by the time I
get to the next town the money will be mostly gone and
so it goes. I guess probably you need the money and
Im sorry Mary but maybe some day I will win in the
lottery and then 111 give you the thousands of dollars I
win.
“ Well Mary its been 41 years and 183 days since
Mother passed away and here I am 60 years old tomorrow and you getting on toward 56. I pray that your cough is better and that your son and my nephew Jack
is doing better than he was in Tallahassee Florida. Some
time Mary if you would write to me c/o Father Justin
O ’Malley in Albatross Michigan where he is pastor now
I would stop by his rectory and get your letter and read
it with joy. But I know Ive been a very bad brother and
I dont blame you Mary if you never get around to writing your brother Frank.
“ Mary Ive been staying out of jails and working a
little here and there along the road. Now Mary do you
know what I hate most about those prisons? Why not
being on the road you will say. No Mary the worst thing-
is the foul language the convicts use from morning till
night. Taking the name of their Lord
in vain is the least
they do. There is a foul curse word in every sentence.
I wasn’t brought up that way any more than you Mary
and I will not revile woman or child. It is like being in
H-----to hear it.
“ Im not in bad shape except the diabetes is no better
but I take my pills for it when I can buy them and dont
have to take needles for it and my heart hurts me dreadfully bad sometimes when I lift heavy things hours on
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end and sometimes it hurts me worse at night when Ive
been just lying there thinking of the life Ive led and
how I ought to pay you the $78 and pay back other
folks that helped me too. I owe Father O ’Malley
$497.11 now altogether and I keep track of it in my
head and when the lottery ticket wins he will not be
forgot.
“ Some people have been quite good to me and I still
can make them laugh and I recite to them and generally
I start my reciting with what No Person of Quality wrote
hundreds of years ago
‘Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.’
“ They like that and also usually they like Thomas
Grays Elegy in a Country Churchyard leaving the world
to darkness and to me and I recite all of that and sometimes some of the Quatrains of Omar. At farms when they ask me I chop wood for these folks and I help with
the dishes but I still break a good many as you learned
Mary 9 years ago but I didnt mean to do it Mary because I am just clumsy in all ways. Oh yes I am good at reciting Frosts Stopping by Woods and his poem
about the Hired Man. I have been reading the poetical
works of Thomas Steams Eliot so I can recite his The
Hollow Men or much of it and also his Book of Practical Cats which is comical when I come to college towns and some professor or his wife gives me a sandwich and maybe $2 and maybe a ride to the next town.
“ Where I am now Mary I ought to study the poems
of John Greenleaf Whittier because theres been a real
blizzard maybe the biggest in the state for many years
and Im Snowbound. Years ago I tried to memorize all
that poem but I got only part way for it is a whopper
of a poem.
“ I dont hear much good Music Mary because of
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 13
