Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  Francis got up and saw that only I was looking at him. He made a silent shushing motion to me, then found his hat and coat on the hallway wall hooks, where Molly had hung them. He went through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard, and I followed him. We both looked at the dead automobile in the carriage barn, a 1923 Essex, up on blocks.

  “That your car, kid?” he asked me.

  “No sir. I’m not old enough to own a car.”

  “Good,” he said. “No point in ownin’ that one anyway. Ain’t worth nothin’.”

  Then he smiled, threw me a so-long wave, and walked out of the alley and down Colonie Street, heading toward the railroad tracks, his home away from home.

  I watched him limp toward the street and knew he was going away, perhaps forever, which was precocious of me to think that, and which saddened me. He was an imposing figure of a man, even with his dirty clothes. His heavy-duty smile made you like his looks, and like him, even though he was beat up, and kind of old.

  Now, reconstituting that moment twenty-four years later, I remember that my sadness at the loss of his presence was the first time I was certain that my father really was Peter, and that I really did belong in this family. I had seen something in the man’s face that resembled what I saw in my own face in the mirror: a kindred intangible, something lurking in the eyes, and in that smile, and in the tilt of the head—nothing you could say was genetic, but something you knew you wanted to acknowledge because it was valuable when you saw it, even though you couldn’t say what it was. And you didn’t want to lose it.

  Francis turned at the front of the house and walked out of my sight, and so I then went and sat in the old car. As if to fill the void, a girl my own age entered the alley with a small black mongrel at her heel and came toward the carriage barn. She looked up into the car’s front window and saw me pretending to drive.

  “Do you know how to make that thing go?” the girl asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Then you shouldn’t be up there. You could have an accident.”

  “This car can’t move,” I said. “It’s on blocks.”

  The girl looked at the blocks and said, “Oh, I see.” And then she opened the door and slid in alongside me. She was obviously a waif, her hair a stringy mess, her plaid jacket held at the throat with a safety pin, her feet in buttonless high-button shoes long out of fashion. But what overrode all things forlorn about her was her eyes: large and black beneath black brows and focused on me with an intensity that I now know was in excess of what her years should allow. This made me uneasy.

  “Is that your dog?” I asked.

  “He belongs to all of us.”

  “All of who? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “I was sent here,” she said.

  “Who sent you?”

  “My people. They want me to find something valuable and bring it back.”

  “Valuable how?”

  “I don’t know yet. They didn’t tell me.”

  “Then how do you know where to look?”

  “I don’t know where to look. I don’t know anything about this place. Would you like to help me?”

  “Help you look for something you don’t know what it is or where it might be?”

  “Yes.”

  I was befuddled, and while I thought about how ridiculous this girl was I saw Molly come out the back door.

  “Orson,” she called out, “did you see Francis?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, sticking my head out the car window. “He went out the alley and down the street.”

  Peter came out then, shoving his arms into his coat, and, when Molly told him what I had said, he too went toward the street.

  “I have to go now,” I said to the girl.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, and she left the Essex and followed me, as I was following Peter, the mongrel keeping pace behind us. When I reached the street I saw Peter already at the corner, looking in all directions, then heading toward Downtown on the run. I jogged and the girl jogged beside me.

  “Are you looking for the man in the hat and the old clothes?” the girl asked.

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “He didn’t go that way,” she said, pointing toward Peter. “He went straight ahead.” And she gestured toward the river.

  I stopped and wondered whether the girl was lying, or knew something.

  “He was limping,” she said.

  “All right,” I said and I resumed jogging toward the river, wondering what I would do or say if I found Francis when Peter was not around. At least I could say Peter was looking for him, and Molly too.

  We ran past an old hospital, empty now, with posters pasted haphazardly on its walls advertising the O. C. Tucker Shows, a carnival with high divers, games, rides, a fortuneteller, a freak show, dancers galore. On another wall I saw a minstrel-show poster of a man in blackface, and yet another of Fredric March in Death Takes a Holiday.

  “That’s where I live,” the dark-eyed girl said.

  “In that empty building?”

  “No, in the carnival.”

  “Where is it now, around here?”

  “Down that street,” the girl said, but she did not change her direction to go toward the carnival, if it was there, which I doubted, for this wasn’t the right weather for carnivals or circuses. It was too cold for outdoor shows, and it was probably going to snow. I was not cold, because I was running. But I knew when I stopped I would feel chilled beneath my sweat.

  “I think he went down there,” the girl said, and she ran ahead of me and down a dead-end street, beyond which lay the river flats at the edge of the old Lumber District. To this day I cannot give a cogent reason why I followed this girl, trusted her to lead me to a stranger she had seen only once, if that. But I felt that the child should not be resisted if I wanted to find Francis.

  “How do you know he came this way?” I asked.

  “I saw him,” the girl said.

  “You couldn’t have seen him down here.”

  “That’s what you say,” the girl said.

  “I think you’re a little crazy,” I said, to which the girl did not reply.

  We left the paved streets of the city and ran on a dirt path toward the railroad tracks, across fields of weeds and trash, and I saw in the distance half a dozen shacks that hoboes had built, saw people moving near them. Then I saw eight freight cars on a siding, with more people sitting by fires, cooking something.

  “That’s where I live,” the girl said, and Orson saw the lettering painted on the cars: O. C. Tucker Shows.

  “You live on the tracks?”

  “We’re waiting for a steam engine to take us south,” the girl said. “We have to bribe the railroad men.”

  I understood nothing about this girl. We ran in silence and then I saw Francis, walking on the flats with his limp. And how he had gotten this far walking at that speed was a mystery. Perhaps the girl and I had run in a roundabout circle to get here, though I doubted it.

  “There he is,” I said, and I stopped running.

  “You see?” the girl said.

  We were uphill from Francis, fifty feet from him, on a slope covered with trees and high weeds, and I then chose to hide myself and watch Francis as he walked north along the tracks, his limp worse than when I last observed him. I felt myself in the presence of hidden meaning (was that what the dark-eyed girl was looking for?) both in my decision to hide, and in the vision that lay before me; and I shivered with the chill of comprehension that something woeful could happen that would mark me. In the presence of malevolence I understood that this is what you feel like before the woeful thing happens. I turned to the girl and saw her petting a kitten, stroking its head with her long, dirty fingernails. Her dog was nowhere to be seen. From the pocket of her jacket a naked doll with only one leg protruded.

  “Where did the cat come from?” I asked, and I realized I was whispering.

  “He found me,” the girl said.


  “And the doll?”

  “It was in the car that’s up on blocks.”

  “Then it doesn’t belong to you.”

  “No, it’s yours,” she said.

  “I don’t own any dolls,” I said.

  “It’s yours because I give it to you,” the girl said, and she handed me the one-legged doll, which I assumed had belonged to Molly, or Sarah, or maybe the long-gone Julia. I put the doll on the ground and looked at Francis, who had stopped walking and was staring up the empty track, nothing to be seen. I felt the chill I knew would come. I heard noise to my right, someone walking, and turned to see Peter not thirty feet away, standing still and mostly concealed by bushes, looking toward Francis, who was standing beside the tracks. Peter, the dark-eyed child, and I now formed Francis’s silent audience in the weeds.

  Francis is a peasant, Peter thought. He is a polar bear. He can live in the snow. He is a walker, look at him walk with that game leg. What did you do to your leg, Francis? Francis is a buzzard, feeding on the dead. Francis is a man who never lost his looks, though he is in terrible condition. You cannot lose the shape of your face unless you lose all your flesh, or stretch it with fat, like Chick. Look at the way Francis wears his hat. In destitution he exudes style. He walks along the gray gravel of the track bed. He casts his shadow on the silverbrown tracks. He walks past a track signal light whose color I cannot see. The weeds where he walks are dun, are fawn, are raw umber, khaki, walnut, bronze, and copper. The sky is the color of lead, soon to be the color of mice. Bosch, The Landloper. Look, he sits on the switch box. He raises the leg of his trousers that are the color of lampblack gone to smoke, and he studies the wound that makes him limp. Not in my line of sight. He nods and decides that his leg has improved, though it pains him. He wipes sweat from his forehead, or is it an itch? He puts his hat on again, stands and walks, stops. Why walk? He will have to run when the train comes. I can see him running with his gimp gait, clever enough to grab the step-iron of the ladder and hoist himself aloft with arm strength alone, perhaps help from a push with the good leg, and up he goes, off he goes to the future in the noplace village of his nowhere world. Away we go, Francis, away we go, swinging from the rope on the hill, flying down into the mud pond. Do not miss the water or you will break your bones. I never missed. Francis taught me how not to miss. Can he see me now? He cannot, yet he can teach me still. The tracks converge in a distant fusion I cannot see from here, but I see them narrowing, darkening as they go, see the yellow lights of a lumber yard still busy, lights of a house so solitary, lights of a burnt-ocher fire (other fires toward the city, carny fire probably fake like everything about carnies), and I see you, Francis, in your termination, the end of family tie, the beginning of nothing. You will carry on, Francis. You will find a way not to die in the midst of your nothingness. You will feel the triumph of the spirit as you leave us in the dust of your memory, obliterating us as you go toward oblivion and the bottom of the jug. Be of good cheer, Francis. Wondrous drunkenness lurks in your future. You will recover from the awfulness of your finality and you will go on to the heights of the degraded imagination, always conjuring yet another rung on which to hoist yourself to new depths. Francis, in your suite of mice and dun, in the majority of your umberness, in the psychotic melancholy of your spirit, I salute you as my brother in the death of our history. You more than I knew how to murder it. You more than I knew how to arrive at the future. In solitude you are victorious, you son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, will you never give me peace? Son-of-a-bitch brother, why is it you do not die?

  Francis put his foot on the track and felt the train before he could see it, or hear it. You goddamn leg, you rotted on me. Let them rot. Why’d it have to be me? Why not? Not a time to go for the religion. Sin and punishment, all that shit. Don’t clutter your head, Francis. This is tricky. You don’t want to miss. One time and we’re on the way. Hey, boys, I’m goin’ for a ride. You’d think a guy’d get an invite to at least sleep over after how the fuck many years. Too many to count. Don’t bother. But they give you a chicken leg, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Woulda seen Annie if this’d worked, if there was a place to stay and go slow, do a visit and get the lay of the land, don’t push it too fast, but you can’t goddamn go home lookin’ like this, goddamn bum and filthy, got a chicken leg in his belly and that’s all he’s got. And lookin’ out the window at Katrina. Jesus, lady, you don’t go away easy, do you? Like a life you lived afore you was alive. A way of lookin’ at women that keeps you on the edge of the goddamn furnace, dangerous, them women, God bless all of ’em, and I don’t leave out none, all welcome here. Welcome, ladies, welcome. Anything I can do for you while you wait? Spurt up a couple of kids? How’d ya like that, Helen? You can’t have no kids. And Bessie, you were some bundle, I’ll tell the world, wouldn’t of been the same world without that month, or was it a week? Who gives a barrel of shit? Not Francis. Francis knows there’s no . . . I see it. I got a minute. A minute? Less? Step lively, Mr. Francis, ’cause the time is now. Chicken leg here you go wherever the hell you’re goin’, chicken leg step lively step.

  When Papa died, Peter thought, there was Francis with him. Francis had everything.

  When Papa died he stepped onto the track backwards and didn’t know the engine

  When Papa died he took my hand and said to me, “Fear Christ.”

  When Papa died

  Francis is stepping onto the track

  I scream.

  Peter heard Orson yell and saw him running toward the track yelling a scream that had no words and he saw Francis turn and look not toward him not seeing him running toward the train and saw Francis stop look toward the train as if he and it were making no sound as if he were a figure in a dream where nobody hears what you most desperately want to say as if you were a nonexistent nothing nowhere and he even so steps off the track bed and looks toward you with a surprise in his eye and the train goes by and you can stop all that yelling now, Orson.

  Not dead yet, Francis said silently, and he stepped off the track bed and out of the path of the fast freight, and said aloud, “Fuck that nonsense,” and heard the screaming then and turned to it, saw the boy and Peter both coming toward him, both. They been watchin’, the two of them, that’s a pair, the boy can’t even talk, just there.

  “Are you all right?” Peter asked.

  “I ain’t been all right in ten years,” Francis said. “Whatcha doin’ down here, keepin’ an eye on me?”

  “You left.”

  “You figured that out.”

  “You left the house.”

  “You been watchin’. You both been watchin’.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Did ya have a good time?” Francis asked. “How’d I do?”

  Only now has it begun to snow

  Only now

  I remember backing away mumbling scream, I did scream as soon as, and I saw the cat with its front left leg bleeding and the naked doll with both its legs gone now and the dark-eyed child gone

  snow now

  now snow

  The solidification of my father’s reputation prior to this present hour, the summer of 1958, followed the exhibition of the six canvases and many sketches he made during the years 1936–1939, the ostensible subject of these works being the near suicide of Francis as witnessed by the artist, by the cruel waif from the carnival, and by myself.

  In the wake of the aborted suicide, Peter fell into an artistic silence that persisted for much of 1935. I judge it to have been induced by his guilt over not confronting Francis when he first saw him beside the tracks, but instead waiting for the train he thought would carry the man away—and thus would Peter have been done with a pesky brother.

  But again Francis confounded his sibling, stepped onto the track bed, then stepped off again, a game of perilous hopscotch if there ever was one. And what this did was derange Peter for more than a year, the greatest thing that had h
appened to him as an artist up to that time.

  Artists, of course, use their guilt, their madness, their sexual energy, and anything else that comes their way, to advance the creation of new art. Peter had fared modestly in his one-man show in that winter of 1934, realizing some dollars, plus an enhanced (but still marginal) reputation, and proving to the gallery owners that, although he was perhaps not Matisse, he was worth wall space. But Peter, given this green light, immediately stopped painting, and no one could get him to say why. It all looks crystalline now in retrospect, but it was probably mysterious even to him for a time. His artistic cycle, as I came to perceive it, was this: profound guilt and remorse, followed by delight with the remorse, for it created the mood for art; self-loathing that followed being delighted by remorse; boredom with self-loathing; rumination about self-destruction as an escape from self-loathing; resurgence of boredom when self-destruction is rejected; and resumption of art to be done with boredom, art again being the doorway into the emotional life, the only life that mattered to him as an artist.

  He began by objectifying, in segments, the scene as it had been, or as he had transformed it in his memory, revealing all that I saw, even to the cat, the legless doll, and especially the waif, which surprised me. She disappeared after I screamed at Francis, but Peter had already seen her in the weeds, and drew her peering out at the tracks like a vigilant demon, which is how I thought of her in subsequent years.

  In one canvas he drew the scene from the perspective of Francis, leaving out the tracks, but including the lumber mill, the switch box, even the Phelan house, which he placed on a hill several blocks to the east and transformed into a place of dark and solitudinous dilapidation. He used the light of dusk, which was when the whole event took place, but he also painted Francis in bright sunlight, a way I never saw him. He painted the carnival boxcars in the background of one work, its people minimally developed, but busy with violence, copulation, voyeurism, and domestic acts around an open fire, none of which I had observed.