William Kennedy - Ironweed

By god that was great, Francis says. You’re better’n anybody.

Helen, says Oscar, that was first-rate. You want a singing job here, you come round tomorrow and I’ll see the boss puts you on the payroll. That’s a grand voice you’ve got there, lady. A grand voice.

Oh thank you all, says Helen, thank you all so very kindly. It is so pleasant to be appreciated for your Godgiven talent and for your excellent training and for your natural presence. Oh I do thank you, and I shall come again to sing for you, you may be sure.

Helen closed her eyes and felt tears beginning to force their way out and could not say whether she was blissfully happy or devastatingly sad. Some odd-looking people were applauding politely, but others were staring at her with sullen faces. If they’re sullen, then obviously they didn’t think much of your renditions, Helen. Helen steps delicately back down the three steps, comes over to Francis, and keeps her head erect as he leans over and pecks her cheek.

“Mighty nice, old gal,” he says.

“Not bad at all,” Oscar says. “You’ll have to do it again sometime.”

Helen closed her eyes and felt tears forcing their way out and knew life didn’t change. If she went away she’d come back on her knees. It is so pleasant to be appreciated.

Helen, you are like a blackbird, when the sun comes out for a little while. Helen, you are like a blackbird made sassy by the sun. But what will happen to you when the sun goes down again?

I do thank you.

And I shall come again to sing for you.

Oh sassy blackbird! Oh!

Rudy left them to flop someplace, half-drunk on six beers, and Francis, Helen, and Pee Wee walked back along Green Street to Madison and then west toward the mission. Walk Pee Wee home and go get a room at Palombo’s Hotel, get warm, stretch out, rest them bones. Because Francis and Helen had money: five dollars and seventyfive cents. Two of it Helen had left from what Francis gave her last night; plus three-seventy-five out of his cemetery wages, for he spent little in The Gilded Cage, Oscar buying twice as many drinks as he took money for.

The city had grown quiet at midnight and the moon was as white as early snow. A few cars moved slowly on Pearl Street but otherwise the streets were silent. Francis turned up his suitcoat collar and shoved his hands into his pants pockets. Alongside the mission the moon illuminated Sandra, who sat where they had left her. They stopped to look at her condition. Francis squatted and shook her.

“You sobered up yet, lady?”

Sandra answered him with an enveloping silence. Francis pushed the cowl off her face and in the vivid moonlight saw the toothmarks on her nose and cheek and chin. He shook his head to clear the vision, then saw that one of her fingers and the flesh between forefinger and thumb on her left hand had been chewed.

“The dogs got her.”

He looked across the street and saw a red-eyed mongrel waiting in the half-lit corner of an alley and he charged after it, picking up a stone as he went. The cur fled down the alley as Francis turned his ankle on a raised sidewalk brick and sprawled on the pavement. He picked himself up, he now bloodied too by the cur, and sucked the dirt out of the cuts.

As he crossed the street, goblins came up from Broadway, ragged and masked, and danced around Helen. Pee Wee, bending over Sandra, straightened up as the goblin dance gained in ferocity.

“Jam and jelly, big fat belly,” the goblins yelled at Helen. And when she drew herself inward they only intensified the chant.

“Hey you kids,” Francis yelled. “Let her alone.”

But they danced on and a skull goblin poked Helen in the stomach with a stick. As she swung at the skull with her hand, another goblin grabbed her purse and then all scattered.

“Little bastards, devils,” Helen cried, running after them. And Francis and Pee Wee too joined the chase, pounding through the night, no longer sure which one wore the skull mask. The goblins ran down alleys, around corners, and fled beyond capture.

Francis turned back to Helen, who was far behind him. She was weeping, gasping, doubled over in a spasm of loss.

“Sonsabitches,” Francis said.

“Oh the money,” Helen said, “the money.”

“They hurt you with that stick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That money ain’t nothin’. Get more tomorrow.”

“It was.”

“Was what?”

“There was fifteen dollars in there besides the other.”

“Fifteen? Where’d you get fifteen dollars?”

“Your son Billy gave it to me. The night he found us at Spanish George’s. You were passed out and he gave us forty-five dollars, all the cash he had. I gave you thirty and kept the fifteen.”

“I went through that pocketbook. I didn’t see it.”

“I pinned it inside the lining so you wouldn’t drink it up. I wanted our suitcase back. I wanted our room for a week so I could rest.”

“Goddamn it, woman, now we ain’t got a penny. You and your sneaky goddamn ways.”

Pee Wee came back from the chase empty-handed.

“Some tough kids around here,” he said. “You okay, Helen?”

“Fine, just fine.”

“You’re not hurt?”

“Not anyplace you could see.”

“Sandra,” Pee Wee said. “She’s dead.”

“She’s more than that,” Francis said. “She’s partly chewed away.”

“We’ll take her inside so they don’t eat no more of her,” Pee Wee said. “I’ll call the police.”

“You think it’s all right to bring her inside?” Francis asked. “She’s still got all that poison in her system.”

Pee Wee said nothing and opened the mission door. Francis picked Sandra up from the dust and carried her inside. He put her down on an old church bench against the wall and covered her face with the scratchy blanket that had become her final gift from the world.

“If I had my rosary I’d say it for her,” Helen said, sitting on a chair beside the bench and looking at Sandra’s corpse. “But it was in my purse. I’ve carried that rosary for twenty years.”

“I’ll check the vacant lots and the garbage cans in the mornin’,” Francis said. “It’ll turn up.”

“I’ll bet Sandra prayed to die,” Helen said.

“Hey,” said Francis.

“I would if I was her. Her life wasn’t human anymore.”

Helen looked at the clock: twelve-ten. Pee Wee was calling the police.

“Today’s a holy day of obligation,” she said. “It’s All Saints’ Day.”

“Yup,” said Francis.

“I want to go to church in the morning.”

“All right, go to church.”

“I will. I want to hear mass.”

“Hear it. That’s tomorrow. What are we gonna do tonight? Where the hell am I gonna put you?”

“You could stay here,” Pee Wee said. “All the beds are full but you can sleep down here on a bench.”

“No,” Helen said. “I’d rather not do that. We can go up to Jack’s. He told me I could come back if I wanted.”

“Jack said that?” Francis asked.

“Those were his words.”

“Then let’s shag ass. Jack’s all right. Clara’s a crazy bitch but I like Jack. Always did. You sure he said that?”

“‘Come back anytime,’ he said as I was going out the door.”

“All right. Then we’ll move along, old buddy,” Francis said to Pee Wee. “You’ll figure it out with Sandra?”

“I’ll do the rest,” Pee Wee said.

“You know her last name?”

“No. Never heard it.”

“Don’t make much difference now.”

“Never did,” Pee Wee said.

o o o

Francis and Helen walked up Pearl Street toward State, the absolute center of the city’s life for two centuries. One trolley car climbed State Street’s violent incline and another came toward them, rocking south on Pearl. A man stepped out of the Waldorf Restaurant and covered his throat with his coat collar, shivered once, and walked on. The cold had numbed Francis’s fingertips, frost was blooming on the roofs of parked cars, and the nightwalkers exhaled dancing plumes of vapor. From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.