William Kennedy - Ironweed

o o o

The talk that passed after what Francis said, and after the silence that followed it, was not important except as it moved the man and the woman closer together and physically apart, allowed her to make him a Swiss cheese sandwich and a pot of tea and begin dressing the turkey: salting, peppering, stuffing it with not quite stale enough bread but it’ll have to do, rubbing it with butter and sprinkling it with summer savory, mixing onions in with the dressing, and turkey seasoning too from a small tin box with a red and yellow turkey on it, fitting the bird into a dish for which it seemed to have been groomed and killed to order, so perfect was the fit.

And too, the vagrant chitchat allowed Francis to stare out at the yard and watch the dog and become aware that the yard was beginning to function as the site of a visitation, although nothing in it except his expectation when he looked out at the grass lent credence to that possibility.

He stared and he knew that he was in the throes of flight, not outward this time but upward. He felt feathers growing from his back, knew soon he would soar to regions unimaginable, knew too that what had brought him home was not explicable without a year of talking, but a scenario nevertheless took shape in his mind: a pair of kings on a pair of trolley cars moving toward a single track, and the trolleys, when they meet at the junction, do not wreck each other but fuse into a single car inside which the kings rise up against each other in imperial intrigue, neither in control, each driving the car, a careening thing, wild, anarchic, dangerous to all else, and then Billy leaps aboard and grabs the power handle and the kings instantly yield control to the wizard.

He give me a Camel cigarette when I was coughin’ my lungs up, Francis thought.

He knows what, a man needs, Billy does.

o o o

Annie was setting the dining-room table with a white linen tablecloth, with the silver Iron Joe gave them for their wedding, and with china Francis did not recognize, when Daniel Quinn arrived home. The boy tossed his schoolbag in a corner of the dining room, then stopped in midmotion when he saw Francis standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Hulooo,” Francis said to him.

“Danny, this is your grandfather,” Annie said. “He just came to see us and he’s staying for dinner.” Daniel stared at Francis’s face and slowly extended his right hand. Francis shook it.

“Pleased to meet you,” Daniel said.

“The feeling’s mutual, boy. You’re a big lad for ten.”

“I’ll be eleven in January.”

“You comin’ from school, are ye?”

“From instructions, religion.”

“Oh, religion. I guess I just seen you crossin’ the street and didn’t even know it. Learn anything, did you?”

“Learned about today. All Saints’ Day.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a holy day. You have to go to church. It’s the day we remember the martyrs who died for the faith and nobody knows their names.”

“Oh yeah,” Francis said. “I remember them fellas.”

“What happened to your teeth?”

“Daniel.”

“My teeth,” Francis said. “Me and them parted company, most of ‘em. I got a few left.”

“Are you Grampa Phelan or Grampa Quinn?”

“Phelan,” Annie said. “His name is Francis Aloysius Phelan.”

“Francis Aloysius, right,” said Francis with a chuckle. “Long time since I heard that.”

“You’re the ball player,” Danny said. “The big-leaguer. You played with the Washington Senators.”

“Used to. Don’t play anymore.”

“Billy says you taught him how to throw an inshoot.”

“He remembers that, does he?”

“Will you teach me?”

“You a pitcher, are ye?”

“Sometimes. I can throw a knuckle ball.”

“Change of pace. Hard to hit. You get a baseball, I’ll show you how to hold it for an inshoot.” And Daniel ran into the kitchen, then the pantry, and emerged with a ball and glove, which he handed to Francis. The glove was much too small for Francis’s hand but he put a few fingers inside it and held the ball in his right hand, studied its seams. Then he gripped it with his thumb and one and a half fingers.

“What happened to your finger?” Daniel asked.

“Me and it parted company too. Sort of an accident.”

“Does that make any difference throwing an inshoot?”

“Sure does, but not to me. I don’t throw no more at all. Never was a pitcher, you know, but talked with plenty of ‘em. Walter Johnson was my buddy. You know him? The Big Train?”

The boy shook his head.

“Don’t matter. But he taught me how it was done and I ain’t forgot. Put your first two fingers right on the seams, like this, and then you snap your wrist out, like this, and if you’re a righty-are you a righty?”-and the boy nodded- “then the ball’s gonna dance a little turnaround jig and head right inside at the batter’s belly button, assumin’, acourse, that he’s a righty too. You followin’ me?” And the boy nodded again. “Now the trick is, you got to throw the opposite of the outcurve, which is like this.” And he snapped his wrist clockwise. “You got to do it like this.” And he snapped his wrist counterclockwise again. Then he had the boy try it both ways and patted him on the back.

“That’s how it’s done,” he said. “You get so’s you can do it, the batter’s gonna think you got a little animal inside that ball, flyin’ it like an airplane.”

“Let’s go outside and try it,” Daniel said. “I’ll get another glove.”

“Glove,” said Francis, and he turned to Annie. “By some fluke you still got my old glove stuck away somewheres in the house? That possible, Annie?”

“There’s a whole trunk of your things in the attic,” she said. “It might be there.”

“It is,” Daniel said. “I know it is. I saw it. I’ll get it.”

“You will not,” Annie said. “That trunk is none of your affair.”

“But I’ve already seen it. There’s a pair of spikes too, and clothes and newspapers and old pictures.”

“All that,” Francis said to Annie. “You saved it.”

“You had no business in that trunk,” Annie said.

“Billy and I looked at the pictures and the clippings one day,” Daniel said. “Billy looked just as much as I did. He’s in lots of ‘em.” And he pointed at his grandfather.

“Maybe you’d want to have a look at what’s there,” Annie said to Francis.

“Could be. Might find me a new shoelace.”

Annie led him up the stairs, Daniel already far ahead of them. They heard the boy saying: “Get up, Billy, Grandpa’s here”; and when they reached the second floor Billy was standing in the doorway of his room, in his robe and white socks, disheveled and only half awake.

“Hey, Billy. How you gettin’ on?” Francis said.

“Hey,” said Billy. “You made it.”

“Yep.”

“I woulda bet against it happenin’.”

“You’da lost. Brought a turkey too, like I said.”

“A turkey, yeah?”

“We’re having it for dinner,” Annie said.

“I’m supposed to be downtown tonight,” Billy said. “I just told Martin I’d meet him.”

“Call him back,” Annie said. “He’ll understand.”

“Red Tom Fitzsimmons and Martin both called to tell me things are all right again on Broadway. You know, I told you I had trouble with the McCalls,” Billy said to his father.

“I ‘member.”

“I wouldn’t do all they wanted and they marked me lousy. Couldn’t gamble, couldn’t even get a drink on Broadway.”

“I read that story Martin wrote,” Francis said. “He called you a magician.”

“Martin’s full of malarkey. I didn’t do diddley. I just mentioned Newark to them and it turns out that’s where they trapped some of the kidnap gang.”