Alice McDermott - After This

At one point during that cold day John Keane had said to the kid, the other Jacob, “We’re a regular Gallagher and Shean,” and the kid had surprised him by knowing more choruses than even his brother Frank did, humming them softly under his breath, carrying the tune.

Oh, Mr. Gallagher, oh Mr. Gallagher, if you’re a friend of mine you’ll loan me a couple of bucks. I’m so broke, I’m nearly bent and I haven’t got a cent. I’m so clean you’d think that I’d been washed in Lux.

Oh, Mr. Shean, oh Mr. Shean (how did it go? Frank would know), to tell the truth I haven’t got a bean. Cost of living’s gone so high, why it’s cheaper now to die.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

Positively, Mr. Shean.

He’d said to the kid (he’d shaken him off late that afternoon, in a frozen rain, and only learned he’d been hit after nightfall, when they were pressed into foxholes, the taste of dirt and smoke like blood in their mouths), What can I do for you? Not out loud, but in his mind, like a prayer. Plenty of others had been killed, but this one had sprung up out of the dirt floor, fresh faced and too young. He’d spent less than twenty-four hours at his war. This other Jacob. What can I do for you, John Keane had said in that foxhole in the Ardennes, in the winter of ’44 or ’45, the worst yet to come-more death and the bitter snow, shrapnel, three toes of his own lost to the cold. What can I do for you? He’d said it like a prayer, it was a prayer, believing the kid heard him because (he told his children) all of us are immortal or no one is. You prayed to the dead or you let them go silent. What can I do for you? he had said, in his mind, like a prayer, and later their mother, in her hospital bed, their firstborn in her arms, grimaced and said, “That’s a Jewish name.”

Michael grinned, turning to his brother whose mouth hung open, dark as his eyes behind his raised knees.

But their father had told her, “It’s just something I’d like to do.”

In the small circle of flashlight, with the sound of the storm already seeming to fade-as if the tree’s fall (or perhaps her husband’s story) had abated something-Mary Keane pressed her two sons against her sides. It was pleasant, to be in the basement like this, with her family, in the middle of the night. She looked across Jacob’s dark hair to her husband, who still had Annie’s thin arms wrapped around his neck. She doubted, thinking back, that she had said, straight off, That’s a Jewish name-or perhaps she did not doubt it as much as regret it, since it had become, in the intervening years, Jacob’s name alone, the name of her own boy, the Jacob from the war having become, in the intervening years, poor kid, mostly forgotten.

Much as she had forgotten, already, what it was that had brought him to mind tonight, that other Jacob. Was it the storm itself? The banging at the door? The young fireman, appearing like a guardian angel to warn them that the lights were out and trees were falling all over the neighborhood?

She wondered briefly if her husband should have told the children this particular war story at all. Michael would surely use it against his brother. There was always the possibility of bad dreams.

If he had wanted to tell the children the story he might simply have said that he and the boy had sung vaudeville tunes together, in the middle of a war. Gallagher and Shean. Mutt and Jeff. Catholic and Jew. Fresh-faced replacement and aging veteran, tramping through the cold, singing. He could have left it at that. He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one.

With her arms around her sons and the new baby curled against her rib cage, her husband and her daughter a mere arm’s length away, and the storm turning from them even as the sun was surely approaching, Mary Keane considered the wisdom of leaving certain, difficult things unsaid. She considered the wisdom of the Blessed Mother who, as the Christmas gospel told it, pondered everything in her heart.

Gently, she collected the children’s cups. With her silence alone she held off, for a moment longer, the suggestion that the worst was over, the tree had fallen, the storm was passing, and time, as she was given to saying, was marching on: school tomorrow, work for their father, laundry, shopping, meals. For just a moment more, she let them linger.

The tiny spiders that lived in the higher branches of the downed tree (which now meant the branches that lay on the other side of the crushed fence that separated front yard from back) were bright red. At the end of the day, even the careful children had the marks of them, bloody starbursts on their palms. And the smell of the green wood, the tender leaves and pliant branches, on their skin and in their clothes. Mr. Persichetti, standing at the top of the three steps, the borrowed truck with the new chain saw just behind him, saw Tony, his own son, moving among the fallen branches as if through a jungle. Tony wore a plastic combat helmet and carried a toy pistol. He was thirteen, three years older than the oldest Keane boy, and Mr. Persichetti wondered if he wasn’t too old for such playacting. He resolved, even before Mrs. Keane had agreed to let him do the job, that he’d get the boy to help out tomorrow afternoon, hauling the thin branches and the smaller slices of tree trunk. He was asking twenty dollars-not an exorbitant amount. Some of the women in the neighborhood merely spoke to him from behind their storm doors, but Mrs. Keane opened hers and invited him in. He stood in the small vestibule. She wore a maternity dress with a bow at the neckline and bedroom slippers. She seemed pale and somewhat puffy, not what you’d call a good-looking woman from the start, but she had a direct and friendly manner that encouraged him to say he had been inspired by the storm to make better use of his free days. He’d been on construction crews in the army. South Pacific. He knew how to handle a chain saw and clear away trees. He’d always thought that if he was ever going to get any kind of sideline going, he wanted it to be something that got him out in the fresh air. Listening to the wind on the night of the hurricane, he’d heard the crack and snap of a falling tree and it had brought the whole thing back to him, the fields he’d cleared, the forests hauled away. One thing led to another, he said. A new chain saw, a buddy with a truck. A place in Commack where he could dump the wood. The vestibule was identical to the one in his own house, although his wife was dark-eyed and thin-faced, younger than Mrs. Keane but well finished with childbearing. Twenty dollars wasn’t a lot to ask but she, like the other women who were not so friendly, said she would have to check with her husband first.

She followed him out to the front step. It was a beautiful day, the kind that always followed such a storm. The September sky a perfect blue and the odor of dried rain still in the air. The green odor of the fallen tree as well. Mrs. Keane and Mr. Persichetti both looked toward it. The grass had been torn by the exposed roots, but the tree itself seemed beautiful in repose. They could see through the branches the children who played there, some brightly colored, others mere shadows amid the leaves. Her boys and the Persichetti boy and a dozen neighborhood children among them.

“It will be a shame to take it away,” Mrs. Keane said, as if she’d already agreed to let him do the job. “We’re the most popular place in the neighborhood.” She put her hand under her belly, the way pregnant women do, holding up the weight. Mr. Persichetti watched his son slide along the downed trunk of the tree, his silver cowboy pistol drawn. There were strings of willow leaves, still strung on their wiry branches, wrapped around his helmet.