William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

“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.