William Kennedy: Very Old Bones

“Broadway? Broadway’s not gone.”

“It ain’t gone,” Billy said, “but it ain’t got no life to it. You can’t get arrested on Broadway anymore. Town is tough as Clancy’s nuts. Even if you get a bet down you don’t know the payoff. No phone line with the information anymore. You gotta wait for tomorrow’s newspaper. I blame Kefauver.”

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Tell me about the house, George. Peg says you may buy this place after all these years.”

“Peg said that?”

“She said you might cash an insurance policy. Seven grand for this house sounds like the bargain of the century.”

“Not buyin’,” George said.

“It’s fifteen hundred down,” Billy said.

“Fifteen hundred down the bowl,” George said. “Who’s got money to buy houses when you’re seventy-one years old? I’m not waitin’ for my ship to come in. It’s not comin’ and I know it.”

“What’re you gonna do, move?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’ll find a place.”

“Probably not at this rent,” Billy said.

“Then we’ll pay what it takes,” George said.

“Why not put that into owning the house?” I said. “It’d make more sense.”

“I’m not buyin’ a house!” George yelled, standing up from the table. “Has everybody got that? No house. Period.”

“You ready to go, Orson?” Billy asked softly, reaching for his cane.

“I guess I’m ready. I haven’t had any coffee but I guess I’m ready.”

“Let him have his coffee,” Agnes said.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it for dinner,” George said to Agnes. “Depends on when the picnic ends.”

“Picnic? I thought it was a political meeting,” Agnes said.

“It’s a political picnic.”

“What’s not political in this town?” Billy said.

“Buyin’ a house,” George said.

Agnes collected Annie’s breakfast dishes and her untouched eggs and put them on the counter by the sink, gave Peg’s African violets by the windowsill of the nook their weekly watering, then sat across from me to finish her second cup of coffee. As she sat, Billy rose up on his cane.

“I gotta do a wee-wee before we leave,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Time to worry is when you can’t.”

“Stop that talk,” Agnes said.

I stared at her and decided she was a looker. Lucky Billy. Agnes had bottled blond hair, the color of which she changed whimsically, or maybe it was seasonally. She’d put on a few pounds since I’d last seen her, but she could handle them. She looked crisp and fresh in a red-and-white-check house dress with a box neck and two-inch straps over bare shoulders.

“I couldn’t butt in on that conversation about the house,” Agnes said, “but I’d be glad to give a hand with the down payment. I’ve got some dollars tucked away.”

“That’s real nice, Agnes,” I said. “Did you tell Peg?”

“Nobody yet. I’m just sayin’ it now ’cause it occurred to me. But if Billy hears he’ll think I’m proposin’.”

“Have you done that before?”

“Twenty times, how about. But he can’t see himself married. He’s been single too long.”

“Everybody’s single till they marry.”

“Billy’d be single even after he got married, if he ever got married, which I don’t think.”

“He loves you, though,” I said. “Anybody can see that.”

“Sure. But what’s he done for me lately?”

“Maybe you ought to go out together more often, be alone. I know you’re in a lot with the family, taking care of Annie.”

“We go to the movies once a week, and dinner after. But you’re right. We should. I also got another obligation, a patient. An old man I sit with one night a week. And another night I take piano.”

“How long you been taking?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“You must be good.”

“I’m terrible. Maybe I’ll be good some day, but I don’t practice enough.”

“It’s hard without a piano.”

“Yeah. But I get a thrill playing the teacher’s. I always do a half-hour alone, before and after the lesson. And once or twice a week I play in the church basement in the afternoons. It fills me up, excites me. You know how it is when you feel young and you know you still got a lot to learn, and it’s gonna be good?”

“You’re a graceful person, Agnes.”

“Yeah, well, George shouldn’t be afraid of lettin’ people do him a favor. That down payment’s not a whole lot of money, really. But I heard him tell Peg, ‘They don’t give loans to people like me.’ “

“What’s he mean, ‘people like me’?”

“He doesn’t know about credit,” Agnes said. “He’s got no credit anyplace. He paid cash all his life, even for cars. Doesn’t wanna owe anybody a nickel. He thinks credit’s bad news.”

“So’s not having a place to live.”

“He said he’d live in a ditch before he bought a house.”

“He’s batty.”

“Could be: Wouldn’t be a first in this family.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t mean that personally,” she said.

Billy expected to have his cast removed but that didn’t happen. After Doc McDonald read the X-rays he decided the cast should stay in place another three weeks at least, and so Billy had to carry his right shoe around in a paper bag the rest of the day. We were in my car, Danny Quinn’s old 1952 Chev that I’d bought from Peg. Billy mentioned an eye-opener at Sport Schindler’s, but it was only ten-fifteen, and that’s a little early for my eye.

“You been to the filtration plant since they started that dig?” I asked Billy.

“I ain’t been there in years. My grandfather used to run that joint.”

“I know, and Tommy was the sweeper. You see in the paper about the bones they found?”

“Yeah, you think they’re still there?”

“It’s worth a look.”

The old plant, which had changed the health of Albany in 1899, was being torn down. The chronic “Albany sore throat” of the nineteenth century had been attributed to inadequate filtering of Hudson River water. But after the North Albany plant opened, the sore throats faded. Still, river water was a periodic liability until the late 1920s, when the politicians dammed up two creeks in the Helderberg Mountains and solved all city water troubles forever. The filtration plant relaxed into a standby item, then a useless relic. Now it stood in the way of a superhighway’s course and so it was time to knock it down.

Construction workers had found bones in their dig, near the mouth of the Staatskill, the creek that ran eastward from Albany’s western plateau and had long ago been buried in a pipe under North Pearl Street and Broadway. When the dig reached the glacial ledge where the creek made its last leap into the Hudson River, half a dozen huge bones were found. Workers didn’t inform the public until they also found two tusks, after which a geologist and biologist were summoned. No conclusions had been reported in the morning paper but everybody in town was saying elephants.

I drove down the hill from the doctor’s office and into North Albany. When I reached Pearl Street Billy said, “Go down Main Street. I want to see what it looks like.”

Billy’s grandfather Joe Farrell (they called him Iron Joe because two men broke their knuckles on his jaw) had lived at the bottom of Main Street, and also had run a saloon, The Wheelbarrow, next to his home. The house was gone but the saloon building still stood, a sign on it noting the headquarters of a truckers’ union. Trucking companies had replaced the lumber yards as the commerce along Erie Boulevard, the filled-in bed of the old canal.

“I wouldn’t know the place,” Billy said. “I never get down here anymore.” He’d been born and raised on Main Street.