Frank McCourt - 'Tis

He changes a few applications every night to prove how stupid a bank can be. He says he knows what happens during the day when asshole loan people go through the applications. Harlem address? Negro? Points off. Puerto Rican? Mucho points off. He tells me there are dozens of Puerto Ricans around New York who think they were accepted for their good credit but it was Andy Peters all the time feeling sorry for them. He says it’s a big thing in PR neighborhoods to get out there on the weekend and polish the car. They might never go anywhere but it’s the polishing that matters, old guys on the stoop watching the polishing and drinking the old cerveza from bodegas in quart bottles, the radio blasting away with Tito Puente, the old guys checking out the girls shaking their asses along the sidewalks, man, that’s living, man, that’s living and what more do you want?

Andy talks about Puerto Ricans all the time. He says they’re the only people who know how to live in this goddam tight-ass city, that it’s a tragedy the Spaniards didn’t sail up the Hudson instead of the goddam Dutch and the goddam limeys. We’d have siestas, man, we’d have color. We wouldn’t have The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. If he had his way he’d give a loan to every Puerto Rican applying for a car loan so that all over the city you’d have them polishing their new cars, drinking their beer out of brown paper bags, digging Tito and flirting with the girls shaking their asses along the sidewalks, girls with those see-through peasant blouses and Jesus medallions nestling in their cleavage, and wouldn’t that be a city to live in?

The women in the office laugh at the way Andy talks but they tell him be quiet because they want to finish the work and get outa here. They have kids at home and husbands waiting.

When we finish early we go for a beer and he tells me why he’s a thirty-one-year-old student studying philosophy at New York University. He was in the war, not Korea, the big one in Europe, but he has to work nights in this goddam bank because of his dishonorable discharge in the spring of 1945, just before the war ended and isn’t that a bitch.

Taking a shit, that’s what he was, a nice quiet shit in a French ditch, all wiped and ready to button up when who comes along but a goddam lieutenant and a sergeant and the lieutenant has nothing else to do but march up to Andy and accuse him of an unnatural act with that sheep standing there a few feet away. Andy admits that in a way the lieutenant had a right to jump to the wrong conclusion since just before pulling up his pants Andy had a hard-on which made it difficult to pull up the aforesaid pants and even though he hated anything in the shape of an officer he felt an explanation would help.

Well, Lieutenant, I may have fucked that sheep or I may not have fucked that sheep but what’s interesting here is your peculiar concern with me and my relationship with that sheep. There’s a war on, Lieutenant. I come out here to take a shit in a French ditch and there’s a sheep at eye level and I’m nineteen years old and I haven’t been laid since my high school prom and a sheep, especially a French sheep, looks very tempting and if I looked like I was ready to jump on that sheep you’re right, Lieutenant, I was, but I didn’t. You and the sergeant interrupted a beautiful relationship. I thought the lieutenant would laugh, instead he said I was a goddam liar, that I had sheep written all over me. I wanted sheep all over me. I dreamed of it but it hadn’t happened and what he said was so unfair I pushed him, didn’t hit him, just pushed, and the next thing, Jesus, they had all kinds of artillery sticking in my face, pistols, carbines, M1 rifles, and before you know it there was a court-martial where I had a drunken captain defending me who told me in private that I was a disgusting sheep fucker and he was sorry he couldn’t be at the other end prosecuting me because his father was a Basque from Montana where they respected their sheep, and I still don’t know if I was sent to the stockade for six months for assaulting an officer or screwing a sheep. What I got out of it was a dishonorable discharge and when that happens you might as well study philosophy at NYU.

30

Because of Mr. Calitri I scribble memories of Limerick in notebooks. I make lists of streets, schoolmasters, priests, neighbors, friends, shops.

After “The Bed” essay I’m sure people in Mr. Calitri’s class are looking at me in a different way. The girls are probably telling each other they’d never go out with someone who spent his life in a bed a man might have died in. Then Mike Small tells me she heard about the essay and how it moved so many people in the class, boys and girls. I didn’t want her to know what I came from but now she wants to read the essay and afterward her eyes fill up and she says, Oh, I never knew. Oh, it must have been awful. It reminds her of Dickens though I don’t know how that can be because everything in Dickens always ends well.

Of course I won’t say this to Mike Small for fear she might think I’m arguing with her. She might turn on her heel and march back to Bob the football player.

Now Mr. Calitri wants us to write a family essay where there’s adversity, a dark moment, a setback, and even though I don’t want to go into the past there’s something that happened to my mother that demands to be written.

THE PLOT

When the war started and food was rationed in Ireland the government offered poor families plots of land in fields outside Limerick. Each family could have a sixteenth of an acre, clear it and grow whatever vegetables they liked.

My father applied for a plot out the road in Rosbrien and the government lent him a spade and a fork for the work. He took my brother Malachy and me to help him. When my brother Michael saw the spade he cried and wanted to go too but he was only four and he would have been in the way. My father told him, Whisht, that when we came back from Rosbrien we’d bring him berries.

I asked my father if I could carry the spade and I was soon sorry because Rosbrien was miles outside Limerick. Malachy had started out carrying the fork but my father took it away from him because of the way he was swinging it and nearly knocking people’s eyes out. Malachy cried till my father said he’d let him carry the spade all the way home. My brother soon forgot the fork when he saw a dog who was willing to chase a stick for miles till he frothed white stuff with the weariness and lay down on the road looking up with the stick between his paws and we had to leave him.

When my father saw the plot he shook his head. Rocks, he said, rocks and stones. And all we did that day was to make a pile by the low wall along the road. My father used the spade to keep digging up rocks and even though I was only nine I noticed two men in the next plots talking and looking at him and laughing in a quiet way. I asked my father why and he gave a small laugh himself and said, The Limerickman gets the dark earth and the man from the North gets the rocky plot.

We worked till the darkness came and we were so weak with hunger we couldn’t pick up another rock. We didn’t mind one bit if he carried the fork and spade and wished he could carry us, too. He said we were big boys, good workers, our mother would be proud of us, there would be tea and fried bread, and he marched ahead with his long strides till halfway home he stopped suddenly. Your brother Michael, he said. We promised him berries. We’ll have to go back out the road to the bushes.

Malachy and I complained so much that we were tired and could hardly walk another step that my father told us go home, he’d get the berries himself. I asked why couldn’t he get the berries tomorrow and he said he had promised Michael berries for tonight, not tomorrow, and away he went with the spade and fork on his shoulder.