by Jack Kerouac
Jacques begat Joseph, who was sick all his life, cried, gasped all the time; from asthma, sadness; a grocer built like a pickle barrel, 230 pounds, bilious sufferings made his face gray like doom, tragic as an undertaker’s curtains on a dark afternoon, the furious summing pathetic caricature of all the Duluozes in him was packed inpent unkeepable explosions of sorrow, mournful huge man, he had the soul of a harassed saint, he was a big, good man trying to endure life and so much of it enlivening his great gut, throbbing there, lamentationing, sometimes he couldn’t stand it and flew into enthusiasms and coughs that shook the ceiling, he and Leo his favorite brother began yelling contests of joy—“Do you remember the time you were—and I—Ah pauvre Leo, poor Leo, they’re all gone the days of boyhood—You were so pitiful with yr little leg, I wanted to help you—Argh, what’s the use.” They’d begin fighting about something and go home and not see each other for years, these tortured brothers. Under the black skies of mortal woe, there never was a more hung woeful face than Joseph Duluoz’s—
And Jacques begat Jean Duluoz, hardlegged, short, powerful, a lumberjack; he ate 12 12-inch pancakes with 144 waves of the fork at winter’s breakfast dawn, because of his appetite the worn out Duluoz mother Clementine, sister of Pomeray’s wife, had to rise before the rooster hallooed the snow, and whip the eggs, about a dozen, and batter real French Canadian crêpes—an uneatable amount, this was all in the old days—for this noncommittal woodcutter who only curled his lower lip as if to cry, when he said his commonplace good morning at the door. By noon he was back, rubbing his hands for more. Absolutely no love in the crafty strength of his eyes, and in his horny hand not too much sympathy.
Four baneful brothers, they never looked when they passed in the hall, in the sad dream; they yelled at each other in the yard, then Ah—they passed the ground to the grave swirling for dust, expressions of pain on their mouths. Several, magnificent sisters, could have lambified and made their lives gentle:—Caroline, who became a nun; Justine, schoolteacher who had learned a lot from her aunt of the same name; and Marie Louise, woman of warm understanding. As little girls they had to pout and play house and make way for the boys. All except Clara, who was mad as a lark in the lattice trapped, she threw knives with furioso sneers at her brothers and sisters, they ducked under the kitchen table. She had to be rolled in a rug, screaming. Insanity in the family, they put her away, she kept coming back. She brooded like a wild hawk over a family of crazy fools and yellers. Magnificent street fights, with Leo’s fists in the air in suspenders on lavender Sunday afternoon, offering his opponent to cross the line; shouters and cheerers from wooden swings, popcorn stands, barbershop quartets. Bam! Leo pops him one in the eye, gets a swipe of knuckles on the burning bleeding cheek. Tears, gasps, they rassle in the gutter. Leo wins, the fight is over, Lil Armand Duval goes home to cry bitter love’s dream in his mother’s dress. “Look, Lil Armand Duval,” says Leo to Ti Jean driving through Nashua on a red afternoon, years afterward, in the Sunday lost streets there’s the little man alone on long spindly shadows, “to think we fought with fists and hate—Armand! Armand! Dammit he went in that street he can’t hear me, he’s almost down the bottom of that street—”
The crazy family of Duluoz . . . the grimfaced look-up Duluozes. Rumors that an uncle So and So had removed his trousers in the presence of a lady on a Sunday morning, not far from church, in a quiet street about nine, or ten in Canada; later threw a flaming mattress down on his keepers, and pisspots in his long underwear down that Dark Corridor.
Stoutlegged brusque Father Jacques for his part was coming home sober by the dark railyards one night when a whore gave him a “sst” near the team, crooking a finger to herself. “Ah?” he yelled enraged. “Putain! Cochonne! Whore! Pig! Slut and bitch! Go home! Go home! God oughta burn your ass for approaching a man like that! Salope! Peau!” He strode with a plane in his hand, over every rail he jammed his shoe on with a side down step, hard chested and neck and ribs conjoined in one hammered mass, sore. “Crapitating around in the dirty holes of the night to piss with drunkards! Harlot! Argh!” and he raised his plane at her. Vein popping with Breton rage he often sat behind the stove muttering day and night. Suddenly he’d burst into tears about his own father, “Oh my poor father Henri; he worked so hard and never had a day off or anything to own in his life. Even if you beat the animal to death the skin’ll never be yours.—Poor old man I see his hands, his big sad face—aïee, aïee, les Duluoz will always be poor and lost in the darkness—Argh! ma mère, ma mère, ma pauvre mère—with her baptism of potatos, I see her in the cold wind with that Christ of a river all iced solid for 6 months—Her hat, she wore a special hat to go to mass Sunday mornings—the patheticness of that rag—ces rubans egarouillez lui tombais dans guêle, pauvre bon femme!—Her ribbons’d fall all haggardly in her mouth, poor old woman—I’d see her stop at a road shrine and pray with her face blue from the cold, there she was with her knees knocking before the little cabin—I saw her in a dream not two weeks ago sitting on the ground, the blanket’s over her head, she’s selling potatos—The golden bonnet’s rolling in the wind—the cold wind, she’s got a candle—she doesn’t look at me—My little dead sister’s sleeping with her head on the potato box—Jeannette Ange!—Ah me Christ of the Baptism they can take this finished-up goddam life and throw it right to the Devil!” he’d start shouting, getting up from his chair to rage on solid feet.
“Jacques! Jacques! The children!”
He’d grab the oil lamp and start swinging it around and around his head. “The children the children we’ll burn em your goddam children! Argh! Get out of my way! I defy God to burn this house down!”
Mother and children ran shrieking to hide in corners—“He’s going to blow up the house!” The old man roared, his rage was only forming.
“Strike! Strike this house down and strike me dead! Varge! Go ahead, damn you, strike! Frappe! Claque! Why the hell wait!” If he had a good thunderstorm during one of these moods, old Jacques Duluoz went out on the porch with his wild oil lamp and swung at the lightning with screams. “Hit the house! Hit me! Go ahead! Bang! Let loose! Goddam it, come on! Coigne! Un coup! Slam! Bang! Clack me one, go ahead I dare you! Boom! Boom!” The thunder answered in kind from its huge heaven; the old man raved, tiny and yelling in speechless macrocosmic cracking black world night.
“Jacques, have pity for the children,” the mother wailed from the kitchen corner. “Oh Dieu, I’m afraid—The Devil makes him mad—I cried to you God from my suffering—I was a young girl, I didn’t understand that I was going to have thirteen children and work and scrub with my hands all the hours of my life—A little sleep in the night of innocence—Oh pity! have pity! Jacques you frighten us!”
Some of the brothers came home and waited on the porch till the old man quieted down, till darkfaced and spent he turned his back on them, silent; the depthless paternal sea; and went back to his stove corner; where one Sunday morning, after many quiet curses, he suddenly merely sat still, raw hands on his lap folded in grim resignation, and was dead. By the time she was dead too, the weary mother, Clementine, thin in her sickly grave, her call for deliverance darkly and forever satisfied. World, the happy endings on this crashing screen.
Clara was put in a madhouse. Baby twins died; were buried in an almost anonymous dual grave, face up, unaccomplished, unexplained in the pit of night. From the depths of earth’s evil sorrow wailed the Duluozes.
At seven little Leo was run over by an ice wagon, Marie Louise cradled her little brother in her arms, he was to be crippled for life. But a white haired 70-year-old hobo passing thru town, learning of the accident, came to the Duluoz house and offered his assistance in exchange for a meal and a lunch for the road. As everyone watched he kneaded the boy’s leg and made a few pulls and left him able to walk, no longer a cripple. “What is your name?”
Tall and white-maned he flowed into eternity out of sight, across town and over the grass to the railroads, the hills; little Leo never forgot him.
“Is it a saint?”
“There’s an old savant for you—He came out of the mountains.”
“He healed Ti Leo—”
“Say what you want, me I’m going to say a little prayer—”
Gray heavens lowering all around, standing in shirtsleeves by the old wood house, the Canadians nodded dumb heads in unison of sad mystery.
“It’s worth going to the presbytère to change my holy water—”
“Bring the crucifix. You might as well bring the crucifix too. On est aussi bien.”
“Did you see him walk as straight as a savage?”
It was 1896, a carriage went by on the dirt street, suspendered brothers convened to talk with the passing baker, they rolled smokes and jawed in the bleakness, a woodpile stood high in the raw mist. The women, satisfied, taking one last look over immensity and pain, the iron racked skies wrung over with the legibility, that Yah of defeat, went back in their kitchens to the cookpots, where on the vast iron range with its Quebecois scrolls and rose-paintings, boiled the pork scraps for the festive New Year pie. They did the sign of the cross at the crucifix, then looked at Little Leo in his bed and nodded with their dark, greedy faces of faith. The older ones began to leave home. “Bon, it makes one less,” was said in the kitchen.
All is ephemeral, all is hurt. The wind in back of the barn at night sings poor adieus that a family almost misses hearing, and only in the narrow rear of heads. Even bare, rugged souls look blearily from their cellars of superstition and doggedness, which is their one, their only workshop, and weep for what is gone. A family starts, they’re all together, they fight—they don’t understand the morning, the truth, the pureness of the morning, the meaning of the frost in their bedroom windows, the big breakfasts of their communal winter—and after that—we don’t see them any more. In the case of the Duluozes, they snuck out one by one, over the doorstep and down to Time, a rueful ghost on each of their heels, and death on his. Leo looking eagerly, Ernest immaculate, John calculating his old advantages, Joe puffing for life, Marie Louise sad, Caroline prophetic, Justine the last to leave and lay the pans aside in honor of their mother; shamefaced clan, piteous, still talking about it, leaving the loony Clara and some remnant cousins and all their dusts of furyation to fall in a house that no longer had the ring of entirety in its beams, as happens to all houses.
“It’s one hell of a thing, Ti Jean, to come from a family like that; we agitate ourselves in life all to pieces to think of the things that are done gone. God doesn’t seem to love us; he seems to be mad about something. Ah Charley was alright for example, we didn’t like him but he was alright, I understand guys like Charley, they want their good times, they want to get excited. Shore.” He was talking about a business friend he’d worked for once. “Nothing we can do, Ti Jean, with avarice and the—We’ll find ourselves a little trip here, we’ll see if we can help the old bum with his kid, we never saw them, their relatives, we’ll chew the rag a little, maybe we’ll eat a little feed, and me and you’ll go to Times Square see some shows. The burlesques and the vaudeville shows and the new pictures and they say they got French pictures—it would be beautiful, ah, see a picture in French? It would make your eyes cry to see a little scene with the lovers on the bed. Marie Louise told me that, she saw one in Boston—Good. Put your little blanket round your knees there and sleep if you can—I’m going to drive straight to New York and I’m not talking any more.”
And the little boy slept in the black machine of eternity guided by his father across the night.
The old man saw all kinds of wings of black angels in the sides of his window; once, at four o’clock, he saw the moon come out from behind a cloud that was illuminated by it, giving it a big face of God of a woman lying on a big black bed with a face of a devil all around and through it.
“Damn, mautadit,” he said to himself low, “it’s making black faces in the sky, I’ve got to watch the road.” He was going fast at six o’clock in the gray morning, hands gripped cold on the wheel, hat slumped over for the eyes that looked joyously everywhere. “Ha ha!” he said, and coughed, “Look at that Walter Winchell guy with the flowers, a character like in a movie but look at his face all gray from his night work—a florist I guess?” And Ti Jean woke up, to the new day, the great voyage.
Leo and Ti Jean arrived at Eighteen Pott Street at seven o’clock in the morning eyes brilliant and buried in their sockets as if they didn’t see any more. Uncle Bull had won $280, lost the same, and re-won $80. When Leo came in, his great unmistakable shadow of coat and paper-in-pocket appearing in the door, Bull yelled “Damn I missed $200 just like that!” It filled him with joy that Leo had arrived—now they were going to straighten out. They’d have a little fun, some talk in the smoke. Things would develop; they’d talk now with anxious eyes about what to do. “Come on, boy!—you took your little trip to New York after all!”
The same Chinese were there; tired, the bottle on the floor was low. Old Dean Pomeray and little Dean were sleeping on the floor.
“You got the key to the place?” demanded Bull clapping Leo on the arm.
“Yes—but Omer didn’t tell me the address yet, of the place—That’s another problem the place. He was drunk when he left Revere Beach. He forgot to leave a note, anything—He sent a telegram to you the fisherman told me?”
“He was drunk.”
“I figured, hell I’ll take a little trip to New York anyway—I figured what was ahead of me or dead in a corner. Where is he Omer?”
“Omer? We have Rolfe with us—Rolfe has the address, he’s gone to take a walk, he wanted to see the city, he’ll come back to eat, we have a little food here. Ha?” Bull asked himself in his head. “Aw yes. It’s Omer who wrote him the address.”
“So Omer knew all these people when he was in Denver with you?” Leo asked—they talked like that in the middle of the floor, all the others watched, they were talking loud as if everybody had to listen with them.
“Oh yes. Well there, that’s them, sleeping, see em? They got in last night, they tried to sleep all night; we’ve had a little game. We won’t disturb them—bring your things in—Gonna continue the game and wait for Rolfe this morning.”
“But where’s Omer?”
“Don’t worry yourself—”
The little boy Ti Jean was already in, standing in a corner. He was watching everything. The Chinese men at the table made him think of his magazines he read, the cartoons in the newspapers, the cartoons he drew himself with his paper and pencil at home in his littered bedroom. He looked at the little boy sleeping with his father on the floor. His father Leo was already engaged in the poker game. It was too late to ask questions.
Old Bull Baloon, beneath the light, had a big round face, cracked teeth, a red nose, and eyes almost buried in the enormity of breakage around there—the face broken like a plate—the most crazy funny face you ever saw—His eyes gleamed—he had cheeks red from booze—But he was aging. He was around 65. In the corner was his old cane, it bowed its head beneath his hopeless coat, he didn’t use it often but his feet were starting to give out, he didn’t work often on the railroad, if at all, he had to fall from the caboose like a poor old tired woman at the end of the track, a poor old man in pain. He went down the main line with his white lamp and his red lamp, like a shadow with broken shoulders, talking to the brakeman when the brakeman wasn’t there; he no longer saw the disaster on the track, he looked for it in other places, always mistaken. He’d been brought before the board of three, four railroads; for putting an engine on the ground, shoving a boxcar off a spur burying the trucks in the mud of a swamp, forgetting cold that a hotshot passenger train was ten minutes late and meeting it in the plains and had to go backward into a siding to let him go a half hour late. He sat in front of his stove in the caboose, the bottle in a drawer, and waited out the rainy nights and the big black work of the glistening track. The fire pleased him when it was deep and November night red.
These days he was keeping
the money he had saved through the years, won through years playing cards, lost, re-won. Sometimes you saw his face fallen, hat on the bottom of his head, whistling a little tune. In his eyes little green interested slits danced. He spat in the spittoon. He hid his destruction.
The other boys, the Chinese, could see his face in the light and tell his story from that. He was a funny and frank Occidental. He said all kinds of impossible things looking at his hand.
“The corners of the king have upsidedown ass holes,” he’d say, studying his cards. “We’ll have to find him a piece of sonofabitch to enlarge his figure—poor dog, we’ll travel his fifty cents. Did I ever tell you that ghost story about the laughing nightgown?” But he showed his teeth and didn’t tell it.
“I have all the ghosts in hand,” he’d say.
“Crack on my head,” said another player.
“Fish em out a five, deck.”
“What? Old canvas grips soft out exploded with the handles ready to run. Burlack saps.” In Bull’s eye you could see two red skeletons against an eyeball.
The others acted bored, once in a while someone said something strange like “I had you, yes,” the Chinese addressing one another you’d think from afar with little voices very serious and alarmed. The sons of Ching Boy, named Ching Bok and Sammy Boy, were in Bronx Jail for the murder of a girl in a hotel room with a broken bottle, they and another Chinese boy; they were ironing their socks on ironingboards among steel bars when the sun went down red in May New York. Seven years gone, they wouldn’t tell who it was had killed the little woman, they were headed for life terms with their secret. The old man was very sad, “They were good boys, it was the other, Poy, who did the damage . . .”—so thought he sitting in his rice darkness. He’d had a store with them, frogs in tanks, doves; they’d made a lot of money; chickens, eels. The other boys playing cards were all sons of his friends and the friends themselves in the village. They looked out the windows of Chinatown in the days of blue air, the afternoons of the golden bars of thought beside the washtubs; Ching Boy was a respected and well known man.