Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

  “You get in the back.”

  “No. No room in there for the likes of me. Legs’re too long.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’ll find me some of them tall weeds, get outa the wind.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “Sure, I’ll be back. You get a good sleep and I’ll see you here or up at the mission in the ayem.”

  “I don’t want to stay here.”

  “You got to, babe. It’s what there is.”

  Francis opened the passenger door and shook Finny.

  “Hey bum. Move over. You got a visitor.”

  Finny opened his eyes, heavy with wine. Little Red was snoring.

  “Who the hell are you?” Finny said.

  “It’s Francis. Move over and let Helen in.”

  “Francis.” Finny raised his head.

  “I’ll get you a jug tomorrow for this, old buddy,” Francis said. “She’s gotta get in outa this weather.”

  “Yeah,” said Finny.

  “Never mind yeah, just move your ass over and let her sit. She can’t sleep behind that wheel, condition her stomach’s in.”

  “Unnngghh,” said Finny, and he slid behind the wheel.

  Helen sat on the front seat, dangling her legs out of the car. Francis stroked her cheek with three fingertips and then let his hand fall. She lifted her legs inside.

  “You don’t have to be scared,” Francis said.

  “I’m not scared,” Helen said. “Not that.”

  “Finny won’t let nothin’ happen to you. I’ll kill the son of a bitch if he does.”

  “She knows,” Finny said. “She’s been here before.”

  “Sure,” said Francis. “Nothing can happen to you.”

  “No.”

  “See you in the mornin’.”

  “Sure.”

  “Keep the faith,” Francis said.

  And he closed the car door.

  o o o

  He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny. He had slept in the weeds of a South End vacant lot too many times. He would do it no more. Because he needed to confront the ragman in the morning, he would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference?

  He walked north on Broadway, past Steamboat Square, where as a child he’d boarded the riverboats for outings to Troy, or Kingston, or picnics on Lagoon Island. He passed the D & H building and Billy Barnes’s Albany Evening Journal, a building his simpleminded brother Tommy had helped build in 1913. He walked up to Maiden Lane and Broadway, where Keeler’s Hotel used to be, and where his brother Peter sometimes spent the night when he was on the outs with Mama. But Keeler’s burned the year after Francis ran away and now it was a bunch of stores. Francis had rowed down Broadway to the hotel, Billy in the rowboat with him, in 1913 when the river rose away the hell and gone up and flooded half of downtown. The kid loved it. Said he liked it better’n sleigh ridin’. Gone. What the hell ain’t gone? Well, me. Yeah, me. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of me left, but I ain’t gone entirely. Be goddiddley-damned if I’m gonna roll over and die.

  Francis walked half an hour due north from downtown, right into North Albany. At Main Street he turned east toward the river, down Main Street’s little incline past the McGraw house, then past the Greenes’, the only coloreds in all North Albany in the old days, past the Daugherty house, where Martin still lived, no lights on, and past the old Wheelbarrow, Iron Joe Farrell’s old saloon, all boarded up now, where Francis learned how to drink, where he watched cockfights in the back room, and where he first spoke to Annie Farrell.

  He walked toward the flats, where the canal used to be, long gone and the ditch filled in. The lock was gone and the lockhouse too, and the towpath all grown over. Yet incredibly, as he neared North Street, he saw a structure he recognized. Son of a bitch. Welt the Tin’s barn, still standing. Who’d believe it? Could Welt the Tin be livin’? Not likely. Too dumb to live so long. Was it in use? Still a barn? Looks like a barn. But who keeps horses now?

  The barn was a shell, with a vast hole in the far end of the roof where moonlight poured cold fire onto the ancient splintered floor. Bats flew in balletic arcs around the streetlamp outside, the last lamp on North Street; and the ghosts of mules and horses snorted and stomped for Francis. He scuffed at the floorboards himself and found them solid. He touched them and found them dry. One barn door canted on one hinge, and Francis calculated that if he could move the door a few feet to sleep in its lee, he would be protected from the wind on three sides. No moonlight leaked through the roof above this corner, the same corner where Welt the Tin had hung his rakes and pitchforks, all in a row between spaced nails.

  Francis would reclaim this corner, restore all rakes and pitchforks, return for the night the face of Welt the Tin as it had been, reinvest himself with serendipitous memories of a lost age. On a far shelf in the moonlight he saw a pile of papers and a cardboard box. He spread the papers in his chosen corner, ripped the box at its seams, and lay down on the flattened pile.

  He had lived not seventy-five feet from where he now lay.

  Seventy-five feet from this spot, Gerald Phelan died on the 26th of April, 1916.

  In Finny’s car Helen would probably be pulling off Finny, or taking him in her mouth. Finny would be unequal to intercourse, and Helen would be too fat for a toss in the front seat. Helen would be equal to any such task. He knew, though she had never told him, that she once had to fuck two strangers to be able to sleep in peace. Francis accepted this cuckoldry as readily as he accepted the onus of pulling the blanket off Clara and penetrating whatever dimensions of reek necessary to gain access to a bed. Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?

  Maybe I won’t survive tonight after all, Francis thought as he folded his hands between his thighs. He drew his knees up toward his chest, not quite so high as Foxy Phil Tooker’s, and considered the death he had caused in this life, and was perhaps causing still. Helen is dying and Francis is perhaps the principal agent of hastening her death, even as his whole being tonight has been directed to keeping her from freezing in the dust like Sandra. I don’t want to die before you do, Helen, is what Francis thought. You’ll be like a little kid in the world without me.

  He thought of his father flying through the air and knew the old man was in heaven. The good leave us behind to think about the deeds they did. His mother would be in purgatory, probably for goddamn ever. She wasn’t evil enough for hell, shrew of shrews that she was, denier of life. But he couldn’t see her ever getting a foot into heaven either, if they ever got such a place.

  The new and frigid air of November lay on Francis like a blanket of glass. Its weight rendered him motionless and brought peace to his body, and the stillness brought a cessation of anguish to his brain. In a dream he was only just beginning to enter, horns and mountains rose up out of the earth, the horns—ethereal, trumpets—sounding with a virtuosity equal to the perilousness of the crags and cornices of the mountainous pathways. Francis recognized the song the trumpets played and he floated with its melody. Then, yielding not without trepidation to its coded urgency, he ascended bodily into the exalted reaches of the world where the song had been composed so long ago. And he slept.

  IV

  Francis stood in the junkyard driveway, looking for old Rosskam. Gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks blew swiftly past the early-morning sun, the world shimmered in a sudden blast of incandescence, and Francis blinked. His eyes roved over a cemetery of dead things: rusted-out gas stoves, broken wood stoves, dead iceboxes, and bicycles with twisted wheels. A mountain of worn
-out rubber tires cast its shadow on a vast plain of rusty pipes, children’s wagons, toasters, automobile fenders. A three-sided shed half a block long sheltered a mountain range of cardboard, paper, and rags.

  Francis stepped into this castoff world and walked toward a wooden shack, small and tilted, with a swayback horse hitched to a four-wheeled wooden wagon in front of it. Beyond the wagon a small mountain of wagon wheels rose alongside a sprawling scatter of pans, cans, irons, pots, and kettles, and a sea of metal fragments that no longer had names.

  Francis saw probably Rosskam, framed in the shack’s only window, watching him approach. Francis pushed open the door and confronted the man, who was short, filthy, and sixtyish, a figure of visible sinew, moon-faced, bald, and broad-chested, with fingers like the roots of an oak tree.

  “Howdy,” Francis said.

  “Yeah,” said Rosskam.

  “Preacher said you was lookin’ for a strong back.”

  “It could be. You got one, maybe?”

  “Stronger than some.”

  “You can pick up an anvil?”

  “You collectin’ anvils, are you?”

  “Collect everything.”

  “Show me the anvil.”

  “Ain’t got one.”

  “Then I’d play hell pickin’ it up.”

  “How about the barrel. You can pick that up?”

  He pointed to an oil drum, half full of wood scraps and junk metal. Francis wrapped his arms around it and lifted it, with difficulty.

  “Where’d you like it put?”

  “Right where you got it off.”

  “You pick up stuff like this yourself?” Francis asked.

  Rosskam stood and lifted the drum without noticeable strain, then held it aloft.

  “You got to be in mighty fair shape, heftin’ that,” said Francis. “That’s one heavy item.”

  “You call this heavy?” Rosskam said, and he heaved the drum upward and set its bottom edge on his right shoulder. Then he let it slide to chest level, hugged it, and set it down.

  “I do a lifetime of lifting,” he said.

  “I see that clear. You own this whole shebang here?”

  “All. You still want to work?”

  “What are you payin’?”

  “Seven dollar. And work till dark.”

  “Seven. That ain’t much for back work.”

  “Some might even bite at it.”

  “It’s worth eight or nine.”

  “You got better, take it. People feed families all week on seven dollar.”

  “Seven-fifty.”

  “Seven.”

  “All right, what the hell’s the difference?”

  “Get up the wagon.”

  Two minutes in the moving wagon told Francis his tailbone would be grieving by day’s end, if it lasted that long. The wagon bounced over the granite blocks and the trolley tracks, and the men rode side by side in silence through the bright streets of morning. Francis was glad for the sunshine, and felt rich seeing the people of his old city rising for work, opening stores and markets, moving out into a day of substance and profit. Clearheadedness always brought optimism to Francis; a long ride on a freight when there was nothing to drink made way for new visions of survival, and sometimes he even went out and looked for work. But even as he felt rich, he felt dead. He had not found Helen and he had to find her. Helen was lost again. The woman makes a goddamn career out of being lost. Probably went to mass someplace. But why didn’t she come back to the mission for coffee, and for Francis? Why the hell should Helen always make Francis feel dead?

  Then he remembered the story about Billy in the paper and he brightened. Pee Wee read it first and gave it to him. It was a story about Francis’s son Billy, written by Martin Daugherty, the newspaperman, who long ago lived next door to the Phelans on Colonie Street. It was the story of Billy getting mixed up in the kidnapping of the nephew of Patsy McCall, the boss of Albany’s political machine. They got the nephew back safely, but Billy was in the middle because he wouldn’t inform on a suspected kidnapper. And there was Martin’s column defending Billy, calling Patsy McCall a very smelly bag of very small potatoes for being rotten to Billy.

  “So how do you like it?” Rosskam said.

  “Like what?” said Francis.

  “Sex business,” Rosskam said. “Women stuff.”

  “I don’t think much about it anymore.”

  “You bums, you do a lot of dirty stuff up the heinie, am I right?”

  “Some like it that way. Not me.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “I don’t even like it anymore, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m over the hill.”

  “A man like you? How old? Fifty-five? Sixty-two?”

  “Fifty-eight,” said Francis.

  “Seventy-one here,” said Rosskam. “I go over no hills. Four, five times a night I get it in with the old woman. And in the daylight, you never know.”

  “What’s the daylight?”

  “Women. They ask for it. You go house to house, you get offers. This is not a new thing in the world.”

  “I never went house to house,” Francis said.

  “Half my life I go house to house,” said Rosskam, “and I know how it is. You get offers.”

  “You probably get a lot of clap, too.”

  “Twice all my life. You use the medicine, it goes away. Those ladies, they don’t do it so often to get disease. Hungry is what they got, not clap.”

  “They bring you up to bed in your old clothes?”

  “In the cellar. They love it down the cellar. On the woodpile. In the coal. On top the newspapers. They follow me down the stairs and bend over the papers to show me their bubbies, or they up their skirts on the stairs ahead of me, showing other things. Best I ever got lately was on top of four ash cans. Very noisy, but some woman. The things she said you wouldn’t repeat. Hot, hotsy, oh my. This morning we pay her a visit, up on Arbor Hill. You wait in the wagon. It don’t take long, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I mind? It’s your wagon, you’re the boss.”

  “That’s right. I am the boss.”

  They rode up to Northern Boulevard and started down Third Street, all downhill so as not to kill the horse. House by house they went, carting out old clocks and smashed radios, papers always, two boxes of broken-backed books on gardening, a banjo with a broken neck, cans, old hats, rags.

  “Here,” old Rosskam said when they reached the hot lady’s house. “If you like, watch by the cellar window. She likes lookers and I don’t mind it.”

  Francis shook his head and sat alone on the wagon, staring down Third Street. He could have reconstructed this street from memory. Childhood, young manhood were passed on the streets of Arbor Hill, girls discovering they had urges, boys capitalizing on this discovery. In the alleyways the gang watched women undress, and one night they watched the naked foreplay of Mr. and Mrs. Ryan until they put out the light. Joey Kilmartin whacked off during that show. The old memory aroused Francis sexually. Did he want a woman? No. Helen? No, no. He wanted to watch the Ryans again, getting ready to go at it. He climbed down from the wagon and walked into the alley of the house where Rosskam’s hot lady lived. He walked softly, listening, and he heard groaning, inaudible words, and the sound of metal fatigue. He crouched down and peered in the cellar window at the back of the house, and there they were on the ash cans, Rosskam’s pants hanging from his shoes, on top of a lady with her dress up to her neck. When Francis brought the scene into focus, he could hear their words.

  “Oh boyoboy,” Rosskam was saying, “oh boyoboy.”

  “Hey I love it,” said the hot lady. “Do I love it? Do I love it?”

  “You love it,” said Rosskam. “Oh boyoboy.”

  “Gimme that stick,” said the hot lady. “Gimme it, gimme it, gimme, gimme, gimme that stick.”

  “Oh take it,” said Rosskam. “Oh take it.”

  “Oh gimme it,” said the hot lady. “I’m a hot slut. Gimme it.”


  “Oh boyoboy,” said Rosskam.

  The hot lady saw Francis at the window and waved to him. Francis stood up and went back to the wagon, conjuring memories against his will. Bums screwing in boxcars, women gang-banged in the weeds, a girl of eight raped, and then the rapist kicked half to death by other bums and rolled out of the moving train. He saw the army of women he had known: women upside down, women naked, women with their skirts up, their legs open, their mouths open, women in heat, women sweating and grunting under and over him, women professing love, desire, joy, pain, need. Helen.

  He met Helen at a New York bar, and when they found out they were both from Albany, love took a turn toward the sun. He kissed her and she tongued him. He stroked her body, which was old even then, but vital and full and without the tumor, and they confessed a fiery yearning for each other. Francis hesitated to carry it through, for he had been off women eight months, having finally and with much discomfort rid himself of the crabs and a relentless, pusy drip. Yet the presence of Helen’s flaming body kept driving away his dread of disease, and finally, when he saw they were going to be together for much more than a one-fighter, he told her: I wouldn’t touch ya, babe. Not till I got me a checkup. She told him to wear a sheath but he said he hated them goddamn things. Get us a blood test, that’s what we’ll do, he told her, and they pooled their money and went to the hospital and both got a clean bill and then took a room and made love till they wore out. Love, you are my member rubbed raw. Love, you are an unstoppable fire. You burn me, love. I am singed, blackened. Love, I am ashes.

  o o o

  The wagon rolled on and Francis realized it was heading for Colonie Street, where he was born and raised, where his brothers and sisters still lived. The wagon wheels squeaked as they moved and the junk in the back rattled and bounced, announcing the prodigal’s return. Francis saw the house where he grew up, still the same colors, brown and tan, the vacant lot next to it grown tall with weeds where the Daugherty house and the Brothers’ School had stood until they burned.