Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

  He saw his mother and father alight from their honeymoon carriage in front of the house and, with arms entwined, climb the front stoop. Michael Phelan wore his trainman’s overalls and looked as he had the moment before the speeding train struck him. Kathryn Phelan, in her wedding dress, looked as she had when she hit Francis with an open hand and sent him sprawling backward into the china closet.

  “Stop here a minute, will you?” Francis said to Rosskam, who had uttered no words since ascending from his cellar of passion.

  “Stop?” Rosskam said, and he reined the horse.

  The newlyweds stepped across the threshold and into the house. They climbed the front stairs to the bedroom they would share for all the years of their marriage, the room that now was also their shared grave, a spatial duality as reasonable to Francis as the concurrence of this moment both in the immediate present of his fifty-eighth year of life and in the year before he was born: that year of sacramental consummation, 1879. The room had about it the familiarity of his young lifetime. The oak bed and the two oak dressers were as rooted to their positions in the room as the trees that shaded the edge of the Phelan burial plot. The room was redolent of the blend of maternal and paternal odors, which separated themselves when Francis buried his face deeply in either of the personal pillows, or opened a drawer full of private garments, or inhaled the odor of burned tobacco in a cold pipe, say, or the fragrance of a cake of Pears’ soap, kept in a drawer as a sachet.

  In their room Michael Phelan embraced his new wife of fifty-nine years and ran a finger down the crevice of her breasts; and Francis saw his mother-to-be shudder with what he assumed was the first abhorrent touch of love. Because he was the firstborn, Francis’s room was next to theirs, and so he had heard their nocturnal rumblings for years; and he well knew how she perennially resisted her husband. When Michael would finally overcome her, either by force of will or by threatening to take their case to the priest, Francis would hear her gurgles of resentment, her moans of anguish, her eternal arguments about the sinfulness of all but generative couplings. For she hated the fact that people even knew that she had committed intercourse in order to have children, a chagrin that was endlessly satisfying to Francis all his life.

  Now, as her husband lifted her chemise over her head, the virginal mother of six recoiled with what Francis recognized for the first time to be spiritually induced terror, as visible in her eyes in 1879 as it was in the grave. Her skin was as fresh and pink as the taffeta lining of her coffin, but she was, in her youthfully rosy bloom, as lifeless as the spun silk of her magenta burial dress. She has been dead all her life, Francis thought, and for the first time in years he felt pity for this woman, who had been spayed by self-neutered nuns and self-gelded priests. As she yielded her fresh body to her new husband out of obligation, Francis felt the iron maiden of induced chastity piercing her everywhere, tightening with the years until all sensuality was strangulated and her body was as bloodless and cold as a granite angel.

  She closed her eyes and fell back on the wedding bed like a corpse, ready to receive the thrust, and the old man’s impeccable blood shot into her aged vessel with a passionate burst that set her writhing with the life of newly conceived death. Francis watched this primal pool of his own soulish body squirm into burgeoning matter, saw it change and grow with the speed of light until it was the size of an infant, saw it then yanked roughly out of the maternal cavern by his father, who straightened him, slapped him into being, and swiftly molded him into a bestial weed. The body sprouted to wildly matured growth and stood fully clad at last in the very clothes Francis was now wearing. He recognized the toothless mouth, the absent finger joints, the bump on the nose, the mortal slouch of this newborn shade, and he knew then that he would be this decayed self he had been so long in becoming, through all the endless years of his death.

  o o o

  “Giddap,” said Rosskam to his horse, and the old nag clomped on down the hill of Colonie Street.

  “Raaaa-aaaaaags,” screamed Rosskam. “Raaaa-aaaaaags.” The scream was a two-noted song, C and B-flat, or maybe F and E-flat. And from a window across the street from the Phelan house, a woman’s head appeared.

  “Goooo-ooooooo.” she called in two-noted answer. “Raaaag-maaan.”

  Rosskam pulled to a halt in front of’ the alley alongside her house.

  “On the back porch.” she said. “Papers and a washtub and some old clothes.”

  Rosskam braked his wagon and climbed down.

  “Well?” he said to Francis.

  “I don’t want to go in,” Francis said. “I know her.”

  “So what’s that?”

  “I don’t want her to see me. Mrs. Dillon Her husband’s a railroad man. I know them all my life. My family lives in that house over there. I was born up the street. I don’t want people on this block to see me looking like a bum.”

  “But you’re a bum.”

  “Me and you know that, but they don’t. I’ll cart anything. I’ll cart it all the next time you stop. But not on this street. You understand?”

  “Sensitive bum. I got a sensitive bum working for me.”

  While Rosskam went for the junk alone, Francis stared across the street and saw his mother in housedress and apron surreptitiously throwing salt on the roots of the young maple tree that grew in the Daugherty yard but had the temerity to drop twigs, leaves, and pods onto the Phelan tomato plants and flowers. Kathryn Phelan told her near-namesake, Katrina Daugherty, that the tree’s droppings and shade were unwelcome at the Phelans’. Katrina trimmed what she could of the tree’s low branches and asked Francis, a neighborhood handy man at seventeen to help her trim the higher ones; and he did: climbed aloft and sawed living arms off the vigorous young tree. But for every branch cut, new life sprouted elsewhere, and the tree thickened. to a lushness unlike that of any other tree on Arbor Hill, infuriating Kathryn Phelan, who increased her dosage of salt on the roots, which waxed and grew under and beyond the wooden fence and surfaced ever more brazenly on Phelan property.

  Why do you want to kill the tree. Mama? Francis asked.

  And his mother said it was because the tree had no right insinuating itself into other people’s yards. If we want a tree in the sard we’ll plant our own, she said. and threw more salt Some leases withered on the tree and one branch died entirely. But the salting failed, for Francis saw the tree now, twice its old sue, a giant thing in the world, rising high out of the weeds and toward the sun from what used to be the Daugherty yard.

  On this high noon in 1938, under the sun’s full brilliance, the tree restored itself to its half size of forty-one years past, a July morning in 1897 when Francis was sitting on a middle branch, sawing the end off a branch above him. He heard the back door of the Daughertys’ new house open and close, and he looked down from his perch to see Katrina Daugherty, carrying her small shopping bag, weanng a gray sun hat, gray satin evening slippers, and nothing else. She descended the five steps of the back piazza and strode toward the new barn, where the Daugherty landau and horse were kept.

  “Mrs. Daugherty?” Francis called out, and he leaped down from the tree. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m going downtown, Francis.” she said.

  “Shouldn’t you put something on? Some clothes?”

  “Clothes?” she said. She looked down at her naked self and then cocked her head and widened her eyes into quizzical rigidity.

  “Mrs. Daugherty.” Francis said, but she gave no response, nor did she move. From the piazza railing that he was building, Francis lifted a piece of forest-green canvas he would eventually install as an awning on a side window, and wrapped the naked woman in it, picking her up in his arms then, and carrying her into her house. He sat her on the sofa in the back parlor and, as the canvas slid slowly away from her shoulders, he searched the house for a garment and found a housecoat hanging behind the pantry door. He stood her up and shoved her arms into the housecoat, tied its belt at her waist, covering her body fully, and undid the
chin ribbon that held her hat. Then he sat her down again on the sofa.

  He found a bottle of Scotch whiskey in a cabinet and poured her an inch in a goblet from the china closet, held it to her lips, and cajoled her into tasting it. Whiskey is magic and will cure all your troubles. Katrina sipped it and smiled and said, “Thank you, Francis. You are very thoughtful,” her eyes no longer wide, the glaze gone from them, her rigidity banished, and the softness of her face and body restored.

  “Are you feeling better?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine, fine indeed. And how are you, Francis?”

  “Do you want me to go and get your husband?”

  “My husband? My husband is in New York City, and rather difficult to reach, I’m afraid. What did you want with my husband?”

  “Someone in your family you’d like me to get, maybe? You seem to be having some kind of spell.”

  “Spell? What do you mean, spell?”

  “Outside. In the back.”

  “The back?”

  “You came out without any clothes on, and then you went stiff.”

  “Now really, Francis, do you think you should be so familiar?”

  “I put that housecoat on you. I carried you indoors.”

  “You carried me?”

  “Wrapped in canvas. That there.” And he pointed to the canvas on the floor in front of the sofa. Katrina stared at the canvas, put her hand inside the fold of her housecoat, and felt her naked breast. In her face, when she again looked up at him, Francis saw lunar majesty, a chilling fusion of beauty and desolation. At the far end of the front parlor, observing all from behind a chair, Francis saw also the forehead and eyes of Katrina Daugherty’s nine-year old son, Martin.

  o o o

  A month passed, and on a day when Francis was doing finishing work on the doors of the Daugherty carriage barn, Katrina called out to him from the back porch and beckoned him into the house, then to the back parlor, where she sat again on the same sofa, wearing a long yellow afternoon frock with a soft collar. She looked like a sunbeam to Francis as she motioned him into a chair across from the sofa.

  “May I make you some tea, Francis?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Would you care for one of my husband’s cigars?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t use ‘em.”

  “Have you none of the minor vices? Do you perhaps drink whiskey?”

  “I’ve had a bit but the most I drink of is ale.”

  “Do you think I’m mad, Francis?”

  “Mad? How do you mean that?”

  “Mad. Mad as the Red Queen. Peculiar. Crazy, if you like. Do you think Katrina is crazy?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Not even after my spell?”

  “I just took it as a spell. A spell don’t have to be crazy.”

  “Of course you’re correct, Francis. I am not crazy. With whom have you talked about that day’s happenings?”

  “No one, ma’am.”

  “No one? Not even your family?”

  “No, ma’am, no one.”

  “I sensed you hadn’t. May I ask why?”

  Francis dropped his eyes, spoke to his lap. “Could be, people wouldn’t understand. Might figure it the wrong way.”

  “How wrong?”

  “Might figure they was some goin’s on. People with no clothes isn’t what you’d call reg’lar business.”

  “You mean people would make something up? Conjure an imaginary relationship between us?”

  “Might be they would. Most times they don’t need that much to start their yappin’.”

  “So you’ve been protecting us from scandal with your silence.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Would you please not call me ma’am. It makes you sound like a servant. Call me Katrina.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “It’s more familiar than I oughta get.”

  “But it’s my name. Hundreds of people call me Katrina.”

  Francis nodded and let the word sit on his tongue. He tried it out silently, then shook his head. “I can’t get it out,” he said, and he smiled.

  “Say it. Say Katrina.”

  “Katrina.”

  “So there, you’ve gotten it out. Say it again.”

  “Katrina.”

  “Fine. Now say: May I help you, Katrina?”

  “May I help you, Katrina?”

  “Splendid. Now I want never to be called anything else again. I insist. And I shall call you Francis. That is how we were designated at birth and our baptisms reaffirmed it. Friends should dispense with formality, and you, who have saved me from scandal, you, Francis, are most certainly my friend.”

  o o o

  From the perspective of his perch on the junk wagon Francis could see that Katrina was not only the rarest bird in his life, but very likely the rarest bird ever to nest on Colonie Street. She brought to this street of working-class Irish a posture of elegance that had instantly earned her glares of envy and hostility from the neighbors. But within a year of residence in her new house (a scaled-down copy of the Elk Street mansion in which she had been born and nurtured like a tropical orchid, and where she had lived until she married Edward Daugherty, the writer, whose work and words, whose speech and race, were anathema to Katrina’s father, and who, as a compromise for his bride, built the replica that would maintain her in her cocoon, but built it in a neighborhood where he would never be an outlander, and built it lavishly until he ran out of capital and was forced to hire neighborhood help, such as Francis, to finish it), her charm and generosity, her absence of pretension, and her abundance of the human virtues transformed most of her neighbors’ hostility into fond attention and admiration.

  Her appearance, when she first set foot in the house next door to his, stunned Francis; her blond hair swept upward into a soft wreath, her eyes a dark and shining brown, the stately curves and fullness of her body carried so regally, her large, irregular teeth only making her beauty more singular. This goddess, who had walked naked across his life, and whom he had carried in his arms, now sat on the sofa and with eyes wide upon him she leaned forward and posed the question: “Are you in love with anyone?”

  “No, m— no. I’m too young.”

  Katrina laughed and Francis blushed.

  “You are such a handsome boy. You must have many girls in love with you.”

  “No,” said Francis. “I never been good with girls.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “I don’t tell ‘em what they want to hear. I ain’t big with talk.”

  “Not all girls want you to talk to them.”

  “Ones I know do. Do you like me? How much? Do you like me better’n Joan? Stuff like that. I got no time for stuff like that.”

  “Do you dream of women?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Have you ever dreamt of me?”

  “Once.”

  “Was it pleasant?”

  “Not all that much.”

  “Oh my. What was it?”

  “You couldn’t close your eyes. You just kept lookin’ and never blinked. it got scary.”

  “I understand the dream perfectly. You know, a great poet once said that love enters through the eyes. One must be careful not to see too much. One must curb one’s appetites. The world is much too beautiful for most of us. It can destroy us with its beauty. Have you ever seen anyone faint?”

  “Faint? No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, Katrina.”

  “Then I shall faint for you, dear Francis.”

  She stood up, walked to the center of the room, looked directly at Francis, closed her eyes, and collapsed on the rug, her right hip hitting the floor first and she then falling backward, right arm outstretched over her head, her face toward the parlor’s east wall. Francis stood up and looked down at her.

  “You did that pretty good,” he said.

  She did not move.

  “You c
an get up now,” he said.

  But still she did not move. He reached down and took her left hand in his and tugged gently. She did not move. He took both her hands and tugged. She did not move voluntarily, nor did she open her eyes. He pulled her to a sitting position but she remained limp, with closed eyes. He lifted her off the floor in his arms and put her on the sofa. When he sat her down she opened her eyes and sat fully erect. Francis still had one arm on her back.

  “My mother taught me that,” Katrina said. “She said it was useful in strained social situations. I performed it once in a pageant and won great applause.”

  “You did it good,” Francis said.

  “I can do a cataleptic fit quite well also.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s when you stop yourself in a certain position and do not move. Like this.”

  And suddenly she was rigid and wide-eyed, unblinking.

  o o o

  A week after that, Katrina passed by Mulvaney’s pasture on Van Woert Street, where Francis was playing baseball, a pickup game. She stood on the turf, just in from the street, across the diamond from where Francis danced and chattered as the third-base pepper pot. When he saw her he stopped chattering. That inning he had no fielding chances. The next inning he did not come to bat. She watched through three innings until she saw him catch a line drive and then tag a runner for a double play; saw him also hit a long fly to the outfield that went for two bases. When he reached second base on the run, she walked home to Colonie Street.

  o o o

  She called him to lunch the day he installed the new awnings. After the first day she always chose a time to talk with him when her husband was elsewhere and her son in school. She served lobster gratine, asparagus with hollandaise, and Blanc de Blancs. Only the asparagus, without sauce, had Francis ever tasted before. She served it at the dining-room table, without a word, then sat across from him and ate in silence, he following her lead.

  “I like this,” he finally said.

  “Do you? Do you like the wine?”