Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

  He had no insights into how he differed in this from other men. He knew he was somehow stronger, more given to violence, more in love with the fugitive dance, but this was all so for reasons that had nothing to do with intent. All right, he had wanted to hurt Harold Allen, but that was so very long ago. Could anyone in possession of Francis’s perspective on himself believe that he was responsible for Rowdy Dick, or the hole in the runt’s neck, or the bruises on Little Red, or the scars on other men long forgotten or long buried?

  Francis was now certain only that he could never arrive at any conclusions about himself that had their origin in reason. But neither did he believe himself incapable of thought. He believed he was a creature of unknown and unknowable qualities, a man in whom there would never be an equanimity of both impulsive and premeditated action. Yet after every admission that he was a lost and distorted soul, Francis asserted his own private wisdom and purpose: he had fled the folks because he was too profane a being to live among them; he had humbled himself willfully through the years to counter a fearful pride in his own ability to manufacture the glory from which grace would flow. What he was was, yes, a warrior, protecting a belief that no man could ever articulate, especially himself; but somehow it involved protecting saints from sinners, protecting the living from the dead. And a warrior, he was certain, was not a victim. Never a victim.

  In the deepest part of himself that could draw an unutterable conclusion, he told himself: My guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing.

  And he raised his head to see the phalanx of men in Legionnaires’ caps advancing into the firelight with baseball bats in their hands.

  o o o

  The men in caps entered the jungle with a fervid purpose, knocking down everything that stood, without a word. They caved in empty shacks and toppled lean-tos that the weight of weather and time had already all but collapsed. One man who saw them coming left his lean-to and ran, calling out one word: “Raiders!” and rousing some jungle people, who picked up their belongings and fled behind the leader of the pack. The first collapsed shacks were already burning when the men around Andy’s fire became aware that raiders were approaching.

  “What the hell’s doin’?” Rudy asked. “Why’s everybody gettin’ up? Where you goin’, Francis?”

  “Get on your feet, stupid,” Francis said, and Rudy got up.

  “What the hell did I get myself into?” Old Shoes said, and he backed away from the fire, keeping the advancing raiders in sight. They were half a football field away but Michigan Mac was already in heavy retreat, bent double like a scythe as he ran for the river.

  The raiders moved forward with their devastation clubs and one of them flattened a lean-to with two blows. A man following them poured gasoline on the ruins and then threw a match on top of it all. The raiders were twenty yards from Andy’s lean-to by then, with Andy, Rudy, and Francis still immobilized, watching the spectacle with disbelieving eyes.

  “We better move it,” Andy said.

  “You got anything in that lean-to worth savin’?” Francis asked.

  “Only thing I own that’s worth anything’s my skin, and I got that with me.”

  The three men moved slowly back from the raiders, who were clearly intent on destroying everything that stood. Francis looked at the piano box as he moved past it and saw it was empty.

  “Who are they?” Rudy asked Francis. “Why they doin’ this?”

  But no one answered.

  Half a dozen lean-tos and shacks were ablaze, and one had ignited a tall, leafless tree, whose flames were reaching high into the heavens, far above the level of the burning shacks. In the wild firelight Francis saw one raider smashing a shack, from which a groggy man emerged on hands and knees. The raider hit the crawling man across the buttocks with a half swing of the bat until the man stood up. The raider poked him yet again and the man broke into a limping run. The fire that rose from the running man’s shack illuminated the raider’s smile.

  Francis, Rudy, and Andy turned to run then too, convinced at last that demons were abroad in the night. But as they turned they confronted a pair of raiders moving toward them from their left flank.

  “Filthy bums,” one raider said, and swung his bat at Andy, who stepped deftly out of range, ran off, and was swallowed up by the night. The raider reversed his swing and caught the wobbling Rudy just above neck level, and Rudy yelped and went down. Francis leaped on the man and tore the bat from him, then scrambled away and turned to face both raiders, who were advancing toward him with a hatred on their faces as anonymous and deadly as the exposed fangs of rabid dogs. The raider with the bat raised it above his own head and struck a vertical blow at Francis, which Francis sidestepped as easily as he once went to his left for a fast grounder. Simultaneously he stepped forward, as into a wide pitch, and swung his own bat at the man who had struck Rudy. Francis connected with a stroke that would have sent any pitch over any center-field fence in any ball park anywhere, and he clearly heard and truly felt bones crack in the man’s back. He watched with all but orgasmic pleasure as the breathless man twisted grotesquely and fell without a sound.

  The second attacker charged Francis and knocked him down, not with his bat but with the weight and force of his moving body. The two rolled over and over, Francis finally separating himself from the man by a glancing blow to the throat. But the man was tough and very agile, fully on his feet when Francis was still on his knees, and he was raising his arms for a horizontal swing when Francis brought his own bat full circle and smashed the man’s left leg at knee level. The knee collapsed inward, a hinge reversed, and the raider toppled crookedly with a long howl of pain.

  Francis lifted Rudy, who was mumbling incoherent sounds, and threw him over his shoulder. He ran, as best he could, toward the dark woods along the river, and then moved south along the shore toward the city. He stopped in tall weeds, all brown and dead, and lay prone, with Rudy beside him, to catch his breath. No one was following. He looked back at the jungle through the barren trees and saw it aflame in widening measure. The moon and the stars shone on the river, a placid sea of glass beside the sprawling, angry fire.

  Francis found he was bleeding from the cheek and he went to the river and soaked his handkerchief and rinsed off the blood. He drank deeply of the river, which was icy and shocking and sweet. He blotted the wound, found it still bleeding, and pressed it with the handkerchief to stanch it.

  “Who were they?” Rudy asked when he returned.

  “They’re the guys on the other team,” Francis said. “They don’t like us filthy bums.”

  “You ain’t filthy,” Rudy said hoarsely. “You got a new suit.”

  “Never mirnd my suit, how’s your head?”

  “I don’t know. Like nothin’ I ever felt before.” Francis touched the back of Rudy’s skull. It wasn’t bleeding but there was one hell of a lump there.

  “Can you walk?”

  “I don’t know. Where’s Old Shoes and his car?”

  “Gone, I guess. I think that car is hot. I think he stole it. He used to do that for a livin’. That and peddle his ass.”

  Francis helped Rudy to his feet, but Rudy could not stand alone, nor could he put one foot in front of the other. Francis lifted him back on his shoulder and headed south. He had Memorial Hospital in mind, the old Homeopathic Hospital on North Pearl Street, downtown. It was a long way, but there wasn’t no other place in the middle of the damn night. And walking was the only way. You wait for a damn bus or a trolley at this hour, Rudy’d be dead in the gutter.

  Francis carried him first on one shoulder, then on the other, and finally piggyback when he found Rudy had some use of both arms and could hold on. He carried him along the river road to stay away from cruising police cars, and then down along the tracks and up to Broadway and then Pearl. He carried him up the hospital steps and into the emergency room, which was small and bright and clean and empty of patients. A nurse wheeled a stretcher away f
rom one wall when she saw him coming, and helped Rudy to slide off Francis’s back and stretch out.

  “He got hit in the head,” Francis said. “He can’t walk.”

  “What happened?” the nurse asked, inspecting Rudy’s eyes.

  “Some guy down on Madison Avenue went nuts and hit him with a brick. You got a doctor can help him?”

  “We’ll get a doctor. He’s been drinking.”

  “That ain’t his problem. He’s got a stomach cancer too, but what ails him right now is his head. He got rocked all to hell, I’m tellin’ you, and it wasn’t none of his fault.”

  The nurse went to the phone and dialed and talked softly.

  “How you makin’ it, pal?” Francis asked.

  Rudy smiled and gave Francis a glazed look and said nothing. Francis patted him on the shoulder and sat down on a chair beside him to rest. He saw his own image in the mirror door of a cabinet against the wall. His bow tie was all cockeyed and his shirt and coat were spattered with blood where he had dripped before he knew he was cut. His face was smudged and his clothes were covered with dirt. He straightened the tie and brushed off a bit of the dirt.

  After a second phone call and a conversation that Francis was about to interrupt to tell her to get goddamn busy with Rudy, the nurse came back. She took Rudy’s pulse, went for a stethoscope, and listened to his heart. Then she told Francis Rudy was dead. Francis stood up and looked at his friend’s face and saw the smile still there. Where the wind don’t blow.

  “What was his name?” the nurse asked. She picked up a pencil and a hospital form on a clipboard.

  Francis could only stare into Rudy’s glassy-eyed smile. Isaac Newton of the apple was born of two midwives.

  “Sir, what was his name?” the nurse said.

  “Name was Rudy.”

  “Rudy what?”

  “Rudy Newton,” Francis said. “He knew where the Milky Way was.”

  o o o

  It would be three-fifteen by the clock on the First Church when Francis headed south toward Palombo’s Hotel to get out of the cold, to stretch out with Helen and try to think about what had happened and what he should do about it. He would walk past Palombo’s night man on the landing, salute him, and climb the stairs to the room he and Helen always shared in this dump. Looking at the hallway dirt and the ratty carpet as he walked down the hall, he would remind himself that this was luxury for him and Helen. He would see the light coming out from under the door, but he would knock anyway to make sure he had Helen’s room. When he got no answer he would open the door and discover Helen on the floor in her kimono.

  He would enter the room and close the door and stand looking at her for a long time. Her hair would be loose, and fanned out, and pretty.

  He would, after a while, think of lifting her onto the bed, but decide there was no point in that, for she looked right and comfortable just as she was. She looked as if she were sleeping.

  He would sit in the chair looking at her for an amount of time he later would not be able to calculate, and he would decide that he had made a right decision in not moving her.

  For she was not crooked.

  He would look in the open suitcase and would find his old clippings and put them in his inside coat pocket. He would find his razor and his penknife and Helen’s rhinestone butterfly, and he would put these in his coat pockets also. In her coat hanging in the closet he would find her three dollars and thirty-five cents and he would put that in his pants pocket, still wondering where she got it. He would remember the two dollars he left for her and that she would never get now, nor would he, and he would think of it as a tip for old Donovan. Helen says thank you.

  He would then sit on the bed and look at Helen from a different angle. He would be able to see her eyes were closed and he would remember how vividly green they were in life, those gorgeous emeralds. He would hear the women talking together behind him as he tried to peer beyond Helen’s sheltered eyes.

  Too late now, the women would say. Too late now to see any deeper into Helen’s soul. But he would continue to stare, mindful of the phonograph record propped against the pillow; and he would know the song she’d bought, or stole. It would be “Bye Bye Blackbird,” which she loved so much, and he would hear the women singing it softly as he stared at the fiercely glistening scars on Helen’s soul, fresh and livid scars whitening among the old, the soul already purging itself of all wounds of the world, flaming with the green fires of hope, but keeping their integrity too as welts of insight into the deepest secrets of Satan.

  Francis, this twofold creature, now an old man in a mortal slouch, now again a fledgling bird of uncertain wing, would sing along softly with the women: Here I go, singin’ low, the song revealing to him that he was not looking into Helen’s soul at all but only into his own repetitive and fallible memory. He knew that right now both Rudy and Helen had far more insight into his being than he himself ever had, or would have, into either of theirs.

  The dead, they got all the eyes.

  He would follow the thread of his life backward to a point well in advance of the dying of Helen and would come to a vision of her in this same Japanese kimono, lying beside him after they had made sweet love, and she saying to him: All I want in the world is to have my name put back among the family.

  And Francis would then stand up and vow that he would one day hunt up Helen’s grave, no matter where they put her, and would place a stone on top of it with her name carved deeply in its face. The stone would say: Helen Marie Archer, a great soul.

  Francis would remember then that when great souls were being extinguished, the forces of darkness walked abroad in the world, filling it with lightning and strife and fire. And he would realize that he should pray for the safety of Helen’s soul, since that was the only way he could now help her. But because his vision of the next world was not of the court of heaven where the legion of souls in grace venerate the Holy Worm, but rather of a foul mist above a hole in the ground where the earth itself purges away the stench of life’s rot, Francis saw a question burning brightly in the air: How should this man pray?

  He would think about this for another incalculably long moment and decide finally there was no way for him to pray: not for Helen, not even for himself.

  He would then reach down and touch Helen on the top of the head and stroke her skull the way a father strokes the soft fontanel of his newborn child, stroke her gently so as not to disturb the flowing fall of her hair.

  Because it was so pretty.

  Then he would walk out of Helen’s room, leaving the light burning. He would walk down the hall to the landing, salute the night clerk, who would be dozing in his chair, and then he would reenter the cold and living darkness of the night.

  o o o

  By dawn he would be on a Delaware & Hudson freight heading south toward the lemonade springs. He would be squatting in the middle of the empty car with the door partway open, sitting a little out of the wind. He would be watching the stars, whose fire seemed so unquenchable only a few hours before, now vanishing from an awakening sky that was between a rose and a violet in its early hue.

  It would be impossible for him to close his eyes, and so he would think of all the things he might now do. He would then decide that he could not choose among all the possibilities that were his. By now he was sure only that he lived in a world where events decided themselves, and that all a man could do was to stay one jump into their mystery.

  He had a vision of Gerald swaddled in the silvery web of his grave, and then the vision faded like the stars and he could not even remember the color of the child’s hair. He saw all the women who became three, and then their impossible coherence also faded and he saw only the glorious mouth of Katrina speaking words that were little more than silent shapes; and he knew then that he was leaving behind more than a city and a lifetime of corpses. He was also leaving behind even his vivid memory of the scars on Helen’s soul.

  Strawberry Bill climbed into the car when the train sl
owed to take on water, and he looked pretty good for a bum that died coughin’. He was all duded up in a blue seersucker suit, straw hat, and shoes the color of a new baseball.

  “You never looked that good while you was livin’,” Francis said to him. “You done well for yourself over there.”

  Everybody gets an Italian tailor when he checks in, Bill said. But say, pal, what’re you runnin’ from this time?

  “Same old crowd,” Francis said. “The cops.”

  Ain’t no such things as cops, said Bill.

  “Maybe they ain’t none of ‘em got to heaven yet, but they been pesterin’ hell outa me down here.”

  No cops chasm’ you, pal.

  “You got the poop?”

  Would I kid a fella like you?

  Francis smiled and began to hum Rudy’s song about the place where the bluebird sings. He took the final swallow of Green River whiskey, which tasted sweet and cold to him now. And he thought of Annie’s attic.

  That’s the place, Bill told him. They got a cot over in the corner, near your old trunk.

  “I saw it,” said Francis.

  Francis walked to the doorway of the freight car and threw the empty whiskey bottle at the moon, an outshoot fading away into the rising sun. The bottle and the moon made music like a soulful banjo when they moved through the heavens, divine harmonies that impelled Francis to leap off the train and seek sanctuary under the holy PheIan eaves.

  “You hear that music?” Francis said.

  Music? said Bill. Can’t say as I do.

  “Banjo music. Mighty sweet banjo. That empty whiskey bottle’s what’s makin’ it. The whiskey bottle and the moon.”

  If you say so, said Bill.

  Francis listened again to the moon and his bottle and heard it clearer than ever. When you heard that music you didn’t have to lay there no more. You could get right up off’n that old cot and walk over to the back window of the attic and watch Jake Becker lettin’ his pigeons loose. They flew up and around the whole damn neighborhood, round and round, flew in a big circle and got themselves all worked up, and then old Jake, he’d give ‘em the whistle and they’d come back to the cages. Damnedest thing.