The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

  In the hot August fields of afternoon, farmers bend in the shimmering haze to sweating sun-tormented chores. The little children flap in the brook like fish, they dive from the bank and from trees like little white minnows. In the shade of the pines, beneath their breezy symphonic soughing, way down to the fields, the brooks, across aisles of golden sun and pale green space, see the farmers, the children, and beyond, the rising smoke-stacks of the Galloway mills shimmering afar.

  There’s weary heat in Daley Square, the streets are airless, the houses hot, at noon the white-shirted, straw-hatted, sun-flushed people move in a sullen throng. The insurance man pauses on a blazing streetcorner to wipe the perspiration from his hatband, the rednecked traffic cop stands stiffly at his position, and Mr. O’Hara, a city comptroller, moves slowly about the dark stuffy corridors of the city hall, greeting a clerk:

  “Couldn’t be any hotter, could it!”

  “Paper says there’ll be showers tonight.”

  “Hope so, hope so.”

  George Martin comes home from the shop at evening, entering the house in a weary shamble, sweating and red-faced, wheezing with discomfort and disgust. Little Mickey watches his father remove the coat, the necktie, the wet limp shirt, watches him fall in the old leather chair in the den and light another cigar. The hot red sun slants in through the drawn shades, the house is breathless and lazy. Peter is sprawled on the cool linoleum floor of the sunporch with a glass of lemonade, the radio gives out the drowsy, humming, catcalling, hooting sounds of a Red Sox game being played in hot blazing Boston.

  “What’s the score?” calls the father.

  “Tigers three to nothing. Bridges is shutting them out.”

  Mr. Martin waves his meaty hand in disgust, puffs on his cigar, sighs. The crowd suddenly rouses itself as someone is rounding first with a double to left field.

  “Cronin!” calls out Peter. “McNair is scoring, Foxx is up next!”

  The sounds of the game quiet down again, there’s the murmur of crowd-conversations, someone suddenly whistling, the drone of an airplane in the lazy Summer sky, someone catcalling the pitcher from a coaching box. The announcer waits listlessly. He repeats: “Two and one, two balls and one strike.”

  Suddenly there’s coolness, the sun is a deep red, a wind comes over the meadows from the river. The Martin mother is frying hamburger in butter, Ruth is banging around the kitchen setting the table, the icebox door slams, the quart of milk is placed on the table.

  “Supper’ll be ready soon!”

  “I want to see what happens in this inning,” calls Peter. He rolls over to a cooler spot on the linoleum, leans his cheek against the smooth floor, waits sprawling for the events on a hot dusty infield in Fenway Park in Boston.

  Mr. Martin rattles the newspaper and glares at the editorial, puffing angrily. “Now the crazy bastards want to raise the city taxes!”

  Mickey wanders out in the yard, where Charley is repairing the bicycle in the sun-heated garage, sweating, absorbed, industrious Charley. Mickey looks up and he can see his brother Francis sitting by one of the bedroom windows, musing.

  The breeze is cooler, the sun is almost dark red, and here comes Joe in the old Ford from his day’s work at the filling station. Now it’s suppertime and, in a moment, it will be summernight.

  And so one night as little Mickey is ready to go to bed, he sits awhile on the front porch of the house—the whole gang has gone home to bed—and as he sits there, he notes the subtle coolness in the air, the premonition of something different, the approach of schooldays again. Above him is a starwealthy sky, Augustcool and calm, full of misty light and a sting of coolness. Everything smells old and dusty and weary from the long Summer; and he realizes that the games he has been playing all Summer with the gang have also grown old and dusty. He goes to bed with a vague feeling of melancholy and loss—and suddenly, in the middle of the night, he awakes with a start, with joyous terror.

  His window is rattling, there is a wind outside bending the branches back and forth, he hears apples thudding to the ground! From the North, from his window, he sees night clouds—he smells a prophecy—he closes his window tight—it rattles! It begins to rain!

  He gets another blanket for his bed. He lies there in bed thinking, beneath the quilt, full of wild new thoughts. Autumn! Autumn! Why is he filled with such a huge excitement, with such glee and jubilance? What is this that comes now?

  He falls asleep and dreams of wild winds, ragged racing clouds, cities in the North along seacoasts where the mad spray flies. And when he wakes up in the morning, there it is, in the smokey-red dawn, a kind of tender blue char through the morning sky, the sky singed brown in its borders,—and there, clean new rain on dark tree-trunks, and something wild and fresh in the clouds. All through that day the clouds assemble and form in great knots and frames on the horizon, something whistles across the land, a leaf flies.

  The days tumble one upon the other, and one night, finally, Mickey is washing his hands and his ears carefully, going to bed early, full of piety and reflection, getting up in the chill morning to go to the first day of school. The oatmeal and toast await him in the kitchen, there’s something fragrant and warm by the kitchen stove, outside it is chilly and raw. He starts off with his brand new pencil-case smelling of new leather and rubber. And lo! there at the school are all the other kids of Galloway, and not one the worse for it!

  So when the sun of October slopes in late afternoon, the children scurry home from school, make footballs out of stuffed socks, they leap and dash in the powerful winds and scream with delight. Fires are burning everywhere, the air is sharp and lyrical with the smell of smoke. There are great steaming suppers to be eaten in the kitchens of home as the raw October gloom gathers outside, and something flares far off. The children are off again at dusk, they form excited groups in front of fires, the iron-gray clouds mass together and move across the skies. There on the street corners are the men and boys gathered, discussing some rumorous tidings, some news, some furor that can be sensed in the very air—football, maybe, or the big heavyweight championship fight, or the elections. The leaves are piled in the gutters, the supper lights are glowing warmly in all the houses, smoke whips from the chimneys, the whole evening echoes with the calls and cries of children, the barking of dogs. Someone is smoking a pipe and striding the street. The streetlamp at the corner-store sways shadows in a big black dance, the store sign swings and creaks in the wind, leaves fly, apples thud to the ground in the orchards, the stars are blazing in the somber sky—everything is raw, smoky, and terrific.

  Peter Martin strides downtown to the library, returns with books and brisk scholarly intentions. Francis winds his scarf around his neck and scowls. The father comes in the house calling: “What’s there to eat? I’m hungry!”

  Now above the tawny fields converge the snow clouds, there are gray skies sullen with omens of snow, it’s November. The first icy winds come blasting across heaths that were summery landscapes—and snow follows, flying and blown forward in a vast sweeping shroud. The brooks freeze up, at night the skaters build great bonfires, there are shouts in the frosty air, the scraping ring of shovels, a soft, locked silence in the air. Here are the fields of snow along which solitary walkers make their mark on Sunday afternoons, and pause to watch the rose light creeping over the milky hillsides, or to shake a snowpile from a sapling’s lap. And bitter December follows, savage with sleet and raw storms and news of catastrophic blizzards yet to come tomorrow.

  The old house weathers another winter upon its hill, with its windows flashing the sun by daytime as the winds whip snowdust about the eaves where the long icicles hang, the tree-branches scraping and knocking against its side in the long howling nights. The wash in the backyard flaps and ripples stiffly, and here comes big Rosey wrapped in a bearish coat, with the tip of her nose so red and snuffling, her big raw hands gripped around a basket again. Joe is in the garage racing the motor of the car, his father is barging around a corner of the barn looki
ng for some old cans of anti-freeze, the eternal cigar trailing smoke behind him, and he swears now because it is so cold and the roads are so bad.

  George Martin goes into the town in the February morning and eats breakfast in the diner. He slides open the diner door and ducks out of the wintry blasts. There’s the steaming racket of lunchcart cookery, men eating and laughing and yelling at him to close that door, and there’s the frost on the windows rosy from the winter dawn. George Martin the printer consumes two batches of pancakes with Vermont maple syrup and butter, ham and eggs, toast, and three cups of coffee before he goes off to his work.

  “Think you’ll last out the morning, Martin?” yells the counterman.

  “Hell, I’ll be back in an hour for some more pancakes!”

  Laughter rattles the frosty windows as Martin slides the door and strides off across the railroad tracks in the blasting wind. He comes slamming into his plant, kicks off his galoshes, rubs his hands zestfully, lights a cigar, and plunges into workaday matters at hand among old ledgers and galleries of inky type.

  “Cold enough for you, George?” yells Edmund the pressman jubilantly.

  Living continues in Galloway like the seasons themselves, nearer to God’s earth by these weathers, through which life pulses processionally in moods and leaps and bounds, while the moods of the universe flank across the skies endlessly.

  [4]

  On a moonlit night in a grove of pines, among the tables and benches of some forgotten picnic ground, a place where there were lights festooned and the music of oldtime waltzes beneath the trees, somewhere in 1910 in the marvelous New England Spring night—George Martin had first seen the girl who was going to be his wife. Her name was Marguerite and she was French and pretty. George Martin the workaday young man had considered his life and the commands of his soul and decided to court this affectionate, simple, and sensible young lady. And he married her. His thought was: “Marguerite is a real girl.”

  Marguerite Courbet was the daughter of a French Canadian lumber worker in Lacoshua who had saved his money and gone into a profitable little tavern business, only to die swiftly and tragically at thirty-eight from heart attack. This left her an orphan, her mother being dead since her infancy, and subsequently Marguerite was taken in by her father’s sisters and went to work in the Lacoshua shoe-shops on her own initiative, as a girl of fifteen making herself self-dependent from that time on. She had always been a cheerful, rosy-cheeked, affectionate kind of woman in whom scarcely a trace of the effects of a tragic lonely girlhood were evident, save for an occasional air of grim quiet that orphans have in moments of reflection.

  In the early years of their marriage, in those days when people hung strings of beads in the livingroom door and placed huge kewpie dolls on top of the piano, when the young husbands and wives went forth on Sunday afternoons perambulating the swaddled child in a basketwork carriage, when the young husbands wore high stiff collars and Homburg hats and trousers that pegged in and made them look spindly, when the young wives wore great hats and long gowns and flopping fur neckpieces, the young Martin couple got along together through the early nervousness of marriage as well as they could manage.

  She sometimes waited up late for him while he played poker with the boys backstage at B. F. Keith’s, and when he got home she cried and he tried to soothe her tears, and then he would refrain from playing poker for two whole weeks and the honeymoon would resume. Each time he went back to poker her tears were less bitter and dumbfounded and, after each sad reconciliation, sweetly, meditatively, their marriage was that much sounder. The children began to come, Martin rented the big house on Galloway Road and left the insurance business to go on his own as a printer, and in time the real tone and substance of their marriage began to take form.

  Marguerite was a devoted mother whose marital love for her husband had decreased in proportion as her family grew and as she expended more and more time to the children, but in her relations with him there was a simple and dignified tenderness, an occasional argument that flared up funnily and was forgotten, and a mutual wondering love for the children and the home that bound them together more than anything else could. They were partners, they were people who still retained an old racial simplicity and earnestness with regard to the home and the family, and after several years of marriage and those few early misunderstandings young lovers have, there never again entered in their minds any thought of acute self-interest in the ways of nuptial advantage. Everything was directed towards the family which was well-knit thereby. In this manner did they succeed in finding happiness and a grave truth through nature’s own old ways. They were an oldfashioned couple.

  There was no official religion in the family, but the mother had always taught the legend of the Catholic religion to those of her children who seemed most interested. As a result, on church holidays such as Easter or Christmas, some of the kids went to church with her, or else did not, all according to whimsical family trends. In this manner some of the young Martins grew up under the influence of formal religion, while the less susceptible ones had practically nothing to do with it. It was a unique situation—especially since the death of little Julian Martin when the grieved and remorse-stricken mother had felt it her mourning duty to acquaint her more devout children closer to the church and its meanings. No family tension was created by this, since the children saw religion as a kind of activity, like school, instead of as a divine ordaining, and they never made comparisons.

  Martin himself was not a church-going man. His contact with the Catholic religion had been through his own mother, a devout Irish Catholic woman whose name had been Clementine Kernochan. Both he and Mrs. Martin believed that there was a God, and that there was a right and wrong, and that the virtuous life of love and humility was God’s own life. “And who has never really believed in Jesus?” he would ask.

  “I’ll never be sorry I raised those children that way,” his wife would say. “It was an education they couldn’t have got anywhere else, it’s something that’ll always be right and good for them now and later in life. And as for all my children, I brought them all up to know right and wrong and what God wants of them.”

  “Marge,” Martin would say slowly shaking his head, “Marge, I’ve never had any complaint with the way you raised the kids. Whatever you thought was the right thing for them was all right with me, God knows.”

  And now when most of her children were grown up, reaching the age when they were ready to start their own lives, this mother’s serene love for them had not abated. She was a lonely woman, an orphan through and through, surrounded by the fruits of a rich life spent with Martin in his house and in his town, yet forever haunted by the memory of her lean and terrifying girlhood. And so she would often sit sewing by the window in the front parlor and spend whole afternoons looking out on the road, waiting for her children to come home from school or from whatever they were doing, without knowing why she sat there or what it was that she was waiting and looking for. She was the mother of eight children, the wife of a good and respected man in the town, and yet there was something strange in her soul that she could not understand. She was a woman with a deep everlasting conviction in the pith and rightness of her life, and still there was something that brooded in her.

  One memory haunted her more than any other, reminding her of this lonely unknowable feeling in her life. It was when she had been a young mother at twenty-four, she was calling her children to supper from the back porch of the house, shielding her eyes with one cupped hand as the sun was breaking through great frames and knots of gray March clouds at dusk, suddenly sending its magnificent red light down upon everything. She was calling out the names of her children, and her children were abroad in the strange otherworldly red light of late afternoon, abroad in the sighing organ sounds of dusk, calling back to her. And she had paused, uneasy, standing there on the porch in that strange red light, and she had wondered who she really was, and who these children were who called back to her, and what this earth
of the strange sad light could be.

  It had all passed swiftly, but in that one moment that she could never forget for the rest of her life, had been made implicit to her the essential chronicle of her somehow irrevocably orphaned life, her orphan loneliness.

  “I don’t care what anybody says,” she would say, “I worry for my children and I want to help them always. Yes, you’re all growing up and you’ll all be going off to live your own lives soon, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not your mother—and that I still don’t love you as much as when you were all my babies.”

  “We’re not talking about that!” someone would shout, laughing. “We’re just kidding you about the way you worried when Joe was gone on his trip!”

  “And why shouldn’t I? I prayed for him every night. I asked God and I asked my little Julian to watch over him. It was the least I could do while he was away from his home,” and saying this she would nod her head in a firm and satisfied manner.