With all my latenesses and absences and falling asleep in class I know I deserve a C and I’d like to tell the professor how guilty I feel and if she failed me completely I wouldn’t blame her. I’d like to explain that even if I’m not a model student she should see the way I am with the Literature of England textbook, all excited reading it in the NYU library, on subway trains, even on piers and warehouse platforms during lunch hour. She should know I’m probably the only student in the world who ever got into trouble with men on warehouse platforms over a literature book. The men taunt me, Hey, look at the college boy. Too good to talk to us, eh? and when I tell them about the strangeness of the Anglo-Saxon language they tell me I am full of shit, that isn’t English at all and who the fuck do you think you’re kiddin’, kid? Maybe they never went to college, they say, but they aren’t gonna have the wool pulled over their eyes by a half-ass shithead just off the boat from Ireland telling them this is the English language when you could see there isn’t an English word on the whole goddam page.
After that they won’t talk to me and the platform boss shifts me inside to run the elevator so that the men won’t be pulling tricks on me, dropping loads to jerk the arms out of my sockets or pretending to run me down with forklift trucks.
I’d like to tell the professor how I look at the authors and poets in the textbook and ask myself which of them I’d like to have a pint with in a Greenwich Village pub and the one that stands out is Chaucer. I’d buy him a pint anytime and listen to his stories about the Canterbury pilgrims. I’d like to tell the professor how much I love the sermons of John Donne and how I’d like to buy him a pint except that he was a Protestant priest and not known for sitting in taverns knocking back the pint.
I can’t talk about this because it’s dangerous to raise your hand in any class to say how much you love anything. The professor will look at you with a pitying little smile and the class will see that and the pitying little smile will travel around the room till you feel so foolish the face turns red and you promise you’ll never love anything in college again or if you do keep it to yourself. I can say this to Brian McPhillips sitting next to me but someone in the seat before me turns and says, Aren’t we being a little paranoid?
Paranoid. That’s another word I have to look up with the way everyone at NYU uses it. From the way this student looks at me with his superior left eyebrow nearly up to his hairline I can only guess he’s accusing me of being demented and there’s no use trying to answer him till I find out what that word means. I’m sure Brian McPhillips knows what that word means but he’s busy talking to Joyce Timpanelli on his left. They’re always looking at each other and smiling. That means there’s something going on and I can’t bother them with the word paranoid. I should carry a dictionary and when anyone throws a strange word at me I could look it up on the spot and shoot back with a smart answer that would collapse the superior eyebrow.
Or I could practice the silence I learned in the army and go my own way which is the best thing of all because people who torment other people with strange words don’t like it when you go your own way.
Andy Peters sits next to me in Introduction to Philosophy and tells me about a job in a bank, Manufacturer’s Trust Company down on Broad Street. They’re looking for people to work with personal loan applications and I could choose a four to midnight shift or a midnight to eight A.M. He says the best thing about this job is once you finish the work you can leave, that no one works a full eight hours.
There’s a typing test and I have no trouble with that because of the way the army dragged me away from my dog and made me a company clerk typist. The bank says, Okay, I can work the four to midnight shift so that I can take my classes in the morning and sleep at night. Wednesdays and Fridays I have no classes and I can shape up at the warehouses and piers and make extra money against the day my brother Michael is out of the air force and the allotment to my mother ends. I can put the Wednesday-Friday money in a separate account and when the time comes she won’t have to be running to the St. Vincent de Paul Society for food or shoes.
There are seven women and four men on the shift at the bank and all we have to do is take piles of applications for personal loans and send notices to the applicants that they’ve been accepted or rejected. Andy Peters tells me during a coffee break that if I ever see an application from a friend that’s been rejected I can change it to acceptance. There’s a little code the daytime loan officers use and he’ll show me how to alter it.
Night after night we see hundreds of applications for loans. People want them for new babies, vacations, cars, furniture, consolidation of debts, hospital expenses, funerals, decorating apartments. Sometimes there are letters attached and if there’s a good one we all stop typing and read them back and forth. There are letters that make the women cry and the men want to cry. Babies die and there are expenses and would the bank help. A husband runs away and the applicant doesn’t know what to do, where to turn. She never had a job in her life, how could she with raising three kids, and she needs three hundred dollars to tide her over till she finds work and a cheap baby-sitter.
One man promises that if the bank loans him five hundred dollars they can take a pint of his blood every month for the rest of his life and it’s a good deal, he says, because he has a rare blood type which he’s not ready to divulge at this moment but if the bank helps him out they’re getting blood that’s as good as gold, the best collateral in the world.
The blood man is rejected and Andy lets it pass but he changes the code for the desperate woman with the three kids who was rejected for having no collateral. Andy says, I don’t understand how they can give loans to people who want to spend two weeks lying on the sand at the goddam Jersey shore and then turn down a woman with three kids hanging on by her fingernails. This, my friend, is where the revolution starts.
He changes a few applications every night to prove how stupid a bank can be. He says he knows what happens during the day when asshole loan people go through the applications. Harlem address? Negro? Points off. Puerto Rican? Mucho points off. He tells me there are dozens of Puerto Ricans around New York who think they were accepted for their good credit but it was Andy Peters all the time feeling sorry for them. He says it’s a big thing in PR neighborhoods to get out there on the weekend and polish the car. They might never go anywhere but it’s the polishing that matters, old guys on the stoop watching the polishing and drinking the old cerveza from bodegas in quart bottles, the radio blasting away with Tito Puente, the old guys checking out the girls shaking their asses along the sidewalks, man, that’s living, man, that’s living and what more do you want?
Andy talks about Puerto Ricans all the time. He says they’re the only people who know how to live in this goddam tight-ass city, that it’s a tragedy the Spaniards didn’t sail up the Hudson instead of the goddam Dutch and the goddam limeys. We’d have siestas, man, we’d have color. We wouldn’t have The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. If he had his way he’d give a loan to every Puerto Rican applying for a car loan so that all over the city you’d have them polishing their new cars, drinking their beer out of brown paper bags, digging Tito and flirting with the girls shaking their asses along the sidewalks, girls with those see-through peasant blouses and Jesus medallions nestling in their cleavage, and wouldn’t that be a city to live in?
The women in the office laugh at the way Andy talks but they tell him be quiet because they want to finish the work and get outa here. They have kids at home and husbands waiting.
When we finish early we go for a beer and he tells me why he’s a thirty-one-year-old student studying philosophy at New York University. He was in the war, not Korea, the big one in Europe, but he has to work nights in this goddam bank because of his dishonorable discharge in the spring of 1945, just before the war ended and isn’t that a bitch.
Taking a shit, that’s what he was, a nice quiet shit in a French ditch, all wiped and ready to button up when who comes along but a goddam lieutenant and a ser
geant and the lieutenant has nothing else to do but march up to Andy and accuse him of an unnatural act with that sheep standing there a few feet away. Andy admits that in a way the lieutenant had a right to jump to the wrong conclusion since just before pulling up his pants Andy had a hard-on which made it difficult to pull up the aforesaid pants and even though he hated anything in the shape of an officer he felt an explanation would help.
Well, Lieutenant, I may have fucked that sheep or I may not have fucked that sheep but what’s interesting here is your peculiar concern with me and my relationship with that sheep. There’s a war on, Lieutenant. I come out here to take a shit in a French ditch and there’s a sheep at eye level and I’m nineteen years old and I haven’t been laid since my high school prom and a sheep, especially a French sheep, looks very tempting and if I looked like I was ready to jump on that sheep you’re right, Lieutenant, I was, but I didn’t. You and the sergeant interrupted a beautiful relationship. I thought the lieutenant would laugh, instead he said I was a goddam liar, that I had sheep written all over me. I wanted sheep all over me. I dreamed of it but it hadn’t happened and what he said was so unfair I pushed him, didn’t hit him, just pushed, and the next thing, Jesus, they had all kinds of artillery sticking in my face, pistols, carbines, M1 rifles, and before you know it there was a court-martial where I had a drunken captain defending me who told me in private that I was a disgusting sheep fucker and he was sorry he couldn’t be at the other end prosecuting me because his father was a Basque from Montana where they respected their sheep, and I still don’t know if I was sent to the stockade for six months for assaulting an officer or screwing a sheep. What I got out of it was a dishonorable discharge and when that happens you might as well study philosophy at NYU.
30
Because of Mr. Calitri I scribble memories of Limerick in notebooks. I make lists of streets, schoolmasters, priests, neighbors, friends, shops.
After “The Bed” essay I’m sure people in Mr. Calitri’s class are looking at me in a different way. The girls are probably telling each other they’d never go out with someone who spent his life in a bed a man might have died in. Then Mike Small tells me she heard about the essay and how it moved so many people in the class, boys and girls. I didn’t want her to know what I came from but now she wants to read the essay and afterward her eyes fill up and she says, Oh, I never knew. Oh, it must have been awful. It reminds her of Dickens though I don’t know how that can be because everything in Dickens always ends well.
Of course I won’t say this to Mike Small for fear she might think I’m arguing with her. She might turn on her heel and march back to Bob the football player.
Now Mr. Calitri wants us to write a family essay where there’s adversity, a dark moment, a setback, and even though I don’t want to go into the past there’s something that happened to my mother that demands to be written.
THE PLOT
When the war started and food was rationed in Ireland the government offered poor families plots of land in fields outside Limerick. Each family could have a sixteenth of an acre, clear it and grow whatever vegetables they liked.
My father applied for a plot out the road in Rosbrien and the government lent him a spade and a fork for the work. He took my brother Malachy and me to help him. When my brother Michael saw the spade he cried and wanted to go too but he was only four and he would have been in the way. My father told him, Whisht, that when we came back from Rosbrien we’d bring him berries.
I asked my father if I could carry the spade and I was soon sorry because Rosbrien was miles outside Limerick. Malachy had started out carrying the fork but my father took it away from him because of the way he was swinging it and nearly knocking people’s eyes out. Malachy cried till my father said he’d let him carry the spade all the way home. My brother soon forgot the fork when he saw a dog who was willing to chase a stick for miles till he frothed white stuff with the weariness and lay down on the road looking up with the stick between his paws and we had to leave him.
When my father saw the plot he shook his head. Rocks, he said, rocks and stones. And all we did that day was to make a pile by the low wall along the road. My father used the spade to keep digging up rocks and even though I was only nine I noticed two men in the next plots talking and looking at him and laughing in a quiet way. I asked my father why and he gave a small laugh himself and said, The Limerickman gets the dark earth and the man from the North gets the rocky plot.
We worked till the darkness came and we were so weak with hunger we couldn’t pick up another rock. We didn’t mind one bit if he carried the fork and spade and wished he could carry us, too. He said we were big boys, good workers, our mother would be proud of us, there would be tea and fried bread, and he marched ahead with his long strides till halfway home he stopped suddenly. Your brother Michael, he said. We promised him berries. We’ll have to go back out the road to the bushes.
Malachy and I complained so much that we were tired and could hardly walk another step that my father told us go home, he’d get the berries himself. I asked why couldn’t he get the berries tomorrow and he said he had promised Michael berries for tonight, not tomorrow, and away he went with the spade and fork on his shoulder.
When Michael saw us he started to cry, Berries, berries. He stopped when we told him, Dad is out the road in Rosbrien getting your berries so will you quit the crying and let us have our fried bread and tea.
We could have eaten a whole loaf between us but my mother said, Leave some for your father. She shook her head. He’s such a fool going all the way back there for the berries. Then she looked at Michael the way he was standing at the door looking up the lane for a sign of my father and she shook her head in a smaller way.
Soon Michael spotted my father and he was gone up the lane calling out, Dad, Dad, did you get the berries? We could hear Dad, In a minute, Michael, in a minute.
He stood the spade and fork in a corner and emptied his coat pockets on to the table. Berries he brought, the great black juicy berries you find at the tops and backs of bushes beyond the reach of children, berries he plucked in the dark of Rosbrien. My mouth watered and I asked my mother if I could have a berry and she said, Ask Michael, they’re his.
I didn’t have to ask him. He handed me the biggest of the berries, the juiciest, and he handed one to Malachy. He offered berries to my mother and father but they said no thanks, they were his berries. He offered Malachy and me another berry each and we took them. I thought if I had berries like that I’d keep them all for myself but Michael was different and maybe he didn’t know any better because he was four.
After that we went to the plot every day but Sunday and cleared it of rocks and stones till we reached the earth and helped my father with the planting of potatoes, carrots and cabbage. There were times we left him and roamed the road, hunting for berries and eating so many it gave us the runs.
My father said in no time we’d be digging up our crop but he wouldn’t be here to do it. There was no work in Limerick and the En-glish were looking for people to work in their war factories. It was hard for him to think of working for the English after what they did to us but the money was tempting and as long as the Americans had entered the war it was surely a just cause.
He went off to England with hundreds of men and women. Most sent money home but he spent his in the pubs of Coventry and forgot he had a family. My mother had to borrow from her own mother and ask for credit from Kathleen O’Connell’s grocery shop. She had to beg for food from the St. Vincent de Paul Society or wherever she could get it. She said it would be a great relief to us and we’d be saved when the time came to dig up our spuds, our carrots, our lovely heads of cabbage. Oh, we’d have a right feed then and if God was good He might send us a nice piece of ham and that wasn’t asking too much when you lived in Limerick, the ham capital of all Ireland.
The day came and she put the new baby, Alphie, in the pram. She borrowed a coal sack from Mr. Hannon next door. We’ll fill it, she said
. I carried the fork and Malachy the spade so that he wouldn’t be knocking people’s eyes out with the prongs. My mother said, Don’t be swinging those tools or I’ll give ye a good clitther on the gob.
A smack in the mouth.
When we arrived at Rosbrien there were other women digging in the plots. If there was a man in the field he was old and not able for the work in England. My mother said hello across the low wall to this woman and that woman and when they didn’t answer back she said, They must be all gone deaf with the bending over.
She left Alphie in the pram outside the plot wall and told Michael mind the baby and don’t be hunting for berries. Malachy and I jumped over the wall but she had to sit on it, swing her legs over, and get down on the other side. She sat a minute and said, There’s nothing in the world like a new potato with salt and butter. I’d give me two eyes for it.
We lifted the spade and fork and went to the plot but for all we got there we might as well have stayed at home. The earth was still fresh from being dug and turned over and white worms crawled in the holes where the potatoes and carrots and heads of cabbage used to be.
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