He was in some ways the least of the Dirty Five. In nothing was he first. He was second in many things: in knowledge to Hans, in talent to Finnegan, in social position to Vincent, in stubbornness to Henry. In compassion he was very close to Hans, but he hid this quality better.
But he was a full member of a club that was unique in the world, with a Fat Frenchman, a banana-nosed river rat, a lace-curtain Irishman, and a kraut-head who was at the same time Faust and Apollo.
“There is a lot of shame in my life, Finnegan,” Casey said, “and it isn't over with.”
They talked for several evenings they were together.
But there was more to Casey than this. There are things that cannot be communicated and yet call out their presence. If there had been no more to Casey than this, Finnegan wouldn't have bothered with him, and neither would the rest of them.
Chapter Seven
Finnegan
Who is Iason, but Who is Also of the Other People
1.
I'll drive me a boat, with oar, donkey, and sail
To Cayman and Kingston and Moule,
And beaches at Clarence and Mona and Baile,
And Castres and Passamagoule.
The Desert is burning at Yenbo and Lith,
The Sea is on Fire at Zuqar;
And I will go over the mountains to Chith,
And down with the divers at Ghar.
I'll climb Sinai's rocks to the thunder-clad crest,
And learn all that Moses forgot,
And see if the bush is at Hebron or Hest,
And if it is burning or not.
The sea birds return to Dutch Harbor in June,
The Dragons to Yushu in May;
And summer's eternal in Roi, and Rangoon,
And Kandi, and Kuri, and Cai.
I worry the rovers omitted a land,
Now saw what they ought to have seen.
I'll cover the globe with the palm of my hand
And be where I never have been.
I'll visit the towns with the towering names
That can only be writ in iamb,
And get myself scorched in the Barbary flames,
And washed in the blood of the Lamb.
They tell me Ravenna is sweet in the spring
And Malmo is crisp in the fall.
They say that the Kraak has a retrograde wing,
And no one has seen it at all.
The Dutchman still sails from the Gulf of Oman
And carries a cargo to Ctuch.
There's gold on the ground at the Cape of Delgan,
And nobody bothers it much.
I'll slide in a sloop through a pass at St. Vince,
And shine at the bar at the Ritz,
And drink like a sailor and dine like a prince,
And sleep on the sand at St. Kitts.
I worry the Argonauts rended their sheets
And mired in the Friesian bogs;
I wonder if all the Illyrian fleets
Were lost in Illyrian fogs.
The cork oaks are green and the olives are gray,
The quinces have bloomed and the pear;
And it may be that Lisbon still looks at the bay;
You never will know till you're there.
I'd better go look at the Indies this spring,
I'd better go check on the Horn,
For these are the regions that fall in my ring,
For this is the cause I was born.
I have to go talk to the oyster at home,
I have to go down from the strand;
And I will go out for a while on the foam
And forget that I lived on the land.
These verses were found by Dotty one afternoon in some of the papers of Finnegan. There were more that may or may not have been crossed out, and there were others unfinished with their rimes unfound. One of the marked through stanzas went like this:
I'll have me a home in a shanty in Spain
And a hut on a rock in the Rhine,
And a raft on the Yom with a roof for the rain,
And a cabin of balsam and pine.
And there was one that went:
I ought to go visit La Paz and Lierre
And make them acquainted with me,
And Dublin and Derry, they surely are there,
I really had ought to go see.
These may have been marked through, though. There were a lot of marks on the paper. And there were some more stanzas that it was impossible to read, for Finnegan wrote with a pencil, and the papers were worn and rubbed. Everything about Finnegan was worn and rubbed, and he was a wanderer from before he was born.
Giovanni (John) A. Solli was born in New Orleans on June 1, 1919, son of Giulio Solli and Mary McCracken: he had a brother Giacomo and a sister Patricia.
Actually that is all in the world that is known about him for sure. Beyond these facts, everything is shaky. Later things about Finnegan that involved others are not remembered by those others in the same way. The most simple things about him contain amazing confusion.
The first one around here who knew him was Dotty. Before the war, he had started to come into the bar where she worked. He had his banana nose in full bloom and was plainly from the Italian half of the family. There seemed to be no parents at that time, and Finnegan was not really close to either his brother or sister.
Giacomo had become Jake and was a smooth-talking Irishman who drove taxis and steered tourists. He was not really a high-class man, and did not care for his dago brother except to borrow money from him and make jokes about him. The sister Patricia cared for Finnegan a little more. She was an acrobatic dancer of a striking beauty that was at the same time weird and comical. She moved with sudden lithe strength. The only other one who moved like that was Finnegan, and it was not quite a human way of moving. Patricia was often in Finnegan's company.
But there was another close acquaintanceship of Patti so eerie that it scared Dotty. This was Doppio di Pinne, Dopey the Seaman, who would sometimes come in with Patti, but who was never in town at the same time that Finnegan was. “This is my brother also,” Patti said once. “In fact, he is the same person as Finnegan. When Finnegan was young, he was Finnegan most of the time, but sometimes he was Doppio. We never did understand it.”
Patrish would sometimes check with Dotty when Finnegan had disappeared for a few weeks. But Patti's stories did not agree with Finnegan's as to their early life.
“Finnegan said that, Dotty? I wonder why he said a thing like that? Papa was never anything but a dock worker and a hell of a poor one. I don't know why mama ever married the bum. He was so damned antediluvian that it was embarrassing. I mean the word literally; he was from before the beginning. Finnegan looks that way a little. I guess I do too. An important man called papa ‘The Monster Forgotten’ once. I don't know why.”
“Then Finnegan never went to Italy to art school?”
“If he wants to say he did, then let him say it. But last year is the only time he was ever over there, and only for two days between ships then. He wrote me from Napoli; he was kind of sloppy about it. I don't know why he wants to hark back to the old country; we're not any part of it.”
“And he never took art lessons from Van Ghi?”
“There isn't any Van Ghi. He's just a name that Finn made up. Finn could always draw. But the only lessons he ever had were from the sisters in grade school and the drunken painters in Pirates’ Alley.”
And once Patricia said something else to her:
“I never really knew him, Dot. He is my brother and only a year younger, and he was with me more than anyone else. I sort of raised him, but we were always strangers. It's as though he were a changeling.”
And another time Patricia told her:
“If you ever hear anything bad about him, don't believe it, Dotty, not even if he tells it to you himself. He is incapable of doing anything bad; but the appearances sure do stack up high against him sometimes.”
“I know,�
�� said Dotty.
From this it would seem that all the early stories of Finnegan are suspect. Dotty never asked Patrish about the other stories; nor could she figure why this so friendly boy was so solitary. He worked most of the time. He shipped out. He also rode the river. He was very fond of Dotty. He gave her his money to keep and never asked an accounting. They had fun. He knew everyone in the Quarter. He always talked of being raised in the heart of the Quarter, but Patti said they were from Irish Channel.
Was he a phoney? Of course not. It is the meticulous people who are the phonies. They restrict events. They nail down things with place and date, not knowing that this is a false way to handle things, that most of them should be taken on the fly.
Was he a liar? Oh, a little bit, a little bit. The feeling against liars is a modern thing and it won't last. He was the real thing. He fancied himself an expert. And he did have taste. Dotty could now perceive that the signed pictures by Van Ghi which he possessed were by his own hand, but she did not argue with his thesis that this was the greatest of the traditionalist-modernist-experimentalists. Who could tell? They were good pictures and Dotty liked to have them hanging around the room.
Finnegan was a faithful correspondent while he was in the army. He wrote to Dotty four times a year: for Christmas, for her birthday, and twice more yearly. She appreciated this. She knew he wouldn't do it for anyone else in the world.
But when he came back she realized that there was no permanency in this. She enjoyed the week in St. Louis and the introduction to the mystic order of the Dirty Five. At home she became a dedicated worker in a journalistic enterprise that would fill the rest of her life. To some it seemed that she served a fetish; to her it was the Greatest Thing.
But Finnegan said there were simultaneous worlds and simultaneous people and that the world she was in was not coincident to his. Well, it did seem Finnegan could never have valid connections with a woman of this world, not with her at least.
And he had flown the coop and left her with a last sorrow that could not be forgotten, that must be lived with. He followed a compulsion to seek and not to find.
“You leave me for Creusa, and she is fantasy,” Dotty said once, “she bursts into flames.” And another time she said “Oh Finnegan, and you were also in Arcadia! Santa Maria, why can't we all be in Arcadia?”
2.
It was very lyric and very early, the false dawn before the summer sunrise. The whole world was rustling, and somewhere water was dripping. There was a bloom on the morning. The dew was heavy. An overly sweet smell was abroad, a little like a fruit market gone stale. A bird called; there is a bird that stirs before the mockingbird that stirs before the lark. But it has never been identified; it is always too dark to see it. It calls only in the very early morning, and is silent until the next morning. There is nothing finer than to sleep outdoors on a summer night on perhaps a fragrant haystack. Was this a haystack? It felt hard and grainy, almost like a brush pile. No matter. Small animals were playing about. What small animals would be frisking about the countryside on an early morning? Chipmunks? Rabbits? Squirrels? They had an odd smell.
There is only one thing that smells like that and it is the rat. Odd that there should be rats running around here in the pre-dawn. Finnegan stretched luxuriously and dozed again. But while he slept, he also thought. His sore little head was starting to work. The overly sweet smell was not just stagnant water and rank weeds: it was the smell of dried blood. Someone around here was bloody and nobody else was here. Finnegan watched the stars fade till even the brightest was gone. Then he sat up.
He was in the middle of a very foul dump. There were indeed rats running around, and the dried blood was his own. The bloom was off the morning now. There is a terrible depression that comes on waking like this with no memory of the last hours of the day before.
This is to be Odysseus, to wake up every morning shipwrecked on a strange shore. Shipwrecked and shoeless: for a long time Finnegan had suspected that he had no shoes on. Now he looked and it was so. And his hair was full of blood.
An inventory showed things to be in better shape than could have been suspected. His shoes were in the mud not ten yards away, where he had walked out of them. They were sunken in the mud, but that was no problem. He had not been roiled. He had three dollars left. There was an inch of Old Crow remaining in a bottle. He drank it and began to clean himself in the stagnant water.
This was the beginning of another day in the life of Ulysses.
3.
This is very early in the wanderings of Finnegan, though this sort of morning happened many times. There is no way to put his wanderings into real order; they defy chronology. Much of what is listed here happened before other things already narrated. Now it was early afternoon and he was walking north through rolling meadows. It could have been the same day, but likely it was several days later. He was not wearing his own clothes. He was wearing a shabby outfit too large for him, but it was fairly clean. He was walking with a boy named Howland who was carrying a rabbit he had killed.
They waded a few brooks or creeks that were flowing west or southwest. The only roads they crossed were country roads. Towards dusk, Howland had caught a second rabbit. They stopped in the bend of a creek and made a pit fire to cook them. Then they put a couple of lines into the water. After they had eaten, they lay down for the night and talked.
“Is Howland your first name or last?” Finnegan asked him.
“That's a lot of names.”
“My father believed in giving us names from the old families. I don't know why, because he hated them. I guess he did it to irritate them by having us called by their names. What's your name?”
“Finnegan O’Hannigan McGillicuddy.”
“That sounds like a phonier name than mine. Is that really your name?”
“No. Most of it I just made up. But everybody calls me Finnegan.”
The next day they made possibly twenty miles; they ate a few milky ears of corn that they picked as they went along, and some small potatoes. They stayed in an old barn that was no longer used. Neither of them had any money left, so the next morning Finnegan went to find a town and get some work. Howland wanted to stay where he was. Finnegan came back every night for three nights. On the fourth morning they started north again, and Finnegan had fifteen dollars which he split with Howland.
They were going to Chicago. Finnegan in the unknown past had promised to take Howland to Chicago. He didn't know where they were, and he recalled with sudden amusement that he had worked in a town for three days and hadn't found out the name of it.
Howland had a jingle that he chanted one night as they lay up in a hay loft. It was to a hoe-down sort of tune:
“Five little gophers, slick and bright as sin.
Farmer plowed their house up, house fell in.
“One found a house where he ate and drank.
Rich and fine by a river bank.
“One built a mansion high a-top a hill.
No one ever plowed it up, no one ever will.
“One found a sly house, dry and safe to perch.
One found a fine house underneath a Church.
“Four little gophers, fat and fine n’all.
The other little gopher di’nt find no house at all.”
Finnegan was weary of the travel which he knew would never end. And he was lonesome for things he was sure he would never have. That may have been why he wept in the dark.
The creeks were running north now. The travelers stayed one night in sight of a great river and a town across from it. The next morning they went over. The town was Metropolis and they were in Illinois. Finnegan had suspected for a long time that they were easy of the Mississippi.
Finnegan had a bottle. Howland did not drink. They sang a lot as they walked, and were very happy. Howland in particular had become jubilant. They both worked three days in a little town and got money ahead. They bought food in the grocery stores now and cooked it in the fields. Sometimes they ate a
t coffee shops and roadside cafés. Never before would Howland go into these places with Finnegan.
Finnegan had been spending several hours a day teaching Howland to read better. He had been to school only a couple of years and not learned much. Finnegan would read the funny papers to him as they looked at them together. Then he made Howland read them back to him. Howland couldn't write much, but Finnegan taught him to print and he made progress.
Howland didn't know the address of anyone in Chicago. He didn't know what Chicago was like, but that was where he wanted to go. They worked in quite a few Illinois towns. Several times they ran into sharp remarks when they registered together at hotels. In this, Noble was not noble, and Urban was not urbane, nor was St. Joseph saintly. This was not the South, but neither was it all harmony. They stopped a week in Blue Island before they went into Chicago. Howland didn't know what he wanted to do.
“I want to make a lot of money. A colored boy hasn't much of a chance without money. I would have to be a singer, or a jazzman, or a prize fighter, or a basketball player, or baseball or football. That's the only things I can make any money at.”
Howland was big and strong. Maybe someone could make a fighter out of him, but he wasn't one now. Finnegan could give him fifty pounds and punch him all over the pasture. But he was a terrific runner. Finn had seen him run down rabbits in the open. He had played neither football nor basketball in high school; he hadn't gone to high school. He couldn't read music, but he said that he could tootle a horn. The odds were against his becoming a great jazzman.
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