by Jack Kerouac
“If I’m going to die, dammit, I want to die in my chair.”
Peter settled him back comfortably in his chair and arranged the blankets around his legs. His father said, strangely:
“That’s right, my poor little boy.”
His wife asked him if he wanted a little breakfast and he said he wasn’t hungry, just a glass of grapefruit juice would do. She brought him that and held the glass to his lips while he gulped blindly. She gazed at him with tender pain, gravity, and sorrow, and then she had to go to work and told Peter to make him a little breakfast later. She went off to work silently, sadly, and Mickey went off to school. Alone with his father in the gray morning, Peter brewed a pot of coffee. He could hear him snoring in the other room beneath the music of the little kitchen radio.
After twenty minutes spent gloomily over a cup of coffee, Peter went in to ask him if he wanted some coffee or breakfast, and saw him there with head lowered, perfectly still in the chair, his lower lip pouting, the ragged hair askew on his head. He called his father in the empty stillness of the house. The old man did not look up with his air of stunned wonder. Peter’s blood crawled with awful understanding. His father was not breathing, his stomach was not rising and falling in tortured wheezes as before, and there was sudden stillness all around him.
George Martin had died as though in his sleep, so quietly that no one had even guessed. And what Peter had imagined to be his snores had really been the lonesome death rattle.
But Peter, understanding that he was dead, refused nevertheless to believe it was so. He went over and picked up a limp wrist and tried to feel the pulse. The old hand slumped back. He placed his hand on his father’s brow with fearful anticipation of cold fleshly marble, but the brow was warm, almost hot. He knelt down in front of his father and cried out: “Pa! Are you dead, for God’s sake? Pa!”—and there was no reply.
“You poor old man, you poor old man!” he cried, kneeling in front of his father. “My father!” he cried in a loud voice that rang with lonely madness in the empty house. He still refused to believe it, with a sense of terrible wonder he reached out and stroked his father’s cheek, like a child, and the notion that now he could stroke his father’s face at will because he was dead and did not know it was awful, it strangled in Peter’s throat. That he could cry out and talk like that, mad and foolish, even though his father was sitting there, too flooded his brain with uncomprehending honor. Without thinking he wiped the mouth of spittle, brushed back the poor ragged hair a little, held his hand on his father’s head unbelievingly, and kissed him on the forehead with a feeling of gentle crumbling grief, and madness, and fear.
“Ruthey!” yelled Peter, looking around the room, his thoughts suddenly fixed feverish on the image of his sister Ruth, that trim sweet daughter of the old man who was so far away as he sat dead. “Hurry up, Ruthey, for Christ’s sake!” Peter was out of his mind as though she would hear him and come rushing immediately. “Oh, somebody hurry up! All of you! Pa’s dead, Pa’s dead!”
He stumbled around the room, stopped to gape at the wall, mused almost absentmindedly, suddenly lashed out with a terrific smash of his fist against the plaster, stared at his bruised aching hand with crazy satisfaction. Almost as suddenly he calmed down, sat down in a chair across the room, gazed at the dead old man, and began to decide what he must do now, what he must do now.
“What will I do?” he asked his father with growing dullness.
He stared at his face, his lowered, pallid mask of a face, the poor face so soon to gape dumbly in darkness, so soon to weep the juices of the grave, to look upon black exfoliating loam and silence and decomposed night. He stared at the lowered eyelids in their last acquiescent prayerful vow, their gloomy sleep, their devout sorrow, their inward-turned religious knowledge, their human tenderness and secret final understanding. He could not believe it. What had killed his father, in God’s name? He had not done it himself, it was not true that he had done it himself! A thousand times it seemed he had done it himself, but it was not so! Who could say that he had done it himself! How would he ever learn that he had not done it himself!
Why was he alone with his dead father like this, what had happened? Where was sweet Ruth, and striding Joe, and poor sarcastic Liz, and dark Francis, and big Rosey, and little Mickey, and lost Charley? Where was his sad and silent mother? Where was the house back home in Galloway? And what was it that had killed his father? Why did he sit there in his chair with his dead lips pouting as from some suffering awful knowledge and experience of hopelessness?
Why did he lie drowned now in the strange ocean of Brooklyn far from the verdant home of his youth? What had happened to him in the fifty-seven years of his life among the scramble and scatter of losses and the impossible griefs and weepings of the poor exasperated world? Amid haunted disappointment, and worrying love, and dear wild wants and mysteries, among wars where the children of the earth go mad—no use, no use …
He had died from the things Peter knew he would die of.… There was his father, the rare flower’s image of him in the world, who had come to live, and care, and work, and die, and go away—leaving nothing now, no seal and mark of his caring anywhere, no monument to his meek figure, no plaque to commemorate his deeds of foolish and woebegone devotion. There was his father, slumped and done in the raw catastrophic world, dead among dust and fury, dead even in his own way, his own suffering true way, his sweet real excellent way, his great way. His embarrassed sheepish shy eyes, modest ways, strong heart, strong hands, true inkstained hands, his strong legs and corded neck and bony jaw, and the love of other men and of children, and the ravenous strange love of attentive delicious women—his admirable life all finished, his soul complete.…
Peter went outside to a candy store and telephoned his mother at the shoe factory, and Mickey at the high school, and then came back in the house and sat looking at his father for the last time.
“In a minute now, in a minute now,” he kept saying anxiously, “everything’ll be all right in a minute now.”
[4]
Several days or so after the death of George Martin in Brooklyn, around the curve of the earth, in Okinawa, two men were running a bulldozer against a pile of rubble at the edges of an air field when they noticed a soldier’s dark, twisted, dusty body turning over in the rock and sand. They shut off the motor, one man wiped his brow, jumped off, walked to the pile of rubble, and the other man jumped down and leaned against the big machine and lit a cigarette nervously.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked the first man in a loud, abrupt voice. He kicked away a few rocks from the pile and leaned his elbow on one knee to examine the body.
“What’s it say on his dawg-tag?” demanded the other man nervously. “Has he got a dawg-tag, Thompson?”
Thompson said nothing, but just leaned there meditatively at the side of the rubble pile, as though thinking about something else.
“Ain’t he got a dawg-tag, Thompson?”
“Aw, he’s turned over, I don’t want to move him.”
“Well, why don’t you see if he’s got a wallet there in his back pocket.”
Thompson pulled out a wallet from the limp-hanging trousers and began looking through it slowly.
“What’s in it?”
Thompson was silent in contemplation of something he had in his hand, and the other man was watching anxiously. The afternoon darkness was deepening, something almost cold had come into the dusty air, a dog barked far away.
“What’s it say, boy?”
Thompson groped slowly through the wallet with a grave searching, sullen curiosity.
“Did you find his name?”
Thompson wiped his brow and deliberately said nothing.
“Did you find his name?”
Thompson lost his temper, turned, held the card up before the other man’s face, and yelled, in a loud irascible voice: “Charles Martin! Charles G. Martin! Galloway, Massachusetts! Born June 16, 1926! Now are you satisfied?!!”
“Is that his name? Charley Martin.” The soldier sitting down thought foolishly about the name for a moment. “I reckon I didn’t know him.”
“Did you think you’d know him, jerk? Do you think you’re the only guy out here, you and your cousins from Louisiana?”
“Well, I could have known him, couldn’t I? What are you making bad jokes about with a fella daid right in front of you?”
“I’m not making bad jokes. All you can do is sit there and ask foolish questions.”
“Lord, I cain’t stand looking at daid fellas, that’s all.”
“You shoulda been around here three months ago, that’s all.”
Silence, grave and sullen silence …
“What’s thet you’re a-looking at now?”
“A letter, a letter. And if you think I’m gonna read a guy’s letter, you’re crazy. It’s his letter, ain’t it? Why do you ask so many stupid questions?”
“I didn’t axe you to read the letter, I just want to know what it says on it,” moaned the other man.
“It says Private Charles G. Martin, APO San Francisco, that’s all it says, and it comes from a guy called George Martin, that’s all. George Martin of 255 State Street, Brooklyn, U.S.A.”
“Didn’t you say he come from Massachusetts?”
“Yeah, he came from Massachusetts but he’s got a letter here from Brooklyn, some guy he knows, maybe his brother or his father or a cousin or somebody”—Thompson was speaking with gentle defeated weariness now—“somebody with the same name, living in Brooklyn, you see?”
“Well then, thet’s all I wanted to know, boy.”
Thompson came over and sat down and lit a cigarette, and stared at the tip of it in moody silence. They just sat there looking around and wondering about the dead boy called Charley Martin, the dusty figure they had just dug up.
[5]
They buried George Martin in New Hampshire, on a long grassy slope off the foot of a hill, in the middle of the farming country around Lacoshua. It was a small cemetery over one hundred years old, with old stones leaning woefully among the waving grass, others fallen and half-buried in the loam, the husks of ancient wreaths mingling with pine cones, wild flowers, and a stonewall that had become a vine in the wild undergrowths of the earth. A great grove of old pines surrounded this burial ground, bending over it shaggily on three sides. From the dirt road at the bottom of the slope wound up an old wagon path over which had marched the funeral of little Julian Martin two decades ago and, before that, the funeral of Jack Martin, George Martin’s own father, almost fifty unclaimable years before.
On this hill, in the distance, one saw the misty lands and farm-fields and pine woods of the old New Hampshire earth from which the Martins of two centuries had risen secretly, hidden and unknown, enveloped and furious, to live and work and die in the brooding presence of themselves and the earth, in the dark atmospheres of their own moody dream of things. Many of them were buried there, grandfathers, grandmothers, unknown lost progenitors of them, forgotten infants, dark aunts, uncles, cousins, ancient brothers and sisters and sourceless kin, and the kin of other families.
The old man had requested that he be buried in this place and his wife agreed as though she had known all along that he had such a longing in his mind.
When Peter heard this he was amazed. Yet he knew that his father never would have consented to be buried in New York among the unnumbered strange dead of the world’s city. He was amazed because his father had never mentioned it to him and because, between his parents, this secret unspeaking pact had long existed, older and deeper than his own mere sonhood. And when Joe heard about it, and Mickey, and the sisters, Ruth and Rosey, they were awe-struck with the realization of some inevitable rule in the huge dark circle of things. But Liz wondered what difference it could make where you were buried. And Francis, receiving a telegram that notified him of his father’s death and of the funeral in Lacoshua, remarked to Anne: “He evidently wanted to be buried among his relatives. It seems rather pathetic, doesn’t it?”
The Martin mother made arrangements in Brooklyn to have her husband’s body shipped to a funeral home in Lacoshua operated by a man who had known Martin in his youth and who knew the old cemetery seven miles out of town. The mother realized now why her husband had been so intent on having his little boy Julian, Francis’ twin, buried there among generations of Martins long ago, as if he had sensed that he himself, these many years later, would have to be buried there before anyone else in the family. She was glad he would be laid to rest close by the dark little angel of the family, the waif of eternity in their souls, “to guard over him.” The Brooklyn undertakers carried the body direct to Lacoshua in a hearse on the second night of his death, after he had lain in state one night in a lonely funeral parlor on a dark neon-winking street in Brooklyn, with no one to see him but his wife and children and a few strangers who wandered in by mistake. When his family left after midnight the lone commercial light was left shining beside his bier and the alley night outside murmured and muttered till dawn. On Saturday afternoon the hearse rolled out of Brooklyn and carried him north to New England. That night the mother, Joe, Patricia Franklin Martin, now Joe’s wife, and Mickey and Peter journeyed up overnight in a car that Joe had bought just a few weeks before.
Then the mournful odysseys for the funeral began. Ruthey and her husband Luke Marlowe, back from the war, drove up from Tennessee and arrived Sunday morning only a few hours after the mother’s party. Rose flew in with her husband and child from the far West, from Seattle, and arrived at the same time. Liz came up with Buddy Fredericks on a train, arriving Sunday afternoon. Francis, the last of the Martins to show up, arrived late Sunday afternoon, alone.
In Lacoshua, the body was laid in state in a great white frame house of noble proportions, now converted into a funeral home, a neat, expansive structure with green shutters, set at the top of a great lawn, under aged trees, far back from a quiet street. The dead man’s wife and some of his children were pleased that he would lie there, if only for a night, in the kind of a house that he had often thought of living in when he was younger and still thinking of following his desires.
How many times they had heard him, on his Sunday drives through the New England countryside in the old days: “Golly! will you look at that beautiful old house there in back of the trees. Just imagine how peaceful and dignified it would be to pass the rest of your days there! Sometimes I wonder why I break my head working and spending money when I could buy a house like that in a few years and live so sweet and peaceful.…”
The mother and the youngsters had arrived at ten o’clock. It was a beautiful May day, a Sunday morning in the small town, fresh with odorous new greenery, thronging faintly with the sound of churchbells in the distant air of the New Hampshire countryside. The mother shook her head sadly as she stood on the lawn of the great house. “Oh, Joey, your father waited and waited for a day like this all Spring, he lost so much blood and he was so cold in the house.… I only wish he could see this now.”
“Well,” said Joe gravely, “he’s here anyway.… This is where he wanted us to bury him.”
“New Hampshire, New Hampshire,” sighed Marguerite Martin, looking around at the beautiful morning and the trees and the distant fields. “He wanted to come back here the worst way. He hated it so much in New York! Joey, this is where your father and I were born and raised, this is where we were married. When we came into town there at Millis Street that was the little church where we were married. And he wanted to come back so bad, to finish his days here. Joey, you’ll never know how unhappy he was down there.…”
“I know, I know.”
The old man was laid out in his coffin among baskets of flowers. He looked like a sweet, saintly young man, pure and inwardly devout in contemplative sleep, silent, virtuous with death, richly content on his satin pillow. Joe and Peter agreed that it did not look like him at all. There was no mournfulness and no eager harassed intensity in that padded and powdered face,
but the mother, sentimental in her grief, was moved, even astonished at the transformation the embalmer had wrought in his Brooklyn moratorium. She whispered sorrowfully at the rim of his bier:
“Well now, he looks exactly the way he was when I married him! See how young and handsome they fixed him, isn’t it marvelous? Just the way he looked. There, you see him now, that’s what he looked like when he was a young man. Poor George, poor George!” she whispered entreatingly. Peter and Joe and Mickey were mortified with crushing sadness, and clustered around their mother. She preferred to stay there gazing at his youngish face, shaking her head with slow amazement and recollection, and they retired and left her there alone.
The boys were exhilarated when Ruth arrived with her husband whom they had never seen. A few minutes later Rosey arrived with her baby in her arm and her short, squatly powerful, gravely scowling husband from Seattle. It was sweetly consolatory to see these two men, these strangers who had married their sisters, bearing regrets for an old man they had never really known. Ruth’s husband, Luke, had seen George Martin once, but both had had tumultuous letters from him. To see them, grave and uncomfortable and tenderly discreet, craning rawburnt necks, moving with the stiff and awkward solicitude of strong men at solemn gatherings, arriving over the long raw night of travel with the grim air of determination and sympathy, was consoling. The Martin brothers clasped their hands gratefully and smoked with them out on the porch.
Luke Marlowe was a strapping slow-spoken Tennessean who looked like the hunter and woodsman that he was. He said very little, smiled a lot, was extremely polite, considerate, vast with deep instinctive knowledge, and kindly as a bird. Yet they marveled at the huge bulge of his shoulders and something raw and powerful in the weighty hang of his hands beneath his clean white shirtcuffs.
Big Rosey’s husband, whose name was Tony Hall, at first glance seemed to be the very opposite of Marlowe. He walked on twinkling bandylegs, whirled about with quick attentiveness whenever someone spoke to him, turned his head convulsively aside in swift decisive consideration, answered with a kind of curtness—and yet they saw that he too spoke very little, that he was depthless with earnest attention and regard, keen, sensitive, nervous with polite apprehension and, like Marlowe, raw with strength, in his case a kind of packed, furious strength that seemed to strain and throb in the thrust of his neck and in the quick action of work-gnarled hands. He and Rosey and the baby were going to go live in Alaska within a year. Young Hall had ideas and vigorous muscles that were suitable for that raw unknown country.