by Jack Kerouac
Sweet Ruthey looked smaller than ever now that she was faintly pregnant. The big powerful Rosey had already begun to look like the young mother of uncountable children, with her flushed cheeks, dark blazing eyes, big forearms and authoritative speech. “Did any of you eat?” she demanded almost angrily. Nobody had—and she went off straightaway to look for food to make a lunch for everybody.
“And, Petey!” cried Ruth, embracing her brother joyfully. “I haven’t seen you for so long! What did I tell you about Luke!…”
“Boy, am I glad for you!” cried Peter with unexpected feeling, looking away mournfully. “That’s the kind of guy you should marry.”
“And I did!” she cried gleefully. “We’re buying a house in Tennessee next month and settling down. What about Liz? Do you think she’ll be coming? Do you think maybe she won’t come?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.…”
They all stood before the bier of the dead father, before the mother who was kneeling and whispering softly over her rosary beads. All these young people, flushed and excited with life, bursting with a thousand things to tell each other, saw, in that silence and brooding candlelight, how all their endeavors and glees and absorptions would end. Yet the stillness that crawled into their hearts was not convincing. Yes, death had happened, but somehow it would not happen to them. It was their own father, and their own bending, repining, rosaried mother, but somehow they themselves would be fathers and mothers who would never end, who would never die, who would never bend and pray over the sad sweet consummation among flowers that they saw there. But when they thought: “This is my father, this is the man they called George Martin, this is the George my mother called in the house, this is him so sad and excitable and full of fun and arguments, so near now, still alive, I can still see him, I can hear him, where is he? Where is he? THIS IS PA!” When they realized that, they looked at each other and knew that they would all die too.
Ruthey was almost angry because her father had been so prettily made up by the embalmer. “For God’s sake, that doesn’t look like him! I wanted to see him, I thought I was going to see my father’s face again, I thought about it all night long. I said to myself, ‘Well, Pa is dead, but, by God, I’m going to have my last look at him.’ And now look what they went and done to him! Did you ever see anything so silly!”
At that very moment, the Martin mother was telling her two new sons-in-law how wonderfully her husband looked—exactly the way he looked when they were married long ago. They listened with haggard sympathy and sudden affection for her.
In the afternoon the relatives began to arrive. The mother had telephoned the Galloway newspaper the day before from New York and a small notice was printed in the Sunday obituaries there. But in Lacoshua everybody knew that George Martin was dead, almost everybody knew who he was, and many of them had known him personally in the past. And now, to the amazement of the Martin youngsters, and as the Martin mother watched with her shrewd and ancient understanding, whole hosts of undiscoverable kinsmen began to arrive at the funeral home. The children knew Uncle Harry Martin and the aunts Martha and Louisa—they had been jiggled on their knees many times—and they knew a few cousins, but they did not know the strangers who came trooping into the old house smiling sadly at them.
“Don’t you know your own cousin?” cried the mother gleefully. “This is a son of your grandfather Jack’s brother William, and these are his children. You don’t remember, you don’t know them all—but I know them. Oh, it’s so grand to see you again, Arthur!” She embraced the man and kissed his children, young and old, and the Martin youngsters were amazed. Unknown relatives arrived in old cars spotted with country mud, with their troops of children, their young mothers, their wise and melancholy old folks, their dark young men all dressed in their Sunday best, and paraded before the coffin of George Martin with grave and respectful demeanor. They came from all over New Hampshire, they all knew that George Martin had died.
“Will I ever forget that argument I had with George almost forty years ago, do you remember, Marge?” cried a very old man, taking the mother’s hand and gazing at her fondly. “Do you remember that night? We were all drinking beer in my backyard, I believe it was the Fourth of July, it was summertime anyway, and we were talking about politics, that’s to say we started talking about politics but when we were finished we was yelling politics and we had the whole town listening on the back fence.…”
“I remember that night. I was a little girl. George was eighteen and he was always arguing with older men to show he was the cock of the walk, and we used to listen to him and laugh, all my little cousins and me!” She chuckled eagerly. “Oh, but he was a big showoff in those days!—”
“I’ll say! He was always arguing with his old Uncle Ray!” Almost letting out a whoop in the solemn house, old Ray hugged the Martin mother and whirled her around. “Margie, do you know you haven’t changed much? Why, I could recognize you. Who’s this? Which sprout is this? Mickey? Is he your youngest? Look here, Mickey boy, I knew your sweet little mother here when she was so high and I want you to know that she’s the grandest little girl that ever lived! Look at him! What’s the matter with him? Cat’s got his tongue! Who’s that tall boy over there, is that the Joe Martin I heard about? Come here, Joe, don’t you remember your Uncle Ray?!!”
Joe had seen him once, he had been jiggled on his knee at the age of two on a forgotten night in a farmhouse kitchen when a great circle of laughing faces had surrounded his infant’s awe.
“Well, he grew up, didn’t he? He grew up all right. He shore grew up!”
Faint flashes of remembrance and recognition haunted the minds of the young Martins as the relatives trooped about, faces remembered from some childhood comprehension, faces changed and grown older yet still hauntingly familiar, faces that reminded them of the brooding pine forest and night of New Hampshire long ago when young George Martin and his young wife so proudly visited the innumerable relatives to present their children.
“Who’s the college football player? What was his name? Charley?”
“No, Pete. That’s him on the porch there.”
“So that’s him, so that’s the guy I read about in the papers. Say! He looks just like my nephew Barney Martin—you know Barney, did you ever see young Barney? He’s not here today, he’s up in Maine now, he grows potatoes up there with his young wife Althea. Do you know Althea Smalley?”
“Well, now,” considered the Martin mother, “if I’m not wrong, I think I do. She was the daughter of Emma Martin, wasn’t she, who married a second time after her husband died, married a Jim Smalley—from Welford, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right! that’s right! Say, Margie, you do know them all, don’t you! Hyah! hyah! hyah! That’s who it was, the daughter of Emma Martin—”
“No relation to your people,” added the woman with satisfaction.
“That’s right! No relation! Boy, I’ll say you know them all!”
And then, to add to the innumerable Martins and kin of the Martins by marriage, came the mother’s own people, the Courbets. They were numerous too. No one there that afternoon could keep track of all the families and all the lines represented, all the in-laws and spreading generations and inweavings of that something that wove and wove and begat mysteries in the earth, no one but the Martin mother in all her immortal knowledge of these things.
And then came the friends of George Martin, trooping from Galloway, Massachusetts, thirty miles to the south; and they came from around Lacoshua, men who had known him as a boy and had gone swimming with him, men who had worked with him in the sawmills, men who had known his father well, men who had hung around the Lacoshua barberships with him, who had vied with him for the affection of the town belles in the long ago summer nights. The mother remembered most of them, the children had never seen them and yet it seemed they knew them well. It was all so deeply moving, so deeply mysterious, so deeply joyful to see their father honored and remembered by the intensity of modes
t sorrowful men.
“There he is,” said one man softly, holding his hat against his breast.
“Yep. That’s Georgie, old Georgie,” whispered another man, and these two old partners turned slowly, spoke awhile with the widow, smiled at the children, stood about awkwardly, gravely in the candle-flickering parlor for a few minutes, and then left, walking back to the sunny town together.
The great crowd of friends from Galloway was a joy and a solace that tore at their hearts. Old Joe Cartier arrived with his entire family, a gay raucous troop that had enlivened many a party in the old Martin house on holidays. To see them lunging in, one after another with earnest troubled looks of pain and regret, to see their true sadness, their perturbation, their loss, was a sight to warm the soul. Old Cartier had not changed a bit, he was still the big sturdy man who had been Martin’s lifelong crony, still the redfaced, stolid, white-haired oldtimer with the powerful bulging stare of unbendable determination, still loyal, still unbending in his feelings.
He stood before the bier gazing at Martin. He held the Martin mother by the hand, shook his head, and said only: “George, George, you poor kid!” And he turned away with a griefstricken sense of some impossible mistake.
Martin was dead and they came and stood and passed before his coffin, remembering him as he was “only yesterday it seems,” recollecting the huge eagerness of his soul from the powdered husk of flesh that lay there. For him death had seemed so impossible, especially to these old friends who had not seen him in the last dark years away from Galloway.
There was young Edmund, who had worked in Martin’s printing plant so long, and old Berlot the barber, who came looking like death himself in his discouraged old age, and young Bill Mulligan and his wife, who had never seen Martin without a drink and a cigar in his hand. And there were many other friends who had once formed an informal association of rotating house parties in Galloway, people who had known Martin at his wildest and most wonderfully affable. And finally there was Jimmy Bannon the spastic editor, who swayed grotesquely before the coffin, craning his tortured neck, straining with awful effort to hold his gaze upon this man he had known and worked with. He had always thought so well of “Joth, big Joth!” as he struggled to explain it to Mrs. Martin in the antechamber.
The day wore on towards late afternoon, the Martins were exhausted and hungry, many visitors had come and gone, many heavy condolences had been borne, much pounding grief had returned again every time they saw their father’s face on the satin pillow. And they all knew how barbarous it was to keep their dead father on display so long. He was dead, he was gone, they hated the waxen sheen of his forsaken flesh, they wished he could be buried and remembered as he actually was.
“When Pa died in Brooklyn,” said Peter to Joe as they sat smoking on the porch railing, “I should have gone out and dug a hole for him, something like that. That’s the way I feel. But, God, did you ever see so many people in all your life?”
“Hell of a lot of good it does him now.”
“He’d be glad if he knew. He’d laugh if he knew!”
“He sure would.”
Finally Aunt Martha took the harassed mother by the arm and led her out on the porch, and said: “Now listen to me, Margie. You can’t say no. I’ve got a big dinner waiting for all of you at the farmhouse. That’s what I’ve been doing all afternoon and I’ve got the finest turkey you’ll ever eat. Louisa and John are waiting for you, and Uncle Ray, Arthur, and all the others. We’re all going to eat and enjoy ourselves for a few hours, so get your things and don’t say no.”
“Oh,” sighed the widow, looking up at her husband’s sister with an air of weariness and humorous defeat, “I should say I won’t say no. I can’t tell whether I’m coming or going any more. But, Martha … did you ever see so many people in all your life?” she added fervidly. “I didn’t think it would be anything like this.… They all came!”
“Certainly. My brother was always popular. Everybody liked him. I see he had a lot of friends in Galloway, too!”
“But, Martha … he was so lonesome in New York, he didn’t know a soul down there, he used to sit for hours and just talk about the old days up here and wish that he could be back. I tell you, he was so unhappy.”
“Well,” said the stern and judicious aunt, “he should have stayed home.”
Everybody got in the cars and drove off to the old Martin farm seven miles across the fields and woods of late afternoon, Luke Marlowe, Tony Hall and Joe driving the three crowded cars over the dirt roads.
Just after they left, as a few raven-garmented old ladies who always visited funeral homes hovered around the coffin of George Martin, Francis Martin arrived.
The three old ladies peered with gimlet eyes at him. “Why,” they said, “that must be one of his sons, yes, that’s one of his sons right there!” And they whispered and cronied up like eager excited buzzards. “Yes,” they said, “and he is a nice young man, isn’t he? Oh, he dresses very well, he looks very nice. It’s a pity, such a pity, tsk tsk tsk!”
Francis went out and walked around the block, and when he returned, wondering what in heaven’s name he was doing in a small New Hampshire town on a Sunday afternoon in May, he was almost pleased to see that Liz and Buddy Fredericks had arrived. Actually they had been in town for several hours looking for a room for the night.
“Well, hasn’t it been ages since I’ve seen you!” cried Liz with astonishment. “Francis! I’d almost forgotten all about you, man! Where have you been all these years! Where’s everybody?” She embraced Francis with the amazing recollection of never having done this before.
“I don’t know where everybody is and I have a vague idea that all of this is some kind of crazy dream.…”
“Solid! Let’s get out of here and go to the hotel and goof off awhile, I can’t stand it here. I don’t mean disrespect to Pa, but this is the end!”
Francis and Liz had to wait awhile on the porch while big Buddy Fredericks, who had always liked old Martin, went in and paid his silent respects to the man who had been like his father long ago, before something, perhaps little Liz, had gone out of the world. She was going back to the Coast to sing; he was going to New York and his bebop night.
The old Martin farm had been run by great-grandfather Joseph Martin and his sons, and Jack Martin had been one of the last to leave and go to the little town and become a carpenter. The farm was now owned by the last of George Martin’s sisters, Louisa and Martha, and it was run by Martha’s husband, a gnarled, stubby, silent oak of a man called Will Goldtwaithe who seemed to live in a world of his own while his wife and sister-in-law conducted their vast family interests and absorptions.
The farm was laid deep in the woods. A marsh in back divided the house and barns from a railroad track. On one side were ten acres of cornfield, and on the other two sides a solid wall of pine forests as dark and as dense as a fabled wood in old fairy tales. These woods and the farmhouse were well remembered by the Martin kids who had spent summers there in the mystifying past of childhood glee.
Even the old collie dog Laddy was still alive, shambling about slowly, grown dim and drooling with age. The kids remembered him when he ran flashing across the marsh after stray rabbits, when he barked on moonlit nights at old cars rattling over the dirt road by the railroad tracks, when he roamed his stamping grounds like an adventurous prince of dogs. Now he sat at old Goldtwaithe’s feet growing blind.
A great many people were there. It was a vast tribal out-spreading of the life that had been born and begun on that farm generations before, from the oldest gaffer who sported a handlebar mustache and still remembered great-grandfather Joseph Martin to the little one squawling in his mother’s arms. The Martin mother seemed to know them all, to trace them, sourceless, to the furthest reach of folding earth and darkness.
Young men in clean white shirts, cousins, stood about the yard smoking in clusters, talking about their cars and their work. Inside, the older women got dinner ready in the big kitchen
and the younger women gathered in the livingroom with the babies. The old men sat in the parlor smoking, discussing matters solemnly, sometimes erupting in loud guffaws of laughter. And the little ones who were old enough ran loose throughout the house and around the yard and into the woods.
The sun sloped and reddened, the grass cooled, smoke whipped from the farmhouse chimney. It seemed to Peter, in the yard with the young men, that something, some inexplicable fertility, had risen from the earth to honor his father’s death. He looked around and thought, “I should have known!” There was a pretty girl, a young cousin of his, he was given to understand, who kept looking at him blushingly and had eyes for him. This too was something he had never realized before, something sudden, inexplicable, and fertile. He was amazed and delighted and saddened all at once. It seemed as though he had been gone a long time, almost longer than he could remember, from these things, from this place, from these people who were his people.
When the fragrant turkeys were taken out of the oven, everybody sat down and ate. Then, just as the sun was beginning to set, Joe and Peter sneaked out to do a little fishing at the creek before nightfall. They borrowed Luke Marlowe’s rod and reel and flies and took off in the car.
They had heard that Francis and Liz and Buddy Fredericks were in town so they drove through the little streets of Lacoshua until they saw Francis buying a pack of cigarettes in a corner store.