The Town and the City: A Novel

by Jack Kerouac

  Joe tooted the horn and yelled: “Come on, boy, we’re goin’ fishing!”

  Francis jumped in the car a little surprised, and they drove off to the creek in the woods. When they got there Joe took out the rod and reel and stationed himself on the bank and started casting about with a lonesome concentrated air, while Peter stretched out on the ground and Francis sat on the runningboard of the car a little ruefully. The soft red sky, mellifluous with low colors, melted warmly in the pool of the creek, pine-shapes darkened all around, the summerbugs flip-flopped in silent air, a dog barked far away, voices murmured across the hush of the fields from farms and from Lacoshua. All over the woods among thickets and leaves and tree-tops, and on the secret enveloped floor of the forest murmurous with crickets, was something dark and splendid and soft … nightfall in the land in May.

  “I guess the old man would be here with us if he could,” suggested Joe, looking at his brothers and grinning, “so I guess he won’t begrudge us a little fishin’.”

  “He’d be the last one to stay in that coffin,” said Peter, gazing dreamily up through the trees. “This is great—or at least,” he turned to Francis, “at least it’s a hell of a lot better than sitting in Central Park.…”

  “Oh, yes … it’s the real thing,” murmured Francis, smiling.

  “Tell you what,” said Joe, casting off again, and wetting his lips in a brief and businesslike way, “I’ve made arrangements to buy old man Bartlett’s farm outside Galloway. You know the one, just near the Shrewsboro line. He’s an old hellcat, you know, and he’s so sick and tired of sitting there all alone he’s willing to sell out cheap, equipment and everything. I’m going to make a home for Ma and Mickey and for my own kids. There’s forty acres there, I could plant corn, potatoes, feed, everything.”

  “You need money and help to start a farm, don’t you?” observed Francis.

  “I’ll get a G.I. loan and handle the work myself. What the hell, I’ve got two hands, haven’t I?”

  “You’ve never done any farming before.”

  “I learned a little on the farm here when we were kids, and besides I can learn, can’t I? Mickey’ll go to high school, but he can help.”

  “If you can stand it out in the country.…”

  “Shore I can stand it!” laughed Joe good-naturedly. “Give my kids a lot of room to play in! Let ’em roam! I want to live a good life and have good times! Boy, after that damn Brooklyn I’d rather live out in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming even, and if you’ve ever seen Wyoming you know what I mean. Hyah! hyah! hyah!”

  “I haven’t had that pleasure,” laughed Francis.

  “What are you going to do now, Francis?” asked Peter suddenly.

  “Oh,” smiled Francis, “didn’t you hear? I’m going to Paris.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve already received my letter of acceptance at the Sorbonne.”

  “And what are you going to do there?” demanded Peter curiously.

  “Nothing, I suppose. Perhaps I might get a perspective of some kind.”

  “Perspective? What do you mean?”

  “On this country, I guess. Everyone who’s going there is saying the same thing, I’m only repeating what I hear.” And Francis smiled ever so faintly. “You know, from a different vantage point—a different culture and so on. It ought to be nice in itself in any case. And so,” said Francis, smiling, and holding out the palm of his hand, “what are you going to do now?”

  “Me?” cried Peter, almost dumbfounded by this kind, unexpected query. “Why, I don’t know.” He stared at Francis foolishly. “Not an idea in the world, I haven’t thought of it at all.”

  Francis simply nodded, as it were decisively, and fell silent, and seemed amused but at the same time delicately satisfied with this answer. And Joe wandered up along the creek with his pole.

  A moment later they heard him whoop as he reeled in a catch, a glistening, wriggling black bass that fought for its life in a lonesome furious splashing in the silence of dusk. He brought it back and hung it over the bank in the water, by a chain, to keep fresh, with a hook torn through its dumb mouth.

  Peter sat on the bank, deeply silent, watching the fish swimming back and forth on the tugging chain.

  “Okay, Willie, take it easy,” laughed Joe, looking over Peter’s shoulder, “you might as well relax, I’ll see if I can catch your brother to keep you company”—and he cast off again, nudging Peter exuberantly.

  Peter could not take his eyes off the struggling enchained fish. He had done some fishing as a boy but now after all these years, and perhaps after the strain of his father’s death also, there was something he could not understand, something hurt, something inexplicably troubled in his feeling about the fish and the fact that a hook was torn through its mournful mouth. He watched its gaping eyes almost with terror. Unaccountably he remembered something he had read a few days before, in the New Testament, something about Jesus and his fishermen casting their nets in the sea.

  “This is what happens to all of us, this is what happens to all of us!” Peter kept thinking over and over again. “What are we going to do, where are we going to go, when do we all die like this?” For a moment he thought he was going to cry, as though he had no control any more. He looked at Francis meekly. Francis noticed; and Peter had no idea what made him look at Francis that way, he felt abashed and childish.

  “Come here and look at this,” Peter finally said.

  Francis came over and looked with a smile, nodding as though with appreciation.

  “Back and forth, back and forth, with a hook in his mouth.”

  “Yes,” said Francis.

  “A minute ago everything was all right … and now! Like people, don’t you think?”

  “You mean the fish!” yelled Joe from down the bank. “He don’t feel nothing or know nothing, he’s just a fish.”

  “From which arises the term ‘poor fish,’ I guess,” said Francis.

  “Did you ever hear that expression they use in New York, Francis? I mean the Village writers especially. They say ‘salvation through sensibility.’ What little sensibility this fish has is not saving him at the moment, it’s only telling him that he’s doomed for certain suffering.”

  “You get so wrought up. Why trouble yourself?”

  “Where did you learn not to trouble yourself, you of all people. Don’t you remember that time we talked up in the attic, all the things you said?”

  Francis laughed.

  “Why do you laugh?” demanded Peter, looking hard at him, almost paling, suddenly, with a terrified sense of anger, resentment, dumb loneliness.

  “Well, heavens, why shouldn’t I laugh!”

  Peter was flushing with embarrassment, he realized he was acting like an idiot, nervously, foolishly, yet there was “no other way,” he kept thinking, there was no other possible way for him to be in the world, as though he himself had a hook torn through his mouth and was chained to the mystery of his own dumb incomprehension.

  He watched Joe fishing and wondered what Joe thought, silent and absorbed as he was. He watched Francis and the inscrutable halo of indifference that always seemed to surround his pale, narrow face.

  “And therefore,” sighed Peter, “we catch a fish, we lock him up in the compartment where there’s no water and he suffocates and dies, alone, while we drive along in the fresh New Hampshire air. He had the water of this brook and the sunshine in the afternoon … and now we’re going to throw him in the back of the car and let him die. There it is.”

  “What the hell you want me to do,” called Joe, “throw it back?”

  Joe was irritated and impatient with the whole thing, foolish as it was on a little fishing excursion that he wanted to enjoy. But Peter, riven with the idea, idiotic before his brothers, persisted, with strange disaffected nervousness, gaining sheepish gloating satisfaction by the moment, and yet infuriated because that was not what he wanted at all.

  “It’s all right, he’s only meddli
ng in God’s system,” joked Francis almost kindly.

  “I’m not God, I’m not supposed to meddle,” cried Peter, staring at him worriedly, “and even if I could, say if I had the power of miracle, I couldn’t alleviate the suffering without breaking up God’s purpose in the whole thing.”

  “There, perhaps, is the cream of the jest.”

  “Ah! that’s so easy to say! What are we supposed to do in a suffering world … suffer? That’s not enough to satisfy the big feeling we might have of wanting everything and wanting to like everything. How can we be fair in an unfair situation like that?”

  “Why do you insist so much?” joked Francis again, to a degree grimly now.

  “Why is it that we can bear our own troubles and pain because we believe in … in fortitude—”

  “Soap opera talk, my dear boy. You should say ‘quiet desperation,’”

  “—and we have to believe in fortitude,” ignored Peter, “of course we have to, but we don’t grant that fortitude to fellow creatures like the fish here.” He pointed at it, hesitantly.

  “How strange!” breathed Francis with sudden curiosity. It suddenly occurred to him that his brother Peter must be mad.

  Peter seemed to sense this. He pointed his finger, almost accusingly, but with a grin, rattling along: “Jesus warned against the sin of accusing any man of madness, Francis, he even said that no man was mad!”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t sit there with that look on your face!” cried Peter, jumping up jubilantly. “Stop thinking that I’m insane. Did you know, for instance, that Jesus always got angry when they brought a lunatic before him? He knew who was responsible, always, he knew what madness meant better than anyone has known since. He said to one woman who brought her mad daughter, ‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ How do you figure that one? That’s all he said. Then another time when his disciples complained they couldn’t heal a certain lunatic, he said, ‘Oh, faithless and perverse generation—it is because of your unbelief.’ It was unbelief that created and aggravated the madness of the madman. The faith that moves mountains didn’t recognize madness anywhere, it only recognized people, people who are responsible, like the annoyed parents you see sometimes on the streets slapping their kids around … don’t you see those things?”

  “Why do you keep asking don’t you see, don’t you see?” Francis was peering at Peter with curiosity and amused interest, yet with genuine, almost troubled concern now.

  “And why do you keep asking that?” cried Peter, flushing.

  “Why, I haven’t the faintest idea,” laughed Francis, looking up. “But your parent, by the way, slapping the child, it would be rather weary, wouldn’t it, to trace that responsibility back to the original slap in the face that everyone got? Wouldn’t it now?” Francis was smiling with urbane amusement now and blushing too, furiously.

  “Is that why you give up?” Peter looked up with sudden soft curiosity.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. You see,” Francis reddened, “it’s just … really … that the original slap in the face has completely … vanished. It cannot be known who did it. It’s all wearying—no one knows … no one can be blamed.… Where is your original annoyed … parent … or unbelief … or whatnot? Therefore, you see …” Francis leaned forward with the palm of the hand held out.

  Peter stared at him. Francis was still leaning forward with his gesture.

  And Joe, who had been listening in silence, came over and sat down and lit a cigarette, and said, “I didn’t know you read the Bible, Petey.” He looked at Peter gravely, with an awe-struck seriousness that was full of kindness, even to Francis who noticed.

  They drifted off into other things, talking warmly, enjoying each other’s company with a kind of understanding they had never had among one another before. It was as though Peter had revealed their common situation, and their differences in it, their individual sorrows, and the sorrows of Francis, by exposing himself like a child and agitating the drama of their secret and especial concerns, making them see one another with serious eyes. This was, after all, so much like the action of the man who had been their father.

  In the morning the burial took place. The mother’s people, the Courbets, were there, as well as the Martin relatives. The Martin children noticed for the first time with peculiar impact the tremendous difference between their father’s and their mother’s people. The Courbets, Uncle Joe and all the others, were white-haired, calm, almost beautiful people of silence, aloofness, and dignity. Like their mother, nothing fazed them, and they were strong and determined. But the Martins, all of them so abundantly similar to the dead man, were mournful, tempestuous, argumentative, sensitive, nervous, furious.

  At nine o’clock the coffin was closed, and four solemn strong young men, Luke Marlowe, Tony Hall, and two of the Martin cousins hoisted the box off the bier and carried it to the hearse in the bright morning sunshine. The Martin boys, even Francis strangely, watched with a proud and inexplicable sense of gratitude, since as sons of the deceased they were not supposed to carry the coffin and the sight of these grave young strangers supporting the weight of their father was like penitence, humility, labor, and honesty, like all those things as unquestioning as the very honor of mankind itself. They felt no grief any more for their father—the modern funeral had done its sleek gloved work—but this ritual, this last ritual, was good, and somehow true.

  The procession got underway. Luke Marlowe drove the first car with Joe and Patricia sitting in front, and the mother, Ruthey, Mickey and Peter in the back. The others followed in their cars. They proceeded through the streets of little Lacoshua following the beflowered hearse, and the townspeople, who all knew the name of the dead man, paused in their Monday morning affairs to watch, the men removing their hats—briefly—before walking on. Somewhere a churchbell was ringing, and everywhere Lacoshuans knew that George Martin had died.

  “Oh, Ruthey,” said the mother, gripping her daughter’s hand, “now I know I did the right thing bringing him back home. I’m so glad! And look over there … our little church, where we were married, thirty years ago.”

  She began to cry, at last, in the privacy of the car with her children, as they passed the old church. Her whole life with the man gripped at her heart and memory, she gazed at the hearse in front and thought of him lying there underneath flowers, and there was a groan in her breast. She had been an orphan, lonely in the world, and then George Martin had found her and married her, and they had lived a lifetime together, and now she was a widow, the mother of grave young people silent at her side. They passed the church beneath the trees, and later the dark house where she was born, and then the places where she had played as a little girl, the place where the circus had come to town with Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill long ago, the park where she had first seen Martin, the fields where they had strolled under forlorn moons, and then the countryside, the old cemetery under brooding shaggy pines, in the hills, where he was to be buried forever.

  [6]

  On a highway one rainy night in the summer of that year, by glistering waters of a river in a place not far from the lights of a town, among hills and river-bluffs that were like shadows, a big red truck stopped at the one-light junction. Peter Martin, in his black leather jacket, carrying the old canvas bag in which all his poor needments for a long journey were packed, got down from the truck.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he cried, waving. “It’s not raining hard at all. See? Just a drizzle, just a little drizzle. I’ll be all right.”

  The driver of the truck, enshrouded in his high cab, sadly called out: “Well, I guess you’ll be okay then. Remember what I told you now. Walk a quarter mile down the road, just follow the river, till you get to the railroad overpass. If it starts raining hard you can wait there. Then you come to the red lights at the big junction, and there you’ll see the gas stations and the diners, and there’s the main highway that’ll take you right in. It goes over th
e bridge. Got that straight? Good luck to you, man!” He shifted into gear and lumbered off the highway.

  And Peter was alone in the rainy night.

  He was on the road again, traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the lights of the river’s cape, towards tapers burning warmly in the towns, looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life.

  The heat-lightning glowed softly in the dark, and crowded tree-top shores and wandering waters showed through shrouds of rain. When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: “Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter?” And a big soft gust of rain came down.

  He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.

  About the Author

  Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was an American writer best known for his novel On the Road. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac attended Columbia University and then, during World War II, briefly served in the Merchant Marine and the US Navy. Along with his friends, including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, Kerouac was a key figure in the counterculture movement known as the Beat Generation. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, about his struggle to balance the expectations of his family with his unconventional life. Kerouac took several cross-country trips with Cassady, which became the basis for On The Road. The manuscript, which was presented to his editor on a single, unbroken roll of paper—the scroll was later exhibited to record crowds in Lowell—was initially rejected. Upon its publication six years later in 1957, Kerouac was faced with challenges resulting from his newfound fame as he tried to live up to the image portrayed in his novels and faced criticism from the literary establishment for being part of what was considered a fad. He published several more novels including Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and his final great work, Big Sur. He settled with his mother and his wife, Stella Sampas, in Florida, where he died in 1969 at age forty-seven.