by Steve Weiner
‘Excruciatingly.’
‘And my virginity?’
‘You will be whole.’
‘Again?’
‘Medically, everything.’
‘Yet espoused fully?’ she asked.
‘Le bon Dieu, Jesu, everybody is moved by your suffering.’
St Martin went to the window and wrote his name on the wet wood. Rain dissolved in headlights that turned on Engel Street. He jumped into the bright droplets and was gone.
‘When …?’ she whispered.
Came the echo.
‘Sooner than you think …’
On 13 March 1955, my pretty mother combed her hair on her bed, then collapsed in a fever. St Christopher walked into the room. He wore a burlap pad where Christ had sat. St Christopher smiled.
‘Yvonne Krems,’ he said. ‘Whose boat glides downriver.’
‘Yes?’
‘Follow me to Ignace.’
‘Where is he?’ she asked.
‘It is difficult to explain …’
Suddenly his flames burned green. The oil portrait of Catherine Labouré glowed. The Palestine sand of Ignace’s diorama burst into flame. St Christopher went to the window, under the photographs of our dead relatives, and jumped.
‘St Christopher’ …?’
My mother threw her wedding ring into the Nemadji, burned her marriage certificate, her permission de marriage, virginity certificate, and scissored my father’s uniform into ribbons. She busted up his black museum. Ed Gien lampshade, lead pipe, everything she threw into the dustbin outside. She scrubbed the floor, even the ceilings of his smell.
‘Oh, Jean, my heart beats like a jackhammer!’
There was a light. The door opened. Catherine Labouré came in. She walked stiffly, as though in pain. Light came from her face. The apartment filled with sweet clouds. Catherine Labouré wore a grey dress with no pockets, a penitent.
‘Yvonne Krems,’ she said, ‘who flies in a golden sun.’
My mother prostrated herself.
‘I come to interrupt your sleep, Yvonne Krems,’ she said.
‘I was not asleep.’
‘But now you are awake.’
‘You will shoot arrows into my flesh,’ my mother said.
‘No one will shoot anything into you.’
My mother sank lower. The atmosphere congealed. I became invisible in the dark and reflective windows.
‘Is it necessary to die?’ my mother asked. ‘To see Ignace?’
‘In a strange way.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘Very soon?’
‘So very soon …’
Catherine Labouré touched my mother at the back of the neck. Then she jumped into the air and was gone.
* * *
‘Le bon Dieu…’ my mother whispered, her hair damp, her cheeks flushed. The lamplight fell across her face. She looked seventeen. She hadn’t moved in fifteen minutes.
‘I clutched a living bird …’ she finally said.
I kissed her under the ear.
‘Poor Mama.’
‘I was a shadow under her wings …’
‘I love you.’
‘She took me far, far away …’
‘I believed in you.’
‘Jean! Her sleeve drifted on my skin.’
‘I loved you.’
‘Jean …’
‘But you never knew it – ’
She was asleep. I kissed her again and covered her in a blanket. I stepped back. She danced in chains down the long Verhaeren prison. These were the visions of our poor mother Yvonne Krems, between 7 March and 17 March 1955, which I also witnessed.
Our mother entered Fork Rivers Clinic.
They undressed her. They tested the electro-galvanicity of her nerves. She was moved to a muslin-covered cot in a soundproofed room. I peeked in and smelled head jelly. Straps bound her arms crossways. Her fine black hair was mussed. Her toes twitched and they wheeled her to a machine.
‘Y sonnent les cloches, fort … fort…’ she said. ‘Those bells ring so loud …’
A grey rag was inserted in her mouth. Delusions fled down the asylum halls.
‘Mother – forgiv – ’
Suddenly a thousand mandibles clacked in a flash of light.
Pzzzzt.
‘IGNACE!’ she yelled. ‘I SEE IGNACE!’
My father jumped on to a chair and crashed into the wall. He clawed the air and hissed.
‘They’ve destroyed her mind!’
* * *
My father dragged me to Toynbee Hall, threw me in, and slammed the doors.
I carried my pyjamas up the corridor past the linen shelves, communal bathroom, gang showers. Outside, beyond long meshed wires covering the windows, down in the courtyard, was a shed of mechanic’s equipment, vises, chains. Across the basketball court was a laundry room. A red light was on over a tractor.
There was a wood dresser, mirror and a basin in my room. Diagonal slats of moonlight crept up my stone wall. I smelled the Nemadji, the wet woods, ferns, sap, berries, small birds, dripping snow in the birches of St Iglesias, Minnesota.
‘Jean …’
I looked out. Etienne Bastide stood on a burial mound. I thought he’d gone back to St Croix. He wore his St Bona venture jacket. A wolf howled beyond the rapids and warm spray moved across the black mud. He showed me a bandaged hand.
‘I cut my wrist for you …’
I crept back into my orphanage room.
‘Jean …!’_
I looked again. Etienne was still there. In the graveyard buds were opening. He held out a towel in both hands. It must have been an old towel because it had a gold cross on it and fringe. On it was the razor.
‘… I …’ he said, smiling. ‘It is I, Etienne Bastide, who loves you …’
He unwrapped his bandage and raised his red wound.
‘… for ever …’
Twelve
I was a hobo.
I travelled west to Sainte Rose du Lac. It was mid-April and the rain was falling. Everywhere I went rain fell in the pines, the fir, the trash timber, on flooded ponds, in logging camps. After a while I couldn’t see a thing. I carried my duffel bag full of oranges, my father’s flashlight, a photograph of Antoinette Hartmann, and slept in cranberry bogs by the peat pots. Black clouds piled over the lakes. Birds screamed from the black clouds:
I was cheated.
I salved my nose with Vaseline.
I dreamed. I climbed black boulders where Antoinette Hartmann was mauled by a bear, but as fast as I climbed I couldn’t get there in time.
I crossed the bogs but the bogs expanded. Everywhere were cranberries, smoke pots and twisted pines. At Little Fork I moved into an empty cabin owned by the Albion Brotherhood. I moved to a better shack that belonged to the Sons of Shiloh. I fell in with Oneida Bible Communists, who fed me hot bread and cranberry soup. I left them for a trailer of Jerusalem evangelists.
Farmers slaughtered cattle because of sickness. I limped through bone piles and slept in them, too. At dawn, at noon, at evening, the sky was blank. I went to Dr Fitzimmons, an ophthalmologist who treated the poor in Bemidji.
‘What is your difficulty, Mr Verhaeren?’
‘I see only blank.’
‘When you look at Bemidji, what do you see?’
‘A vague white.’
The nurse, Marjorie Kims, came in. She was a young woman with orange hair, white stockings. She stuck a hypodermic needle into a bottle, drew off fifty ml, held it against the light, and tapped out the air. She injected me. Miss Kims had a lovely freckle on her wrist. I touched her elbow while she plunged the needle. She paused. She had extraordinary black eyes.
‘Did I hurt you?’ she asked.
‘No. Not at all.’
She went to the door.
‘NOT IN THE LEAST LITTLE BIT,’ I shouted.
She retreated out the door in little phases, such that she was slightly transparent. She raised an eyebrow and smiled know
ingly.
‘… Are you … sure …?’
The injection worked. I threw up three times between Dr Fitzimmons’s office and the river, but when I stopped the streets were cluttered with dark shapes: Protestants, nursing old wounds.
I went to the White River Diner. It was decorated with lacquered fish on wood ovals and gold chains. Behind the counter a one-armed man made sandwiches. Men bent out of the swirling rain and stomped their feet on the welcome mat. Suddenly there was a brightness. I ran out. A bird was electrocuted on a telephone wire, trapped.
I went to Woolworth’s. Suddenly I saw something in a bright light. I wanted it more than anything in the world, but when I bent down to look the shelf was empty.
I visited the museum of religion.
It was in a tenement on Brick Street behind a shelter run by the Presbyterian mission. Hobos begged outside. It was dark inside, very quiet. I was the only one in the museum. Brown carpets absorbed light from the windows. The foyer had bowls of rose petals. Paintings of Jerusalem lined the wall: Kidron, Siloam, the Mount of Olives.
The Catholic exhibit was in a brass case. Inside, against black velvet, brass keys hung on thread over gold brocade fragments. There was a portrait of Pius XII and a dwarf palm tree, and a silver reliquary with a finger in the shadows. Incense smoked around the reliquary. A black iron lion turned on a gold pole.
The Mormon exhibit was in an aluminium case. Joseph Smith knelt on black velvet in miniature white birches. In plastic ferns, between red berries and mugwort, in a shaft of white light, the Book of Moroni opened. Deer watched as the light from the Book of Moroni bathed Joseph Smith.
The atheism exhibit was a sundial with no numbers. Broken white columns rose from an empty, cracked pool. Silver milk pods splayed from white vases and silver seeds lay in milk-white ceramics. A white moth moved its wings back and forth. Around everything was black velvet, the deepest black.
The Pentecostal exhibit was in a tin case lined with black silk. Old men and women, dolls with shaggy hair, were on cogs. I pressed a red button. A papier-mâché dove descended and in a fiery light of aluminium reflections the elders danced.
The Jewish exhibit was in a copper case. There was a Polish village in a deep black forest. Jews in gaberdine stood in a circle wearing black hats, black coats, beards, black shoes. By the well a baby lay in a wicker cradle. I pressed a red button. Smokestack plumes rose behind the forest.
The Calvinist exhibit was in a black velvet-lined wood box. There was a Swiss chalet where Calvinists stirred an enormous kettle. Hands went around inside the brew. Ears were nailed along a fence rail. Calvinists came from the mountain path with Catholic heads on pikes. Catholics were chained to a millwheel, crosses jammed into their fists. I pressed a red button. The millwheel ground the Catholics.
The Methodist exhibit was in a black lead box. A lantern projected into smoke the vision of the Drummer of Tedworth. Behind that were field preachers: John Elias, Christmas Evans, Praying Johnny, Lorenzo Dow. John Wesley clung to the London Wall, his hair wildly flying.
I went outside. Rain fell from black skies. Beggars followed.
‘I’m sick – in a terrible way -’
‘Save me.’
‘I need grace.’
I was out of money. I slept on Fitzwater Street. The dosshouse was crowded. Snow blew in from the broken windows. Men groped drunkenly in the dark. The toilet was broken. A watchman sat on a high wooden stool. Men cried in their sleep.
‘Jennifer …’
‘Marie …’
‘Antoinette …
A bum stroked my neck. I hit him. He left me alone. He went toward the toilet, collapsed like a piece of rubber, bounced down the stairs, crashed into the garbage cans outside. He picked himself up as though nothing had happened, groped back up the stairs and re-registered. In the morning rainwater ran down the streets. A different hobo climbed out of a florist truck.
‘I’ve gone blind,’ he said. ‘In a terrible way.’
I heard there was a hobo camp at Tenstrike so I left Bemidji and followed the rails.
The camp was in a railroad embankment where a trestle bridge faded in the fog. Dead trees turned on a deep, sluggish black river. Chains banged against submerged logs. Hobos stirred a kettle on a fire, flames reflected on their coarse faces. I went down and a tramp gave me soup.
In the curve of the railroad two men turned from the dark, bodies sewn together.
‘We work in festivals and fairgrounds,’ one head said. ‘All over America.’
‘What do you do?’ I asked.
‘You know.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Sure you do. You were born that way. It’s written on your face.’
‘Show me.’
The men twisted. One sodomized the other. The other never stopped smoking.
‘You owe us two dollars,’ they said.
‘What for?’
‘The show.’
‘I ain’t got two dollars.’
‘You want to be next? With both of us?’
I threw my watch in their laps and walked away. A passenger train went by. When the tramps saw the people eating, served by Negroes, they raised their hats and peed. I walked back to Bemidji. An Albanian named Kurt Flood followed me. He wore a khaki duffel coat with insignia from the Korean War.
Kurt and I drove trucks, shovelled walks, carried bricks. It rained almost every day.
Kurt and I got jobs with the municipal park. I went into the toilets and spread disinfectant. We hauled rotted grass in gunny sacks and dumped it on the edge of town.
We lived in a railroad shack. Locomotive headlights swept through at night over the chair, table, and broke into a raving cinema on the wall. Pine resin oozed from the rafters. Kurt showed me photographs of what the Turks had done to his people. From him I learned the force of racial hatred. Sometimes he got the coughs so bad his whole body shook. Then I would go out behind the shack with a lantern so he thought there was a train coming, and he would calm down.
‘Bless you, Johnny,’ he whispered.
During the day we robbed children. They came into the park, Kurt would throw them into the pines, and I rummaged their pockets for change. We survived, but the handwriting was on the wall.
We ate breakfast at the Roadside Café, on Blackwater Street. The café was decorated with photographs of railroad men. Kurt held his hands over the napkin dispenser. It turned into a tureen, full of steaming pea soup.
‘I can do that any time,’ he said.
I asked him about the Kaministikwia Delta.
‘There’s no asylum in the Kaministikwia Delta,’ he said.
‘There isn’t?’
‘Hell no. I’ve been there a hundred times. You must’ve had an episode.’
‘Something. That’s for sure.’
Suddenly I banged my head on the table.
‘I can’t stand it any more,’ I said. ‘What is the meaning of my suffering?’
‘Beats me.’
‘I am a living statue, Kurt,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel any more.’
‘Who said that?’ Kurt Flood suddenly said, eyes sharp.
‘I did, Kurt.’
‘Oh. I thought … somebody outside us … women’s voices …’
‘We’ve become blind,’ I said. ‘In some horrible way.’
We were disgusted with Bemidji. We decided to go to Brainerd. Kurt Flood coughed, shook his head, waved his hands and when he was through coughing said, ‘But the cripple was right, Jean. You can leave the body.’
‘I never told you about the cripple.’
‘Shut up. Listen.’
The Veteran
‘I was an orphan.
‘I grew up in Sault Sainte Marie. The orphanage was run by Arminians, Advanced Agents. Charles and John Wesley’s portraits hung over my bunkbed. Camp Meeting Methodists, the Connexion, Bible Christians, Independent Methodists, Primitive Methodists, I knew the history of my people. I became an exhorter by the age of eight.
We used to drive to Brimlet to have watch nights. We rode to Bay Mills where we sang John Wesley’s hymns by firelight. John Wesley came to me in dreams, out of the grave carrying a lantern.
‘I had weak lungs and was sent to a sanitarium in Bryces Hill. I met Albanians who taught me the tragedy of my people, the falseness of my name. I worked at the age of nine carrying trash at the Father Marquette grave in St Ignace. I cut hay in Paw Paw. I cleaned gutters in Schoolcraft. I had an affinity for the railroads because of the people who lived along them. I sensed they understood my rootlessness, my sense of racial tragedy. I followed the big lines to Chicago.
‘You don’t know anything until you go to Chicago. Chicago is the centre of the world. You always fall back to Chicago. Chicago is full of Balkans, French, Germans, Poles. Chicago just has this stink. It’s the stink of humanity. We all stink, see?
‘Thousands of us passed through Chicago. I moved with socialists, anarchists and bolsheviks. You couldn’t walk on the sidewalk without stepping on moochers. Those were the days. I beat up mush fakers. Pinkerton agents patrolled the railroad yards. They beat us up, but what the hell, we beat them up, too.
‘So this society of wingies, blinkies, and sticks, this was my society. I graduated with them. I got a degree in cheap wine. Our language was different. I didn’t invent it. But it was my life. You’re born that way. It’s funny how it works. I knew the minute I came to Chicago. But there was this element: stew bums and jungle buzzards, stinking bits of running sores and scabs. I had to be protected. See, I was good-looking. Understand, Jean? Understand what I’m saying, Jean? I became a kid, a road kid.
‘His name was William Brick. He was a bad man. He abused me. He threw me to the wolves until I was covered in spunk. But I was under his protection. Nobody touched me without his say-so. And he fed me regular. He was a bad man, William Brick. Toughs came from as far as Cicero to beat him with planks. Vigilantes came and then the Chicago police beat the shit out of William Brick.
‘William Brick and I travelled down the small lines to Missouri. We set up a tent. Men came after work. They wore flannel shirts and denim trousers stained red and everybody smelled like pig turd. We laid tarpaulin on floorboards. William Brick and I performed a play: The Love of Jenny Logan. When the men saw me in a dress they got restless. William Brick sang a dirty song. Night came on. We served beer. William Brick and I did the dirty dance. He invited the men into the back of the tent. That was where I made our money. Sometimes I couldn’t walk for weeks afterward. William Brick counted his money all night. He was very cruel.