Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  The ring of the telephone broke our concentration on our communal photographic image, and Molly answered it. Alice Shugrue.

  “She can’t pick me up,” Molly said when she hung up. “It’s raining so hard the sewers are backed up and the streets are flooded. Her engine got wet and they had to tow her out of a huge puddle. She’s at her cousin’s in the North End, and she’s not even going to try to go home tonight.”

  It was truly a fierce storm. Great sheets of water were flowing off the roof past our windows, and you could barely see Pearl Street.

  “So you’ll stay here tonight,” Peter said to Molly.

  “If it keeps up we’ll all have to stay,” Peg said.

  “If it keeps up,” said Peter, “it won’t come down.”

  “Oh dear,” said Molly, “my brother is telling Papa’s jokes.”

  “As paterfamilias he’s entitled,” I said.

  “As what?” Billy said. “Whataya givin’ us all these twenty-dollar words.”

  “Just means the ‘father of the family,’ ” I said. “Also means he’s liberated from his own father—and mother too, you might say. Am I right, Father Peter?”

  “I hope we’re all liberated,” Peter said.

  “I’m liberating Molly from the kitchen,” Peg said.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Molly

  “I’ll help in the kitchen,” Giselle said.

  “No you won’t,” Peg said. “You take it easy. I’m drafting Roger to dry dishes.” And I said silently to myself, “Ah ha, Margaret, ah ha.”

  “It rained like this,” Peter said, “the day I left home in 1913. You remember that, Billy?”

  “You mean the rowboat?” Billy said.

  “Right. You and your father rowed down to rescue me.”

  “I remember,” Billy said. “We took you to the railroad station. Where were ya goin’?”

  “New York, but anywhere would’ve been all right with me. I was just getting out from under. And yet I never really left this place.”

  “It can be a trap,” Molly said, and she turned to Giselle. “So be careful, my dear, if Orson decides you should live here. You are going through with the second marriage, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” Giselle said. “Are we, Orson?”

  “It somehow seems as though deuterogamy is an idea whose time has come,” I said.

  “There he goes again,” Billy said.

  Molly smiled. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Peter was nodding his head at the completion of something, the beginning of something else. It seemed facile to think of the remarriage as a beginning when it was merely the supercharging of an old steam engine that might or might not make it over the next rise. The new name, the child, the remarriage as confirmation that the first marriage was a bust, which it was, these thoughts also saddened me: the sadness of the completion of anything, a book, a marriage, a life. Or a sad painting.

  “There’s one more painting,” Peter said. “It’s upstairs, and it’s not a pretty picture. I warn you against it, but Orson will show it to anybody who wants to see it.”

  “Have I seen it?” Molly asked.

  “No,” Peter said. “Only Orson.”

  And so we all, including Giselle, who had photographed it two months ago when it was embryonic, went up to Peter’s studio to see The Burial, his major unfinished work. If he lived on, it would very probably not be his last in the Malachi Suite. He’d already made several sketches of Malachi and Crip in hell, and was trying to assign a fitting punishment for them; but as of today, The Burial was as far as he’d gone with his great graphic leaps through those abominable events.

  It is raining in the painting, and Colm Dorgan, with the point of a spade, and Malachi McIlhenny, with his muddy right brogan, are pushing the half-folded corpse of Lizzie into her muddy grave, which is too short for her. The grave’s borders are a sea of mud and Malachi and Colm are drenched. Lizzie is naked except for her black stockings and a burlap bag over her head. Colm is pushing her feet into the grave. Malachi is stepping on her right breast with his foot. The left side of her chest is a broad, raw crevasse of flesh, her charred rib cage and parts of her internal organs protruding, the flesh burned off two fingers of her left hand, leaving the burned bones visible.

  A small cottage, Malachi’s, wherein the other witnesses to Lizzie’s burning are locked and awaiting the return of Malachi, is visible in the distant background, as are a sky and a landscape full of demonic figures, including the lithe form of Lizzie dancing on a hill with a web-footed creature with the head of a goat.

  Piles of dirt beside the grave will be heaped on Lizzie and on the secluded grave, which is at the side of a ditch, with a high fence on one side and trees on the other. When the grave is covered with dirt it will be hidden by leaves and twigs, and Lizzie will lie scrunched in it for five days before searchers find her corrupted body, tortured even in death.

  Upon his return from the grave to the cottage, Malachi will, with a long knife in his hand, swear all present to secrecy, and will invent the story to be circulated: that Lizzie ran away from the house in a crazed condition the previous night. Malachi will be especially threatening to his sister, Kathryn, whose throat he swears he will cut if she peeps a word of what happened. When Kathryn swears this out of fear, Malachi will then scrape his trouser leg with the blade of his knife and say, “Oh Kate, that’s the juice and substance of poor Lizzie I’m scraping.”

  And Kathryn will say, “Malachi, even if you scrape off your skin, God will not let the stain be off you. You’re damned, my brother, and I hope the devils in hell never let you draw a painless breath.”

  Upon public revelation of this story, neighbors will sack and burn Malachi’s house, and Malachi and Crip Devlin will be tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in jail. Colm Dorgan will be sentenced to ten years, will serve all ten, and emerge toothless, hairless, mindless, and without a family. Ned Cronin will be given, and will serve, one year in prison, and live six more months before dying of public shame. Minnie Dorgan, though guilty of conspiracy to murder, will be set free because of her advanced age, and will sell all that she owns to move away from Albany.

  In the first six months of his incarceration Crip Devlin will sicken from the pox, develop intolerable headaches and lightning pains to the legs. He will vomit and become incontinent, will develop ulcers of the heels, soles, toes, and buttocks, blockage of the penis, and rubbery tumors in the testicles. At the moment when his memory vanishes and he can no longer remember who he is or what he did to Lizzie, he will die of suppressed urine and an exploded brain.

  In 1890, during the third year of his sentence, Malachi, with leather thongs he created in the shoe shop of the Albany penitentiary, will hang himself in his cell, swearing to the moment of his death that it was not Lizzie but a demon that he burned, and he will be buried in a potter’s field. On the day after his burial his grave will be violated and his corpse stabbed through the heart with a wooden dagger in the shape of a cross, a suitable implement for destroying the soul of a heretic.

  Kathryn Phelan will be the chief witness against Malachi. Already the mother of Francis, Sarah, and Charles, she will give birth to Peter within two weeks of Lizzie’s death. She will also have three subsequent children, in this order: Julia, Mary (Molly), and Thomas.

  Mab Devlin will become a charge of the city, but will escape confinement and become a vanished child.

  The family’s mood, after viewing the painting and listening to my recounting of the details, was so bleak that Giselle suggested putting on some music, and she then unwrapped the gift she’d found in a second-hand store and bought for the house: three player-piano scrolls of the songs “They Always, Always Pick on Me,” “After the Ball,” and “Won’t You Be My Little Girl.” I put on the first one under the hopeful gaze of Julia, whom Peter had etherealized in the sketch of her at the seashore, about age twenty-one, a year away from death, abounding in her virginal glory;
although I noted Peter had emphasized the ample bust line that was common to all the Phelan girls. But even with Julia as a prod, I could not bring myself to pump the piano’s pedals, could not so easily turn my mind from Lizzie to music.

  George Quinn called to tell Peg he had asked Patsy McCall for work, something he had never done before; for city and county jobs paid only pittances, and George always believed that the ban on gambling was temporary that the okay would come down from on high one sunny day and all the gamblers in town would go back to work. But he could afford this fantasy no longer, and so he finally popped the question, and Patsy told him to go down to Democratic-party headquarters in the morning and talk to Tanner Smith, and they’d probably put him to work canvassing the Ninth Ward for the next election Peg said the prospect of a political job so excited George that when she told him about her bequest from Peter and her plan to buy the house he said only, “That’s great, I gotta go. Patsy’s giving me a ride to my car.”

  Peter finally relaxed, took off his neckerchief and his coat, and sat alone at the table, smiling. I leaned across and asked him, “After all these years, what do I call you? Papa?”

  He considered that, then shook his head no. “Sounds like an alias,” he said.

  Billy stood up from the table and, with cane and gimp leg, hobbled into the front parlor.

  “Shall we adjourn?” I said to Peter.

  “You go ahead. I’ll sit here a minute with the chocolates.”

  So I joined Billy, and when I did he said, “I ain’t even gonna collect my elephant bet if they take that bum’s leg off.”

  “You were pretty sure they weren’t elephants.”

  “One of the workers was up there came by Brady’s saloon. All them guys knew the bones was owned by a mastodon, whatever the hell that is. It’s big like an elephant, but it ain’t an elephant.”

  “You’re pretty shrewd, Billy. You shrewd enough to use that money to get married? Money was the main obstacle, wasn’t it?”

  “Who said I was takin’ the money?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Right,” Billy said.

  “Maybe we could have a double wedding,” I said, and that made Billy laugh.

  Doing people favors isn’t always easy.

  If I really was a magician and could command the spirits the way Malachi thought he could, I’d build a skeleton that would have Lizzie’s ribs and fingers, Tommy’s chipped backbone, Francis’s all-but-gangrenous leg with the bone showing, Billy’s broken ankle, Sarah’s near-fleshless arms with bones pushing through skin and with tubes dangling, Peter’s arthritic hips, Walter Phelan’s partial skull, Meister Geld’s toe and thumb, the handless armbone that my sugar whore loved to suck, and I’d have the creature dance to the 1911 tune Giselle brought us to lighten things up with music from the past. Remember the lyric?

  They always, always pick on me,

  They never, never let me be.

  I’m so very lonesome, I’m so sad,

  It’s a long time since I’ve been glad.

  I know what I’ll do, bye and bye.

  I’ll eat some worms and then I’ll die.

  And when I’m gone, just wait and see.

  They’ll all be sorry that they picked on me.

  It’s about four o’clock in the afternoon now, and outside the rain is as torrential as it was at three. Colonie Street is a river. Here, in the midst of this performance by nature, we have no reversal, no ironic sunshine about to dawn. The day is crepuscularly gray, as it seems to have been forever in the life of this family; and there is something so profound in that grayness, in that cloud of unexpungeable horror and loss, that, even when the sun finally does come our way, we grieve at the change, and we pray for thunderstorms.

  Poor hubristic Malachi, think of it. When you cross the border out of the real world, as he did, the way back, if you can find it, is perilous, at best; and not only for yourself. I think of the itinerant Francis, walking abroad in a malevolent world, never knowing what lay beneath the exile his mother and sister had forced upon him; and of the subterranean Molly, burying and resurrecting her sins, and living on to regret everything forever; and of myself, Orson Phelan-to-be, fugitive from the isolato’s disease, about to reinvent marriage with an ambiguous wife of a second dubious dimension; and of all the others in this family: collective of the thwarted spirit, of the communal psyche that so desperately wants not to be plural.

  I am one with the universe, we Phelans say; but I am one.

  The universe answers us with black riddles of the past that refuse to yield their secrets: lost faiths and barren dogmas that weave the web and the winter that the poet of order had seen: the web is woven and you have to wear it, the winter is made and you have to bear it . . . It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you.

  I remember Molly telling me that her mother was always afraid her daughters would meet someone, and in a single night would ruin their lives. But it takes longer than that.

  I left the contemplative Billy and walked to the dining room. I watched my father choosing between a chocolate-covered nougat and a vanilla cream. In the kitchen I saw Giselle drying the dishes alongside Molly and Peg and Roger, the four of them discussing a prolonged kiss that Cary Grant had given Ingrid Bergman in a movie, and I took my cue from that. I gripped Giselle’s face in my right hand and kissed her, did the same to Molly, kissed the radiant Peg, shook Roger’s hand, and I then said to them, “It’s all that we are.”

  They looked at me as if I had gone back into isolation, but when I smiled at them they knew I was as sane as any of them.