by Jack Kerouac
Then the bleak January, the friendless February with his iron fingers in your grill of ribs—
Gerard lay abed all the time, getting up only to go to the toilet or occasional wan visits to the breakfast table, where after dishes were cleared, he’d sometimes sit a half hour erecting structures high that I watched standing at the side of him, holding his knee I expect—“What you doin, Gerard?”
No answer but in the action of his hands and the working of his face as he thinks, and I marvel at my love for him—
Then he’d get tired and sigh and go back to bed and try to sleep, at midday, and I had no one to play with any more—I’d bring him drawingboards and crayons, he’d feebly rise to do my bidding—Sitting up, against pillows, legs out, in the white room, and white frost on the windowpane, and my mother watching us in the doorway—Her gleeful way of saying: “You’re having fun now?” as tho everything was alright with the world and 50 years later she’ll still be the same, and seen it all—
“Ti Pousse, Ti Pousse, Ti Pousse, how fat you are Ti Pousse,” he’d say to me, mockfighting and hugging me and stroking my face. “Little Cabbage, Little Wolf, Little Piece of Butter, Little Boy, Little Pile, Little Nut, Little Savage, Little Bad, Little Cryer, Little Bawler, Little Winner, Little Robber, Little Lazy, Little Kitigi—Ti Jean Ti Jean—Ti Jean Louis le gros Pipi—Little Fatty—you weigh two tons—they’ll bring you in a truck—Little Red, Little red mug—Look, Mama, the beautiful red cheeks Ti Jean has—he’ll be handsome little boy!—he’ll be strong!”
I basked in all this just like you would expect someone who deserved it, to bask in eternal bliss—I was going to be made to appreciate it, like a Fallen Angel.
Lancing pain in the legs and vague pain in the chest wakes Gerard in the mid of night, he makes a soft groan and represses even that realizing we’re all asleep, and Mama is exhausted—I lie in the crib across the room, lips to sheet—“Aw it hurts, it hurts!!” he groans, and grabs his pain, which wont stop—It comes on and off like a light.
“Lance, lance, lance, why is this happening to me, what’d I do? I confessed to the priest, I havent hidden anything—It’s not that—Aw well, I guess it isnt worth it living—Ow—Oh Ow—” Hands to face, about to cry. Like a load of rocks dumped from a truck onto a little kitty, the pitiful inescapability of death and the pain of death, and it will happen to the best and all and most beloved of us, O—Why should such hearts be made to wince and cringe and groan out life’s breath?—why does God kill us?—The only answer can be written without words.
And Gerard knows that. He remembers his whole life now. Nothing to do in the long pain night, but hurt. And think. It is the long night of life. And think. The morning he was born somehow there was gray rain and damp overshoes and rubbers in a dreary closet and a brown sad light in the kitchen and angry smirch of bepestered life-faces, and somehow from somewhere out, or in the center, Counsel coming to him, saying, “Dont do it—Dont be born” but he was born, he wanted to do it and be born and ignored the Counsel, the Ancient Counsel—
The pain knifes into his jerking flesh, he jumps in bed a little, and aside, to avoid, it fades away a bit—“To me, to me it’s happening”—He knows it isnt happening to me otherwise I’d be thrashing in my crib—“It’s happening only to me”—He hears Pa snore upstairs, the littler harmonious snores of probably Ti Nin and Ma—It’s only happening to him and it’s the middle of the night and the window leaks and rattles from that wind—Out on the cold canals of Lowell across the river, snow-swirls are turning in the moon—
“O, when will it stop—?”
“O my Lord, help me—”
A stab of pain—“Help me!” he involuntarily cries out loud—“Nobody could know how much it hurts—O my Jesus you’ve left me alone and you’re hurting me—And you too, you were hurted—Aw Jesus—nothing to help me—nothing”—Stab of strange pain, it advertises as it comes and comes with quick and open robbery, and vanishes with your peace—“I’ll have to die, I’ll have to die!” steals the dark cant-help-it thought—“If it doesnt stop”—And “It wont stop” sneaks the other thought, coming with the pain as voucher—
“Throughout all that, throughout that snowy window and the cold night and the big wind, and my leg and everything else in the house, throughout all that there isnt something else?”
And ecstasy unfolds inside his mind like a flower and says Yes, and he sees millions of white dots, like, and in another instant his legs are stabbing again and he’s opened his eyes to concentrate on the concentrating—Like a Roman Soldier left to die on a deserted battlefield and howling for mercy for three days running, without food or water, and finally dying, which is a remembrance of the great American Saint Edgar Cayce (according to him in an earlier transmigration) Gerard a petallish thing of 9 is left to face cold unhopeful bone antagonized deep by elements within itself that will to war and wreck it, he himself, his personal-soul, is but victimized, tyrannized, wracked, flung aside, suffered to be a loser in the dubious game of mortal well-being—Words cant do it—“I’ve been thrown to that!”—A thousand realizations come to him—“It’s got to stop!” the constant human thought as pain continues to hurt—
Words cant do it, readers will get sick of it—
Because it’s not happening to themselves—
“O Lord, Ethereal Flower,
Messenger from Perfectness,
Hearer and Answerer of Prayer,
Raise thy diamond hand,
Bring to naught,
Destroy,
Exterminate—
O thou Sustainer,
Sustain all who are in extremity—
Bless all living and dying things in
the endless past of the ethereal flower,
Bless all living and dying things in
the endless present of the ethereal flower,
Bless all living and dying things
in the endless future of the ethereal flower,
amen.”
Unceasing compassion flows from Gerard to the world even while he groans in the very middle of his extremity.
But comes morning and a temporary cessation of his pain and Ma’s up making oatmeal in the kitchen, the steam from the stove is fragrant and comes and steams Gerard’s bedroom window and gives everything a wonderful new quality of gladness, of simple attempt—The earth and the flesh be harsh, but there’s comradeship below—“I’m making you some nice oatmeal, Gerard, and some nice toasts—wait another five minutes, I’ll put you that on a tray and we’ll have a nice breakfast together.”
“It was a long night, Mama.”
“Well now it’s finished, my golden angel—It was hurting?”
“Oui”—sadly.
“You shoulda called me if it was hurting—Always call me when you need something, Mama is there—There! Ti Pousse is awake—your chum’s gonna get up and you can spend the morning having fun together.”
“O Mama, I’m so happy it’s morning—the oatmeal smells so good—You’re so nice, Mama.”
Such tributes few mothers hear, or at least over so little, and over the oatmeal she blurs and rubs her eyes—“Dear angel, are you comfortable?—here, I’ll fix your pillow—there”—slapping the pillow expertly, then kissing him—“There—Mama’s golden angel—Dont worry, you’ll be all better in two months—the Doctor Simpkins told me—You’ll be able to go out and play in the nice warm weather!—It’ll be March in two weeks and bing, April!—May!—See how fast it goes?”
“Oui, Ma.”
“Dont you worry, with your Mama to take care of you you’ll be well in two shakes of a lamb’s tail—”
Great joy, because of the vacuum created by great horror in the night, floods into his being as he sees his delighted mother come hurrying over bearing the steaming tray to place on his lap—Ahead of him is a long day of inte
rested drawing and erector set—The sun hasnt shown, it’s a cold cloudy day, the windows are gray and portentous with the news of the excitement of life and the healthy and the living—
He eats daintily and formally the simple food, reverencing each bite as tho it was holy, to enjoy it more, and because it is so momentous. “The corner of the toast—good—the middle of the toast—there—” A faint twinge in his legs recalls the pain of the night before, and setting the tray aside with a weary sigh he nevertheless sees it fit to realize, “Ah well, it goes up and down and then it goes no more. It’s best not to frighten anyone, nor harm anyone—dont let them know.”
I’m up in my crib, in long johns, jealous because Gerard got his breakfast before me. I’m thinking “Because he’s sick he’s always waited on before me—Me, me!” I cry. “Me too I’m hungry!” “They always make such a fuss over him,” I pout—I remember that morning, distinctly, standing in the crib like that—Sticks and stones may break my bones but words’ll hurt me never?
In fact, Gerard is a little impatient with me for rattling the crib and throws me an exasperated look—“Eh twé, Oh you!”
And there’s no doubt in my heart that my mother loves Gerard more than she loves me.
After awhile Pa’s up and grumbling in the kitchen over his breakfast, with puffed disinterested eyes, not, as Edgar Cayce explicitly reminds us, “mindful of the present vision before our eyes.”
The long night of life is terribly long and deceptively short.
Caribou the man who was drunkest and gayest the night before, having undergone indescribably ghastly feelings under the bridge where he wobbled and woggled and spit, is now lofting a new morning drink to his lips which will soon plunge him back into—what?
“What else you want me to do?—We all die? We’re all piles of you-know-what? Liars? Poor? Invalids? Well then! I drink! Open the door, belly, gimme another chance.” He gets his other chance, dances jigs till ten, and sleeps at noon. What he does at 4 o’clock in the afternoon is in its poor selfsame essence no different than what the mournful ladies with their beads and moving-lips, in the shadows of the church, are doing—For, the truth that is realizable in dead men’s bones ought to be a good enough truth for everybody, laughers, cryers, cynics, and hopers included, all—The truth that is realizable in dead men’s bones, all great gloomy unwilling life aside, and setting aside my knighthood to thus say so, exhilirates yea exterminates all symbols and bosses and crosses and leaves that quiet blank—For my part, the news about the truth came from the silence of my predecessor diers’ graves.
Sicken if you will, this gloomy book’s foretold.
Comes the cankerous rush of spring, when earth will fecundate and get soft and produce forms that are but to die, multiply—And a thousand splendors sweep across the March sky, and moons with raving moons that you see through drunken pine boughs snapping—When the river with her loaden humus gets heavier at the bank, because of the melting of the caky stiffnesses that’d had the earth seal-locked in her vaunted tomb of Hard—And there’ll be laughter in the melting earth tonight—And there’ll be sawdust, trees, women’s thighs, river bends, starlight, backporches, more babies, young husbands, beer—There’ll be singing in the April tree tops—There’ll be visitations from the South from oft-returning species of visitors with feather tails and beady eyes, avaricious for the worm—And the worm himself will divide into a billion counterparts and come oozing out of parted-sands (black and oily and blue) like as if someone were squeezing the earth from below—There’ll be new fish—There’ll be There’ll-be Himself—
All of a sudden tossed wars of tree-tops will be warmer wars and less dry and crackety ones, and there’ll be rumors and singing down the hillsides as snow melts, running for cover under the bloody light, to join the river’s big body—So that Ocean will again receive her swollen rent, as ever April, yet, landlord without end, be none the richer and with such coffers bottomless how the poorer possible?—In the ocean there is a Spring, deep and verdurous we cant estimate, so I sing the surface one, the Spring that makes us feel so sad and fair, and morning air brings nostalgic cigarette smoke from holy hopey smokers—When hats are whipped and finally succumb, coats flap and run their stories out, and vests disappear, and shirtsleeves are hoisted of a sudden afternoon April 26 and the ballgame is on—The time when all the earth is black with sap—No end to what you could say about Spring, and in that locked-in New England Spring is a big event, long coming, short staying, it flows by as fast as a flooded river—In that river you can see the accumulated debris of seventeen thousand fecundities up the both shores clear to the maw of the well where she began—Marble’d melt in such country at the time, and add veins to the color in the river—Children run out exhilarated as princes and knights, illustriously insane as ancient fools, to weirdly fool in fields and down river banks; to at that time put them behind a knife-carved schooldesk is like asking Thane to stow his Ice Axe and say farewell to his Prow—It is the dizzy lyrical time, airy, ethereal, mists are bright, the sun is never exactly golden, never exactly silver, never exactly bright, never exactly dark, never for a long time dimmed, but races continual eye dazzling wars, reaches everywhere throughout textures of clouds and shows birds’ shining wings—And when the first buds appear on bushes and trees, and your heartborne blossoms float to commemorate new Awakened Ones and fall in migholes and on hopskotch trails, Vaya, then, night coming, and the round horizon all about reverberates with roars of all-sigh all-world all-men Shush War, you’ll know, by the fence, the sad wooden American fences and under the promised yellow moon, the pierce of the arrow of April in your flesh, the promise accounted for in the Tablets of Hardworking Man’s Beardy Serious Prophets: namely, ecstasy of living and dying . . .
You’ll have your cold wars and warm peaces, the frotting and rubbings of all things on all sides, the ecstasy general, orgasms, screams of passion, rites of Spring, May, June, July and the Bees—No matter what anyone says, you’ll have it, you’ll dream you have it and so like the popular lovesong says, You’ll Have It.
Blossoms fluttered from the trees and crossed contrarious Gerardo’s windowpane, he would not balmy truck with Spring and swell with it, but wasted like Sacrosanct and ill-timed Autumn, out of his element—Like my father exactly 20 years later, he was dying during the Resurrection and the Life Renewed.
He was getting worse. Rarely now we saw him out of bed and about the kitchen. Our visits to his beside were still, for he slept a lot. My mother grew rings around her sleepless eyes, and prayed late and rose early to praise early—Her nerves were so shot she was losing her teeth one by one, her stomach was a mass of gelid anxious phenomena, like swarms of snakes—The Snake of Inevitability was rising up and eating the Duluozes.
My father had more time to avoid the sight of his little boy’s death, by busying by burying himself in details of his work at the shop—And as heartbreaking April blossomedburst into May and the mornings and the nights were music, the death in the house grew browner—I remember Springnight the fence in our backyard, and the dim light in Gerard’s sickroom window casting a faint candle-like glow on the lilac bushes, and above the warm teary stars, and the roar furor all around in the city of Lowell: trains across the river, the river itself booming heavily at the Falls, cries of people, doors slamming clear down to Lilley Street.
“Angie, we gotta do some work tonight me and Manuel—I’m going to his house now.”
“Awright Emil—dont come home too late—I’m afraid to be alone if anything happened.”
“Ah well, you should be used to it by now—It’ll happen in time.”
“Dont talk like that—He recovered the last time.”
“Yeah, but I never saw him skinny and quiet like that—Ah,” from the porch, door open, “the beautiful nights that are coming—all for other people—”
“Call Ti Jean, he’s in the yard with his kitty—it’s his bedtime.”
“Take it easy, my girl, I’ll be home before eleven—We got a big order, just came in this morning—Manuel’s waiting—Ti Jean, come in the house—your mother wants you—come on, my little man.”
“Did you take your bath?”
“Aw tomorrow, if I’m dirty I’m dirty—Make me some cortons if you got time, I always like them for my sandwiches at the shop—”
“Bye Emil.”
“Bye Angie—I’m going now.”
Emil Alcide Duluoz, born in upriver St. Hubert Canada in 1889, I can picture the scene of his baptism at some wind whipped country crossing Catholic church with its ironspike churchspire high up and the paisans all dressed up, the bleak font (brown, or yellow, likely) where he is baptized, to go with the color of old teeth in this wolfish earth—Forlorn, the Plains of Abraham, the winds bring plague dust from all the way to Baffin and Hudson and where roads end and the Iroquois Arctic begins, the utterly hopeless place to which the French came when they came to the New World, the hardness of the Indians they must have embrothered to be able to settle so and have them for conspirators in the rebellion against contrarious potent churly England—Winds all the way from the nostril of the moose, coarse rough tough needs in potato fields, a little fold of honey enfleshed is being presented to the holy water for life—I can see all the kinds of Duluozes that must have been there that 1889 day, Sunday most likely, when Emil Alcide was anointed for his grave, for the earth’s an intrinsic grave (just dig a hole and see)—Maybe Armenagé Duluoz, bowlegged 5 feet tall, plank-stiff, baptismal best boots, tie, chain and watch, hat (hat slopey, Saxish, slouch)—His statuesque and beauteous sisters in endless fold-draperies designed by Montreal couturiers tinkling delighted laughter late of afternoons when parochial children make long shadows in the gravel and Jesuit Brothers rush, bookish like “ill angels,” from darkness to darkness—The mystery there for me, of Montreal the Capital and all French Canada the culture, out of which came the original potato paternity that rioted and wrought us the present family-kids of Emil—I can see the baptism of my father in St. Hubert, the horses and carriages, an angry tug at the reins, “Allons ciboire de cawlis de calvert, wait’ll they finish wipin im”—Poor Papa Emil, and then began his life.