Francis walked half an hour due north from downtown, right into North Albany. At Main Street he turned east toward the river, down Main Street’s little incline past the McGraw house, then past the Greenes’, the only coloreds in all North Albany in the old days, past the Daugherty house, where Martin still lived, no lights on, and past the old Wheelbarrow, Iron Joe Farrell’s old saloon, all boarded up now, where Francis learned how to drink, where he watched cockfights in the back room, and where he first spoke to Annie Farrell.
He walked toward the flats, where the canal used to be, long gone and the ditch filled in. The lock was gone and the lockhouse too, and the towpath all grown over. Yet incredibly, as he neared North Street, he saw a structure he recognized. Son of a bitch. Welt the Tin’s barn, still standing. Who’d believe it? Could Welt the Tin be livin’? Not likely. Too dumb to live so long. Was it in use? Still a barn? Looks like a barn. But who keeps horses now?
The barn was a shell, with a vast hole in the far end of the roof where moonlight poured cold fire onto the ancient splintered floor. Bats flew in balletic arcs around the streetlamp outside, the last lamp on North Street; and the ghosts of mules and horses snorted and stomped for Francis. He scuffed at the floorboards himself and found them solid. He touched them and found them dry. One barn door canted on one hinge, and Francis calculated that if he could move the door a few feet to sleep in its lee, he would be protected from the wind on three sides. No moonlight leaked through the roof above this corner, the same corner where Welt the Tin had hung his rakes and pitchforks, all in a row between spaced nails.
Francis would reclaim this corner, restore all rakes and pitchforks, return for the night the face of Welt the Tin as it had been, reinvest himself with serendipitous memories of a lost age. On a far shelf in the moonlight he saw a pile of papers and a cardboard box. He spread the papers in his chosen corner, ripped the box at its seams, and lay down on the flattened pile.
He had lived not seventy-five feet from where he now lay.
Seventy-five feet from this spot, Gerald Phelan died on the 26th of April, 1916.
In Finny’s car Helen would probably be pulling off Finny, or taking him in her mouth. Finny would be unequal to intercourse, and Helen would be too fat for a toss in the front seat. Helen would be equal to any such task. He knew, though she had never told him, that she once had to fuck two strangers to be able to sleep in peace. Francis accepted this cuckoldry as readily as he accepted the onus of pulling the blanket off Clara and penetrating whatever dimensions of reek necessary to gain access to a bed. Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?
Maybe I won’t survive tonight after all, Francis thought as he folded his hands between his thighs. He drew his knees up toward his chest, not quite so high as Foxy Phil Tooker’s, and considered the death he had caused in this life, and was perhaps causing still. Helen is dying and Francis is perhaps the principal agent of hastening her death, even as his whole being tonight has been directed to keeping her from freezing in the dust like Sandra. I don’t want to die before you do, Helen, is what Francis thought. You’ll be like a little kid in the world without me.
He thought of his father flying through the air and knew the old man was in heaven. The good leave us behind to think about the deeds they did. His mother would be in purgatory, probably for goddamn ever. She wasn’t evil enough for hell, shrew of shrews that she was, denier of life. But he couldn’t see her ever getting a foot into heaven either, if they ever got such a place.
The new and frigid air of November lay on Francis like a blanket of glass. Its weight rendered him motionless and brought peace to his body, and the stillness brought a cessation of anguish to his brain. In a dream he was only just beginning to enter, horns and mountains rose up out of the earth, the horns-ethereal, trumpets-sounding with a virtuosity equal to the perilousness of the crags and cornices of the mountainous pathways. Francis recognized the song the trumpets played and he floated with its melody. Then, yielding not without trepidation to its coded urgency, he ascended bodily into the exalted reaches of the world where the song had been composed so long ago. And he slept.
IV
Francis stood in the junkyard driveway, looking for old Rosskam. Gray clouds that looked like two flying piles of dirty socks blew swiftly past the early-morning sun, the world shimmered in a sudden blast of incandescence, and Francis blinked. His eyes roved over a cemetery of dead things: rusted-out gas stoves, broken wood stoves, dead iceboxes, and bicycles with twisted wheels. A mountain of worn-out rubber tires cast its shadow on a vast plain of rusty pipes, children’s wagons, toasters, automobile fenders. A three-sided shed half a block long sheltered a mountain range of cardboard, paper, and rags.
Francis stepped into this castoff world and walked toward a wooden shack, small and tilted, with a swayback horse hitched to a four-wheeled wooden wagon in front of it. Beyond the wagon a small mountain of wagon wheels rose alongside a sprawling scatter of pans, cans, irons, pots, and kettles, and a sea of metal fragments that no longer had names.
Francis saw probably Rosskam, framed in the shack’s only window, watching him approach. Francis pushed open the door and confronted the man, who was short, filthy, and sixtyish, a figure of visible sinew, moon-faced, bald, and broad-chested, with fingers like the roots of an oak tree.
“Howdy,” Francis said.
“Yeah,” said Rosskam.
“Preacher said you was lookin’ for a strong back.”
“It could be. You got one, maybe?”
“Stronger than some.”
“You can pick up an anvil?”
“You collectin’ anvils, are you?”
“Collect everything.”
“Show me the anvil.”
“Ain’t got one.”
“Then I’d play hell pickin’ it up.”
“How about the barrel. You can pick that up?”
He pointed to an oil drum, half full of wood scraps and junk metal. Francis wrapped his arms around it and lifted it, with difficulty.
“Where’d you like it put?”
“Right where you got it off.”
“You pick up stuff like this yourself?” Francis asked.
Rosskam stood and lifted the drum without noticeable strain, then held it aloft.
“You got to be in mighty fair shape, heftin’ that,” said Francis. “That’s one heavy item.”
“You call this heavy?” Rosskam said, and he heaved the drum upward and set its bottom edge on his right shoulder. Then he let it slide to chest level, hugged it, and set it down.
“I do a lifetime of lifting,” he said.
“I see that clear. You own this whole shebang here?”
“All. You still want to work?”
“What are you payin’?”
“Seven dollar. And work till dark.”
“Seven. That ain’t much for back work.”
“Some might even bite at it.”
“It’s worth eight or nine.”
“You got better, take it. People feed families all week on seven dollar.”
“Seven-fifty.”
“Seven.”
“All right, what the hell’s the difference?”
“Get up the wagon.”
Two minutes in the moving wagon told Francis his tailbone would be grieving by day’s end, if it lasted that long. The wagon bounced over the granite blocks and the trolley tracks, and the men rode side by side in silence through the bright streets of morning. Francis was glad for the sunshine, and felt rich seeing the people of his old city rising for work, opening stores and markets, moving out into a day of substance and profit. Clearheadedness always brought optimism to Francis; a long ride on a freight when there was nothing to drink made way for new visions of survival, and sometimes he even went out and looked for work. But even as he felt rich, he felt dead. He had not found Helen and he had to find her. Helen was lost again. The woman makes a goddamn career out of being lost. Probably went to mass someplace. But why didn’t she come back to the mission for coffee, and for Francis? Why the hell should Helen always make Francis feel dead?