“That’s the family plot.”
“I know.”
“There’s a grave there for you, right at the stone, and one for me, and two for the children next to that if they need them. Peg’ll have her own plot with George and the boy, I imagine.”
“When did you do all that?” Francis asked.
“Oh years ago. I don’t remember.”
“You bought me a grave after I run off.”
“I bought it for the family. You’re part of the family.”
“There was long times I didn’t think so.”
“Peg is very bitter about you staying away. I was too, for years and years, but that’s all done with. I don’t know why I’m not bitter anymore. I really don’t. I called Peg and told her to get the cranberries and that you were here.”
“Me and the cranberries. Easin’ the shock some.”
“I suppose.”
“I’ll move along, then. I don’t want no fights, rile up the family.”
“Nonsense. Stop it. You just talk to her. You’ve got to talk to her.”
“I can’t say nothin’ that means anything. I couldn’t say a straight word to you.”
“I know what you said and what you didn’t say. I know it’s hard what you’re doing.”
“It’s a bunch of nothin’. I don’t know why I do anything in this goddamn life.”
“You did something good coming home. It’s something Danny’ll always know about. And Billy. He was so glad to be able to help you, even though he’d never say it.”
“He got a bum out of jail.”
“You’re so mean to yourself, Francis.”
“Hell, I’m mean to everybody and everything.”
The bleachers were all up, and men were filing silently into them and sitting down, right here in Annie’s backyard, in front of God and the dog and alclass="underline" Bill Corbin, who ran for sheriff in the nineties and got beat and turned Republican, and Perry Marsolais, who inherited a fortune from his mother and drank it up and ended up raking leaves for the city, and Iron Joe himself with his big mustache and big belly and big ruby stickpin, and Spiff Dwyer in his nifty pinched fedora, and young George Quinn and young Martin Daugherty, the batboys, and Martin’s grandfather Emmett Daugherty, the wild Fenian who talked so fierce and splendid and put the radical light in Francis’s eye with his stories of how moneymen used workers to get rich and treated the Irish like pigdog paddyniggers, and Patsy McCall, who grew up to run the city and was carrying his ball glove in his left hand, and some men Francis did not know even in 1899, for they were only hangers-on at the saloon, men who followed the doings of Iron Joe’s Wheelbarrow Boys, and who came to the beer picnic this day to celebrate the Boys’ winning the Albany-Troy League pennant.
They kept coming: forty-three men, four boys, and two mutts, ushered in by the Fiddler and his pals.
And there, between crazy Specky McManus in his derby and Jack Corbett in his vest and no collar, sat the runt, is it?
Is it now?
The runt with the piece out of his neck.
There’s one in every crowd.
Francis closed his eyes to retch the vision out of his head, but when he opened them the bleachers still stood, the men seated as before. Only the light had changed, brighter now, and with it grew Francis’s hatred of all fantasy, all insubstantiality. I am sick of you all, was his thought. I am sick of imagining what you became, what I might have become if I’d lived among you. I am sick of your melancholy histories, your sentimental pieties, your goddamned unchanging faces. I’d rather be dyin’ in the weeds than standin’ here lookin’ at you pinin’ away, like the dyin’ Jesus pinin’ for an end to it when he knew every stinkin’ thing that was gonna happen not only to himself but to everybody around him, and to all those that wasn’t even born yet. You ain’t nothin’ more than a photograph, you goddamn spooks. You ain’t real and I ain’t gonna be at your beck and call no more.
You’re all dead, and if you ain’t, you oughta be.
I’m the one is livin’. I’m the one puts you on the map.
You never knew no more about how things was than I did.
You’d never even be here in the damn yard if I didn’t open that old trunk.
So get your ass gone!
“Hey Ma,” Billy yelled out the window. “Peg’s home.”
“We’ll be right in,” Annie said. And when Billy closed the window she turned to Francis: “You want to tell me anything, ask me anything, before we get in front of the others?”
“Annie, I got five million things to ask you, and ten million things to tell. I’d like to eat all the dirt in this yard for you, eat the weeds, eat the dog bones too, if you asked me.”
“I think you probably ate all that already,” she said.
And then they went up the back stoop together.
o o o
When Francis first saw his daughter bent over the stove, already in her flowered apron and basting the turkey, he thought: She is too dressed up to be doing that. She wore a wristwatch on one arm, a bracelet on the other, and two rings on her wedding ring finger. She wore high heels, silk stockings with the seams inside out, and a lavender dress that was never intended as a kitchen costume. Her darkbrown hair, cut short, was waved in a soft marcel, and she wore lipstick and a bit of rouge, and her nails were long and painted dark red. She was a few, maybe even more than a few, pounds overweight, and she was beautiful, and Francis was immeasurably happy at having sired her.
“How ya doin’, Margaret?” Francis asked when she straightened up and looked at him.
“I’m doing fine,” she said, “no thanks to you.”
“Yep,” said Francis, and he turned away from her and sat across from Billy in the nook.
“Give him a break,” Billy said. “He just got here, for chrissake.”
“What break did he ever give me? Or you? Or any of us?”
“Aaahhh, blow it out your ear,” Billy said.
“I’m saying what is,” Peg said.
“Are you?” Annie asked. “Are you so sure of what is?”
“I surely am. I’m not going to be a hypocrite and welcome him back with open arms after what he did. You don’t just pop up one day with a turkey and all is forgiven.”
“I ain’t expectin’ to be forgiven,” Francis said. “I’m way past that.”
“Oh? And just where are you now?”
“Nowhere.”
“Well that’s no doubt very true. And if you’re nowhere, why are you here? Why’ve you come back like a ghost we buried years ago to force a scrawny turkey on us? Is that your idea of restitution for letting us fend for ourselves for twenty-two years?”
“That’s a twelve-and-a-half-pound turkey,” Annie said.
“Why leave your nowhere and come here, is what I want to know. This is somewhere. This is a home you didn’t build.”
“I built you. Built Billy. Helped to.”
“I wish you never did.”
“Shut up, Peg,” Billy yelled. “Rotten tongue of yours, shut it the hell UP!”
“He came to visit, that’s all he did,” Annie said softly. “I already asked him if he wanted to stay over and he said no. If he wanted to he surely could.”
“Oh?” said Peg. “Then it’s all decided?”
“Nothin’ to decide,” Francis said. “Like your mother says, I ain’t stayin’. I’m movin’ along.” He touched the salt and pepper shaker on the table in front of him, pushed the sugar bowl against the wall.
“You’re moving on,” Peg said.
“Positively.”
“Fine.”
“That’s it, that’s enough!” Billy yelled, standing up from the bench. “You got the feelin’s of a goddamn rattlesnake.”
“Pardon me for having any feelings at all,” Peg said, and she left the kitchen, slamming the swinging door, which had been standing open, slamming it so hard that it swung, and swung, and swung, until it stopped.
“Tough lady,” Francis said.
“She’s a creampuff,” Billy said. “But she knows how to get her back up.”
“She’ll calm down,” Annie said.
“I’m used to people screamin’ at me,” Francis said. “I got a hide like a hippo.”
“You need it in this joint,” Billy said.
“Where’s the boy?” Francis asked. “He hear all that?”