“Cigarette?” Billy asked Francis.
“Sure,” Francis said.
Annie stood up and went to the refrigerator in the pantry. She came back with the butter dish and put it on the dining-room table. Peg came through the swinging door, into the silence. She poked the potatoes with a fork, looked at the turkey, which was turning deep brown, and closed the oven door without basting it. She rummaged in the utensil drawer and found a can opener and punched it through a can of peas and put them in a pan to boil.
“Turkey smells real good,” Francis said to her.
“Uh-huh, I bought a plum pudding,” she said to all, showing them the can. She looked at her father. “Mama said you used to like it for dessert on holidays.”
“I surely did. With that white sugar sauce. Mighty sweet.”
“The sauce recipe’s on the label,” Annie said. “Give it here and I’ll make it.”
“I’ll make it,” Peg said.
“It’s nice you remembered that,” Francis said.
“It’s no trouble,” Peg said. “The pudding’s already cooked. All you do is heat it up in the can.”
Francis studied her and saw the venom was gone from her eyes. This lady goes up and down like a thermometer. When she saw him studying her she smiled slightly, not a billboard smile, not a smile to make anybody rich in toothpaste, but there it was. What the hell, she’s got a right. Up and down, up and down. She come by it naturally.
“I got a letter maybe you’d all like to hear while that stuffis cookin’ up,” he said, and he took the yellowed envelope with a canceled two-cent stamp on it out of his inside coat pocket. On the back, written in his own hand, was: First letter from Margaret.
“I got this a few years back, quite a few,” he said, and from the envelope he took out three small trifolded sheets of yellowed lined paper. “Come to me up in Canada in nineteen-ten, when I was with Toronto.” He unfolded the sheets and moved them into the best possible light at longest possible arm’s length, and then he read:,
“‘Dear Poppy, I suppose you never think that you have a daughter that is waiting for a letter since you went away. I was so mad because you did not think of me that I was going to join the circus that was here last Friday. I am doing my lesson and there is an arithmetic example here that I cannot get. See if you can get it. I hope your leg is better and that you have good luck with the team. Do not run too much with your legs or you will have to be carried home. Mama and Billy are good. Mama has fourteen new little chickens out and she has two more hens sitting. There is a wild west circus coming the eighth. Won’t you come home and see it? I am going to it. Billy is just going to bed and Mama is sitting on the bed watching me. Do not forget to answer this. I suppose you are having a lovely time. Do not let me find you with another girl or I will pull her hair. Yours truly, Peggy.’“
“Isn’t that funny,” Peg said, the fork still in her hand. “I don’t remember writing that.”
“Probably lots you don’t remember about them days.” Francis said. “You was only about eleven.”
“Where did you ever find it?”
“Up in the trunk. Been saved all these years up there. Only letter I ever saved.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It’s a provable fact. All the papers I got in the world was in that trunk, except one other place I got a few more clips. But no letters noplace. It’s a good old letter, I’d say.”
“I’d say so too,” Annie said. She and Billy were both staring at Peg.
“I remember Toronto in nineteen-ten,” Francis said. “The game was full of crooks them days. Crooked umpire named Bates, one night it was deep dark but he wouldn’t call the game. Folks was throwin’ tomatoes and mudballs at him but he wouldn’t call it ‘cause we was winnin’ and he was in with the other team. Pudge Howard was catchin’ that night and he walks out and has a three-way confab on the mound with me and old Highpockets Wilson, who was pitchin’. Pudge comes back and squats behind the plate and Highpockets lets go a blazer and the ump calls it a ball, though nobody could see nothin’ it was so dark. And Pudge turns to him and says: ‘You call that pitch a ball?’ ‘I did,’ says the ump. ‘If that was a ball I’ll eat it,’ says Pudge. ‘Then you better get eatin’,’ says the ump. And Pudge, I.e holds the ball up and takes a big bite out of it, ‘cause it ain’t no ball at all, it’s a yellow apple I give Highpockets to throw. And of course that won us the game and the ump went down in history as Blindy Bates, who couldn’t tell a baseball from a damn apple. Bates turned into a bookie after that. He was crooked at that too.”
“That’s a great story,” Billy said. “Funny stuff in them old days.”
“Funny stuff happenin’ all the time,” Francis said.
Peg was suddenly tearful. She put the fork on the sink and went to her father, whose hands were folded on the table. She sat beside him and put her right hand on top of his.
After a while George Quinn came home from Troy, Annie served the turkey, and then the entire Phelan family sat down to dinner.
VII
“I look like a bum, don’t I?” Rudy said.
“You are a bum,” Francis said. “But you’re a pretty good bum if you wanna be.”
“You know why people call you a bum?”
“I can’t understand why.”
“They feel better when they say it.”
“The truth ain’t gonna hurt you,” Francis said. “If you’re a bum, you’re a bum.”
“It hurt a lotta bums. Ain’t many of the old ones left.”
“There’s new ones comin’ along,” Francis said.
“A lot of good men died. Good mechanics, machinists, lumberjacks.”
“Some of ‘em ain’t dead,” Francis said. “You and me, we ain’t dead.”
“They say there’s no God,” Rudy said. “But there must be a God. He protects bums. They get up out of the snow and they go up and get a drink. Look at you, brand-new clothes. But look at me. I’m only a bum. A no-good bum.”
“You ain’t that bad,” Francis said. “You’re a bum, but you ain’t that bad.”
They were walking down South Pearl Street toward Palombo’s Hotel. It was ten-thirty, a clear night. full of stars but very cold: winter’s harbinger. Francis had left the family just before ten o’clock and taken a bus downtown. He went straight to the mission before they locked it for the night, and found Pee Wee alone in the kitchen, drinking leftover coffee. Pee Wee said he hadn’t seen, or heard from, Helen all day.
“But Rudy was in lookin’ for you,” Pee Wee told Francis. “He’s either up at the railroad station gettin’ warm or holed up in some old house down on Broadway. He says you’d know which one. But look, Francis, from what I hear, the cops been raidin’ them old pots just about every night. Lotta guys usually eat here ain’t been around and I figure they’re all in jail. They must be repaintin’ the place out there and need extra help.”
“I don’t know why the hell they gotta do that,” Francis said. “Bums don’t hurt nobody.”
“Maybe it’s just cops don’t like bums no more.”
Francis checked out the old house first, for it was close to the mission. He stepped through its doorless entrance into a damp, deep-black stairwell. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness and then he carefully climbed the stairs, stepping over bunches of crumpled newspaper and fallen plaster and a Negro who was curled up on the first landing. He stepped through broken glass, empty wine and soda bottles, cardboard boxes. human droppings. Streetlights illuminated stalagmites of pigeon leavings on a windowsill. Francis saw a second sleeping man curled up near the hole he heard a fellow named Michigan Mac fell through last week. Francis sidestepped the man and the hole and then found Rudy in a room by himself, lying on a slab of board away from the broken window, with a newspaper on his shoulder for a blanket.
“Hey bum,” Francis said, “you lookin’ for me?”
Rudy blinked and looked up from his slab.
“Who the hell you talkin’ to?” Rudy said. “What are you, some kinda G-man?”
“Get your ass up off the floor, you dizzy kraut.”