“I’ll put a bandage on it,” the second boy said, and he took off the red bandanna he was wearing on his neck and tied it around his friend’s wound. The boy who’d been bitten took a few steps, limping.
“It hurts,” he said.
He picked up a stone and hurled it at the garden where the dog had fled. The second boy picked up two stones and threw them at the eastern sky that arced toward the bed of the Erie Canal that was: whelps alclass="underline" the dog, the boys, Edward.
The moon sent down its light to weave an image in the branches of an oak tree, and Edward saw in it Emmett’s face: a grid of sinew and wisdom that would not stay in the grave. There, perfectly etched by leaf and moonlight, were the lines of the Emmett nose and jaw, the wry slash of smile, vanishing, then reappearing in the flickering light’s gestalt. Keeper of the flame. But there is no longer a flame. Your father is preparing for your departure, Edward.
Under this July moon, now shaped like a battered face, Edward left the porch, walked past the lot where the cattle pens used to be on Champlain Street, parallel to the tracks and the all-but-dead canal. Beyond the canal half a dozen of forty-two sawmills were still active in the Lumber District, which was dying from want of softwood: so many Adirondack pine forests denuded, so few people working in the District that for sixty years gave jobs to men by the swarm: now a zone of quiet. No more overflowing lunch crowds in Black Jack’s, no more cardsharps at the tables, no more brawls, no more dead horses in the canal, all work in the foundries now, or over the hill in the West End, at the Central’s railroad shops. Purpose vanishing from North Albany, eclipsed like the dead Irish of Connacht. Potential actualized into a living neighborhood. And then? Yes. What, then, is the potential of the new actuality?
He walked up Erie Street past the icehouse, and the site of the old wooden Sacred Heart church, where pigs and chickens came to mass, now a vacant lot. He passed the car barns. When he read the Car Barns play to his father in his sickbed (for he would not live to see it performed) Emmett had asked:
“Is that fella in the play supposed to be me?”
“Does he sound like you?”
“He does.”
“Did you say those things he says?”
“Never.”
“So there you are. You and not you, reality and fantasy in one package.”
“You’re a glib man. If you don’t change your ways you’ll come to a bad end.”
Prophetic.
He turned onto Broadway, bats swooping through the glow of streetlamps, and saw Cappy White with a growler under his arm. Edward hadn’t seen Cappy since his son, Bitsy, a softspun boy born without ears, who’d earned candy money eating live frogs for a nickel, went up in flames in church while lighting a candle for his mother, Mamie. Mamie weighed maybe five hundred pounds — nobody ever found a way to weigh her — and grew wider with the years. When Doc McArdle came to examine her dropped stomach she refused him access: “I never showed my front end to anybody but Cappy White. He was the first one, he’ll be the last one.”
Mamie stayed in the house, could not leave it even for Bitsy’s funeral, did not fit into the stairwell. When she died Cappy knocked out siding and two windows, then backed up a derrick to lift her out of bed and carry her to her own funeral. After that he took himself to bed and stayed there, leaving it only to buy food and beer. Hermit of Main Street, punished by the gods for marrying fat and cherishing a freakish child. What peculiar shapes love takes.
“Hi ya, Cappy,” Edward said.
“Who’s that?”
“Eddie Daugherty.”
“Eddie, yeah, you’re back. I heard you lost everything.”
“That’s right, Cappy.”
“So did I.”
“I know.”
“How you livin’?”
“Best way I can.”
“You still got your son,” Cappy said.
“I guess you could say that.”
“I lost my son.”
“I know you did. I hate that, Cappy.”
“So do I.”
“You get out much, Cap?”
“Nope. No reason to.”
“Maybe it’ll get better.”
“No, it won’t get no better. You oughta know that.”
“I keep wondering whether it’s finished.”
“It’s finished.”
“How do you know?”
“They ain’t nothin’ worth doin’.”
“It seems like that, all right.”
“You came back to North Albany.”
“I did,” said Edward.
“What for?”
“No place else to go.”
“That’s a good reason. So long, Eddie.”
Cappy turned toward his house and Edward thought: Now Main Street has two hermits. He walked to Jack McCall’s saloon for an ale. Respite. But maybe not. The night he moved back to Main Street he stopped at Jack’s for an ale. Smiler McMahon and Petey Parker were at the bar when he came up beside them.
“Something stinks,” Petey said.
“Yeah. We don’t need that around here,” Smiler said, and he and Petey crossed the room and sat at a table.
“I’ll have an ale,” Edward said to the bartender, a man he didn’t know, but who obviously took his cue from Smiler.
“One’s all you get,” said the bartender.
Edward let him draw the ale. He picked it up and poured it onto the floor, then let the glass drop and shatter in the puddle.
Now, through the screen door, he saw Jimmy McGrath behind the bar. Four men looked at him when he entered, then went back to their beer. Had he ceased stinking after only a month?
“What’ll it be, Eddie?” Jimmy asked.
“I’ll try an ale. The last glass I had here I never got to drink.”
“I heard about that,” Jimmy said. “And so did Jack. He fired that stupid son of a bitch. ‘Nobody tells Eddie Daugherty he can’t drink in my saloon,’ Jack said.”
Jimmy set an ale in front of Edward, then sat on his stool behind the bar.
“Here’s to Jack,” Edward said, taking a mouthful. “I thought you retired, Jim.”
“I did. Had two toes taken off from the sugar. But I come in nights when Jack needs help. Business is kinda quiet, and I’m next door. Long as I don’t stand up too long.”
“The whole neighborhood’s quiet.”
“Right. But the Tablet Company’s comin’ in up the road. They’re hiring men, and women too, they say.”
“That’ll be good for business.”
Edward took another mouthful of ale.
“Eddie,” said Jimmy, “I’m sorry about the fire, and your wife. They hit you hard.”
“That they did.”
“I remember her coming in after some ale when Emmett was dying. I didn’t serve her first, but she kept at me. She knew what she wanted, that one.”
“You could say that,” Edward said.
“The fire take everything, did it?”
“I saved some journals, inside a trunk in the cellar. They got wet but I can read them. A few books, some silver, odds and ends, a piece of marble. The rest is ashes.”
“How you gonna live now?”
“That’s a hell of a question, Jimmy.”
“People know you’re holed up down there in the house. They see the ice and the food going in. Freddy Doran, the mailman, says the letters he delivers are gone outa the box the next day.”
“I don’t read letters. They’re all about yesterday.”
“We got a letter here for you,” Jimmy said.
He went to the back bar and opened a drawer, handed a letter to Edward.
“Came about a month ago. ‘Hold for pickup,’ it says.”
When Jimmy drew beer for the men down the bar, Edward looked at the letter. Maginn’s hand. He opened it.
Old Chum Edward,
Missed you at your opening night. If you’re up for a bit of a chat, look me up at 65 Division Street, any time. Always a pleasure to see you.