chapter 14. now that we’re happy
He was living up there on 131st Street. He’d got himself mostly silence for a life now. But you see I loved him more than anything else in the world, so we’d all visit much as we could. Like I told you, he’d been making furniture. But for some reason he took to deciding, right at the very end of his life, that he’d make a fiddle. And he got some wood and he carved it out and it was shaped like a fiddle — like this, ya know? Some people call it a violin. He had garnet paper, and he wrapped it around a cork and he sat out there all day, varnishing and carving and sanding. Then he got some horsehair, shit knows where, and strung his-self a bow. He said that music’d been some sort of gift in his life, there’d been this important piano and all. My grandmother even played a piano down the tunnels, but that’s something else altogether. Wrap yourself in that blanket there, sister. Anyways, yeah. So he’d be there making tea in his apartment and waiting to go down to the stoop to work on his fiddle and he had this thing, this tea cosy, to keep the pot warm. It belonged to my grandmother’s mother, Maura O’Leary. And one day when he’s making tea he just leaves it on his head! It was something his kids did to him once. Even did it for me when I was a kid. Just cause he liked it, it was funny to him. And maybe he liked it there, on his own head, like it was keeping his memories warm or something.
And he’d go on down and sit there on 131st with his half-made fiddle and this goddamn tea cosy on his head. He got laughed at, but he didn’t care; he was dying, he allowed hisself some of that there eccentricity, ya know? I bought him a Walkman once — I had money back then — but he didn’t take no truck in those sort of things. Damn, he even got a small cosy for my Lenora, but she didn’t like to wear it, can’t rightly blame her. We was visiting lots and sitting out there with him on the stoop and those were the good days, the best of days. And we was all there — Lenora too — when he played that fiddle for the first time. Man, he played so bad, it sounded terrible, man; it was awful, right? But it was beautiful too. And he sang this song which is a blues song which don’t go with no fiddle, and it goes, Lord, I’m so lowdown I think I’m looking up at down. We was so happy sitting there on the stoop that we went changed the words, and we were singing, Lord, I’m so high up I believe I’m looking down at up. Cars going by. We even heard some gunshots far on down the street, but we didn’t pay no mind.
Which is one of the things I always do find myself thinking about. Looking up at down and looking down at up. I never heard nicer than that, no matter which way you believe it.
I know you’re cold, sister, but I’m cold too. And, man, it was the coldest day when I went to his apartment. Dancesca and Lenora, they’re making visits to her family; we all of us got two families no matter which way we think on it. Like ol’ Faraday. I went on up the stairs and I was smoking then — no, no — cigarettes; cigarettes, sister — and so I always made sure that I stubbed it out in the flowerpot just one floor down from his apartment, ’cause I told him I’d given up the smoking.
I told you. Later.
Anyways. Listen up.
Just me on my own, knocking on the door. Normally he’d be curled up on the couch or something, in some amount of pain, but this time he just opened the door for me — it was 1986 and he was eighty-nine and he was shoving close to timber. But this time he opened up the door and said, I saw you coming down the street, son. He was all done up in his overcoat and scarf and that damn stupid tea cosy. I went on in and took off my coat and sat myself down and turned on the TV and this baseball game came on, see, the Yankees and the Red Sox. He asked me who’s winning? And I told him the Yankees just scored, even though they hadn’t. He had this old friend who liked the Dodgers and the Yankees. So it made my grandaddy happy if the Yankees won. Yankees just hit a homer, I said. And then he just came on over to the couch and said, Let’s you and me take a walk. I says to him, It’s cold out, but he says, I’m feeling good today, I could walk a million miles. Let’s watch the game, I said, but then he just reached out and dragged me up from the seat — he had some power still — and we put on our overcoats and went outside. Here’s this old man with a tea cosy on his head and outside it’s colder’n fuck and the only ones about are a couple of guys selling smack and sprung.
We went on down the deli and bought ourselves a copy of the Daily News, and I never seen him with so much energy. I heard sometimes if you know you’re gonna die then you get energy.
Y’ain’t gonna die, Angela, come on.
And then, see, he shoved some tobacco in his mouth but I didn’t say nothing even though I wanted a cigarette. He always said he was old enough to be allowed a vice, said the one thing an old man regrets in his life is that he behaved hisself so well. So, anyways, we went on to the subway and changed a couple of times and went all the way down to that tunnel that he dug way way back. We went out and we was standing by the East River near a pile of rubbish by the old Customs House, when he says to me, he says, There’s a gold ring under that there river. Your own great-grandmomma’s, he says, and I says I know, ’cause he told me a million times. And then he says to me — you know what he says? — he says, I’d like to walk through that there tunnel and say hello to my old friend Con, he says, that’s what I’d like to do.
And I says, Huh?
I’d like to walk under that there river, he says.
And, course, I says, You’re crazy. And he just sighs and says, Come on, we’ll go down and just ride that train.
We can’t walk the tunnel, I says.
I said ride the train, he says. Ride, son.
So we went on down the steps — I won’t never forget it — we put in the tokens, and I helped him on down the steps. He still had his walking stick. At the edge of the platform we waited for the M train — it’s the M train, isn’t it? Yeah. And when it arrived, brakes squealing, he held me back by the elbow and stared at me in the eyes like this and said, he says, How about it? And I said, You wanna walk under the river? It’s Sunday, he said, let’s wait for the next one and see how long it takes ’tween trains. Might be much as half an hour. On Sundays they don’t run so good. I don’t know how long it took, but it was damn near thirty-five minutes and — I swear to whoever be up there, I swear — we looked at each other and laughed, my grandaddy and me. Then the door of that train closed and the platform was left empty save us. And we went nodded at each other. Right, he says, just a few short yards, that’s all. And we slapped hands. I was quick then — quicker’n now — and I vaulted on down onto the tracks and reached up to take ahold of him, help him down. We don’t have to do it, I says, and he says, I’d like to. It’s what I want to do. Just a couple of yards.
Watch out for the third rail, I says. And he’s all happy, saying, I know what the third rail is, son.
And then he asks me, Y’all got a lighter? And I asks why. And he says in case the train comes early, we can flick it so’s the driver sees us.
I gave him the lighter and asked him how long it’d take us to walk, and he says fifteen minutes give or take. And I says, We best hurry.