Visions of Gerard Read Free

suffer and be harsh in return, one the other, and drop turds of iron on brows of hope, and mop up sick yards and sad—“I’ll tell you, Ti Gerard, little one, in life it’s a jungle, man eats man either you eat or get eaten—The cat eats the mouse, the mouse eats the worm, the worm eats the cheese, the cheese turns and eats the man—So to speak—It’s like that, life—Dont cry and dont bother your sweet lil head over these things—All right, we’re all born to die, it’s the same story for everybody, see? We eat the cow and the cow gives us milk, dont ask me why.”
    â€œYes, why—why do men make traps for little mice?”
    â€œBecause they eat their grain.”
    â€œTheir old grain.”
    â€œIt’s grain that’s in our bread—Look here, you eat it your bread? I dont see you throw it on the floor! and you dont make passes with the dust in the corner!”— Passes were the name Gerard had invented for when you run your bread over gravy, my mother’d do the soaking and throw the passes all around the table, even to me in my miffles and bibs at the little child flaptable—But because of our semi-Iroquoian French-Canadian accent passe was pronounced PAUSS so I can still hear the lugubrious sound of it and comfort-a-suppers of it, M’ué’n pauss , as you’d expect Bardolph to remember his cockwalloping heigho’s of Eastcheap—My father is in the kitchen, young and primey, shirt-sleeves, chomping up his supper, grease on his chin, bemused, explaining moralities to his angels—They’ll grow 12 feet tall in the grave ere the monstrance that contains the solution to the problem be held up to shine and make true belief to shine, there’s no explaining your way out of the evil of existence—“In any case, eat or be eaten—We eat now, later on the worms eat us.”
    Truer words were not spoken from any vantage point on this packet of earth.
    â€œWhy? Pourquoi ?” cries lil Gerard with his brows forming woe and inabilities—“I dont want it to be like this, me.”
    â€œThough you want or not, it is.”
    â€œI dont care.”
    â€œWhat you gonna do?”
    He pouts; he’ll go to heaven, that’s what; enough of this beastliness and compromising gluttony and compensating muck—Life, another word for mud.
    â€œCome, come, little Gerard, maybe there’s something you know that we dont know”—My father always did concede, Gerard had a deep mind and deep things to think that didnt find nook in insurance policies and printer’s bills—They’d never write Gerard a policy but in eternity, he knew we were here a short while, and pathetic like the mouse, and O patheticker like the cat, and O worse! like the father-cant-explain!
    â€œAwright,” he’ll go to bed and sleep it off, he’ll tuck me in too, and kiss Ti Nin goodnight and the mouse be no lesser for her moment in his hands at noon—Together we pray for the Mouse. “Dear Lord, take care of the little mouse”—“Take care of the cat,” we add to pray, since that’s where the Lord’ll have to do his work.
    Ah, and the winds are cold and blow forlorner dust than they’ll ever be able to invent in hell, in Northern Earth here, where people’s hopes though warm fail to conceal the draft, the little draft that works all night moving curtains over radiator heat and sneaks around your blanket, and would bring you outdoors where russet dawn-men with coldchapped ham-hands saw and pound at wood and work and steam with horses and curse the Satan in the air that made all Russias, Siberias, Americas bare to the blasts of infinity.
    Gerard and I huddle in the warm gleeful bed of morning, afraid to get out—It’s like remembering before you were born and your hap was at hand and Karma forced you out to start the story.
    â€œWhere is she the