Visions of Gerard Read Free Page A

little mouse now?”
    â€œThis morning. The cat has shat her in the woods ( Le chat l’a shiez dans l’champ )—with the little pipi yellow you see in the snow down there, see it?”
    â€œ Oui .”
    â€œ Voilà your fly of last summer, she’s dead too—”
    We think it over in motionless trance, as Ma prepares Pa’s breakfast in the fragrant kitchen below.
    â€œAngie,” says Dad at the stove, “that kid’ll break my heart yet—it hurt him so much to lose his little mouse.”
    â€œHe’s all heart.”
    â€œWith his sickness inside—Ah, it busts my head—Eat or get eaten—not men?—Hah!—There’s a gang downtown would, if their guts were big enough.”
    Gerard’s feeling of the holiness of life extended into the realm of romance.
    A drunkard under an ample tent was never more adamant concerning how his little sister should behave—“Mama, look what Ti Nin’s doing she’s going to school with her overshoes flopping and throwing her behind around like a flapper!” he yelled one morning looking out the window—It was one of those days when he was suffering a rheumatic fever relapse and had to stay in bed, weeks sometimes, some days worse than others—“Aw look at her!—” He was horrified—He refused to let her do it, when she came home at noon he had a speech worked out for her—“I’m telling you Gerard, you’ll be a priest some day!” my mother’d say.
    Meanwhile the kids at church did the sign of the cross some of them with the following words:
    Â 
    â€œ Au nom du père
    Ma tante Cafière
    Pistalette de bois
    Ainsi soit-i”
    Â 
    Meaning
    Â 
    â€œIn the name of the Father
    My Aunt Cafière
    Pistolet of wood
    Amen”
    Â 
    There’s my pa—Emil Alcide Duluoz, at that time, 1925 a hale young printer of 36, dark complexioned, frowning, serious, hardjawed but soft in the gut (tho he had a gut so hard when he oomfed it and dared us kids butt our heads in it or punch fists off it and it felt like punching a powerful basketball)—5:7, Bretonsquat, blue eyed—He had a habit I cant forget, even now I just imitated it, lighting a small fire in the ashtray, out of cigarette pack paper or tobacco wrapping—Sitting in his chair he’d watch the little Nirvana fire consume the paper and render it black crisp void, and understand, mayhap, the bigger kindling of the 3,000 Chillicosms—That which would devour and digest to safety—A little matter of time, for him, for me, for you.
    Too, he’d take fresh crisp MacIntosh apples of the Fall and sit in his easy chair and peel em with his pocket knife, making long tassels around and around the fruitglobe so perfect you could have hung them like tassels’ canopies from chandelier to chandelier in the Hall Tolstoy, the which we’d take and sling around and I’d eat em in like great tapeworms and they’d end up flung out in the garbage can like coils of electric wire around and around—After which he’d eat his peeled apple at the gisty whitemeat cutsurface with great slobbering juicy bites that had all the world watering—“Imitate the roar of a lion! Imitate a tiger cat! Imitate an elephant!”—Which he’d do, in his chair, for us, evenings in New England, Gerard on one knee, me on the other, Nin on his lap—That is, when ever there was no poker game to speak of downtown.
    â€œAnd you my little Gerard, why do you look so pensive tonight? What’s goin on in that little head?” he’d say, hugging his Gerard to him, cheek against soft hair, as Nin and I watched rave lip’t and rapt in the happiness of our childhood, little dreaming what quick work the winds of outside winter would do against the timbers and tendons of his poor house.
    In the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.
    Gerard had