Visions of Gerard (3 page)

With my little hands clasped behind me I stand at the kitchen window, sometime not long after, on a gray blizzard day, watching the inky snowflakes descend from infinity and hit the ground where they become miraculous white, whereby I understand why Gerard was so white and because of man came of such black sources—It was by virtue of his pain-on-earth, that his black was turned to white.

It's a cold crisp morning in October, Gerard is going to school with his books and bread and butter and banana lunch and an apple—I watch him going down Beaulieu Street, alone—Gangs of kids run around—At the end of Beaulieu Street is the large gravel play yard of the Green Public School where because the kids werent Catholics the nuns have been telling Gerard and Nin and the kids of St. Louis de France Parochial School that they have tails concealed beneath their trousers—Which some of us (I for one) seriously believe—At that street Gerard turns right to go to St. Louis which is right there along three wooden fences of bungalows, first you see the nun's home, redbrick and bright in the morning sun, then the gloomy edifice of the schoolhouse itself with its longplank sorrow-halls and vast basement of urinals and echo calls and beyond the yard, with its special (I never forgot) little inner yard of cinder gravel separated from the big dirt yard (which becomes a field down at Farmer Kenny's meadow) by a small granite wall not a foot high, that everyone sits on or throw cards against—The big game is card slinging, the bubblegum cards with pictures of movie stars and baseball players (Great God! it musta been Vilma Banky and Rogers Hornsby with young faces on the fragrant bubblegum cards)—They are flung against the wall, nearest wins—The big game at recess—Gerard comes slowly ruminating in the bright morn among the happy children—Today his mind is perplexed and he looks up into the perfect cloudless empty blue and wonders what all the bruiting and furor is below, what all the yelling, the buildings, the humanity, the concern—“Maybe there's nothing at all,” he divines in his lucid pureness—“Just like the smoke that comes out of Papa's pipe”—“The pictures that the smoke makes”—“All I gotta do is close my eyes and it all goes away”—“There
is
no Mama, no Ti Jean, no Ti Nin, Papa—no me—no
kitigi
” (the cat)—“There is no earth—look at the perfect sky, it says nothing”—Little snivelly Plourdes is losing at a game of cards in the corner, the bullies buffet him out—“He's crying—he only thinks of his luck and his luck is worse”—“his luck is mixed up in the bad and the poor”—“Ah the world”—To the other end is the
Presbytère
(Rectory) where Father Pere Lalumière the
Curé
lives, and other priests, a yellow brick house awesome to the children as it is a kind of chalice in itself and we imagine candle parades in there at night and snow white lace at breakfast—Then the church, St. Louis de France, a basement affair then, with concrete cross, and inside the ancient smooth pews and stained windows and stations of the cross and altar and special altars for Mary and Joseph and antique mahogany confessionals with winey drapes and ornate peep doors—And vast solemn marble basins in which the old holy water lies, dipped by a thousand hands—And secret alcoves, and upper organs, and sacrosanct backrooms where altar boys emerge in lace and blacks and the priests march forth bearing kingly ornaments—Where Gerard had been and kept on going many a time, he liked to go to church—It was where God had his due—“When I get to Heaven the first thing I'm gonna ask God is for a beautiful little white lamb to pull my wagon—
Ai
, I'd like to be there right away already, not have to wait—” He sighs among the birds and kids, and over at the end of the yard are gathered the teacher nuns getting ready for the morning bell and lineup, the morning breeze moving their black robes and pendant black rosaries slightly, their faces pale around rheumy eyes, delicate as lacework their features, distant as chalices, rare as snow, untouchable as holy bread of the host, the mothers of thought—Striking awe in children—Monastic ladies devoted to sewing and devout service in their gloomy redbrick hermitage there where we saw them in the windows with their cap flares and cameo profiles bent over rosaries or missals or embroideries, they themselves mostly all the time vigorously curiously digging the scene outdoors—In fact right now a hobo from Louisiana and the East Texas Oil fields who happens to be passing thru Lowell, lies in the straw grass below the Green School fence, knee on knee, grass in mouth, contemplating the flawless void and humming the blues and what could be the thoughts of the old nun at the window watching him—“Lazy bum! (
Paresseux
!)”—“Robber!—Sinner!”

Typical of Gerard that he doesnt look to the fields, the trees down further where Farmer Kenny's fields become a thicket and after a few cottages of Centerville spurting morning smoke the distant hills and horizon meadows of on-to-Dracut and New Hampshire and all that pale brown promise of the sere continent—Gerard was inward turned like a chalice of gold bearing a single holy host, bounden to his glory doom—He sits on the little wall contemplating the kids, and the bum in the field, the nuns in the window, the little girls hopskotching beyond and where Ti Nin is screaming with the rest—“Little crazy, look at her gettin all excited—she doesnt understand the blue sky this morning, she doesnt care like a little kitty—But look—” he looks up, mouth agape—“There's nothing there, not a cloud, not a sound—just like it was water upside-down and what's the bugs down here?” The air is crisp and good, he breathes it in—The bell rings and all the scufflers go to shuffle in the dreary lines of class by class with the head nun overlooking all, the parade ground formation of the new day, latecomers running thru the yard with flying books—A dog barking, and the coughs, and the gritty gravel under restless many little shoes—Another day of school—But Gerard has eyes up to sky and knows he'll never learn in school what he'd like to learn this morning from that sky of silent mystery, that heartbreaking sayless blank that wont tell men and boys what's up—“It's the eye of God, there's no bottom—”

“Gerard Duluoz, you're not in line—!”

“Yes, Sister Marie.”

“Silence! The Mother
Supérieure
is going to talk!”

“Ssst! Mercier! Give me my card!”

“It's mine!”

“It is not!”

“Shut your trap! (
Famme ta guêle
).”

“I'll fix you.”

“Prrrrt”

“Silence!”

Silence over all, the rustle of the wind, the banners of two hundred hearts are still—Under that liquid everpresent impossible-to-understand undefiled blue—

A few Fall trees reach faint red twigs to it, smoke-smells wraith to twist like ghosts in noses of morning, the saw of Boisvert Lumberyard is heard to whine at a log and whop it, the rumble of the junkmen's cart on Beaulieu Street, one little kid cry far off—Souls, souls, the sky receives it all—Nobody can comment on the only reality which is Crystal Naught not even Viking Press—Not even Père Lalumière who now with clothesline-fresh garments parades downhall in the
Presbytère
whistling to his room,
lacrimae rerum
of the world in his smarting morning eyes, pettling and purtling with his lips at thought of the good
cortons
pork-scraps for breakfast comin up just now soon's he gets his dud-o's on and sweeps officially to another day as
Curé
of the World—A good man and true, like Our Mayor in his City Hall and the President Coolidge at his desk 500 miles South to the morning that brights the Potomac same as brights the Merrimac of Lowell—In other words, and who will be the human being who will ever be able to deliver the world from its idea of itself that it actually exists in this crystal ball of mind?—One meek little Gerard with his childly ponderings shall certainly come closer than Caesarian bust-provokers with quills and signatures and cabinets and vestal dreary laceries—I say.

O, to be there on that morning, and actually see my Gerard waiting in line with all the other little black pants and the little girls in their own lines all in black dresses trimmed with white collars, the cuteness and sweetness and dearness of that oldfashion'd scene, the poor complaining nuns doing what they think is best, within the Church, all within Her Folding Wing—Dove's the church—I'll never malign that church that gave Gerard a blessed baptism, nor the hand that waved over his grave and officially dedicated it—Dedicated it back to what it is, bright celestial snow not mud—Proved him what he is, ethereal angel not Festerer—The nuns had a habit of whacking the kids on the knuckles with the edge part of the ruler when they didnt remember 6 X 7, and there were tears and cries and calamities in every classroom every day—And all the usual—But it was all secondary, it was all for the bosom of the Grave Church, which we all know was Pure Gold, Pure Light.

That bright understanding that lights up the mind of the soldier who decides to fight to death—“O Arjuna, fight!”—That's what's implied at the rail of the altar of repentance, for the repenter gives up self and admits he was a fool and can only be a fool and may his bones dissolve in the light of forever—
All
my sins, leaving not jot or tittle out, even unto the smallest least-noticeable almost-not-sin that you could have got away with with another interpretation—But you bumbling fool you're a mass of sin, a veritable barrel of it, you swish and swash in it like molasses—You ooze mistakes thru your frail crevasses—You've bungled every opportunity to bless somebody's brow—You had the time, you will have the time, you'll yawn and wont understand—Ah you're a bum as you are—'T were better to dissolve you—The Holy Milk you act like a curdler and a bacteria in it, yellow scum, sometimes purple or pot green—As you are, it wont do—The Lord
knows
he made a mistake—We talk about “the Lord” out of the corner of our hands for want of a better way to describe the undefilable emptiness of the blue sky on such mornings as the morning Gerard wondered—It's typical of us to compromise and anthropomorphalize and He it, thus attributing to that bright perfection of Heaven our own low state of selfbeing and selfhood and selfconsciousness and selfness general—The Lord is no-
body
—The Lord is no bandyer with forms—All conditional and talk, what I have to say, to point it out—Miserable as a dull sermon on a dull rainy morning in a damp church in the North, and Sunday to boot—We are baptized in water for no unsanitary reason, that is to say, a well-needed
bath
is implied—Praise a woman's legs, her golden thighs only produce black nights of death, face it—Sin is sin and there's no erasing it—We are spiders. We sting one another.

No man exempt from sin any more than he can avoid a trip to the toilet.

Gerard and all the boys did special novenas at certain seasons and went to confession on Friday afternoon, to prepare for Sunday morning when the church hoped to infuse them with some of the perfection embodied and implied in the concept of Christ the Lord—Even Gerard was a sinner.

I can see him entering the church at 4 PM, later than the others due to some errand and circumstance, most of the other boys are thru and leaving the church with that lightfooted way indicative of the weight taken off their minds and left in the confessional—The redemption gained at the altar rail with penalty prayers, doled out according to their lights and darknesses—Gerard doffs his cap, trails fingertip in the font, does the sign of the cross absently, walks half-tiptoe around to the side aisle and down under the crucified tablets that always wrenched at his heart when he saw them (“
Pauvre Jésus
, Poor Jesus”) as tho Jesus had been his close friend and brother done wrong indeed—He genuflects and enters the pew and puts little knees to plank, the plank is worn and dusted with a million kneeings morning noon and night—He starts a preliminary prayer—“Hail Mary—” in French the prayer: “
Je vous salue Marie pleine de grâce
”—Grace and grease interlardedly mixed, since the kids didnt say “grace,” they said “grawse” and no power on earth could stop them—The Holy Grease, and good enough—“
Le Seigneur est avec vous
—
vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes
”—Blessed among and above all women, and they saw their mother's and sister's eyes as one pair of eyes—“
Et Jésus le fruit de vos entrailles
”—“entrailles” the powerful French word for Womb,
entrails
, none of us had any idea what it meant, some strange interior secret of Mary and Womanhood, little dreaming the whole universe was one great Womb—The coil of that thought and wording, not conducive to a true understanding of the nature and emptiness-aspect of Wombhood, the perfect blue sky's our Womb (but not our guts and coils)—“
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pécheurs, maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort
”—No comma in the minds and thoughts of the little boys (and their fathers) who ran it straight thru “
pécheurs maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort
”, sinner always right unto death, no help no hope, born—

“
Ainsi soit-il
”, amen, none of them knowing either what that meant, “thus it is,” it is what is and that's all it is—thinking
ainsi soit-il
to be some mystic priestly secret word invoked at altar—The innocence and yet intrinsic purity-understanding with which the Hail Mary was done, as Gerard, now knelt in his secure pew, prepares to visit the priest in his ambuscade and palace hut with the drapes that keep swishing aside as repentent in-and-out sinners come-and-go burdened and disemburdened as the case may be and is, amen—

Now Gerard ponders his sins, the candles flicker and testify to it—Dogs burlying in the distance fields sound like casual voices in the waxy smoke nave, making Gerard turn to see—But in and throughout all a giant silence reigns, shhhhhing, throughout the church like loud remindful ever-continuing abjuration to stay be straight and honest with your thought—