Townie_ A Memoir Part 25

He began talking about his own father, and while I don't remember one detail of what he said, I can still hear Pop's voice, the acceptance in it, the forgiveness, and it brought me immediately to one of those weekends when I'd spent the night at his and Peggy's house on campus. When I woke in the spare room late in the morning, Pavarotti was singing and I knew my father was in his room writing. He sometimes played opera as he wrote, and lately he'd wear a j.a.panese kimono at his desk.

But when I climbed the stairs to the kitchen, he was standing in his kimono at the countertop, a cup of steaming tea there, and he was crying. I asked him if he was all right. Did something happen?

He glanced at me, his eyes s.h.i.+ning. "I've been writing about my old man." He shook his head. "I'm more like him than I ever thought I was." He lowered his chin and cried and I hugged my father and he hugged me back.

Maybe my father's forgiveness for his father had begun then, maybe later or earlier, but as I sat on Pop's couch at nearly three in the morning, my gla.s.s long empty, Pop talked about his own father as if he were simply another man in the world like he was, just another man climbing out of bed each day to try and do the best he knew how to do. I listened and I nodded. I said little and did not need to say much. That had been true of my father too, hadn't it? He'd done the best he'd known how to do, and if it wasn't enough, then we still had this, didn't we?

Across from me in the window was my reflection lit by the artificial light of the TV, a grown man sitting near another man in a wheelchair. Nine miles down the river, my own children slept in a house without me, and tomorrow I was leaving.

I stood and told my father it was time for me to go.

"All right, man." He smiled up at me and raised his arms for a hug. I leaned down, the gla.s.s in my hand, and hugged him with one arm. His back felt broad and thick, and I could smell his Old Spice, the dried cognac on his whiskers. He held on and looked into my face and said to me what he said to all six of his children all the time, those three words his father had never said to him. I said them back and kissed him on the lips.

He took my gla.s.s and rested it in his lap with his, then he turned his chair around, gripped the railings, and pulled himself up the plywood ramp into his dining room and kitchen. He switched on the overhead light. I put on my jacket and opened the door. The stars were out, the air so cold my lungs ached with the first few breaths. Pop followed me out in just his black s.h.i.+rt and sweatpants. He stopped at the end of the landing before the descent of the first ramp. He was talking about this new novel I'd written, his tone generous and encouraging, the way it was with most young writers, including me.

I turned and waved and headed down the first ramp, then the second, third, and fourth. From the driveway I could see him in his wheelchair beneath his porch light, his breath thin and white, rising into the air where it vanished. Beyond him was the steep hill behind his house, the bare poplars in snow, their upper branches against the stars.

Pop was talking, and while I couldn't make out his words, his tone was upbeat, and I knew he was still speaking about me and my new work.

"I'll call you from the road, Pop."

He called out something else I couldn't hear. I started my car and didn't give it enough time to warm up. I backed it to the frozen s...o...b..nk, drove down the hill, and away.

21.

THE COFFIN WAS a simple pine box with a domed lid and it took Jeb and me all night to build. Even with power tools it took two men twelve hours, though our work was interrupted by visits from people who'd come for the funeral-Pop's agent, Philip Spitzer, who was like a brother to him, his wife Mary, Reverend Bob Thompson from Exeter, others too. Jeb and I would be at the table saw or the chop saw, or we'd be clamping and gluing pieces of pine together on the worktable, when the front door of Jeb's shop would open and people would move slowly toward us down the long concrete corridor. We'd stop and walk over to them. There'd be long tight hugs, a shake of the head, tears and sometimes even a teasing or two. Jeb would describe his design, that he'd decided on a coffin with no nails, just glue and dowels. He'd show them the cardboard template he'd sketched to get the arc of the domed lid, how he'd used that to trace the final shape onto pine boards he then cut on the band saw. My main job was to rip the forty staves we would need to cover those supports for the finished cover.

We told them this, and we told them other things, and we listened to whatever they had to say. Our father's body lay in a funeral home in Haverhill not far from the courthouse and police station, but as his coffin began to take shape in Jeb's shop, people who loved Pop would stand before it and lower their voices. They looked from the coffin to Jeb and me then back at the coffin. Before leaving, they'd take a small sc.r.a.p of pine we no longer needed, pus.h.i.+ng it into their coat pockets or holding it in one hand. They hugged us once more and walked back down the concrete corridor out into the night.

For long stretches Jeb and I were alone. In many ways it felt like old times. Jeb was the artist at this; I was the slow, careful, mostly competent worker. While Jeb glued and clamped the planks of the side panels, a smoking cigarette between his lips, three-day-old whiskers across his chin and cheeks, I was cutting the shorter lengths for the end panels. Sometimes we'd glance over at each other at the same time, and our eyes would catch and we'd shake our heads and well up. Other moments, we'd be busting each other's b.a.l.l.s the way you did on a job: "You call that square square? What a butcher." More than once, one of us would pa.s.s closely by the other on the way to a new tool or task and we'd reach out and squeeze a shoulder or upper arm, then pull each other in for a quick hug.

Many times during the night-pine dust in the air, smoke from Jeb's Marlboros, the heated electric engine smell of the power tools-one of us would shake his head and say, "Three hours, my a.s.s."

Just before dawn, we began to tire but not much. We had just screwed the lid to its long piano hinge when the shop door opened and against the gray light stood the silhouettes of two men. One of them pulled the door shut behind them and they came walking down the corridor, a cooler over the shoulder of the shorter one, a bag under the arm of the other. Walking into the light were Sam Dolan and Kourosh, who had flown all night from Seattle, and they'd brought beer and sandwiches. There were hugs and some laughter, quiet words that got quieter as we stood back and looked at my father's nearly finished coffin. It was long and straight, the corner joints tight and clean, a router bead running the length of the closed lid whose arc was slight, all forty staves glued tightly together and sanded smooth, this new pine the color of bone.

We four sat against the wall. We ate our sandwiches and drank cold beer. Maybe we talked about the wake that would start in less than twelve hours. Maybe about the funeral the next day and how the ground was too frozen for the burial and we'd have to wait till spring for that, Pop's body to be kept in a vault in a local cemetery until then.

While we talked and ate and drank, I kept looking at the coffin sitting over on the worktable, this last project for our father. I stood and brushed the crumbs and sawdust off my legs. I walked up, opened the lid, climbed onto the table, then stepped inside and lay down. I asked Jeb to close it, told him I wanted to make sure there was enough room for a body inside. These are the words I said, and part of me was thinking that, but another part of me had to feel what our father would not, had to see what he would not, the new lid closing, then the darkness, the nearly milk-sweet scent of drying glue, the sap and sawdust, the walls of this final box at my shoulders and toes.

When the call came, I'd been standing in the lobby of my hotel in San Francisco. It was c.o.c.ktail hour. Business men and women sat around a small fireplace sipping complimentary wine, talking quietly to one another or on their cell phones. Jazz was playing softly on the sound system, light brushwork on cymbals, a throbbing ba.s.s, a lone horn. Outside, on the other side of the street, candles burned in the windows of a restaurant, and I stood near the revolving gla.s.s door with my new book in my hand, this novel that was now being reviewed around the country, the response overwhelmingly positive. It was strangely hard to take, all this good news, and earlier that day, cold and sunlit, I'd walked up and down n.o.b Hill, I'd walked through Chinatown and Ghirardelli Square, I'd looked for gifts to buy my kids, and I felt blue. Nothing good ever comes for free and something bad was going to happen and when would it come knocking?

This was neurotic and self-absorbed, I knew, but as I stood in that lobby, just minutes from walking out the door and down to the Clean Well-Lighted Place bookstore to read, it was as if I hung suspended in this membrane I'd learned all those years ago to break, this barrier between what was and what would be, and now came the ringing of the phone at the front desk, then my last name being called in the air. It was from the man who'd checked me in hours earlier. He was older, his hair short and gelled, his tie in a snug Windsor at his throat. He held his hand over the receiver as if it were a home phone. "There's a call for you, sir." Then I was standing at the desk, the jazz and c.o.c.ktail chatter behind me. Fontaine was crying so hard she couldn't get her breath to speak.

"Honey, what? What? What?"

I saw my children's faces-six-year-old Austin's deep brown eyes, swollen from allergies, his curly hair; Ariadne and how she'd make a face at me and laugh, as if she were fourteen and not four; two-year-old blue-eyed Elias, his big hands and feet, his patient sweet stillness-which one, which one one. "Fontaine-"

She kept crying and couldn't stop.

"Just tell me. Tell me."

There was the shudder of her breath. "Your dad-"

Relief jabbing into my heart, a half-breath of grat.i.tude, then the knowing and a right cross of black grief before I even asked the words and she confirmed them, and I was climbing carpeted marble stairs, the stairwell bright and quiet, a sound coming from me from so long ago, Pop's breath in the air just three nights before, just three nights, and I was unlocking my door, then I was facedown on the mattress crying Daddy Daddy, Daddy Daddy, a word I hadn't used since I was a young boy and in it was mine but also the voices of my own children calling for me, and my father's voice for his father, too. I had lived thirty-nine years without ever losing someone this close, so fortunate really, so blessed, so why did it feel so familiar? Why did this feel like the second punch following the first? a word I hadn't used since I was a young boy and in it was mine but also the voices of my own children calling for me, and my father's voice for his father, too. I had lived thirty-nine years without ever losing someone this close, so fortunate really, so blessed, so why did it feel so familiar? Why did this feel like the second punch following the first?

Then I saw it, Pop's back as the four of us followed him down the porch stairs, Mom crying inside the house. There was the glint of frost on gravel, Pop tousling my hair, then his old Lancer driving down the hill and Jeb running after it, You b.u.m! You b.u.m! You b.u.m! You b.u.m! You b.u.m! You b.u.m!

Jeb opened the lid and I climbed out. I was blinking in the light at my friends, at my younger brother who held out his hand.

THE LADY I'd bought the plot from said her men would dig as soon as the thaw began. I asked her if she owned her own backhoe. She said no, they dig it themselves.

I could feel the blood descend into my hands. "Would you mind if we did that then? His sons?"

"No, I don't mind."

But we would have to wait over two months, Pop's body kept in a concrete crypt in that same cemetery behind the old Hale Hospital and the doctor's office Mom had rented for us at the base of Nettle Hill. Life continued. Despite this black grief, I was working on something new and needed to do some research at the local county jail. I called them and soon was standing in a gla.s.sed-in walkway twenty feet over the main population. Below us, over a hundred men sat in orange or tan jumpsuits at tables and benches bolted to the concrete floor. They were playing cards or checkers, reading newspapers, or watching one of the TVs hung high in the corners of the room. From where I stood behind thick protective gla.s.s, I could see a lot of shaved heads and homemade tattoos, some of the men sitting with their legs spread wide and their chins up, an unlit cigarette between their lips. Others, narrow-shouldered or obese, sat off to themselves and avoided making eye contact. The public affairs officer beside me, an easygoing and talkative man in his late fifties who'd worked here for years, was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with stories. He was doing his best to give me good material, though I wasn't looking for any; one of my characters had found himself in a jail like this, and I just had to see it for myself.

The man from public affairs pointed out one inmate after another. "That big one there? He kidnapped his own wife. You don't even want to know the rest of that story. See those two under the TV? That old man and the other one? Uncle and nephew, only they never met each other till they got in here at the same time."

I nodded and listened. The uncle was no more than fifty, his graying hair tied back in a ponytail, his nephew a foot taller and half-black or half-Latino. The officer kept talking about them, about the good story their lives would make, but ten feet away from them sat someone I knew.

He was thin. His hair was short, the color of old tea, and he was playing checkers or dominoes with a bald man. The one I knew said something, and I could see the chipped front tooth, that wise-a.s.s mouth in a lined and pallid face.

"'Scuse me." I pointed down to him. "I know that guy."

"Who?" The public affairs officer followed my arm and finger. "Murphy? How do you know him?"

Dennis Murphy, his pine branch flicking out and slapping the old woman in the face. "We're from the same town."

"Yeah? Good story about him." And the man from public affairs told me how two or three Thanksgivings ago, all four Murphy brothers were in at the same time, some awaiting a hearing or trial, others serving a sentence. "And Frankie, the bank robber-he's dead now, by the way-he comes up and asks us since it's Thanksgiving and all the brothers are together, would it be all right for their mother to bring them a turkey dinner? What the h.e.l.l, we allowed it. We even had the kitchen make up some side dishes for them. So there's Ma Thanksgiving Day, sitting down there at one of the big tables with all her boys. They had a good feed, too."

He laughed and shook his head. I stared at Dennis Murphy. Except for the desiccated hair and yellowed skin, the lines around his mouth, he'd changed little since we were teenagers and his brothers were in their twenties and the four of them would walk into house parties down on the avenues and do whatever they felt like, later cruising by my gas station booth on Winter Street looking for revenge.

I followed the public affairs officer off the walkway for the rest of the tour, one concrete room and corridor after another. In the mess hall a gang of men in white jumpsuits were on a cleaning detail. They scrubbed tables and swept and mopped the floor, their faces hard, their bodies too, but they looked like boys to me, and when one or two of them glanced up at us-two men in suit jackets and pressed pants-in their eyes was the dull light of resignation, not, it seems, to the time they'd yet to serve, but to this, two village fathers walking by without a nod or a word, as if these young men were not right here in front of them, as if they never had been.

IT WAS a weekend in April, the sun high in a cold sky, and Jeb and Sam and I wore sweats.h.i.+rts and sweaters and had been digging for three hours. We were only down two and a half feet. Nearly halfway through the day, our mother showed up with water and sandwiches she'd made herself.

One of the caretakers of the cemetery had cut into the gra.s.s the shape of the grave we were to dig: four feet wide, eight feet long, and we were to go down six feet. I'd brought two picks, two long-handled spade shovels, and two short. I'd brought work gloves and a jug of water, too.

The cemetery was less than a mile from Pop's house. There were nearly as many hardwoods and pine trees in it as there were graves, and most of those went back before the Civil War. Sam started in first with the pick, tearing up the brown earth, then he stepped back and Jeb and I began shoveling into a pile the clumps of dirt and leaf-rot and lingering turf. After ten inches or a foot of this, we hit rock and it took all three of us two hours taking turns with both picks to get through it. When we finally got back to dirt, we'd only gone down another foot and a half. We stopped and pa.s.sed around the water jug. Not far off, someone was burning a trash pile, the woodsmoke drifting through the pines behind us. The air was still and cool, and high overhead a chicken hawk soared south toward the Merrimack.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead. We went back to work. Less than an hour later, it was a sweet surprise to see Mom's tired red Mitsubis.h.i.+ pull up to the cemetery gate, to see her walking toward us with a picnic basket and more water. She was wearing sweatpants and a black wool sweater, her hair blonde and gray. We hugged and thanked her. We dropped our pick and shovels, pulled off our gloves, and sat on the ground to eat.

Two months earlier, just minutes after the coffin was done, she and Fontaine had walked down that long corridor carrying measuring tapes, scissors, a staple gun and staples, a roll of cording, and the beige satin sheet off Pop's bed. While Jeb and I and our friends went home for a few hours' sleep, my mother and wife lined the inside of Pop's pine box with the same sheet he'd slept in the last night of his life.

Now Mom was sipping her water, her eyes on the grave of her ex-husband. She was sixty years old. I'd been in her life since she was twenty. In the coming months she would lose her mother, then Bruce, but this recent loss was enough. Over eight hundred people had come to Pop's funeral: his two older sisters from Louisiana, their grown daughters and sons, cousins of ours we barely knew. There were writer friends from his time in Iowa City, ex-girlfriends and two ex-wives, Peggy singing "Summertime" up in the balcony. There were hundreds of students from over the years, drinking buddies from Ronnie D's, retired professors from Bradford, waitresses and bartenders and former cops. And there were his six kids from forty-year-old Suzanne down to twelve-year-old Madeleine. Pop had eaten life, and his death had left a cavernous, gnawing hole in the air we moved through.

Many times over the years, my mother had told me that Pop had been the one love of her life. "He was a self-absorbed son of b.i.t.c.h, and we could never stay married, but he was the one." She still had Bruce, her man of thirty years, but sitting on that gra.s.s with us she looked to me like a widow.

The night of Pop's death, Jeb and his building partner were coming over to watch a movie. Bob got to Pop's first, heard the water running in the shower. He knocked on the bathroom door but got no answer. He opened it and found our father slumped under running water that had turned cold. Bob pulled him out and did what he could, but Pop was gone.

A slight wind had picked up. It was sifting some of the dirt back into the hole, and it was hard not to think of those last moments, my father soaping himself on his shower bench, the hot water coming down, then whatever the first signs were, a final pain I did not want to think about him suffering alone. I stood and walked back through the gravestones.

So many of the names were French or Irish. There was one with the image of an electric guitar etched into it. Beside that marker, another with a man's name. He'd died in his early thirties, and next to his birth and death dates were the words: A Loving Husband and Father A Loving Husband and Father. But the H, u, H, u, and and s s of of Husband Husband had been chiseled away at the corners, the work, the caretaker lady later told me, of the dead man's grieving girlfriend. I kept walking past stones that were spread farther apart. Beyond them lay a pile of faded memorial wreaths, plastic flowers, deflated balloons, and soggy teddy bears. Just west of it, in the shadow of a thick stand of blue spruce, lay the graves of babies. had been chiseled away at the corners, the work, the caretaker lady later told me, of the dead man's grieving girlfriend. I kept walking past stones that were spread farther apart. Beyond them lay a pile of faded memorial wreaths, plastic flowers, deflated balloons, and soggy teddy bears. Just west of it, in the shadow of a thick stand of blue spruce, lay the graves of babies.

I turned around to get back to work. I could see Mom putting away what was left of our lunch. Sam and Jeb were already standing with their shovels. I took a different route back to them, and there it was carved into the back of a granite slab: CLEARY. CLEARY. I slowed and walked around to the front of it. There was my old best friend's first name, his dates, born two years after me and dead at twenty-five. I called Jeb over, and he joined me and we stood there staring at the stone, the three of us together again, roaming downtown and the avenues. I looked back at our father's deepening grave. Sam stood in it, swinging the pick down over his shoulder again and again, and there was the dirt alley and Cleary's small asbestos-sided house, his mother drunk on the couch, his father's big Chevy down in Boston. My once-a-month visits with Pop on the other side of the river when I'd tried to wash the smell off me-the dope, the alley dust, the trash of dumpsters we searched through for something to drink or break or eat. I took long showers and washed and dried my clothes. I tied my hair back as tightly as I could. At my father's apartment, I tried to stand straight, my chest out, and speak as if everything was all right and under control. I tried my best to flush away our friend and all we did together. And now here he and Pop would lie in the same stretch of ground, any past secrets exposed and irrelevant. I slowed and walked around to the front of it. There was my old best friend's first name, his dates, born two years after me and dead at twenty-five. I called Jeb over, and he joined me and we stood there staring at the stone, the three of us together again, roaming downtown and the avenues. I looked back at our father's deepening grave. Sam stood in it, swinging the pick down over his shoulder again and again, and there was the dirt alley and Cleary's small asbestos-sided house, his mother drunk on the couch, his father's big Chevy down in Boston. My once-a-month visits with Pop on the other side of the river when I'd tried to wash the smell off me-the dope, the alley dust, the trash of dumpsters we searched through for something to drink or break or eat. I took long showers and washed and dried my clothes. I tied my hair back as tightly as I could. At my father's apartment, I tried to stand straight, my chest out, and speak as if everything was all right and under control. I tried my best to flush away our friend and all we did together. And now here he and Pop would lie in the same stretch of ground, any past secrets exposed and irrelevant.

Mom waved goodbye from her car, and we three kept digging. After nearly eight hours we finally got down to six feet, the surface of the ground a couple inches above my head. Jeb gave Sam ten fingers to step in and he climbed out. He turned around and extended his hand and Jeb grasped it and Sam, still as strong as he'd always been, pulled him up and out of the hole.

It was just me now. Sam offered his hand, but I said, "Wait, buddy," and I lay down at the bottom of my father's grave. It seemed so much deeper than six feet, the dark walls of earth at my sides and head and feet, a blue rectangle of sky so far above. I smelled clay and cool stone. I closed my eyes for just a second, but it was too dark, too eternally dark, and I stood and climbed fast out of that hole.

WE HELD the burial on Fenway Park's Opening Day. While thousands of fans streamed into those seats surrounding that green field in Boston, a small group of us gathered to lower Pop's pine box into the earth. The sun was out, but it was cold enough you could see your breath in front of you. Sam had helped me find a Catholic priest who'd known our father. From the yellow pages I hired a bagpipe player, then called the local Marine Corps recruiting office in Lawrence. They sent a young captain and seven Marines, and while we gathered at the foot of Pop's coffin and open grave, these eight young men in dress blues stood at attention alongside it. The captain was a handsome young Latino, his eyes shadowed beneath the visor of his head cover, his white-gloved hands stiff at his sides. The priest, graying and respectfully jocular, had finished a prayer and was talking about Pop, how even in a wheelchair he'd make it to Ma.s.s, how when he couldn't a layman would drive out to his house to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was language from the church Pop had turned to and used his entire life, and I was glad they were out in the air over his body and grave.

East Broadway lay thirty yards behind us on the other side of a chain-link fence. The priest was just finis.h.i.+ng up, and I could hear it back through the trees behind me, a car coming fast down the asphalt, its engine ups.h.i.+fting and getting the gas. The priest was asking us to say the Lord's Prayer, and I didn't want to give this car any of my attention, but now it came into view as it sped west, a blue lowrider, the center of its spinning wheels a flash of chrome. A kid leaned out the pa.s.senger window and yelled at us: "f.u.c.kin' f.a.ggots f.a.ggots!"

Then they were gone, the driver downs.h.i.+fting for the drop of the hill through the trees. The priest smiled and shook his head: "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." I began reciting the words with everyone else, but my tongue had become my beating heart and my hands had turned oily and light, and that old rage sat up inside me as if it had just lain down for a short nap. "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done." I didn't move but saw myself running in my overcoat and suit to my car, starting it up and tearing down East Broadway through the pines. "On earth as it is in heaven." They'd be a half mile ahead of me by now, maybe more. "Give us this day our daily bread." These little punks with no respect for anyone, my eyes scanning for any flash of blue. "And forgive us our trespa.s.ses." At the stop sign at the end of East Broadway, Charlie's Variety Store across the street, I'd cut right and accelerate for downtown. Soon I'd be on River Street, on my left the rusted guardrail and bare trees, the Merrimack River flowing east, the boxboard factory on the other side, gray smoke unfurling from its stacks. I'd pa.s.s the hill street where the hospital used to be, the emergency room where they'd st.i.tched up Sam's chin and Vinny smoked under the awning, his eyes on me. Farther up the street, the base of Nettle Hill, Russ Bowman on his back in the cla.s.sroom, his face getting punched over and over. Then I'd be on Water Street, Captain Chris's Restaurant a gay bar now, that back kitchen where Charlie Pierce had sprayed me with scalding water and I'd gone after him, this killer of kids like me. "As we forgive those who trespa.s.s against us." No blue car yet, to my right the concrete retaining wall for the parking lot of the shopping plaza where Crazy Jack had yelled on a warm, crowded Sunday afternoon, How's it feel to be a chicken How's it feel to be a chickens.h.i.+t?! Then the traffic lights at the intersection where ten years after that night at the 104 Club, a loaded .38 in my father's Red Sox jacket pocket, Ben Wallace, drunk behind the wheel of a dented sedan, had seen me walking along the sidewalk and he revved his engine till the cha.s.sis vibrated and yelled, You still want to go at it, Dubis?! You still want to go at it, Dubis?! And I'd drive straight through the intersection, the Basilere Bridge to my right, Bradford s.h.i.+mmering on the other side, and if there was still no blue ahead of me, I'd head deep into downtown, on the river side the old Woolworth's building, Valhally's Diner, Mitch.e.l.l's Clothing Store where our mother had put clothes for us on layaway she still could not afford, past Casey's Office Supplies and the post office in Was.h.i.+ngton Square, then the bars of Was.h.i.+ngton Street-the Lido, the Chit Chat Lounge, the Tap and Steve Lynch swallowing his front teeth. "As we forgive those who trespa.s.s against us." At the black trestle of Railroad Square, I'd turn right and ups.h.i.+ft past the old leather tanneries, the berm of the Boston and Maine rail line to my left, the abandoned brewery coming up, the turn under the iron trestle for Lafayette Square, Devin Wallace straddling my chest, knocking my head against concrete again and again, the martial arts studio and Haffereffer Gas, the brown rush of the Little River flowing through drainage pipes beneath cracked asphalt, no blue yet, no blue, the shadow of another trestle above me as I downs.h.i.+fted up Winter Street, the booth where I pumped gas and waited for the Lynches and the Murphys to come get me, gone now, an empty concrete lot, a chain-link fence halfway around it, and before the Greek church there'd be the sharp left for the avenues, of course the avenues, still poor, abandoned cars on the sidewalks, but now I'd see satellite dishes screwed to the vinyl sides of some of the houses, now I'd see security lights and bred pit bulls. The lumberyard still there, the concertina wire coiled at the top of the fence and gleaming in this April sun, my brother and our dead stabbed friend pa.s.sing me two-by-fours, and look, a flash of blue gunning up Fourth Avenue. "And lead us not into temptation." And me following in my family car, an old used Toyota wagon, the booster seats of my two youngest still strapped in the back, their raging father in his suit and tie accelerating after the boys he'd been, hoping he'll find them, hoping he won't. And I'd drive straight through the intersection, the Basilere Bridge to my right, Bradford s.h.i.+mmering on the other side, and if there was still no blue ahead of me, I'd head deep into downtown, on the river side the old Woolworth's building, Valhally's Diner, Mitch.e.l.l's Clothing Store where our mother had put clothes for us on layaway she still could not afford, past Casey's Office Supplies and the post office in Was.h.i.+ngton Square, then the bars of Was.h.i.+ngton Street-the Lido, the Chit Chat Lounge, the Tap and Steve Lynch swallowing his front teeth. "As we forgive those who trespa.s.s against us." At the black trestle of Railroad Square, I'd turn right and ups.h.i.+ft past the old leather tanneries, the berm of the Boston and Maine rail line to my left, the abandoned brewery coming up, the turn under the iron trestle for Lafayette Square, Devin Wallace straddling my chest, knocking my head against concrete again and again, the martial arts studio and Haffereffer Gas, the brown rush of the Little River flowing through drainage pipes beneath cracked asphalt, no blue yet, no blue, the shadow of another trestle above me as I downs.h.i.+fted up Winter Street, the booth where I pumped gas and waited for the Lynches and the Murphys to come get me, gone now, an empty concrete lot, a chain-link fence halfway around it, and before the Greek church there'd be the sharp left for the avenues, of course the avenues, still poor, abandoned cars on the sidewalks, but now I'd see satellite dishes screwed to the vinyl sides of some of the houses, now I'd see security lights and bred pit bulls. The lumberyard still there, the concertina wire coiled at the top of the fence and gleaming in this April sun, my brother and our dead stabbed friend pa.s.sing me two-by-fours, and look, a flash of blue gunning up Fourth Avenue. "And lead us not into temptation." And me following in my family car, an old used Toyota wagon, the booster seats of my two youngest still strapped in the back, their raging father in his suit and tie accelerating after the boys he'd been, hoping he'll find them, hoping he won't.

"But deliver us from evil. Amen."

There was the young captain's orders in the air, the report of seven rifles firing three times each. The acrid smells of hot bra.s.s and cordite. A sob from one of my sisters or my mother. Then the low mournful wheeze of the bagpipe, its nearly frantic search for the notes becoming "Amazing Grace," the man in his kilt walking slowly off into the trees where we heard the last note without him, like some lovely echo we all one day leave behind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I'd like to thank Alane Salierno Mason, once again, for helping me to find the true book within the one I'd first written. I would especially like to thank my family for allowing me to write so openly from my memory of our mutual past: my sister Suzanne, a national leader in the field of domestic violence prevention; my brother Jeb, an inspired and inspiring architectural designer of homes and restaurants and public s.p.a.ces; my sister Nicole, a professor and licensed therapist who works with families not so different from the one she came from; and my mother Patricia, who after thirty-five years working with and for the poor, is now, at age seventy-two, a newly certified Montessori teacher for young children. I am honored to be her son.

And here's to my father who, when I first began to write in my early twenties, told me not to do what he did. "Don't wait till your mama and I are dead before you write about us, son. Just go ahead and write."

ALSO BY ANDRE DUBUS III.

The Garden of Last Days

House of Sand and Fog

Bluesman

The Cage Keeper and Other Stories