When we turned the subject to gloom and evil (dark and dirty and dying), we talked of the death of Zap Plouffe, Gene’s and Joe’s kid brother our age (with those backstore stories maybe told by malicious mothers who hated the Plouffes and especially the dying melancholy old man in his dark house). Zap’s foot was dragged under a milk wagon, he caught infection and died, I first met Zap on a crazy screaming night about the third after we’d moved from Centralville to Pawtucketville (1932) on my porch (Phebe), he came rollerskating up on the porch with his long teeth and prognathic jaw of the Plouffes, he was the first Pawtucketville boy to talk to me… And the screams in the nightfall street of play!–
“Mon nom cest Zap Plouffe mué—je rests au coin dans maison la”—(my name it is Zap Plouffe me–I live on the corner in the house there).
Not long after, G.J. moved in across the street, with dolorous furnitures from the Greek slums of Market Street where you hear the wails of Oriental Greek records on Sunday afternoon and smell the honey and the almond. “Zap’s ghost is in that goddam park,” G.J. said, and never walked home across the field, instead went Riverside-Sarah or Gershom-Sarah, Phebe (where he lived all those years) was the center of those two prongs.
The Park is in the middle, Moody’s across the bottom.
So I began to see the ghost of Zap Plouffe mixed with other shrouds when I walked home from Destouches’ brown store with my Shadow in my arm. I wanted to face my duty–I had learned to stop crying in Centralville and I was determined not to start crying in Pawtucketville (in Centralville it was Ste. Therese and her turning plaster head, the crouching Jesus, visions of French or Catholic or Family Ghosts that swarmed in corners and open closet doors in mid sleep night, and the funerals all around, the wreaths on old wood white door with paint cracking, you know some old gray ash-faced dead ghost is waxing his profile to candlelight and suffocating flowers in the broon-gloom of dead relatives kneeling in a chant and the son of the house is wearing a black suit Ah Me! and the tears of mothers and sisters and frightened humans of the grave, the tears flowing in the kitchen and by the sewing machine upstairs, and when one dies–three will die) … (two more will die, who will it be, what phantom is pursuing you?). Doctor Sax had knowledge of death … but he was a mad fool of power, a Faustian man, no true Faustian’s afraid of the dark–only Fellaheen–and Gothic Stone Cathedral Catholic of Bats and Bach Organs in the Blue Mid Night Mists of Skull, Blood, Dust, Iron, Rain burrowing into earth to snake antique.
As the rain hit the windowpane, and apples swelled on the limb, I lay in my white sheets reading with cat and candy bar … that’s where all these things were born.
20
THE UNDERGROUND RUMBLING HORROR OF THE LOWELL NIGHT —a black coat on a hook on a white door–in the dark— -o-o-h!—my heart used to sink at sight of huge headshroud rearing on his rein in the goop of my door– Open closet doors, everything under the sun’s inside and under the moon–brown handles fall out majestically–supernumerary ghosts on different hooks in a bad void, peeking at my sleep bed–the cross in my mother’s room, a salesman had sold it to her in Centralville, it was a phosphorescent Christ on a black-lacquered Cross–it glowed the Jesus in the Dark, I gulped for fear every time I passed it the moment the sun went down, it took that own luminosity like a bier, it was like Murder by the Clock the horrible fear-shrieking movie about the old lady clacking out of her mausoleum at midnight with a–you never saw her, just the woeful shadow coming up the davenport tap-tap-tap as her daughters and sisters screech all over the house– Never liked to see my bedroom door even ajar, in the dark it yawned a black dangerhole.—Square, tall, thin, severe, Count Condu has stood in my doorway many’s the time– I had an old Victrola in my bedroom which was also ghostly, it was haunted by the old songs and old records of sad American antiquity in its old mahogany craw (that I used to reach in and punch for nails and cracks, in among the needle dusts, the old laments, Rudies, magnolias and Jeannines of twenties time)— Fear of gigantic spiders big as your hand and hands as big as barrels–why … underground rumbling horrors of the Lowell night–many.
Nothing worse than a hanging coat in the dark, extended arms dripping folds of cloth, leer of dark face, to be tall, statuesque, motionless, slouch headed or hatted, silent– My early Doctor Sax was completely silent like that, the one I saw standing–on the sandbank at night–an earlier time we were playing war in the sandbank at night (after seeing The Big Parade with Slim Summerville in muddy)— we played crawling in the sand like World War I infantrymen on the front, putteed, darkmouthed, sad, dirty, spitting on clots of mud– We had our stick rifles, I had a broken leg and crawled most miserably behind a rock in the sand … an Arabian rock, Foreign Legion now … there was a little sand road running through the sand field valley–by starlight bits of silver sand would sparkle-the sandbanks then rose and surveyed and dipped for a block each way, the Phebe way ending at houses of the street (where lived the family of the white house with flowers and marble gardens of whitewash all around, daughters, ransoms, their yard ended at the first sandbank which was the one I was pelting with pitching rocks the day I met Dicky Hampshire —and the other way ending on Riverside in a steep cliff) (my intelligent Richard Hampshire)— I saw Doctor Sax the night of the Big Parade in the sand, somebody was convoying a squad to the right flank and being forced to take cover, I was reconnoitering with views at the scenery for possible suspects and trees, and there’s Doctor Sax grooking in the desert plateau of timbers in brush, the all-stars of Whole World strung up behind him à la bowl, meadows and apple trees as a background horizon, clear pure night, Doctor Sax is watching our pathetic sand game with an inscrutable silence– I look once, I look, he vanisheth on falling horizons in a bat… what great difference was there between Count Condu and Doctor Sax in my childhood?
Dicky Hampshire introduced me to a possible difference … we started drawing cartoons together, in my house at my desk, in his house in his bedroom with kid brother watching (just like Paddy Sorenson’s kid brother watching me and Paddy drawing 4-year-old cartoons–abstract as hell–as the Irish washingmachine wrangles and the old Irish grandfather puffs on his clay upsidedown pipe, on Beaulieu Street, my first “English” chum)— Dicky Hampshire was my greatest English chum, and he was English. Strangely, his father had an old Chandler car in the yard, year ‘29 or ‘21, probably ‘21, wood spokes, like some wrecks you find in the Dracut woods smelling of shit and all sagged down and full of rotten apples and dead and all ready to sprout out of the earth a new car plant, some kind of Terminus pine plant with sagging oil gums and rubber teeth and an iron source in the center, a Steel tree, an old car like that is often seen but rarely intact, although it wasn’t running. Dicky’s father worked in a printing plant on a canal, just like my father … the old Citizen newspaper that went out —blue with mill rags in the alleys, cotton dust balls and smoke pots, litter, I walk along the long sunny concrete rale of the millyards in the booming roar of the windows where my mother’s working, I am horrified by the cotton dresses of the women rushing out of the mills at five–the women work too much! they’re not home any more! They work more than they ever worked!— Dicky and I covered these millyards and agreed millwork was horrible. “What I’m going to do instead is sit around the green jungles of Guatemala.”
“Watermelon?”
“No, no, Guatemala–my brother s going there—”
We drew cartoons of jungle adventures in Guatemala. Dicky’s cartoons were very good–he drew slower than I did– We invented games. My mother made caramel pudding for both of us. He lived up Phebe across the sandbank. I was the Black Thief, I put notes in his door.
“Beware, Tonight the Black Thief will Strike Again. Signed, the Black Thief!!!”-and off I’d flit (in broad daylight planting notes). At night I came in my cape and slouch hat, cape made of rubber (my sister’s beach cape of the thirties, red and black like Mephistopheles), hat is old slouch hat I have … (later I wore great big felt hats all level to imitate Alan Ladd This Gun for Hire, at 19, so what’s silly)— I glided to Dicky’s house, stole his bathing trunks from the porch, left