Visions of Gerard

The child's gentle spirit ought never to meet the vicious winds of death. Rest well, Gerard.


"Behold: – One day he found a mouse caught in Scoop’s mousetrap outside the fish market on West Sixth Street—Faces more bleak than envenomed spiders, those who invented mousetraps, and had paths of bullgrained dullishness beaten to their bloodstained doors, and crowed in the sill—For that matter, on this gray morning, I can remember the faces of the Canucks of Lowell, the small tradesmen, butchers, butter and egg men, fishmen, barrelmakers, bums in benches (no benches but the oldtime sidewalk chair spitters by the dump, by banana peels steaming in the midday broil)—The hungjawed dull faces of grown adults who had no words to praise or please little trying-angels like Gerard working to save the mouse from the trap—But just stared or gawped on jawpipes and were silly in their prime—The little mouse, thrashing in the concrete, was released by Gerard—It went wobbling to the gutter with the fishjuice and spit, to die—He picked it tenderly and in his pocket sowed the goodness—Took it home and nursed it, actually bandaged it, held it, stroked it, prepared a little basket for it, as Ma watched amazed and men walked around in the streets “doin good for themselves” rounding up paper beyond their beans—Bums! all!—A thought smaller than a mouse’s turd directed to the Sunday Service Mass necessity, and that usually tinged by inner countings how much they’ll plap in th’basket—I dont remember rationally but in my soul and mind Yes there’s a mouse, peeping, and Gerard, and the basket, and the kitchen the scene of this heart-tender little hospital—“That big thing hurt you when it fell on your little leg” (because Gerard could really feel empathetically that pain, pain he’d had enough to not be apprentice at the trade and pang)—He could feel the iron snap grinding his little imagined birdy bones and squeezing and cracking and pressing harder unto worse-than-death the bleak-in-life—For it’s not innocent blank nature made hills look sad and woe-y, it’s men, with their awful minds—Their ignorance, grossness, mean petty thwarthings, schemes, hypocrite tendencies, repenting over losses, gloating over gains—Pot-boys, bone-carriers, funeral directors, glove-wearers, fog-breathers, shit-betiders, pissers, befoulers, stenchers, fat calf converters, utter blots & scabs on the face of it the earth—“Mouse? Who cares about a gad dam mouse—God musta made em to fit our traps”—Typical thought–I’d as soon drop a barrel of you-know-what on the roof of my own house, as walk a mile in conversation about one of them–I dont count Gerard in that seedy lot, that crew of bulls—The particular bleak gray jowled pale eyed sneaky fearful French Canadian quality of man, with his black store, his bags of produce, his bottomless mean and secret cellar, his herrings in a barrel, his hidden gold rings, his wife and daughter jongling in another dumb room, his dirty broom in the corner, his piousness, his cold hands, his hot bowels, his well-used whip, his easy greeting and hard opinion—Lay me down in sweet India or old Tahiti, I dont want to be buried in their cemetery—In fact, cremate me and deliver me to les Indes, I’m through—Wait till I get going on some of these other bloodlouts, for that matter—Yet not likely Gerard ever, if he’d have lived, would have fattened as I to come and groan about peoples and in plain print loud and foolish, but was a soft tenderhearted angel the likes of which you’ll never find again in science fictions of the future with their bleeding plastic penis-rods and round hole-machines and worries about how to get from Pit to Pisspot which is one millionth of a billionth of an inch further in endlessness of our gracious Lord than the earth speck (which I’d spew) (if I were you) (Maha Meru)—Some afternoon, Gerard goes to school—It had been on a noontime errand when sent to the store to buy smoked fish, that he’d found the mouse–Now, smiling, I see him from my overstuffed glooms in the parlor corner walking up Beaulieu Street to school with his strapped books and long black stockings and that peculiar gloomy sweetness of his person that was all things to me, I saw nothing else—Happy because his mouse was fed and repaired and safe in her little basket—Innocent enough comes our cat in the mid drowses of day, and eats, and leaves but the tail, enough to make all Lowell Laugh, but when Gerard comes home at 4 to see his tail-let in the bottom of the poor little basket he’d so laboriously contrived, he cried—I cried too.

My mother tried to explain that it wasnt the cat’s fault and nobody’s fault and such was life.
He knew it wasnt the cat’s fault but he took Nanny and sat her on the rocking chair and held her jowls and delivered her an exhortation no less:
“Méchante! Bad girl! Dont you understand what you’ve done? When will you understand? We dont disturb little animals and little things! We leave them alone! We’ll never go to heaven if we go on eating each other and destroying each other like that all the time!—without thinking, without knowing!—wake up, foolish girl!—realize what you’ve done!—Be ashamed! shame! crazy face! stop wiggling your ears! Understand what I’m tellin you! It’s got to stop some fine day! There wont always be time!—Bad girl! Go on! Go in your corner! Think it over well!”

I had never seen Gerard angry.

I was amazed and scared in the corner, as one might have felt seeing Christ in the temple bashing the moneychanger tables every which away and scourging them with his seldom whip."