Full Dark, No Stars

Of course I went to St. Eusebia’s, but made no attempt to go in and inquire about Shannon Cotterie to the governess or matron or whatever her title may have been. It was a cold and forbidding hulk of

a building, its thick stone and slit windows expressing perfectly how the papist hierarchy seems to feel in their hearts about women. Watching the few pregnant girls who slunk out with downcast eyes and hunched shoulders told me everything I needed to know about why Shan had been so wil ing to leave it.

Oddly enough, I felt closest to my son in an al ey. It was the one next to the Gal atin Street Drug Store & Soda Fountain (Schrafft’s Candy & Best Homemade Fudge Our Specialty), two blocks from St.

Eusebia’s. There was a crate there, probably too new to be the one Henry sat on while waiting for a girl adventurous enough to trade information for cigarettes, but I could pretend, and I did. Such pretense was easier when I was drunk, and most days when I turned up on Gal atin Street, I was very drunk indeed. Sometimes I pretended it was 1922 again and it was I who was waiting for Victoria Stevenson. If

she came, I would trade her a whole carton of cigarettes to take one message: When a young man who calls himself Hank turns up here, asking about Shan Cotterie, tell him to get lost. To take his

jazz elsewhere. Tell him his father needs him back on the farm, that maybe with two of them working together, they can save it.

But that girl was beyond my reach. The only Victoria I met was the later version, the one with the three comely children and the respectable title of Mrs. Hal ett. I had stopped drinking by then, I had a job at the Bilt-Rite Clothing factory, and had reacquainted myself with razor blade and shaving soap. Given this veneer of respectability, she received me wil ingly enough. I told her who I was only because

—if I am to be honest to the end—lying was not an option. I could see in the slight widening of her eyes that she had noted the resemblance.

“Gee, but he was sweet,” she said. “And so crazy in love. I’m sorry for Shan, too. She was a great gal. It’s like a tragedy out of Shakespeare, isn’t it?”

Only she said it trad-a-gee, and after that I didn’t go back to the Gal atin Street al ey anymore, because for me Arlette’s murder had poisoned even this blameless young Omaha matron’s attempt at kindness. She thought Henry and Shannon’s deaths were like a trad-a-gee out of Shakespeare. She thought it was romantic. Would she stil have thought so, I wonder, if she had heard my wife screaming

her last from inside a blood-sodden burlap sack? Or glimpsed my son’s eyeless, lipless face?

I held two jobs during my years in the Gateway City, also known as the City of Fools. You wil say of course I held jobs; I would have been living on the street otherwise. But men more honest than I have continued drinking even when they want to stop, and men more decent than I have ended up sleeping in doorways. I suppose I could say that after my lost years, I made one more effort to live an

actual life. There were times when I actual y believed that, but lying in bed at night (and listening to the rats scampering in the wal s—they have been my constant companions), I always knew the truth: I was stil trying to win. Even after Henry’s and Shannon’s deaths, even after losing the farm, I was trying to beat the corpse in the wel . She and her minions.

John Hanrahan was the storage foreman at the Bilt-Rite factory. He didn’t want to hire a man with only one hand, but I begged for a trial, and when I proved to him that I could pul a pal et ful y loaded with shirts or overal s as wel as any man on his payrol , he took me on. I hauled those pal ets for 14 months, and often limped back to the boardinghouse where I was staying with my back and stump on

fire. But I never complained, and I even found time to learn sewing. This I did on my lunch hour (which was actual y 15 minutes long), and during my afternoon break. While the other men were out back on the loading dock, smoking and tel ing dirty jokes, I was teaching myself to sew seams, first in the burlap shipping bags we used, and then in the overal s that were the company’s main stock-in-trade. I turned out to have a knack for it; I could even lay in a zipper, which is no mean skil on a garment assembly line. I’d press my stump on the garment to hold it in place as my foot ran the electric treadle.

Sewing paid better than hauling, and it was easier on my back, but the Sewing Floor was dark and cavernous, and after four months or so I began to see rats on the mountains of freshly blued denim

and hunkering in the shadows beneath the hand-trucks that first brought in the piecework and then rol ed it out again.