Doctor Sax stood high above the parapets of Lowell, laughing. “I am ready,” he cried, “I am ready.” He pulled his little rubber boat from his slouch hat and blew it up again and paddled away with his rubber oar and Dove in pocket through the dismal forest flood waters of the night —towards the Castle–his hollow laugh echoed across the desolation. A giant spider crawled from the flood water and rushed on sixteen legs rapidly to the Castle on Snake Hill-
also nameless little ones did
rush there.
3
PAUL BOLDIEU’S HOME that we used to climb rickety outdoor steps to–at the edge of the Cow Field near St. Rita’s church,—his dismal house where his mother made beans for his breakfast in the morning–where poor dim religious St. Mary Calendars hung in brown door behind the stove —Pauls bedroom, where he kept his records in red ink of all our baseball batting averages–crazy Kid Faro (because of his gold tooth and green tweed suit on Sunday afternoon at the Crown Theater with rats in the balcony and the time we threw boxes of ice cream at the miser in the movie foreclosing the widow’s mortgage and a 90 year old cop came upstairs to try to find us)—Paul’s house was flooded, six feet of water made it necessary to ride to his porch in a rowboat–
Tremendous excitement filled all the riverside streets of Lowell where people–in the clear air of holiday-like mornings–massed at the lapping beautiful flood-edge—”I got a nose, you got a nose”— I’m roaming both sides of the bank, singing–I go across the White Bridge which ordinarily I cross every day to go to Bartlett Junior High and there’s the massive miraculous long-awaited monstrous flood-hump rolling thirty feet below at a speed of 60 miles an hour– massively more of the flood arcs down from New Hampshire, over highways sometimes–Paul’s house was smack in the middle of the new waterbed across low-ground Pawtucketville— “I got a nose–you got a nose—” Poor Paul–I can’t see him in all the crowd–there’s a roadblock thrown across Riverside Street at the monument of World War I with Lauzon’s uncle’s name on it where the river is eating at the lawn-back of it, the monument’s about to topple in the river–the river is not only roaring through Mrs. Wakefield’s home but comes lapping almost beyond the monument to the very bridge head of Varnum Avenue–but Varnum Avenue is also flooded a few hundred feet beyond at Scotty’s–out on the boulevard there’s a new river– G.J. and I congratulate each other that our houses are built high on the rock of Pawtucketville–the Sandbank will never get wet–Sarah Avenue and Phebe Avenue survey immense vistas when you can see through the trees–the flood might rise like Noah’s flood and the mayor would know the difference in lower Lowell–in Pawtucketville Hump we could make a last ditch stand with a hastily improvised ark—”Clear the way gentlemen!” G.J. is asseverating at the sandbags as he tries to poke his fingers through—”From time immemoriam’s mortariums ye swabs avast ye’ve swabbed them seabags to the fore myzen mast god dam ye”—G.J.’s a regular Ahab at the Flood, a fiend at the Levee– Hungrily we prowl up and down the flood admiring the black madness, the demoniac river–it’s eating away everything that ever hated us–trees, houses, communities are capitulating– Mad glee fires in our souls, we hear now clearly the laugh of Doctor Sax penetrating the roar of the middle river, we feel the hum and Vibration of evil in the earth. When night comes we go striding with wild arms swinging into the matted leaves and rocks of the shore under Moody Street Bridge-we throw tiny feeble rocks into the mass … the rocks are hurled up–back-Along the tragic granite wall of the canal we see no more ancient watermarks of flood, or whitewashed numbers; the flood has reached a record peak. A famous St. Francis Lock in a Canal across town is saving the downtown District of Lowell from complete inundation. As it is, six feet of water fill my father’s printing plant–he has taken several despairing drives downtown looking at the water and even around Pawtucketville–
“I’ll never forget that time, Zagg, your father coughed” —G.J.’s talking to me as we prowl like rats—”in the alley wall, you know between the Club and Blezan’s store on Gershom you get those two wood walls each side of the street, I was on one side, your father on the other, one early morning last week, cold as hell you remember, I’m sending up smoke screens from my mouth, suddenly a great explosion rocked me to my knees–your father had coughed and the echo had hit my wall and bounced right off me —my ears exploded, I fell down on one knee Zagg no shit– I said (to regain my senses, no one there to slap me you understand)”—(reaching out and goosing me—) “Zagg–so I says, innocently, ‘Why Mr. Duluoz you do seem to have rather a bad cough there, don’t you know?’ ‘N-o-o,’ he says, no Gussie it ain’t so bad–just a little rasp, Gussie, just a little rasp in my throat’- A-a-oo-ay–Brash!” he yelled, lifting a leg–an imitation of big burpers laying explosive farts at board of directors meetings.
The flood roared on, Craw River–it came Raining and Weeping from Six Thousand Holes in the moisted Earth of all New England’s spring. Newspapermen were out on the bridge with photographers taking pictures of the river– newsreels from Boston–visiting Red Cross journalists horn the Hague Convention in Jersey City.
4
IT’S LENT AND PEOPLE GO ON WITH THEIR NOVENAS—I’m in there at gray dusk Tuesday evening (the afternoon after the raft fiasco with Dicky I spent hours simply on my back in the riverside grass at the cliff precipice under Moody Bridge, surveying the flood with drowsy time’s eye of summer and idly watching an airplane circling the river)—I’m at church, have to finish my Novena with which I can pray for anything I want later, besides they all told me to do my Novena, so I’m in church at dusk– More people than usual, they’re afraid of the Flood. Dimly you can hear it roaring behind the candle silence walls.
5
BAGGYPANTS JOURNEYMEN INVENTORS OF THE WORLD couldn’t have been able to solve the riddle of the flood even if they had a union– Make a study:—along the shore of the presdigitator water-measurer on the canal there was nothing but water, the gimmick was drowned, the alley between redbrick warehouses leading to the grimy door of my father’s front floor hall-chamber with wagon wheels and wrinkly coaldust basement groundfloor for a red carpet to the Boss–it was all one vast and ghastly swimmingpool made of mud, straw, cotton, machine oil, ink, piss and rivers–
6
STAVROGIN HUNGRY MY FILIAL BROTHER was lost in the mud rats–I heard that Joe was off somewhere with a .22 rifle hunting rats, there was a bounty being paid, talk was up about a mass Typhoid inoculation–everybody had to take these shots, G. J. and I were terribly sick and arm-swollen from them that following week–
7
MY FATHER, Ma and Nin, and I, the car parked behind us, are standing on a high parapet street down by White Street surveying below us the brown water rising to the second floor level of houses just like our own on Sarah Avenue and the poor families like us that were out of a house,—well all they gotta do now is go bohemianing in the candlelight like all Mexico,—White Street was the name of Mrs. Wakefield’s street, it was now Brown Street,—down towards the river you can see the arm of water inrushing and how it all happened, all coming from great seas of flood reported up-river–
“Bon, ca sera pas terrible ca avoir l’eau dans ta chambre a couchez aussi haut que les portrats sur T mur” said my father—(Well, wouldn’t that be terrible to have water in your bedroom as high as the pictures on the wall!) I stood close to him for protection, love and loyalty. A fly buzzed.
8
MRS. MOGARRAGA THE IRISH WOMAN who lived in the little white bungalow in Rosemont was heard declaiming as she moved out of her piano parlor in a rowboat, “Bums and kit’s kaboodles they are, the slimes of Arrah, to make trousers of themselves in the general pants bottoms Gomorrah of their filthy hovel house–it’s the Lord brought the Flood to wash the wretches out like cockroach! Bottles in their bedspreads, beans in their bedbugs, batty–I’d as soon sweep them out with me broom”— (referring to her boarders) (clutching her cat to her bosom God bless her huge delight)— A ripple of laughter rise
s from the floodside crowd.
9
EUGENE PASTERNAK, mad with love of his stride-howl midnights, comes furiyating down the slime path in hod’s man’s boots with a flume of essence in his air—”Geeyaw! The groolemen make my single dole ring soul make out–containt my comp! save my bomp!”—and disappearing in the back shacks (in a shimmy dance like a comedian leaving the stage).
10
IN SEARS ROEBUCK and hardware stores people stomped around by the light of gray afternoon and bought boots, rubbers, fiddled among rakes, cape, gloomrain gear–something like a dirty splotch of ink hung in the sky, the flood was in the air, talk in the streets–views of water at distant street-ends all over town, the great clock of City Hall rounded golden silent in the dumb daylight and said the time about the flood. Puddles splashed in traffic. Unbelievably now, I returned to see the flood still rising–after supper —the mighty roar beneath the bridge was still there, casting mist up in an air sea–brown torrent mountains falling in–i began to be afraid now of watching under the bridge- Huge tormented logs came careening from the moil of upriver falls and consequence, lurched up and down like a piston in the stream, some huge power was pumping from below … glistened in its torments. Beyond I saw the trees in the tragic air, the scene rushed on dizzily, I tried to follow filthy brown wave crests for a hundred feet and got dizzy and like to fall in the river. The clock drowned. I began to dislike the flood, began to see it as an evil monster bent on devouring everyone–for no special reason–
I wished the river would dry up and become the swimming hole of summer for the heroes of Pawtucketville again, right now it was only fit for the heroes of Punic War II—But it kept roaring and rising, the whole town was wet. Gigantic diving barn roofs suddenly submerging and rising again huge and dripping elicited “Ooohs & Aaahs” from watchers on the shore– March raged to her fury. The mad moon, a crescent hint, sliced thinly through the rayward crowds of cloud that boosted themselves in an east wind across the skies of disaster. I saw a lonely telephone pole standing eight feet deep, in thin rain.
On the porch of my house I knew in meditative revery that the roar I heard in the valley was a catastrophic roar —the big tree across the street added his multiform Voice of leafy to the general sigh sad of March–
The rain fell in the night. The Castle was dark. The knotty limbs and roots of a great tree growing out the side of a pavement near the ironpickets of old downtown Lowell churches made a faint glimmer in the streetlamps.— Looking at the clock you could envision the river behind its illuminated disk of time, its fury rush over shores and people–time and the river were out of joint. Hastily, at night, at the little green desk in my room, I wrote in my diary: “Flood going full force, big brown mountain of water rushing by. Won $3.50 today Pimlico show bet.” (I also kept my bets going in the imaginary bankroll that lasted years—) There was something wet and gloomy in the green of my desk (as brown darkness flared in the window where my mudblack apple tree branches reached in to touch my sleep), something hopeless, gray, dreary, nineteen-thirtyish, lostish, broken not in the wind a cry but a big dull blurt hanging dumbly in a gray brown mass of semi late-afternoon cloudy darkness and pebble grit Void of sweaty sticky clothes and dawg despair–something that can’t possibly come back again in America and history, the gloom of the unaccomplished mudheap civilization when it gets caught with its pants down from a source it long lost contact with–City Hall golf politicians and clerks who also played golf complained that the river had drowned all the fairways and tees, these knickers types were disgruntled by natural phenomena.
By Friday the crest had been passed through town and the river starts going down.
“But the damage has been done.”
BOOK SIX
The Castle
1
A STRANGE LULL took place–after the Flood and Before the Mysteries–the Universe was suspending itself for a moment of quiet–like a drop of dew on the beak of a Bird– at Dawn.
By Saturday the river is gone way down and you see all the raw marks of the flood on wall and shore, the whole town is soaked, muddy and tired– By Saturday morning the sun is shining, the sky is piercingly heartbreakingly blue, and my sister and I are dancing over the Moody Street Bridge to get out Saturday morning Library books. All the night before I’ve been dreaming of books–Im standing in the children’s library in the basement, rows of glazed brown books are in front of me, I reach out and open one–my soul thrills to touch the soft used meaty pages covered with avidities of reading–at last, at last, I’m opening the magic brown book–I see the great curlicued print, the immense candelabra firstletters at the beginnings of chapters–and Ah!—picture of rosy fairies in blue mist gardens with gingerbread Holland skylark rooftops (with breadcrumbs on them), talking to wistful heroines about the mean old monster on the other bosky side of the dale —”In another part of the forest, mein princess, the lark’s largesse is largely hidden”—and other sinister meanings– shortly after dreaming that I dive into dreams of upper hills with white houses slashed across by rays of a Maine sun sending sad redness over pines in a long highway that goes unbelievably and with … remorse … jump off the bus so I can stay in little Gardiner town, I bang at shutters, that sun’s same red, no soap, the people of the north are silent, I take a freight train to Lowell and settle on that little hill where I rode my bicycle down, near Lupine Road, near the house where batty woman had the Catholic altar, where–where— (I remember the statue of the Virgin Mary in her livingroom candlelight)—
And I wake up in the morning and it’s bright March sun —my sister and I, after hurried oatmeals, rush out in the fresh morning not unenlivened by the dew-residue of the river in its muddy slaw down by the tearful shore–Nature’s come to pet and woo poor billywoo in the river valley-golden clouds of blue morning shine above the decay of the flood–little children dance along the washlined neighborhoods, throw sunny rocks in muddy rivers of the turtle day,— In a Susquehanna special river shore on Riverside Street-a-Dreams, legitimate, I saunter along with my sister to the library, throwing scaled rocks on the river, drowning their flight in mud floodwaters of greenly corpses bumping– Sailing along and jumping in the air we dally to the library, fourteen–
I come home from the library that morning, up Merrimac Street with Nin. At one point we veer off to Moody Street parallel. Ruddy morning sun on stone and ivy (our books firm under our arms, joy)—the Royal Theater we pass, remembering the gray past of 1927 when we went to movies together, to the Royal, free because Pop’s printing press that printed their programs was in back, early days, the usher upstairs niggerheaven balcony where we sat had raspy voice, we waited impatiently for 1:15 movie time, sometimes arrived 12:30 and waited all that time looking at cherubims in the ceiling, round Moorish Royal Theater pink and gilt and crystal-crazy ceiling with a Sistine Madonna around the dull knob where a chandelier should be,—long waits in rickety nervous snapping bubblegum seat-scuff Seattle tatter “Shaddapl” of usher, who also had hand missing with a hook at the hump World War I veteran my father knew him well fine fellow–waiting for Tim McCoy to jump onscreen, or Hoot Gibson, or Mix, Tom Mix, with snowy teeth and coalblack eyebrows under enormous snow white bright blinding sombreros of the Crazy Hollywood silent West–leaping thru dark and tragic gangs of inept extra-fighters fumbling with beat torn vests instead of bright spurs and feather-holsters of Heroes– “Gard, Ti Jean, le Royal, on y alia au Royal tou le temps en?—on faisa ainque pensee allez au Royal–as t’heur on est grandis on lit des livres”(Look, Ti Jean, the Royal, we used to go to the Royal all the time hey?—that’s all we thought about go to the Royal–now we are grown up we read books.) And we trip along gaily, Nin and I, past the Royal, the Daumier Club where my father played the horses, Alexander’s meat market on the canal now in the Saturday morning all mad with a thousand mothers milling at the sawdust counters. Across the street the old drugstore in an ancient wood Colonial block house of Indian times showing jockstraps and bedpans in the
window and pictures of the backs of venereal sufferers (made you wonder what awful place they’d been to get such marks of their pleasure).