Read Online Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online Page A

corner at Lilley and Aiken, stopping at the drugstore for his 7-20-4 cigars, then the bakery for fresh Franco-American bread that at home he’ll slice on a wood board in the middle of the table slices big enough to write your biography on—
    â€œAllo Emil—long time no see.”
    â€œI’m pretty busy.”
    â€œStill got your shop near the Royal?”
    â€œI’m established there, Roger–business is going good.”
    â€œThe anglais aint givin you marde ?” (the English)—“the Irish—the Greeks?—one thing me I like about bread, I do my business with the Canadians” (pronounced Ca-na-yen, the thick peasant pride and emphatic umph of it)—
    My father is actually a complicated cosmopolite compared to Roger the baker—but he hands him a cigar.
    â€œWe’ll see you at the bazaar?”
    â€œIf I have time—I’ll pitch in a little in any case, for invitation cards, my little bit—”
    And all the usual pleasantries, detailed styles, and panoramic shots of a complete social scene, Centerville in Lowell in 1925 being a close knit truly French community such as you might not find any more (with the peculiar Medieval Gaulic closed-in flavor) in modern long-eared France—
    Emil comes home with his cigars and bread, and rounds the corner of Beaulieu just as the dusk clouds have fought their last war grim and purple in the invisibilities and here comes the evening star shimmering like a magic hanger in the fade-far flank of the retreat, and lights of brown and quiet flavor have come on in homes and he sees lil Nin and I wheeing with our sleds—
    â€œIn any case I got two of em in good health—but in my heart I cant be happy about anything, Gerard there are no others like Gerard, I shall never be able to understand where a little boy like that got so much goodness—so much—enough to make me cry, damn it—it’s the way he’s always got his little head to one side—pensive, so sad, so concerned—I’d give all the Lowells for the map of the Devil, to keep my Gerard—Will I keep him?” he wonders looking up?—seeing the same unsaying stars Gerard had stared at—“ Mystère , it’s a Christmas to make the dogs cry”—“Come my little kids!” he calls to Nin and me but we dont hear him in the heat of our play in the cold snow so he goes in the house anyway, with that sad motion of men passing into their domiciles, the pitifulness of it, specially in winter, the sight of which, if an angel returned from heaven and looked (if angels, if heaven, which is an ethereal crock) would make an angel melt—If angels were angels in the first place.
    Christmas comes, Gerard gets a great new erector set, big enough and complicated enough to build hoists that’ll carry the house away—He sits in bed contemplating it with his little sad sideways look, like the way the moon looks on May nights, the face tilted over—It’s an expression, with his arms folded, that again and again says “Ah, but and but, look at that, my souls”—Nin gets a pickaninny doll, I remember distinctly finding it that Christmas morning on the mantle by the tree, and the little high chair that went with it, and Gerard promptly that week made a little doll house for his sister, subsidiary gifts from his own Santa Claus hands—Me, I had toys that I’ve forgotten cold, and it goes to show—
    Then New Year’s—
    Then the bleak January, the friendless February with his iron fingers in your grill of ribs—
    Gerard lay abed all the time, getting up only to go to the toilet or occasional wan visits to the breakfast table, where after dishes were cleared, he’d sometimes sit a half hour erecting structures high that I watched standing at the side of him, holding his knee I expect—“What you doin, Gerard?”
    No answer but in the action of his hands