Читать книгу Dr. Sax - Jack Kerouac - Страница 21

AT THE AGE OF SEVEN I went to St. Louis Parochial School, a particularly Doctor Saxish school. It was in the auditorium of this kingdom that I saw the Ste. thérèse movie that made stone turn its head–there were bazaars, my mother officiated at a booth, there were kisses free, candy kisses and real kisses (with all the local mustachioed Parisian Canadian blades rushing up to get theirs before they run off to join the Army in Panama, like Henry Fortier did, or go into the priesthood on orders from their fathers)— St. Louis had secret darknesses in niches… Rainy funerals for little boys, I saw several including the funeral of my own poor brother when (at age 4) my family lived exactly on the St. Louis parish on Beaulieu St. behind its walls… There were dignified marvelous old ladies with white hair and silver pince-nez living in the houses across the school–in one house on Beaulieu, too … a woman with parrot on varnished porch, selling middleclass candies to the children (discs of caramel, delicious, cheap)—

The dark nuns of St. Louis who had come to my brother’s hoary black funeral in a gloomy file (in rain), had reported they were sitting knitting in a thunderstorm when a ball of bright white fire came and hovered in their room just inside the window, dancing in the flash of their scissors and sewing needles as they prepared immense drapes for the bazaar. Incredible to disbelieve them … for years I went around pondering this fact: I looked for the white ball in thunderstorms–I understood mysticism at once– I saw where the thunder rolled his immense bowling ball into a clap of clouds all monstrous with jaws and explosion, I knew the thunder was a ball–

On Beaulieu St. our house was built over an ancient cemetery—(Good God the Yankees and Indians beneath, the World Series of old dry dusts). My brother Gerard was of the conviction, ark, that the ghosts of the dead beneath the house were responsible for its sometimes rattling– and crashing plaster, knocking pickaninny Irish dolls from the shelf. In darkness in mid-sleep night I saw him standing over my crib with wild hair, my heart stoned, I turned horrified, my mother and sister were sleeping in big bed, I was in crib, implacable stood Gerard-O my brother … it might have been the arrangement of the shadows. —Ah Shadow! Sax!—While I was living on Beaulieu Street I had memories of that hill, and Castle; and when we moved from there we transferred to a house not far from an across-the-street haunted Pine ground with deserted Castle-manse (near a French bread-bakery back of woods and skating ponds, Hildreth St.). Presentiments of shadow and snake came tome early.