Ironweed - William Kennedy [54]
The Fiddler, erstwhile motorman, now wearing a tan tweed suit, brown polka-dot bow tie, and sailor straw hat, smiled coherently at Francis for the first time since that day on Broadway in 1901 when they both ignited the kerosene-soaked sheets that trapped the strike-breaking trolley car.
When a soldier split the Fiddler’s skull with a rifle butt, the sympathetic mob spirited him away to safety before he could be arrested. But the blow left the man mindless for a dozen years, cared for by his spinster sister, Martha. Martyred herself by his wound, Martha paraded the Fiddler through the streets of North Albany, a heroic vegetable, so the neighbors could see the true consequences of the smartypants trolley strike.
Francis offered to be a bearer at the Fiddler’s funeral in 1913, but Martha rejected him; for she believed it was Francis’s firebrand style that had seduced the Fiddler into violence that fated morning. Your hands have done enough damage, she told Francis. You’ll not touch my brother’s coffin.
Pay her no mind, the Fiddler told Francis from his perch on the riddled pot. I don’t blame you for anything. Wasn’t I ten years your elder? Couldn’t I make up my own mind?
But then the Fiddler gave Francis a look that loosened a tide of bafflement, as he said solemnly: It’s those traitorous hands of yours you’ll have to forgive.
Francis brushed rust off his fingers and went behind the house for more dead metal. When he returned with an armload, the scab Harold Allen, wearing a black coat and a motorman’s cap, was sitting with the Fiddler, who had his boater in his lap now. When Francis looked at the pair of them, Harold Allen doffed his cap. Both men’s heads were laid open and bloody, but not bleeding, their unchanging wounds obviously healed over and as much a part of their aerial bodies as their eyes, which burned with an entropic passion common among murdered men.
Francis threw the old junk into the wagon and turned away. When he turned back to verify the images, two more men were sitting in the wheelless wheelbarrow. Francis could call neither of them by name, but he knew from the astonishment in the hollows of their eyes that they were the shopper and haberdasher, bystanders both, who had been killed by the soldiers’ random retaliatory fire after Francis opened Harold Allen’s skull with the smooth stone.
“I’m ready,” said Francis to Rosskam. “You ready?”
“What’s the big hurry-up?” Rosskam asked.
“Nothin’ else to haul. Shouldn’t we be movin’?”
“He’s impatient too, this bum,” Rosskam said, and he climbed aboard the wagon.
Francis, feeling the eyes of the four shades on him, gave them all the back of his neck as the wagon rolled north on Pearl Street, Annie’s street. Getting closer. He pulled up the collar of his coat against a new bite in the wind, the western sky graying with ominous clouds. It was almost three-thirty by the Nehi clock in the window of Elmer Rivenburgh’s grocery. First day of early winter. If it rains tonight and we’re outside, we freeze our ass once and for all.
He rubbed his hands together. Were they the enemies? How could a man’s hands betray him? They were full of scars, calluses, split fingernails, ill-healed bones broken on other men’s jaws, veins so bloated and blue they seemed on the verge of explosion. The hands were long-fingered, except where there was no finger, and now, with accreting age, the fingers had thickened, like the low-growing branches of a tree.
Traitors? How possible?
“You like your hands?” Francis asked Rosskam.
“Like, you say? Do I like my hands?”
“Yeah. You like ‘em?”
Rosskam looked at his hands, looked at Francis, looked away.
“I mean it,” Francis said. “I got the idea that my hands do things on their own, you know what I mean?”
“Not yet,” said Rosskam.
“They don’t need me. They do what they goddamn please.”
“Ah ha,” said Rosskam. He looked again at his own gnarled hands and then again at Francis. “Nutsy,” he said, and slapped the horse’s rump with the reins. “Giddap,” he added, changing the subject.
Francis remembered Skippy Maguire’s left hand, that first summer away at Dayton. Skippy was Francis