The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [143]
The car jolted as it was jammed into an unexpected halt. Studs looked up into the face of Ames Dubois, and the countenance of the conductor; he knew that he knew the conductor and hated him like poison.
“Lonigan, take your goddamn tree off the tracks!” they jointly demanded.
“My tree?” Studs asked in surprised apology.
To the amusement of all the passengers, he was ejected from the car, and landed in unwet snow. He found no tree on the tracks, and when he looked up, the car was in motion, and Weary Reilley, the conductor, stood on the rear platform thumbing his nose.
Studs ran, flagging after the car, and pleading in shouts for them to wait. He was outdistanced and he stopped to catch his breath. A sense of loss swept him with oceans of sadness, and he was more sad than any man had ever been. He peered around him, and saw the same monotonous desolation of snow on every side, with neither sight nor sign of a human being. He had lost glorious Gloria forevermore, and he was poor, and miles upon miles from his home in Chicago that he should never have left. And when he did return, after walking the whole distance without shoes, he would have neither love nor gold.
You’re no good! You’re not a man. You never will be, you yellow Lonigan louse, a voice within him, as if it were the voice of conscience, sneered.
He dropped a dejected head, and set out upon that thousand-mile journey back to his home, without any shoes on his feet. He already could hear the crackling, sarcastic laughter with which he would be greeted. Suddenly, he was amongst buildings which resembled the houses and apartments in the 5700 block on Indiana Avenue. And in the sky, like a rising sun of the spring time, he saw the beaming face of Lucy Scanlan. In a voice as sweet as candy, she sang to him that she still loved him in a cosy Morris chair, and that if he wanted her, he must go and touch the tree. He confidently strode through a recognizable gangway, and came out upon a street which was fronted with a park of huge oak-trees. He crossed the street, but the trees receded and disappeared with his approach. He chased the vanishing trees across fields of grass, encouraged and hopeful, only because the face of Lucy Scanlan still shone in the sky like a rising sun of the spring time. He came upon a bent, gnarled oak-tree, and knew that it was the one, because the face of Lucy Scanlan blew kisses down upon it, and it sang In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with the voice of Lucy Scanlan. He touched the tree gently with the second and third fingers of his right hand
and suddenly ..
the boy Studs Lonigan sat nervously in the eighth-grade room of St. Patrick’s school, wishing that school would let out, because he had just touched something that was the secret of love and happiness and he couldn’t remember what it was, or where it was, and he had to go out and find it again before it was too late.
“William Bastard Lonigan, you were late for school this morning,” Sister Battling Bertha said, wrinkling the toothless face of a crone.
“I wasn’t. The bell rang before I got here,” the boy Studs Lonigan replied, and a six-foot-four pupil in short britches named Slug Mason guffawed.
“Sister, he played poker last night and lost eight dollars and when I asked him for a penny because I was starving, he wouldn’t give it to me,” TB McCarthy said, turning a sickly yellow face upon the schoolboy, Studs Lonigan.
“All I did last night was go to bed with Lucy, only we didn’t sleep much. Ha! Ha!” the schoolboy Studs Lonigan said. William Bastard Lonigan, by your gambling and immoral thoughts, words, deeds, acts and wishes, you have spilled the consecrated blood of the Sacred Heart of the Crucified Jesus, and you have put gray hairs upon the heads of your father, mother, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and all the communion of saints in Heaven and on earth. You will go to the gallows for your sacrileges, and God will send you special delivery to Hell to burn forevermore in a lake of brimstone!
She descended on him like a cyclone, and vigorously shook his head.