The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [6]
Golly, it would be great to be a kid again!
He said to himself:
Yes, sir, it would be great to be a kid!
He tried to remember those ragged days when he was only a shaver and his old man was a pauperized greenhorn. Golly, them were the days! Often there had not been enough to eat in the house. Many’s the winter day he and his brother had to stay home from school because they had no shoes. The old house, it was more like a barn or a shack than a home, was so cold they had to sleep in their clothes; sometimes in those zero Chicago winters his old man had slept in his overcoat. Golly, even with all that privation, them was the days. And now that they were over, there was something missing, some thing gone from a fellow’s life. He’d give anything to live back a day of those times around Blue Island, and Archer Avenue. Old man Dooley always called it Archey Avenue, and Dooley was one comical turkey, funnier than anything you’d find in real life. And then those days when he was a young buck in Canaryville. And things were cheaper in them days. The boys that hung out at Kieley’s saloon, and later around the saloon that Padney Flaherty ran, and Luke O’Toole’s place on Halsted. Old Luke was some boy. Well, the Lord have mercy on his soul, and on the soul of old Padney Flaherty. Padney was a comical duck, good-hearted as they make them, but crabby. Was he a first-rate crab! And the jokes the boys played on him. They were always calling him names, pigpen Irish, shanty Irish, Padney, ain’t you the kind of an Irishman that slept with the pigs back in the old country. Once they told him his house was on fire, and he’d dashed out of the saloon and down the street with a bucket of water in his hand. It was funny watching him go, a skinny little Irishman. And while he was gone, they had all helped themselves to free beers. He came back blazing mad, picked up a hatchet, called them all the choice swear words he could think of, and ran the whole gang out into the street. Then they’d all stood on the other corner, laughing. Yeh, them was the days! And when he was a kid, they would all get sacks, wagons, any old thing, and go over to the tracks. Spike Kennedy, Lord have mercy on his soul, he was bit by a mad dog and died, would get up on one of the cars and throw coal down like sixty, and they’d scramble for it. And many’s the fight they’d have with the gangs from other streets. And many’s the plunk in the cocoanut that Paddy Lonigan got. It’s a wonder some of them weren’t kilted throwing lumps of coal and ragged rocks at each other like a band of wild Indians. To live some of those old days over again! Golly!
He took a meditative puff on his stogy, and informed himself that time was a funny thing. Old Man Time just walked along, and he didn’t even blow a How-do-you-do through his whiskers. He just walked on past you. Things just change. Chicago was nothing like it used to be, when over around St. Ignatius Church and back of the yards were white men’s neighborhoods, and Prairie Avenue was a tony street where all the swells lived, like Fields, who had a mansion at Nineteenth and Prairie, and Pullman at Eighteenth and Calumet, and Fairbanks and Potter Palmer and the niggers and whores had not roosted around Twenty-second Street, and Fifty-eighth Street was nothing but a wilderness, and on Sunday: afternoons the boulevards were lined with carriages, and there were no auto-mobiles, and living was dirt cheap, and people were friendlier and more neighborly than they now were, and there were high sidewalks, and he and Mary were young. Mary had been a pretty girl, too, and at picnics she had always won the prizes because she could run like a deer; and he remembered that first picnic he took her to, and she had won a loving cup and gave it to him, and then they went off sparking, and he had gotten his first kiss, and they sat under a tree when it was hushed, like the earth was preparing for darkness, and he and Mary had looked at each other, and then he knew he had fallen, and he didn