Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online Page A

we finish school ha?” I found him as beautiful as seven times the pick because his rosy cheeks and white teeth and the eyes of a woman dreaming, of an angel maybe, bit my heart; children love each other like lovers, we dont look at their little dramas in the course of our adult days. The picture—, also at the crucifix I prayed. Every day at school it was one ruse after another to make me loved by my boy; I watched him when we all stood in line in the schoolyard, the Brother up front was delivering his speech, his prayer in the cold zero, redness of Heaven behind him, the big steam and balloon and ballturd of horses in the little alley that crossed the school property (Saint Joseph’s Parochial), the ragmen were coming at the same time we were marching to class. Dont think we werent afraid! They had greasy hats, they grinned in dirty holes on top of tenements. . . . I was crazy then, my head ran fantastic ideas from seven morning till ten night like a little Rimbaud in his racks cracked. Ah the poetry I’d written at ten—letters to Maggie—afternoons walking to school I’d imagine movie cameras turned on me, the Complete Life of a Parochial School Boy, his thoughts, way he jumps against fences.—Voila, at sixteen, Maggie—the crucifix—there, God knew I had love troubles that were big and real now with his plastic statued head just neckbroke leaned over as sad as ever, more sad than ever. “You found yourself your little darknesses?” said God to me, silently, with his statue head, before it my hands clasped waiting. “Grew up with your little gidigne ?” (dingdong). At the age of seven a priest had asked me in the confessional “And you played with your little gidigne? ”
    â€œYes mon père .”
    â€œWell therefore, if you played with your little gidigne say a whole rosary and after that do ten Notre Pères and ten Salut Marie’s in front of the altar and after that you can go.” The Church carried me from one Saviour to another; who’s done that for me since?—why the tears?—God spoke to me from the crucifix:—“Now it is morning and the good people are talking next door and the light comes in through the shade—my child, you find yourself in the world of mystery and pain not understandable—I know, angel—it is for your good, we shall save you, because we find your soul as important as the soul of the others in the world—but you must suffer for that, in effect my child, you must die, you must die in pain, with cries, frights, despairs—the ambiguities! the terrors!—the lights, heavy, breakable, the fatigues, ah—”
    I listened in the silence of my mother’s house to divine how God was going to arrange the success of my love with Maggie. Now I could see her tears too. Something there was, that was not, nothing, just the consciousness that God awaits us.
    â€œMixing up in the affairs of the world isnt for God,” I told myself hurrying to school, ready for another day.

9
    Here was a typical day, I’d get up in the morning, seven, my mother’d call, I’d smell the breakfast of toast and gruel, the windows were frozen an inch of snowy ice the whole glass illuminated rose by the transformations of the ocean of winter outside. I’d jump out of the sheets so warm soft, I wanted to stay buried all day with Maggie and maybe also just the darkness and the death of no time ; I’d jump into my incontestable clothes; inescapable cold shoes, cold socks that I threw on the oil stove to warm. Why did people stop wearing long underwear?—it’s a bitch to put on little undershirts in the morning—I’d throw my warm pajamas on the bed—My room was lit by the morning the color of a rose coal a half-hour dropped from the grate, my things all there like the Victrola, the toy pool table, the toy green desk, the linoleum all raised one side and sitting