Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online Page B

on books to make banks for the pool balls and raced track meets when I had time but I didnt any more—My tragic closet, my jacket hung in a dampness like powder from fresh plaster lost locked like adobe closets Casbah roof civilizations; the papers covered with my printed handwritings, on the floor, among shoes, bats, gloves, sorrows of pasts. . . . My cat who’d slept with me all night and was now thrown awake in the empty semi-warm bed was trying to hide himself in near the pillow and sleep a little more but smelled the bacon and hurried to begin his day, to the floor, plap, disappearing like a sound with little swift feet; sometimes he was gone when seven o’clock woke me, already out making crazy little tracks in the new snow and little yellow balls of pipi and shivering his teeth to see the birds in trees as cold as iron. “Peeteepeet!” the birds said; I look outside briefly before leaving my room, in a window hole, the roofs are pure, white, the trees frozen mad, the cold houses smoking thinly, docile-eyed in winter.
    You have to put up with life.

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    In the tenement it was high, you could see downstairs the roofs of Gardner Street and the big field and the trail people used gray rose dawns five o’clock January to go flatulate in church. There were old women of the block who went to church every dawn, and late afternoon; and sometimes again evening; old, prayery, understanding of something that little children dont understand and in their tragedy so close you’d think to the tomb that you saw already their profiles sitting in rose satin the color of their rose-morns of life and expectoration but the scent of other things rising from the hearts of flowers that die at the end of autumn and we’ve thrown them on the fence. It was the women of interminable novenas, lovers of funerals, when somebody died they knew it right away and hurried to church, to the house of death and to the priest possibly; when they themselves died the other old women did the same thing, it was the cups of sugar in eternity—There’s the trail; and winter important morning opening stores and people hallo ! and I go ready to go to school. It’s a mélt-mélon of morning everywhere.

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    I’d have breakfast.
    My father was usually away on his out-of-town job running a linotype for some printer—Andover, near the little crew-cuts there who had no idea of the darkness inherent in the earth if they didnt see that sad big man crossing the night to go make his 40-hour week—so he was not at our kitchen table, usually just my mother, cooking, and my sister, getting ready for her job at So and So’s or The Citizen , she was a bookbinder—Grave facts of worklife were explained to me but I was too proud in purple love to listen—Ahead of me, nothing but the New York Times , Maggie, and the great world night and morning of the shrouds on twig and leaf, by lakes—“Ti Jean!” they called me—I was a big lout, ate enormous breakfasts, suppers, afternoon snacks (milk, one quart: peanut butter and crackers, 1/2 pound). “Ti Jean!”—when my father was home, “ Ti Pousse !” he called me, chuckling (Little Thumb). Now oatmeal breakfasts in the rosiness—
    â€œWell how’s your love affair with Maggie Cassidy coming along?” my sister’d ask, grinning from behind a sandwich, “or did she give you the air because of Moe Cole!”
    â€œYou mean Pauline? Why Pauline?”
    â€œYou dont know how jealous women get—that’s all they think about—You’ll see—”
    â€œI dont see anything.”
    â€œ Tiens ,” my mother’s saying, “here’s some bacon with toast I made a big batch this morning because yesterday you finished em all up and you was fightin at the end for the last time like you used to do over Kremel, never mind the jealous girls and the tennis courts, it’s gonna be