Very Old Bones by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

You want to see the pictures?”
    “It don’t matter,” Billy said. “I know what he looked like.”
    “He looks very young. My father did a sketch from one of them, a good sketch. In the dining room.”
    “Never mind that stuff. Your father wouldn’t let him in this joint when he came home in ’34.”
    “That’s not how it was,” I said.
    “Just get the cards,” said Billy, and I knew we’d come back to Francis before long. Billy was intimidated by the house, by the memories of his father’s exile from it
after his marriage to Annie Farrell, and by his inexact knowledge of Francis’s peculiar visit here when Kathryn died. But here he was, on deck for the family luncheon with the lawyer that
would take place in another hour or so. My father, when we organized this luncheon, thought it essential that Billy be present to hear whatever was going to be said, even if he didn’t care
about any of it.
    The gathering had to do with money, but Peter was tight-lipped about specifics. He knew he was seriously ill and he was putting what was left of his life in order, the way I had put his Malachi Suite in order (with the Leica I’d given Giselle in Germany, and which she gave back to me when I undertook the job), numbering and photographing the hundreds of sketches,
watercolors, and oils that my father was obsessively creating, and which had sprawled chaotically in all the upstairs rooms until I put everything into categories.
    Peter did not consider the Malachi Suite finished, and I wasn’t sure he ever would. Two days ago he had asked me to hang one of the oils over the dining-room table, the first time
he’d exhibited any of the work anywhere in the house outside his studio. It was the painting he called Banishing the Demons , and it showed Malachi and his co-conspirator, Crip Devlin,
shooing invisible demons out of Malachi’s cottage, with five others, including a woman in bed, as terrorized witnesses. It is a mysterious and eerie painting, but Peter gave me no explanation
of why he wanted it on the dining-room wall.
    “Where’s your old man now?” Billy asked me.
    “Upstairs sleeping,” I said. “He gets up at dawn, works till he drops, then goes back to bed.”
    “Another screwball in the family.”
    “Without a doubt. You gettin’ hungry?”
    “In a while.”
    “We’ll have lunch. Molly is bringing food, and Giselle’s due in on the noon train. You never met Giselle, did you?”
    “I heard about her. I seen that stuff she did about your father in a magazine.”
    “She’ll be here. So will Peg.”
    “What’s happening?”
    “A get-together.”
    “I’ll get outa your hair,” Billy said.
    “Not at all. You stick around. You should be here.”
    “Who says I should?”
    “I do.”
    “You wanna show me your card tricks, is that it?”
    “Right,” I said, and I found the cards in a cabinet and we went to the dining-room table, site of two notable crises in the life of Billy’s father; and I wondered if Billy knew
anything about the day Francis fell into the china closet. Billy took a long look at the sketch Peter had done of Francis and then we sat down with the cards. When I started to shuffle the deck I
realized Billy was the only man I trusted totally in this life. After he confessed to me that he never knew how to do nothin’, I felt bonded to him, and to his father, in a way that seemed
new to me; and as I performed for him with the cards, I knew I was going to tell him about my nosedive in Germany. I dealt us both a hand of blackjack.
    “Was that straight or seconds?” I asked him.
    “Seconds?”
    “Wrong.” And I turned up the cards to show him the ordinary cards I’d dealt. Then I dealt again, asked again.
    “Straight,” he said.
    “Wrong again,” and I showed him the ace and king I’d dealt myself.
    “You’re good,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”
    “The best ones you never see.”
    “Why you doin’ this shit? You got a brain. You don’t hafta