Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac

the mornings and the nights were music, the death in the house grew browner—I remember Springnight the fence in our backyard, and the dim light in Gerard’s sickroom window casting a faint candle-like glow on the lilac bushes, and above the warm teary stars, and the roar furor all around in the city of Lowell: trains across the river, the river itself booming heavily at the Falls, cries of people, doors slamming clear down to Lilley Street.
    â€œAngie, we gotta do some work tonight me and Manuel—I’m going to his house now.”
    â€œAwright Emil—dont come home too late—I’m afraid to be alone if anything happened.”
    â€œAh well, you should be used to it by now—It’ll happen in time.”
    â€œDont talk like that—He recovered the last time.”
    â€œYeah, but I never saw him skinny and quiet like that—Ah,” from the porch, door open, “the beautiful nights that are coming—all for other people—”
    â€œCall Ti Jean, he’s in the yard with his kitty—it’s his bedtime.”
    â€œTake it easy, my girl, I’ll be home before eleven—We got a big order, just came in this morning—Manuel’s waiting—Ti Jean, come in the house—your mother wants you—come on, my little man.”
    â€œDid you take your bath?”
    â€œAw tomorrow, if I’m dirty I’m dirty—Make me some cortons if you got time, I always like them for my sandwiches at the shop—”
    â€œBye Emil.”
    â€œBye Angie—I’m going now.”
    Emil Alcide Duluoz, born in upriver St. Hubert Canada in 1889, I can picture the scene of his baptism at some wind whipped country crossing Catholic church with its ironspike churchspire high up and the paisans all dressed up, the bleak font (brown, or yellow, likely) where he is baptized, to go with the color of old teeth in this wolfish earth—Forlorn, the Plains of Abraham, the winds bring plague dust from all the way to Baffin and Hudson and where roads end and the Iroquois Arctic begins, the utterly hopeless place to which the French came when they came to the New World, the hardness of the Indians they must have embrothered to be able to settle so and have them for conspirators in the rebellion against contrarious potent churly England—Winds all the way from the nostril of the moose, coarse rough tough needs in potato fields, a little fold of honey enfleshed is being presented to the holy water for life—I can see all the kinds of Duluozes that must have been there that 1889 day, Sunday most likely, when Emil Alcide was anointed for his grave, for the earth’s an intrinsic grave (just dig a hole and see)—Maybe Armenagé Duluoz, bowlegged 5 feet tall, plank-stiff, baptismal best boots, tie, chain and watch, hat (hat slopey, Saxish, slouch)—His statuesque and beauteous sisters in endless fold-draperies designed by Montreal couturiers tinkling delighted laughter late of afternoons when parochial children make long shadows in the gravel and Jesuit Brothers rush, bookish like “ill angels,” from darkness to darkness—The mystery there for me, of Montreal the Capital and all French Canada the culture, out of which came the original potato paternity that rioted and wrought us the present family-kids of Emil—I can see the baptism of my father in St. Hubert, the horses and carriages, an angry tug at the reins, “ Allons ciboire de cawlis de calvert , wait’ll they finish wipin im”—Poor Papa Emil, and then began his life.
    A whole story in itself, the story of Emil, his mad brothers and sisters, the whole troop coming down from the barren farm, to the factories of U.S.A.—Their early life in early Americana New Hampshire of pink suspenders, strawberry blondes, barbershop quartets, popcorn stands with melted butter in a teapot, and fistfights in the Sunday afternoon streets between bullies and heroes