Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac Page A

chilled. Aunt Louise sits at the kitchen table shaking her head—“ La peine, la peine , pain, pain, always pain for the Duluozes—I knew it when he was born—his father, his aunt, all his uncles, all invalids—all in pain—Suffering and pain—I tell you, Emil, we havent been blessed by Chance.”
    The old man sighs and plops the table with his open hand. “That goes without saying.”
    Tears bubbling from her eyes, Aunt Louise, shifting one hand quickly to catch a falling crutch, “Look, it’s Christmas already, he’s got his tree, his toys are all bought and he’s lying there on his back like a corpse—it’s not fair to hurt little children like that that arent old enough to know—Ah Emil, Emil, Emil, what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen to all of us!”
    And her crying and sobbing gets me crying and sobbing and soon Uncle Mike comes in, with wife and the boys, partly for the holidays, partly to see little Gerard and offer him some toys, and he too, Mike, cries, a great huge tormented tearful man with bald head and blue eyes, asthmatic thunderous efforts in his throat as he draws each breath to expostulate long woes: “My poor Emil, my poor little brother Emil, you have so much trouble!” followed by crashing coughs and in the kitchen the other aunt is saying to my mother:
    â€œI told you to take care of him, that child—he was never strong, you know—you’ve always got to send him warmly dressed” and et cetera as tho my mother had somehow been to blame so she cries too and in the sickroom Gerard, waking up and hearing them, realizes with compassion heavy in his heart that it is only an ethereal sorrow and too will fade when heaven reveals her white.
    â€œ Mon Seigneur ,” he thinks, “bless them all”—
    He pictures them all entering the belly of the lamb—Even as he stares at the wood of the windowframe and the plaster of the ceiling with its little cobwebs moving to the heat.
    Hearken, amigos, to the olden message: it’s neither what you think it is, nor what you think it isnt, but an elder matter, uncompounded and clear—Pigs may rut in field, come running to the Soo-Call, full of sow-y glee; people may count themselves higher than pigs, and walk proudly down country roads; geniuses may look out of windows and count themselves higher than louts; tics in the pine needles may be inferior to the swan; but whether any of these and the stone know it, it’s still the same truth: none of it is even there, it’s a mind movie, believe this if you will and you’ll be saved in the solvent solution of salvation and Gerard knew it well in his dying bed in his way, in his way—And who handed us down the knowledge here of the Diamond Light? Messengers unnumberable from the Ethereal Awakened Diamond Light. And why?—because is, is—and was, was—and will be, will be—t’will!
    Christmas Eve of 1925 Ti Nin and I gayly rushed out with our sleds to a new snow layer in Beaulieu street, forgetting our brother in his sack, tho it was he sent us out with injunctions to play good and slide far—
    â€œLook at the pretty snow outside, go play!” he cried like a kindly mother, and we bundled up and went out—
    I still remember the quality of that sky, that very evening, tho I was only 3 years old—
    Over the roofs, which held their white and would hold them all night now that the sun was casting himself cold and wan-pink over the final birches of griefstricken westward Dracut—Over the roofs was that blue, magic Lowell blue, that keen winter northern knifeblade blue of winter dusks so unforgettable and so cold and dry, like dry ice, flint, sparks, like powdery snow that ss’ses at under doorsills—Perfect for the silhouetting of birds heading darkward down their appointed lane, hushed—Perfect for the silhouetting presentations of