Chapter 37
On Sunday, September 23rd, the Patriots played the Redskins at home. It was Tony Eason’s first professional start. He had come off a week of stepping in for Steve Grogan against Seattle and orchestrating the largest come-from-behind win the Pats had ever seen. Frank was all ready for the game the week before. I think he may have even circled September 23rd on the International Harvester calendar that hung on the back shed door.
This week, on our final full day in America, Luke, Decky, and I decided to watch the game at Richie’s apartment. The Pats didn’t score until the third quarter on a thirty-eight yard Eason to Starring touchdown pass. But they wouldn’t get another touchdown for the rest of the game. In the end, the Pats lost to the Redskins twenty-six to ten.
After the game was over, we left the surfboard at Richie’s apartment. He would keep it, maybe make a coffee table out of it, he said, a coffee table that had started on the shores of Huntington Beach and surfed the waves of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Indiana; a coffee table like no other before it.
Monday the 24th came really quickly. It marked thirty-one days of being on the road for us. Our journey in America was over. It was an incredible story, but like all great stories, these amazing chapters of life have to end sometime. I quietly sensed another great journey that was now ahead of me. That same anxiety that I had back in Huntington Beach began to well again. We were leaving our great country, maybe forever, with our one-way tickets to London purchased and in our possession now.
On Eighteenth Street, we said our final good-byes to my parents and the sweet Fairlane. Luke parked her resting at the far end of the driveway. She would sit there in the event that Luke would return, through the changing seasons, through the heaps of fallen leaves, and the onset of winter’s snow. If Luke ever returned, he would need a means to get back to Kansas, or Alaska, or wherever else, and the Fairlane had done right by us. With the bungie cord and surfboard gone now, she looked so naked and abandoned there as we rolled out of the driveway and turned to go down the street in my sister Kate’s boyfriend Sully’s car. My older sister Ciara drove with us too.
We left Lowell the same way we had come in. On the way out, we passed Arthur’s Paradise Diner. We passed by the abandoned barbershop of the most famous barber of Lowell, my great-grandfather Henry Hughes. His mother had been a beggar right there in Kearney Square in the late 1800s. She was buried in Edson Cemetery in a pauper’s grave without a headstone, my grandmother Lillian used to tell me.
Born into a time,
Born into a place,
Given a face,
But now forgotten.
Had the famous barber tried to help her? I would never know. He had to raise eight young children on his own. Lillian was one of them.
We drove down Gorham Street toward the Lowell Connector. There was a woman named Mary Jane Gannon who died on Gorham Street in 1908, pulled under an electric car, right there in front of St. Peter’s Church where she had just gone to confession. Mary Jane was Lillian’s other grandmother (not the pauper grandmother). My twelve-year-old grandfather Tom saw it all happen from South Street that day. Mary Jane had tried to step up on the car, but the conductor closed the door too quickly, and she was thrown under the wheels. She was pinned there for two hours; had both legs amputated by the car before it was all over. My grandfather Tom watched as people went crazy around her, trying to lift the car without a jack. Tom looked into Mary Jane’s eyes as she lay there right before she died. I wondered if she hovered above him as he looked toward the church and said a silent prayer. You just have to believe in heaven after seeing something like that. You see, Mary Jane had just gone to confession.
Life was so random and coincidental, I thought. Tom, who had stood there in 1908 as a kid and looked into Mary Jane’s dying eyes, ended up marrying Mary Jane’s granddaughter, Lillian, fourteen years later. It was strange how the paths of true love seemed to always crisscross.
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Luke said to us all in the car.
I said good-bye to empty St. Peter’s Church and South Street. I thought about my own uncle Mike. In the early 1950s before I was born, Lillian made him break his engagement to the only woman he ever loved, a Protestant. It was a few years after the breakup in 1954 when poor Mike died of cancer. It had come on so sudden. My grandmother blamed it on the deplorable conditions of the war. But I wondered if his will to live had been taken from him when he had to give the girl up in order to honor the wishes of his parents. I wondered if, in fact, it wasn’t cancer at all but simply a broken heart. I wondered if Uncle Mike was somewhere now with his Protestant bride.
We jumped on the Lowell Connector, Route 495 bound. I remembered the stories of old people that are married for fifty years who die within hours of each other, leaving the earth together to find another chance in another place, a beautiful place where the sun is warm but never burns the skin, and people paddle out into a starlit ocean, sitting atop their surfboards in the beautiful sparkling darkness to worship the silence.
My mother was given up for adoption as a newborn in 1924. I was fourteen when Theresa found her birth certificate in her adopted mother’s cold flat after the funeral. A single mother’s name on a birth certificate, that’s all there was . . . A name we didn’t know, and it was at the bottom of a dresser drawer tucked beneath marriage licenses and forgotten linen.
I always wondered about those nameless and faceless grandparents of mine. Was my mother born of a love that knew no bounds? But why had they given her away? Was he a Protestant?
Good-bye, Lowell.
We drove south on Route 93. Approaching Boston now, I looked over at Bunker Hill Monument from the bridge. The granite obelisk thrust into the blue skies of Charlestown on our left as it always had. I remembered Ray Champeaux and I took the train out of Lowell as kids all the way to North Station one day with the desire to climb that tower. He had taken a crisp twenty-dollar bill out of his mother’s open purse to pay for our tickets. We had skipped school. It had been an icy climb that day for both of us. We exhaled fits of running steam into the cold air as we counted those 294 granite stairs all the way to the top. We thought it was the stairway to heaven. At first, as we began to climb, it seemed like it would never end, but once we got to running them in an exhilarating full sprint, it ended so abruptly. From those little cut stone windows at the top, I peered out across all of Boston, looking down while I imagined the ghosts of the early New Englanders hundreds of feet below me, ghosts who were fighting the British on the ground, ghosts who had once been breathing aloud like me, gulping at life, fighting to the death for what they stood for . . . ghosts whose memories lived on.
I pointed out the white steeple of Old North Church to Luke and Decky, just visible to the south, jutting up over the water beyond it, a church that had been so much a part of so many historic rides, rides that were alive and seemed to last forever. But the steeple quickly disappeared out of sight like everything else material, as fast as a passage of a book or the burning of a simple match. I pointed out The Prudential Tower, off to our right, overlooking Fenway, where the Red Sox would be returning from Baltimore and playing the Blue Jays later in the day, with no chance at making the playoffs, for Detroit was so far ahead in the AL East that the rest of the games didn’t even matter anymore. Boston Sand and Gravel, a permanent landmark of the working class, sat there as it always did, that big yellow sign on a ghostly gray steel building, right off the raised highway next to Storrow Drive, and then we disappeared down through the tunnel underneath all of that water, toward Logan Airport, leaving all of the generations that I came from finally behind.
Generations upon generations of Irish Catholic guilt, generations of perseverance and love, and generations of everything else that came with it. This was my burden and my gift. God knew the sequence of each of our lives like the written pages of a novel, from beginning to end, but here I was in the moment, in the midst of these pages with the free will to choose whatever would be written tomorrow. And I knew it.
My heroes, the great writers, comedians and musicians, like Kerouac, Belushi and Roy Buchanan, transcended all of time with their poetry. Some had very tragic courses with destiny, some had an untimely demise, but all of it could never undermine their passion for everything in life while they walked. They drank life in, and it poured all out the sides of their mouths, and it spilled all over everything. Alcoholism and addiction didn’t have to be the trade-off for passion and genius. I knew that Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty had never died. Somewhere in Mexico, a lonesome horizontal ladder made from abandoned railway ties stretched for hundreds of miles across the arid desert until it found lush green vegetation and the warm sunlight of eternity.
Paradise was within us, in Luke, Decky, Colette, all of my friends, my family, all of the people that I always knew, and all those that had touched me across our beautiful land. And the truly great ones allowed us to breathe as they did every time we stepped into their pages. I could feel them; I could drink in life the way they did and cherish the opportunity to struggle every day in order to keep from falling, lest I fall into my own unwritten pages in my sordid old age without ever registering a word.
In the end, I didn’t burn it all like Trent had wanted me to. I always had it with me. I had written the ending first. It was beautiful, a beaten man finally finding the goodness in rich life again. There was a warm beautiful beach there where the sun always shined.
And in the blink of an eye, Luke, Decky and I were flying at thirty thousand feet. And just like that . . . We were gone.
There was this brilliant bright light right after that very last vision of her. She was with me now. Colette was beautiful, standing there, red plaid shirt and blue jeans, country like, the beautiful warm Orange County sun studying the perfect lines of her face. I touched those lines one more time just ever so softly with my index finger, ran it over her beautiful cheeks as I closed my eyes gently and ran the bridge of her perfect nose forever.
The End