Bright and Distant Shores Read Online Free Page B

the angle of the boots and the depth of the pile. Nonetheless, the foreman led the son away when, an hour later, three men removed the final ceiling joist and picked off the smaller, covering debris. Owen stood at the edge of the demolition site, numb, but also filling with dread. He saw the wreckers doff their helmets and bow their heads. Someone covered the body with a canvas tarpaulin, leaving only the scuffed boots exposed. Owen broke free from the foreman’s grip and ran forward but the wreckers held their circle as he tried to take hold of the canvas. The foreman, the oldest of the crew, came up, panting: “You can remember him whole or broken up like he is. It’s your choice, but trust me, he wouldn’t want you to see what’s underneath.” Owen looked into the men’s faces, their eyes averted, and let the foreman lead him out by the shoulders. He waited on the street until it was near dark and the coroner arrived by carriage to take the shrouded body away. Behind the lighted windows of nearby apartments people were eating supper. Owen heard the men talking as they came out into the falling night, already reliving his father’s death, formulating the cause, naming the linchpin joist or beam, inducting Porter Graves into the pantheon of fallen wreckers. Owen paced in thehalf-light of the street and watched the coroner’s wagon disappear from sight. He heard the foreman utter the word
orphaned
to a stranger, an official of some kind, and it was the cold finality of the word that struck him. He withdrew into an alcove, away from the wreckers, and gave himself permission to weep into a grease-smeared handkerchief. A building could be razed or felled and a child could be
orphaned
. Like an old house, life was waiting to topple.
    The scrapyard was the only thing Owen inherited and he refused to sell it. By now he had amassed hundreds of items in his salvage museum. He leased the yard to a colleague of his father’s and received a small monthly stipend from the rental. The tin shed museum was locked and the entire compound—an acre of coiled metal and building innards—was guarded by a pair of mongrel yard dogs. Everything but the yard had been mortgaged and financed, down to the pneumatic guns. And so at thirteen Owen found himself without relatives and packed off to the South Side Tabernacle Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic lair of moral training and practical instruction that boasted a separate department for crippled orphans. During his six-year stay, he learned to fix small engines, say the Hail Mary, fear the Holy Ghost, fist-fight, masturbate silently and in the dark. He hoarded books from the City Hall library, an excursion that happened once a month. Owen always chose seafaring tales and missionary journals, epics that unfolded in the tropics or the Arctic, in a brig being slowly crushed by pack ice or in a shanty beset by warring cannibals. He preferred books with digestive-smelling pages, odorous proof of their hoary contents; marbled inside jackets and ink-drawn maps, frontispieces that depicted voyage routes with indigo dotted lines. He was so moved by these tales of adventure that he began to prepare for a life of deprivation in equatorial climes or the Arctic Circle. He did not love Jesus enough to be a missionary but freelance adventurer, bounty hunter, and buccaneer all seemed likepossibilities. Attempting to strengthen his constitution, he left his bedside window open in August and February and went out of his way to eat foods he didn’t like—cow tongue, liver, sweet potato, tinned trotters, cabbage soup.
    By the time he was sixteen, he would sometimes escape into the city—run out into the South Side streets, jump a cable car, and be inside the Loop within fifteen minutes. He felt at home in the avenues and side streets, the alleyways of perpetual shade. Owen moved among the newsboys and bootblacks, the hundreds of children making their living