Maggie Cassidy Read Online Free

and small letters; or just sat in the brown kitchen with the Sun and read the sports page. There was a little brother. There was a dead father there too. It had been some big-fisted man with a grim countenance, whose trudgings to work in the morning were like the departure of the Golem across the fogs and seas of his duty. Scotty, G.J., Zagg, Lauzon, Vinny all played an important part in a summer baseball team, a winter basketball team, and an invincible autumn football team.
    Lauzon lived back down Riverside Street in the direction they were coming from, down the hill from the Greek candy store at the edge of the sandbank’s desert of sand, on a rosy street, among bungalows. Tall strange Lauzon’s father was a tall strange milkman. His tall strange kid brother prayed and made novenas at the church with all the other kids his age doing their Confirmation. At Christmas the Lauzons had a Christmas tree, and gifts; G.J. Rigopoulos had a tree too but something sick, scraggly, forever defeated shone from it in his dark window; Scotty Boldieu’s mother put up a tree in a linoleumed parlor with the gravity of an undertaker, by vases. In the big Zara house trees, gifts, window wreaths, confetti . . . his being a typical large French Canadian home.
    Vinny Bergerac lived across the river, on Moody Street, in the slums. Jacky Zagg Duluoz lived just a stone’s throw from the intersection where they had now stopped. The intersection had a traffic light, it illuminated the snow rosy red, wreathy green. Wooden tenements on both corners had most of their windows shining with red and blue lights; an air of festivity puffed out of their chimneys; people were below in the tar courts talking echoey chatters under clotheslines in the snowfall.
    Jacky Duluoz’s home was in a tenement several doorways up, on another corner, where the Pawtucketville center-store area seemed always to buzz the most, right at the lunchcart, across the street from the bowling alley, poolhall, at the bus stop, near the big meat market, with an empty lot on both sides of the street where kids played their gray games in brown weeds of winter dusk when the moon is just starting to show with a refined, distant, unseen paleness as if it had been frozen and also smeared with slate. He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the neater whiter blaze of stars—those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood. In the Duluoz home the kitchen window looked down on bright wild street scenes; inside, the bright light showed much food, cheer, apples and oranges in bowls on white tablecloths, clean ironing boards leaned behind varnished doors, cupboards, little plates of popcorn left over from last night. In the gray afternoons Jacky Duluoz rushed home, sweating in November and December, to sit in the gloom at the kitchen table, devouring, over a chess book, whole boxes of Ritz crackers with peanut butter smeared. In the evening his big father Emil came home and sat in the dark by the radio, coughing. Through the kitchen door in the hall he rushed down pell-mell to find his friends, using the front stairs down the front rooms of the tenement only with parents and company and for sadder more formal runs—The back stairs were so dim, dusty, strange, as if loose-plastered, some day he would remember them in rueful dreams of rust and loss . . . dreams when G.J.’s shadow would fall across a piece of broken leg like pottery in the street, like modern paintings in their keen screaming lostness. . . . No idea in 1939 that the world would turn mad.
    On the intersection itself a surprising number of