Ouch! I looked at him. He actually cared. He never seemed to care for anybody. Most of the time he played cards at the Park, sitting with legs spread out over the long, narrow benches, throwing cards down and saying movie stuff like “I’ll never raise you, “or “I’ll see you for a dime.”
So I was surprised when he said it was too bad. I liked Miss Feeney. She was kind and she talked to kids as though they were her equal. My eyes filled up with tears and I wanted to cry, to sob, to yell out how sorry I was. I soaped my face so my eyes would be bloodshot from the stinging soap. I turned up the shower so my voice wouldn’t sound as though it was cracking. “How, how did she die?” I yelled over the din of the showers.
“Cancer,” he said with authority.
Cancer. It was a word that was generally whispered and to hear it yelled over the noise of the shower made it seem even more sinister, like something that everybody got eventually and there was no escaping it, like polio or pneumonia. I would never reach age twenty. I knew that then, when Poirier, almost casually accepting said “Cancer.”
“Yeah,” Poirier continued, “She was O.K.”
“Yes, she was,” I agreed, trying to control myself.
“Yeah,” he repeated as he soaped down, “She was O.K. and she had a real nice pair of knockers.”
On the night that Poirier told me about Miss Feeney, I walked home by myself. I didn’t know much about death although with World War II exploding daily in the newspapers and boys from the neighborhood, who only a few years before were playing in the Park and no doubt standing up on the swings, dying in strange places, death was slowly no longer a stranger.
Joe McCarey, who led “The Men of Music,” was one of the first to die and my mother used to point at the McCarey’s window for years afterward and say of the square, satin flag that hung red, white and blue from the curtain tassel, “That’s all the poor woman has, a Gold Star to show for all the pain of bringing a child into the world.”
But that was different, Joe McCarey’s death; it was heroic and the way any one of us would want to die—rushing a machine gun nest like Gary Cooper in Sergeant York. But not the way Miss Feeney died, from some disease that couldn’t be seen and just blew in on you for no reason and from nowhere in particular. These thoughts occupied me all the way home, my corduroy pants whistling as I sloshed through dirty snow. The field house, an annex of the elementary school, was quiet and in darkness as I passed it. I thought of the afternoons we played half court three on three, and Saturday mornings when Miss Feeney opened up the annex early so we could glut ourselves on basketball all day long.
I didn’t feel like going home. My father would have eaten and already gone off to his night job in the liquor store and my sister was always somewhere else, but that was a small loss because I never really knew her anyway. My mother was working in the war plant so supper would be on the back of the stove. I could eat any time.
I walked through the iron gate and sort of moseyed through the Park until I got to the Green Box. I always wondered if all the summer stuff was kept in it during winter. I tried to lift the cover but it was secured by a strong lock. I thought of all the times Miss Feeney opened the Box for us, and we reached in for the gear that was special to us and us alone. Stretch Magni always grabbed the catcher’s mitt and the mask, shin guards and chest protector. Larry Finerty and his brother, Little John, always took the cards and the comic books.
I used to trade comic books with their father. If my mother wasn’t working the night shift, I’d say after supper, “Ma, I’ll be right back. I’m just going over to Mr. Finerty’s to trade.”
Mr. Finerty, who worked hard and drank harder, would be sitting in a clean white T-shirt on the steps of the porch reading funny books and drinking beer. Larry and Little John would be arguing over cards and I would approach in a very businesslike fashion. “Hi, Mr. Finerty. I was wondering if you wanted to trade.”
“Sure, Sull, whaddya got?”
Looking at the pile in my hand, I’d select one and show him. “New Wonder Woman—full cover.”
“Yeah, yeah, looks good. I don’t have that one. What’s the deal?”
“Three covers for this one.”
“Two.”
“O.K., two.” I was always quick to oblige. I didn’t like to argue and I still made a good deal—two for me.
“I got a Crimebuster and a Batman—no covers—O.K.?”
“O.K. Thanks, Mr. Finerty.”
When we made the swap I could always smell beer or booze from him. But, he was always friendly and respectful.
“You’re a good businessman, Mr. Sullivan,” he’d say with a twinkle in his red eyes.
“Thank you, Mr. Finerty. See ya next week.”
I climbed up on the Green Box and sat in the brittle March cold, shivering and thinking about what Miss Feeney’s death would mean to all of us. I began to cry and shake and I was really going at it when I heard a voice from the benches back near the fence. “Hey, kid, what’s wrong?”
I froze in shock and fear at this voice out of the black. “Huh? Wha—what?”
The figure rose from the bench and approached me and then I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it was “The Jugger”—Jugger Casey.
“Hey, Sully, that you? That the old Sully sittin’ there cryin’ his eyes out? What ya cryin’ about, Sull?”
He was holding a wine bottle by the neck, dangling it playfully. I could hear the wine swishing around inside the bottle. He used his thumb as a bottle cap. He handed me the bottle and I took it, not knowing why he did and why I did. He hoisted himself up on the Green Box and took the bottle from me, gulping in a mouthful and placing it between us. “I don’t think you want a swig of wine, do ya, Sully?”
“Yeah. I do,” I said resolutely. In the movies people always drank when they were sad or depressed.
“Well, help yourself. I’ve got another bottle stashed behind the fence.”
I took the bottle and gulped down the wine. I had never had it before, and I was surprised by its sweetness. I liked it.
“So, Sully, what ya cryin’ for?”
“Oh, I was just sad. Miss Feeney died. Didja know her, Jugger?”
“Sure, I knew her. I used to watch her from my bedroom window. Nothin’ dirty, mind ya. I just thought she was good with the kids.”
Jugger was around thirty years old and he never had much schooling. He lived with his parents who seldom came out of the old, brown house that brooded over the Park. My father used to say he had been a very good baseball player, had played in the Industrial League. One night he was pitching for the Rope Mill and a giant French Canadian down from New Brunswick, who was clowning around, was impressed with his own brand of humor. My father and his friends told the story many times while they were pitching horseshoes at The Park after supper. And they told it with that Northwoods accent—all of them—and they all told it well.
“The game was in the fourth inning with the bases loaded when the Frenchman, he come up
