A Tune on a Bass Drum

WHENEVER it was Saturday my father sometimes said to me, “Well, it is time to go uptown among the buildings and listen to the Salvation Army play the band.”

So my mother dressed me in my new suit, just as if she were sitting there waiting for my father to speak, and told me to be a good boy and told my father, who was good anyhow, to be a good boy and together we left, going down the dark rough alley to the street and up the street to the first light and across the railroad tracks and past the icehouse and on.

Once in a while my father stopped to relight his cigar. Very often, on the way, he stopped to talk to a man who might just then have come out of a house to knock the ashes out of his pipe or see what kind of weather it was going to be tomorrow or hide for a while from an avalanche of words, being married and all. Sometimes my father stopped to examine a broken picket on a fence and say to me as we afterwards walked on: “It is always wise to fix the first picket that goes bad; otherwise one picket after the other goes bad and finally you just have a bad fence.”

But I never said anything back because he did not seem to mean that I should have an answer. In fact he had his own answers.

It was very dark in the streets, dark and sinister and very quiet, and my father took my hand because I guess he was afraid, too, and when we got to where the light was again it was just as if we were at a festival of some kind because everyone was in the streets and there was a jubilance everywhere; at the fact, I guess, that we had made the trip safely. When we came to where the full lights were, in the center of town, my father moved back a little and held me with him because for a brief time the lights were too bright for him and he was frightened. It seemed that we had come out onto a stage in that moment and that the lights and the music were too much for my father to bear. Finally my father would see several of his good friends, and they had themselves come out of their own special kind of darkness just as we had come out of ours, and now they were in their own light and we were in ours, and we all met there, Jim Peterson and Langley Price and Jerry Miller and Mr. Glasglow, all close, all intimate friends of my father’s, men who worked at my father’s shop doing difficult things like my father and growing old like my father and looking tired like my father, even on Saturday night. They all greeted one another as if they hadn’t seen each other for a year, which was not true at all because they had just seen each other the day before in the shop, and yet on the street in those days and with the cars hurrying by and all kinds of people and horses with fancy trimmings on them and buggies with fringes, these men were so happy to see each other and so jubilant that they danced around and around.

They hugged each other and patted each other on the back and did all sorts of things that we kids, when we played together, never thought of doing. Men, in fact, are pretty mixed up sometimes. Then my father and I walked on until we came to the Salvation Army band on the corner of two large streets. As soon as we got there it commenced to snow because it had turned cold now, and my father got down on his knees and took off his gloves and blew on his fingers for a while and fastened my coat collar directly under my chin, and there we were, two small men, a father and his child, a father and his son ready to listen to the Salvation Army band play a tune.

While we were waiting we saw a brilliant red flame in the sky and my father pointed to it and said that it was like the one he made himself with the furnaces at the steel mill. He looked at it a long time and the wind sang high in the sky and the trees sighed and snow fell down all around us. Then he said, “I guess that is old Kingsley working on the furnaces tonight; he has a crippled foot; see how the fire is heavier on the one side than the other.” And I looked, comparing the fire of poor, crippled Mr. Kingsley with the one I remembered of my father’s. There was just no comparison, my father’s was the brightest of all.

Afterward there was a horse that ran away, a white horse with a white mane, that went up one street and down another and I thought, seeing the wildness in the horse’s eyes, of my wonderful Uncle Jade, a night watchman in a toy store, whose wife was a dancer in a cabaret in another town, and I remembered one time after he had got fired from his job how he came to sit with my parents in their house and played “Silver Threads Among the Gold” on our piano and sang so loud that the neighbors complained. “And do you know why I was fired?” my Uncle Jade asked my father. “I was fired because they caught me riding around on the toys. There was no one in the store and it was past midnight and I got lonely thinking of Esther dancing in that damned old cabaret while I night-watched a bunch of toys that hardly anybody could afford, so I just got on some of them and rode around.”

I don’t know why the horse as it ran away reminded me of my wonderful Uncle Jade, except that my Uncle Jade had the same kind of look in his eyes when he was talking to my father and waving his hands back and forth and telling about the cabaret and the loneliness and of leaving home forever.

“The horse will run now until it drops over dead,” my father said into the wind of that Saturday night, and we stood huddled together in the midst of joy and in the midst of wonder and I held my father’s hand.

Finally there was an intense quiet that came down. Those who had been talking suddenly stopped saying anything, stopped moving their feet on the bricks and stopped blinking their eyes at the snow, and if there were any dogs running around without homes, they ceased to be hungry or bark and the sky grew close and the darkness with it and the Salvation Army band began to play. The music came up out of the narrow streets and went from one building to another, hitting first the flat parts, then the corners, then the windows. People came to the windows of the buildings, just the faces of people, not their shoulders or their arms or their bodies but just the sad white faces of the people, and they looked down on us and the snow fell all around us and we became timid little frettings like the people my father made to stand under the Christmas trees of my life.

And my father looked up toward the darkened sky and saw the faces looking down and said, “I wonder how we look to the faces that are perched there, to the white, drawn, round, and anxious faces looking down. I wonder how we look!” And when he held onto my hand I cried a little because it hurt.

In a while and after the tune, which was very slow and very sad, someone in the middle of the crowd began to play a pattern of rhythm on the drum and a strange graceful silence was made to occur. During the rhythmed silence of the tune my father reached into his pockets and pulled out nickels and dimes and quarters, more money than the whole world had, and he handed me a handful and gave himself one and we commenced to throw the money on the drum, and the drum made a thump, thump, thumping sound as the money came upon it, and the money was like a strange parade of marching sounds that fell and fell again upon the skin, and a lovely girl who had hair like my mother’s came out with a tambourine and made it jingle and walked around and around in the center of the group and sang a soft song.

“What is the name of the song?” I asked my father. “What is the woman singing?”

But my father did not move. He stood staring into her face and listened to whatever it was she sang and finally when I looked again his shoulders were white with snow and his hat was white and he looked too old in his gravness ever to move again. And the sound of the money grew faint until it took on the aspect of an old man using a crutch going across a dry dusty road, and I thought for a little while of my Uncle Frank’s beautiful farm where I spent my summers with my mother and I thought of unripened apples and the stomachache and the sound of a litter of pigs eating their dinner.

Finally the wind blew again and the town clock at the square struck nine or ten, I cannot tell you which, and the throwing of the money onto the drum was over and the Salvation Army band formed a line and marched out of the circle of us and into a darkness of their own again. My father and I followed for a while, running across streets and up over high curbstones, and then we allowed ourselves to melt into an altogether new kind of dark, my father’s dark and mine, for we both had one, you see, and we knew which one of the darknesses was ours. We moved out across the deepening snow, back toward the edges of a city, back down the rough and lonely alley toward the wonderful light at the window of our house.

But somehow, going back, I wanted to hold my father from hurrying because in the hurrying I was emptying myself of this strange hour forever. I held onto my father’s hand, holding and holding him, but he went on just the same and into the area of light that came out of the window, and in no time at all the door was flung open and there stood my mother. She was in her nightgown and her lovely black hair was in a tight braid that went a short way down her back. She held the door open wide and my father walked toward her and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

“Do you want to see what I built at the side of the house?” I asked him. “Do you want to see what Paul and I built with store boxes and burlap?”

But do you want to know something? My father never heard a single word I said.