The Father and Son Cigar

A Winter Of a Single Wind has driven snow against the ads that once offered baby talcum and Log Cabin Syrup. But no el stops here anymore. Rains have ripped the ad that promised dancing lessons at the Merry Gardens, its tatters are less merry now. Waltz king and waltzers alike are gone. The 12th Street beau with cap tipped for love in Garfield Park, the Monday-morning salesgirl with lashes still Maybellined by Sunday night, the Mogen David wino with Happy New Year snow on his shoulders, none get off here anymore. Only a rail of rounded iron guards a peanut machine whose glass is cracked and its peanuts long vended. Snow shadows race like children in the blood-red glow cast by two railroad lamps; up the drift of snow against the rail and then tobogganing down. They stop to rock the platform, lamps and all, when the midnight B train passes, and the lamps dip and tip like flares left burning on a raft abandoned at sea. The B train's echo trails the B train. Then a fog shot with neon closes down, the coldest that ever fell. Yet riders of late winter (continued on page 186) Father & Son Cigar (continued from page 121) locals sometimes hear a piano playing faintly somewhere below the ties, like a piano out of times long gone: on a night when tavern doors were opened to the street for the first night of the year.

Take me out for a joy-rideA girl-ride, a boy-rideI'm as reckless as I can beI don't care what becomes of me.

The long car leans to the land where old els wait for winter to pass. The walker on the midnight platform, adrift above the town, is left like a walker adrift in a dream. A dream dreamt by any old el rider.

For the blue-and-white legend that once named this station, its ads that once bragged and its pigeons that made summer strut, all have passed in the wash of this sea of blue snows.

Leaving two railroad lamps arock in the echo and ebb of the B train's final passing.

• • •

He was a fixer of tools, a fixer of machinery, a fixer of tables gone wobbly and windows that had stuck, doors that had warped and furnaces that had clogged. His labor was fixing, eternally fixing: the plaster that had cracked, the wallpaper that had peeled, the glass that had shattered, the wood that had splintered and the lathe that had broken. Other men wished secretly to be forever drunken. He wished secretly to be forever fixing:

The step that had rotted, the rain pipe that had rusted, the hinge that had loosened, the fence wind had bent. He moved among pistons and vises and cylinders, he healed boilers and ministered to valves: hoses had to be coiled with care lest they crack, clocks had to be warned against losing time, wiring had to be insulated against fire. He used electrical tape like a doctor applying a tourniquet: he was a geneticist of lathes and prolonged the lives of brushes stiff with sclerosis of paint. His ear was not so well attuned to human speech as it was to the delicate play of gears: his dreams moved on ball bearings and within them he sensed that one dreambearing was more worn than the others.

Puttying or soldering, welding or binding, my father was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages.

He could get a piece of machinery to work for him that would work for no one else; but he could not get other men to pay him any mind at all.

"If you're so damned smart why ain't you a foreman?" I would hear my mother going for him when the bulb that lit the kitchen and the lamp that lit the door were the only lights foretelling the beginning of the day – and was still going at him in the bedroom after dark when supper dishes had been put away and the gas lamp burned before the door once more.

Yet in the hours between she paid her lot no mind, sometimes singing to herself –

Take me for a joy-rideA girl-ride, a boy-rideI'm as reckless as I can beI don't care what becomes of me.

There were no heroes nor heroines on my father's side of the family, although he had many brothers and sisters. My mother's family, on the other hand, consisted of nothing but heroes and heroines – of whom the most heroic was Uncle-Theodore-the-Great-Lakes-Sailor.

Uncle Theodore had had a fistfight with the cook on the deck of the steamer Chicora that the ship's captain had stopped: which of the brawlers had begun it he didn't care to hear, but one would have to pack his gear and get off the Chicora. Some captain.

Uncle Theodore packed his gear and walked ashore at Benton Harbor after shaking hands with everybody but the captain.

He should have said goodbye to the captain, too, for the Chicora went down with all hands on her next trip.

Down with all hands to leave not a trace on the unshaken waters. Not an overturned lifeboat nor a sailor boy's cap. Not a beer cork nor a clay pipe nor a smudge of oil. Cutters scoured the waves for days but found no sign. Then the waves froze over, the wind blew the memory of their names into winter. Spring began as though the Chicora had never been.

But a son of the Chicora's fireman built a glass-bottomed boat in his Chicago backyard, determined to find the wreck on the lake's shifting floor or go down himself. Five days after he had put out, the glass-bottomed craft capsized.

Down went the brave son of the brave fireman to join the brave crew of the brave ship Chicora below the cowardly waves. Down to the uselessly shifting sands, yet determined all the way down. And left no more sign than his father had.

My mother spoke of these upsets as though the glass-bottomed disaster were the greater. But my father insisted that the youth who had followed his father had been simply one more glass-bottomed damned fool.

"Not all the damned fools are at the bottom of the lake," my mother observed.

How having a relative who didn't happen to go down with the Chicora made anyone an authority on shipping disasters my father claimed he failed to see.

How a man could work six years for the Yellow Cab Company and not get to be foreman was what my mother failed to see.

How a man could get to be a foreman when he had a woman who never let him rest was another thing my father failed to see.

If a man didn't have a woman to inspire him he could never be a millionaire was how things looked to my mother.

If a man has to be nagged into being a millionaire he's better off to stay poor was my father's decision.

Some men couldn't even be nagged into being a foreman my mother implied.

Then she might as well save her breath, my father concluded, and threw the cat off the davenport.

"That's right, blame everything on the cat." My mother encouraged us all to penalize the cat for our poverty.

"What good is a cat that won't hunt mice?" my father wanted to know, with the Saturday Evening Blade across his face.

"He can't hunt mice because he's handicapped," my mother explained.

"Then let him hunt a handicapped mouse," my father suggested.

"He can't hunt because he can't smell," my mother insisted. "When you cut off a kitten's whiskers he'll never smell anything."

"Has he tried using his nose?" my father inquired softly.

I'd snipped the brute's whiskers off with my sister's nail scissors, but to this very day I cannot help but feel that the real reason that cat never caught mice was, purely and simply, that it didn't want to take unnecessary chances. It was accident-prone and it knew it. Especially when I was near.

When it limped home trying to lick red paint off its fur, however, that was none of my doing. I simply hadn't thought of it. The stuff stuck pretty good, especially onto the softer fur around its paws. Both my mother and father agreed that nobody could have done anything as idiotic as ducking a cat into a can of red paint except Johnny Sheeley, but they were both wrong.

The kid who had done it, the kid to watch out for, the real neighborhood nut wasn't really Johnny Sheeley. It was Baldy Costello.

Baldy raised hell with us littler kids. He was really mean and really bald, too. And really accident-prone. The 71st Street trolley, that had never run anyone down in its life, chomped off two of Baldy's toes. The shock, it was said, was what had caused his hair to fall out, but I think that was only a handy excuse. That kid never really wanted to have hair.

The backs of both his hands were tattooed with decalcomania papers we called "cockomanies" and sometimes his forearms, too. He shoved me off my handmade pushmobile, raced it down to 71st Street and left it lying in the middle of the tracks. My sister recovered it before it got smashed but I never cared for that pushmobile anymore.

Baldy was a thief and was always caught. Whether anyone had actually seen him take the money out of a purse or not was not important, because he always spent it immediately on cockomanies. When money was missing in the neighborhood, Baldy was sure to show up half an hour later covered from forehead to forearms with red, green and purple designs.

A few years later he became one of the first men to sit in Cook County's electric chair upon conviction of murder and rape.

That's what I mean by accident-prone.

• • •

There was no way of prying my mother off an idea nor an idea off my mother. One afternoon as our winter life was running toward spring, I was busy addressing valentines to put into a box on the teacher's desk the following day. She would then call out the names of everybody's valentine in what was a kind of runoff election to determine who was the most popular girl and boy in the class.

There were 48 kids in that class and I had 46 greetings.

"Are you sending one to Mildred Ford?" my mother asked.

Mildred Ford was the only colored kid in the Park Manor school at that time. How she got there I never was told. It was just my luck that she should show up for Valentine's Day.

I had no answer, so I made none.

Mildred Ford, by tacit agreement, had been ruled off the turf.

No answer didn't work. When I'd finished the 46th heart-shaped greeting, my mother scooped up the bundle.

"You can't send valentines to anybody unless you send one to everybody," she told me.

"Nobody sends a valentine to a nigger, Ma."

"You heard what I said."

The situation was bewildering. Here but a moment ago the world had consisted of 47 of us to one of them, and now I was being told to switch sides. For what? Just to make it 46 to 2?

The situation, as Governor Faubus expressed it on a later occasion, was untenable.

"Nobody sent her any last year, Ma." I fell back on tradition.

"Then this is the year to begin," she decided.

It wasn't, you understand, that I had anything against that child personally. It was just that I felt it would be better for her if we proceeded more gradually, in another school, on a different holiday. I was afraid that a promotion to second-class citizenship, if it came too suddenly, might leave the girl unbalanced the rest of her life. All my friends tell me I ought to stop putting the interests of others above my own, but I can't help myself.

The valentine that Miss Ford received from me possessed as much wit as could be bought for a penny at that time: It showed a tearful puppy pleading, "Don't Treat Me Like a Dog, Be My Valentine" – about as far as you could go and still stay segregated in 1918.

All I could see of her, from where I sat, was a pair of nappy pigtails, each tied with a blue ribbon-bow, bent above the one card she had received.

I never spoke to Mildred Ford, she never spoke to me. She didn't thank me for the valentine. But, as she passed me when class let out, she gave me a glance that plainly spoke – "You're on the other side."

I had not known until that moment that there was another side.

• • •

Out of odd lore and remnants of old rains, memory ties rainbows of forget-fulness about the old lost years.

Out of old rains new rainbows.

One such rainbow for me is a winter remembrance: a day when the sun had hidden till dusk. Then the church across the prairie lifted its cross like a command: daylight and cloudlight broke the sky wide, pouring an orange-red light. Triumph and doom shown down, it was The End and The Beginning.

"Gawd's blood is burning," my fiancée, Ethel, explained to me in an awed whisper and, genuflecting, she pulled me down beside her – "Pray" – she ordered in a hoarse whisper.

"Why?" I wanted to know just as hoarsely.

"So you'll see the face of Gawd."

"Is that the same as 'God'?" I wanted to know.

"Don't say 'God,' say 'Gawd' – or you'll never see His face," she warned me.

If I missed His face I'd catch the next showing was my thinking.

An image of Jesus hung above the piano in Ethel's home, but above our piano nobody but Uncle Harry looked down. Yet there was a resemblance: both had died young of a wound in the heart. But Uncle Harry's was hidden under the buttons of his Spanish-American uniform.

That uniform still hung in our closet with a threat about it, because my mother planned to cut it down to fit me, to wear to school on the anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Maine. That would be just about what might be expected of a kid who had asked a colored girl to be his sweetheart.

Ethel's faith in Gawd encouraged me to wait at the window every evening to see His colors rage the sunset sky. Yet I did not feel I had as much to do with Him, nor He with me, as with the lamplighter who came later.

Came riding a dark bike softly: softly as the snow came riding. God's colors would begin to die on tree and walk and street, when the lamplighter propped his ladder against the night to defend us. Touched a torch to a filament that came up green. Then turned to blue against the drifted snow.

I followed him with my eyes to see a line of light come on like tethered fireflies. God's colors passed but the night flares burned steadily on.

For we are very luckyWith a lamp before the door –And Leerier stops to light it –

I read in a book my sister had gotten for me at a library –

As he lights so many more.

My memory of that Chicago winter is made of blue-green gas flares across a shining sheet of ice so black and snow so white, it was a marvel to me to recall that under that ice sheet tomatoes lately flowered.

St. Columbanus kids stood around the ice pond's rim with skates under their arms, for an inch of water was already spreading to the pond's edges. When they tested the ice it squeaked the first squeak of spring.

In March came the true thaw, running waters in running weather, when we raced the sky to school and raced it home once more. The St. Columbanus kids began lingering on the steps of their church – then the light, that had closed each night like a door behind their cross, began to linger, too. As it to see what they would be up to next.

Then the fly-a-kite spring came on and I fled through the ruins of Victory Gardens pulling a great orange grin of a kite higher than the cross of St. Columbanus, with Ethel screaming behind me.

When it soared so high it no longer grinned, I anchored it and Ethel sent a message up: I Love My Savior. I don't know what had frightened that kid so.

Yet that whole blue forenoon she stayed in continuous touch with the Virgin Mary, assisted by an unlikely assortment of angels, dead uncles, saints, martyrs, erring friends and, of course, Gawd. The kite went to work for the Church. It became a Jesuit kite scouring Heaven for proselytes. Ethel ran home and came back with a cup of holy water to help it. I made no protest when she sprinkled me. She was older and infinitely wiser than myself.

"I'm a Catholic now," I announced that night at dinner.

"Eat your soup," my mother instructed me.

"Ethel baptized me."

"That takes a priest. Eat your soup."

"I want to see the face of Gawd."

"Eat your soup."

I ate the soup but brooded.

Nobody knew I was brooding until I looked at the bread pudding with distaste. Then it was plain something had gone wrong.

So my sister ate it for me and helped my mother with the dishes while I sat on, bread-puddingless, till the last dish was stacked.

Just as Ethel burst into our kitchen. She was weeping with anger or disappointment – "I'm running away from home! I'm going to live with you!"

My father looked at my mother for an explanation. My mother looked at Ethel.

Ethel's father had died without last rites and her mother had paid a priest $100 to keep her late husband from spending eternity in Purgatory. The priest, Ethel now told us between sobs, had returned to tell the family that all the $100 had done was to get the old man to his knees. It would take another $100 to get him out. But Ethel's mother had answered, "If the old man is on his knees, let him jump the rest of the way," and had sent the priest on his way. The blasphemy had provoked Ethel's decision to run away from home.

Ethel's mother opened the kitchen door, tossed in an armful of the girl's clothing onto the floor – "And don't come home!" she announced, and slammed the door on her pious daughter.

The cast-out girl stood silently. Then her features began working.

"He'll never see the face of Gawd!" she howled her grief and love. "He'll never see His face!"

"Then let him look at his ass," my father made a swift decision.

• • •

On weekdays I got a penny to spend and blew my nose into a rag. But on Sundays I got 10 cents and a clean handkerchief. Weekdays gave only the meanest kind of choice: that between two yellow jawbreakers or licorice whips or a piece of chewing wax shaped like a wine bottle with a few drops of sugar water inside. But Sundays offered a choice between a chocolate or vanilla or strawberry sundae.

Sundays were for sundaes, the very same day that Ethel was my girl and I was the one with the dime. Ethel owned weekdays because she was closer to Gawd. But Sundays belonged to me because I was the one who knew the way to the country where maraschino cherries lived atop vanilla ice-cream cones. Where strawberries loved whipped cream and pineapple syrup ran down both sides of banana splits. It was all butter-cream frosting there, where caramels lived in candy pans and Green River fizzed beside root beer. It was always root-beer and ginger-ale time, it was always time for lemonade there. Where walnuts lived in butter-cream fudge and pecans lived in chocolate. It was the one place where vanilla, chocolate and strawberry embraced. Ethel's church was St. Columbanus but mine was John the Greek's, The Store Where Ice Cream Came True.

Yet even there Ethel couldn't forget Gawd. She was really dotty on Jesus. The minute John the Greek brought us two glasses of water, that kid would start sprinkling me. I didn't mind the wetting as the day was warm. But as she had already used holy water on me without any result, I didn't see how a couple glasses of soda-fountain water would do any good.

And as though that weren't enough superstition for one Sunday, she would dare me to step on a crack in the walk all the way home. If I did, Gawd would strike me dead, she decided.

I didn't believe a word of it. I put both feet down flat, deliberately, on each crack of the walk, all the way home.

Nothing happened.

"You wait and see," she warned me.

Another Sunday, though the weather was still cool, Ethel and her mother and my mother and myself took a basket lunch and swimming suits and went to the Jackson Park beach.

A replica of Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, had been standing around the Jackson Park lagoon since the World's Fair of 1893. We took our lunch on the grass in view of its rotting hulk. Ethel and her mother went to the women's bathhouse and I went to the men's to change into swimming suits.

My mother wasn't going swimming herself and she felt the weather was too cool for swimming. If I wanted to go in the water I would have to put the suit on over my winter underwear.

When I came out of the bathhouse Ethel's mother took one look and started to laugh. Then my mother laughed. It must have been a pitiful sight. When Ethel began to laugh, however, I felt really brought down.

In pauses in our play, after that Sunday, Ethel would survey me gravely – then give me a smile of thinnest mockery as she saw me once more in a swimming suit drawn on over a suit of long underwear. Ground lost by such experience is not easily regained.

As the roll-a-hoop spring came on blue as peace. By the light that now lingered, the light that now held, I stood bowed against the gas lamp crying warning – "eight-nine-ten-redlight As the roll-a-hoop spring raced to a summer of redlight pursuit.

A terrier got hit in the street by a car that kept going. We heard its yelp and watched it drag itself to the curb. Ethel gave it last rites.

The next morning she got me out of bed to give it a Catholic burial. And I hadn't even known the brute was Christian.

We took turns digging with a toy shovel. When it was deep enough Ethel began crossing herself and I stepped back until she should tell me to throw in the deceased.

Johnny Sheeley came up, put his six quarts of milk down, and took the shovel from me. The grave wasn't deep enough, it seemed.

At his first stroke, the shovel bent and Johnny looked humiliated.

"Wait for me," he asked us. We stood around until he came back bearing a man-sized shovel.

Johnny dug until we grew tired of watching him and wandered off to hunt four-leaf clovers. When we came back he had dug himself to his waist.

The dead terrier lay beside the milk. Ethel threw in an extra prayer for the dog and I practiced crossing myself until it was time for lunch.

From our front window, I watched Johnny on the warm noon, digging for his life. He had, it was plain, forgotten both dog and milk, dirty home and dirty mother. In the early afternoon Ethel came down to fetch me and we went out to watch Johnny for lack of anything else to do.

"You're going to catch it if you don't get home," Ethel shouted down into the hole from which we could see Johnny's sweat-tousled head. Her answer was a shovelful of dirt from which we both jumped back.

Johnny dug until we saw his mother coming – somebody had snitched! She was a formidable harridan who supported half a dozen sons and daughters with her backyard dairy, doing more herself than her whole brood combined. Johnny tried to scramble out, but couldn't get a hold. His mother had to get two of his brothers out of bed to pull him up.

When they got him up, without a word they both began punching him, while his mother slapped him with the broad of her hand. Johnny ducked into a running crouch and all three followed, punching and slapping, the old woman carrying the soured milk in her left hand while she slapped at his ears with her right.

The battle went across South Park Avenue, with Ethel and me following, drawn by horror and joy, through a narrow way between the building and up the alley between South Park and Vernon Avenue, when Ethel's mother and mine both hollered us back into our own yards. I don't remember whether the terrier ever got buried.

I know the great hole remained there until my father filled it with the shovel Johnny had left, and Ethel and I had to return the shovel as some sort of punishment. Nobody knew what we had to be punished for, but my punishment was always the same; I was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. I don't see how my father was qualified to excommunicate anybody, but he did it all the same.

This time it was my mother who thought the action was comical and my father who went around growling that somebody ought to have that milk delivery kid locked up before he started thinking about girls.

So far as I know, Johnny never got any ideas about girls that were any funnier than anyone else's.

In the late sunflowered summer of 1918 I took my fiancée to John the Greek's confectionery on the corner of Vernon Avenue and 71st Street. She ordered a strawberry sundae and I ordered chocolate and John put his favorite record on his mechanical piano and sang along with the song for us –

If you don't like your Uncle SammyIf you don't like the red, white and blueGo back from whence you cameWhatever land its nameDon't bite the hand that's feedingyou –

In the corn-stalked autumn of 1918 I built a new pushmobile out of an orange crate and fitted it with a candle holder. When my father got off the 71st Street trolley he could see me flickering toward him in the dark. And held my hand all the way home.

• • •

That was the last autumn my mother took me to see my grandmother and grandfather.

We walked together below the Lake Street el, and a grandfatherly light came down through the Lake Street ties.

All the way to the West Side House.

The West Side House was where my grandfather sat sealing cigars of his own making with a lick of his tongue. The band he wrapped each cigar in said it was a Father & Son Cigar.

And he had promised to tell me a secret he had not told any of his other grandchildren.

And the secret that I was never to tell was that he, himself, personally, my own grandfather, had thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar! That he was therefore the inventor of the Father & Son Cigar! And that he had applied for a patent on the name: Father & Son Cigar.

And that it was a good cigar.

I was proud to have the man who had invented the Father & Son Cigar for a grandfather.

Then he made the wooden half-figure of a clown on his worktable blow real smoke at me and we went upstairs to dinner.

Behind my grandfather's West Side House stood the Sommerhaus, a little old-world cottage with blinds.

It was always summer in the Sommerhaus.

The old man sat at dinner with his wife at his right hand and all his married daughters, and all his married sons, and his grandchildren running in and out of the Sommerhaus. He was proud that all of his grandchildren had been born in the States.

But I was the only one in the whole tribe for whom he made a wooden clown that blew real smoke.

I was the only one the old man ever told who thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar.

And that it was a good cigar.

After dinner Uncle Bill sat at the player piano and played The Faded Coat of Blue and Aunt Toby sang the words. Aunt Toby didn't look exactly faint and hungry the way it said in the song –He sank faint and hungryAmong the vanquished braveAnd they laid him sad and lonelyIn a grave unknownO no more the bugleCalls the lonely oneRest, noble spiritIn they grave unknown –but I figured it must be because she had just had dinner.

Then in no time at all it was time to go home and I walked back with my mother below the Lake Street el.

A grandfatherly light drifted like yellow cigar smoke between the ties and my mother hummed cheerfully –Take me for a joy-rideA girl-ride, a boy-rideI'm as reckless as I can beI don't care what becomes of me –all the way home.

Halloween night Ethel and I put on false faces and went up and down 71st Street chalking windows of laundry, undertaker, delicatessen and butcher shop. Dotty as ever, Ethel chalked a cross on John the Greek's and I wrote below the cross – Everything inside is a Penny! and we both ran off screaming. On my way home from the Park Manor School the next noon, all the store windows had been washed clean except John the Greek's.

John's window stayed chalked. On Sunday morning police broke the lock and found John hanging by his belt above the candy tins. I don't know how it had happened, but I now knew there was something terrible afoot in the world, and began to skip the sidewalk cracks just to make sure it wouldn't get me.

I skipped the cracks with particular care when passing the Hanged Man's Place. Frost froze the cracks over and the Hanged Man's windows went white.

I rubbed off the frost with my mitten and peered in: Dust and cold had laid a gray hand across the bottles of Green River and Coca-Cola. The great jar of fresh strawberry syrup had fermented, then split the bowl, bubbled over the counter. It hung in a long frozen drip like a string of raw meat.

The magic of strawberry was gone. The magic of its smells and the magic of its color all hung in a freezing dust.

That night I said the German prayer my mother had taught me out of her own childhood:

Ich bin kleinMein Herz is reinDarf niemand 'drin wohnenBloss Gott und die Engel allein.

Yet somewhere between that St. Valentine's Day and the Store Where Ice Cream Came True I had realized that where God's colors raged behind a lifted cross was no business of mine: that these were for people who lived upstairs and not for people who lived down.

• • •

My father was a working man in a day when the working hour was from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. He left the house before daylight six days a week and returned home after dark six days a week, year in and year out.

He worked for McCormick Reaper and Otis Elevator and Packard and the Yellow Cab Company in a time when there was no sick leave, no vacations, no seniority and no social security. There was nothing for him to do but to get a hold as a machinist and to hold as hard as he could as long as he could.

He was a good holder but he was unable to keep any one job for more than four or five years because he couldn't handle other men. He could handle any piece of machinery, if left alone. But he was as unable to give orders as he was to take them. He was a tenacious holder, but after four or five years he would hit a foreman. This would happen so blindly that he would be as stunned by it as the man he had hit.

When he walked into the kitchen at noon with his tool chest under his arm my mother knew it had happened again. The first time this happened I was frightened, because I had never seen him, during the week, in the middle of the day. I had the feeling my mother was going to go for him like never before.

• • •

That was one time she didn't go at him at all.

Then for days we lived under an oppression of which only the tool chest in the corner of the kitchen spoke. On the morning I rose to find the tool chest and the old man gone to work together, the sense of ominousness lifted, and life began once more.

He was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages who had seen the Electrified Fountain in Lincoln Park.

My father was a farm youth who had come to the city to see Little Egypt dance, and had stayed on to work for many great plants; for they offered him twice the wages that others were getting for doing the same work.

He liked earning twice as much as anybody else and would stay on the job loyally until some picket would take him aside and ask him how he would like to have his head blown off his shoulders.

My father would say that he would like to wait until after lunch if that wasn't asking too much.

He had witnessed the fight between police and anarchists on the Black Road near the McCormick works. He heard Samuel Fielden speak on the Lake Front, but his most vivid memory was of Honey-throat Regan singing If He Can Fight Like He Can Love/Goodby/Germany.

My father avoided being killed in situations simmering with violence simply because he didn't hear anything simmering.

• • •

The day falls with a colder light today, between the Lake Street ties, than once fell between the blinds of the Sommerhaus.

It was always summer in the Sommerhaus, the old-world house lit by a grandfatherly light, where grandchildren ran in and out before dinner.

When I was the only one, of all those children, to whom the old man told the name of the inventor of The Father & Son Cigar.

And the farm boy from Black Oak who worked for McCormick Reaper and Otis Elevator and Packard and Yellow Cab became an old man on a West Side bed. An old man who lay without knowing that his wife and son stood looking down at him.

They saw his right hand take the fingers of his left as though something had gone wrong with the fingers, and saw he was trying to fix the machinery of his left hand with the machinery of his right.

They saw him pass from life into death still trying to fix machinery.

His old woman saw him go, yet she did not weep.

So the son knew that, for all his fixing, the old man hadn't fixed anything after all.

Now a winter of a single wind drives snow against the blue-and-white legend that once said Lake Street. But the ads that once bragged and the pigeons that made summer strut, drunkard and lover both alike, have passed into neon mists adrift above the town.

Captain and crewman, all alike, are down with all hands on the proud ship Chicora; lost without trace in the ice off South Haven.

Sunken without sign on the unshaken waters.

Yet it was a good cigar.