Free Frenchtown Summer by Robert Cormier Page A

dyes
dumped that day by the comb shops.
The brook slid
under Main Street
and reappeared
on Water Street,
colors hectic in the sunlight,
until it went unseen again
beneath the B&M railroad bridge,
before finally flowing
into the Meadows.
There it created
a sudden pool
into which Frenchtown kids,
Raymond among them,
plunged with glorious abandon,
emerging later,
dripping
red, purple or green
depending on the dyes
dumped that day
by the shops.

I wore my aviator helmet,
the goggles pushed up
on my head
in careless fashion,
striding through the streets
like a World War hero
home after aerial battles
over the trenches in France
until Hector Henault
tore the helmet from my head,
dashed it to the ground
and crushed the goggles
under his boots,
the sound
like my own bones cracking.
He paused to view his damage.
Holding the ruined goggles
in hands that trembled,
I withheld tears
as I screamed at him:
“Die, you dirty rat, die,”
(but silently, of course)
like James Cagney
in the movies.
    Three days later,
Hector Henault was crushed
like my goggles
under the wheels of a Mack truck
on Mechanic Street
near Fifth.
They said he died instantly.
I was awestruck
by my power to kill.
On the fourth of July,
Oliver Randeau,
giggling,
lobbed a firecracker my way.
It exploded like a grenade
against my ear,
stunning my skull with pain.
Knowing the power I possessed,
I ignored the mad doorbells
ringing in my head
and looked at him.
Because he was stupid,
still in the sixth grade
at the age of fourteen,
with a left eye that often
went askew,
I decided
not to kill him.
    Whenever I met him later,
on the sidewalks or in the empty lots,
I deflected his baleful stare
with a pitying smile.
Frowning, he always looked away.
Did he somehow know
that I held the power
of life and death over him?
    I wondered whether I should confess this power of mine to Father Balthazar but instead vowed never to use it again even if absolutely necessary.

My father
often sat in the shadows
in the middle of the night,
The Monument Times

collapsed in his lap,
the dial on the Emerson radio
an orange moon in the dark,
the volume turned down.
As I crept by on my way
to the bathroom,
having been awakened
by a dream or a noise,
he looked up,
squinting,
then took his eyes away
from me.
I tried to speak, but no words
my voice drugged with sleep,
and he continued to stare
at nothing
while I glided like a ghost
to the bedroom,
my bathroom urge
forgotten.
    Back in bed,
smelling the drifting smoke of my father's cigarette, I thought of him sitting up like a sentry in the night, guarding his family.
    Yes but
why had he looked at me
as if I were a stranger unknown to him, in the kitchen of the tenement that was home?
    I pretended
that my tears
were drops of sweat
because
the night was hot.

The Boston & Maine freight yards
drew Raymond and Paul Roget and me
across the iron bands of the tracks
to the boxcars.
We'd climb up,
then race along the roofs,
leaping from car to car
in breathtaking swoops,
pretending railroad bulls
(that's what they called them
in the movies at the Plymouth)
were chasing us,
blowing their whistles
and waving their billy clubs.
We'd take refuge in an empty car,
inhaling the aroma of faraway places
… Chicago … Omaha … Santa Fe…
dangling our feet at the door
like hoboes
riding the rails.
    Our parents always reminded us
of Harold Donay,
who ran away from home
to ride the rails
and, one rainy night,
outside of Denver, Colorado,
slipped and fell
between the boxcars
and was sliced in half
by the wheels.
    He was shipped home
in two parts,
people said,
and old Mr. Cardeaux,
the undertaker,
stitched him back together again
for the wake and funeral.
    But we still stole across the tracks
and climbed the boxcars,
and outran the bulls …
although for a long time
I left the tenement
whenever my mother
picked up her needle and thread
to do her sewing.

My mother was Irish,
from a small town in Vermont,
her eyes the color of bruises,
her hair black
as the velvet on