(Elene Usdin - The Washington Post)     _____

By John Dufresne
Sunday, July 14, 2002; Page W10

In the summer of 1953, I was 5, and my fondest dream was to grow up to be a cowboy/priest.

My father worked for the electric company, but had been the Cheyenne Kid in his younger days. So he told me. Rode the range on his fiery steed, seeing to it the desperadoes were brought to justice. Hollywood had made movies of his life. We watched the Cheyenne Kid on "The Gabby Hayes Show." I said, That's not you, Dad. He explained the idea of acting, of pretending to be someone else. He was far too busy to star in a movie about himself, to do over what he'd already done. Tom Keene looked a lot like Dad, and that's how he got the part.

The nuns at Sacred Heart told us that any Catholic mother whose son became a priest would go directly to Heaven. And since I was sure I was Heaven-bound, I figured to ensure my domestic tranquillity in the hereafter with my ordination. God might be omni-this and all-that, but He surely could not care for you like your mother could. I rode my Hopalong Cassidy bicycle, wore my Roy Rogers tie, said my morning and evening prayers, slept with a rosary draped over the headboard. When I grew up, I'd punch cattle and save the souls of fellow cowhands. I pictured myself in the bunkhouse of a place like Gene Autry's Melody Ranch. Me and my pals, hot and dusty from the trail, catching some shuteye or singing "Home on the Range" or "Ave Maria." There'd be a little altar over by the wood stove. We lived in a public housing project in Worcester, Mass. Not a deer or an antelope in sight. On June 9, I was in the paved courtyard with Bobby Vanderhoof and Donny Gannon. We were trying to retrieve a rubber ball from a storm drain, and Bobby was explaining to me that my old man couldn't have been a cowboy because he had been a Marine in the war, and when would he have had the time.

Time? As far as I knew, there was only then and now. And now stretched on forever. My mother called me to supper from the kitchen window of our first-floor apartment. I wanted to stay outside, but she insisted. Thirty minutes later we were eating chocolate Junket rennet custard when my father looked across the room and bolted out of his seat.

I turned and saw our console TV slide toward the window and the small maple tree out front, the one to which our television antenna was incongruously attached, bend in the wind and then fly away down the street. My father grabbed my sister, Paula, from her highchair; my mother took my hand, and we huddled against the linen closet door near the bathroom. The windows in the apartment exploded.

I'm told by folks who were also there that the tornado thundered like a freight train, but all I heard was the rain of shattering glass and the crashing of furniture, appliances and knickknacks against the walls and the floor. Though I was told not to, I peeked beneath my arms and watched a bedside lamp skate across the floor and stop just before slamming into my feet. I saw my parents' mahogany dresser lift off the floor, hover in the air and smash against the bedroom wall. In less than a minute, the tornado passed. The ceiling had collapsed into Paula's crib. Everything we owned was broken.

We stepped around the debris in the living room and kitchen, got to the back hall, and stared outside at the devastation. Glass and bricks littered the courtyard. Someone's blue sofa rested atop the garbage can shed. Third-floor apartments were exposed, roofs blasted away. I could see my friend Willie's bathtub. The houses up the hill on St. Nicholas Avenue were gone. My father sent us to the basement and told us to stay put until he got back--just like he would if the Cavendish gang were on the warpath. He went out with his buddy, Hank Perrin, a Worcester cop, to search the rubble of the neighborhood for victims. They found an elderly couple, the Falcones, buried beneath a wall, their critically injured terrier yapping next to them. The Falcones were dead. Perrin shot the dog.

Later, we sat on the front steps and waited to be told what to do by the rescue workers. My father's car, a 1940 Dodge, which he had just bought, sat unmoved but roofless and sandblasted in front of the house. The city bus next to it was on its side. We eventually walked out of the project. My friend Sharon waved to me from the broken window of her apartment.

Sharon had won all of my baseball cards in a marathon game of flip earlier that week and then offered to give them back. I couldn't understand why she would be so gracious. I refused her offer, ran home and wept.

Our way out of the project was littered with fallen power lines, downed trees and toppled automobiles. The twister had killed 94 people and left 10,000 homeless. We went to live with my grandparents and my two teenage aunts in their three-bedroom flat across town. With my father working double shifts, my pregnant mother having a bad time of it, and my friends in parts unknown, I got to spend a lot of time with my grandmother. Talking with her wasn't like talking with my parents, who spelled out words they didn't want me to know and were full of instructions and reprimands. Memere was full of stories and surprises. So when I wasn't out playing statue man or poison tag, wasn't shooting off my cap guns or practicing rope tricks with my crepe paper lariat, I sat around while Memere cleaned or cooked, and I tried to stay out of her way but within earshot.

One morning I sat at the kitchen table eating fried toast and cantaloupe, hoping the ragman would be by today. The ragman was the closest person to a cowboy in the neighborhood. He wore a frayed suit jacket, a tweed cap and tinted wire-frame glasses. He drove his horse-drawn wagon up Fairmont Avenue yelling, "Rags for sale!" The horse was a swaybacked chestnut mare. When the wagon stopped, I liked to pat her twitching flanks while she munched the oats in her feedbag. My grandmother looked at the calendar, leaned her dry mop against the table. She told me this would have been Paulette's 11th birthday. She took the Pall Malls from her apron pocket and sat down across from me. I said, "Who's Paulette?"

She said, "Paulette was your aunt, my last baby. She died."

I knew children died. When I was 3 I sat playing in the dirt with my trucks when I saw Mom rush from the porch and run toward the ice truck. I followed her and saw Elmer the iceman sitting on the ground crying. My mother put her arm around his shoulder. Women hugged each other and wailed. Water dripped from the back of the yellow truck. A little girl lay face up in a pool of brilliant blood, her trike on its side, her red woolen coat buttoned to the neck, the red bonnet tied at her chin. Mom told me I wouldn't see the little girl again. Not ever? Never. Not next week?

When I tried to imagine my aunt Paulette, I saw her as she would have been at 11, overalls, white jersey, blond wavy hair. A face like Sharon's. And in this way she became real to me. I asked Memere what happened to Paulette.

"Jesus wanted her with Him."

"He couldn't wait?"

"He takes the special ones first."

So now I knew I wasn't special, but I ignored my resentment. "How did she die?"

Memere kept that secret, but told me another. She said my aunt Bea in California was sending me a cowboy outfit as a surprise. Shirt, pants, hat, boots. In black, I hoped.

Afternoons, Memere stopped her cleaning long enough to watch her stories on TV. "Search for Tomorrow," "Hawkins Falls," "Guiding Light." I told her that the people on the show were only pretending to cry, you know. They really don't hate each other. She said, Okay, maybe it didn't happen, but it could happen, and that's what counts.

She sent me to Colangelo's Market to buy condensed milk for her coffee and a can of hair spray. On the way back, I studied the can of Helene Curtis (I think it was) hair spray. On the can was a painting of a woman spraying her hair with the same can of Helene Curtis hair spray with her picture on it. And on that can the same smaller picture. I realized the spraying--well, not the actual picture of the spraying (you could only paint so small) but the idea of the spraying--went on forever. Like Heaven went on forever.

Memere seemed uninterested in my incredible discovery. She told me to hush--Jo was in another mess.

I thought if Heaven went on like that, always the same, there was certainly no need for me to hurry. And what could be so special about getting there early?

That was the summer of the polio epidemic, so we stayed close to home. No trips to Boston or to public pools. Evenings I sat outside with my grandfather and we surveyed his tomato garden in the vacant lot next door. If the Sox were playing, we'd listen to the game on the transistor radio. On Friday nights we watched boxing on TV. Saturdays Pepere and I went fishing. I talked too much, scared the fish, couldn't sit still in the boat. One day at Heard's Pond he tied me down on the floor of the rowboat with the anchor rope. I wasn't upset. After all, I wouldn't stop fidgeting. What else could he do?

On Sunday mornings we went to the French Mass at St. Joseph's. On Sunday afternoons the family got together for dinner: brown potatoes, pot roast and string beans. Pie for dessert, chocolate cream and blueberry. And when the meal was over and the dishes cleared, we sat around the kitchen table and talked about the family and the neighbors. I got to sit on a footstool by the stove and listen. If Pepere wanted another bottle of ale, I'd fetch one from the shed. I might empty an ashtray or bring more cookies from the pantry.

The adults talked about the kind of trouble you can't solve with a six-gun, about the Jacques boy who was headed straight for reform school, about Uncle Fred's philandering ways and Aunt Agnes's failing health, and about the Courchenes, who seemed to find some kind of pleasure in walking into Mass late and then strolling right up the aisle to the front pew. Thought they were something on a stick.

Sometimes the subject was tragic: Wally, the high school boy who lived up the street in the triple-decker behind my great-grandmother's house, the boy whose seizures frightened his friends, could no longer tolerate his violent fits, or he couldn't stand people staring at him anymore, so he killed himself in his own house. What a horror for the parents. Pepere said Wally was nuts in the head. My aunt said, He had epilepsy. Pepere nodded. Nuts in the head.

When they talked about Paulette, they whispered, looked at their hands. I didn't understand what they were talking about, knew I was not supposed to ask, but sensed guilt and remorse in their studied reserve. I noticed for the first time that we speak with words and also with our bodies. And with words we can lie.

Paulette was born with Down syndrome--Mongoloid was the word they used--and did not survive long after birth. It was a blessing, really, that she did not live, they said. What kind of life could she have had?

My uncle George's fiancee, Ginny, had a brother, about 12, who lived in an orphanage like a character out of a chapter book. This was, of course, delicious trouble. I was beginning to know a good story when I heard one. Uncle George asked if I'd want to spend time with Peter when he visited Ginny for the weekend. Would I ever!

Peter and I tossed a football around, and although he was a good foot taller than I, he seemed surprisingly uncoordinated and disappointingly unenthusiastic. And he wouldn't answer my questions about the orphanage: Are there lots of bullies? Do you have to eat porridge?

As we drove back to the orphanage, Peter cried in the back seat of the car, unnerving me no end. In my experience, crying seldom worked with

adults. My father's repeated response to my own tears was, "Knock it off or I'll really give you something to cry about." Peter pleaded, said he didn't want to go back there. No, they weren't cruel to him, weren't bossy; they weren't unpleasant or harsh or strict; they just weren't anything.

When we arrived at the orphanage, Ginny helped Peter from the car, hugged him, calmed him, stroked his back for several minutes, kissed his forehead. Peter stood in the driveway, his eyes red and swollen, trying to wave to us, unable to bear the image of the car backing away from him, watching me leave with his sister. He was trembling, sobbing into his hands. If I asked anyone that night why we had to leave him behind as if he had no family, I don't remember the answer. I knew even then that he did not deserve his shame.

That was nearly half a century ago, and I can see Peter across the years as vividly as if he were standing beside me now. And it turns out Mom was wrong. I've seen that little girl, seen her broken body again and again. And I see 11-year-old Paulette, who did not live 11 days, and Sharon, who never moved back to the project and has no idea who I am. I'm not a cowboy/priest. I write novels, make up stories that did not happen, but could have. I pretend, and I remember. As I become someone new, someone like my father, I cling to what I was. And why wouldn't I? In my younger days I was the Cheyenne Kid's fortunate son, and one summer I saw trees fly and Heaven in an aerosol can.