Studs Lonigan by James T Farrell

Author:James T Farrell [Farrell, James T]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-10-06T14:27:38.493000+00:00

Judgment Day

Deliver me, 0 Lord, from eternal death in that tremendous day when the heavens and the earth shall he shaken, when Thou shalt come to judge the world with fire. Seized am I with trembling, and I fear that approaching trial, and that wrath to come. 0 that day, that day of wrath, of calamity and misery, that great and bitter day indeed, when Thou shalt come to judge the world with fire.

FROM DEVOTION TO BE SAID AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MASS FOR THE DEAD.

SECTION ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I

“Red, I tell you, when I saw poor Shrimp Haggerty laid out in the coffin, I got a damn snaky feeling,” Stan Simonsky, riding backward by the window, morosely said, turning to Red Kelly beside him.

“I used to tell Shrimp, Lord have mercy on his soul, I used to warn him that with his health and condition, he shouldn’t do as much carousing and drinking as he did,” Red Kelly oracularly said, and he and Stan glanced unobtrusively at Studs opposite Stan.

Twisted partially sidewise, Studs Lonigan captured quick-appearing and -disappearing glimpses of flat Indiana plains and isolated farm houses, in the early drizzling twilight. Buildings, tumbling shacks, barns, dotting the landscape, heralded the approach to a small town, and he commenced to see thin puffs of smoke snaking from occasional chimneys. The train clattered over a wetted road where, beyond the closed train-gates, an impassive, overalled man leaned on the handle-bars of a bicycle, waiting next to a Ford automobile. With decreasing speed, they were carried down the center of a small-town street that was set against a background of sooty clapboard buildings. Among the dribbling of people on the narrow side-walk, Studs singled out a schoolboy, who was staring dreamily at the train with open-mouth wonder, his strapped books flung over his shoulder. Whisked along, the train swept by a paved street, flanked with stucco bungalows, and Studs thought that the hick villagers, stopping to gape at the train, might have caught a load of him from the window, wondering who he was, and where he was going. If they had, he was a mystery to them, and being a mystery to others when he knew himself so well, stuffed him with the feeling of being important.

The train crawled through a station and a mustached man, lazily pushing a station truck containing a few mail sacks, reminded him of many such characters from movies. He did not catch the town name lettered above the station window, and as the engine picked up speed, he saw scattered wooden houses standing at the other end of the town like so many lonely sentinels. And then again, the altering picture of flat farmlands, dreary and patched with dirty snow at the end of February, houses, barns, silos, telephone posts, steel towers connecting lines of strung wire, with a row of wintry trees in the distance, bare like death, and appearing to speed as swiftly as the train travelled.

The car clattered over a small bridge, affording him a momentary sight of a thin stream of steely-colored water.

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