Michael Malone - Weebly

sent him to the refrigerator for three of the buttermilk
biscuits Beanie had baked at dawn), what had he to
offer a child, should it be their destiny to have one?
Milk glass in hand, Rage looked out the window to
the sidewalk, where two small boys sat counting stacks
of comic books, and imagined a son. His beautiful little
Jacob, who would have no birthright to snatch, his son
with a pastless father, an Isaac father who knew no
more of Grandpa Abraham than that he had cracked
peanuts with his teeth and had been run over by a '52
Studebaker. That was no heritage! Rage wished he
were Jewish, or Amish, or Lithuanian; something with
shared sufferings and joys passed down with recipes.
Something instead of this bland mongrel new Americanness
that built houses without attics. If only he were an
old American, with his trunk with its Civil War saber, its
Rough Rider pistol, its Nazi bayonet. Where were the
flat yellow satin of a wedding gown, the thick, scratchy
phonograph recordings of Caruso and Al Jolson?
Where were the Happy Warrior button, the tattered
star for the Christmas tree; where were all the ticket
stubs and brown photographs and souvenir programs