The Untold Roar

by Michael Thériault

Uphill a cat screamed.

Under predawn streetlights downhill and under newspapers charged into a pair of canvas pouches front and back, the boy Rory Leary heard first from the same direction a truck engine roar in acceleration, then the scream.

The streets of his route defied the typical San Francisco grid. At the stucco neighborhood’s perimeter they curved into bell form. Long islands of lawn divided the straight street that was clapper down the bell’s center. Also unlike elsewhere in the City, the houses stood apart and at the tops of sloping lawns. Rory knew that a college that had departed long ago for a suburb had built the neighborhood, he supposed to house professors. Now the families of unionized workers prospering in blue collars, of pipefitters, teamsters, cops, firefighters, longshoremen inhabited it.

He rubber-banded the newspapers into thirds and a folded shape that sailed well, bagged them on rainy days in waxed paper, and flung them high up front stairs. For this the subscribers, so many of whom themselves labored under loads, tipped well.

One of Rory’s shoulders felt always the load through the wide canvas straps more than did the other. No matter that to balance the pouches and keep the headhole from grasping his throat he rotated them front to back; either strap made the shoulder as sore.

He knew the roar that preceded the scream. Few vehicles took the streets at that hour. He recognized the sounds of them all: Garbage trucks, bakery trucks, the Owl coaches of the Municipal Railway, and this one, the panel truck in which his DM, District Manager, Tom, stacked wire-bundled newspapers at the Chronicle’s Fifth and Howard yard and carried them to streetcorners on the south slopes of Bernal Heights, from which Rory and other boys, freeing them with wirecutters, spread them through the dark and cold.

Rory knew the truck’s roar from outside and in; from inside because when a boy couldn’t work his route Tom the DM would gather others, Rory among them, as they finished theirs, and the boys would struggle to remain seated on newspaper bundles as Tom flung the truck through the varying slopes and tight streets and corners of Bernal Heights and its College Hill spur. Stopping the truck, Tom would shout addresses at boys spilling through its passenger-side door and the running boys would spin banded newspapers through the air. Afterward Tom would bring his crew of strays to a diner on Mission Street and buy them breakfast. Then he would drive them home seated on the truck’s steel floor bared of bundles.

Working through the bell of streets this morning, emptying rotating pouches with right-handed and left-handed heaves across his chest, Rory heard in thought: Tom’s truck roared. A cat screamed.

He assigned the cat no name. It might have had any.

Those breakfasts were like none Rory ate otherwise. They had eggs, meat, potatoes or pancakes, fresh fruit, even, or fresh-squeezed orange juice. They were not government corn flakes from the black-lettered box and lumpy grayish milk from powder and orange beverage from another powder. With the cash he collected monthly from customers and after giving the Chronicle its much greater share and his parents their half of what remained, he supplemented his diet further with quarts of Guernsey milk, “extra rich,” that he drank all in one go, with apple- or cherry-filled pocket pies, with bananas. Even so he was slight and often hungry. Without the cash he might have been sharp-ribbed and famished.

He had as recompense also the company of sparrows. In spring as he finished his route into the first gray of the sky came the rising minor third and the cascade of chitters from its top note that together were the San Francisco song of white-crowned sparrows. It sounded from all sides, from yards of the bell, from the park that bordered its east. Rory had found he could reproduce it in whistles. He threw newspapers to stairs and whistles to brightening sky, and the songs he heard back answered his, he was sure. He had read that they declared territory and thus divided sparrows, but he knew this was not all their truth. He had seen in winter the sparrows unite in a flock that sheltered in and sallied from the declivities of scrub or eucalyptus that divided the park’s levels and tumbled at its bottom to a field where the rains raised a marsh. The song was also of sparrows knowing each other for this flocking, and he singing it by whistle was of their clan.

A steep block where he emptied his last newspapers onto stairs took his breath from whistling. At the top, turning unburdened by anything but canvas onto the level block home, he resumed it. All around songs answered.

Not many songs down the sidewalk he saw a lump of white fur on the street. He stepped out between parked cars.

From the mouth of his sister Maureen’s cat, which she had named Snowdrop, projected a short red length of spine.

Tom the DM’s truck accelerated. Snowdrop screamed. The scream ended on a stub of spine.

Thin-legged strides brought Rory to the house and upstairs and back to the kitchen where at this hour Maureen was mixing the day’s powders and water. This was one of many tasks their mother’s disarray had ceded to her. Seven younger siblings looked first to her, the eldest, and then to Rory, born not a year after, for many of their needs and took discipline from their hands. Maureen had in the last two years attained an age at which several larger families in their Catholic parish gave her babysitting work, “because,” she said, “for them no one else will.” Half her income, as Rory’s, went to their parents. Much of Maureen’s other half bought food and litter for the white cat she had found as a kitten mewling caught in the branches of a juniper against the front wall of a house on her walk home from school.

“Your cat is dead,” Rory told her.

“Where is she?” said Maureen.

Rory pointed streetward.

“Take me there,” said Maureen.

She wore still the pajamas and slippers whose fraying she had inherited from cousins. She followed Rory to the cat. She stared at its white and red. She returned to the house, and Rory with her.

At a cabinet Maureen knotted her auburn waves into a quick ponytail and went through the twin-size sheets for the siblings’ bunks until she found one untorn.

She and Rory went with it to the street.

Other wheels had found the cat. To its spine’s red was added that of puddled blood, pink of intestine, and brown of extruded shit. Cars were still few, but Rory stood watch for them as Maureen unfolded the sheet and knelt to roll the cat into it. She bore the shrouded body to and through the house, Rory behind her.

Their mother was awake and in the kitchen with two of Rory’s sisters and a brother. “Where are you off to?’ she said to Rory and Maureen. “They’re needing breakfast.”

Rory wondered that she did not see the sheet and the blood spotting it, or that she did and ignored them. “Her cat is dead,” he said and received no reply but headshaking.

His cortege with Maureen and the cat in its shroud went to the yard’s northwest corner. Many mornings the cat had lain there on bare sandy soil in the shelter from prevailing sea winds given by the junction of high weathered redwood plank fences until midday carried the sun beyond them. Taking turns with the shovel, Rory and Maureen dug. They did not attempt six feet. Something close to three seemed enough when they achieved it. Maureen knelt by the hole and Rory gave her the shrouded cat. Kneel and bend and stretch did not suffice; the bundle fell the last bit to the hole’s bottom. “I’m sorry,” Maureen said to it.

She stood. “Now we pray. Our Father…,” she said, and they prayed aloud. “Hail Mary…,” she said, and “Hail Mary…” again, and “Hail Mary…,” and each time they prayed.

“Rest in peace,” she said.

“Requiescat in pace,” added Rory in his choirboy Latin.

She threw in the first shovelful.

Again they took turns. All until the hole was full Rory almost told her of the acceleration preceding the scream. He grew sure an anger at Tom the DM would result that would end his predawn labor.

He considered his belly and thin legs and was silent.

A white-crowned sparrow sang. He ached to answer it and was silent.

With his first paycheck as Inside Wireman apprentice Rory bought new boots to replace the ill-fitting second-hand pair he’d found at Goodwill.

With a little of his second he bought a bouquet of flowers and a BART ticket under the bay and out to Hayward.

To attend the California State University there Maureen rented behind a house a garage that had been converted nearly to apartment, with half-bath and kitchenette, but concrete-floored throughout and with sectional garage door still part of one wall and the door’s tracks crossing some of the ceiling. Her door beside the sectional door had no bell. She answered his knock.

The bouquet obliged him to return her embrace with one arm, but his smile equaled hers.

She arrayed the flowers in a glass jar that had once held mayonnaise. She set the results beside the initials “BD” that had been scratched into the dark finish of the table where Rory had taken a chair.

“Elegant,” Rory said.

She tapped the table. “I shop only the best sidewalks.”

“And the hair is gorgeous,” he said.

She‘d cropped the auburn almost as short as his brown, too short to preserve any wave. “It’s my own creation, low-maintenance.” She pointed a hand one way, the other. “Hairdresser, or books. Hairdresser, or food.”

Rory judged from the spare cheeks sallowed from their childhood rose that food was not a grand expense.

She touched a finger to a tiny white bloom of baby’s breath and jerked her head one side. “Oh, I’m afraid he’ll eat these.”

Turning where her head indicated, Rory saw for the first time a big orange-striped tabby tom curled on a towel, not one she’d brought from home but new, before an electric space heater that was the garage’s warmth. The cat’s eyes inspected his. “When did you get him?” Rory said.

“He decided to move in a few weeks ago,” Maureen replied.

“What do you call him?”

“Hey You,” Her lips pinched tight an instant. “I had a couple of the obvious names in mind, but they seemed an unlucky way to go.”

Rory felt then the silenced scream and unrecounted acceleration still between them. He had breakfasted on ham and eggs and paid from a full pocket there and at the florist’s, and neither his job nor belly had anything to fear from her anger. He wanted none of it anyway, not now especially, when they had started along separate paths of adulthood. He did fear that anger might cleave too sharp a separation.

He determined that in his next visit he would bring not flowers but food for the cat and maybe a bed for it. In this way Maureen might spend more for her own table and not suffer any affront to her pride from his feeding her directly.

He watched the nameless tom watch him.

Rory drove with his wife Tomasina behind him and the infant Nick in the car seat beside her from their Outer Mission house across two bridges to the bungalow Maureen had bought near the old downtown of Vallejo. The stop-and-go up the freeway along the Bay’s east side allowed him sometimes to glimpse in the rearview mirror the heartcurved brown face he had kissed so often lean and prattle to their babbling creation.

He could not have been happier.

All Rory saw of the first cat when Maureen opened the door was its gray sprint toward the back of the house. The second, black with white chest, watched from the living room doorway at right, tail swishing.

Maureen held out arms. “Oh, he’s beautiful,” she said. Tomasina surrendered the child.

The black and white cat padded along before them as Maureen cooed to the baby’s coos and led Rory and Tomasina into the living room. Rory noted the cat’s limited scope of white. A teacher’s wages were not a union electrician’s, and the room’s mismatch of furniture testified that Maureen had not extended her shopping past sidewalks except perhaps to yard and garage sales. The green of the armrest of the sofa where he sat down with Tomasina had faded in patches from an avocado flecked with yellow to a pale seafoam and its cloth, while still intact, threatened tatter.

The baby still in her arms, “No, I don’t need kids,” said Maureen, though neither Rory nor Tomasina had asked a question. Neither had she wanted a husband, Rory thought, and if she had wanted some semblance of wife, her enduring Catholicism had objected. “God bless you for having Nick here, but with the younger sisters and brothers I had all the diaper-changing I could want for a lifetime, and now five days a week I have thirty, all well past diapers.”

“Big class,” said Tomasina.

“Ask your husband,” said Maureen. “I have ample experience in kid management.” She kissed the baby’s head. Her auburn hair, restored to shoulder-length waves but never given a hairdresser, spilled around him. “Funny chestnut in his hair,” she said.

“It’s a hapa thing, we think,” said Rory.

“Some suspense,” said Tomasina, “as to whether he’ll turn out looking more Irish or Pinoy.”

“He’ll be beautiful either way,” Maureen said. “I have the thirty, and I run into some of them almost every time I step out the door, and now I have handsome Nick here.”

The black and white cat had come to lean against Rory’s shin. Rory ran a hand from crown of its head to base of its curling tail. It purred. “And you have your babies here. What are their names?”

“That’s Thing One,” said Maureen. “The other, the coward, is Thing Two.”

“Those are names?” said Rory.

“Well, you know,” said Maureen.

He did, and a shadow passed through him: She would not want a child or maybe any great love because she had already known a grief and could bring herself to risk none greater. And another: He held still between himself and her an untold roar.

In this sunny living room, in the joy of his young marriage and a gurgling nephew for her, he could not imagine telling it.

He wanted to see his sister but didn’t yet have the doctor’s all-clear to drive after cataract surgery. Tomasina was in Seattle to visit her own sister, who was declining. Rory called Nick. Nick, who had followed him into the trade and gone beyond him to make general foreman, had just finished punch list on one job and was waiting for his next to start from its Market Street hole. He had time.

Rory already wore his jacket when Nick, who had the key still, in case, came into the Outer Mission house to look for him. The question of how Nick would turn out, more Pinoy or more Irish, thought Rory, had settled into the undecidable; his face had only a little of his mother’s brown and bloomed certain days or moments with Irish rose, and the chestnut hair had gone dark but not black, and he was taller than any of Tomasina’s family but shorter than Rory.

On the drive across the Bay Bridge and north Rory wore sunglasses against the renewed brightness. As Nick’s pickup passed between the Berkeley Lagoon that might have been another green and the bay that might have been blue Rory said, “I detest these things. Give me the world in its own colors.”

“Are you preaching a radical honesty?” said Nick, laughing.

“That’s hell no,” said Rory, and he, too, laughed. He would not for example at this moment, he decided, embarrass his son by telling him how lovely he found his baritone.

A few miles farther along, by the eucalyptuses and apartment towers of El Cerrito, a thing struck Rory. “It’s a series of little surrenders,” he said.

“What is?”

“Age.”

Nothing more was said between them before their arrival at the door of Maureen’s bungalow.

Its porch was wild now, a mix of potted plants rampant or half-dead or mere sticks. Jane answered the door. She was Rory’s niece, his younger sister Nora’s daughter. She hadn’t yet decided what to do with herself and so for now she stayed with her aunt Maureen and did what Maureen no longer could, and for this Maureen gave her a little and Rory a little more, because a teacher’s pension couldn’t match his.

Maureen sat in the same yard-sale armchair in which she had held Nick in his infant visits. It smelled now of urine. Rory decided against talking to Jane about changing the pad more often and against a new chair as gift; things might be past that point.

Maureen didn’t or couldn’t stand to greet him. He bent to kiss her, as did Nick. She had arranged her hair, white years now, into careful waves from a left part. These obscured a little its thinning.

“Your hair looks great,” Rory told her.

She touched fingertips to it and smiled. “Jane helps with it.” She considered something a moment. “Jane is wonderful,” she almost whispered, and Rory understood that Maureen was absolving her niece of the reek.

Slender and mouse-nervous, Jane came from the kitchen. “We have coffee,” she said. “Would you like some?”

“Please, no trouble,” said Nick.

“It’s none. Father Miranda will be by later. I have some waiting in an insulated carafe for him. There’s much more than enough.”

Rory nodded at the mention of Father Miranda. He had not kept with the Church. He did see in her keeping with it at least this advantage: However diminished was the number of her living friends, however distance or infirmity might divide them from her, the priest would visit.

Maureen seemed to remark the nod. “My students keep in touch,” she said. “On Facebook. Jane brought me a laptop. She set up internet and showed me how to get around.”

“You’re good at it,” said Jane.

“That’s blarney, dear,” said Maureen.

A gray-striped tabby leapt onto her chair’s armrest. Rory started; how hadn’t he noticed it in the room? As she stroked it, he looked around and distinguished in the clutter also a little tortoiseshell and something long-furred, like a Persian. “Three cats now?” he said.

“Yes. Well, maybe four,” said Maureen. She turned to Jane. “Four?”

“Four,” Jane confirmed.

“One must be off getting into trouble,” said Maureen.

“They have names?” asked Rory.

Maureen laughed and waved the hand not stroking the cat. “I asked them what they call themselves, and they all answered the same, so why bother?”

Rory wondered how the full truth of what he knew would have salved the long grief in this namelessness even at its start. It hung behind his lips through the next hour and a little, as they bemoaned and celebrated the acts of nieces and nephews, ticked the early doings of great-nephews and -nieces, and laughed at their own stumbles, across such a span. He knew now that any visit with her could be his last, and that they would finish with a truck’s roar and a scream between them.

“Shoulder?” she asked him.

He realized that his discomfort, if misidentified, was obvious. He touched the one that had ached under newspapers. “It’ll hurt till I’m done,” he said.

The priest arrived and Maureen introduced him to Rory and Nick.

He was a small man of gentle brown eyes. Maureen’s satisfaction in him was evident. “A pleasure, Father,” said Rory, further comforted that she was of his flock. “We’ll leave you to each other.”

“Please stay,” said the priest. “I just ask that you step out when I receive her confession.”

“No, this is my exit cue.” Rory bent again into the reek to kiss Maureen. “Be good, love.” 

“Oh, but I’m wicked.”

“That’s a matter for him,” Rory said, winking at the priest. “Besides, I have you beat there.”

Outside, as he took support from the front fence’s cracked pickets while waiting for Nick to bring the pickup, he essayed the whistle of the San Francisco sparrow’s song into the Vallejo sun and wind. Although the minor third rose just as it had into dawns in the bell of streets, his lips had surrendered agility; the cascade of chitters broke and halted.

Nothing answered.

Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative. He published fiction in his twenties but abandoned it for decades to support a family, then a movement. In his return, since 2022 numerous publications have accepted his stories. He is a San Francisco native and resident.