#Broken heart bordello chapter 6 picture full
Aunt Carmen lived alone in a little house full of bisque figurines.
“That goes double, Carmen,” my dad always replied. “The boy needs a mother, and you need a wife to keep your hair short and make you some casserole dinners.” “Get your life back on the tracks and find a good woman, Oscar,” Aunt Carmen whispered loudly to Dad every time she had the littlest chance. Aunt Carmen was always telling Dad what he ought to do. He certainly did not wish to move into the Chateaux Apartment Village as Aunt Carmen, his in-town sister, suggested. But in the end he could not bear to leave the yellow curtains and white trim that Mama had painted herself. You might think my dad would want to move away from Lucifer Street and the terrible reminders of the accident. What was left of the Lucifer factory was declared unsafe and closed down soon after. All I remember seeing was a fire truck out the window of our kitchen and my aunt Carmen, who had appeared from nowhere, covering my eyes with her hands.
Everyone would say afterward she had not known or felt a thing in that half-second explosion. Mama was the bookkeeper in the Lucifer Fireworks plant until one day a bolt of walking lightning shot right through the shipping-room window, stopping the clock and sizzling into a box of Roman candles near her chair. I was just a skinny, freckled little boy of three in that Brownie camera snapshot, with a cowlick pointing straight up out of the top of my head. We have a lone portrait, its edges curled, of me, Dad, and Mama. She fixed it up so pretty when I was just a baby, all yellow curtains and shiny white trim. The house at the end of Lucifer Street had been my mama’s great joy. In the kitchen, our dinner was warm and fragrant on the stove. The forty-watt yellow bulb made a Grand Central Station for flapping moths and zizzing june bugs above my head. The Blue Comet was the queen of all trains. In that box was my birthday present, the Blue Comet. Bouncing along on his shoulder was a red cardboard box labeled L IONEL C OMPANY, R OCHESTER, N EW Y ORK. My heart quickened as I watched my dad lope home over the fallen needles. We lived at the end of Lucifer Street, on the Mississippi River side of Cairo, Illinois. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you If all men count with you, but none too much If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it, And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son! If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on” If you can dream - and not make dreams your master If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise Summary: When the Depression hits in Cairo, Illinois, and Oscar Ogilvie’s father must sell their home and vast model train set-up to look for work in California, eleven-year-old Oscar is left with his dour aunt, where he befriends a mysterious drifter, witnesses a stunning bank robbery, and is suddenly catapulted onto a train that takes him to a different time and place. On the Blue Comet / Rosemary Wells illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher. Text copyright © 2010 by Rosemary Wells Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Bagram IbatoullineĪll rights reserved. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
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