![]() ![]() Least of all Francis.Īs his work truck winds through the cemetery, figures from his past begin to stir in their graves, including his father, who hopes to “catch a glimpse of how much his son had changed.” In the nearly half-century since his father’s death by train, it’s clear Francis hasn’t aged well. Why has the prodigal returned? Why now? No one, at least among the living, seems to know. And this happens to be the first time Francis has been back to see anyone in 22 years. This is Saint Agnes Cemetery in Francis’s hometown of Albany, New York, the final resting place of many of his own family members. It’s 1938, deep in the Great Depression, and this is the best work a “bum” like Francis can get. It opens in broad daylight, for starters, and Francis is not some wide-eyed teenager looking for graveyard thrills, but a 58-year-old drifter - penniless, sockless, filthy - working a one-day gig as a gravedigger. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that something strange is afoot: Francis is being haunted. In the first chapter of William Kennedy’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed, the protagonist Francis Phelan wanders through an old Catholic cemetery on Halloween. ![]()
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