Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels: A Library of America eBook Classic

by Katherine Anne Porter

  Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.

  At once it grew, flattened, thinned to a fine radiance, spread like a great fan and curved out into a rainbow through which Miranda, enchanted, altogether believing, looked upon a deep clear landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow and sky, freshly washed and glistening with transparencies of blue. Why, of course, of course, said Miranda, without surprise but with serene rapture as if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope for it. She rose from her narrow ledge and ran lightly through the tall portals of the great bow that arched in its splendor over the burning blue of the sea and the cool green of the meadow on either hand.

  The small waves rolled in and over unhurriedly, lapped upon the sand in silence and retreated; the grasses flurried before a breeze that made no sound. Moving towards her leisurely as clouds through the shimmering air came a great company of human beings, and Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure identities and she knew them every one without calling their names or remembering what relation she bore to them. They surrounded her smoothly on silent feet, then turned their entranced faces again towards the sea, and she moved among them easily as a wave among waves. The drifting circle widened, separated, and each figure was alone but not solitary; Miranda, alone too, questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy, stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always morning.

  Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly from sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely smiling familiar beings about her, Miranda felt without warning a vague tremor of apprehension, some small flick of distrust in her joy; a thin frost touched the edges of this confident tranquillity; something, somebody, was missing, she had lost something, she had left something valuable in another country, oh, what could it be? There are no trees, no trees here, she said in fright, I have left something unfinished. A thought struggled at the back of her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as a curtain had fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out, Oh, I must go back! But in what direction? Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand. The cloth was drawn away; she saw Miss Tanner filling a hypodermic needle in her methodical expert way, and heard Dr. Hildesheim saying, “I think that will do the trick. Try another.” Miss Tanner plucked firmly at Miranda’s arm near the shoulder, and the unbelievable current of agony ran burning through her veins again. She struggled to cry out, saying, Let me go, let me go; but heard only incoherent sounds of animal suffering. She saw doctor and nurse glance at each other with the glance of initiates at a mystery, nodding in silence, their eyes alive with knowledgeable pride. They looked briefly at their handiwork and hurried away.

  Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in mid air, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur colored light exploded through the black window pane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamor went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt.

  The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating. It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee. . .”

  Sweet land. . . oh, terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamor of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land of Liberty—”

  “Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss Tanner, her underlip held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, “Please open the window, please, I smell death in here.”

  Now if real daylight such as I remember having seen in this world would only come again, but it is always twilight or just before morning, a promise of day that is never kept. What has become of the sun? That was the longest and loneliest night and yet it will not end and let the day come. Shall I ever see light again?

  Sitting in a long chair, near a window, it was in itself a melancholy wonder to see the colorless sunlight slanting on the snow, under a sky drained of its blue. “Can this be my face?” Miranda asked her mirror. “Are these my own hands?” she asked Miss Tanner, holding them up to show the yellow tint like melted wax glimmering between the closed fingers. The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there? Is it possible I can ever accustom myself to this place? she asked herself. The human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance; the once white walls of her room were now a soiled gray. Breathing slowly, falling asleep and waking again, feeling the splash of water on her flesh, taking food, talking in bare phrases with Dr. Hildesheim and Miss Tanner, Miranda looked about her with the covertly hostile eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself, does not understand the language nor wish to learn it, does not mean to live there and yet is helpless, unable to leave it at his will.

  “It is morning,” Miss Tanner would say, with a sigh, for she had grown old and weary once for all in the past month, “morning again, my dear,” showing Miranda the same monotonous landscape of dulled evergreens and leaden snow. She would rustle about in her starched skirts, her face bravely powdered, her spirit unbreakable as good steel, saying, “Look, my dear, what a heavenly morning, like a crystal,” for she had an affection for the salvaged creature before her, the silent ungrateful human being whom she, Cornelia Tanner, a nurse who knew her business, had snatched back from death with her own hands. “Nursing is nine-tenths, just the same,” Miss Tanner would tell the other nurses; “keep that in mind.” Even the sunshine was Miss Tanner’s own prescription for the further recovery of Miranda, this patient the doctors had given up for lost, and who yet sat here, visible proof of Miss Tanner’s theory. She said, “Look at the sunshine, now,” as she might be saying, “I ordered this for you, my dear, do sit up and take it.”

  “It’s beautiful,�
�� Miranda would answer, even turning her head to look, thanking Miss Tanner for her goodness, most of all her goodness about the weather, “beautiful, I always loved it.” And I might love it again if I saw it, she thought, but truth was, she could not see it. There was no light, there might never be light again, compared as it must always be with the light she had seen beside the blue sea that lay so tranquilly along the shore of her paradise. That was a child’s dream of the heavenly meadow, the vision of repose that comes to a tired body in sleep, she thought, but I have seen it when I did not know it was a dream. Closing her eyes she would rest for a moment remembering that bliss which had repaid all the pain of the journey to reach it; opening them again she saw with a new anguish the dull world to which she was condemned, where the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright surfaces corroded, the sharp planes melted and formless, all objects and beings meaningless, ah, dead and withered things that believed themselves alive!

  At night, after the long effort of lying in her chair, in her extremity of grief for what she had so briefly won, she folded her painful body together and wept silently, shamelessly, in pity for herself and her lost rapture. There was no escape. Dr. Hildesheim, Miss Tanner, the nurses in the diet kitchen, the chemist, the surgeon, the precise machine of the hospital, the whole humane conviction and custom of society, conspired to pull her inseparable rack of bones and wasted flesh to its feet, to put in order her disordered mind, and to set her once more safely in the road that would lead her again to death.

  Chuck Rouncivale and Mary Townsend came to see her, bringing her a bundle of letters they had guarded for her. They brought a basket of delicate small hothouse flowers, lilies of the valley with sweet peas and feathery fern, and above these blooms their faces were merry and haggard.

  Mary said, “You have had a tussle, haven’t you?” and Chuck said, “Well, you made it back, didn’t you?” Then after an uneasy pause, they told her that everybody was waiting to see her again at her desk. “They’ve put me back on sports already, Miranda,” said Chuck. For ten minutes Miranda smiled and told them how gay and what a pleasant surprise it was to find herself alive. For it will not do to betray the conspiracy and tamper with the courage of the living; there is nothing better than to be alive, everyone has agreed on that; it is past argument, and who attempts to deny it is justly outlawed. “I’ll be back in no time at all,” she said; “this is almost over.”

  Her letters lay in a heap in her lap and beside her chair. Now and then she turned one over to read the inscription, recognized this handwriting or that, examined the blotted stamps and the postmarks, and let them drop again. For two or three days they lay upon the table beside her, and she continued to shrink from them. “They will all be telling me again how good it is to be alive, they will say again they love me, they are glad I am living too, and what can I answer to that?” and her hardened, indifferent heart shuddered in despair at itself, because before it had been tender and capable of love.

  Dr. Hildesheim said, “What, all these letters not opened yet?” and Miss Tanner said, “Read your letters, my dear, I’ll open them for you.” Standing beside the bed, she slit them cleanly with a paper knife. Miranda, cornered, picked and chose until she found a thin one in an unfamiliar handwriting. “Oh, no, now,” said Miss Tanner, “take them as they come. Here, I’ll hand them to you.” She sat down, prepared to be helpful to the end.

  What a victory, what triumph, what happiness to be alive, sang the letters in a chorus. The names were signed with flour ishes like the circles in air of bugle notes, and they were the names of those she had loved best; some of those she had known well and pleasantly; and a few who meant nothing to her, then or now. The thin letter in the unfamiliar handwriting was from a strange man at the camp where Adam had been, telling her that Adam had died of influenza in the camp hospital. Adam had asked him, in case anything happened, to be sure to let her know.

  If anything happened. To be sure to let her know. If anything happened. “Your friend, Adam Barclay,” wrote the strange man. It had happened—she looked at the date—more than a month ago.

  “I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?” she asked Miss Tanner, who was folding letters and putting them back in their proper envelopes.

  “Oh, quite a while,” said Miss Tanner, “but you’ll be ready to go soon now. But you must be careful of yourself and not overdo, and you should come back now and then and let us look at you, because sometimes the aftereffects are very—”

  Miranda, sitting up before the mirror, wrote carefully: “One lipstick, medium, one ounce flask Bois d’Hiver perfume, one pair of gray suède gauntlets without straps, two pairs gray sheer stockings without clocks—”

  Towney, reading after her, said, “Everything without something so that it will be almost impossible to get?”

  “Try it, though,” said Miranda, “they’re nicer without. One walking stick of silvery wood with a silver knob.”

  “That’s going to be expensive,” warned Towney. “Walking is hardly worth it.”

  “You’re right,” said Miranda, and wrote in the margin, “a nice one to match my other things. Ask Chuck to look for this, Mary. Good looking and not too heavy.” Lazarus, come forth. Not unless you bring me my top hat and stick. Stay where you are then, you snob. Not at all. I’m coming forth. “A jar of cold cream,” wrote Miranda, “a box of apricot powder—and, Mary, I don’t need eye shadow, do I?” She glanced at her face in the mirror and away again. “Still, no one need pity this corpse if we look properly to the art of the thing.”

  Mary Townsend said, “You won’t recognize yourself in a week.”

  “Do you suppose, Mary,” asked Miranda, “I could have my old room back again?”

  “That should be easy,” said Mary. “We stored away all your things there with Miss Hobbe.” Miranda wondered again at the time and trouble the living took to be helpful to the dead. But not quite dead now, she reassured herself, one foot in either world now; soon I shall cross back and be at home again. The light will seem real and I shall be glad when I hear that someone I know has escaped from death. I shall visit the escaped ones and help them dress and tell them how lucky they are, and how lucky I am still to have them. Mary will be back soon with my gloves and my walking stick, I must go now, I must begin saying good-by to Miss Tanner and Dr. Hildesheim. Adam, she said, now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here; I wish you had come back, what do you think I came back for, Adam, to be deceived like this?

  At once he was there beside her, invisible but urgently present, a ghost but more alive than she was, the last intolerable cheat of her heart; for knowing it was false she still clung to the lie, the unpardonable lie of her bitter desire. She said, “I love you,” and stood up trembling, trying by the mere act of her will to bring him to sight before her. If I could call you up from the grave I would, she said, if I could see your ghost I would say, I believe. . . “I believe,” she said aloud. “Oh, let me see you once more.” The room was silent, empty, the shade was gone from it, struck away by the sudden violence of her rising and speaking aloud. She came to herself as if out of sleep. Oh, no, that is not the way, I must never do that, she warned herself. Miss Tanner said, “Your taxicab is waiting, my dear,” and there was Mary. Ready to go.

  No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  NOTES

  Chronology

  1890

  Born Callie Russell Porter, May 15, in Indian Creek, Texas, the fourth child of Harrison Boone Porter (b. 1857, Hays County, Texas) and (Mary) Alice Jones Porter (b. 1859, Guadalupe County, Texas). (Alice Porter, a former schoolteacher, was the second of three children of prosperous farmer John Newton Jones, 1833–1886, and Caroline Lee Frost Jones, b. 1835; she met Harrison Porter, a graduate of the
Texas Military Institute, at a family wedding in 1880. In 1883, when Alice’s mother was declared insane, John Jones placed her in private care and moved to Indian Creek, a frontier settlement in Brown County, North Central Texas, where he purchased a 640-acre farm. In 1885, he invited Alice and Harrison, married two years earlier, to join him and Alice’s brothers at the farm, offering them free tenancy on a small farming tract. Harrison Porter was the fourth of 11 children born to Asbury Duval Porter, 1814–1879, a veteran of the Confederate Army, and Catharine Ann Skaggs [“Cat”] Porter, b. 1827, a native of Warren County, Kentucky. Harrison and Alice’s first child, Anna Gay [called “Gay”], was born in 1885, and their second, Harry Ray, in 1887. Their third child, Johnnie, was born in 1889 and died shortly after his first birthday.)

  1892

  The Porters’ fifth child, a daughter, born January 25; Alice Porter, always frail, dies March 20. To honor her memory, Harrison christens the infant Mary Alice, but she will always be known as “Baby.” Harrison takes the children to Kyle, a town of 500 in Hays County, to live in the home of his widowed mother, Cat Skaggs Porter. Family divides time between Kyle and Cat’s small farm on nearby Plum Creek.

  1893–95

  Grieving and directionless, Harrison is a distracted and often-absent father. Cat takes charge of the children: she demands obedience, excellent schoolwork, attendance at the local Methodist Church, and good manners. She also instills in Callie the pleasures and powers of storytelling, spinning family tales in which her Skaggs ancestors are larger-than-life figures: her father, Abraham Moredock Skaggs, fought with distinction in the War of 1812; her mother, Rhoda Boone Smith Skaggs, was a descendant of Jonathan Boone, brother of Daniel; her grandfather James Skaggs served under General George Washington; and her great-grandfather Henry Skaggs was an intrepid explorer in the Kentucky territory. “I was fed from birth on myth and legend,” Porter will recall, “and a conviction of natural superiority bestowed by birth and tradition.”