and Ansel carried himself with an air of deliberate well-being though he felt he might be coming apart at the seams. As he walked he closed his eyes and named all the stores – Swepples Drugs, Danforth Radio, Adanac Cakes – and when he went into Woolworth’s he saw on the wall, over Stationery Supplies and Fine Toiletries, a painting reproduced on canvas, a wobbly white church looming up out of a dark sky full of stars like big sunflowers. He liked it, the almost childish lunatic gaiety. There was only the plate-glass mirror over the mantel, his mother’s mirror, because she said it made the room bigger, filled it full of light, and she had painted the walls white to help the light but he preferred the front and back porches, like little houses, each window a small screen alive with shadows, and he bought the painting and carried it wrapped in a big brown paper bag under his arm.
The next morning it was cold and clear and the sunlight on the deep snow was bright. He took down the mirror, unscrewing the chrome clamps. He hammered a nail into the wall and hung the painting, wondering why his mother would rather have had an empty mirror than a church no matter how wobbly because life itself is wobbly, so you need some certainty, some confirmation of how things really are, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing else, Mother, between us and the dirt we do ourselves, the damage we do in doing damage to others, so he decided to store the mirror in the tool shed at the end of the garden. It was heavy and he carried it out in front of him like a placard. The snow was deep and unbroken. It glistened in the strong sunlight. Walking with his head down watching his step, he suddenly thought he must look ridiculous and he looked up into the mirror but all he saw was a blinding flash, an explosion of light.
He stood with his arms out, holding the light, unable to close his eyes or find his face. He dropped the mirror, which sank like a blade into the snow. All he could see was light and snow and empty sky. The milkman found him like that, white-faced, drained, standing staring with his arms straight out, and the milkman led him back into the house and sat him down, “Don’t worry, Ansel, it’ll all come back, you’ll see,” but he sat staring, hardly eating day after day, and some neighbours came around and talked for a while and left shaking their heads. Sometimes he got up and stood close to a window, looking into the glass as if something were there. Every day the milkman said to him, “Don’t worry, nothing lasts forever, you’ll see,” but it did last into the spring when one afternoon old Father Cooper came around. He opened the door and Father Cooper touched him on the shoulder and slipped inside without a word, a wistful look in his eye, and then he walked toward the stairs, his hands in his pockets. He smiled at Ansel. “I knew your mother, you know, years ago.” He looked up the stairs, and then he shrugged, saying, “We all like to think we’ve played a part.” Ansel, bewildered by the familiarity, stepped back into the living room. The old man followed, saying, “In case you forgot, the name’s Cooper,” and he reached out and touched Ansel on the cheek. Ansel sat with his arms folded across his chest and whisker rubs, I’d forgotten the whisker rubs when I was a boy, young Father Marshall, those big blue lonely eyes chalking up his angels of perfection on the blackboard, the points of isosceles piercing the heart of God, three persons with pointed heads, he’d said, laughing, with all the best lonely intentions in the world giving his boys whisker rubs cheek to cheek, the affection of the loneliness of priests that I’d forgotten and old Father Cooper said, “I see you’ve no TV in the living room. It’s a bad thing, these TVs in the living rooms. TVs everywhere. Cuts down on the talk, and no talk’s no good. Black-and-white TV on the good old days was absolutely worse. The good old days were worse. I hate black-and-white.”
They sat in silence. There was a strong wind and the branches near the windows swung in the wind and cast shadows across the floor.
“I’m a Nosy Parker,” the old man said.
Ansel nodded, smiling.
“Is that yes or no?”
The priest, shifting in his chair, saw the painting over the mantelpiece. “Fella that painted that picture, I know all about that. He cut off his ear, but I guess you know that, too. Clean as a whistle. Guess he only wanted to hear half of what was going on. That’s what it’s like to be a priest, you know. A woman gossiping is just a loose lip, but her secret she keeps in her heart. That’s what you hear in confessional. You hear the secret half of what’s going on, one ear to the grille, you know.”
Ansel squinted and stared at the cornflower stars, his eye filling with flowers, spinning flowers that left him light-headed. “And well, now,” the old priest said, settling into his chair, “we do the best we can. It’s all you can ask,” the light from the windows catching his freckled forehead. He closed his eyes and sat still for a long while. The house was silent except for the wind and Ansel heard a creaking in the walls. A crack in the plaster ran like a vein down to the baseboard. There was dust along the baseboard moulding and, in the corner near the foreleg of the old radiator, a thimble, Mother’s little cup, needle pusher, leaning into the mahogany mirror on her dressing table, looking not at herself but into the past for some clear moment, some insight into the hang and shape of things. She was, pouring little shots of straight rye, a charwoman’s drink she’d always said, into her thimble, giggling, throwing them back and she probably used that thimble to mend the rips in my life, and then the old priest rubbed his cheeks as if he’d just come out of a little sleep and, with his chin resting in his hand, he said, “You know, I’ve got a theory. I was thinking about this all day today. Of course we’ve all got theories, but it seems to me that any man’s the hero of his own little world, his dreams, right? And there’s nothing a woman would rather believe in than in a man’s dreams about himself but the trouble is,”
and the old priest loosened his collar, “the trouble is most men have little or nothing to say for themselves. They’re thin in the storyline, and it’s why they change women, because they’ve got only these few small stories they’ve got to tell over and over. And if they’re married, a woman soon knows she’s heard the best he’s got and there’s really no more to say, no more dreams, except the woman can’t ever let her man see in her eyes that she knows his dream life is over, and this is why men take off with other women, not just to sleep with them, but to tell their one or two little stories about themselves again, wanting to see that wonder look come into a woman’s eyes.” The old priest leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his mouth set, holding his head. He waited. Ansel blinked and licked his lips. Then the old man, closing his eyes, said, “You ever seen an owl in a tree? You ever tried talking to an owl in a tree?”
Ansel shrugged and the old man smiled and patted his hands together. “That’s more like it. I can’t hardly get a word out if there’s no response. I just came by because I can’t stand you sitting here gawking into nothing all alone, and since I’ve stood talking to an owl, you got to admit that’s pretty interesting, too, because there’s nothing quite like the unblinking eye of a sitting owl.”
Ansel nodded.
“Owls keep down the night life.”
Ansel nodded again.
“Sometimes I think God’s an owl,” the old man said. “An owl in the night. Except that’s only after I read about Abraham and suchlike. Blood sacrifice. It’s blood that binds the old books together.”
Ansel opened his mouth, and then closed it.
“During the day, of course, he’s not there at all. The owl, I mean. God’s there, that’s for sure. Of course a lot of men don’t believe that, maybe even yourself. Maybe that’s what’s going on, what with your mother gone and all, but I figure not believing’s a kind of impotence. A man gone impotent is a strange bird.”
Ansel laughed and shook his head, smiling.
“No, no. Not that. I mean real impotence. It’s in the heart,” the priest said. He stood up and shook Ansel’s hand.
Ansel opened the door. “Home, my boy,” the old priest said, “whether you hang yourself or your hat, is where you are, and you are what you are.”
Ansel
sat in the living room. It was July now. He was sweating and he stripped down to his shorts and went out onto the back porch. A white gravel walk led from the back porch to the tool shed. Outside the shed door a wooden piccaninny lawn boy stood in blue breeches and a red jacket. The eyeholes had been drilled clean through the head, and though the mouth was drawn at the corners, without the eyes it was hard to tell whether the mouth was set in contempt or laughter. There were huge sunflowers down the length of the garden, golden yellow heads, big dark centres, the only flowers in the small oblong backyard. He sat on the porch whetstoning an old hand-sickle. He was in a white wicker chair, naked except for his white undershorts, sweating in the stifling heat. From time to time he wiped his face and shoulders with a towel and then he drank a glass of cold milk, the other day, as if he were talking to the old priest, and suddenly he wished the old priest were still there as he touched his thumb to the sickle blade, I read how a fellow had his whole yard cemented and then he laid that over with outdoor carpeting, glued her down, good emerald-green carpet, and once a week he went out there vacuuming his lawn clean as a pistol, wearing a white handkerchief knotted around his forehead in a sweatband. His toenails needed clipping. He smiled, spat on the whetstone, and patted the flat of the blade on his thigh.
Two sparrows landed on one of the huge sunflowers. The sparrows were pecking the dark brown centre. They know I’m here, looking around, suddenly struck by his loneliness, not the birds, I mean the flowers, how I feel them feeling me sitting here whetstoning, those stems there, thick as a man’s forearm, and the sun caught the blade with a flash of light and the birds flew away. He sat very still with a wry little smile, staring at the head of the blackface lawn jockey whose feet were anchored in a bucket of cement buried under the lawn, and only last week, cutting the two flowers down right above the root, carrying them shoulder-high remembering how he’d suddenly picked them up and started whipping them around over his head, waving great big yellow daisies, thrashing the empty air, and he had got the old hand-drill and reamed the eyeholes through the lawn Sambo’s head and I knelt down and looked through to those little holes of light on the other side, thinking, What’s that, greener pastures? and laughing not to myself or the big sun hole up there, the white hole, white holes in every black pane of glass at night, but just laughing, laughing at the street all entirely empty except maybe a girl, a woman hurrying home, and how come right now I hardly can think of women, the dip like a thumbprint in the low small of a woman’s back, the weight always lacking in small breasts, gone, lightweight, being light-headed and haven’t had a hard-on for who knows how long, nor want one in this absence, the peak roofs of the dark houses in the moonlight, gravestones gone from Mother’s yard, dreaming of how I have tried to love, holding on, hoping only for a little thumbprint, some stamp, veracity while the ice worms work their way. He got up and went into the kitchen. He took a carton of cold milk from the refrigerator and carried it along the dark hall by the stairs out onto the front porch. He sat down and hunched forward in his chair, covered with sweat. He poured his glass full of milk. He had a big man’s body. He got up, funny, and walked back through the dark house to the garden porch, I’ve got myself in protective custody. He held the sickle shoulder-high, aiming the blade at something in the air, and sometimes thinking it’s my head or theirs, those sun-sucking sunflowers, just sucking up all the sun. He hooked the sickle’s point into the newel post, letting it hang there like half an ice tong. There was a heat haze over the tin roof of the tool shed. The trouble is it’s simple. No endings. If there’s an ending then everything falls into place, falls because you know where you’re going, which is why I figure I never know where I’m going. Anyway, and he folded his arms across his chest, the lines around his mouth being two deep shadows, the clomp clomp down the hall of my footsteps, tunnelling, that bewildered mole’s smile of mine I see in the mirror, and then I come out here into the light that glitters like particles of snow lifting off ice except it’s summer, glittering sparkles of light in my eyes like sparklers on firecracker night, the way we used to write our names in the air with sparkling wands, names, light no one else sees, and I don’t know how the light hit me, like lightning in the eyes, God or a great gap of nothing. Who knows? I don’t know if this is God’s grace or the end of everything, except how calm I feel, this huge nothing or silence a satisfaction like the wasted fullness after a woman and yet the feeling that somehow there in the glass between me and the black dog, something hangs, suspended, hidden, like a truth, a word, a word that’ll open up between me and what’s out there on the other side.
He sat for a long while and then pulled the sickle point out of the post and ran the flat of the blade along the back of his forearm. Something about a blade sun-heated, the feel on the skin, like the shock of ice water, a shock almost soothing. I’ve done that, up to my neck naked in ice water and there’s nothing you can think, so numb, it’s just soothing, you’re iced, it’s the end, and one of these days I’m going to ice those sunflowers. I get sometimes so I can’t stand their great big heads, overgrown costume jewellery, flowers for the way things are, someone all the time sucking you dry, and I feel them actually feel the way I’m feeling, as he laid the sickle down on a small side table and smiled, knowing that he was soon going to cut them all down to their roots. He opened the screen door and took up the carton of milk again and Ansel, you get yourself ready, mother’s milk, the milk of human kindness. He shook with silent laughter and then shrugged standing out on the porch, sopping wet, unmoving, staring, his mouth drawn at the corners, no song, singing, no one and between the dog saliva and semen, my lost face in the light. I have lost myself in the light, looking, and all there is is compassion, somewhere from someone, a word beyond anything I might say if I could about this complete nothingness which keeps my eye more alive than ever before, so that even sleeping spiders in their webs sometimes look like opals in the light.
He sat for three days listening. He wondered if the voice he heard was his own. He had never heard his own voice.
He got up and dressed.
He combed his hair.
There was a blue jay in the tree outside the window. He had never seen a blue jay before. It was almost a week since he had combed his hair. He was surprised at how well he looked. He’d lost weight, the loose jowly flesh.
He stood, listening.
I have nothing to say, as later that week he walked along the river road, coming upon a small church wedged between storage yards and foundries, and he stood inside the church, I have nothing to say, staring at an unknown woman, raven-haired and high cheekbones, sitting in a pew, eyes closed, humming a low mournful tune, keeping time with her foot, a light tapping on the marble floor, the sound of tap water dripping in the night, her hooded eyes staring at the ceiling of the cold brick chapel, a plague-procession fresco, bodies twisted in pain by buboes, flagellants whipping themselves in rage, howling with the death lurch, and in front of the altar rail a carved Christ caught in mid-stride with big bony feet and a haggard peasant’s face with a round little mouth, a short man wearing an off-the-shoulder carmine velvet cape, naked except for a gleaming gold-leaf loincloth and you are nothing, so fish-mouthed, zero, and one night on television he had heard a man say, “You want to know how successful someone is then just count the zeros after his name,” and then, after a nod and shuffle, a shrug and a quiet laugh, the woman said, Yes, sure, why not? She would love to take a walk with him. And so they, both curious and smiling, headed toward Ansel’s home.
The wind made an easy lisping noise along the edge of the river. They went down the slope of a hill behind an ironworks, along an unused path, and there were broken drain tiles, wire, a rusted bolt, groundhog holes, and rough grass giving off a chill. She stepped lightly ahead, half guileless, half brazen, and said, “I feel just like when I was a girl and put on heels for the first time, knowing that when a man looked at me in heels he didn’t see little girl legs and that gave me pleasure because there’s nothing bet
ter than being a woman,” and who knows what Mother would’ve said to that, trying to fill the narrow rooms of her life with light, staring into the eye of her own unhappiness, sometimes strangely satisfied, with her unhappiness, so it seemed. “When I was a little girl,” the leggy woman said, “my father used to wash me every night and dry me with a great big towel. Then one night when he was drying me he handed me the towel and said, ‘Dry yourself between your legs,’ and though I was a little girl I somehow knew from that moment on I was a woman. I mean, then and there I made up my mind I was a woman, and felt very sad about that thing between me and my father being gone because he could not touch me. That’s what I was thinking up there in the chapel, that I wanted him to touch me,” pretending to pray, and she had reached out and touched the toe of the haggard Christ and then had begun to smile and laugh in the chapel hush, and had whispered across the pews to Ansel, “What’s the matter, the cat got your tongue?” and in the cat’s eye always a bird, past, to be, in the mouth of the mute Christ in his gold loincloth, and the sky was overcast and grey. She had an open easy laughter, and she said, “Imagine me saying that and I always wanted to leave a man speechless so I guess you’re my man,” as she later lay down, upstairs naked on your back, and you said, “There’s blood, but all births begin in the vacating blood,” and the next night with you staying over like you had every right to be there, “on your own time, on your own dime,” as you said while I was kneeling between your legs as you shoulder-rocked the way children push themselves through water on their backs, backwards, all sourness emptied out, tasting, smelling the skin folds, breathing words into that mouth. “But I guess it is the loneliness,”
All the Lonely People Page 38