Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas

by Gass, William H.

  Nature was rats and mice, briars and insect bites, cow plop and poisonous plants, chickens with severed heads and minute red ants swarming over a stump soaked in blood. It was the bodies of swatted flies collected in a paper bag.

  The swatter, an efficient instrument, was made of clothes-hanger wire and window screen trimmed with a narrow band of cloth which bore the name of a hardware store. Emma became an expert, finally, at something. Sometimes she would hit them while they were still in the air and knock them into the wall, where she’d smack their slightly stunned selves into mush. Even so, they were clever little devils and could sense the swatter’s approach, even though it was designed to pass without a wake or any sound through the air. They knew a blow was coming and would almost always be taking off when the screen broke their wings.

  Emma killed many on the kitchen table, sliding the carcasses into a paper sack with the side of the swatter. It occurred to her that there was no word for the crushed corpse of a swatted fly. Her father liked to swing his right hand across the cloth and catch one in his closing fist, a slight smile slowly widening on his face like the circle of a pebble’s plop. Where’s your sack, he’d say, and when Emma held it out he’d shake the body from his palm where it was stuck. Once in a while, with that tiny smile, he’d try to hold his fist to Emma’s ear so she could hear the buzz, but she would leave the room with a short cry of fear, her father’s chuckle following like a fly itself.

  After they’d eaten, Emma would clear the dishes away and wait a bit while the flies settled in apparent safety on the crumbed and sugared cloth. Her mother sweetened her tea with a careless spoon. Even the herbals her husband sometimes brewed for her she honeyed up one way or other. The flies would land as softly as soot. They’d walk about boldly on their sticky little feet with their proboscises extended as though requiring a cane. Her father was pleased to explain that flies softened their food with spit so they could suck it up.

  Emma liked to get two at once. Each swat would bestir some of the others and they’d whiz in a bothered zigzag for a while before trying to feed again, no lesson learned, the carnage of their comrades of little concern, although a few would remain at work even when a whack fell within a yard of their grazing.

  Flies seemed to flock like starlings, but the truth was they had no comrades, no sense of community. Occasionally, a crippled one would buzz and bumble without causing a stir, or a green-bottle arrive in their midst to be met by colossal indifference. Standing across from the center of the table, Emma would slap rapidly at each end in succession while uttering quiet but heartfelt theres each time: there and there and there.

  Oh she hated the creatures, perhaps because they treated the world as she was treated. It was certainly out of character for Emma to enjoy bloodshed. However, her father approved of her zeal, and her mother didn’t seem to mind, except

  trace to be grieved,

  for the little red dots their deaths left on the tablecloth. They’d accumulate, those spots, until their presence became quite intolerable to her mother, and she would remind Emma how hard it was to get those spots out, and about the cost of bleach, and how she hated that bag with its countless contents, she felt she heard a rustle from it now and then, it gave her the creeps. Emma wondered what, in her mother, creeps were. Later, when her mother was ill always, and vomiting a lot, Emma thought that perhaps the creeps had won out.

  When the fly was flipped from the table into her sack, it would almost always leave that reminder behind, a red speck as bright as the red spider mite though larger by a little. And after the evening meal, Emma would enter a dozen specks and sometimes more into her register.

  Where were they coming from? the compost heap? Her father said he saw no evidence of it. Her mother shook her head. Somewhere was there something dead? Her father hadn’t encountered anything, and he walked the land pretty thoroughly. From as far away as the woods? Her mother shook her head. Well, Emma wondered, if the breeding of these flies was a miracle, God was certainly wasting his gifts. God is giving you something to do, her father said.

  There was something in Emma which made her want to keep count, and other things in Emma which were horrified by the thought.

  Days drew on, mostly with a monotony which mingled them, so that time seemed not slow, not fast, just not about. And she failed grades and advanced anyway, and grew like a skinny tree to be stared at, and became increasingly useless, as if uselessness were an aim. Why, her father complained, wouldn’t Emma attack those bugs in the garden when she was so murderous about flies. As if he’d failed to notice that Emma had stopped swatting them many months, years, failed grades ago. Things went on in their minds, Emma imagined, out of inertia. Memory was maybe more than a lot of little red dots. The swats were still there, swatting. The paper sack still sat in a kitchen chair like a visitor. And Emma stayed on the page even when all her books were closed. The cloud

  The shed got built about the ash stump. Emma could hear the hammering. Built of limbs and logs, it leaned to one side, then another. Had her father any interest in the number of nails he’d hammered while the ash shack was going up? Did he know how long the walk to the mailbox was? how many yards? Without books, Emma couldn’t disappear into them. So she began to make and mail her memory cards, her versified objects, receiving for them a few dollars, and then, with this slim income, to order books of poetry by Elizabeth Bishop from an Iowa City shop. It was a great day when

  POEMS

  North & South

  A Cold Spring

  arrived, the title typed on a chartreuse ginkolike leaf lying across the join of two fields, one white for northern snow, she supposed, the other blue for southern seas. The flap copy was typed, too, and there were warm recommendations from Marianne Moore and Louise Bogan as well as the usual guys. Emma opened the book and saw a poem on a page like treasure in a chest and closed the book again and opened it and closed it many times. She held it in her two hands. Finally, it seemed to open of its own accord. She began “The Monument.” Page 25. Yes, she remembered. Even the brackets [ 25 ]. “Now can you see the monument?” She could. She could see it. “It is of wood built somewhat like a box.” Yes, Emma saw it. Her eyes flew flylike to the yard where the shed stood. It was a revelation.

  Later on there would be others.

  She turned the page and read the conclusion. “It is the beginning of a painting,” the poem said, “a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood.” All of ash. “Watch it closely.”

  Emma’s father probably didn’t care whether she found out or not. He probably neglected to tell her he was intercepting her mail, whether going in or going out, just because he didn’t care, one way or the other. He simply piled it up—the square envelopes with their cards of sewn- and glued- and inked-on sentiments and emblems, those with a few customer requests, some with simple sums inside them, a bookstore order—higgledy-piggledy on a small oak table in the room he was sleeping in now that his wife was ill and vomitous. That’s where, through an open door, Emma saw her envelopes, looking otherwise innocent and unopened, and said aloud in complete surprise: that’s why I never got my May Sarton.

  She did not try to retrieve them. To her, they were dead as flies, leftovers from a past life. They almost puzzled her, they seemed so remote from the suspended condition she was presently in, although not that many weeks had passed, she guessed, since she’d composed her last card: four hard green pea gravels placed like buttonholes inside a wreath of mottled mahonia leaves, stained as though by iodine and flame. In a kind of waking dream, Emma tottered the hundred and more yards to where the postbox leaned from a tuft of weed at the roadside, and opened it on empty. She held on to the lid as though it might fly up, and stared hard into the empty tin, more interested in the space where the confiscation had taken place than in the so-called contraband. Empty. Its emptiness was shaped from zinc. zzzzzz … in … cckkkk. Emma knew at last something for certain: her father was poisoning her mother.

  Well, it was no
business of hers.

  She closed the mailbox carefully so none of its emptiness would leak out.

  Indeed her mother rasped to her rest in a week’s time. Her father rolled her mother in the sheets and then the blanket from her bed and laid her at length, though somewhat folded—well, knees a good ways up—in a wooden footlocker. He poured a lot of mothballs in the crannies. We won’t be needing those, he said, fastening the lid with roofing nails. He slid the locker down the front stairs and lugged the box, cursing because it was heavier than he expected and awkward to carry, to the back of the wagon—lucky the wagon was small-wheeled and low—where he propped one end and lifted the other, then pushed the locker in. He never expected Emma to help. At helping she was hopeless. That’s enough for one day, he said. I got to scout out a good place.

  He went inside and washed all the household dishes. Grief, Emma decided, was the only explanation.

  The next day she saw her father’s distant figure digging in a far field. He appeared to be digging slowly because he dug for a long time.

  Emma’s head was as empty of thoughts as the mailbox. There was no reason to stand or sit or walk.

  Got my exercise today, he said.

  Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop were both dead. Edith Sitwell too. Elizabeth Bishop just keeled over in her kitchen. Nobody knew. Her poems couldn’t purchase her another hour.

  I’ve got to figure how to get her in, her father said. Can’t just roll her over. A fall like that might break the box open. We’ll do it tomorrow.

  Her father found an egg, which he had for breakfast. Emma rode in the back of the wagon with the coffin and an ironing board. The tractor dragged the wagon roughly over the ploughed ground. Then reluctantly through the marshy meadow. Smoother movement steadied her horizon. Emma remembered the Randolph Scott movie. Her father had chosen a spot near the trees which appeared to have no distinction. Earth was heaped neatly on both wide sides. Emma looked in the hole. “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear.”

  Her father backed the wagon up to an open end of the pit. Then he pried the box up with a crowbar and forced the ironing board under it. He never expected Emma to help. He steadied the box on the board as it slid down the board from the wagon. It was, Emma realized, a mechanical problem. The board then was lowered into the grave, and the box once more sent on its skiddy way. In a cant at the bottom, her father wiggled the board out from beneath the box so at last it lay there, as settled as it was going to get. The zinc-headed nails reflected a little light.

  Supposed to say a few words, her father said, so why don’t you?

  Poetry doesn’t redeem, Emma thought. Saintliness doesn’t redeem. Evening doesn’t redeem the day, it just ends it.

  Her father waited with a fistful of dirt ready to fling in the hole.

  She was small and thin and bitter, my mother. No one could cheer her up. A dress, a drink, a roast chicken were all the same to her. She went about her house without hope, without air. Her face was closed as a nut, closed as a careful snail’s. I saw her smile once but it was not nice, more like a crack in a plate. What on earth had she done to have so little done for her? She sewed my clothes but the hems were crooked.

  While Emma was silent a moment, trying to remember something more to say, to recite, her father released his fistful of earth and he went for the shovel. He shoveled slowly as if his back hurt. Dirt disappeared into dirt. The morning was cloudy but the grave was cold and dark and not so deep as it had been. The nails went out—animal eyes in a cave. Layer after layer: sheet blanket mothballs board, earth on earth on earth. Too bad we couldn’t afford to do better by her, her father said, but we didn’t do too bad. Emma realized he hadn’t cared what her words were, probably hadn’t heard. Words were one of the layers—to ward off what?

  They hadn’t any prayers. Emma hated hymns. Hymns weren’t private enough. And you were told which one to sing. This morning, please turn to [ 25 ]. The grave filled and a little mound rose over it, the soil looking less raw, more friable. Emma rode back to the house alongside the ironing board which was quite dirty and bedraggled. The board bounced as it hadn’t bounced coming out, when it was wedged. Emma tottered to the mailbox and looked in. That was how it was inside the box, she supposed. Empty, even though

  In the days, the weeks, the month which followed, Emma disappeared almost completely into her unattachments. She freed herself of food, of feeling, father. The fellow was a wraith. She was a shadow no one cast. He no longer farmed, though he often stood like a scarecrow in the field. Grief, Emma decided, was the explanation. But his grief was no concern of hers. She thought about freeing herself from verse when she realized she always had been free, for she had never respected, never followed, the form or been obedient to type.

  She waited for the world, unasked, to flow into her, but she hadn’t yet received its fine full flood. What if it weren’t a liquid, didn’t flow, but stood as if painted in its frame? What if it were like a fly indifferent to its own death? No matter. She was freeing herself of reflection. All of a sudden, she believed, the lethal line would come: “The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly …” Perhaps it would be that one. So what if it was shot from a sonnet. The only way flies could get into a poem would be as a word. “They were black, their eyes were shut. No one knew what kind of birds they were.” Each night, night fell in huge drops like rain and ran down the eaves and sheeted across the pane. He’d move somewhere in the house. He’d move. She’d hear. “Quick as dew off leaves.” The sound will be gone in the morning.

  Mother beneath the earth. Others are, why not she? He waits in the soybean field for me. I must carry the shovel out to him. It is thin as I am. Almost as worn, as hard. Mother has no marker. Many lie unknown in unsigned graves. Might we hear mother rustling under all her covers, trying to straighten her knees? To spend death with bended knee. He’ll never mark her. The mound will sink like syrup into the soil. Weeds will walk. Perhaps black wood-berries will grow there as they do in Bishop’s poem. My steps are soundless on the soft earth.

  Emma struck her father between his shoulder blades with the flat of the spade. She hit him as hard as she could, but we can’t suppose her blow would have amounted to much. She heard his lungs hoof and he fell forward on his face. Emma flung the spade away as far as she could a few feet. What can you see now, she wondered. Or did you always see dirt?

  She hadn’t considered that a blow meant as a remonstrance might have monstrous consequences. She bounced floatily back to the house somewhat like a blown balloon. That’s it: rage redeems. What does? evening.

  And evening came. The dead birds fell. Found in the field. She hadn’t missed him a minute. She hadn’t for a moment worried about how angry he would be, or how he might take his anger out on her, so uppity a child as to strike her grieving father in the back. Found facedown. After a rainstorm. Heartburst. Creamed corn is a universal favorite. Dark drops fell. The field was runneled and puddlesome. Emma peered more and more through the round thread-wound shade pull. And felt the flow. The world was a fluid. Weights have been lifted off of me. I am lonely am I? as a cloud

  Emma was afraid of Elizabeth Bishop. Emma imagined Elizabeth Bishop lying naked next to a naked Marianne Moore, the tips of their noses and their nipples touching; and Emma imagined that every feeling either poet had ever had in their spare and spirited lives was present there in the two nips, just where the nips kissed. Emma, herself, was ethereally thin, and had been admired for the translucency of her skin. You could see her bones like shadows of trees, shadows without leaves.

  Some dreams they forgot. But Emma Bishop remembered them now with a happy smile. Berry picking in the woods, seeing shiny black wood-berries hanging from a bough, and thinking, don’t pick these, they may be poison … a word thrilling to say … poison … us. Elizabeth Bishop used the phrase loaded trees, as if they might like a gun go off. At last … at last … at last, she thought: “What flowers shrink to seeds like these?”

  dot where it died.


  THE MASTER OF

  SECRET REVENGES

  Luther Penner, after many years, had perfected the art of secret revenges. They were pallid, to be sure, these revenges; they were thin; they were trivial and mild compared to the muscular and hearty recoveries of honor that brighten history and make it bearable to read; yet they were revenges so secretly conceived and so deftly executed that the spider might have learned a more entangling web, the wasp a surer sting, by studying them. It was Luther Penner’s solemn purpose to improve on Nature and prefigure Providence, and to this end he had, during the time of which I write, become a master of the art of his invention. Completely conscious of his powers, he did not hesitate to address himself in his journal as cher maître et ami, taking care to compose each entry in the third person and to invest it with all the featureless precision of analytical philosophy. There was no affectation in this formula of greeting, for he had come to regard the creative part of himself with astonishment and awe as having separate existence and richly independent means. Always himself a modest, humble man, he knew his genius had not only discovered an art and carried it to perfection, it had also seized upon the idea of the transcendental revenge itself and, like Descartes, had come into possession of its essence in one searing afternoon of vision. While he felt he could ascribe the necessary preparation for this moment to his lifelong study of revenge—a study which had till then resulted only in a catalogue of every kind of offended honor with its appropriate requital—he could not honestly suppose that from these studies, by themselves, had come such a revolutionary notion as The Pure Revenge en soi; never, without the aid of the Upper Air, could he have realized the secrecy essential to it, or discovered the subjective ground of its satisfaction, or understood so well its immeasurable moral power. Indeed, the idea of The Pure Revenge puts within the reach of every ordinary man and woman a truly formidable weapon, a weapon which balances at once the forces of the weakling with the bully’s, and one which must, in time, surely tip the scales to the nobler side; for despite the fact that these revenges are in figure pale and wasted, and regardless of the measures which a man may take to guard himself against the vigorous antique kinds, there is no safety for him from L. T. Penner’s invisible reprisals; no man may sleep securely who has sinned against his neighbor; and I feel confident now, as I have never dared to feel before, that our most pious hopes shall be fulfilled, and thanks to Luther Penner, we shall see this unjust comedy of life justly concluded, and the meek come into the legacy that long ago was promised them.