by Joy Williams
Also by Joy Williams
Novels
State of Grace
The Changeling
Breaking and Entering
The Quick and the Dead
Short Stories
The Visiting Privilege
Honored Guest
Taking Care
Escapes
99 Stories of God
Nonfiction
The Florida Keys: A History and Guide
Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals
this is a borzoi book published by alfred a. knopf
Copyright © 2021 by Joy Williams
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Williams, Joy, 1944– author.
Title: Harrow: a novel / Joy Williams.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050338 (print) | LCCN 2020050339 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657569 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657576 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3573.I4496 H37 2021 (print) | LCC PS3573.I4496 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050338 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050339
Ebook ISBN 9780525657576
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover image: (horse) Mary Evans Picture Library
Cover design by Kelly Blair
ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Joy Williams
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
[On the vehicle...]
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
A Note About the Author
For JZ
On the vehicle that transported them was written: All creatures of whatever description, named or unnamed, are to be brought with us on the Great Journey. It was a perfect assurance becoming increasingly illegible. They believed themselves to be tourists. They wore sun hats and clutched sippy cups. Oh! they’d exclaim.
The rocks were pretty in a certain light.
The air was pleasant.
Was it not Socrates who doubted that a person was a human being at birth? He did so doubt. Those were the days when a human being was something to be aspired to.
They didn’t want to be told, shown maybe. Each felt the others to be as inanimate as dolls. They appreciated the paradox of being together in this but not really.
In the distance, something wheeled slowly in the air.
The beyond is in this life, a pretty exciting notion.
They paid scant attention to the scrimshawed vehicle that transported them. That was the skin outside them. It was lost on them really. The skein of ice on mud held patterns too.
Something fled in its shadow before them.
They had come from other places and the inevitable comparisons and confidences arose. They missed different things. They thought they’d see those things again here.
Where are the antelopes with their lovely masks…Where are the milty streams…
No one had brought a pen or a camera or a tin of paints.
I left my paints behind. Could hardly do this justice, I thought.
Yes. Look at these canyon walls.
When I first heard a cave breathe? I’ll tell you, I was scared. Something like that breathing. Inhale, exhale. The holes just scream.
Excuse me, we weren’t talking caves, we were talking canyons.
When my daddy had his cerebral hemorrhage he couldn’t talk no more but he could scream and sing.
That’s the left. When it affects the left.
Will this way go? That’s canyoneering jargon. When they say, I don’t know if this way will go, they mean…
I just got back from the desert, the American one of course, was visiting my nephew, my sister’s boy. He’s got himself an eagle now. He’ll kill anything to support that eagle.
How did he come by that?
Lottery. Now he’s got to support it which means feeding it. He shoots all manner of things for it but he’s got a connection at the grocery store who gives him stuff, too, mostly ham. Have you ever seen anything stiller than a ham? I’ve certainly not. You’d think an eagle wouldn’t care for anything that still.
What else did you do in the desert, Danielle?
Nothing stiller than a ham. That’s funny.
I don’t believe I’d care for the desert. You’d have to look at it, there’d be no choice. What else would there be to look at.
Well they’re putting in lots of solar grids now. They’re paving the desert floor with panels. Some poor devil whose job it is to have to look at those. They’re like the sheepherders of yore living in these peanut trailers, farming the sun and the wind. But the wind’s dying down out there, more and more no wind days a month. Isn’t that the darndest thing? It’s like the wind is saying I WILL NOT BE ENSLAVED.
Danielle, you are a riot today.
I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.
You are not our guide. You shouldn’t talk like you’re our guide.
I do like some of the guides better than others.
Some of them are nicer.
Death’s angels. They’re death’s angels, the nicer ones.
I’d like to go back to the little rooms now. Aren’t there still the little rooms where we can be?
Oh what have we done!! someone cried.
If they do this when the wood is green,
What will happen when the wood is dry?
—LUKE 23:31
My mother and father named me Lamb. My mother believed that I had died as an infant but had then come back to the life we shared. As I grew, her intention and need was to put me in touch with where I had been when I was dead, what I remembered of it and what I had learned. She believed I was destined for something extraordinary.
My father did not believe I had ever been dead. Nor did any of the doctors they consulted.
A young man was watching me the night I was said to have died. He did not harm me was the truth of it. It was just a story that was to grow up around us both, causing us both to be outcasts.
My mother and father were at a dance, the first dance of the summer.
My mother lacked good judgment in many things. She would be the first to admit it. She had taken up with this young man who was still a teenager a little more than a month after I was born. He was a town boy, he delivered our groceries and was Catholic as well. His mother made him go to St. Margaret’s but to my mother he railed against the constraints of the church. She found him sweet—his sometimes impotence, his muscles, his dark, dark hair, his inchoate manner of thinking…sweet.
She enjoyed having him explain Purgatory to her.
“They abolished it,” he said.
“How utterly ridiculous. I just don’t think they can do that, do you?”
“They did, but it still exists.”
“And one should fear it but one should guard against excessive fear. One mustn’t feel overwhelmed. One must always keep in mind that justice punishes and mercy pardons.” She looked at him somberly.
“Correct.”
“And tell me again how long a person of faith would have to spend there, assuming that even being very good this person would still manage to commit ten wrongs a day. Which is a conservative number by any reckoning.”
A priest had told his mother that each wrong results in one hour of Purgatory. Even if you strive tirelessly to be good you’ll be racking up faults by the thousands and will meet God dangerously in debt, the priest, a geriatric traditionalist, said. After fifty years, say, you’ve accumulated 150,000 faults and got rid of half of them through penance and good works but you’d still have 75,000 hours to pay down. And that would take seven years, ten months and fifteen days.
“I’ve told you what my mother was told,” he said. “You’re just fucking with me.”
“I just love the calculations. They’re so precise.”
“They abolished it, but that doesn’t mean we’re relieved of the necessity of going there.”
Yes, my mother found him sweet. His smooth face and square hands, the practiced roll of his walk, his threadbare jeans, the impracticality and poverty of his life. She arranged to have him babysit when she and my father went to the first club function of the new season. It amused her to hire her unlikely lover in this manner and bring him into the very heart of our home.
From birth I had been remarkably serene and considerate, seldom crying and sleeping straight through the night, so the likelihood was small that this directionless young man would have to have any interaction with me at all. If I cried he was to call them at the club.
The dance floor was laid out on the sand. It was Mexican Night, Fiesta Night in Olde New England. The following week it would be Argentine/Tango Night. Modest fireworks were being set off. A ragged hiss, then a streaming downward, the light enfolded by the waves. Small boats rocked gently on their moorings.
“There are some Mexicans, in Chiapas, I think, who believe the world’s a cube,” the man who would be commodore said.
“I want the tequila that’s got the scorpion in the bottle,” my mother said, laughing, and the people at their table laughed, too, for it’s a worm, Martha, a worm…
She laughed, “I hate my name so much.”
“But you’ve given your baby such an interesting name,” her friend Slim teased.
“That’s not her legal name of course,” my father said. “It’s just for now. Her name is Christen.”
“Oh him and his damn boats,” my mother said. “Everything has to be connected to boats. I’ve insisted on the letter K at least.”
“Let’s get a little dinghy,” a man on my mother’s left said. He was new, she didn’t know who he was.
“What a pretty charm bracelet,” the banker’s wife said. Her husband was a loan officer, recently promoted.
“You must be happy,” someone said, congratulating him. “We am,” he said. He firmly believed he wasn’t drunk yet but that if he went to the bathroom, which he ached to do, he would be. He knew himself.
“Thank you,” Martha said, touching a charm. “This is a new one. It’s the zodiacal sign of the Gemini.”
“But you didn’t have twins, Martha, did you?”
“No, no,” she laughed. She hated her laugh. “But that’s her sign. She was born in May. On a Thursday.”
“Astrology can be fun, I guess,” the banker’s wife said.
“Fiesta!!” a young man shouted. He was wearing red pants, a tie as a belt and a white shirt on which he’d already spilled bean dip. “Throw down your burdens of time and reason!”
* * *
—
My mother’s young man went into the kitchen and put a pot of water on to boil for a package of pasta he’d found in the cupboard. He was always hungry but didn’t like people seeing him eat. He found eating tactless.
My mother liked candles, they were all over the house. Some were expensive, but there were others she’d bought in supermarkets as a joke, the wax poured into tall glasses with decals wrapped around them.
St. Martin de Porres with the broom and the cat and the dog and people lying behind him in beds, not looking good. Or the Guardian Angel one, with a winged woman following two barefoot children over a wooden bridge slung over a chasm and clearly unsafe and what were they doing out there by themselves anyway? The prayers on the back of the glass were in Spanish and English and even the most casual examination showed them to be evasive and nonsensical in the extreme. Most of them had cheap wicks and didn’t even light or if they did the flame soon drowned in its own wax.
My mother was teasing him, even mocking him, he knew that—his troubled, angry faith, its outrageous sentimentalities and brutal corrections. If it were up to him, he’d told her once, he’d be a Jew, a Zealot in the time of the Roman Empire. They were audacious and went far beyond the norms of consensual behavior. They ripped things apart. They went after Rome and just chewed it to pieces. But then they screwed up, burning the food supplies of their own people during a long siege of Jerusalem in order to force God’s hand to act against their enemies. They figured God would have no choice but to intervene to preserve them, His adherents. But God did nothing and everybody in Jerusalem starved to death.
But to be a Jew your mother had to be a Jewess and his mother was no Jewess. She was a sun-wrinkled dope-fogged ex-hippie whose highest ambition in life was to have someone give her an old Mercedes diesel that she could run on waste fry oil from the restaurant where she worked. Ma, he’d say, it’s a seasonal restaurant, it closes the first week of November. How you going to get around after that? You’re not thinking, Ma.
He wandered through our house, lighting candles and turning off lights. He came into the nursery and looked at the two framed photographs of my mother that hung on the wall. She was in a bikini, showing off her big belly and wearing the charm bracelet she always wore, glinting with the codes of her known life. The photographs were in black and white, one frontal and the other taken from the side which made her, and what she was carrying, look like suspects in an atypical police lineup.
He looked down into the crib at the baby, me, and I gazed back at him. My name escaped him. He was nothing to me, of course—this figure, this presence, this filament of darkness—but his was the world I would inherit. He said no word to acknowledge or comfort me but sat down in the chair my mother rocked me in in the early mornings before the day began.
I felt his presence disappear then. Then of myself as well, I became no longer aware. I was neither awake nor asleep, nor could I know what was expected of me, for surely something would be expected?
* * *
—
My mother and father were preparing to leave the club. On the drive home my mother felt chilled and wanted my father’s jacket to put over her shoulders but he refused. They were already out of love even then. He turned onto our lane, ignoring her as she theatrically pretended she was freezing. Blackberry bushes and wild roses and Queen Anne’s lace lined the road. Every year, they and their few neighbors fought to keep it paved, but the councilmen, elected officials, he was forever reminding them, wanted it tarred. The whole matter would end up in court one of these days he feared. They probably would have to get together and hire a lawyer just to protect the false pastoral quality of the road. He said, “Did the power go off?”
The house was lit up like an altar with what must have been every candle my mother possessed. They’d gotten home earlier than they’d intended. Maybe he was entertaining a girl in there, my mother thought, amused.
My parents had misplaced their key
s.
“What are you, drunk!” my father demanded when the young man finally appeared at the door. Candles were guttering everywhere and a two-hundred-dollar pot was seared and ruined on the stove. Yet no explanation or apology appeared forthcoming.
Never apologizing or explaining was how the men and boys of the club navigated their days, but such posturing by this presence infuriated my father.
“What are you, drunk!” my father demanded again, puzzled, aware that it was he and my mother who were half-cut from Fiesta Night.
My mother confessed to me that she had giggled—her irate husband, her absurd lover—it was all so preposterous—but she hurried into the nursery and with care picked me up.
“Thomas!” she screamed. “The baby’s not breathing.”
And then, as she told me, after an eternity, my father appeared and seized me from her arms. When she, in turn, tore me from his grasp, I cried out as I had at birth. And it was, my mother said, as if I were being born all over again.
* * *
—
My father had no more patience for my mother. In the time that was left for them, in the time they remained together, she never stopped wanting another baby, an extra one was perhaps her thinking, a replacement one were I to die again and not return.
“Lion,” my mother begged. “We can name him Lion if he’s a boy. We can name her Lion if she’s a girl.”
But my father ignored her. He spent less and less time in our pleasant house and more at the boatyard he managed. He even began designing his own boats, though he suspected that few people would still be sailing for pleasure in the future. The waterways were being increasingly compromised. The demand was for mammoth houseboats with fireplaces and hot tubs. He was disgusted with these vessels and the people who craved them. Still, he continued to refit and repair them. More and more he realized it was best not to try and change the minds of others, best not to resent or struggle. Even the road he had so recently loved, the sandy roller-coaster road leading to our house and beyond which he had sought so to preserve, he was going to let the neighbors have. Soon he would not live there anymore.