Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  I was in the middle of violating this most fundamental of Academy tenets—for the third time that day—when the books arrived. My mother’s shopping spree was into its second month. She’d been gone for five or six days on this particular occasion, and I hadn’t showered in at least that long. God only knows what I smelled like. Well, no, pretty much anyone can guess what I smelled like: I smelled like dried sweat and dried semen, and a lot of both. It was spring in the South and I was fourteen and shoveling more loads a day than an earth mover at Ground Zero (9/11 was six years in the future, but the metaphor’s just too good to pass up). The only reason I got dressed and came downstairs at all was because our regular UPS man carried a package in his brown shorts more interesting than anything he could have pulled out of his truck. But the heavy tire tread I’d heard on the driveway gravel wasn’t UPS after all, but a big rig with a three-man crew, two boys two or three years older than me and a man in his thirties. The boys had already opened the truck’s back panel by the time I got downstairs, already started rolling a set of identical boxes down one of those ramps composed of a series of metal-wheeled axles, which rattled so loudly as the boxes slid down them that the older man had to shout to be heard:

  “Delibery for You—” He squinted. “Delibery for Yudas Stammers?”

  Like almost everyone who meets me for the first time, the man did his best to stare directly into my right eye, and when I closed it he swayed a little as if he’d stepped off a merry-go-round.

  “Please pardon our appearance while we renovate!”

  The man tried to put his pen in my right hand but I reached for it with my left because, even though I’m right-handed, I’m also an asshole.

  “Third floor. All the way in back, please. Breathe through your nose!” I called after him, then secreted myself in the first-floor bathroom to finish what I’d started.

  But I was done before they were, and even after I’d showered, and jerked off again in the shower (my mother had a mentholated something or other that made it feel like I’d plunged my penis in an ice bath, inspiring a fantasy about a Neanderthal recovered from a glacier thawed by global warming, a low-browed hairy halfman whose penis curved like a mammoth’s tusk, and, well, you can probably see where this is going), they were still at it when I came out, wrapped only in a towel because I could’ve sworn I heard my underwear crack when I tossed them on the floor, and even I couldn’t bring myself to step back into them.

  “Motorboat and titty fuck.” It was a phrase I’d heard come out of a passing car a few days earlier, and though I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant I’d been dying for an excuse to use it. “How many boxes are there?”

  “Fifty,” one of the boys said, doing his best not to stare at my chest, which looked as though I’d slipped one arm into a tattered flamenco blouse but left the other bare. “Five seventy, uh, five seven hunturd.” He shrugged. “Cinco ciento setenta y siete,” he said, and carried his load up the stairs.

  “What the hell is in them?” I asked the next boy, but he just shook his head.

  “No inglés.”

  “I don’ know wha’s in them,” the older man said, coming in behind the boys, “but is sure as shit heavy.”

  The return address on the shipping manifest was in Kansas (a state from which I’m pretty sure nothing good has ever emerged) and for the first time it occurred to me that the boxes might not have come from my mother. They were covered with a thick oily layer of dust, the kind of grimy sediment that takes years to build up, some all the way across the top but most just along one or two edges, as if the boxes had been crookedly stacked atop each other in one of those forgotten places that removes its contents not just from sight but from memory. I ripped one open, saw that it contained books. So did the next, and the next, and the next. I looked at the wall of boxes, which already covered most of the back wall of the third floor in a three-deep stack, and because that’s how my mind works, I had to stop and count all the books in all the open boxes, which averaged twenty-eight per. I did the math. Someone had sent me something like fifteen thousand books. “Muchacho,” the second boy came up the stairs just then, “su toalla, por favor,” and I looked down and saw that it had fallen off.

  It took the three men three more hours to unload the rest of the boxes, after which I tipped them a thousand dollars (each); it took me two weeks to unpack them, by the end of which I was convinced they’d belonged to my father. My mother had been home twice during that period, but I didn’t ask her about the books and she didn’t venture onto the third floor (“Sorry, I haven’t had my shots”) and it was only after I’d unpacked all the books, divided them by language and genre and alphabetized them, that I confronted her. She gasped when she saw them stacked around the perimeter of the room—the entire perimeter of the room, 314 stacks each almost seven feet tall, although even now I can’t tell you the exact number because I came up with a different figure all four times I counted them, and there’s a limit even to my OCDishness. Fifteen thousand plus or minus a hernia, that’s all I can say. My mother tried to convince me that the books must have belonged to my great-uncle, but I pointed out that, in addition to the fact that there’d been no mention of even a single book in the inventory of his possessions, there was no record of an Anthony DeVine in the Academy’s rolls. “You looked?” my mother said quickly, and even as I nodded she tried to backpedal. “How do you know they belonged to someone who went to the Academy? These are trade editions.”

  My mother was right: the books had been printed by commercial publishers, by which she meant that they hadn’t been printed on the Academy’s press like standard Academy texts. Even so, the collection sported a full complement of Greek, Latin, and Arabic classics in the original languages as well as in Academy-approved translation, along with highlights from Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese literature and an exhaustive survey of the world’s religions—sacred texts, apocrypha, and commentary—along with an extensive catalog of European literature. The catalog ended conspicuously in 1896, and all the editions had been printed before 1981, the year I was born. The fact that the books had been purchased rather than made suggested that after the man in question had left Marcuse he’d replaced virtually every book that he’d abandoned along with my mother and their unborn child. But this was hardly a typical reading list. The breadth of the texts went far beyond the standard purview of an Academy education, and well into the Academy’s version of advanced training. I.e.:

  “He was studying to be a master.”

  “Who was studying to be a master,” my mother said, not even trying to make it a question.

  “My father was studying to be a master. Although I know he didn’t make it, since there hasn’t been a white master in at least fifty years.”

  “Sixty-nine,” my mother said absently, picking up a copy of the Metamorphoses and thumbing through it even though she didn’t have Latin. “I really don’t know,” she said then, putting the book back on the stack, and from her tone I could tell that she meant yes, but also that she didn’t know.

  “Jesus fuck. Is he”—I knew the answer but had to ask anyway—“still alive?”

  “No,” my mother said so quickly that it was tempting to think she was lying. “He really is dead,” she said furiously, “but I guess that doesn’t mean he’s done fucking with me,” and she turned for the stairs.

  “I’m keeping them,” I called after her, because even though that might seem obvious, one had either to claim things or reject them in the Stammerses’ world, lest they be stolen from or thrust on you against your will.

  My mother paused on the first stair below the landing, and when she turned back to me she had to look up because the difference in our height had become a matter of attitude rather than inches. She smiled one of those wistful half smiles that parents assume before they communicate a truth they know won’t be believed until their children have suffered through an experience for themselves.
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br />   “You don’t keep books like these. They keep you.”

  From another mother it would have been a sentimental comment, a platitude even: Literature! The gift that keeps on giving! But I could hear the warning in her voice, the trace of contempt, and even as she tried to scare me away from Academy pedagogy I wonder if she realized how much she sounded like a master.

  What I am saying? This was Dixie Stammers. Of course she realized how much she sounded like a master.

  She offered to buy me shelves, but I turned her down. I didn’t want my father’s books to read them. I wanted only to possess them, to build them into a bulwark against my mother and her designs for my life, whatever they had been, whatever they were still. That didn’t mean I wanted to yield to my father. I didn’t want to be an Academy believer, let alone a master. I only wanted to know what it meant to live circumscribed by such a particular cultural tradition and its even more esoteric application. I suppose reading his books was the most obvious way to arrive at that understanding, but it also exposed me to five thousand years of cultural drift, and despite my snottiness about Wye’s high school faculty, I didn’t think I possessed the mental equipment to resist that kind of mass, let alone make sense of it. So I opted for a more literal method of surrounding myself with my father’s books:

  I surrounded myself with my father’s books.

  I tore down the cardboard cell and replaced it with a twenty-five-foot-wide vortex composed of four spiraled wedges that came together near the middle of the room, so that four of the eight openings led to dead-ends (which caused my mother no end of consternation over the next three and a half years) while the other four led to my bed, which was just a mound of blankets and pillows and clothes at the spiral’s hollow center. Can you visualize that? If not, here’s a picture:

  I experimented with different bond patterns before settling on the same stolid but solid Flemish bond in which the walls of the house had been laid, which, for those who are kin to neither brickmaker nor potter, consists of two rows of bricks (in my case books) laid next to each other and alternating spine out–base out–spine out–base out (or, in masonry terms, stretcher-header-stretcher-header), which seems only slightly clearer than the description of my book spiral, and makes me wonder if the editors of weren’t right after all. At any rate, here’s another picture:

  The headers, laid perpendicular to and across both rows of stretchers, join the two rows together, making them substantially more stable then a single wythe laid in running bond (think Legos), which has a tendency to fall over after it grows beyond five or six feet. The walls of my spiral reached all the way to the rafters, and at its center my semen-steeped nidus filled a ragged chamber about eight feet in diameter. At least four double rows of books stood between me and the rest of the room, and although the books didn’t fit together as tightly as bricks—they weren’t all the same size, after all—they were still more than thick enough to protect me against spying eyes and ears (though every once in a while something pounded the floor beneath me; I assume it was my mother, but couldn’t be bothered to go downstairs and find out).

  She’d settled into the first floor by then, although packages continued to arrive from as far afield as New York, London, Istanbul, complicating my original estimation of her perigrinations (or, you know, not: Dixie Stammers could work a catalog as well as any other well-heeled woman with a black card). The arrival of something as simple as a floor lamp or a Dresden doll necessitated a complete reassessment of the first floor’s feng shui, and when I wasn’t masturbating and I wasn’t at school or the doctor’s office I could hear the faint squeaks of couches and bureaus scratching up the heart-of-pine floorboards two stories below, and I don’t know, maybe I was too busy jerking off or maybe I’m just a jerk, but it wasn’t until spring was almost over that it finally dawned on me:

  My mother wasn’t making pots.

  Hadn’t, now that I thought about it, made a single pot since the Art in America article came out well over a year earlier.

  There’d been gaps before, a month here, a month there, but she was never not working in one way or another, mixing glazes or seasoning clay or just playing with it, rolling out one eighteen-inch-long coil after another and braiding and unbraiding the coils with the fingers of one hand while the other completed sudoku puzzles at the rate of eight or ten per hour (lest you think she was truly a freak: she got all the puzzles wrong, and based on the way she filled in the boxes I’m pretty sure she had no idea how the game worked). But of the hundreds of boxes that arrived after we bought the Field, not one contained clay. Her smock hung on a peg beneath a shirt and a windbreaker and a jump rope and straw hat, the only evidence of its existence being the crumbs that cracked off its wrinkled surface whenever something new was hung over it. Her pots were harder to ignore. Custom shelves stretched down one wall, each pot nestled in its own backlit cube like a skull in a reliquary. No matter where you were you could see them, or, rather, they could see you, fui quod es, eris quod sum. The only place to escape their memento mori admonition was outside. And at Potter’s Field, outside meant for all intents and purposes the White Woman.

  I said that the house sat about a half mile from the creek. But this isn’t quite true, or, rather, isn’t always true. For ten months of the year, yes, house and creek were separated by several hundred yards of rich black earth sloping almost imperceptibly toward one of the White Woman’s many U-shaped turnarounds. But each March, when the spring melt came, and the spring rains, the stream widened dramatically, from the fifteen-foot-wide core meander to a glassy sheet more than a mile across, though rarely more than a foot or two deep. I was well aware of this, of course, but the full impact of the transformation never really impressed itself on me until the day I watched the stream double in size in less than four hours—then double again, and again, and again, and again, and again. And again, until a week or ten days after it started to swell the creek was licking at the foundation of the house (a neat line of moss, reaching nearly a foot up the fieldstone, suggested that in some years it did more than lick). The sheet of water lay on the land for five or six weeks, reflecting so vast a swath of sky that, staring into it from one of the third-floor windows, you could get disoriented and think you were tumbling into Heaven’s opened vault. By the time my mother returned from her shopping spree the water had begun to retreat. Hummocked trails of twigs and leaves stretched across the mud in Art Nouveau ogees, and mosquito larvae and transparent tadpoles raced the sun’s rays in the hundreds of puddles that dotted the flood plain like coins scattered from a giant’s hand. My mother wandered the wrack, in rubbers first, then rain boots, then fisherman’s waders, and often came home so covered in muck that she resembled a golem, the only white on her body the sheepish, wondrous smile she couldn’t keep off her face.

  For the life of me I couldn’t understand her fascination. I mean, it was just weeds and water as far as the eye could see. Or, rather, reeds and water. When the White Woman resumed its flow in 1883, its return as mysterious as its disappearance, its waters were suffused with coal dust, and after several strikeouts Marcus’s scientists finally hit on the then-novel solution of planting the entire course of the stream with phragmites, which left the flood plain a virtual monoculture: reeds and water, as I said, stretching from the foot of the mountains all the way to the Marcuse-Wye Road (which only Stammerses still call the Post Road), the glass-smooth surface broken only by the thin, whitened trunks of lodgepole pines poking up here and there like tapers on an emerald tablecloth.

  But my mother was a Stammers and, God bless her, she gave the phragmites the Stammers due. She stripped its leaves and wove them together, into doilies first, then fans, then curtains and tablecloths and tents; then baskets whose first iterations were simply structured yoni that quickly evolved into two-handled amphorae so tightly woven they could hold water. She ordered a dozen Shaker chairs and ripped off their seats and recaned them herself, then hung the chairs
on pegs and made new ones entirely from reeds, long-necked sacks that hung from the rafters as though a colony of orioles had moved in with her. She bored holes into harder reeds to make flutes, bound them together into mouth-organs, hung the organs outside (on ropes woven from reeds, natch) so that the wind blew through them with a sound like a slide-whistle orchestra. She even ground the shoots of young plants into a paste that she toasted and smeared on bread. She said it tasted like marshmallow but I refused to try it.

  All this ended as quickly as it began when, one day in early June, ringing a cow bell like a leper, she braved the stairs to the third floor bearing a few stalks of a plant I didn’t recognize, but clearly wasn’t phragmites. The small, wispy stalks looked familiar though, pale green, with nascent umbels and threadlike, rubbery leaves—like fennel, though the roots showed no sign of a bulb. She held it to my nose. She hadn’t bothered to shake the dirt off and that was what I smelled first, a solid odor, wet, feculent. Then a lighter tinge floated in, tart yet cool, almost mentholated, and my mouth watered with a remembered taste of potato salad, borscht, salmon, pickles. Lots and lots of pickles.

  “Is it . . . dill?”