Diana wanted to tell him that she had been living in Dudleytown for several weeks without any trouble, but she decided it wouldn’t do to have the local people knowing that she and Day were camping up there. So she merely remarked, “It’s a very pretty place.”
“Yeah, pretty as the fire of Hades,” he said.
Diana drove slowly home, thinking about the old man and what he had said. She wasn’t certain that his irritated response to her questions about such words as perkin and funicle wasn’t simply an unwillingness to discuss the subject with a female.
As soon as she got back to camp, she found Day and turned him into Daniel, and asked him, “Who are the Jenners?”
The Jenners?
Yes, the Jenners. Who are the Jenners?
———Oh, that’s just some of these folks.
Which folks?
———Well, there’s Enos Jenner and his wife Arvilla, and his brothers Theron and Belding, and Belding’s wife Cate and their sons Girshom and Gurdon.
You’ve never mentioned him to me before.
Don’t know ’em too mighty well. The Jenners is quality folks, you might call ’em upper crust. They never have the time a day for us Montrosses.
Where do they live?
Big house right this side of the brook, on Dudleytown Road.
I thought you said that was the Jones place.
Well, it used to be. The Jenners bought it from ’em.
Let me ask you something else, Danny. Why do you call a whippletree a whiffletree? Everybody else calls it whippletree.
Yeah, I know. I guess ’cause Grandpa Montross called it that, ’cause his folks called it that. Old “Mountain Horse” Montross was a downstater, you know, and they talk different. And anyhow, whiffle means suffle, you know, the whiffletree sort of suffles and plays, that’s how it got the name.
All right, she said, and woke him up.
Then she said, “I met an old man.” Then she told Day everything the old man had said.
When she finished, Day said, “Well, as for the Curse of Dudleytown, I would be more inclined to believe in something as fantastic as reincarnation before I could make myself believe that these woods are haunted by fairyfolk or ghosts. As for the old man’s ignorance of such words as perkin and funicle, well, possibly, of course, the fact that you are a girl….”
“But he couldn’t remember any of the people Daniel has been mentioning, except the Jenners, whom Daniel never mentioned, until just now I asked him—I asked you—and you seemed to take a long time to remember them, almost as if…as if you were making them up.”
Day nodded, then hung his head. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. “A lot.” He looked sad. “What if,” he said, hesitantly, “what if all of it is nothing but my imagination?”
“That’s what I’m dying to find out,” she said. “What are we going to do if we can prove that Daniel Lyam Montross never lived in Dudleytown?”
“Even so,” he said, “even if we should ever be able to prove that, I want you to remember this: I still love you.”
13
Oh, he loves you, he does. In my stead. For I cannot. Though I would if I could, incest be damned. You are the spit image of your fair grandmother, whom I loved more than any other woman in my life, who gave birth to your fair mother, without whom you would not be. But I can’t talk to you, now, of love, for you don’t yet know what it means, and you can’t say to him what he said to you, that you love him. I’m not sure he knows what love means either, though perhaps he knows it better than you. But I intend for the two of you to find out what it means, just as I had to find out, painfully if need be. This is my gift for you, in the stead of the love I cannot give you.
Sometimes Day sang to her. It made her terribly self-conscious, at first, and she found it difficult to look at his eyes when he was singing to her. But he had an excellent tenor voice, which resounded through the woods, and he held his high notes well, and the high notes tolled and tinkled off the trees. He sang to her love songs, things like Beethoven’s “Ich Liebe Dich” and in time she overcame her embarrassment and was flattered by his singing. She wanted to sing something for him too, but the only love song she knew all the words to was “Danny Boy,” and when she sang this for him, meaning it for him, he wouldn’t believe that she didn’t mean it for Daniel, and his feelings were hurt.
I could never sing a note. Except for that old school song, “Happy School, Ah, From Thee Never Shall Our Hearts Long Time Be Turning” just squawking it more than singing it. So I envy that boy, I do, and I wish he knew it; it might make up for all his confounded envy of me. No, I couldn’t sing. But eventually I learned to play a real decent fiddle. And he will too. In time, after your travels to some other place, you will buy him a fiddle, and I’ll play it for him, or teach him to play it himself.
Also he knew by heart all the love poems of e.e. cummings, which he must have been saving up for the time when he would meet his first true love and get a chance to use them. He recited all of them, to her, several times. His particular favorite was “Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,” and after reciting it to her, he even explicated the poem, showing her how well it fit her, and him, and how well it fit this situation that they were in, almost as if cummings had written it for her, for them, just as Vaughan Williams had written the Pastoral Symphony for their fungus and alga. Diana was very moved, but at the same time she felt extremely guilty, because she could not feel such depths of emotion toward him. It bothered her greatly that he loved her so much. But although she couldn’t give him her love in return, as a substitute she choreographed a dance to cummings’ poem, a dance of traveling somewhere gladly beyond, and of silent eyes, of frail gestures, of unclosings and openings, of death and forever with each breathing, and she danced this dance with him and their shadows projected against the trees, and it was almost as good as being in love.
Why are your pretty dancings, your pretty singings and poetry-recitings, and your pretty funiclings, never disturbed by the ghosts of Dudleytown? Why does the Curse never curse you? I wish I could boast that it is because I, over here on the Other Side, have the power to keep them from it, to make them let you love and play in peace. But that would be a vainglorious contention, because I haven’t the slightest power over them. Perhaps you are amusing them, or entertaining them, and they are waiting until your dance is over before driving you away.
Diana realized that she and Day were getting to be “old friends” when they reached the point at which they no longer felt the need of “using the woods” in order to use the woods; that is, eventually they were able to “use the woods” in each other’s presence, without much modesty or embarrassment, although sometimes, when she watched Day peeing, the fact that she was watching him gave him an erection, which wouldn’t go away, and sometimes made peeing difficult, and always made an immediate funicle mandatory. They funicled a lot. Sometimes in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, in the middle of the night. They bathed together in the pool below Marcella Falls and enjoyed some interesting underwater funiclings.
Unfortunately, he nearly always fetched before she did, and sometimes she couldn’t fetch at all. But only on rare occasions did she find herself left feeling so keyed up that she had to turn him into Daniel again.
Diana discovered that Day was a better lover after several drinks, and so was she. Perhaps they did drink more than was necessary, and Day made a rather sloppy “Daniel” when he had been drinking. But Daniel himself, Diana found, took up drinking at a relatively early age, homemade beer and, less frequently, rum and hard cider.
There was one period, in late July, when the weather seemed to turn against them: a spell of damp, humid days when everything seemed to be wet and wouldn’t dry out, and the mosquitoes became worse. It was times like that when she needed a lot of beer, wine and gin just to bear the atmosphere.
Toward the end of that month, Day wrote a postcard to his parents, which Diana mailed from a box in Tor
rington. It said: “Dear Mom and Dad—I’m all right, so don’t worry about me. In fact, I’m fine, and having the best time of my life. But I’m not coming home. And don’t try to find me, because you can’t. Day.” Diana considered, briefly, writing to her own parents at Rome, but decided against it.
They never bought a newspaper. They had no desire to. But they could not help hearing occasional news broadcasts between the music on their radio, so they were not ignorant of that summer’s lunar expedition by the astronauts.
The moon itself, Day explained to her, is an ancient symbol of reincarnation—its appearance, increase, wane, disappearance, followed by reappearance after three nights of darkness.
One day he came to her, all excited, and said, “Come and see what I’ve found out!” and took her hand and led her toward their campsite. She thought maybe he had finally found part of the foundation of the Montross house, but what he had found, she discovered with a laugh, was that their two sleeping bags could be completely unzipped and then zipped together to form one double sleeping bag. In celebration of this momentous discovery they had a bottle of champagne before trying out their new bed.
That night they lay together and listened to a radio broadcast about the progress of the moon exploration.
“Think about it,” Day said, hugging her closer. “Just the two of them alone up there on the moon. Just the two of us alone down here on the earth.”
“Nice,” she said, but then she corrected him. “No, there are three. Three of them up there. Don’t forget the guy in the command module, orbiting around them.”
14
All my brothers are gone. And one of my sisters too. Ethan has written once from Cincinnati, Ohio, where he works in a factory and has taken a bride. Nathan is in Illinois, where he clerks in a store. We do not know yet where Nicholas is; Nathan has said that Nicholas was intending to go farther west, out to the high mountain country. Emmeline has followed Nathan to Illinois, but not the same town, she is near the big city, Chicago, and says she is going to marry the man she works for, in a dry goods store. She wants us to come out for the wedding, and my mother dearly wants to go, but my father says How? We have no money for such a long way.
I think he’s afraid that if he went he’d never come back. And he keeps telling me, Dudleytown is our home.
What town? There is no town here now.
Charity’s the only one left but for me. And she will never leave. She stayed in the first grade for three years, before they knew she couldn’t do school. She can milk the cow, is all, and that slowly. The pity’s she’s so pretty, now that she’s full grown. Any man would want her if she had a mind. She was Seth’s girl a year or two, in a way, because Seth was none too bright himself. But even he is gone now.
For some time now, my mother has tied Charity’s hands behind her back, with a handkerchief.
Why? I asked.
So she can’t harm herself, my mother said.
My mother unties her hands five times each day, three times for meals, twice for milking the cow.
Charity cannot talk, but she can make noises, as she does in her bed at night with her hands tied. A wonder she can sleep that way. My room is too close to hers.
I think a lot: can she think? Do any thoughts invade her mind, or is she all feeling only? Can you have emotions without a mind? And if you can, are your emotions stronger than smart people’s? I wonder a lot: is Charity better off than us?
Once I try to reason with my mother: But you can’t go on tying her all her life, and all your life too.
I will if I have to, she says.
But what if she outlives you?
Daniel, what a thing to say! she rebukes me.
Long time now I have not been with Violate. Renz told her dad on us, and old Eph birched her within an inch of her life and said he’d take the other inch if she ever came near me again. Eph Parmenter’s a mean and terrible case.
There are no clubs now, neither SS nor Oatsowers, nor need of any; there’s nobody here who doesn’t know all the facts of life and more. Except Charity, who knows nothing.
Who knows nothing except that her vale burns her and that the hands which cooled it are bound in a handkerchief behind her back. This much I calculate.
I’ve tried to get to her, to ask if she knows why her hands are tied, but her speech is only noises, for all that she’s a full-breasted woman of sixteen. I wonder a lot: is she maybe really smarter than all of us, but has no time for talk, or doesn’t care to talk in the kind of noises that we make?
Mother never leaves her go from sight, except at milkings, and then she times her so she’s not gone for long. I hide in the cowstall and talk to her for ten minutes at morning and evening milking.
How much can you say in ten minutes? The weather’s nice today. Your hair is done up pretty. Bossie seems good and full this morning, don’t she? Your eyes are larger than all time. Have you heard there’s only four of us left at school? Renz quit out last week. I’d give my arm to give you a mind. Both arms. Hear Bossie looing. Do you reckon she’d like a calf? If anything could physic you, I’d buy it with a mountain in my arms. ’Pears Dad broke another wagon neap. If you could but speak and say that having no mind keeps you from ever thinking that you’re lonely, then I’d wish I had no mind too. Sometimes I get so lonesome. I wish we’d go to Ohio or Illinois or some other place where a lot of people are. Dunno’s I know we ever will. Me and you are gonna rot away together on the vine. You’re all I know.
Once, one evening in the cowstall, I say first thing: Do you want I should milk the cow for you? I’ll milk her for you if you want. But she doesn’t understand. I take the pail from her and sit on her stool so she can’t sit on it and I commence to milk. She just stands there watching. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands.
But then she does know.
That’s right, I say, trying not to watch. Go ahead. Mother may think it’s wrong, but I don’t. Everybody does it, I guess, except Mother. If you weren’t my sister, we wouldn’t have to use our hands.
Often now I milk for her. In her bed at night she doesn’t make her noises so much any more.
Often now I think and ponder and wonder: why would it be wrong? Cattle and dogs don’t care if they’re blood kin. Bulls and boars and billies funicle their sisters without giving it a thought. Because they don’t have thoughts to give. And neither does Charity. Does she even know that I’m her brother?
In the Oatsowers club they used to say that if your sister had your baby it would be feebleminded. But funicling’s not just for having babies; funicling’s for fun, and for not making noises in your sleep at night.
But I’d never have a chance, anyway, except at milking, and even if we both milked together we’d never get it done in time.
Yet now one bright and fair Saturday morning, early, my father hitches the wagon and says he and Mother are driving into Cornwall to see some of Mother’s kin. My mother says to me: Now listen, as soon as she’s done with the milking, you get that rag tied back on her hands right away. You hear me?
I nod.
Promise? she says.
I promise. They are gone.
Charity comes back from the barn with her pail of milk. She leaves the pail in the buttery. I hold the handkerchief in my hands. She puts both hands behind her back, crossing her wrists there; she’s done this so often she doesn’t think. She doesn’t think anyway. I hold the handkerchief. But I did promise. So I tie her. She doesn’t bat an eye.
Come, I say, and lead her to her room. I’ll do it for you. Lie down. She does, on her side, because her hands are behind her back. I do with my hands what I’ve seen her do with hers. She closes her eyes, there is almost a smile on her mouth.
This is something new for her, somebody else’s hands, better than her own. Her fetch is wild.
Now she’s had hers, I want her to give me mine. But she can’t understand, because she can’t understand. And her hands are tied behind her back. I won’t break promises. I lie b
ehind her and lay my perkin on her near palm. She grasps, those hands that can so milk a cow. But the milking stroke is downward; I need an upward too. After a time, I turn: my feet where my head was: now her stroke is upward. I wrap my arms around her thighs.
Too late, as my quid begins its rise, I know I’m going to blotch her bedcovers or her dress. I look around for something else. There is nothing but the handkerchief on her wrists. I get it off just in time.
She doesn’t need it anyway, I’m going to watch her all day. As good as a promise. That I will stay with her all day and watch her and see to it that she never touches herself. I will touch her for her.
But hands are not enough, there’s the hitch. Near noon, whilst she milks me yet another time, as we lie facing side by side, she seems to show a first real thought, she seems to think: now maybe this was meant to be inside me, and she draws nigh, urging her vale nearer, and yet nearer, and higher, until her hands cannot move for being in the way, and she removes them.
I think: if I hadn’t lost Violate I wouldn’t do this.
But I do it. And oh! great Caesar’s ghost how she carries on, as if this was all she were ever meant for, as if all her life she had waited for this, as if all her mind could do was make her ready and ripe, as if, since she had to live, she lived for this.
Near the end I ask her if it’s the right time of month, and somehow I even expect an answer, so I’m a bit put out when she won’t or can’t. I’ll take no chance. When she’s seized by her fetch, and the valves of her vale commence milking mine out of me, I pull away and use her handkerchief once more.
Then there is the afternoon, after we have eaten, and the bed again.
When our mother and father return at supper, they do not seem to notice that it is a different hankerchief she is tied with.
Tonight, late, I learn I am wrong to have hoped that I could have done enough to hold her for a while.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 41