As soon as he was gone, I went to Diana and tried to wrap my arms around her, but she wagged her finger in my face and said, Don’t touch. Then she reminded me that she was still not in any condition for “romance,” and we had better take it “easy” for a while. So she got into our sleeping bag in the lean-to to rest and keep warm, while I chopped some firewood and fixed a lunch for us. I built up a good fire, and then threw into it some of the trash that had accumulated before we had had to leave, along with spoiled food and a few articles that had been damaged by being left out in the snow while we were gone. Most of our possessions were still in good shape because they had been left in the lean-to where the snow couldn’t get them. This included the most important thing: the collection of tapes, and the tape recorder. Our first day or so back in Five Corners, Diana just rested in the sleeping bag while replaying a lot of her favorite tapes so she could “pick up the pieces” that we had sort of left scattered behind us. I decided that instead of rushing her back into “romance,” I would devise a rather imaginative “program” for our slow and gradual but systematic return to lovemaking. Being a program and being systematic, it wasn’t very spontaneous, of course, but it was better than leaving well enough alone, and it was, at least in the first stages, a lot of fun for both of us. The beginning, or first step, was what I called “eye-fusing” or what Diana jokingly referred to as “eyeballing.” We just looked at each other. That’s all. But it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. If you stare deeply into someone’s eyes for long sustained periods of time, and just let your mind run free, you can have all sorts of fabulous thoughts and feelings. It’s also a good cure for “solipsitis,” if you suffer from it. The best way to convince yourself that somebody else exists is to look deeply into their eyes for a long time. As Diana said, being funny again (she was often very amusing, which is another good cure for solipsitis), on a clear day you can see forever. Well, almost. Sometimes I thought I could catch glimpses of her whole life, past and future, in the depths of her bright blue eyes. I think her eyes are the part of her that I like the best; much more exciting to me than her female parts.
This long session of eye-fusing wasn’t necessarily done in silence. We talked occasionally, telling each other what we could “see,” and after about half an hour of looking straight into each other’s eyes, without even blinking, much, I started talking to her. Come live with me and be my love, I said, and we will all the pleasures prove that hills and valleys, dales and fields and all the craggy mountains yields. There we will sit upon the rocks, and see the shepherds feed their flocks, by shallow rivers to whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses with a thousand fragrant posies, a cap of flowers, and a kirtle embroidered all with leaves of myrtle; a gown made of the finest wool which from our pretty lambs we pull; fair lined slippers for the cold, with buckles of the purest gold; a belt of straw and ivy buds, with coral clasps and amber studs and if these pleasures may thee move, come live with me and be my love. The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing for thy delight each May morning: if these delights thy mind may move, then live with me and be my love.
And when I finished, Diana smiled at me and, still looking straight into my eyes without ever losing them, said: If all the world and love were young, and truth in every shepherd’s tongue, these pretty pleasures might me move, to live with thee, and be thy love. Time drives the flocks from field to fold, when rivers rage, and rocks grow cold, and Philomel becometh dumb, the rest complains of cares to come. The flowers do fade, and wanton fields, to wayward winter reckoning yields, a honey tongue, a heart of gall is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall. Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies, soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten in folly ripe, in reason rotten. Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, thy coral clasps and amber studs, all these in me no means can move, to come to thee, and be thy love. But could youth last, and love still breed, had joys no date, nor age no need, then these delights my mind might move, to live with thee and be thy love.
We both laughed then, in self-consciousness, and for the first time had to break the hold of our eyes. It was all I could do to keep from kissing her, but that had to wait for a later stage in my program. That was the third stage. The second stage, on our second day back in Five Corners, after the stage of eye-fusing, was a session of imaginary kissing. As in the first stage, we stared into each other’s eyes, but up very close this time, with our heads tilted to clear our noses out of each other’s way, and our lips just a fraction of an inch apart, almost but not quite touching, and in this position we pretended that we were having a long session of kissing, and imagined what it was feeling like without ever feeling it, actually. At first this was kind of frustrating, and both of us wanted to quit pretending and start doing, but after a while, if you let your mind run free, it’s almost as good as the real thing. In fact, in one respect it’s better than the real thing, as we discovered after moving on to the third stage on the third day, the stage of actual kissing, which seemed rather anticlimatic after the stage of imaginary kissing. If it’s actually happening, you know it is, and tend to take it for granted. But if you’re only pretending that it’s happening, you get more of a charge out of it because of the extra effort you have to put into the pretense. By God, I didn’t learn that from Daniel’s Henry Fox, nor from my Henry Fox either. I learned it from me…. And of course from Diana too, who agreed with me. She was ready, on the fourth day, for the fourth stage, more intimate. I had planned this too, but it didn’t bother me in the slightest to do it, and I was even sorry that I had given her so much trouble about it previously. Conic licorice, although I still don’t find that expression as amusing as she does. I did it very slowly at first, trying to stretch it out, and also because I didn’t want her to start writhing or squirming, which could have aggravated her injury; she was still wearing bandages on her side. But at the end she started writhing and squirming anyway, and asked me to go faster, which I did, and she had a very powerful climax which, I was relieved to learn, hadn’t really bothered her wound very much. That led me to hope that she would be ready for the sixth and final stage, which is actual fusing. But we still had the fifth stage to go through, which is felicity, and I discovered on the fifth day that for some reason she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do this. It bothered me, and gave my solipsitis a turn for the worse. Her only excuse was that she was becoming tired of our “game” because it was only a “game,” and that she wasn’t going to “perform on schedule.” This left me so disappointed that I went off into the woods by myself and used my hand and tried to pretend it was her mouth, but this pretense just didn’t hold up, and afterwards I felt very ashamed of myself, and more solipsitic than ever.
I don’t want to leave the impression that during those first five days we were only playing games. That was only our recreation, or re-creation, as I saw it. It was a diversion from our main business, which was to continue recording on tape the story of Daniel Lyam Montross’s life in Five Corners. This was Diana’s first concern…and I should say mine too. But during those days I slept an awful lot, that is, she kept me in a trance so much of the time, that once again I started feeling jealous because she was spending more of her time with Daniel Lyam Montross than she was spending with me. But it was harder on her, too, because something went wrong with her tape recorder, and she had to use a kind of shorthand in her own handwriting instead. After our first session with the recorder, on the first day back in Five Corners, she brought me back from my trance, and said, Listen to this, and pressed the Replay button. I listened for a while, and said, I don’t hear anything. That’s what I mean, she said. There’s nothing coming back. It won’t replay. So I took the tape recorder apart, that is, I took the back off of it, and looked at it closely to see if any of the connections had come loose or unsoldered, but I couldn’t find anything wrong. I said maybe she had forgotten to push the right button, but she said she had enough experience with the recorder to know what she was
doing. So I turned it on and spoke into the microphone, “Testing. One…two…three…four” and then rewound the tape and pushed the Replay button and the recorder said “Testing. One…two…three…four.” There, I said. Nothing wrong with it. You just must’ve forgotten to push down on the little red “Record” button. But after our next session with Daniel Lyam Montross, she brought me back from the trance again and she was very irritated. There’s still nothing coming back, she said. It still won’t replay. This began to seem pretty spooky to me, as if Daniel Lyam Montross was no longer actually with us, as if he had abandoned us, or as if Diana were no longer able to summon him up. But she claimed that she could hear him just fine, only something was wrong with this goddamn tape recorder and it wouldn’t replay his words.
So from then on, she stopped trying to use the tape recorder and instead attempted to get most of it down on paper in a kind of shorthand that she used. Several years of Daniel Lyam Montross’s life in Five Corners were condensed into these jottings. Here’s one of them, for example:
’01–’02. Fundmntlst relig. reviv. held 2 wks 5 Corn. summer ’01 by itin. evang. using ballroom Glen House, causes several to “get relig.,” includ. Melissa McL. who after getting relig. refuses further relations w/D.L.M., also puts stop to “sinful” commun. sharing outhouse by D.L.M. and Rachel. “Belated punishm. frm. God,” says Melissa McL when winter ’01–’02 all Joel McL. sheep die of staggers. A famine year.
I’ll confess that I simply don’t have any enthusiasm for trying to make a narrative out of stuff like that. But for whatever it’s worth (and to persuade D.L.M. that I haven’t made a complete botch of things), I’ll summarize, briefly, the essential information about his remaining years in Five Corners. We know that he stayed here until 1906. We know also why he left, finally. There had been a number of times when he had felt like leaving. At one point, when the United States was at war with Spain over the possession of the territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and the state of Vermont was recruiting a regiment to be sent against the Spaniards, Daniel Lyam Montross almost joined up, and several years later regretted that he hadn’t. Henry Fox had talked him out of it, or rather, Henry Fox had given him a monologue on the subject of home, of home as the right place (Tape #176b, if anybody’s interested), and Daniel Lyam Montross began to feel disinclined to leave what had become very much his home. His life for the next several years was not very interesting, but that itself was what he liked about it, because, according to another of Henry Fox’s theories (revert to Tape # 153c), the ideal life is the settled life, the tranquil life in which nothing “happens,” or in which nothing happens that would be worth making a story out of (so don’t blame me, Daniel, if I can’t put anybody on the edge of their chairs with your last years here). At any rate, most of his life here until right near the end was what Vermonters would call an “accommodation.” Even his relationship with Rachel became an accommodation. Why didn’t he marry her? Well, he had tried to, at one point. He had even sent off to a mail-order house for a $13.75 diamond ring, and she had even worn it for a while, for a long time, in fact, without definitely saying yes or no. But then that business about the half-wit Marshall Allen had happened, and when Daniel found out about it, it had almost driven him as crazy as Rachel was. It certainly “soured” him on her. And Rachel began neglecting her appearance, as if that too would make her into more of an animal. Then Melissa McLowery “got religion” and everything seemed to be going downhill for Daniel as well as for the town of Five Corners. I don’t see any direct connection between the decline of Five Corners and the decline of Daniel’s life there, although Diana disagrees with me on this. The decline of Five Corners, from my point of view, dates from the time when, in 1903, Henry Fox for some perverse reason of his own (Tape #181a) decided to reveal the fact that there wasn’t any gold in Five Corners and never had been any. The bad economy of the famine year of ’01–’02 had caused the creation of a citizen’s committee, led by Judge Braddock, who tried to persuade Henry Fox to reopen the gold mines and continue operations. And when Henry Fox let out his secret, things just started to fall apart. It was as if the only thing that had kept the town existing there was the possibility of gold, not the actual mining of it, but just that possibility, that dream, and now that that dream was vanished, there was no longer any excuse for the existence of a town here. Naturally, Henry Fox’s unwise (or wise?) disclosure convinced the people of what they had guessed all along: that Henry Fox was crazy. Another group of citizens banded together for the purpose of burning down Gold Brook Chateau and driving Henry Fox away, but when they got there they found Daniel Lyam Montross standing with his rifle on the front porch, threatening to kill any or all of them. They retreated, but this incident didn’t help Daniel’s standing in the community very much.
The decline of the community was rapid, once it got started. A lot of people simply packed up and moved away. Glen House Hotel closed for lack of business, and because nobody was coming to the Saturday night contra-dances any more. The mail route was discontinued and most people had to get their mail from Bridgewater or Plymouth Notch. Several suicides occurred among old people who didn’t care to move away. Jake Claghorn was one of these. The covered bridge burned down, or somebody set it on fire, and Daniel Lyam Montross as the town carpenter (did I neglect to mention that he took up the trade of carpentry after giving up schoolteaching?) wanted to rebuild it exactly as it had been, but Judge Braddock told him to build the cheapest, simplest plank bridge, without any cover. This, incidentally, turned out to be the last job of work for Daniel Lyam Montross in Five Corners. His relations with Rachel, strangely enough, were beginning to take a turn for the better at the same time everything else was taking a turn for the worse. She had apparently been sane enough to realize that she wasn’t getting any younger, and she cleaned herself up and broke off her crazy “affair” with that half-wit Marshall Allen, and she even showed signs of becoming normal again, at least in the sense of being able to have a rational conversation with Daniel Lyam Montross (Tape #194c, the last one before our recorder stopped “working”) in which she told him that she had “come to her senses.” They talked about the idea of wedding. But then Daniel Lyam Montross made—or tried to make, it isn’t clear yet—love to her, and shortly after that Rachel was discovered drowned in the millpond. Daniel was certain that her drowning was the work of that sadistic half-wit Marshall Allen. Shortly thereafter Daniel Lyam Montross shot and killed Marshall Allen and left Five Corners forever.
Recently (yesterday afternoon, in fact) Diana brought me back from a trance, and I found her sitting there in her Adirondack chair holding a piece of paper in her lap and looking at it very sadly, with tears rolling down her cheeks. She just kept on looking down at it for a while, then she sniffled, and without a word handed it over for me to read. I recognized at once that it was a poem, even though it had no rhyme and not much meter, and I didn’t want to read it, because I’ve already agonized over this business of Diana asserting her own identity by writing poems which she claimed came from Daniel Lyam Montross. But it occurred to me now that I very much wanted Diana to assert her own identity, I needed for her to do it, even if it meant writing poems for “Daniel.” So I read the poem. It is called “For Rachel, My Woodscreature, Killed in a Millpond.”
Listen:
She approaches the millpond, still and dull as silver;
And her eyes dart, a sheep-eyed left-and-right glance
As if, when warming up to boys, the right looks could draw love to her,
And love rescue her in this eleventh hour,
A loon, diving, deep into the pond,
Her laugh shaking the dead but clear water.
The fish laugh with her!
The water, its ripplets rise to sighing
As her feet make of the surface one final sight.
No, there are no boys, who catch her last lorn glance and come to help her;
Only a lover could have helped her:
Hearing the laughter’s meaning.
Her lover, he is not there,
Holding to her dress, grabbing for her red ringlets.
The grasp of cold water cannot replace her
When he comes, groping for her hair.
If only he had grabbed her in a time
When grasp mattered, when ravenous touches
Might have in right breaths taught her the depth of his love,
Or, if no touch be to teach her:
Find her, hold her, and reach her.
I got sort of choked up myself, reading this, and might even have brushed away a tear or two, I guess, although it bothered me considerably, too, and it led to the first angry argument or quarrel that we had since getting back from Woodstock. My feelings were really all mixed up. On one hand, this simple poem almost single-handedly wiped out my solipsism for good, once and for all. I mean, I know I didn’t write that poem, I know I couldn’t have. And I don’t think Daniel Lyam Montross could have, either. Because he’s my creation, after all. So that leaves only Diana. And if it leaves only her, then she is. She has to be. But on the other hand, while I was so pleased with this proof of her identity, I couldn’t help resent it, I couldn’t help being envious of her poetic style, and, above all, I couldn’t help but be annoyed that she was messing around with my story of Daniel Lyam Montross…and couldn’t even get her facts straight.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 59