by Joy Williams
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“What’s that?” Pearl said sharply.
“You’ve dropped your glass, Pearl. Look, it didn’t break.” Peter retrieved it for her politely, wiping it out with the hem of his sheet.
Lincoln opened the door of the sauna and walked into the meadow. Pearl was relieved to see him.
“Hello, Daddy,” Jane bawled.
Lincoln responded with a cursory flap of his hand.
He was empty again, Pearl supposed. Ready to be filled with the sight of the way things seemed again, she supposed.
Tracker was feigning jabs at his small sister. He had a long body but short legs. “Daddy, Daddy,” he mimicked. “You don’t know anything, Jane.”
Peter said, “I bet I know something that nobody here knows. I bet nobody here knows what it was they did first to make mummies in Egypt.”
“Mommies?” Jesse looked interested.
“They took their brains out through their noses,” Peter said grandly.
“Echhh,” Franny wailed.
Disgusted, Jesse dove to the bottom of the pool. Pearl saw him lying down there on his stomach. He would stay down there, it seemed to Pearl, for incredible lengths of time. He said it was easy. He said all you had to do was close your nose and ears.
“I know something you don’t know,” Joe said lazily to Tracker. He was lying down now on his back, squinting at the younger boy. “Someday there’s going to be a girl who wants to put your pecker in her mouth.”
Tracker’s eyes widened. He was horrified at the thought.
“You’re all so dumb and silly,” scolded Sweet. “Honestly, you make me sick.” Her auburn hair shone prettily in the sun. She held Angie in her arms and turned around and around with her.
“What’s that, Sweet?” Franny asked in a high, cautious voice. “What’s that that’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Sweet snapped. “You’re the ones who are dopes. Little kid dopes.”
“No, you’ve hurt yourself. You’ve cut yourself. You’ve got blood all over your bottom.”
The children looked at her from a great distance.
“Oh, Sweet,” Pearl said, “come here, dear . . .”
Sweet brushed the palm of one hand across the back of her flowered bikini. It was soaked with menstrual blood. She hurriedly placed Angie on the grass and moved off toward the house in a graceful, frightened lope.
“What happened to her?” Jane said, worried. “What hurt her?” She moved her thumb wildly in her mouth.
“When girls change into women, they bleed,” Joe said. “And they bleed once a month like that unless they’re making a baby and then they don’t bleed.”
Pearl threw an ice cube in her glass and poured wine after it. The children had eaten all the blueberries.
“Do you want some of my pear, Pearl?” Ashbel said. He had split the pear in two. Even the seeds were halved. Pearl saw the teeth marks in the fruit’s white meat. Being a child is living in a world apart, she thought. A world all sufficient unto itself, and when one falls from it, it is like an angel cast from heaven. Magic envelops you as a child but then the magic vanishes . . . poor Sweet, she thought.
Pearl herself had not menstruated in over a year. It was the drinking, she supposed. The drinking had made her unattendant to a normal moon.
CHAPTER NINE
Pearl pinched a tick between her fingernails and dropped it on the grass. She ruffled the hair lightly with her fingers to seek out another. Awful things . . . they’d get into an animal’s coat, burrow right beneath the skin sometimes and fester there. As a child she had been dedicated to their extinction. She had a jar of kerosene beside the porch steps and she would drop them in there. They were worse in the poor dog’s ears and around his eyes . . .
“Ouch!” Tracker yelped. “That hurt, Pearl.”
Pearl held a tick with a lake of skin still clenched between its jaws. Tracker was rubbing his neck.
“Well you have to get them out,” Pearl said. “You can get sick from them.” She pinched it between her nails. It made a tiny snap.
“Crazy Pearl, nice Pearl,” Tracker said. He rolled out of her reach and sat rocking on his heels in the grass. Beside him sat Sam. They had been born within days of one another. Tracker was intelligent but rough and greedy Sam was . . . Pearl didn’t know what Sam was. He looked at her from his impassive eyes. His eyes were curious. The irises appeared oval-shaped. With shame, she knew she was afraid of him. He seemed all the disorder of her heart. She saw the infant in his face still. His other face, his boy’s face, was harder for her to recognize. He didn’t speak to her as the other children did. He kept away. She had no real sense of his purposes. Were not his purposes rooted in her responsibility? But she was an irresponsible woman, removed from everything, floating through space, exorcising longing. She would have liked to speak to him more, tuck him in his bed at night, share the night with him in her room. She did not want to be alone. Even wild animals don’t sleep alone. It’s too dangerous. Even a dog discovers in the darkness things invisible to men. In the night, demons chattered in her aching head. Not voices at all but comprehensible all the same. Terrible things. Creeping or winged, dark and avenging, carving a woman like her but different, out of carrion, out of mold. Carving this woman out with their sharp beaks. It was the drinking that caused the apparitions, Thomas told her, but if this were true, and Pearl did not concede to Thomas that it was, it was also only the drinking that could protect her from them.
Everything depressed her. Thomas would say, as though to reassure her, that she was not at all well. Tears rolled down her cheeks, bringing the flavor of tanning lotion to her lips. Oh the idea of the infinite is always present, the marvelous is so near, and then one gets bogged down in the arbitrariness of life. It is all hopeless. Absurd. She was not well, but she had been sicker before. A crisis had passed. And something wrong had been set right. But there was something else, something monstrous in that rightness. And that was what she wanted to remember. Did she not drink to remember it?
She suspected that she was maudlin. In soberer moments, She was quite aware of this. And yet even though her suffering was foolish and misplaced, her life had become an agony with it, and if what she felt now was the disproportionate anguish of the drunk, it was anguish after all, and it was overwhelming.
An ant crawling across her hand made her skin tickle. She looked down and pressed her thumb upon it the same instant that a bluejay screamed close by. She jumped, surprised.
“It’s all right,” Sam said, his eyes widening, “don’t cry.”
“You love me, don’t you, Sam?” Pearl looked past him toward the house. She wished it were time for a real drink. The children’s shadows were growing upon the grass.
“You have to love someone, Sam,” she said after a moment.
“I love you,” he said.
But it was not true, she knew. Pearl looked at the infant’s face framed by the shaggy, sun-bleached hair. He was shirtless and wore new but muddy denims. He sat, fixed in sunshine, smiling. She took a swallow of wine. He knew her fearful thoughts of him. No one who has private thoughts going on in his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard. Any child knows that. Sam understood her thoughts. Was not his understanding reflected in the oval irises of those eyes? She wished she did not have those thoughts. She drank to get beyond them. She drank in the hope that her drunkenness would produce a clarity that would usher her into effective love. She drank because sometimes she felt her whole body gleaming with it. And whatever she wanted to see, she could see.
One of the children farted.
“That was Tracker,” yelped Franny. “Tracker let the Devil out!”
Tracker leapt up, his arms flailing, but Franny danced nimbly out of his range. She was a humorous, coquettish child. She did a cartwheel out of sheer, mocking joy.
Tracker took several steps after her, but it was a movement apparently without threat, for he squatted on the ground abruptly and assum
ed a peaceful, far-away look. It was as though a gate had suddenly swung shut upon him. A gate, a wall of boards, protecting him from pain and confusion. He lopped on his back in the grass.
Tracker was rowdy and probably cruel, but what could Pearl do about that? Sam was an ever-increasing influence on all of them but what could Pearl do about that? She herself was a weak and evil woman. She was evil because she was unbalanced, she mistook appearance for reality, and she was empty as a sucked egg.
She worked the bottle up from the ice and filled her glass again.
Timmy and Jane were crawling around inside the sculpture at the edge of the pool. Jesse was still under water.
“Be careful around that thing’s head,” Pearl called. The year before the bees had made honey but it had been bad honey, poisoned really, because it had been made from rhododendron blossoms. Timmy had eaten some and gotten sick.
“We are not playing around its head, we are playing where it pisses,” Timmy said.
“What was it like when Sam lived inside of you?” Jane asked Pearl. “Did it feel funny? The little hole that ladies have . . . is that where the souls of babies live?”
“Tell us a story, Pearl,” said Franny. “Tell us the one about the king and queen who couldn’t have children until the old woman told the king to catch a fish with golden wings and clean it and cook it and give it to the queen to eat and the king did,” Franny said. Her face was bright with expectation. She sat, cradling Angie in her lap, squeezing the baby half blue in her enthusiasm. Sometimes she quite forgot that Angie was not a doll. Angie gave a squeak. Franny looked at her, surprised, and let her crawl of into the flowers.
“The king did,” Franny went on, “and he gave it to the cooks to wash it and clean it and fry it and serve it to the queen and the cooks did, they washed it and cleaned it and threw all the inside stuff . . .”
“Entrails,” Ashbel said.
“Ohh,” Pearl sighed.
“. . . out the window where the cow ate them and later the cow and the queen both had babies on the same day and the cow had a human baby and the queen had a baby that was just like a cow’s baby . . .”
“So now you’ve told it all yourself,” Jane said irritably from within the sculpture. She looked at her thumb, which looked wonderful. She thrust it into her mouth. Her eyes glazed.
“Let’s go to the stone house,” Timmy said, “and tell a story there.”
Pearl couldn’t hold the children in her mind anymore. She couldn’t keep their features distinct. They were silent now around her.
The stone house. She had never entered it herself but the children talked about it often. The degree of their captivity in their childhood amazed her. Even Joe and Sweet were reluctant to leave the rituals of that childhood . . . the secret society of childhood from which banishment was the beginning of death. Joe and Sweet, Trip and Peter, along with the others, the littler ones, heeded the story they had made down there. Sam’s story really. Sam’s formulation of their world suited them.
The day seemed colder. Pearl pulled a shirt over her bikini. The sun was sliding down in the sky.
Sam was not yet seven. His birthday was tomorrow. “Speedily a tale is spun, with much less speed a deed is done . . .” It was as though he had grown by one of the devices of his story. He grew by the hour as other boys grew by the year. In one hour he seemed as others were in one year . . .
Pearl pulled her shirt around her more tightly and rested her chin on her chest. She smelled the scorched grass and the children’s sweat and her own. I have to have a real drink soon so I will not become confused, Pearl thought. The time had passed. One sits down to a glass of wine and the years pass. Nothing magical about that. It had taken Sam almost seven years to become almost seven. And she had been with him all the while.
And yet she did not know him. She saw in his face only the face of that fierce dark infant who had torn her breast. Since that day she knew she could not love him as she might. Love for Sam would entail accepting the monstrosity of salvation. The others were unafraid of such salvation. They were children. Their world was as the world would be. Once, in the very earliest time, a human being could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. There was no difference. That was the way it was.
“Come on, come on,” a child cried.
Sam shook his head.
Once the stone building had been a slaughterhouse. Blood had beaded in the dust. a smoky ire burned outside to keep the lies away. Then briefly it had been a chapel. and then a greenhouse. And now it was theirs. They lit candles and played in the dark with Aaron’s animals.
Thomas knew the children used it but he didn’t know what they did. There are fewer experiences for the body than for the mind, Thomas would say. It is through the mind that the human mud can be turned into spirit. Thomas allowed the children their privacy in the stone house. Their life on the island, superficially so chaotic, was actually quite structured, except for the summer months when they were allowed the holidays of ordinary children.
But in the winter, long hours of each day were set aside by Thomas for instruction, whether it be physics or reading or astronomy. He liked to keep his hand upon them all, but he would be the first to say that the cultivation of the spiritual self was more important than formal education. This cultivation, this discovery, he allowed them to make for themselves, believing that, as children, their imaginations were far more intricate and honorable than his own. Show me your thoughts when you are ready, Thomas would say. He believed in the necessity of secrets. He believed in the children. And he allowed them the secrets they kept from him in the stone house.
But the children kept no secrets from Pearl. She knew what they did there. Her world and theirs were very close. It was as though she were present, always, with them.
In the summer it was cool, almost cold. Half the floor was earth, the other half, planks laid over earth. The walls were stone except for the south wall, which was of small panes of glass, put in when part of the building had been converted into a greenhouse. Hot-water pipes ran along the ceiling. Scraggly plants grew from collapsed seedling boxes. Other, dried, plants hung down from hooks, their bulbs flayed and strangely healthy-looking. The room slanted back and telescoped into a smaller, empty room. The entire house was empty of furniture except for a long pine table against the north wall. on this table were the carvings that had been on the library mantel when Pearl had first come to the island. Twelve small figures, dry and light with age.
Each child took the carving that was his and settled down with it in the place that was his and they would wait. They would wait for their shadows to come to them. Their other, stronger, and more magical selves.
Sam had shown them how to do this. He had never spoken about it. He had just shown them.
Many times the shadows didn’t come. The children would not admit to this if it were the case. It was hard for them to distinguish between the real shadow and something that they had just made up in their urge to exhaust the darkness here, something created out of air, no more separate from them than the real face is from the reflected image.
In the beginning the children would come down here to tell stories and scare one another. It was like the beginning of the world, full of chaos and warring seeds. The stories would get all jumbled up and the children would shriek and quarrel with excitement and disgust.
Trip had told Miriam’s little Johnny such a bad story once that Johnny had died. Trip wouldn’t say what it was. He had been younger than Johnny at the time. He had just been showing of. After Johnny died, Trip had been mildly shocked by handling a worn plug in space heater and after that he could no longer remember the story he had told.
Trip decided not to tell stories anymore but to stick more or less to the facts. Trip’s interests now were electromagnetic wave propagation and creating an android out of scrap metal like Doctor Universalis.
In the stone house now there was only one story that was told. The story of Aaron
and Emma. The children never tired of it. Children who were gone, who had left the island long ago, who were adults now, had had a part in the making of it. For years it had not been finished. But now with Sam, it was close to completion. The circle was closing.
The sun bored through Pearl’s closed lids. Not just one circle, but two, closed and intersecting, the union of two worlds.
The children sat on the cold earth floor, in their darkness, in that tremendous human darkness that they were aware of only when they were still, when they tried to conjure up the dream and couldn’t, the time before the shadows of the stories came. They sat waiting, sighing a little, holding the worn little objects that Aaron had made in his fear. Holding them, eyes shut, seeing with their minds, inching out little by little from that tremendous human darkness . . .
What a story it was. A story that fit them all so perfectly. A story that could be refined each day to their changing sensibilities.
Emma’s first child’s name was Stark. All twelve had names and natures but Stark seemed the best, the most impossible and pronounced, because he was the first.
Zezolla was the last. Still a baby when Aaron died. Franny sang a song for Zezolla.
“. . . she had a wart in the middle of her chin she called it a dimple but a dimple goes in . . .”
When she sang the song to Angie, Angie would laugh. The baby did have a dimple in her chin, but hers was a very pretty one.
The children held their animals up to their faces and felt the hollows that were their eyes. They put the animals in their minds. They were children here, making believe. outside, the august day was burning down with its dry salt heat, but inside the children shivered as the animals that Aaron had skinned long ago shivered. They shivered and cried in their skinlessness, their otherness. Sam told them this.