by Joy Williams
The sun was still in the sky along with the moon. The sea seemed higher than the land. Pearl walked toward the stone house, expecting to find the children there. Would they take her with them? Could she be like one of them? She hoped so. The animal was inside her too, the little animal curled around her heart, the beast of faith that knew God.
She put her empty glass upon the grass. Pearl’s empty glasses were everywhere, on the beach and in the woods, on the stones that had fallen from the walls.
She put one foot after another on the cool, slippery steps that plunged down into the damp floor of the stone house. She waved an arm about tentatively and then withdrew it, not because it connected with anything, but because it felt as though it had been thrown down a well. She felt in a sock, in a casing, in one of Aaron’s animal skins, inside out, her eyes in her flesh. There was an odor here. This was where the meat had been stored long ago. In the winter, living animals had been kept here as well. The room jogged downward, like a theater or a crypt, and its feel suggested other rooms, other levels. One could not scrub the smell of death out of things. The dead had once been here below, in clean cold rooms, and the living above, in warm and troubled waiting.
Light sifted through the dirty glass above. The pitch of the roof met the ground and the still grass glittered in the lower panes. The grass looked sleek as though there was knowledge in it of a storm. She felt the old despair, the old thirst. She was alone, one, and the storm was outside, undifferentiated, everything. She feared and despised her life. She had never wanted this responsibility, this dreadful responsibility to one’s own life, the knowledge that everything was outside oneself.
She leaned against the walls, walls that exposed wide ribs beneath the most delicate skin of plaster. She could see more clearly now. She could distinguish the table upon which the carvings stood like shadows. She moved farther into the room, holding the wall.
“Tracker,” she called.
He would come to her, wouldn’t he? If she called? He was so rough and gloomy, but gentle somewhere in his hunger, scrupulous, brave.
“Ashbel,” she called, “Franny . . .” They would come surely if they heard. They were fond of her. They would tumble across her feet and climb her sides and sing their sad songs in her ear with happy voices.
“Trip!” she called, not really expecting him to approach. Him with his grin and his long face, his clever lope, his counterfeit hands . . .
The earth raised up slightly beneath her feet, a mound of fertile earth, suckering weeds. Elevated now, Pearl’s fingers grazed the rusting hooks that lined the uppermost part of the walls. She drew her hand back with distaste and sat down. She could not sort out the sounds she heard. Ice settling in a cocktail glass? Someone stirring in a gnawed stall? Music somewhere playing, music both intelligible and untranslatable . . .
No, there was nothing. They were all gone, and she was too. It was so. It had happened. People try living without knowing what it is they’re supposed to be doing, and then one is changed and it is over. There is one side and there is the other. And one travels back and forth and it becomes simply too much to bear, the moving back and forth between advent and farewell. Skimming on the surface of the darkness, past the rocks black with mussels, over the shoals and the dead caves full of light, through the race, running, past the buoys that marked safety and danger both, and into the others’ harbor. Red, right, return . . . but she was gone from that now. It was over. The town with its faces, with its people talking. Humans have cruel eyes. The eyes of the boy in the animal’s head outside the garden in which she drank . . . The eyes of the woman in the drugstore replacing the cards. There was another card on the deck she remembered. The fool followed by the hound. The fool, she was the fool, and yet the edge beneath the fool which opened on the depths held no terror . . .
Pearl heard a noise.
“Jane,” she called. “Timmy!”
Her bones creaked as she turned. How she had aged with these children! Her thighs had slackened, her hair had grayed. Her hands trembled as she ate. She could not eat. She could not remember eating.
She could see the dried plants hanging from the window frames, tied by their roots, resting, waiting to be redeemed. She could make out the tubs, nests, bins, the labyrinthe runs. A hundred hiding places here, a hundred homes. Crypt and changing room the same, here. And the yawning womb within her was the room outside she was in, fetid greenhouse or cold grave, sloping out of darkness into a darkness deeper still, into heavy, depleted air.
A quilted light rose and fell in the room. Soundless lightning. A pair of buttocks floated down upon her face like a pale valentine. She could see the wooden animals on the table, disclosed in a circle, knowing no ending. If she touched them they would be like ashes in her hands. The vessel must be strong. If the vessel is not strong, it will break. Instead of peace, there will be only madness.
Pearl had had a baby. She had named the baby Sam.
She had no baby. She had lost the child because she didn’t believe in it. Now there was only this other Sam . . . this intimation . . . a product of her understanding.
She had no one but herself. The gone child in herself.
Herself. A little child asking, insistent, of such an insistent child. Would you love me if I was someone else? Would you . . . She had been a child. She had buckle shoes and a rabbit called Witch Hazel. The rabbit died. A violent death, as they say. The way all rabbits die.
Would you love me if I was . . . Hush, Pearl. What a silly question. If you were another, you wouldn’t be our Pearl. Now isn’t that so? Hush . . .
As a child she had believed in phantoms in the fire. She found that she could dismiss and summon them. She could tell them to go and they would go. But then when she grew older, she stopped believing in them and they would not go when she told them to go, and sometimes they would come when she didn’t tell them to come.
Poor Pearl. Pearl . . .
It is all one long day, a summer day, a day of thirst with the glass emptying, the children playing, then gone . . .
She had had a baby but the baby had died. It had fallen like a star from the sky. And then there was Sam, who had never been a baby, but something she had witnessed, and was now not even a child, but something charged to continue God.
Pearl wondered if they had been frightened, not in seeing Sam, who they knew, but in realizing the old woman, whom they had never seen. The hunter, the fisher of men.
She saw a terrible figure threading a hook through the body of a child, beginning at the groin and ending at a point near the eye. The child thrashed and struggled. The child was Jesse turning into a fish that couldn’t swim away.
Pearl raised her fingers to her face. Luminous beetles crawled across the greenhouse glass. The interiors of their bodies were incandescent. They crossed and recrossed in every direction, appeared and vanished, were brought into creation and just as quickly annihilated. Pearl put her fingers closer to her face and saw her hands floating, illuminated in ashen light.
She saw the hunter setting the snares, the child running toward them, avoiding the first, clearing the second but then falling, something snapping in the child’s soul. The child was Trip looking up with eyes like fat green flies.
Terrible, terrible. Pearl couldn’t catch her breath.
“Pearl?” The door had opened. Thomas was standing there. “Pearl,” he said. “What are you doing? Where are the children?”
Pearl’s teeth chattered. Her body felt plunged in ice. Her body felt bruised and still and heavy suddenly with cold. The air she gasped for was like soup poured boiling down her throat. Thomas came toward her. He seemed illuminated by insects. The dead vines on the floor crackled beneath his feet. He helped her up and pushed the hair back from her face. Her face was smudged and wet. She’d been crying. He kissed her.
She did not move back. His tongue felt strange and hard. He pressed her body closer. What was it like for him? she thought. Breasts pressing against his chest. Spilling against hi
s chest like guts falling from an animal, nipples nudging with their blind eyes . . . So much the difference between men and women. As between raw and cooked. As between wet and dry. And yet not enough.
Once when Peter and Trip were playing on the porch, she heard Trip say to her, “Uncle Thomas doesn’t have a pecker, Pearl . . .” But it hadn’t been pecker at all that he’d said of course, it had been checker. They had been playing checkers on the porch.
Her jaws ached with the kissing, but she didn’t move, didn’t resist. Why was he kissing her? She couldn’t help him. Did he think she could help him? He ran his hand across her small breasts, across her boyish belly. She once believed that he was the one in charge, that he was in control, but he wasn’t. No one was in control. Her own hands hung at her sides. His man’s mouth was kissing her. Her own was filling with saliva. She wasn’t doing it right. She felt excited and angry. She had forgotten how to do it. But one doesn’t forget a thing like that. It’s just that one doesn’t want to anymore. She watched herself being kissed. She felt so far away, so many years away, watching this man and woman kiss, as though she had awakened to a previous dream.
He pushed his hand beneath her dress, his fingers now between the fold of panty and moist lip, rubbing into her. Her knees began to buckle but he caught her, bringing her softly down again to the floor. There was an occult smell, an earthy smell. Her body felt pleasure but her mind did not. Her mind was running off, shambling, horrified, a humpbacked child, running. She saw the little animals upon the table, in a circle, one. What outlaws they had been. Emma’s children, what angels . . . making joy from their darkness, their eyes, the eyes of animals, every one, the smiles upon their lips, the smiles that changelings smile.
She was on her back. He dropped his face from hers and buried it between her legs. He pushed her back and up, heaved her legs around his neck, stroked her with his tongue from the crown of cunt to cleft of buttock. She cringed beneath him like a cone of paper in flame, and like a paper, too, fanned out, grew delicate and rose, all one with its disintegration.
She fluttered there, trembling with the softly ragged strokes of his tongue. Then he pulled away and pressed his mouth again on hers, pressing upon her lips the smell of herself, swamp smell, moon smell. She shuddered, her mouth filled with his milking of her, breathed in his breath and felt herself stiffening, coming. But then, abruptly, just before ending it stopped, the coiling rising. She moaned, repelled by it all. She had tried so earnestly once to be sane. But sanity, it was like holding onto a balloon, a balloon of the world, fragile and full of petty secrets and desires. She would let it go. It was easy to let it go.
His hands were by her head now, holding back her hair, trying to calm her, saying words to her. His bare, muscular arms held her, but all she could think of were the bones in the arms. She struggled. The thin table shuddered but stood, the little animals shuddered and flew off with no sound at all. She wrenched sideways, her lips finding the hand that lightly held her neck, catching the hand in her mouth and biting down with all her might, into the hand’s heavy flesh, touching bone. He rolled from her with a cry and she scrambled to her feet and ran.
Outside, the trees made a sound like water falling. The lightning high above her made the sky look like the inside of a cave.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Pearl tried to shut out everything except the meadow through which she was running. The meadow ran to the unrisen stars. The wind had the time that was left in it and pushed against her face. The wind pushed the remembered children’s remembered voices up from the bottom of her heart.
Look at me, Pearl! I can touch the bottom. I can touch the bottom of the pool!
Doesn’t the sky look like a cave sometimes, Pearl? I’d hate to fall down through it. In England once a man was lowered down a place, the Eldon Hole they called it, seven hundred and seventy feet down he went and when they drew him up he was a raving maniac and died in seven days.
Don’t go Pearl you’re always trying to go listen the earth is like us you can hear it breathing listen he drank up all the water he ate up all the soap and he died last night with a bubble in his throat you will live but I will die if I can I will come back to you to you to you love you Pearl swing me over the rocks and I’ll fly I won’t cry who’s the lady with the alligator purse is she bad is she good is she you Pearl they used to bury the dead in trees but the animals would come down from the bottom and go up from the top Peace in Rest they don’t really go away when you do it backward like that you know those brandies where they have the fruit inside hanging there it’s awful the peaches the pears the lunar hare Timmy loves honey the bees sting him and sting him but he doesn’t care and look at Peter he had a dream that a tree made feathers instead of leaves in the springtime he used to say blatet for blanket can you remember and he used to say yap for lap he never did his every hour invented his face white as the pool smoking in the morning do you know the Devil has six eyes to weep from here’s a pretty label it’s got the Queen of England on it Pearl you be our Queen and we will be your subjects we will stay here forever once I wet my bed dreaming I was a wolf I saw the meadow the way a wolf would see it it was nice I didn’t know anything about me they say that if a wolf pisses on you you have to follow him wherever he goes tell us a story tell us about Sam look at that pompous sunset isn’t it pompous once I saw a sea horse a boy had it in a bucket once I saw Miriam go into the house that has the sign of the lobster upon it yes she goes to a medium in town it’s a green house the color of tamale Miriam talks to her she’s going to let Miriam talk to Johnny I feel funny Pearl look at my tooth isn’t it a funny tooth look at that clock it’s trying to tell time Uncle Thomas says that Time is the Tiger that eats us but that we are the Tiger too I’m growing like the light grows see your heart’s as big as the fist you can make he used to say piddow he never did he never spoke there weren’t the words he knows from where we came and where we are going and how we will return by another path after many days we’ll take care of you Pearl we love you drink this wine is a wonderful thing wine a wonderful moment when water looked upon its Maker and blushed as Milton said if Tracker killed his daddy would God call him back would he have to go to school Pearl your eyes have skinny cracks in them Emma’s eyes were like that skinny cracks through which the sunlight fell burning falling was it true that that horizon spoke to you Emma was nice she loved them too she could be pretty she could be whatever she thought who twinkle twinkle little star what you say is what you are Shelly says she’s going to call the new baby Twinkle no matter what it is she’s getting too old for that sort of thing grownups aging get sort of soft and rotten don’t you think they get mean hit him with a stone Timmy a thinking stone make a noodle of him stones have thoughts too though crabby ones everything has thoughts leaves discourse upon disintegration and water reflects upon the crudities of fish it’s true but grownups are mean they eat meat they hit you in their sleep they tell you things they don’t believe Uncle Thomas took Johnny out in the woods to punish him that’s a pretty one Pearl but not this no don’t buy that see the bird in the corner by the importer’s address the bird with sorrow in its beak don’t let’s bring that one home with us Pearl stay with us there’ll just be you and us
Pearl was staring into the pool at the body floating there. It was Shelly, her long hair loose and streaming. The water stirred and rocked gently against her legs canting down. Her head bumped against the grid beneath the diving board.
They’re dying, Pearl thought. They’re dying and there’s nothing I can do. Pearl touched the canvas of the diving board and then in a queer spasmodic movement began touching her own lips and teeth and eyes. The water was a dark shade, impermanent but devastating and the other woman’s body rocked lightly upon it.
I will tell Lincoln, Pearl thought. Lincoln will do something. He will breathe into her mouth. She will swim away laughing. The child will be born, the spitting image of its father.
Pearl ran across the grass toward the sauna. The door was o
pen. Vapor poured into the air. She saw Lincoln on the floor slippery with wetness and hair. One eye pressed downward. The other rattled like paper. It shook in his head. The eye in darkness, already excluded from the world. She saw him dead, the blood upon his mouth like a wide purple flower. Everything was vivid in the heat. The color of the towel the corpse had rolled its haunches from. The smell of the cedar wood, the color of the ferns that grew from the cracks in the shower stall. A mottled lizard on a black stone held the remnants of another lizard in its mouth.
Pearl saw Lincoln’s body’s leg flung out, the muddy tracks across the shoulders, the sarcastic tongue stilled and thrust between the rigid lips, the tongue, that red and pointed organ more dangerous than the prick, protruding unwittily toward the corroded stall. She looked into the jelly of the dead man’s eye. It had made its arrangement. Death is an arrangement like any other that one makes with the likes of oneself. He seemed unimaginatively wrought, dry, red, a pimple plump upon his buttock. Pearl sweated. It was terrible. But there were things more terrible than this. Pearl knew them.
Pearl saw prints in the long wet grass leading from the door into the trees. She could hear the moaning there of the children, the scolding murmurous cries, and she could see the darkness of the tree line shift forward with their passage through it.
The woods were like dark lace.
She could see the children threading through the woods.
She saw them, the patterns of their coats, the symmetry of their design. She saw their sparkling points of incorruptibility like the shapes of the stars just now blossoming in the heavens.
She saw herself running parallel with the children toward the house. Her tired legs pumped across the ground through the new night still faithful to the secret that it held. A star fell leaving a hole behind it. Lights spilled from the house. It smelled of mice and spilled liquor. Had she never noticed that before? And unseen timbers that never dried. She could hear the children panting, in a stream beside her. The house had all its endless rooms lit, the rooms that Aaron had made to keep the darkness out. One might as well live within it. He had built the rooms with his own hand, a frightened carpenter, one door constantly repeated, leading or locked to another, in the past, one hundred years ago, performing those irrevocable acts of the past, the memory of which time is made.