James Riding was learned for a man of twenty-one. He said when the time had come some years ago for him to work he went to work—like all the boys in Babylon eventually did—in the Johnson plant. This was the only place where a young man could come in to build a career on something substantial. He lasted only a week. There were three jobs. They were horrible.
One, slaughterhouse. Two, the processing plant. Three, the butcher shop.
One, death dolled up in whites for the beasts. False bottom door pops wide open and descent into hell in a hurry: age-old, no sweat. No thanks.
Two, quarter-ton semifrozen slabs of bone and muscle hung from hooks along the sliding ceiling racks, stained aprons, special bandsaws, cleavers, the meat now still and without stench. This is where they make bacon, where the jerky is made for all the jerks. Nope.
Three, the sissification of a once-live beast, trudging to and fro in damp sawdust spread on a cold marble floor behind the showcase, summer’s humidity attracting black bugs, paper doilies and a cuts chart, promote and push the tripe and mention menudo as a curative for hangover, brains tart and tasty with black butter, the heart of a calf stuffed with prunes may win a man’s compliment, hocks and a chuck swell, epigrams of sweetbreads, calf’s head à la terrapin, fort lincoln and frizzled beef, the exchange of smiles with unimaginable vulgarians. How do you like your lamb? Redemptive.
Impossible and impossible, said James Riding.
Other things James Riding did not like: preachers and Jesus, war, politicians, the rat race, the race to space, race discrimination, lime rickey, and root beer.
He liked my ears, liked kissing them with his tongue. He did this up in the projection room while the movie ran for its hundredth showing. I liked the feel of our blue-jeaned legs all wrapped around each other up there on the narrow couch, and how I would get so wet it soaked straight through my panties. There was a lock on the door, but I was the one who always locked it. Otherwise, Mr. Johnson might have walked in on us. James Riding didn’t care if the door was locked or not. Let him come on in, he said.
The first time James Riding went all the way with me he hurt me, but I believe he hadn’t meant to. I was so slick between my thighs when he pulled off my jeans and he ran his palm up along my leg there that he thought I was more ready than I guess I was. He was too big for me. I couldn’t believe how big he felt. I wanted to look at it, but I didn’t dare. I gritted my teeth because I wasn’t going to let him know how much it hurt. But fortunately it didn’t take him long to finish. Afterward he seemed grateful to me for letting him do it. I told James Riding I loved him more than any man, and that was why I let him.
He started talking about what we had ahead of us and it was always so exciting to hear him talk. We were going to run off to the Baja Peninsula where we would have our own little ranch and take good care of the animals. There would be, say, fifteen or eighteen children, at least, by my count.
I don’t know what happened to all these plans. They sounded so great. Poor James couldn’t hang around waiting for me. He had to keep moving on. You can’t spend your life running movies without going batty. I forgive you, James Riding. The children would have been very happy, though, all of them at the table speaking in Spanish.
Butcher
August 1956
WELL THERE NOW Sweetie I got me some shut eye much better now. I got my mind back home in my head. Where did I leave you off telling? Oh; yes. Anyways I dont know how it all got started what I was telling you about before but a couple of days back the weatherd gotten worse than I’d ever seen it in years and years. There was tornado warnings put out all over the county and the sky was dark as a hole. I recall I was very skeptic about it all even though the sky was truly peculiar. I was skeptic because as I said this area is famous back as far as the Indian times for being a blessed ground and not a cyclone alley like most of the rest of the state. Now the plant works full shift so it never really shuts down day or night. We just come on work when these here tornado warnings was put out and the boss Johnson come around the freezer and tells everybody that they’d put up tornado warnings. Now he said the safest thing to do would just be to go on here at the plant since there werent no use trying to get home when the watch was up for twisters. Now a few of the boys decided they’d go home anyhow and the boss let them go home to their families. I thought I’d better go ahead and get back up to home myself but Mister Johnson he took me aside after he went and made that announcement to all the other boys and he told me that he didnt have much patience for weather predicters and that he’d lived in these parts for most of his life and seen plenty of skies even darker than this one and no tornado ever come of it. He told me seeing as I was the only man working the saw and that without me the plant would pretty much be shut down he would see his way clear to paying me time and a half wage if I’d keep at it. I thought about it and told him okay I’d stay with it. He was very happy about that and I figured he knew more about these things than I did anyhow. So I just sat tight in the plant and stayed on wage. The broad kindly brought us back news she heard on the short band in the office kept us updated whether they had sighted any tornados which they hadnt. I guess Mister Johnson decided to go on up to home himself since I didnt see him around no more after he come to talk to the boys earlier but the broad she stuck around and I figured that was pretty nice. Thats about when everything just blew up in our faces. Here we heard this roar like an engine more like about one hundred engines to tell the truth deep like and I thought this must be it. I pretty near died in my tracks when I heard that rumble outside the plant. Whooom you could hear it over the noise of the saws. Whoohooom, just like that. Then the saws they all shut down the lights and everything shut down all you could hear was this deep deep rumbling roar. Thats when the windows blew through and the roof started up shuddering over our heads. The poor broad she screamed like there was no tomorrow and I got down on the concrete real quick like. Then it all it all just I dont know just happened. The roof tore off at the far end of the plant. I think it started coming up at the far end of the building and off she went just like that. But it werent any brighter in the plant when the roof come up like you might think. It was pitch dark just black as night. Things flying around in circles there was whole shanks of fresh killed meat come scuddling across the floor. Undressed carcasses. Chairs tables knives cleavers chains. A pig head I swear come flying straight at me its entrails hanging out behind like the tails on a kite. I could smell gas right after that. My sawtable come down on top of me afterward I think and then I just hardly recollect anything at all after that.
What happened they told me was the plant caught fire and the gas depot next door sprung a leak and powerlines was knocked down. They tell me I was saved probably by that bandsaw that got blowed over on top of me.
The one thing I do recollect is this. I’m sure as God is in his heaven before that saw come down on me I saw the broad hung up about fifteen twenty feet in the air. You dont have to believe me you can say I dreamed it up. She werent flying or shuddering around or going up or going down, she just hung there. I swear she looked down with her arms spread out very beautiful and she didnt seem frightened sort of had this strange smile on her face. All these tools and slaughtered beasts and bricks and things was blowing round and round and round her but she was hung up there perfectly still. I suppose thats when the plant and the depot blew up because they never found her after that. One of the boys was killed in the accident too but at least they found him not too far away in a field. The broad they never come up with. And that’ll always bother me because to tell you Gods honest truth I dont care that some of the boys never thought too much about the broad one way or another or that they called her the broad in the first place but I always thought she was polite and pretty and sweet. She never bothered me none on the contrary. And as long as I live I will always remember her up there in the wild air like that. She was like some beautiful angel hung there before the end of the world.
But I cant go on anymore
about it because I’m starting to feel a little bit sleepy again and the doctor tells me when I get to feeling a little drowsy the best medicine is just to nod off for a while. God speed, your son.
Gerald
June 1956
THE MOON ACTED as cynosure. Hannah lay awake in her bed, situated directly beneath its transparency. Funny how the moon turned everything gray. Its vast reflected light aborted within the confines of her bedroom and through an unshuttered window concluded in an irregular rectangle, thrown with delicious sentiment across her face, and spilling in more fastidious geometrical shapes over the sill, floor, wall, bedstead. The concerns of a dog that froze in a field, its foreleg gracefully suspended, its damp nose working before a crumpled snout, displayed in a single abundantly echoed yap the lunacy of an animal’s cycles. Prowl, devour, sleep: mindless round robin into perpetuity. Prowl, devour, sleep. Another, fainter bark ripped into the illuminated night. No birds sang. There were no other sounds.
Hannah twisted under the bedclothes. There was no sleep to be had. The thought of getting caught in this defiant venture, caught by her uncle, whose cycles had seemingly narrowed to two, with regard to her—prowl and, when possible, devour—kept her mind moving.
Hannah’s stubborn friendliness in the face of uncle’s harassments served only to rile him up more. Uncle LeRoy exactly interpreted his niece’s compliance with his rules for the intractable defiance it really was. Not in a position to retaliate, Hannah waged war with her uncle through a scheme of complacency. An insult propped up every quiet yessir; vanity of fulfilling some menial task assigned by uncle with every intention of breaking her spirit was restructured by the girl, sometimes through her mime of strange grins, other times through feigned shyness, sometimes by a crooked frown, sometimes with an unwitting and spontaneous blink, into pure hokum, into insolence. Mama Opal could not have intervened even if she understood the nature of their conflict.
Getting caught with no ready excuse in uncle’s bedroom last Christmas had been the first false move Hannah had made since she and her mother arrived. Uncle’s overreaction served by inadvertence to even everything up between them. He had gone too far. Mama Opal refused to speak to her brother for a week after the incident.
Hannah cried, in bed, under the closeness and warmth and privacy of her pillow for many nights after it happened.
Death; the death of uncle’s wife. Abandonment; the loss of her own father. Uncle finally apologized. To say, he came as close to making an apology as he possibly could. The apology, as only Hannah knew, was riddled with lies. Hannah had rifled his drawers. A silver dollar was missing from his coin collection. She had damaged a favorite family photograph. With no other father available, uncle had taken it upon himself to discipline the child. Who would, otherwise? By the time he’d finished, through a process of democratizing all fault, even mama Opal was made somehow responsible for what had happened. The three of them stood side by side on equal ground in his imagination, like figures in a primitive painting.
But Hannah suspected the rage she would encounter were she caught with Gerald Mann’s books would be much greater. In the first place, Gerald Mann did not exist. Only the books remained. Remnants of a ghost. Hannah would claim Gerald Mann for her own. Those faces of brothers, one youngish filled with smugness and life, the other an obliterated apparition, with eyes that matched mama Opal’s, as empty as a field awaiting the seeding machine. If Hannah could take on at least bits and flecks of Gerald Mann’s being through these books, what would happen?
She got out of bed and slipped on her clothes, shoes, and a light jacket, walked downstairs and soon was outside in the yard bathed in moon. It was a warm night and dewless. The signatures of the million stars overhead were nearly washed out by the bleaching light. Its intensity was enough, Hannah thought as she strode to the barn, to keep a hen from laying. Inside the barn beams shone through cracks that ran where the roofing wasn’t joined. A chiaroscuro played over the forms, some familiar, others not. Hannah didn’t need much light to locate the pail. There was a sputter from a stall, then silence.
Lucretius tucked under the waistband of her pants, she set out toward the rocky meadow carpeted with ryegrass, brambly and stony, where they never bothered to mow. Here uncle never came. Only the dogs ran down here. She opened the gate, hurriedly made her way down. It occurred to her as she went that she might not be able to see the pages clearly in the moon. She stopped, pulled out the book, opened it up. The paper had an eerie glow, but the type was distinct. Hidden from view of the farmhouse, with only the roof of the barn outlined against the starry backdrop, Hannah sat down on an outcropping of rock.
She flipped to the opening pages. The text was in Latin, with English translation facing. On the front endsheet, beneath Gerald Mann’s signature of ownership, was drawn a diagram. Hannah fixed her eyes on this diagram, squinted, straining to focus, and saw in it a radiance of some kind of possible magic, or an explanation of everything from the commonplace to the divine.
Beneath the diagram were the words: turned to whole. And in pencil on the pastedown: out of Duff.
Hannah traced the lines in the figure, to memorize them by touch, and stopped, hesitated, wherever Gerald Mann had written in a letter of the alphabet where certain lines met.
In the center of the circle there was an intersection of lines. Across the middle ran a straight line, halving the pie, marked on the left “S” (sun? south? star?) and, on the right “N” (night? north?).
Cutting diagonally downwards, from the upper right of the circle, through the center, ending at the lower left, was another straight line. It was marked “P” at the point where the line connected with the arc of the circle just right of its apex, and “P’” at the left of its nadir. The point at the center of this circle, where the lines intersected, was marked “O.”
zero? orbit? ocean? ourselves?
Zero made some sense.
Opal?
Opal, yes, she was the littlest circle, the O in the center, okay.
A series of ellipses, one two three four five of them, was traced on different axes, intersecting the edges of the circle at different intervals, starting from the midway points “S” and “N.” Hannah’s eyes followed the first ellipse, through the rings of confusion, around its perimeter. At each of the intersections on either side of the circle there were other letters.
None of the letters suggested anything to her.
Drawn across the “O” at the center of the circle, at an angle not as great as that of “POP’,” was the only line in the diagram that did not connect with the outer circle.
Was the drawing unfinished?
That was a question that didn’t count. It was as finished as it was going to get, right. Everything up till now was as finished as it was going to get.
The drawing was finished. Try this.
Hannah rubbed her eyes and studied the page, one eye closed. In a moment some of the structure fell backward into the page while other lines, other arcs seemed to lift off the paper and hover over it. The drawing had metamorphosed into a motionless gyroscope. It was wedged halfway into the physical body of the book itself. She noticed that at the top, actually at the back, of this shorter straight line, which was as long as the line drawn across the middle of the circle, was the letter “W” (surely, west?) which ran through the central “O” and terminated along the front edge of the ellipse, actually itself a circle, where it was marked “E” (earth? east?—no, east, of course). Around that circle born from the ellipse Hannah now ran her finger: S, E, W, N.
South, east, west, north, these were—
sewn into a bundle, all sewn up
—points of the compass at whose center was the observer, the compass with its cracked glass face, and the needle shivering as she walked across the fields in the daytime, twisting and whirling whenever she spun, the compass held out before her face where she watched it, until she fell down, head spinning and her stomach fluttering. The points of the compass were subdivid
ed into two poles. The “P”s were poles, but she saw no equator in the sketch, since the “E” meant east. Counterclockwise she traced the circles to find herself an equator.
The moon had sunk some, its light not as brilliant as when she came down into the brambly dell. She might have heard the first dove, behind her in the twisted scrub, close by. The sky was still cast in gray-blackness. She heard a faint coo whose hollowness was like an invisible encyclopedia of mourning, its every aspect. Its solemnity was matched by the paradox of its distant-nearness. A strange, dry chill blew over her face and hands. It came from nowhere. She turned around on her haunches in order to see the dove. With patience she studied the hillside, looking across the area from which she thought the sad song had given. Nothing moved or made any more noise. Her breathing, which had quickened and become shallow, slowed, and she looked across the rise for the morning star. It was, she thought, too early for doves to call and, as she settled back down, she heard the homonym: mourning, morning.
Hannah looked down at the diagram again. Its perspective had collapsed back to the flatness of the page on which it was drawn. Her heart fell a little at this and she tried to will the drawing back into its optical-illusory three dimensions, but couldn’t.
The land, the sky, everything now pulled away from her, but arbitrarily. Arbitrarily, because in its big starry regions, expanding away and away, she felt the outrageous certainty that she herself had no place in it, the land or the sky. In the simplest act of sitting in this field under the night with a book, with its diagram, mysterious, in her hands, she understood her absence would be regretted by no one and nothing.
In that moment another prospect became clear. That the power to forgive her father for having abandoned them was at once a possible act and, being possible—that is, having a meaning unto itself without ever being communicated—could be rejected, could be a power beyond the virtual.
Come Sunday Page 27