She could, she knew, in a flash of knowing, withhold forgiveness from her father, forever, and that act would generate real force in the world. And because her own place in the world was, by every evidence, arbitrary and without much point, this evil, so generated, could in no way circle round to its source. There was no such thing as spiritual gravity.
Here was an “N”—for Nicholas, saint Nick.
A twig clicked behind her, up the rise. She turned and studied the thistles and stones that riddled the declivity. Nothing was there. She stood up. The book dropped into the dirt. She stared up the hillside, picking over each detail of it; finding nothing, she sat down and took up the book one more time, opening the covers and turning to the drawing.
It meant nothing, she thought. The noises in the night meant nothing. Her own way of distracting herself.
Just as she moved to close the book to give up on any rebellion against ignorance before mystery, she saw the word where she had begun, precisely where she’d begun, the word which denoted her place in the universe, depicted just here, in the diagram. Three letters shone in the moonlight and she ran her finger across them, directly across the straight line that traversed the center of the circle.
It read: SON.
The abstract melted into the concrete by a strange process of language combining the two hemispheres, south and north, linked by an observer who stood midway between them, at their threshold, and who became their flesh-and-blood counterpart. Possessed, Hannah’s eyes darted around the maze of letters and lines, as she mumbled aloud whatever word combinations the symbols might render. Then she read it, astounded as much as anything by the sense that even mysteries have a logical, even linear, order to them, once some initial premise is reached. Three letters, in perfect counterpoise to the others. WOE, she read.
“Woe.”
It fell across the path of SON and found at its center the common zero, the mutual oh, right there the oh of Opal and the en of Nicky and the terrible “S” for Hannah, all the big mistake. And the circular mark fashioned in the ink on the page, the circle which gave each point of the compass a letter to anchor it and give it life, served as—more than a symbol—a perfect sketch of how the rest of the diagram worked. The “O” was observer, was perfect, was the “oh” of exclamation and love, was the antique “O!” of address, the true first word of the world which at once circumscribed everything, began everything, ended all; it was a self-sufficiency, an eye, a mouth, an egg, a sun and a moon. It was the zero that preceded the first natural number and the zero that followed whatever final number might indicate infinity. And surrounding it, as if it were the axle, and the four points of the wheel the compass points, were the ways this universe might move. South-east-west-north, whose anagram too meant closure and spelled out a kind of zero. The wheel had two spokes which extended from this zero-axle out to the points of the rim, and these were the results of that universe set into its spinning motion.
One was progenitor. One was its product. The other was fate.
She traced with a twig the other lettered bands that swung around the circle, filling in possible vowels, hopeful other words would further solve the puzzle. Gibberish was all this exercise produced. More and more the diagram began to resemble a child’s sketch of a ball of yarn. As helpless as a baby waking from a sweet dream, against its will, unable to fall back into a sleep so that the dream may go on, Hannah now began to try out the three words in combinations.
“Sewnson, woesewn, woeson. Woesewnson.”
Each word gave up its own strict meaning which, when mingled with the others, suggested a sense: the son sewn in woe. Or, woe sown in the son. Pop made son for woe … son was sown by pop who was sewn in woe.
Hannah lay back and took in with her eyes the high ceiling of stars that flickered overhead.
She picked out the Dippers. Lucretius had looked at that same moon and it had looked just the same so long ago as it looked now. The earth under Hannah’s back was warm, but prickly.
Her thoughts were all confusion, but their patterns twirled still around the words, wobbling, faltering, straying a little, gliding further and further off center like a top whose gyrations slowed and whose instability gained, its fat bell racing side to side and threatening to topple.
“Woe, woman, womb, woof, worm, work, wound.”
It came like a moan, this incantation, so slowly made. And as she inscribed each word on her lips she noticed the stars were turning blue. Several turned reddish, or pink. The moon remained and the space between the countless stars stayed black-gray. The face in the moon was restless and stony. It did not spring to life as the stars had. Hannah blinked. When she opened her eyes once more the stars were white.
Then the dove called behind her again, although its cry was oddly guttural. This time Hannah refused to acknowledge its presence, or non-presence. The shooting star that burned overhead was only extinguished once it had traveled far down toward the horizon over an island of sunflowers, their heads bowed. They looked like monsters, drooped and groggy on their stalks. She shut her eyes and smiled to herself. Yet this time steps were taken and the thistle crackled. There was a scraping of pebbles being dislodged. She bounded up and turned to face the hillside and what she could see was so radically different it was just as if she had tumbled out of her own life and into another’s.
There it was, glaring at her, its eyes muddy yellow, luminous from within, stationary and aglow in the dark that hovered in the brush. It was not ten yards above where she stood.
A goat? but—
Hannah gagged on the scream that broke in her lungs. Nothing moved, nothing sounded. The head of the goat was very stiff, almost statuesque, shorn of any locks. Its flesh clung to the convex forehead and stood out like marble. From its poll two thick scimitarlike horns swept backwards, undulant, marred by knots and bosses, culminating in points jagged, sharp as arrowheads. They were a corrugated filthy white, and beneath them were pendant ears that tapered into its pied shaggy coat. Sunken nostrils and watery black lips were at the end of its narrow expressionless head that began to toss.
Now its head stopped moving and off its back rose large wings—they extended to their fullest reach, and they resembled the webbed structure of a bat’s wings, filmy membranes stretched between the delicate elongated bones of four or five fingers. The wings rustled like paper as it brought them back into its sides.
Hannah stumbled backwards tripping over her book as the goat flexed its jaw as if to speak. She snatched up Lucretius, holding the creature’s stare, began to walk sideways up the hill, giving it as wide a berth as possible. The barbs of weeds brushed against her pantlegs. It made no move to follow her but only turned its head to watch her as she crept away.
As she reached the gate she glanced back down into the rack of weed and rock.
Considerable shadows. The moon had gone down.
She ran toward the huddle of buildings colonnaded on the flat ahead, ashamed and angry. She had wet her pants. Her eyes were full of tears. Again she thought she heard something, whipped about, expecting anything, expecting to see it bearing down on her, its black wings careering: only stillness and far away the drowsy performance of different birds passing to matutinal songs. She hid her breeches under a pile of hay in the barn loft and walked, clutching the book in her hands, across the shadowed clearing to the farmhouse, half naked and still shivering.
It wasn’t for a day or two she remembered the nature of the dream (and against the physical evidence of her cut feet, and the musty book itself under her pillow, she knew it must have been a dream, a nightmare)—it was a—
son was what she should’ve been, the dream was right, a son for Nicky, not this Hannah whose name even turned around upon itself like the mirrored folds she had looked at between her legs, for if she had been a son then Nicky would have had both mama Opal to love, mama Opal who shared the same blood as Gerald, whose blood was all like angel hair now, tiny Geralds all set loose around the plains, and he would have had
the boy Nicholas to love too, instead of this Hannah, whose name folded in from both ends on itself and began with a kind of laughter before your mouth or anyone’s mouth came down closed to make the other sound, like an uh, and—?
Yes, she wished (half believed) it had been a nightmare. There was nothing in the front of the book, right? No circle, no letters. The book was a primer that covered all kinds of subjects for school, the three Rs. Oh, and there was no signature. It might have been there in the night, but this morning it was gone, right? No south, north, east, west, and no spheres running around like bracelets and, but for the photograph of a gawky man in a funny old-time suit standing there in a faraway place with pointy plants all faded and brown as the water the sheep pass at the Texas gate when the truck goes by too fast, there was no ghost of Gerald either, or the goat, who he must have gutted to climb in its skin and chew at grass in the night with its picket teeth and rimple gums. Ah, day.
She got up. The smell of flapjacks. Uncle LeRoy would pile them high and drown the tower in syrup. Hannah, she liked plum preserves. For mama Opal, marmalade, sparingly.
“Hannah?” cried her mother. “Come eat.”
Hannah—spell it backwards and it still comes out the same.
Fathers Mothers Sisters Brothers Others
August 1956
AND AFTERWARDS? AFTER THE storm that afternoon? In a circle tykes play. Hunker over a game of marbles, aggies, cat’s-eyes, clay marbles. A dust devil toys with Russian burrs, driving them lightly across a barn in shambles.
Chairs, an ottoman with green velveteen upholstery, highboy, a mahogany breakfront its glass shattered, gateleg tables of varying size, an armoire whose treble-beveled mirror is cracked, rolled rugs set in the tan sun in rows, bric-a-brac broken and spared both by the wild wind, a leaf-and-floral-patterned chamberpot, a player piano with tubby putti inlaid on its sides sans its rolls and bench which might be a county or two over—these are set with other things, lifetimes of objects, of stuff, by men in lines in the road before a house that was destroyed.
A baby is crying in its bassinet out under the dusty sky.
Catch a grasshopper and it will spit brown tobacco on your finger before you are able to slide your fishhook down its gullet. Two young men know this. One is catching hoppers and putting them in a jar for bait; the other is fishing the brook for tonight’s fry. Everyone is going to share. Browns and brookies twist in the creel, a rainbow lies in the shallows, gills caught in a forked branch set in the water to keep it fresh and cold.
A group of women stand in a circle where the kitchen of the house once was, its simple order hurled to kingdom come. They are picking through rubble salvaging whatever is usable. Here is a butterbox. There is a fork. There a gravy boat with a scene in delicate blue on its sides of Venetians poling through their Byzantine waters and blue ribbons fluttering behind their blue side-cocked hats.
The crowd at vespers gathers in song then silence: ritual mimetic recollection of the deadest silence before the storm. Outside, the children still crouch together at marbles in the falling light facing each other around the ring traced in the dirt with a stick: the power of sphere and circle. And of omission.
To hunker upon the plains of a new hybrid pagany. To hunker in the newest africk of savage midwest America the newest Old World knocked out of the old Old World’s bowels. To feel tragedy obscured and at abeyance in this posture of pure surety. Aboriginal laze, and to rest comfortably with hams on heels. Squatting with haunches, knees, and ankles acutely bent so to bring the hams near heels and throw the whole weight of one’s life on the fore part of the delicate feet: not the best posture for the untrusting, the cowardly, the faithless.
Hunk
honk
honcke
honck
O house, place of refuge or safe abode.
V
An Observance of Hermits
1.
P.S. (THE LETTER ENDED) What, without divulging secrets scientific or theoretical, is it you’d propose to do with It once It comes into your possession, for as you must understand we cannot afford to be cavalier about such matters.
“It” being the term Krieger insisted upon using for the old Indian, the old Indian being through some rite of conjury the same Cristóbal de Olid who walked away from his would-be executioners so long ago, like a saint out of any martyrology. The postscript Krieger had added to the first epistle, the one which gave the historical sketch of early Spanish enterprise in the New World, may have been just the touch which lifted the whole matter out of the realm of the possibly grotesque into a more benign reality; and here the saint seemed almost sprung from his own mythology, willing to climb down off the stone facade of his own cathedral—jaunty little miracle fated for encasement in the reliquary, a jewel-encrusted box in the shrine. The question was purely custodial and on the surface could have no impulse other than good. Addressed to a man of science who had over the years lapsed into an increasingly impoverished connoisseur and collector, the thing came as a bit of a shock.
It never really occurred to him, from the first epistle forward through their negotiations, that he would pass on the opportunity to have this living, breathing specimen come take up residence with him there in the house over the Hudson. But experimentation, and study? Owen had not considered it. At least, not deeply, and not practically. Materials were to be had, findings, answers to the half-formed queries he had assembled, disassembled, and reassembled through the years which had shot by so quickly. But how to get at them? Here was the first instance in a career (he could still bring himself to call it that) given over to pure nervousness, defensiveness, staring out windows, where he might be challenged and then rewarded with some sort of disclosure. He had to face it, this was exciting. The mysteries locked within It could not be drawn forth by surgical procedure; anything remotely hinting of anesthesia hinted also of autopsy, either of which would defeat the point of the venture. And besides, Owen was neither inclined nor set up to undertake any such thing. Yet the answer to Krieger’s inquiry came more easily to him than he might have thought; it also would force him for the first time to accept a premise in his son’s research that he had never admitted to liking. As a collectible, Olid was a pièce de résistance. The acquisition involved a greater outlay than the mere money, which in any case he barely had. It was all getting a bit complicated, he understood, but it was also enlivening. He sat down to pare his fingernails, and answer Krieger’s postscript in his head.
The orthodox approach would be to observe the subject, just like the Frenchman who sat in the cabbage patch under the moon all night, watching the cabbage grow, hoping to discover some essential pattern there, a cabbageness within the garden. Here he could control diet, and he could note results. Here he might vary UV-light intake, observe the behavior of suppressor cells (autoimmunity was surely a key, the body’s unwillingness to reject the cells of its own tissues). Here allow minute adjustments of the subject’s environment to stimulate in it—It—effects which could be measured against its earlier condition. Here, here, and so forth, but what Owen thought was to make his study more from the inside than the outside. He’d create an environment which would ensure the subject’s continued health, say, working with the subject as closely as possible, and then progressively introduce himself (a not too perfect, Northern member of same species) into that environment. The maximum (known) obtainable results of the experiment were already achieved within the physical being of the elderly Indian—it was merely a matter of adaptation, or bridging assimilable chemical balances, modes of behavior, ingestion rites, all life patterns. Come midwinter should It want fresh venison, they would go hunt down by the Hudson and kill deer. When the weather got warm, corn and squash could easily be cultivated.
If it wasn’t working, the time might come, Owen foresaw, to abandon everything and journey south himself to be absorbed into whatever power, what water and earth, what vegetable and meat, was there to produce continuation. Successful survival within a hostile
environment, wasn’t that the very definition of youth? He would go south only as a last resort because among other things it’d be seen as an admission that some of his son’s techniques—which had never produced very substantial results, for all of his third-rate anthropology, his conventional rebelliousness and high jinks—were still worth trying.
“Continuation is a self-fostering state,” he began to write Krieger, having finished with his manicure and sitting at his desk, “It is like the old joke about the egg. Such perfection of form, an egg. Such natural beauty. Durable, a house full of life. So perfect that the chicken—that hideous and cretinous mass of feathers—is only a necessary aberration which must take place between an egg and another egg.”
But he didn’t send that. He was paying good money, the concessions to Jonathan aside, and the many risks aside. There was no need to clue Krieger in on his proposed methodology. He was under no obligation to clue Krieger in on anything. A man may buy a Rembrandt, or a Renoir, take it home, spread mayonnaise and mustard over it, and eat it for his supper. One owns one’s body; one may throw it off a roof. Privacy of determination is one of the great prerogatives of ownership. It was heartening that Krieger (whom Owen knew as Corless) asked what Owen intended to do—otherwise his Honduran correspondent would have seemed too much the merchant. However, Corless’s surface humanitarianism would not trick Owen into sharing secrets.
Esteemed Dr. Corless, the letter began, Yours of November third to hand, for which many thanks. Indeed you are correct in assuming (and no, it is not presumptuous of you to have indicated your proposition in such frank language) that this would be of interest to me. I say “frank” with some reservation naturally since frank may not be precisely the term for those several instances in your letter where you couch our subject matter in codewords. I understand fully and am perfectly sympathetic with your need to be cautious, but if we are to do business, you and I, then I think it will become necessary to define our terms. As far as I am concerned you may continue in the contract you draw up to use these obfuscations, which in theory might legally protect you, but before any transfer of money can take place, before we can proceed, I feel that a code key must be established at my end. Therefore, let’s say that if you do not contradict and correct the assumptions I make here, in your next letter, I can rest assured that I understand what it is we are in fact discussing. A hundred and fifty thousand strikes me as a reasonable compromise.
Come Sunday Page 28