The House of Breath

by Reginald Gibbons

  “Guess I made a mistake in leavin em there in Charity, but it was up to the boys to help make the livin and I had this chanct for this job in the city. What in the world would they have ever done without me? It was always, ‘Hattie Hattie kin you come home to Charity this weekend cause the front porch is fallin in and we got to get it fixed and Papa is drawn double with rheumatism and Mama can’t squat even to gather eggs from the henhouse.’ Or, ‘Hattie Hattie, come home on the bus soon as you get off on Saturday noon, count of Willadean’s in trouble by a drummer that came through Charity sellin Watkins Products.’

  “Never had a life of my own, always workin and doin for others, till suddenly I’m an old woman, fifty, and an old maid, kissed once at the Charity Chatauqua by the best-looking man of Charity County but never had time to follow it up, never had time to give to kissin and courtin, had to let him go, Huck Chandler uz his name.

  “Remember once I went in the C.O.D. Cafe after Willadean and what did I see but that young priss standin on her tiptoes on some scales that said upon them, ‘Your wate and fate,’ and a young roughneck graspin her round the lower waist and both of them gigglin to beat the band. I could see Willadean’s fate right there, didn’t have to putt no penny in no machine to ask her fate. Well, I said to myself, ‘Hattie you’re a Christian and like a mother to Willadean, raised her from the cradle, nursed her and washed her and fed her and toted her like your very own, it’s up to you to get her home and do some talkin to her.’ But I decided to jes set down first without makin any fuss that might let her know I uz there and to jes watch this Miss Willadean. The C.O.D. Cafe was jes full, people at the machines, all at the counter, ever seat at the tables was filled with somebody from the Charity sawmill or the C.C.C. Camp out at Groveton or the oilfields, smokin and drinkin their beer and bottles of whisky under the tables; and the nickelodeon was on the rampage, playin at the moment Ding Dong Bells. Miss Willadean was in her glory, I could see that; prissin in and out like a priss-ike at the tables, switchin here and there, laughin and cuttin up with the rowdies and singin right with the nickelodeon as she waited on them, ‘Ding Dong bells are ringin, but not for me….’ I was standin way back in a corner, alone in a corner of the whole world, and my heart breakin to see this Willadean I never knew about.

  “After a while I sneaked out and went on home with the dingdong bells ringin in my head.

  “Well, when Willadean got off work and came home I took her to task for her actions in the C.O.D. Cafe and we had a family ruckus good and proper, Willadean shoutin, ‘I’ve got a right to do as I damned please. When you start tellin me what to do, the fat’s in the fire. Got me some good men friends here, as good as any you’ll find in Houston or anyplace else—you’ve never had any, but I’m going to—and right now my special one is Mr. Steve Cavanaugh, who is an oilman with lots of money and a big Packard….’

  “And Mama said, ‘Hattie Hattie, Willadean’s pretty and popular in the town, not like you was, going to church and Sundayschool and doin all the chores on the place. Why are you so hateful? Times have changed and ways have changed in Charity, and Willadean has to have her some men friends, she’s no little girl anymore…’

  “That was all the thanks I got.

  “Well, when Willadean got married away to the widower from up at Sanderson I never heard from her much anymore. And there was Gilbert to handle, poor crippled Gilbert up and grown and needin to have braces on his legs so he could walk, since he was paralyzed when jest a little boy by the paralysis plague that hit all the childrun of Charity so hard and killed quite a parcel of em back in the woods. Sent Gilbert to doctors in Houston, paid for his braces, by the month, then sent him to a school up north in Illinois to learn watch-making.

  “But there was nothing I could do with Thrash, just hung around Mama and sat on the front porch, never would do a lick a work, like a child, cuddlin close to Mama, warm and close in some dream.

  “O Mama and Papa and Willadean and crippled Gilbert and pore old Thrash, ever time I punched the time-clock at the S.P. it ’uz for you.

  “What of my time and life I didn’t give to all them in Charity, I give to the Church and the Young People in Houston. What times we had! Wienerroasts and barefooted hikes and hayrides and New Year’s Watch Parties. Oh the programs we put on on Sunday nights at Epworth League! The fine speeches made by my boys and girls and the readin out of the Bible verses. The hymns we sang, all of em settin before me, young and bright, Clara Lou Emson, Joe David Barnes, Folner Ganchion, Conchita Bodeen, and all of them, singin loud and joyful ‘He Leadeth Me’ and ‘I Will Be True, for There Are Those Who Trust Me’ and our very favrite of all, ‘Blest Be The Tie That Binds.’ Just for a little while, not long, but just for a wonderful little while, they were all mine, bound to me and bound together, the only thing I ever had, in Fellowship Hall.

  “And then they all began to fall away. What ever stays, in this world? One by one, and in such a little while, they drew away and turned from me—to something they had found beyond me and the Epworth League that I could never find—and the Epworth League at the Methodist Church was never the same again.

  “It was, I am sure, because all of them went to college and I never had more’n a high school diploma and a bizniss course. This made them take to other interests, the symphony concerts and college clubs, talkin atheism and biology and historical learnin that I never had. I knew they was thinkin, ‘Hattie, we’ve outgrown you,’ and on Sunday nights they went to dance at the Rice Hotel instead of comin to League, and on New Year’s Eve they was all at the night clubs, and I watched alone. Cept for a few old reliables like Sarah Elizabeth Galt who had a hare-lip, pore thing, and that kind of a sissy Raphael Stevenson, but both good Christians.

  “And then a college class was formed at the Methodist Church with Mr. Smart, a college graduate and a prominent lawyer, teachin them. Oh I’m sure he did a good job—but I ask you, is a college graduate a better Christian? Was Jesus a college graduate? These are some things to think about.

  “And now there’s no one else to help or to call, Hattie Hattie, kin you come home, Hattie Hattie this and Hattie that. Mama and Papa’s dead and buried away in Charity and Willadean’s raisin her heathen family up in Sanderson and Gilbert’s got a good watch-repairing bizniss up north in Deetroit, Michigan. And pore ole Thrash is in the State Home in Orange where he is taken good care of but don’t know nothing, nobody. I send things up to him, and onct I went up to see him on the bus, but he never knew who I was, he’s gone, in another world. I never go anymore, jes cain’t stand it.

  “Now all this has passed like a dream and I never go to Charity anymore, cept onct in a while for a funeral of an ole-timer and hear them all say to me, ‘I’ll swan if tisnt Miss Hattie Clegg—Hattie, remember the old days?’ As though I’d jes come home to remember them on a week-end…. That bus I ride home to Charity on, to put flowers on graves at funerals, is a long ride between rememberin and rememberin with nothing but rememberin in between. Here I set in a room I rent from ole Miz Johnson in East End, an old maid left with a twisted face from the Bell’s Palsey that struck me like a curse of the Lord six months ago when I was ridin the S.P. on my pass, going to the Grand Canyon on the first vacation I ever took for myself past Charity Texis as a result of the three weeks they give me at the office for workin twenty-five years with the Southern Pacific. (I get to wear a gold button now, with a 25 on it.) I don’t even own my own washrags, everthing round me is rented.

  “Why? Why? Benn a Christian all my life. Why, after all this, should I be twisted with a twisted face and no one in the whole wide world to call to me, ‘Hattie Hattie…’ This is my reward.

  “There is a pane of glass between me and the world, seems like, and nothing in the world can ever get to me anymore, only press its nose up against the pane and look through at me. All the world seems flat-nosed against this glass (what breath blows this fog upon my pane?) and I am separated from everthing in the whole world and feel alone and lost and afraid, with
no one needin me for anything, useless and twisted and no one dependin on me, callin, ‘Hattie Hattie Hattie.’”

  O Well! Womb of all my darkness, great dark mouth that swallowed all my agony when you swallowed me. You have held all their faces, mirror of their faces, caught their buckets dropped down like their secret longings deep into themselves, reservoir of all calls and cries of kin: you have lent me to vision, I was borrowed and claimed by some force that wanted to use me in the world for you and never used, wrenched away from you and out of time like an hour out of a clock; I am that bird that walks in the rime of the bog of the icebound bottomlands, chiming his fiery midnight hour, I am Devil, I am Goodness, I am Gall and I am Heartbreak. To be light! light!—to dance like Folner, to hunch in the dark like Swimma, to hear the Ding Dong Bells! O possessions hoarded in a bag with holes, the excrement upon the floor, the clashing of horned beaks, the endless sound of hollow shells pouring upon plate, the combinations forming and re-forming, walking up and down under the dripping trees. I am in that staggering timeless moment when vision and life are married in passion and agony in the streets in the rain. A shape, a shape! I see it taking form! That some of us have to find other lives to give our own lives meaning; that we live in others and they live in us; alone on the shingle of the world, washed against this wet rock, O I melt down! Name! Praise! Connect! One molten face forming many faces—I slide down down… I start to cry down another name into the well…. But I hear the shutter’s tune in the room where Malley Ganchion sat by the shutter, and I go there. An empty chair sits, as if it were Aunt Malley herself, waiting by the closed shutter. The wind is blowing out a long long tale in the shutter….

  IX

  HERE YOU SAT, Malley Ganchion, by this old blind window that was like the closed and drooping eye of this decrepit rainwashed house, listening to this sad little tune played by the east wind in the shutter. Pieces of a broken memory drifted by in your head. What was this little lament the wind blew and blows, dipping you (and me) deep down like a bucket into the well of an ancient memoried self? You did everything to stop it, because look what you did to stop it: here in the cracks and louvers are the yellowed stuffed newspapers, the Charity Clarion, and the thick cardboard pages with swatches of men’s suit material from Sears’ catalogue. But nothing stopped that tune in your window when the wind was in the East coming from the Charity River, whirling the cisternwheel and filling the well. You sat and listened and lamented…

  “Oh the Charity Riverbottoms where the wind that blows this tune like some mouth on a frenchharp is comin from! There in the spring the dogwood used to blossom and blow, and the redbud and yella jessmine; and the katdids ‘ud bleat like the beat of an old rusty heart, and the frogs make such a husky commotion. Oh the sweet breath of the woods—the baby-breath fern and the little woodsviolets and the daylilies; and on Rob’s Hill risin up beyond the old river bridge there’d be Fire on the Mountain blazin like the burnin bushes of Moses. There’s a new steel bridge now and the old one is broken and swaybacked—the one I’d never ride over, was condemned, and would make them let me get out and walk across when we’d go for our rides out on the Highway. (Remember those summer Sundays we had our picnics there and all’d go wadin in the water, and look for good sweetgum and hickry sticks; and some would be fishin with sugarcane poles and others’d be rustlin through the dry palmettas like fieldmice or strollin under the shinin longleaf pines and the blackjack pines—and through it all the sweet little Charity River flowin lazy, and small, and clear as a tear. Instead of all this decoration of the woods, you know what’s there now, oilwells there now, thickern flies, all along there; and all the treefrogs and whipperwills are flown away, caint live in an oil derrick, no nature left, no wonder….) Nothin is like it used to be except the wind blown from the riverbottoms into my shutter to play a tune about what has gone. (The bottomlands are bald and have sluices and slues full of black, muddy oil scabs, can smell it here when the wind’s right. That stink puts all Charity in a spell, they walla in it, it smells money. Never the sweet fresh smell of the old riverbottoms. Is this the vile oil of joy, this green and yellow putrid scum over the ponds?) The world has sold away everthing that was beautiful and as the Lord put it here to be, human beins have changed everything into money and show. Why, out by Tomball the land is littered with oilwell riggins, and day and night the chug-chug-chug and the little flickrin oil flames wavin in the night like the red flags of the Devil staked out to say he owns this infernal land; and nigras and pore people who used to have no more’n one Jersey cow and a few Plymathrock hens got colonial homes and stationwagons. Everthing that used to be in East Texis is ruined, there’s a terrible change in the world; and I set here left behind in this old house by all my kin and by my dead husband Walter Warren Starnes and my dead daughter Jessy, and my wanderin son Berryben who’s gone away through the world and will never come back to me.

  “That tune! I try to keep my faith and Job is my example; for I have been smitten with these cataraeks on my eyes to test me, it seems, on this dungpile of East Texis. But oh I think the eye of Heaven’s got a catarack On it too, getting blinder and blinder, blinkin and blinkin, closin on the world. Soon it’ll be like the dark of the moon, no light, no sight. O Lord wink me over Jordan. O the droopin lid of the sick eye of Heaven, like my own blighted eyes. Cain’t tell who’s comin up the road, a gypsy or a nigra or one of the Cleggs that live over in the crumblin house. Have to stare and stare at anybody for a long long look before I can tell who they are, and that Lulabelle Ramey sayin to me in the Postoffice, ‘See anything green, Malley Ganchion?’

  “There’s a straight pin, I’ll pin it in my bosom—see a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck; see a pin and let it lie, all day good luck’ll pass you by.

  “What is this little tune the wind blows? Listen! There… It almost played a slow ‘Fly in the Buttermilk, Lula, Lula!’ but not quite, just enough to torment me. How we’d dance that tune and clap our hands! That’s a memry! I had a waist neat and limber as a wrist—and good teeth. I’ve got pictures that show it, to prove it to myself; didn’t always have this bag hangin down from my left side, this tumor big as Granny Ganchion’s goiter, this windgall, this big Devil’s snuff-box.

  “Sometimes when I was young, in the mornins, I would come to this very shuttered window and think that if I flung it open wide and quick I might see before me a magic world I had never known before, somewhere out beyond the Katy rayroad tracks and far across Bailey’s Pasture where now there are only cows eatin the bitterweeds. Then when I’d make a wish and open the winda wide—there was only the wood-roofed little shanties of Charity across the pasture and a string of sick-green smoke windin out of the sawmill smokestack. And at night in the summertimes the half-shutter of a small moon in the roof of the Charity sky seemed like if it twas opened, something magic and bright might fly down out of Heaven through it and rescue us all. From what? Poverty and grievin? Oh I don’t know, now…. Sometimes when Walter Warren and I would be sleepin here I would suddenly be wakened by a flood of light swimmin and tremblin upon my face and it would be the bright little moon passin over this house and over us in bed in it and over Bailey’s Pasture which it turned silver and white (I see the moon and the moon sees me, God bless the moon and God bless me). And I would lie next door to Walter Warren feelin haunted and full of some nightmare, fearin for all of us—Lauralee and her family, Granny Ganchion and all hers, all of us in this old house.

  “But Walter Warren would never save; me from anything of fear or any nightmare. The world he gave me was cold; and so I waited for yon, Berryben, to grow up and make the world warm and save something for me

  “Walter Warren would never let me swank. When I had my hair bobbed (was one of the first of Charity to do it, sittin on a crate on the back screenporch), Esther Crow came over to do it and I was so excited, trembled and giggled and I screamed so and we all got so tickled (something terrible happened) and me screamin so, ‘Oh! oh! oh!’, that it scaired
little Berryben half to death and he cried, ‘Mama! Mama!’ and thought they were hurtin me and ran and hit Esther Crow and tried to pull her away from me to protect me and Walter Warren was mad and trembled too and went away to set on the front porch sayin ‘I’ll be damned, Malley’; and little Berryben ran cryin out to the chickenyard.

  “Then Walter Warren would grumble about my long gloves I’d wear at nights over my coldcreamed hands and arms to keep them white—for him, but he never cared. But he cared enough to make me have Jessy, me in my condition that never should have had another child and she was born so hard and mangled and nearly killed me; that’s why she died so young, because she never should have been born.

  “’That’s all right,’ I would say to Walter Warren, lyin with his back to me in the night, ‘wait till Ben grows up, we’ll never have to depend on you for anything.’

  “And I’d lie there and hear the tune in the shutter and feel cold and alone and want to die except for Berryben, my salvation, in the next room, sleepin with his little sickly sister Jessy.

  “It was waitin and waitin, through these cold years. And then, when it was time, Berryben just turned and went away and I cain’t ever call him back. It was Walter Warren drove him away, that meanness in him; called him a scoundrel once, always criticized him and fought with him at the supper table, made him vomit up all his supper, is why he was always so thin.

  “Here at this very winda little Berryben stood with me once and watched the tents and folks of a circus that had crept in one night to the pasture while we all slept—it was like some fairytale thing; and I wanted to go but Walter Warren wouldn’t, so Berryben and I and Folner went and we bought a red and yellow paper bird that whistled when the wind turned him on a stick. And again one morning when I opened this very winda I discovered the big flappin tent of those Holy Rollers that had just cropped up like a toadstool in the night and stayed and stayed until the fool preacher was bit and killed by the sting of a diamond rattler whose poison he swore to all Charity the Lord would antidote through prayer. Then the tent was moved away. I’d lie and hear their shoutin songs and sit and watch the cripples come on their crutches and in wheelchairs to be healed—and some of them were, tool threw away their crutches and walked away. That young Jempson boy did.