And then, when the family started walking by your coffin, Folner, to look at your doll-in-the-rain face for the last time, Granny Ganchion flung herself into your coffin and tried to seize you to her, crying out in her carline voice, but you would not come up to her; and they pulled her away.
As we drove along (what Charity was not in the procession was standing watching us like a parade) a storm broke over us and scattered leaves. It was the first full devastation of Autumn.
We stood around the grave and they let you down in it while Brother Ramsey sprinkled rose petals. It seemed he was murmuring, “sawdust to sawdust,” and that surely what was falling was sawdust from the planing mill. All around the graveyard there was the ruin of Summer, Summer’s wreck and plunder. Weeds were rusty with seed and the zinnias were crumbling. And then all the members of the families fell upon each other, embracing and kissing and wailing and sharing their separate and secret tragedies; and for a moment at the Charity Graveyard there was a reunion of blood and a membership of kin over your grave (the odor of lilies and carnations gave me a sensuous, exotic elation that I was ashamed of). There was a kind of meekness and the relief felt in truce. Some took a flower from your grave and fought others to keep it—it was like a battle of fiends over a holy prize; and Aunt Malley came up in a trance and said to Cousin Lottie, “What kin are we all to each other, anyway?”
But the deaf old Mother, wise and bitter and skeptic, did not fall to the graveyard trickery and stood off to herself, gazing at your grave.
There seemed to be some misery over in the world. Some atonement, some ransom was paid for all of us, for all our Sins. Now, in due time and in right season, what resurrection of what spirit would assure us of the meaning of this death, Folner?
As we turned to go away and leave you in the grave yard, I looked back and discovered a tall and sorrowful stranger standing alone by a crepemyrtle tree. It seemed he wanted to say something to me, that he was beckoning to me. But we got in our cars and drove away and he turned and watched us as we went away.
The next day there was a change in the whole world. There was a moon in the daytime like the pale, lashless lid of a drooping eye and it haunted the day. Then rain fell while the sun shone and the devil was beating his wife; birds flew in and over and away, as if bewildered (they knew), one of the hens crowed and a whirlwind got caught in the beantree and rattled the dry pods. I went out among the castorbeans and sat and heard the sad rain, like a faint weeping, dripping on the leaves.
Finally in the afternoon it seemed the whole earth died, dried up and faded and curled. Huge blood-green maple leaves drifted like lost wings in the wind. Hens moulted. Some amputation had happened in the world, some desperate surgery. The fantasy was finished; something crueler was beginning, hard and of agony. The winter was close and lay long and gray and leafless ahead. Something waited for me, now—a world of magic and witchcraft, the brute, haunted world of some nameless terrible beauty, whirling in the twilight glimmer of coming hope and hopelessness. (Who has not seen the gizzard-like birthmark on the luminous temple of the moon?)
Then as the day ended, in the terrifying sunset that was like the ends-of-the-world dusks I had dreaded so often, the rain fell golden in the distance and the golden rain fell over the sawmill, apotheosizing it, as if it had achieved some kind of victory.
You’ve been buried in Charity for a number of years, Follie, our Follie, and I am called back to the loft where your relics lie stored; and I am here among them rummaging for some answer. It is hard to be in the world and bone of your bone. Cry me out a name, which like a spangle cast out to me, I may carry out of this loft with me.
I come, bending low, into the loft. I had been here once before with Aunty to rummage for a picture of her mother, and when we found the picture it had one eye eaten out by some animal and looked hideous and staring and tormented.
Then I went again and again, with a heavy feeling of sin. I was looking for something within myself that might flower out in this warm, secret light, unfurl (I had in my mind the vermilion image of a paper Hallowe’en serpent that would unroll, splendid and quivering, when blown into) like a paper flower dropped in a bowl of water. I felt the excitement—the first I can remember—of discovery, like the feeling I had when I crept into forbidden books. (Eugenics was big and black and evil, hidden under the linens of the closet and there I first saw the picture of a woman with a window in her belly through which I could see a little, wound baby, all in a sac entwined by a mass of strings and cords.) I trembled in the loft.
Here in the loft, which is really your sepulehre, Folner, are many things of silence and dignity; and it seems that in them lie all the hope, all the future, in the riot of insects and rodents which are feeding on this storage of antiques.
There is a spinningwheel which spiders have mocked with glittering webs like doilies and lace valentines. There is an organ with a rat world in its insides, and rats’ feet sift over the strings with the faintest prism tinkle like the death-knell of the delicate. On a sugarcane pole in a corner are strung old dresses and coats and, crumpled in a corner, is a Ku Klux Klan hood like a caved-in ghost. The clothes hanging in the purple loftlight are shredded by claws and streaked by rain and drenched in light and burned through by ceaseless rays of sunlight and moonlight and starlight. They are ripped by teeth and gnawing (almost as if in some kind of vengeance) and the tiny punctures of the mouths of ants and moths, as if the wearing of life had left some sweet syrup on them. A gray, diaphanous veil hangs like a web and spun so fine by age that it seems a veil of light. Because these garments have been so long diffused with light and lights—through many washings and drenchings—their colors have faded and the lights have dyed them delicate pale Light colors.
In an eave is a whole mosque of dirtdobber domes and globed hives of bees and the blown gray papier-mâché bags of wasps. Curtains of gossamer hang trembling purple and luminous. In this wreckage the insects and creatures have made their artifice and their order: frail mouth-built or cilia-built structures, envelopes and membranes and spun-out or spat-out fragile architecture, phantom and fantastic and terrifying.
The faded pine walls wear Wear like a fabric, a garment of speared and cometed and darted and spiraled grain, and grain designs like those on the sole of a foot; and lacunae of lucent amber resin; and serrated or glabrous surfaces: a landscape of figures of grotesque naked men and women among pools and hummocks and flumes; and there are fantastic scrawlings and lewd phalliforms of grain. On one wall there is a terrible water-mark figure like the huge claw of an enormous bird grappling over a long dried pool of blood.
There is an old cowboy hat felted with fuzz and fine agglutinated dust.
A pale, watery green sea of Mason jars, and a pile of rubbish onions that had sprouted sickly lianas curling over each other and then withered to crumble are in a dark corner and near them is a croakersack of peanuts, slashed open by some hunger and spilled out like doubloons and now only shriveled husks. And there is a crock, cold to feel, and marbeled like an aged agate.
There stands a churn that has not turned for years.
And behold a group of dolls, limp and dignified, like ancestors sitting together; and some blueing bottles filled with gentian light; and a small tarnished silver key. Away in the farthest end of the loft a big rusted tusk of a plow curves out of the shadow.
The loot of the loft lies like treasure in some thief’s lair, and the thief is everywhere so powerfully present I can feel him gathering and fumbling and destroying. Yet all is so silent, except for a tinkling and occasional shiftings like the sound of a page turned in a book.
And then I find the two chests that belonged to you. On the outside is printed GAYETY SHOWS AND COMPANY. Inside I find out your whole secret.
Inside is a corroded violin whose bow has molded strings furred with raveling, like a rat of hair; some peeling gilded tap-shoes whose taps are thin from much dancing. And false faces, with tragic-gay bent down eyes, women’s wigs, tubes of make-
up grease, and spangles spilled over the clothes like dried fishscales. And there are fringed gypsy shawls, and scarves, crimson and jacinth and one green as a ragged peacock. I touch a scarf and it falls into air and light and seems to evanesce. And there is a yellow glove and here is a mandarin’s lavish emerald-mauve gown with sleeves hanging like pointed asses’ ears, with intricate work of golden braid laid tarnished over the hem.
And here is a crushed paper bird on a stick.
Sifted all among the treasures of the chests are letters and photographs of many beautiful played-out people, like lost cards, dealt and used for win or loss and cast away.
At the end of the loft room is an old dresser with a swung mirror. I go there. On the dresser is a pincushion made like a tomato, a mending box full of buttons, a cameo box of beads and cameos and bracelets and balls of faded yarn. Spiders and dust have claimed them all. Next to the dresser is an old ruptured and gutted chair.
“I give you this glass,” your voice whispers, “in which to see a vision of yourself, for this is why you’ve come. My breath is on the glass and you must wipe away my breath to see your own image.”
In the mirror I cannot see myself but only an image of dust. I brush it off—and then see my portrait there. For a moment I look like Folner! Within that cornered face, in the purple hollows and fosses of its umbrageous landscape, lie agonies like bruises; this face is thus bruised unreal. But age and time have blown their rheumy breath on the mirror and curdled it and it clouds again. Then I blow my own breath upon the mirror and wipe it clear for another instant. I seem old, I seem unused, as these loft things, in the capture of some thief. The mirror seems to say, “Dance! Swagger with a cane and sequins!”
I cry out, “Folner!” in the loft. But only the rustle of startled creatures and the faint swinging of webs respond.
(I think he ate some kind of bitterweed and suffered a change for the eating and sprang away into a marvelous haunted and haunting world and never could return—although they waited in Charity for him—nor wanted to. Until he was washed (as I am washed against this wall) dead—like uprooted coral weed by some violence only the sea knows and only the sea-depths suffer, upon the oil-rimed and sawdusted shingle of Charity—and was claimed and buried there. They were all looking for him, waiting and watching, and looking for some grass that might take them to him—Granny Ganchion, Berryben, Malley Ganchion, Aunty, Sue Emma—and even I. And I, having not waited but wandered for him (calling, “Draw me; I will follow!” but he murmured, “Whither I go you may not follow me.”), have come back here where I think I might find the magic he found among the bitterweeds and ate that liberated him and so myself be liberated into understanding and cruel authenticity.)
“Love in the cotton gin, my dear. And once, very early in the delicate watergreen shell of morning, in an old moored shellbarge on Green’s Bayou down around the Battlegrounds. We got tar on us.
“The C.C.C. Camp at Groveton didn’t help. Ah the East Texas woods in the fall, with flying red leaves like desires, and the smell of burning brush and that dangerous, voluptuous wind of a norther that stabbed the heart, so evil; like Spanish Fly on the soul… Do I shock you? Of course I say these things, which are absolutely true, to shock you, you are so good, Boy, you and Berryben are so damned sweet and good, such damned sweet kids.”
And you dazzled your opal cufflinks at your white wrists.
“Something cursed me. There was that melancholy always over me, brooding over me. Why? As far back as I can remember, lying on the pallet in the summer of the afternoons, there was the drone of the electric fan, like the drone of bees, and Mama going through the rooms in her slip. I felt frail and limp. It was just sorrow bred in me, bred in you too, you’ll see; we are the sons of grief at cricket. I had to stop it.
“I was wild for the world of a flashing eye and life castanetting round and stomping an insinuating foot. Sometimes in Charity I couldn’t stand it any longer and would go out in the henhouse and make up dreams and play like I was something grand and royal and march up and down with a poker for a cane, with only the chickens to watch me And then love myself and feel real again, a kind tremor from the world ran through me.
“Behold my talents: Started out in the Church with good Hattie Clegg, led Young People’s programs, gave the main speech, sang a solo, then a duet with some girl, then said the final Benediction—it was all my show. Went to Conferences at Lon Morris College, even signed up to be a missionary. I was just looking for some passionate cause in the world to give myself to (so are all of you, all of you)—can I help it if the Church petered out for me? Then I turned to music and the stage. At the high school I was in every play that was put on and I even wrote an original musical show for the Senior Night; and at Grace Methodist Church I was always directing plays, sang in the choir, sang solos, did impersonations on programs in Fellowship Hall, played the piano by ear, anything that was make-believe. To make me forget that cisternwheel turning and turning and that old shuttered house and the family Sundays on the front porch.
“O the drone of the flies and the bees droning in the zinnias like a sound blown by a child on a comb and a piece of tissue-paper; and the melancholy working of the wind in the trees and a whole dead town gleaming out before us in a false serenity under the burning sun of a fleecy summer Sunday sky with a piece of a moon in it, and nothing happening.
“When the circus came to Bailey’s Pasture, I knew this was my chance. Remember how you and I and Aunt Malley went and what we saw and did, the yellow-skinned grinning freaks in their stalls with the sawdust floor, twisted like worms the freaks grinned and ground in the sawdust; and the screams of the animals in the menagerie and the sad, exciting music of the calliope? I bought you a paper bird on a stick and here it is, crushed in this loft, to try to tell you something, to try to tell you, even then, that you were lost in Charity and that you had to get away, like me, chiming Charity Cock, to turn in the wind towards the wind‘s four corners, steeple-cock, welded to Charity church-tops, chanting in the wind. Remember when I lifted you up on that big elephant, you little scared thing perched on that enormous back, you shook and cried and got so excited you almost fainted and Aunt Malley had to run to buy some lemonade and throw it in your face. We were going through the world in Bailey‘s Pasture that night, my own world, and I wanted to tell you then that I would never see you again and that the World was like this circus, stall and dazzling Fairies Wheel, and lights and tights, whirling and gleaming and screaming and twisting on a sawdust floor. We stood and watched the birdman clawing his scaly horned hands into the sawdust. Then I took you and Malley home and slipped away again, back to the circus; and met a trapeze man with thighs in black tights; and stayed and went away with the circus early that next morning. As we rolled away in our gay wagons, the last thing I saw of the house where you lay sleeping was the wheel turning over it, and the only one in that whole house that I cried for was you, Boy O Boy.
“In San Antonio I left the circus and took tap dancing at Hallie Beth Stevens’ Studio of the Dance, sang out in front of a chorus of tapping girls, had a cane and a hat, and strutted singing, ‘You’ve Got Me in the Palm of Your Hand’—not before chickens in a Charity henhouse but a real clapping audience.
“The rest I needn’t tell you. Bailey’s Pasture was my revelation.
“They treated me as though I was a freak in Charity, and I know it was just jealousy and envy. They blamed it on my mother, your Granny Ganchion, because she dressed me like a girl when I was little and called me ‘Follie.’ But it was more than that. Right away I learned what I was and went on like that, what I was, and used myself for that, made no bones about it—and can’t say the same for most of the rest of Charity who don’t know who they are. What matters if it got me death?
“But if you’re going to start calling names, I can tell you a few things about Brother Ramsey in the church, who knew me all my life and even preached my funeral sermon, and who taught me a lot of what I know. Everything in this world
is not black and white, as little Charity thinks; there are shades in between. And I can tell some dirt on Jim Lucas and Mimi Day Calkins—sitting there in the Pastime Club with her finger in his fly—and Floydell Lucas, his wife, bent over a cradle at home singing a lullaby—and a lot of other things. (We are all broken over the cradle, Boy.) Nobody’s hands are clean in Charity. But let Charity flick its old toad’s tongue after the gay green and golden summer files—and let them croak away that same old croaking tune. They don’t want anybody to be anything that they can’t understand and give a name to. They had to have some ready label to lick and stick on you; and when they couldn’t figure me out because I wanted different things from what they in Charity wanted, they started bullying me and torturing me. They were all really afraid of me—and most of them envied me, really envied me.
“The whine and shriek of the planing mill was always in my head, as though they were dressing ship-lap in my brain. And that hard little mouth of hunger pressing hot against my soul. To be fed! Who could feed it in Charity? Oh Charity, I would thou wert cold or hot; but because thou art lukewarm I will spew thee out!
“I take along some memories. The sight of the black watertower squatting like a fat-bellied reptile over Charity eggs; and the old house smelling of O-Cedar Oil; that old yard of guineas and cackling hens and the manure of cows. But Boy, we had a time of it, didn’t we? You little frightened thing, always frightened. On one Easter Sunday I taught you a secret. We rolled away some stone, remember?”
“And you don’t know how hard I prayed in the barn in the sunsets I thought were the burning end of the world, Follie. You made me feel so full of sin that I never mentioned your name to anybody; and when once and a while they would say your name I would tremble and think they knew. When the Riverbottom Nigras came to town to tell that they had seen a Haint walking in the sloughs of the riverbottoms I knew it was you come back and at night I lay and watched, trembling on the wall, the shadow of the paper bird made by the firelight, and I thought I heard its annunciation: Come away; and I had nightmares of a haunted bird at night, and never left the kitchen all day, sitting trembling by the woodstove. I thought I heard you at the windows, scratching; and once I am sure I saw you sitting in the Beantree with the three black hens that lived up there. When the preacher spoke about Sin it always had your face. I have just found your real face, Follie my Follie.”
The House of Breath Page 10