“Oh Boy, I had to have some drama in a life. I had a rhapsody in me. But it devoured me. I was so afraid of what I found out that I began to run and run from it until I melted down into this death. Can you learn anything from this? Tell it—for me; someone has to tell it.
“Somewhere beyond all this muck and dreck there lies a pasture of serenity and I will find it. I am on my way. Hang a wreath on the door of this fallen house for me. How did I die? I invited Death. Because I was so very weary. The rest is a secret never to be told (see seven crows). Leave us alone and we will destroy ourselves in the end, but we will leave undestroyed our other selves to breathe the bridges of breath between our ruined and isolate islands.
“I am the Ur-Follie of many derivations of your time. Find me on walls, most prophetically adumbrated; in shadows of firelight; bursting from clocks; turning on steeples. And I am the beast-muzzled Prince, black-lipped and riverlapping, begging the miracle. Give, and change the Beast. Watch.”
“I watch and watch and watch, Follie, and I will build a bridge between these ruined islands; then blow the bridge of breath away. But the islands will remain forever like stone islands in a still and frozen sea. For we are only breath to blow and bridge eternal ruins while we breathe, until we are blown away.”
XI
OPEN the cellar door (that swings on hinges of web) and cry down, “Granny Ganchion!”—and rouse the worm called Old Fuzz that the children were always afraid of.
Now Granny Ganchion, when you went down in the rootcellar so often I know what happened down here where you sat among all your preserves—the figs and apricots and pears like jewels shining in the Mason jars, shaped like the parts of love. I know you fondled and counted that string of rubyred beads like a rosary.
Here in the cellar, once, when I came down for chowchow, sent by Aunty and trembling to see Old Fuzz, I first discovered where you were when I missed you in the house. I stood at the little cellar door and watched you who couldn’t hear me, sitting dressed in a yellow widebrimmed hat with boafeathers round it. I heard, rumbling in the heavens of your world overhead, while you sat down in your Purgatory praying yourself through your beads free of it and into a Paradise of Fruit, the thunder of all their feet in their coming and going, so that their lives must have seemed to you below them only a walking or a rocking; and I know now as you heard their footsteps you named them over, “There’s Christy, I can tell the way he walks, he’s lookin for me, always tryin to find me; there rocks Malley over me in her rocker by the window, she is rockin across my skull. Going and comin, backwards and forwards, from gallry to breezeway, they are all walkin and rockin over me and I bend still beneath them here like their dark root in the Charity earth.”
All your desires were preserved in Mason jars. And then when you saw the light from the cellar door and me standing in it (like what angel come in light through your door?) you jumped and made your uck uck sounds and then murmured, “Boy! Boy!” as though I was a lover called to you by your wishing for him and you were waiting, ready for him. And then I closed the door. They said I was pale when I came back without the chowchow and that it was because I had seen Old Fuzz in the cellar, and laughed and ate without it.
But what I saw was the truth of you, Granny Ganchion, that I know now and now give back to you in this cellar, and leave it here. I know you sat down here with Old Fuzz, that I always imagined to be like some great green-warted worm coiled down here, and that he said to you, “Hannah Ganchion, you got nothin in the world but a few hundred jars of rotten preserves and an old pair of rubyred beads. The rest is silence and no love and no brightness anywhere, only a house full of silent folks makin faces at you. And an old dead husband, Gentry Ganchion, that used to say to you, ‘All right, Hannah, then I swear to God I’ll go downtown to the City Hotel!’” (and the time I heard the whores in the city jail, blessed damozels leaning their heads out the golden windows singing, “Bless them all, bless them all, the long and the short and the tall”) “and him sneakin over to niggertown right from your own bed at midnight, while ever month there was a nigger tarred and feathered and beaten up on Rob Hill because he’d raped an East Texis white woman” (they said you weren’t a man in East Texas until you’d had a nigger woman); “and you just finally drove him away and he went to St. Louis and died, alone, in a Convalescent Home.”
And you protested to Old Fuzz that you had Christy and that you had had Folner and that you had had a time in your own time. And then the worm flashed and said, “That’s a lie and a fairy tale! You know it and the preserves know it and the rubyred beads know it. You know Folner’s done strange things like going away with a show and everyone says there was something wrong with him—the time he came home in patent leather shoes and even had a permanent wave in his blonde hair proved it. And what happened around Charity and the commotion he caused among the young boys, and everyone sayin he acted just like a girl—and at the depot when they took his used-up, burnt-out body off the train, people of Charity saw box after box of costumes with spangles and rhinestones and boafeathers and said, lookin in, ‘Can this be all that’s left of Folner Ganchion to come back from San Antone: spangles and rhinestones and boafeathers?’”
But you said, “Them was all lies in a little town. Cause they come home, Christy come home and Follie come home…. O my sons and daughters…! Wrenched screamin out of me and I couldn’t even hear their screams…!
“Worm! Where did I come from, who was I… I cain’t remember…”
“You was born and raised in Alabama, ran with a flock of children through the pastures like geese; and your papa was a sea captain besides ownin about a dozen Negroes that worked his cottonfields….”
“I remember, I remember… Worm! How did I ever meet Gentry Ganchion, that ole cuss that finally went off to Saint Louis and died there? Tell me…”
“He wasn’t the first you met, nor the last. Tell yusself. That’s why you come down here. Tell yusself.”
“Deafness is hearin just a person’s own voice; who’s deaf to their own voice? But it seems like I’m talkin to somebody hearin me. Somebody settin someplace thinkin of all their life… What does that mean? Thinkin how their life, now that it is near the end of their life, and all lives, uz like some book read, with some plot and story to it, and things happenin in it to make a long and unbelievable story—would anybody ever believe it if I told it?—and how now they knew what their life as a story had been, just in one moment settin somewhere in a moment of clearin they see it clear and what was all in it, all along the line. So that they could tell it, after that—to who? To theirselves is enough—like a made-up story, or sing it out like somebody in a Christmas cantata, comin in suddenly where there are people gathered round and singin out the long long story of what had happened to them in their experience. And that this was it: how a person could come to them (that was Vester Langley) and in a orchard (this was Hare’s orchard) under flowers on boughs and under petals of broken flowers on the spring grass, and where there was danger of bein caught, and how for the first time in their lives they were touched and give up and let it happen. And then—uck uck— how a warmth like a ray of sun slipped in them, havin no shape or weight it seemed: quiverin, brilliant, feelin like a golden minnow or a goldfish and felt to them like the feel of a minnow slippin through the hand; and then it lept and jerked and jackknifed like a leapin fish. And how, lyin under what would be in the summer fruit hangin on the fruittrees, they could, then, they learnt in that orchard, be sworded by a sword of warmth, be bladed by some blade, and set aglow like a Fourth a July night by this.
“And then how they could go along (this was still Vester) and this happen here and that happen there, making things worst or making things better, and in the orchard the pears hung low and heavy and they touched them and loved them in their hands and then how they laid under the peartrees with the pears in their faces.
“Oh there could be the pears that I put up, brought by by Mr. Hare. And those plums, they could be the blossoms
I putt in my hair and that I laid under and had fallin on my face (before it slid down like icin on a cake into this fallen face), that I laid on. Mind as well see that things come round to an end if you wait long enough. Look look at the fruit!” (I see the fruit in their jars like ruined aquariums with their corpses of fishes: rhubarb, indigo plums, green cherries, and once golden apricots; the wizened sapless figs.)
“And then how at the end a summer Vester went off to the North and I was left alone. And how I waited and waited until another one came, and this was Jeff Cranberry and how I married him and how we went along, not too good, until he was shot in the buggy with me settin by him. I had a baby comin and that was Lauralee. Then the whole town made a fuss over me because I was a widow and a pretty one, and one who made a fuss was Gentry Ganchion and we married. Had Malley right away. Then nothin but sawmills forever after, I married sawdust. Then we come to Texis to the Charity Sawmill. The noon whistle and Gentry comin home for dinner. But in some year, when it twas I don’t know now, the Carnival come, and I spun a wheel and he knocked niggerbabies down to win these beads—he wanted to brush the sawdust that we had laid in off my skirt but I said let it be you’ll never brush that sawdust off.
“Then Christy come. When Christy was made in me his maker made him in sorrow and tears in a wet tent and on sawdust, and we cried together; O Lord that face! Bobblin and swimmin over me, that face before my face starin down on my face pressin against my face, with such sadness in it, eyes closed, eyes wild as storm moons, teeth grittin and mouth hot and pantin—over my face this face, ghost-faced, until it closed down upon me and fitted upon me like a mask and our faces melted into each other, his tongue slippin into my mouth, ready mouth, and our faces meltin into each other… Then all down the line and length of us we fitted and melted and mixed, swellin into hollow, knowin we uz made for this, like tongue n groove…. And I rocked him in the cradle of myself…
“He was divin, divin, down down—and risin—and fallin—and then when we touched everwhere, and locked tight and rocked like one person so that we felt like one tiny cog, oiled, turnin smoothly and without one sound the whole, huge cisternwheel of the human race—it happened up inside us, and we cried; and broke apart; and saw through the splits in the tent the burstin flashes of the whirlimagig and heard again the music of the hobbyhorses like a frenchharp.
“And then we went out and threw baseballs at niggerbabies and he won me this pair of beads.
“But when Follie was made, Gentry laughed (he always laughed) and bleated like a wild goat. How I despised that goatlaugh; and finally I couldn’t hear it and I thanked the Lord I’uz deaf.
“O I’ve held, bent over in me, like in some sorrow, the folded childrun in me; I’ve held in me, like a capsule, a little world, the germ of all that can happen to anybody, carried little worlds round in me round as a globe, and I thrust worlds out into the world. I’ve held these breaths breathed into me, and the man that touched these breaths and brought em up from the cellar of my woom out of me was Dr. Currie Monette. And I know what happened when he touched the breath in me and brought it up from me, this breath was brought up in joy and I shuddered and sank away into my sleep.
“I have seen Roma the cow come home from the pasture over the rayroad tracks and through the gate, home to the fold. Her milk was the milk of bitterweeds and through my breasts (like dog’s ears now) and through the breasts of my daughters Malley and Lauralee the bittermilk was passed on to childrun of this house. I’ve seen the folks of this house come back from places they’d gone to, while I set here through the years, Christy from his Merchant Marines and Follie in a casket. I’ve seen the river come over the pasture, too….
“All I need do is touch a bead—and although I cain’t feel joy now I can sure remember what it felt like to feel joy when I could feel it. Oh I’ve had my life in my time and out of it, such a fertilized field, I’ve bred my childrun of Joy. Now the caterpillar is on the leaf, the mildew upon the stalk and the worm is in the bud. When you get old and everthing goes from you and all your childrun go from you, you are shut off from everthing, you have only Ole Fuzz that you used to scare all the childrun with left that scares you now, that still lives on in the delapidated, cold and decrepid nest. The life of all olefolks is just a shambles of the nest where the moulty old worm sets, in a pest of all the lice of memry—built of birds’ spit and spiders’ hair and ole women’s gray hairs—the nest is withered and fallin away. We mothers kicked a crooked cradle, and it rocks forever and ever like a dry nest in a leafless dead tree.
“But O we cure ourselves, we do it with ourselves and by ourselves, we are our own cure and nobody else. We’re sick and then get well again and then are sick all over. Sometimes I think women are nothin but woomtumors and blood and afterbirth; but they get well and clean again and then they take on all their sickness through more joy: in the sickness lies the cure.
“Ole Fuzz, you and I have loved this souring fruit—your scales are Follie’s spangles, your warts are my goiter; wens, chancres and shale cover your body. Sometimes I believe you breathed out this house from your dragon nostrils. Sometimes I think you are the worm in that fruit, that you are the caterpillar on the leaf. Ole Fuzz, this house blown down into these ruins is built of feathers and shells and webs and spangles and beads; and sometimes I think that if you’d blow hard you could blow it all away, and that after a minute’s noise of something soundin like the breeze in a prismcurtain, there’d be no more house and jest silence forevermore.
“This house was putt together from the inside like Christy’s ship in the bottle and like the sea in Swimma’s seashell—something put us all inside it, like that haunted something that someway putt the breath of the sea in the shell or our own breath into us. Seems like I’ve got the memry of the whole race of people in me—something returned to everthing; something always comes back…wait for the comin back; the years go and the years come back and it never ends, with us all in all of them, going on as everthing that ever was, changin one into another, mothers and sons. I may be deaf, Ole Fuzz, but I know this; and I can hear a bucket splashed in the well and I can hear the grindin of the cisternwheel and I know I’ll carry the whine of the planin mill inside my head until I die, and probly foreverafter….
“Now tell me worm, where did I come from, cain’t remember…”
“Tell yusself….”
“I touch the beads for Charity….”
XII
WHAT WAS this man with a long houndface and a glistening silver eye who tacked this map to the kitchen wall and gazed and gazed at it? (How old and worn the world looks now! From too much gazing Christy faded the world like too much light on colors; he has taken the luster into himself and looked the luster into me, stamped it upon my skull so that my skull became a globe of the world.) His image is teardrops of birds’ blood speckled on his denimed thigh, a waist girdled by a wreath of small dead birds, an axe-wound’s scar secret on my thigh. And about his image there resounds an echo of frenchharp music and of clashing beaks of horn.
Christy was big and had dark wrong blood and a glistening beard, the bones in his russet Indian cheeks were thick and arched high and they curved round the deep eye-cavities where two great silver eyes shaped like bird’s eggs were set in deep—half-closed eyes furred round by grilled lashes that laced together and locked over his eyes.
He was a hunting man; and hunted; and his mother Granny Ganchion was a shaggy old falcon that had caught him like a surrendered bird and held him close to her, home; as though he had been hunted in his own hunting, the hunter hunted; and captured: by trap or talon; or treed; or set or pointed at and stalked in his own secret woods and brought home, driven towards stall and what forage, at nightfall, to her, the hunter’s huntress. He had had one friend before me, he said, and that was his mother (O cries into a deaf world!) who could not hear him, only read off his lips his passion that lay so fair and lovely, trembling on his full wiener-colored lips. He had just talked so long into deafness that
he came to judge the whole world deaf, and so he no longer said anything much (could or would he be heard?). It was what he didn’t say that said what he said (I think I know now what he didn’t say). He became a man of gestures: shrugging his humped shoulders under his workshirt like a big bag carried there; waving his long scarecrow arms with raveled strips of fingers, long-nailed and hanging down at the end of his arms like the raveling out of arms (the isinglass nails shaped like oval shells were bent over sharp and tough at the ends as roosters’ spurs are); throwing his great dark head from side to side or tossing it up and down in horse movements; and, in his despairs, heaving up in the air the whole huge, buoyant, winged upper portion of his body, arms and bladed torso, like enormous agitating wings of a huge and sinewed man-angel.
Christy made everything seem an evil secret—the songs he sang to his guitar: “Write me a letter, send it by mail; send it in care of Birmingham Jail…,” and he would be in jail singing this song because he had done something wrong in the woods or with the Mexicans. He had a circumcision-like scar, pink and folded, on his brown neck over which he would gently rub his fingers and tell me how it was a knifecut because of love. When Christy yodeled, flashing his silver eye, “You get a line, I’ll get a pole; we’ll go fishin in a crawdad hole, Ba-abe,” he was telling me long, long stories of woods-meetings. He would go off hunting (in Folner’s same woods), leaving me behind and wondering (“One day when you’re old enough I’ll take you huntin with me, we’ll go huntin, Boy”) and then come back to us as though he had been in some sorrow in the woods, with birds’ blood on him and a bouquet of small, wilted doves hanging from his waist over his thigh, or a wreath of shot creatures: small birds with rainbowed necks, a squirrel with a broken mouth of agony. Then he would come to me and speak, for he had found words, “Listen Boy, listen; come out to the woodshed with me quick and let me show you something, come with me, quick; by Gum I’ve got something…”
The House of Breath Page 11