Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  A strange thing for the most important man in Cheesehill to say, but I know what he means. “Don’t cry, Father,” I say kindly, “Someday one of your inventions will work.”

  He raises the ruler again.

  Sometimes I looked at myself in the maculated mirror above my mother’s dressing table and marveled at my ordinary looks, for my mouth felt bigger, if possible, than the head it was set in, and as violently resistant to socialization as a kraken, strapped to my face in place of a mouth and enjoined to speak.

  That there was something of pride in my feelings toward this monstrosity, I did not then recognize. Indeed, for a long time I did earnestly try to master my unruly speech, and in sentimental moments the fantasy rose up before me of the loving family life to which I would matriculate once I had solved my little problem: the parlor, of an evening—myself, reading aloud with superior enunciation and eloquent gestures—my parents’ faces bright with candlelight and pride! But increasingly I believed it to be impossible, and knew my father for a brute for punishing me for something I could not help. And a brute could not figure in those fantasies of mine. It had been a long time since I had seen anything like tenderness in even the way he treated my mother; so those dream candles guttered and went out.

  I often loitered near my father’s study as he made his experiments, hopeful that something would go wrong, and once, at least, this paid great dividends. The occasion was the arrival of the Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Machine previously mentioned, which promised to Tune the Entire Organism, Restoring Balance and Harmony to Disordered Nerves, and Sending Vitality Coursing Through the Body. I watched through the door as, moving with deliberation, he unbuttoned his cuffs and collar, took off his shirt and folded it and set it aside, then his undershirt. He had a patch of bear-black hair between naked, womanly breasts. I do not recall that I had ever seen them before. He took hold of one wire and after hesitating a moment fastened the claw-grip at its end to one nipple. He connected the other wire to the other nipple. It comes to me now, as it did not then, that this was a curious site to choose and that perhaps he was engaged in something other than scientific inquiry or medical treatment. I have heard that there are those who take erotic pleasure in pain, their own or others’, but I know nothing of such perversions of sensuality—and little enough, to be candid, of its orthodox course—so shall leave further speculation to those better informed.

  As I edged a little farther into the room, my father took up the pamphlet and consulted it again, holding it in both hands. Then he reached out slowly and switched on the Magneto-Electric Machine. A strange expression came over his face and he jerked about, dropping the pamphlet and batting at the wires, but they did not come loose; finally he seized hold of one wire and with a powerful yank pulled it quite free of the machine, which spat cobalt zips of light and then went dead. He hunched over, breath coming in tearless sobs, then carefully parted the jaws of the dangling wire to detach it from his nipple. The other still connected him to the dead machine. Suddenly he perceived me watching him. He stared at me for a moment, the wire hanging from his hand, then struck at me with it.

  Many things then happened at once. I sprang back, receiving the protruding corner of a credenza in the kidneys. The wire, missing its target, flexed wildly, and its tip caught him in one nostril and scored a line from there down to his lower lip. His sudden movement threw his weight against the wire that was still affixed to his nipple and ripped it free, so that he cursed and clapped both hands to his breast; the first wire, borne thoughtlessly along, flexed again and struck him, though this time with less force, on the forehead. I leaned back against the credenza as if I were quite comfortable there, and made myself laugh, though my side hurt very much. Blood was coming from both his nipple and his lip, and his pale stomach was jumping up and down with his breath.

  “Monster! Banshee!”

  “It is not my fault, Father,” I said. “Perhaps the machine was on an incorrect setting. Why don’t you try it again?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He lunged at me and got me by the ear, twisting it as he pulled me against him, until I cried out. “I’ll let go if you can say, ‘Please, Papa, pick me a peck of pickled peppers.’” My face was against his sweating side; he smelled sour.

  I could not say it, as he knew very well.

  Now that he had the best of me he seemed to swell; his stomach broadened, the worm of blood that had started wriggling down it froze as if alarmed. “You would like to curse me, wouldn’t you? But you just can’t find the words!” He laughed loudly, his rage almost forgotten in enjoyment of my shame.

  Let us bring down the curtain on this sorry scene—it can go nowhere good. Suffice it to say that I could never witness his misfortune without ultimately suffering a greater one.

  It is probably not possible to feel completely innocent when one is always being punished, so I supposed myself to be a fairly wicked character, and while I was sometimes sorry for it, I felt myself a hopeless case, and gave in to a life of sin and stuttering. Indeed, my father always punished me a little more than I thought my transgressions were worth, so I felt that I had paid in advance for any crimes I might wish to commit, and would be improvident not to commit them. By, for instance, watching my parents through a crack in their bedroom ceiling that I had widened with a nail file, an often boring vigil enlivened by the certainty that my father would be incensed at the illicit advantage it gave me to possess a knowledge that he did not know I had. Or hiding a lump of ambergris that he had acquired at great expense in the back of a kitchen drawer, where it reposed for many years, imbuing the vicinity with a mysterious fragrance. Or tampering with the wiring of a new gadget. Thus I balanced my books. If after a particularly criminal act I thought I might have overdrawn my account, I got an uneasy feeling, and sometimes even goaded my father to punish me again, on the rare occasions that he lacked reasons of his own to do so. At this I became very adept, playing on my father’s rage as other, happier daughters might on the spinet, rousing and calming it in orderly arpeggios, until I was ready to release it. The feeling of superiority and control that this gave me was worth the pain of a beating to me, and the system worked to my satisfaction until I stupidly succumbed to the temptation to show him that I did not care much about the kind of pain he dealt me. Then he sought other ways to punish me, and found them.

  My first rabbits were not really mine but my father’s, intended for the table. When he slaughtered them I grieved but little, since through all the moments of our acquaintance a spectral gravy boat had bobbed, reminding me of their destination. But these rabbits got more rabbits before they died, and I petitioned my father for the raising of them. His enthusiasm for rabbit-breeding having waned, he agreed.

  Do not care excessively for anything, not even your own self, and you will be invulnerable. So I thought and so I sought to conduct myself. I made a grim game of hiding away my favorites, but when they were discovered, and delivered to our hired man Lucius, who killed and skinned them, I taught myself to watch. In this way I schooled myself in hardness and thought myself a pretty cool customer. But then came Hopsalot, the weapon I put into my father’s hands. He did not look like a weapon, he was fat, furry, and indolent, with floppy ears, but I loved him, though I tried not to show it.

  That I had failed I learned on the occasion of a piece of petty mischief. My father had arranged his collection of dessert spoons in order by their year of issue, one of the rare enterprises that he carried through to completion. I had carefully rearranged them. Not having any very high opinion of his discernment, I imagined that he would never notice—the joke was to be a private one—and pictured him taking out his case and polishing each spoon before putting it back in its slot, his lips bunched up with pleasure, while I savored a different pleasure of my own. But my sabotage was discovered after all, and my father confronted me. Aware of the magnitude of my crime, I stammered so badly that I could not answer him, a circumstance that invariably infur
iated him. He rushed out of the house and to the shed—there were the hutches; took up his knife from the shelf (I was clinging to his arm now, and groaning in an uninflected monotone, for I could not discover any words in myself, such was my distress); opened the hutch and took out Hopsalot, who hung in his hand as tame, comfortable, and soft as an old hat.

  “D-d-d—”

  He raised his brows, cocking his head in mock solicitude, and I felt his anger spoil into malice. “Oh, sorry—did you have something to say?” His voice was roguish, kittenish, grotesquely lilting.

  A bulb of pressure rose in my throat, forcing my glottal folds, but only a huff of breath escaped before they closed with an audible click. A muscle on the side of his mouth twitched. My mouth shaped the word don’t, but no breath came to fill it.

  To think of it, even now, my skull roars like a blast furnace. Didn’t happen, didn’t happen, no no no no no no no! Over and over I speak words ablaze with righteousness. Over and over Hopsalot spills new-smelted from the flames: sleek, shining, whole. But that ingot is fairy metal, it melts. Probably there was nothing I could have said to avert what was coming, but I will never know. Silver-tongued Demosthenes did not rise again in me. I stood there, my fingers plucking at my father’s arm, and choked on my assassin silence.

  My father regarded me with smiling contempt. “Did you wish to raise an objection? No? Nothing to say? My mistake!” He flipped Hopsalot upside down and waggled the blade violently around in his mouth. “We cut the mouth veins so as to drain the body of blood,” he said in a neutral tone (barely audible under the terrible screaming, as if addressing nobody, or his own conscience). He ran a wire a few turns around the kicking feet, one of which got loose and broke, I hoped, his nose—then, cursing, strung him up from the roof beam while I kicked him as hard as I could in his shins, Hopsalot jerking, twisting, screaming, and flicking drops of blood all over my father and myself that were indistinguishable from the blood streaming now from my father’s nose as well.

  Language is a terrible, cold thing, I think. One may recount an event, calmly selecting the most suitable words, that to remember without benefit of ink is almost beyond bearing. We accept the counterfeit and are thankful, for it spares us the awful weight of our lives.

  My father thrust me from him and, jamming his finger crosswise under his up-tilted nose, from which black-cherry blood was flowing, strode out of the shed. He left me pretty well frantic, leaping up to catch at the roof beam, though I was too short. I wasted a moment or two in this pointless activity before I thought to pile up the hutches and though I put my foot through one of them, to the stupid consternation of young Gundred, Countess of Furry, I did then manage to reach the beam and, weeping, unwind the wire that bound Hopsalot, paying no mind to his claws raking my cheeks. But when I bore him down to the heap of straw where the escaped but unmoved Gundred, against whom I conceived an immediate dislike, was hopefully sniffing (for concealed carrots, perhaps), he lay listless on his side, paws twitching a little, blood rouging his muzzle, and died.

  “Oh, please—don’t go—don’t leave me—” is what I tried to say, and more to this effect, but it came out very broken under the press of my emotion. Indeed I had possibly never stuttered so violently.

  This is how I made the first of my great discoveries, which I therefore owe to my father’s cruelty. You can read about it elsewhere. The result was that I brought him back, I mean Hopsalot. Alas, I brought him back, not to healthy indifferent life, but to that moment in which he lay dying, in pain, terror, and incomprehension, perhaps not even trusting, now, my own hands, since they had taught him a lie, that he was safe. I kept him dying for hours, or so it felt, and then in hot, banging shame for my cruelty I shut up and let him be. Be dead. Die.

  Gundred took belated fright and fled. I believe that she accounts for the great number of feeble-minded rabbits that presently inhabit Cheesehill and regularly fling themselves under one’s wheels.

  I rose from the soft mound that had been Hopsalot—the pluperfect was making its fitness felt—and went meditatively into the house, repeatedly spreading and unspreading my fingers to feel the blood that was drying on the webbing between them stick and unstick. My father was languid on the divan in a smoking jacket, a healthy flush in his cheeks, a fine crust of black rimming his nostrils, poring over a pamphlet and mumbling, “Deranged condition of the whole system . . . innervated . . . dyspepsia. Beef tea?” Without looking up, he added in the same tone of voice, “Where have you been?”

  I could not call my mouth back from wherever it had been. “Sh-sh-sh . . .”

  He swung his feet to the floor and swatted the pamphlet down onto the cushion beside him, which bounced a little. “Damn it,” he ejaculated lazily, “you will regulate your speech!”

  I gazed dumbly at him, my fingers spreading and unspreading.

  “You are my creature,” he said. His tone was sonorous, he seemed to taste his words; I perceived that he was calling on his elocutionary skills. “My qualities appear in you, although warped and weakened by the deleterious influence of your mother’s line. I will not allow that minuscule portion of myself that survives in you to appear before the world with disordered speech and—” he sat back, perceiving only now that my dress was fouled with blood and rabbit fur “—appearance.” His tone was disbelieving. “Why, in some vitiated fashion, you express me! You bear my signature, although the text is corrupted. The fault for that is mine, and I accept it, but I cannot accept that even in dilute form my gifts are not equal to or superior to those of a lesser man’s child, and you will make yourself the mistress of my legacy, however diminished. Come here.” He smiled grotesquely, patting a cushion. “Let us hear you say, ‘I will regulate my speech and impose harmony on my disordered senses.’”

  I took a few steps toward him and attempted to force the air between the commissures of my lips. Only a grinding sound ensued, like that of a motor failing to start.

  His face twisted in a grotesque imitation of kindness, though the time for kindness, I thought, was past. He had perhaps forgotten what reason he had lately given me for resentment; or I was wrong and he had never understood in the first place what my rabbits were to me. “Shall we try again? ‘I will regulate . . .’”

  “Grr-grr-grr.”

  The suppressed impatience roared back into view. “Are you being deliberately obtuse? This is the nineteenth century!” He leaned forward, employing the Horizontal Oblique gesture, Fig. 28, A Practical Manual of Evolution. “When industry and the applied sciences break mighty rivers and the power of the lightning bolt to the harness, shall one little girl’s tongue idle in a state of nature, as lawless as a catamount? I say nay! We squeeze lemons until they express their juices, and make no doubt of it, Sybil Joines—” he caught my shoulder in a pincer-like grip, forgetting oratory “—I will juice you.”

  I turned my face away. I pressed my hand to my thigh. I moved my hand and felt that my dress was stuck to it.

  How real I was, and solid as a ham. It is distasteful to look back on it, now that I am scarcely here at all. Now that I am little more than a corset through which an interesting wind blows, and the other world is more real to me than this one.

  My father had a pedagogical theory (original to him, as far as I know) of the proper sequence of childhood attainments, from the diaper right on up to higher mathematics. Every art was erected on the foundation of the last; each had its numbered place, and although he periodically revised the list, promoting, say, the study of counterpoint from #164 to #158, while demoting the trimming of bonnets from #174 to #193, the spoken word (#13) invariably preceded the written (#37), and as we know, I stuttered. So there I stuck, at the first landing.

  Thus it was with the fearful, forbidden relish of an Eve (whose attainments, I noted, would have ranked her in the low teens) that, one afternoon, when he was at the factory, I crept into my father’s study, abstracted a book from a low shelf, took it into a corner where a little warm, dust-s
pangled sunlight fell sidelong between curtain and wall, and seated myself in that bright angled stripe, which etched with crisp shadows the blind-stamped decoration (oak leaves, an acorn) on the front of the object in my lap. Sliding between my thighs, the book presented to me its fore-edge, which was smooth and gilt, and I ran my finger down the golden channel between the boards, consciously dawdling. I had conceived a sort of dread of books, which had supplied my father with so many notions disconcerting to the tranquility of our home, and yet I was determined to make their acquaintance. It seemed to me that if I piled up enough books I might mount high enough that I could leave #13 for a more auspicious time, or forever. At last I parted the willing pages and stared at their Byzantine ornamentation, willing it to become words.

  Those peculiar entities they called letters frightened me a little. Nothing in the groans and hoots of speech suggested to me that it was made up of such articles. I might have imagined myself the victim of a fanciful hoax, had my father possessed any sense of whimsy or shown the least interest in my belief one way or the other. Spurred and tufted like flies’ feet, the printed words seemed glossy but dry, chitinous also as a fly; the round counters were globular, oversized eyes that were watching me knowingly; like flies the words kept deceptively still, but appeared primed for flight, and when I closed the book I heard coming from it the sound a fly makes against a window in another room, a quiet, sad, monotonous frenzy. From other, larger books in the glazed bookcase came the dull underwater rattle of crustacean claws. If speech was made of such spiky characters it did not surprise me that they got caught in my throat and tangled up in one another. The marvel was to see them in such quiet and orderly ranks upon the plot of the page. One thought of cemeteries. Perhaps it was their spirits that rose, silent and vaporous, to the reader’s mind. The reader was then God, bent avidly over the charnel ground, inhaling souls.

  You will perceive that I was confused, and not only theologically. My mind teemed with likenings. I could not even decide whether the printed word was quick or dead. Now, accepting that it is both quick and dead, like ghosts, I can barely understand my perplexity, but I remember it. With equal vibrancy do I remember the nap of the curtains against the side of my face, and the brandy sheen of the fine hairs on my lawlessly exposed shins, and the dark room whose heavy chairs and desks and secretaries, inkstands, ledgers, and paperweights, galvanometers and centrifuges, coils of copper wire, retorts and beakers all kindly turned their backs to me, and the page staining with brightness the space around it, and how I would shuffle sideways on my haunches without lifting my eyes from the page when a chill along one thigh told me that the sun had moved. Time, syrup-slow. My father’s absence, that had made it so. The absence of everyone, except the distant authors whose intentions somehow infused the cryptic signs before me. Infused also the green and violet specters that the incandescent page burned into my retinas.