by Joy Williams
“This here is milk,” he says, and puts the paper bag in my lap. “When you get to your place, you heat it up and drink some. I seen people in shock before and you don’t want any part of that. You drink this and go to sleep and tomorrow you’ll be all right.” We get back on the highway and almost immediately, off of it again, turning through fancy gates onto a gravel road. It is a small, smug and elegant college.
“He ain’t dead,” Ruttkin snarls, “and you ain’t dead.” He seems to be getting angry again. He accelerates. Gravel spins up from beneath the tires and across the hood.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “I don’t appreciate this.”
“They took the wreck to Glick’s yard. You know where that is? North of town?”
“O.K.,” I say. “Yes.” The milk is cold in my lap. My thighs are cold.
“You’ll probably have to pay the towing fee,” Ruttkin says. “Ten bucks it is.”
He pulls in front of a large stucco house, three stories high. It’s faded pink and heavy with turrets and balconies. A rich man’s nightmare, reeling in space. Once it was a mansion, then a bank, museum, church, rest home and dancing studio. Descending like Dante’s circles. All gone, all failed. Now, at this moment, it is the sorority house.
Ruttkin watches it with great distaste, watching it as though it might start to move toward him and he will have to shoot it. He is puzzled, he is exasperated. The house seems to float, to sway before us, breathing with the bodies of all the sleeping girls.
I am so tired. I concentrate on pulling up the door handle, pushing my feet over the ledge and onto the ground.
“Take the milk,” Ruttkin insists. Childishly, I treat the carton roughly, knocking it against the door. He doesn’t drive away until I am inside the house.
The main hallway is lined with mirrors. A clock ticks and the old house creaks and pings like a cooling engine. The clock is on a mantel in another room, a white and fading face set between the flailing hoofs of two bronze horses. Poor Durousseau. The horses are rendered in perfect detail, pricks, eyelashes, teeth, and the clock, they say, keeps perfect time. I don’t see this but am remembering it. It is as though I have never left that tocking clock which really I have not been familiar with for very long. Grady had a watch with a black face and numbers and hands that shone in the dark. It might be comforting to some … so many nights I watched the watch on Grady’s wrist. When he moved, it wound itself; while he reached for me in sleep, curling his hand between my legs, it fed off Grady. Yes, a succubus. Even when he removed the watch, the mark was there, a broad band of white that the sun hadn’t touched.
The clock tocks. One can even hear it in the kitchen, where I go immediately. The refrigerator is full of remains—fatted, wilted, jellied and iced. Dishes covered with waxed paper and cinched with a rubber band. I quickly remove some and start spooning the contents into my mouth. The food seems harmless enough and bland. I drink Ruttkin’s quart of milk too even though it would not be irrational of me to dump it down the sink or commit some terrible crime on it … as a gesture.
But I eat and I drink Ruttkin’s milk, for I’ve been taught it’s a sin to waste the food that prolongs life. What with all the starving bodies, I’ve learned to use everything up.
19
My radio is in its ordered corner beside my bed but someone has been using it. There’s wax on the plugs. I turn it on right away. There is my old chum, my answer man on “Action Line,” with the voice I’ve left him with. He is saying, “I am sorry, we do not accept solicitations. We only take questions offered in good faith and taste.” I cradle the radio to my cheek. There is nothing for me to think about and I’ll tell you, even when I could, I would never think about those woods we’ve left now. I couldn’t understand them and I couldn’t understand the people and the animals that came into them. When Grady was away at school, I spent hours in utter solitude and didn’t learn a thing. At first I was alarmed, but then I realized that it was what I wanted all the time. My life was slowing down. Nothing was feeding it any more. It was draining like a wound and there was a possibility that soon I might experience true freedom.
Indeed, even now I have hopes that my only opportunities will be those I’ll miss. I want to stall my life like a train on a track, perfectly midway, between what has happened and what is happening. First emission, then omission, that’s the key to life and our success can be measured by the purity and bleakness of the bone of our existence. As someone said, no one is going to kill you. No, no one’s going to kill you or even loathe or love you. Though this is not quite true, for we’re told it has happened to some. Not us certainly but to some, people that we know.
Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we’re all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you’ve made it. Do not be a polite guest.
BOOK TWO
What is a lost soul? It is
one that has turned from its
true path and is groping in
the darkness of remembered ways—
Malcolm Lowry
20
THE CONGREGATION was the town and the town made up the island. The cold was convivial to their natures but before the Reverend had come they had never been instructed in the bitter ways of God. It was true that once, before the Reverend took up his duties, there had been a suicide among them. Mr. Pardee cut his throat with an oyster knife. Mrs. Pardee, who was only seventeen at the time, was making cheese and refused to attend to anything else before the cheese was completed. This was an enviable trait exhibited and one which, all conditions being equal, everyone in town would have been proud to show themselves. Since that time, nothing more occurred—one dusk as they were out cutting greens for the Christmas mantels, each noticed the other had become middle-aged or worse.
Then the Reverend came and after a few years it appeared that God had found the island again, in the manner of putting a bad hand down upon it. When it appeared that the hand had come to rest on the Reverend’s little family, the people came to the conclusion, without being aware that they had reached it, that the distribution of pain, at least on this tiny place, on this doggerel rock adrift in the sea, was as just as man could expect, because the man and the lone peculiar little child could bear it best. They handled it not only impassively but gracefully. It was almost their style. It was the mother who had always been wasted by it, who threw herself on grief’s mercy. And of course now she was gone. There was the lesson. Everything exists to teach. Her haunted manner, her aching ways gone, at peace the frenzy she had shown in the last months … The Reverend was a difficult man, an exacting man. Perhaps he never should have married … but who could say? Needs are forgotten. Arrangements rearranged. Now he is alone, a father with the little Kate. Such a discomfiting child. There’s something lame about her, something dark. There is the air of a sanctified crime about her—of a holy slattern. But she is only a child! She has the boniness of a child, the tiny features—they could be put in a cup. Heartbreak surrounds her, though she seems unaware of it. She moves through it like a leaf, like a feather, like a falling piece of soot. It is as though she is living out some event that is not part of her life. The townspeople, however, would not think of this. How could they? They live in the faltered rhythm and dip of the island. They listen to the telephone. Nothing happens here. The town has no possibilities and this is the only child now. The wombs are barren, the land cannot bear. They swim in conjecture, the time and the tides.
But how will the father and the little
girl live now? The child seems an orphan, a ward of something vast and troubling. Of course they will remain here, she will go to school. The townspeople expect that the Reverend will continue to instruct her. Already she has developed great skill at recitation and vaguely terrorizes them, being able to recite long sections of the Bible with a dreamy and demonic exactitude, translating the sounds into something privately understood and then returning them to rote, to a maddeningly void and childish lilt. It’s almost heresy for her to prattle so, so unmindful, the words so clear and useless like a mirror hung backward on a wall. She reflects nothing but her father. He is in her eyes, the way she holds her hands. Perhaps it is simply a stage the child is going through. They know nothing about children. The sister had playmates who would come from the mainland, who would tumble and yowl through the crisp black and white town, but now Kate is the solemn solitary child they must share and she has no friends who visit her. Even before the mother died, she was seen only in the company of the Reverend. At dusk each weekday, he would meet her at the ferry slip and they would go home together, flowing up the street, not speaking, her fingers in his big hands. The townspeople watch from their windows, eating bread and beans. They take an embarrassed delight in her inconsistencies, embarrassed because she is, after all a child, not yet seven years old, and they wish her no ill. She maintains that she takes no pleasure. That phrase. She has said it to almost all of them at one time or another when they wanted to give her a little something, make her a small and harmless present. And yet they have seen her eating ice cream. Tying ribbons in her hair. Climbing in the trees. In the winter she plays earnestly, skating, sledding, running with her dog. She obviously has rules, strict restrictions, self-imposed. The play is highly ritualized but it is play. Once the postman heard her singing …
“God’s begun a state of grace in me
I’m the only one in town.”
The sea wind carries such scraps of conversation, nonsense rhymes, dream images, for miles. Everything is echo. The townspeople are ashamed of the smallness of their thoughts but they are pleased that her actions belie the lie. She is a child, nothing more, small, dependent and without resources. We are justified not without and yet not by our works is the base they build upon. Is that not what has always been taught? And has not the Reverend himself said, scornfully, coldly, so that one could almost hear in his ears the frozen whistle of the fall to hell, “Works, a man get to heaven by his works! I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand.” So they needn’t concern themselves with their thoughts about the child. They are free to think them. The Reverend continues to remind them that they are worldly free. They are dismissed. Perhaps they are truly saved and safe. The child dismisses them with the gaze of her father. She is meek and even pretty, but unruly, a bit menacing. Sometimes her face looks withered as a crone’s.
But her mother is dead, her sister is gone, transported so precisely that summer day, out of the moving car into the giant oak, that historical oak was it not? the one that had been brought over from England in a snuff jar? Yes, it could be the burden of death that the very young can assimilate but not bear, it could be merely that that makes the child appear so singular, so remote. And then the mother, the Mrs. being so odd at the end, bearing that new baby with such fury, being so unseemly, almost deranged.
Yes, they had not seen how any good could have come of her rage. For something had been in evidence, even to the town’s slow heart. Something desperate and angry and even afraid. She was after something nameless, the Mrs. Jackson, or had already found it. How, they couldn’t say. Where, they couldn’t imagine on this simple island where everything lay like silhouettes flat against the sky. But she said the queerest things at the end, things that had no substance. It was as if already she had one foot in the other world. And half her mind as well.
SHE SPOKE OF HORRORS. She spoke to Mrs. Morrissey of giving her heart to horrors. This was difficult. For some reason, the Mrs. had chosen Mary Morrissey to confide in although Mary had once been Catholic and drank and couldn’t be counted on to keep things straight. Had she selected someone more dependable to speak to, the town might have made more sense of it. It was the burden of a woman bearing, they supposed. She moved with hatred, moving hurriedly, heavily off through the ice, her chapped face wrapped up in scarfing. These were the only times they saw her in the last months, walking recklessly, out for the air, they supposed, but walking so quickly, as though she had a destination. But she visited no one and the boundaries of the town were the sea. Once, she had seemed quite ordinarily happy. Quite social. Enthusiastic. Kept herself up quite a bit more than the other ladies would care to. After the daughter’s death, though, the only habit she kept was churchgoing. Three times a week for prayers and twice for Sunday service. Each time she left, she shook the Reverend’s hand, her eyes averted, cast off into the umbrella stand. Except for these moments, she was never seen with her husband. He was always with the Lord.
The Reverend seemed such a loveless man. A dedicated man certainly. Wedded to God’s work. But not one to give a woman comfort. They could not imagine … but their thoughts were frivolous, base. They had been shocked when they learned the Mrs. was pregnant. At first they had believed that their feelings were those of dismay, of fear for her well-being, but then they admitted to each other that they were oddly shocked.
She was in the seventh month when she died. She had taken to bed shortly before then, receiving no visitors (had it been her request or the Reverend’s?—the question didn’t matter—they were all barred, even Mary Morrissey, who undoubtedly would have been disappointing in her information anyway, having been married three times and divorced once, and having a penchant for unpleasant generalizations). No one could recollect the Mrs. ever looking as poorly as she did lying in the coffin. They can’t understand what did it. A complication of pregnancy. They don’t inquire further. They misunderstand medical terms. Their vocabulary is not one of disease. Nor is it one of health. What they do, always, is a compromise between death and living. They do know that no doctor was called. She died at night while the Reverend was sleeping, while the little child Kate was sleeping. They also know that the fetus was not expelled. It was tight within her still when she was taken away. Snug as a core in an apple. They do not like to discuss it really. It is not that they are not curious or bereaved or amazed. It is just that they lack the proper terms. They are embarrassed by their own references. The death isn’t quite acceptable. It isn’t quite … respectable.
They shuffle past the coffin, observing. Hair puckered up in tight ringlets. Not her way. A great deal of gray. They hadn’t noticed. But very natural. With good color. Lipstick, which she seldom wore, prettily applied. A good job the man had done. Came over on the ferry with the equipment of his trade and set up in the parish house. Realistic. She looked as though she would get right up and walk among them, blinking her large mortified eyes, her hands spilling over them, making invitations and promises as she always did. She had loved to entertain, although the townspeople were not familiar with the accepting of hospitality. Once she had been giddy, nervous, eager. Twice monthly, she opened the doors of the parsonage, the finest house in town. They could depend on that like on the sun rising … the tea and cookies served in the pleasant rooms of the first floor, “strings” on the record player which they didn’t care for. The afternoons began well but ended rather badly. One of the men would make a crude comment or break a cup. Fingerprints on the clean windowpanes … The talk would die down to almost nothing. And she would seem close to tears. She was always high-strung and expensive-looking. Once she had been from the city. A flawless complexion, a charming laugh. All gone now. Emptied her essence somehow. The mysteries of undertaking. Who would want to? In the family’s footsteps.
A lovely job. Though it was not the woman they remembered. She had lost an extraordinary amount of weight. Her head was quite wasted. And her skin seemed much too smooth. After all. He must have poured the makeup on. Stomach fl
at as a frying pan, for the unborn child had been removed and placed in a smaller box. Such a tiny coffin, like a jewel box. She had carried the baby full and low … wasn’t that to mean a boy? The word was that it had been a boy.
“Called back,” said Mrs. Parrish, whose husband was in feeds. “Called back because the loving Lord couldn’t bear to have him leave His care, not even for man’s brief lifetime.” Her good eyes shook out tears.
The child did not even have the opportunity to be born dead. As the Reverend said, for he was a man of order and belief, even though he spoke of his own … “too imperfect even for that.” Sickly harbored. So sad. With its little untried soul.
“My wife,” the Reverend said, “had unnecessary thoughts at the end. You could tell she was sick. You could tell that something wicked had her in its grasp.”
They all tipped slightly over the coffin, their hands twitching behind their backs. A button on the deceased’s blouse was dangling, the thread all ravelly. They all had a desire to push it back in place. Such carelessness was inexcusable. All pride gone out of craftsmanship ever since the war. The blouse was brown silk, rather old, the thread of the buttons was black. Two strands of beads; one of glass, the other of clay. Like an Indian curio in a novelty shop. Almost a toy. A child’s necklace, for dress-up. Perhaps the child had been responsible for this. A lovely gesture, though rather lurid. Motherless Kate. Makes you cry. Looks like neither the poor Mrs. nor the Reverend except in bearing. Little stranger. Black wool skirt on the deceased. A full skirt, as though for dancing. A plastic belt. Red and white pumps. Newly shined. The darker polish somewhat lopping over its bounds. The Reverend had picked out the clothes. You know the way men are. No sense of a woman’s image. If the Mrs. Jackson could see herself, she’d cry. She cried for less when living. Her eyes were always brimming. Just before the end.