by John Updike
The Centaurus
John Updike
National Book Award for Fiction
In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels.
John Updike
The Centaurus
© 1963
“Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth.”
– KARL BARTH
But it was still needful that a life should be given to expiate that ancient sin,-the theft of fire. It happened that Chiron, noblest of all the Centaurs (who are half horses and half men), was wandering the world in agony from a wound that he had received by strange mischance. For, at a certain wedding-feast among the Lapithae of Thessaly, one of the turbulent Centaurs had attempted to steal away the bride. A fierce struggle followed, and in the general confusion, Chiron, blameless as he was, had been wounded by a poisoned arrow. Ever tormented with the hurt and never to be healed, the immortal Centaur longed for death, and begged that he might be accepted as an atonement for Prometheus. The gods heard his prayer and took away his pain and his immortality. He died like any wearied man, and Zeus set him as a shining archer among the stars.
– Old Greek Folk Stones Told Anew
BY JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY, 1897
I
CALDWELL turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night’s washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise.
Out in the hall, the feather end of the arrow scraped on the floor with every step. The metallic scratch and stiff rustle mixed disagreeably. His stomach began to sway with nausea. The dim, long walls of the ochre hall wavered; the classroom doors, inset with square numbered panes of frosted glass, seemed experimental panels immersed in an activated liquid charged with children’s voices chanting French, singing anthems, discussing problems of Social Science. Avez-vous une maison jolie? Oui, j’ai une maison tres jolie for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain throughout our history boys and girls (this was the voice of Pholos), the federal government has grown in prestige, power, and authority but we must not forget, boys and girls, that by origin we are a union of sovereign republics, the United God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood-the beautiful song was blindly persisting in Caldwell’s brain. To shining sea. The old baloney. He had heard it first in Passaic. Since then, how strange he had grown! His top half felt all afloat in a starry firmament of ideals and young voices singing; the rest of his self was heavily sunk in a swamp where it must, eventually, drown. Each time the feathers brushed the floor, the shaft worked in his wound. He tried to keep that leg from touching the floor, but the jagged clatter of the three remaining hooves sounded so loud he was afraid one of the doors would snap open and another teacher emerge to bar his way. In this crisis his fellow-teachers seemed herdsmen of terror, threatening to squeeze him back into the room with the students. His bowels weakly convulsed; on the glimmering varnished boards, right in front of the trophy case with its hundred silver eyes, he deposited, without breaking stride, a steaming dark spreading cone. His great gray-dappled flanks twitched with distaste, but like a figurehead on the prow of a foundering ship his head and torso pressed forward.
The faint watery blur above the side doors drew him on. Here, at the far end of the hall, through windows” exteriorly screened against vandalism, light from outdoors entered the school and, unable to spread in the viscid, varnished atmosphere, remained captured, like water in oil, above the en trance. Toward this bluish bubble of light the moth inside him drove Caldwell ’s high, handsome, compounded body. His viscera squirmed; a dusty antenna brushed the roof of his mouth. Yet also on his palate he eagerly tasted an anticipation of fresh air. The air brightened. He bucked the double doors whose dirty glass was reinforced with chicken wire. In a tumult of pain, the arrow battering the steel balusters, he threw himself down the short flight of steps to the concrete landing. In ascending these steps a child had hastily penciled FUCK on the darkly lustrous wall. Caldwell gripped the brass bar and, his mouth thin with determination beneath his pinched and frightened eyes, he pushed into the open.
His nostrils made two plumes of frost. It was January. The clear blue of the towering sky seemed forceful yet enigmatic.
The immense level swath of the school’s side lawn, pointed at the corners by plantings of pines, was, though this was winter’s heart, green; but the color was frozen, paralyzed, vestigial, artificial. Beyond the school grounds, a trolley car, gently clanging, floated up the pike toward Ely. Virtually empty- the time was eleven o’clock, the shoppers were all going the other way, into Alton -it swayed lightly on its tracks and the straw seats showered sparks of gold through the windows. Outdoors, in the face of spatial grandeur, his pain seemed abashed. Dwarfed, it retreated into his ankle, became hard and sullen and contemptible. Caldwell ’s strange silhouette took on dignity; his shoulders-a little narrow for so large a creature-straightened, and he moved, if not at a prance, yet with such pressured stoic grace that the limp was enrolled in his stride. He took the paved walk between the frozen lawn and the brimming parking lot. Beneath his belly the grimacing grilles flashed in the white winter sun; the scratches in the chrome were iridescent as diamonds. The cold began to shorten his breath. Behind him in the salmon-brick hulk of the high school a buzzer sounded, dismissing the class he had abandoned. With a sluggish digestive rumble, the classes shifted.
Hummel’s Garage adjoined the Olinger High School property, a little irregular river of asphalt separating them. Its association with the school was not merely territorial. Hummel had for many years, though not now, served on the school board, and his young red-haired wife, Vera, was the girls’ physical education instructor. The garage got much trade from the high school. Boys brought their derelict jalopies here to be fixed, and younger boys pumped up basketballs with the free air. In the front part of the building, in the large room where Hummel kept his accounts and his tattered, blackened library of spare-parts catalogues and where two wooden desks side by side each supported a nibbled foliation of papers and pads and spindles skewering up to the rusted tip fluffy stacks of pink receipts, here a cloudy glass ca
se, its cracked top repaired with a lightning-shaped line of tire tape, kept candy in crackling wrappers waiting for children’s pennies. Here, on a brief row of greasy folding chairs overlooking a five-foot cement pit whose floor was flush with the alley outside, the male teachers sometimes-more of old than recently-sat at noon and smoked and ate Fifth Avenues and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Essick’s Coughdrops and put their tightly laced and polished feet up on the railing and let their martyred nerves uncurl while, in the three-sided pit below, an automobile like an immense metal baby was washed and changed by Hummel’s swarthy men.
The main and greater part of the garage was approached on an asphalt ramp as rough, streaked, gouged, flecked, and bubbled as a hardened volcanic flow. In the wide green door opened to admit motored vehicles, there was a little mansized door with keep closed dribblingly dabbed in blue touch-up paint below the latch. Caldwell lifted the latch and entered. His hurt leg cursed the turn needed to close the door behind him.
A deep warm darkness was lit by sparks. The floor of the grotto was waxed black by oil drippings. At the far side of the long workbench, two shapeless men in goggles caressed a great downward-drooping fan of flame broken into dry drops. Another man, staring upward out of round eyes sockets white in a black face, rolled by on his back and disappeared beneath the body of a car. His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Caldwell saw heaped about him overturned fragments of automobiles, fragile and phantasmal, fenders like corpses of turtles, bristling engines like disembodied hearts. Hisses and angry thumps lived in the mottled air. Near where Caldwell stood, an old potbellied coal stove bent brilliant pink through its seams. He hesitated to leave its radius of warmth, though the thing in his ankle was thawing, and his stomach assuming an unsettled flutter.
Hummel himself appeared in the doorway of the workshop. As they walked toward each other, Caldwell experienced a mocking sensation of walking toward a mirror, for Hummel also limped. One of his legs was smaller than the other, due to a childhood fall. He looked hunched, pale, weathered; the recent years had diminished the master mechanic. The Esso and Mobilgas chains had both built service stations a few blocks away along the pike, and now that the war was over, and everybody could buy new cars with their war-work money, the demand for repairs had plummeted.
“George! Is it your lunch already?” Hummel’s voice, though slight, was expertly pitched to pierce the noise of the shop.
As Caldwell answered, a particularly harsh and rapid series of metallic clashes sprang up in the air and flattened his words; his voice, thin and strained, seemed to hang hushed in his own ears. “No, Jesus, I have a class right now.”
“Well what is it then?” Hummel’s delicate gray face, bleached by spots of silver bristle, alerted timidly, as if anything unexpected had the power to hurt him. His wife had done that to him, Caldwell knew.
“Lookit,” Caldwell said, “what one of the damn kids did to me.” He put his injured foot up on a severed fender and lifted his trouser leg.
The mechanic bent over the arrow and touched the feathers tentatively. His knuckles were deeply ingrained with grime, his touch silken with lubricant. “Steel shaft,” he said. “You’re lucky the tip went clean through.” He signaled and a little tripod on wheels came rattling by itself across the bumpy black floor. Hummel took from it a pair of wire cutters, the type that has an elbow hinge on one jaw to give extra leverage. As the string of a helium balloon slips from a child’s absentminded fingers, so fear set Caldwell ’s mind floating free. In his dizzy abstraction he tried to analyze the cutters as a diagram: mechanical advantage equals load over force less friction, length of lever AF (fulcrum = nut) over length FB, B being biting point of gleaming crescent jaw, multiplied by secondary mechanical advantage of accessory fulcrum-lever complex, in turn multiplied by mechanical advantage of Hummel’s calm and grimy workman’s hand, clenching action of contracting flexors and rigid phalanges five-fold, MA X MA X 5MA = titanic. Hummel bent his back so Caldwell could brace himself on his shoulders. Uncertain this was being offered and reluctant to presume, Caldwell remained erect and stared upward. The beaded boards of the garage ceiling had been painted velvet by rising smoke and spider traces. Through his knee Caldwell felt Hummel’s back shift with twitches of fitting; he felt metal touch his skin through his sock. The fender shuddered unsteadily. Hummel’s shoulders tensed with effort and Caldwell clamped his teeth upon an outcry, for it seemed the cutters were biting not into a metal shaft but into a protruding nerve of his anatomy. The crescent jaws gnashed; in a swift telescopic thrust Caldwell’s pain shot upwards; coruscated; and then Hummel’s shoulders relaxed. “No good,” the mechanic said. “I thought it might be hollow but it isn’t. George, you’ll have to come over to the bench.”
Trembling through the length of his legs, which seemed as thin and rickety as bicycle spokes, Caldwell followed Hummel and obediently set his foot up on an old Coca-Cola case the mechanic rummaged out of the sooty rubble beneath the long workbench. Trying to ignore the arrow that like an optical defect in his lower vision followed him everywhere, Caldwell concentrated on a bushel-basket full of discarded fuel pumps. Hummel pulled the chain of a naked electric bulb. The windows were opaquely spattered with paint from the outside; the walls between them were hung with wrenches aligned by size, ballpeen hammers with taped handles, electric drills, screwdrivers a yard long, intricate sprocketed socketed tools whose names and functions he would never know, neat coils of frazzled wire, calipers, pliers, and, stuck and taped here and there in crevices and bare spots, advertisements, toasted and tattered and ancient. One showed a cat holding up a paw and another a giant trying in vain to tear a patented fan belt. A card said safety first and another, taped over a window pane, protect your N N you won’t be given another pair.
Like the outpouring of a material hymn to material creation, the top of the bench was strewn with loops of rubber, tubes of copper, cylinders of graphite, threaded elbows of iron, cans of oil, chunks of wood, rags, drops, and dusty scraps of all elements. This tumble, full of tools, was raked by intense flashes of light from the two workmen down the bench. They were fashioning what looked like an ornamented bronze girdle for a woman with a tiny waist and flaring hips. Hummel put an asbestos glove on his left hand and plucked a broad scrap of tin from the heap. With the cutters he sliced into the center and, abruptly deft, cleverly folded the piece into a cupped shield, which he fitted around the arrow at the back of Caldwell ’s ankle. “So you won’t feel the heat so much,” he explained, and snapped the fingers of his un gloved hand. “Archy, could I have the torch a minute now?”
The helper, careful to keep his feet from tangling in the trailing wire, brought over the acetylene torch. It was a little black jug spitting white flame edged with green. Where the flame streamed from the spout there was a transparent gap. Caldwell locked his jaw on his panic. The arrow had been re vealed to him as a live nerve. He braced for the necessary pain.
There was none. Magically, he found himself at the center of an immense insensible nimbus. The light startled into being sharp triangular shadows all around him, on the bench, on the walls. Holding the tin shield in his gloved hand, Hummel without the protection of goggles squinted into the blazing, purring heart of Caldwell ’s ankle. His face, dead-pale and drastically foreshortened, glittered fanatically on the points of his two eyes. As Caldwell looked down, a wisp of Hummel’s tired gray hair strayed forward, shrivelled, and vanished in a whiff of smoke. The workmen watched mutely. It seemed to be taking too long. Now Caldwell was feeling the heat; the touch of tin began to boil against his leg. But by closing his eyes Caldwell could envision in the top of his skull the arrow bending, melting, its molecules letting go. Something metal and small chinked to the floor. The pressures encircling his foot lifted. He opened his eyes, and the torch went off. The yellow electric light seemed brown.
“Ronnie, could you get me a soaking wet rag?” Hummel explained to Caldwell, “I don’t want to pull it through hot.”
“You’re a dam
n good workman,” Caldwell said. His voice was fainter than he had expected, his praise empty of blood. He watched Ronnie, a one-eyed boy with shoulders like tummocks, take an oily rag and plunge it into a small bucket of black water standing under a far electric bulb. Reflected light bobbed and leaped in the violated water as if to be free. Ronnie handed the rag to Hummel and Hummel squatted and applied it. Cold wet dribbled into Caldwell ’s shoe and a faint aromatic hissing rose to his nostrils. “We’ll wait now a minute,” Hummel said, and remained squatting, carefully holding Caldwell ’s pants leg up from the wound. Caldwell met the stares of the three workmen-the third had come out from under the car-and smiled self-deprecatingly. Now that relief was at hand he had a margin in which to feel embarrassed. His smile made the helpers frown. To them it was as if an automobile had tried to speak. Caldwell let his eyes go out of focus and thought of far-off things, of green fields, of Chariclo as a lithe young woman, of Peter as a baby, of how he had pushed him on his Kiddy Kar with a long forked stick along the pavements under the horsechestnut trees. They had been too poor to afford a baby carriage; the kid had learned to steer, too early? He worried about the kid when he had the time.
“Now George: hold tight,” Hummel said. The arrow slid out backwards with a slick spurt of pain. Hummel stood up, his face pink, scorched by fire or flushed in satisfaction. His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood. Caldwell ’s ankle, at last free, felt soft, unbraced; his shoe seemed to be filling with warm slow liquid. The pain had changed color, had shifted into the healing spectrum. The body knew. The ache came now to his heart rhythmically: Nature’s breathing.