Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  Look how he changed to a pink-headed loving old nigger:

  After the violence in the woods with the raped white girl Louetta, Blanch’s daughter you will recall, he ran back toward the Alabama swamp that he grew up in. He hid in weeds and crawled by rivers and walked highways in rags until he stole some clean clothes off a clothesline and put them on. He finally got on a truck that took him as far as Mobile and from there he got to the hidden swampland that he knew and sank into it, hidden from the world. His wretchedness and his self-loathing made him grovel in the alligator excrement and filth of the shallows of the swamp water. He lay naked among the alligators, hoping they would bite him to pieces and eat him up. They did not touch him. Sometimes, blinking, they lumbered over him as he lay in the steaming swamp mud; their claws left deep bleeding gashes on his body whose white scars he carried to his death. The heat was infernal and fierce swamp insects sang in his ears and stung his naked body until he threw himself into the hot swamp water, howling. He could not die.

  And then one afternoon in his dementia he heard an urging to go back to Moscow, Texas, to the sawmill and stand up and work honestly and earn his pay. When he determined to go, to turn away out of the hell swampland, he stood up and felt the madness in him leave. And he saw the alligators go crazy, as if they were mad as he had been. They thrashed and lept and beat their horned heads against the cedar stumps in the water and all of them that he had lived with battered themselves to death. The water was blood. When the silence that followed filled the swampland, Ormsby the changed man stood up in a peace that he could not understand; but he got himself ready to go back to the sawmill. He found his filthy clothes and washed them in a spring and they dried in an hour while he scoured his filthy body in the clean springwater until he was fresh again. Ormsby then walked out of the dark hidden place of his madness.

  At the sawmill they saw that he was a different man and in trust they gave him a job. Ormsby worked hard and was quiet among the men who could hardly believe that he was the same man who had been chained, hollering and gnashing his teeth, to trees so that others could be safe from him. Because of his long suffering, Ormsby’s hair, which had been red, had turned pink.

  He came one day into the nearby town where Kansas Tate had lived, asking for her in Niggertown. He was told that she was dead and that he could find out more from the man, the uncle, who still lived on the place where Kansas Tate had worked for so many years.

  At the place Ormsby found the uncle, who took right to him, and the uncle told the long story to Ormsby and how Kansas Tate was dead from shock and grief. Ormsby wept and seemed gentle and saintly, yet he was the cause of all the woe and doom that had fallen upon the place. The uncle then told Ormsby his own story of his love for Louetta, of his fathering and nursing and healing Leander, child of rape, when he was dying in a cave from the violence of the KKK, of Leander’s lust for Louetta and of Louetta’s terrible suicide in the well. Ormsby then told of his long suffering and hiding and how he had been urged back to ask forgiveness. He told the uncle of his terrible deed and begged on his knees for mercy and forgiveness. His pink head shook with the sobs that poured silver tears down his black glistening face and the white signs of the claws of the alligators shone on his black body. The uncle might have straightaway killed Ormsby there in the house. But an extraordinary thing occurred. I forgive you, said the uncle. Who can cast the first stone? They had loved the same woman, and the white man had brought up the black man’s son and loved him like his own. The uncle told all this to Ormsby, the pink-headed nigger. Let’s try to live together in this place, the uncle said, or the Klu Klux Klan will kill you if they catch you, and me, too. You can live in this house with me. And together, the uncle said, being the only ones left of the whole story, we can wait for the possible return of our son Leander. The town rumbled at a white man and a black man living in the same house, for of course they found out about them. But who among them knew all that had happened? Yet they judged and denounced the two men as derelicts and the KKK rode for many nights around and around the house with burning torches until the dust from their horses’ hooves set a cloud over the old family house. But the two men laid low inside. Sometimes they saw the glow of fire at their windows and they looked out to see burning crosses staked in the road and in the fields. It is a miracle that the KKK arm of justice and morality did not set the house on fire, and their threats of this and of tar-and-feathering the two men as a means of punishment and of setting things aright came often in shouts and chants, but the old house stood untouched and the men inside unharmed. This is because, it is said, that some said they saw in a white glowing above the roof of the house the bright figure of a winged man flashing a sword and calling with a powerful voice, “This house is blest by forgiveness. Go away.” And all the fires of the burning crossed died out. This is what they say, this is what some saw.

  Leander never returned. Some dark nights and on some dark stormy days, one or other of the two men was sure that he saw a figure of Leander, the lost son, coming across the pasture, rising and falling in the high grass; or leaping and darting toward the house like a jackrabbit, at dusk in the twilight; or sometimes on the road in the summer heat, a glowing veil-like shape seemed to be arriving. But Leander never arrived.

  Finally Ormsby was found dead in his bed by the uncle one sleety morning in November. The uncle buried him in a grave on the place and put at its head a slab of wood with the words on it, “Leander’s father forgiven.”

  From then on, alone in the house of sorrow and forgiveness, the uncle drank, full of his silent story—except what he would tell of it to me when he would let me through the horseman-cursed door—graced, too by the horseman and the horse—until he closed that door to the old house and walked out on the highway to wait for somebody to pick him up that was going to Houston. There he was going to look for his brother and sister; but we know that he never found them.

  TWO COUSINS

  Now the old family land, accursed, had been disinherited by the uncle’s brother and sister in Houston—I will tell more about this later—and inherited by two cousins whose whereabouts was not readily known. When one, the older, was found and came to the town he heard all this story. Of course by the time he found out the story nobody knew how much had been added to it but he saved what he heard and what he knew.

  His one mission was to find his cousin. The city of Houston was reaching out seventy, eighty miles into towns that were no longer considered towns but additions to the city of Houston. What had been a quiet, ramshackled little town was now called a suburb, and Houston people were building fine homes in it. The chemical age was flourishing, its toxic waste dumps lay festering in hidden ravines or vacant lots, and choking smogs and acid rains seeped into the gigantic shopping malls. The fouled water of rivers choked its own fish. The family land was suddenly worth a good price. It lay, in its modest acreage, in bitterweed and mallow and thistle under half a dozen live oak trees as old as the county. Only some burnt timbers of the house and the cemented well gave signs of the former dark life on the land.

  The cousin sought his cousin. There was very little hearsay of him since he had been such a silent figure in the town. None of the Klu Klux would tell anything about him. It seemed to be a case of a person quite thoroughly disappeared from the face of the earth. The older cousin could not sell the land without his cousin’s signature. Yet if the cousin were never to come forth to claim his property would it become the possession of the next in line? It was said that fifty years would have to pass before this forfeiture could occur. This would make the older cousin over a hundred years old. The older cousin made a surprising decision and it was to stay home in the old town where he began his life. Why couldn’t he build a dwelling for himself on the land which was half his? He planted a grove of white and rose Oleander around the old well, and under two ancient live oaks he built a simple house. As soon as the house was finished—it hadn’t been a month—there appeared three blond women with news which th
e cousin had not been able to find out anywhere, and they brought it with odd good humor. These announced themselves as ex-wives, sisters, of the younger cousin. Each one had married him and divorced him in turn. They explained their ex-husband’s one annoying flaw—a defect of speech which turned him un-pleasantly silent most of the time, except when he was excited. This impediment was caused by a freak accident. The man had a habit of clenching his doubled tongue between his teeth when he strained at anything, and while sliding on his back under a sawed-off locked door he had slit his tongue down the middle on a protruding nail. It was ridiculous what some said, the women announced darkly. That the KKK had cut off their ex’s tongue for talking too much—could you imagine that! they exclaimed. Yet the KKK said that the man had divulged some of their secrets. But it had always been the man’s silence that soured marriage, the sisters declared, even before he’d slit his tongue under the door; although they well knew about it when they entered into wedlock. You never knew what he was feeling, the sisters complained. Was the dinner good? No answer. Do you love me? Silence. How could a person live with somebody who couldn’t comment on things, have an opinion? the women questioned. Each marriage had lasted only a few weeks. In turn each sister simply couldn’t make a go of it, yet each had been so challenged to accomplish what the other could not that she took on the silent one. “He ran through the whole crop of us,” the sisters told the older cousin, “and then he left the area.” One sister said it was to Port Arthur that he went, to enlist in the Merchant Marine, but of course they wouldn’t take him, with a split tongue. Another said that when he married her he had begun to make ungodly sounds, particularly when excited. And the other, the third, said that when her time came the cousin disclosed on their wedding night a brand on his thigh, a letter and a number, which was the mark of a well-known penitentiary. “I had married an escaped convict!” she cried. The three women were so good-natured, overall, that it was hard not to believe their stories. They all vowed that the speechless groom was the hottest lover and that he had the body of a statue. He knew how! they giggled. So they stayed on with him for a while. And for a little while each sister had had the same thought, saying to herself, listen, does he have to talk? But life’s not all sex, they concluded, in their well-earned wisdom. And they departed, leaving their disturbing news behind them.

  The older cousin pondered what to do about his lost kin. He put ads in the newspapers of Texas towns urging his cousin to come back and claim his due. Somebody sent a letter to the older cousin informing him that his cousin was working among the Mexicans in the pea fields of the Rio Grande Valley, where he was known as “El Mudo.” He had long ago learned not to speak at all, since he had begun to make such sinister sounds when he tried. But when he drank whiskey he seemed to fall into the possession of demons, for he broke into rages and flailed and kicked in the dust, whirring his tongue in a sound like a rattlesnake. He would finally have to be held down in the dust until he weakened and his horrible sound died out. The poor man, wrote the informant, had no friends. After his ferocity had passed, he was gentle again, a harmless Mudo hoeing the peavines in the fields. I have shown him the newspaper ad but he seems not to understand it or to care, ended the letter.

  One night in the early dark hours after midnight the older cousin was wakened by a distant sound, and it came closer. With a chill he recognized the horrible sound of his cousin as it had been described to him, the whirring that afflicted him when he was excited. He lay in his bed and heard the sound come closer and then it was at his window, like a snake in the bushes. His cousin had at last arrived. He called his cousin’s name. Come in, he said, I’ve been waiting for you. This is your home.

  He heard the window open and saw in the deepest dark the form of a man and heard the terrible sound. His cousin was desperate to speak, to tell something. The older cousin turned on the light and he saw a horrifying gasping figure. He embraced his cousin and said, welcome; please come and let me help you. He knew that his cousin could not speak and so he sat him at a table with paper and pencil and asked him to write to him all that he could not say. But the young cousin fainted and his cousin lifted him into the bed, where the two slept for some hours side by side. In the early dawn the older cousin awoke and saw his cousin writing at the table. He wrote of the horror of his life. How KKK men had accused him of telling their secrets. They had cut off his tongue and put a fish hook in it and hung it on the branch of the tree they tied him to, and all night he saw the organ licking and lapping its drooling saliva. He had been tormented by the image of the lapping tongue and of the genitals of black men he had helped castrate; they seemed to be the same human members. He raved in the nights, sleepless, and then he poured whiskey down his flaming throat to bring deliverance. But the whirring sound began and he became a monster that men would sometimes club with sticks, like a snake, to stop the horrible sound. When men discovered his erotic throat and its tantalizing arrangement of parts, they used him. For the KKK had cut off his tongue where it is fattest and lies beneath the moist and quivering membrane called the uvula. When breath played through these soft meats they quivered and clasped the lingual stub, a chunk of thick meat throbbing at the vestibule of the throat, causing the dry whirring sound men feared. It was a deformity caused by the evil of men. Yet a warm and hospitable sucking and clasping organ had been remade by nature in its healing. This creation was so sexually maddening that once the men discovered it they fought each other over it out of self-loathing and unending whipping prurience, and, still in rabid sexual arousal, an infernal priapism, they slashed open each other’s throats and stabbed one another in the bowels and tried to castrate each other. In his trance, the cousin saw that the men seemed to be caught hold of by devils, and it occurred to him that they might have created in him a trap of their own destruction in his lascivious throat. When he lay almost dead from strangling and suffocation and had thrown up some of his insides, in the vision of exhaustion he thought that a winged person who looked like an angel appeared in front of him. “Through man’s savagery and nature’s remodeling of it,” said the winged person, “you have been made the very device of your enemy’s undoing: the withering of malevolent energy coming from insatiable lust.” Then the person unbound the cousin from the tree where the men had tied him and showed him to the cool river and refreshed him and urged him to go to his cousin, which he did.

  The older cousin longed to put his cousin to rest and to pacify the tormenting images before him; heal him. He held his young cousin to his breast and for the first time since their own uncle long ago had held them each under an arm against his breast, the young cousin felt love and tenderness and forgiveness, without a word being spoken; and he felt that his cousin was saying to him, in this way, that you do not have to speak to tell somebody something that is gentle and loving. By showing him the fullness of silence, the older cousin was able to bring his young cousin to some peace and the tormenting images, and even the horrible whirring sound, began to pass away.

  It was then that the young cousin was visited again by what he thought was an angel. A big winged male came before him and the cousin asked him, “Are you an angel?” “Yes,” said the angel and said that he had come to offer the cousin his tongue and straightway installed it in his mouth and told him to speak with it. The cousin was so afraid for a little while, to have an angel’s tongue in his mouth, but it was not for long before he spoke to the angel and told him of his joy and thanks. The angel then told him that he could keep his tongue if he would use it to show the poor Mexican people in the peafields of the Rio Grande Valley among whom he had worked how to spell words and how to add numbers. The cousin said he would try. Some mysterious money came to his hands from a Carmelite Nun who arrived one day. She drove up in a cleanly washed Ford in which another Nun sat. The money was to be used for the teaching of words and numbers to the Mexicans so that they would not be speechless even as he had been and know when they were cheated and how to protect themselves and get better pay.
/>
  The cousin returned to the peafields and established a kind of school at night, speaking with the angel’s tongue. People of the Valley who had known him before as El Mudo didn’t recognize him to be the same person until a man cried out “El Mudo!” and then he was recognized by all and beloved. He was now speaking so freely that he did not know whose tongue he was using, his or the angel’s. A lot of the time he found that he had not even thought about it—he simply opened his mouth and said the words he had to say.

  In some time the angel returned and announced to the cousin that he would take back his tongue and that he might very well see how well he could speak with what he had of his own. “Do what you can with what you’ve got,” advised the angel. “You may now be able to speak better than you think.” The cousin was afraid for a while, but when he saw that he could do pretty well with what he had of his own, he lost fear. And he lived on for quite a while, there in the Rio Grande Valley among the Mexicans he loved and helped and who loved him. When he and his brothers and sisters of the fields began to organize the first Union, the KKK blew right in like a fresh washing of white sheets in the red wind of the Valley. El Mudo called out to the angel, “Give me your tongue to denounce these men!” And he felt the angel’s tongue in his mouth; and with full tongue he drove back with eloquence the men who had once humiliated him, to their astonishment and fear.

  It was then that the angel appeared for the last time and told the cousin that it was his own tongue that had spoken the truth before the enemy, for somewhere during his speaking the angel had taken back his own tongue and the cousin without knowing it had gone on fully with his own. In joy, the cousin saw that he had been restored through the help of love and trust.

  This is the end of the story of the two cousins whose uncle loved them. Unless some more comes to mind later about the older cousin. The younger one lived on among the Mexican people of the Rio Grande Valley. He never saw his father again, never went over to Shreveport, Louisiana, to find him as he had in his boyhood planned. His mother had died of the TB that cropped up in the family from time to time over two generations, but this was when he was in the torment of another world. He later found that she had been buried in Houston with a burial insurance policy for which she had paid a few dollars a month for years.