Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  The older cousin had finally come home—it looked like. He sank peacefully into the land of his ancestors and lived there in his house built over the foundations of the old, dark house and the ruins of the door that haunted him. I am not sure what he does. I go out to the place and talk with him from time to time. His father, who turned his back on his own brother because of his drunkenness and would not come home to his funeral, died not long ago in an Old Folks’ Home paid for by his pension from the oil company he had worked for for over thirty years, brought to his death by a liver cancer caused by “the excessive use of alcohol.” Those were the words used. His mother had turned into a recluse and kept planning to come to live with him, but she never came. Interesting how this Houston brother and sister disavowed the old place of their grandparents and their childhood. The truth is that they were just plainly scared to death and in their fear and unhappiness were counseled by the leader of their religious group to wash their hands of the cursed place of so much bloodshed. There’s some more in this to be told, about this afflicted man and woman who labored and went down under their own accursedness.

  But I’ll wait until later to tell it. I’ve wanted to stick to the two cousins and the outcome of their loving reunion that brought to their family’s troubled lives redemption. Or so it has seemed to me.

  GHOSTAND FLESH

  1947—1952

  THE WHITE ROOSTER

  Walter’s Story

  There were two disturbances in Mrs. Marcy Samuels’ life that were worrying her nearly insane. First, it was, and had been for two years now, Grandpa Samuels, who should have long ago been dead but kept wheeling around her house in his wheel chair, alive as ever. The first year he came to live with them it was plain that he was in good health and would probably live long. But during the middle of the second year he fell thin and coughing and after that there were some weeks when Mrs. Samuels and her husband, Watson, were sure on Monday that he would die and relieve them of him before Saturday. Yet he wheeled on and on, not ever dying at all.

  The second thing that was about to drive Marcy Samuels crazy was a recent disturbance which grew and grew until it became a terror. It was a stray white rooster that crowed at her window all day long and, worst of all, in the early mornings. No one knew where he came from, but there he was, crowing to all the other roosters far and near—and they answering back in a whole choir of crowings. His shrieking was bad enough, but then he had to outrage her further by digging in her pansy bed. Since he first appeared to harass her, Mrs. Samuels had spent most of her day chasing him out of the flowers or throwing objects at him where he was, under her window, his neck stretched and strained in a perfectly blatant crow. After a week of this, she was almost frantic, as she told her many friends on the telephone or in town or from her back yard.

  It seemed that Mrs. Samuels had been cursed with problems all her life and everyone said she had the unluckiest time of it. That a woman sociable and busy as Marcy Samuels should have her father-in-law, helpless in a wheel chair, in her house to keep and take care of was just a shame. And Watson, her husband, was no help at all, even though it was his very father who was so much trouble. He was a slow, patient little man, not easily ruffled. Marcy Samuels was certain that he was not aware that her life was so hard and full of trouble.

  She could not stand at her stove, for instance, but what Grandpa Samuels was there, asking what was in the pot and smelling of it. She could not even have several of the women over without him riding in and out among them, weak as he was, as they chatted in confidence about this or that town happening, and making bright or ugly remarks about women and what they said, their own affairs. Marcy, as she often told Watson, simply could not stop Grandpa’s mouth, could not stop his wheels, could not get him out of her way. And she was busy. If she was hurrying across a room to get some washing in the sink or to get the broom, Grandpa Samuels would make a surprise run out at her from the hall or some door and streak across in front of her, laughing fiendishly or shouting boo! and then she would leap as high as her bulbous ankles would lift her and scream, for she was a nervous woman and had so many things on her mind. Grandpa had a way of sneaking into things Marcy did, as a weevil slips into a bin of meal and bores around in it. He had a way of objecting to Marcy, which she sensed everywhere. He haunted her, pestered her. If she would be bending down to find a thing in her cupboard, she would suddenly sense some shadow over her and then it would be Grandpa Samuels, he would be there, touch her like a ghost in the ribs and frighten her so that she would bounce up and let out a scream. Then he would just sit and grin at her with an owlish face. All these things he did added to the trouble it was for her to keep him, made Marcy Samuels sometimes want to kill Grandpa Samuels. He was everywhere upon her, like an evil spirit following her; and indeed there was a thing in him which scared her often, as if he was losing his mind or trying to kill her.

  As for Grandpa, it was hard to tell whether he really had a wicked face or was deliberately trying to look mean, to keep Marcy troubled and to pay her back for the way she treated him. It may have been that his days were dull and he wanted something to happen, or that he remembered how he heard her fight with his son, her husband, at night in their room because Watson would not put him in a Home and get the house and Marcy free of him. “You work all day and you’re not here with him like I am,” she would whine. “And you’re not man enough to put him where he belongs.” He had been wicked in his day, as men are wicked, had drunk always and in all drinking places, had gambled and had got mixed up in some scrapes. But that was because he had been young and ready. He had never had a household, and the wife he finally got had long since faded away so that she might have been only a shadow from which this son, Watson, emerged, parentless. Then Grandpa had become an old wanderer, lo here lo there, until it all ended in this chair in which he was still a wanderer through the rooms of this house. He had a face which, although mischievous lines were scratched upon it and gave it a kind of devilish look, showed that somewhere there was abundant untouched kindness in him, a life which his life had never been able to use.

  Marcy could not make her husband see that this house was cursed and tormented; and then to have a scarecrow rooster annoying her the length of the day and half the early morning was too much for Marcy Samuels. She had nuisances in her house and nuisances in her yard.

  It was on a certain morning that Mrs. Samuels first looked out her kitchen window to see this gaunt rooster strutting white on the ground. It took her only a second to know that this was the rooster that crowed and scratched in her flowers and so the whole thing started. The first thing she did was to poke her blowsy head out her window and puff her lips into a ring and wheeze shooooooo! through it, fiercely. The white rooster simply did a pert leap, erected his flamboyantly combed head sharp into the air, chopped it about for a moment, and then started scratching vigorously in the lush bed of pansies, his comb slapping like a girl’s pigtails.

  Since her hands were wet in the morning sink full of dishes, Mrs. Samuels stopped to dry them imperfectly and then hurried out the back door, still drying her hands in her apron. Now she would get him, she would utterly destroy him if she could get her hands on him. She flounced out the door and down the steps and threw her great self wildly in the direction of the pansy bed, screaming shoo! shoo! go ’way! go ’way! and then cursed the rooster. Marcy Samuels must have been a terrible sight to any barnyard creature, her hair like a big bush and her terrible bosom heaving and falling, her hands thrashing the air. But the white rooster was not dismayed at all. Again he did a small quick hop, stuck his beak into the air, and stood firmly on his ground, his yellow claw spread over the face of a purple pansy and holding it to the ground imprisoned as a cat holds down a mouse. And then a sound, a clear melodious measure, which Mrs. Samuels thought was the most awful noise in the world, burst from his straggly throat.

  He was plainly a poorly rooster, thin as some sparrow, his white feathers drooping and without luster, his comb of
extravagant growth but pale and flaccid, hanging like a wrinkled glove over his eye. It was clear that he had been run from many a yard and that in fleeing he had torn his feathers and so tired himself that whatever he found to eat in random places was not enough to keep any flesh on his carcass. He would not be a good eating chicken, Mrs. Samuels thought, running at him, for he has no meat on him at all. Anyway, he was not like a chicken but like some nightmare rooster from Hades sent to trouble her. Yet he was most vividly alive in some courageous way.

  She threw a stone at him and at this he leaped and screamed in fright and hurdled the shrubbery into a vacant lot. Mrs. Samucls clashed to her violated pansy bed and began throwing up loose dirt about the stems, making reparations. This was no ordinary rooster in her mind. Since she had a very good imagination and was, actually, a little afraid of roosters anyway, the white rooster took on a shape of terror in her mind. This was because he was so indestructible. Something seemed to protect him. He seemed to dare her to capture him, and if she threw a shoe out her window at him, he was not challenged, but just let out another startling crow at her. And in the early morning in a snug bed, such a crowing is like the cry of fire! or an explosion in the brain.

  It was around noon of that day that Mrs. Samuels, at her clothesline, sighted Mrs. Doran across the hedge, at her line, her long fingers fluttering over the clothespins like butterflies trying to light there.

  ‘That your rooster that’s been in my pansy bed and crows all the time, Mrs. Doran?”

  “Marcy, it must be. You know we had two of them, intending to eat them for Christmas, but they both broke out of the coop and went running away into the neighborhood. My husband Carl just gave them up because he says he’s not going to be chasing any chickens like some farmer.”

  “Well then I tell you we can’t have him here disturbing us. If I catch him do you want him back?”

  “Heavens no, honey. If you catch him, do what you want to with him, we don’t want him anymore. Lord knows where the other one is.” And then she unfolded from her tub a long limp outing gown and pinned it to the line by its shoulders to let it hang down like an effigy of herself.

  Mrs. Samuels noticed that Mrs. Doran was as casual about the whole affair as she was the day she brought back her water pitcher in several pieces, borrowed for a party and broken by the cat. It made her even madder with the white rooster. This simply means killing that white rooster, she told herself as she went from her line. It means wringing his neck until it is twisted clean from his breastbone—if we can catch him; and I’ll try—catch him and throw him in the chickenyard and hold him there until Watson comes home from work and then Watson will do the wringing, not me. When she came in the back door she was already preparing herself in her mind for the killing of the white rooster, how she would catch him and then wait for Watson to wring his neck—if Watson actually could get up enough courage to do anything at all for her.

  In the afternoon around two, just as she was resting, she heard a cawing and it was the rooster back again. Marcy bounded from her bed and raced to the window. “Now I will get him,” she said severely.

  She moved herself quietly to a bush and concealed herself behind it, her full-blown buttocks protruding like a monstrous flower in bud. Around the bush in a smiling innocent circle were the pansies, all purple and yellow faces, bright in the wind. When he comes scratching here, she told herself, and when he gets all interested in the dirt, I’ll leap upon him and catch him sure.

  Behind the bush she waited; her eyes watched the white rooster moving towards the pansy bed, pecking here and there in the grass at whatever was there and might be eaten. As she prepared herself to leap, Mrs. Samuels noticed the white hated face of Grandpa at the window. He had rolled his wheel chair there to watch the maneuvers in the yard. She knew at a glance that he was against her catching the white rooster. But because she hated him, she did not care what he thought. In fact she secretly suspected Grandpa and the rooster to be partners in a plot to worry her out of her mind, one in the house, the other in the yard, tantalizing her outside and inside; she wouldn’t put it past them. And if she could destroy the rooster that was a terror in the yard she had a feeling that she would be in a way destroying a part of Grandpa that was a trouble in her house. She wished she were hiding behind a bush to leap out upon him to wring his neck. He would not die, only wheel through her house day after day, asking for this and that, meddling in everything she did.

  The rooster came to the pansy bed so serene, even in rags of feathers, like a beggar-saint, sure in his head of something, something unalterable, although food was unsure, even life. He came as if he knew suffering and terror, as if he were all alone in the world of fowls, far away from his flock, alien and far away from any golden grain thrown by caring hands, stealing a wretched worm or cricket from a foreign yard. What made him so alive, what did he know? Perhaps as he thrust the horned nails of his toes in the easy earth of the flower bed he dreamed of the fields on a May morning, the jeweled dew upon their grasses and the sun coming up like the yolk of an egg swimming in an albuminous sky. And the roseate freshness of his month when he was a tight-fleshed slender-thighed cockerel, alert on his hill and the pristine morning breaking all around him. To greet it with cascading trills of crowings, tremulous in his throat, was to quiver his thin red tongue in trebles. What a joy he felt to be of the world of wordless creatures, where crowing or whirring of wings or the brush of legs together said everything, said praise, we live. To be of the grassy world where things blow and bend and rustle; of the insect world so close to it that it was known when the most insignificant mite would turn in its minute course or an ant haul an imperceptible grain of sand from its tiny cave.

  And to wonder at the world and to be able to articulate the fowl-wonder in the sweetest song. He knew time as the seasons know it, being of time. He was tuned to the mechanism of dusk and dawn, it may have been in his mind as simple as the dropping of a curtain to close out the light or the lifting of it to let light in upon a place. All he knew, perhaps, was that there is a going round, and first light comes ever so tinily and speck-like, as through the opening of a stalk, when it is time. Yet the thing that is light breaking on the world is morning breaking open, unfolding within him and he feels it and it makes him chime, like a clock, at his hour. And this is daybreak for him and he feels the daybreak in his throat, and tells of it, rhapsodically, not knowing a single word to say.

  And once he knew the delight of wearing red-blooded wattles hanging folded from his throat and a comb climbing up his forehead all in crimson horns to rise from him as a star, pointed. To be rooster was to have a beak hard and brittle as shell, formed just as he would have chosen a thing for fowls to pick grain or insect from their place. To be bird was to be of feathers and shuffle and preen them and to carry wings and arch and fold them, or float them on the wind, to be wafted, to be moved a space by them.

  But Marcy Samuels was behind the bush, waiting, and while she waited her mind said over and over, “If he would die!” If he would die, by himself. How I could leap upon him, choke the life out of him. The rooster moved toward the pansies, tail feathers drooped and frayed. If he would die, she thought, clenching her fists. If I could leap upon him and twist his old wrinkled throat and keep out the breath.

  At the window, Grandpa Samuels knew something terrible was about to happen. He watched silently. He saw the formidable figure of Mrs. Samuels crouching behind the bush, waiting to pounce upon the rooster.

  In a great bounce-like movement, Mrs. Samuels suddenly fell upon the rooster, screaming, “If he would die!” And caught him. The rooster did not struggle, although he cawed out for a second and then meekly gave himself up to Mrs. Samuels. She ran with him to the chickenyard and stopped at the fence. But before throwing him over, she first tightened her strong hands around his neck and gritted her teeth, just to stop the breathing for a moment, to crush the crowing part of him, as if it were a little waxen whistle she could smash. Then she threw him over th
e fence. The white rooster lay over on his back, very tired and dazed, his yellow legs straight in the air, his claws clenched like fists and not moving, only trembling a little. The Samuels’ own splendid golden cock approached the shape of feathers to see what this was, what had come over into his domain, and thought surely it was dead. He leaped upon the limp fuss of feathers and drove his fine spurs into the white rooster just to be sure he was dead. And all the fat pampered hens stood around gazing and casual in a kind of fowlish elegance, not really disturbed, only a bit curious, while the golden cock bristled his fine feathers and, feeling in himself what a thing of price and intrepidity he was, posed for a second like a statue imitating some splendid ancestor cock in his memory, to comment upon this intrusion and to show himself unquestionable master, his beady eyes all crimson as glass hat pins. It was apparent that his hens were proud of him and that in their eyes he had lost none of his prowess by not having himself captured the rooster, instead of Mrs. Samuels. And Marcy Samuels, so relieved, stood by the fence a minute showing something of the same thing in her that the hens showed, very viciously proud. Then she brushed her hands clean of the white rooster and marched victoriously to the house.

  Grandpa Samuels was waiting for her at the door, a dare in his face, and said, “Did you get him?”

  “He’s in the yard waiting until Watson comes home to kill him. I mashed the breath out of the scoundrel and he may be dead the way he’s lying on his back in the chickenyard. No more crowing at my window, no more scratching in my pansy bed, I’ll tell you. I’ve got one thing off my mind.”