Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  Quella sneaked a good black jawbreaker into her mouth, acting like she was just brushing her hand across her mouth, and Miss Morris never knew. Then she sat, waiting for a reason to get an early pass to dawn upon her. She could hear the voices of this one and that one reading out about Sam Houston—forever Sam Houston! They had had him in the Third Grade and they had had him in the Fifth. And now, even in the Seventh and as far as Junior High School they had to have him again. It was Mabel Sampson, the biggest girl, reading now. If she would say thee—ee, Miss Morris would stop her and make her say it thuh; and she could not even pronounce the word that clearly spelled Puritan but said it Prutan. Mabel Sampson was so dumb. Because Mabel Sampson was bigger than the rest in the class, she deviled them and snooted them whenever and wherever she could, to make it plain that she had somewhere (and Quella was going to find out) passed all the rest of them on her way to something and would get there first.

  And then it was Billy Mangus reading. He was fat and white and whined a lot, and the worst boy to sit in front of if you were a girl and an M. She and Helena McWorthy just hated him for what he would do with redhots. He would plant these little dots of sticky candy in Helena McWorthy’s beautiful hair and she would not even know it or feel them there and go all through the halls between classes having redhots in her hair until someone laughed at her and made fun of her and picked them out to eat them. Or Billy Mangus would bore a sharpened pencil into Helena’s back right through an Angora sweater or even her Mexican bolero which her aunt brought her back from Tijuana, Mexico. Helena was a very quiet girl. She would let Quella stroke her, huddled blinking in her seat, keep her always right and everything about her straight, plait and unplait and plait again her hair, arrange her ribbons. Helena would go anywhere holding Quella’s hand, submissive to be with her. She had little chinkapin eyes fixed close to the bridge of her nose like a cheap doll’s, dull and with scant white eyebrows. Her almost white hair, which was long and divided down her back, was infested with lures like sometimes two red plastic butterflies lighted there, or a green Spanish comb staked over one ear, and always red or blue knitting yarn wound through a spliced hawser of it, which arched over the top of her head from ear to ear. Helena had discovered that a pencil, too, might be stuck there and stolen often by Billy Mangus, who sat behind her alphabetically, and have to be fussed for.

  Billy Mangus was reading and Quella wondered if his false tooth in front was wiggling, and she stretched over to see. No. It must be locked in place now. But if he wanted to, Billy could, by unlocking this false tooth some way with his tongue, cause it to wiggle like a loose picket in a fence. This tooth was his special thing in a class or anywhere if he wanted to unlock it. Suddenly she just had to see it wiggle and she did not know why but she shouted, right in the middle of the reading, “Wiggle us your tooth, Billy!” This made Miss Morris very outdone and Billy Mangus giggled and the whole class tittered. Miss Morris made everything quiet, then stared so hard at Quella and all the class sat very still to watch Miss Morris do one of her stares, hold her rocky eyes, never even breathing or blinking, right on a pupil until he had to look down first. Quella did not know whether to try to outstare Miss Morris by doing just the same to her until she put her eyes down, or to look to see if Billy Mangus was wiggling his tooth. But she decided she would rather see the tooth and turned to look; and so Miss Morris won. “Sit up straight, Quella, and do not talk one more time out of turn!” Miss Morris said, very proud because she had won a staring contest.

  Quella sat up in her seat and there seemed nothing to do, so she remembered her lips, if they had enough lipstick on them. Very carefully she opened her nice black patent-leather purse and got out her lady’s mirror which was of red-skinned leather and had some redhots sticking to it. She cleaned them off into her purse to save them and held out the mirror for her lips to see themselves. She put her lips in a round soft circle. She saw them in her mirror, red enough, sweetheart lips, so beautiful. Then she made different shapes with them, some kissing shapes, some like “OOOOO!”; and one like being prissy, or a word like “really!”; or like the Nurse saying, “I find nothing whatsomever in your eye that does not naturally belong there.” But she would not do her lips like Miss Morris at a mean boy, for then it would spoil the lipstick. Last, she gently kissed a piece of composition paper to leave her lips there. Liz her sister kissed letters at the end and all over, she mailed her lips to boys, and she would, too, when she began to write letters to somebody besides her Grandmother in Yreka, who would certainly not be thrilled with kissing lips in a letter.

  Then she put her mirror back in her purse and spied her big blue comb in there. She scraped some redhots off it and brought it out and raked her hair with it. It was a good feeling. She thought of Helena’s bunch of hair and how she wanted right now to be behind her plaiting it and fixing it as she did in Science, where they did not have to sit alphabetically. She seined her hair again through the net of her comb, right in back this time, being very careful not to comb down the red ribbon which was pinned there like an award for something. If a boy pulled at it, this would make her mad and stamp her foot and have to slap him. She lolled the black jawbreaker around in her mouth and devoured the sweet juice from it.

  Then suddenly there was something being unwrapped cunningly in the L’s across from her. She looked to see Charlotte Langendorf, the ugliest girl, holding something sticky and blue in her lap. It had been wrapped in wax paper. “What is that stuff?” she whispered across to Charlotte. “A thing we cooked today in Cooking and I am going to eat it when the eating period comes,” Charlotte whispered, glad someone had noticed it. “Let me see it,” Quella whispered again. “I won’t eat it, cross my heart. I have Cooking next period and I need to know what we will cook.” Charlotte passed it secretly across and Quella looked at this peculiar thing which they would cook next period. She examined it, smelled of it, and wanted right then to taste some of it. “What is it?” she asked. “It smells funny.” “I don’t know,” Charlotte whispered back, “but it’s something we made out of ingredients. Miss Starnes told us how.” Quella tasted it. It was not good to eat at all, not even cooked; but she had another taste. “Let me have it!” Charlotte whispered severely. “Give me back my cooking!” Quella gave it back. “It smells tacky,” she said. Then she looked ahead of her in the front of the S’s and watched Bobby Sandro’s broken arm in a cast, how he was writing tattoos on it, in a cast and a sling from breaking it in Gym and he did not have to write because of it. And then at Suzanne Prince’s bandaged-up finger, so she couldn’t write, too, saying it was bitten by their cat that went insane.

  And then she surveyed the whole row of mean boys, every one of them mean, not a one cute, whose names began with B as though all the meanest were named alike, and she thought how they would step on your saddle shoes to dirty them. Then she thought of several things in a row: horses and their good gentle one named Beauty they used to have; of a fight in the rain before school by Joe and Sandy and how all the girls stood purposely to get their hair wet and be so worried about it; of Liz and her boy friend Luke Shimmens who owned a hot-rod and took them riding around town and up and down dragging Main blowing the horn and backfiring and seeing different kids walking along and waving out at them.

  Then there seemed nothing else going on to see or do, and Quella wanted to have an early pass again. Wayne Jinks was just finishing his paragraph. When it was over she raised her hand and popped it to jingle the jingles round her wrist. Miss Morris said, “Do you want to read next, Quella?” “Nome,” Quella said, and prissed, “it is time to go to May Fete practice.”

  Miss Morris said a surprise. “All right, take a pass and go ahead.” And she took a pad of passes from her drawer and wrote on one. She tore it off and gave it to Quella, looking for a moment as if she were going to stare at her. But Quella went out of the room quickly.

  She was in the hall with a pass in her hand, going down the very quiet hall that did not have another single person in i
t. She passed all the rooms, sometimes seeing through a door pane some teacher writing on a blackboard or standing talking to a class. She noticed as she went along that without any other kids, alone in the hall (and this same thing was true when she was by herself with a teacher) she was no more than somebody quiet and courteous. But when the others were around, she could be all the things they were, shouting and slapping boys and eating at the wrong time, provoked with the way things were or excited about them. She stopped by the closed door to the Teachers’ Room where all their mailboxes were, like pigeons’ holes. No one was in there. She remembered seeing the teachers gathered in front of their boxes before the first class began, fumbling, dipping and rising like homing pigeons. She came by Mrs. Purlow’s room where the Stuttering Class was—in there was George Kurunus and she spied him through the glass pane of the door, sitting like some kind of an animal. She heard Mrs. Purlow’s perfect words, like “lit-tle,” like “yel-low” floating across the room, how she would say every word right. And next was Mrs. Stanford, who would treat you so very nice when you met her in the grocery store after school or on Saturdays, with her hand on your head, saying, “How’s little Quella?” and patting you, but mean in class and acting as though she never had seen you in a grocery store in her life, or anywhere. Then here was the typing class. It was like a heavy rain in there. And old Miss Cross, who had been teaching how to type for thirty years, standing at the front of the class pointing with a long stick at the letters on a chart and saying “A” and then an enormous clack! to make an A, then “B” and another clack to make this letter. Then faster, and it was like a slow gallop of a horse on pavement and Miss Cross with her stick like a circus trainer, “A - S - D - F - G.” And next was Miss Winnie’s room where this teacher cried a lot and for this was called Weeping Winnie and spoke in a soft cooing voice and seemed so sad. She always lost her voice the Ninth Period and said, “Cheeldrin you will have to write today, my voice is gone.”

  As she went along she would walk like different kinds of people, or in different ways, very quickly and hopping; or as she had seen Miss McMurray, the English teacher and very pretty, going down the halls—as though she were carrying a bag of eggs, afraid to break them, or a sleeping baby that might be waked; and like the Royal Princess with a train that she had been voted to be in the May Fete. Then she meandered in big S’s or in zigzags from one side of the hall to the other; or smeared one finger along the wall, loitering, browsing, lolling at every drinking fountain to sip a long time or spew the water back. She saw some faded redhots and the little stone of a jawbreaker in one fountain.

  Once she thought of Helena and wished Helena could be with her. Helena was such a beautiful name. She came to her sister Liz’s room and peeked in. The good-looking Mr. Forbes was teaching them some important senior subject and they were all listening as if what he was saying had to be learned to take out in the world when they would soon go. She looked to see what color his tie was today. Liz had counted seventeen different ties in seventeen days on Mr. Forbes and he wore so many different kinds of coats and trousers that they said he changed sometimes between classes. Yes, he had his saddle shoes on, too. Then she saw Mr. Forbes looking towards the door where she was. She ducked down quickly to wait until he turned and she could look again for Liz, to see how she looked sitting up in class.

  As she crouched there she suddenly heard someone coming down the hall and looked to see who could it be. It was the awful deformity George Kurunus writhing and slobbering and skulking towards her. She was afraid of him and thought she would scream as all the girls did when he came to them; but she knew if you went up to him not afraid of his twisted face and said George to him and talked to him he would not do anything to you. Together, all the kids played with him, at him, as though he was some crazy and funny thing like a bent toy on a string; but no one ever wanted to be with him alone. Often a class would hear a scratching at the door and would see his hoodlum face at a door pane like Hallowe’en and be frightened until they saw it was just George Kurunus. Then the class would laugh and make faces back at him and the teacher would go to the door and say “Now, George…” and shoo him away; and the class would titter. The boys all went around with him as if he was something they owned, something they could use for some stunt or trick on somebody, their arms around his shoulder; and they talked and laughed with him and told him ugly jokes and things about girls and sicked him on certain girls. Why did this deformity George have to be in a school? He couldn’t even hold a word still in his mouth when he said it, for it rattled or hopped away—this was why he was in Stuttering Class, but it did him no good, he still broke a word when he said it, as if it were a twig, he still said ruined words.

  He could not speak a word right and whole no matter how hard he tried or how carefully. But if you live among breakage, he may have reasoned, you finally see the wisdom in pieces; and no one can keep you from the pasting and joining together of bits to make the mind’s own whole. What can break anything set back whole upon a shelf in the mind, like a mended dish? His mind, then, was full of mended words, broken by his own speech but repaired by his silences and put back into his mind. The wisdom in all things, in time, tells a meaning to those things, even to parcels of things that seem to mean disuse and no use, like scraps in a mending basket that are tokens and remnants of many splendid dresses and robes each with a whole to tell about.

  Whenever the Twirling Class for girls in the Black and Gold Battalion practiced on the football field, here was this George on the field, too, like some old stray dog that had to be shooed away. And in a marching line of some class to somewhere, the library or a program in the auditorium, he ruined any straight marching line and so was put last to keep the line straight. But at the end of a straight marching line he twisted and wavered like the raveling out of a line and ruined it, even then; he was the capricious conclusion and mocking collapse of something all ordered and precise right up to the tag end. When he walked, it seemed he always ran upon himself like someone in the way—or like a wounded insect. He was a flaw in the school, as if he were a crack in the building.

  This day he had sat in his row by the window and the sun was coming in upon him. It warmed his vestigial hand, lay upon a page of his book. It touched some leaves of a begonia on the teacher’s desk and showed their white lines and illuminated the blooms to like glass flowers. Flower was a word, but he could not say it. The sun came in and lay upon Miss Purlow’s face and showed where the round spot of rouge ended and her face’s real skin began. The sun made, also, between Miss Purlow and the blackboard, a little transparent ladder leading up and out through the window. Specks of golden dust were popping in it, dancing and whirling on out the window. Then suddenly Miss Purlow walked through it and broke it, but it joined together again, in spite of Miss Purlow, and made him glad. Miss Purlow went to the blackboard and wrote upon it some perfectly shaped words in her pretty curlimacue handwriting that said:

  “Come into the garden, Maud,

  For the black bat, night, has flown…”

  Then she read them aloud, musically and perfectly, and he so wanted to have these words in his mouth. Miss Purlow asked him to say them after her but he could not, they fell away from him, they were all hers; yet he had it perfect, the little melodious collection of words, in his mind from Miss Purlow’s mouth, a small tune of sounds that hung clear and warbling in his ears like birdsong. He turned and shuffled away, to leave the room. Miss Purlow called at him that she would report him to the Principal again as soon as the class was over, but he did not care, he opened the door and went away from this room where he could not speak and where words tormented him.

  Then here he was, ruining a quiet hall for Quella. Although with other children she laughed at him and thought him a funny thing, alone she was afraid of him and detested him. Where was this George going? He was shuffling closer. She stood up and pressed against the wall and watched him, hating him. It was said that if he ever fell down he could never get up unless
somebody helped him, but just lie there scrambling and waving his arms and legs, like a bug on its back, and muttering. His little withered left arm was folded like a plucked bird’s wing and its bleached and shriveled hand, looking as though it had been too long in water, was bent over and it hung limp like a dead fowl’s neck and dangling head. But he could use this piece of hand, this scrap of arm quickly and he could snap it like a little quirt and pop girls as they passed him in the hall. Here he came, this crazy George Kurunus, a piece of wreckage in the school. What did he want? She looked to see if he had a pass in his hand. No. Certainly he was not going to practice for any May Fete. Why should he be in the halls and without a pass?

  She shrank close to the wall, but did not want to be caught there by him. She decided to run fast past him, not looking at his goblin face and not going close enough to him to be popped by his whip of an arm. She darted and fled past him, wanting to push him down and leave him wriggling there in the hall. He said some sound, all drunken and gargled, to her as she passed him; but he did not try to pop her. She ran looking back at him and when she came to the turn of the hall that led to the lavatory, she ran around it fast, then crept back to peek around and see if he was still going on or coming after her. George Kurunus was staggering along, his knees scraping each other, sounding like a little puffing train in the hall, without ever looking back. This made her furious and she was going to yell, “Stuck u-up!” until she remembered she would be heard and was supposed to be going to the auditorium.