Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  She ran in to the girls’ lavatory and was dramatically hiding from him there, panting faster than she really had to. She stopped to listen and heard his sh-sh-sh-sh down the hall away from her. This was another narrow escape she would tell Helen McWorthy about.

  Then it was time for the May Fete practice and she went to the auditorium that always seemed so cool when the whole school wasn’t in it. There were the royalty, already assembled: Joe Wright, the handsome King, also the Chief Yell Leader; Marveen Soames, the beautiful Queen; the other Princess, Hazel May Young, not pretty but with personality, and all the Dukes and Duchesses. Miss McMurray, the perfect-walking English teacher, was there to take charge.

  They all marched down the aisle, very proud, and the King and Queen mounted the throne, the Princesses and Princes, Dukes and Duchesses swaggered to their places around the throne. The King had on his silver crown and was holding his tinfoil wand. When it was time to crown the Queen, the biggest moment of all, and everything was real quiet, all the empty seats in the auditorium hushed and watching, she spied in the glass frame of the auditorium door the terrible face of George Kurunus, like a grasshopper’s face. He was watching the May Fete and had it all in his eye. This George Kurunus was everywhere, why did he have to be everywhere she was? But she turned her eyes away from him, upon all the beautiful royalty, and they went on with the practice. Then suddenly it was the bell for the next class, which was Homemaking—a dreary place for a Princess to go: to a cookstove after a coronation.

  The Homemaking teacher was Miss Starnes and there she was, waiting for the girls at the door, smiling and standing straight. Miss Starnes would stand before her class reading from some book. Each day she had a fresh rose or some other flower from her own garden stuck to her strict dress, and the way she maneuvered her mouth and bowed and leaned her head towards the girls sitting before her made them know that she knew she was saying something good, as though she were smacking her lips and golloping something like a dessert. Yet Miss Starnes was very serious and meant what she would say or read and paused often, sticking out her chin (which had hairs on it) for emphasis.

  The girls in Homemaking class who sat before her were not sure at all what these words meant, but they sat there, among the linen dresses and the fancy aprons hanging on hangers, which last year’s class had made with its own hands and left the prices pinned on to show that they were good enough to be bought in any store. Then there was a manikin on a stand—in a corner by the American flag, which the manikin seemed to need to drape around itself to hide its nakedness, headless and with a pole running right up through her to be her one leg; and in an adjoining room—the kitchen—there were rows of little stoves where Miss Starnes told the girls things to cook.

  The bell had rung and all the girls were in their seats—any chosen seat and not alphabetically—and “responsibility” was a word Miss Starnes was already smacking off her lips to the girls in Homemaking. “Domestic re-spon-si-bi-li-ty.” These were words Miss Starnes started right in telling to the class, things they should be or do in the good home they would have or make—and which lay off somewhere in the vague unknown and which they could not quite see as something of theirs but just imagine and did not even particularly want, now. But whatever or wherever or however this place “The Home,” they would be there, all these girls, going industriously around in aprons, there would be a lot of busy sewing and a difficult cooking, and… “Domestic re-spon-si-bi-li-ty”… these words Miss Starnes was saying.

  Quella was going to start in plaiting and unplaiting Helena McWorthy’s hair when Miss Starnes kneaded and worked her lips and they were getting ready to say another careful word to the class. “E-con-o-my.” The manikin was standing there in the corner trying to be that word, which was a good thing to be. The manikin was a pitiful thing, undressed, or something headless like a fowl, or something deformed, but proud and seeming to want to help Miss Starnes with the lecture by standing there as though it, too, were teaching Homemaking. It was about the size of her mother in her short slip in the summertime, Quella observed.

  And then Miss Starnes led them in the kitchen and they were going to cook their lesson. “I know what it will be,” Quella told the others. “Like some stuff Charlotte Langendorf cooked first period and carried in wax paper to Social Studies—of potatoes or something.” But Miss Starnes was saying that in this class today there would be cooked pudding and to light the stoves and listen to some things she would say about the making of pudding, and to put on their white cook aprons. “Ingredients” was a word about pudding which Miss Starnes was saying, and it seemed just the word for what milk and sugar, which they were already mixing, looked like together. There was a gregarious stirring. Then Miss Starnes told about the soft ball that the mixture would make in a cup of cold water to show it was ready. Here and there already a soft ball was found in a cup and a girl would raise her hand to tell it to Miss Starnes.

  Just as Quella and Helena’s mixture made a soft ball for them in their cup of cold water, a staccato bell-ringing that was certainly not the regular bell resounded in the school building, and it was fire drill. Although the mixture was ready and showed its undeniable sign, all the Homemaking girls had to leave it and line up in twos and march behind Miss Starnes through the hall smelling of their mixture, which even then, though it was not yet anything but ingredients, made them feel important because they had caused this smell to move all in the corridors just as they were moving now, and even reach around as far as the algebra room, where there were no good smells, and hang under the noses of the class doing unknowns. The girls marched and fretted.

  When the Homemaking class got outside under the trees where the school busses were waiting for school to be out, and stood in their right place under the cottonwood trees, Miss Starnes suddenly thought about the windows in Homemaking and remembered she had not closed and locked them according to fire drill instructions. “Quella,” she said carefully as though she were saying “do-mes-tic” or “e-con-o-my,” “please to run back to Homemaking and close all the windows tight and see that no stoves are burning.”

  “Don’t I need a pass?” Quella asked.

  “No, Quella. Run.”

  She was alone in the hall again. The pudding will be ruined, she thought. If the school burns, they will have to save the pudding and the May Fete pretties. She could smell smoke, and then once she was sure she saw a flame lick out of Boys’ Lavatory, but she would never go in there to put it out. She went very fast to Homemaking and in the room she went right to her and Helena’s cup with the soft ball in it. She felt it. It was still soft. She went around looking at other cups. Margy Reynolds’ was not ready but was still just ingredients in a cup of water. But some hand or finger had been in it all, in all the cups and pans, who had been meddling in Homemaking? She thought she heard the crackling of flames above her, so she rushed to close the windows, and as she ran out, she swiped her finger through her and Helena’s ready mixture and strung it along the stove and floor and on her dress; but she licked it up quick and slammed the door.

  Then she ran through the hall, not liking the halls this way, with no pass, without classes in the rooms, no different teachers standing or sitting there as she passed them. How scarey the school seemed now, full of the echoes of her clapping feet and her panting. She passed Miss Purlow’s room and looked in through the door. On the blackboard were written the lines in beautiful penmanship:

  “Come into the garden, Maud,

  For the black bat, night, has flown…”

  and under the lines was—what? Was it a joke or what? There was a curious disheveled chaos of giant and dwarf runaway shapes, tumbled and humped and crazy… like the Devil’s writing or like a ghost’s. She ran.

  Then she was by the auditorium and stopped to make sure there was no flame in there to eat up all the May Fete pretties—the dresses and the paper flowers, the paper wand and all the paper streamers. She could feel something in there! There was some live thing in there! She
listened. No sound. She looked through the pane of the auditorium door and what should she spy but George Kurunus sitting on the King’s Throne like a crazy king in a burning building. On his head was the silver crown and in his ruined hand the silver wand. He was into everything, who would keep him out of all the things at school; he was a disturbance in this world of school and in her own world, touching and tampering with everything she did. She thought she saw him rise and come down from the throne and down the aisle towards her, after her; and she ran away and down the hall, now full of smoke she was sure, hearing him after her—sh-sh-sh-sh—and seeing rags of flame waving out from alcoves and recesses at her. She ran out the door and into the open, without looking back. If the schoolhouse burned it would burn him like a cricket in it. She would not tell.

  She was thrilled to see all the boys and all the girls lined under the trees and gladly joined them. She stood shivering under the trees in her place in line, waiting to see what was going to happen, in the unearthly quiet that lay over all the school people, over all the school building. Suddenly at a window on the second floor she saw his face, as if her fear of fire had a face and it was George Kurunus’. No one else seemed to see it—was she imagining it? for she now had the insect-headed and devil-bodied image of him in her head. No, there it was, his face, looking down at her, she was sure. And then she thought she saw him crying! If he was crying she wanted to save him from the burning building, to call out that he was in there, or to run in and save him herself; hurry! hurry! hurry! But suddenly the all-clear bell that would bring them all back to where he was, separate and waiting, but never back to him whirred out, convulsing through her whole body and through his own tilted body like electric shock…it was all a nightmare: if there had been no fire then there had been no George in the empty building, she thought.

  Now they all began to move, in their colors like a field of flowers jostling in the wind; and she saw again, for sure, his grasshopper face at the window, watching them coming back to the skulled building of stone that held him like an appetite or a desire that would surely, one day, get them every one: all the beautiful schoolchildren gathered and moving like the chosen through the heavenly amber afternoon light and under the golden leaves—the lean ball-players, the agile jitterbuggers, the leaping perch of yell leaders, the golden-tongued winners of the declamation contests, Princes and Princesses, Duchesses and Kings, and she, Quella, among them, no safer than the rest but knowing, at least, one thing more than the rest.

  CHILDREN OF OLD SOMEBODY

  For Katherine Anne

  Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse:

  Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!

  Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;

  Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede:

  And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

  —CHAUCER, TROUTHE.

  On the road, the dust at his feet, where was he bound, where was he to go, our Old Ancestry? He seemed to find no rest for the sole of his foot. For he knew another country that had a landscape he could not wink or water out of his eye; and he had another language in his ears.

  Where was the leader, whom to follow, shall we follow a follower? was the thought that hissed like a snake in the brake of the brain of his times and led to confusion in the flock, for a thought can destroy. It was a time when everything shifted and changed, swarmed around and clustered on an idea or a craving, used idea and craving up, or wearied of them, then scattered to pieces again; it was a time of confusion of cravings, it was like a bunch of sheep dispersed and broken, shepherd or no…he only followed when he was supposed to lead, another sheep, one of the broken flock, and could not summon them all together; or there was no shepherd (maybe that was the trouble), he was lost under the hill. Yet the permanent gesture was passing up and down, hovering, vanishing.

  Fallen to the grasshopper, the plague year at hand; brother against brother, the community broken into Real Estate, a price on the head; flesh sealed up, men in a male prisonhouse, the women gone mad—where was the road, the wayfarer’s flower, the bird in the air, the roadside spring? It was out of this broken flock that he broke, free and loose, to keep the idea of himself uneaten in his brain. Preserve my image of myself, he thought; set my skull over this image like a glass cover. Losing this, befouling this image is whoring all our hope, the fiendish betrayal of Satan, the destruction of our Old Ancestor.

  So he was a shape of dust—and if all things return to dust, fall back into it, dust was his great pile, he the dust-grubber, himself formed of the dust of the ground, from which he would find the first things formed out of the ground and bring them to himself and to us all to see what would we call them. Breathed out of dust, he was yet the enemy of all dust-eaters; he would save the dust from the appetite, from the blind voracious driving bite of hunger: the grasshopper and the worm. Then, before it all is eaten, he would have his hands in it, on it, to touch it to smut it with his fingermarks—but even more: to shape it, out of its own dust and with the miraculous light of his own dust, and thus set it away, preserved. Shaped from no more than the small and agitated dust of dancers’ feet on the side of the hill, all his aim and all his desire was to return to the dust to prospect in it and to save the grubbings. Consider this old road-runner: he is shuttler, hoverer: face at windows, fingers at panes, stick-knuckles on doors. But the dust is at his heels and his feet are on the road that he thinks to lead him for a little while to the blood beginnings of himself.

  So the figure of Old Somebody comes to mind; this is to consider Old Somebody, who had no more of a name than what people gave him when he was not there to hear it.

  Once, in another house, in another country, there passed on the road by the side of the house an old stranger who sometimes turned off to come to the back door and knock upon it with a stick he always carried. We of the house would know his knock on the house and though we seldom went to answer him with fear, unless it was after dark and a convict had escaped, we always felt a vague unearthly question in us as we went to answer his knock, as though some great unnameable phenomenon, like weather or like love, knocked on our house to call us away or to tell us something. This old stranger would knock and call out, “Somebody! Somebody! Hello-o-o!”; and for this we came to call him Old Somebody. What fears or visions the children of the house might have had of him no elder would ever know, for children’s images sink into nameless depths of themselves—there is this loss to recapture, to salvage up from the fathoms, hovering over the depths to rescue the shape when it rises. We came, then, people of the house he knocked on, to the back door to see this old knocker covered with dust. Given a begging—some momentary mercy; a biscuit or a cold potato or a dipper of well water—he would turn away and we would watch him through the window as he took his road again and went on.

  To threaten children in the house against the repetition of any mischief they had it in their minds to commit, the elders warned them that they should be given to Old Somebody to take away next time he came, as any begging, unless they corrected their ugliness in advance or dried up and straightened their face right that very minute. “Old Somebody’s goan come get you and carry you off down the road if you don’t hush it right up.” So they used Old Somebody for a threat: we would be delivered into the hands of a passing figure of dust if we did not behave. And what we had to grow into was the knowledge that, behave or no, his hands would have us, this old haunting threat, this old vagrant intimidation.

  And so we learned that the dust trembles at the touch of dust, agitates its own kind, rouses it, bestirs it, recruits its gratuitous army of it, dust, that becomes a choir of dust; and everything is taken, behave or no, by Old Somebody. For in the winter the ghostly fruit that clove to the unleafed branches would crumble at the touch and fall to the ground, fruit of dust. We dug holes in the ground and cupped our hands around our mouth and cried into the dirtholes “Old Somebody! Old Somebody!” and covered up our cry with dirt, while elders thought
it was a warning to a doodle-bug that his house was on fire.

  Tales told of him tried to create him in the minds of us listeners. It was told how when the boardinghouse where Old Somebody once lived burnt to the ground, how he appeared suddenly as if risen up out of ash and was seen fingering the ash—and how he found something and disappeared with it. Was it some old ashen vanity of his past that he grubbed for and found, some object his flesh had loved, some locket or letter or picture frame with the face once in it vanished?

  And it was also told how he lolled and haunted about in the winter orchards touching and gathering the ghosts of summer fruit that hung like balls of dust on the bare branches. Was it to save them? How moss was Old Somebody’s beard, how the Devil’s Snuffbox, sifting to rusty powder in the hand that picked it from the ground, was Old Somebody’s dippingsnuff; how the urchins of dust in corners that the broom could not snare were the resdess children of Old Somebody. He belonged to all ghostly, elusive, vanishing things. All vanishing things! We would not give our life, our heart, our soul to the Devil of all vanishing things. Yet how they haunted and begged the heart and how one grieved after them. We knew that it was said to us that we must cleave to the permanent things and let all vanity pass; but think how because a life was given, haunted and called after by all vanishing things from the first, to vanishing things that appear and then slip away so suddenly, passing through the hands and on away, think how a life so given therefore suffered and was cursed and set on evil ground, unstable in unstable things. But what else could be done but to claim unto oneself, passager himself, what was his, all passing things. We pass with them and in them… they do not leave us behind but pull us on down and away with them. But to leave something of us both behind, a shape of dust in the dust, was the task, so early taken, of Old Somebody’s children.