Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  James was this mysterious, wandering boy. He loved the woods at the edge of his cousin’s neighborhood and would spend whole days there while his aunt called and searched for him by telephone. She would call the grandmother’s house, talk to a number of little grandchildren who passed the phone from one to another and finally to the deaf old grandmother, who could scarcely understand a word. But James was not there and no one had seen him. Once Fay, one of the young aunts living in the grandmother’s house, called at midnight to say they had just discovered James sleeping under the fig trees in the back yard. Jock her husband had almost shot him before he had called out his name. Years later, when the cousin was in high school, he heard talk between his mother and father about Fay’s hiding in the very same place while the police looked for her in the house—why, he did not know. At any rate, they had not found her.

  He was a wild country boy brought to live in the city of Houston when his parents moved there from a little town down the road south. He said he wanted to be a cowboy, but it was too late for that; still, he wore boots and spurs. He hated the city, the schools, played away almost daily. The cousin admired James, thought him a daring hero. When he listened to his mother and father quarrel over James at night after they had gone to bed, his tenderness for him grew and grew. “He’s like all the rest of them,” his mother accused his father.

  “They are my folks,” the cousin’s father said with dignity. “Macel is my sister.”

  “Then let some of the other folks take care of James. Let Fay. I simply cannot handle him.”

  Poor James, the cousin thought, poor homeless James. He has no friend but me.

  One afternoon James suggested they go to see some Cornish fighting cocks on a farm at the edge of the city. The cousin did not tell his mother and they stole away against his conscience. They hitchhiked to the farm out on the highway to Conroe, and there was a rooster-like man sitting barefooted in a little shotgun house. He had rooster feet, thin and with spread-out toes, and feathery hair. His wife was fat and loose and was barefooted, too. She objected to the cousin being there and said, “Chuck, you’ll get yourself in trouble.” But Chuck asked the cousins to come out to his chicken yard to see his Cornish cocks.

  In a pen were the brilliant birds, each in its own coop, some with white scars about their jewel eyes. Stretching out beyond the chicken pen was the flat, rainy marshland of South Texas, over which a web of gray mist hung. The sad feeling of after-rain engulfed the cousin and, mixed with the sense of evil because of the fighting cocks and his guilt at having left home secretly, made him feel speechless and afraid. He would not go in the pen but stood outside and watched James and Chuck spar with the cocks and heard Chuck speak of their prowess. Then the cousin heard James ask the price of a big blue cock with stars on its breast. “Fifteen dollars,” Chuck said, “and worth a lots more. He fights like a fiend.” To the cousin’s astonishment he heard James say he would take the blue one, and he saw him take some bills from his pocket and separate fifteen single ones. When they left they heard Chuck and his wife quarreling in the little house.

  They went on away to the highway to thumb a ride, and James tucked the blue cock inside his lumberjacket and spoke very quietly to him with his stuttering lips against the cock’s blinking and magnificent ruby eye.

  “But where will we keep him?” the cousin asked. “We can’t at my house.”

  “I know a place,” James said. “This Cornish will make a lot of money.”

  “But I’m afraid,” the cousin said.

  “You’re always ’f-f-fraid,” James said with a tender, mocking smile. And then he whispered something else to the black tip that stuck out from his jacket like a spur of ebony.

  A pickup truck stopped for them shortly and took them straight to the Houston Heights, where James said they would get out. James said they were going to their grandmother’s house.

  Their grandmother and grandfather had moved to the city, into a big rotten house, from the railroad town of Palestine, Texas. They had brought a family of seven grown children and the married children’s children. In time, the grandfather had vanished and no one seemed to care where. The house was like a big boarding house, people in every room, the grandmother rocking, deaf and humped and shriveled, in the dining room. There was the smell of mustiness all through the house, exactly the way the grandmother smelled. In the back yard were some fig trees dripping with purple figs, and under the trees was a secret place, a damp and musky cove. It was a hideaway known to the children of the house, to the blackbirds after the figs, and to the cats stalking the birds. James told his cousin that this was the place to hide with the Cornish cock. He told the cock that he would have to be quiet for one night and made a chucking sound to him.

  The cousins arrived at the grandmother’s house with its sagging wooden front porch and its curtainless windows where some of the shades were pulled down. The front door was always open and the screen door sagged half-open. In the dirt front yard, which was damp and where cans and papers were strewn, two of the grandchildren sat quietly together: they were Jack and Little Sister, whose mother was divorced and living there with her mother. They seemed special to the cousin because they were Catholics and had that strangeness about them. Their father had insisted that they be brought up in his church, though he had run away and left them in it long ago; and now they seemed to the cousin to have been abandoned in it and could never change back. No one would take them to Mass, and if a priest appeared on the sidewalk, someone in the house would rush out and snatch at the children or gather them away and shout at the priest to mind his own business and go away, as if he were a kidnapper.

  “Our mother is sick in bed,” Jack said to James and the cousin as they passed him and Little Sister in the yard. Their mother, Beatrice, was a delicate and wild woman who could not find her way with men, and later, when the cousin was in college, she took her life. Not long after, Little Sister was killed in an automobile crash—it was said she was running away to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to get married to a Catholic gambler. But Jack went on his way somewhere in the world, and the cousin never saw him again. Years later he heard that Jack had gone to a Trappist Monastery away in the North, but no one knew for sure. James grumbled at Jack and Little Sister and whispered, “If-f-f you tell anybody we were here, then a bear will come tonight and e-e-eat you up in bed.” The two little alien Catholics, alone in a churchless house, looked sadly and silently at James and the cousin. They were constantly together and the cousin thought how they protected each other, asked for nothing in their orphan’s world; they were not afraid. “My pore little Cathlicks,” the grandmother would sometimes say over them when she saw them sleeping together on the sleeping-porch, as if they were cursed.

  James and the cousin went around the house and into the back yard. Now it was almost dark. They crept stealthily, James with the Cornish cock nestled under his lumberjack. Once it cawed. Then James hushed it by stroking its neck and whispering to it.

  Under the fig trees, in the cloying sweetness of the ripe fruit, James uncovered the Cornish cock. He pulled a fig and ate a bite of it, then gave a taste of it to the cock, who snapped it fiercely. Before the cousins knew it he had leaped to the ground and, as if he were on springs, bounced up into a fig tree. The Cornish cock began at once to eat the figs. Jim murmured an oath and shook the tree. Figs fat and wet fell upon him and the cousin.

  “Stop!” the cousin whispered. “You’ll ruin Granny’s figs.”

  “Shut up.” James scowled. “You’re always ’f-f-fraid.”

  The cousin picked up a rock from the ground and threw it into the tree. He must have hurled it with great force, greater than he knew he possessed, for in a flash there shuddered at his feet the dark leafy bunch of the Cornish cock. In a moment the feathers were still.

  “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to!” the cousin gasped in horror, and he backed farther and farther away, beyond the deep shadows of the fig trees. Standing away, he saw in the dark lusc
ious grove the figure of James fall to the ground and kneel over his Cornish cock and clasp the tousled mass like a lover’s head. He heard him sob softly; and the cousin backed away in anguish.

  As he passed the curtainless windows of the dining room, where the light was now on, he saw his old grandmother hunched in her chair, one leg folded under her, rocking gently and staring at nothing; and she seemed to him at that moment to be bearing the sorrow of everything—in her house, under the fig trees, in all the world. And then he heard the soft cries of Beatrice from her mysterious room, “Somebody help me, somebody go bring me a drink of water.” He went on, past the chaos of the sleeping-porch that had so many beds and cots in it—for Beatrice’s two children the little Catholics, for Fay’s two, for his grandmother, for his grandfather who would not stay home, for Fay and for Jock the young seaman, her third husband, with tattoos and still wearing his sailor pants. He thought of Jock, who cursed before everybody, was restless, would come and go or sprawl on the bed he and Fay slept in on the sleeping-porch with all the rest; and he remembered when he had stayed overnight in this house once how he had heard what he thought was Jock beating Fay in the night, crying out to her and panting, “you f…”; how Jock the sailor would lie on the bed in the daytime smoking and reading from a storage of battered Western Stories and Romance Stories magazines that were strewn under the bed, while Fay worked at the Palais Royale in town selling ladies’ ready-to-wear, and the voice of Beatrice suddenly calling overall, “Somebody! Please help me, I am so sick.” Once the cousin had gone into her sad room when no one else would and she had pled, startled to see him there, and with a stark gray face scarred by the delicate white cleft of her lip, “Please help your Aunt Bea get a little ease from this headache; reach under the mattress—don’t tell anybody—your Aunt Bea has to have some rest from this pain—reach right yonder under the mattress and give her that little bottle. That’s it. This is our secret, and you musn’t ever tell a soul.” Within five years she was to die, and why should this beautiful Beatrice have to lie in a rest home, alone and none of her family ever coming to see her, until the home sent a message that she was dead? But he thought, hearing of her death, that if he had secretly helped ease her suffering, he had that to know, without ever telling—until he heard them say that she had died from taking too many pills from a hidden bottle.

  The cousin walked away from the grandmother’s house and went the long way home under the fresh evening sky, his fingers sticky with fig musk, leaving James and the dead cock under the fig trees. If he could one day save all his kindred from pain or help them to some hope! “I will, I will!” he promised. But what were they paying penance for? What was their wrong? Later he knew it bore the ancient name of lust. And as he walked on he saw, like a sparkling stone hurling toward him over the Natural Gas Reservoir, the first star break the heavens—who cast it?—and he wished he might die by it. When he approached the back door of his house, there was the benevolent figure of his mother in the kitchen fixing supper and he wondered how he would be able to tell her and his father where he had been and what had happened to James. “We went to the woods,” he cried, “and James ran away.” Later that night when James did not come back, his father telephoned the grandmother’s house. But no one there had seen him.

  The cousin cried himself to sleep that night, lonely and guilty, grieving for much more than he knew, but believing, in that faithful way of children, that in time he might know what it all meant, and that it was a matter of waiting, confused and watchful, until it came clear, as so much of everything promised to, in long time; and he dreamt of a blue rooster with stars on its breast sitting in a tree of bitter figs, crowing a doom of suffering over the house of his kinfolks.

  James stayed away for three days and nights; and on the third night they had a long-distance call from James’ father in St. Louis, saying that James had come there dirty and tired and stuttering. They had not seen each other for seven years.

  Long later the cousin was in a large Midwestern city where some honor was being shown him. Suddenly in the crowded hall a face emerged from the gathering of strangers and moved toward him. It seemed the image of all his blood kin: was it that shadow-face that tracked and haunted him? It was James’ face, and at that glance there glimmered over it some dreamlike umbrageous distortion of those long-ago boy’s features, as if the cousin saw that face through a pane of colored glass or through currents of time that had deepened over it as it had sunk into its inheritance.

  There was something James had to say, it was on his face; but what it was the cousin never knew, for someone pulled him round, his back to James, to shake his hand and congratulate him—someone of distinction. When he finally turned, heavy as stone, as if he were turning to look back into the face of his own secret sorrow, James was gone; and the cousins never met again.

  But the look upon James’ face that moment that night in a strange city where the cousin had come to passing recognition and had found a transient homage bore the haunting question of ancestry; and though he thought he had at last found and cleared for himself something of identity, a particle of answer in the face of the world, had he set anything at peace, answered any speechless question, atoned for the blind failing, the outrage and the pain on the face of his blood kindred? That glance, struck like a blow against ancestral countenance, had left a scar of resemblance, ancient and unchanging through the generations, on the faces of the grandmother, of the aunts, the cousins, his own father and his father’s father; and would mark his own face longer than the stamp of any stranger’s honor that would change nothing.

  OLD WILDWOOD

  On a soft morning in May, at the American Express in Rome, the grandson was handed a letter; and high up on the Spanish Steps he sat alone and opened the letter and read its news. It was in his mother’s hand:

  “Well, your grandaddy died two days ago and we had his funeral in the house in Charity. There were so many flowers, roses and gladiolas and every other kind, that the front porch was filled with them, twas a sight to see. Then we took him to the graveyard where all the rest are buried and added his grave, one more, to the rest.

  “At the graveyard your father suddenly walked out and stood and said the Lord’s Prayer over his daddy’s grave, as none of the Methodists in the family would hear a Catholic priest say a Catholic prayer, nor the Catholics in the family allow a Methodist one; and your grandaddy was going to be left in his grave without one holy word of any kind. But both were there, priest and preacher, and I said what a shame that your poor old daddy has to go to earth without even ‘Abide with Me’ sung by a soloist. His own begotten children marrying without conscience into this church and that, confounding their children as to the nature of God, caused it all, and there it was to see, clear and shameful, at the graveyard. Then all of a sudden your two great aunts, my mother’s and your grandmother’s sweet old sisters, Ruby and Saxon Thompson, one blind and the other of such strutted ankles from Bright’s Disease as could barely toddle, started singing ’Just As I Am Without One Plea,’ and many joined in, it was so sweet and so sad and so peaceful to hear. Then we all walked away and left your grandaddy in his grave.”

  The grandson lifted his eyes from the letter and they saw an ancient foreign city of stone. So an old lost grandfather, an old man of timber, had left the world. He folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Then he leaned back and settled upon the pocked stone of the worn steps, supporting himself upon the opened palm of his hand. He rested a little, holding the letter, thinking how clear pictures of what had troubled his mind always came to him in some sudden, quiet ease of resting. He considered, as a man resting on stone, his grandfather.

  Yes, he thought, the little old grandfather had the animal grace and solitary air of an old mariner about him, though he was a lumberman and purely of earth. His left leg was shorter than his right, and the left foot had some flaw in it that caused the shoe on it to curl upwards. The last time the grandson had seen his grandfather was the summer day
when, home on leave from the Navy, and twenty-one, he had come out into the back yard in his shining officer’s uniform to find his grandfather sitting there snowy-headed and holding his cap in his hand. Grandfather and grandson had embraced and the grandfather had wept. How so few years had changed him, the grandson had thought that afternoon: so little time had whitened his head and brought him to quick tears: and the grandson heard in his head the words of a long time back, spoken to him by his grandfather that night in Galveston, “Go over into Missi’ppi one day and see can you find your kinfolks…”

  Where had the grandfather come from, that summer afternoon? Where had he been all these years? The grandson had scarcely thought of him. And now, suddenly, on that summer day of leave, he had heard his mother call to his father, “Your daddy’s here,” with an intonation of shame; and then his mother had come into his room and said, “Son, your grandaddy’s here. Go out in the back yard and see your grandaddy.”

  When he had put on his uniform and stepped into the yard, there he saw the white-headed little man sitting on the bench. And there, resting on the grass and lying a little on its side as though it were a separate being, curled and dwarfed, was his grandfather’s crooked foot, old disastrous companion.

  The grandfather was an idler and had been run away from home, it was said, by his wife and children time and time again, and the last time for good; and where did he live and what did he do? Later, on the day of his visit and after he had gone away, the grandson’s mother had confessed that she knew her husband went secretly to see his father somewhere in the city and to give him money the family had to do without. It was in a shabby little hotel on a street of houses of women and saloons that his father and his grandfather met and talked, father and son.