Had I a Hundred Mouths (30 page)

It was so long, her waiting. Now she and Zamour mostly sat in the upholstered chair in the living room facing the front door, waiting for the deliverer of the pension. She made a nice place of waiting there. She and Zamour would not go out for anything, for fear of missing the person who would come. Every morning as soon as the click of the shut-off alarm sounded in Mr. Simpson's clock, she would rise in a nervous haste and rush to her waiting place and begin to wait. Sometimes she fell asleep in the chair, waiting, forgetting everything but the waiting, and wake in the morning still in the chair; and go on waiting there. The chair took her shape, as if it were her body, and Zamour, who sat in his place on the back of the chair as if on her shoulder, had grown so nervous that in his waiting he had clawed it to its stuffing of straw and clotted cotton. But Princis had not heard or seen this. In the Neighborhood there was a wedding once, and Mercel Framer was shot at by her husband early one morning when he came home off night duty to find her in a parked truck with a stranger in front of his house, causing some scandal and commotion on Hines Street; and a baby of the Catholic family in the corner house had died—the funeral was held in the house and the cars were parked as far as the front of Princis' house. But she went on waiting, bridelike, in her chair, and never had a single notion of birth or death or scandal beyond this sensual embrace of the chair and the longing for the knock on the door as if a bridegroom would be there to come in and take her so full of anxiety and saved rapture. If she had to get up from the chair for a moment, the chair seemed to carry on the waiting for her, though it clung to her and was loath to let her go, they were so locked together. But she would instruct Zamour to keep his place and take over until she got back—and she came back to the chair panting, as if in desire, to plug herself savagely into it and be fitted tightly, shuffling henlike in it until she settled in a satisfaction on this nest of waiting.

If there was a knock on the door she would grow rigid and whisper to Zamour, “That's Mr. Simpson's pension, there they are”; and go to the door with a welcome ready—just to find a salesman of Real Silk Hosiery or Avon Products who, looking at her, stepped back as if frightened and went away. When the delivery boy had brought the groceries the last time—how long past?—and told her she could not charge them anymore because they did not believe at the store that the pension would ever come, he stood away from her and stared at her. “They all must think I am crazy,” she said to Zamour, and considered herself for a moment, then added, “because my face must show the secret waiting”; and went back to the chair.

Still the pension would not come, and she waited and she waited. What it was or how much, she could not guess; but the pension was what all railroad people talked about and waited for, and when it came, one beautiful morning, everything would be all right. How it would come or who would bring it she was not sure, though she imagined some man from the Government looking like Mr. Simpson in the commissary, when he was so fresh and full, arriving on her porch calling her name and as she opened her front door handing to her, as tenderly as though it were some of Mr. Simpson's clothes, a package with the pension in it.

One afternoon of the long time a rain storm began, and a neighbor knocked on her door to try to tell her there would be a Gulf hurricane in the night. When Princis spied the neighbor through the curtains she did not break her connection with the chair but sat firmly clasped by it and would not answer nor listen, seeing that it was no one bringing the pension. But the neighbor knocked and knocked until Princis went to pull back the curtain and glare at the woman to say “Give me my pension!” and Princis saw the woman draw back in some kind of astonishment and run away into the Neighborhood. “The Neighborhood is trying to keep the pension from us,” Princis told Zamour.

The rain fell harder, and in a time the rain began to fall here and there in the room. She did not care. But the rain began to fall upon her waiting place, upon her and upon Zamour and upon the good chair. “They are trying to flood us out, before the pension comes,” she said. She went to get the mosquito bar she had brought from Red River County and stretched it, between two chairs, over the upholstered chair, the way children make a play-tent; and over the mosquito bar she put a faded cherry-colored chenille bedspread she had made many years ago, just to make the tent-top safe. “This will preserve us from the Neighborhood,” she told Zamour.

But where was Zamour? He had suddenly escaped the back of the chair in a wet panic. She managed to catch him, brought him back and wrapped him in her old orange velveteen coat with only his wet head showing; and huddled in the Chair under the tent, nursing Zamour, she went on waiting. The water was falling, everywhere now there was the dripping and streaming of water. She began to sing “Beautiful Ohio,” but in the middle of the song she spied her favorite ice-blue glass lamp that she had had all these years, and she crawled out of the tent, leaving Zamour in his swathing and rescued the lamp. It was so dark. Would the lamp yet burn? She plugged it in the socket near the tent, and yes, it still glimmered pale snowy light that made her warm and glad. She brought it into the little tent. She took up “Beautiful Ohio” again, right where she had left off. The tent began to leak wine-colored water and she remembered that old sweet red water in the gullies of home when the summer rains came. There is my home, she remembered.

The wind rose and the rain poured down; and after dark, her blue lamp miraculously burning, a portion of the roof over the living room where she and Zamour sat, lifted and was gone. “What is the Neighborhood doing to destroy us?” she cried to Zamour. “They are tearing our house down and turning the Gulf of Mexico upon our heads.” And she remembered the leering face at her window of the woman who had come with some threat and warning to her. “Still,” she spoke firmly, “they cannot keep our pension from us. We will wait here.” Through her mind went the question, “What else is there of mine to save in under this tent from the destruction of the Neighborhood?” She thought of the cherished things she had possessed so long, to take back to Red River County in the game she had played with Zamour: the golden thimble—no, let it go; Maroney, her eldest sister, had mailed it to her parcel-post as a wedding present. The alarm clock with Mr. Simpson getting up in the morning in it: no. The little setting hen of milk glass who sat on her savings of dimes and nickels and pennies—she would get her, for she had been one of the things in this house to wait with her, waiting so brightly on her milk-glass nest full of savings. She found the glass setting hen and brought her back into the tent. The savings were dry, thanks to the way the little hen sat tight over the nest part.

Now the water was deep on the floor and the tent was sagging and dripping. Still the lamp burned. One other thing she suddenly thought of and that was her face mirror that was willed to her by her grandmother, it was bronze and had green mold in the crevices, but on the back were the figures of two shy lovers under a tree. She had forgotten the mirror for so long during all this waiting for the pension. She waded through Red River and found it, feeling it out in the darkness, where it had always been, in the dresser drawer, and waded back to the tent with it, her hand sliding at once into the intimacy on the handle which she had worn by clasping it so long. It felt as familiar as a part of her body. “If the pension would come,” she begged.

As she got to the tent with the mirror, Zamour turned suddenly fierce and leapt at her like a tiger. She could not catch him, screaming, “Zamour! Zamour!” and Zamour bounded through the water into the darkness. She flounced through the waters of the darkness after him and she could hear him wailing and tearing at the wallpaper and knocking over the furniture. Had Zamour lost his mind, after all she had done to try to keep them both patient? No, cats hate water, she thought. I must pacify Zamour. She cornered him where he had run and leaped, on top of their tent, and in the pale light of the lamp beneath she saw Zamour's face wild and daring her to reach out to him. She reached out, murmuring, “Zamour, Zamour, it is just water”; and as she put out her wet hands, the mirror clasped in one of them, Zamour attacked her and clawed her face, and fled. She cried out and began to weep, fell back onto the floor of water, holding up the mirror to keep from breaking it, and she lay there crying, “O Lord,” and buried her bruised face in her hands.

But what did she feel there on her wounded face, was it blood, was it water, and was it fur like the very coat of Zamour? She crawled on her hands and knees, the face mirror still in her hand, into the tent, muttering, “Lord, don't let the light of the little glass lamp go out”; and by the light of the lamp she held up the bronze mirror and saw in it her bearded face, and it bleeding, and the mirror cracked. Accompanying the watery sounds in her house she heard the low gurgling of Zamour somewhere in the dark drenched wilderness, like the sounds of a whimpering baby. She called out, “Zamour! Zamour! do not cry; come back to our tent, I am Princis, remember me; I will do you no harm.” But Zamour would not come, he only wailed and sobbed his forlorn watery sounds of fear and alienation in the darkness. She humped under the ruined tent, in the sodden chair, and quietened. Then she whispered, “It is here, it has come, what is mine. Cheyney and Maroney, my two sisters of Red River County, I can come home to you now.” And then the light of the lamp went out.

She sat in her chair under the tent in the wilderness. In her lost darkness, she tried to make up her life again like a bed disturbed by a resdess sleep. What had led her to where she was, waiting for a pension that would never come? She could not name herself any answers—she would salvage Zamour.

She crawled out of her tent on hands and knees and the tent of gauze and chenille fell upon her like a net. She crawled on, dragging the tent, and hunted through the swamp for Zamour, ever so quietly. She might have been the quietest beaver. She saw two gleams—those were his eyes. She oared herself closer, closer, ever so softly. What was this lost and trackless territory she crawled through, it was like a jungle slough, it was not any place she had ever known, neither sea nor land, but a border-shore of neither water nor earth, a shallows where two continents divided. Zamour, Zamour, her heart begged as she waggled closer to his burning eyes, but her lips could not utter his name. Zamour, Zamour, something deep in her whimpered and bleated, as if it were cold, as though retrieving Zamour he might warm her like a collar of fur.

On her knees, she reached out to the two low gleamings and were they coals of fire that burnt her to the quick, or were they the eyes of a rattlesnake whose fangs struck her at her face? and she bouldered back, then reared up, bearlike, scrawling and pawing with her hands and arms to claw this fiend away. She heard the crashing of objects Zamour collided with as he escaped her. Was this wildcat clawing the world down upon her? She heard him making a sound that was familiar to her, somewhere, it was a ripping to pieces; and then she heard the burst of glass and the sound of spilling coins, and she remembered her lost waiting place with the chair and the lamp and the setting hen. Which way was this place, to go back to? Where was the light, where was the face mirror? Over there, she thought, still on her haunches. No… over here. And then she knew they were forever lost. She had no way, no sign to go by.

She lifted up, feeling now so light, like a buoy, and rising from her knees she sank again, at rest, like stone into the shallows where she was, another waiting place, as if she might from that moment on be a permanent mossy rock in these reefs and tides—of what geography? She breathed. It was all over. She gave it all up then. The tent was hanging from her as though she would carry it forever like a coat of hair. “I give up the lamp and the mirror and Zamour, and even the pension. I give up even the last thing,” she said to herself; and, giving it all up to the last thing, she rested and settled, being this rock of nobody, no one she had ever known, renouncing all the definitions, the landmarks, the signs she had gone by to get to this nowhere in this dark bog of debris, on this lightless floor of the mud of her accepted eternity.

But what was that little cry? She found out two lights burning in the faraway distance. Some mercy ship is coming on some channel, she thought; what are those two mercy lights? It was an indestructible sign, lighting her memory back to an orchard on a frosty night and the sound of a cry and the glimmer of two eyes in a tree, and the meeting of two friends.
Zamour!
What was that watery music played out by the rain's hammering drops on broken glass but the tinkling little hammerstrikes of the xylophone… and oh her two sisters! She would survive in this dark world she sat in, she would start from there. For it was hers to begin with, to make her own. Something of her own had come to her and there was this to begin with: she was the sister of her two sisters, Cheyney and Maroney Lester, and their own blood. If this darkness ever lifted and the waters ran away, if there was enough light to go by, she would try to find her sisters; and if there was no light she would go by darkness, rising out of these waters, and find her sisters wherever they were in this night waterworld and arrive there, steering herself home, to join them, crying, “See, I am your sister, Princis Lester.” They would take her in, be so glad, there would be no more watching, no more waiting,
for they were sisters
. And they would live together in a home of warm felicity.

But Zamour uttered a kind of witch's cry again, from somewhere, somewhere, as if to call her to his claws again; and Princis Lester cried out in the darkness, “Zamour! I give up even you.” What time of night was it, because there was suddenly a bright light shining upon her and could there be a voice she heard saying, “Arise, shine; for thy light has come.” Who, what had come for her? There were voices and knockings at the front door. They called her name. Why could she not answer? Then they beat upon her door and called her name, “Mrs. Simpson! Mrs. Simpson! Let us in!”