Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (18 page)

He thought of telegrams and about taking out ads. He tried to send a letter but the words evaded him. Maggie had been fluent, and she would have found the language, but his own stock phrases stuck. He could not bring himself, he knew, to beg for what was his by right and what each man could anyhow expect: a son beside him in his house. He imagined protestations that would haul his son back, hat in hand, protesting that he also left for love. He imagined Ian reconciled and by his bed, saying, “Why didn’t I understand sooner? What a fool I must have been!”

“Not foolish,” Judah would say. “Just a bit stubborn, that’s all.”

“A willful piggish fool,” Ian would accuse himself, and the tears would blind him. “How can you ever forgive me?”

“No need. Just stay here is the only thing I ask.”

“Done,” Ian said. “You didn’t have to ask for that. My stuff is at the station, Dad. I’m here to stay.”

When Judah comes to, there is silence. He does not recognize the space; it reeks of lemon oil. The air is bad. He breathes and stretches and opens his eyes but is in blackness nevertheless. Stretching, he touches two walls. He remembers, then, his place and purpose and gathers himself to his feet. He reaches for the light switch, and finds it and presses and remembers he unscrewed the bulb. He takes mincing, sideways steps around the floor’s perimeter and toes the bulb in the last corner and leans to retrieve it, then rests again. There is silence in the library; he feels for matches in his hunting pockets. Patting at the pockets, he drops the bulb and hears it bounce and shatter. He curses himself for a loose-fingered fool, and continues. There are empty shotgun shells and a handkerchief and sand grit and a penknife in his pocket also, but nothing like light. He sighs. He hears his breathing echo. He decides to ascend and presses the button for the second floor but does not move. He thinks perhaps he’s pressed the wrong button and fingers each button beside him, then presses his palms against the instrument panel entirely. There is silence. There is not even a boiler below him, or any sort of clanking in the elevator chains. Hattie had been claustrophobic. She had feared just such a breakdown, she told him, just such a short in the lines. What if I’m riding, she asked him, between one floor and another, and lightning comes and knocks the power out, what then? You pays your money and you takes your choice, Judah said, not wanting to coddle her fears. For every fire, he maintained, there’s twenty false alarms.

So he collects himself and breathes again—the air denser this time, acrid—and counts to ten. He shrugs himself out of his coat. The insides of his arms are wet; his right foot itches. He wants to sneeze. He can always, he tells himself, open the door. He tries the door. It does not give. He tries again, leaning his weight on the slab. He knows enough of circuitry to know the circuit holds. It clicks and does not give. He had known, somehow, in the dream from which there’s no escape, that the door too would be locked. There is air and space and time in abundance, he tells himself; there are people in the house to find him when he calls.

He blames himself, at times. It isn’t a question of taking the blame or whether he deserves it so much as whether he is willing to admit the possibility. Judah admits the possibility. He could have bent a little who had been unbending, could have guessed the way the wind would blow and made his own adjustments. He should have checked on Seth that night and should have checked on Maggie on a hundred nights. But he’d thought that not reacting was a reaction also: a man of his stamp sits and takes it till there’s nothing left to take. Lately he’s suspected that his nothing done or doing was to blame; “You can’t take it with you” was a fool’s compliance. He would take it with him since there was nothing to take.

They stand there attentive, awaiting him, eyes left, though what they see he can only question, seeing in their stance the marines at Iwo Jima, scaling the rock face to plant a bronze flag—or perhaps the imitation of a statue he saw once in school, the Laocoön, an old man muscled as is he, Judah, surrounded by sons and a snake that surrounds them. His eyes are blood-engorged and blind with possibility—mottled with effort, the rock-veins bulging—and so they clasp each other and embrace with a concentrated fury that proves this combat mortal, proves the opposition absolute of arm to arm, knee-knee. His right knee fused with his opponent’s left, the fulcrum there where one must surely topple, go flailing full-length out over that rockbed as base. Once spread-eagled, Judah asks himself, once felled and pinioned and made to cry mercy, what variety of mercy might be his to beg—since he had asked no quarter nor offered any ever—mercy not his strong suit, never his strong suit, and not the kind of quality to outrank justice—or not in his ranking, at least. Put them in a scale and he’d put on his thumb for punishment, weighing it with probity and willing to accept and pay whatever was assessed as his fault’s due—and at the door’s unyielding handle thinks collapse a kind of comfort, the promise not threat of thirst finally slaked. Perhaps “The Kiss” is the statue he sees, or one of those headless, handless statues that Maggie made him study while she enthused about proportion and he waggled his toes in museums, trying to see what she saw. Or some time-blunted frieze of centaurs raging, drunk with undiluted wine, through courtyards where the women cower yet—does he imagine it?—exult. He is exultant anyhow in the knowledge of completion, and finality inhering,
whatever it is this is it
. Nor will the lazy circling birds bother to investigate who surfeit on the easy scavenge and are heavy-bellied by noon, those legs that were so pliant now rigor-stiff, unbending—men in the streets with naked swords, the swords aloft and wavering, seeking that unguarded entrance to palpitant flesh, or ambushed, upended in wells, the well-throats stuffed with this wet clot of carrion. Judah shifts his stance just slightly, imperceptibly rocking on his toes and heels to make minute adjustments, the motion imperceptible to those who watch, if any might, except only perhaps as the witnessing eye’s nictation, or the sun glinting off some new flesh facet, or a sudden breath drawn, and offers and acknowledges and yields up his arrogant shame . . .

Then there is light. Then he sees himself naked, holding his duck-hunting jacket, and there is blood on his foot. There is no light in the elevator, but there is light in the room, and he is in the room since the door-latch had released. He has fallen forward as the door gave way. It opened without warning, since his weight was on the door. He has not harmed himself. He stands. There is no one in the room. There are fire remnants. There is the smell, still, of cigarette smoke, and he wonders has she been blowing smoke rings and did Finney admire her pursed-lip dexterity. It is—he considers the grandfather clock—two twenty-three. The minute hand moves slightly backward, always, before it moves the minute forward; Judah thinks of springs uncoiling to advance.

The blood has dried. He broke the bulb; he recollects that. He turns again to the elevator, propping the door back, and retrieves his locust stick. The mess is negligible. The door should be oiled, he reminds himself, and the lock system changed. He hears house sounds above him, but they have not opened his door. He has not been found. Fleetingly he wishes he had been discovered—here, sprawled on the landing, bleeding, blinded by the sudden light burst, a hero spat back. She would have bent above him and been solicitous. She would cradle his head in her arms. She would ask if he were hurt, and he would answer not too badly, and then she’d say, in a low voice to Finney: “Run for the doctor. Quick.”

Finney, less solicitous, would pause. “Do as I say,” Maggie would order. The man would scuttle off and she would bend above him once again, protective. Now Judah stands half naked in the room he fears she’s fled forever. He breathes. He walks, without disguise or limping and precaution, to the mud room. He takes three rights and one left. There he pulls on his brown wool pants and a red shirt, and his walking boots. He replaces his hunting jacket, stuffing himself through the sleeves, but leaves his cane.

“We none of us,” Peacock had written his daughters, “should forego the Pleasure and Profit of Travel. There is instruction in the temples and the Pagan mosques where no man has a pew to call his own, nor can he keep his shoes on in the sight of God. For whatsoever they name Him He is immanent, as if Allah or Buddah or Thor be the nick-name childishly put on by youthful Pleasantry, until we learn that Nick himself is but the Devil’s label, and there prove one proper appellation only. Just so with methods of Food preparation and marriage and ornament and all the Customary appurtenances of this life. First custom seems peculiar then it seems but quaint then regular then normal then the rule, and by these slow succeeding ventures we who were Parochial become what now they call Cosmopolites. It is a stage, as any Other, to endure.”

II

First he walked with Ian or took him pickaback. His son was long-legged even then, and Judah made him stretch his legs. He tried to teach him pace. But Ian would bustle and dart along and get tangled up in grapevines or make a game of puddles, jumping, stomping flat-footed into the deep center to see how much water it sprayed.

“Don’t do that,” Judah said.

“Why not?”

“Because it gets your pants all wet.”

“They’re not all wet,” said Ian.

“OK. Because it gets me wet.”

“You’re not either. It doesn’t.”

“Because your mother would be angry.”

“It’ll dry. I promise.” Ian jumped three feet across the flagstone path and landed like a geyser in the mud.

“Because I tell you to,” said Judah.

“It’s not a reason.”

Judah leaned and lifted him and held him up, spread-eagled, eight feet above the ground. “This’ll dry you off.”

“Carry me, Daddy.”

“Not wet like this.”

“I’ll dry, I promise. Please.”

So Judah eased his son’s soaked legs around his neck; he held to Ian’s ankles and they continued.

“Giddyap. Let’s canter. Let’s jump that old fence.”

“How much do you weigh now?”

“A lot,” said Ian. “Forty-three pounds.”

“Well, that’s too much for this old horse to jump a fence with.”

“We did it yesterday. Giddyap.”

“But yesterday you weren’t all wet. That makes it heavier. You’ve got to add the water,” Judah said.

He pressed his son’s knees to his ears. He heard only Ian’s burbling instructions, felt only the self-willed warm extension of his flesh. “That one,” yelled Ian. “Get the ram!”

“Horned Dorsets,” Judah instructed his son. “Those bigger one are Suffolk. The most of them is culls.”

“We’ll get them at the pass.”

“What pass?”

“The gate,” said Ian. “Up ahead. That’s where we’ll head them off.”

“Not this horse.”

“Giddyap.”

“You’re not checkreining. You haven’t given me signals.”

Ian pummeled at him and he veered left. For all his gruff disclaiming, Judah felt the victor when he lost.

Now he sits in the kitchen’s deep dark, having placed himself precisely in the center of the space between the sink and table. He knows the room’s coordinates. He is at the apex of a triangle with the cutting board and faucet at the base; Judah tucks in his arms. He follows his nose. He is someone sitting, he assures himself, in the middle of the kitchen that is the middle of the downstairs wing in the middle of the house.

His chair is painted white. It has three slats in the back. It has a solid seat, and the legs have been squared off. There are three additional chairs drawn up to the table’s three sides; Judah bisects the chair that had been opposite his. He draws the line from that apex (where Harriet had used to sit, and splits her down the center, imagining her intestines and esophagus coiled around the perpendicular bisector that makes of man a mirror) and connects those two legs across the table’s plane, and has an isosceles triangle similar to that which his chair fashions with the far legs of the flanking chairs. Except he himself has moved. The room will not stay vacant. No matter how hard Judah stares at the wall as though it were Euclidean, he sees his parents backed against it, wearing evening clothes. They are gesturing and fretful in the middle of some argument he cannot hear, but feels himself involved in. It is summer since the screens are in, and he hears the june bugs clattering against them. His father had his arms upraised; his mother was not cowering but shrinks from him, is wearing silk, and the rustle of her dress is like the rustle of the june bugs on the screens. Then Judah sees himself with Maggie on the cutting counter, watching her reflection in the kitchen window as she bounces above him and jiggles. He balances on his toes. “We’d best not wake the boy,” he says. She makes appreciative noises although he covers her mouth.

Therefore he does his roots. The square root of four is two, and the square root of two hundred and fifty-six is sixteen. The square root of one is one, but the square root of minus one is an imaginary number, i.

Ian was a real result and Seth an imagined result; they multiplied an “i” by “i” and got minus one. “Don’t talk arithmetic to me,” said Hattie when he tried to explain. “There’s no such thing as making a mistake with roots. Square roots indeed. You water children and feed and love them and they grow; our family tree, Judah, is as long as anybody’s in America. Don’t ever be ashamed of that.”

“I’m not.”

“There’s glory in it,” she said. “It’s no disadvantage to know your own roots.”

The root of nine is three, and three has a fractional root; the root of eighty-one is nine, and nine squared is eighty-one; things fit. He can imagine apples doubling and contracting and being bushel after bushel and then stacked crates. The world is a warehouse of numbers, and if you keep close enough track you’d know where everything is stored and when it had been put there and labeled and how it stood with reference to everything about it. There are no memories, no panting wives or generations scrabbling at the edges of composure like june bugs at screens. Maggie played cat’s cradle for him, and he watched the intricate interlocked twining; there were patterns she could twist and fatten or reverse and then she’d flick her fingers at him and there’d be only string.

As the years went on, however, Ian lost his interest in games played on the farm. The boy was studious. Judah read him Peacock’s letters and he liked them well enough but said that history had passed the old man by.

“What’s that mean?”

“You know the frontier thesis,” Ian said.

Judah waited.

“Frederick Jackson Turner says you have to keep on going if there’s wilderness in front of you.”

“What of it?”

“That’s what makes America. That’s why we’re so busy moving all the time.”

They were in the study. Ian had his Hammond Atlas and a sheet of copy paper and was making maps.

“I follow,” Judah said.

“Well, the way Mom sees it, Peacock got to the Pacific but he had to turn around. He should have stayed there, maybe.”

“Is that how she sees it?”

“Yes. Then we could all be California people. It’s an improvement, Mom says, it’s the Gateway to the Orient, and warm.”

“Your mother talks that way to you?”

Ian drew the Mississippi, using blue. He made the delta just above the gulf and put a big black spot at Hannibal, the birthplace of Mark Twain.

“She says that Peacock’s partner, Colonel Frémont, was a brave man with men’s lives as long as they weren’t his own. She says that General is just another word for coward, and we won the west by genocide.”

“By what?”

“By genocide. What’s that mean?” Ian asked.

“It’s when you kill off everyone. But there’s people left in California.”

“Well, anyway,” said Ian. He crosshatched the Texas panhandle and Oklahoma in red.

When Ian learned to paint, Maggie bought him easels and sketch pads and a box full of oil tubes and brushes. Then Judah set a gallon can of Barn Red beside them and asked which was likely to last.

“That’s not the question, is it? Look at this sunset, darling.”

“Look at this barn,” Judah said.

But more and more, as the years passed, he set out alone. He took the pickup or a tractor to the bottom land and saw his fields splay out, untenanted. He watched his son, come back from school, practicing lay-ups at the basket he had rigged behind the sugarhouse for twenty minutes only, then practicing the piano for two hours every afternoon. It grew dark while he played.

“Aren’t you proud of him, Jude?” Maggie asked.

“Why?”

“Listen to that. Grieg. It took me years to learn just the first movement. He’ll play it in the school recital Thursday.”

“What time is that?”

“What time will that be, Ian?”

He looked up at her from where he sat on the piano bench. He used no music.

“Three o’clock,” said Ian and commenced the phrase again. Maggie bent above him, nodding, tapping her foot and wiggling her fingers in time, and Judah—watching from his leather chair beside the fireplace—saw that his son’s eyes were closed.

“It’s beautiful,” said Maggie.

Ian continued.

“Sixteenth notes,” she explained to Judah. “Every one of them clear as a bell.”

“They’re muddy.” Ian said.

At two o’clock that Thursday, Judah got stuck in the Shed field. He had been seeding alfalfa, and turning on the western slope he sunk his right rear wheel. He tried rocking free, then led his length of chain around a locust tree and pulled. The tractor stalled. It settled. He had one pass left to make and took his work coat off and tied the sleeves around his neck. He filled this sack with alfalfa and completed the seeding by hand.

“Let the buildings be laid out,” Peacock had commanded, “in the Shape and Memory of our Savior’s ransom, with the four points of the compass being the four of the Cross. Let the barns be due west of the house, pointing as His strong arm pointed to where I scribe these lines. Let the Carriages and suchlike be stored on the easterly Axis. South at a suitable distance, where his feet were nailed, you may build in whatsoever fashion but not above one story’s heighth, the farmer’s house. Thus even to the eagle’s eye, and surely to him who stands on the Cupola, will we furnish instruction. Somehow I seem to see the Holy Spirit hovering, in the bird-guise he assumes wherewith in safety he may visit this nether pit, and to avoid a suchlike crucifixion—for what are the yearly migrations but testimonial also to the Flock’s disgust? And do not greylag geese example this search, scanning the Compass-points for some clear sign that our Redeemer prospers—espying the Reverent arrangement of our Severall buildings, and reporting to the august Captain that in this township anyhow there thrives one Honest man!”

The order in the house assures him. He knows what each closet contains. He knows the way the servants’ stairwell curls around the dumbwaiter and laundry chute, and how the elevator shaft takes up the southeast corner of what had been the ballroom. He knows the hall’s dimensions, and that it takes seventy-two steps descending from the room she used to sleep in. There are plaster ornaments Judah can trace, eyes shut, and he distinguishes the feel of the oak fireplace from those that are sided in walnut; he knows who bought the billiard table for the billiard room.

The difference between four and fourteen, he knows, can be ten or the first integer or he can multiply by three and then add two or subtract two from the square of four; they’re all of them fourteen. And it had been the same with steamer trunks or women’s protestations and the jobs he held then quit. Within the seeming random sets there was always this arcane rigidity—always his own sense of system and logic and the exact opposition of loss to gain. From one to two, Judah knows, you either add one or double the original number; you also multiply by seven and then subtract five.

Yet these rooms contain no series he can plumb. Nor did his age and illness seem sequential to his block-hard rock-thick middle age. Nor is Maggie’s disappearance and return and disappearance a series; you go from one to four to one to six to one to eight to one, and someone on a contrapuntal series thinks you’ve never left. He was running home mud-crusted, with the taste of metal in his throat. He was hiding in the laundry room behind the wicker baskets, staring at the shapeless, starched gray uniforms of maids. He was chewing on a syrup stick, his hands full of beet sugar, and he added water to it until it was a paste. He shuts his eyes and focuses and creates color: red and yellow and the sun’s orange arrangement. He wills it, this one dawn, to turn as he turns, motionless, and slip around the world the way a sleeve might on a scrawny pointing arm. He opens his eyes and is gratified: flame comes from the west.

Fire: he sees her also as flame, though this is more his element, and of the four he’d qualify for earth and fire, she for air and water (he knows this; they have worked it out in the game called “Essences”: “What animal is Jo-jo,” she would ask. “What time of day?” And he’d answer “Skunk,” or “Three o’clock in the morning,” and she’d swat at him and grin and say “Raccoon. Early evening.” Then he’d ask, “What color is Hattie? What scent?” And she’d answer, “Mauve. The smell of pressed lilacs,” and he’d say “Green, because you ate my second piece of apple pie . . .”), but still he sees her firelit, her face become a kind of screen with shadowplay, that hair of hers alight (“Enclosed air spaces,” he would say, “it’s the secret of flame. And build it back up tepee style, and far enough back there to catch the draft.” “Why are you telling me this?” she would ask. “Because,” he’d say, “although I hope not, there may come a time when you need to make a fire and I’m not here to build it. Check the flues.” “You’re always here to build it,” Maggie said. She mock-shivered, then stretched. “You’re my heat source, husband . . .”)—so flame was domesticated for her, a source of comfort not terror, and he thinks of her always as “toasty,” which also was her word, or bending to the match flare with which she’d light her cigarette, or standing by the chunk stove with her hands out, fingers spread. He gave her a rotisserie one Christmas, and she used it often, so he’d stand in the kitchen watching while she trussed the chickens up, or ducks, and pricked them with her long-handled fork and added seasoning, then skewered them with what he could only call relish, ramming through. While the bird was turning they would watch it sweat and pucker and his wife would say, “That’s it. That’s heaven. Name every pleasure and the chicken has or is it now”—the fat igniting underneath the broiler coils, and liquid sizzling that would later coalesce. If they had an argument it was how she hated winter (and it was true, he came to acknowledge, that their first three meetings had been in the summertime, that she maybe thought Vermont a place of green abundance, not mud and granite and ice): fire her servitor somehow, so that she’d have only to breathe on the last white ash heap of the last set of embers on some abandoned hearth to kindle the household again, to set the stewpot bubbling and the ice-stiff clothes to dry . . .