The House of Breath

The House of Breath

William Goyen

 

 

Dzanc Books

Dzanc Books
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 1949 William Goyen

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Sections of this novel have appeared in
Accent, Southwest Review, Penguin New Writing, Partisan Review
and
Harper's Magazine
.

Published 2014 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-18-1
eBook Cover by Awarding Book Covers

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.

T
HE AUTHOR
wishes to acknowledge his gratitude to the editors of
The Southwest Review
for the Southwest Review Literary Fellowship awarded him in 1949 for work on this book.

For Frieda and Walter

The House of Breath

Under All the Land Lies the Title

I

…and then I walked and walked in the rain that turned half into snow and I was drenched and frozen; and walked upon a park that seemed like the very pasture of Hell where there were couples whispering in the shadows, all in some plot to warm the world tonight, and I went into a public place and saw annunciations drawn and written on the walls. I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and felt robbed of everything I never had but dreamt of and hoped to have; and mocked by others' midnight victory and my own eternal failure, un-named by nameless agony and stripped of all my history, I was betrayed again.

Yet on the walls of my brain, frescoes: the kneeling balletic Angel holding a wand of vineleaves, announcing; the agony in the garden; two naked lovers turned out; and over the dome of my brain Creations and Damnations, Judgments, Hells and Paradises (we are carriers of lives and legends—who knows the unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull?).

Then I was standing against the wet, cold wall of this building in the park and I slid down against the wet wall, wanting to die, squatting there in the dark. Faces glided past me up above me under the rainstreaked moon of a streetlight like prows of safe ships with somewhere to go—the rain on some was beautiful—and all around me they were meeting in the park and walking away under the dripping trees, figures were walking up and down upon the sodden leaves, and in my spell I thought,
they are all passing me by, and I sink down, way below the faces, prows of ships
.

And then I heard the voices again (
Come home, the light's on, come on home, Ben Berryben. I'll be glad when you've had enough and will come on home again, I'm so blue and so upset, can hardly swallow water….) (Swimma -a-a! Swimma -a-a-a! come in ‘fore dark….) (Rescue the Perishing!) (Boy, Boy, come out to the woodshed I've got something to show you, by gum….) (Draw me, draw me, I will follow
…. In
all your sunshines if you can remember one day any darkness, that will be me drawing you
…. I
have left Word in the darkness for you, the Word that was my flesh (take that Wafer); all darkness proclaims my Word—listen in the darkness and you will hear it.
) and I melted down like the gingerbread man that ran and ran and melted as he ran. I began to name over and over in my memory every beautiful and loved image I ever had, to name and praise them over and over like a rosary, bead by bead, saying, Granny Ganchion, I touch you and name you; Folner, I touch you and name you, Aunty, Malley, Swimma, Boy, I touch you and name you and claim you all. It was like a procession through the rooms of the house, saying, now this is the hall and there is the bottled ship and the seashell, this is the breezeway, there is the well and here is the map in the kitchen and the watery mirror in which, behold, is my face,
me
, my face…. I cried out “O Charity!”, so that those who heard me might have thought I was a beggar crying; and wanted to die….

II

WHAT
is it the wind seeks, sweeping among the leaves, prowling round and round this house, knocking at the doors, and wailing in the shutters?

O Charity! Every frozen morning for awhile in early winter you had a thin little winter moon slung like a slice of a silver Rocky Ford cantaloupe over the sawmill; and then I would go out to the well in the yard and snap off the silver thorns of ice from the pump muzzle and jack up the morning water and stand and look over across the fairy fields at you where you lay like a storybook town, and know that on all the little wooden roofs of houses there was a delicate trail of lacelike rime on the shingles. Then all the chickens and guineas of Charity would be crowing and calling and all the cattle lowing, and the Charity dogs barking (all with a sound that china animals might make if they could crow or call or low), and in that crystal and moonhaunted moment I would stand dazzling in the first sunray of morning, and wonder what would ever happen, to us all.

And on a spring Saturday you would be sitting there in your place in Texas “grinnin like a Chessy Cat” as Aunty said, so happy and hopping with all the people come in from the fields and farms to handle you and claim you and gather round in you—there was Glee Ramey and there was Sweet Climpkins and Sing Stovall and Ola Stokes, the music teacher (“One day a little bubble will break in your throat, honey, and then you'll have a beautiful voice. Just wait for the little bubble.”), and all the Grants, who had to ford White Rock Creek to get in from their blackland farm—and families all standing together here and there or carrying out oats and feed and cartons of Pet's Milk from the Commissary.

And in the still, clear dusks I remember especially a voice that sounded in you, Charity, resounding as in a cistern, calling “Swimma -a-a! Swimma -a-a-a! Come in 'fore dark!”—Aunty calling Sue Emma, my cousin and her daughter (no voice calling this name can ever call back Sue Emma to that fallen splendid house, and it grows dark. But Sue Emma, dancing or hunching in the dark, grinding in her own glitter's ashes, might hear a calling voice within her that does not answer back). All my life since, in any place and for no reason at all, sometimes at dusk I will suddenly hear a voice calling “Swimma -a-a! Swimma -a-a-a! Come in 'fore dark!”; and wish we were all together in Charity again.

You had a little patch of woods behind the house that I remember. It had bearded trees that clicked and ticked and cracked and cheeped and twittered and lichen grew on an ancient fence like an old old sheep's coat; and stroking it with my hand once made me feel how old and lusterless and napworn you might be, Charity, and all the people in you, just as Aunty said. But to see an old live oak drop a single young little leaf twinkling to the ground was to know that there was still the shining new thing of myself in the world and I would be filled with some passion for something, bigger than Aunty's hopelessness, bigger than Granny Ganchion's agony, than all Charity—until suddenly I would hear the groaning of the cisternwheel back at the house, calling me back, and I would go.

You were such a place of leaves, Charity; and I think the first time I was ever aware of you as any place in the world was in a deep and sad and heavy autumn. Then you seemed to have been built of leaf and twig and bark, as a bird's nest is woven and thatched together, and had been used and used until you were withered; then you were shaken and thrown down into these ruins. All the summer of anything that had ever touched or known you seemed despoiled and was rubble that autumn, and I suddenly knew myself as something, moving and turning among these remnants. (Oh all the leaves I have known in you, Charity!—the shining leathery castorbean leaves, with the chickens cool under them in the summer or sheltered from the rain (oh the sound of the rain on the castorbean leaves, how forever after Folner's funeral that sound reminded me of the funeral).) And the lace and grace of chinaberry leaves in a summer breeze; and those of the vines that had a name I did not know and hung, full of bees or busy hummingbirds all after the little sweet white bloom on it, over the long front gallery of the house. Then of course the live-oak leaves, that were flaked over Charity Riverbottom; and muscadine leaves and sycamore leaves and the leaves on go-to-sleep flowers. (In the autumn of one year, every leaf that had ever hung on any Charity tree in spring and summer lay fallen upon the ground and I moved and turned through the wreckage like an unhung leaf that would not lie down nor wither.)

In you, Charity, there stands now, as in the globed world of my memory there glimmers the frosted image of it, blown by all these breaths, the fallen splendid house, sitting on the rising piece of land, out of which all who lived and lost in it have gone, being dispossessed of it: by death, by wandering, by turning away. And the house appears, now, to be an old old monument in an agony of memory of us, its ruined friezes of remains, full of our speech, holding our things that speak out after us as they once spoke into us, and waiting for one of us to give it back its language and so find his own. (But I think how our worlds—like this household us within them like an idea they might be having or like dreams they are dreaming, where our faces are unreal, worn blurred stone faces of ancient metopes of kin, caught in soundless shapes of tumult, wrestling with invasion of some haunted demon race, half-animal, half-angel—O agony of faces without features like faces in fogs of dreams of sorrow and horror, worn holes of mouths opened, calling cries that cannot be heard, saying what words, what choked names of breath that must be heard) And to find out what we are, we must enter back into the ideas and the dreams of worlds that bore and dreamt us and there find, waiting within worn mouths, the speech that is ours. For now in this autumn when all the young are ceaselessly walking up and down under the falling trees, trying to make themselves real, I have walked and walked among the leaves that lie like lost claws clutching the earth that fed them, weaving and winding myself to myself, binding the lost leaf back to the tree. For all that is lost yearns to be found again, re-made and given back through the finder to itself, speech found for what is not spoken.

III

TO GET TO the house, Charity, if I had been in town, I would just start walking toward the sawmill, down Main Street (which was really only the Highway named this for the short time it ran through you and became a little piece of you) under all the Charity trees. I would pass the only stores you had, looking across Main Street at each other; and ahead of me would stretch the Highway, going to pretty close little towns like Lufkin and Lovelady, and behind me it wound to faraway places, huge and full of many people, like Dallas or Santone. Then I would turn off at the twisted cedar, in whose branches I had been as often as any bird, that had a forked limb like a chicken's wishbone, where once I slipped and hung like Absalom until Mrs. Tanner came running to save me; then there would be the sawmill, where my father worked (the men urinating in the lumberstacks)—and came home with sawdust in his pockets and shoes—that had a long, legged sawdust conveyor sitting like a praying mantis. And next would come the graveyard, nothing but names and dates and enormous grasshoppers vaulting over the graves; and the little Negro shacks next, with black faces at the windows or some good old Negro sitting on his front gallery or calling to little Negro children playing in the mudpuddles, and a rooster crowing somewhere, after the rain. Finally I would take the sandy road, my feet barefooted and glad in it, stand by the Grace Methodist Church where it always seemed I could hear the voice of Brother Ramsey inside saying “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God,” and then if I suddenly looked up, after thinking into the sand what peacemakers were, I would see the house, looking at me like a face of a sleeping bird (the cisternwheel would be its tail over it), and calling me back to it, home.