The House of Breath (12 page)

He would come across town and through Bailey's Pasture home to us through the bitterweeds with dock and wild buckwheat in his blonde hair, and below his eyes the blue rims of circles, the color of eggplant, would shine on his flushed cheeks—the Prince of Peace returneth—beast had sprung into Prince in the riverbottoms, agony of vision married to agony of body in the rain, vision eating body, flesh become word. He said—and now I understand—
“Behold this gift of darkness this house has given me and I give you; I have stolen your light away. We are, and never will be. In all your sunshines if you can remember one day any darknesses, that was me drawing you
…
I have left Word in the darkness for you, the Word that was my flesh; all darkness proclaims my Word; listen in the darkness and you will hear it.”

He chose a show to go away with, finally, out of East Texas because I think it was the only bright and glittering thing in the world he could find. Of all the ways and things in the world, he chose a show, with acrobats and lights and spangles. Because he couldn't bear the world without a song and dance and a burnished cane. He was wild like a creature, the way he crept as if he went on paws like an animal out of the brush, a kind of hunted, creeping thing in his gait. He was for the beautiful evil world and he let it ravage him to ash, he gave his life for it. (Was
he
what Christy hunted for in the woods, going with his birdbag and his gun and returning with bird's blood on him and a chatelaine of slain birds girdled round his hips?) He went all the way. He knew what he was and endured it all the way, to the bitter bitter end, burned down to ash by it, charred down to clinker. (I embrace him now, against this wall in the rain.)

They told about the trunks of costumes that came back to Charity after he took sleeping pills at midnight in a hotel in San Antonio—they said he was coming home from New York City and had got that far, lingered on the very edge of Charity in San Antone but couldn't come on in home—all the trunks up in the loft, filled with rhinestones and spangles and boa-feathers and holding the wicked smell of greasepaint. I rummaged there as if I thought somewhere I might suddenly come upon some explanation of his mystery.

Brave and noble, Folner? Clean and fine? Boy Scouts and the Epworth League and all that, Folner? Pshaw! You didn't want to flicker around East Texas, you wanted to
blaze
in the world, to sparkle, to shine, to glisten in the great evil world. You wanted tinsel and tinfoil and spangle and Roman candle glamor, to be gaudy and bright as a plaster ruby and a dollar diamond. Was that right? Of course not. Wrong? What
is
wrong?

“Who has a
choice
, really?” you said.

All of it was wrong from the beginning, from the corrupted foetus, the poisoned womb, from the galled cradle (endlessly rocking for you and me, for you and me).

You were tinsel all the way, beautiful boy Folner, all the rotten way. Once I said, building a chicken coop, “I want to make this
right.”

“Nothing is made right around here, Boy,” you said. “Everything is crooked and warped and twisted.”

And walked, lost and cheaply grieved, away; and I wondered what you meant.

When your corpse came back to Charity from San Antonio that deep and leaf-haunted autumn, Folner, they embalmed it at Jim Thornton's Funeral Establishment (which was also a cleaning and pressing shop when nobody was dead). There was a gray hearse. All of us went to the Grace Methodist Church and the Starnes and the Ganchions filled up two pews. We sang “Beulah Land” (You would have loved that…“for I am drinking from the fountain that never shall run dry (praise God!); I'm feasting on the manna of a bountiful supply…”). A few women kept fainting. Aunty sat hating you, even dead. Even laid in a coffin she despised you like a snake. Granny Ganchion sat like a sick bird, humped and bitten, and gazed into your cheap coffin. Oh her hands!—bony and knotted at the knuckles—how she moved them round her goitered throat like a starved woman's. (Do you know what she wore, Folner? A great yellow hat with a boafeather round it, and on her neck was a pair of rubyred beads. What voices were howling round in her head as she sat there, gazing at you in your cheap coffin?) Your brother Christy sat out in front of the church in the car, would not come in, sullen and wretched. As we marched by your coffin to look in at you for the last time, I saw your wasted doll-in-the-rain face and I thought I could hear you whisper to me, “Make it gay, Boy, make it bright, Boy!” And no one in that whole Grace Methodist Church, or in all of Charity, or in the whole wide world but you and I knew I dropped a little purple spangle into your cheap coffin as I passed by. It was a little purple spangle stolen from a gypsy costume in one of your trunks in the loft. You loved it! It was put in the earth with you.

At your funeral there was a feeling of doom in the Grace Methodist Church, and I sat among my kin feeling dry and throttled in the throat and thought we were all doomed—who are these, who am I, what are we laying away, what splendid, glittering, sinful part of us are we burying like a treasure in the earth?

(The Grace Methodist Church had started out underground. There had been only enough money to build a basement with, and for several years we went down steps into the Church, like a cellar, and had a meeting. In summer it was full of crickets; and often, tired of the singing, we would go outside and sit on the steps and watch the summer toadfrogs leap after and lick in the crickets. But when old Mr. Ralph J. Sanderson, the owner of the sawmill and terror of Negroes, had died, he had left enough money for a ground floor and some colored glass windows and these were added as a memorial to him.)

There were about thirty rows of pews and the Starnes and Ganchions occupied two of them at the funeral. Charity came and filled the rest.

On the raised platform in front under a bare arch were the folding chairs where the choir sat, and to the right of the chairs was the piano. Nina Dot Dooley was the pianist. (She said it peeanist and always ended even the most austere anthem with rolling chords, finishing up on a very high and tinkling treble note with her little finger that was arched over with a dinner ring displayed upon it. She had an orange, spotted face.) In the center of the altar, which was only the barest hint of an altar, stood one spare crooked candle in a gold-plated holder: the cause of the schism in the church that finally broke the old and the new factions apart and caused Brother Hildebrandt to form the Church Foursquare and lead his followers with him.

A quartet was sitting straight in the choirloft—it was Mrs. Shanks (called Horseface by all the boys because she had black lips that peeled back off her two rows of large, square, roastingear teeth when she sang out); Miss Pearl Selmers, the alto and the only alto in the church with a trained voice and therefore in every duet or quartet, singing sadly and so faintly you could scarcely hear her; Mr. Bybee, the forced tenor, singing always eeeeeeeee with a quavering sound like a saw played; and Mr. Chuck Addicks, the little old bass.

(Once the Ku Klux Klan interrupted the sermon on Sunday to come marching down the center aisle in their sheets, terrifying the congregation who did not know who among them they might be coming after—but they had come in only to make a demonstration in favor of the preacher, of whom they approved, and to give a donation, wrapped in a white handkerchief, to the church. One of the sheets moved unevenly with a hobble and people knew it was Walter Warren Starnes.)

Then the quartet stood, rattling the folding chairs, and with great austerity sang “For his eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watcheth me…” (You were' no sparrow in that coffin, Folner; you were plumed and preened gorgeous bird, hatched in a borrowed nest, cuckolded, meant for some, paradise garden.)

The sermon was a long and sad one. It told about all the family, about your young life in Charity and your work in the Church. (Once you had stood, at ten, before the whole congregation and recited the books of the Bible first forwards, then backwards. You had been a bright boy. You had sinned. The Lord save your soul.)

I want to make a little speech upon the passing of this boy, the sermon said. We have lost a leaf from a beautiful old Charity tree (a leaf! a leaf!). A bright star has fallen over Charity (a star!). We have lost a jewel (a sequin! a rhinestone! a parure of great price!), a toy of the world (O Jack-in-the-Box!). This is a piece of the lavish gay world brought back to Charity black earth, the bitterweed pollen of the bitterweed of the world cling to his limbs brought home to this hive. (Green bee that gyres out of season over us, grown thus into what yield of bitterweed are we? Pollen to what cilia (spike in the horses' throat, death in the fowls' craw) of what green bee of gall?) We are burying the brightness of the world. We are burying like a foul thing in the dirt this twisted freak, like Sue Emma's two little monsters, little slobbering freaks with bloated watermelon heads. Sue Emma's sins (and every day they'd come and measure and measure—their head was like Granny Ganchion's vile goiter, round and swollen and strutted with purple veins big as a chicken's intestines). O precious shard of the Old Mother Lode that we bury! Old Mother Lode, ore of what dark cursed vein?

Songs went through my head, Folner, as I sat there, songs I had known where, when? “O had I the wings of Noah's dove, I'd fly away to the one I love…” “One day you going come and call my name…” “My love went away on a long long train…” And the little verse, piping itself out in my brain, over and over…“It was just a little doll, dears, brought in from the fields and the rain; its hair not the least bit curled, dears; and its arm trodden off by the cows. And its face all melted away…” And the tale of the gingerbread man who ran and ran and melted away as he ran… And the mournful little tune that a child could blow on a petunia; and the words of the hymn “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go…”

“When I was young,” the voices howled round in Granny Ganchion your mother's head as she sat there gazing at you in your cheap pink coffin, “I loved gems and jewels and would almost steal to have a colored ring to glisten on my finger, just like a Gypsy. We are burying here the glassy part of me. O me…desire faileth; it is the burden of the grasshoppers.
There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel's veins; And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains
…Sure we had nothing in Charity but Beulah Land to hope for and wait for—but how could that help? That wasn't enough while we waited. The church cheated us, Brother Ramsey cheated us. I had to burrow down
under
it all like a quick mole to have any life. Don't think I don't know all this. Now there Follie, lay still, lay still. Remember when I couldn't keep you quiet on a pallet in the summer afternoons when you would have to take your nap? This is the last pallet, little Follie, a pallet for good. Lay still on it, child. (There's old Miz Van come to your funeral—she brought you the first present you ever got in this world—a pitcher of cold buttermilk the morning you were born. Fly in the buttermilk Lula Lula…)

“What does he say, Brother Ramsey, in his talking, in his sermon? He is condemning Follie to hellfire. The Lord hath hung this millstone upon my neck, and I know what for and I have never told. It is a lavalier of wickedness. It is the enormous rotten core of Adam's Apple. But I have had my life in my time—some way…”

(You knew lips, how they move to make their words; and the grimaces of faces when you were yelled at were sometimes so grotesque that you dreamt of them, strained and veined and goggle-eyed—and in your dreams the faces were only making faces at you and not saying anything.

You came to hear only the voices in your head. All the world beyond you was hushed as though some turning of a great wheel was stopped beyond you (but went on inside you), and there remained only the silence of working mouths on shifting faces—and there was only the babel of voices in your head.

When desire failed you, you had nothing left but the betrayal of desire (the moth-eaten coronation robes of dethroned queens) and a pair of ruby beads given you once by a dark alien youth who found you at a carnival and loved you and stayed to love you longer and again. You would steal away at night and run to him at the City Hotel and all the town knew. It was said that Christy was this stranger's son but no one ever proved it, for Christy was black-headed and swarthy among the other towheads—but this could have been the Indian blood that was supposed to be in the Ganchion veins come out in him, you said.

Your father was a southern sea-captain with a wart on the left side of his nose for lechery and by the time you were fourteen he had shot dead two Negroes for not keeping their place and calling him Cap'n.

You had had a hand upon your thigh in the church choir that made you trill like a meadowlark, “Fling Wide the Gates!”; and once while singing “Hear The Soft Whisper” at communion when all the heads were bent, you received your first baptism of joy—and had been Joy's sister ever since.)

And then, when the family started walking by your coffin, Folner, to look at your doll-in-the-rain face for the last time, Granny Ganchion flung herself into your coffin and tried to seize you to her, crying out in her carline voice, but you would not come up to her; and they pulled her away.

As we drove along (what Charity was not in the procession was standing watching us like a parade) a storm broke over us and scattered leaves. It was the first full devastation of Autumn.

We stood around the grave and they let you down in it while Brother Ramsey sprinkled rose petals. It seemed he was murmuring, “sawdust to sawdust,” and that surely what was falling was sawdust from the planing mill. All around the graveyard there was the ruin of Summer, Summer's wreck and plunder. Weeds were rusty with seed and the zinnias were crumbling. And then all the members of the families fell upon each other, embracing and kissing and wailing and sharing their separate and secret tragedies; and for a moment at the Charity Graveyard there was a reunion of blood and a membership of kin over your grave (the odor of lilies and carnations gave me a sensuous, exotic elation that I was ashamed of). There was a kind of meekness and the relief felt in truce. Some took a flower from your grave and fought others to keep it—it was like a battle of fiends over a holy prize; and Aunt Malley came up in a trance and said to Cousin Lottie, “What kin are we all to each other, anyway?”