The House of Breath (15 page)

“And then we went out and threw baseballs at niggerbabies and he won me this pair of beads.

“But when Follie was made, Gentry laughed (he always laughed) and bleated like a wild goat. How I despised that goatlaugh; and finally I couldn't hear it and I thanked the Lord I'uz deaf.

“O I've held, bent over in me, like in some sorrow, the folded childrun in me; I've held in me, like a capsule, a little world, the germ of all that can happen to anybody, carried little worlds round in me round as a globe, and I thrust worlds out into the world. I've held these breaths breathed into me, and the man that touched these breaths and brought em up from the cellar of my woom out of me was Dr. Currie Monette. And I know what happened when he touched the breath in me and brought it up from me, this breath was brought up in joy and I shuddered and sank away into my sleep.

“I have seen Roma the cow come home from the pasture over the rayroad tracks and through the gate, home to the fold. Her milk was the milk of bitterweeds and through my breasts (like dog's ears now) and through the breasts of my daughters Malley and Lauralee the bittermilk was passed on to childrun of this house. I've seen the folks of this house come back from places they'd gone to, while I set here through the years, Christy from his Merchant Marines and Follie in a casket. I've seen the river come over the pasture, too….

“All I need do is touch a bead—and although I cain't feel joy now I can sure remember what it
felt
like to feel joy when I could feel it. Oh I've had my life in my time and out of it, such a fertilized field, I've bred my childrun of Joy. Now the caterpillar is on the leaf, the mildew upon the stalk and the worm is in the bud. When you get old and everthing goes from you and all your childrun go from you, you are shut off from everthing, you have only Ole Fuzz that you used to scare all the childrun with left that scares you now, that still lives on in the delapidated, cold and decrepid nest. The life of all olefolks is just a shambles of the nest where the moulty old worm sets, in a pest of all the lice of memry—built of birds' spit and spiders' hair and ole women's gray hairs—the nest is withered and fallin away. We mothers kicked a crooked cradle, and it rocks forever and ever like a dry nest in a leafless dead tree.

“But O we cure ourselves, we do it with ourselves and by ourselves, we are our own cure and nobody else. We're sick and then get well again and then are sick all over. Sometimes I think women are nothin but woomtumors and blood and afterbirth; but they get well and clean again and then they take on all their sickness through more joy: in the sickness lies the cure.

“Ole Fuzz, you and I have loved this souring fruit—your scales are Follie's spangles, your warts are my goiter; wens, chancres and shale cover your body. Sometimes I believe you breathed out this house from your dragon nostrils. Sometimes I think you are the worm in that fruit, that you are the caterpillar on the leaf. Ole Fuzz, this house blown down into these ruins is built of feathers and shells and webs and spangles and beads; and sometimes I think that if you'd blow hard you could blow it all away, and that after a minute's noise of something soundin like the breeze in a prismcurtain, there'd be no more house and jest silence forevermore.

“This house was putt together from the inside like Christy's ship in the bottle and like the sea in Swimma's seashell—something put us all inside it, like that haunted something that someway putt the breath of the sea in the shell or our own breath into us. Seems like I've got the memry of the whole race of people in me—something returned to everthing; something always comes back…
wait for the comin back;
the years go and the years come back and it never ends, with us all in all of them, going on as everthing that ever was, changin one into another, mothers and sons. I may be deaf, Ole Fuzz, but I know this; and I can hear a bucket splashed in the well and I can hear the grindin of the cisternwheel and I know I'll carry the whine of the planin mill inside my head until I die, and probly foreverafter….

“Now tell me worm, where did I come from, cain't remember…”

“Tell yusself….”

“I touch the beads for Charity….”

XII

WHAT WAS this man with a long houndface and a glistening silver eye who tacked this map to the kitchen wall and gazed and gazed at it? (How old and worn the world looks now! From too much gazing Christy faded the world like too much light on colors; he has taken the luster into himself and looked the luster into me, stamped it upon my skull so that my skull became a globe of the world.) His image is teardrops of birds' blood speckled on his denimed thigh, a waist girdled by a wreath of small dead birds, an axe-wound's scar secret on my thigh. And about his image there resounds an echo of frenchharp music and of clashing beaks of horn.

Christy was big and had dark wrong blood and a glistening beard, the bones in his russet Indian cheeks were thick and arched high and they curved round the deep eye-cavities where two great silver eyes shaped like bird's eggs were set in deep—half-closed eyes furred round by grilled lashes that laced together and locked over his eyes.

He was a hunting man; and hunted; and his mother Granny Ganchion was a shaggy old falcon that had caught him like a surrendered bird and held him close to her, home; as though he had been hunted in his own hunting, the hunter hunted; and captured: by trap or talon; or treed; or set or pointed at and stalked in his own secret woods and brought home, driven towards stall and what forage, at nightfall, to her, the hunter's huntress. He had had one friend before me, he said, and that was his mother (O cries into a deaf world!) who could not hear him, only read off his lips his passion that lay so fair and lovely, trembling on his full wiener-colored lips. He had just talked so long into deafness that he came to judge the whole world deaf, and so he no longer said anything much (could or would he be heard?). It was what he didn't say that said what he said (I think I know now what he didn't say). He became a man of gestures: shrugging his humped shoulders under his workshirt like a big bag carried there; waving his long scarecrow arms with raveled strips of fingers, long-nailed and hanging down at the end of his arms like the raveling out of arms (the isinglass nails shaped like oval shells were bent over sharp and tough at the ends as roosters' spurs are); throwing his great dark head from side to side or tossing it up and down in horse movements; and, in his despairs, heaving up in the air the whole huge, buoyant, winged upper portion of his body, arms and bladed torso, like enormous agitating wings of a huge and sinewed man-angel.

Christy made everything seem an evil secret—the songs he sang to his guitar: “Write me a letter, send it by mail; send it in care of Birmingham Jail…,” and he would be in jail singing this song because he had done something wrong in the woods or with the Mexicans. He had a circumcision-like scar, pink and folded, on his brown neck over which he would gently rub his fingers and tell me how it was a knifecut because of love. When Christy yodeled, flashing his silver eye, “You get a line, I'll get a pole; we'll go fishin in a crawdad hole, Ba-abe,” he was telling me long, long stories of woods-meetings. He would go off hunting (in Folner's same woods), leaving me behind and wondering (“One day when you're old enough I'll take you huntin with me, we'll go huntin, Boy”) and then come back to us as though he had been in some sorrow in the woods, with birds' blood on him and a bouquet of small, wilted doves hanging from his waist over his thigh, or a wreath of shot creatures: small birds with rainbowed necks, a squirrel with a broken mouth of agony. Then he would come to me and speak, for he had found words, “Listen Boy, listen; come out to the woodshed with me quick and let me show you something, come with me, quick; by Gum I've got something…”

What would he show me if I went?

They said around Charity that he did the thing that would make you crazy if you did it too much; they said he was a niggerlover; they said he was a KuKlux; they said he was adopted by Granny Ganchion and was a no-good Peepin Tom whose parents were probably foreigners or Jews or thieves in the Pen; and some of this was true and he was bad. But after he dived down into the river and found Otey, his wife, and brought her up to the shore, drowned, he was a different man.

He hated Folner, said he had to squat to pee and didn't have enough sense to pour it out of a boot. He had raised him like a mother (“Folner came when I was fourteen and Mama was sick, sick before he came (the way I knew he was comin was when I asked Mama if she had a pillow stuffed there and she said, ‘No, it's going to be a little baby'), sick to almost dyin when he was born (and had to have him Cicerian, Follie came out her side, came into this world sideways), and sick always afterwards. I was Follie's mother all those years, makes me part woman and I know it and I'll never get over it. How I rocked him and how I slept warm with him at nights, rolled up against my stomach and how I never left him day nor night, bless his little soul, settin on the gallry with him on my knee while I watched the others comin and going across the pasture to town and back from town, to Chatauquas and May Fetes. Until he changed. What was it got hold of him? Took to swingin in the gallry swing all day, by hisself, turned away from me, something wild got in his eye, and then Mama took him back. Began to wear Mama's kimona and highheeled shoes and play show, dancin out from behind a sheet for a curtain; and then I turned away from him…. Oh what does it mean tellin and rememberin all this—except that it has made me what I am right now: somebody settin here tellin and remembering what made them what they are right now…”); he had raised him like a mother until Folner turned away from him and hated him, and then Christy said he was a sissy and a maphrodite (but they joined again in the woods—were I joined them too; and now we all join in the world).

He would say whispered things about animals: udders, the swinging sex of horses, the maneuvers of cocks, bulls' ballocks and fresh sheep—he was in some secret conspiracy with all animals. He fought game and Cornish cocks with the Gypsies and the Mexicans, and often he would clink in his hand some dangerous-looking tin cockspurs that he used for his fighting roosters. But after a roosterfight with the Mexicans or a hunt in the woods, Christy would be quiet and then sit all day close to Granny whittling little figures; and once he carved a perfect ship and put it in a bottle.

Out in the woodshed Christy played a frenchharp cuddled in his trembling hands, blowing and sucking sounds like birdcalls and moaning voices of animals; and before I knew him I lay in my bed hearing these sounds like a mystic music played from the moon that rocked like an azure boat in our sky, framed by my window. Everything Christy never said was whispered, lipped, blown into his frenchharp; and his pale wet lips curled like some delicious membrane; or like the workings of fishes' mouths that might be saying something under water.

He had had a little wife named Otey and they had lived sometime together in a shack up the road beyond the house; then they both went home again, she to her folks at Clodeen and he back to Granny Ganchion. Otey had big daisy eyes, yellow with lashes like sun rays radiating from the hazel centers; and a sunlight shone from them. But her hands were long and frail and purplish, shaped like frogfeet, with tiny white bones white under the skin. O her frail frogfeet hands holding a bouquet of Cups and Saucers brought from the fields to Granny Ganchion! (who always sneezed immediately). (Granny would say, “Christy what's the matter with Otey, she's as white as a pile of chalk; pore as a snake.”

“She's just tarred, Mama,” Christy would say.

“She's such a sunk-in little thing, all bowed over. I don't see how she's worth much at her chores, that Otey's sick, Christy, her skin's real crepey.”)

They would come down the sandy road, Christy deep in his silence, Otey's bare feet glad in the cool yellow sand of the old wagon road, coming bent over, and good, down the road to the house. Christy would say, “Otey we got to go and be with Mama, Mama's lonesome.” Then they would come down to us and Christy and Granny'd just sit, not saying a word much, Granny uttering her
uck uck
sounds because of her goiter, that sounded like an old setting hen safe with her eggs.

Sometimes if they didn't come, Granny would say, “Why don't Christy come down to see me; why don't none of my children ever come to see me?”

And then she would send me up the road after Christy. I would find him sitting on their little porch, huge and quiet, and Otey no place to be found. Then Christy would call into the trees for her, sounding her name through all the woods; and finally she would come, very softly and bent over from the trees, holding some wood she had gathered. “We got to go down to the house, Otey,” he'd say. “Mama wants us.”

I know that while he sat on the little porch of his shack in the woods, voices called to him, “Come home, come home,” and that the doves moaned this and the owls hooted it, “Come home, come home”; and that I must have seemed to him like another bird when I came to him from the house calling, “They want you home.”

Then once, in the hottest summertime, he came to me and whispered to meet him in the woods to catch a mother possum and her babies. I trembled to go, and slipped away and met him. I saw him waiting for me (like a lover), I saw him sitting on a stump watching me as I came, closer and closer, feeling evil, feeling guilty. We rejoiced (without words) at our meeting secretly.

The mother possum lived in the rotten stump of an old tree, and when we found it Christy began chopping at it with an axe. Because I came too close to him once he came down on my thigh with his axe—so gently that he only cut a purple line under the skin and no blood came. I almost fainted and fell to the ground but did not cry. But Christy wept and begged me not to tell anyone and tied his bandanna tightly round the wound and hugged me and trembled; and I have never told. I have carried on my thigh the secret scar he left me (O see the wound on this thigh left by that hunter's hand!) and have never told.