The House of Breath (16 page)

But we got the little possums and put them in a chicken coop at night. The next morning they were gone—as if they had never been there and we had only caught them in a dream of mine; yet I saw the purple axewound on my thigh and found a hole scratched out under the chicken coop, and so I knew it really happened, and that no one but Christy and I would ever know.

After that, there was a long time of waiting in which I knew there was a preparation for something. Within this waiting (was Christy waiting too?) we looked at the map together or I watched him make the ship in the bottle or heard the frenchharp in the woodshed.

And then one summer night I learned his truth (and mine). It was through a window that I learned it when, wondering what he was, I squatted in the garden ducking down under the peavines, outside his room, and watched him through leaves of moonlit vines. It seemed he was floating above me and that I was seeing him through thin-shaled waving leaf and light patterns of water; and the light through the tiny bones of waving leaves made him have green feathery lines winnowing over his body and he was spotted and speckled with dark leafshapes, marked like a fish. From where I watched him from below it seemed he might at some moment dive down to me and embrace me and there speak and say, “Listen Boy, listen, let me tell you something…” There, in the garden, I, like an Eve, found him leaf-shadowed (and, like Eve, leaf would forever after make me stop to remember). There he lay, among vines now, so beautiful in his naked sleep, and so stilled (I thought)—a hot liquid summer night filling the world with the odor of greengrowing and moonlight—green-golden under the light he had fallen asleep with still on, little cupids of gnats wafting round him. I found him hairy with a dark down, and nippled, and shafted in an ominous place that I seemed to have so known about always in my memory, not new, although suddenly like a discovery, that I whispered to myself “Yes!”—as though I was affirming forever something I had always guessed was true. He lay among the vines decorated with a stalked flower—or was it a flame licking up out of him—so quiet, yet with some inner commotion going on within him, perhaps a dream he was having of being discovered like this, all gentle and in his prime and bloom: he lay blooming among the vines, in my moonlight; and in all this soft night I had him before me, eternal shape of man, all my own discovered resplendent prize in the world, caught unfolded like a flowerless daytime plant into its unsurmised nightflower by the wild eye of a little animal, glorious in his solitary unsuspected blessing (yet somehow always known about—we all know, how?) and diving in his dream of quest for something to pull to him and embrace in some glory, through some power that would create him man, defined, real, continuing man in through the window. Snakes, I thought, slough, under ferns, In their time, and what eye sees them? Shells open at their tide and moon on shores where only moon sees and tide knows: I am something old and mysterious and wise as moon and tide; for I have seen; and I will never tell but
be
what I see here, in my time. O what was it in the life of things that prized open the shells, lifted up the bloom off stalks, and slipped the skin off serpents, on and on and on?

Then I climbed up in the chinaberry tree and looked at him again and it seemed he was lying in the branches, bough in bloom or fruit on a tree.

After that I knew how beautiful he could be, that he had his beauty cursed or blessed, as though it was smitten, on him, close as flesh; and when I later saw all adornments of bodies and of the world: spires of ancient churches where birds lived among bells as though the birds were flown-out bells ringing in the sky; light through stained glass Creations of naked Adams on windows (and Adams expulsed, with hands like leaves covering their flower that, in another garden, had caused all Christy's woe), signs seen on boughs and bodies, flowers and gems and flames; stars, eyes: the torment of their luster; the infinite fairness of veined temples, stretched hands like wings of birds—I recalled him that I saw like my creation of man, through a window, floating and flowering in my early moonlit darkness among the peavines and the boughs of the chinaberry tree—and thought that this vision must be the meaning of boy beholden to man.

I went out in the road and walked in the moonlit sand and thought, O
when I am ready, really ready, and filled with blood, I will
go,
before I die and in my strength, hung with my beauty blooming close upon my flesh and this vision burned upon my brain, in the spring, through all the land, sowing it with my substance, lying under fruittrees in meadows and on hills with all the young; and brush the leaf away. And we will fill the world with our sighs of yes! and make it sensual like rain, like sun, like scents on wind, being blossoms and pollen: flowing and flying coupled over the world and sowing our wealth into it, fertilizing it. My life will be for making the world an orchard
.

And then, finally, it was the time Christy had whispered about. We rose early and went away into the woods in a blue, wet world to hunt together. The sky was streaked like broken agate, as if the huge bowl were porcelain or agate and had been cracked; and it seemed there were no clouds anywhere in the world. Christy and I were sleepwalkers going away from a house of breath and dream. The sound of a chopping axe echoed in the acoustics of the agate heavens. I was so afraid; we were going, it seemed, towards some terrible mission in the woods. The sad, dirty face of Clegg's house looked at us as we passed it.

A fragile, melodious Oriental language blew in on the wind like the odor of a flower and we saw the string of smoke from a gypsy camp somewhere in the woods. The sliding of our feet in the road flushed a flutter of wings from the bush. The fields were alive with things rushing and running; winged and legged things were going where they would, no engine or human to stop them. Out in the fields under the thick brush and in the grass and green were myriad unseen small things that were running or resting from running. Under the trees as we went we swept back the webs and broke them as we went. What was this terrifying rising of something in me, like a rising of fluid? Some wild and mourning thing was calling and claiming me. It was autumn and the time of the killing of hogs; there were squeals in the distance. Dandelions whirled like worlds of light. Hickory nuts were falling. Folner lay buried in the graveyard; and Otey, too. We only looked that way, toward the graves, as we passed, and carried their lives within us as we went towards the woods.

We climbed a little hill and he stood for a moment on the hill, all his life breaking with loneliness and memory inside him, looking down on the country of Charity behind and the river ahead like the wolf in the picture in Aunty's room. As we came down the hill on the river's side we were walking down the slopes of the strangest, yellowest world to a wide field that seemed the color of a pheasant's wing. And then a bird appeared. Instantaneously Christy shot it dead. He picked it up and we went on. We passed the carious ruins of an old shed. Two Negro women appeared from behind it. “Blackbirds!” some voice said. “We can watch them wash in the river (ever seen a nigger's tits? Big as coconuts…).” But we went on.

And then we came into the bottomlands where the palmettos were turning yellow. At the river, which seemed to have just waked and was clucking in its cradle, we saw the leaves falling into the river. Now not a living creature ran or rustled. There was only the occasional comma of dropped cones punctuating the long flowing syntax of the river's sentence. Then the river bent and we followed it, and there the river was drugged in the early morning and creeping so slowly that where many leaves had fallen and gathered the river seemed a river of leaves.

These were Folner's woods. What had he found here or left? Once we saw, in the sand, the prints of knees left by someone who had kneeled and drunk from the river; and then I saw Christy get down on his hands and knees and drink like a beast from the river, and I saw the signs his body left there.

We walked along under the ragged trees and pieces of them were forever falling falling about us as we went; as though the world was raveling into pieces and falling upon us as we went, Christy ahead, silent and huge under his hunting cap, his isinglass nails shining, and I behind, afraid and enchanted. No fishes were making the noise a rock makes dropped in the water; only a watermoccasin, once, was skiffing along soundlessly with his brown head erect like the head of an arrow. We were going through the ruin and falling away of dreams, Christy and I—come from the house filled with its voices, going towards our reality that, once found and taken, would fall away again into dream.

And then a purring, gurgling sound came as if it were the river; but it was Christy's frenchharp.

We passed a muscadine vine with grapes that had some silvery frenchharp music's breath blown on them. There was the sound of the hopping of birds on leaves.

And then Christy suddenly shot at a turtle that looked like a rock, and got him.

He shot again and a dove fell, followed by the falling blessing of feathers. He looked at me, asking me to pick up the fallen dove. I picked it up, ruined. We went on.

We were going after all marvelous things; silently; he going ahead blowing and sucking his frenchharp; I behind, timid, and terrified and marching in an enchantment by the music in the woods. For a time he was leading me like a piper to the river; and for a time I was following in a kind of glory, and eager, and surrendered, and wanting to follow—just as he was, in his own dumb sorcery and splendor, leading me, victor, proud, like a captive. But the uncaptured, unhypnotized part of me was afraid, wanting to run home (where was home to run to, towards where?); for I knew he was leading me to a terrible dialogue in the deepest woods. All his hunting, all his shooting and gathering up of shot birds was a preparation—like a meditation in which there is a collection of words, for prayer or protestation or farewell or betrayal—in which he would tell me some terrible secret. In it he would finally, after making me wait until I was almost mad with desire for words from him, tell me all the Evil and arm me for all the Joy that there could be and be had, in the world; and I would have no one to tell it to, to contain it, just as he had had no one, only the hunt and this boy. But until the moment of speech in the deepest shadowed woods where it seemed we would be in a cistern, let down alone together for this terrible revelation of secrets, Christy's silence was the ringing starry soundlessness of night in the woods, of deafness got from his mother. (I carried his news for years within me until now I tell it. Evil comes free to you, it has been purchased for you as a gift. But steal Joy, he told me, find it and rob it out of the world, suffer for it but, steal Joy like a thief of despair.) (“Yet that's what Folner did and you despised him,” I would answer him if we could have a conversation now—O Christy, if you were here! We could have a conversation.) Now the river flowed like his own wordless speech.

We looked across the river toward the ahead—long flat brown land—and we wanted separately and silently to start across the field away toward something ahead. He said to me fly away from here—I give you these bird's wings to fly away with from here where we are all just the sawed-off ends of old tubafours rottin on a sawdust heap; fly up and away, across the river past Riverside and on away. And what brings you down will be what gave you wings to fly up and away, will be what needs to use you to speak with be bird, be word. (Yet as we went, “comehome, come ho-o-me,” the voices called. The doves moaned this and the owls hooted it, “come home, come ho-o-me…”)

“But when I would run home, what would there be for me to do? Only set by Mama while she rocked and hear her go uck uck in her throat and watch the goiter sliding up and down under her lank skin, rising and falling. But in the woods I had my life—and in some other places
.

“Towards the river—across! The birds! What went by? Wings! O wing me over! Come over, come over, let Christy come over! Hell-o! Hell-ooo! Listen to the echo O-O-O! suffering from the other side. But Boy, we'll send you over. When he runs to me, bringing a bird, it is Freshness, Newness, Unusedness running to me—O come to me! Let me touch your untouched newness (I am old and cold, but burning). Let me shoot you like a shining cartridge over the river and into the fields of the world
.

“To swim like a fish up the river to the mouth, O Great Mouth to swallow me in, home to the end. O my blue face! That I bite my fingernails—that they will know and say I'm crazy—the time I dove in the river and going down what happened and comin up how it happened, comin comin—Oh God Almighty I'd do it twenty times a day, to shudder like that, to forget, shuddering like that, everything but what is lovely and warm and nothin. And then how I sat down dizzy on the banks and wept, on the banks of the river I cried—by the waters of the Charity I sat down and wept. O Otey I had you at last, I had you, caught in my hands, alone and wrapped together in the soft crepedesheen cloths of the waters of Charity I had you, nekkid I had you, below the surface of the river, where above they all sat waitin for us; and when we came up to the top and the light and world you were dead and I was deaf and dumb and blind. They laid us both on the shore and one of us never did come to, and that was you
.

“But now let us go—we are going after it, what we never had. If it lies across the river, I cannot cross the River. O Bird! Wing me over the River! This young brightness following me will one day cross the River for all of us, we will send him over. I will tell him to go, by killing the next bird I will tell him to—there's the wing of a dove, sounds like a flying frenchharp… Got it, by gum, look at the falling wings, look, look at the falling wings! Let Boy run to get it like any birddog. Hey, young sad birddog, Hey, Birddog! He is fresh to be used, this cleanpeckered boy, keep him away from the niggers and the cows, keep him away from himself, keep him from the fruits like Follie, my own brother. There's another beak—it's a woodpecker—tell him by the stopping of a woodpecker's pecker—Zing! got him, by gum (Hey, Birddog!).