The House of Breath (2 page)

It was a big, wide, live house with a long hall running right through the middle of it, and had many people in it, Aunty, Uncle Jimbob, Aunt Malley, Uncle Walter Warren, Christy, Granny Ganchion and all the cousins, little and big: Swimma, Follie, Berryben, Jessy, Maidie and all—even Miss Hattie Clegg, who came to live with us. There was always that wagon in the field; it had lost a wheel and was standing broken at the back and wrenched to one side. A family of chipmunks lived and bred and lived on in it. Close to the outdoor well was the babybuggy, ragged and decrepit, like the sloughed-off husk of abandoned infancy, in which many babies had been fitted and ridden round; and later, when there were no more babies in the house, the children who had lain in it had played with it, recklessly, as if disdainful of any infancy, until Aunty had captured it again and planted some Hen-and-Chickens in it. If it was winter, the cattle would be standing in a stare in the fields, dull and motionless; and the ragged hens would be huddled drooping by the barn. Then it seemed that summer might not ever come again (and Jessy played her jacks in the hall or sang for one of her sick dolls, “Mama, Mama, I am sick, run for the doctor quick quick quick!”; and I gazed at the picture of the sorrowful girl sitting playing her lyre on the side of the world). But summer or winter, turning and turning over it all like a blessing or a curse (or sometimes blowing as if it were trying to blow the house down) was the whirling wheel at the cistern.

You had other places, Charity—the little Bijou (said “Byejo” by everybody) Theatre, bright and rowdy, where Jack Norbitt played, thumping his wooden leg, the piano for the show—mostly one piece called “Whispering,” over and over again. And you had the City Hotel—but that burned and brought all Charity to it in nightgowns and out of its wreckage they carried an old charred drummer burned in the praying shape they found him in—and I would never go this way to town again, to smell the rain on burnt woodash and flesh. Then there was the Postoffice, where the faces of Sam and Birdie and old Bill Grady were framed in each window like a mantel array of family photographs as I passed, going to get the mail. And there was the Racket Store and Sam Brown's Dry Goods Store that had the smell of cretonne and gingham and Union Jack overalls in it, and old Mrs. Huffman with a pair of scissors hanging on a black ribbon round her neck saying, “Kin I hep ye, Boy Ganchion?”.

All these years, Charity, that I was in you, crystal dazzling in the radiant shell of mornings, eye going over and over you, reflecting everything and wondering, I never said anything, but only waited for some speech that the breath of the house was breathing into me. In memory the image of these days in you is what happened once on Main Street when a bunch of boys was standing round telling about things and suddenly one of them pointed out of the circle and called, “Look! Standin there listenin with's mouth open!” and they all looked and laughed. It was me, suddenly aware of myself looking, that they were pointing and laughing at; and I went on away, then, thinking, I'll go home to the house; I have a place to go.' For there was not a thing to say.

Within the house you held, Charity, and in the hall that led to the breezeway there lay, propping open the door to the breezeway in summer and, cold to touch and of no use at all in the corner in winter, the seashell that Swimma brought. When she came running home the time she thought oil was on the property she brought it as a present from Florida to her mother, Aunty. On it was written
PLAYGROUND OF THE WORLD
. This was all she ever gave her mother.

Summer and winter, doorstop or just seashell, it always had the little roar of the sea in it. Sometimes I found Aunty sitting with it at her ear and once I saw Christy whisper into it; and one of the few words he ever said to me was when he held it out to me once and said “Listen!”

(One time when Swimma was in high school I saw Aunty after her because Swimma had a note in her hands that she wouldn't let Aunty see. They ran out of Aunty's room through the hall and onto the breezeway, Swimma yelling, “It's none of your business what I have or do!” and Swimma ran to the well and threw the note in. Then she had her tantrum and ran out into the yard, chickens shooting up frightened everywhere, feathers flying, and Swimma seemed like one of them; and she stayed away all afternoon. She came back late, from town where she had been, and Aunty looked out to see her coming and said, “Well yonder comes Miss Priss; I vow to you I don't know what we're going to do with her.”

Swimma prissed in home, through the gate, with her lipstick on and walking as if she had on highheels, and said to Aunty on the gallery, “I hoped you'd thought I'd run away, is what I'll do one day, too, sure's Satan.”

Then she came in and sat on the bench in the hall and gazed at herself in her mirror, making kissing shapes with her lipsticked lips and doing her lips around as if she were saying “ooooo!” and rocking her head as if she were whispering “hotcha!”—a word she was always saying around the house, now. She all of a sudden got mad as a bull and threw her mirror on the floor and broke it into pieces there where the seashell lay after she brought it, yelling, “Why do I have to have this nose as long as a pineywoods rooter's—and with a possible wart comin like Mama's? Dang it I wish I had the gold earrings Eulaly Sanderson has on in town today, and all the money they cost, and
she
was going to have a wart on
her
nose!”

Aunty just got up from her chair on the gallery and said in at the front door, “Seven years bad luck little feist,” for the broken mirror. (Oh she had it, seven and more.))

There also lay in the hall, close to the seashell doorstop, a pale green turpentine bottle with a perfect little ship in it that Christy made one winter (what was this man who made it?).

And in the hall there hung a picture of a blinded girl with a lyre, sitting on top of a blue, rolling world and bent over in some sorrowful, lyrical telling-out of a memory. When I looked at this picture, it seemed that some voice in me was telling out a memory of the world, as though I had always known the world, in what past of mine, what dream? I stood and looked and heard the song of the world that told of the splendor of itself, like an object created by all that happened in it, and of what was done in it through all its years: it sang out, in a voice like Jessy's, frail and trembling, of fallings of angels, down from a red raging heaven like falling birds or leaves or dropped flowers; of the first man and woman naked and yawning in a garden, their flesh speaking (O for some intimacy of bodies speaking to each other, creating a language for the first time that would be the speech of all love in all the years—one simple sentence of touch and burst) a language that would create and speak out into the world all passion and all despair, loneliness for lack of it that would be a kind of dumbness of speech—where there is no love there is no speech—and desire like speech unheard, and ecstasy like the murmuring and pouring out of the sentence, bring body to body and start a ceaseless murmuring, the turning of the wheel of blood, yearning and tiring and yearning again, eternally rising and falling. And the song sang of kings and falls of kings, and plots of princes; princesses in grated towers and queens in love or sending out ships or causing battles for nations, and conquests of religions and building of stained jewels of churches; of classes, riots and clashes of classes, and systems discovered by one man for all ages, and laws and pacts and edicts. The singing was of architecture of great stone buildings standing in light and throwing down their shadows across swept spacious plazas, and of figures on the capitals of columns—doves and granite grapes and tongued gargoyles; of painted and striped baubles of cities, glittering with loot of robbed wealth, built over water, built on mountainsides; of palaces and great dynastic houses and fortifications and monasteries…

And over all this tumult of concourse of men alive in the years of the world had hung the same old sky as over you, Charity, with all the stories of stars in the constellations: Orion hunting eternally through the frozen wastes and ices of the bottomlands of the firmament, the lights twinkling round his loins and girdling them, Bulls; and Fishes; the Seven Sisters coming up, clustered, like slow shot Roman Candle stars over Rob Hill (just over there!), a thrown moon over like a gleaming skull from the graveyard of centuries of moons (thrown by what gravedigger's hand?) or sometimes like the head of a laughing boy or a luminous fingernail-end of some moving pointing finger.

In the kitchen, tacked on the wall by Christy, was a map of the world. Christy often sat at night (and I sometimes with him) and looked and looked at the map, almost as if he were talking to the world and adoring the world and taking each part of it into himself as he looked. Sometimes he showed me that by looking a long time at the map and then closing your eyes, you could open them again and look out into Bailey's Pasture and see there, radiant and throbbing, the lighted shape of the world. And sometimes it seemed on the map, as we looked, that the whole world was melting down and leaving drippings of the world on the map like melting ice on a floor. Then the world was melting down into me and into Christy and we were changed into the world. In the enormous fluid of universe ice floes of countries were broken off and floating and Christy and I were floating like separate (but bridged by some secret underwater island) lands. We saw together the brainshaped countries and livershaped countries where the whole mapped world looked like blooded lights of the dissected, opened out and pinned down body of the world as if it were an enormous fowl; and then we saw green and orange seas with pearl chains of islands, and fringed coasts. And we felt the wealth of nations, of colored populations inhabiting like flocks of flowers—yellow or black or red—the fields of countries; of wars and crusades, of all the languages speaking to one another; and we saw places with rivers and named after the rivers; and we knew that there were many countries and lands and that some, in the running out of many years (“The years! the years!” Christy would whisper) would famish and grow so used that ancient grapevines would not give one more grape, and die—but that then other countries, heretofore forest full of eyes and calls and beaks against bark, and fat breasts of unshot birds, and where cones lay like fruit and spores dropped and high high grasses shone in sunlight; and floored with fresh soil ripe for roots and seeds in fields where seeds flew in the winds or were carried on hooves or tails or manes and dropped and watered by rains, planted and cultivated by no man; where airs were full of flying seeds and pollen and wings—but other countries then would be found (men see them from a peak, after long guessings of travelings; or from a wide and brimming river which they had opened like a marriage with the curved prow of their ship named after Queens and sent by Queens) and history go on. History got onto maps, Christy's gaze said, because men searched and because men were lonely and because men wandered and found countries and brought, like bees or winds or hairy carriers, the seeds
home:
in a box a tender frond in its soil, to be smoked or its fruit eaten; a leaf, a dried blossom; or rock-embedded ores; or in a bottle water from a lake or a spring; or cages of colored birds, a chained, aghast black man; or teeth or tusks; or a purse of precious stones.

Here, tacked on this wall in the kitchen of the house you held, Charity, was the world's body showing all the life in it; and all the life was in Christy and me—and our skulls became lighted globes of the world that the map had stamped there, which each of us held in his hands, turning it round to find the worlds that each of us had given to the other.

IV

WHEN I FIRST discovered your River, Charity, I had the song of the world sung into me by the map and the picture and, looking at the river, map and picture and river were singing together the same story, of beginnings, and ages, and of movement through ages
towards
something, towards
me
. You had this
little
river, Charity, that scalloped round your hem like a taffeta ruffle. It glided through your bottomlands (that could be seen from the gallery of the house) winking with minnows and riverflies and waterbugs. It was ornamented with big, drowsy snap-turtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and thick purple catfish shining in it and sliding cottonmouth watermoccasins. It crawled, croaking with bullfrogs and ticking and sucking and clucking and shining, round through meadows of bottomland palmettos (fanning in a breeze like a meadow of Methodist women in July Prayer Meeting), between muscadine vines that plashed up like fretted fountains (and trailed and curled and twined over the ground and crept over old stony logs and ancient saffron-golden rotted wood festered with the decoration of pink and white and azure fungusflowers, and climbed up trees and coiled round their branches and then were flung down again in tassels and sprays and thick swags over the river), under purple hangings of moss and under bridges of many little towns until, somewhere far away from you, Charity, in a place you did not know but only imagined, it swam into a bay.

O River! You were our Time flowing wrinkled and ceaseless over stones and roots, sliming or mossing or eroding them as Time passes over people and their houses and objects, touching them with a ghostly invisible hand and changing them—see its work on the face, the hair, the body: mossing and wrinkling and eroding. You were a kind of Beulah Land for everybody: people gathered at you, gathering at water like creatures. You were known to be treacherous after rains and in your deep places, where it was quietest, were dread suckholes sometimes marked by the warning of a whirlpool, but not always. For a fording wagon full of the Chubbs from Elmina had sunk into one of them and all were drowned and people all along in the towns of Onalaska and Pointblank and Camilla found bodies coming along, now of the baby, now of Ora Bee Chubb, now of the two boys, floating by; and although they waited and watched for Selmers Chubb, he never passed and it was guessed that he was caught in a snag. Others drowned in you, too—three Charity girls almost did while wading and squealing and one of them did and this was Otey Bell, rescued by Christy Ganchion, but too late. They rolled her over a log but she was drowned.