The House of Breath (9 page)

“Now there are only cows in the bitterweeds.

“The whole time of my life has been in this house in this town. Seems I have seen my whole world through this stereoscope of a winda. Often I sat sewin and darnin here in the summers, the summer sun slantin in and lyin on my hands and gleamin the needle (and a little golden stair of golden dust archin up and out through the winda that might be a golden ladder up to something) and watched through this very winda the children playin out in the pasture across the Katy tracks, chasin and cryin in their games. Berryben flew a kite there in the March winds and the sight of that little thing holdin on hard to a flyin kite with all his might is a memry of him. Or watched the children walkin the rayroad ties or swingin in and out on the iron gate; and singin in the yard, ‘I measure my love to show you.' And another time a wild black bull upon a cow in the pasture and the children screamin, in November. Once Berryben brought me in a rain-soaked and smeared doll's head from the pasture that he had lost and searched for there, and I made a little rag and sawdust body for it, and there it sets on that sofa to this very day, next to the pilla from Hawaya that cousin Sewall who joined the Navy sent.

“But when all my sorrow came I closed this shutter and've never opened it again. Why should I? I'd only see the Katy tracks and the haunted pasture beyond—and I feel like I don't want to ever lay eyes on it again through this winda. Sometimes the eastern sun tries to worm through the blinds and I almost want to open them; but then I don't and never will again. When Berryben went out that front gate I said, ‘It's only for a little while and he'll be back, don't grieve so, Malley Ganchion.'

“I watched him walk straight across the pasture on the path to town and played like he was only going to the store for meat and chicken feed. So straight and quick, walkin across Bailey's Pasture, he went, with his suitcase, going to take a temporary job in Nacka-doches, he said. Little Jessy waved at the fence and I waved from this winda. Walter Warren stayed out in the patch and would not look or say good-bye. He and I was all alone together with just little sickly Jessy. Lauralee and Jimbob had gone to live with Maidie in Dallas while Lauralee had her teeth pulled (but then she died suddenly there before they could ever come back) and Swimma had gone to Dallas, too, and started her shameful life.

“Then every day I'd set and set by this winda watching for Berryben. It was fall and the leaves and the leaves were fallin and I thought the leaves must leave their tree when it is time, how sad to see them leave the mother tree. But they will come back, too, in their right time, I said.

“All the winter I waited and watched; and the spring come quick, the way it does here, and the dogwood trail was all white again and redbud abloom by the riverbottoms and the leaves came sure enough back but not Berryben. Of course I know that that Evella Sykes had gone to him but I didn't allow what I thought to anyone, even to Walter Warren, I kept what I thought to myself. She was older than him and had had one husband who had died in Charity, and she was a kind of mother to him, I know, loved him and wanted to help him all she could. He never mentioned her to me in his letters.

“Then years passed, and in one of these that passed Jessy fell so quickly sick and passed on so quickly with that one year…. Berryben wrote a letter sayin he couldn't come, on account of his bein so far away and had obligations there.

“And then word come to me that Evella Sykes had gone away from Ben and that that was all over.

“So quick Walter Warren passed on, going as silent to his grave as he had always been here on the place, keeping some secret to himself that he would never tell. I never knew how sick he'd been until they said he died of a cancer.

“Then Maidie wanted me to come on to Dallas and live with them; but they had trouble enough and I didn't want to live in a city and I wanted to stay in this old house. And here I've stayed. Some of the Cleggs come over once in a while to see if I am all right. That good Hattie's been gone for years, works in Houston but comes home once in a while; and the young ones have scattered into trouble and scandal, and only the old Cleggs live there in that house that I declare to the Lord will fall right in on them one day.

“Hope the wind don't get in the flue, cain't stand
that
sound…. There is twilight in this house. Oughtn't to be so alone, going to get me some boarders.

“That tune! Now it sounds like pore Jessy's voice singin like she used to—'Rescue the Perishing' (Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save…) at our Mason piano in the living room that was ruined by the leak in the roof over it and the rain gave it such a clinkety tune (Berryben wanted to play that old piano so, but Walter Warren would fuss and fume and rant so when he caught him at it that finally the little thing made a keyboard out of a card-board and hid out in the woodshed playin cardboard music that nobody could hear). Pitiful little runted-Jessy, stunted by what curse of the Lord? Just too frail to live through a life, just at nineteen death took her away (to a better land I know); but oh how she lay so coppercolored in that bed for days and days, moanin and moanin, something like this sound in the shutter now—and the day she died I heard the rumblin of a wagon on the road and the mournful terrible call of old Mr. Hare through his nose: ‘paa-ahs! paa-ahs!'; and while his call was still in my head Jessy breathed so hard and died away from all of us. It was her liver. (The children would always run and hide when old Mr. Hare would pass callin. ‘Old Mr. Hare will get you,' I would say when they were ugly and mean.)

“Jessy, Jessy, I put out all your pictures sometimes, get a mania for em. Take spells when I jest need to see you so. Sometimes it's a baby picture of you ‘th not a hair on your little head and a little golden locket hangin round your frail little neck. Sometimes it's that one of you and Berryben standin together by the speckled yellow canna; then the one of you in your pale girlhood jest at sixteen in your sateen blouze that I worked orange curlimakews in for you. You looked like a little elf, never was of this world, taken from the beginning. Then I put em all away again, back in my goods box, back with all your little clothes and Sunday-school things, after I get my fill of em. Those little biddy softsoled shoes! The print of your little feet was no bigger than a mockinbird's. Many times I think you was the only good thing sent among us, so good and frail and gentle, never hurt a fly

“Seems like I've so little now, seems like I'm nothin at all, useless and idle and old and blind, that I have to get out signs and tokens of all I've been and done in my life to prove that once I'uz something more. Then I go to the watery mirror in the hall by the hat-tree and look at myself and see my droopin cataracted eyes and it appears my face is all meltin down, cryin down in tears and meltin away like Epaminondas' butter. Oh my! How we can come to so little from so much in this life, wouldn't believe it if you didn't have pictures to prove it. Oh the memry of the catbrush of you and Berryben against my legs as I stood at the kitchen woodstove that I will never feel again…. All of it seems like a dream, like a trance, a woman old and blind as me shouldn't be alone so long. Sometimes I get in a spell, there's such a long chain of days, one like the other going on and on and on, till it seems I don't know any time or place or anything and even the clocks go all wrong and seem to tell no time and I feel like a cork that bobbles and drifts in a pond. And I go through room and room and say to myself ‘
what muss I do? but what muss I do?'
and pass like a graveyard of memry all the signs of everbody gone and all the relics of you all, and I stand by the well and look down to see my face and want to cry into the well, ‘Who are you, can you be Malley Ganchion,
who are you?'
and pass the watery mirror that quivers my dissolving face like a face seen in the well, shimmerin and runnin together to form Berryben's, then Jessy's, then Lauralee's, then even Granny's and Folner's faces; and even look out the kitchen winda for somebody to pass on the road and see only one lone black buzzard sailing high and slow and quiet over sawmill town. (See one buzzard, don't see two, you'll see someone you're not expectin' to.) And then ‘paa-ahs! paa-ahs!', comes the ancient wail of old hare-lipped Mr. Hare selling pears from his wagon. And finally I end up at this winda and set and remember all over again and get everthing straight and get hold of myself again.

“Now the wind is Jessy's voice just as plain. Listen.”

“Hello, Mama, I've got a little talking to do, too.

“I always knew I wouldn't last. Know how I knew I was sick? Had that pain always down in my side but never told about it. And lots of times, at night, I'd lie in my bed and see a sight; and when they were burning brush over by the river it was a signal of some kind to me; and most of all when I sang my hymns at the piano I knew I wouldn't last, that I was called. (‘Hear the soft whisper wherever you are. From this sad world He would take you apart; Tenderly calling: Give me thy heart!') I was always hearing the soft whisper. When I would be hiding behind the pyrocanthus bush in a game some little ticking bug would be ticking in the bush and seemed to be telling a secret time for me. Or when I would be doing my homework by the woodstove in the kitchen I would hear the little bugle blowing in the woodstove, it was a call of a faroff land, calling me (‘Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, Calling to you and to me, Calling Oh sinner come home. Come home, come ho-o-ome; Ye that are weary come ho-o-ome…')

“There were so many signs. At night the sight of the three black hens sitting in the beantree when I would go out to the privy with a lantern was like three black angels waiting for me. And the knocking of the fieryeyed moths at the window, staring at me by the lamplight they craved and fluttering against the pane, their terrible burning faces—it seemed they wanted me and not the light.

“In church the women singing in the pews, the sad strained voices and the wailing screaming voices calling, ‘Rescue the Perishing.'

“In church the long yellow face of Brother Ramsey crooked over the pulpit and hovering over us in the congregation like a scarey falseface on a stick, clacking his gray teeth over us like the rattle of bones, saying, ‘And the Lord will open the Book on Judgment Day and the Lord will read out the names written there. Chuck Adams, will your name be written there in the Book?'

“And the congregation trembled and somebody shouted in the silence ‘Hep him, Lord!'

“We all wanted our names in the Book, prayed and worshiped and tithed and took communion to get our names written there.

“My special flower was the little go-to-sleep flower and I loved it most of all. I knew where a bunch of them lived in our pasture and would often go there and lay my finger on their leaves and put them asleep. (And at the Chatauqua I wore my red crepepaper dress that you made for me, Mama; and Berryben, who was some kind of clown with a pointed cap, spurted water from a fountain on me and my dress melted down. But he didn't mean to. And at the May Fete I was a flower and Berryben a King with a silver crown and a wand and silver stars on it made out of Dennison paper. When Berryben the King wove in and out all us flowers squatting low with heads bent over, he quietly touched all the flowers with his silver wand and all the flowers lifted up and bloomed. But when he touched me I was so excited and wanted to be so ready to bloom up—and his touch was like an angel touching me, so gentle—that I felt paralyzed for a minute and couldn't bloom, and then fell to the ground; and all the people laughed.)

“I loved all the yellow roses by the woodshed, how in the springtime the very air round the woodshed was stained and flushed golden by all the yellow roses. (But I never put one in my hair, I cross my heart I never; I never prissed, I never sinned that way; I never had vanity, vanity or wanted any lipstick. If I'd have lived, I'd a had a wart on my nose, anyway, and it would a sprouted a bristle like all the Ganchion women have.) I wanted to go to Heaven, to the city Foursquare and paved with gold that we sang about in church and that Brother Ramsey told us over and over again about; to have my name in the Book, Mama.

“You see how much I knew, Mama, that you never knew? I was just everywhere and all the time called and I was not afraid but really glad, for the Methodist Church had prepared me and I had always prayed long and hard at night or any time when I needed the help and strength of prayer; and I knew my Redeemer would take me to him when he needed me. So I was not scared. You know yourself, Mama, that I was born with a veil over my face, that I was stunted and stunned at birth and Miz Van and Pollyella Van had to hold me first in a tub of hot water and then a tub of cold to get my circulation running. You know that I was purple for three days and nights, that nobody ever thought I'd live.

“I played with the littler children out in the yard, hopscotch and Teacher on the front steps and Crack the Whip and Drop the Handkerchief (and when I ran too hard I would wipe away some blood from my nose and I would go away to hold my blood in my hand and look at it and wonder what it meant; but I never told); and Jacks in the hall when it rained. We called to Doodle-bugs, using the straw of a broom.

“‘How many hearses shall I have? One two three four five six…'

“About Berryben, Mama. He always stood up for me and now I want to stand up for him. Let him go around or if he's hiding, let him hide. He's trying to dive down for something to bring up for us all to see and to save us by. I hope we can all bear to face it when he brings it up. He wants to touch us all for all our sakes. Mama, for all our sakes, where we can bloom, and burst us up open into light. Everything else wants to touch us and close us up and put us to sleep.