Had I a Hundred Mouths

Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse:

Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!

Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;

Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede:

And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

—CHAUCER, TROUTHE.

On the road, the dust at his feet, where was he bound, where was he to go, our Old Ancestry? He seemed to find no rest for the sole of his foot. For he knew another country that had a landscape he could not wink or water out of his eye; and he had another language in his ears.

Where was the leader, whom to follow, shall we follow a follower? was the thought that hissed like a snake in the brake of the brain of his times and led to confusion in the flock, for a thought can destroy. It was a time when everything shifted and changed, swarmed around and clustered on an idea or a craving, used idea and craving up, or wearied of them, then scattered to pieces again; it was a time of confusion of cravings, it was like a bunch of sheep dispersed and broken, shepherd or no…he only followed when he was supposed to lead, another sheep, one of the broken flock, and could not summon them all together; or there was no shepherd (maybe that was the trouble), he was lost under the hill. Yet the permanent gesture was passing up and down, hovering, vanishing.

Fallen to the grasshopper, the plague year at hand; brother against brother, the community broken into Real Estate, a price on the head; flesh sealed up, men in a male prisonhouse, the women gone mad—where was the road, the wayfarer’s flower, the bird in the air, the roadside spring? It was out of this broken flock that he broke, free and loose, to keep the idea of himself uneaten in his brain. Preserve my image of myself, he thought; set my skull over this image like a glass cover. Losing this, befouling this image is whoring all our hope, the fiendish betrayal of Satan, the destruction of our Old Ancestor.

So he was a shape of dust—and if all things return to dust, fall back into it, dust was his great pile, he the dust-grubber, himself formed of the dust of the ground, from which he would find the first things formed out of the ground and bring them to himself and to us all to see what would we call them. Breathed out of dust, he was yet the enemy of all dust-eaters; he would save the dust from the appetite, from the blind voracious driving bite of hunger: the grasshopper and the worm. Then, before it all is eaten, he would have his hands in it, on it, to touch it to smut it with his fingermarks—but even more: to shape it, out of its own dust and with the miraculous light of his own dust, and thus set it away, preserved. Shaped from no more than the small and agitated dust of dancers’ feet on the side of the hill, all his aim and all his desire was to return to the dust to prospect in it and to save the grubbings. Consider this old road-runner: he is shuttler, hoverer: face at windows, fingers at panes, stick-knuckles on doors. But the dust is at his heels and his feet are on the road that he thinks to lead him for a little while to the blood beginnings of himself.

So the figure of Old Somebody comes to mind; this is to consider Old Somebody, who had no more of a name than what people gave him when he was not there to hear it.

Once, in another house, in another country, there passed on the road by the side of the house an old stranger who sometimes turned off to come to the back door and knock upon it with a stick he always carried. We of the house would know his knock on the house and though we seldom went to answer him with fear, unless it was after dark and a convict had escaped, we always felt a vague unearthly question in us as we went to answer his knock, as though some great unnameable phenomenon, like weather or like love, knocked on our house to call us away or to tell us something. This old stranger would knock and call out, “Somebody! Somebody! Hello-o-o!”; and for this we came to call him Old Somebody. What fears or visions the children of the house might have had of him no elder would ever know, for children’s images sink into nameless depths of themselves—there is this loss to recapture, to salvage up from the fathoms, hovering over the depths to rescue the shape when it rises. We came, then, people of the house he knocked on, to the back door to see this old knocker covered with dust. Given a begging—some momentary mercy; a biscuit or a cold potato or a dipper of well water—he would turn away and we would watch him through the window as he took his road again and went on.

To threaten children in the house against the repetition of any mischief they had it in their minds to commit, the elders warned them that they should be given to Old Somebody to take away next time he came, as any begging, unless they corrected their ugliness in advance or dried up and straightened their face right that very minute. “Old Somebody’s goan come get you and carry you off down the road if you don’t hush it right up.” So they used Old Somebody for a threat: we would be delivered into the hands of a passing figure of dust if we did not behave. And what we had to grow into was the knowledge that, behave or no, his hands would have us, this old haunting threat, this old vagrant intimidation.

And so we learned that the dust trembles at the touch of dust, agitates its own kind, rouses it, bestirs it, recruits its gratuitous army of it, dust, that becomes a choir of dust; and everything is taken, behave or no, by Old Somebody. For in the winter the ghostly fruit that clove to the unleafed branches would crumble at the touch and fall to the ground, fruit of dust. We dug holes in the ground and cupped our hands around our mouth and cried into the dirtholes “Old Somebody! Old Somebody!” and covered up our cry with dirt, while elders thought it was a warning to a doodle-bug that his house was on fire.

Tales told of him tried to create him in the minds of us listeners. It was told how when the boardinghouse where Old Somebody once lived burnt to the ground, how he appeared suddenly as if risen up out of ash and was seen fingering the ash—and how he found something and disappeared with it. Was it some old ashen vanity of his past that he grubbed for and found, some object his flesh had loved, some locket or letter or picture frame with the face once in it vanished?

And it was also told how he lolled and haunted about in the winter orchards touching and gathering the ghosts of summer fruit that hung like balls of dust on the bare branches. Was it to save them? How moss was Old Somebody’s beard, how the Devil’s Snuffbox, sifting to rusty powder in the hand that picked it from the ground, was Old Somebody’s dippingsnuff; how the urchins of dust in corners that the broom could not snare were the resdess children of Old Somebody. He belonged to all ghostly, elusive, vanishing things. All vanishing things! We would not give our life, our heart, our soul to the Devil of all vanishing things. Yet how they haunted and begged the heart and how one grieved after them. We knew that it was said to us that we must cleave to the permanent things and let all vanity pass; but think how because a life was given, haunted and called after by all vanishing things from the first, to vanishing things that appear and then slip away so suddenly, passing through the hands and on away, think how a life so given therefore suffered and was cursed and set on evil ground, unstable in unstable things. But what else could be done but to claim unto oneself, passager himself, what was his, all passing things. We pass with them and in them… they do not leave us behind but pull us on down and away with them. But to leave something of us both behind, a shape of dust in the dust, was the task, so early taken, of Old Somebody’s children.

We grew into the kind of men who wished only that our life might be often enough in our own hands—something that arrives, knocks, announces itself, is looked upon in a clear, still moment, goes away, and appears again—to give us a feeling, and a sense of its shape, so that we could describe it and get that joy of recognition from it that comes from handling something one wants to know, all over, as a lover, though later lost. For such children made up their mind that in their time all their purpose and all their desire would be to discover and establish, for themselves, at least—and, they hoped, for many men—a sense of self as related to this coming and going that asked to be shaped; and if we could set down a line, a chain, a continuity to keep a touch between men before us and ourselves, all linked together through what happened, burst living again and into new being out of dust, then we might leave figures of dust in our time and out of our time, and go into the dust that was ours, waiting for other hands to shape us, and joined there. We grew into the kind of men who kept, by nature and as if we had made them and named them, a resdess, loving watch on things—there was some shape to this roving watch of ours. Beyond this, indeed all around this, lay a huge, roiled and anxious shapelessness, the impulsive and unquiet and suspicious doings of men, hunts to kill, plots to gain, plans to trick to glory or increase. But we knew where the exquisite and delicate morsels of dust were given to us: the sweet glaze on trees called rawsum, the little bled and crystalline droplet of gum on a fallen plum, the tiny single sup of nectar at the end of a shoot of sweetgrass. Exhalations, musks, juices, gums and icings, we knew them as well as any bee or hummingbird or butterfly that fell into insect of dust at the end of any summer. These were there, then, for us to come and see, come and get, for us to admire and touch, our own discovered shape of things.

One time in the afternoon when Old Somebody knocked, the elders went to the door and the children followed. We saw him with eyes like dusturchins in his face, a clayey face white in the cheek hollows, blue ridge along the corona of the lips, blue at the mouth’s corners, and hoods of flesh over the dust-shot eyes: a figure clothed in dust: he had been walking a dry country. Who was his mother, who was his father, what was his race? Did he want an answer—what answer could we give him? The beggings were given him, and after he went away, the children threatened, the elders gathered in the kitchen and built their story of him so as to make another accounting of him and so answer away his call. He was the child of the Summer Hill people who had long since passed away. The elders as children had known his old folks. Bright Andrews had finally married his little housekeeper, Cora, and at an old age this accident of a child was born. The child grew up on the place, so far behind all the rest of the people of Summer Hill, the only small one, the rest all old and past him, a kind of unpossessed foundling. When he became a young man he had suddenly disappeared, gone to where, nobody knew… but to get his world. Years passed; he passed out of the minds of his people and might, to their minds, never have been born, only a passing fiction. One day he returned, so changed by whatever had happened to him that he was not even recognized. He was turned away from the door of his own people’s house—his half-sisters and brothers and their married children. He began to wander up and down, appearing, vanishing, hovering. It was said that he wanted the graves of his mother and father, Cora and Bright Andrews. It was said that he lived in a cave in the hills beyond the cotton gin; it was said he lived under a broken bridge. But his was a life never told; there was no tongue that could tell it. That was his life, that was his accounting.

Yet surely Cora Andrews remembered how she kept him quiet in her shell of flesh, like my own image of him in my mind, Bright Andrews stiff abed with his stroke and knocking on the wall with his stick when he wanted something. And surely she could not forget how when she felt the pain of her child she went quietly into the woods and brought him into this world with her own hands and hid him in a hollow log. One day he, this secret child, would have his own truth as one day I would have his truth, and mine in his. Our search and our waiting were, then, the same. It all went into the mind of a child, listener, this accounting of the elders who shaped Old Somebody’s life with their guessing tongues; and something closed up around it there in my mind, a soft shell to hold it. This mind would shape it all again one day, all its own, when something would touch the shell that kept it and it would open and the life within it would come out.

A knock opened it. Long later on the midnight watch at sea, I heard suddenly from the deck, after unconsolable loss, the knocking of the masts in the quiet midnight, and his image came back to me. “Somebody! Somebody! Hello-o-o!” the soft voice called with the knocking. He was back, Old Somebody. Walking the road of the waters, knocking on this riding house of men, this sleeping and watching family with whom I watched or among whose mysterious breathing beings I walked at night, shining my flashlight on their nameless faces; he had come back. Something of mine so precious, another vanishing beautiful thing, had been lost to sea; but something, too, was restored. This old man of dust had settled the dust with the waters, knocking on the waters of the grave of my loss, “Hello! Hello-o-o!” his stick on the waters. Dust of my loss was a pilgrim gone in peace to the waters, O waters hold him, settled forever, while I and you, Old Somebody, dust-bound, shore-bound, walk the shore and the waters, knocking and calling “Hello! Hello-o-o!” where no door opened. Far away from the borrowed house and the road that once brought him past it, but he still upon it, I upon that road now, borrowed child, I with his help saw my truth of him: the buried shell opened at his knock, he had called up his own buried image left years ago with me, and the figure of dust rose to its life and meaning out of the deeps and took its everlasting shape.

For they had lately put me down from the ship into the waters in a little leaf of a boat and sent me to wait upon the spot where a plane had fallen into the sea, to hover at the rim of the broken waters to watch when a body would rise from the depths, and capture it. I waited on the leaf, at the spot of this destruction, and behold he came rising up like a weed, the drowned sailor. I, whose hands had named and shaped and blessed this sunken shape, clipped my hands into the water and lifted it from it and brought back the salvaged shape lying across my knees, sea-boy lie light on my body, to the ship; welcome us back to the ship that enchanted us, so back we rode to the enchantress in our sorrow, welcome with garlands and vows to the temple; sleep in soft bosoms forever and dream of the surge and the sea-maids. Back we rode back to the ship in our grief, see how I found him I who shaped him, see how I returned him—tumbleweed of dust on the desert sea, the sea’s dust which I, rover upon water, must settle, unquiet dust that blows in the deserts of the mind; dust can settle dust—back to the ship of our beginning. In the days and nights that followed, one a burial day, and with the help of Old Somebody who had returned, knocking, to take this begging away, I made my accounting.

When she had him she had him in the woods, alone, and then she put him in a hollow log and never told a soul. She came back several times a day to nourish him, and at night she kept a watch on him through her window. He was, then, a little woods animal nested in the hollow tube of this old log on Summer Hill; and he lived like this for quite a while. When he first got his sight he watched at the nether end of the log the little speck of light that was his daytime and in his unmothered nights he saw there sometimes the spangle of a star or the horn of a moon. This little druid never complained of his log life, it was only another hollow for him to curl in; and his first sounds, not counting the gurgles to his mother’s milk as he took it from her when she came to give it, sitting on the log, were the tap and scrape of creatures’ feet over his wooden dome and heaven. What was this little knocking?

This little tree spirit, could you believe it, lay unmolested by the life of the ground or by gypsies, never an ant stung it or snake bit it, there was no hostility between its world and the creatures’ world, that hostility is learnt; he slept, little camper, right among the leaves and grass, a little seed dropped and left in the soil; can you believe it; waking to find a beak of horn over it or the adoring fierce eye of something of the woods hung over it. Its sky was the roof of a log and its moon the eye of a creature.

Now in old histories we can read of such, like of Childe Percival and like of little princes, secret folk, kept in secret woods places by charmers or enchanters. But would you believe it that this child could be put there in our sensible time, so far along later after old fables have faded away into just stories to be told for want of fable, after all the fancies had perished, and that it flourished, this child, and thrived; and that its mother, an old woman startled by a child out of her, could keep it all so quiet and in her heart and never tell a soul. This little pipping never doubted its beginning just as it never doubted the womb it came from while it was in it, but accepted it as right and took the nourishment that was piped into it from the veins and ducts it never thought to question. So with this new life of this little sprout within this hollow log.

Can you wonder, then, that when Cora, its mother, finally fetched it from its hollow and brought it out into the light of day, for good, it might have thought it was being born again, and that its eyes, with so much light after so much gloom, squinted into long bushy caterpillar shapes with a green fleck shining in the middle; and wouldn’t you wonder, then, that there was before its eyes eternally a speck of light; it could not blink it out, the speck of light was singed into its vision as the blast of the sun itself is when you look long enough at it: you will see this ball of light wherever you look, as though your eyeballs were the burning globe of a sun in your head. Another thing about this child was that its hide was speckled with moles and spots, and that its hide was downy with hair, even on its back. So when its mother Cora Andrews took it out for good she had a kind of little animal that she had robbed from the summer woods; and the day she took it away it is said that the woods began to faint away and the into an autumn.

There is a lot of traffic in our life because we are unhoused. This rough, uncosseted, uncircumcised, spotted and downy being, put into the world beyond his beginnings, never knew, of course, of its deliverance from the log in the woods, nor why it had the speck of light in its eyes or the knocking in its ears; but its life was one long and incessant searching for the meaning of its own household and to name its blood.

That day Bright Andrews rose from his bed and came on good legs through the woods and saw ahead of him the young man’s vision and the meaning of manhood, the whole tormented striving: his woman suckling his child, sitting on the log, was all the beginning. His little creature was curled upon her breast and joined to her in a connection that he had known with her, a suckling coupling. He watched, behind a tree, his child at his woman’s breast, here was this woods family; but he would not join them, yet. He lingered on the edge of this woods household and filled his eye with it, then he crept away.

He came, later at night and by the light of a lantern, to be by himself with it, to take his own child to his arms and look at it all over, yearning to suckle it but knowing he could reach the child only through the woman, no other way, rocking it in his cradled arms, crying with an unutterable new pride at it, loving it more than anything he had ever known in this world, his lantern hanging in a tree, bringing the little being to the light like a moth to see its marks and features, to find its eyes’ color, to see the look on its face. Is it a boy, he whispered, and found its tiny unharming and untormenting boy’s sex and fingered its precious hide.

Cora found him standing under the light with his armful bundle like her vision of womanhood. She thought, now I have given it to him, this child, for him to come and see, to come and get, to come and adore. She stood longer, quiet, watching the creator adoring its begotten. It was made in the grass of the woods, she thought, it is a little animal. She could bear it no longer and she called out “Bright!” and when he saw her he could not speak but only looked darkly at her. She came to them under the light, the family was complete; and without a word they placed the child in its nest. Then they stood for a moment looking upon each other until they met against each other and fell down into the grass together, he lowering her gently and descending over her like a falling tree, terrible; and then he was upon her, sweet and soft, and his wide wing-like folding in of her clapped her in to him up against his loins. He smelled the grass around her nested head and smelled her juices that oozed from her to greet him. Flesh onto flesh by the light of the lantern in the trees, they threshed and harrowed the grass, their bed of earth, grinding gently and clapping swelling against swelling, worming in the grass; he beating her with his body and the one body of them flipping in the leaves like a dying fowl until they lay still in the leaves. Thus they adored their child that lay, ghost of their passion, in the log, chastening themselves.

“But what will we name it?” he asked softly, lying upon his narrow pallet of her. She could not think; it seemed so nameless.

He fell back to his bed, an old stiff man again, and he did not judge his dream. Cora kept the dream and never told it, even to the dreamer.

Where it went when it left, this vision of their flesh, this dream of an old man stiff abed and a woman who hid it in a log, where it went in the years that followed was to all places that would join it to its own flesh’s vision and bring it its own time; and in the end it joined itself to dust and loved it more than the world or any creature, and got its name—who will tell or whisper or knock it out?—and saw its own flesh fall away from it into dust and cast unsettled upon the water and the road.

Where its parents, Cora and Bright Andrews, went was into dust, into all elusive, ghostly and vanishing things, a handful of dust and a clasp of bones in a country graveyard, marked by tilted gravestones, the end of all wandering, peace we are home, pilgrims come in peace, we wait for a pilgrim.

So we learned that there is no house he does not knock on, no room in which to hide away from him. And the rapping on the side of any house we are ever housed in builds for a second that old sudden vision of Old Somebody. What is it he knocked the dust with his stick for, what was it he rapped out on the dust? Say it, say it, whisper it out, stick-message, knock it out in the dust, a bird’s foot knocking on the ground, say it, say it, do not be afraid. If we build the bridge of flesh we must cross over, over it, into the land of dust, and burn the bridge of burning flesh behind us: cross over flesh to reach ghost. The dust yearns for dust, but dust will have its flesh and, having it, deliver it over with its own hands, into dust.

Where is he, Old Somebody, where has he gone? Into the heart, into the spirit, where we must settle him; and out of the heart, out of the spirit, he rises, the dust that blows, his ghost, our Old Ancestry. He is the ghost of fruit on winter fruit trees, he is the snuffbox that crumbles in the hand, he is the ash of houses, he is the dusty hound on the road, a ladder of dust in the light of a lantern in the trees.

And on he goes, on the road, the dust at his heels; there is no rest for the soles of his feet. Think how in the towns he passes through they are electing mayors, raising funds for churches where there will be christenings and marriages, funerals and soul-savings; where there are halls for town meetings, jails for correction, fines for punishment and awards for deeds. Or how in the cities he rings around with his circle of dust there is all this ten times over—causes, codes, contests, beliefs. He is passing on the road, he is the gesture, the connection of dust, the old simplicity, the old common particle, our old ingredient, carrying our truth on the nap of his back.

I give him my accounting and his, and hope he will take it to his disturbed dust and that it will settle his dust as he has settled mine. See how an old Shape hidden in the depths and folds of the mind can appear, knocked for, when it is time, and show its meaning, salvage the dust of the truth, give a biscuit of courage and a dipper of faith and put us on the road again to who knows where?

For our feet have been broken by the ways we have gone, we have walked the waters and cinders; and the blood of our feet stains the wave and the dust. There is no balm for the soles of our feet.