The House of Breath

HERE YOU SAT, Malley Ganchion, by this old blind window that was like the closed and drooping eye of this decrepit rainwashed house, listening to this sad little tune played by the east wind in the shutter. Pieces of a broken memory drifted by in your head. What was this little lament the wind blew and blows, dipping you (and me) deep down like a bucket into the well of an ancient memoried self? You did everything to stop it, because look what you did to stop it: here in the cracks and louvers are the yellowed stuffed newspapers, the Charity Clarion, and the thick cardboard pages with swatches of men’s suit material from Sears’ catalogue. But nothing stopped that tune in your window when the wind was in the East coming from the Charity River, whirling the cisternwheel and filling the well. You sat and listened and lamented…

“Oh the Charity Riverbottoms where the wind that blows this tune like some mouth on a frenchharp is comin from! There in the spring the dogwood used to blossom and blow, and the redbud and yella jessmine; and the katdids ‘ud bleat like the beat of an old rusty heart, and the frogs make such a husky commotion. Oh the sweet breath of the woods—the baby-breath fern and the little woodsviolets and the daylilies; and on Rob’s Hill risin up beyond the old river bridge there’d be Fire on the Mountain blazin like the burnin bushes of Moses. There’s a new steel bridge now and the old one is broken and swaybacked—the one I’d never ride over, was condemned, and would make them let me get out and walk across when we’d go for our rides out on the Highway. (Remember those summer Sundays we had our picnics there and all’d go wadin in the water, and look for good sweetgum and hickry sticks; and some would be fishin with sugarcane poles and others’d be rustlin through the dry palmettas like fieldmice or strollin under the shinin longleaf pines and the blackjack pines—and through it all the sweet little Charity River flowin lazy, and small, and clear as a tear. Instead of all this decoration of the woods, you know what’s there now, oilwells there now, thickern flies, all along there; and all the treefrogs and whipperwills are flown away, caint live in an oil derrick, no nature left, no wonder….) Nothin is like it used to be except the wind blown from the riverbottoms into my shutter to play a tune about what has gone. (The bottomlands are bald and have sluices and slues full of black, muddy oil scabs, can smell it here when the wind’s right. That stink puts all Charity in a spell, they walla in it, it smells money. Never the sweet fresh smell of the old riverbottoms. Is this the vile oil of joy, this green and yellow putrid scum over the ponds?) The world has sold away everthing that was beautiful and as the Lord put it here to be, human beins have changed everything into money and show. Why, out by Tomball the land is littered with oilwell riggins, and day and night the chug-chug-chug and the little flickrin oil flames wavin in the night like the red flags of the Devil staked out to say he owns this infernal land; and nigras and pore people who used to have no more’n one Jersey cow and a few Plymathrock hens got colonial homes and stationwagons. Everthing that used to be in East Texis is ruined, there’s a terrible change in the world; and I set here left behind in this old house by all my kin and by my dead husband Walter Warren Starnes and my dead daughter Jessy, and my wanderin son Berryben who’s gone away through the world and will never come back to me.

“That tune! I try to keep my faith and Job is my example; for I have been smitten with these cataraeks on my eyes to test me, it seems, on this dungpile of East Texis. But oh I think the eye of Heaven’s got a catarack On it too, getting blinder and blinder, blinkin and blinkin, closin on the world. Soon it’ll be like the dark of the moon, no light, no sight. O Lord wink me over Jordan. O the droopin lid of the sick eye of Heaven, like my own blighted eyes. Cain’t tell who’s comin up the road, a gypsy or a nigra or one of the Cleggs that live over in the crumblin house. Have to stare and stare at anybody for a long long look before I can tell who they are, and that Lulabelle Ramey sayin to me in the Postoffice, ‘See anything green, Malley Ganchion?’

“There’s a straight pin, I’ll pin it in my bosom—see a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck; see a pin and let it lie, all day good luck’ll pass you by.

“What is this little tune the wind blows? Listen! There… It almost played a slow ‘Fly in the Buttermilk, Lula, Lula!’ but not quite, just enough to torment me. How we’d dance that tune and clap our hands! That’s a memry! I had a waist neat and limber as a wrist—and good teeth. I’ve got pictures that show it, to prove it to myself; didn’t always have this bag hangin down from my left side, this tumor big as Granny Ganchion’s goiter, this windgall, this big Devil’s snuff-box.

“Sometimes when I was young, in the mornins, I would come to this very shuttered window and think that if I flung it open wide and quick I might see before me a magic world I had never known before, somewhere out beyond the Katy rayroad tracks and far across Bailey’s Pasture where now there are only cows eatin the bitterweeds. Then when I’d make a wish and open the winda wide—there was only the wood-roofed little shanties of Charity across the pasture and a string of sick-green smoke windin out of the sawmill smokestack. And at night in the summertimes the half-shutter of a small moon in the roof of the Charity sky seemed like if it twas opened, something magic and bright might fly down out of Heaven through it and rescue us all. From what? Poverty and grievin? Oh I don’t know, now…. Sometimes when Walter Warren and I would be sleepin here I would suddenly be wakened by a flood of light swimmin and tremblin upon my face and it would be the bright little moon passin over this house and over us in bed in it and over Bailey’s Pasture which it turned silver and white (I see the moon and the moon sees me, God bless the moon and God bless me). And I would lie next door to Walter Warren feelin haunted and full of some nightmare, fearin for all of us—Lauralee and her family, Granny Ganchion and all hers, all of us in this old house.

“But Walter Warren would never save; me from anything of fear or any nightmare. The world he gave me was cold; and so I waited for yon, Berryben, to grow up and make the world warm and save something for me

“Walter Warren would never let me swank. When I had my hair bobbed (was one of the first of Charity to do it, sittin on a crate on the back screenporch), Esther Crow came over to do it and I was so excited, trembled and giggled and I screamed so and we all got so tickled (something terrible happened) and me screamin so, ‘Oh! oh! oh!’, that it scaired little Berryben half to death and he cried, ‘Mama! Mama!’ and thought they were hurtin me and ran and hit Esther Crow and tried to pull her away from me to protect me and Walter Warren was mad and trembled too and went away to set on the front porch sayin ‘I’ll be damned, Malley’; and little Berryben ran cryin out to the chickenyard.

“Then Walter Warren would grumble about my long gloves I’d wear at nights over my coldcreamed hands and arms to keep them white—for him, but he never cared. But he cared enough to make me have Jessy, me in my condition that never should have had another child and she was born so hard and mangled and nearly killed me; that’s why she died so young, because she never should have been born.

“’That’s all right,’ I would say to Walter Warren, lyin with his back to me in the night, ‘wait till Ben grows up, we’ll never have to depend on you for anything.’

“And I’d lie there and hear the tune in the shutter and feel cold and alone and want to die except for Berryben, my salvation, in the next room, sleepin with his little sickly sister Jessy.

“It was waitin and waitin, through these cold years. And then, when it was time, Berryben just turned and went away and I cain’t ever call him back. It was Walter Warren drove him away, that meanness in him; called him a scoundrel once, always criticized him and fought with him at the supper table, made him vomit up all his supper, is why he was always so thin.

“Here at this very winda little Berryben stood with me once and watched the tents and folks of a circus that had crept in one night to the pasture while we all slept—it was like some fairytale thing; and I wanted to go but Walter Warren wouldn’t, so Berryben and I and Folner went and we bought a red and yellow paper bird that whistled when the wind turned him on a stick. And again one morning when I opened this very winda I discovered the big flappin tent of those Holy Rollers that had just cropped up like a toadstool in the night and stayed and stayed until the fool preacher was bit and killed by the sting of a diamond rattler whose poison he swore to all Charity the Lord would antidote through prayer. Then the tent was moved away. I’d lie and hear their shoutin songs and sit and watch the cripples come on their crutches and in wheelchairs to be healed—and some of them were, tool threw away their crutches and walked away. That young Jempson boy did.

“Walter Warren and I strolled and courted in that very pasture and walked the rayroad ties under the moon.

“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.

“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.

“‘Wire, briar, limberlock

Three geese in a flock;

One flew east

And one flew west

And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’

“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.

“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.

“He was always so gentle, never hurt me once in our games, always gave up to me. If we both had a syrup biscuit I would eat mine quick and then say ‘havers’ and get half of his. He would never fuss for this. He always saved his good things back—to give away when and if they were asked for. That, I believe, is what he’s doing now; finding some real good thing to give away one day when it is asked for or needed.

“Once he built a little house out of croakersacks for me and my dolls and when me and my dolls were cozy inside our good house, Berryben set it on fire and I burned off some of my hair, but I didn’t get mad, that was all right, it was because Berryben’s wagon was supposed to be a firewagon and needed a fire to put out and I understood.

“And then we kept secrets; and buried pretty little pieces of broken glass for treasure and never told anyone where they were hid.

“We all wanted to bury him and save him back like a little buried treasure for ourselves always. But so many things came early to claim him away from us, for themselves. He had a special place to go, just as I had. But always, when good and special things want you, just as many bad and ugly things crave you too; and there is a battle on. Berryben is in some battle.

“Oh I don’t mean to sound so smart, but you must understand that I have got some wisdom from this death. We were just lost here, Mama, where you sit by your closed window. We didn’t know where to go, but we wanted to go away from Charity and the sawmill. The Church told me where to go and got me ready—for I was marked for death when I was born. Berryben chose some other place that we can’t understand yet but will.

“And I got this death, Papa’s got his, you got these cataracks and this lonesome grieving life, and Berryben has his hiding away and searching. But he’ll redeem us all, in the end. I know he will. He only wants us all to wait and we will finally understand. He’s good, Mama. He’s a good thing live in this world, that’s gone but coming back twofold.

“But we never had any life together, all of us, you and me and Berryben and daddy. Daddy was so alone, all to himself, and you would stand away from us at the window, looking away from us, grieving always for something out beyond the window and beyond us. And Berryben had his own world, we could never touch him or gather him to us. And I had my secret signs. We were all looking for something and I wonder what?

“Not long ago I dreamt I was home again in Charity with you all and that I went out by the cisternwheel and found no water there because the cisternwheel had fallen to the ground and the well had dried, and that it was the end of all our time and sorrow and sinning because the oilwells and evil had come to Charity in a time of great drought, drying up the river, and there were no more birds, only a great pest of grasshoppers that had flown into all the gardens and eaten up the crops, and Charity was filled with freaks and tarred running Negroes, and Charity hated Jews and Charity hated Yankees and Charity even hated Charity, and everybody good was gone. And that the sawmill had grown so big and so close to our house that all day the sawdust sifted down on our yard, in our house, choking us, like white Fuller’s Earth at Riverside. And that the oil money had bred swank and greed and false-facedness and we were all playing a game and deceiving ourselves and deceiving and cheating others and would not look at our true selves because we did not have the courage to endure what we would find; and that all things fell to pieces like the broken wheel. And that when I looked down by the broken wheel I saw the little leaves of my go-to-sleep flower and said softly ‘Go to sleep.’ And the little leaf folded together.

“Jessy, Jessy, you speak only a memry in my shutter and I can hear it just as plain. But I can’t think straight, too old and blind and mixed up. I can only hear your voice like a wind in my shutter. But now—hear it? The wind is singing in the shutter about Berryben, pore lost and sufferin Berryben. Oh Berryben Berryben I lighted the way leadin home a hundred times that winter you was over in Sour Lake, burnt the coaloil lamps late; but you would never see any road that led back to Charity and this house.

“‘But I can’t come back to Charity, Mama,’ you wrote from Sour Lake. ‘What is there in Charity for me? Can’t anybody do anything, go anywheres? I got to keep moving, can’t stop, can’t settle, like a bee in a flower bed.’

“‘But Charity’s as good a place as any on this earth,’ I said. ‘Got the foundry, got a new plant of some kind out by White Rock and also going to get a paper mill factory; lots of nice young people, all askin about you, ought to see what a time they have. Come on home to Charity where your own blood is and settle down and make your way.’

“But you would never come, I could have preached to you till the world looked level but you would never never come; kept movin and movin over Texis, blown like a tumbleweed—by what wind, what wind, Berryben? And now, hearin this tune blown by the wind in the winda, I think of you next, my pore lost and sufferin little Berryben. What was there that made you different from us all? A mother’s got the right to understand her own son even though the whole rest of the world don’t and cain’t. But you would never come close where I could really set down and ask you face to face what was it? What was it made you different? Was it your father that wouldn’t let you play the piano or be anything that hounded and scaired you? Was it your Granny Ganchion that put some Ganchion curse in your blood and set such an example for you? If I could have just seen you, I could have read it in your face, whether you and Evella Sykes were in love and why she followed you round. But I swore I would never mention her name again to you or even say her name again to myself.

“We could never hold you, none of us. You seemed like a little scaired animal of some kind. Something somewhere had shaken you up, scaired you so that nobody could ever hold you still. You trembled. Was it Evella Sykes, or was it Charity or was it all of us you got ashamed of and ran away from—your own blood an bones?

“Come on home, it’s not too late, even after all these years. The light’s on. Haven’t been home in Charity for years and years, not even to lay a wreath on your dead sister Jessy’s grave nor set a pot of geraniums on your daddy’s. I remember everthing you ever said to me, that the world is big and Charity so small and this house old and sleepy. I’ve kept em all in my heart and pondered them, all the words you said. How it nearly killed me at first, really it did, I vow to you Berryben it nearly killed me, couldn’t even swallow water. Had to keep busy mornin to night workin and doin; if ever I’d a set down I’d a burst out cryin. When there was no chores to be done, before I had my cataracks, I’d embroidry. Embroidried twelve cup towels that winter you left, one right after another.

“I knew you wanted something that we all didn’t know about; and you kept it secret from me and would never let me know. That you wanted to go out after something in the world—something that your father never found but maybe grieved for. And I didn’t know how to tell you how to do it, Berryben; I would have helped you if I could’ve, Lord knows I would’ve, would’ve done anything. You were my hope boy Ben, when you went away all my hope went with you. You were my only chanct. You closed this winda on my world, and when the wind comes from the riverbottoms there’s the song of all this sorrow between you and me in the shutter; the song of sorrow in the shutter’s the same as in my mind. You were my only chanct. For what? I’m not sure, I cain’t say anymore, I’m all confused and riled up inside, cain’t say; but in you there seemed to be all my chance for everthing. But I couldn’t keep you; any way I tried, I couldn’t keep you. When you went away I said I know it’s right that you go, wouldn’t have you stay at all if you don’t want to stay, want you to do what you have to do, what will make you happy Ben, I won’t keep you. But what I felt when I found out you were never comin back I can never tell you, just the whole insides of me gone and fallen to pieces.

“Our life was so hard and so little, I knew you would make it big for us—sneaked money to you for your expression lessons with that teacher that came in onct a week from Huntsville—all this behind your daddy’s back to get you out of the sawdust, Berryben, to deliver you from the sawmill, to put you in a better world and away from the trash standing round in striped shirts and bigbilled caps on Saturday nights in front of Duke’s Drug Store with cigarettes hangin out of their mouths.

“You were such a promise in the church. I thought you would give your life to the church and for the good of mankind. I still believe you uz called to be a preacher and Hattie Clegg does too. How you can do this to us all I don’t understand.

“But what do I have? Only the twilight of this oldmemry-house, and a chickensnake’s somewhere in the castorbeans stealin my few eggs, and settin by this shuttered winda listenin to this tune playin out my memry by a wind from the ruined Charity Riverbottoms.

“Berryben and Jessy, my two pore lost children, listen, listen to the wind’s tune. Your pore old daddy, Walter Warren Starnes, for a long time after both you left us he never slept well, slept hardly at all, set up quick in his bed at nights and couldn’t get his breath. Said he was chokin, said it was his heart; but I know it was memry and worry over you had their hands at his throat and his heart. Parents oughtn’t to do that, I know, but how else can you do? Then he’d hear a noise in your rooms and say, ‘Malley, there’s a sound a footsteps comin from Berryben’s room, he’s come home’; or, ‘Malley, there’s some commotion in Jessy’s room’; and he’d take the shotgun and go creepin and a pointin it through every room, all through your room, Ben, and all through your room, Jessy; and I would lie there, frozen, thinking, what will he find, an excaped convick from the Pen at Huntsville or a rat or just the creakin floor, but never Berryben or Jessy. And there was never nothing in your rooms, never nothin at all but everthing standing left the way you left them, quiet and like you left them. I’d lie there in my bed and want to die, and think—is this what parents have to come to, a creepin at night through room and room with a shotgun after the ghosts of their children who’ve gone away and left them lonely and sleepless and chokin in the night? O the memry of your daddy in his nightshirt creepin through your deserted rooms with a shotgun in his hands!

“This house is like an old burnt-out hollow of a tree. Why should a mother have to set midst all the heart-breakin leftovers of the past? Going to rent out these rooms, going to move to the City Hotel, or write to Cousin Lottie in Lovelady to come and stay with me.

“You used to write me not to think so much, Berryben; but I must look back, pillar of salt or no. And that wind turns a slow and steady wheel through the waters of my memry as it blows this tune of sorrow in my shutter. O what’s the meanin of it all? There must be some meanin somewhere—it cain’t all be just this rabblement and helter-skelter. Something has to replace what’s lost in us, what’s grown and been harvested or withered, like crops—but what? We are taken and held and shaken by so many things in life; but in the end it is Memry that gets us—we are finally delivered into the bitter, clawin hands of Memry after life is through handlin us and is done with us. We ought to see to it that we make good memry for ourselves, like a slow and perfect stitchin, as we go along, and embroidry a good and lovely memry out of all the thread we one day have to set, alone, and unravel, stitch by stitch. Now I see that every day I uz makin a memry and didn’t know it. Oh wish I uz like old Aunt Mat Bell—she cain’t remember a thing, cain’t even remember her name—everthing that ever was, for her, is gone, wiped clean out of her head. ‘Molly Jim,’ she’ll say to her daughter, ‘what’s my name, Molly Jim?’ Seems like a blessed state.

“Listen again, Mama, and I’ll try to tell you for the hundredth time what it was that made me go away.”

“I’m listenin, Ben, but let me see your face. I cain’t see your face, Berryben.”

“It’s because you don’t open the shutter, Mama, because you’ll never open the shutter. But let me tell you if I can. I really left so I could come back again.”

“But it’ll be too late, then. Either I’ll be too blind to see your face or I’ll be dead and gone.”

“It’s never too late to come back again, Mama. There was just something that called me away from the Sundays on the porch and the children in the yard, from the grieving and misery and bitterness of Aunty and Granny Ganchion, from the scrape and rusty screech of the cisternwheel. It called me when I sat in the black hen’s tree, when I stood in the fields, when I thumped on my cardboard piano in the woodshed. There seemed something more magnificent than the Charity loneliness. Somewhere there would be somebody to understand me–I could prove my blood-feel and find out the keys of a piano that played, not just a dumb-show. But more: an unnameable call away from all the withered quiet and dying old life and ways of this little world of Charity, hemmed in by a railroad track and a sawmill and a deserted meadow.

“All I know is that there was a change in me and, discovering that change in me, I would do anything to keep it unchanged I would not let it die in me. I had to keep listening, listening, listening to it, just as you listen to another thing in this shutter. The sawmill tried to drown it out, the cisternwheel tried to drown it out; I had to save it, hear it; so I went away. I don’t want to live if I can’t hear that voice. When I was home you followed me round through the rooms saying, ‘If you’ll just tell me what is wrong with you! What is changing you, if you’ll just put me straight on it all, Ben?’

“And when I would wipe you away then it would break my heart and break your heart and you would catch my face in your hands as if you could hold me there forever, caught in your poor old hands, and weep and say, ‘Ben Ben Berryben’; and then I knew that I could never never tell you what it was, only break your heart again and again.

“I tricked you all to get away, but I couldn’t tell the truth about the things that claimed me. Because you always said these things were sins. I always had that terrible guilt before you, had to tell lies and lies—you really made me evil, you made me be just what you were afraid I’d be. I served you all and let you all use me any way you wanted; anything you wanted me to be I was. Took care of little Jessy day in day out. I never had any romance except because of what Folner and Christy and Swimma told me like a secret. (Once when we sat on the fence rail in the late afternoon, Swimma said, ‘Look!’ and it was the bull upon Roma the cow in some savage battle and when I said, ‘The bull will kill Roma the cow!’ Swimma laughed on the fence and leaned over and told me. Later she wrote a word on the chimney brick and couldn’t erase it, and I would see those letters written on the walls of the bedroom and on the ceiling, everywhere, smudged the way Swimma’s hand had smudged them. I never fully understood until we pumped in the swing, first me then Swimma, and then I suddenly knew the whole terrible secret. After that when Swimma would cry, Pump me! pump me!’ I would tremble.)

“Sometimes, because I am a failure in the world, I blame my failure on you all; say that you got me so mixed up when I was young that I can never clear myself up again inside; or that you made me so false to myself that I am unreal and never can be real. But I must see that the reason I am a failure is that I gave myself away to everybody and so had none of myself left for myself—I mean the part of oneself that is the part he works with, held by himself to work with.

“And yet I collaborated with you in making myself false—for I was so afraid of myself and what it wanted to do, and so ashamed of it. So you and I together stomped the life out of it, every day, mangling it like a beetle.

“But suddenly something beyond all of us, greater than all of us, freed us from each other. We tore at our hearts because we were powerless against this thing that came in between us and wrenched us apart. This was loving somebody.

“She came, gentle and sweet, bringing peace, at a time when I was the loneliest and most miserable boy in the world. She made all my secrets vanish into her. For she made me feel that everything I had kept secret was kept back just to tell her—we were joined within a secret that was divulged to us by touching where we had never touched before, and by the honesty of passion where we had been dishonest before. After our honesty with each other, what more was there to hide? We had told. Passionate love is a conspiracy to tell each other’s truth to each other—that I am like this and you are like that, and together, in a joining, we make a moment’s truth of what each is. Beyond the moment’s truth, though, lies the hour’s untruth, which keeps yearning to be bared into truth again. She broke my unreality against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against and mended me with all the care in the world, it seemed. For her I betrayed you and for myself I betrayed her; we melted into each other. I tricked you and left you; and after I had left you, all your kin and all your world died away from you and fell away, leaving you broken off and isolate. All of us were shattered from our whole, I roaming through the world with Evella, you sitting by the window trying to piece everything together again in a falling house.

“That very meadow upon which you close your shutter was a pasture of revelation, of trembling news for me. For it was enchanted, some grass of magic grew there, could it have been the bitterweed? When the circus came, Folner and you and I went—just across the tracks, there it was: the lovely sparkling girls whirling in the air like stars. And the times I played there—all the things I found when I played there brought me secret news: once a curled transparent skin; the evening primroses, hairy and firm, opening and closing at the touch of light or darkness; the doll was lost there and later found, but found too late, trodden and mangled and broken by Roma the cow. After the circus left to go across the river and into the world, stealing Folner with it like a gypsy steals a painted bead, I went there and found sawdust all over the meadow (and got sawdust in my shoes) and all the secret signs left by the magic circus; but the bitterweeds grew up through the sawdust, Mama. And Evella and I walked through the bitter-weeds on summer nights (scattering the pollen and gathering it on our legs), I telling her about my hopes and she saying, ‘I will follow you across the river and past Riverside.’

“What did we go after? I can’t tell you. What do you yearn after, here at the window? Something marvelous, something magic, that makes all secrets vanish.

“When the forlorn beast, the spotted heifer Roma, bellowed at dusk in the wet meadow, it was a mystic desire, a voluptuous fear, a call way into the future, beyond the meadow, beyond Charity, over the River and far beyond—the voice of Bailey’s Pasture. That wintertime, standing by the window, I worried about the poor cow caught in the ditch. The gray, dull winter was everywhere, in the eaves where icicles hung like daggers, in the naked trees and across the bare dead earth where life lay frozen and paralyzed. That wintertime, standing by the window and looking out upon the winter and behind me you, Mama, singing softly ‘Pass me not, O gentle Savior, Hear my humble cry’; as you sewed something, rocking in a chair. The loneliness of standing looking out a window at winter upon a town, feeling afraid, like crying, while you, Mama, sat in this room sewing and singing.

‘While on others Thou art calling,

Do not pass me by…’

And the poor spotted cow out there, frozen in the ditch, the way she bellowed and called out for them to help her, to break her out of the ice (‘Mama,’ I said, ‘they are coming with axes. Mama,’ I said, ‘they will kill her, Roma the cow; Mama,’ I said, ‘they cannot get her out of the frozen ditch and oh she cries, she cries so sadly’).

“The low pleading bellows of Roma came through the window on the winter wind and I felt sick with it all, the room, you, Mama, singing and sewing in that chair as if nothing were happening, the winter spread over everything outside, killing everything, the men (Christy was the leader) with the axe over the poor ugly cow Roma caught in the ice. (‘Mama,’ I said, ‘she is crying so loud, now, like the dog the time he was sick under the house. Mama!’ I cried, ‘they have hit her hard on the head with the axe, hard! hard! hard! Mama—she is quiet, now; Mama—she is not crying anymore. Mama… Roma the cow is dead.’

‘Savior, Savior, Hear my humble cry;

While on others Thou art calling,

Do not pass me by.’)

“Evella and I wandered and wrote you occasionally. I was in a beautiful spell. It was in an autumn and it was a turning round, through light and darkness, under suns and stars, in a fantasy land. The faces of days were disaster and passion. The luminous wind was binding the autumn to the glistening world, blowing it round through trees with a sound of the breaking sea, and the sun was driving summer away, weaving autumn into the world and turning a wheel in Evella and me, turning us towards and turning us away—all love is a turning on a spit, towards, through, and away from flame—and we were like sleepwalkers and Evella would turn to me and say, ‘Who are you?’ and I would murmur, ‘I am you and you are me and we are some rabblement of soul…’

“With Evella I could never see myself, only hold up a mirror for Evella to see herself; thus I became unreal. Who has the courage to destroy the one who makes him unreal? We parted; and she rolled away like a stone into an abyss. Now I had only myself to remake. I was alone and floating in the world; and I was alien to Charity and felt I never could return to all those secrets—the passion of the Bull, Swimma’s news of trembling, Christy’s songs and stories and his scar, the blood of his killed creatures….

“The world is a window fogged by my own breath through which I cannot see the world because of my own breath upon the pane; and until I wipe it away with this ragged sleeve, I shall not see what lies beyond the window; nor you, Mama. We spend our youth breaking the enchantments of childhood; it is the bitterest time of all. Youth is the naked, disenchanted child, shivering without garment; for the garments of childhood fall into ashes.

“Of all the evils you taught and tried to teach me, the only evil is that we cut ourselves off from any force that wants to flow into us and use us like a turbine; or that when that force finds us we hold ourselves still, blind and deafen ourselves to it. The finding of that force, the awareness of it, quivering in us, trying to turn us so that we may generate, and the attempt to use it is to make oneself real. The substitution of any other force is a mechanical turning and is false; is evil.

“To belong to this force does not make me evil or a failure at all, it only gives me back to you, to all of you, Evella and all of you whom I have ever loved or who have ever loved me; only restores me to you.

“Oh it is a crooked path I follow, Mama, but a straight wisdom comes from it once in a while; and once in a while a sure and beautiful joy comes from it and I will build my life on that wisdom and on that joy that comes once in a while. And give it all back to you and those who follow you, to mend all that is ruined and broken.

“O the drone of the flies and the bees droning in the zinnias like a sound blown by a child on a comb and a piece of tissue-paper; and the melancholy working of the wind in the trees and a whole dead town gleaming out before us in a false serenity under the burning sun of a fleecy summer Sunday sky with a piece of a moon in it, and nothing happening.

“Mama open your eyes; open the shutter, Mama. For surely one day I’ll come back to this house. And what will that terrible, terrible moment be like when the shutter will open slowly like the unfolding of a waking go-to-sleep flower and there is beheld before you the wide shining meadow of Bailey’s Pasture, yellow with blooming sweetclover and spotted with a thousand trembling bees—and through it on the old path will be coming me, wading as if I were wading in to a shore through shallows of the sea, home; and with gifts in my hands.

“What will that terrible moment be like when you, blind from cataracts, will sit on there, never knowing that the shutter is open, with the tune playing on in your head; blind for so long that suddenly when vision comes restored you go on blind and yearning and wailing for the vision?

But Malley Ganchion you went on sitting; there with the wind’s tune in your head and said, “Let me see your face, Ben; I want to see your face; I want to catch and hold it in my hands.”

And when no answer came, you sat and said, “Oh I wait for something to come to me, just as I expected it when long ago I flung open this winda in the mornin upon Bailey’s Pasture; and I guess it must be the peace of Death I am waitin for and was always waitin for, to come callin like old hare-lipped Mr. Hare from his rumblin wagon, ‘Paa-ahs! paa-ahs!’ And oh I am old and tired and left behind by all I gave everthing I ever had to, and I want to die and pass away from all this eternal task of memry and heartbreak and never remember, never remember again.

“And now listen—the voices have gone, and only the little tune remains, playin that beautiful and peaceful hymn of the Methodist Church, ‘Oh Let Us Pass over the River and Rest Under the Shade of the Trees.’”