XII

WHAT WAS this man with a long houndface and a glistening silver eye who tacked this map to the kitchen wall and gazed and gazed at it? (How old and worn the world looks now! From too much gazing Christy faded the world like too much light on colors; he has taken the luster into himself and looked the luster into me, stamped it upon my skull so that my skull became a globe of the world.) His image is teardrops of birds’ blood speckled on his denimed thigh, a waist girdled by a wreath of small dead birds, an axe-wound’s scar secret on my thigh. And about his image there resounds an echo of frenchharp music and of clashing beaks of horn.

Christy was big and had dark wrong blood and a glistening beard, the bones in his russet Indian cheeks were thick and arched high and they curved round the deep eye-cavities where two great silver eyes shaped like bird’s eggs were set in deep—half-closed eyes furred round by grilled lashes that laced together and locked over his eyes.

He was a hunting man; and hunted; and his mother Granny Ganchion was a shaggy old falcon that had caught him like a surrendered bird and held him close to her, home; as though he had been hunted in his own hunting, the hunter hunted; and captured: by trap or talon; or treed; or set or pointed at and stalked in his own secret woods and brought home, driven towards stall and what forage, at nightfall, to her, the hunter’s huntress. He had had one friend before me, he said, and that was his mother (O cries into a deaf world!) who could not hear him, only read off his lips his passion that lay so fair and lovely, trembling on his full wiener-colored lips. He had just talked so long into deafness that he came to judge the whole world deaf, and so he no longer said anything much (could or would he be heard?). It was what he didn’t say that said what he said (I think I know now what he didn’t say). He became a man of gestures: shrugging his humped shoulders under his workshirt like a big bag carried there; waving his long scarecrow arms with raveled strips of fingers, long-nailed and hanging down at the end of his arms like the raveling out of arms (the isinglass nails shaped like oval shells were bent over sharp and tough at the ends as roosters’ spurs are); throwing his great dark head from side to side or tossing it up and down in horse movements; and, in his despairs, heaving up in the air the whole huge, buoyant, winged upper portion of his body, arms and bladed torso, like enormous agitating wings of a huge and sinewed man-angel.

Christy made everything seem an evil secret—the songs he sang to his guitar: “Write me a letter, send it by mail; send it in care of Birmingham Jail…,” and he would be in jail singing this song because he had done something wrong in the woods or with the Mexicans. He had a circumcision-like scar, pink and folded, on his brown neck over which he would gently rub his fingers and tell me how it was a knifecut because of love. When Christy yodeled, flashing his silver eye, “You get a line, I’ll get a pole; we’ll go fishin in a crawdad hole, Ba-abe,” he was telling me long, long stories of woods-meetings. He would go off hunting (in Folner’s same woods), leaving me behind and wondering (“One day when you’re old enough I’ll take you huntin with me, we’ll go huntin, Boy”) and then come back to us as though he had been in some sorrow in the woods, with birds’ blood on him and a bouquet of small, wilted doves hanging from his waist over his thigh, or a wreath of shot creatures: small birds with rainbowed necks, a squirrel with a broken mouth of agony. Then he would come to me and speak, for he had found words, “Listen Boy, listen; come out to the woodshed with me quick and let me show you something, come with me, quick; by Gum I’ve got something…”

What would he show me if I went?

They said around Charity that he did the thing that would make you crazy if you did it too much; they said he was a niggerlover; they said he was a KuKlux; they said he was adopted by Granny Ganchion and was a no-good Peepin Tom whose parents were probably foreigners or Jews or thieves in the Pen; and some of this was true and he was bad. But after he dived down into the river and found Otey, his wife, and brought her up to the shore, drowned, he was a different man.

He hated Folner, said he had to squat to pee and didn’t have enough sense to pour it out of a boot. He had raised him like a mother (“Folner came when I was fourteen and Mama was sick, sick before he came (the way I knew he was comin was when I asked Mama if she had a pillow stuffed there and she said, ‘No, it’s going to be a little baby’), sick to almost dyin when he was born (and had to have him Cicerian, Follie came out her side, came into this world sideways), and sick always afterwards. I was Follie’s mother all those years, makes me part woman and I know it and I’ll never get over it. How I rocked him and how I slept warm with him at nights, rolled up against my stomach and how I never left him day nor night, bless his little soul, settin on the gallry with him on my knee while I watched the others comin and going across the pasture to town and back from town, to Chatauquas and May Fetes. Until he changed. What was it got hold of him? Took to swingin in the gallry swing all day, by hisself, turned away from me, something wild got in his eye, and then Mama took him back. Began to wear Mama’s kimona and highheeled shoes and play show, dancin out from behind a sheet for a curtain; and then I turned away from him…. Oh what does it mean tellin and rememberin all this—except that it has made me what I am right now: somebody settin here tellin and remembering what made them what they are right now…”); he had raised him like a mother until Folner turned away from him and hated him, and then Christy said he was a sissy and a maphrodite (but they joined again in the woods—were I joined them too; and now we all join in the world).

He would say whispered things about animals: udders, the swinging sex of horses, the maneuvers of cocks, bulls’ ballocks and fresh sheep—he was in some secret conspiracy with all animals. He fought game and Cornish cocks with the Gypsies and the Mexicans, and often he would clink in his hand some dangerous-looking tin cockspurs that he used for his fighting roosters. But after a roosterfight with the Mexicans or a hunt in the woods, Christy would be quiet and then sit all day close to Granny whittling little figures; and once he carved a perfect ship and put it in a bottle.

Out in the woodshed Christy played a frenchharp cuddled in his trembling hands, blowing and sucking sounds like birdcalls and moaning voices of animals; and before I knew him I lay in my bed hearing these sounds like a mystic music played from the moon that rocked like an azure boat in our sky, framed by my window. Everything Christy never said was whispered, lipped, blown into his frenchharp; and his pale wet lips curled like some delicious membrane; or like the workings of fishes’ mouths that might be saying something under water.

He had had a little wife named Otey and they had lived sometime together in a shack up the road beyond the house; then they both went home again, she to her folks at Clodeen and he back to Granny Ganchion. Otey had big daisy eyes, yellow with lashes like sun rays radiating from the hazel centers; and a sunlight shone from them. But her hands were long and frail and purplish, shaped like frogfeet, with tiny white bones white under the skin. O her frail frogfeet hands holding a bouquet of Cups and Saucers brought from the fields to Granny Ganchion! (who always sneezed immediately). (Granny would say, “Christy what’s the matter with Otey, she’s as white as a pile of chalk; pore as a snake.”

“She’s just tarred, Mama,” Christy would say.

“She’s such a sunk-in little thing, all bowed over. I don’t see how she’s worth much at her chores, that Otey’s sick, Christy, her skin’s real crepey.”)

They would come down the sandy road, Christy deep in his silence, Otey’s bare feet glad in the cool yellow sand of the old wagon road, coming bent over, and good, down the road to the house. Christy would say, “Otey we got to go and be with Mama, Mama’s lonesome.” Then they would come down to us and Christy and Granny’d just sit, not saying a word much, Granny uttering her uck uck sounds because of her goiter, that sounded like an old setting hen safe with her eggs.

Sometimes if they didn’t come, Granny would say, “Why don’t Christy come down to see me; why don’t none of my children ever come to see me?”

And then she would send me up the road after Christy. I would find him sitting on their little porch, huge and quiet, and Otey no place to be found. Then Christy would call into the trees for her, sounding her name through all the woods; and finally she would come, very softly and bent over from the trees, holding some wood she had gathered. “We got to go down to the house, Otey,” he’d say. “Mama wants us.”

I know that while he sat on the little porch of his shack in the woods, voices called to him, “Come home, come home,” and that the doves moaned this and the owls hooted it, “Come home, come home”; and that I must have seemed to him like another bird when I came to him from the house calling, “They want you home.”

Then once, in the hottest summertime, he came to me and whispered to meet him in the woods to catch a mother possum and her babies. I trembled to go, and slipped away and met him. I saw him waiting for me (like a lover), I saw him sitting on a stump watching me as I came, closer and closer, feeling evil, feeling guilty. We rejoiced (without words) at our meeting secretly.

The mother possum lived in the rotten stump of an old tree, and when we found it Christy began chopping at it with an axe. Because I came too close to him once he came down on my thigh with his axe—so gently that he only cut a purple line under the skin and no blood came. I almost fainted and fell to the ground but did not cry. But Christy wept and begged me not to tell anyone and tied his bandanna tightly round the wound and hugged me and trembled; and I have never told. I have carried on my thigh the secret scar he left me (O see the wound on this thigh left by that hunter’s hand!) and have never told.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To wash out my mind of all these remembrances—who can I tell, to get rid of them, them to? Boy will listen, he is just nothin but a little quiet listener, I’ll tell him, tell him with words when the moment comes. It will be in the thicket and he will be waitin for it, he is always waitin to hear. Children are the ones to tell things to, they are the only keepers of secrets in the world. I’ll tell Boy (Hey, Birddog!).

“I remember an Owal. I remember a blue Owal in a cave by the bend of this river. I saw him at twilight as we were headin home from our huntin trip, Walter Warren, Ollie Cheatham and myself (the men coughin in the tents at night; the sad dyin fire dyin down in the cold; the night with stars caught in my mosquitobar up over me, and me cold upon the ground hearin only a call of some animal off somewhere, a stream runnin on, the coughin of Walter Warren and Ollie, and the chokin of the fire. In the smells I smelt was a whole world that could never be, only be breathed in and make in me pinecones and windscents and earth—someone to be this smelt world with, be still with me! to be calm with! someone to be still in!); first, I felt something in that grotto, then I looked and it was the blue Owal. I never told anyone, but I knew there was an Owal in there. I’ve remembered that Owal for years, for fifteen years that Owal’s been in the cave of my memory, settin there blue and still. What does anything settin like that mean? What does Mama mean, settin there in that house? In that cellar? There’s a meanin! There’s a meanin! Onetime we stood on a hill and looked down at the crawlin river below. There were animals down there, I don’t know what kind, couldn’t make em out, but I could feel animals down there. There was a huge moon about to bust in the sky. Suddenly lookin down there, with the moon heavy over me and the animals movin around below, I felt something that had been like this before, way back somewhere, the way you do, you know, the same kind of feelin—it was in Deridder Loosiana, when we was all there and kids, and Papa was traveling for the rayroad; and one night in my room I was waked up by the feelin of the sky pressin down on me, and of something movin, some life of some kind rustlin around me, and I went to the winda and looked out to see this big lopsided moon about to bust in the sky and across in the next house I saw a bare arm reach out from a bed and slowly pull down the shade. As the shade was comin down I saw legs wound around in some kind of fightin; and then the light went out. I squatted there and couldn’t hear nothin, couldn’t see nothin, but I knew there was some commotion of life going on in there in that blinded room, I could feel it. (There’s a meanin! There’s a meanin!) (I had seen insects coupled in flight; and this was like that, insect legs locked, and there was a kind of huge flight, of enormous but ever-so-light leapin, and beatin of a kind of wings: a risin and a flutterin and a fallin. Then I thought how two can be caught in some crisis that they seem to be desperately tryin to get out of together, strugglin to help each other yet each wrestlin to get something the other has and wants to give up but is waitin to give it up just a little longer, wont give it up (O when… Hurry hurry…), and in which there is pain; and wordlessness; and tears. For I knew, even then, that we all have got something in us that will give pain, that will make somebody go uhuh uhuh uhuh and wag’s tongue and roll’s eyes and breathe as though he is gaspin or suffocatin with the croup, or say whew! whew! as though he is burnt; and almost die. To give this pain, and to get it, we will do almost anything. All those years I would do anything, anything to get this pain—but then it got to where the pain I wanted could not be reached by any hands, it moved down so far inside me that nothin could reach it. Oh Lord, from all that happens to anybody in this world you’d think they’d never want to live…) And then I knew that there was a fight going on in the world—for things I dreamt of but never thought you could get, but so wanted, so wanted. And then O I wanted to holler out because I was so clost to bustin like the moon, because I was so lonesome and so lonesome, and there was nothin I could do, bein eighteen, because I so wanted legs wound around me and to fight and to be pressed down on, hot and soft, but do the thing that will make you crazy, and be afraid to look Mama in the eye because of it.

“(Lyin in the fields all afternoon one afternoon, watchin for the stallion to take the mare. It was fall and the weeds were brown and live with seeds rattlin over me. As I laid there I could hear the bellow of the bull in’s pen for Roma the cow out in the pasture. I waited and waited and just about dark Good Lord it happened. How the mare screamed and how the stallion leapt with’s hooves in the air like a great flyin horse of statues; and I thought, ‘I am as strong as this winged stallion but nobody knows it and I will say nothin of it, keep it to myself.’ As I laid in the fields, somewhere in me I was fillin with blood, and suddenly somewhere I was full and throbbin with blood.)

“Then again, onct, in Shrevesport when we had all moved there (it snowed and we were cold in our first snow and Mama took all us kids ridin ever Sunday on the streetcar to the end a the line and back) and I was walkin at night, and in a winda there in a jewelry store that I was lookin in at in the rain suddenly there was an arm and a white hand that reached down into the brightest winda among all the glitterin diamonds and gold bands there and then disappeared again. I stood and waited in the rain till I was drenched, but no more white hand came down again. (Some white hand to reach down! O reach us out a hand; this hand has birds’ blood on it, has a crooked knuckle broken by a baseball hit out to me in centerfield in a game at Charity when we played the Bloomer Girls by that tomboy Sis Moody.) And then I walked and walked in the rain that turned into snow and I was drenched and frozen (but burnin); and walked upon a park that seemed like the very patch of Hell where there was couples whisperin, men to men and men to women, and I went into a city toilet and saw drawn pricks hangin long on the wall and messages of lovers left for lovers written there; and crap from the toilets erupted up onto the floor and I had trod in it. Then I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and I felt robbed of everthing I never had but dreamt of and hoped I could have, I felt fouled by the filth of what men, leave and had left behind them: and then I thought, ‘O I am young and have something to give and to be used and to write on a wall.’ But I had no memory of anything beautiful or of my own to call inside me to, to name and touch; I could only go, in my mind, through the rooms of the house and find no one I could join with for anything, or speak to; and I thought, ‘I will return, then, to my aloneness and fold back my secrets into it with me and we will be folded together there in a secret and silent place that will never be broken into, I will dive down naked and alone into that place and touch what I never had and hold it there, away from everbody on the outside of me.’ (But he will break into my deep buried place, I will let him break into me and then he will be stained and marked by all my hidden secret and he will touch and bring it up, saved, into the light and bind it to everthing; for he belongs to everthing that ever was and is. For what I’ll put into him he cain’t forget or wish away, it is the truth of the world, and of walls, and of men; and he must endure it and take it into hisself willingly and keep it in the world, proclaim it.)

“O misery! I swear I never touched a woman or a girl or anybody until it got to where I had to.

“At Daisetta, when I was stayin in the summer with the Chanceys, me and Dave were in the yard when Sarah, the biggest of us all, came out and just said, ‘Do you want to see me?’ and showed us her beginnin breasts, raw like a young sow’s, and we went in the house where nobody was and took turns feelin of em; and then the little girl, Mary, came in and said, ‘Want to see mine?’ and showed us where there was nothin at all yet but shriveled places, like a man’s. All that summer Sarah was after us, cryin, ‘You Merry Widows!’

“O Otey why did what happened have to happen? I married you too young. She lived in a house way back in some trees and was just a funny kind of bowed-over girl (from carryin brothers and sisters on her hip) that hardly ever came out of the trees into town, with a lot of the yellowest cornsilky hair and a loose dress with no belt. Why didn’t they tell her that when we married I would want to touch her? She screamed and ran from me that wedding night out the door and down the rayroad tracks and slipped on the ties and fell and cut over her eye that left a scar like a shriveled apricot. She was a rabbit in the house after I brought her back pantin and damp from runnin, and bloody, and then I was dyin dyin to touch her and could have almost killed her in my hands she was so limp and little and white; but I said, ‘All right, little Otey, I’ll wait for you, I’ll wait until you grow up big enough to be my wife.’

“I was workin at the sawmill then, strawbossin the niggers with the mules that pulled the logs from the kiln to the plane, through the black sawdust in the mud, surrounded by the tearin sound of the cuttin of the logs, like goods bein ripped all day long. I’d go home at dinner and she’d have good butterbeans and peppersauce and corn bread for me like I like and we’d eat and O Lord I’d want to touch her but I wouldn’t. Then they sent me out to the Thicket with a crew to cut new timber and we stayed there for a whole month and I would not touch any niggers or any of the Indians that lived on the reservation around there; and when I come back Otey was gone. She had run home; and I let her stay; I didn’t blame her. I went home, back home, and Mama said, ‘Here is where you belong, come on back to this house with all of us.’

“I never told that I had never touched her—and no one ever knew. But I’ll tell Boy, this little listener will listen, I’ll tell him when the time comes.

“And then one day Sam Riddle come to say three girls swimmin in the river by White Rock had fallen in a deep hole and they had got two out but the third was drownded and would I come hep dive for the body of the third. I went with them and got to the river and they said to me the third one was Otey Bell. I took off all my clothes and dove in where they said she had sunk and went down down to China it seemed, prayin to touch Otey there, and in time; and Lord God I touched her. Then I opened my eyes quick and saw a sight I’ll see in dreams until I die: Otey was sittin bent over with her head on her knees in some sorrow, and nekkid, and I grabbed her hair and crushed it in my hands for a second; and then I caught her hands with my hands and we were joined, just by our fingertips, so lightly, and came up slowly slowly. It was so long comin up, like a lifetime of Otey and me being together in a darkness, alone and not savin a word—but the bubbles of our breath were bathin us, we were wrapped in the bubbles of our breath, and they were our words speakin for us—and I prayed Lord Lord don’t let me lose Otey, don’t let me let her get away this time, because she had surrendered to me at last, she was mine, my wife now; and come up with me so quiet without fightin, and I was nekkid with her. Bubbles of her last breath rose and sprayed my loins and clung to the hairs on me like diamonds breathed out by her and we must have looked beautiful to fishes in our underwater marriage, glitterin with diamonds of breath and risin nekkid and touchin ever so lightly at our fingertips together, joined and flowin into each other, up to the shore. As we rose up together all our life that we never had together happened within me—Otey cookin and singin in our warm winter kitchen and me choppin wood in the mornins. As we floated up through watery vines and ferns and slippery roots through scales and petals of sunlit water, layers breakin open over us as we broke through them like thin leaves of silver, I remembered that a hand does let down to you if you get lonesome and lost enough, that a big broken birdbloodied hand does reach down to you, wet and alone and so lonesome; and that you are washed clean by the touch of this hand, And as we came something suddenly burst inside me and this was for love and for Otey, drowned but rescued Otey. I did get to the top with her and then those on the banks saw what it was and Jim Moody yelled, ‘Christy’s found her,’ and jumped in to help but I was nearly passed out and thought they were tryin to take Otey away from me, and this time it seemed she wanted to stay with me, even nekkid, and I fought them off like a wilecat. Then Jim Moody hit me hard up against the head and that was all I remember till I woke up lyin out on the bank with the feelin of Otey’s fingertips on my fingertips. And I looked over to see the three boys rollin poor Otey over a log to try to get the riverwater out of her lungs; but she was drowned dead.

“When I was young because I was big and big-handed they used me like a plowox—but I had in me the beautiful thing that could happen to me. Something is over us, flies over us always over us, and we must bring it down; something is under, down under, and we must bring it up for ourselves and for everbody.

“I was mean and wrong and unused until my one moment that lasted all my lifetime, it seemed, going down to find Otey—now I know what going down, to find anything means: go down, Boy, after what is folded over like a child of sorrow, egg in its nest, and is all your life and love never had for your own, never owned but always waitin to embrace and hold warm to you, and bring it up, pullin it up with all the strength you’ve got in you to pull up anything with, holdin it just by your fingernails (that I bit them, once!), bring it up through all the darkness of the world, through all the circles of mizry, to the top and deliver it, though gone, though unbreathin and dead, retrieved and brought home to you where it has always belonged, to the rescuers of the perished on the shore. For below the level where we are nothin but nekkid murmurins and whisperins over the world, only breath breathin dialogues in bubbles: rememberin, and yearnin, grievin and desirin, we are the life that lasts in us and has its meanin in us all; we touch there where we have never touched before, in the only world where we can touch and join and enter into one another forever.

“We’ll go to the cemetery, we’ll go take flowers to the graves.

“O tell a child your griefs. Tell him all your wickednesses, all your secrets. Boy, Boy you are so good, what made you so good? I am spoiled and he is clean; O I am vile, a shitten lamb. I will corrupt him, do not let me corrupt him when we get to the thicket. I didn’t spoil Otey, I let her wait; I can let a thing wait until it is time; O Lord, let me let him wait—but what will get him, what will claim him eventually and spoil him? Back a Shultzes Bakry onct, I drew a picture on the signboard of it and then took Hapabelle Cook back there to see it. But I never touched her. O myself, how splendid myself, good as a stallion, and pretty, and circumcised (is he?), for who, who got me? Does he do it? How will I ask him? (If your Uncle Jack was on a mule and couldn’t get off would you help your Uncle Jack off?)”

We had come into the deepest gloom of the woods, vauted by enormous pinetrees, called the Thicket, and I knew it was time. I had a garland of birds Christy had shot and I had run to gather like flowers in a wild enchantment…. How long had we been hunting? We were standing by a pool of the river. I looked at my quivering image in the pool, throbbing as if the pool were breathing through me. A purple snake glided over my image and Christy shot it, tearing my image into pieces.

And then he sat down on a stump (oh is that stump covered over with blooming vines now? do birds or possums nest in it?), looking as tired as if he had lived through all the ages, and with such a longing and such an ageing in his face that I backed away—for he looked like a beast in the woods, shaggy and gray and fierce. Yet some enormous tenderness was rising out of him. His look asked for something that I could not give because I had not learned how to give it.

I backed away, backed away and he sat still on the stump. He pointed his gun at me to shoot me like a bird; and I backed away. And then he lowered his gun and watched me and let me get away; and then I ran.

I ran and ran and felt myself melting down as I ran, but I would not cry. It was towards twilight and soon it would be dark. O which way was home? The sun was setting. I ran and ran.

All the woods were now saying the same things to me that I had heard during the long and timeless hunt with Christy. Something like stars was twinkling in my loins. I prayed. Moss hung from trees like long hair and I saw the little green fuzz on rocks. What would I ever do with all this that had been said to me, now that Christy knew I knew all this? I would pray against it. I walked praying through the woods. O which way was home? The sad dusk was falling, and I was lost, lost. There was a kind of purring of the woods before dark. Which way was home? I had left Christy alone in the woods and night was coming. I called, “Christy Christy!” but only the woods, faraway, called him too; and he did not answer. Then I cried, “Christy Christy come home, come ho-o-me!” Only an echo answered and no answer from Christy came. Some burden weighed upon me, some yoke around me.

I was by the river. There, in a place, I suddenly saw the print of Christy’s body in the sand where he had kneeled down to drink, and I kneeled into it and drank as Christy had and felt at that moment that I was Christy drinking from our River. As I kneeled something swung against my face like petals of flowers and it was the birds Christy had shot and I had tied by their little legs to a string, as fishermen do fish, and had strung them round my neck. I saw that I was dappled by the blood of birds and that the beaks had beaten against my bare arms as I had run and brought my own blood there, mixed with the blood of birds.

I ran on again with his yoke of birds swinging against me, Christy’s message to me. I ran blessed with his yoke of loves, of words, his long sentence of birds, bloody and broken and speechless, sentences of his language shot out of his air and off his trees’ boughs that were his words’ vocabulary: flying words that call at twilight and twilight, nest and hatch and fly free for others, yet caged in his birdcage of mind, and betraying him, but freed by my hand on his hand; and brought down solid and sullied by beebee shot from his air by his own aim and fire (misfire!) for me to gather and make speak: answer to his caged whisper: with tongues of birds.

I ran marked and stained. How would I ever wash away all this blood of birds? O now he was bird and I was bird, he was my truth and my untruth, he was my victim, he contained me, I possessed him.

Now it was dark and I was full of fears. In a pond I passed, the moon lay fallen and small and mean among weeds and fallen branches. All birds were calling and returning to bough or nest without Christy there to try to shoot them, safe and homing at nightfall. O who would welcome me home when I finally got home?

Now the woods seemed a huge web that held Christy like a caught insect in it. Now I really loved Christy, longed for him, calling to him (O where was he?). We had come to the woods in a dream and in a quick dream he had faded away from me. The ripe cracking of his gunshot like the splitting of a ripe tree fired in my head. That I betrayed Christy! That I failed him in the woods, he who gave me all these gifts of birds, who spoke for the first time to me and waited for me to answer! To whom would I answer, to whom in the house would I answer when I came back, over the sea of bitterweeds of Bailey’s Pasture riding in home, bottled news to be broken against the hands of the House that sealed the bottle? What he had put into me, through my eyes, through my ears, and marked and stained upon my body was to be carried away, through the bitterweeds, across the River and into the world to be read out to the world. If I could only find him again to tell him this, for he would want to know. I called his name into the woods that he had called his own names into—“Christy! Christy!”—but no answer came back, only my own calling turned back into my ears.

I was by the river and so tired with all the weight of the birds. What would I ever do with them? And then I knew…. I flung them into the river. No one would ever know. They went down, a flotilla of feathers, like, a floating garden, like a wreath to the river drowned, for Otey, for Christy, for all of us I washed in the river. And then I felt so light with all my burden and I lay down close to the river’s side, and slept.

Suddenly I woke in touch with something, as forever after, in the air. Something called, something hovered, hard and real and whole as a soaring bird. O bird-cursed, birdblessed, birddrenched…. He is all our Sin and all our Vision and all our searching calling back to us, claiming us. Just when I am free and clean and myself again I hear this voice, I know this hovering—in my ascensions like wings from a bough that I think are up and away from him I am only soaring up to him—he is my air, he receives me, I fly in him back to him.

There is the river, over I must—across I’ll go.

It was morning and a new, known world. I walked straight home and as I came through Bailey’s Pasture, stained with all my stains and feathers in my hair and clinging to my clothes, the wind blew the feathers from me over the pasture and the feathers fell on the bitterweeds. Ahead, in the woodshed, I saw Christy sitting there and whittling. He did not even look up as I came through the gate and went into the house. In the house Malley was sitting by the window and Granny was nowhere to be found. No one even seemed to know that I had ever been away, and Christy never mentioned it. We never went hunting again.

Our winter was close and lay long and gray and leafless ahead. Something waited for me now—a world of magic and witchcraft in which there were secrets and dreams and fantasias, whirling in the glimmer of coming hope and hopelessness (who has not seen the gizzard-like birthmark on the luminous forehead of the moon?), and all of us speaking to each other, apart and solitary in our buried selves. All December the moon had a birthmark on it like Mrs. Childers the crazy woman had.

The coldest winter in anybody’s memory came to Charity. All day some days there was the wild and savage howl of the wind loping round the house; and at night in the sleet the shivering brethren horses huddled against the wind. The wind was in the shutters, swung like a ghost the tire swing and rattled the cisternwheel. Roma the cow got frozen in the ditch and Christy had to kill her. Granny sat below away from us in the cellar. Swimma was in Florida or somewhere; and Christy sat gazing at the map of the world in the kitchen or putting, wordlessly and patiently, the little ship in the turpentine bottle. I was listening to what everybody was saying and to what the blinded girl with the lyre on top of the world was singing; and our house was full of the breath of speech.

But our spring came and with it such thaws and such rains that there was the biggest flood in years and the river widened out even onto Bailey’s Pasture and was so close to the house that we could see upon it drowned wooden cows rolling like barrels, lily pads of chickens floating and little outhouses and wagonwheels. When the river finally shrank back to the bottomlands it had left in Bailey’s Pasture crawfishes and catfish, pine-needles and spores and pinecones and its golden silt and the bones of birds; and it had taken back there with it bitterweeds and sawdust and go-to-sleep flowers and even the babybuggy that we had left in the pasture to be ruined by the worst winter.