Bigmouth

There was a time in my extreme youth when I stopped speaking. I’d had my say. Enough, enough. One day I paused in mid-sentence to take a breath and a great tide of air rushed into my mouth and bore my words back up into my brain. Keep them, I thought. Burnish them to a higher sheen and hoard them. Mark this (I also thought): the time will come when my detractors will crawl to me on hands and knees, their heads empty as beggars’ bowls, pleading for one wordy crumb, that’s all!, some paltry token from my vast—and by then compounded—investment.

But, my spendthrift days were over. For years my silver tongue had tolled almost unstoppably. I could be absolutely relied upon to deliver commentary on failings of family life, along with critiques and crisp assessments of anyone who lived within shooting range. Besides this, I tossed off clever asides on more general themes, likewise aphorisms, puns, and bon mots that were sheathed in the luminous and crackling golden foil of my wit. Mine was a richness of expression known around the house, otherwise and regrettably, as Hero’s “prattle” or “gibberish.” To say that I was underappreciated does not even begin to say enough. My mother had taken to stuffing cotton balls in her ears and wearing earmuffs, or breaking out into spontaneous acts of vacuuming whenever I cleared my throat. Father was more receptive and attentive, although after listening to me for an extended period, his face would take on a worn and exhausted expression, as if what I had to say made no more sense than what the wind had been saying forever to the eroded brow of the shore.

So, I paused. I paused and silence fell among us. Like a benediction, I gather. At first my parents looked around inquisitively, blinking like Sleeping Beauties newly awakened, faint, puzzled smiles forming on their lips, for they couldn’t quite identify what was happening. Then simultaneously—and guardedly—they looked at me. I went about my business, pulling the head off my doll and snapping it back on with a gratifying pop. (Perhaps I’ll become a doctor instead of a lawyer, I mused, considering how my communicative skills will no longer be exercised.) I knew what they were thinking. Not that I might be unwell, or sick at heart, or conducting a protest, or suffering an artistic crisis—speaker’s block—but, that carried along by some unheralded developmental surge, I had passed through my yakkety-yak phase, my prolonged and painful bout of verbal colic. They were thinking—now that they could hear themselves do it—that I had finally become a bonafide member not only of our family, but of the whole human community. I had become normal, that is. Which is to say, repressed and fumbling and ever proving the lamentable inadequacy of language as it is usually deployed.

So much for providing a domestic service. Fine, I clamped my lips together: let them speak to one another and see how far they get. I refused to supply the linguistic binding that might have held this whole fragile structure together. Rents, rifts, leaks. A family needn’t be airtight to float, sealed up so snug you can’t breathe, black emotional pitch in the seams, but there were drafts in ours, cold currents circulating that had an alien source. I knew what was what, if not precisely the meaning of what I had witnessed: my mother reaching through a bombed-out hole in the wall of our family into the raw, hard light of day, and placing her hand gently as a fallen leaf on the back of a stranger.

I wasn’t the only talker among my relations. During family get-togethers my Uncle Clyde spoke in tongues, providing he had enough fuel in him for liftoff. Cow’s tongue, chicken, pig—he could do a fair imitation of my grandmother Albertha’s sow, Maud. (Massive Maud, a fleshy and sensitive pink nestled in straw, all tongue she could have been, a huge speaking organ.) Clyde grunted and oinked and squealed—throat slit, Easter dinner—making a comedy of these sad, irreligious sounds. He did this mainly for the benefit of his sister-in-law, my Aunt Faith, a real tongue-banger herself, who’d been reborn (whereas I got it right the first time around) and on the subject of religion was merciless.

“Tell me, I’m inerested here, what’s the difference between praying and braying?” Clyde queried before performing the latter and rolling his eyes heavenward.

“Give it a rest, Clyde,” Auntie Viv said, with a snort of laughter, while Faith cursed him and predicted that one day he would be struck dumb.

Instead, it happened to me, or so they must have reasoned. Me, who had so often broken the rules designed to silence children: don’t speak with your mouth full, speak only when spoken to, a child should be seen, not heard. Then if you did clam up, they shamed you for not speaking.

“What’s wrong with you?” Faith said. “Cat got yer tongue?”

Nope, my answer under normal circumstances, bird got your brain? But I would not be drawn. Any confidences I had to divulge, I shared with the local fauna. This included our pumpkin-coloured dog, E.D. Smith (he was the exact shade of the pie filling, but named after our mayor Ed Smith, who’d been caught pissing against the side of the town hall), and my cousin Nile, who was wayward enough to be counted in with the wildlife. E.D. Smith was highly receptive, a diplomat of dogs, human affairs to him as diverting as a steaming pile of dung. Lifting the velvety trapdoor of his ear and whispering to him, I could hear my secrets drifting slowly down into the cellar of his canine soul. Nile was another matter. He didn’t care. I tried to tell him what I heard late at night, the sounds that skirled up into my room. My parents arguing, a violent jagged drone, a crude hornet’s nest of words kicked against the wall.

“Turn around Scuts, let’s play our game.”

He lifted my shirt and began to draw pictures on my bare back with his finger. It only felt like tickling to me, but the object of the game was to guess what he was drawing. Or who he was drawing, as his quick sketches had lately evolved from cars into curvy female shapes. ‘Nuds,’ as Uncle Clyde would say, the stripped nymphs of Nile’s distorted local mythology.

“Roxanne Box?” I guessed.

“Nah, not enough room on a skinny minnie like you for that tub of lard.”

“Peg Ritchie, then.”

“Her? She’s a dog. C’mon Scuts, it’s easy.”

“Draw her again.”

He ran his finger, nail ragged and scratchy at a real nib over my shoulder blades, down my spine, trunk to waist, his medium as he drew the lineaments and filled in the details of this softly rounded mystery woman. She evaporated the instant he laid her down, and yet, and yet… didn’t I know her? She felt familiar, close, so lightly riding on my back. A burden of absence, not weight. Who was she?

“I give up,” I said, hating to, hating to let Nile win.

“Waa, waa,” all he’d say. “Sucky Baby’s gonna cry.”

There were questions I could have asked if I were on speaking terms with the household and the world at large. A child could whine like a dog (or a mayor) at the closed bedroom door.

The sounds they made in there were scarcely to be believed. Animal grammar, I could write the book.

My mother had many admirers. Or maybe it was only one, unrecognizable, mercurial, his face always turned away from me, or bagged in shadow. That half-man who slipped out the back door like a thief. Once I saw his hands gripping the sides of her head like a vice. I saw her own hand pressed hard against his face, the heel of it in his mouth.

I’d been told, often, not to speak to strangers. Uh-huh. In my own home? I wondered if this prohibition was some sort of sly joke, or intended as good advice that my own mother had not heeded, to her peril. Before taking my vow of silence, speaking had come as natural to me as breathing. No one had warned me before of its dangers, how it might draw predators to the door.

“She’s changed,” I overheard my mother telling Auntie Viv. “For the better. She’s much quieter, shy all of a sudden. Growing up, I guess. For a while there, I thought she’d never shut up.”

“I dunno, I don’t like it,” said Auntie Viv. “It’s like she’s in shock, eh, like she’s seen something. Something bad. Real bad.”

E.D. Smith moaned softly in his sleep, his legs twitching, enduring dreams of doggy council meetings, endless and inescapable. A cloud of flying ants drifted by the window, the mating aerial relations of the ones that were undermining the front porch, turning solid woodwork into lace. I could hear them if I placed my ear against the floorboards, a light scratching within, disaster arriving in increments.

Mother laughing. A beautiful sound, but only she was making it.

Okay, so what if I talked? Carefully, casting a spell over the house without wasting myself, only enough language to effect the necessary repair.

Too late, though. Too late to hold it fast and tight.

Now see, I told you this would happen. A time came when my father fell on his knees, suitor-style, before me. He grabbed my arms, my inoffensive and listening father, and shook me hard, desperate for the treasure I contained.

“Where is she? Hero, you know, tell me. Where?”

So we’ve descended to this, I thought. All right, I’ll tell. And for once in my life I was succinct. I sifted through those months of silence for what they had to offer, and said, simply, “Gone.” No gem, no gold, but a ghost of a word, a word without habitation. Wind whistling down an open plain, a tire track in the sand, a wisp of exhaust trailing off into nothing.

Once a man came walking along our shore. I had put in a full morning ransacking my parents’ room, clawing through drawers, looting the jewellery box, yanking dresses off their hangers in the closet, tossing out shoes. It was an approach, what was I supposed to do? You can’t make a mother out of lipstick, spilled perfume, and a sweater set laid out flat on the floor, but you can doll up her absence. I wrote a ransom note using the nub of an eyebrow pencil. I painted the puppies’ toenails red and powdered their faces until they started to sneeze. Sometimes Father was too smart for our own good. But mostly he was too stupid. He named them Romulus and Remus. Somebody had dumped them at the end of our road, two pups in a sealed-up cardboard box, passing their problem along with a callousness that was pervasive enough in the world, but usually missed us gormless rubes, suckers who couldn’t resist opening a whimpering, barking box.

Not yet up to a macho, snarly toothed show of aggression, the pups were too young to save my life, but they at least provided a brief, clownish diversion. Not long after Mother disappeared, E.D. Smith, our old, orange mutt, went missing, too. Lost in the bush, Father said. This unregulated passage of people and animals made the unknown man’s arrival less unexpected to me than perhaps it should have been. By then I was outside, near the dock.

“Hello girl,” he said.

Girl? No one had ever called me that before. He was unshaven. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes what you might expect—filthy white T with a ripped flannel shirt overtop, work pants, a nap of motor oil and dirt where he’d wiped his hands on his thighs, scuffed boots, half-unlaced. In short, your classic stranger (hick model), literally the kind of child-stealer and abominator that mothers conjure up to terrify themselves with. But the thing was, you see, I didn’t have a mother. Sure, there were intimations of her. She lingered still in the house, in the folds of the curtains, in the depths of the burnt-bottomed pots and pans. My Sin, unstoppered, gave you a good strong blast of her. Her soiled slippers, her hair snaking through a brush, her pink swimsuit in the bathroom slung like a piece of skin on a nail. But not her. She was the crime for which she had left too much evidence.

The puppies did their best, tumbling white-faced around the corner of the house, a mother parody with their red nails, cheap clip-on earrings swinging low on the tips of their floppy ears, the sweater set divvied up between them. The man stared at them, unmoved by their canine youth, undeceived by their disguise. He then stared at me—much too long. Calculating, I suppose. Doing the books, assessing my value, my silence, my availability. He was unsmiling, shrewdly serious, not wasting any charm on me. He had come by the shore, not the road, but he hadn’t made a game of it, hopping from rock to rock as I would have done. So what did he conclude finally?

No, not this one. This one’s trouble.

For all I knew, he could have been an acquaintance of my father’s, looking for him. Or some harmless sap looking for a job, a drifter, a lost soul. Although really, how many times do you have to learn not to be taken in, and yet you go ahead and open that can of worms, that taped-up box?

He wasn’t fooled, at any rate. I was trouble. Trouble’s apprentice, and trouble’s little cousin. I was being coached in it and had become a true disciple of the condition. A loquacious smartypants when younger, Father had told everyone that I was destined to become a lawyer. Since then I had learned to dummy up, but law still interested me, especially the other side of it where my cousin Nile ranged, secure in his delinquency, beckoning.

This girl business, though, I didn’t like it. Other people were accusing me of it, too, if more indirectly. Insinuations were being made.

“Did that man speak to you?” barked Aunt Faith, after I skipped back into the house.

Barked was her usual mode of expression. That, or snapped, growled, scolded, sneered. She never just said. Behind the tight set of her jaw, she had a cache of unpleasant information stored, a jackpot of sordid particulars that she did not intend to share with me. Mind you, it must have been tempting. She would have enjoyed scaring the wits out of me.

“You be careful, hear.”

Speak and die, was that it? Speak to a stranger and he’ll hold your innocent response taut as a cord against your throat.

I wasn’t all that surprised to find Aunt Faith in our living room, spying on me. Since Mother left it was like open house at our place. Female relatives streamed through with casseroles, ironing, advice, lies. I never realized before that one woman in the house protects you from others.

“That girl of yours, Morland, heard tell she was out by the lighthouse. . . .”

Breaking windows? Check. That part was true. I broke the sun in them, shattered them into blackness. I was handy with a rock. But that other thing, they weren’t going to pin that on me. It’s not that I wanted to be a boy, what good would that do? I wanted to be something larger, looser, something that would take in the puppies, and the shore that man walked along, and the hidden, twisted road that took my mother away from me. Call me that and maybe I’d listen.

Nile, lean and quick, slipped unseen through the dark, a wolf in wolf’s clothing. At night, lighting matches on his teeth, he might have been pulling fire right out of his mouth. A couple of barns went up that summer. We watched them go, faces doused in orange light.

Romulus ate Father’s Y-fronts and Remus caught hell. There was a useful lesson in this, I felt, but not having a sibling of my own, I didn’t know how to apply it. I had to bear the guilt of Mother’s defection, there being no other child around to blame but me. Children squabble over their parents’ attention, and when there is no attention at all, you get to eat dust, however many there are of you. No attention stretches pretty far. Father didn’t mean to withdraw, but he was stricken. There was a dearth in the family. (Some joke.) Like me, he was missing some pertinent, possibly saving, piece of information. He didn’t know what to do, so he kicked the dog, which is what they’re for, according to Aunt Faith. Then later, because he’s a soft man pulled out of shape, he apologized. He took Romulus’ paw in his hand and murmured affectionately to him. But again, wrong dog. Crime rewarded. Tail thumping, Romulus grinned quizzically, the single beneficiary in our house of civilized behaviour. Shreds of Father’s Stanfield’s were snagged like floss in his teeth.

And on the subject of unmentionables, you didn’t want to turn your back on Nile, a great one for stealing up behind you, silent as smoke, sliding his hand down the back of your jeans, and giving your gotchies an abrupt, often vicious, yank. A corny and puerile trick that drove the crotch up into your crack like a G-string. It hurt. It was humiliating. You had to laugh, though.

“How could she walk in these?” Caught snooping in my parents’ room, Aunt Faith snatched up one of Mother’s spike-heeled pumps and shook it at me.

“Dog’s breakfast, this room. It’s disgusting.”

This occurred to me—her leaving was the ultimate maternal act. Altruistic, a sacrifice. She did it for me. Her defection protected me from harm, far more that her anxious presence would have done. Breaking rules (and windows), telling fibs, watching, waiting, I had grown wary and more observant. Watching the road, the shore. There are worse things than being raised by wolves.

When Remus was older, he developed this habit of jumping on car hoods. We all ran wild, but he took it further, as though wildness itself were a country whose boundaries he had to leap clear of. A mad lilt feathered his heels, a death wish gleamed in his eye. Men don’t like to lose their women, don’t like them touched or tampered with. The same applies, only double, to their cars. Dirt on the whitewalls makes them unhappy. A missing hubcap is a quest that can take days of ditch exploration. Rust eating a fender, scratches on the hood, don’t even think about it. As Remus skidded across the hood of Nile’s waxed and polished black Buick, he left behind a fatal trail in the paint, an empty musical staff, scoring for a dirge. Like a cartoon dog, he skated scritching across the hood until he stood eyeball to eyeball with the driver, pallid face looming on the other side of the windshield. Remus, the unlucky one, the dupe. He did not disappear in a thunderstorm and enjoy deification, as did his brother’s namesake, but disappear he did, not long after.

Father read the ransom note I wrote in eyebrow pencil Leave money under doormat. (WELCOME the mat said in big rubber letters, although we didn’t really mean it. GO AWAY was more the idea.) I didn’t specify the amount, not wanting to undervalue myself by asking for too little. I did add, Or Else!, implying perhaps that if he didn’t pay up he’d find me at the end of the road, my remains sealed up in the now vacant cardboard box. Or found not at all, my whereabouts never to be revealed.

Father smiled and dug into his pocket for some loose change, which he slipped under the mat. “For candy,” he said aloud, thinking, My poor motherless daughter.

For ciggies, I smiled, watching him through the window, thinking, Poor dumb Dad.

I’ll leave him too, first chance.

And you know what, I did speak to that man, that loathsome stranger. I even acknowledged the identifier: girl.

“Hello,” I said. “Mister.”

It wasn’t much, but he knew what I meant. Hello danger, depravity, bearer away of female bodies, whoever you are. You’ve found me, so young, but yes, it’s me, and I’m ready to go, too. Hello, welcome, here are my hands, take them, and my child arms. Let me embrace you.