Had I a Hundred Mouths (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just Little Somebody,” she finally said, “until it names itself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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