The House of Breath (17 page)

“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.