The House of Breath (4 page)

But across the icebound bottomlands, over the sleeted slues and the rime of the bog, with beak of horn and horned nails, chiming his terrible Midnight, stalks the bird whose ghost you are, O river O my waters
.

It Seems. Charity, that the young ones were always packing their suitcases to come back to you or to leave you again and the old ones sitting and waiting, taking the young ones back and keeping them as long as they could—they at their standoffish distance of never belonging there or anywhere that broke the old ones' hearts who never said a brokenhearted word—till they had to stand on the front porch again and watch them, the Folners and the Berrybens and the Sue Emmas and the Boys, going through the gate to the Highway with their suitcase in their hands—away again, who knew where. There was just no future in a little town like you for young people young and ready, they said. But the old ones sat right there with you. Charity, holding your dying hand, rocking and wailing and listening or counting their secret futile beads of hope.

V

YET what were the ways and roads that led me back, I whose ancestors were wheel and well and cellar and loft?

Day after day, night after night a ship plowed and plunged through the water—and we two were on its bow, standing together looking together ahead: now I hear Christy's voice speaking into mine and telling, the way he told me long ago in the woods, in his way, of his life that became mine (now I see it)', of the roads he followed away, and of the ways back home (
“Blues” he called me instead of Christy because he said I was so sad. I had left home in you, Charity, with Clatzco Skiles, for the Merchant Marines, we had signed up at the Postoffice, and gone away through Texis lyin in cotton, for it was pickin time, and the pickers, draggin their long limp bags behind em across the fields, were like a pack of crawlin wounded animals with broken backs. I passed through Tennysee with niggers' laughter over Memphis, niggers on the steps of houses in the September heat; crossed over the catfish rivers. A fall wind was already blowin in Ohio. I spit in the Beautiful Ohio for luck and good-bye. In New York I took my ship bound for Panymaw that I had seen like a red appendix on the map, but they putt Clatzco on a freighter going I don't know where. In the ship I was lonesome and afraid, but I did my work. At night I'd lay in my bunk and think of everthing. And then I saw a face, fair in its youngman's bearded beauty, and so much like Follie that I almost cried out “Follie!” I watched this face while I worked and it swam before me in my nights in my bunk. I wanted to putt my hand on this hand and hold it still under mine, made still by his made still. Oh he was bright and I was dark and I gave him all my darkness. On that ship: but we joined, for all good things in the. World, and to find sometime to gether; and loved, I never knew I could do it and was afraid; and on the bow of the ship that night that he said. “What have we done Christy?”

I said, wonderin too, “But something good will come of this, I know something good will come of this…”

Only sorrow came
).

Day after day, night after night, our ship plowed through the water filled with flying fishes and dolphins and the nights so blue and white, the spray flying up like feathers of white birds, and white birds following us. Some nights the water was so smooth, so quiet, and we were so quiet upon it, that the ship glided like a phantom skater; and the moonlight would lie in the wide gleaming swath following as though the ship turned up, like a plow, moonlight. Life was in a stunning balance, timeless and directionless, and identities and names were lost. And then some watercurse fell upon us and our names were broken by the brute prow of the ship, like the waves that were broken, and we were anonymous as broken pieces that never can be mended to their whole again. This craft called Ship, this monstrous artifact of builders, held us, broken pieces, within it, trying to find ourselves in each other.

But when the disenchantment came and the voyage ended and the others turned their backs upon the enchantment as though it had been only joke played upon them, or dream, or charade, we, nameless pieces, pieced ourselves together into each other and went away, off the ship, into a world of magic and witchcraft whirling in the twilight glimmer of hope and hopelessness. Who were we and where had we ever come from, what had made us what we were? Charity and the house and all the people in it had been blown away, it seemed, by my breath.

Looking, as we went, toward the water that held beyond us the ship it had spawned, phantom water-egg that had borne us, we stopped; we heard the fogbell forlornly clanging. It had a broken sound that seemed to tell us dread, terror, loss, but some destiny. Waterborn, Glaucus and magician grass, we felt land alien.

At night, in the cities, as we went, the wind was flogging a ragged cloud like an old woman beating a rug, and the dust fell over the cities. The moon would hang fat in the East. And looking upon it, we wished we could find one word, one strong word, small but hard as a stone, that would mean our aloneness in the world, and say it in great crying voice, hurling toward the moon. On the lighted boulevards there was marching pomp and ceremony and the rattle of laughter, revel and carousal and a running. There was no name for anyone or anything. The lonely were waiting on the corners and in most every park for someone to come—and they could bruise themselves against each other into at least a momentary reality upon a bed of peace. (But if I were to speak of the loneliness
within
love, would anyone understand?)

In the cities certainty was deranged and a crack and a break were in the once clear voice, a flaw in every finely woven garment. Some daemon purpose was sown all in the land. (The only caress that of an image, that of a coldhanded beauty, like a marble caress. O granite caress. O granite kiss.)

And in the desert, where we were, the bare scalp of earth stretched scabrous and feverish under the metallic light, and the wind would run its lion-toothed comb through the loose sand and sage, rend them like loose hair and scale and fling and scatter them over roof and against us going bitten and stung under the hard tile sky. Hordes of grasshoppers would ride in on the wind and shuttle together, clacking their desiccate wings. There was a steaming vapor out over the tortured desert and the light went hard and percussive so that it might ring like a copper bell if it could be struck, and the world lay brittle as bone. We felt all of bone and rock and metal, we could no longer melt together but stood apart hard as bone and rock. What ruined us? We yearned for water.

Then, in a little town by water, at the Equinox, we broke ourselves against each other, broke forever, broken O broken forever.

O the cry over the waters, what was crying over the waters, what was running all through the waters, ringing the buoys over all the waters? Shadows on the shore, what shadow-people, worn faces like stone metopes, shadow family, shadow kin, hovering together along the shore, near me, always near me.

Walking walking walking round in one's loneliness, up and down in a town. It is cold and the wind blows; the streets are dirty. Because of much rain the trees are green-slimed; the slime is bright and frozen in the streetlights. Yet the beast will not come into the fold. The ultimate agony of aloneness is not to be real; and, unreal, to demoralize love.

The grinding of my feet over ice on the city pavements was over everything frozen, yet when I walked on the pavements something in some others I passed turned a little and bowed to something in me turning; and we greeted each other secretly by a secret turning—but passed on. Yet when I looked in a showwindow I saw my terrible white face, lined and drawn like a dead man's…. Who would turn to a dead man?
Savior, Savior, hear my humble cry; while on others thou art calling, do not pass me by!
(I would set in the bus stations wantin to talk to somebody, but couldn't, wouldn't…. I would set and, hearin the wheels of the busses crushin the ice on the pavements, going off to home for people in them, remember the snow and sleet in the bottomlands and the feet of the birds on the icebound bottomlands. And think of in Loosiana when we went there, Mama and Malley and Lauralee and me, when Papa was workin for the rayroad and travelin out of headquarters in Shrevesport; and how we hobbled along like cripples over the first snow in our lives, and fell down on the hard ice, alone in Shrevesport, and cryin, and homesick. And how the only thing we knew to do on Sundays was to ride the streetcar to the end a the line and back for a nickel. In school there I had my first music and all the songs we sang were sad: “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”…) and think that some of us are preparation for others: that we prepare others for their life—and that that ought to be enough. But the wound is left. How we work on each other like chemicals, like acids and salts and sulphurs; how like lacquer we change surfaces… Everything, then, working with and upon everything—with accompanying resistance and damage and error but turning out something changed, finished, prepared to receive something more, to take in and take on something more: pain, wisdom, love. This great, mysterious chemistry-going on—praise it.

When the betrayal comes, in the season of disenchantment, my agony goes formless and flies through the world, is only
felt
like wind and cannot be caught into any images or shaped into any meaning, but hovers insubstantial and untouchable; only breathes and whispers and murmurs round me and lulls me into a spelllike dream.
What muss I do?
Then I feel I may never hold or shape a hope again. I forget everything—and I am demoralized and abuse those who love me and go from street to street, betrayed, wandering, drenched in rain. Who am I, bruised so unreal?—what will realize me?—I whirl round and bobble or stand like a statue thrown into the stickerburrs. And then I hear the voices (“Come home, the light's on, come on home, Ben Berry-ben…”) (“Swimma-a-a-a! Swimma-a-a-a! come in ‘fore dark…”) (“Rescue the Perishing…”) (“Boy, Boy come out to the woodshed, I've got something to show you, by gum…”) (“Draw me, draw me, I will follow”) and I melt down like the gingerbread man that ran and ran and ran and melted as he ran. Then I name over and over in my memory every beautiful and loved image and idea I have ever had, and praise them over and over, saying, Granny Ganchion, I touch you and name you; Folner, I touch you and name you; Aunty, Malley, Swimma, Christy, I touch you and name you and claim you all. It is like a procession through the rooms of this house, saying, now this is the hall and there is the bottled ship and the seashell, this is the breezeway, there is the well, here is the map in the kitchen and here is the watery mirror in which, behold, is my face,
me
, my face…

That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it
HOME
, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover: remembering the grouping of old trees, the fall of slopes and hills, the lay of fields and the running of rivers; of animals there, and of objects lived with; of faces, and names, all of love and belonging, and forever be returning to it or leaving it again!

Out of this suffering a vision of violence: of striking beaks of horn; of blood upon my thigh; of fallen and falling birds. Fallen wings of leaves (what silent terrible flock rows over across the heavens, dropping lost wings, blood-green and yellow, lined like the palms of phantom hands, upon us?) drift down upon us.

So it all ends, in wordlessness, and in my tears.

Yet something forms within the
world
of a tear, shaped by the world that caused it; something takes shape within this uttered breath that builds an image of breath:

VI

BEHOLD the house… Now ruin has passed over all that fallen splendid house and done ruin's work on it. Now, ruin (of childhood) returning to ruin, come, purged of that bile and gall of childhood (into the empty purity of memory), come through the meadow called Bailey's Pasture that is spun over with luminous dandelions like a million gathered shining heads, through random blooming mustard and clover and bitterweeds, over the grown-over path that was a short-cut to town when there was no circus or revival tent there. Pass one brown spotted cow folded there (remember her name as a calf was Roma and a good ride) and munching the indestructible bitterweed cud of time, and pass around the silent laboring, nervous civilization of an anthill that swarms and traffics on and on beyond the decline of splendid houses or the fall of broken cisternwheels. The slow grinding of cud, even and measured, the twinkling, red, timeless quarry of ants and the eternal, unalterable cycle of flowers—first the white, then the pink, then red to blue to purple and finally to sunflower yellow—round and round, turning and turning, moving and moving: they mock the crooked mile that families walk, suffering and failing and passing away, over their crooked stile, into a crooked Beulah Land.

If you come this way about this time of a time, through Bailey's Pasture, you will then come to and have to cross over the warped, rusted railroad tracks of the MKT, called Katy Railroad; and, having crossed the rails, you will behold before you this house. You think you hear a voice—from the shuttered window? From the front gallery? From the cellar, the loft?—murmuring, “But who comes here, across the pasture of bitterweeds, wading in through the shallows, home?”

If you be Berryben Ganchion you have returned after a long long time and too late. For your mother, Malley Ganchion, has gone blind from cataracts that kept her half-blind for such a long time, sitting by the closed shutter in this house, alone, waiting for you to come back.

If you be Sue Emma Starnes, you are too late, too; and if you be any other, then you have returned for all of them, for all their sakes, come to rummage and explore, in your hour, and find a meaning, and a language and a name.