The House of Breath (6 page)

“But pore little Maidie in that duplex in that city; I wish she'd come back here. Wish all of em would come on back here and we could have our reunions that we used to have when all the Starnes ud come in from the woods. Never saw so much squash and yella-legged chicken in your life, all the young Starnes not a one under six feet, and the pretty, timid girls—where have they all gone? I tell you the Devil walked in the river-bottoms—and cussed this town.

“I just want to set right here in this house, don't want to see nobody, don't care if they all never come here again, just want to set here in this! Old rotten house until I die. Never had nothin, never will have nothin, none of us ever had a chanct and I don't care anymore, be glad when I die, wish I'd hurry up, then it'll be all over with.”

Oh you ain't got a chanct, you ain't got a chanct in this world. You are down in the back and got hemorrhoids and a stone in your bladder and you can't carpenter or work at the roundhouse and the garden's dry and burnin up in the burnin sun and you can't buy feed for the cows and chickens and I don't know what you'll ever do, just sit there on the porch and rock and spit and die one day and be buried by your poor relations. And the infernal little town dead and rottin away and all of you poor as niggers and your teeth bad and your sides hurtin day and night and no money to see a doctor in Dallas.

“(And Jimbob, Jimbob, the pigs is in the peapatch but don't run, walk, Jimbob. Mind your back, Jimbob. My Lord guess we'll all die in a pile right here with the pigs in the peapatch and nobody carin.)”

Nobody carin.

Now a spider lives unbothered in the doormat that never knows a pawing foot upon it.

There is the kitchen gathered around the great worn woodstove. A faded map is still tacked on the wall. You hear the mice kicking in the turned-over oatmeal. And you hear the wind that lopes like a spectral rider round and round the house, whirls down the flues and chutes into the woodstove and thrashes the ashes and blows a wild little horn in the hollows of the stove. Then you hear a melody from a farther room and it is the wind blowing a tune in the closed shutter in the room where Malley Ganchion lived on like a mouse in the house after all the others had gone, hoping some redemption for them all would come.

Some appetite waits and lurks in the world, you remark; it is some great hunger, insect and rodent and decay hunger. This seems suddenly to be a law of the universe. Insect, mold, rat, rust, death—all wait for and get the human plunder in the end, to carry the carrion away. The vultures of this greed hover and plane over us all our lives, waiting to drop down. The leaf has its caterpillar, the stalk mildew and the worm lies crooked in the bud. And observe the little white lice, dandruff in the golden head of the marigold, the gall chancres and fistulas on the rosebush. See the shale of fly carcasses in the spiderwebs, of caught hornets and flying ants, wings folded like a closed fan (the dead of this house lie fastened in what web, stretched over what blue Kingdom?), bits of wings and antennae, all debris. The dirtdobbers' knobs of mud, lathed round and whorled smooth, hang like many lightless lanterns—because there is no hand to knock them down. The insects have taken over-we fight them back all our lives, but in the end they come victoriously in, our inheritors. Look in the corners, under things—find the little purewhite puffs and tents in which some whiskery thing lives, find the thousandlegs and stinkbugs and doodlebugs and Junebugs, find fantastic bugs with shielded backs and delicate marks and brilliant colors and designs. See a caught mouse in a trap—set by what futile, mocked hand?—rotted to a frail skull and a vertebra. And see over the boards of the faded floor the Sienese lines of tracks and roads and tunnels and cross-hatched marks and trails. In the bins and cannisters are weevils; the roaches, unmolested, are grown big. The legged armies have come into this house. This is the slow eating away—mold and canker and mildew and must, gall and parasite, lice and little speckled ticks and grooved worms. In a corner of the pantry (where you often ran to hide from old Mr. Hare, passing in his rumbling wagon calling “paa-ahs! paa-ahs!”) discover a ruined still life of left vegetables, whiskered and leprosied, and rotted fruit spotted with pustules and the stippled fuzz of fungus. (You remember the glassy picture in the dining room, where you ate on Sundays, that was of a sad dead blue duck dangling down a golden-flecked and purple-speckled head—with staring eyes that watched you eat—and pears and peaches round him; and feel that picture's ruin before you.)

And all so quiet is this eating away, except for the wind that winds a mummy cloth around the fallen splendid house delivered to its inheritors.

So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenters' hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.

VII

LED BY THIS HAND you go to the well, made of stone and minaretted by a slender windlass where the rusty and battered bucket hangs like a ruined bell on a rotted and raveled rope in its tower. If I should cry down some name in this well, you think, what voice would rouse and speak out of this well to me? You cry down the name of Sue Emma Starnes, calling “Swimma-a-a! Swimma-a-a-a!' (come in ‘fore dark) and you hear the round wavering answer, like a voice heard under water, “And all the daughters of musick shall be brought low…”

And then the long story, told out like a speaking mouth filled with wind, opening and closing in the wind:

“Well, when Swimma finished Charity High,” the well-voice says, “she stayed around home for awhile but then got restless and packed her suitcase and went to Dallas to stay with Maidie, her sister, you know. Right away that girl blossomed out in Dallas, it was just her style.

“Got her a job in J. C. Pennys sellin paints and hatchets and hardware things, but soon they learned that Swimma Starnes didn't belong back with the hardware. She had talent at fixin and arrangin and when they saw that she was right smart at decoratin they put her in the windows, gave her the job of sprucin up the showwindows. Naturally Swimma loved to be in a showwindow, don't you just
know?
It was the Ganchion in her.

“Then because she had a real cute shape, built like a carnival kewpie doll, she got this job modelin at Neiman Marcuses. This really changed Swimma, let me tell
you
. Got to smokin cigarettes through a cigarette holder long as a beanshooter, would wear her black hair (she's part Indian, you know) piled up on her head one day like a African and flowin all down her back the next like a huzzy. She moved right out of her sister Maidie's duplex into a suite at the Stoneleigh Manor, said Maidie was an old fogy and ought to move back to the sticks, meanin Charity, and made fun of the Sunshine Boys that practiced ever Wednesday night at the duplex.

“‘You oughta go back home and hep Mama and Papa,' Maidie said to her, and this made Swimma so mad she had one of her tantrums, shoutin, ‘
I
'm not going back there, it's a cinch. Why should I go back there, that's where
you
belong. I'm not going to wash over a rickety ole washstand covered with oilcloth and ruin my complexion with lava soap and go out through the cold and rain to the privy when I can have Princess Pat Preparations and a pink ruffled boudoir in a suite all my own
with adjoinin bath
at the Stoneleigh.'

“Now just a word of well-wisdom here. You remember Ola Peabody's neck—how it was scaly like the bark of a tree? The end of all beauty and swank is Ola's neck, scaly and crusted and crinkled. Josh left Ola for a twenty-two-year-old girl. His marriage to Ola was as if he had abused her and deformed her for twenty-seven years and then throwed her on a trash pile. Look what marriage does to a woman. Look what it did to poor Ola—a big tumor is all she has; and gray dry hair and a scaly neck. No childrun, she could never have any. While Josh has kept himself up good, with still good teeth, never went to a dentist in his life (except once when he thought he had pyorrheah and we nearly had to bury him because he thought all his front teeth would turn black—and I wish they had)—and a figure so straight and no pot like middle-aged men have and not even bald. He found this girl Eula Pearl and is startin his youth all over again with her. These nasty men. Men are so nasty, hair all over ‘em—did you ever see a man that wouldn't scratch where it itched, I don't care
where
it is? Nasty things, that's all they think of. ‘I want youth and beauty,' Josh said. Why of course, so do all of us want youth and beauty, but how can Ola have youth and beauty after being bounced around, used like a drayhorse, after liftin and scrubbin and servin him like a servant? Josh is a big Shrine, wears that tasseled cap often as he can, laughin and struttin and bitin a cigar. I wonder if those Shrines know what he's done in his personal life? Ola ought to write them a good letter about him and tell them all what he has done. That's what Miz Shively did. When she found out what was going on between Brother Shively, preacher of the First Baptist Church, and Mrs. Branch, a widow, she just called a meetin of the Board on Tuesday evenin and read before them a letter about what she had found out. That was the end of Brother Shively, he was transferred to Beaumont.

“But the point is that the end of all beauty is Ola's neck, scaly and crusted and crinkled like a work-glove.

“Well, anyway, at a personality contest of some kind Swimma won it and was sent to New York in a airplane to walk up and down in some long silk dress with-out any bosom to it, jes straps, mind you, and nekkid as a jay half-way down to her waist. She was judged a beauty everwhere and they was a flyin her all over the country like some prize heifer to show off, even to Hawaya and everplace.

“Then she went on the stage (just like Folner Ganchion, everbody could all see it)—that little country girl Swimma Starnes that everbody knew in Charity Texis—and made a mint a money I guess and became a real celebrity, you couldn't turn through the magazines without comin upon Swimma Starnes smokin a cigarette or cocked up on a wall like Humpty Dumpty with her long legs bare in a bathin suit no wider than a hair ribbon. Naturally she attracted the men like flies—that's what she
wanted
. Like her ole grandma, had to have whiskers round her, had to have a pair of pants round her noon and night. Had more men friends than you could shake a stick at, got expensive presents flung at her from all of them, I
know
on account of I was told.

“She jes disinherited all her family. While she was prancin round half-nekkid in some personality show, her pore mother Lauralee Starnes was a brushin down dirtdobbers' nests from a outhouse in Charity Texis with a hickrystick, or spittin snuff in a tincan on the front gallry.

“Then Lauralee and Jimbob Starnes got word, jes on a postcard from Miami, Florida, that Swimma had married, had married some rich man (we think he was a Jew) with some business, nobody knew what. And Swimma started havin the little babies with big heads. First one was a boy with a head big as a watermelon and shaped like one. That little freak lived and lived, head kept gettin bigger and bigger, and they would come and measure it and measure it, but it wouldn't die, really got strong and healthy as an ox, and jes lay there in its bed, huge and strong and an idiot, thrashin like a whale and slobberin all over the bedclothes. The wicked have their hell right here on earth, I said. Well, that thing lived to be
nine
years ole and no doctor in the country could do a thing for it; until one mornin they found it dead in its bed and that uz a blessin.

“Now Swimma will really come to her senses, we all thought; it's taken such a tragedy to shake some sense into her head. She grieved and grieved over that little monster, had a nervous breakdown and took to heavy drinkin, and we all waited for her to come home. We thought she would divorce that rich man that people said was some big Miami gambler. But nope, she stayed on with him and what do you think? She had
another
bigheaded freak. Another boy. But it lived only a year. You know there've been a lot of freaks in Charity, that Lindalou Bell had a bigheaded baby like that and they said it uz because Simp Bell had lived round among the nigras out at Grapeland when he uz buildin the Highway through there. Oh there was a row over that—Lindalou's famly, the Bensons (been in Charity for years and years) blamed it on Simp's old daddy, Dr. Bell, a perpetual drunkard and had insanity somewhere in iz famly; and Simp's famly said twuz Lindalou's fault, that she was diseased and oh I don't know what all, it was all terrible and one of the worse scandals of Charity, the two famlies literally fightin in the street and the whole town talkin—you know how a town talks. Then there was that little deformity that the Barkers had, turned out to be real talented, went away with a carnival as a frogboy last we heard; and the Saxton boy, blown big as a balloon, couldn't walk with him on the sidewalk, he was so stout; and those little deaf-and-dumb children of the Royces, flashin finger language, it was so sad to see them. And there're a lot of other Charity freaks, too, in my estimation (but they'll all come home; like the cows they'll all come home)—Smollett Thompson (let's not mention
him
) and the rest—leave them alone and they'll all come home, late or soon. What got into this house? What got into this town? Houses and towns hold their tragedies and could tell some things if they could speak. You know how Christy Ganchion left with the Skiles boy for the Merchant Marines. Something happened to Christy, somewhere, that nobody'll ever know. Christy's quiet as a tomb—and dumb as a doornail, some said (but
I
don't believe it—still water runs deep), like Thrash Clegg, they say, but you cain't make me believe it. Anyway when he come back they had a time with him for awhile. Then you know how he married Otey Bell from up in the woods beyond the mill and what all happened, but that's another story, don't ask me.