Wild Life (26 page)

A woman's situation is entirely irreconcilable. Not every one of us should be expected to accept homemaking and child rearing as her main purpose in life: Melba is a decent overseer for my children, gives them all they should have in the way of discipline, a tidy house, regular meals, clean clothes. And I am sprung free—have the time, and the necessary conditions, to write and to read (though conditions are never right for writing and you've just got to write anyway). Still, I always feel it's cowardly in me, or lazy, or shirking, to do only the nice part of taking care of the children. Perhaps I should be giving them what she does (and getting from them what she does!); perhaps there cannot be two women important to a child, and either you are that woman or you are not. If you walk away from them and leave them entirely to the housekeeper, how can you know them or understand their problems? There are so many things only a mother can know or do. Writing comes out of life; life must come first.

And yet at times I am certain I would be a worse mother if prevented from following my own occupation. My life does not go well without writing. It is my flywheel, my cloister, my communication with myself. It is my
eyes to the world, my window for awareness, without which I cannot see anything or walk straight. Would my children wish to be raised by a resentful and bitter scold? But I suppose the truth of the matter is that my children will grow up, themselves, bitter and resentful—ill raised by a mother who ignored them in favor of her own selfish preoccupations.

I like to imagine that, with only sufficient hours in the day, I could be both a saintly Mother and an uncompromising Artist. But of course I feel pressed and frustrated, as though I must continually choose between love of a book and love of a child. And sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, my boat always will drift toward this perilous truth: though I am often curt and cross when my children surround and importune me, I have never felt besieged by the writing—have never wished to cut and run from my fictions.

C. B. D.

September 1907

Death comes continually into my mind. I always have refused to believe in life after death, but here I am, feeling as if something important is about to happen—a threshold about to be crossed—and find I have an interest in discovering what is on the other side. There is nothing like living close to death to get you used to the idea, which is something Montaigne and others have said and which I am now proving to myself by coming within sight of death every day and at the same time becoming slowly free of distress. I have begun to take a kind of pleasure in growing weaker and letting myself go—which I imagine must be the usual feeling among the dying if provided with sufficient time to contemplate the process. I only wish I did not have to die alone.

I have seen men die in terrible ways. Wilem Frei was felled but not killed outright when Byers Alesson dropped his .22 rifle while climbing over a fence—this happened when Wilem and Byers were
shooting in the hills just north of our farm on the Left Fork. When Byers came down to our house, crying and inarticulate, my mother and I went up into the woods and found Wilem with a bullet in his temple, lying gently waiting for us. It was plain that he was mortally hurt. Byers hung back from the scene, wailing and useless, wringing his hands. My mother began trying to stanch Wilem's bleeding, while I had a conversation with him. He was not much more than a boy—he may have been twenty—and I was twelve or thirteen at the time. Sorry about the trouble, was what he said to me, and that he was glad we had come. His only worry, he said, was of dying alone. When I asked him if he was suffering very much he answered no, not very much at all, but how was Byers holding up? He didn't “bear no grudge,” he said, because these kinds of things could happen where shooting was concerned. After going on in this vein a short while, he died.

Pain, of course, is useful as an alarum—for the body to take some sort of action against the danger while there's still time for it to do some good; after that, the brain appears to have certain mechanisms for turning off suffering. It's also true, of course, that these mechanisms can be imprecise and slow. When Teddy became ill with typhus it was seven weeks of perilous living—coming within sight of dying each day—and there was terrible pain; but on the last day of his life he became like a mouse dropped from the jaws of a cat—lying there so quietly, dying without a struggle. And the last thing he said to us (if I heard it right) was, “I have the true ease of myself.”

It is not death but waiting for death that wears one down—and the prospect of dying alone—and the dread of what one may become. Have seen ghosts and apparitions and heard their screams in the night—I
do
fear losing my mind, dying as madwomen do, tearing off my clothes as I run shrieking through the dark trees.

 

Teddy

 

The boy and the dog wrestled with each other in a rambunctious way, the boy down on his knees in the dirt and rolling at times onto his shoulders and his back or neck as the dog rolled too, his feet scrabbling loosely against the boy or against the earth, and the two of
them springing apart every little while, eyeing each other as they circled, and then the boy or the dog, one of them, releasing a sudden high bark and jumping again upon the other. The boy's tongue was a thick salmon-pink muscle, which, in an unconscious habit, he pushed out and held flexed in his teeth as he wrestled. The dog's tongue was long and loose and slavering, which the boy failed to notice, as he also slavered. He imagined that he was a Texas Ranger and the dog a notorious desperado named Wolf Hicks, who had a reputation for dealing death and mayhem. This was not their first encounter, and would not be their last; they were evenly matched in a fight, and Hicks, through trickery or the last-minute arrival of henchmen, always would manage an escape.

The two of them fell apart, panting, and after an interval the dog began to inspect his own genitals. This interested and distracted the boy, who lay on his back in the dry pasture grass, his eyes turned to watch the dog. Under the dog's tongue, a pink tip of penis, shockingly wet and bright, extended itself from the sheath. As the boy lay watching the dog licking his penis, his own tongue extended itself again, as much in imitation of the dog's action as from his big stiff tongue overfilling his mouth: he had an awareness of himself as an animal, as one among the animals. He licked his own mouth and lips, the salt taste becoming the taste of his maleness, his nature, which he apprehended indistinctly.

The pasture was embayed by a long curve of the creek, whose banks were hedged by red alder thickets and its outer limit unambiguously bound by the sudden steep rise of the wooded hills. A cow and an old horse grazed there, and the boy had been sent to drive them in to the barn. In recent nights, a yearling black bear had been reported ambling through the darkness of neighboring fields, and the boy's mother feared the cow or the horse might be killed—shot by certain of her neighbors rushing headlong to clear the world of bears. Wolf Hicks had sprung his bushwhack just as the Ranger drove his herd toward the river, and now that the boy lay daydreaming, the cow and the horse had wandered off to resume grazing.

The dog stood and shook himself and made as if to inspect the grass: he meant to signal the end of their play. The boy, who understood the dog's meaning but objected to his intent, swung his long arm out and grasped the loose skin of the dog's neck in a provoking
way. “Hey, Hikth,” he said, which was the dog's imaginary name, Hicks, and then, “Bawther,” which was the dog's true name—Boxer.

By reason of the shortness of the bridle, or frenum, that attached his tongue to the floor of his mouth, the boy was unable to speak in a completely human way. His impeded, tongue-tied speech was lisping and guttural, a roupy, beastlike articulation as of a bear or an ape attempting human words: a language that could be understood only by members of his family and which kept him isolate and despised by other boys. When the boy hugged the dog and patted him and kissed him, the dog tolerated this, having a dim understanding that he was the boy's only brother, but he was bored with their play and could not be persuaded to wrestle. Eventually the boy gave himself up to the dog's uninterest and he lay down in the late-afternoon light, in the long thrown shadows of the cow, the horse, and became lost in thought.

The boy could not have told anyone what were his thoughts; he had nowhere near an understanding of them. But in the long, feral summer days, he was more attentive than other boys to the smell of the cedar woods, and of dust upon the dry ferns and thimbleberry bushes, of plowed earth, strawberries, lilacs, rotting apples, of barns and cow pastures, of the mud at low tide in the sloughs and along the riverbanks. He had a wild nature, and his understanding of the world was primitive, emotional; he was engrossed with the land and the sky, and though he could not have articulated such things to himself or to the dog, he was aware of the way colors changed and moved in the water at different times of the day, or under different weathers; and the way the air changed its weight, its light, under the shifting presence of clouds. He was lonely and reticent, reclusive, and loved only by his family, but he felt the world to be alive around him, down to the rocks and trees, and felt himself to be embedded in it as completely as an embryo in a womb. Had he lived long enough, this was something that would surely have been driven from him—such is the social compact of Civilization; but within the next year the boy would be dead, killed by an outbreak of typhus that would sweep him up in a windrow along with seven other children living along the upper reaches of the valley; and thus he never would be forced to acknowledge his separation from the rest of Creation.

Cold. Very poor. Beasts in the shadows. How much longer?

 

The wind and the thunder

They are the same everywhere,

What does it matter then,

If I die in a strange land.

M
ARY
A
USTIN
,
“INDIAN DEATH SONG”

There is something someone things I have seen and not reported in these pages not wanting to give proof of an insane mind and so writing now in the darkness where I cannot see the shameful evidence of my own scribbled words, here is what I have seen, their prints first and then seen them skulking along, though when I try to see them better they are gone—shadows—which I think must be creatures of my imagination (lunacy brought on by a starving by freezing) but oh—must believe they are actual creatures as are known to live deeply secret in the woods—so thick the trees here the darkness—and shying from human scent of which I have none, being by now a stinking wild creature myself—which may be a species of bear or Homer's hairy
wildmen or Indians of the most primitive tribe their brutish clothes made of wolfskin and which a human being should fear—I do fear if they should see me butchery or savage assault—but being so afraid to go on alone and to suffer alone the cold nights so densely black in which my eyes strain and strain to see emptiness I must welcome the company even of monsters or ghosts though I don't get close but watch them watch for them and follow their great bare tracks (cannot be made by weightless phantoms but impressed deep in the moss the mud individual toes distinct) and tonight they lie together in the crevice of a rock an undercut, I see their great hairy limbs entangled as animals will do for warmth and comfort sleeping while the very air becomes saturated—rain not pouring but a thick fine quiet drizzle—and my own bed a shallow hole scraped in the earth and pieces of bark leaning over it to direct the rivulets—I am so very cold and wet—believe I would creep under the rock and lie down with those wild creatures if not for the smell the savage reek of their animal nature which I am afraid of and their hugeness—or if they should prove insubstantial and my sanity gone afraid to discover it—so lie here shivering alone sleeping with my eyes open watching them the heavy darkness of their bodies under the lip of the rock face and the slight stirring which must be the shimmer of a lunatic mirage or the twitching of their animal dreams and I hear them their heavy bodies turning in sleep and murmuring which has made me think of my brother Teddy and how he whispered to wraiths every night and thrashed about on his bed and my own fearful ghosts, how I must fight them off every night every night in the cold blackness and lying shaking under piles of hemlock switches with my eyes open listening to the murmuring shapeless mystery of those wild cries in the darkness those sad whimpers those troubled dreams—oh it is just a terrible comfort not to be alone.

 

The worst of a true ghost is, that, to be sure of his genuineness—that is, of his veracity—one must wait the event.

H
ERBERT
M
AYO
,

On the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions
(1849)

On the trunks of certain trees they have left the long ragged slashes of their claws (I believe I have not imagined them) and in those places I have used my knife to free the tender inner bark, which I chew in long thin strips, acerbic but not unpleasant. The troop of shadow-beasts, if that is what they are, makes its way slowly through the primeval forest, not doing bloody murder but browsing like the very deer and elk upon leaves and sprouts of thimbleberry, horsetail, nettle, clover, which I have begun to eat also, going slowly after them, taking their example as to what is edible, though it may be the advice of deluded belief. Where they have nibbled the young twigs of blackberry bushes, I peel and eat the shoots raw. I've seen the marks of their digging, the long scrapes in the mud, where must be wild carrots and wild onions as well as roots of ferns, which my fingernails cannot get at—have begun to whittle a stick slightly curved with a crutch handle, a digging tool, which will also serve for clearing the stones and roots where my bed is to lie each night. I have had a dream in which I located the matches and the lost soda cracker tin—my forlorn pot left behind with the boots, etc.—a dream in which I heated water and cooked snails (as the French do?) with the addition of fiddlehead ferns, and thus made soup which was meager and salty though not vile, and its warmth so very welcome, and then the tin became a deep tub of steaming water which I sat in, tenderly washing with soap and a soft cloth every filthy orifice and weeping sore upon my body. I believe I could eat a fish raw, chewing small bites slowly, before eating grubs or ants, but catching them is a work of patience which I have tried and tried and failed. Today I did put a dead beetle in my mouth and swallowed whole, though afterward imagined horrible hatchings within my belly. (They eat slugs, which I cannot do, not yet, and sowbugs, ants, caterpillars, which they scrape from rotted trees, or turn over old logs and excite the bugs with a stick, which they lift to their mouths and lick with long gray tongues curling around the twigs. I have seen them at evening, at the edges of talus where colonies of white moths were roosting among the rocks—gathering the bodies of the ghostly butterflies into their mouths by the handfuls.)