The Hair of Harold Roux (36 page)

But why is this house so breathless and silent? Where are Agnes and his children? Not that they would be expected to comfort him; he is expected to be perfect, or at least to approach perfection, and anything that goes wrong is presumed to be his fault—which it often is. They all seem to love him in a kind of exasperated way. Intensely, but with this undertone of betrayed perfection. “What has he done now?” he can hear them thinking. “What has he forgotten now?” But it is unnatural not to have them here. It feels like falling—that breathless, anxious moment in an elevator that quickly passes, but now does not pass. He limps upstairs, no witnesses to see how painful his knee really is, and begins to pull off his clothes. If he gets into the bathtub at three in the afternoon
the telephone is sure to ring. Somebody will come to the door. Why is he compelled to answer every ring, knock and question, no matter whose? And what is he going to say to Mark Rasmussen’s mother, whose child is a man but still her child? Just as his children are still his, though growing into their strange independence.

He sits in the bathtub, the water rising, burning him slowly, its half-visible presence, this strange white-blue translucence, rising on him as slowly as the minute hand of a clock. It seems wrong to be alone in an empty house and in the bathtub. There is sin in this flowing liquid, this unfamilial solitariness.

There could be a winter night with the cold snow ticking at the windows, the two children in their cotton flannel pajamas, warm against his inner arms. Janie and Billy Benham, those soft-hard awarenesses, one on each side of him, waited for his voice. Agnes waited, too, for their story to continue, watching from across the room where the fire flickered in its black irons. The story would continue, immune to change because the children would not let it change. They would grow out of its magic someday and it would remain, whole, like an abandoned old friend, like Jonquil the teddy bear in the old tin trunk in the upstairs hall closet, fondly remembered if thought of at all.

Janie said, turning her intense, pale face to look up at him, “Come on, Dad. Where the little girl and the little boy saw the mountain and the waterfalls and the black clouds.”

“In the old lady’s eye,” Billy said. “Right
inside
her eye.”

“All right,” Aaron said. He must tell the story but keep himself from the power of their involvement in it. It is so dangerous to him to have this power, so far beyond pleasure in the telling of the story. When his children squeeze his arms in happiness, or in anticipation or dread, he feels their lives moving beyond his fiction, beyond this warm house, into the real places of blood and death.

But he told the story as best he could, about Tim Hemlock the father, Eugenia the mother, Janie and Billy the children, and of the terrible winter when the Traveler never came, when the strange old lady who never spoke except with her hands sat every day and night on the bench before the fire. He told what they ate when their food began to run out and all the animals were gone from the forest. How they had to slaughter the pig, and how they did it, the pig’s bright blood crimson on the snow, and all the lean pieces and parts of the Pig

Later Tim Hemlock grew weak and sick. That happened after the one-day thaw when the air turned summery and strange, then turned back to winter cold so deep the farm and the forest were encased in blue ice hard as iron. When, after that, Oka’s milk began to dry up, Janie spent many hours in the animal-smelling richness of the barn. Sometimes she thought she could talk to Oka, but other times she wondered if she made up Oka’s words in her own mind and Oka hadn’t really said them at all. Brin, the ox, deep in the stall, sighed as if he never felt like saying anything, but Oka did seem to say things to her, to answer her questions in deep ruminant slow answers as heavy in themselves as Oka’s great body and bones. “Oka knows how butter grows,” the butter song went, and those seemed to be Oka’s words, too.

“My father’s sick, Oka,” Janie said. “And you didn’t give much milk this morning. Are you sick, too? I hope you aren’t.”

As Oka moved her head slowly, sighing, her jaw sliding slowly from side to side, Janie seemed to hear deep, echoing words. They were about a calf, a brown and white calf with long awkward legs and a handsome bony head, and how Oka’s milk was rich with cream then, she turning in the warm air and sweet grass, clover grass, into richness and sustenance, the giver of life. But now she was sad, down through the hollow, four-chambered depths of her cowness, heavy, heavy with sadness for a place she had once been long ago, a wide
meadow and a bony calf, sweet water and the green heat of the grass.

Janie was filled with sadness to hear of the deep yearning of her friend. She had always been so grateful for the milk and butter and cheese that Oka gave them. Oka was the giver of life, and now her sadness made Janie sorrow for the beautiful rich meadow and the bony, long-legged calf, as if she, too, had been happy and calm there long ago.

Janie Benham’s fingers dug into Aaron’s arm, both of her hands gripping him fiercely. He knew her feelings; he didn’t dare look down at her face which would reveal her pure sympathy for the cow, the beloved beast. Those emotions were so pure and clear, not innocent—because a child could never afford to be innocent—but clear, with the naked clarity of a child’s vision. He had stopped, and now he coughed to hide the uncertainty of his voice, that deep adult tonality that was the maker of this tale for them. Billy had taken hold of his other arm, pulling on it to hurry him up, to get him going again. His children, not by their own choice thrown into dependence upon him.

So he went on with the story, about how Tim Hemlock grew worse, until he lay by the fire on a pallet, breathing quick little breaths hardly longer than the breaths of a deer mouse, and how Eugenia and the children were near to despair. They were all hungry, and the wood was giving out so the room was so cold they could see their breaths. Death itself seemed to hover at the door and the frozen windows of the cabin.

And then came the time when Billy couldn’t make himself eat the small crust of bread he was given for supper. It would not soften in his mouth. There was his father, so sick, and the bread seemed as hard as iron. Iron, he thought. And then he remembered. It was the old woman. They were all so worried and frightened about his father they hadn’t thought of the old woman at all. She might have been a piece of wood sitting, sitting there on the bench all day long. She had said
once in her hand language to Tim Hemlock, “The month of the iron ice will be the worst.” And now, certainly, they were in the month of the iron ice. February. With these thoughts he was awakened again to the strangeness of the old woman, what she had brought with her as a gift when she first came to the cabin. Yes, there they were, all the little birch-bark boxes of powders up on the shelf, each with a picture cut into its top. He remembered some of the pictures of plants: goose-foot, arrowhead, roseroot, kinnikinnick, glasswort, purslane and dock. Others he didn’t recognize. Suddenly he felt that it was time to open the boxes. For one thing, all of those plants he recognized were good to eat, and they were hungry. He got a stool and climbed up on it so he could reach the shelf.

“What are you doing?” Eugenia asked.

“We’ve got to eat,” Billy said. “Here, Janie, take these as I pass them down.”

“But we don’t know what’s in them!” Eugenia said.

“I do. Some of them, anyway.” Somehow he knew he was right, that it was almost too late but not quite. Then he happened to see a movement out of the corner of his eye, a brown thing moving. He looked, and was shocked to see that the old woman stared brightly into his eyes. She was speaking to him! Her arm was raised, her hand limp at the end of her wrist, limply falling. Her hand reminded him of something, of the picture of a hand. Yes! He remembered that on the cover of one of the boxes was a hand delicately poised like that. It also reminded him of something else, something plantlike, but quickly he found the box with the hand on it and took it to the old woman.

She nodded, her polished, cracked old face unmoving but her eyes bright. She raised her arms and her hands began to move quickly, up and down, back and forth, her crippled old fingers moving, too. He couldn’t understand anything of what she was trying to say, and he felt hopeless again. But a strange thing happened, little by little. He would never know how it happened, but he began to understand! Her gestures that a minute before were nothing but the meaningless
twitches of an old woman’s arms and hands suddenly began to mean water, box, powder, cup. Other movements suddenly meant open, heat, pour, stir, and finally all the different kinds of words—words for things and words for doing—came together just as easily as the words he had spoken all his life.

When the old woman stopped speaking she nodded three times and he nodded three times back, then began his preparations. Janie and Eugenia watched in wonderment as he put just so much of the brown powder from the box with the hand on it into a large cup. He added hot water from the water pot that hung over the fire, added a pinch of kinnikinnick and a pinch of glasswort and stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon. He got down from the shelf the two kinds of mushrooms they hadn’t dared to eat before—the yellow ones and the red ones. They were dried out now, and he put them together in the mortar and with the pestle ground them into a fine powder.

“But what are you going to do with those things, Billy?” Eugenia said. “They may be dangerous!”

“I’m making medicine for Dad,” Billy said, pouring the ground mushrooms into the steaming cup.

“No!” Eugenia said. “It might be poison! We don’t know what those things are!”

“Are you
sure
, Billy?” Janie said.

“No, I’m not exactly
sure
,” Billy said, “but I feel this is the right thing to do.”

And so Billy propped his father’s head up in his arm and held the strange steaming broth to his lips. Billy could see the orange-yellow steam enter his father’s nose at each short breath. Soon the breaths became longer, longer and more easy, and then, still deep in sleep, his father drank the brownish broth. When he had drunk it all he still slept, far too deeply for their voices to follow him, but it was an easier sleep, and they all at once dared hope that he might live.

Now Billy Benham’s hands pressed Aaron’s arm, the small hands holding his father’s thick forearm as if it had been in danger of going away. He would not be as demonstrative
of his excitement and pride about the boy’s brave cleverness, but his hands held tightly.

The story went on, as it had to. When they looked around to thank the old woman, she was gone. When they looked further they found that the barn door was open and that Oka was gone, too. Brin and the goats were there in the dim light of the barn, but Oka was gone. They couldn’t tell which direction she had taken because no hoofprints would show in the ice. They tried to comfort Janie but she could not be comforted. Eugenia made a thick, nourishing soup for them from some of the powders in the birch-bark boxes, but Janie couldn’t eat. “Oka will be hungry!” Janie cried. “Dear Oka! Where can she go on the ice with nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat?” Later, when she was in bed, all she could see was Oka, somewhere deep in the strange wilderness, hungry and alone. Oka, who had been so generous to them, all alone in a cruel land so different from the warm green fields she yearned for, with no one to help her. Even now the deadly cold might have her down on her side, awkward on the hard, slippery ice. Janie couldn’t think of anything else. She couldn’t sleep in her warm bed when Oka was in the cold, so when everyone else was asleep she got up, as quietly as she could, dressed herself in her warmest clothes—her fur parka with the fringed hood, her fur-backed mittens, boots with the fur inside and the iron crampons strapped to the soles—and stepped out into the moonlight where it was so clear she was in the cold zero chill of the moon itself. She didn’t know where to go to look for Oka, but she had to go. And that was how she left her warm home and her family for the cruel shadows of the frozen forest.

His last words had that final sound. Janie Benham groaned, a noise that held, at its rising end, a question. Could the story go on? A little girl named Janie was going on her great adventure. What about that vision of dark mountain and falling water, and the black clouds rolling? How brave and kind she was! Because she loved a cow she would leave her home and go alone upon that deadly quest.

“It’s time for bed,” Aaron said.

“It’s nine-thirty,” Agnes said from across the room. “It’s late and you both have to go to school tomorrow.”

“Just till where the little girl …”

“No. Come on, now.”

Billy stared quietly across the room at the fire, his cowlick standing up in a silken whorl on his head that was still balanced upon the slender neck of childhood.
“They
don’t go to school,” he said.

“It’s a story,” Aaron said. “Maybe they’re taught at home. I just didn’t get to their lessons.”

“His father taught him to cut jerky and he helped his father all the time.”

“Her mother taught her how to sew moccasins and make butter,” Janie added.

“You’re both procrastinating.”

“I don’t want to go to bed yet,” Billy said in a calm, thoughtful voice, as if for the first time in his life that feeling deserved rational consideration.

But they had to go to bed because the father and the mother, who had the power, would make them go to bed. Not soon, not later, but now. Janie got up with a sulky swagger. It wasn’t fair. Her look at him was resentful, glistening, her turned-down mouth almost ugly. He was about to call her ungrateful; wasn’t the story a gift from him?

“I just want to talk about it for a little while,” Billy said.

Janie immediately understood Billy’s new method and joined it. “What’s the matter with that?” she asked.

His children’s brilliant sly reasonableness made Aaron’s heart turn with love and admiration.

Aaron has been dissolved. He wakes bodiless, his soul at the specific gravity of tepid water. What used to be his legs and arms feel little more cohesive than gelatin. But there is something he has to do. All he knows is that it is something he doesn’t want to do, but of course that condition is so usual
it doesn’t help him remember. Then he does remember and reaches a gelatinous arm for his watch, where he left it on the bathroom scales. Four o’clock: he must go right now. He’d rather be a sinuous body of kelp, his head a hollow flotation chamber swirling gently in the warm tides of a timeless sea. But like an awkward, transitional monster he heaves himself from the brine. His knee no longer hurts quite so much but it does not want to be bent; certain valves within that complex joint are plugged with grease. His wrist will do nearly anything for him except be leaned upon. In the mirror he sees a Band-Aid melting from his jaw, a bloodless blue cut showing. He talks to the parts of his faithful body as he dries and gets dressed, reminding them of all their shared experiences. The captain may be crazy but they owe him a certain loyalty and he is certain they will do their utmost. Besides, they are far from port and they’d better make the best of it.