The House of Breath (11 page)

“And when I would wipe you away then it would break my heart and break your heart and you would catch my face in your hands as if you could hold me there forever, caught in your poor old hands, and weep and say, ‘Ben Ben Berryben'; and then I knew that I could never never tell you what it was, only break your heart again and again.

“I tricked you all to get away, but I couldn't tell the truth about the things that claimed me. Because you always said these things were sins. I always had that terrible guilt before you, had to tell lies and lies—
you really made me evil
, you made me be just what you were afraid I'd be. I served you all and let you all use me any way you wanted; anything you wanted me to be I was. Took care of little Jessy day in day out. I never had any romance except because of what Folner and Christy and Swimma told me like a secret. (Once when we sat on the fence rail in the late afternoon, Swimma said, ‘Look!' and it was the bull upon Roma the cow in some savage battle and when I said, ‘The bull will kill Roma the cow!' Swimma laughed on the fence and leaned over and told me. Later she wrote a word on the chimney brick and couldn't erase it, and I would see those letters written on the walls of the bedroom and on the ceiling, everywhere, smudged the way Swimma's hand had smudged them. I never fully understood until we pumped in the swing, first me then Swimma, and then I suddenly knew the whole terrible secret. After that when Swimma would cry, Pump me! pump me!' I would tremble.)

“Sometimes, because I am a failure in the world, I blame my failure on you all; say that you got me so mixed up when I was young that I can never clear myself up again inside; or that you made me so false to myself that I am unreal and never can be real. But I must see that the reason I am a failure is that I gave myself away to everybody and so had none of myself left for myself—I mean the part of oneself that is the part he works with, held by himself to work with.

“And yet I collaborated with you in making myself false—for I was so afraid of myself and what it wanted to do, and so ashamed of it. So you and I together stomped the life out of it, every day, mangling it like a beetle.

“But suddenly something beyond all of us, greater than all of us, freed us from each other. We tore at our hearts because we were powerless against this thing that came in between us and wrenched us apart. This was loving somebody.

“She came, gentle and sweet, bringing peace, at a time when I was the loneliest and most miserable boy in the world. She made all my secrets vanish into her. For she made me feel that everything I had kept secret was kept back just to tell her—we were joined within a secret that was divulged to us by touching where we had never touched before, and by the honesty of passion where we had been dishonest before. After our honesty with each other, what more was there to hide? We had told. Passionate love is a conspiracy to tell each other's truth to each other—that I am like this and you are like that, and together, in a joining, we make a moment's truth of what each is. Beyond the moment's truth, though, lies the hour's untruth, which keeps yearning to be bared into truth again. She broke my unreality against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against and mended me with all the care in the world, it seemed. For her I betrayed you and for myself I betrayed her; we melted into each other. I tricked you and left you; and after I had left you, all your kin and all your world died away from you and fell away, leaving you broken off and isolate. All of us were shattered from our whole, I roaming through the world with Evella, you sitting by the window trying to piece everything together again in a falling house.

“That very meadow upon which you close your shutter was a pasture of revelation, of trembling news for me. For it was enchanted, some grass of magic grew there, could it have been the bitterweed? When the circus came, Folner and you and I went—just across the tracks, there it was: the lovely sparkling girls whirling in the air like stars. And the times I played there—all the things I found when I played there brought me secret news: once a curled transparent skin; the evening primroses, hairy and firm, opening and closing at the touch of light or darkness; the doll was lost there and later found, but found too late, trodden and mangled and broken by Roma the cow. After the circus left to go across the river and into the world, stealing Folner with it like a gypsy steals a painted bead, I went there and found sawdust all over the meadow (and got sawdust in my shoes) and all the secret signs left by the magic circus; but the bitterweeds grew up
through
the sawdust, Mama. And Evella and I walked through the bitter-weeds on summer nights (scattering the pollen and gathering it on our legs), I telling her about my hopes and she saying, ‘I will follow you across the river and past Riverside.'

“What did we go after? I can't tell you. What do you yearn after, here at the window?
Something marvelous, something magic, that makes all secrets vanish
.

“When the forlorn beast, the spotted heifer Roma, bellowed at dusk in the wet meadow, it was a mystic desire, a voluptuous fear, a call way into the future, beyond the meadow, beyond Charity, over the River and far beyond—the voice of Bailey's Pasture. That wintertime, standing by the window, I worried about the poor cow caught in the ditch. The gray, dull winter was everywhere, in the eaves where icicles hung like daggers, in the naked trees and across the bare dead earth where life lay frozen and paralyzed. That wintertime, standing by the window and looking out upon the winter and behind me you, Mama, singing softly ‘Pass me not, O gentle Savior, Hear my humble cry'; as you sewed something, rocking in a chair. The loneliness of standing looking out a window at winter upon a town, feeling afraid, like crying, while you, Mama, sat in this room sewing and singing.

And the poor spotted cow out there, frozen in the ditch, the way she bellowed and called out for them to help her, to break her out of the ice (‘Mama,' I said, ‘they are coming with axes. Mama,' I said, ‘they will kill her, Roma the cow; Mama,' I said, ‘they cannot get her out of the frozen ditch and oh she cries, she cries so sadly').

“The low pleading bellows of Roma came through the window on the winter wind and I felt sick with it all, the room, you, Mama, singing and sewing in that chair as if nothing were happening, the winter spread over everything outside, killing everything, the men (Christy was the leader) with the axe over the poor ugly cow Roma caught in the ice. (‘Mama,' I said, ‘she is crying so loud, now, like the dog the time he was sick under the house. Mama!' I cried, ‘they have hit her hard on the head with the axe,
hard! hard! hard!
Mama—she is quiet, now; Mama—she is not crying anymore. Mama… Roma the cow is dead.'

“But you kept on singing softly softly

“Evella and I wandered and wrote you occasionally. I was in a beautiful spell. It was in an autumn and it was a turning round, through light and darkness, under suns and stars, in a fantasy land. The faces of days were disaster and passion. The luminous wind was binding the autumn to the glistening world, blowing it round through trees with a sound of the breaking sea, and the sun was driving summer away, weaving autumn into the world and turning a wheel in Evella and me, turning us towards and turning us away—all love is a turning on a spit, towards, through, and away from flame—and we were like sleepwalkers and Evella would turn to me and say, ‘Who are you?' and I would murmur, ‘I am you and you are me and we are some rabblement of soul…'

“With Evella I could never see myself, only hold up a mirror for Evella to see herself; thus I became unreal. Who has the courage to destroy the one who makes him unreal? We parted; and she rolled away like a stone into an abyss. Now I had only myself to remake. I was alone and floating in the world; and I was alien to Charity and felt I never could return to all those secrets—the passion of the Bull, Swimma's news of trembling, Christy's songs and stories and his scar, the blood of his killed creatures….

“The world is a window fogged by my own breath through which I cannot see the world because of my own breath upon the pane; and until I wipe it away with this ragged sleeve, I shall not see what lies beyond the window; nor you, Mama. We spend our youth breaking the enchantments of childhood; it is the bitterest time of all. Youth is the naked, disenchanted child, shivering without garment; for the garments of childhood fall into ashes.

“Of all the evils you taught and tried to teach me, the
only
evil is that we cut ourselves off from any force that wants to flow into us and use us like a turbine; or that when that force finds us we hold ourselves still, blind and deafen ourselves to it. The finding of that force, the awareness of it, quivering in us, trying to turn us so that we may generate, and the attempt to use it is to make oneself real. The substitution of any other force is a mechanical turning and is false; is evil.

“To belong to this force does not make me evil or a failure at all, it only gives me back to you, to all of you, Evella and all of you whom I have ever loved or who have ever loved me; only restores me to you.

“Oh it is a crooked path I follow, Mama, but a straight wisdom comes from it once in a while; and once in a while a sure and beautiful joy comes from it and I will build my life on that wisdom and on that joy that comes once in a while. And give it all back to you and those who follow you, to mend all that is ruined and broken.

“O the drone of the flies and the bees droning in the zinnias like a sound blown by a child on a comb and a piece of tissue-paper; and the melancholy working of the wind in the trees and a whole dead town gleaming out before us in a false serenity under the burning sun of a fleecy summer Sunday sky with a piece of a moon in it, and nothing happening.

“Mama open your eyes; open the shutter, Mama. For surely one day I'll come back to this house. And what will that terrible, terrible moment be like when the shutter will open slowly like the unfolding of a waking go-to-sleep flower and there is beheld before you the wide shining meadow of Bailey's Pasture, yellow with blooming sweetclover and spotted with a thousand trembling bees—and through it on the old path will be coming me, wading as if I were wading in to a shore through shallows of the sea, home; and with gifts in my hands.

“What will that terrible moment be like when you, blind from cataracts, will sit on there, never knowing that the shutter is open, with the tune playing on in your head; blind for so long that suddenly when vision comes restored you go on blind and yearning and wailing for the vision?

“Hear me, Mama? Hear me in the shutter?”

But Malley Ganchion you went on sitting; there with the wind's tune in your head and said, “Let me see your face, Ben; I want to see your face; I want to catch and hold it in my hands.”

But no answer came.

And when no answer came, you sat and said, “Oh I wait for something to come to me, just as I expected it when long ago I flung open this winda in the mornin upon Bailey's Pasture; and I guess it must be the peace of Death I am waitin for and was always waitin for, to come callin like old hare-lipped Mr. Hare from his rumblin wagon, ‘Paa-ahs! paa-ahs!' And oh I am old and tired and left behind by all I gave everthing I ever had to, and I want to die and pass away from all this eternal task of memry and heartbreak and never remember, never remember again.

“And now listen—the voices have gone, and only the little tune remains, playin that beautiful and peaceful hymn of the Methodist Church, ‘Oh Let Us Pass over the River and Rest Under the Shade of the Trees.'”

X

FOLNER was sad and cheap and wasted, a doll left in the rain, a face smeared and melted a little, soft and wasted and ruined. Where did he go when he crept away in the nighttime, staying sometimes for two or three days, then returning spent and wasted and ruined a little in his face?

(Now ruin returning to ruin (passion of Beast to Prince's peace) come, purged of that spleen and blood of passion (into the empty purity of peace), come through Bailey's Pasture (Beauty's changed Beast) over the railroad track and home—who had lapped with bestial tongue the riverwater at the river, the blood of creatures under his nailed claws and a salt tear dripping into the river. (He waits for the crashing of glass—alone in our most ultimate distresses we all wait for the crashing of glass when the glittering Redemption will rise, springing corruptible and purified from a pasture of bitterweeds—O endless cycle of suffering that turns between Beast and Prince—and hears only the endless sound of the feet of the bird grinding upon leaves.) Ruin in the peace of afterpassion, peaceful and destroyed a little in the ruins of the jack-knife agony, the leaping shrimp-like flexions, in the collapse and debris of earthquake of kiss and trembling, himself a ground ruin, the hiss of finish whispering from the ruin like the aftersmoke over rubble: did he not know that ruin lay wound within the works of everything, for him? That every constructed thing carried hidden in it the intricate greengolden wheels and chains of terror that turned for him? Did he not know that the house of breath and blood that held him promised only terror within every room, where terror would break out through some unconsidered door to chime its own plumed hour of irreversible doom upon him? He walked in the rime of the bog of the icebound bottomlands and heard, with beak of horn and horned nails, the bird of fire whose prey he was, chiming his terrible Midnight; his image in the rime of the bog is rainbow… He is Devil, he is Prince, he is Heartbreak. He is destiny of fire, he is ashes and cinders. He is artifice of breath, grinding in his own ruin's cinders under a blown, gray, bubbled moon of breath across a field of ash.)