The House of Breath (14 page)

“In San Antonio I left the circus and took tap dancing at Hallie Beth Stevens' Studio of the Dance, sang out in front of a chorus of tapping girls, had a cane and a hat, and strutted singing, ‘You've Got Me in the Palm of Your Hand'—not before chickens in a Charity henhouse but a real clapping audience.

“The rest I needn't tell you. Bailey's Pasture was my revelation.

“They treated me as though I was a freak in Charity, and I know it was just jealousy and envy. They blamed it on my mother, your Granny Ganchion, because she dressed me like a girl when I was little and called me ‘Follie.' But it was more than that. Right away I learned what I was and went on like that, what I was, and
used
myself for that, made no bones about it—and can't say the same for most of the rest of Charity who don't know
who
they are. What matters if it got me death?

“But if you're going to start calling names, I can tell you a few things about Brother Ramsey in the church, who knew me all my life and even preached my funeral sermon, and who taught me a lot of what I know. Everything in this world is not black and white, as little Charity thinks; there are shades in between. And I can tell some dirt on Jim Lucas and Mimi Day Calkins—sitting there in the Pastime Club with her finger in his fly—and Floydell Lucas, his wife, bent over a cradle at home singing a lullaby—and a lot of other things. (We are all broken over the cradle, Boy.) Nobody's hands are clean in Charity. But let Charity flick its old toad's tongue after the gay green and golden summer files—and let them croak away that same old croaking tune. They don't want anybody to be anything that they can't understand and give a name to. They had to have some ready label to lick and stick on you; and when they couldn't figure me out because I wanted different things from what they in Charity wanted, they started bullying me and torturing me. They were all really afraid of me—and most of them envied me, really envied me.

“The whine and shriek of the planing mill was always in my head, as though they were dressing ship-lap in my brain. And that hard little mouth of hunger pressing hot against my soul. To be fed! Who could feed it in Charity? Oh Charity, I would thou wert cold or hot; but because thou art lukewarm I will spew thee out!

“I take along some memories. The sight of the black watertower squatting like a fat-bellied reptile over Charity eggs; and the old house smelling of O-Cedar Oil; that old yard of guineas and cackling hens and the manure of cows. But Boy, we had a time of it, didn't we? You little frightened thing, always frightened. On one Easter Sunday I taught you a secret. We rolled away some stone, remember?”

“And you don't know how hard I prayed in the barn in the sunsets I thought were the burning end of the world, Follie. You made me feel so full of sin that I never mentioned your name to anybody; and when once and a while they would say your name I would tremble and think they knew. When the Riverbottom Nigras came to town to tell that they had seen a Haint walking in the sloughs of the riverbottoms I knew it was you come back and at night I lay and watched, trembling on the wall, the shadow of the paper bird made by the firelight, and I thought I heard its annunciation: Come
away;
and I had nightmares of a haunted bird at night, and never left the kitchen all day, sitting trembling by the woodstove. I thought I heard you at the windows, scratching; and once I am sure I saw you sitting in the Beantree with the three black hens that lived up there. When the preacher spoke about Sin it always had your face. I have just found your real face, Follie my Follie.”

“Oh Boy, I had to have some drama in a life. I had a rhapsody in me. But it devoured me. I was so afraid of what I found out that I began to run and run from it until I melted down into this death. Can you learn anything from this? Tell it—for me; someone has to tell it.

“Somewhere beyond all this muck and dreck there lies a pasture of serenity and I will find it. I am on my way. Hang a wreath on the door of this fallen house for me. How did I die? I invited Death. Because I was so very weary. The rest is a secret never to be told (see seven crows). Leave us alone and we will destroy ourselves in the end, but we will leave undestroyed our other selves to breathe the bridges of breath between our ruined and isolate islands.

“I am the Ur-Follie of many derivations of your time. Find me on walls, most prophetically adumbrated; in shadows of firelight; bursting from clocks; turning on steeples. And I am the beast-muzzled Prince, black-lipped and riverlapping, begging the miracle. Give, and change the Beast. Watch.”

“I watch and watch and watch, Follie, and I will build a bridge between these ruined islands; then blow the bridge of breath away. But the islands will remain forever like stone islands in a still and frozen sea. For we are only breath to blow and bridge eternal ruins while we breathe, until we are blown away.”

XI

OPEN the cellar door (that swings on hinges of web) and cry down, “Granny Ganchion!”—and rouse the worm called Old Fuzz that the children were always afraid of.

Now Granny Ganchion, when you went down in the rootcellar so often I know what happened down here where you sat among all your preserves—the figs and apricots and pears like jewels shining in the Mason jars, shaped like the parts of love. I know you fondled and counted that string of rubyred beads like a rosary.

Here in the cellar, once, when I came down for chowchow, sent by Aunty and trembling to see Old Fuzz, I first discovered where you were when I missed you in the house. I stood at the little cellar door and watched you who couldn't hear me, sitting dressed in a yellow widebrimmed hat with boafeathers round it. I heard, rumbling in the heavens of your world overhead, while you sat down in your Purgatory praying yourself through your beads free of it and into a Paradise of Fruit, the thunder of all their feet in their coming and going, so that their lives must have seemed to you below them only a walking or a rocking; and I know now as you heard their footsteps you named them over, “There's Christy, I can tell the way he walks, he's lookin for me, always tryin to find me; there rocks Malley over me in her rocker by the window, she is rockin across my skull. Going and comin, backwards and forwards, from gallry to breezeway, they are all walkin and rockin over me and I bend still beneath them here like their dark root in the Charity earth.”

All your desires were preserved in Mason jars. And then when you saw the light from the cellar door and me standing in it (like what angel come in light through your door?) you jumped and made your
uck uck
sounds and then murmured, “Boy! Boy!” as though I was a lover called to you by your wishing for him and you were waiting, ready for him. And then I closed the door. They said I was pale when I came back without the chowchow and that it was because I had seen Old Fuzz in the cellar, and laughed and ate without it.

But what I saw was the truth of you, Granny Ganchion, that I know now and now give back to you in this cellar, and leave it here. I know you sat down here with Old Fuzz, that I always imagined to be like some great green-warted worm coiled down here, and that he said to you, “Hannah Ganchion, you got nothin in the world but a few hundred jars of rotten preserves and an old pair of rubyred beads. The rest is silence and no love and no brightness anywhere, only a house full of silent folks makin faces at you. And an old dead husband, Gentry Ganchion, that used to say to you, ‘All right, Hannah, then I swear to God I'll go downtown to the City Hotel!'” (and the time I heard the whores in the city jail, blessed damozels leaning their heads out the golden windows singing, “Bless them all, bless them all, the long and the short and the tall”) “and him sneakin over to niggertown right from your own bed at midnight, while ever month there was a nigger tarred and feathered and beaten up on Rob Hill because he'd raped an East Texis white woman” (they said you weren't a man in East Texas until you'd had a nigger woman); “and you just finally drove him away and he went to St. Louis and died, alone, in a Convalescent Home.”

And you protested to Old Fuzz that you had Christy and that you had had Folner and that you had had a time in your own time. And then the worm flashed and said, “That's a lie and a fairy tale! You know it and the preserves know it and the rubyred beads know it. You know Folner's done strange things like going away with a show and everyone says there was something wrong with him—the time he came home in patent leather shoes and even had a permanent wave in his blonde hair proved it. And what happened around Charity and the commotion he caused among the young boys, and everyone sayin he acted just like a girl—and at the depot when they took his used-up, burnt-out body off the train, people of Charity saw box after box of costumes with spangles and rhinestones and boafeathers and said, lookin in, ‘Can this be all that's left of Folner Ganchion to come back from San Antone: spangles and rhinestones and boafeathers?'”

But you said, “Them was all lies in a little town. Cause they come home, Christy come home and Follie come home…. O my sons and daughters…! Wrenched screamin out of me and I couldn't even hear their screams…!

“Worm! Where did I come from, who was I… I cain't remember…”

“You was born and raised in Alabama, ran with a flock of children through the pastures like geese; and your papa was a sea captain besides ownin about a dozen Negroes that worked his cottonfields….”

“I remember, I remember… Worm! How did I ever meet Gentry Ganchion, that ole cuss that finally went off to Saint Louis and died there? Tell me…”

“He wasn't the first you met, nor the last. Tell yusself. That's why you come down here. Tell yusself.”

“Deafness is hearin just a person's own voice; who's deaf to their own voice? But it seems like I'm talkin to somebody hearin me. Somebody settin someplace thinkin of all their life… What does that mean? Thinkin how their life, now that it is near the end of their life, and all lives, uz like some book read, with some plot and story to it, and things happenin in it to make a long and unbelievable story—would anybody ever believe it if I told it?—and how now they knew what their life as a story had been, just in one moment settin somewhere in a moment of clearin they see it clear and what was all in it, all along the line. So that they could tell it, after that—to who? To theirselves is enough—like a made-up story, or sing it out like somebody in a Christmas cantata, comin in suddenly where there are people gathered round and singin out the long long story of what had happened to them in their experience. And that this was it: how a person could come to them (that was Vester Langley) and in a orchard (this was Hare's orchard) under flowers on boughs and under petals of broken flowers on the spring grass, and where there was danger of bein caught, and how for the first time in their lives they were touched and give up and let it happen. And then—
uck uck—
how a warmth like a ray of sun slipped in them, havin no shape or weight it seemed: quiverin, brilliant, feelin like a golden minnow or a goldfish and felt to them like the feel of a minnow slippin through the hand; and then it lept and jerked and jackknifed like a leapin fish. And how, lyin under what would be in the summer fruit hangin on the fruittrees, they could, then, they learnt in that orchard, be sworded by a sword of warmth, be bladed by some blade, and set aglow like a Fourth a July night by this.

“And then how they could go along (this was still Vester) and this happen here and that happen there, making things worst or making things better, and in the orchard the pears hung low and heavy and they touched them and loved them in their hands and then how they laid under the peartrees with the pears in their faces.

“Oh there could be the pears that I put up, brought by by Mr. Hare. And those plums, they could be the blossoms I putt in my hair and that I laid under and had fallin on my face (before it slid down like icin on a cake into this fallen face), that I laid on. Mind as well see that things come round to an end if you wait long enough. Look look at the fruit!” (I see the fruit in their jars like ruined aquariums with their corpses of fishes: rhubarb, indigo plums, green cherries, and once golden apricots; the wizened sapless figs.)

“And then how at the end a summer Vester went off to the North and I was left alone. And how I waited and waited until another one came, and this was Jeff Cranberry and how I married him and how we went along, not too good, until he was shot in the buggy with me settin by him. I had a baby comin and that was Lauralee. Then the whole town made a fuss over me because I was a widow and a pretty one, and one who made a fuss was Gentry Ganchion and we married. Had Malley right away. Then nothin but sawmills forever after, I married sawdust. Then we come to Texis to the Charity Sawmill. The noon whistle and Gentry comin home for dinner. But in some year, when it twas I don't know now, the Carnival come, and I spun a wheel and he knocked niggerbabies down to win these beads—he wanted to brush the sawdust that we had laid in off my skirt but I said let it be you'll
never
brush that sawdust off.

“Then Christy come. When Christy was made in me his maker made him in sorrow and tears in a wet tent and on sawdust, and we cried together; O Lord that face! Bobblin and swimmin over me, that face before my face starin down on my face pressin against my face, with such sadness in it, eyes closed, eyes wild as storm moons, teeth grittin and mouth hot and pantin—over my face this face, ghost-faced, until it closed down upon me and fitted upon me like a mask and our faces melted into each other, his tongue slippin into my mouth, ready mouth, and our faces meltin into each other… Then all down the line and length of us we fitted and melted and mixed, swellin into hollow, knowin we uz made for this, like tongue n groove…. And I rocked him in the cradle of myself…

“He was divin, divin, down down—and risin—and fallin—and then when we touched everwhere, and locked tight and rocked like one person so that we felt like one tiny cog, oiled, turnin smoothly and without one sound the whole, huge cisternwheel of the human race—it happened up inside us, and we cried; and broke apart; and saw through the splits in the tent the burstin flashes of the whirlimagig and heard again the music of the hobbyhorses like a frenchharp.