The House of Breath (18 page)

“We'll go to the cemetery, we'll go take flowers to the graves.

“O tell a child your griefs. Tell him all your wickednesses, all your secrets. Boy, Boy you are so good, what made you so good? I am spoiled and he is clean; O I am vile, a shitten lamb. I will corrupt him, do not let me corrupt him when we get to the thicket. I didn't spoil Otey, I let her wait; I can let a thing wait until it is time; O Lord, let me let him wait—but what will get him, what will claim him eventually and spoil him? Back a Shultzes Bakry onct, I drew a picture on the signboard of it and then took Hapabelle Cook back there to see it. But I never touched her. O myself, how splendid myself, good as a stallion, and pretty, and circumcised (is he?), for who, who got me? Does he do it? How will I ask him? (If your Uncle Jack was on a mule and couldn't get off would you help your Uncle Jack off?)”

We had come into the deepest gloom of the woods, vauted by enormous pinetrees, called the Thicket, and I knew it was time. I had a garland of birds Christy had shot and I had run to gather like flowers in a wild enchantment…. How long had we been hunting? We were standing by a pool of the river. I looked at my quivering image in the pool, throbbing as if the pool were breathing through me. A purple snake glided over my image and Christy shot it, tearing my image into pieces.

And then he sat down on a stump (oh is that stump covered over with blooming vines now? do birds or possums nest in it?), looking as tired as if he had lived through all the ages, and with such a longing and such an ageing in his face that I backed away—for he looked like a beast in the woods, shaggy and gray and fierce. Yet some enormous tenderness was rising out of him. His look asked for something that I could not give because I had not learned how to give it.

I backed away, backed away and he sat still on the stump. He pointed his gun at me to shoot me like a bird; and I backed away. And then he lowered his gun and watched me and let me get away; and then I ran.

I ran and ran and felt myself melting down as I ran, but I would not cry. It was towards twilight and soon it would be dark. O which way was home? The sun was setting. I ran and ran.

All the woods were now saying the same things to me that I had heard during the long and timeless hunt with Christy. Something like stars was twinkling in my loins. I prayed. Moss hung from trees like long hair and I saw the little green fuzz on rocks. What would I ever do with all this that had been said to me, now that Christy knew I knew all this? I would pray against it. I walked praying through the woods. O which way was home? The sad dusk was falling, and I was lost, lost. There was a kind of purring of the woods before dark. Which way was home? I had left Christy alone in the woods and night was coming. I called, “Christy Christy!” but only the woods, faraway, called him too; and he did not answer. Then I cried, “Christy Christy come home, come ho-o-me!” Only an echo answered and no answer from Christy came. Some burden weighed upon me, some yoke around me.

I was by the river. There, in a place, I suddenly saw the print of Christy's body in the sand where he had kneeled down to drink, and I kneeled into it and drank as Christy had and felt at that moment that I was Christy drinking from our River. As I kneeled something swung against my face like petals of flowers and it was the birds Christy had shot and I had tied by their little legs to a string, as fishermen do fish, and had strung them round my neck. I saw that I was dappled by the blood of birds and that the beaks had beaten against my bare arms as I had run and brought my own blood there, mixed with the blood of birds.

I ran on again with his yoke of birds swinging against me, Christy's message to me. I ran blessed with his yoke of loves, of words, his long sentence of birds, bloody and broken and speechless, sentences of his language shot out of his air and off his trees' boughs that were his words' vocabulary: flying words that call at twilight and twilight, nest and hatch and fly free for others, yet caged in his birdcage of mind, and betraying him, but freed by my hand on his hand; and brought down solid and sullied by beebee shot from his air by his own aim and fire (misfire!) for me to gather and make speak: answer to his caged whisper: with tongues of birds.

I ran marked and stained. How would I ever wash away all this blood of birds? O now he was bird and I was bird, he was my truth and my untruth, he was my victim, he contained me, I possessed him.

Now it was dark and I was full of fears. In a pond I passed, the moon lay fallen and small and mean among weeds and fallen branches. All birds were calling and returning to bough or nest without Christy there to try to shoot them, safe and homing at nightfall. O who would welcome me home when I finally got home?

Now the woods seemed a huge web that held Christy like a caught insect in it. Now I really
loved
Christy, longed for him, calling to him (O where was he?). We had come to the woods in a dream and in a quick dream he had faded away from me. The ripe cracking of his gunshot like the splitting of a ripe tree fired in my head. That I betrayed Christy! That I failed him in the woods, he who gave me all these gifts of birds, who spoke for the first time to me and waited for me to answer! To whom would I answer, to whom in the house would I answer when I came back, over the sea of bitterweeds of Bailey's Pasture riding in home, bottled news to be broken against the hands of the House that sealed the bottle? What he had put into me, through my eyes, through my ears, and marked and stained upon my body was to be carried away, through the bitterweeds, across the River and into the world to be read out to the world. If I could only find him again to tell him this, for he would want to know. I called his name into the woods that he had called his own names into—“Christy! Christy!”—but no answer came back, only my own calling turned back into my ears.

I was by the river and so tired with all the weight of the birds. What would I ever do with them? And then I knew…. I flung them into the river. No one would ever know. They went down, a flotilla of feathers, like, a floating garden, like a wreath to the river drowned, for Otey, for Christy, for all of us I washed in the river. And then I felt so light with all my burden and I lay down close to the river's side, and slept.

Suddenly I woke in touch with something, as forever after, in the air. Something called, something hovered, hard and real and whole as a soaring bird. O
bird-cursed, birdblessed, birddrenched
…. He is all our Sin and all our Vision and all our searching calling back to us, claiming us. Just when I am free and clean and myself again I hear this voice, I know this hovering—in my ascensions like wings from a bough that I think are up and away from him I am only soaring up to him—he is my air, he receives me, I fly in him back to him.

There is the river, over I must—across I'll go.

It was morning and a new, known world. I walked straight home and as I came through Bailey's Pasture, stained with all my stains and feathers in my hair and clinging to my clothes, the wind blew the feathers from me over the pasture and the feathers fell on the bitterweeds. Ahead, in the woodshed, I saw Christy sitting there and whittling. He did not even look up as I came through the gate and went into the house. In the house Malley was sitting by the window and Granny was nowhere to be found. No one even seemed to know that I had ever been away, and Christy never mentioned it. We never went hunting again.

Our winter was close and lay long and gray and leafless ahead. Something waited for me now—a world of magic and witchcraft in which there were secrets and dreams and fantasias, whirling in the glimmer of coming hope and hopelessness (who has not seen the gizzard-like birthmark on the luminous forehead of the moon?), and all of us speaking to each other, apart and solitary in our buried selves. All December the moon had a birthmark on it like Mrs. Childers the crazy woman had.

The coldest winter in anybody's memory came to Charity. All day some days there was the wild and savage howl of the wind loping round the house; and at night in the sleet the shivering brethren horses huddled against the wind. The wind was in the shutters, swung like a ghost the tire swing and rattled the cisternwheel. Roma the cow got frozen in the ditch and Christy had to kill her. Granny sat below away from us in the cellar. Swimma was in Florida or somewhere; and Christy sat gazing at the map of the world in the kitchen or putting, wordlessly and patiently, the little ship in the turpentine bottle. I was listening to what everybody was saying and to what the blinded girl with the lyre on top of the world was singing; and our house was full of the breath of speech.

But our spring came and with it such thaws and such rains that there was the biggest flood in years and the river widened out even onto Bailey's Pasture and was so close to the house that we could see upon it drowned wooden cows rolling like barrels, lily pads of chickens floating and little outhouses and wagonwheels. When the river finally shrank back to the bottomlands it had left in Bailey's Pasture crawfishes and catfish, pine-needles and spores and pinecones and its golden silt and the bones of birds; and it had taken back there with it bitterweeds and sawdust and go-to-sleep flowers and even the babybuggy that we had left in the pasture to be ruined by the worst winter.

XIII

SUDDENLY I was in touch with something, in the air. Something called, something hovered, hard and real and whole as a soaring bird. O Christy, our great lover! Reach down your birdbloodied hand to me, you who decorated me with your garland of news, crowned me with your birdbays of love, blessed me with the flowers and the songs of our woods, hung me with the trappings of our woods to send me, wrought like a frieze with all this beauty, all this knowledge, alone away through my inevitable journey away from you, like a new bird, fledged by your birdridden hands, towards home (O let me go!) to get there as I could and find my own and, for the first time, earned welcome, to learn the bitter parting that gives freedom and slavery; bless me now, unclaim me, haunt me, bless me now who led me away, broke my seal of secrets, then left me—violated and ready again: pattern of all the journeys I would ever make, bird-enchanted, bird-shadowed, bird-tormented…

For I am in those woods again where the dialogue of our shared secrets once flew like birds from the trees of your mind to the trees of mine (but there is a clearing ahead where the river turns and flows, cuts through the trees, shall I follow it?) where there seems and seemed to be no time, nor past nor future, where once I was lost for the first time away from the house and kin-homing! How homing? O home me! Where…?—and thought of all of them, back there, Granny and Aunty and Malley and all the rest…. Who am I, separated from all of them and from home, yet with the idea of them and the idea of home in my mind, claimed and cursed by these, blessed and marked, sent somewhere? Those who will ever see me naked will find upon my thigh the blue sign, the stigma but no blemish, really lovely, like a vein in an agate or the grain in wood—and they will know the touch of the birds upon me.

There is the river, over I must—across I'll go. For the vision burns away like cold blown breath; and when I look again it will have vanished away.

Christy make us real, make us hard and real in our lives: we who walk up and down in this autumn, trying to make ourselves real. We are involved, we are involved; and we cannot break away. All the history that we saw on the map in the kitchen pours into us and we contain it, we display it like a map for others to look at and be history; and the song of the girl on the world sings through us to be sung into others: Go
into the world, go build cities, go discover countries; go spread love, go give, go make magnificence, get and give light, save and join and piece together (as you did the bits of string and cloth and whittled wood to make your ship) and show a whole and put it, combined and formed and shaped, into the world like a bottle with a ship in it. Gather the broken pieces, connect them: these are the only things we have to work with. For we have been given a broken world to live in—make like a map a world where all things are linked together and murmur through each other like a line of whispering people, like a chain of whispers a full clear statement, a singing, a round, strong, clear song of total meaning, a language within language, responding each to each forever in the memory of each man
.

And then I said, “I will get up now and go now, where I belong, and be what I must be.”

I went to the bus station and really waited for a bus this time, and took it, and the next morning I knew it was no spell when I heard them calling all the names of the little forgotten towns, Normangee, Sweetwater, Cheetah, and I saw the live oak trees like old kinfolks in the fields.

Then, after a while, I was in the road going to the house and looked up and there it was, on the little rising piece of land, waiting for me. Through the mist that lay between us it seemed that the house was built of the most fragile web of breath and I had blown-it-and that with my breath I could blow it all away.

AFTERWORD

William Goyen was thirty-five years old when he published
The House of Breath
, his first book, in 1950. World War II, during which he had served in the U.S. Navy, had taken more than four years from him with its consuming dangers, obligations, and psychological imperatives; Goyen also suffered from chronic migraines and seasickness. His chances to make the most of his ardent desire to write, and of his gifts as a writer, even though he continued to write and to think about writing during the war, were necessarily postponed not only by his duties but also by the emotional and mental demands of being in the midst of mortal uncertainty and destruction. Thus his apprenticeship as a writer was prolonged. So
The House of Breath
—at which he worked for many years, repeatedly recasting and revising it, till he completed it only a few months before its publication—is in some ways a very young book for a writer of thirty-five, in the way it looks back so intently to childhood and youth (not only Goyen's own particular childhood and youth, which provided the materials for the book, although greatly altered by artistic choice, but also the aura and feelings and mysteries of childhood and youth in all lives). In fact, when Goyen wrote a brief “Note on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of This Book” for the 1975 paperback edition of
The House of Breath
, youth and the preoccupations and possibilities particular to it were uppermost on his mind: