In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

by William H. Gass

  My wife and I find it strange that they should all run home. It seems perverse, unnaturally sacrificial: the self leading itself, as in a great propelling crowd, blind over cliffs, stupidly to the sea. We’d run away, we affirm in our adulthood to one another, knowing, as we make the affirmation, that even old as we are, adult as we claim to be, we would return to the poisonous nest as they return, children still largely on turned-out feet, the girl unbreasted, the boys inadequate and bare for manhood. We would chew on our hurt and feel the pain again of our beginnings. We would languish for the glory of complaint in the old ties. The eldest Mean child may someday say, confronted by a meanness that’s his own, by his own mean soul, that he was beaten as a boy; and he may take a certain solace from the fact; he may shift at least a portion of his blame to the ages. “This shit’s not mine.” “Mann ist was er isst.” “Alas for the present time!”

  We wish they would run off, certainly, as we wanted to run off, for had we run away, had we had the courage we so easily wish for them and the necessary resource, we feel we’d be as much as moral now, clear of the need to disclaim our dirt, round, holding our tail between our teeth. For that, we must exaggerate the past. We inflate it with our wrongs. Fortunately for us then, unfortunately for us now, it was really not so bad. We were not pursued and beaten. We were not beggared in our own yard. We were not flayed within the hearing of the world. Our surprise is symbolic. It is a gesture of speech. It expresses a wish of our own; and if we really felt the indignation and disappointment we put into words when we see the Mean children flying to their hive, my wife and I; if we ever borrowed to apply to them any anger from our feelings for Mrs. Mean, it would be an injustice on our part almost as great as in our power as mere observers to do them; although I am not above injustice and must confess, despite my knowledge of the dreadful circumstances of his life, a dislike of Ames, the eldest Mean child, especially upon his bike, as deep as my dislike for his cow-chested, horse-necked, sow-faced mother. “It may have been put in him, but he is nasty, unnaturally nasty,” I’m afraid I often say. “He can’t help it,” my wife replies, and I glare at the children too, as Mrs. Mean flushes them one by one and they run or toddle to the house, because I know my wife is right. I exclaim at their stupidity, their lack of character, their lack of fight—I have my list as Mrs. Mean has hers—for I am, in these remote engagements, as fearsome, as bold and blustering as a shy and timorous man can be.

  But after all there must be corners in that little house for each of them, corners that are personal and familiar where the walls come together like the crook of a soft, warm arm and some hour has been passed in quiet love with a private treasure. There must be some sight, some touch, that is a comfort and can draw them to the trap. We haven’t been suckled, thank god, by Mrs. Mean, or bathed or clothed or put to bed or nursed when we’ve been ill. Perhaps her touch is sometimes tender and her tone is sweet. My wife is hopeful.

  Really I am not. Their house is chocolate. The paint is peeling badly. It has a tin roof. The front porch is narrow. The house is narrow. The windows are low and small. The gutters need repair. There are rust stains on the side of the house. There are cracks in the foundation. The chimney tilts. I cannot think of it as sanctuary for very long. I try. I see the children orbiting. They vanish within and I try to think they could, like Quasimodo, cry their safety. But is there any reason for us to suppose that life inside is any better than the life outside we see? My wife wishes to believe it—for the children—but I cannot imagine the deep shadows of that little house full of anything warm except perhaps the rolled, damp fat of Mr. Mean, squatting like a toad in his underwear, his bright, hard eyes pinned like beads to his face, his tongue licking the corners of his mouth, his fingers rubbing softly up and down his other fingers, his legs gliding against themselves, his pale skin bluish in the bad light.

  But then my wife is subject to failures of the imagination. I have tried to carry her but her sentiments are too readily aroused. Her eyes stay at the skin. Only her heart, only her tenderest feelings, go in. I, on the other hand, cut surgically by all outward growths, all manifestations, merely, of disease and reach the ill within. I conceive the light, for instance, as always bad, of insufficient strength and a poor color, as having had to travel through too much dust and too much muslin, as having had to dwell too long in the company of dark rugs and mohair chairs and satin-shaded lamps. The air, I feel, is bad too. The windows never open. The back door bangs but the breeze is metaphorical. All things in their little house that hang, hang motionless and straight. Nothing is dirty, but nothing feels clean. Their writing paper sticks to the hand. Their toilet sweats. The halls are cool. The walls are damp.

  I was playing with toy cars and digging roads around the supports of the family porch when I accidentally placed my hand upon a cold wet pipe which rose out of the ground there and saw near the end of my nose, moist on the ridge of a post, four fat white slugs. I think of that when I think of the Means’ house and of pale fat Mr. Mean, and the urge to scream as I did then rises strongly in me. I bumped my head, I remember, scrambling out. I was afraid to tell my father why I’d yelled. He was very angry. Even yet I have a distaste for the odor of earth.

  My wife maintains that Mrs. Mean is an immaculate housekeeper and that her home is always cool and dry and airy. She’s very likely correct as far as mere appearance goes but my description is emotionally right, metaphysically appropriate. My wife would strike up friendships, too, and so, as she says, find out; but that must be blocked. It would destroy my transcendence. It would entangle me mortally in illusion.

  Yes. The inside of the Mean house is clear and horrible in my mind like a nightmare no one willingly would want to enter. It may be five rooms. It can’t be more. And into these five rooms, at best, the six Means are squeezed with the machinery to keep them alive, with the gewgaws she buys, the bright blue china horses which trot in the windows, and some of the children’s toys, for they do not lack for toys, at least the kind you ride. They have a scooter, a small tricycle, a large tricycle, one that has a wagon welded to its rear, and a sidewalk bike with which the eldest Mean child rides down flowers, people, cats and dogs. I must salute their taste this once. They haven’t bought their children cycles shaped by great outriding fenders of tin and paint like rockets, airplanes, horses, swans or submarines. They have an eye for the practical, the durable, in such things. I remember with fondness my own tricycle, capable of tremendous speed or so it seemed then, and because it was not fangled up by paid imaginations, it could be Pegasus, if I liked, and it was.

  There is no Pegasus—imaginary—real—in the house of the Means. There is father floating among the couches, white as animals long in caves, quiet as a weed, his round mouth working, his eyes twitching, his fat fingers twisting a button on his sleeve.

  Purple bath towels hang in the bathroom. I have seen them on the line. They have some colored sheets—one lavender, one rose, one wine—and some brightly yarned doilies you can buy in the living room of a house, a block away, where articles of religion are sold among candies and cozies and pickles in mason jars. The two ladies who make them are also immensely fat and immensely pious. They furthermore sell signs which gloomily, but with a touch, I fancy, of spiteful triumph, herald the Coming of the Lord and the Eventual Destruction of the World. There is a fine one I have noticed in their dining room window which says in scarlet letters simply, Armageddon, like an historical marker. The expectation is tastefully surrounded by a dark border of crosses and small skulls. Mr. Mean bore one of their placards home and tacked it up on the door of the small barn where he keeps his car. In silver script that glitters from the black card it warns of Eternity Tomorrow, and it must have cost him a dollar and a half. At least I take it as a warning. My wife says it reminds him to drive carefully. You see how easily and dangerously she is deceived. However, perhaps for the Means it is not a warning but a hope, a promise of reward; and it no doubt speaks plainly and poorly for my destination that I regard its me
ssage so pessimistically.

  The Means are Calvinists, I’m certain. They may be unsure of heaven but hell is real. They must feel its warmth at their feet and the land tremble. Their meanness must proceed from that great sense of guilt which so readily becomes a sense for the sin of others, and poisons everything. There is no pleasure. There is only the biological propriety of the penis. In another, more forthright age, they would have read to their children from Slovenly Peter, the picture story book of the righteous, where the reward of moral weakness, of which it was an illustrated catalogue, was a severed limb, the loss of teeth and vision, the promise of a bloody and crippling accident, a painful and malignant disease, or fits of madness—all of these disasters tailored by a wise and benevolent Providence to fit the crime. I remember very well, too, a poem of our Puritan ancestors, in rather strenuous iambics, about a child called Harry, perverse to the heart, who went fishing against his father’s wishes, doubtless on the Lord’s day too, and with the devil’s pleasure.

  Many a little fish he caught,

  And pleased was he to look,

  To see them writhe in agony,

  And struggle on the hook.

  At last when having caught enough,

  And also tired himself,

  He hastened home intending there

  To put them on the shelf.

  But as he jumped to reach a dish,

  To put his fishes in,

  A large meat hook, that hung close by,

  Did catch him by the chin.

  Poor Harry kicked and call’d aloud,

  And screamed and cried and roared,

  While from his wounds the crimson blood

  In dreadful torrents poured.

  The pattern of punishment here is based on the principle of a comparable eye for a comparable eye but I feel sure that while the Mean children might dread their moral transmigration into ants (a steamroller mash them flat) or butterflies (their arms fall off), all ants and butterflies would dread as much their total intersection. A butterfly, I think, would prefer to die of burned-off wings, with some immediacy, possessing beauty, than to be rubbed, pinched, and buffeted about, losing, before the power of flight, the desire, and before the desire, the eloquence of its design.

  I should like to see Providence take the side of the dandelion. A tooth for a tooth would suit me fine.

  But of course all the Means have suffered metamorphosis. They are fly-beleaguered bears in a poor zoo with nothing to claw but each other and a dead trunk and no one to hate but themselves, their flies, and the bare, hot, peanut-spotted ground.

  4

  Mr. Wallace has displayed a certain strength. I had thought him shorn but he has joined the Means. They gather now on cooler evenings on the Means’ front porch, the misters and the missuses, heads together. Shouts and wails of laughter, snorts and bellows as from steers rise out of the porch’s shadows as out of shadowing trees by a wallow bank. It is a juncture, I must confess, that had not occurred to me although I sometimes fancy I am master of the outside chance. It was a part of her that I let slip. Following her gyrations in the grass, her rush and whirl and roaring curse, I forgot her geologic depth, the vein of meanness deep within her earth. Against the mechanical flutter of appearance I failed to put the glacial movement of reality.

  I drove them together . . . an unpleasant end for so pleasant a beginning.

  Mr. Wallace was before at large, as I have said; gigantic in the landscape, swallowing life. There was, in him, no respect for my mysteries, only for his own: signs, omens, portents, signatures and symbolings whose meaning he alone was privy to. Mr. Wallace was the paramour of prophecy, yet it came to me when the boy Toll catted across his path that day that it was a stone symbolic more than real that struck the light from Goliath’s eyes. It was for prophecy that Jonah fled the Lord. For Jonah’s flight the tempest rose, and for the tempest was Jonah flung between the whale’s jaws. To be properly swallowed, then, was the secret; to cause, in going down, the oils to flow that would convulse the membranes of the stomach. What must that whale have felt, his moist cavernous maw reverberating prayers and pledges! Would Mr. Wallace be a dog and eat his vomit? I judged that I should soon be cast on dry land. Thenceforth the mystery would be mine, as it was Jonah’s. To be the bait, to carry the harpoon down and in that round and previously unshaken belly stick it, then escape—that would be the trick. And prophecy would do it.

  How I was enamored of the notion! All day I lightly walked. Mr. Wallace obliged me by appearing almost at once to record his aches, to dilate upon the midnight’s weather, and to wallow surely, by absolutely predictable thrashes, toward the topic. I was on a vast dry plain. Red rock rose out of its distances. Behind me and before me there were multitudes embannered—murmuring. The sun’s light struck from shields and spears. I squinted at the giant. His figure wavered. I sensed the wet and dry together. Perhaps the ancient Greek philosophers were right about the wedding of these opposites. Dust clouded my shuffling feet. Spume flew to the giant’s face. It is amazing how the feelings of the universal fables sometimes focus in a single burning vision. Of course that singleness of sight has always been my special genius.

  I waited. The ankles were painful. I said I had a mole that itched. A bad sign, Mr. Wallace said, and I saw the thought of cancer fly in his ear. Moles are special marks, he said. I was aware, I said, of how they were, but the places of my own were fortunate and I divined from them a long life. Moles go deep, I said. They tunnel to the heart. Mr. Wallace grinned and wished me well and with great effort turned away. It was a good start. Wonder and fear began in him and twitched his face. When again he came he thought aloud of moles and I discoursed upon them: causes, underflesh connections, cosmic parallels, relations to divinity. There was a fever in him, dew on his lip, brightness in his eye. Moles. Every day. At last there was no art in how he brought the subject up. I spoke of the mark of Cain. I mentioned the deformities of the devil. I talked of toads and warts. I discussed the placing of blemishes and the ordering of stars. Stigmata. The world of air is like the skin and signs without are only symbols of the world within. I referred to the moles of beauty, to those of avarice, cunning, gluttony and lust, to those which, when touched, made the eyes water, the ears itch, or caused the prick to stand and the shyest maid to flower. My fancy soared. I related moles and maps, moles and mountains, moles and the elements of interior earth. Oh it was wondrous done! How he shook and warmed his lips like an old roué and trembled and put anxiety in every place! I was everywhere specific and detailed. This may correspond to that. The region of the spine is like unto the polar axis. But I was at all times indeterminate and vague as well. A certain horn-shaped mole upon a certain place may signify a certain spiritual malignity. I informed him of everything and yet of nothing. I moved his sight from heaven to hell and drew from him the most naïve response of bliss, followed first by a childlike disappointment as our viewpoint fell, then a childlike fright. His cane quivered against the pavement. He was in the grip. To be so near, continually, to dying; to feel within yourself the chemistry of death; to see in the glass, day by day, your skull emerging; to rot while walking and to fear the sun; to pick over the folds of your loosening flesh like infested clothing; to know, not merely by the logician’s definition or the statistician’s count that men are mortal, but through the limpsting of your own blood—to know so surely so directly so immediately this, I thought, would be a burden needing, if a man were to bear up under it, a staff of self-deceiving hope as sturdy and leveling as the truth was not: an unquenchable, blasphemous, magical hope that the last gasp when it came would last forever, death’s rattle an eternity.

  There were moles upon that body I was certain. And he would want to know their meaning. It wouldn’t matter if he had, before me, given sense and order to their being; these things despair of guarantee. He would want to know. He would have to know. And he would fear to know. What if I said: This is the mole of death most painful? Yet what if I said: This is the mole of everlasti
ng mortal life? What if a miracle should happen? What if?

  I waited. Again and again he came, nibbling. Excitement, worry, anticipation, profoundest thought passed and repassed like winds across him. Finally I broached the deadly topic. Mr. Wallace showed his teeth and his eyes hunted in the trees. His cane chattered. He admitted his wife had a mole or two. Ah, I said, where are they? Mr. Wallace blew his nose and bade farewell. Not yet. The rogue would offer up his wife. He wanted a safe bite, a free taste of the news. Well I should freely give it. I worried only that the shriveled witch had moles upon her privates—this shame silencing speech. Such a sign, if I could pronounce upon it, I would deed the whole of fortune to.

  Again and again he came until I grew so sick of the smell of oil and the sound of water that I thrust the question boldly toward him. Each time, in silence, he refused it. Again and again he came. I had no heart any more. I feared his coming. I hesitated to enter my yard. And then he said that there were moles upon her body, on her thigh. The thigh, I exclaimed, the home of beauty. The right side or the left? The left. The left! Momentous conditions are being satisfied. Are they low upon it? high? Near the hip. The hip! Glorious! Were there two? Two. Two! And the color: brown? red? black? Yellow. Yellow! What a marvel! And the hair that grew there? the color of the hair that grew there? Surely there was hair. There must be. My friend, you must look again. Look again. Again. Determine it precisely.