This is all I know of my first year unto heaven.
2
Nor did Diana and Day do it that night either. In a tent twelve by twelve, it is possible to position the air mattresses and sleeping bags so that there is a space of at least six feet separating them, and this, because a tent is a condensation of a house, enables you to feel almost as if you have your own room. You could share such a tent without discomposure with your mother-in-law. Or even your grandfather. Diana waited until the gas lantern was extinguished before putting on her pajamas and getting into her sleeping bag. She zipped the bag up snugly, for the night was cool.
From his side of the tent, Day’s voice said, “I’m sorry about what I said about the tent. It’s a nice tent.”
It was. The canvas still smelled too new, but already the smell of it was becoming submerged beneath the smell of the woods and the night air and the mountain laurel.
His voice said, “Tomorrow let’s do some archaeology, and see if we can’t excavate some remains of the Montross house.”
“That would be fun,” she said.
“Well, good night, Diana,” he said. It was the first time he had called her by name.
“Good night, Day,” she answered.
They would sleep a good night for eight hours. Except for a time, at midnight, when Diana would be awakened by some strange noises outside the tent, they would sleep a good sleep.
And while they slept those eight hours in their tent in Dudleytown, Connecticut, that night of June 21, elsewhere in the country: 3,823 babies were born; 632 old people died, of natural causes; 721 died of heart disease, 310 of cancer, 202 of stroke, 52 in motor vehicle accidents, 27 of cirrhosis of the liver, 21 of suicide; of the latter 11 were by firearms, 5 by poisoning, 3 by hanging, 2 by sleeping pills; firearms also accounted for 17 homicides and 3 accidental deaths.
A family of seven died in a fire in their sleep in Nebraska.
Two carsful of teenagers met head-on on a desert highway in Arizona, killing nine.
In Manhattan, two, in the Bronx, three, in Brooklyn, one, and in Queens, three young drug addicts died of overdoses, infected needles, or other related causes.
In San Francisco, two persons, one male, one female, died as a result of injuries sustained in multiple rapes by multiple persons.
In Beverly Hills, a movie idol died of lung cancer. Elsewhere, sixty-one others died of the same injury.
A father of six, in a Chicago slum, took a last look at the luxury apartments rising across the park, then put away each member of his family by strangulation, himself by hanging.
The inventor of the contrate wheel died in Sandusky, Ohio.
Near Harlan, Kentucky, a G.I. on furlough shot and killed his fiancée and her father, mother and sister.
Nationwide, eighty-nine infants died in childbirth, twenty-two taking their mothers with them.
Twelve babies were born to heroin-addicted mothers; one of them mercifully died at birth; the other eleven babies began immediate painful withdrawal.
A woman in Texas gave birth to quadruplets.
As contrasts, a son was born to a fifty-eight-year-old woman in Pendleton, Oregon, while in Beaufort, South Carolina, a girl was born to an eleven-year-old woman.
There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.
After breakfast, cooked and eaten amid wood smoke and morning mist and a heavy fallen dew, they began a meticulous search of the mountain laurel glade, hunting for any relics of the Montross house, any vestige of a former abode. All morning they tracked the ground and beat the bushes, without finding anything, until Day declared that he would have to have some sort of shovel.
She invited him to accompany her on the shopping trip, but Day declined, saying that since he had retreated from civilization he had no wish to return to it again so soon. Diana wondered if his real reason was that he was uncomfortable being seen with her in public. She told him she wanted to get him some clothes, and didn’t he want to pick them out? No, he did not care what they looked like. With a shrug, she got him to give her his sizes.
He did walk with her the mile to the car, as though she needed an escort in broad daylight. Before she left, he said, “While you’re at it, we could use a good axe. A short-handled tomahawk axe will do. And if they have it, see if you can get the kind of folding shovel that also has a pick and mattock on it.”
“All right,” she said. “Would you like for me to pick up a tape recorder so I can play back for you what he says?”
“Where would we plug it in?”
“There are battery models.”
“No,” he said. “It would seem out of place. Besides, I’ll take your word for it, what he says.”
She drove to Torrington in good time and was able to do her shopping and return to Dudleytown within the space of a couple of hours. The man at Llewellyn’s Sporting Goods had been delighted to see her again, and he had asked if everything was going okay in her camp. Then he had asked her where she was camping, but she had answered only, “The woods.”
When she returned to camp, her arms laden with packages, Day was not there. She called for him, and waited, then called again, louder. She thought she heard some answer, but it was only a distant echo of her own call. She collapsed into a camp chair and rested for a while, then opened a beer and drank it and waited. She wondered if Day’s adolescent instability had gotten the better of him again.
But he came at last. She heard him whistling before she saw him. He came, whistling some snatch from a Beethoven quartet, into the glade, naked to the waist, his shirt swinging from his hand. When he saw her he stopped and began putting his shirt back on.
“Wait,” she said. She opened one of her packages and took out a shirt, a bright cotton plaid of yellow and lime green and azure blue. “Here,” she said, and gave it to him. He tried to unfold it but it was stuck with pins. He fumbled with the pins, but could not find the right ones to pull out, and the shirt started to twist up. His mother must have opened all his new shirts for him. “Let me,” Diana said, and took the shirt back.
When he had his new shirt on, she opened the other packages and showed him what else she had bought for him: four more shirts, two sweaters, two pairs of blue jeans, a pair of dress slacks, a pair of hiking boots, a pair of sandals, a pair of slippers, a bathrobe, bathing trunks, and shorts, undershirts, socks, belts, handkerchiefs. “Gosh,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”
She gave him the new camp shovel, which, true to his request, had a combination pick and mattock built into it, and he put it right to work, excavating around a pile of rocks enclosed by the mountain laurel shrubs.
He spent the rest of the day digging. She did not know what she could do to help, and as he seemed to be finding nothing she grew tired of watching him, and went to lie in the hammock and read a paperback book she had found on a drugstore rack in Torrington, Reincarnation for the Millions, by Susy Smith.
Late in the afternoon he called to her, “Hey, come and look.”
She found him up to his knees in a hole he had dug, and around his feet a litter of objects, rusted metal pieces. He held up something which she recognized as the bit from a horse’s bridle. The rest of the stuff she did not know.
“Well, it proves there was something here,” he said. “Maybe the barn.”
“What are all those things?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, and picked up a large metal object that looked like the sort of semicircular bucket filled with water that garage mechanics use to roll tires in, to hunt for air leaks. “We could find out, though,” Day said. “I’ll bet he would know.”
“We’ll see,” she said, and she put him to sleep and moved him back to one of Daniel Lyam Montross’s years in Dudleytown, then told him to open his eyes. Then she asked, “What are you holding in your hands?”
He looked down. “This?” he said. “It’s an oil trough, it is.”
She asked, “What is an oil trough for?”
“What would a good new one be for?” she asked.
“Fer greasin’ wheels, a course,” he said.
“Wagon wheels?” she said. “How do you use it?”
“Jist prop the thimble skein on something and lower the wheel so the felloe’s covered, then you roll her slow through.”
She thought he said “fellow,” and she thought it quaint to refer to a fellow as “her.” She asked him about this.
“Felloe,” he said. “The felloe’s the wood rim a the wheel. Not her nor him but it.”
“I see,” she said. She pointed at something by the toe of his shoe. “What’s that?” she asked.
He picked it up and examined it. “A clevis,” he said.
“What’s a clevis for?”
“You sure don’t know chalk from cheese about wagons, do ye? A clevis is fer hookin’ the harness to the whiffletree.”
“Whiffletree,” she said. “That’s a lovely word.”
“It is,” he agreed, smiling. “Whiffletree’s what the wagon says when it’s moseying through the grass of the meadow.”
“That’s nice,” she said, and thought to make a game of it. “What else does the wagon say? What are the other parts of the wagon?”
“Wal now,” he said, warming to her game, “there’s the king bolt. That’s what the wagon says when it hits a bump, ’less the bump’s a real thank-ye-ma’rm, then the wagon says HAWN! ’Course there’s front hawns and there’s hind hawns. Hind hawn is what the wagon says if it’s a buggy. If the wagon’s a sled, it don’t hit the bump, but just says rave!”
“What’s a rave?”
“Part a the runner on a sled.”
“Do you have a sled?”
“You bet ye. A good ’un.”
“Where is it?” she asked, and realized, too late, it was a perverse question.
He was turning around, searching. “Uh…” he said. “Aw…it’s…” He was looking bewildered and hurt. “Aw, jeepers…”
“Never mind,” she said. “What is your horse’s name?”
“Got two of ’um. There’s Boneyard, and there’s Mistress, she’s the off horse.”
“What’s an off horse?”
“Huh? Where do ye hail from, anyhow? Don’t ye know the first thing ’bout horses? The off horse’s the right one in a span.”
“Oh. Your horses make a team, is that it? They’re not riding horses?”
“Mistress leaves me ride her, if I want. Boneyard’s too spiney. Craunches my witnesses.”
“Your witnesses? Who are they?”
“Aw, now, dang, ma’rm…” He was blushing. “You and your fool questions.”
“Oh,” she said. Then she asked, “You don’t use a saddle?”
“Can’t spare the price a one. Lief as not hitch the wagon, anyhow.”
“You know all about wagons, do you?”
“Like a book,” he said. “Backwards and forwards, and right down to the ground. The wagon’s not been made that will flummox me.”
“I believe you,” she told him. Then she told him to close his eyes and she brought him back to the present and woke him. “What’s a whiffletree?” she asked.
“A whiffle-what?” Day said.
“A whiffletree. Think very hard, and tell me what a whiffle-tree is.”
He pondered. “Some kind of hatrack, maybe?” he said.
“Day,” she said. “Look me in the eye and swear on your Boy Scout honor that you don’t know what a whiffletree is.”
“I’ve heard the name, somewhere,” he said. “I just don’t remember what it is. I know it’s not any kind of tree. Not a tree tree, anyway. Maybe something like a shoe tree.”
“Have you ever ridden in a wagon?” she asked.
“Well, I went on this hay ride, one time….”
“You told me.”
“But it wasn’t actually a wagon, just the back of a truck.”
She reached for his hand and pulled him out of his hole. “Come here,” she said. “I want to read you something.” She led him over to the hammock where she had left her paperback book, and she opened it and read him this paragraph:
One of the things known for sure about hypnosis is that some entranced subjects will make every attempt to please the hypnotist, and often carry out what is expected of them. The hypnotist’s own beliefs about what he is doing, the tone of his voice, his manner, and his mode or procedure cause the subject to enact faithfully the role thereby handed to him. This is then taken by the hypnotist as evidence confirming the correctness of his original belief. Because this is true, age regression is complicated, and past life regression is problematical, to say the least.
Day took the book from her and looked at its cover with disdain. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
“I found it in a drugstore in Torrington,” she said.
“‘Reincarnation for the Millions,’” he quoted its title with a slur. “An appropriate title. For amateurs. And look at this picture on the cover. Like a flying saucer.”
“I just thought I’d like to read something on the subject,” Diana protested.
“I could give you a bibliography of more respectable volumes,” he said. “But what you just read is, in fact, the truth. It’s the major defect in hypnosis. The hypnotized person—not all of them, mind you, but a lot—will say what he thinks the hypnotist wants him to say. Like a Pavlovian dog. If the hypnotist thinks his subject is the reincarnation of George Washington, the subject is going to do his best to please the hypnotist and sustain him in that belief.”
“But how can you lie under hypnosis?”
“It isn’t exactly lying. Have you ever seen a stage hypnotist performing? If you hypnotize me and tell me I’m the world’s greatest violinist, even if both my arms are gone, I am going to stand up and do a virtuoso pantomime of a violinist.”
“But you couldn’t do something you didn’t know how to do. If I gave you a real violin and told you to play it, you wouldn’t sound like the world’s greatest.”
“Probably not. Or not to you. But to myself I would. I am the one who is deluded.”
“But I still don’t understand how you could know something you didn’t know. I mean, like just now when you were hypnotized, you mentioned all these words—whiffletree and clevis and hawn and I forget what all—parts of wagons—so how would you know these words if you didn’t know anything about wagons?”
Day shrugged. “I could have been reading your mind,” he suggested.
“But I don’t know these words myself!”
“Well, have you ever heard of what they call ‘genetic memory’?” he asked. “Maybe there’s something in each of us that knows everything.”
She frowned. “You sound like you’re trying to eliminate Daniel Lyam Montross.”
He laughed. “If he can be eliminated, then he doesn’t exist. If he exists, then he can’t be eliminated. You know something? I would eliminate him if I could. Sure I would. Sometimes I’ve wanted to kill him. But I don’t think I can…short of killing myself, of course.”
3
Oh, I am, I am. If I were not, who then would I be? Would I were another, would I were even you, but there is not a pin to choose. I am what I be, and I be what I am. Who else would be me?
Who else would choose Castroline, four spoons daily after feeding? Emulsion of Norwegian cod liver oil? Who else would choose worm syrup, would choose my worms? Even if once she fooled me with worm cake instead, saying it was candy. Paregoric? Laudanum? And that sham of shams, Lactopreparata? Who would choose spirits of nitre? These bitter draughts she doses me with, in the stead of milk.
I drool chemicals when I drool. At one I’m weaned, the way they do it: suddenly and completely, to “cry it out.” Notwithstanding she has broken five and one-half infants before me in this way, my mother twinges at the size of my crying. All these draughts I take dope not my guts but her guilt. My worm medi
cine is for her wormy heart.
Early I learn to walk, as if to get away. Soon I learn to run, as if to get away sooner. The white dimity dress of my first year has been changed for one of pale blue chambray, the easier to clean, and for me the easier to run in and fall in.
It’s queer about the twigs and pebbles of the ground: if I walk slowly on them my bare feet hurt like time, but if I run, scorning them, pounding upon them as with the pads of a rabbit, they never hurt at all. I run, I run.
My fears are small. The dark does not scare me, nor the woods. Animals do not frighten, except those I imagine, which are not, which I create only to frighten me because there is a need of it. Why is this need? All that’s to fear is fate, which is not seen. Fate takes seen form in the things I imagine: I denizen the skirts of Dudleytown with tigers and lions, leopards and crocodiles. They never get me but I know they’re there. Fate waits, luck lurks, destiny rests in ambush.
One thing I fear that’s real: one day unseen I follow my father to work at the sawmill. I have heard this screaming before, but imagined it the death throes of those fate-beasts being slain by others. I find it is the screaming of the tree, the tree screaming as the great sawblade whirls whirring through it. Before, I did not know that trees could feel. In pity I wail my heart out. My father sees me now, and yells something at the other men, and they stop the saw. They look at me and laugh. My father sends me home. They do not wait until I’m gone before they start the saw again. On the road home I stop to hug a tree. Oh, tree!
Tonight I dream bad dreams. My father wakes me. His great heavy hand on my hair: “Scairt, little feller? Wha’sa matter ’ith ye, lad?”
“Saw cut me open.”
“Saw don’t never cut folks. Jist timber.”
“Hurts. Timber hurts.”
“Thunder no, boy. Timber don’t feel nothing.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 35
