The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  “The country is so damned dull with their quarrels and animosities over five cents, and who’s a Republican. Who cares? Ruth and Frankie are getting sucked into it, too. That young fellow up at Strassers’ skulking round that dry rock farm often looks as if he’s going crazy. If I went to town I would worry about leaving Ruth here alone. He might go nuts in the middle of the week and start burning our house down. I know what’s passing in his mind; it passed in mine. You know they’ve got no water. We’re hogging it. All the water they use must come from that spring house that drips across the track back into our creek. I’ve dreamed that I’ve seen this place in flames, a fiery honeycomb,” he said, exalted; “all we have is a leaky pump, although we own three-quarters of a mile of creek. It’s the inconsistencies, stupidities, the smug imbecility of the country that gets an intelligent man down. It’s all right for women and children if they’ve got a defence. I often thought of getting a big dog here to defend Ruth and Frankie; but if I did so, do you know what,” he said with a bright smile, “I might go off to town. This way I stay here to look after them. That’s what irritates me about Ruth’s attitude. She quite openly thinks that I’m straining to get off the string. She doesn’t understand that I’m thinking of her and Frankie day and night. She doesn’t realize that no decent man would go away and leave them in a place like this, without a gate or fence, with all those doors and windows; with the crazy Strasser boys and trucks full of farm workers going about on the road and the hot summer coming. The other day a truck full of boys about seventeen, eighteen, sex-crazy youngsters, stopped by our bridge and three of them walked right into our kitchen and took a drink of water. They stood there by the sink pumping water and drinking pints of it, pouring it down their throats. I was on the track, Frankie was at school, Ruth was upstairs making the beds. You know Ruth. She’s not afraid of men, used to be a good-time gal. But she was afraid. She came down and asked them what they were doing there. They looked her over for a long minute, and they walked out without saying a word. When I came home she cried on my chest. Ruth!”

  “Well, I have to hang out the washing,” said Ruth; and she went out with the basket.

  Laban laughed and said, “It would drive you to drink! It’s all a worry to me. But the city’s hopeless for us. I go along seven or eight months and hate the sight and sound of it; and then I backslide and hell opens. I’m a pathological drunk like Poe, you see; one glass—you think I’m weak-willed probably.”

  “No, I don’t, Laban. I assume there’s a factor unknown to me.”

  “I’m not an ordinary sot. It’s another dimension. One glass—and I’m off on those joyrides you dream about as a child, up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, in an airborne toboggan, flying, the rushing frightening joy that people buy for ten cents on the loop-the-loops. One glass of ordinary red ink and no one knows how long it will last; as long as it takes to make me a sodden, spineless, helpless imitation of a human being, unable to use his tongue or his legs, crawling about the floor like a child of two.”

  Sam said nervously, hearing the ring of triumph in Laban’s voice, “Love of drink is a strange thing. But there must be a great joy, release, excitement in it, when you feel superior to your troubles and to other people, I suppose.”

  Laban’s voice, metallic, hurried on, “In the beginning, as a boy doing the farm chores, I drank greedily and with a certain amount of vanity and pleasure.” After a pause, he said, with an underlit smile, “You see, I don’t remember many things, many weeks, many months—long periods of my life don’t exist for me. If I were under oath and after due reflection, I’d probably say something incredible. I loathe alcohol and I always did. I get an infernal brutish feeling that I’m injuring everyone and everything I ought to like and love, I’m a brute; and then, to hell with it. I never had any joy or excitement or release. Maybe I did. I get to a point where I’m above all such petty considerations as decency, morality, family, fame and even success. I know why they egg me on, they don’t want me to succeed. I’m a comment on their living when I escape and get to work.” After a moment, he looked friendly towards his wife and said more cheerfully, “I never allow Frankie to taste it. In Europe they let children have beer or watered wine, but Frankie never had it. As a child I was terribly greedy for it. I drank a whole quart of homebrew on the way home one day and was picked up after a storm, senseless, frozen, wet through. It wasn’t the only time; but you only die when your time is up; I survived everything. I’ve been able to make something of myself even with the curse, because I read a lot as a boy and I realized that I wasn’t alone. So many great men have had a hankering or lust for liquor or whatever other artificial paradise: some such terrible blemish usually goes with genius. So I’m afraid for Frankie: because of the father in his blood.”

  Sam Parsons said he wasn’t a genius, but he had read somewhere, some Frenchman had said that genius was the control of disorders and blemishes, just as Laban himself thought.

  “Well,” said Laban, “you are right, that thought helped me. And I think America’s a land to live for. I naturally believe in the future of men; and I believe in myself; and I have the youngster, I believe in him. So what have I to worry about, except an accident of temptation, which I avoid? And I thank God every moment for Ruth. She did more for me than my own mother.”

  Parsons tried to bring the conversation back to America’s future; but Laban laughed poignantly, to say, “My mother’s old folks were very religious people; but they took their moonshine and their Bible in equal parts. Religion wasn’t my brand. I have got to believe in society, social destiny in our people. That gives me something to give Frankie. My poor father had nothing to give me. He was not much better off, and not as well regarded as Mr. Tanner in Lambertville. When he found out what a present I had got from the old folks, blood ninety per cent cornjuice, he just gave me up.”

  While this conversation had been going on, the men had risen from the table, and had walked up and down the track from the ravens to the rabbits.

  When they returned, Ruth was looking for them, as she sat with Frankie in her lap, on the southern porch facing the rustic bridge. She beamed.

  Laban kissed her and his son, and remarked, “Boaz has got his Ruth. Whither thou goest there will I go. What did I ever do, Ruth, to deserve you and Frankie? In all my dreams as a young country poet, I never thought of such a perfect afternoon as this, so cool, so calm, so bright, this green paradise, this home. I laboured in the stormy seas, but I got a toehold on good land at the other side: I am safe home now.”

  He went upstairs and began writing. Ruth walked out to dig in the vegetable garden. Parsons stood beside, watching.

  Ruth said, “I am going to bake our own bread, to save money. I can manage better than I do. Laban is such a good man, such a good man! I never knew there were really good men till I met Laban. I knew there were good fellows, friends, but Laban was something else; almost a saint, I assure you, Sam. He writes me such beautiful letters when he’s away. I’ll get them out and show them to you. One day they’ll be printed. He’s never written me a cruel word.”

  A moment later, she said drily, referring to the time Parsons knew of, “And yet, Sam, that same summer, when you had to buy my boat-ticket home, he went to my father and borrowed six hundred dollars to bring us over; and he used up all that money in six weeks and was destitute when I found him in the hospital. I had to borrow another hundred dollars to start again. He knew, when he came over, that Frankie and I were starving in Europe, in a ruinous stone hut in a village no peasant would live in. We had not the money for eggs or milk.”

  The next afternoon Laban wanted to walk with Parsons to Lambertville to mail letters and get newspapers. It was a good two-mile walk, up and down, either way; they went by the back way, the green road, past Thornton’s, as the bulls were then dangerous up by Newbold’s and Sobieski’s.

  Laban broke into their usual political comments, “You asked me about the pleasure of drink only yesterday; and today I
can give you a good picture of it. Last night I dreamed I had taken a glass of the old poisonous slop I used to get as a boy on the farm; and the bottle was standing just out of reach, on top of the outhouse among the wild grapevines; it was the very image of desire. I held the glass in my hand. It was full and glowed like a jewel and the bottle when I looked at it with such desire, delightful, hopeful and hopeless passionate desire, glowed in blue and yellow, absinthe jewels. The drink was very real: it’s real to me now. The way I am now, the mere sniff of a dirty old Third Avenue saloon with its mixed smell of sawdust, lethal alcohol and piss would send me raving with delight. Yes, delight and horror; there’s delight in it and the utmost limit of horror. Most people don’t know what horror is. They talk of it—the horror of the Nazis, the horror of crimes; this is loathsome, that is terrible: they simply don’t know. In fact, I wonder how can you be a poet and know the just measure of words and emotions without being a drunkard—a hopeless drunkard like me. I’m glad you’re here; and I’m here. As soon as I’d taken that fatal glass in my dream last night, I heard voices shouting, and hissing and singing like a thin musical saw, a saw about two inches long. I saw a cornbin on a bare hill; and this bin was done in rustic style, with a rustic railing round the porch and pieces of wood fitted together to read M—A—D; and voices were singing away over the hill, down the sky in a shouting chorus, ‘In-sane, in-sane, in-sane.’ I woke up and looked beside the bed and there saw a nest of fluorescent snakes coiling where Ruth had put her stockings. You know the barmen are very clever to put bottles on glass shelves with glass behind them. It’s fascinating. If even a drop of water had touched my lips then, it would have turned to whisky, just from my burning desire and I should have been out raging today.”

  “You had the DT’s just from a dream?” remonstrated Sam.

  A cold bitter smile was on Laban’s lips. “You people call that the DT’s. As you can imagine, I’m a specialist. That’s a very light hallucination. Why some bad drunks are committed to the madhouse without knowing genuine DT’s. There’s no imagination in the bottle that you didn’t put there. Naturally, with my temperament and visions, a poet, I have very out-of-the-way hallucinosis.”

  “Don’t let’s talk about it,” said Sam: “it’s not good for you.”

  “The dream’s in me: let me talk it out.”

  “Don’t dwell on it.”

  Laban took his arm in a hard grip, “No, no, it drives me on. Ruth must never know I’m in this condition.”

  “Let us talk about literature and history. It’s better for you. Try to control yourself.”

  Laban laughed and pointed to his scar. “Ruth told you I got this scar in the First World War. She used to believe that too. One cold Christmas I was out with a friend, from one place to another where they made their own stuff, during prohibition, and we came to a country druggist’s who had a kind of general store. He had the stuff in barrels. He was always half-blind, not with liquor, but from drugs from his own store; and he loved people to come to him, he loved to destroy others. There he sat like a blind barn owl and motioned us inside. Inside was a cabinet where I knew he kept his home-made whisky. Our host couldn’t move; we helped ourselves. I don’t know what happened after that, but we heard howling and screaming about the countryside that night; and next day I was picked up beside a barbed-wire fence along which I had been dragged.” After a pause: “Not that this is my only scar. Hard work on the farms such as I did not only as a boy younger than Frankie, but all the time I was working my way through college—and the fact that I felt obliged to drink because I soon became famous for it—well, that accounts for my obsession. It’s like the obsession of a mother like Ruth with her children: I am one of them. What she has gone through for us has turned her from a normal woman into a sort of lunatic, part prison warder and part village sibyl. You know how madhouse warders are all of turned wits. And every year it grows in me, getting bigger like an oak, stronger. I want you to see what I have in me, my will power. It’s abnormal, like my vice. How can a man like you who doesn’t care if he never sees a drop, understand the need I have to talk about it? Mustn’t a lover talk about his love?”

  Sam was silent with disgust and fear.

  “If I wrote down my dreams, or rather my hallucinosis,” said Laban, “they would rank with the stories of Poe. I once thought I saw my mother standing in the doorway in grave-wax, her grey and white hair around her woven into a coat and crying that I had killed her. That’s hackneyed, isn’t it? I once dreamed—”

  “Do me a favour, Laban, and don’t tell me any more of this graveyard poetry. I’m not quite the pachyderm you think. I can’t take it. My mother is dead, too.”

  Laban smirked. Neither made an attempt to lengthen the walk, but returned straight to the house. Laban took a jugful of coffee upstairs, shouting to Ruth to put on more. They had a gay supper, and Frankie was allowed to sit up late talking politics. Everyone was happy, Laban in his best mood, penetrating, considerate, balanced. He condemned the Fascists and their “watchdogs and lapdogs of the pen,” and he named names—all those who sold their pens. He showed how the ideas of the corporate state and of the brown-shirted horde were essentially incompatible with true writing. Of the four at the table, only Frankie did not know that upstairs in a velvet-lined case in a box was the jewelled cross on a ribbon; and that with it the former farmboy, following Ezra Pound to Italy, dreaming of glory, and flattered by the empty-heads around Mussolini, had acquired a title in a Fascist order. The honest radical scholar, the poor farmboy could not give up this secret jewel.

  In the morning, Laban came down from his workroom with spectacles on, looking fussy and saying that his agent had written a ruinous contract, giving fifty per cent of Hollywood sales to his publisher.

  “That’s quite normal,” said Parsons: “that is in my contract too.”

  Laban withered him with a glance. “These ten per cent bastards are working for the publishers, though we pay them out of our thin purses. They get into a huddle at cocktail parties, kill themselves laughing at the pretensions of authors. What chance do I stand living in the back of beyond? I am classed with the other daydreaming hicks.”

  “Write him a sharp note,” said Ruth.

  “I’ll have to go to New York to straighten things out: they throw your notes into the trash basket. Author equals moron.” Ruth and Laban had rancorous words. In the end Ruth won. Laban went up to Newbold’s and telephoned his agent.

  The next evening, a Wednesday, after dark, they were having a light meal in the kitchen, when they heard a car bumping along the track; and shouting and whistling. It was all quite clear, at a distance, in the still gully. The car stopped below Strassers’, men got out and there was a lot of shouting, which sounded like “Laban! Laban Davies!” A man evidently fell into the bushes by the creek, was pulled out and the car struggled forward. “A bunch of drunks,” said Parsons. Laban was sitting upright and still, his odd long round-eyed face staring at a window which faced the creek.

  Ruth cried, “They’ve come!”

  Laban remained motionless, excited, staring.

  “All of you go upstairs at once,” said Parsons; “I’ll say you’re not here.” He got up, pulled down all the blinds, starting with the ones facing the creek. When they were down, the family hurried through the door into the stone house, which was dark and so up the enclosed stairway of the stone house. The house was now in midsummer screened from the road by the trees. The taxi with the visitors had to make the full turn around the rightangled creek to reach Dilley’s wooden bridge, the only entrance to the property. Sam observed the car from the door. It had stopped at the very beginning of the Dilleys’ place and with pocketlights the visitors were surveying the creek for an entrance. The banks were smothered with poison ivy, an effective barrier. “Sit still and don’t make a sound,” said Sam, shutting every door of the stone house. The car started up again and was cautiously making its way over the track, avoiding the creek. Presently it thumped over the brid
ge with the loose plank and the shouting went on, the voices calling for Laban, all very clear in this hollow. Laban on the way upstairs had recognized voices. There was now not a sound from upstairs, where all was dark. Parsons had no more time than to partly clear the table, leaving only one place, his own, and push away the chairs, when the car, which had taxi lights, found its way over the Dilleys’ bridge, and stopped by the barn. The men, all drunk, were arguing. The taxi-driver refused to go farther. There was nothing but tussocks and holes ahead. Two of the passengers got out, and, cursing and stumbling, shouting for Laban, they made for the house. Several others milled around the car, took a few steps, saw the creek, hesitated. Parsons stood at the door.

  “Put on the porch light, you so-and-so,” shouted one of the drunks.

  “There’s no porch light,” called Sam in his resonant Mid-Western voice: “what is it you want, my friend?”

  “What’s the matter, you damn so-and-so, who are you? Where’s Laban? The taxi-driver won’t come any closer. What the hell sort of a dump is this?”

  “What’s the matter? Whom do you want, my friend?” cried Sam.

  “Shut up, it’s someone else,” said the man behind, not so drunk.

  “Where’s Laban, Laban and Ruth?” asked the first drunk, arms spread to help him over the tussocks and stopping a short way from the porch.