The House of Breath

by Reginald Gibbons

  And once in my greatest flood when I was swollen huge and throbbing with all my fluid, I crept through Charity and through Bailey’s Pasture close to you and to your house and lay by you and by the house (O we were joined again) and heard within it all the murmurings of the house, by the shuttered window, in the cellar, in the loft, in the kitchen by the map, and sang my duet with the girl on the world; and you slipped out to me and dropped into me Swimma’s seashell and Christy’s ship in the bottle that I floated down and away onto the waters of the mapped world he looked at and became, and also dropped some Folner spangles and a stranger’s photograph and a string of ruby beads—and I received them all and mixed them in my substance, in my stuff. And I lay upon all the life of the people of the house left in the pasture: the sawdust, the bones of frozen and shot Roma the cow, the go-to-sleep flowers, the bitterweeds, the lost doll, the babybuggy; I washed over all the footprints on the path of Folner and you and Berryben and Christy and Swimma; saw Malley peeking at me through the shutter and watched all of you sitting on the front gallery together fearing me; heard the grinding of the cisternwheel and heard the splashing of the dropped bucket in the well, And when I left the pasture you know what I left: what you left in me and I brought back to you and to your pasture. O we were lovers in your place and in my place, in bottomland and pasture.

  And I knew your agony with Christy in my woods, heard it and took the gift of birds you threw me, Christy’s yoke and your yoke and my yoke, and dissolved them in my substance.

  O when I rolled over onto the world in my agony and thought, lost in Charity, that I might never find my way back home to the bottomlands, I slept by you: and in my agony I was reaching out to touch the world and I touched you when I touched the world, I touched myself that I had put in you. Reach spread, roll out onto the world and touch, O Boy! O River!

  When Christy and I looked at the map and saw all the life of the shaped countries, our minds were blown globes like the world and within the worlds of our minds there was created, mapped and carried there our idea of World and of History, although we were of little Charity; and our hearts, like a Creator pumped all the creation: in Märchen and epic and lieder of blood: through the corridors of our veins, singing like troubadours and minnesingers and bards Iliads and Eddas, Odysseys and Geneses, and breaking echoes of history and time and the rabbled glory of men and life through ages in the spaces of our minds’ universe—and creating everything again.

  And hearing the blinded girl’s song of the world in the hallway, I melted into the world and changed into everything, entered into everything that had ever been created or constructed, buildings, woods, rivers, pomp, love, history; and everything entered into me, all involved in all.

  You, River, then, held like a capsule of sperm the whole seed of creation; and the house we came from, breath breathed into it, like one uttered breath all the speech and all the life of men in a world of worlds.

  But even a river, River, can fall to ruin (you lie so thin and weak and old). In time, important men came advising the Riverbottom Nigras that the land was bought and to move; and in time the bottomlands where, it seemed, Nigras and Charity gatherers were gathered so often, like a flight of summer flies that have vanished, were cleaned smooth as desert of palmettos and muscadines, and oilwells stood up over broken yellow swords, and you were turned out of your path as though you had forgotten all the ways you had ever gone and moved farther over into Riverside, white Fuller’s Earth Mill on one side, gasping the white fogged breath; and on the other the black towers of riggings and the scraped and bald desert of yellowgreen or black slag, ugly subterranean rocks and the thick mudflats and slues like the slime of decomposition.

  But across the icebound bottomlands, over the sleeted slues and the rime of the bog, with beak of horn and horned nails, chiming his terrible Midnight, stalks the bird whose ghost you are, O river O my waters.

  It Seems. Charity, that the young ones were always packing their suitcases to come back to you or to leave you again and the old ones sitting and waiting, taking the young ones back and keeping them as long as they could—they at their standoffish distance of never belonging there or anywhere that broke the old ones’ hearts who never said a brokenhearted word—till they had to stand on the front porch again and watch them, the Folners and the Berrybens and the Sue Emmas and the Boys, going through the gate to the Highway with their suitcase in their hands—away again, who knew where. There was just no future in a little town like you for young people young and ready, they said. But the old ones sat right there with you. Charity, holding your dying hand, rocking and wailing and listening or counting their secret futile beads of hope.

  V

  YET what were the ways and roads that led me back, I whose ancestors were wheel and well and cellar and loft?

  Day after day, night after night a ship plowed and plunged through the water—and we two were on its bow, standing together looking together ahead: now I hear Christy’s voice speaking into mine and telling, the way he told me long ago in the woods, in his way, of his life that became mine (now I see it)’, of the roads he followed away, and of the ways back home (“Blues” he called me instead of Christy because he said I was so sad. I had left home in you, Charity, with Clatzco Skiles, for the Merchant Marines, we had signed up at the Postoffice, and gone away through Texis lyin in cotton, for it was pickin time, and the pickers, draggin their long limp bags behind em across the fields, were like a pack of crawlin wounded animals with broken backs. I passed through Tennysee with niggers’ laughter over Memphis, niggers on the steps of houses in the September heat; crossed over the catfish rivers. A fall wind was already blowin in Ohio. I spit in the Beautiful Ohio for luck and good-bye. In New York I took my ship bound for Panymaw that I had seen like a red appendix on the map, but they putt Clatzco on a freighter going I don’t know where. In the ship I was lonesome and afraid, but I did my work. At night I’d lay in my bunk and think of everthing. And then I saw a face, fair in its youngman’s bearded beauty, and so much like Follie that I almost cried out “Follie!” I watched this face while I worked and it swam before me in my nights in my bunk. I wanted to putt my hand on this hand and hold it still under mine, made still by his made still. Oh he was bright and I was dark and I gave him all my darkness. On that ship: but we joined, for all good things in the. World, and to find sometime to gether; and loved, I never knew I could do it and was afraid; and on the bow of the ship that night that he said. “What have we done Christy?”

  I said, wonderin too, “But something good will come of this, I know something good will come of this…”

  Only sorrow came).

  Day after day, night after night, our ship plowed through the water filled with flying fishes and dolphins and the nights so blue and white, the spray flying up like feathers of white birds, and white birds following us. Some nights the water was so smooth, so quiet, and we were so quiet upon it, that the ship glided like a phantom skater; and the moonlight would lie in the wide gleaming swath following as though the ship turned up, like a plow, moonlight. Life was in a stunning balance, timeless and directionless, and identities and names were lost. And then some watercurse fell upon us and our names were broken by the brute prow of the ship, like the waves that were broken, and we were anonymous as broken pieces that never can be mended to their whole again. This craft called Ship, this monstrous artifact of builders, held us, broken pieces, within it, trying to find ourselves in each other.

  But when the disenchantment came and the voyage ended and the others turned their backs upon the enchantment as though it had been only joke played upon them, or dream, or charade, we, nameless pieces, pieced ourselves together into each other and went away, off the ship, into a world of magic and witchcraft whirling in the twilight glimmer of hope and hopelessness. Who were we and where had we ever come from, what had made us what we were? Charity and the house and all the people in it had been blown away, it seemed, by my breath.

  Looking, as we went, toward t
he water that held beyond us the ship it had spawned, phantom water-egg that had borne us, we stopped; we heard the fogbell forlornly clanging. It had a broken sound that seemed to tell us dread, terror, loss, but some destiny. Waterborn, Glaucus and magician grass, we felt land alien.

  At night, in the cities, as we went, the wind was flogging a ragged cloud like an old woman beating a rug, and the dust fell over the cities. The moon would hang fat in the East. And looking upon it, we wished we could find one word, one strong word, small but hard as a stone, that would mean our aloneness in the world, and say it in great crying voice, hurling toward the moon. On the lighted boulevards there was marching pomp and ceremony and the rattle of laughter, revel and carousal and a running. There was no name for anyone or anything. The lonely were waiting on the corners and in most every park for someone to come—and they could bruise themselves against each other into at least a momentary reality upon a bed of peace. (But if I were to speak of the loneliness within love, would anyone understand?)

  In the cities certainty was deranged and a crack and a break were in the once clear voice, a flaw in every finely woven garment. Some daemon purpose was sown all in the land. (The only caress that of an image, that of a coldhanded beauty, like a marble caress. O granite caress. O granite kiss.)

  And in the desert, where we were, the bare scalp of earth stretched scabrous and feverish under the metallic light, and the wind would run its lion-toothed comb through the loose sand and sage, rend them like loose hair and scale and fling and scatter them over roof and against us going bitten and stung under the hard tile sky. Hordes of grasshoppers would ride in on the wind and shuttle together, clacking their desiccate wings. There was a steaming vapor out over the tortured desert and the light went hard and percussive so that it might ring like a copper bell if it could be struck, and the world lay brittle as bone. We felt all of bone and rock and metal, we could no longer melt together but stood apart hard as bone and rock. What ruined us? We yearned for water.

  Then, in a little town by water, at the Equinox, we broke ourselves against each other, broke forever, broken O broken forever.

  O the cry over the waters, what was crying over the waters, what was running all through the waters, ringing the buoys over all the waters? Shadows on the shore, what shadow-people, worn faces like stone metopes, shadow family, shadow kin, hovering together along the shore, near me, always near me.

  Walking walking walking round in one’s loneliness, up and down in a town. It is cold and the wind blows; the streets are dirty. Because of much rain the trees are green-slimed; the slime is bright and frozen in the streetlights. Yet the beast will not come into the fold. The ultimate agony of aloneness is not to be real; and, unreal, to demoralize love.

  The grinding of my feet over ice on the city pavements was over everything frozen, yet when I walked on the pavements something in some others I passed turned a little and bowed to something in me turning; and we greeted each other secretly by a secret turning—but passed on. Yet when I looked in a showwindow I saw my terrible white face, lined and drawn like a dead man’s…. Who would turn to a dead man? Savior, Savior, hear my humble cry; while on others thou art calling, do not pass me by! (I would set in the bus stations wantin to talk to somebody, but couldn’t, wouldn’t…. I would set and, hearin the wheels of the busses crushin the ice on the pavements, going off to home for people in them, remember the snow and sleet in the bottomlands and the feet of the birds on the icebound bottomlands. And think of in Loosiana when we went there, Mama and Malley and Lauralee and me, when Papa was workin for the rayroad and travelin out of headquarters in Shrevesport; and how we hobbled along like cripples over the first snow in our lives, and fell down on the hard ice, alone in Shrevesport, and cryin, and homesick. And how the only thing we knew to do on Sundays was to ride the streetcar to the end a the line and back for a nickel. In school there I had my first music and all the songs we sang were sad: “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”…) and think that some of us are preparation for others: that we prepare others for their life—and that that ought to be enough. But the wound is left. How we work on each other like chemicals, like acids and salts and sulphurs; how like lacquer we change surfaces… Everything, then, working with and upon everything—with accompanying resistance and damage and error but turning out something changed, finished, prepared to receive something more, to take in and take on something more: pain, wisdom, love. This great, mysterious chemistry-going on—praise it.

  When the betrayal comes, in the season of disenchantment, my agony goes formless and flies through the world, is only felt like wind and cannot be caught into any images or shaped into any meaning, but hovers insubstantial and untouchable; only breathes and whispers and murmurs round me and lulls me into a spelllike dream. What muss I do? Then I feel I may never hold or shape a hope again. I forget everything—and I am demoralized and abuse those who love me and go from street to street, betrayed, wandering, drenched in rain. Who am I, bruised so unreal?—what will realize me?—I whirl round and bobble or stand like a statue thrown into the stickerburrs. And then I hear the voices (“Come home, the light’s on, come on home, Ben Berry-ben…”) (“Swimma-a-a-a! Swimma-a-a-a! come in ‘fore dark…”) (“Rescue the Perishing…”) (“Boy, Boy come out to the woodshed, I’ve got something to show you, by gum…”) (“Draw me, draw me, I will follow”) and I melt down like the gingerbread man that ran and ran and ran and melted as he ran. Then I name over and over in my memory every beautiful and loved image and idea I have ever had, and praise them over and over, saying, Granny Ganchion, I touch you and name you; Folner, I touch you and name you; Aunty, Malley, Swimma, Christy, I touch you and name you and claim you all. It is like a procession through the rooms of this house, saying, now this is the hall and there is the bottled ship and the seashell, this is the breezeway, there is the well, here is the map in the kitchen and here is the watery mirror in which, behold, is my face, me, my face…

  That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover: remembering the grouping of old trees, the fall of slopes and hills, the lay of fields and the running of rivers; of animals there, and of objects lived with; of faces, and names, all of love and belonging, and forever be returning to it or leaving it again!

  Out of this suffering a vision of violence: of striking beaks of horn; of blood upon my thigh; of fallen and falling birds. Fallen wings of leaves (what silent terrible flock rows over across the heavens, dropping lost wings, blood-green and yellow, lined like the palms of phantom hands, upon us?) drift down upon us.

  So it all ends, in wordlessness, and in my tears.

  Yet something forms within the world of a tear, shaped by the world that caused it; something takes shape within this uttered breath that builds an image of breath:

  VI

  BEHOLD the house… Now ruin has passed over all that fallen splendid house and done ruin’s work on it. Now, ruin (of childhood) returning to ruin, come, purged of that bile and gall of childhood (into the empty purity of memory), come through the meadow called Bailey’s Pasture that is spun over with luminous dandelions like a million gathered shining heads, through random blooming mustard and clover and bitterweeds, over the grown-over path that was a short-cut to town when there was no circus or revival tent there. Pass one brown spotted cow folded there (remember her name as a calf was Roma and a good ride) and munching the indestructible bitterweed cud of time, and pass around the silent laboring, nervous civilization of an anthill that swarms and traffics on and on beyond the decline of splendid houses or the fall of broken cisternwheels. The slow grinding of cud, even and measured, the twinkling, red, timeless quarry of ants and the eternal, unalt
erable cycle of flowers—first the white, then the pink, then red to blue to purple and finally to sunflower yellow—round and round, turning and turning, moving and moving: they mock the crooked mile that families walk, suffering and failing and passing away, over their crooked stile, into a crooked Beulah Land.

  If you come this way about this time of a time, through Bailey’s Pasture, you will then come to and have to cross over the warped, rusted railroad tracks of the MKT, called Katy Railroad; and, having crossed the rails, you will behold before you this house. You think you hear a voice—from the shuttered window? From the front gallery? From the cellar, the loft?—murmuring, “But who comes here, across the pasture of bitterweeds, wading in through the shallows, home?”

  If you be Berryben Ganchion you have returned after a long long time and too late. For your mother, Malley Ganchion, has gone blind from cataracts that kept her half-blind for such a long time, sitting by the closed shutter in this house, alone, waiting for you to come back.

  If you be Sue Emma Starnes, you are too late, too; and if you be any other, then you have returned for all of them, for all their sakes, come to rummage and explore, in your hour, and find a meaning, and a language and a name.

  Open the rusted iron gate and step across the sticker-burrs blooming in the grass, go round past the rotted tire where the speckled canna used to live and turn towards the cisternwheel that does not turn. See the cistern, rusted and hollow and no water in it, and the wheel of the windmill wrecked and fallen and rats playing over the ruin. The wheel is like an enormous metal flower blighted by rust. Bend down to touch the fallen petals and, bending, hear the grinding groan of the wheel that begins to turn again in your brain of childhood, rasping the overtone of loneliness and moaning the undertone of wonder. Remember how it rose up on long legs out of the round, deep, lidded stock tub, and remember once when the lid was left off how the child of a Negro washwoman (recall her poking, head wrapped in a scrap of red bandanna, the steaming black iron pot full of Starnes and Ganchion clothes) climbed up and fell into the tub and was drowned and how the cows come to drink bellowed to find its corpse.