The House of Breath

by Reginald Gibbons

  Now the wheel lies in a grotesque ruin by the rusted and empty tub, and weed grows up between its metal petals (and sunflowers, crooking over after the sun, mock because they turn) and rats scuttle over the wreckage. It lies like the emblazonment of a fallen house, blazoned by rat’s scratches and rust engravings, the intaglios carved in by decay; and, vanquished and defiled like the coat of arms of Starnes and Ganchion, it lies unturned by the wind that brushes against it but cannot turn it, useless and disempowered. Once its turning was like a silver burning in the autumn sunlight, flashing and turning in its gyre so that wind in it meant water and families lived by wind, as a sailed ship. And if the wind came from the direction of the sawmill it bore and scattered over the house the piney pollen of sawdust; and if from the direction of the river bottom lands, the scents of pines glistening far from the hot inferno of kilns, and the sweet breath of the Charity Riverwoods.

  Often I stood, boy blown in the wind that blew upon the cisternwheel and turned it, in an autumn dusk, a big hand holding mine, and watched the whirling of the wheel. I felt myself a steady fixed point on the earth round which a whirling gathered and spun as a center. Then it was that I seemed to be no one, to belong to no one (he holding my hand) and suddenly beholding the russet light of the turning sumach tree in the pasture (pulled down and stolen from all light by that terrible winter’s long ropes of solid ice), I thought, O I am leaf and I am wind and I am light. Something in the world links faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes of them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.

  Dare you go into the house? Go, entering through the back door (out of which you used to throw the water from the washstand to the chickens gathered waiting for it. Oh the mournful mewling of Aunty’s young broilers waiting at the steps for you in the mornings or at dusks when you would wash at the washstand: they haunt you, the calls of the broilers, their plaints and plaintive whines in the yard) which opens on the screened-in breezeway. There seems some hand, big and broken-knuckled, waiting at the door taking your hand to lead you.

  On this breezeway in the summer afternoons she held the flyswatter like a scepter and Uncle Jimbob sat, poorly and silent, on a little barrel, and all of them, the Cousins and Aunts and Uncles and other kin, just sitting there with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to dress up for, just sitting. And then, hearing wheels on the road and running to the kitchen window, she shouted “The gypsies!”, and all of them gathered at the windows, watching the bright gypsies jingle down the road, bright and quick and going someplace, and none of them saying a word, all of them gathered at the windows, looking through the windows.

  Her drinking well was right in the house at the end of the long back porch next to the indoor privy (there was a crooked one outside beyond the chickens, but in it were hornets). This was the only magic thing, the dark, enchanted well that held the beautiful voice prisoner, down below the shimmering water. When you cried down, “Hello! hello!”, it answered back only, “O!…O!”, in a wailing young girl’s voice.

  When Uncle Jimbob had to clean the well he would draw out all the water and lower you down into the darkness on a little wooden sling of a seat. You dreamt of it, and often—forever—(for you had been so bred as a well-creature, brother to the bucket, lowered empty and pulled up full and brimming clear to be drunk down by waiting thirst—child of wheel and cistern-child, with gift of turning) felt the terrible descent of alienation from face and voice and light into empty, lightless loneliness (but O Granny Ganchion, joined to you, below); and knew, that once you were pulled up (by whom, what hand?) into light and warmth again, you would somewhere in you be changed by the well-terror and committed to make it known to those on the summer breezeway as vision, for all their sakes. For each time you ascended—by hard will, by choice, by courage, you had a responsibility to the vision of descent. Down on the cold sand floor of the well you crouched, cold and trembling, and heard the mysterious voices beyond the well (as you heard them from your pallet often, whispering in the next room) talking in an easy summer afternoon: Aunty’s and Malley’s and Granny’s and Swimma’s and the others’, and wondered, alien there, if you would ever be joined to them again—or if you were, whether you could ever really tell them what your terror in the well had been; or heard the voices round the blue hole far above, voices of the gathered faces round the rim calling down “Boy! Boy! Can you hear your name?”

  (The wheel is broken at the cistern, the rope at the well is raveled and rotten, the bucket is rusted and leaky; and there is never a hand on the windlass now.)

  And in the front yard in the late summer afternoons when the children played barefoot upon the sticker-burrs, all her kin sat rocking round her on the porch and she spat snuff into the front yard and rocked and said, “This is an old house. That was pore Mama and Papa’s room there. I remember pore Mama and Papa sleeping in that front room where Malley and Walter Warren and Jessy and Berryben live now when all of us was children.”

  And the children in the front yard running barefooted over the stickerburrs, singing “Go in and out the windows, go in and out the windows, go in and out the windows, for we have gained this day.”

  Or, in the game of Statue, all the Starnes and Ganchion young thrown into frozen poses, bent-over mourning shapes or vain or heroic arabesques—so that in memory they seem like a pavilion of ruined statuaries. (Folner even then would cheat a pose into some careless, blasè stance, but he could not ransom his face.)

  The little train would go by in front of the house and stop all rocking and any game and where, where was it going? And who was the wild-faced man in the dirty cap who waved the gloved-black hand from the engine as it passed? And what was he trying to say to all of them, to the children playing games in the big front yard round the speckled canna and the big ones rocking on the long gallery in the swing and wicker rockers? Here they sat and ran as he passed, and oh who was he, this leering, magical, terrible man who waved the great gloved-black hand at them from the little engine as it passed, going where? coming from where? Oh they said it was going to Riverside, but that train was going everywhere.

  “And oh,” Aunty said, “we ain’t got a chanct, we ain’t got a chanct in this world. Jimbob’s down in the back and got hemorrhoids and a stone in his bladder and cain’t carpenter or work at the roundhouse or even lift a good size squash; and the garden’s dry and burnin up in the burnin sun and we cain’t buy feed for the cows and chickens and I don’t know what we’ll ever do just set here on this porch and rock and spit until we die one day and be buried by our pore relations. And Swimma finishin high school next year and then where does she go and what does she do? If she goes wild like that Willadean Clegg I’d rather see her dead, I declare to you all and to the good Lord I’d rather see her dead. But I can see it comin. Ought to have her a business course in Palestine, but who on earth can afford to pay for the kind of course she needs at Miz Cratty’s Select Business College in Palestine? And Maidie marryin Fred that runs a streetcar in Dallas and who can live off the money they pay you to run a streetcar in Dallas? And Malley and Walter Warren unhappy and little Jessy sickly—and this infernal little town of Charity dead and rottin away with only the Ralph Sandersons havin the money and all the rest of us pore as nigras and our teeth bad and my side hurtin day and night with the change a life and no money to see a specialist in Dallas (Jimbob, Jimbob, the pigs is in the peapatch again, but don’t run. Walk, Jimbob, mind your back). My Lord, guess we’ll all die in a pile right here, with the pigs in the peapatch and nobody carin, nobody carin.

  “Why? On New Year’s Day I cook my cabbage and make my pillow slips.”

  “Aunty, why does the Widow Barnes just sit on her porch?”

  Oh all the porches in the little town had them rocking on them, sitting, sitting; and the crops burning up under the burning sun and the teeth going bad and stones in the bladders and the town rotting away and no place to go, no place to go.

  The K
u Klux Klan went riding riding. You saw the fiery cross on Rob Hill in the summer nighttime and you knew some poor crazy riverbottom Negro was going to burn, was going to run shrieking down Main Street in tar and feathers.

  “Aunty, Aunty, what is that noise by the woodstove?”

  “Be still, Boy. It’s only the rats in your Aunty’s wood-box.”

  “Oh the sad sad days when all of us was young,” she said, and spat and rocked. “You know when Mama passed on, she left me all her old crockery. There was some big pitchers with roses handpainted on them. And then the old Nigra Mary Bird who cleaned for Mama for years just took them all, sayin they was rightfully hers because she was the only one that ever was kind to Mama and rightfully deserved them. Everthing we ever had is gone. What they don’t steal away from us we lose by drout or a plague or a rottin away. Life is hard and only sufferin and it does no good to any of us and how we ever bear it I don’t know. But we have it to do and we’ve got to be strong about it and try not to be blue about it and go on in trial and tribylation. But how life changes and the things that happen to us in this world are like stories to be read and I declare the great God don’t even know sometimes the dreadful things that happen to us; and oh Boy, Boy, let me push back the hair from your eye. Going to be wrinkled as old man Nay down by the sawmill, worst suit a hair I ever saw. Come to me—lemme roach back ya hair. The Ganchions are the blight of Charity, and I know it, worse than boll weevils, worse than a pest a hoppers, the Devil incarnit, despise the day we all come here from Sour Lake, us rawsin bellies; Charity ruined us. Don’t frown so, Boy, don’t worry so; commere, lemme roach back the hair from ya eye…”

  “Aunty, Aunty, who am I? Who are we? What kin are we all to each other?”

  “The gingerbread man he ran and ran; and melted as he ran. On the nose of the fox he melted down into the tears of the fox that ran… When we was all in Sowlake with Mama and Papa, runnin in the fields and playin in the wagon it seemed like nothin ever could happen to any of us. (Papa played a jew’s-harp on the screenporch in the evenins.) When Walter Warren married Malley we all nearly died, I tell you, nearly killed us. That was the beginnin of the whole trouble; then we come to Charity, then the Starnes come into this house, one by one, right in on us, till we’uz all here together. Ever year got harder and harder, drouts come and floods come and children come; the whole world was changing, preachers said the end a the world was comin, wickedness everwhere and sickness everwhere, and no money.

  “Maidie was so sweet and quiet, always minded me and never give me one lick a trouble. When the Revival meetin was acrost in Bailey’s Pasture we’d go and there sang the best quartet I ever heard in my life, the Sunshine Boys; and Fred Suggs was in it, a tenor with a beautiful solo voice. When the Sunshine Boys sang, Man of the world, why stand ye idle all the day? Look up to Christ, he will forgive, your sins he’ll wash away! Then be prepared to meet thy God and of the feast partake; The King of Kings is ruler there, he guards the golden gate! this was just about the peacefulest thing in the world; and when Fred Suggs would chime in with his beautiful tenor voice: Is there anyone here who is not prepared to pass through the golden gate? Be ready, for soon the time will come to enter the golden gate. Don’t let it be said, too late, too late, to enter the golden gate. Be ready, for soon the time will come, to enter the golden gate.

  “Well, Fred Suggs was just the finest boy, we brought him across the tracks to Sunday dinner and he and Maidie picked a watermelon from the patch and we had it and then they went walkin down the tracks afterwards. I knew they wanted to marry and in the Fall Fred Suggs come back to Charity and they married and went away to Dallas. It nearly killed me to pack her suitcase, but I waved at them from the gate and they went on off to Dallas. Pore Maidie, she cries ever night for Charity and all of us in this house, and I wish she could come back, the city’s no place for Maidie, no place for pore pineywoods folks, Maidie’s no city girl, never was farther than White Rock Bridge on Fourth of July picnics before she went to Dallas. She don’t even know her neighbors, they work all day, and on Sunday she takes the children to Sunday School and then they ride the streetcar to the end a the line and back. Sometimes she goes to town to Kress a little, but that’s about all. The time they made me come to Dallas to see the dentist was awful, firewagons howlin their sireens ever minute, those streetcars grindin day and night, just couldn’t stand it. ‘This town’s burnin down and they’re all killin each other, I cain’t sleep or set still and I’m going back home,’ I said; and declared I uz comin back to Charity. Said I’d order my teeth from Sears (certainly wouldn’t have Doctor Stokes in Charity to make my teeth, that drunkard; he’s ruined ever mouth in Charity).

  “But pore little Maidie in that duplex in that city; I wish she’d come back here. Wish all of em would come on back here and we could have our reunions that we used to have when all the Starnes ud come in from the woods. Never saw so much squash and yella-legged chicken in your life, all the young Starnes not a one under six feet, and the pretty, timid girls—where have they all gone? I tell you the Devil walked in the river-bottoms—and cussed this town.

  “I just want to set right here in this house, don’t want to see nobody, don’t care if they all never come here again, just want to set here in this! Old rotten house until I die. Never had nothin, never will have nothin, none of us ever had a chanct and I don’t care anymore, be glad when I die, wish I’d hurry up, then it’ll be all over with.”

  Oh you ain’t got a chanct, you ain’t got a chanct in this world. You are down in the back and got hemorrhoids and a stone in your bladder and you can’t carpenter or work at the roundhouse and the garden’s dry and burnin up in the burnin sun and you can’t buy feed for the cows and chickens and I don’t know what you’ll ever do, just sit there on the porch and rock and spit and die one day and be buried by your poor relations. And the infernal little town dead and rottin away and all of you poor as niggers and your teeth bad and your sides hurtin day and night and no money to see a doctor in Dallas.

  “(And Jimbob, Jimbob, the pigs is in the peapatch but don’t run, walk, Jimbob. Mind your back, Jimbob. My Lord guess we’ll all die in a pile right here with the pigs in the peapatch and nobody carin.)”

  Nobody carin.

  Now a spider lives unbothered in the doormat that never knows a pawing foot upon it.

  There is the kitchen gathered around the great worn woodstove. A faded map is still tacked on the wall. You hear the mice kicking in the turned-over oatmeal. And you hear the wind that lopes like a spectral rider round and round the house, whirls down the flues and chutes into the woodstove and thrashes the ashes and blows a wild little horn in the hollows of the stove. Then you hear a melody from a farther room and it is the wind blowing a tune in the closed shutter in the room where Malley Ganchion lived on like a mouse in the house after all the others had gone, hoping some redemption for them all would come.

  Some appetite waits and lurks in the world, you remark; it is some great hunger, insect and rodent and decay hunger. This seems suddenly to be a law of the universe. Insect, mold, rat, rust, death—all wait for and get the human plunder in the end, to carry the carrion away. The vultures of this greed hover and plane over us all our lives, waiting to drop down. The leaf has its caterpillar, the stalk mildew and the worm lies crooked in the bud. And observe the little white lice, dandruff in the golden head of the marigold, the gall chancres and fistulas on the rosebush. See the shale of fly carcasses in the spiderwebs, of caught hornets and flying ants, wings folded like a closed fan (the dead of this house lie fastened in what web, stretched over what blue Kingdom?), bits of wings and antennae, all debris. The dirtdobbers’ knobs of mud, lathed round and whorled smooth, hang like many lightless lanterns—because there is no hand to knock them down. The insects have taken over-we fight them back all our lives, but in the end they come victoriously in, our inheritors. Look in the corners, under things—find the little purewhite puffs and tents in which some whiskery thing lives, find the
thousandlegs and stinkbugs and doodlebugs and Junebugs, find fantastic bugs with shielded backs and delicate marks and brilliant colors and designs. See a caught mouse in a trap—set by what futile, mocked hand?—rotted to a frail skull and a vertebra. And see over the boards of the faded floor the Sienese lines of tracks and roads and tunnels and cross-hatched marks and trails. In the bins and cannisters are weevils; the roaches, unmolested, are grown big. The legged armies have come into this house. This is the slow eating away—mold and canker and mildew and must, gall and parasite, lice and little speckled ticks and grooved worms. In a corner of the pantry (where you often ran to hide from old Mr. Hare, passing in his rumbling wagon calling “paa-ahs! paa-ahs!”) discover a ruined still life of left vegetables, whiskered and leprosied, and rotted fruit spotted with pustules and the stippled fuzz of fungus. (You remember the glassy picture in the dining room, where you ate on Sundays, that was of a sad dead blue duck dangling down a golden-flecked and purple-speckled head—with staring eyes that watched you eat—and pears and peaches round him; and feel that picture’s ruin before you.)

  And all so quiet is this eating away, except for the wind that winds a mummy cloth around the fallen splendid house delivered to its inheritors.

  So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenters’ hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.