The House of Breath

by Reginald Gibbons

  “‘But I can’t come back to Charity, Mama,’ you wrote from Sour Lake. ‘What is there in Charity for me? Can’t anybody do anything, go anywheres? I got to keep moving, can’t stop, can’t settle, like a bee in a flower bed.’

  “And then I had a letter from Saren saying you had moved on there.

  “‘But Charity’s as good a place as any on this earth,’ I said. ‘Got the foundry, got a new plant of some kind out by White Rock and also going to get a paper mill factory; lots of nice young people, all askin about you, ought to see what a time they have. Come on home to Charity where your own blood is and settle down and make your way.’

  “But you would never come, I could have preached to you till the world looked level but you would never never come; kept movin and movin over Texis, blown like a tumbleweed—by what wind, what wind, Berryben? And now, hearin this tune blown by the wind in the winda, I think of you next, my pore lost and sufferin little Berryben. What was there that made you different from us all? A mother’s got the right to understand her own son even though the whole rest of the world don’t and cain’t. But you would never come close where I could really set down and ask you face to face what was it? What was it made you different? Was it your father that wouldn’t let you play the piano or be anything that hounded and scaired you? Was it your Granny Ganchion that put some Ganchion curse in your blood and set such an example for you? If I could have just seen you, I could have read it in your face, whether you and Evella Sykes were in love and why she followed you round. But I swore I would never mention her name again to you or even say her name again to myself.

  “We could never hold you, none of us. You seemed like a little scaired animal of some kind. Something somewhere had shaken you up, scaired you so that nobody could ever hold you still. You trembled. Was it Evella Sykes, or was it Charity or was it all of us you got ashamed of and ran away from—your own blood an bones?

  “Come on home, it’s not too late, even after all these years. The light’s on. Haven’t been home in Charity for years and years, not even to lay a wreath on your dead sister Jessy’s grave nor set a pot of geraniums on your daddy’s. I remember everthing you ever said to me, that the world is big and Charity so small and this house old and sleepy. I’ve kept em all in my heart and pondered them, all the words you said. How it nearly killed me at first, really it did, I vow to you Berryben it nearly killed me, couldn’t even swallow water. Had to keep busy mornin to night workin and doin; if ever I’d a set down I’d a burst out cryin. When there was no chores to be done, before I had my cataracks, I’d embroidry. Embroidried twelve cup towels that winter you left, one right after another.

  “I knew you wanted something that we all didn’t know about; and you kept it secret from me and would never let me know. That you wanted to go out after something in the world—something that your father never found but maybe grieved for. And I didn’t know how to tell you how to do it, Berryben; I would have helped you if I could’ve, Lord knows I would’ve, would’ve done anything. You were my hope boy Ben, when you went away all my hope went with you. You were my only chanct. You closed this winda on my world, and when the wind comes from the riverbottoms there’s the song of all this sorrow between you and me in the shutter; the song of sorrow in the shutter’s the same as in my mind. You were my only chanct. For what? I’m not sure, I cain’t say anymore, I’m all confused and riled up inside, cain’t say; but in you there seemed to be all my chance for everthing. But I couldn’t keep you; any way I tried, I couldn’t keep you. When you went away I said I know it’s right that you go, wouldn’t have you stay at all if you don’t want to stay, want you to do what you have to do, what will make you happy Ben, I won’t keep you. But what I felt when I found out you were never comin back I can never tell you, just the whole insides of me gone and fallen to pieces.

  “Our life was so hard and so little, I knew you would make it big for us—sneaked money to you for your expression lessons with that teacher that came in onct a week from Huntsville—all this behind your daddy’s back to get you out of the sawdust, Berryben, to deliver you from the sawmill, to put you in a better world and away from the trash standing round in striped shirts and bigbilled caps on Saturday nights in front of Duke’s Drug Store with cigarettes hangin out of their mouths.

  “You were such a promise in the church. I thought you would give your life to the church and for the good of mankind. I still believe you uz called to be a preacher and Hattie Clegg does too. How you can do this to us all I don’t understand.

  “But what do I have? Only the twilight of this oldmemry-house, and a chickensnake’s somewhere in the castorbeans stealin my few eggs, and settin by this shuttered winda listenin to this tune playin out my memry by a wind from the ruined Charity Riverbottoms.

  “Berryben and Jessy, my two pore lost children, listen, listen to the wind’s tune. Your pore old daddy, Walter Warren Starnes, for a long time after both you left us he never slept well, slept hardly at all, set up quick in his bed at nights and couldn’t get his breath. Said he was chokin, said it was his heart; but I know it was memry and worry over you had their hands at his throat and his heart. Parents oughtn’t to do that, I know, but how else can you do? Then he’d hear a noise in your rooms and say, ‘Malley, there’s a sound a footsteps comin from Berryben’s room, he’s come home’; or, ‘Malley, there’s some commotion in Jessy’s room’; and he’d take the shotgun and go creepin and a pointin it through every room, all through your room, Ben, and all through your room, Jessy; and I would lie there, frozen, thinking, what will he find, an excaped convick from the Pen at Huntsville or a rat or just the creakin floor, but never Berryben or Jessy. And there was never nothing in your rooms, never nothin at all but everthing standing left the way you left them, quiet and like you left them. I’d lie there in my bed and want to die, and think—is this what parents have to come to, a creepin at night through room and room with a shotgun after the ghosts of their children who’ve gone away and left them lonely and sleepless and chokin in the night? O the memry of your daddy in his nightshirt creepin through your deserted rooms with a shotgun in his hands!

  “This house is like an old burnt-out hollow of a tree. Why should a mother have to set midst all the heart-breakin leftovers of the past? Going to rent out these rooms, going to move to the City Hotel, or write to Cousin Lottie in Lovelady to come and stay with me.

  “The Lord hep us and bind us.

  “You used to write me not to think so much, Berryben; but I must look back, pillar of salt or no. And that wind turns a slow and steady wheel through the waters of my memry as it blows this tune of sorrow in my shutter. O what’s the meanin of it all? There must be some meanin somewhere—it cain’t all be just this rabblement and helter-skelter. Something has to replace what’s lost in us, what’s grown and been harvested or withered, like crops—but what? We are taken and held and shaken by so many things in life; but in the end it is Memry that gets us—we are finally delivered into the bitter, clawin hands of Memry after life is through handlin us and is done with us. We ought to see to it that we make good memry for ourselves, like a slow and perfect stitchin, as we go along, and embroidry a good and lovely memry out of all the thread we one day have to set, alone, and unravel, stitch by stitch. Now I see that every day I uz makin a memry and didn’t know it. Oh wish I uz like old Aunt Mat Bell—she cain’t remember a thing, cain’t even remember her name—everthing that ever was, for her, is gone, wiped clean out of her head. ‘Molly Jim,’ she’ll say to her daughter, ‘what’s my name, Molly Jim?’ Seems like a blessed state.

  “But listen! Listen—wind sounds just like Berryben talkin…”

  “Listen again, Mama, and I’ll try to tell you for the hundredth time what it was that made me go away.”

  “I’m listenin, Ben, but let me see your face. I cain’t see your face, Berryben.”

  “It’s because you don’t open the shutter, Mama, because you’ll never open the shutter. But let me tell you if I can. I real
ly left so I could come back again.”

  “But it’ll be too late, then. Either I’ll be too blind to see your face or I’ll be dead and gone.”

  “It’s never too late to come back again, Mama. There was just something that called me away from the Sundays on the porch and the children in the yard, from the grieving and misery and bitterness of Aunty and Granny Ganchion, from the scrape and rusty screech of the cisternwheel. It called me when I sat in the black hen’s tree, when I stood in the fields, when I thumped on my cardboard piano in the woodshed. There seemed something more magnificent than the Charity loneliness. Somewhere there would be somebody to understand me–I could prove my blood-feel and find out the keys of a piano that played, not just a dumb-show. But more: an unnameable call away from all the withered quiet and dying old life and ways of this little world of Charity, hemmed in by a railroad track and a sawmill and a deserted meadow.

  “All I know is that there was a change in me and, discovering that change in me, I would do anything to keep it unchanged I would not let it die in me. I had to keep listening, listening, listening to it, just as you listen to another thing in this shutter. The sawmill tried to drown it out, the cisternwheel tried to drown it out; I had to save it, hear it; so I went away. I don’t want to live if I can’t hear that voice. When I was home you followed me round through the rooms saying, ‘If you’ll just tell me what is wrong with you! What is changing you, if you’ll just put me straight on it all, Ben?’

  “And when I would wipe you away then it would break my heart and break your heart and you would catch my face in your hands as if you could hold me there forever, caught in your poor old hands, and weep and say, ‘Ben Ben Berryben’; and then I knew that I could never never tell you what it was, only break your heart again and again.

  “I tricked you all to get away, but I couldn’t tell the truth about the things that claimed me. Because you always said these things were sins. I always had that terrible guilt before you, had to tell lies and lies—you really made me evil, you made me be just what you were afraid I’d be. I served you all and let you all use me any way you wanted; anything you wanted me to be I was. Took care of little Jessy day in day out. I never had any romance except because of what Folner and Christy and Swimma told me like a secret. (Once when we sat on the fence rail in the late afternoon, Swimma said, ‘Look!’ and it was the bull upon Roma the cow in some savage battle and when I said, ‘The bull will kill Roma the cow!’ Swimma laughed on the fence and leaned over and told me. Later she wrote a word on the chimney brick and couldn’t erase it, and I would see those letters written on the walls of the bedroom and on the ceiling, everywhere, smudged the way Swimma’s hand had smudged them. I never fully understood until we pumped in the swing, first me then Swimma, and then I suddenly knew the whole terrible secret. After that when Swimma would cry, Pump me! pump me!’ I would tremble.)

  “Sometimes, because I am a failure in the world, I blame my failure on you all; say that you got me so mixed up when I was young that I can never clear myself up again inside; or that you made me so false to myself that I am unreal and never can be real. But I must see that the reason I am a failure is that I gave myself away to everybody and so had none of myself left for myself—I mean the part of oneself that is the part he works with, held by himself to work with.

  “And yet I collaborated with you in making myself false—for I was so afraid of myself and what it wanted to do, and so ashamed of it. So you and I together stomped the life out of it, every day, mangling it like a beetle.

  “But suddenly something beyond all of us, greater than all of us, freed us from each other. We tore at our hearts because we were powerless against this thing that came in between us and wrenched us apart. This was loving somebody.

  “She came, gentle and sweet, bringing peace, at a time when I was the loneliest and most miserable boy in the world. She made all my secrets vanish into her. For she made me feel that everything I had kept secret was kept back just to tell her—we were joined within a secret that was divulged to us by touching where we had never touched before, and by the honesty of passion where we had been dishonest before. After our honesty with each other, what more was there to hide? We had told. Passionate love is a conspiracy to tell each other’s truth to each other—that I am like this and you are like that, and together, in a joining, we make a moment’s truth of what each is. Beyond the moment’s truth, though, lies the hour’s untruth, which keeps yearning to be bared into truth again. She broke my unreality against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against her reality like a pot dashed against and mended me with all the care in the world, it seemed. For her I betrayed you and for myself I betrayed her; we melted into each other. I tricked you and left you; and after I had left you, all your kin and all your world died away from you and fell away, leaving you broken off and isolate. All of us were shattered from our whole, I roaming through the world with Evella, you sitting by the window trying to piece everything together again in a falling house.

  “That very meadow upon which you close your shutter was a pasture of revelation, of trembling news for me. For it was enchanted, some grass of magic grew there, could it have been the bitterweed? When the circus came, Folner and you and I went—just across the tracks, there it was: the lovely sparkling girls whirling in the air like stars. And the times I played there—all the things I found when I played there brought me secret news: once a curled transparent skin; the evening primroses, hairy and firm, opening and closing at the touch of light or darkness; the doll was lost there and later found, but found too late, trodden and mangled and broken by Roma the cow. After the circus left to go across the river and into the world, stealing Folner with it like a gypsy steals a painted bead, I went there and found sawdust all over the meadow (and got sawdust in my shoes) and all the secret signs left by the magic circus; but the bitterweeds grew up through the sawdust, Mama. And Evella and I walked through the bitter-weeds on summer nights (scattering the pollen and gathering it on our legs), I telling her about my hopes and she saying, ‘I will follow you across the river and past Riverside.’

  “What did we go after? I can’t tell you. What do you yearn after, here at the window? Something marvelous, something magic, that makes all secrets vanish.

  “When the forlorn beast, the spotted heifer Roma, bellowed at dusk in the wet meadow, it was a mystic desire, a voluptuous fear, a call way into the future, beyond the meadow, beyond Charity, over the River and far beyond—the voice of Bailey’s Pasture. That wintertime, standing by the window, I worried about the poor cow caught in the ditch. The gray, dull winter was everywhere, in the eaves where icicles hung like daggers, in the naked trees and across the bare dead earth where life lay frozen and paralyzed. That wintertime, standing by the window and looking out upon the winter and behind me you, Mama, singing softly ‘Pass me not, O gentle Savior, Hear my humble cry’; as you sewed something, rocking in a chair. The loneliness of standing looking out a window at winter upon a town, feeling afraid, like crying, while you, Mama, sat in this room sewing and singing.

  ‘While on others Thou art calling,

  Do not pass me by…’

  And the poor spotted cow out there, frozen in the ditch, the way she bellowed and called out for them to help her, to break her out of the ice (‘Mama,’ I said, ‘they are coming with axes. Mama,’ I said, ‘they will kill her, Roma the cow; Mama,’ I said, ‘they cannot get her out of the frozen ditch and oh she cries, she cries so sadly’).

  “The low pleading bellows of Roma came through the window on the winter wind and I felt sick with it all, the room, you, Mama, singing and sewing in that chair as if nothing were happening, the winter spread over everything outside, killing everything, the men (Christy was the leader) with the axe over the poor ugly cow Roma caught in the ice. (‘Mama,’ I said, ‘she is crying so loud, now, like the dog the time he was sick under the house. Mama!’ I cried, ‘they have hit her hard on the head with the axe, hard! h
ard! hard! Mama—she is quiet, now; Mama—she is not crying anymore. Mama… Roma the cow is dead.’

  “But you kept on singing softly softly

  ‘Savior, Savior, Hear my humble cry;

  While on others Thou art calling,

  Do not pass me by.’)

  “Evella and I wandered and wrote you occasionally. I was in a beautiful spell. It was in an autumn and it was a turning round, through light and darkness, under suns and stars, in a fantasy land. The faces of days were disaster and passion. The luminous wind was binding the autumn to the glistening world, blowing it round through trees with a sound of the breaking sea, and the sun was driving summer away, weaving autumn into the world and turning a wheel in Evella and me, turning us towards and turning us away—all love is a turning on a spit, towards, through, and away from flame—and we were like sleepwalkers and Evella would turn to me and say, ‘Who are you?’ and I would murmur, ‘I am you and you are me and we are some rabblement of soul…’

  “With Evella I could never see myself, only hold up a mirror for Evella to see herself; thus I became unreal. Who has the courage to destroy the one who makes him unreal? We parted; and she rolled away like a stone into an abyss. Now I had only myself to remake. I was alone and floating in the world; and I was alien to Charity and felt I never could return to all those secrets—the passion of the Bull, Swimma’s news of trembling, Christy’s songs and stories and his scar, the blood of his killed creatures….

  “The world is a window fogged by my own breath through which I cannot see the world because of my own breath upon the pane; and until I wipe it away with this ragged sleeve, I shall not see what lies beyond the window; nor you, Mama. We spend our youth breaking the enchantments of childhood; it is the bitterest time of all. Youth is the naked, disenchanted child, shivering without garment; for the garments of childhood fall into ashes.