The House of Breath

by Reginald Gibbons

  What would he show me if I went?

  They said around Charity that he did the thing that would make you crazy if you did it too much; they said he was a niggerlover; they said he was a KuKlux; they said he was adopted by Granny Ganchion and was a no-good Peepin Tom whose parents were probably foreigners or Jews or thieves in the Pen; and some of this was true and he was bad. But after he dived down into the river and found Otey, his wife, and brought her up to the shore, drowned, he was a different man.

  He hated Folner, said he had to squat to pee and didn’t have enough sense to pour it out of a boot. He had raised him like a mother (“Folner came when I was fourteen and Mama was sick, sick before he came (the way I knew he was comin was when I asked Mama if she had a pillow stuffed there and she said, ‘No, it’s going to be a little baby’), sick to almost dyin when he was born (and had to have him Cicerian, Follie came out her side, came into this world sideways), and sick always afterwards. I was Follie’s mother all those years, makes me part woman and I know it and I’ll never get over it. How I rocked him and how I slept warm with him at nights, rolled up against my stomach and how I never left him day nor night, bless his little soul, settin on the gallry with him on my knee while I watched the others comin and going across the pasture to town and back from town, to Chatauquas and May Fetes. Until he changed. What was it got hold of him? Took to swingin in the gallry swing all day, by hisself, turned away from me, something wild got in his eye, and then Mama took him back. Began to wear Mama’s kimona and highheeled shoes and play show, dancin out from behind a sheet for a curtain; and then I turned away from him…. Oh what does it mean tellin and rememberin all this—except that it has made me what I am right now: somebody settin here tellin and remembering what made them what they are right now…”); he had raised him like a mother until Folner turned away from him and hated him, and then Christy said he was a sissy and a maphrodite (but they joined again in the woods—were I joined them too; and now we all join in the world).

  He would say whispered things about animals: udders, the swinging sex of horses, the maneuvers of cocks, bulls’ ballocks and fresh sheep—he was in some secret conspiracy with all animals. He fought game and Cornish cocks with the Gypsies and the Mexicans, and often he would clink in his hand some dangerous-looking tin cockspurs that he used for his fighting roosters. But after a roosterfight with the Mexicans or a hunt in the woods, Christy would be quiet and then sit all day close to Granny whittling little figures; and once he carved a perfect ship and put it in a bottle.

  Out in the woodshed Christy played a frenchharp cuddled in his trembling hands, blowing and sucking sounds like birdcalls and moaning voices of animals; and before I knew him I lay in my bed hearing these sounds like a mystic music played from the moon that rocked like an azure boat in our sky, framed by my window. Everything Christy never said was whispered, lipped, blown into his frenchharp; and his pale wet lips curled like some delicious membrane; or like the workings of fishes’ mouths that might be saying something under water.

  He had had a little wife named Otey and they had lived sometime together in a shack up the road beyond the house; then they both went home again, she to her folks at Clodeen and he back to Granny Ganchion. Otey had big daisy eyes, yellow with lashes like sun rays radiating from the hazel centers; and a sunlight shone from them. But her hands were long and frail and purplish, shaped like frogfeet, with tiny white bones white under the skin. O her frail frogfeet hands holding a bouquet of Cups and Saucers brought from the fields to Granny Ganchion! (who always sneezed immediately). (Granny would say, “Christy what’s the matter with Otey, she’s as white as a pile of chalk; pore as a snake.”

  “She’s just tarred, Mama,” Christy would say.

  “She’s such a sunk-in little thing, all bowed over. I don’t see how she’s worth much at her chores, that Otey’s sick, Christy, her skin’s real crepey.”)

  They would come down the sandy road, Christy deep in his silence, Otey’s bare feet glad in the cool yellow sand of the old wagon road, coming bent over, and good, down the road to the house. Christy would say, “Otey we got to go and be with Mama, Mama’s lonesome.” Then they would come down to us and Christy and Granny’d just sit, not saying a word much, Granny uttering her uck uck sounds because of her goiter, that sounded like an old setting hen safe with her eggs.

  Sometimes if they didn’t come, Granny would say, “Why don’t Christy come down to see me; why don’t none of my children ever come to see me?”

  And then she would send me up the road after Christy. I would find him sitting on their little porch, huge and quiet, and Otey no place to be found. Then Christy would call into the trees for her, sounding her name through all the woods; and finally she would come, very softly and bent over from the trees, holding some wood she had gathered. “We got to go down to the house, Otey,” he’d say. “Mama wants us.”

  I know that while he sat on the little porch of his shack in the woods, voices called to him, “Come home, come home,” and that the doves moaned this and the owls hooted it, “Come home, come home”; and that I must have seemed to him like another bird when I came to him from the house calling, “They want you home.”

  Then once, in the hottest summertime, he came to me and whispered to meet him in the woods to catch a mother possum and her babies. I trembled to go, and slipped away and met him. I saw him waiting for me (like a lover), I saw him sitting on a stump watching me as I came, closer and closer, feeling evil, feeling guilty. We rejoiced (without words) at our meeting secretly.

  The mother possum lived in the rotten stump of an old tree, and when we found it Christy began chopping at it with an axe. Because I came too close to him once he came down on my thigh with his axe—so gently that he only cut a purple line under the skin and no blood came. I almost fainted and fell to the ground but did not cry. But Christy wept and begged me not to tell anyone and tied his bandanna tightly round the wound and hugged me and trembled; and I have never told. I have carried on my thigh the secret scar he left me (O see the wound on this thigh left by that hunter’s hand!) and have never told.

  But we got the little possums and put them in a chicken coop at night. The next morning they were gone—as if they had never been there and we had only caught them in a dream of mine; yet I saw the purple axewound on my thigh and found a hole scratched out under the chicken coop, and so I knew it really happened, and that no one but Christy and I would ever know.

  After that, there was a long time of waiting in which I knew there was a preparation for something. Within this waiting (was Christy waiting too?) we looked at the map together or I watched him make the ship in the bottle or heard the frenchharp in the woodshed.

  And then one summer night I learned his truth (and mine). It was through a window that I learned it when, wondering what he was, I squatted in the garden ducking down under the peavines, outside his room, and watched him through leaves of moonlit vines. It seemed he was floating above me and that I was seeing him through thin-shaled waving leaf and light patterns of water; and the light through the tiny bones of waving leaves made him have green feathery lines winnowing over his body and he was spotted and speckled with dark leafshapes, marked like a fish. From where I watched him from below it seemed he might at some moment dive down to me and embrace me and there speak and say, “Listen Boy, listen, let me tell you something…” There, in the garden, I, like an Eve, found him leaf-shadowed (and, like Eve, leaf would forever after make me stop to remember). There he lay, among vines now, so beautiful in his naked sleep, and so stilled (I thought)—a hot liquid summer night filling the world with the odor of greengrowing and moonlight—green-golden under the light he had fallen asleep with still on, little cupids of gnats wafting round him. I found him hairy with a dark down, and nippled, and shafted in an ominous place that I seemed to have so known about always in my memory, not new, although suddenly like a discovery, that I whispered to myself “Yes!”—as though I was affirming forever something I had al
ways guessed was true. He lay among the vines decorated with a stalked flower—or was it a flame licking up out of him—so quiet, yet with some inner commotion going on within him, perhaps a dream he was having of being discovered like this, all gentle and in his prime and bloom: he lay blooming among the vines, in my moonlight; and in all this soft night I had him before me, eternal shape of man, all my own discovered resplendent prize in the world, caught unfolded like a flowerless daytime plant into its unsurmised nightflower by the wild eye of a little animal, glorious in his solitary unsuspected blessing (yet somehow always known about—we all know, how?) and diving in his dream of quest for something to pull to him and embrace in some glory, through some power that would create him man, defined, real, continuing man in through the window. Snakes, I thought, slough, under ferns, In their time, and what eye sees them? Shells open at their tide and moon on shores where only moon sees and tide knows: I am something old and mysterious and wise as moon and tide; for I have seen; and I will never tell but be what I see here, in my time. O what was it in the life of things that prized open the shells, lifted up the bloom off stalks, and slipped the skin off serpents, on and on and on?

  Then I climbed up in the chinaberry tree and looked at him again and it seemed he was lying in the branches, bough in bloom or fruit on a tree.

  After that I knew how beautiful he could be, that he had his beauty cursed or blessed, as though it was smitten, on him, close as flesh; and when I later saw all adornments of bodies and of the world: spires of ancient churches where birds lived among bells as though the birds were flown-out bells ringing in the sky; light through stained glass Creations of naked Adams on windows (and Adams expulsed, with hands like leaves covering their flower that, in another garden, had caused all Christy’s woe), signs seen on boughs and bodies, flowers and gems and flames; stars, eyes: the torment of their luster; the infinite fairness of veined temples, stretched hands like wings of birds—I recalled him that I saw like my creation of man, through a window, floating and flowering in my early moonlit darkness among the peavines and the boughs of the chinaberry tree—and thought that this vision must be the meaning of boy beholden to man.

  I went out in the road and walked in the moonlit sand and thought, O when I am ready, really ready, and filled with blood, I will go, before I die and in my strength, hung with my beauty blooming close upon my flesh and this vision burned upon my brain, in the spring, through all the land, sowing it with my substance, lying under fruittrees in meadows and on hills with all the young; and brush the leaf away. And we will fill the world with our sighs of yes! and make it sensual like rain, like sun, like scents on wind, being blossoms and pollen: flowing and flying coupled over the world and sowing our wealth into it, fertilizing it. My life will be for making the world an orchard.

  And then, finally, it was the time Christy had whispered about. We rose early and went away into the woods in a blue, wet world to hunt together. The sky was streaked like broken agate, as if the huge bowl were porcelain or agate and had been cracked; and it seemed there were no clouds anywhere in the world. Christy and I were sleepwalkers going away from a house of breath and dream. The sound of a chopping axe echoed in the acoustics of the agate heavens. I was so afraid; we were going, it seemed, towards some terrible mission in the woods. The sad, dirty face of Clegg’s house looked at us as we passed it.

  A fragile, melodious Oriental language blew in on the wind like the odor of a flower and we saw the string of smoke from a gypsy camp somewhere in the woods. The sliding of our feet in the road flushed a flutter of wings from the bush. The fields were alive with things rushing and running; winged and legged things were going where they would, no engine or human to stop them. Out in the fields under the thick brush and in the grass and green were myriad unseen small things that were running or resting from running. Under the trees as we went we swept back the webs and broke them as we went. What was this terrifying rising of something in me, like a rising of fluid? Some wild and mourning thing was calling and claiming me. It was autumn and the time of the killing of hogs; there were squeals in the distance. Dandelions whirled like worlds of light. Hickory nuts were falling. Folner lay buried in the graveyard; and Otey, too. We only looked that way, toward the graves, as we passed, and carried their lives within us as we went towards the woods.

  We climbed a little hill and he stood for a moment on the hill, all his life breaking with loneliness and memory inside him, looking down on the country of Charity behind and the river ahead like the wolf in the picture in Aunty’s room. As we came down the hill on the river’s side we were walking down the slopes of the strangest, yellowest world to a wide field that seemed the color of a pheasant’s wing. And then a bird appeared. Instantaneously Christy shot it dead. He picked it up and we went on. We passed the carious ruins of an old shed. Two Negro women appeared from behind it. “Blackbirds!” some voice said. “We can watch them wash in the river (ever seen a nigger’s tits? Big as coconuts…).” But we went on.

  And then we came into the bottomlands where the palmettos were turning yellow. At the river, which seemed to have just waked and was clucking in its cradle, we saw the leaves falling into the river. Now not a living creature ran or rustled. There was only the occasional comma of dropped cones punctuating the long flowing syntax of the river’s sentence. Then the river bent and we followed it, and there the river was drugged in the early morning and creeping so slowly that where many leaves had fallen and gathered the river seemed a river of leaves.

  These were Folner’s woods. What had he found here or left? Once we saw, in the sand, the prints of knees left by someone who had kneeled and drunk from the river; and then I saw Christy get down on his hands and knees and drink like a beast from the river, and I saw the signs his body left there.

  We walked along under the ragged trees and pieces of them were forever falling falling about us as we went; as though the world was raveling into pieces and falling upon us as we went, Christy ahead, silent and huge under his hunting cap, his isinglass nails shining, and I behind, afraid and enchanted. No fishes were making the noise a rock makes dropped in the water; only a watermoccasin, once, was skiffing along soundlessly with his brown head erect like the head of an arrow. We were going through the ruin and falling away of dreams, Christy and I—come from the house filled with its voices, going towards our reality that, once found and taken, would fall away again into dream.

  And then a purring, gurgling sound came as if it were the river; but it was Christy’s frenchharp.

  We passed a muscadine vine with grapes that had some silvery frenchharp music’s breath blown on them. There was the sound of the hopping of birds on leaves.

  And then Christy suddenly shot at a turtle that looked like a rock, and got him.

  He shot again and a dove fell, followed by the falling blessing of feathers. He looked at me, asking me to pick up the fallen dove. I picked it up, ruined. We went on.

  We were going after all marvelous things; silently; he going ahead blowing and sucking his frenchharp; I behind, timid, and terrified and marching in an enchantment by the music in the woods. For a time he was leading me like a piper to the river; and for a time I was following in a kind of glory, and eager, and surrendered, and wanting to follow—just as he was, in his own dumb sorcery and splendor, leading me, victor, proud, like a captive. But the uncaptured, unhypnotized part of me was afraid, wanting to run home (where was home to run to, towards where?); for I knew he was leading me to a terrible dialogue in the deepest woods. All his hunting, all his shooting and gathering up of shot birds was a preparation—like a meditation in which there is a collection of words, for prayer or protestation or farewell or betrayal—in which he would tell me some terrible secret. In it he would finally, after making me wait until I was almost mad with desire for words from him, tell me all the Evil and arm me for all the Joy that there could be and be had, in the world; and I would have no one to tell it to, to contain it, just as he had had no one, only the hunt and th
is boy. But until the moment of speech in the deepest shadowed woods where it seemed we would be in a cistern, let down alone together for this terrible revelation of secrets, Christy’s silence was the ringing starry soundlessness of night in the woods, of deafness got from his mother. (I carried his news for years within me until now I tell it. Evil comes free to you, it has been purchased for you as a gift. But steal Joy, he told me, find it and rob it out of the world, suffer for it but, steal Joy like a thief of despair.) (“Yet that’s what Folner did and you despised him,” I would answer him if we could have a conversation now—O Christy, if you were here! We could have a conversation.) Now the river flowed like his own wordless speech.

  We looked across the river toward the ahead—long flat brown land—and we wanted separately and silently to start across the field away toward something ahead. He said to me fly away from here—I give you these bird’s wings to fly away with from here where we are all just the sawed-off ends of old tubafours rottin on a sawdust heap; fly up and away, across the river past Riverside and on away. And what brings you down will be what gave you wings to fly up and away, will be what needs to use you to speak with be bird, be word. (Yet as we went, “comehome, come ho-o-me,” the voices called. The doves moaned this and the owls hooted it, “come home, come ho-o-me…”)