Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  This morning a fine mist is falling as she walks out to the back, to feed the game cocks. She watches the wattles in the necks, the eyes, so piercing, looking anything but stupid, taking her in, glossy little facetless beads, below brows that look like those of old angry men. It strikes her that they are the picture and manifest image of the thing with which she’s so preoccupied: passion, animal need. They are slaves to it, and have no understanding of it. They cannot even derive a conscious sense of the pleasure available in it. This is hell. She has the thought that people come back, are made to return in the shape of their former appetites. Embodied in them without the capability of speech. She has touched herself now in the nights, and felt the rising in her blood. She believes it is stronger with her than with anyone she knows, and she’s aware that this is tied up in the reading, the fact that she is always living in her mind, even when she’s fixing something in the house, performing tasks usually reserved for men—shoveling coal into the furnace downstairs, for instance, or emptying the dustbin. She has a mind full of lurid images.

  She feeds the gamecocks, and in the distance there is the sound of horses. Several riders go by in the muddy street. The air smells of horses and coal ash, from the chimney pots; she’s wet to the skin when she gets back to the house. Mrs. Barrett is waiting for her.

  —You’ll catch your death.

  —Leave me be, please.

  —I shall tell Mr. Kingsley, me.

  —Do. When you see ’im again. Or shall I write ’im?

  Mrs. Barrett, who can neither read nor write, looks her up and down.

  —You’re getting to be quite the lady, aren’t you?

  —Did you require something of me?

  —Don’t think I don’t know what’s in that head of yours, girl.

  Mary stares back at her.

  —Will there be anything else?

  —Reading them books. Too much of books is unhealthy.

  —Rot.

  Mary moves by her, to the stairs.

  —Don’t you disturb your mother, you.

  —Bugger.

  —What did you say?

  Mary turns on the stairs and says, in a voice scarcely controlling her rage:

  —Mrs. Barrett, if I ’ave to contend with you every day in this manner I shall ask Father to discharge you.

  —You are a spoiled little girl, and I’m keeping track of the words, me. Mark you.

  They hear Mary’s mother coughing upstairs.

  —There. You’ve wakened her.

  —Excuse me, please, Mary says, and curtsies.

  She ascends the stairs and opens her mother’s bedroom door, peering into the dimness. Her mother lies very still with her eyes closed. She’s capable of lying that way for hours at a time, though she’s far from sleep. Mary waits a moment, and her mother, without opening her eyes, speaks:

  —Yeh’ll drive ’er crazy, she says.

  Mary laughs.

  —Did you ’ear all that, Mum?

  —I wasn’t coughing up ’ere, my darling. I was laughing.

  Her mother puts one arm over her eyes, turning slightly in the bed.

  —I wonder if she’ll report it to Father, Mary says.

  —Oh, well, of course. English intrigue, you know.

  She laughs again. There is such a rapport with her mother; the two of them have become so good at entertaining each other.

  —Mrs. Barrett remains a bit exercised.

  —Oh, Mary says. Quite.

  —Well, that’ll keep her off me, a’ least.

  —Can I get you something from her clutches?

  —Nothing now, my darling. I’m going to try sleeping again.

  Mary closes the door. She descends the stairs with a feeling of having been strengthened and refreshed. Mrs. Barrett is in the kitchen area, chopping vegetables. Mary takes a carrot and bites the end off of it, and Mrs. Barrett reaches over and grabs the carrot from her.

  —Go busy yourself, girl.

  —In some cultures girls are married and with child by my age.

  —I won’t have you speak of these heathen practices in my presence, you. That tree in the Garden of Eden was a tree of knowledge, and you know too much already.

  —If you need me, Mrs. Barrett, I’ll be in the library, committing Adam’s sin all over again.

  —I will not listen to blaspheming.

  Mary goes into her father’s library, and sits in the gray light of the window, reading about a ship that sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Mrs. Barrett works on furiously in the kitchen, a woman nursing a resentment, energetic in her outrage. Mary thinks of other young women out in the afternoon preening themselves, romantic fools without a thought in their heads but romantic fantasies and games. None of them would have the slightest idea where the Cape of Good Hope is. But then they wouldn’t suppose it was knowledge a young woman ought to have, and of course Mary, reclusive, strange Mary, as the family and friends see her, Mary has it. She has come to know a good deal about the ship that sailed so bravely down the world. She’s been teaching herself the terminology, not because she has any sense that she will one day use the knowledge, but because it delights her to know the words and their uses: bowsprit, bobstay, bulwark, davit, mizzen sail, halyard. These matters keep her from thinking about her body, the bodies of others, their secrets.

  She entertains no hope of ever leaving London, and sometimes little hope of ever leaving this house. She doesn’t feel wronged by the facts. It is the world she has inherited, and, as she has said to her mother more than once, she respects the opinion of the Human Race. One doesn’t live in the world of books without gaining a sense of that respect.

  This is what she says to the little world she lives in.

  When Charley comes in from school, she meets him in the hallway. Church bells toll in the distance. A vicar has died in the town, no one they knew. Charley reports this, and she follows him into the parlor. He’s tall for his age, taller than Mary now, and from a distance looks to be in his teens.

  —Did we hear from Father today? he asks, assuming his late demeanor: the man of the house. School has made him proud.

  —No, Mary says.

  —Please see that I have some juice to drink. I’ve got a devilish lot of reading to do.

  —Do you ’ave greetings for Mrs. Barrett?

  —Are you vexing her again?

  —I believe she would testify to it.

  —Priceless. I’m fortunate to have such an ill-tempered older sister.

  —When your voice changes, Charley, that might work.

  —Just see that I get what I asked for.

  She leaves him there, strides into the kitchen, and tells Mrs. Barrett that Master Charley is home and requires a glass of juice. Then she climbs the stairs to her room, closes the door, and is alone with the sense of having been petulant, shallow. What must others say about her? What is the talk among the lordly Kingsleys about Mary with her solitary existence, and her invalid mother? It seems to Mary that there is a high wall between herself and everyone else, a line of demarcation that no one crosses, not even her father when he’s home.

  At night, now, listening to the sounds of the house—her mother’s fitful groans in the other room, the slow creaks and protests of the old wood settling in the changing temperatures of the dark—she feels a depthless dread, a shiver at the very core of her heart, that spreads through her, and makes it difficult to breathe. Alone. She is alone. She imagines that she has died and is lying in a casket. She crosses her arms over her small breasts. She knows—without understanding quite how she knows—that she will never bear a child, never have a normal life, the life she has only received fragmentary impressions of in her relations with other members of the family—the Kingsleys and the Baileys (her mother’s people). She remains skeptical about the visceral sense that she is marked for an early death, yet while she has no trouble imagining far-flung parts of the world, she cannot begin to picture herself having reached the age of her mother, who is not yet thirty-
five. She tries to picture it—a husband and children. Perhaps a scientist, or a writer. Someone—a young assistant, or protégé of her father. Someone who shares his love of knowledge and travel. But then what she sees is her own mother—sees herself as this woman lying in bed in a room with drawn curtains, surrounded by the smells of several kinds of physic, and half asleep on laudanum. The vision is confusing and upsetting, and so she stares at the dark and lies very still, thinking of her life as a small waking bordered by two endless sleeps. And sleep won’t come. She doesn’t feel deprived of it. But she experiences such horrors of thought and half dreaming. On many nights she rises and goes downstairs to read. The only sound is the pages turning, her small breathing. She sometimes murmurs the words, for the sound of them, so there is her voice in the little room, a hedge against the blackness outside. And when day comes she drifts off in the chair, or with her head down on one of the books. The sounds of the others moving in the house brings her out of a sleep that is peopled with ghosts and spirits.

  —Do you remember your dreams? she asks Charley one evening.

  —What a stupid question, he says.

  —Well, do you?

  —No. He smiles.

  —I mean the question, she says. I ’aven’t spoken figuratively.

  He stares, chewing.

  —Sound your aitches, Mary. You sound like Mother.

  —You sound like Father, and you’re not old enough to carry it.

  —I’m old enough.

  They are silent for a time. There’s a preening sort of self-satisfaction in his face, but then he smiles at her, a boy again.

  —I ’ave a lot of dreams, Charles. Almost constantly when I sleep. And I remember them all.

  —Nightmares? he asks.

  —I don’t know. All my dreams are bizarre.

  —Well, but do they frighten you?

  She nods.

  —Then they must be nightmares.

  —Do you ’ave them, Charley?

  He leans toward her across the table.

  —Every night.

  —And are they bizarre?

  —They’re bloody terrible.

  —I don’t think you quite know ’ow I mean all this, Charley.

  She feels wrong for seeking some kind of reassurance from him, this child for whom she is more mother than sister. Yet she hopes he will say something that reveals a similar experience with his own dreams. In the next moment, she understands the absurdity of speaking seriously to him about anything—he’s still so much a baby, though he already has a sharp tongue, and not much patience.

  —I wonder if we’ll hear from Father today, he says.

  —Not for at least another three weeks.

  —I wish you weren’t so sure all the time, Mary. You don’t even go to school. You keep house.

  —I was guessing.

  —Well stop.

  —Leave me be, can’t you?

  She opens the newspaper, which Mrs. Barrett has brought in, and reads an item on the left-hand side of the page:

  MASSACRE

  American General George Armstrong Custer Lost!

  Entire expedition slaughtered in ambush

  at Little Big Horn

  She looks across the table at her brother, who is absorbed in his own reading, chewing part of a chicken leg.

  —Charley. Who was it Father and Dunraven were traveling to join?

  —What?

  —Father, in his last letter. They were going on an expedition with…

  He stares.

  Mary holds the paper toward him, coming to her feet so suddenly that she nearly upsets the table.

  —My God, Charley! Look.

  He squints, hands mincing with a napkin, touching his lips with it. Then he looks at her.

  —It was this one, Mary says. Custer. General George Armstrong Custer. It was. Oh, God it was, wasn’t it.

  He rises, moves toward the stairs, and then halts.

  —Oh, Charley don’t go up there!

  He bolts up the stairs, and she starts to follow. But Mrs. Barrett has come into the hall, and they face each other.

  —You’re as white as death, you. What is it, what’s happened?

  Charley comes slow back down the stairs, his face blotched with violet patches, his eyes wide and strangely unseeing.

  —I can’t.

  —For God’s sake, what is it? Mrs. Barrett says. Tell me.

  The boy turns to her but doesn’t seem to take her in. Then he faces Mary.

  —We have to tell. Don’t we. We have to tell Mother.

  —Somebody please tell me what this is, Mrs. Barrett says.

  Mary retrieves the newspaper and hands it to her.

  —We believe Father was with them.

  —My God, Charley breaks forth. And Father felt sorry for them! He felt for them! And the bastards! The bastards!

  Mary goes into the small parlor and sinks down in one of the chairs. The quiet in the room is astonishing. There is a clock on the mantel, ticking.

  Charley paces a little, then stumbles into the dining room and sits at the table there. Mrs. Barrett mutters the words of a hymn.

  There has never been such a silence.

  And then her mother calls from the top of the stairs:

  —Children. Mary, Charles, what is it? What’s wrong?

  The boy knocks his chair over, standing, and moves to the bottom of the stairs. Mary hears their mother emit a terrible long gasp. Charley starts slowly up the stairs, and Mary follows, taking the newspaper from Mrs. Barrett. She tears the important page out, and puts it in the pocket of her dress. She lets the rest of the newspaper fall from her fingers. Their mother has dropped to her knees in the upstairs hall, and is cringing there as against a gigantic something swooping toward her. Charley tries to lift her. Tears stream down his pale cheeks.

  —No! their mother says. No! You stop this! I won’t ’ave it!

  They work together to get her back into the bedroom, and the bed, where she curls up like a baby and lies there whimpering.

  —I won’t ’ave it, children. I won’t ’ave it.

  —Mother, Charley says, something terrible…

  Mary interrupts him.

  —For God’s sake, Charley.

  Her mother says:

  —Tell me, Mary. You tell me.

  —Father said in the last letter that they were going to join this man Custer on an expedition.

  —It’s all right, isn’t it, Mary. It’s all right.

  —Mother, I’m frightened, Charley says.

  —No, says their mother, addressing Mary. No. No.

  And Mary presses on, holding the page of the newspaper toward her:—It says here, Mother. Look.

  Her mother stares at it, stupefied. Her expression is horrifyingly aghast, the eyes wide, the mouth open, completely without sound, not even the sound of breathing.

  Mary touches the side of her face, then draws her hand away.

  Charley mutters:

  —No it isn’t, no it isn’t.

  —Be quiet, Mary says.

  —Father felt sorry for them, he says.

  —Please leave me, says their mother.

  —Mother, Mary says to her, leaning down close. Mother, it’s not right to assume anything at all, is it?

  —I’m frightened, Charley says.

  —Leave me. Please, children.

  —We must wait to know. Please? Mary says. Isn’t that right?

  —Oh, God! Charley says. It’s right there in print! The entire lot of them lost!

  —We do not know for certain that Father is dead, Charley!

  —Please, their mother says. I can’t stand it. Let me be, please. Please.

  Mary walks out and down the stairs, past the litter of the newspaper, where it fell. Mrs. Barrett is standing in the hall murmuring the Lord’s Prayer over and over. Mary goes out to the garden in back of the house. It’s dark. The day’s heat is still rising from the ground. The sky is clear, starry, and moonless. She walks to the e
nd of the garden and back, and then she’s pacing. If this is the end of the world, she thinks, the end of the world, the end of the world.

  3

  July 30, 1876

  Priestley and Lavoisier, among others, the first to identify oxygen. How must it have been to come to the knowledge that we live in gases.

  No. Unable to think or write anything. Pure pretending. Writing this down for some stranger I will never know.

  Father is in North America. Father is. Is. The Indians of North America: wars. Warring factions. Tribes. Hunter-gatherers, raiders. Thousands of them banding together to fight the white men. They would not distinguish an observer. Oh, friend, faraway. They would not distinguish a peaceful observer, whose sympathy they have.

  Their mother is up in the nights, sitting on the edge of her bed, wringing her hands. She refuses to lie down, or get up. She cannot be compelled to move. She rocks back and forth, slow, murmuring part of a song she used to sing to Mary, when Mary couldn’t sleep. Mary sits with her, and sings the little song herself. But nothing has any effect.

  —Mother, Mary tells her, I think the news would’ve reached us, wouldn’t it? If father ’ad been with them.

  Her mother turns her head and stares, vacantly, still wringing her hands. Her expression says it all: the news is on its way to them. Her body cringes, precisely as if she can see the physical embodiment of the words heading toward her from the world. Mary tries to soothe her, and feels the sense of the remorseless truth closing around them. There will come a knock at the door. And someone will be standing there, with the final, dire word. Except that she knows it’s entirely possible they’ll never hear anything else at all. What sort of efforts can the Americans make toward the identification of the dead? How awfully will the savages have disfigured or burned the corpses?

  When morning comes, her mother rises, and moves to the entrance of her closet, and without having performed her toilet or removed her nightgown, begins trying to put on her stays, trying to dress herself, distractedly, slowly.