False Entry

by Hortense Calisher

  “That’s Semple,” said Johnny.

  “The Wizard?” Outside the circle, the wardrobe door swung to, creaking. We both wheeled.

  “You crazy?” he said. “That’s for the whole country. Semple’s the—that other.”

  “The Cyclops,” I said. A prickle, half pleasure, ran up my forearms. “For Tuscana?”

  “For the entire State of Alabama, some say.” A flicker of triumph crossed his face—that peculiar flicker of those who live close to authority, even to one they despise. For that moment I shared it, it was transmitted to me, a feeling not unlike that surge of privilege I had felt, gazing up, solitary, at Miss Pridden’s ceiling, standing inside her secret, jalousied door.

  “Johnny,” I said. I held my hands out to him. “Can I? Can I belong?”

  “You?” he said.

  By such painful stages is the trade of confidant learned.

  “You read what it said,” he said. “You have to be born here. But maybe you could ask Lemon.”

  Then Lemon belonged.

  “Shall you belong then?” I said, hating him for having asked something of him. I knew that he did not know where he had been born, or of whom.

  “Most likely,” he said, raising his chin. “Likely I will, sometime. But not here!” It burst from him. “Not anywheres in the State of Alabama! Not anywheres Semple is!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s rotten, that’s why. He’s making the whole town rotten. Anybody who hangs out with him is rotten.”

  Across the room, the old wardrobe creaked again, from the force of his voice. “Never you mind,” he said, low. “Ain’t none of your beeswax. Read out the rest of it. Go on.”

  So I went on reading, while he watched at my elbow through page after page, for the names. I read of the Grand Tribunal, that in organized Realms was to be composed of Hydras, Furies and Giants, and of the “Sitting of the Tribunal,” of the charges involving a major offense, and of how the accused might be tried. I read of the Night Hawk, who was the special courier of the K-Quad, and of how he was also the Fiery Cross Bearer, “who shall carry the Fiery Cross in the ceremony and in all public exhibitions where same is used.”

  That is the only time I saw the book, that one time when I read it through. And when we came to the end of it, we found the names. A piece of thin paper, cut to the same size as the back cover, had been pasted to it, and the list, much creased and crossed out, had been slipped like a library card inside. The paste was old and dry, ready to part, and in my handling, the thin, concealing end paper fell off and fluttered to the floor. The list, left on the table, was a long one crudely typewritten, with here and there a hand-inserted name. I do not remember the names, all of them, in their proper order, for the list was almost a male roster of the town. But if a name were to be given to me now, I could still say whether or not that name was there.

  And I can see exactly, as I saw it then, the twelve names that headed the list in capital letters, with their identifying offices beside them.

  I did not read these out. Johnny, pushing me aside, read them for himself, his lips moving, his finger going down the page: the Cyclops, the Klaliff, the Kludd, the Kligrapp, the Klabee, the Kladd, the Klonsel, the Klarogo and the Klexter—and opposite each, a name. I saw the minister’s name, and the doctor’s. Semple’s name was at the top: Exalted Cyclops—E. V. Semple. The twelfth name—the name of a man who had died recently in the town—had been crossed out, and another name had been inserted.

  Night Hawk—T. Nellis. I saw it before Johnny’s fist, big as a man’s, crushed the list and let it drop to the floor.

  “You sure sucked it in,” he said. “All that stuff I told you about the town. Took you in for fair.” His hand fell to his side, but I had seen where it had paused, the slow forefinger withdrawing into the fist, at the twelfth name.

  “You believed it, you poor little old ninny,” he said “didn’t you?”

  I thought back to our afternoons on the hill, to the town below, that I had always seen with the free, falcon stare of the outsider, to that other town that he had floated above it like a golden sphere—and I knew that I never had.

  “Didn’t you?” he said.

  No, the listener is not the friend. But sometimes he smells its fragrance—friendship—a smell of roses from a garden where he stands outside.

  “Yes,” I said. “I believed you.” It was the one good thing I ever did for him.

  He pushed at the papers on the floor then with the toe of his shoe, moving one around the other, edging the crumpled list until it was dead center on the unmarked end page. Then he kicked it away. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Will they be coming back?”

  “Uh-uh. Not tonight. They’re going up to the dam. Nigger took a job there couple of days ago.”

  “But they went the other way,” I said, “toward the backs.”

  He turned, halfway to the door. “Where else they gonna find him?” He waited. “You coming? Or ain’t you?”

  “What about these?” I pointed to the tangle of thread on the table, the papers lying on the floor.

  He shrugged.

  “Won’t they think you did it?”

  “Me? I keep watch for them in the grove. I help cut the pine and truck it down to the café. I been riding lookout for them all day.” He shrugged again. “Reckon they’ll figure the niggers did it. Come on. Ain’t none of your beeswax.”

  And it wasn’t of course—neither of his nor of mine. Children, coming upon the attic-hidden firearms of their fathers, do not debate the ethic of guns; to pretend that they might is only our own Lamarckian dream.

  “Sure ’nough, they’ll never think it was you,” he said. “Nor your new paw, up there with your maw, in Memphis.”

  It was then that the idea came to me. There is an urge that arises in us when we are in hidden places—in the lumber-room, the sedile, the chancel. It is our own hidden motives, rising obscurant to hoax us. This is the attic-dream—of the enormous joke to be played.

  “Let’s hide it on them,” I said.

  He was still for a moment, but it reached him too. “Where?”

  I pointed to the room—a latticework of places, of gear, and dust to cover the gear.

  It was while we poked into the room’s decaying niches, prying out an umbrella frame in one bin, ancient pease in another, that he told me details of the Klan meetings in the grove, of what they did there, and had done. In the end we chose a spice drawer, far up and in the farthest corner with lidded compartments that were empty except for scattered mice kernels and the dead, satin shells of roaches. We cached each article neatly in its separate hold and left them—the list, the pamphlet, the thread and the pins. In the circle of chairs the bare bamboo-stand seemed, when we turned to look back at it, the tallest thing in the room. Before we left, Johnny righted the fallen chair.

  Outside, I thought at first that dawn had come, but all was still, cooler, with no birds yet, and dawn always came to Tuscana with calling trains. A vague nimbus above the dam site had tricked me, a slight, vibrating pallor, as if the sun were having trouble rising.

  “Let’s go up the hill,” said Johnny. His face was not quite perceptible in the dark, but his voice was quiet, safe somehow, and this time I followed him as I used to do, walking behind him as if nothing had changed between us, between the hot haze of those afternoons and this dark.

  Once we were among the trees, no light was visible. He took my hand, and I gave it. We climbed, peering for the path, and on the way up he talked almost as he used to do, but this time with a certain tenderness, as one might use perhaps to one who had believed. And what he spoke of, once again, was the town.

  In essence what he said was that Tuscana was not like other places; it was a town gone wrong, not like other towns somewhere else. And Semple was all its evil, the corrupter who brought license with him wherever he came. Elsewhere there were towns that emerged, as he spoke of them, strong as cathedrals, resting on the h
oly framework he gave them—of men in their parlors with their children, with their wives in the churches, with each other in their Klans. Yes, this latter he put holy with the rest; he was not born, as this age dreams it bears its children, under liberty’s caul. The horror of the list lay not in what it was, but in that any man on it was with Semple, in all Semple’s other games, that he knew so well. He was only a less than fatherless boy who had placed all evil in one man, too much good in another. He had no knowledge of where to ascribe evil except singly; sometimes I think we shall not learn to do it better. He did not say all this, or know it. I say it for him, now.

  So, until we reached the top, he talked on in his sweet, hopeless jesuitry, piecing together his broken sphere, floating it toward some farther hill. And as I listened, plodding along with him in an almost serene exhaustion, a curious thing happened. For the first time, Tuscana became real. As he cast it down, aside, for himself, it arose for me. I had done something in the town, to it; there was the list, ensconced secret in me, and the book I had helped to hide. Childhood is spent in the province of adults; it is only by living on in a place until the age of action, or by the action of leaving it, that, long after, one sees the province to have been one’s own. In that sense, Tuscana never became mine. But as I walked that night, listening to Johnny, the path, the hill, even our house that was always so full of my sullen self, and the streets where I had walked beclouded, rose for me for the first time as Tuscana, a place of a certain geography and vegetation, that I saw almost as a boy born native to it might see it, from the receding observation car of his first train. It had become mine enough to leave.

  We had come almost to the brow of the hill, climbing with heads bent to the steepness, our backs to the east. It was still black-dark, the darkest hour, but beneath us the trains now began their low, predawn stammering to one another. A piece of hanging moss brushed my hair, and it occurred to me that I knew almost none of the words for the plants and trees here. From far away across that sea over which I could not remember coming, I remembered children who had charted the sedge and the scabious with Elizabethan exactness, making dim poetry of a hundred trefoiled names, mapping their heritage in a botany of love. Here, where we were taught that each place was only a chip upon the vastness, the land-language of possession must be a different one, I thought; perhaps it was the language of trains.

  “Johnny,” I said. “What’s the name of the next big town north?”

  He never answered me, for we had come to the top of the hill.

  We rounded a ledge, raised our heads, and the whole of the east struck our eyes, a black horizon with a penumbra that burned.

  Before us, the great crater line of the dam site crested its silent tidal wave in an arc that took in half the world. Its four peaks rose like pediments. Each one bore a cross. Each one bore a fiery cross whose roaring current streamed backward although little wind blew—four wooden images of a man breasting the wind with his arms stretched wide, his flesh a yellow mane behind him, a running man who burned.

  I watched them for a long time. In the end I held out my arms to their Biblical glory. The apocalypse reaches the eyes long before it hits the heart. Beauty bombards us from wherever it can. I watched them until they fell.

  Johnny lay at my feet in the myrtle, looking down on the lights in the houses below, as they went out one by one. He looked at them steadily, chin on his folded arms. Finally only one was left, an orange lamp on a street we knew. Then it went out, the last one.

  “Nellis’s light,” I said softly.

  He did not answer.

  I thought of the Night Hawk coming home, the last one, walking up the path where the bulbs were beginning, seeing his own long head, his long chin, in the brass name plate on his door.

  “The man up at your mother’s!” I said. “That was Nellis!”

  He turned his face and looked up at me. No, that is the way I remember his face best. That way.

  “Go down,” he said. “You go down.” Then he put his head on his folded arms.

  Before I left, I stood over him, remembering how he had lifted my face from the ground and had wiped the just filth away. I was of no use to him now; I had spoken; I had his paring. He would never of himself call for me now. I could never say “Call for me” again.

  That same day, the dam moved forward, over the hill. Fire had crept to the wooden forms for the concrete; water and fire had cracked the heart-wall, and one whole side of the earthworks had given way. Charlotte disappeared under water, and Denoyeville, and two feet of water crawled in the streets of Tuscana, but not a man could be found who remembered a fiery cross.

  And that same day, Johnny left town. At least, he was not seen there again. Some might think that he never left the hill at all, that the dam came over him with its dynamite thunder and still holds him, skeletal, inside. But I do not believe that. I think that he went on, as most of us go on in this life, as I, that night, went back down the hill, and so home.

  Time does not need to murder the innocents with bloodshed. It lets them find one another.

  PART II

  Compromise

  SO ENDS MY CHILDHOOD.

  We are streaked with childhood all our days, and when death finishes us with its perfect stroke we must lie like those bottles of swirled glass in the museums, whose shapes flow from the initial angle of the layers—a gadrooned column, a spread fan. Surely we do not need those latest epigraphers of the human condition to tell us this, naming for us, in numbers only as old as Greek, what we are born knowing in our pre-Hellenic bones. I know that I must already hold in these pages the gist of what some sharp-eyed scholar might well be able to point out to me, saying: “Here it is, do you not see it? And here again … and here!” But one cannot receive from outside what must be seized like fruit from a table. A man walks pigeon-toed through his life, looking back, up, forward at those time-spires which rise in their special way, in his way, only for him, and will sink when he does. The responsibility is mine. The chronicle is mine.

  I shall meet it yet.

  Chapter I. My Parents. Mr. Demuth.

  ON AN AFTERNOON SOME three years later, the afternoon of the day before I was to leave to take up my scholarship in the North, I went to the courthouse with my mother, for the granting of the legal paper that was to change my name.

  Across from us, the lights along the flanks of the rebuilt dam, kept lit even by day, ranged the horizon in queer hypotenuses, all their constellations strictly guarded. Tuscana was a backwater now, left, with blueprint vengeance, to its mill. Alongside the other two towns, the dynamos had shouldered up again from the tabula rasa of the farms, and the dams’ artificially calm expanses of water now seemed more elemental than the vanished hills. I went to school in the rebuilt town of Charlotte now, descending from the battered Tuscana bus, with its front seats of leather, its back benches of wood, into flocks of new buses, still built in two sections but no longer with benches, into streets whose bright, plumb store fronts, filled with the hard r of voices from the West and North, made the air seem suddenly cooler, the way air might be in a town on the other side of a glass mountain. Some of the ignorant in Tuscana said that the cables which carried the electric juice ran all the way from the Carolinas—“all the way from Pennsylvania, with a branch line from Massachusetts to carry bank money alongside,” others said jeering, but although they were wrong, they were not so far wrong—what they felt, relaying steadily along the cables, was the copper tic of change.

  For me, those three years had been ones common to the age I then was, to that period when the young revile their own ordinariness, even while they are sure that no one has ever seen the sun-diamond on the turf, the cloud-veil on the land—the idea sunning beneath the veil—as they see it, meanwhile promising themselves they always will. Years dormant yet revolutionary, when the radices of life are never again to be seen so clear of compromise, with a violence of perception that the world tolerates in the child, begrudges the artist, meanwhile praying with s
ome certainty for alterations in the vision of each. Si la jeunesse savait, si la vieillesse pouvait is, like most sentimental statements, falsely true—it is the young who have the real knowledge, age that has the real power, nullified only by what it has forgotten. It was during those years that I began telling myself that the cardinal sin, the only failure was—to forget.

  Meanwhile, I saw my elders without pity and worked hard to get away from them. In that I was normal. At that age one takes even the seaming of the elder face for submission, recoiling physically aside from it, as from the circle of the corrupt. I saw how life was blunting both the inner and outer edges of my mother and uncle, and despised them for allowing it. For, although by very national temperament they were never able to accede wholly to Tuscana, shortly after their marriage they had wilted into a certain neighborliness with it, achieving, through their small outlets of the pub, the mill and my mother’s trade, a modest modus vivendi. And this I saw as dishonesty. Whereas, when first in Tuscana and before, I must have craved to be wreathed in a family that in its turn would be so wreathed, now I wanted them to keep the harsh dignity of our earlier isolation, and contemned them for not having done so. Remembrance was loyalty—they had not kept it. In this, no doubt, I had merely exchanged one innocence for another—we are told that man, unlike the crustaceans, cannot regrow an appendage once it is lost, but in the physiology of our innocence it is otherwise—as fast as we lose one head of it, we regenerate a new one for the ax.

  Then, also, there was the second thing I had to get away from—the sexuality of my parents. In this too I was normal. No doubt the late fact of their marriage, coincidental with my own discoveries, fantasies, made me more keenly aware of the evening door, so closed in our small house, and of my mother who, though still a plain body, and reverted now, after that one wedding excess, to her own prim constriction of dress, sometimes came home now a little silly from the pub. But the fact that my uncle was not my true father made slight difference—I was no Hamlet; his part in the drama was much the same as if he had been. The Oedipean explanation is too simple, so absolute as to make one smile; the boy and the girl, men and women, want something much more complicated than to lie with their mothers, to sleep with their fathers. Before experience, what we want is to get out of sight, out of memory of those stale conjunctions of our parents, which, by their very existence, involve us in the old cycle of generation at the very time when we feel ourselves outside the cycle, unique. Whether we are with our blood-parents or not, whether they are joined or disjoined, this is the constant for most of us. Contrarily, most of the few true bachelors and spinsters I have encountered are those who still draw upon the remote animal life of their parents as upon an annuity, trusting thereby to purchase tax-free a ticket of entry to the world. Whatever I am, of that breed I am not.