“At a Special Term of … Court, State of … County of … at the Courthouse … Street … City of … Alabama, on the … day of … nineteen-hundred and thirty-six,” said the clerk with a flourish. “Present: Honorable Hannibal Fourchette, Justice.” He paused, in a backwash of quiet. Noises inside and out had stopped, leaving a hollow that pressed the ears. The electric light weakened in the sudden sulphur gloom, fluttering once in the familiar pearl of my mother’s breastpin, given her—I recalled now, after all the years between, by whom and when—at my birth. I thieve nothing, I told myself; it is an accidental name that I may never use—interrupted, patched in halves.
“Go on, Clarence,” said Fourchette. His voice was absent, fading too in the gloom.
“Beg pardon, it’s the order itself, sir,” the clerk whispered. “You usually read the order….”
“Ah, yes, yes, thank you, Mr. Whitlock,” said the judge, rousing quickly in a voice intended to cover, raising his chin from his hand with a large look at the rear of the room. He reached down over the lectern and took the paper. A smile of terror parted my lips. My arm, released from my mother’s weight, felt as light as air.
“On reading and filing the petition of Dora Cross Higby, verified the twenty-eighth day of July, 1936 …” Fourchette’s voice was flat, an old man’s office tones now, enunciating every word. He stopped now to verify the two of us, his court, his audience, with a glance, cleared of its mist, that knew us for what we were. “… praying for a change of name of the above infant, it being requested that he be permitted to assume the name of Pierre Goodman in the place of his present name and the court being satisfied that said petition is true and it appearing from the said petition and the court being satisfied that there is no reasonable objection to the change of name proposed—”
I did not move, turn an inch to look at my mother, from whom there had come a sound, a motion like a muffled wing-beat, but no word.
“Now on motion of … hmmm … attorney for the said petitioner it is Ordered—” Here he paused. It seemed to me, staring, that I fed him with my breath. “—that the said infant, born on November 11th, 1918, be and hereby is authorized to assume the name of Pierre Goodman in place and stead of his present name upon complying with the provisions of this order, namely …”
I must not look at her, I thought. I will not look at her, for it seemed to me that if I did so everything would fall away, all the counterpoises that held us up, together—the family illusion shared of shared days, the illusion of love and the fabric, not of hate, but of anti-love revenging itself for what it is. The word “turn” swung in my mind like a compass needle. It is her turn now for one thing, yours for the other. Only turn now and see what you wished for arrived. The room will fall away, you will fall away from each other—all as you wished—you will be two nothings on a plain. Why is there no sound from her, I thought, no cry? Yet I could not turn.
“That this order be entered and the said petition upon which it is granted be filed within ten days from the date hereof in the office of this court in the County of Banks, that within ten days from the date of entry hereof, a copy of this order shall be published in the Denoyeville Dealer, a newspaper published in the County of Banks, Alabama; and that, within forty days after the making of this order, proof of such publication by affidavit shall be filed with the clerk of the Supreme Court in the County of …”
I am innocent, I said to the rostrum, my lips dry over my teeth in what I could not be sure was a snarl or a smile, for it seemed to me truly that I held a part of myself to myself, as the young mother had held her child. And now I heard it again, the tic, the drumming spasm of the heel on the floor. Save me from what I shall have done, I thought; who brought us here? We bring ourselves, we brought ourselves, we came to this dock together. Let me remember that when I turn.
“… that, following the due filing of the said petition and entry of said order as hereinbefore directed, the publication of such an order and the filing of proof of publication thereof, said infant shall be known as and by the name of Pierre Goodman …”
And then I heard the sound. And I turned.
“—which he is hereby authorized to assume and by no other name: (and it is further ordered, that a certified copy of this order shall not be issued until proof of compliance with the above provisions has been duly filed with the clerk of this court.)
“Enter.
“Hannibal Fourchette … Justice Supreme Court.”
My mother stood upright, her hand clapped to her mouth. It was a posture seen at once to be physical; this was no hand holding back a cry but the cramp of agony in which the hand presses back the actual knife in the throat, the burst in the breast, the clutch in the bowels. Her heel was still now, the foot clamped to the floor by the rod of the leg—stiffened to the hip—on which she appeared transfixed. As my arms went out to her she bent from the waist, looking down on the alien rod that would not let her fall; then, as I touched her, she straightened, and as I caught her she fell.
The chairs next us had arms to them and she was not to be bent; on my knees I held the upper part of her from the floor. Above the hand that concealed her mouth, her eyes looked into mine, not a cloud between us, lens into lens. They were wide and bright, stricken with knowledge, not with death.
“You … are—” she said, and the third word, the glottal echo I ponder yet, escaped me except, for its vowel. Lost I thought it was once, then false—I was sure of it—then for a while that it was surely gone; I have risen up at night and struck the wall above my bed with my fist, saying, “The word was wrong,” and believed it for the span of a cigarette, and I have halted, as to a gong, on a street corner, thinking all; what she said was all. Each is a facet of the central stone. The glossary goes down the years and will never be done. It is the word—suckled, lost, hunted—that is written at birth on the wall. It was my paring, and I thought then that she spoke it, behind the hand that slid down then and showed to the sudden cluster of faces above her the puckered seam of her lip, dragged downwards, smeared to the side.
“Sunstroke,” whispered one of the men. “Hits you worst in hurricane weather.”
“Not the sun kind,” the other said low. “My father—I know the look of it”; and the old clerk, hunched over his own chancre of mortality, said nothing. I searched for gospel in any face that would give it.
“Phone the doctor from here, Clarence,” said Fourchette from the rostrum, “and get her home in my car.” He had not moved; there was no need for him to, although a lesser man would have. Authority, stepping forward from him like the ghost of all that he had slipped from, dictated to us precise details of what to do.
The two men lifted her up and from me, their faces goblin-near to hers, as in a deposition. They refused my help as I got up from my knees. “Stay here a minute, son,” said one, “and pull yourself together. We’ll meet you outside.” As they steadied her between them, the old clerk reached over, his head humbly averted, lifted the portion of her skirt that hung between her legs and folded it across them, and I saw that it dripped wet from a wide dark circle at the groin.
Then I was alone. Fourchette was there, and yet it still was so. To the right of one of the pictures a clock that I had not seen, expected clock of public rooms, assumed and seldom noticed, showed its hands at three o’clock; three hours more before my uncle would come off shift; less than an hour since we had come here. It asserted the day, joined me to it, yet I had more than enough time to note with pedantic care that its frame was yellow mission oak like such clocks everywhere, that its scraped gilt name was “Seminole.” I had time, as one does when alone, to feel an air current pure on my hands, to turn them over in it, examining their scars, the faintly begun script of the years, their pores. I stood in one of those yawns of identity when alternatives lock, where one can only wait and be. In a minute I would live, move again, live forward; meanwhile I idled there in the languid horror of the human when it first sees the web, when it first knows that what
it will fight to the death to keep and what it will fight to the death to lose are the same.
Above me, over the lectern, the waiting hole of darkness had returned—Fourchette’s head, sunk over its next case, or its own. As I turned to leave, its visor lifted again and the white face looked out at me. I thought of what I secretly knew of it—devious leaver of keys, doler-out of bottles to its son. Contender or collaborator, we were together and alone. It was no wonder the town kept him on as the world keeps Hamlet—lucid immovable who knew us each for what we were, and whom we could then call mad. Outside, on the courthouse steps, my legs wavered like a convalescent’s, but they carried me forward to the waiting car.
Our cortege passed slowly through streets still darkened by the tail of the wind that had brushed them seasonally and veered off, leaving behind it for some hours yet a sound as of a train riding in the air six feet or so above us, the declining hurricane’s characteristic roar. The car was an old touring eight, its shape vaguely familiar; the men had placed my mother on the long rear seat, themselves on the two jump seats facing her, and had shunted me up front with the clerk, who drove. I felt nothing. I was a nothing on a plain. But I was alone.
My uncle opened the door to us. He had seen us from the parlor window where, all against custom, he had been sitting, unaware of what had occurred. He did not explain to us, then or after, what had brought him home at that hour—later I saw the ceremonial bottle out on the sideboard and the white stain on my aunt’s walnut table where the small glass, its modest ration slopped over in the moment of drinking, had left a ring. Mr. Whitlock’s telephone call to the mill had missed him; the doctor had not yet arrived.
He received us, our bedraggled procession, our circumstance, full in the face, while this side information dribbled from us and him in the crosshatched babble that attends such a blow. His face did not change when he saw us, but no one who watched it could ever again misunderstand the plight of a face that could not. At the moment when the two men, walking directly to the bedroom with the surety with which everyone in the region knew these houses, were about to put down their burden, my uncle, who had been following numbly behind, intervened. Arms upthrust, in a sudden motion that staggered all three men, he scooped her from the other two, held her for a moment over the bed, defying gravity and them as if this were his privilege, and gently lowered her down. My mother’s eyes, still wide, remained so; her crooked lip said “George,” and one hand, the unaffected left one, scrabbled at her shamed dress, as if she asked his help to conceal it. My uncle nodded, then his face changed at last; his lips turned in upon themselves, and bending, he rested them for a minute over the stain, on the hand. Watching, I felt my throat distend, not for myself, but as any bystander outside the life and accident of this house might feel the salt hurt, salt surprise of his first sight of what intimacy was.
One of the men, the stranger, clearing his throat, mentioned hot applications and spoke again of his father. Just then a neighborhood slattern, a Mrs. Jebb, who had never before been in our house, walked in among us, upborne by the righteous eagerness of those quick to adopt the minor role that disaster allows. When she saw we were all men there, she pushed through us with disdain, stood at the bedside in her fat slippers, then waved us aside. Grouped toward my uncle by her entry, the two men offered him the embarrassed shoptalk of tragedy. “Doc ought to be here soon now … reckon the storm passed us over … heat in that place was terrible … know how the air gets, all tight, before one of those Gulf winds.” One of the men stepped forward.
“Reckon I ought to take this opportunity—name’s Mount, Dabney Mount.” It was not the stranger, who might have, who introduced himself, but the courthouse lounger, the sight of whom, dabbled by the seasons as a park statue is by pigeon dirt, had been silently known to us for years. Generations back, an ancestor had endowed him with a powerful nose that slacker heredities and a single-track diet had perverted at the eyes and the chin, adding the dull roguery of gapped teeth, making of his face a kind of Punch without the intelligence, around its mouth the great, humorous brackets carved by bad feeding, its hatchet shape not entirely guileless of harm.
“Dabney Mount,” he repeated, offering me the serious hush of a man greeting the bereaved. Not a derelict quite, but a man long unused in the ordinary way of things to being in family houses, a life—fed out of paper bags, in no time frame, in flophouse random—that would seek out the public wedding, public funeral where, exhaling its carious, short-order breath, it would find the excitation of kinship almost as satisfying as a sit-down meal. A giggle spurted from him. “Have to give this boy time to recollect which, hey, young fella? Right fancy name you got yourself down there today.”
My uncle heard him with lowered eyes. Excusing himself, he stepped back to listen at the bedroom door, which Mrs. Jebb had half closed.
“Don’t try to raise yourself, honey,” we heard Mrs. Jebb whisper. “That’s it now. There.”
Mount shook his head; his eyelids even pinkened. The stranger—a heavy man with flat white cheeks and an urban taste in linen and haircuts, one of the well-heeled boarders of whom the dam had brought us dozens, family men often, with fringe tastes for the cheap company brought on by their manner of living—cast him a look of disavowal and murmured firmly that they must go, brushing aside my uncle’s brusque thanks. Mount nodded in solemn, side-kick agreement. But my uncle’s terse handshake unnerved him, admitting him so without prejudice to the company of men who by normal process participated in each other daily, jumped to the emergency, rode in the judge’s car, were detailed to carry a sick woman home. It was too much to ask him as well so suddenly to leave the stage.
“Fine woman,” he said, “everybody knows it. Stood up under the judge’s sermon like she felt her business was her own.” His eyes, roving my uncle’s face, seemed at the same time to near each other; his mouth pursed like a valve. Sensing the intent, though not the direction of what was coming, I thought that the circumstance that had removed this man from the center of men might know better than our pity, that there was a force which knew what it was about when it swept him aside from the mainstream. “Stood up under the heat well enough; recollect she wouldn’t even hang on this boy here’s arm. Funny thing—how it was only when the judge gave out the name that it struck her.”
My uncle raised his eyes and looked at me. I avoided them. But I was rescued. I was no longer a nothing.
“Thought of that when I was carrying her,” Mount continued, his pleasure dwelling on that past role. “Thought to myself—the family will want to know that. Case anything happens, the family will want to know it looked like she repented just before she was struck down.” His tongue protruded slowly from his lips, and his companion moved away from him with an indefinable grimace. It extruded like a tongue from an anus, a dirty reminder of the sore red tissue of which we all were made.
“She had nothing to repent,” said my uncle, flanking him toward the door the way a broom urges over the threshold a piece of ordure that ought not to be touched. “And now get out, man. One job doesn’t excuse the other.”
But to Mr. Mount, moved to hysteria by sudden affinity with his kind, this was yet another reminder. “Got your mind on jobs, hey, after this morning, and shouldn’t wonder—heard the news about it at Semple’s this noon.” He fumbled in a crevice in his clothing, took out the smallest size paper bag, from which he extracted the pinched half of a cigar, and inserted this in the wet, restless round under his nose. “Tip you off—crowd down there ain’t too sweet on you, sum totally. Happens I’m sponsoring this gentleman there this evening. Glad to do the same for you any time.” It was the remnant nose, after all, that made for travesty. Watching that bleared cockscomb above what crowed beneath, I understood how a flock might peck to death one of its kind—because he was.
“Come along,” said the stranger. “This gentleman has no time for that now.”
“Coming.” Mount made a jaunty half-salute with the hand that held the cigar. He winked.
“Promised I’d take him to Semple’s by way of the Three Sisters.” The other hand cradled the near elbow of the stranger, who this time seemed unable to flinch from it.
Behind us, Mrs. Jebb came out, finger to lips. “Maybe she’ll drop off, now, you all be quiet.”
“Tuh, Jesus!” Mount bent almost double, pantomiming his remorse over forgetting about noise. He was almost over the threshold now, but again he halted, blinking his scanty lashes. Perhaps he felt our triple enmity, triple disgust radiating toward him, accepting it as the return of that element in which he normally moved. His hand moved to my shoulder.
“You recollect it, don’t you though, young fella. Tell ’em how it was the way I said it was. Wasn’t till the very moment the judge give out the new name, skips my mind what it is. But it was right then and there that your mamma fell down.” His hand, with its sickening, ancient slug-smell, nudged me, pleading. I could not flinch under it either. What I had done, what the stranger would do, linked us to it.
My uncle’s clear, sandy glance took us both in; there was no telling what it had received. At the moment, as the stranger had said, he had no time for us. He turned to Mrs. Jebb, sleazy concierge of the bedside, for any message she might have. And as he did so, the doctor arrived.
She had had a stroke, though a light one; the history of such cases was that all her faculties, but slightly impeded now, would return. It was true also, to be sure, that the same history predicted the return, far ahead but inevitable, of another and another of death’s strokings until the final one—each to be preceded by the visible spasm peculiar to such cases, that strumming whose end appearance was muscular but undoubtedly began hours or days before in the great banyan trunks of the nerves. And this in itself was encouraging, since these very symptoms, always premonitory, when once felt by a patient were henceforth unmistakable and with prompt medication could be controlled, postponed time and time again before they reached their ultimate—although of course the real ultimate could never be postponed. But was not this latter, said the doctor’s bonhomie, the same sentence as lay in wait for all of us? Mrs. Higby’s case was no different from the rest of us, except perhaps in that she had been given an insight—always alarming at first but soon tolerable—into the special terms under which she might expect the tap that comes for us all. Merely a warning, an inkling of the kind of death he would pick for himself had he the choice of one; here followed a light listing of the morning’s pitiables, although how he had consoled these gangrenous amputees, terminal cancers, was not revealed. As to the time limit, let her not think of it—time enough, like the rest of us, to be in an automobile accident or have a flowerpot fall on her head. Years of it. Years and years.
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