Burning Your Boats

by Angela Carter

  The Minister’s wife made sure Annie-Belle knew a thing or two when she judged it about the time the girl’s bleeding started. The Minister’s wife, in a vague, pastoral way, thought about a husband for Annie-Belle, a wife for Johnny. ‘Out there, in that little house on the prairie, so lonesome . . . Nobody for those young folks to talk to ’cept cows, cows, cows.’

  *

  What did the girl think? In summer, of the heat, and how to keep flies out of the butter; in winter, of the cold. I do not know what else she thought. Perhaps, as young girls do, she thought that a stranger would come to town and take her away to the city and so on, but, since her imagination began and ended with her experience, the farm, work, the seasons, I think she did not think so far, as if she knew already she was the object of the object of her own desire for, in the bright light of the New World, nothing is obscure. But when they were children, all they knew was they loved each other just as, surely, a brother or a sister should.

  She washed her hair in a tub. She washed her long, yellow hair. She was fifteen. It was spring. She washed her hair. It was the first time that year. She sat on the porch to dry her hair, she sat in the rocking-chair which her mother selected from the Sears’ Roebuck catalogue, where her father would never sit, now. She propped a bit of mirror on the porch railing. It caught the sun and flashed. She combed out her wet hair in the mirror. There seemed to be an awful lot of it, tangling up the comb. She wore only her petticoat, the men were off with the cattle, nobody to see her pale shoulders except that Johnny came back. The horse threw him, he knocked his head against the stone. Giddy, he came back to the house, leading his pony, and she was busy untangling her hair and did not see him, nor have a chance to cover herself.

  ‘Why, Johnny, I declare – ’

  Imagine an orchestra behind them: the frame house, the porch, the rocking-chair endlessly rocking, like a cradle, the white petticoat with eyelet lace, her water-darkened hair hanging on her shoulders and little trickles running down between her shallow breasts, the young man leading the limping pony, and, inexhaustible as light, around them the tender land.

  The ‘Love Theme’ swells and rises. She jumps up to tend him. The jogged mirror falls.

  ‘Seven years’ bad luck – ’

  In the fragments of the mirror, they kneel to see their round, blond, innocent faces that, superimposed upon one another, would fit at every feature, their faces, all at once the same face, the face that never existed until now, the pure face of America.

  EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

  (Long shot) Farmhouse.

  (Close up) Petticoat falling on to porch of farmhouse.

  Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana . . . Oh, those enormous territories! That green vastness, in which anything is possible.

  EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

  (Close up) Johnny and Annie-Belle kiss.

  ‘Love Theme’ up.

  Dissolve.

  No. It wasn’t like that! Not in the least like that.

  He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.

  Annabella: Methinks you are not well.

  Giovanni: Here’s none but you and I. I think you love me, sister.

  Annabella: Yes, you know I do.

  And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now, before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous plain they knew they must not do it . . . do what? How did they know what to do? From watching the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the cock. They were country children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the other’s face as if it were their own.

  [Music plays.]

  Giovanni: Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.

  For pity’s sake, I beg you!

  [She kneels.]

  Annabella: On my knees,

  Brother, even by our mother’s dust, I charge you

  Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

  Love me, or kill me, brother.

  [He kneels.]

  Giovanni: On my knees,

  Sister, even by our mother’s dust, I charge you

  Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

  Love me, or kill me, sister.

  EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

  Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.

  Empty rocking-chair, rocking, rocking.

  *

  It is the boy – or young man, rather – who is the most mysterious to me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he works the land, he toils and sweats. His work consists of the vague, undistinguished ‘work’ of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never before broken until now.

  And I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt.

  For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!

  Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? ‘Look after your sister.’ But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.

  Giovanni: I am lost forever.

  Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes. She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.

  INTERIOR. MINISTER’S HOUSE. DAY

  Dinner-table. Minister’s wife dishing portions from a pot for her husband and her son.

  MINISTER’S WIFE: ’Tain’t right, just ain’t right, those two out there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.

  MINISTER’S SON: She’s terribly pretty, Mama.

  The Minister’s wife and the Minister turn to

  look at the young man. He blushes slowly but comprehensively.

  The rancher knew nothing. He worked. He kept the iron core of grief within him rustless. He looked forward to his solitary, once-monthly drink, alone on the porch, and on those nights they took a chance and slept together in the log cabin under the patchwork quilt made in the ‘log cabin’ pattern by their mother. Each time they lay down there together, as if she obeyed a voice that came out of the quilt telling her to put the light out, she would extinguish the candle flame between her finger-tips. All around them, the tactility of the dark.

  She pondered the irreversibility of defloration. According to what the Minister’s wife said, she had lost everything and was a lost girl. And yet this change did not seem to have changed her. She turned to the only one she loved, and the desolating space around them diminished to that of the soft grave their bodies dented in the long grass by the creek. When winter came, they made quick, dangerous love among the lowing beasts in the barn. The snow melted and all was green enough to blind you and there was a vinegarish smell from the rising of the sharp juices of spring. The birds came back.

  A dusk bird went chink-chink-chink like a single blow on the stone xylophone of the Chinese classical orchestra.

  EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

  Annie-Belle, in apron, comes out on homestead porch; strikes metal triangle.

  ANNIE-BELLE: Dinner’s ready!

  INTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. NIGHT

  Supper-table. Annie-Belle serves beans. None for herself.

  JOHNNY:
Annie-Belle, you’re not eating anything tonight.

  ANNIE-BELLE: Can’t rightly fancy anything tonight.

  The dusk bird went chink-chink-chink with the sound of a chisel on a gravestone.

  He wanted to run away with her, west, further west, to Utah, to California where they could live as man and wife, but she said: ‘What about Father? He’s lost enough already.’ When she said that, she put on, not his face, but that of their mother, and he knew in his bones the child inside her would part them.

  The Minister’s son, in his Sunday coat, came courting Annie-Belle. He is the second lead, you know in advance, from his tentative manner and mild eyes; he cannot long survive in this prairie scenario. He came courting Annie-Belle although his mother wanted him to go to college. ‘What will you do at college with a young wife?’ said his mother. But he put away his books; he took the buggy to go out and visit her. She was hanging washing out on the line.

  Sound of the wind buffeting the sheets, the very sound of loneliness.

  Soranzo: Have you not the will to love?

  Annabella: Not you.

  Soranzo: Who, then?

  Annabella: That’s as the fates infer.

  She lowered her head and drew her foot back and forth in the dust. Her breasts hurt, she felt queasy.

  EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

  Johnny and Annie-Belle walking on the prairie.

  ANNIE-BELLE: I think he likes me, Johnny.

  Pan blue sky, with clouds. Johnny and Annie-Belle, dwarfed by the landscape, hand in hand, heads bowed. Their hands slowly part.

  Now they walk with gradually increasing distance between them.

  The light, the unexhausted light of North America that, filtered through celluloid, will become the light by which we see America looking at itself.

  Correction: will become the light by which we see North America looking at itself.

  EXTERIOR, FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

  Row of bottles on a fence.

  Bang, bang, bang. Johnny shoots the bottles one by one.

  Annie-Belle on porch, washing dishes in a tub.

  Tears run down her face.

  EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

  Father on porch, feet up on railing, glass and bottle to hand.

  Sun going down over prairies.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  (Father’s point of view) Johnny shooting bottles off the fence.

  Clink of father’s bottle against glass.

  EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. DAY

  Minister’s son rides along track in long shot.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Annie-Belle, clean dress, tidy hair, red eyes, comes out of house on to porch. Clink of father’s bottle against glass.

  EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. DAY

  Minister’s son tethers horse. He has brushed his Sunday coat. In his hand, a posy of flowers – cottage roses, sweetbrier, daisies. Annie-Belle smiles, takes posy.

  ANNIE-BELLE: Oh!

  Holds up pricked forefinger; blood drops on to a daisy.

  MINISTER’S SON: Let me . . .

  Takes her hand. Kisses the little wound.

  . . . make it better.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Clink of bottle on glass.

  (Close up) Annie-Belle, smiling, breathing in the scent from her posy.

  And, perhaps, had it been possible, she would have learned to love the Minister’s gentle son before she married him, but, not only was it impossible, she also carried within her the child that meant she must be married quickly.

  INTERIOR. CHURCH. DAY

  Harmonium. Father and Johnny by the altar.

  Johnny white, strained; father stoical.

  Minister’s wife thin-lipped, furious.

  Minister’s son and Annie-Belle, in simple white cotton wedding-dress, join hands.

  MINISTER: Do you take this woman . . .

  (Close up) Minister’s son’s hand slipping wedding ring on to Annie-Belle’s finger.

  INTERIOR. BARN. NIGHT

  Fiddle and banjo old-time music.

  Vigorous square dance going on; bride and groom lead.

  Father at table, glass in hand.

  Johnny, beside him, reaching for bottle.

  Bride and groom come together at end of dance; groom kisses bride’s cheek. She laughs.

  (Close up) Annie-Belle looking shyly up at the Minister’s son.

  The dance parts them again; as Annie-Belle is handed down the row of men, she staggers and faints.

  Consternation.

  Minister’s son and Johnny both run towards her.

  Johnny lifts her up in his arms, her head on his shoulder. Eyes opening. Minister’s son reaches out for her. Johnny lets him take hold of her.

  She gazes after Johnny beseechingly as he disappears among the crowd.

  Silence swallowed up the music of the fiddle and the banjo; Death with his hair in braids spread out the sheets on the marriage bed.

  INTERIOR. MINISTER’S HOUSE. BEDROOM. NIGHT

  Annie-Belle in bed, in a white nightgown, clutching the pillow, weeping. Minister’s son, bare back, sitting on side of bed with his back to camera, head in hands.

  In the morning, her new mother-in-law heard her vomiting into the chamber-pot and, in spite of her son’s protests, stripped Annie-Belle and subjected her to a midwife’s inspection. She judged her three months gone, or more. She dragged the girl round the room by the hair, slapped her, punched her, kicked her, but Annie-Belle would not tell the father’s name, only promised, swore on the grave of her dead mother, that she would be a good girl in future. The young bridegroom was too bewildered by this turn of events to have an opinion about it; only, to his vague surprise, he knew he still loved the girl although she carried another man’s child.

  ‘Bitch! Whore!’ said the Minister’s wife and struck Annie-Belle a blow across the mouth that started her nose bleeding.

  ‘Now, stop that, Mother,’ said the gentle son. ‘Can’t you see she ain’t well?’

  The terrible day drew to its end. The mother-in-law would have thrown Annie-Bell out on the street, but the boy pleaded for her, and the Minister, praying for guidance, found himself opening the Bible at the parable of the woman taken in adultery and meditated well upon it.

  ‘Only tell me the name of the father,’ her young husband said to Annie-Belle.

  ‘Better you don’t know it,’ she said. Then she lied: ‘He’s gone, now; gone out west.’

  ‘Was it – ?’ naming one or two.

  ‘You never knew him. He came by the ranch on his way out west.’

  Then she burst out crying again, and he took her in his arms.

  ‘It will be all over town,’ said the mother-in-law. ‘That girl made a fool of you!’

  She slammed the dishes on the table and would have made the girl eat out the back door, but the young husband laid her a place at table with his own hand and led her in and sat her down in spite of his mother’s black looks. They bowed their heads for grace. Surely, the Minister thought, seeing his boy cut bread for Annie-Belle and lay it on her plate, my son is a saint. He began to fear for him.

  ‘I won’t do anything unless you want,’ her husband said in the dark after the candle went out.

  The straw with which the mattress was stuffed rustled beneath her as she turned away from him.

  INTERIOR. FARMHOUSE KITCHEN. NIGHT

  Johnny comes in from outside, looks at father asleep in rocking-chair.

  Picks up some discarded garment of Annie-Belle’s from the back of a chair, buries face in it.

  Shoulders shake.

  Opens cupboard, takes out bottle.

  Uncorks with teeth. Drinks.

  Bottle in hand, goes out on porch.

  EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. NIGHT

  (Johnny’s point of view) Moon rising over prairie: the vast, the elegiac plain.

  ‘Landscape Theme’ rises.

  INTERIOR. MINISTER’S SON’S ROOM. NIGHT

  Annie-Belle and Minister’s son in bed. Moonli
ght through the curtains. Both lie there, open-eyed. Rustle of mattress.

  ANNIE-BELLE: You awake?

  Minister’s son moves away from her.

  ANNIE-BELLE: Reckon I never properly knowed no young man before . . .

  MINISTER’S SON: What about –

  ANNIE-BELLE (shrugging the question off): Oh . . .

  Minister’s son moves towards her.

  For she did not consider her brother in this new category of ‘young men’; he was herself. So she and her husband slept in one another’s arms, that night, although they did nothing else for she was scared it might harm the baby and he was so full of pain and glory it was scarcely to be borne, it was already enough, or too much, holding her tight, in his terrible innocence.

  It was not so much that she was pliant. Only, fearing the worst, it turned out that the worst had already happened; her sin found her out, or, rather, she found out she had sinned only when he offered his forgiveness, and, from her repentance, a new Annie-Belle sprang up, for whom the past did not exist.

  She would have said to him: ‘It did not signify, my darling; I only did it with my brother, we were alone together under the vast sky that made us scared and so we clung together and what happened, happened.’ But she knew she must not say that, that the most natural love of all was just precisely the one she must not acknowledge. To lie down on the prairie with a passing stranger was one thing. To lie down with her father’s son was another. So she kept silent. And when she looked at her husband, she saw, not herself, but someone who might, in time, grow even more precious.

  The next night, in spite of the baby, they did it, and his mother wanted to murder her and refused to get the breakfast for this prostitute, but Annie-Belle served them, put on an apron, cut the ham and cooked it, then scrubbed the floor with such humility, such evidence of gratitude that the older woman kept her mouth shut, her narrow lips tight as a trap, but she kept them shut for if there was one thing she feared, it was the atrocious gentleness of her menfolk. And. So.

  Johnny came to the town, hungering after her; the gates of Paradise slammed shut in his face. He haunted the backyard of the Minister’s house, hid in the sweetbrier, watched the candle in their room go out and still he could not imagine it, that she might do it with another man. But. She did.