The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  One crawls through and gets pricked by splinters, and one comes to the windlessness of here-under-the-house. The house stretches above, wood-walled, monstrous, echoing above us. A plaid automobile rug, a dented kettle, a mop handle without the mop, tin spoons and two tin knives, a dirtied doll are here, near a hole eight or nine inches deep; dust whispers, slides, falls into it, blown when we move and create a stifled force of air in the windlessness here. Children play here. She gives the plan of the story, she gives orders, some description, threats, blandishments. With a twig of yew, she dusts my lips—“You are a little girl-baby—I am making you pretty.…” She says, “Now stand up—I will make you pretty some more.” Resting her face against my ribs, she unbuttons my pants, she removes them and has me lie on her lap. Face up. She pokes at my belly with the twig: “You have appendicitis—”

  She inserts the twig into my mouth—I turn my head away; she grabs my nose, presses the nostils together. I open my mouth. The twig, its bark, its smell of dust, its needles enter my mouth, scratch on my palate—I gag and wiggle and then convulse: Nonie slaps down my struggling arms and legs. “Do what I tell you, you have to do what I tell you—this is a game—we’re playing a game!” A moral value in a world of children. She pours dirt on my lips: “This is food—you have to eat it—” Intent with interest, she digs with the twig, a fake stethoscope, into the soft flesh between my legs behind my balls. I roll over on her leg and push at her with both my hands. She sits on the blanket, a fat-thighed girl, she says consoling and argumentative things, she makes promises, she turns me away from her and lies me sort of across her lap, her folded legs, her plump thighs. My bared bottom seems to develop vision, to look up in a way at the air. She says, “You’ve been bad—I have to spank you.” I behave as if I still don’t speak. I shake my head no. She has never hurt me before—not very much—not so that I am certain of malice.

  The first blow was soft: time continued. The second, sharper blow disordered me as if I had a covering of dust that now each particle ticklingly and stingingly glowed and disposed of feeling in me. “Too hard,” I said indignantly. It was not within the range of things we did when we played, my being hurt except in casual ways, the sideways brutalities as of the splinters coming through the trellis to this windless darkness.

  She hits me again.

  “No—I don’t want to do this!”

  Partly undressed, I now feel for the first time that embarrassment, or even chagrin, that will enter my dreams, of having been lured or having gotten myself further into the role of baby than was sensible. The third blow perhaps surprises her, too, it has no meaning as part of a game as I have known games until now.

  I turn an angry face toward her—she looks triumphant and studious. She presses her knees against my sides and squeezes so that I vibrate.

  In a singular unity of self, the child wriggles and kicks. Nonie says, “You’re just a baby—you have to do what I say.” She wants to enjoy me as her parents do. She is curious about why I am loved the way I am. She pushes my head back—my neck—her having more strength than I do turns me into a creature of animus such that I grunt and let loose my urine. I pee on her leg. She yells, “What have you done! Did you dare do that? I’ll teach you a lesson!” She holds my wrist while I wriggle and kick at her in a rage that I am here under the porch, in this dusty place with her, this cave of games.

  I pry at her fingers and I succeed in loosening one fìnger. She lets me go. I turn. She scoots on the blanket and gruntingly she gets her fleshy, round legs around me from behind, she corrals me and turns with her legs and knees and feet, I am captured by the giant woman squid or titan.

  My ignorance, my not knowing what is coming next, has that special taste it has in one’s childhood. I scowl into her face. The inability to hurt someone locks you into hysteria, into being an audience—a kind of farce-prison.

  I stoop and scrabble at the loose blowy dust; I throw it at her. The thrown dust moves in the air with a weak delicacy and Nonie waves it off, blows at it. It is terrible; none of it stains her. She leans back on her arms and kicks at me, she says, “Don’t fight with me!” Her plump leg knocks me in the chest and then squeezes me: a knot of wood forms there, then that place becomes rough-edged, and as if discolored it feels blurry and bilious, it blocks my breathing. Nonie kicks me in the stomach: “You shouldn’t throw dirt at me!”

  I sit down in a bubble of asphyxiation. You can see her think and decide to laugh. Although I can’t breathe, I throw myself at her. She grabs the mop handle, she holds it with both her hands and pushes me back with it, she pushes with it against my rucked shirt, my chest. I am naked below. She pushes in such a way that it is like a blow—the problem of her power in the world, of its limits is hard: she cannot make its elements coincide with her notions about good sense and what is practical and what-is-bearable as far as she is concerned.

  She says, “You’re spoiled; you were bothering me—oh, ha-ha, you’re just a pest.” My feeling dishonored is what she wants: she is convinced I ought not be a source of pain or hurt for her at all. She is morally self-assured—a form of moral hysteria since moral questions are painful, all of them, steadily.

  The child says, “You stop this!”

  She hits me with the mop handle to correct my facial expression and to make my state of mind acceptable to her.

  Then she keeps hitting me rapidly so that the yell she sees I am about to make, I can’t utter—my yell is halted mid-throat: and this, too, interests her. I am penned in and netted by her ability, her reflexes and her harshness.

  Her face, her eyes wince and are averted; and I stare at her. My pain echoes in her pleasurably. I begin to be piled with sensations as with rocks piled in a heavy, smelly, stained canvas sack. It feels dirty. I want to be clean. Inside me it stinks of shaken bile. My eyes jerk and bug out to see tiny, barely comprehensible areas of the visible. Momma will tell me one day that women hope to kill you by means of what they make you feel—it is normal, she insists.

  Now I am phosphorescent and wounded; I am a dully gleaming unseemliness. My heart shambles, jostles. Pain usurps my attention, and I can’t remember now what painlessness actually was like. I am in the pain continuum. This pain is partly a lapse of intelligence: it is a silly, grinning, leering idiot who looks at Nonie. Pain sets me free from my usual curatorships of sense and bounding companionships to things. Memories that are impossible when one is happy gather and make a continuum going back to the beginning, dog-headed presences, old thumpings, prickings, abominable and noisome. Nonie has a look of scrubbing away at a foulness. My back bristles and wrinkles. I stare at her from within the pain continuum that is contiguous to the one she is in; she has been in pain and had stared at me from within her pain continuum and I had not noticed it. The hate I feel is odd, is tilted and complicitous. When she hits me on the side of the head with the pole, the bone of the skull vibrates, and my head and eyes and mouth are invaded by, they gorge on, skinny sensations, shiny, cold. The sensations spin and ring like coins on marble or glass but almost at once they grow thick and wadded and vile—now specific and disordering pain overwhelms the sense of dishonor and gifts me with more enmity than I had yet known—not love and adoration: Nonie has made a psychological error by not pretending sufficiently well to Purity of Motive; but she is following out the line of her desires, her mood; and she does not feel this as an error yet.

  Why pain knocks love into you is that strong feeling has to be something, and if hate is too dangerous, or is unknown—if it isn’t contagious as hers was for me—then one collapses into love, into eagerness—eagerness to please.

  Nonie’s face was a roughened blur for me, an erasure where the paper grows furry and a yellowish oval becomes a hole where the light shows through. The fingers, polar and smelly, of my pain and the smell of Nonie’s hair and the sound of her voice coil around me: she says, “I’m the good one, you’re the bad one.” Look and fear me. Under the porch, in the half-light.

  I establish an I
-hate-you posture: this is because of my nurse, Annemarie, I think; she has taught me different stuff from this; I have a this-is-bad, I won’t feel anything, I won’t cry, I’ll wait until it’s over posture.

  This breaks the connection between me and my tormentor, between my state and her will. Everything my tormentor knows is part of a pointless bludgeoning, a blundering. To leave someone alone, alone and crazed and charged with guilt and without your complicity, this changes things so that she feels bad (goaded and restless); an irregular gasping enters her breath, she is half-laughing, corrosively. She jabs with the stick in front of my eyes. The pains inside me now are like a glare and a noise and some like a night outdoors. I do not have to fear her, I dislike her so. When pain really matters, it stops being tragedy—or comedy: It becomes melodrama.

  I felt a baby’s disbelief in pain, and the conviction that Nonie was wrong and would be punished for this.

  She saw that in my manner. The stick approached, the skin winced, the stick entered the eyesocket, the shallow, childish cup of bone around the soft eye. My scream shoved a scream out of Nonie: hers was, “You made me do it! You walked into it! You did it on purpose!”

  When I screamed, I lifted my head—the jabbing stick jerked downward to my nose, to the nostril; the stick disarranged the center of my face—a squishing-squashing sensation.

  I expected this not to have happened, to be untrue, this lightless exile, this unbearable, endless, greasy slide in private time. I see out my eyes in flickers. In my gullet, the air drags. Gasping, swollen-faced, airless, I feel my fear. I am still on my feet. A wordless sense of animals in a ring, of pain, that’s what I feel, and an unforgivingness.

  It is true that she is, in a number of ways, more the victim now than I am, if I don’t slobber into lover.

  One gags everywhere inside oneself. The distance from here to painlessness is a matter of an astronomy of human goodness not fully to be calculated ever. I am aware of Nonie’s disgust, her triumph, and her staring. On my hand, after I touch my face, are gouts and trickles, wormy runnels of blood—they hop and twitch like some kind of hot grasshoppers or warm, flustered, giggling worms. Assaulted and chilled, I tried to walk but the blood came too fast and I was too sickened, too ashamed and angry and faint. The wind moved outside this place, in the air and yews, and the sky was a clear blue far away with dim clouds in it, blue-stained white filmy things—this sky entered my dreams.

  Everything in the world was in one dimension with everything else but this place wasn’t as real as the place was that had colors in it somewhere. I even saw the blood on my hand when I took it away from my face as gray—it was a serious world, the one with gray blood in it. I didn’t know a great deal. I squatted, my knees came up alongside my chest. I had no vocabulary for some things: I don’t like this; this is bad. The presence of something like rough-textured brick or rough-skinned concrete, the pressure of something that could tear your skin jutting from a field in which everything was in the pallid light of shock and faintness, tore you in such a way that the tear could not be sewn again. I thought maybe it was final; I didn’t know.

  Nonie utters a birdlike shriek. She passes out.

  After a while, I crawled out through the trellis and went, a human child in search of help.

  Lila, my mother, refused to “suffer"—she had enough “trouble” as it was—and S.L. was summoned from his work: you wanted a son.

  He drove me over the bridge to St. Louis, to the hospital there. Then began the medical sequence—the doctors cleaned and probed, then sutured. Now one lives with sewn skin, sickly self-horror and the stomach-turning shock of memory and doctors’ clumsiness (no matter how skilled they are) and the present moment in which one aches. One’s own smells are medical, the antiseptic smells, so do the bandages.

  We drove back over the bridge. For several minutes we were among the sunstruck girders; they combed the windy, eddying air that then thumped the car. The air transparently duplicated the muddy swirls of the Mississippi which seemed distant and tiny below us.

  S.L. drove with his arm around me. He said he wasn’t going to punish Nonie—she was upset and hysterical, grief-stricken, she was “worse off” than I was, he expected me to forgive her. When we got home, he insisted I go to her as I had in the past: we both now recollected a history of pain. He was carrying me and I made him put me down. He tried to draw me by the hand, but I grabbed and clung to the newel post.

  Annemarie, my nurse, came and rescued me; she took me upstairs and I tried to get her to lock my door against Daddy and Nonie and she did but Daddy protested. For forty-eight hours, Annemarie had to stay with me because otherwise I became violent and my soul’s obstinacy led to recklessness such that it threatened to tear the stitches.

  Nonie, whose face did not look sad, came to the door of my room—and did not seem to be much aware of me at all while she supposedly tried to make peace. This was the first occasion of her violence toward me. Over the next two years, there would be seven more serious occasions including one with a knife and one with boiling water. Twice she pushed me from heights. I have eighteen scars, most of them small, on me from her attempts. Her sadness now is that of her trying to handle a dark and amazing and very difficult happiness. It is a success that she’s had, this event. Nonie did not apologize or confess, and she was not punished, but was helped to “recover.” So the child, me, would not touch S.L. or eat. The child languished, and S.L. had no choice but to languish for a while. He had to do without being comforted. He was doubly kind to Nonie who he thought was suffering as he did day by day—he thought she suffered over me, and he picked on Ma.

  Ma’s nerves under pressure got weird. She grew more devil-may-care than ever and she wrecked her car. Nonie had become frenzied and strange in her guilt and happiness—a terrible combination—and she suffered a weird gnawing pain because Ma had wrecked her car and Daddy languished; she began to have something like hysterics very often. The nicer Dad was to her, the worse she got. And she got into fights with other kids at school. In a sense guilt proceeds in a demonic fashion always to infect and wreck. And one builds props and stays. But, meanwhile, everyone in our house is unconsoled. We are an ordinary household now. An unhappy child is a grave punishment.

  On a warm, airless afternoon, I woke from a nap, S.L. was waking me—that gloom-smitten, urgent, politeness-needled man—God, how he wanted to be fine and sensitive, a gentleman. I resisted him at first, but the heat and the way I felt made me sick, and I grew limp in his arms and let him lift me and dress me. And besides he kept saying he knew something that would make me feel better.

  He said he was going to fix everything.

  He was dressed in business clothes—a yellowish suit, vest, hat; he wore spats. He dressed me in short pants (yellow ones), a white shirt, high white shoes. A cane over his wrist, an unlit cigar in his mouth, he carried me in my bandages, my silence, my loud breathing—a groan, a sigh, small sobbing breaths, sorts of tiny, inadvertent screams of doubt about being with Dad—downstairs, then outside abruptly among the terrible straw brooms of hot light. He moved heavily in the heat, suffering too; he said, “I suffer when you suffer, this is no picnic for me. But soon we’ll be all happy, it will all be right as pie—apple pie with cheese on it—you’ll like that, won’t you?”

  Over the worn and slightly shaking boards of the porch (gray but worn pinkish in places) from which a bitter heat rises and pinches us, over noisy and shifting gravel, over soft lawn, over sidewalk pavement, we go.

  His sweaty discomfort, his loud breathing and mine match each other: “We’re a duet, we’re a groaners’ duet.”

  On the far edge of the bluff overlooking Portsmouth where a short row of small wooden houses stands, ugly unlike the other houses on the bluff, we enter one that has all its blinds drawn—we enter without calling out or ringing a doorbell. S.L. opened a screen door with one hand: that door, frail, wooden and with old wire netting bent in places, rattled and slammed; and he pushed open the regular door, a
nd we were in a dark hallway that smelled of cooking and dust, not of soap and the straw summer rugs as our house did.

  A woman in a red sundress and white shoes hurried out of a shadowy room smiling in an intense way that turned her face into a mirror reflecting our arrival.

  At some moments, her body seemed to be like a goldfish—some yards up here had goldfish ponds in them where bright fish swam with soft flutters of gauzy fins and with curvatures of fat-muscled torsos. Her teeth stuck forward.

  “Cheery Cherry,” Daddy said.

  She is in a state of contingent amusement—she is beyond law, she is ready to laugh in a bandit way: this was what made Daddy call her Cheery Cherry.

  In her nervous pleasure, she touches him and his pulse strengthens noisily.

  “Lookit your suit, here, let me dampen it and straighten the lapel, you’re all sweaty from carreeuhn theuh chee-iiilld (uh)—I swear to God, you must be the kindest man alive.…”

  “I sweat to God,” Daddy said.

  “Do you want a glass of water? How about sody pop? Poor thayng, look at all the bayenduhges—kitchykoo—I gayiss it’s too hot, he don’t want to smile none, do he, sweet little thang—”

  Her hand moves on Daddy’s sleeve, the muscle of his arm—then his hip—briefly, his neck.

  A bill woman, a drunk: she was good to men, but she was a mean drunk; she came from harsh people; she thought S.L. was a godsend; I don’t blame her; I don’t blame either one of them: I’ll be honest, I didn’t like her, and Lila was hurt, Lila didn’t care but she was in pain because of that woman anyway but she never let him know it.

  Cherry is harsh and grating in rhythm, in force, she is soft and repetitive, clumsy and muscular in nature.

  She always, always, waits for violence, expects it, awaits it—attends on it.