Had I a Hundred Mouths (11 page)

The older cousin longed to put his cousin to rest and to pacify the tormenting images before him; heal him. He held his young cousin to his breast and for the first time since their own uncle long ago had held them each under an arm against his breast, the young cousin felt love and tenderness and forgiveness, without a word being spoken; and he felt that his cousin was saying to him, in this way, that you do not have to speak to tell somebody something that is gentle and loving. By showing him the fullness of silence, the older cousin was able to bring his young cousin to some peace and the tormenting images, and even the horrible whirring sound, began to pass away.

It was then that the young cousin was visited again by what he thought was an angel. A big winged male came before him and the cousin asked him, “Are you an angel?” “Yes,” said the angel and said that he had come to offer the cousin his tongue and straightway installed it in his mouth and told him to speak with it. The cousin was so afraid for a little while, to have an angel's tongue in his mouth, but it was not for long before he spoke to the angel and told him of his joy and thanks. The angel then told him that he could keep his tongue if he would use it to show the poor Mexican people in the peafields of the Rio Grande Valley among whom he had worked how to spell words and how to add numbers. The cousin said he would try. Some mysterious money came to his hands from a Carmelite Nun who arrived one day. She drove up in a cleanly washed Ford in which another Nun sat. The money was to be used for the teaching of words and numbers to the Mexicans so that they would not be speechless even as he had been and know when they were cheated and how to protect themselves and get better pay.

The cousin returned to the peafields and established a kind of school at night, speaking with the angel's tongue. People of the Valley who had known him before as
El Mudo
didn't recognize him to be the same person until a man cried out “El Mudo!” and then he was recognized by all and beloved. He was now speaking so freely that he did not know whose tongue he was using, his or the angel's. A lot of the time he found that he had not even thought about it—he simply opened his mouth and said the words he had to say.

In some time the angel returned and announced to the cousin that he would take back his tongue and that he might very well see how well he could speak with what he had of his own. “Do what you can with what you've got,” advised the angel. “You may now be able to speak better than you think.” The cousin was afraid for a while, but when he saw that he could do pretty well with what he had of his own, he lost fear. And he lived on for quite a while, there in the Rio Grande Valley among the Mexicans he loved and helped and who loved him. When he and his brothers and sisters of the fields began to organize the first Union, the KKK blew right in like a fresh washing of white sheets in the red wind of the Valley.
El Mudo
called out to the angel, “Give me your tongue to denounce these men!” And he felt the angel's tongue in his mouth; and with full tongue he drove back with eloquence the men who had once humiliated him, to their astonishment and fear.

It was then that the angel appeared for the last time and told the cousin that it was his own tongue that had spoken the truth before the enemy, for somewhere during his speaking the angel had taken back his own tongue and the cousin without knowing it had gone on fully with his own. In joy, the cousin saw that he had been restored through the help of love and trust.

This is the end of the story of the two cousins whose uncle loved them. Unless some more comes to mind later about the older cousin. The younger one lived on among the Mexican people of the Rio Grande Valley. He never saw his father again, never went over to Shreveport, Louisiana, to find him as he had in his boyhood planned. His mother had died of the TB that cropped up in the family from time to time over two generations, but this was when he was in the torment of another world. He later found that she had been buried in Houston with a burial insurance policy for which she had paid a few dollars a month for years.

The older cousin had finally come home—it looked like. He sank peacefully into the land of his ancestors and lived there in his house built over the foundations of the old, dark house and the ruins of the door that haunted him. I am not sure what he does. I go out to the place and talk with him from time to time. His father, who turned his back on his own brother because of his drunkenness and would not come home to his funeral, died not long ago in an Old Folks' Home paid for by his pension from the oil company he had worked for for over thirty years, brought to his death by a liver cancer caused by “the excessive use of alcohol.” Those were the words used. His mother had turned into a recluse and kept planning to come to live with him, but she never came. Interesting how this Houston brother and sister disavowed the old place of their grandparents and their childhood. The truth is that they were just plainly scared to death and in their fear and unhappiness were counseled by the leader of their religious group to wash their hands of the cursed place of so much bloodshed. There's some more in this to be told, about this afflicted man and woman who labored and went down under their own accursedness.

But I'll wait until later to tell it. I've wanted to stick to the two cousins and the outcome of their loving reunion that brought to their family's troubled lives redemption. Or so it has seemed to me.

G
HOST
AND
F
LESH

1947—1952

T
HE
W
HITE
R
OOSTER

Walter's Story

There were two disturbances in Mrs. Marcy Samuels' life that were worrying her nearly insane. First, it was, and had been for two years now, Grandpa Samuels, who should have long ago been dead but kept wheeling around her house in his wheel chair, alive as ever. The first year he came to live with them it was plain that he was in good health and would probably live long. But during the middle of the second year he fell thin and coughing and after that there were some weeks when Mrs. Samuels and her husband, Watson, were sure on Monday that he would die and relieve them of him before Saturday. Yet he wheeled on and on, not ever dying at all.

The second thing that was about to drive Marcy Samuels crazy was a recent disturbance which grew and grew until it became a terror. It was a stray white rooster that crowed at her window all day long and, worst of all, in the early mornings. No one knew where he came from, but there he was, crowing to all the other roosters far and near—and they answering back in a whole choir of crowings. His shrieking was bad enough, but then he had to outrage her further by digging in her pansy bed. Since he first appeared to harass her, Mrs. Samuels had spent most of her day chasing him out of the flowers or throwing objects at him where he was, under her window, his neck stretched and strained in a perfectly blatant crow. After a week of this, she was almost frantic, as she told her many friends on the telephone or in town or from her back yard.

It seemed that Mrs. Samuels had been cursed with problems all her life and everyone said she had the unluckiest time of it. That a woman sociable and busy as Marcy Samuels should have her father-in-law, helpless in a wheel chair, in her house to keep and take care of was just a shame. And Watson, her husband, was no help at all, even though it was his very father who was so much trouble. He was a slow, patient little man, not easily ruffled. Marcy Samuels was certain that he was not aware that her life was so hard and full of trouble.

She could not stand at her stove, for instance, but what Grandpa Samuels was there, asking what was in the pot and smelling of it. She could not even have several of the women over without him riding in and out among them, weak as he was, as they chatted in confidence about this or that town happening, and making bright or ugly remarks about women and what they said, their own affairs. Marcy, as she often told Watson, simply could not stop Grandpa's mouth, could not stop his wheels, could not get him out of her way. And she was busy. If she was hurrying across a room to get some washing in the sink or to get the broom, Grandpa Samuels would make a surprise run out at her from the hall or some door and streak across in front of her, laughing fiendishly or shouting boo! and then she would leap as high as her bulbous ankles would lift her and scream, for she was a nervous woman and had so many things on her mind. Grandpa had a way of sneaking into things Marcy did, as a weevil slips into a bin of meal and bores around in it. He had a way of objecting to Marcy, which she sensed everywhere. He haunted her, pestered her. If she would be bending down to find a thing in her cupboard, she would suddenly sense some shadow over her and then it would be Grandpa Samuels, he would be there, touch her like a ghost in the ribs and frighten her so that she would bounce up and let out a scream. Then he would just sit and grin at her with an owlish face. All these things he did added to the trouble it was for her to keep him, made Marcy Samuels sometimes want to kill Grandpa Samuels. He was everywhere upon her, like an evil spirit following her; and indeed there was a thing in him which scared her often, as if he was losing his mind or trying to kill her.

As for Grandpa, it was hard to tell whether he really had a wicked face or was deliberately trying to look mean, to keep Marcy troubled and to pay her back for the way she treated him. It may have been that his days were dull and he wanted something to happen, or that he remembered how he heard her fight with his son, her husband, at night in their room because Watson would not put him in a Home and get the house and Marcy free of him. “You work all day and you're not here with him like I am,” she would whine. “And you're not man enough to put him where he belongs.” He had been wicked in his day, as men are wicked, had drunk always and in all drinking places, had gambled and had got mixed up in some scrapes. But that was because he had been young and ready. He had never had a household, and the wife he finally got had long since faded away so that she might have been only a shadow from which this son, Watson, emerged, parentless. Then Grandpa had become an old wanderer, lo here lo there, until it all ended in this chair in which he was still a wanderer through the rooms of this house. He had a face which, although mischievous lines were scratched upon it and gave it a kind of devilish look, showed that somewhere there was abundant untouched kindness in him, a life which his life had never been able to use.

Marcy could not make her husband see that this house was cursed and tormented; and then to have a scarecrow rooster annoying her the length of the day and half the early morning was too much for Marcy Samuels. She had nuisances in her house and nuisances in her yard.

It was on a certain morning that Mrs. Samuels first looked out her kitchen window to see this gaunt rooster strutting white on the ground. It took her only a second to know that this was the rooster that crowed and scratched in her flowers and so the whole thing started. The first thing she did was to poke her blowsy head out her window and puff her lips into a ring and wheeze shooooooo! through it, fiercely. The white rooster simply did a pert leap, erected his flamboyantly combed head sharp into the air, chopped it about for a moment, and then started scratching vigorously in the lush bed of pansies, his comb slapping like a girl's pigtails.

Since her hands were wet in the morning sink full of dishes, Mrs. Samuels stopped to dry them imperfectly and then hurried out the back door, still drying her hands in her apron. Now she would get him, she would utterly destroy him if she could get her hands on him. She flounced out the door and down the steps and threw her great self wildly in the direction of the pansy bed, screaming shoo! shoo! go 'way! go 'way! and then cursed the rooster. Marcy Samuels must have been a terrible sight to any barnyard creature, her hair like a big bush and her terrible bosom heaving and falling, her hands thrashing the air. But the white rooster was not dismayed at all. Again he did a small quick hop, stuck his beak into the air, and stood firmly on his ground, his yellow claw spread over the face of a purple pansy and holding it to the ground imprisoned as a cat holds down a mouse. And then a sound, a clear melodious measure, which Mrs. Samuels thought was the most awful noise in the world, burst from his straggly throat.

He was plainly a poorly rooster, thin as some sparrow, his white feathers drooping and without luster, his comb of extravagant growth but pale and flaccid, hanging like a wrinkled glove over his eye. It was clear that he had been run from many a yard and that in fleeing he had torn his feathers and so tired himself that whatever he found to eat in random places was not enough to keep any flesh on his carcass. He would not be a good eating chicken, Mrs. Samuels thought, running at him, for he has no meat on him at all. Anyway, he was not like a chicken but like some nightmare rooster from Hades sent to trouble her. Yet he was most vividly alive in some courageous way.

She threw a stone at him and at this he leaped and screamed in fright and hurdled the shrubbery into a vacant lot. Mrs. Samucls clashed to her violated pansy bed and began throwing up loose dirt about the stems, making reparations. This was no ordinary rooster in her mind. Since she had a very good imagination and was, actually, a little afraid of roosters anyway, the white rooster took on a shape of terror in her mind. This was because he was so indestructible. Something seemed to protect him. He seemed to dare her to capture him, and if she threw a shoe out her window at him, he was not challenged, but just let out another startling crow at her. And in the early morning in a snug bed, such a crowing is like the cry of fire! or an explosion in the brain.

It was around noon of that day that Mrs. Samuels, at her clothesline, sighted Mrs. Doran across the hedge, at her line, her long fingers fluttering over the clothespins like butterflies trying to light there.

‘That your rooster that's been in my pansy bed and crows all the time, Mrs. Doran?”