The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (53 page)

It was as if, that day in the country, his birthday, they had lured her, using her very hatred of them as bait, to their mound, where, like a host of germs entering the bloodstream through some scratch, they had stolen inside her. Now she was like a person unconscious that a fatal disease is quietly eating him alive, as cancer is said to be painless and give no warning until its host is already past cure. In this case the organ invaded was the soul.

To watch them play with their victim was both horrible and fascinating. That he was himself a part of their scheme he knew, but was powerless to prevent. Besides, he rather enjoyed it. By making him remind her continually of them they rubbed her where she was rawest. Drop by drop the cup of her irritation would fill, then at some trifle brim over. Then she tore at her hair as though there were bats in it. Then she would not have peace. Then nothing so irritated her as his efforts to appease her. “You're good at starting trouble, aren't you?” she would taunt him. “But when the going gets rough you cry off. Soft! Can't take it, eh?” She would not let him give in to her. He shunned her; this enraged her. He fleeing, she pursuing, their arguments swept up and down stairs and through all the rooms of the house, doors banging, windows, walls, and furniture shuddering at the violence. He could not shake her off; she clattered after, attaching herself to him like a tin can tied to a dog's tail. When she had him cornered then he turned. Then he bared his fangs. They parried words. She always won, always had the last word:
they
put it in her mouth. And when she had said something at last that chilled him into silence, then she would quit the field in dubious triumph. For days, weeks—the torture was fiendishly drawn out—all their quarrels would end on the same double-edged phrase. So it had been from the start, with “That's the Indian in you coming out!” So it was later with “A snake in your mother's bosom, that's what you are!” So it was for a time with “I brought you into the world just to torment me!” Then, wrought to a pitch of outrage which that phrase had grown too worn to express, she would utter a new and more reckless one, something that left them both appalled, then retire to savor the bitter taste of her triumph. So she was led on from one Pyrrhic victory to another.

As he grew more morose she grew more cutting. “Aren't you the little joy to your mother, though? Mother's little joy! Other women's children bring sunshine and laughter into the house, but you, sullen creature—! You're a stranger in the house. You came into the world just to torment me, you snake in your mother's bosom, you little savage, you!” And he would glower at her out of those hooded cold black eyes, remote, hostile, alien, lashing her on to ever more bitter recriminations, drawing the net ever closer about herself, until in a fit of rage one day she said, “You will be the death of me!”

So ended the worst quarrel they had ever had, with both of them left gasping for breath. This time she feared she had gone really too far. Ah, but she had certainly given him something to think about! That she could see. As in the days when she used to wash him, her words had wiped his face clean of its black scowl, leaving him pale and blinking. In tones still more ominous she repeated, “You will be the death of me!”

VIII

Under cover of darkness Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom fled from home that night, never to return. He went to seek for himself a new home, new parents, a new name. He knew where to find them. Where not to be found by the ones he was leaving behind.

To postpone the discovery of his flight he left a dummy of himself in his bed as jailbreakers do. It looked so much like him lying there in his bed it made him feel it really was himself, the old him with all his troubles, with that heavy curse upon him, that he was leaving behind. By the time his trick was found out and chase given, he would be beyond recapture.

His mother would fume and rage when she found him gone. Doubting prophetess, eager victim, she would pursue her appointed executioner and be angry when he eluded her. Then having done her duty she would give up the search. His mother would receive condolences from family and friends, and look sad, and be secretly glad, and never know how much she had to be glad for.

The route taken by Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom was the same one along which the last surviving remnant of his people had been driven in 1854. His destination was the same as theirs. Across the Red River in Oklahoma among those Indian tribes with whom the earlier Caddoes exiled from Texas had found a home, and lost their identity, the last of the Caddoes hoped to find for himself a new home, a new mother and father, or many mothers, many fathers, lose his identity, and thereby evade his terrible fate. A Comanche, a Cherokee, a Choctaw, or a Creek: when Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom had been adopted as one or another of those and been given his new name then the Caddoes would truly be no more.

No more! The night around him groaned at the dismal thought. The moon veiled her face behind a cloud and through the treetops passed a long low sigh of woe. Over the dark land of the Caddoes the sentence of irrevocable doom rolled out in the muffled drum of the owl.

The road to the river and the ferry to Oklahoma, the road he was on, would take him within two miles of his grandfather's farm. Could Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom pass so near and not pay a last visit to his ancestral burial mound? At this season, early spring, before time for the planting of crops, his grandparents slept late. He could go and pay his respects and still get away unseen. Although it was from their prophecy that he was fleeing, the last of the Caddoes must not go forever from the land of his fathers without taking leave of his tutelary spirits.

He arrived shortly before daybreak. The house was still asleep as he passed it going down to the mound. In the field still stood the stalks of last year's cotton. A multitude of empty cottonbolls murmured in the wind. Day broke as he stepped on top of the mound. He advanced to the center and set down his suitcase. Looking at the ground he seemed to see into it, down into the depths where he had dug, down to the bottommost layer where the old first fathers lay in their lavish decay, smiling serenely, confident of the continuity of their kind, having gone into the grave before the white man's coming. Above them in successive layers of decline, those who had followed after: children laid on top of their parents, their children on top of them, and now on top of all himself, the last of the line, come to forswear his allegiance and bid them good-by forever.

He prepared to deliver his farewell speech, and the silence grew attentive. He was about to begin when a sound, a rustle, at his back made him turn. From a hole in the ground quite near him a snake was emerging slowly like something being squeezed out of a tube. Out and out it came: its final four inches were rattles. It was an old snake. Its skin was dull and lusterless, its markings blurred, and it was half blind with a film clouding its eyes so that it groped its way with its tongue flickering constantly, tasting the air for unseen danger. It hitched itself along in angles as the knight moves on a chessboard. It passed within mere feet of him while he stood rigid and unbreathing. Yet he was not afraid of being bitten by the snake. No snake would bite him. He was of the clan of snakes. He was a snake himself. It was something else that he feared. This was the time of year when the ground's warming up roused snakes from their winter's sleep and brought them out. But in the emergence of this old, decrepit, possibly dying one coinciding with his visit here he feared some omen.

Every few feet the snake paused and half coiled itself to strike and reared its head and peered blindly about, its long forked tongue quivering like an antenna. Presently it came up against a stone. At once it began stroking its jaw against this stone. He could hear the rasping of its scales.

And suddenly with one long stroke, at the part dividing its nostrils, the snake's skin split and out of its dull wrapper popped a bright new head with keen new eyes that blinked at the raw daylight. Then rapidly it peeled itself its entire length, turning the old skin inside out as a finger comes out of a glove. Its glassy little scales tightly woven in a pattern of diamonds, it resembled nothing so much as a belt of Indian beadwork. A shiver of pleasure ran down from its head to its rattles as it felt the air for the first time on its new skin. It gaped, showing its fangs, coiled and reared itself high and slowly looked about with lordly menace. Then quick as a fish it flashed away and was gone.

Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom knelt and picked up the cast-off skin. Rising, he saw his mother's face appear over the top of the mound. He felt himself instinctively coil, his lips fly back to bare his fangs. “Ah-hah,” said his mother's smirk, “I knew where to find you, didn't I? You can't get away from me.”

Beneath his feet all was silence. Silence and sly toothless grins.

Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom surrendered himself with a sigh to his fate. He could not get away from her—foolish ever to have thought he could. He was what he was; what would be would be. The snake might shed his skin, but only to grow another one the same as before.

In obedience to his victim's nod, Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom took up his suitcase and followed her down the steps and across the barren field to the car. In its rearview mirror he watched the mound diminish and finally disappear. The snakeskin rode on his lap. Now he must wait. Must wait for their next, their final command. It would not come soon; they sipped their pleasures slowly. Many times yet he would have to hear his mother say that he would be the death of her. So many times that when the final order came it would be almost welcome, a release. Distant and ghostly, it sounded already in the echoing silence of his mind. Over and over, like a phonograph record when the needle cannot find the starting groove. “Kill me at once then and be done with it!” his mother's voice was saying. One day the needle would find the groove. Then out would come the command loud and clear and with the sudden shock of long-expectedness. Then Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom would strike, accomplish his mission and fulfill the prophecy; and then at last the ghosts of the Caddoes could lie down at peace in their many-tiered mound and haunt the land and him no more.

A Biography of William Humphrey

William Humphrey (1924–1997) was an American author and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959 for his classic book
Home from the Hill
, which told the story of a small-town family in rural Texas. Indeed, themes of family life, hardship, and rural struggle are the defining characteristics of his writing, appearing in all thirteen of his works.

Humphrey was born on June 18 in Clarksville, Texas, to Clarence and Nell Humphrey. Nestled in the heart of Red River County, Clarksville in the early 1920s resembled the Old South more than the Texan West. It is from this time and place that Humphrey drew inspiration for much of his writing career. Daily life in rural, isolated Clarksville was built around cotton farming and was emotionally and physically taxing. Neither of Humphrey's parents attended school beyond the third grade, and the family moved frequently during his childhood: fifteen times in five years. His father, an alcoholic, hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed his wife and son. Although Clarence was a difficult and quick-tempered man, Humphrey cared deeply for him, and his love for his father had a profound impact on his writing.

As the Great Depression progressed into the 1930s, so did the strain on the Humphreys' already-precarious finances. Clarence worked as a shade-tree mechanic, yet was too poor to buy a car of his own. He would test-drive the cars he fixed as fast as they could go, taking them screaming down the back roads of Red River County.

In 1937 Clarence was killed in an auto accident. Humphrey was just thirteen at the time. Much later, in his memoir
Farther Off From Heaven
(1977), Humphrey commented on this period, which was to be the end of his childhood: “What my new life would be like I could only guess at, but I knew it would be totally different from the one that was ending, and that a totally different person from the one I had been would be needed to survive in it.” Soon after his father's death, Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas to live with relatives. He did not return to Clarksville for thirty-two years.

Humphrey exceled in school and was able to attend an art academy in Dallas on a scholarship. At the onset of the Second World War, Humphrey attempted to join the navy but was rejected for being color blind. Having seriously considered being an artist up to this point, Humphrey decided to focus on his writing instead. He attended the University of Texas and the Southern Methodist University for short spells during the early 1940s but did not graduate from either college. In 1944 he left SMU in his final semester and headed briefly to Chicago and then went on to live in New York City's Greenwich Village.

In 1949 Humphrey published his first short story, “The Hardys,” in the
Sewanee Review.
He was so excited to receive the letter of acceptance that he tripped and fell as he was running up the steps to his house to share the news with his wife, the painter Dorothy Cantine, and broke his ankle. On the strength of that story, Humphrey was hired to teach creative writing and English literature at Bard College. Starting around this time, renowned writer Katherine Anne Porter, Humphrey's contemporary and a fellow Texan, became a close friend and a firm supporter of his work, and remained so for many years.

The 1950s were a period of prosperity for Humphrey, who continued to publish stories in magazines like the
New Yorker
and
Harper's Bazaar.
These works drew on Humphrey's childhood in the Texan scrub, and many were collected in
The Last Husband and Other Stories
(1953). During this early stage of his career, Humphrey also formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Theodore Weiss and mentored playwright and author Sherman Yellen.