The House of Breath (10 page)

“He was always so gentle, never hurt me once in our games, always gave up to me. If we both had a syrup biscuit I would eat mine quick and then say ‘havers' and get half of his. He would never fuss for this. He always saved his good things back—to give away when and if they were asked for. That, I believe, is what he's doing now; finding some real good thing to give away one day when it is asked for or needed.

“Once he built a little house out of croakersacks for me and my dolls and when me and my dolls were cozy inside our good house, Berryben set it on fire and I burned off some of my hair, but I didn't get mad, that was all right, it was because Berryben's wagon was supposed to be a firewagon and needed a fire to put out and I understood.

“And then we kept secrets; and buried pretty little pieces of broken glass for treasure and never told anyone where they were hid.

“We all wanted to bury him and save him back like a little buried treasure for ourselves always. But so many things came early to claim him away from us, for themselves. He had a special place to go, just as I had. But always, when good and special things want you, just as many bad and ugly things crave you too; and there is a battle on. Berryben is in some battle.

“Oh I don't mean to sound so smart, but you must understand that I have got some wisdom from this death. We were just lost here, Mama, where you sit by your closed window. We didn't know where to go, but we wanted to go away from Charity and the sawmill. The Church told me where to go and got me ready—for I was marked for death when I was born. Berryben chose some other place that we can't understand yet but will.

“And I got this death, Papa's got his, you got these cataracks and this lonesome grieving life, and Berryben has his hiding away and searching. But he'll redeem us all, in the end. I know he will. He only wants us all to wait and we will finally understand. He's good, Mama. He's a good thing live in this world, that's gone but coming back twofold.

“But we never had any life together, all of us, you and me and Berryben and daddy. Daddy was so alone, all to himself, and you would stand away from us at the window, looking away from us, grieving always for something out beyond the window and beyond us. And Berryben had his own world, we could never touch him or gather him to us. And I had my secret signs. We were all looking for something and I wonder what?

“Not long ago I dreamt I was home again in Charity with you all and that I went out by the cisternwheel and found no water there because the cisternwheel had fallen to the ground and the well had dried, and that it was the end of all our time and sorrow and sinning because the oilwells and evil had come to Charity in a time of great drought, drying up the river, and there were no more birds, only a great pest of grasshoppers that had flown into all the gardens and eaten up the crops, and Charity was filled with freaks and tarred running Negroes, and Charity hated Jews and Charity hated Yankees and Charity even hated Charity, and everybody good was gone. And that the sawmill had grown so big and so close to our house that all day the sawdust sifted down on our yard, in our house, choking us, like white Fuller's Earth at Riverside. And that the oil money had bred swank and greed and false-facedness and we were all playing a game and deceiving ourselves and deceiving and cheating others and would not look at our true selves because we did not have the courage to endure what we would find; and that all things fell to pieces like the broken wheel. And that when I looked down by the broken wheel I saw the little leaves of my go-to-sleep flower and said softly ‘Go to sleep.' And the little leaf folded together.

“But don't grieve, poor blind and lonesome Mama. We have our Redeemer.”

“Jessy, Jessy, you speak only a memry in my shutter and I can hear it just as plain. But I can't think straight, too old and blind and mixed up. I can only hear your voice like a wind in my shutter. But now—hear it? The wind is singing in the shutter about Berryben, pore lost and sufferin Berryben. Oh Berryben Berryben I lighted the way leadin home a hundred times that winter you was over in Sour Lake, burnt the coaloil lamps late; but you would never see any road that led back to Charity and this house.

“‘But I can't come back to Charity, Mama,' you wrote from Sour Lake. ‘What is there in Charity for me? Can't anybody do
anything
, go
any
wheres? I got to keep moving, can't stop, can't settle, like a bee in a flower bed.'

“And then I had a letter from Saren saying you had moved on there.

“‘But Charity's as good a place as any on this earth,' I said. ‘Got the foundry, got a new plant of some kind out by White Rock and also going to get a paper mill factory; lots of nice young people, all askin about you, ought to see what a time they have. Come on home to Charity where your own blood is and settle down and make your way.'

“But you would never come, I could have preached to you till the world looked level but you would never never come; kept movin and movin over Texis, blown like a tumbleweed—by what wind, what wind, Berryben? And now, hearin this tune blown by the wind in the winda, I think of you next, my pore lost and sufferin little Berryben. What was there that made you different from us all? A mother's got the right to understand her own son even though the whole rest of the world don't and cain't. But you would never come close where I could really set down and ask you face to face what was it? What was it made you different? Was it your father that wouldn't let you play the piano or be anything that hounded and scaired you? Was it your Granny Ganchion that put some Ganchion curse in your blood and set such an example for you? If I could have just seen you, I could have read it in your face, whether you and Evella Sykes were in love and why she followed you round. But I swore I would never mention her name again to you or even say her name again to myself.

“We could never hold you, none of us. You seemed like a little scaired animal of some kind. Something somewhere had shaken you up, scaired you so that nobody could ever hold you still. You trembled. Was it Evella Sykes, or was it Charity or was it all of us you got ashamed of and ran away from—your own blood an bones?

“Come on home, it's not too late, even after all these years. The light's on. Haven't been home in Charity for years and years, not even to lay a wreath on your dead sister Jessy's grave nor set a pot of geraniums on your daddy's. I remember everthing you ever said to me, that the world is big and Charity so small and this house old and sleepy. I've kept em all in my heart and pondered them, all the words you said. How it nearly killed me at first, really it did, I vow to you Berryben it nearly killed me, couldn't even swallow water. Had to keep busy mornin to night workin and doin; if ever I'd a set down I'd a burst out cryin. When there was no chores to be done, before I had my cataracks, I'd embroidry. Embroidried twelve cup towels that winter you left, one right after another.

“I knew you wanted something that we all didn't know about; and you kept it secret from me and would never let me know. That you wanted to go out after something in the world—something that your father never found but maybe grieved for. And I didn't know how to tell you how to do it, Berryben; I would have helped you if I could've, Lord knows I would've, would've done anything. You were my hope boy Ben, when you went away all my hope went with you. You were my only chanct. You closed this winda on my world, and when the wind comes from the riverbottoms there's the song of all this sorrow between you and me in the shutter; the song of sorrow in the shutter's the same as in my mind. You were my only chanct. For what? I'm not sure, I cain't say anymore, I'm all confused and riled up inside, cain't say; but in you there seemed to be all my chance for everthing. But I couldn't keep you; any way I tried, I couldn't keep you. When you went away I said I know it's right that you go, wouldn't have you stay at all if you don't want to stay, want you to do what you have to do, what will make you happy Ben, I won't keep you. But what I felt when I found out you were
never
comin back I can never tell you, just the whole insides of me gone and fallen to pieces.

“Our life was so hard and so little, I knew you would make it big for us—sneaked money to you for your expression lessons with that teacher that came in onct a week from Huntsville—all this behind your daddy's back to get you out of the sawdust, Berryben, to deliver you from the sawmill, to put you in a better world and away from the trash standing round in striped shirts and bigbilled caps on Saturday nights in front of Duke's Drug Store with cigarettes hangin out of their mouths.

“You were such a promise in the church. I thought you would give your life to the church and for the good of mankind. I still believe you uz called to be a preacher and Hattie Clegg does too. How you can do this to us all I don't understand.

“But what do I have? Only the twilight of this oldmemry-house, and a chickensnake's somewhere in the castorbeans stealin my few eggs, and settin by this shuttered winda listenin to this tune playin out my memry by a wind from the ruined Charity Riverbottoms.

“Berryben and Jessy, my two pore lost children, listen, listen to the wind's tune. Your pore old daddy, Walter Warren Starnes, for a long time after both you left us he never slept well, slept hardly at all, set up quick in his bed at nights and couldn't get his breath. Said he was chokin, said it was his heart; but I know it was memry and worry over you had their hands at his throat and his heart. Parents oughtn't to do that, I know, but how else can you do? Then he'd hear a noise in your rooms and say, ‘Malley, there's a sound a footsteps comin from Berryben's room,
he's come home';
or, ‘Malley, there's some commotion in Jessy's room'; and he'd take the shotgun and go creepin and a pointin it through every room, all through your room, Ben, and all through your room, Jessy; and I would lie there, frozen, thinking, what will he find, an excaped convick from the Pen at Huntsville or a rat or just the creakin floor, but never Berryben or Jessy. And there was never nothing in your rooms, never nothin at all but everthing standing left the way you left them, quiet and like you left them. I'd lie there in my bed and want to die, and think—is this what parents have to come to, a creepin at night through room and room with a shotgun after the ghosts of their children who've gone away and left them lonely and sleepless and chokin in the night? O the memry of your daddy in his nightshirt creepin through your deserted rooms with a shotgun in his hands!

“This house is like an old burnt-out hollow of a tree. Why should a mother have to set midst all the heart-breakin leftovers of the past? Going to rent out these rooms, going to move to the City Hotel, or write to Cousin Lottie in Lovelady to come and stay with me.

“The Lord hep us and bind us.

“You used to write me not to think so much, Berryben; but I must look back, pillar of salt or no. And that wind turns a slow and steady wheel through the waters of my memry as it blows this tune of sorrow in my shutter. O what's the meanin of it all? There
must
be
some
meanin somewhere—it cain't all be just this rabblement and helter-skelter.
Something
has to replace what's lost in us, what's grown and been harvested or withered, like crops—but what? We are taken and held and shaken by so many things in life; but in the end it is Memry that gets us—we are finally delivered into the bitter, clawin hands of Memry after life is through handlin us and is done with us. We ought to see to it that we make good memry for ourselves, like a slow and perfect stitchin, as we go along, and embroidry a good and lovely memry out of all the thread we one day have to set, alone, and unravel, stitch by stitch. Now I see that every day I uz makin a memry and didn't know it. Oh wish I uz like old Aunt Mat Bell—she cain't remember a thing, cain't even remember her name—everthing that ever was, for her, is gone, wiped clean out of her head. ‘Molly Jim,' she'll say to her daughter, ‘what's my name, Molly Jim?' Seems like a blessed state.

“But listen! Listen—wind sounds just like Berryben talkin…”

“Listen again, Mama, and I'll try to tell you for the hundredth time what it was that made me go away.”

“I'm listenin, Ben, but let me see your face. I cain't see your face, Berryben.”

“It's because you don't open the shutter, Mama, because you'll never open the shutter. But let me tell you if I can.
I really left so I could come back again.”

“But it'll be too late, then. Either I'll be too blind to see your face or I'll be dead and gone.”

“It's never too late to come back again, Mama. There was just something that called me away from the Sundays on the porch and the children in the yard, from the grieving and misery and bitterness of Aunty and Granny Ganchion, from the scrape and rusty screech of the cisternwheel. It called me when I sat in the black hen's tree, when I stood in the fields, when I thumped on my cardboard piano in the woodshed. There seemed something more magnificent than the Charity loneliness. Somewhere there would be somebody to understand me–I could prove my blood-feel and find out the keys of a piano that
played
, not just a dumb-show. But more: an unnameable call away from all the withered quiet and dying old life and ways of this little world of Charity, hemmed in by a railroad track and a sawmill and a deserted meadow.

“All I know is that there was a change in me and, discovering that change in me, I would do anything to keep it unchanged I would not let it die in me. I had to keep listening, listening, listening to it, just as you listen to another thing in this shutter. The sawmill tried to drown it out, the cisternwheel tried to drown it out; I had to save it, hear it; so I went away. I don't want to live if I can't hear that voice. When I was home you followed me round through the rooms saying, ‘If you'll just tell me what is wrong with you! What is changing you, if you'll just put me straight on it all, Ben?'