The House of Breath Read online

  The House of Breath

  William Goyen

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Road

  Ann Arbor, MI 48104

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1949 William Goyen

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Sections of this novel have appeared in Accent, Southwest Review, Penguin New Writing, Partisan Review and Harper’s Magazine.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-18-1

  eBook Cover by Awarding Book Covers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  THE AUTHOR wishes to acknowledge his gratitude to the editors of The Southwest Review for the Southwest Review Literary Fellowship awarded him in 1949 for work on this book.

  For Frieda and Walter

  The House of Breath

  Under All the Land Lies the Title

  I

  …and then I walked and walked in the rain that turned half into snow and I was drenched and frozen; and walked upon a park that seemed like the very pasture of Hell where there were couples whispering in the shadows, all in some plot to warm the world tonight, and I went into a public place and saw annunciations drawn and written on the walls. I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and felt robbed of everything I never had but dreamt of and hoped to have; and mocked by others’ midnight victory and my own eternal failure, un-named by nameless agony and stripped of all my history, I was betrayed again.

  Yet on the walls of my brain, frescoes: the kneeling balletic Angel holding a wand of vineleaves, announcing; the agony in the garden; two naked lovers turned out; and over the dome of my brain Creations and Damnations, Judgments, Hells and Paradises (we are carriers of lives and legends—who knows the unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull?).

  Then I was standing against the wet, cold wall of this building in the park and I slid down against the wet wall, wanting to die, squatting there in the dark. Faces glided past me up above me under the rainstreaked moon of a streetlight like prows of safe ships with somewhere to go—the rain on some was beautiful—and all around me they were meeting in the park and walking away under the dripping trees, figures were walking up and down upon the sodden leaves, and in my spell I thought, they are all passing me by, and I sink down, way below the faces, prows of ships.

  And then I heard the voices again (Come home, the light’s on, come on home, Ben Berryben. I’ll be glad when you’ve had enough and will come on home again, I’m so blue and so upset, can hardly swallow water….) (Swimma -a-a! Swimma -a-a-a! come in ‘fore dark….) (Rescue the Perishing!) (Boy, Boy, come out to the woodshed I’ve got something to show you, by gum….) (Draw me, draw me, I will follow…. In all your sunshines if you can remember one day any darkness, that will be me drawing you…. I have left Word in the darkness for you, the Word that was my flesh (take that Wafer); all darkness proclaims my Word—listen in the darkness and you will hear it.) and I melted down like the gingerbread man that ran and ran and melted as he ran. I began to name over and over in my memory every beautiful and loved image I ever had, to name and praise them over and over like a rosary, bead by bead, saying, Granny Ganchion, I touch you and name you; Folner, I touch you and name you, Aunty, Malley, Swimma, Boy, I touch you and name you and claim you all. It was like a procession through the rooms of the house, saying, now this is the hall and there is the bottled ship and the seashell, this is the breezeway, there is the well and here is the map in the kitchen and the watery mirror in which, behold, is my face, me, my face…. I cried out “O Charity!”, so that those who heard me might have thought I was a beggar crying; and wanted to die….

  II

  WHAT is it the wind seeks, sweeping among the leaves, prowling round and round this house, knocking at the doors, and wailing in the shutters?

  O Charity! Every frozen morning for awhile in early winter you had a thin little winter moon slung like a slice of a silver Rocky Ford cantaloupe over the sawmill; and then I would go out to the well in the yard and snap off the silver thorns of ice from the pump muzzle and jack up the morning water and stand and look over across the fairy fields at you where you lay like a storybook town, and know that on all the little wooden roofs of houses there was a delicate trail of lacelike rime on the shingles. Then all the chickens and guineas of Charity would be crowing and calling and all the cattle lowing, and the Charity dogs barking (all with a sound that china animals might make if they could crow or call or low), and in that crystal and moonhaunted moment I would stand dazzling in the first sunray of morning, and wonder what would ever happen, to us all.

  And on a spring Saturday you would be sitting there in your place in Texas “grinnin like a Chessy Cat” as Aunty said, so happy and hopping with all the people come in from the fields and farms to handle you and claim you and gather round in you—there was Glee Ramey and there was Sweet Climpkins and Sing Stovall and Ola Stokes, the music teacher (“One day a little bubble will break in your throat, honey, and then you’ll have a beautiful voice. Just wait for the little bubble.”), and all the Grants, who had to ford White Rock Creek to get in from their blackland farm—and families all standing together here and there or carrying out oats and feed and cartons of Pet’s Milk from the Commissary.

  And in the still, clear dusks I remember especially a voice that sounded in you, Charity, resounding as in a cistern, calling “Swimma -a-a! Swimma -a-a-a! Come in ’fore dark!”—Aunty calling Sue Emma, my cousin and her daughter (no voice calling this name can ever call back Sue Emma to that fallen splendid house, and it grows dark. But Sue Emma, dancing or hunching in the dark, grinding in her own glitter’s ashes, might hear a calling voice within her that does not answer back). All my life since, in any place and for no reason at all, sometimes at dusk I will suddenly hear a voice calling “Swimma -a-a! Swimma -a-a-a! Come in ’fore dark!”; and wish we were all together in Charity again.

  You had a little patch of woods behind the house that I remember. It had bearded trees that clicked and ticked and cracked and cheeped and twittered and lichen grew on an ancient fence like an old old sheep’s coat; and stroking it with my hand once made me feel how old and lusterless and napworn you might be, Charity, and all the people in you, just as Aunty said. But to see an old live oak drop a single young little leaf twinkling to the ground was to know that there was still the shining new thing of myself in the world and I would be filled with some passion for something, bigger than Aunty’s hopelessness, bigger than Granny Ganchion’s agony, than all Charity—until suddenly I would hear the groaning of the cisternwheel back at the house, calling me back, and I would go.

  You were such a place of leaves, Charity; and I think the first time I was ever aware of you as any place in the world was in a deep and sad and heavy autumn. Then you seemed to have been built of leaf and twig and bark, as a bird’s nest is woven and thatched together, and had been used and used until you were withered; then you were shaken and thrown down into these ruins. All the summer of anything that had ever touched or known you seemed despoiled and was rubble that autumn, and I suddenly knew myself as something, moving and turning among these remnants. (Oh all the leaves I have known in you, Charity!—the shining leathery castorbean leaves, with the chickens cool under them in the summer or sheltered from the rain (oh the sound of the rain on the castorbean leaves, how forever after Folner’s funeral tha
t sound reminded me of the funeral).) And the lace and grace of chinaberry leaves in a summer breeze; and those of the vines that had a name I did not know and hung, full of bees or busy hummingbirds all after the little sweet white bloom on it, over the long front gallery of the house. Then of course the live-oak leaves, that were flaked over Charity Riverbottom; and muscadine leaves and sycamore leaves and the leaves on go-to-sleep flowers. (In the autumn of one year, every leaf that had ever hung on any Charity tree in spring and summer lay fallen upon the ground and I moved and turned through the wreckage like an unhung leaf that would not lie down nor wither.)

  In you, Charity, there stands now, as in the globed world of my memory there glimmers the frosted image of it, blown by all these breaths, the fallen splendid house, sitting on the rising piece of land, out of which all who lived and lost in it have gone, being dispossessed of it: by death, by wandering, by turning away. And the house appears, now, to be an old old monument in an agony of memory of us, its ruined friezes of remains, full of our speech, holding our things that speak out after us as they once spoke into us, and waiting for one of us to give it back its language and so find his own. (But I think how our worlds—like this household us within them like an idea they might be having or like dreams they are dreaming, where our faces are unreal, worn blurred stone faces of ancient metopes of kin, caught in soundless shapes of tumult, wrestling with invasion of some haunted demon race, half-animal, half-angel—O agony of faces without features like faces in fogs of dreams of sorrow and horror, worn holes of mouths opened, calling cries that cannot be heard, saying what words, what choked names of breath that must be heard) And to find out what we are, we must enter back into the ideas and the dreams of worlds that bore and dreamt us and there find, waiting within worn mouths, the speech that is ours. For now in this autumn when all the young are ceaselessly walking up and down under the falling trees, trying to make themselves real, I have walked and walked among the leaves that lie like lost claws clutching the earth that fed them, weaving and winding myself to myself, binding the lost leaf back to the tree. For all that is lost yearns to be found again, re-made and given back through the finder to itself, speech found for what is not spoken.

  III

  TO GET TO the house, Charity, if I had been in town, I would just start walking toward the sawmill, down Main Street (which was really only the Highway named this for the short time it ran through you and became a little piece of you) under all the Charity trees. I would pass the only stores you had, looking across Main Street at each other; and ahead of me would stretch the Highway, going to pretty close little towns like Lufkin and Lovelady, and behind me it wound to faraway places, huge and full of many people, like Dallas or Santone. Then I would turn off at the twisted cedar, in whose branches I had been as often as any bird, that had a forked limb like a chicken’s wishbone, where once I slipped and hung like Absalom until Mrs. Tanner came running to save me; then there would be the sawmill, where my father worked (the men urinating in the lumberstacks)—and came home with sawdust in his pockets and shoes—that had a long, legged sawdust conveyor sitting like a praying mantis. And next would come the graveyard, nothing but names and dates and enormous grasshoppers vaulting over the graves; and the little Negro shacks next, with black faces at the windows or some good old Negro sitting on his front gallery or calling to little Negro children playing in the mudpuddles, and a rooster crowing somewhere, after the rain. Finally I would take the sandy road, my feet barefooted and glad in it, stand by the Grace Methodist Church where it always seemed I could hear the voice of Brother Ramsey inside saying “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God,” and then if I suddenly looked up, after thinking into the sand what peacemakers were, I would see the house, looking at me like a face of a sleeping bird (the cisternwheel would be its tail over it), and calling me back to it, home.

  It was a big, wide, live house with a long hall running right through the middle of it, and had many people in it, Aunty, Uncle Jimbob, Aunt Malley, Uncle Walter Warren, Christy, Granny Ganchion and all the cousins, little and big: Swimma, Follie, Berryben, Jessy, Maidie and all—even Miss Hattie Clegg, who came to live with us. There was always that wagon in the field; it had lost a wheel and was standing broken at the back and wrenched to one side. A family of chipmunks lived and bred and lived on in it. Close to the outdoor well was the babybuggy, ragged and decrepit, like the sloughed-off husk of abandoned infancy, in which many babies had been fitted and ridden round; and later, when there were no more babies in the house, the children who had lain in it had played with it, recklessly, as if disdainful of any infancy, until Aunty had captured it again and planted some Hen-and-Chickens in it. If it was winter, the cattle would be standing in a stare in the fields, dull and motionless; and the ragged hens would be huddled drooping by the barn. Then it seemed that summer might not ever come again (and Jessy played her jacks in the hall or sang for one of her sick dolls, “Mama, Mama, I am sick, run for the doctor quick quick quick!”; and I gazed at the picture of the sorrowful girl sitting playing her lyre on the side of the world). But summer or winter, turning and turning over it all like a blessing or a curse (or sometimes blowing as if it were trying to blow the house down) was the whirling wheel at the cistern.

  You had other places, Charity—the little Bijou (said “Byejo” by everybody) Theatre, bright and rowdy, where Jack Norbitt played, thumping his wooden leg, the piano for the show—mostly one piece called “Whispering,” over and over again. And you had the City Hotel—but that burned and brought all Charity to it in nightgowns and out of its wreckage they carried an old charred drummer burned in the praying shape they found him in—and I would never go this way to town again, to smell the rain on burnt woodash and flesh. Then there was the Postoffice, where the faces of Sam and Birdie and old Bill Grady were framed in each window like a mantel array of family photographs as I passed, going to get the mail. And there was the Racket Store and Sam Brown’s Dry Goods Store that had the smell of cretonne and gingham and Union Jack overalls in it, and old Mrs. Huffman with a pair of scissors hanging on a black ribbon round her neck saying, “Kin I hep ye, Boy Ganchion?”.

  All these years, Charity, that I was in you, crystal dazzling in the radiant shell of mornings, eye going over and over you, reflecting everything and wondering, I never said anything, but only waited for some speech that the breath of the house was breathing into me. In memory the image of these days in you is what happened once on Main Street when a bunch of boys was standing round telling about things and suddenly one of them pointed out of the circle and called, “Look! Standin there listenin with’s mouth open!” and they all looked and laughed. It was me, suddenly aware of myself looking, that they were pointing and laughing at; and I went on away, then, thinking, I’ll go home to the house; I have a place to go.’ For there was not a thing to say.

  Within the house you held, Charity, and in the hall that led to the breezeway there lay, propping open the door to the breezeway in summer and, cold to touch and of no use at all in the corner in winter, the seashell that Swimma brought. When she came running home the time she thought oil was on the property she brought it as a present from Florida to her mother, Aunty. On it was written PLAYGROUND OF THE WORLD. This was all she ever gave her mother.

  Summer and winter, doorstop or just seashell, it always had the little roar of the sea in it. Sometimes I found Aunty sitting with it at her ear and once I saw Christy whisper into it; and one of the few words he ever said to me was when he held it out to me once and said “Listen!”

  (One time when Swimma was in high school I saw Aunty after her because Swimma had a note in her hands that she wouldn’t let Aunty see. They ran out of Aunty’s room through the hall and onto the breezeway, Swimma yelling, “It’s none of your business what I have or do!” and Swimma ran to the well and threw the note in. Then she had her tantrum and ran out into the yard, chickens shooting up frightened everywhere, feathers flying, and Swimma seemed like one of them; and
she stayed away all afternoon. She came back late, from town where she had been, and Aunty looked out to see her coming and said, “Well yonder comes Miss Priss; I vow to you I don’t know what we’re going to do with her.”

  Swimma prissed in home, through the gate, with her lipstick on and walking as if she had on highheels, and said to Aunty on the gallery, “I hoped you’d thought I’d run away, is what I’ll do one day, too, sure’s Satan.”

  Then she came in and sat on the bench in the hall and gazed at herself in her mirror, making kissing shapes with her lipsticked lips and doing her lips around as if she were saying “ooooo!” and rocking her head as if she were whispering “hotcha!”—a word she was always saying around the house, now. She all of a sudden got mad as a bull and threw her mirror on the floor and broke it into pieces there where the seashell lay after she brought it, yelling, “Why do I have to have this nose as long as a pineywoods rooter’s—and with a possible wart comin like Mama’s? Dang it I wish I had the gold earrings Eulaly Sanderson has on in town today, and all the money they cost, and she was going to have a wart on her nose!”

  Aunty just got up from her chair on the gallery and said in at the front door, “Seven years bad luck little feist,” for the broken mirror. (Oh she had it, seven and more.))

  There also lay in the hall, close to the seashell doorstop, a pale green turpentine bottle with a perfect little ship in it that Christy made one winter (what was this man who made it?).

  And in the hall there hung a picture of a blinded girl with a lyre, sitting on top of a blue, rolling world and bent over in some sorrowful, lyrical telling-out of a memory. When I looked at this picture, it seemed that some voice in me was telling out a memory of the world, as though I had always known the world, in what past of mine, what dream? I stood and looked and heard the song of the world that told of the splendor of itself, like an object created by all that happened in it, and of what was done in it through all its years: it sang out, in a voice like Jessy’s, frail and trembling, of fallings of angels, down from a red raging heaven like falling birds or leaves or dropped flowers; of the first man and woman naked and yawning in a garden, their flesh speaking (O for some intimacy of bodies speaking to each other, creating a language for the first time that would be the speech of all love in all the years—one simple sentence of touch and burst) a language that would create and speak out into the world all passion and all despair, loneliness for lack of it that would be a kind of dumbness of speech—where there is no love there is no speech—and desire like speech unheard, and ecstasy like the murmuring and pouring out of the sentence, bring body to body and start a ceaseless murmuring, the turning of the wheel of blood, yearning and tiring and yearning again, eternally rising and falling. And the song sang of kings and falls of kings, and plots of princes; princesses in grated towers and queens in love or sending out ships or causing battles for nations, and conquests of religions and building of stained jewels of churches; of classes, riots and clashes of classes, and systems discovered by one man for all ages, and laws and pacts and edicts. The singing was of architecture of great stone buildings standing in light and throwing down their shadows across swept spacious plazas, and of figures on the capitals of columns—doves and granite grapes and tongued gargoyles; of painted and striped baubles of cities, glittering with loot of robbed wealth, built over water, built on mountainsides; of palaces and great dynastic houses and fortifications and monasteries…