The House of Breath Read online

  And over all this tumult of concourse of men alive in the years of the world had hung the same old sky as over you, Charity, with all the stories of stars in the constellations: Orion hunting eternally through the frozen wastes and ices of the bottomlands of the firmament, the lights twinkling round his loins and girdling them, Bulls; and Fishes; the Seven Sisters coming up, clustered, like slow shot Roman Candle stars over Rob Hill (just over there!), a thrown moon over like a gleaming skull from the graveyard of centuries of moons (thrown by what gravedigger’s hand?) or sometimes like the head of a laughing boy or a luminous fingernail-end of some moving pointing finger.

  In the kitchen, tacked on the wall by Christy, was a map of the world. Christy often sat at night (and I sometimes with him) and looked and looked at the map, almost as if he were talking to the world and adoring the world and taking each part of it into himself as he looked. Sometimes he showed me that by looking a long time at the map and then closing your eyes, you could open them again and look out into Bailey’s Pasture and see there, radiant and throbbing, the lighted shape of the world. And sometimes it seemed on the map, as we looked, that the whole world was melting down and leaving drippings of the world on the map like melting ice on a floor. Then the world was melting down into me and into Christy and we were changed into the world. In the enormous fluid of universe ice floes of countries were broken off and floating and Christy and I were floating like separate (but bridged by some secret underwater island) lands. We saw together the brainshaped countries and livershaped countries where the whole mapped world looked like blooded lights of the dissected, opened out and pinned down body of the world as if it were an enormous fowl; and then we saw green and orange seas with pearl chains of islands, and fringed coasts. And we felt the wealth of nations, of colored populations inhabiting like flocks of flowers—yellow or black or red—the fields of countries; of wars and crusades, of all the languages speaking to one another; and we saw places with rivers and named after the rivers; and we knew that there were many countries and lands and that some, in the running out of many years (“The years! the years!” Christy would whisper) would famish and grow so used that ancient grapevines would not give one more grape, and die—but that then other countries, heretofore forest full of eyes and calls and beaks against bark, and fat breasts of unshot birds, and where cones lay like fruit and spores dropped and high high grasses shone in sunlight; and floored with fresh soil ripe for roots and seeds in fields where seeds flew in the winds or were carried on hooves or tails or manes and dropped and watered by rains, planted and cultivated by no man; where airs were full of flying seeds and pollen and wings—but other countries then would be found (men see them from a peak, after long guessings of travelings; or from a wide and brimming river which they had opened like a marriage with the curved prow of their ship named after Queens and sent by Queens) and history go on. History got onto maps, Christy’s gaze said, because men searched and because men were lonely and because men wandered and found countries and brought, like bees or winds or hairy carriers, the seeds home: in a box a tender frond in its soil, to be smoked or its fruit eaten; a leaf, a dried blossom; or rock-embedded ores; or in a bottle water from a lake or a spring; or cages of colored birds, a chained, aghast black man; or teeth or tusks; or a purse of precious stones.

  Here, tacked on this wall in the kitchen of the house you held, Charity, was the world’s body showing all the life in it; and all the life was in Christy and me—and our skulls became lighted globes of the world that the map had stamped there, which each of us held in his hands, turning it round to find the worlds that each of us had given to the other.

  IV

  WHEN I FIRST discovered your River, Charity, I had the song of the world sung into me by the map and the picture and, looking at the river, map and picture and river were singing together the same story, of beginnings, and ages, and of movement through ages towards something, towards me. You had this little river, Charity, that scalloped round your hem like a taffeta ruffle. It glided through your bottomlands (that could be seen from the gallery of the house) winking with minnows and riverflies and waterbugs. It was ornamented with big, drowsy snap-turtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and thick purple catfish shining in it and sliding cottonmouth watermoccasins. It crawled, croaking with bullfrogs and ticking and sucking and clucking and shining, round through meadows of bottomland palmettos (fanning in a breeze like a meadow of Methodist women in July Prayer Meeting), between muscadine vines that plashed up like fretted fountains (and trailed and curled and twined over the ground and crept over old stony logs and ancient saffron-golden rotted wood festered with the decoration of pink and white and azure fungusflowers, and climbed up trees and coiled round their branches and then were flung down again in tassels and sprays and thick swags over the river), under purple hangings of moss and under bridges of many little towns until, somewhere far away from you, Charity, in a place you did not know but only imagined, it swam into a bay.

  O River! You were our Time flowing wrinkled and ceaseless over stones and roots, sliming or mossing or eroding them as Time passes over people and their houses and objects, touching them with a ghostly invisible hand and changing them—see its work on the face, the hair, the body: mossing and wrinkling and eroding. You were a kind of Beulah Land for everybody: people gathered at you, gathering at water like creatures. You were known to be treacherous after rains and in your deep places, where it was quietest, were dread suckholes sometimes marked by the warning of a whirlpool, but not always. For a fording wagon full of the Chubbs from Elmina had sunk into one of them and all were drowned and people all along in the towns of Onalaska and Pointblank and Camilla found bodies coming along, now of the baby, now of Ora Bee Chubb, now of the two boys, floating by; and although they waited and watched for Selmers Chubb, he never passed and it was guessed that he was caught in a snag. Others drowned in you, too—three Charity girls almost did while wading and squealing and one of them did and this was Otey Bell, rescued by Christy Ganchion, but too late. They rolled her over a log but she was drowned.

  You had live bodies of bathers jumping in you in the summers; and waders; and seiners and rowers.

  If somebody stood looking at his image in you, River, his head would seem to be a black flame or a black torch, furling and unfurling.

  You seemed wicked, too, for once, on a fishing trip with some uncles and other men, I had lain listening all night to a conversation against the stitching call of katydids about women and certain Charity women; and then one man had said (it was Christy, my uncle) while he thought I was asleep, that he wondered if I had any hairs down there yet and drank his homebrew and said let’s wake him up to see, and chuckled. I had lain trembling and waiting for them to come, knowing they would find what they came to see, quite a few, and lovely golden down, and they had been my secret; but they never came, only made me feel a guilt for secrets.

  And you could make one feel terror, River; for men, as men will in any place at times, had turned suddenly hostile towards men along your moist sides on hunting trips, and no one seemed to have a friend among the hunters—like the time of the hunting trip that I was forced to go on and was almost shot because I had cracked a pecan off to myself in the woods, standing in the lemongreen light of trees, and the hunters had crept upon me and aimed at the cracking noise I made, like a squirrel they hunted, and would have shot if I had not emerged just at the moment from the thicket and looked, pitiful and pitifully, at them. Then they cursed and turned upon me and turned upon each other because they were tired and a bit drunk and the sun was hot and there was a boy who did not want to hunt, not even to shoot his niggershooter, but only crack his nuts, alone, and foil them.

  You had spectral pools standing still close to you, full of their secret life, like your hidden otherlife—ringed in November by gray, luminous trees whose wiry branches were like tangled strands of steel; and mauve and amber and russet ferns shimmered in the phosphorescent marsh
es around. And in some trees sat haunted, colored birds.

  In summer the rich pond water was a vat of ripe simmering fruit, of varnish color: golden in the sun, holding like a rich syrup all the stock and plankton of the woods: loam-wealth, growth richness, leaf and sap goodness, the potlikker of the secret woods—all untouched and rare and gamy. There lolled fat, torpid, safe fish, bobbling languorously over in the thick piny syrup, bubbling their rubbery globules, like plump ripe fruit in their juices. Then the summer deep green growth of enormous ferns, dropping their quiet spores beneath themselves, and brambled, locked berrybushes with swollen, flaming berries, safe again, except from beak and tooth; and mayhaw and muscadine vines and ambushed snakes lying hot-bodied and dozing, their fluent eyes the mirrors of berry and frond and watersparkle, or slipping through the maidenhair. There also were un-anxious frogs with half-closed eyes and throbbing throats; and the noise of the heat in the steaming woods was a kind of heart-sound or a breathing sound; and there was the gasping of crickets.

  But in the deep winter the brown Indian skin of ice lay over the pond and a bird might walk on the water like an apostle.

  Yet they said that the Devil walked in the bottomlands.

  In your bottomlands, which you kept moist and lush (except in droughts that dried you up and shamefully showed your white fishbelly of muscled sand and your green rippled ribs of shining treeroots), there lived a bunch of Negroes and they were called the Riverbottom Nigras. Your Riverbottom Nigras lived in little shotgun houses with a clappety porch and a swept dirt yard and a flowerbed neat as a flowered bonnet, bordered with green and amber bottles or fruitjars. They grew some vegetables—one could see the tincans over the tomato plants in the spring—and some of them worked across at the Fuller’s Earth Mill or the women came to Charity houses and washed and ironed the Charity clothes. But a lot of them mostly just fished in you. Nearly every year you rose up, swollen with the rains, and slid out to the Negroes’ places to flood them out, ruined their vegetables and rotted their porches and twisted their steps; but your Riverbottom Nigras waited until you shrank back into your bed, pulling their vegetables back with you and scattering the fruitjars and cans, and then they went quietly back and cleaned up your river-mess and leavings and made their places nice again.

  Your Nigras knew your bottomlands like their own rooms, knew your good fishing places and where there was white sand and safe hiding places for escaped convicts from Huntsville. They knew when mosquitoes were coming, by wind or lack of wind, and when rattlesnakes sloughed or were abroad. The Riverbottom Nigras had lost children in you, caught on fishhooks strange monsters from you that were sent by the Devil, bathed in you and sung along you. Lovers had met in your bottomlands, crapshooters snapped fingers around a secret fire, and killers had run to you and lain all night in some dense rushes where the Ku Klux might not find them.

  Yet above your bottomlands, River, like a hill of terror rose Rob Hill in its shaggy old pelt of scrub oak and crowned by burning crosses, where the Ku Klux Klan met and burned a Negro to remind them all along you that they were Negroes.

  You were my first river in the country of childhood and when I discovered you, from a hill in a blue, early morning, I saw you whispering along through the woods like the long and weaving Märchen of the woods murmuring history. Think of me then (was what you were singing) when I had never had a boat upon me or any net thrown or seine dipped into me, flowing only with moonlight or sunlight and all my swimming and breathing things within my womb (and such a thing as Charity never existed); and of my floods which I had (and caused no dikes to be made nor any human alarm, only the terror of creatures who knew the visits, and endured them, of catastrophe and built rushnests again, afterwards, moved eggs in time or their young away), rolling over on to the bottomlands where I lay heavy and large and pressing upon them. And then when it was time, folded back again over upon myself, a shrunken, lighter lover, and fell back to my size and place and ran on again, in repose, to my bay. What I left upon the bottomlands all could see—I left my sand in bars and wrote my designs and crystal shapes upon them and then birds’ feet made their marks with mine and paws of animals theirs and snakes made smooth, crooked, wiped places with their bellies (what man first found these and asked me what they meant?) and what I left on the bottomlands anyone could have; but I fertilized the land with my sperm of fishes’ bones and algae and left crawfish and swollen rats and wooden cattle and all my lavish and manifold plankton, my mulch. Everything flows into everything and carries with it and within it all lives of its life and others’ life and all is a murmuring and whispering of things changing into each other, breeding and searching and reaching and withdrawing and dying. Whatever crossing is made each over other, by boat or bridge or swimming, is to another side; and whatever drowning is dying and sinking back into a womb, and what salvation or rescue of the perishing in waters or wickedness, dead or alive, is a union, of silence or rejoicing; and to drop down into any of us, into depths (in river or self or well or cellar) is to lower into sorrow and truth But we are purged, to plunge beneath a flood is to lose all guilty stains and to rise is to be purified. And we are to keep turning the wheels we turn, we are wind we are water we are yearning; we are to keep rising and falling, hovering at our own marks, then falling, then rising. (Who can set a mark or measure us? They cannot name my tides or measure me by the marks drawn on a wall; I hover.)

  But let me tell you that if there is a call from the other side, then come over, Red Rover, come over, over…

  You came, young boy from the House, to these woods with me running in them and you called out any name (and I will never tell it) and the woods held the name you called and trembled with the name and all the nests shook with it and berries swung with the calling like little bells, and flowers rocked the name like listening faces turning their ears to hear the name, and birds flushed up at the calling of the name; and animals stopped where they were going and pricked their ears and heard and their ears held the name you called. You walked and thought of all those killed by their love and lovers, and you had none, of all lost causes of hunters and explorers, of all failures of men going after something, and said the words that the Mexicans say, O Dios, O Dios, O Dios, and wished and yearned for someone to lead you and to follow. And you knew that I, river, had gone out onto the land, the land of wide spread corruption and drouth, the flaccid land of the dead, and lain upon it and covered it with my sperm and brought up life from corruption; that I crossed over my banks and went where there was nothing of me, where I was not, and left some of myself there. But there is the inevitable return, we are forever going out and coming in, joining and abandoning, alone and together.

  Once, when you were swimming, naked, it happened for the first time to you in me. Christy stood on the bank and told you and Berryben to jump in and touch my bottom and see who could come up to the top first; and you were struggling to come up first, rising rising rising, faster, faster, when some marvelous thing that can happen to all of us happened to you, wound up and burst and hurt you, hurt you and you came up, changed, last to the top trembling and exhausted and sat down on my banks in a spell; and had lost (Christy knew, and tried to make you jump into me again). You blamed it secretly on Christy, that he had made you feel like this, and were afraid of him for it. This was the way you learned what could happen to you, but not why; like a clock that could wind up and chime in you, down there.

  By me, in these woods, you once made up for what you never had, played your fingers over my hairy rock-moss and lay against my sandstone and ached and cramped and burned and I know what happened there. Just you hard against my rock; and in your trousers, all over you, hot and running like glue—you washed you in my waters; and by my waters you lay down and wept, and slept, by me. From then on you were aware of the feeling water could make you have, O we were lovers, I had you rising and falling in me and you left something in me and it was mixed with my rich sediment and my spume, O we were lovers; and I cast your sperm mixed in my s
pume and sediment onto the land, the country of your beginnings, and we made it rich. What I taught you is that there must be a rising and falling, a bursting and a bursting and a casting out. All your family feared water, would not cross it on bridges, would not swim much in it (but one drowned in it): cross it love it, be water, you are river, I am you.