Arcadio Read online

  Arcadio

  William Goyen

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Road

  Ann Arbor, MI 48104

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1983 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.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-12-9

  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.

  To the Vine

  and

  The Palm

  and

  for Doris

  The author wishes to express his gratitude to John Igo, Reginald Gibbons, and Deirdre Simone-Hill for their loving help with this work.

  Portions of this novel, in different form, have appeared in The Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, and Conjunctions.

  1

  The Knocking Figure at the Door

  JUST TODAY I CAME upon the picture postcard. It fell out of a book that I had not opened for years.

  I had found the painting in a London museum, stood before it and remembered Uncle Ben, long gone. In the museum shop I had bought the postcard reproduction of the painting and took it for my own, as Uncle Ben took it long ago for his and lost it. I must have found it again for him.

  Today I have so long gazed upon the picture, here in a faraway place, in an ancient holy city far from my own place where I first heard Uncle Ben’s unexpected story and where Uncle Ben lies now in the ground with his ancestors, and mine, many who, with me, had heard his sudden story that long-ago summer night; I have today so long gazed upon that picture that I have come into a vision—an “apparition” my mother would have called it—made of true memory and outrageous fabrication. And that is what I have to tell, what has risen up so long later from the image hidden early in my mind by Uncle Ben’s story and freed by the picture postcard of the beautiful painting called The Light of the World.

  2

  Early Visitors to My Solitude

  ONE TIME ON A HOT July night when we were sitting in the dark hoping to get a breath of breeze, I heard my mother whisper, “There’s somebody standing out in the yard.” In the flare of the heat lightning we saw a figure streaming down its whole body with hair struck full of quivering light, with hair of light streaming down to the ground and eyes as glowing as lanterns.

  “Tis a visitation,” said the woman Carrie, our friend who lived with us. “The Bible tells us that word.”

  “An apparition,” said my mother; and my father called it something out of the woods, drawn out of the deep woods by the light of our house. My sister said it was a big moth and it did look something like that.

  But whatever the thing was, it glowed out its pale lamps of eyes at us and streamed down its lighted hair. I was not afraid but pitied it. My father cried “Ho!” and then the little dog who had been paralyzed with fear was given voice to bark, and the light of the shy visiting stranger was gone.

  All night I thought the figure might be out there, darkened, its light put out by our fear. I lay awake and thought about it, about turned-away things, things not taken, things thrown back or let go, or the light in them put out by fear. At the window, on my knees, I sought the light of the beautiful visitor, wherever it was, far away in the dark woods or nearby on the sandy road that went past our house, on the black railroad tracks leading off into gloom beyond the distant house on the rise of land; or very close, right in the yellow jasmine bush that my mother’s mother planted when she was a bride in this house, the sweet flowering bush of summer nighttime, just there by the window—could the turned-away caller, man-woman, saint-devil, comforter and disturber, be there, just at the window? My feelings were human and divine. I wanted the streaming figure to lie close to my body in my bed, touch my body which burned for touching and was so secret to me—how much longer could I bear the secret, keep my body a secret to others, consecrated only to myself? It is said we leave home—go out—at the urge of our young soul; but it is just as much to break the secret of our body, in its name we go. Yet I longed for the blessed stranger to restore my soul, which seemed lost.

  We had seen other mysterious strangers in the remoteness of our place. They had come to us out of the black summer nights that stung us with heat and kept us sitting up most of the night, half-drugged between sleep and waking, together in the darkness where we were each one alone, solitary sleeper each; or in the windy, starlight, spring nights—a knocking, a shadowed face, a hand held out at the back door: a gypsy girl, dark and spiteful, a gentle beggar from the road, a hobo off the freight train that ran past our house, a drunken logger from sawmill town, and once what turned out to be an escaped woman convict run away from Huntsville Pen driven by longing to see her child in Houston. What the feeling was that they left in me, in memory, was their shyness, a giving out from them, though they were asking, and a moment of beauty. Shy beauty surrounds those times in my memory, not fear. And it seemed that for that moment, in which we gave the stranger something, there was an exchange of love, that we were visited by love, not fear. Others spoke of calling the “deputy” (whatever that was) and of putting a shotgun by the door at night.

  And there once had come a daring old bearded person in the afternoon, who stood by the woodpile and looked and looked at us and did not come closer. He had come soundlessly, in an October afternoon, when apples were purple on our trees and blue smoke hung in the distances, what for, he would not answer when the question was called out to him. His look was that look I cannot describe, although I see it over and over in my memory and I have seen it a few times more, as my life has gone on, on the faces of the unexpected at that still and awesome moment of recognition. And I try, again, to tell what it was like—that look; that look on the face of those sudden visitors appearing before me: it was shy, it was tender, it gave radiant love, it gave union not alienation, asking, not questioning, it gave fearlessness not fear, those visitors’ (they would not stay) faces, eyes, mouth, dear hair, that came before me in my life, to bring me fresh sense of life, and to go on.

  Another was a sprightly figure who looked at us as though we were intruding upon him, sitting in our pomegranate tree at summer noon. When we came he looked down at us with mischief in his eye. He seemed to be at home in the pomegranate tree. He wore a curious hat with a bird’s feather in it and some kind of a jacket made of faded purple satin on which something sparkling caught the bright noon sunlight. He was a sight in the pomegranate tree. While we watched him, after a long cordial, almost bemused, stare, the person descended gracefully from the tree and looking at us again straight on, with that look, went on his way. We watched him disappear on the road.

  “It’s the orphan boy, grown up,” someone said. “That used to live with Leota Barnes, up towards the cotton gin, but then ran away to live in the bottomlands.”

  “Seems happy enough,” another said. “Sitting up in our pomegranate tree like he planted it.”

  “Peculiar persons living in this part of the world,” my father said. “East Texas’s a peculiar part of the world. Peopled with some peculiarities you wouldn’t guess were here, coming as a surprise to people that live outside—and even to us that live inside, sometimes. Must be the river and the riverbottoms, parts of it wild and forbidden, and the Thicket. Seeing men in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots in town talking cattle and cotton—that’s only the way it looks; there’s more than that.”

  And then Uncle Ben said, quietly as if out o
f a dream, “Once while hunting rabbit by the dry river I come upon a person bathing itself in a pool of Trinity River. I seen it. I crouched down in the weeds and couldn’t believe my eyes. At first I said it’s a baptism in the river, a person’s baptizing themselves, I said. And I saw it quietly washing in the river hardly making a sound except for the soft comforting sound that only rustling water makes, yet tis, too, like the sound a bird will make in the deep nighttime when you’re sleeping in the woods and will lie there and hear it, almost as if tis to console you, almost like a mothering sound or of something being taken care of making it feel safe and peaceful—a peaceful sound is what it is that water makes when it’s handled and picked up and tossed and breaks against flesh like the beautiful body I come upon standing knee deep in the clear spring water there at the hidden place where the river used to flow under the trees. And there I saw it slowly bending to pick up water and scatter it over its beautiful body, scattering the water and the water could have been something like sand or soft grain, the person could have been in a field; except there is nothing else in the world like spring water, is its own special thing unto itself, pure spring water, isn’t it? I love spring water, love all water, and it’s a wonder, too, considering how Mama almost drownded in the river and acarrying me six months inside her womb, I know the feeling water can make me have. Twas just at sundown. Twas so beautiful is all I can say. Just wish I had the words for it or had a picture of it. What I did was not to disturb the strange beautiful person, was to very quietly rise up from the high grass and go away. To let the person alone, to let the beautiful body alone. I didn’t want to go. I looked back and saw, in the early twilight that was already falling, the bending and gathering and tossing figure, glistening with water, washing itself as if twas making slow dancing movements and twas only washing itself; and then twas when I saw that it twas part a man and part a woman, the man part was sweetly washing the woman part and the woman sweetly the man, the woman part baptizing the man and the man baptizing the woman. How twas so holy and how twas so flesh, the body of this being was so holy and so flesh, I was divided in two almost by my feelings from it. How it had such respect for itself and give such tenderness to itself was what hurt me so, twas like a sudden hurt in my breast to witness such tenderness, and yet I was apanting so and had all kinds of feelings that I still so sharply remember. And I turned again to go and leave the beautiful bather. And saw then, in that time of day—twas in early May I recollect—how lonely it was and saw suddenly how lonely everything there was, in that time of day, the sundown, the last of Trinity River run down to just a pool, all the powerful springs that had made a long river running through the bottomlands gone down to just one trickling one, and the last bather in it, like the ghost of the lost river, like all humanity bathing together in it, all men, all women, for the last time, in Trinity River. This is what I felt, and the rustling sound of the water, the beautiful place and the peace and the sadness, that I never forgot. And there under a willow tree I found the bather’s things. They were an old army officer’s uniform neatly folded, and a cap, and a Bible written in Mescan, once white but now yellowed, and from that yellowed white Bible there fell out upon the ground what I took away, stole I guess because I had to have it, a picture card faded in its colors and soiled from a lot of handling. It showed gentle Jesus knocking at a door in the night and holding a burning lantern in the night and said The Light of the World. And I saw on the back written in a big handwriting a strange name: Arcadio. I had to have this picture and I took it with me, wish I had it now but lost it somewhere through the years, lost it, maybe when I rode on the train that time up to Crockett to see the side doctor, to have a complete physical cause of that pain kept griping me in my side, maybe on that trip was when I lost the picture, oh wish I had it now.”

  Everyone was quiet and no one said another word. Then Ben said finally, “Wish I had a picture of it, wish I had it on my dresser and could look at it, the holy sight in the river, naked, naked. Twas—well, just a feeling I never had before and not again since, I guess, until just now when I’ve told it, more than I could ever find a word for, don’t know what, to this day, exactly, and that was oh I guess fifty years ago, by this time the beautiful bather must be dead and buried in its grave. But now somebody else will know its story cause I’ve told it, and I’m glad.”

  And then my Uncle Ben, a man I knew was going soon to die—I’d heard the whispering about it—and lately had been saying peculiar things, sometimes black and dreadful, out of an obsessive remembering, went slowly on away.

  I knew so little about him—how could I know except what I overheard and what I imagined: he had gone away early in passion to some promise, against all pleading, and lost the promise, and came back, made dumb. We had never before—and then suddenly—heard him speak like that; sometimes a person finally finds the song out of what had struck him dumb long before; and later I heard a person say that such a time is the time of Grace, of reconciliation with the will of God after long pain of lost promise, and I believe that Uncle Ben had found the song that summer night and was, for those moments of his found song, in the grasp of such a time; and his song was a parting song, a song of farewell. So had Arcadio in my vision of him found his adiós—voice to sing a sweet goodbye, and after his own long dumbness.

  Then Aunt Evelina said, “Ben was drinking. Never hunted a rabbit in his life sober.”

  “Twas a Sideshow escaped from a Carnival,” another voice explained.

  That night I could not sleep because of the extraordinary visitation to our ordinary place that Uncle Ben had surprisingly told of. I was haunted by visions of the beautiful being. I felt its presence. It beckoned me. I wanted at once to go into the night to the riverbottoms in search of the beautiful being Arcadio, long long dead, to wait under the willows in expectation of its appearance. What beings there were in the world, and had been! Magical and mysterious and hidden, not plain and easy and available like people in the town, saying “Hoddy Son how’s your folks?” I was ready now, full, where I had been in preparation before, I would without question go away with it, into the magical world where all the other visitors to my solitude dwelt. For this I called softly through the window, into the blue personal moonlight of our local midnight. I left a futile call, long ago and long too late, “Arcadio! Arcadio! Come back to our place! Come back!”

  In a rapture, that night, I saw that the strange being had come to the window by my bed. I saw in the gentle moonlight its face glowing through the trembling curtains that the midnight breeze touched. It was all hot and luring. I was stirred to an excitement I had never known, a surging, now, of that earlier faintly touching excited fear and wanting, touching at my breast, and down below my belly in the tenderest part of me. The face and drawing presence of the beautiful naked bather demanded something of me I had never given.

  “Is your heart right?” I heard it whisper. “You got to get your heart right, Son. Because we are living in the Last Days! It is the End Time, the Rapture is coming.”

  The being of the beautiful body was imploring me to consider my soul, to look after my salvation at the end of things. Yet I hadn’t even begun! I was fresh, daily charged with powers that were ripening me, I was new, my body was beginning to glow, there were secret moistures, there was new soft hair, there was a promise of a coming rapture that would deliver me of what had grown to be unbearable swelling of my senses. Yet the beautiful visitor spoke of the salvation of my soul, of the Last Days, the Rapture of the End of the World. My world! Soon to end just when it was soon to begin! And my annunciator of the last days of the world was my very tempter, my very invitation to my beginning, to my first days!

  I whispered back to my visitor through the moonlit window, “But how do you know? How do you know that these are the Last Days of the World?”

  “Omens, promises, prophecies coming to pass—hens crowing, women whistling, man’s greed and the murder of fresh water.” My visitor pronounced its doom in a voice that was melodio
us.

  And after an awful time of silence, I whispered, trembling, “Make my heart right! Save my soul! But let me see your body again.”

  But it was gone.

  I did not tell my Uncle Ben about my vision of Arcadio. In the days that followed his story and my dream I watched him, dumb again and staying far apart, sitting sometimes in the field under the live oak tree. Within another year my Uncle Ben was dead and gone. But this was what I heard and what I saw and all I had with which to make the story that follows, if you will read it or hear the song of it, although time stopped it until just today, many years later. For within some more years I was gone, in my own passion and toward my own promise. I never came back again.

  But today as I’ve held the picture postcard before me, that place and those people are live in my memory, that summer night hums in heat and music in my head: I see again that dark gathering of stilled listeners. They heard a mysterious song sung only once. Those listeners are gone, all but one, and the first singer is gone but not the song. I sing it again. Canto.

  In my vision I went to the riverbottom—twas in early May, I recollect. I was headed toward the wondrous bather’s pool when I begun to hear the faint music, silvery and watery and softly throbbing, and it was like a warmth around my head and face and seemed to come out of my own head, music of my own. It softly pulled me through the palmettos and the dewberries and the crawling vines. And then when I looked up I saw the early-morning specter of the old abandoned railroad trestle. Aloft against the hot blue sky, vaulted higher than I ever remembered it, held ascendant by frail legs rising out of the green willows and wateroaks of the bottomland, aloft and slender and as fragile as if it were made of paper, hung the condemned trestle, a lonesome bridge of orange-colored rails and gray ties that weather had taken over after the trains were forbidden, a lonesome pier reaching over a white riverbed of shell, vanishing into a green billow of woods, a crossing of dreams, of secret trespasses, flights of ghosts and fairies, and since it was removed from the dead weight of iron was now the fragile avenue of weightless things, slide of snakes, feet of frogs and tread of birds, the passing over of groundless, footless things, motes and beams and flowers of floating snow, and winged seeds and blown crystals of rain, a transfer for winds and fogs and aerial lights and fires.