Had I a Hundred Mouths Read online

  The hurricane that was said to be coming toward us from down off the deep southern Gulf kept reaching at us. Now we could smell it; and quick wind, then rain, had turned over us, whipped away, turned back on us. Now it really was close on us and my father guessed we were going to get it. Storms scared my father where little else did. He felt afraid in our old house and always took us to the high school basement. “Mary, you and the children go on to the high school and hurry up,” my father called. At this I rushed into the house.

  “I’ll stay with my father and the hurt man,” I announced. There was going to be a discussion of this, but little time was left for it; and I could see that my father was glad to have me stay.

  The storm came nearer. It threw down a limb of a hickory tree across the road and a driving rain hit against the side of our house for a few minutes, then stopped.

  “It’s coming,” my father said. “We can’t stay out here on this screen porch. Latch the screen door and move things away from the open. We’ll move the hurt man into the parlor. What’s your name, friend?” I saw my father put his ear to the young man’s mouth.

  My father lifted up the stranger and carried him like a child inside the house to the parlor, where few people went. It was a cool shadowy room used only for special occasions. It looked like my father wanted to give the wounded man the best we had to give.

  I covered things on the porch and pushed things back and brought some firewood to the parlor. “I thought we could build a fire in the fireplace,” I announced. “That’d be fine,” my father said. “You know how to do it, like I taught you.” I saw that he had made a pallet on the floor with the mattress from the daybed.

  “Help me put our friend on the pallet,” father asked.

  When we lifted our friend I was at first afraid to touch him so close, to hold him, but in my trembling grasp his body felt friendly and like something of mine—and more: he felt beloved to me. He must have felt something of the same to my father, for I saw my father’s face filled with softness in the light of the fire. Now the fire was going and brightness and warmth were coming from it, suddenly bringing to life on the wall the faces of my grandmother and grandfather who had built fires in this fireplace; they looked down from their dusty frames upon us. Suddenly the man murmured, “Thank you.”

  “God bless you, pardner,” my father said, and I patted the man’s head. My breath was caught in my throat, that he was with us.

  The storm was here, upon us. Our little house began to shudder and creak under it. Though we didn’t say anything, my father and I were afraid that Doctor Browder would never be able to get out to us now; for when we could see what would be the dirt road in front of our house we saw a flowing stream; and when we saw in the lightning some trees fall over the road along the field we knew the doctor could not get to us.

  We began to nurse the wounded stranger, my father and I. We washed his wounds. And my father prayed, there in the yellow firelight in the swaying little house my grandfather had built for his family and whose roof and walls and floor had been their safe haven and now ours, a shelter for generations in a world none of us had known beyond this place and a few nearby little towns. My father prayed over the young man, laying his carpenter’s hand on the brow of the suffering man and clasping his hand in love and hope. And then I heard my father’s words, “He’s dead.”

  We said the Lord’s prayer together on our knees by the dead stranger’s pallet. The rhythmic clanging of the wind against something of metal, our washtub maybe, tolled over our prayer. And when we opened our eyes at the end of the prayer, my father said, “He looks like somebody.” I knew he did, in that moment, for I saw in my sorrow his somehow blessed brow and his pale full lips, his dark bitter hair, familiar as kin. The wind tolled the washtub. My heart was heavy and aching and my face felt flooded but no tears came for a long time. And when they came, I sobbed aloud. My father held me and rocked me as though I were three, the way he used to when I was three; and I heard him cry, too.

  I felt for the first time the love that one person might have for another he did not know, for a stranger come suddenly close. The great new swelling love I had for the stranger visitor to our house now filled our parlor. And I hoped then, with a longing that first touched me there on that wild and tender night in our faraway parlor in that hidden little town, that one day I would know the love of another, no matter how bitter the loss of them would be.

  In the toiling hurricane that whipped at our house, our trees and fields, lightning showed us what the storm had already done to the world outside. “This must be the worst ever to hit this country,” my father said. “God hold down our roof over our heads and receive the spirit of this poor man.”

  “And protect Mama and Sister and Joe in the school basement,” I added.

  The flood rose to our front porch. My father and I sat lone with the stranger. My father had washed him and taken away his clothes that had been stained again by his wounds and dressed him in a fresh shirt and workpants. The dead being was a presence in the parlor. We waited.

  The sun flared out and streamed down on the waters that covered the town in the unsettled midafternoon. We looked out and saw a whole world of things floating by. We ourselves felt afloat, among them. And then the rain began again, right out of the sunshine, and put it out. It turned very dark.

  “We’re lost,” my father told me. “We’ll all be washed away.”

  “God please stop the rain,” I prayed. The fire had burnt our supply of wood and it was sinking fast.

  “Go get a candle from the bedroom, son,” my father asked. “We’ll put it by the body so that it won’t lie in the darkness.”

  When my father called the stranger “the body” I felt, for the first time, a sense of death and loss. Our friend whom I loved and grieved for, as though I had long known him, was gone. Only “the body” remained. Now I understood the hardest part of death, the grief at gravesides, and what was given up there so bitterly. It was the body.

  What interrupted our mourning was a figure at the window. A figure of flying hair and tearing clothes with wild eyes and a face of terror stared through veils of water.

  “Somebody,” I gasped to my father. “Somebody wants in from the storm.”

  “Hot damn Lord help us!” my father cried out, as afraid as I had ever seen him.

  We struggled with the front door. When we unlocked it, it blasted against us and knocked us down to the floor, and it seemed to hurl the blowing figure into the house. We saw that it was a young man in tattered clothes and a thick beard. The three of us were able to close the front door and to barricade it with the heavy hat tree, oaken and immemorial, standing in the same place in the hallway since first my eyes found it. Suddenly it had life.

  “Worst storm I’ve ever seen,” my father said to the man. The man nodded and we could see that he was young.

  When he walked into the parlor, drawn there by the candlelight and the fire, he saw the man on the pallet and lunged to it and fell to his knees and cried out and wept over the dead man. My father and I waited with our heads bowed, holding together in bewilderment under the fire’s guttering sound and the soft sobbing of the young man. Finally my father said, “He was lying in the field. We tried to help him.” But the man stayed on his knees beside the figure on the pallet, sobbing and murmuring. “Boy, boy, boy, boy…”

  Then my father went to the kneeling man and put a blanket around his shoulders and said softly,

  “I’ll get some hot coffee, pardner.”

  I was alone with the two men, dead and alive, and I felt scared but full of pity. I heard the man speak softly, now, in a gasping language I could not understand—or I was too choked with astonishment. And then I heard him say clearly, “Put your head on my breast, boy! Here. Now, now boy, now; you’re all right, now. Head’s on my breast; now, now.”

  When my father came into the parlor with coffee, he put it down at the side of the grieving man. “Sit back, now,” he said, “and warm yourse
lf.”

  When the man sat back and pulled the blanket around his shoulders, my father asked him for his name.

  “Ben,” he said. “He and I are brothers. I brought him up.” He would not drink his coffee but looked down at the figure of his brother and said, “We were in the boxcar comin from Memphis. Goin to Port of Houston. We had a plan.” And then he cried out softly, “I didn’t go to hurt him. I swear to God I didn’t mean to hurt him.” And then he held his brother’s head to his breast and rocked him.

  My father and I were sitting on the cold springs of the daybed whose mattress was the dead man’s pallet, and I could feel the big, strong wrap of my father’s arm around me, pulling my head to his breast. I felt my everlasting love for him, my father, but in my head rang Ben’s words, we had a plan. My blood rushed in exciting hope. And that hope was that one day I would have enough courage to be this tender as this man was now at this moment, if ever I was lucky enough to find someone who would take my tenderness. And to have, together with someone, a plan. I knew, at this moment, that that was the thing I would look for in my life. And who could hold that from me or tell me I could not have it, that unspeakable tenderness that already I felt to grow in my breast as my blood rushed through me and which was the gift of Ben and his brother to me.

  And out of this passion, as though I had been blinded by it and now could see again, I saw Ben lifting up the body of his dead brother from the pallet.

  “Thank you for tending to my brother,” he said to us, solemnly, and turned to go. “My brother and me will go, now.”

  “But you’ll drown,” my father told him. “Wait until the flood is over, for God’s sake.”

  My father stood in front of Ben as if to stop him; but in a growling voice and with a look of darkness, Ben said,

  “Get out of our way, my friend.”

  Ben was going, holding the nestled body against his breast. My father and I stood still as our visitors out of the flood went back into it, through the barricaded front door and into the storm.

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” I whispered.

  “God be with you and God forgive me for letting a man who killed his brother go,” my father said, almost to himself.

  Through the window we saw, in the fading daylight, the brothers move through the water. Ben was nestling the body of his dead brother in his arms and pressing his head upon his breast. “They’ll never make it,” my father said.

  “But where are they going?”

  “They’re in God’s hands,” answered my father. “Although Ben was a murderer, I feel he is forgiven because he came back and asked forgiveness,” father said. “The love of God works through reconciliation.”

  “Father,” I asked. “What is reconciliation?”

  “It means coming back together in peace,” my father answered. “Although there was torment between the two brothers, they have been brought back together in peace.”

  Through the gray rain, moving through the rising waters, they disappeared, the two men of “reconciliation” who had come back together in peace. My eyes clung to them as long as they could see, trying to hold the loving enemy brothers back from the mist they were slowly melting into.

  The days after the rain were worse than the rain. The river swelled and covered farms and roads and many people sat on top of their houses. Though the water around us fell to the lower land, since we were on a rise, my father and I were marooned. The sun had a new hotness, the world was sodden and the smell was of soaked things and rotting things. There were snakes and sobbing bullfrogs and there were crying peafowls in the trees and red crawfish flipped in the mud. In the remoteness and seclusion of our place, through the strangeness of our days, I wept for Ben and his brother so many times I can’t remember. A new feeling had been born in me, obscure then but clearer through time. A man in a boat stopped to tell us of the wonders of the storm: gin cotton lay over an acre of water like white flowers; a thousand sawmill logs were aloose, a church steeple had been carried away with its bell, miraculously afloat, and stood gonging like a buoy near Trinity bridge.

  And for a while it was reported that a floating door bearing the bodies of two men was seen moving on the wide river through several towns. At one town people had said that when it came through there, the raft was whirling in the currents as though a demon had hold of it; but the men stayed put, though it was considered that they were dead. And another time, near the river’s mouth where it flows into the Gulf, they said it rode the crests of dangerous rapids so serenely that it was easy to see the two men, one, alive and fierce, holding the other, dead. I waited to hear more, but after this, there were no further reports of the precious door.

  IN THE ICEBOUND HOTHOUSE

  It is true that I have not been able to utter more than a madman’s sound since my eyes beheld the sight. I’ve lost speech. And so they have asked me to write. Since you are a poet, write, they told me. Little do they know what they might get. Little, even, do I.

  So I’m writing this in the Detention House, where they’re holding me until I can give word. Little do they know what I might give. Little, even, do I. A “suspicious witness” they name me. I am, certainly, a witness—or was. But was there no “suspicious witness” for me? To help me explain? Maybe the dead naked girl was my witness. Had she watched from the high window of the Biology Lab? As I loitered near the icebound hothouse? As I knocked on the ice-armored door? As I peered through the ice-ribboned windows; as I waved to the sullen Nurseryman inside? No use wasting time on that, her lips are forever sealed, cold, kissless and silent. But the dead naked girl certainly was my key to the hothouse; it was she who, at last, gave me entrance, opened the icebound door barred to me heretofore. Through her death. Before my eyes, at the sound of crashing glass, sprang open the door, shattering ice over me. I got in! Oh I got into the hothouse all right. Her sacrifice! The diving girl’s sacrifice! I notice as I write how my mind throws rapid thoughts. Not like my mind. Which usually operates in languor; at slow bubble; and darkening and thickening, like a custard at simmer. Symptom of my bad head.

  But would not working among green things make for a certain bliss? Harmony, peacefulness? What had disturbed the Nurseryman that he was drunken among his growing things? A crocked Nurseryman in the hothouse! Drunk among his plants, drunk in the greenhouse. Drunk in the shooting galaxy of Fuchsias, knocking his head into the Comet blossoms. His drunken breath scalding the Maidenhair Fern; alcohol fumes over the Babybreath. Pissed among the tuberous Begonias.

  Seedsman in a warm nursery of sprouts and tendrils, so close to the making of leaf and bud, to the workings of bulb and seed, wouldn’t you think the nursing man might be tranquil? What ate at you, green man, that you drowned your sorrows? What blighted your joy, nurse, that you sought relief in the deadening of it? What is the canker worm that ate at your roots? If you, among healing flowers and leaf, got a kind of madness, what about us lost in the bloomless? If the green be mad, then what of the dry? What does it mean that the garden is greening and the gardener withering? For if the gardener walk dumb, be two sheets in the wind, what of us, who speak and are sober and have no garden? “In a world of grief and pain, flowers bloom, even so,” to quote an old saying. Even so.

  Even so, I was haunted by the drunken Nurseryman. Plotzed, smashed, a bag on. The Phlox grows so straight and is so festered with blossoms: what of the afflicted hand that shakes as it tends, and scatters the blossoms? How can a quivering hand tie a leaning stem? Without a clear head—hung over in the greenhouse—can bulbs be sorted? In a plague of Whitebug was both nurse and patient afflicted? Then who nurses the nurse?

  There for most of the month of January, everything was frozen cracking silver. We’d had a “silver freeze”: rain all night, a sudden drop in temperature, everything brittle, silvery, ice-encased, breakable trees cracking, streets and sidewalks paved with ice, houses like iced cakes. Fierce, burning world, untraversable, a harsh world of thorns, daggers, blades. Passing every frozen morning in this silver winter,
the elegant greenhouse, tropical oasis on that desert campus, in the month of January when everything was frozen silver, I saw him weaving inside the ice-gripped glass. Under a frozen sky I moved like a cripple over the frozen land. The greenhouse was a cake of ice decorated with blooms and silver windows. I could hardly see through the panes with their white icing. Yet inside I saw glimmering colors, salmon and rose and purple and red, glimmering in the roselight lampglow. I was drawn to the glow and laureate warmth of the icebound hothouse. The vision in the frozen hothouse! Glimmering and locked in the icestorm. And through the window I saw the figure of the Nurseryman. Drunk! Worming his way under hanging baskets of showering blooms, staggering around fountains of lace-leaves, lurching through fountainous palms. An evil figure? Would he harm the growing, the blooming? This lone figure, moving among the glowing blooms—he haunted me, haunts me yet. Even now.

  Why does the Nurseryman drink? I questioned. Has a giant Begonia, that he nursed almost upon his bosom for weeks when it was sick, died? Has a Maidenhair Fern, fragile as a mist sprayed from an atomizer, evaporated? Did the death of delicate things drive the gardener to bottle? But does he not know, has he not heard that all flowering things fade and die? That the grass with-ereth when the wind blows over? All things die? Does he not know? I asked the dark of night. Living among green (the most perishable color), was he not accustomed to daily yellowing (leaf) and graying (frond); all things die…? Did insidious insects arrive? That unstoppable march through the ages, millions of legs, millions of antennae moving through the centuries. Did bugs come? And do quick damage, effect sleight-of-hand change on a tray of Pansies so perfect-looking that a gardener would believe they were changeless, like china flowers? Did a dragon worm get to the Ficus tree and draw its infernal saw across the root; did a viper-like insect, thick as a snake, hatch in the very soil that caressed and gently clasped the Tree of Eden plant and in a time when it had gained its power, strengthening itself as the buds fattened, strike with one strike at the bulb of the Tree and bring an end to it? What losses a gardener suffers! But was the gardener not accustomed to devastation by insect? What was the canker eating at the roots of the Nurseryman? Did he reach for the bottle instead of the bug killer? I cannot yet understand this gardener. In his greenhouse all was order. Cleanliness; not one leaf on the floor. The rows of green were neat. But he was disordered. And lurching a little. Yet he never fell over a little cradle of nursing seedlings or crashed against a hanging Habernaria grandiflora. He moved cautiously through the rainy tropical leaves and the sunny blooms far away from the blue sea whose light had nourished them and given them color, far away from the hot noons, from the rain wilderness and mossy coves and humid crevices, from soft shadows of hidden glens. Like a ghost he was here, gone, then there. Sometimes I’d see his shadow falling over the green; sometimes he seemed like a statue standing in the shadow of huge leaves, head bowed, fixed like stone.