Had I a Hundred Mouths Read online

  On the frosted frontdoor pane was the figure of a mysterious rider with a plumed hat astride a phantom horse the color of a cloud, silver-gray, with plumed cloud-colored mane and plumed silver tail—a Prince? a Knight? But why, I wonder now, was he rearing back as if startled by the knocker at the door, challenging the arriver at the door, “Who are you and why have you come here?” Who put the rider there? Who of my ancestors put the rider there? Why, there were warm stories told at night, loving as often as fearful, as often gay as melancholy. Who among the old dwellers of these rooms was dark? Who put the dark host at the door, rearing suspicious horse and suspicious plumed dark rider shying back from the homeless traveler, from the guest half-welcome? Even for me when sometimes I returned and came, once more, to that door, tired and wanting home. Even there. Even then. O rider I am done for, the brothers in me have for the last time fought, the dark one won, darkness prevailed, O rider why did I ever come to this university, O why did I not resign when I saw the emptiness of this school, the failed professors, these classes in poetry, these students, this town, the depth of my loneliness and hunger?

  TONGUES OF MEN AND OF ANGELS

  I started out to tell about what became of two cousins and their uncle who loved them, according to what the older cousin told me. But some of their kinfolks’ lives would have to be told if you’re going to talk at all about the cousins and their uncle. So what I have to tell about first is all one family, what I heard told to me and what I watched happen. I have been here in this family’s town longer than any of the family, and have in my long time noted—and wonder if you have, ever—the turning around of some people’s lives, as if some force moved in them against their will: runaways suddenly arrived back, to the place they fled; berserk possessed people come serene; apparently Godblessed people overnight fall under malediction.

  JOE PARRISH

  Blanch, Louetta’s mother, ran away from everybody—mama, papa, husband, child—with a good young Mexican that had worked on the East Texas place, named Juan Melendrez from the Rio Grande Valley. Blanch’s husband, Louetta’s father, named Joe Parrish, went loco at this. He was found lying in the mud of the pigpen, sockeyed and slobbering from what was thought to be a stroke, staring up at the mudcaked pigs grunting over him. And again, some fishermen came upon him prostrate in the steaming weeds of the river. Cottonmouth water moccasins glided all around him yet no snake bothered him. He’s gone crazy, said the town, and tried to persuade Blanch’s folks to put him in the insane asylum, but they would not. A black woman was brought by Kansas Tate to pull out the devils that had taken hold of Joe Parrish, but she said that they were deeper into him than any she had ever witnessed. She told how devils put roots into a person that thread around his liver and his lights and rope his heart and grow thorns into his lungs. This is why he foams and screams and pants for breath. But then Joe Parrish quieted for a while and sat on the porch, calm. Until one night he was missing. He was gone, leaving Louetta a tragic orphan in her grandparents’ house at fourteen.

  Now a lot of years later, Joe Parrish came back one night, and he wanted to see his daughter and to get her to help him, but found no one left on the place but the uncle. Joe Parrish told that he was escaped from the Penitentiary, a murderer-convict that had killed six Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley. A winged man with black wings had come near him and unfurled and curled back again a thin black tongue like a horned toad’s and said, “Get even. Pay back the Mexicans.” Now he had broken out and had come back barefooted and in rags, wanting to hide on the place.

  When told that Louetta had drowned in the well, his old bedevilment took him again, and again the black-winged figure came and licked out his black tongue and suggested that at the bottom of the well Joe Parrish would possibly find better times for himself. Before the uncle’s eyes Joe Parrish lept into the very well, which had long been without water and was only a cistern of deep thick mud. Flashlights revealed only the yellow soles of Joe Parrishes naked feet lying on a floor of black mud, like a pair of turned-over houseshoes. When the rescuers, about fifty of them gathered from all over the county, threaded through the well-wheel a rope with an iron claw at the end of it and hooked it to Joe Parrishes feet (some said the claw looked like the Devil’s pitchfork but it was used to grab along the riverbottoms for bodies of the drowned) they strained together as if they were lifting an enormous bucket of wellwater. Suddenly there was a socking sound deep in the well and its echoing was a sound of horror, and then the tuggers, who had fallen back upon one another upon the ground, saw swaying at the crest of the well-wheel, dripping of mud and blood and clawed by the iron claw, two naked feet. Joe Parrishes feet had been pulled from their ankle sockets. The whole town was sickened for a time by the feet of Joe Parrish. They poured bag after bag of lye into the accurst well on the back porch of the old house and then strong men laid a cement hood over the top of what was now Joe Parrishes tomb. Except for his feet, which of course many thought ought to have been thrown into the well. Instead, they were stolen from the Funeral Home where they had been taken—where else could you take them?—and it was not known whether they were embalmed or whether they were just rank feet in the hands of the thief.

  And then began the rumors of the feet of Joe Parrish, one foot or both, cropping up here and there. Some reported seeing a footless man crawling through the woods, howling for his lost feet. But the two feet of Joe Parrish began to haunt people. One person said she saw one of the feet walking on the railroad track one moonlight night and that it chased her; another screamed that a foot was in her bed when she got in, but nobody in her household could find it; and sure enough a woman at a dinner table, wanting the butter, asked somebody to please pass the foot—the town was so foot-haunted; and another, way down in the Rio Grande Valley in a Mexican town, reported being followed home from the midnight shift by two steadily tromping feet. Finally this all stopped. Joe Parrishes feet were never found, or haven’t been yet. God knows where they came to rest. You will say that every town old enough to have its stories has some hand or a head or has something walking without peace to haunt people. This town was not any different. But since I am interested in the old places that are lost and the stories in them and how they were almost lost until they were saved by some who had ears and tongues and mouths, I thought I’d mention the story of Joe Parrish.

  But one question: what had Joe Parrish done to deserve all this? Is there no meaning to some lives? Doesn’t it sometimes seem that a life has reeled through its time without making any sense to the rest of us? Or is it that Joe Parrish was just a toy of a bad angel, a poor soul crazed by jealousy-madness and vengeance, that lept headfirst into a well of mud at the bidding of a bad angel. Are there such angels?

  But I have some more to tell.

  INEZ MELENDREZ MCNAMARA

  Two women arrived in town one day. One was an older but beautiful woman, and the other a beautiful brown young girl of some fifteen years with flowing coarse black hair. It was Blanch and her Mexican daughter, Inez Melendrez. Juan Melendrez had been killed beside Blanch and Inez in the truck as they drove along a road back of Refugio, Texas. They said that three gunshots shot out of the fruit groves. Blanch saw Juan burst into blood as though he were a punctured wine sac, and had enough composure to grab the wheel and put on the brake. Inez was thrown through the door and into the air and came down like somebody under a parachute of black hair into a watermelon field and landed astraddle a large watermelon. Blanch couldn’t stop screaming. A car stopped and helped. Juan Melendrez was dead, faceless, in Blanch’s lap of blood. Inez was badly hurt—her womb was crushed—and she was told that she could never bear a child.

  Blanch thought to come back home. Did she think they would all be waiting with open arms? There was no one there to tell her the story of all that happened, of Joe Parrishes fate and of Louetta’s, her daughter’s. Her sister and brother in Houston had long ago disowned her and had left their home place to rot and fall in upon their drunken brother, the uncle I w
ill tell you more about (and his two nephews—maybe you will remember) in a while.

  When mother and daughter came to the family house, they found doors and windows all boarded up. Blanch came face to face with the forbidding riding figure on the glass pane. She fell back for a moment and felt a cold shudder over her, but then, being a strong woman of Texas prairie and valley, she tore open the front door. The odor of the house was of death and rot, and when she found the well cemented over and read the words drawn with a nail in the cement, THIS WELL ACCURST, and the figure of a skeleton head in the embrace of crossbones, she felt a chill of horror. When she was later told of the content of the well, she pulled her daughter Inez Melendrez to her and told her the tale of Joe Parrish and of Louetta, her daughter, and of Juan Melendrez and of the uncle, her brother and of the red nigger. She was told that the uncle had gone off to Houston to seek his sister and brother and just as she was making plans to go there and find him and to bring him back home, the uncle arrived, but as a wasted corpse in the hands of his nephew. You have already heard of the funeral.

  Blanch and Inez Melendrez went on living in the house with the accurst well. She had an altar built over the well and kept a candle burning on it night and day, but you can sure enough believe and will want to know that evil spirits were not in the least held away by the burning light of any candle.

  Blanch began to be worried by the sound of somebody walking on the roof. She placed a ladder to the roof so that she was often climbing the ladder day and night, staring at the roof. She had climbed the ladder so many times that she had blisters bleeding in the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. No sooner had she come down the ladder than up she had to go again. Up and down the ladder she went, night and day. Inez Melendrez feared for her mother’s sanity because she herself had not heard anything. One night Inez heard a crash and when she ran outside she found that it had come from her mother Blanch who had fallen off the ladder in the dark and was dead in the Canna Lilies from a broken neck. At last Blanch had peace. But who knows who has peace? It is told that when Inez found her mother dead in the lilies, a black-winged person stood near and with a long black tongue going in and out of its mouth said, “Joe Parrish won.” Inez cried out and the figure vanished. She lifted up her mother and carried her into the house, where she laid her in her bed and lit candles around her. That night when Inez dozed, the house burned to the ground, burning Blanch to ashes in it as Inez fled for her life. Nothing but the well was left.

  I later came to the place to see what was left of the door. I found in rubble on a jagged piece of glass the perfect head of the horse rearing passionate and proud in his curling delicate mane, and took it. I looked for the rider but never found him. He must have lain on the burnt ground in a thousand pieces of blackened glass. I would give anything to have found the rider of that precious horse, horseman lost forever.

  Inez the Chicana was now seventeen. She saw suffering, persecution and unfair treatment of the Mexican people in her county. She deplored the exploitation of her people by rich Anglo Texans. “I am a Tejana,” she said. “I am a Texan as well as a Meji-cana.” She was widely sought after since she was so haughty and beautiful with her fountainous coarse black hair. A rich independent oil man name Ralston McNamara pursued Inez Melendrez and he happened to be one of those who confiscated land wherever he wanted it to drill for oil from it. He took away land from Mexican people, then hired them as cheap labor to work on it with his drilling company, promising a share of profits, which they never got, since they did not know numbers or how to speak English. How could they figure anything out? They seemed to be naturally in disgrace everywhere. Why was this? Many towns would not allow Mexican people to eat in their cafes or to come into their stores. “I’ll tell you, give me a nigra anytime over a greasy Mescan” is what you heard.

  Ralston McNamara continued to pursue Inez Melendrez and in some time Inez Melendrez married Ralston McNamara. His big wells which he gave to his young bride (she was nineteen) as a wedding present, Inez No. 1 and Inez No. 2, had come in like earthquakes and explosions bursting open the earth and splattering with thick oil mud a countryside of grazing cows and blooming cotton fields and tomato and pea farms, and bringing overnight power and riches to Inez Melendrez McNamara. She at once moved to invest and to buy and to accumulate. She bought a hotel in the Panhandle, acreage in the small town of Houston adjacent to what would one day be a great international airport, and some several miles of the early Houston Ship Channel, along which she built docks and warehouses for cotton and grain. She bought automobile agencies in some small towns like Tomball and Conroe, Texas, and a radio station in the state capital of Austin. Ralston McNamara was amazed at her avarice and her clutching sense of money and was already experiencing spells of impotence with his young wife. Within two years of their marriage he was dead from a split skull brought about by the blade of a machete that fell from a rigging. His head had been sliced in two to the end of his nose. For a time there had been suspicion of foul play among the Mexicans since it was known that the Mexicans were not fond of Ralston McNamara even though he had a Mexican wife. Now all the McNamara fortune fell into Inez’ hands and at twenty—and miraculously pregnant—she was perhaps the most powerful person in all Texas and no doubt in the whole Southwest, probably in half the country. Soon after McNamara’s death Inez Melendrez McNamara gave birth to an Irish-Mexican boy, who was named Juan McNamara. This boy was the idol of Inez McNamara’s eyes. He was not out of her sight. She held him against her breast wherever she went, whatever she did. He slept beneath the cool cover of her coarse black hair. But the shining glory of an immense fortune was darkened by the sickness of a child. Juan McNamara was attacked by a mysterious illness when he was two years old and he lay in a pale languor night and day. The beautiful ivory-colored child could not be healed. Famous doctors came and were of no help. Inez’ investments fell; she did not care. She closed shops and offices and warehouses, canceled contracts. People embezzled from her and stole her property. She was in a trance of dread, clutching her dying child to her. She pawned and sold for a nuisance her silver and furs to pay for exorbitant miracle medicines and to bring healers and holy men to her child. But Juan McNamara died. He was three years old and had withered to look sixty.

  Inez Melendrez McNamara turned her back on her former life. She brought a bag of cash money and jewels to a Carmelite nunnery in the fields near San Antonio, Texas, and entered it, taking a vow of renunciation and total silence.

  No one from the outside world has ever seen her or spoken to her again. Not once has she opened the little door to her cell. The nuns who feed her and take care of her have been pursued by people from all over the world for information about the hidden beautiful woman of sorrows. And some have come with business papers, leases, titles and contracts. The Sisters would not speak to them, although some needed immediate life-saving answers that only Inez could give. Some begged to slip a piece of paper under the door for Inez’ signature. There was even one incensed man on the roof of Inez’ cell crying down to her to help him salvage some few dollars of his lost fortune, but there was no answer. The Sisters would not speak to anyone of Inez Melendrez McNamara, as though she did not exist. Only one little Novitiate, who was missing and was found in the Shamrock Hotel in Houston wearing a huge emerald and ordering elaborate room service for a bunch of conference salesmen in a penthouse orgy, told some news of Inez before she passed out, champagne-sodden. She told how Inez Melendrez McNamara weighed 350 pounds and that her huge body was cloaked by her coarse black hair, which dragged on the floor, like a shaggy black cape. When the Novitiate sobered up she found herself back in the nunnery, raped so many times that it took some weeks to heal her.

  But time has almost carried off forever the story of Inez Melendrez McNamara. I’ve saved a little of it here.

  ORMSBY

  What is this wild thing that will cut like a shark-toothed blade through a person until it has hacked him to pieces? Or more, what I am int
erested in is the change that will come over a wild person, as though a devil had suddenly departed him. Where did the devil go? The Bible says into some swine—that, filled of two men’s devils, ran crazy over a cliff and fell into the sea, leaving the two men peaceful after long torment. But I am not interested—right now—in the receivers of the demons that flee insane people, in the swine: it is the wild person that takes my thought right now: a man named Ormsby.

  Now Ormsby was a wild red young nigger come down from a poverty-killed back swamp town near Mobile, Alabama, to get work at a sawmill in Moscow, Texas. He was in trouble from the first because he drank whiskey with the Cushata Indians and fucked them and cut them across their throats and faces with a nasty knife. He was wild with his red dick and mean with his knife and was locked up a lot and bound to posts and trees to keep him from tearing up half a town—or his own self.