The Complete and Collected Stories

William Goyen

Dzanc Books

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Copyright © 2019 by William Goyen

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Published 2019 by Dzanc Books

A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-945814-80-8

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This collection includes all of the stories published in William Goyen’s four previous short story collections, as well as nine stories that were not in any of that quartet. Below is a guide as to when each collection was published, when each story was completed, and what, if any, collection(s) the story was originally published in.

Collections:

Ghost and Flesh, 1952

The Faces of the Blood Kindred, 1960

The Collected Stories, 1975

Had I a Hundred Mouths, 1985

Individual Stories:

The Seadowns’ Bible, 1934 (not published until 1979)

The Children, 1938

Simon’s Castle, 1943 (not published until 1978)

The White Rooster, 1947 (GF) (CS) (HHM)

River’s Procession, 1947

The Evil, 1948

A Parable of Perez, 1949

The Storm Doll, 1950

A Shape of Light, 1951 (GF) (CS)

Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt, 1951 (GF) (CS) (HHM)

Children of Old Somebody, 1951 (GF) (CS) (HHM)

Pore Perrie, 1951 (GF) (CS) (HHM)

Nest in a Stone Image, 1952 (GF) (CS)

The Grasshopper’s Burden, 1952 (GF) (CS) (HHM)

The Letter in the Cedarchest, 1952 (GF) (CS) (HHM)

Figure Over the Town, 1953 (CS) (HHM)

The Horse and the Day Moth, 1953 (FBK) (CS)

The Enchanted Nurse, 1953 (CS)

The Armadillo Basket, 1953 (FBK) (CS)

The Geranium, 1954 (FBK) (CS)

The Rescue, 1954 (CS)

Old Wildwood, 1955 (FBK) (CS) (HHM)

A People of Grass, 1956 (FBK) (CS)

A Tale of Inheritance, 1960 [also, Zamour, or A Tale of Inheritance] (FBK) (CS) (HHM)

Rhody’s Path, 1960 (FBK) (CS) (HHM)

Savata, My Fair Sister, 1960 (FBK) (CS)

Face of the Blood Kindred, 1960 (FBK) (CS) (HHM)

The Moss Rose, 1960 (FBK) (CS)

There are Ravens to Feed Us, 1960 (FBK) (CS)

Tenant in the Garden, 1962 (CS)

The Thief Coyote, 1964 (CS)

Tapioca Surprise, 1974 (CS)

Bridge of Music, River of Sand, 1975 (CS) (HHM)

Arthur Bond, 1979 (HHM)

Precious Door, 1978 (HHM)

Black Cotton, 1982

The Mockingbird’s Song, 1982

Had I a Hundred Mouths, 1982 (HHM)

In the Icebound Hothouse, 1982 (HHM)

The Texas Principessa, 1983 (HHM)

Where’s Esther?, 1983 (HHM)

Tongues of Men and Angels, 1983 (HHM)

Contents

Introduction

Preface

The Seadowns’ Bible

The Children

Simon’s Castle

The White Rooster

River’s Procession

The Evil

A Parable of Perez

The Storm Doll

A Shape of Light

Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt

Children of Old Somebody

Pore Perrie

Nest in a Stone Image

The Grasshopper’s Burden

The Letter in the Cedarchest

Figure Over the Town

The Horse and the Day Moth

The Enchanted Nurse

The Armadillo Basket

The Geranium

The Rescue

Old Wildwood

A People of Grass

A Tale of Inheritance

Rhody’s Path

Savata, My Fair Sister

Face of the Blood Kindred

The Moss Rose

There are Ravens to Feed Us

Tenant in the Garden

The Thief Coyote

Tapioca Surprise

Bridge of Music, River of Sand

Arthur Bond

Precious Door

Black Cotton

The Mockingbird’s Song

Had I a Hundred Mouths

In the Icebound Hothouse

The Texas Principessa

Where’s Esther?

Tongues of Men and Angels

Introduction

I’ve cared most about the world in one person’s head. Mostly, then, I’ve cared about the buried song in somebody, and sought it passionately; or the music in what happened.

Though the author of six novels, including his best known work The House of Breath, William Goyen was fundamentally a writer of short stories. His artistic and intellectual energies were sudden and intense rather than extended and strategic; he moved, even in his longer works, from peak to peak of feeling. His temperament was lyric rather than novelistic; he thought of his own writing as a kind of singing. His first creative work, as he himself explained, was an opera, The House of Malvenu, written when he was fourteen and already sharply aware of his spiritual exile in his native East Texas. His lumberman father disapproved of such things, and so the work was furtive, secret. The lyricism became defiant, the song buried, only to be released in a high stakes performance, an aria that sung of its own escape.

We might expect such a writer to identify as a poet. But Goyen’s particular childhood repressions generated a desire to tell, to reveal secrets, to expose publically stories everyone knew but no one had the courage to share. No doubt some of this impulse can be traced to his own secrets, particularly the need to hide his sexuality from a family and culture that considered homosexuality sinful. (His father’s restrictions were clearly an attempt to control a complicated and hypersensitive son.) In response, Goyen put narrative drive, often dramatized as the compulsive act of telling itself, into the service of the lyric. Somebody is telling something to somebody: an event!, he wrote in the preface to his Collected Stories. Who’s listening to this telling? Where is the listener? The story teller is forced by some internal requirement to release the tale; the listener is evoked to imply social revelation (the outing of internal information), intimacy, secret sharing. The short story as a form becomes deeply, almost aggressively, personal. We the readers become the listeners, and the compact of secrecy—of an intimacy that sometimes verges on the erotic—entangles, implicates.

It is for this reason, primarily, that Goyen’s stories are cherished and deeply loved by readers who know and accept this demand—and avoided or misunderstood by those who find the emotional price too great. It’s not a question of sentimentality; Goyen was not a sentimental writer. Nor was he a simple recorder of raw feeling. He was a writer who loaded his unique style to its maximum carrying-weight, giving shape to despair without (miraculously) ironizing or debasing the pure feelings of his characters. Nothing is better than an elegant cry of despair, he once explained in an interview, a line that may sound like a contradiction—or a joke. It’s not. It’s a way of stating that maximum emotion on the page can only be achieved through stylistic control. Speech is not voice. Voice is the made music of speech. To reveal the world in one person’s head the writer must find the shaped song that carries both the meaning and the feeling of the speaker. This is the music in what happened.

*

From an early age Goyen knew he was wounded and that his writing came out of the wound. When his musical and theatrical ambitions fell to the pressure of his father’s disapproval, he continued writing short fiction, eventually under the eye of George Williams at Rice University. His early stories were laments for the lost life of the small town, Trinity, where he was born. He hated Houston, where the family had moved in 1923; compared to the quiet idyll of the little town by the river of the same name, this growing city full of country exiles seemed unfriendly, dangerous, isolating. He complained, grieved, as his characters so often do, mourning what had been lost and spoiled. In some fundamental sense, he was an elegist from the start, and Williams, though impressed by the intensity of his quiet student, told him he needed anger, venom, some meanness, that his writing was too gentle and melancholy. That violence would mount over the years and occasionally find release, but from the beginning Goyen was an artist of deprivation and loss—and he knew it. Homesickness was his theme, not nostalgia but the recognition of a primary dislocation and isolation, an understanding of Being as essentially alone, exiled.

Intellectually it was a relatively confined patch of ground, but the stories he wrote at Rice and later in the Navy during World War II dug that soil deeply, obsessively. There are writers who wander and gather, magpies for material, and there are writers who mine, who seem at times to be writing the same story again and again, a story they can never completely capture or reveal. Goyen was an obsessive from the beginning: his early efforts, like The Seadowns’ Bible (1934) or The Children (1938), written when he was a student, worry and wear the same emotional material as his final fictions. He is haunted by the house in Trinity where he grew up, by his feelings of difference and absence, by the image of the door that promises entry but also refuses welcome. He gathers the lonely and sorrowful and gives them voice, but never does he allow them recompense, return, the fundamental welcome they seek.

As a consequence, the development in Goyen’s work is technical rather than substantive. From an early age he possessed the unique combination of control and emotional efflorescence that separates his work from that of his contemporaries. He distrusted the macho style of Hemingway and declared himself a rhapsodist, but it was rare in his short fiction that he displayed the kind of pyrotechnical and poetic writing that made The House of Breath famous. He found ways to let his characters sing, to turn their speech into music, and developed strategies to implicate the reader/listener into the telling, but the stories themselves lived in the same emotional register. An early masterpiece like Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt (1951) shows how sophisticated his verbal magic had become since his student days, but Margy, its teller, never ceases to belong to the long line of Goyen women who chant and mourn their sorrows:

Dreamt last night again I saw pore Raymon Emmons, all last night seen im plain as day. There uz tears in iz glass eyes and iz face uz all meltin away. O I was broken of my sleep and of my night disturbed, for I dreamt of pore Raymon Emmons live as ever.

Did anyone, even in deep East Texas, ever talk like this? Probably not. But its soft, almost melted rhythms and rubbed off ends of words capture the tonal register of an older woman’s voice, not just its verbal texture but its emotional nap, with eerie precision. A short story about mourning and memory, ghosts and desire, has become a small play, a staged moment, and we as readers have been welcomed inside, to a table at the Pass Time Club, to sit with Margy as she sits with us.

An event!, as Goyen indicated, with no small emphasis. Drama was key to his conception of short fiction. He found early release as a high school student hanging out with vaudevillians when he was an usher at the Metropolitan Theater in Houston. He befriended and worked closely with Margo Jones, the dynamic founder of the Houston Community Players, and he converted a number of his stories and novels into plays and musicals. Theater, particularly the idea of self-display and self-exposure, was fundamental to his imagination of telling, and it dovetailed productively but dangerously with his religious upbringing. To tell in a story or on a stage both replicated and repudiated the sort of witness required of the convert. The tent preachers, snake handlers, and evangelistic flag-pole sitters of East Texas turn up often enough in his stories to suggest their double role: as both artistic models and cautionary exampla. In one of his finest stories, Figure Over the Town, just such a mysterious artist appears one day above a small town like Trinity. What distinguishes Flagpole Moody from his historical models is his refusal to be defined. He isn’t there to promote a tent revival; he refuses to be used as advertisement. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Moody doesn’t really know why he does what he does, and when others want to label him or attach a significance to his act, he withdraws further, eventually disappearing, still unknown.

A number of other stories might be classified as confessional or self-naming; some hover between fiction and spiritual autobiography. Goyen was fond of the saint’s life as a narrative form (at one point he had plans to write biographies of St. Francis and St. Paul), and at times he seems to be imitating the internal drama of self-flagellation and salvation that structures such stories. The plot-static Nests in a Stone Image follows the narrator’s struggle to locate himself across a penitential dark night inside the stony, Golgothic skull of a San Francisco hotel. And later stories such as Bridge of Music, River of Sand and In the Icebound Hothouse have the air of hallucinated confessions, oneiric expressions of guilt and the search for forgiveness in highly symbolic, almost allegorical landscapes.

These later stories in particular, beginning in 1975 with Bridge of Music and ending with the final set of East Texas tales Goyen wrote just before his death in 1983, are among his deepest and most powerful. Alcoholism had taken its toll on his health and writing during the 60s and early 70s, and a job in publishing assured that his energies were directed toward other writers’ work rather than his own. When he left McGraw-Hill in 1971 he was, in essence, fighting for his life. Though he had married the actress Doris Roberts in 1963, Goyen was unable to reconcile his sexuality with traditional domestic life or with his long-standing feelings of rejection and exile. A crisis followed, partly fueled by alcohol, that led him to an intense embrace of Jesus as a figure of personal and sexual redemption. His small re-telling of the gospels, A Book of Jesus, appeared soon after, but the conversion experience that prompted it failed to prevent deeper depressions and alcoholic episodes. In 1975, profoundly depressed by his move to California with Roberts, he attempted suicide in a hotel in Newport Beach. That same year he began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and his writing took on a new clarity and vigor. It was under these conditions that he produced the novel Arcadio and a handful of masterful, devastating final stories.

The French poet and critic Patrice Repusseau has noted that Goyen’s late stories possess a more acute bareness of style, [a] new driving urgency, and [an] intensity of feeling that distinguish them from those in his earlier collections, Ghost and Flesh and Faces of the Blood Kindred. I would add that the landscapes of these stories are more stark and more figurative, the central images more profoundly symbolic, as though issuing from some deeper sounding of a post-traumatic self. Beginning with Bridge of Music, River of Sand, these stories include Precious Door, Had I a Hundred Mouths, In the Icebound Hothouse, and Tongues of Men and Angels." It is here that Goyen finally found the venom and violence George Williams had looked for so many years before. Old wounds are opened yet again, salt poured copiously in, and for the first time in his life Goyen screams rather than sings his grievances. The two stories meant for the unfinished novel Leander unleash the horrors of East Texas rural life in a way only implied in earlier works like The House of Breath and Come, the Restorer. The ghoulish Arthur Bond gives us a kind of allegory of alcoholism and lust in the form of a man tormented by a baby-faced worm in his thigh. And In the Icebound Hothouse, perhaps the greatest of these later nightmares, is the confession of a disturbed poet with a hole in his breast who has witnessed and participated in a scene of hallucinatory horror.

Reviewing Goyen’s posthumous collection Had I a Hundred Mouths in the New York Times Book Review, the critic Vance Bourjaily called In the Icebound Hothouse one of the great short stories of the century. It is both that and a summation of Goyen’s life of writing, a dark portrait of his own lostness and sense of abandonment, his spiritual sense that he was fundamentally unwelcome in the greenhouse of love, family, and artistic understanding. Its events describe a troubled dream of erotic failure in a form that echoes and honors both Poe and Hawthorne. Indeed, the story could be productively placed as the late 20th century counterpart to Rappaccini’s Daughter, a spoiled idyll, late pastoral horror. And it contains, yet again, an evocation of the primary house and door that haunted him, set in one of the most direct and full-throated cris de coeur in all of short fiction:

I want to go home! That house rises before me, built once more. Again on the pit floor of my life, it blows into shape. That house. It seemed perfect in its simplicity. Its quietness within itself. The humility of it, resting there shady under the trees; the dirt yard, the noble footworn steps. It seemed my last innocence and once of the few beautiful things of openness and plainness that I knew—the woodfire’s throbbing glow rosying the room where I slept with my mother while the wind crackled the frozen branches at the window; the peaceful woodfirelight-blessed room, the warmth of the simple room in that strong sure house. Surely it led me to poetry, for it had given me early deep feelings, mornings of unnameable feelings in the silver air, nights of visions after stories told by the lamplight. But oh I see that it held a shadowed life. Even at the best of times the light in that life was contending with a shadow that came back and back and back.

*

In one of two final lectures he delivered at New York University just before his death in 1983, Goyen compared himself to the figure of the archer Philoctetes, exiled to an island, snake-bit, plagued by seizures and obsessed with his wound. No doubt Goyen’s lifelong epilepsy helped him recognize this comparison, but he was also drawn to the idea that the festering wound was deeply connected to the archer’s strength. The bow of Philoctetes was required at Troy. A doctor offered to cure him, but he rejected him: Philoctetes was now in a position of power. A person with a handicapping wound and priceless gift in demand by his society! Should he remain and nurse his inescapable grievance, reject and turn away from the world? Or should he return to the battle, healed but not unburdened of his pain? Faced himself with the prospect of terminal leukemia, Goyen seems to have found the clarity of an answer:

At any rate, there is a conversation I must have with Philoctetes, my brother. For it is clear that he and I have met with the same choice, suffered together that crucial struggle, lain day after day, night after night, in the same haunted cave, unhealable, dozing undelivered in the uterine glow, held by sucking death from pushing out into the explosion of life, heel in the grasp of a seductive supplanter. The deadly wound was all. The life robber, the death sore, had taken over life. The radiant, the life thrusting—the bow—lay untouched in the darkness. But brother Philoctetes, your healer arrived, the wound was closed, the bow won the battle, and O brother of the cave and the pain, I too have once again shaken free, flipped like a fish from the hand that stretches toward me; I kick towards light, but the finger touch is on my heel. Lend me you bow! Come before me!...

Art and Spirit endure together. Art heals, puts the precious bow in our hands again; binds up and reconciles; recovers the dignity and the beauty in us that keep getting wounded by the wrestling with the angel in us, with the God in us, or—in the absence of angels or God—with the mystery in each of us, waiting in the night by the river that we shall surely come to, on our way home to meet our brother.

—Clark Davis

April 2018

The Collected Stories (1975)

William Goyen

Of the twenty-six stories in this volume, nineteen were originally published in two volumes under the titles Ghost and Flesh and The Faces of Blood Kindred, and the remaining seven in American and European magazines. Some of the uncollected stories have enjoyed a long-time popularity in Europe and have only recently been published in America (Tenants, Tapioca Surprise, The Thief Coyote), years after they were written. The stories cover a span of nearly thirty years: The White Rooster was first published in 1947 in Mademoiselle; Bridge of Music, River of Sand was published in 1975 in The Atlantic Monthly.

A number of these stories were written in the fifties, which now turns out to have been a kind of Golden Age of the short story in America. In those days we were all publishing in several magazines, large and small. Mademoiselle, with high enthusiasm, published many of us young story writers, including James Purdy, Truman Capote, Jean Stafford, Shirley Jackson and Tennessee Williams. This was because of two women, Cyrilly Abels and Margarita Smith, the editors. Many serious American writers owe a debt to these two women of taste, courage and belief.

But no matter where these stories of mine were published, a small but enduring and distinguished magazine has played the most prominent part in my writing over the years. This is The Southwest Review, Through the years, since 1946, the editors, Allen Maxwell and Margaret Hartley, fervently and faithfully published my stories. I cannot imagine my life and its work of writing, from the very beginning, without Allen and Margaret and The Southwest Review. Whatever its meaning, the progress of my work is documented in its pages and issues, year after year. It is a calendar, a diary. And Margaret Hartley and Allen Maxwell have been a presence in the life of my writing.

For what it is worth to those who want to write stories or simply to know something of one writer's insight in the writing of short fiction, I have felt the short-story form as some vitality, some force that begins (and not necessarily at the beginning), grows in force, reaches a point beyond which it cannot go without losing force, loses force and declines; stops. For me, story telling is a rhythm, a charged movement, a chain of pulses or beats. To write out of life is to catch, in pace, this pulse that beats in the material of life. If one misses this rhythm, his story does not seem to work; is mysteriously dead; seems to imitate fife but has not joined life. The story is therefore uninteresting to the reader (and truly to the writer himself), or not clear. I believe this is a good principle to consider.

But for me, as I have written, I’ve been mainly interested in the teller-listener situation. Somebody is telling something to somebody: an event! Who's listening to this telling? Where is the listener? I’ve not been interested in simply reproducing a big section of life off the streets or from the Stock Exchange or Congress. I’ve cared most about the world in one person's head. Mostly, then, I’ve cared about the buried song in somebody, and sought it passionately; or the music in what happened. And so I have thought of my stories as folk song, as ballad, or rhapsody. This led me to be concerned with speech, lyric speech—my heritage. Since the people of the region where most of my stories start—or end (they do, I believe, move in and through the great world) are natural talkers and use their speech with gusto and often with the air and bravura of singers; and since the language of their place is rich with phrases and expressions out of the King James Bible, from the Negro imagination and the Mexican fantasy, from Deep South Evangelism, from cottonfield and cotton gin, oil field, railroad and sawmill, I had at my ears a glorious sound. A marvelous instrument of language was given to me. I worked with this instrument as though it were a fiddle or a cello, to get its true music out of it; and I was finally able to detach myself from this speech so as to be able to hear it almost as a foreign language; and in several of my stories (most notably Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt), I have wanted to record as closely as possible the speech as heard—as though I were notating music.

The landscape of my stories, generally East Texas, is pastoral, river-haunted, tree-shaded, mysterious and bewitched. Spirits and ghosts inhabit it: the generations have not doubted their presence, their doings. Here there exists the local splendor of simple people who wonder and imagine. Some heartbreak is here, too; and something of doom. The landscape of these folk, and mine, is more like Poussin or Claude or Manet than Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell or Rosa Bonheur.

Landscape and language and folk, I seized it all, early, as mine to work with and to make some manner of art out of. It truly was, early, my absolute life's work and my dedication. In Europe, in nearly a dozen states of the United States, this was my work. Living in Rome, it was never more urgent, this faraway haunting landscape, this ringing speech, this tender and yearning, rollicking people, this notion, this vision of home, this ache of homesickness. It seems to me that I was always homesick. Standing before great paintings in Venice or Paris, I saw my own people in Rembrandt's, my own countryside in Corot's. Europa was my fat cousin in Trinity, Texas (pop. 900) and the bull that was raping her was our own, named Roma. I wrote quite a bit about them both.

When I was two-thirds through my first novel, The House of Breath, I announced to my editor, Robert Linscott, that I was going to live in Europe for a while. He was astonished that I would make such a radical move and seriously concerned that the book would lose focus and vitality. I went, and the immense experience disturbed my concentration not at all: what I saw in Europe I put right into my novel: it fit very well—ancient frescoes, grand avenues, plazas, noble ruins—into the little town of Charity that I was creating out of my own home town of Trinity, Texas. Ernst Robert Curtius, the distinguished German translator of this novel wrote in his Preface:¹ The House of Breath’, to be sure, tells us about Charity and East Texas; yet when it does extend itself, it reaches only as far as neighboring Louisiana. And for all that, this book is different from a regional novel. No regionalism is offered here. The language and the landscape of East Texas are only foils to a fabric, in which vital and neighborly human beings talk and move about. In the kitchen of the house near Charity hangs a map of the world. To the boy, whose story is being told, the outlines of countries and continents seem to be the organs of the human body. The organization and formation of the earth has imprinted itself upon the child's consciousness, and in the most perceptual form. In sleepy Charity he had sensed the quality of the whole world and realized that he belonged to it. So it is that this novel of a childhood has become a book of universal scope.

So, I could hope, for these stories that came out of that same childhood, that same town, that same breath.

New York City

January 1975

¹ Haus ans Hauch, Verlag Der Arche. Zurich, 1952. (English translation by Michael Kowal, in Essays on European Literature, E. R. Curtius, Princeton University Press, 1973.)

The Seadowns’ Bible

In a house on a hill beyond a little town, I used to know an old man and woman. They were the Seadowns. When I was younger I used to go out there to that house and talk with the Seadowns, sometimes for hours and hours until my mother would grow worried about me and have to send one of my brothers for me with a lantern. I knew many people in this town when I was younger and lived there, but the Seadowns I remember now, in this city, above all the others because they would always talk with me as though I were grown up. And, most of all, because they used to read the Bible to me.

The Bible in their house was the handiest thing, as often used as a stewpan; and it seemed always to be in the hands of one of them when I came in, with a finger caught in it so as not to lose the place. The way the Seadowns would read their Bible was a wonderful thing. When I heard Suffer ye little children or Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels… it was like a beautiful story that would hurt my feelings. The words would catch me at my wrists and run along my arms and tingle as they ran, or shoot straight to the pit of my stomach and explode there like a Roman candle; or they would begin at the back of my neck and quiver all up and down my spine like a toy spider on a rubber band or a toy monkey climbing a string.

This was long ago.

Then I had to go away from this little town, and for many years in another town I never heard of the Seadowns. The usual and expected things happened to me: I got older and grew taller and had to shave and found a girl I liked and finally, being of age, went farther north to this city to get a job.

But many times I would think of the Seadowns back there in that house on a hill in my little town—in odd places I would think of them, as in a telephone booth or during that time in the bathtub after washing and you are just sitting not wanting to get out of the good warm water–places the Seadowns had nothing to do with at all; then I would wonder what they were doing and if they were still reading the Bible and if they were still as they had always been. Some nights Ï would even dream about the Seadowns, and in my dreams I could see them walking about their farm or sitting before the fire-place reading the Bible–the way people, long forgotten or left on your way to something (who knows what?)–suddenly come back to you again, in your imagination, no matter what you might be doing—suddenly they come back, like something you forgot to do remembered too late.

This began to happen a little while before a holiday was coming for our store, and when it came I decided to use it to go back to my little town and see those Seadowns. Seemed like they were wanting me to come back, maybe to tell me something (Mama used to say, Last night I had a dreadful dream of poor old Chittah and I know it must mean she wants to tell me somethings, needs me.).

So I went back on this holiday. It was my old town. No one knew me now except in the way a town feels a stranger walking up and down in it and is uneasy with him in it, and curious (and wants to spew him out or take him closer to it and ask him questions). Only an old woman stopped me and said Can’t you be Joe Edward Marks, Lucy Marks’s boy, who used to live by the Methodist Church and would ride my little spotted heifer? I said no, because Î did not want to remember any of it before her although I knew that little spotted heifer well whose name was Roma.

I felt nothing for this little town, except when once I saw in a flower bed made of an old tire some canna lillies and could not bear to look at them again. At one glance I could see and feel all my life in this town in the canna lillies, especially the yellow one speckled with red.

I walked towards the Seadowns’ hill, past the Tanners old place with the cedar tree that still had a forked limb, like a chicken’s wishbone, where once I slipped (and fell) and hung like Absalom until Mrs Tanner came running to save me; past the sawmill, still, now, and like the ghost of a sawmill, and past the graveyard with the same enormous grasshoppers still vaulting over the graves in it, and down the sandy road where I used to walk barefooted, coming home with some fryers or summer squash from Mrs Larjens.

And then I saw the Seadowns’ house. It was still there on the hill and it was the same, although the shutters had fallen and had not been moved from where they had fallen. The wagon we used to ride in had lost a wheel and they had not moved it and it was standing there broken at the back.

I went to the door and knocked. I waited, but I was anxious for I knew the Seadowns were still there and that one of them would finally come to the door and let me in and be glad to see me after I would tell them my name and remember myself to them. After a long time an old man came to the door and it was Mr Seadown. He had a cane and he was not smiling. I told him I was Joe Edward Marks and he remembered me and put his arm around my shoulders and I could feel his arms trembling. I asked for Mrs Seadown and he said that she was very old and very weak and lay in bed upstairs all the time because she was too old to walk. We went upstairs and found Mrs Seadown lying like a shrivelled bean in her bed, so old it seemed she was not even a woman anymore, just something old and white with a bracelet of white hair round it.

Mr Seadown said this is Joe Edward Marks who used to come to see us when he was a little boy, and then Mrs Seadown smiled and tried to reach out for my hand. Her hand was trembling. It seemed everything there at the Seadowns’ was trembling and old and worn out.

I asked the Seadowns to read the Bible to me like they used to do. But Mr Seadown said that Mrs Seadown did not have enough voice to read any lines from it and that he would try.

He read very slowly and in a weak trembling voice some lines he had never read to me before that said, Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, While the evil days come not, Nor the years draw right, When thou shalt say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’….I sat changed while he read them, sat being anything, everything I was nor had been, hearing no words but only the sound of old Mr Seadown’s voice which was like the noise an old door makes when the wind opens and closes it. And then suddenly I was hearing the words And the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: Because man goeth to his long home, And the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, Or the golden bowl be broken, Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, Or the wheel broken at the cistern; Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, And the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

We all waited, for he had finished. He was very tired, and he closed the Book, his warped old finger caught in it to hold the place, as though he were only pausing and were going to read again. Both of them looked at me, kindly but with a kind of dare and a kind of sadness in their faces.

And then I stood up and said, wanting to speak something like these Bible lines I have come back without having done anything that could be like all the lines you have read to me out of that book, Mr and Mrs Seadown. And now you are old and worn out and have no voice to talk to me with. There have been jobs of many kinds for me, but none of them ever anything–like the one I am in now which is a clerk in a dry goods store in the city. And there is a woman named Hazel who lives with me like my wife but who is not because I do not love Hazel, only want her. I have gone here and there, with this one and that one, doing what I pleased with them, and content with my little life and my little possessions. We all waited. But they did not have enough voice to speak back to me.

Then I stood up and said I had to go, but that I would come back very soon, after they had rested up for me, and that I would read the Bible to them, for my voice was strong. I shook their trembling hands and turned out of the room and left.

As I walked back to the bus I came to the graveyard again and stopped there. I stood looking at the graves under the curving of the giant grasshoppers. They have never asked anything of me, I thought, Yet I have failed the Seadowns in my life. And then I thought of all the people in the graves, that they were dead and done, but I was still walking upright. They seemed better than me even though they were lying dead, and then by the graveyard I let it all come back to me–my honest yearning for the little town.

On the bus I felt so ashamed and that night I went to bed feeling ashamed and nothing.

The next day at the store I hated everybody, the floorwalkers talking of their holiday, the ladies in crepe dresses slow in buying; and I was convinced again that this was not the place for me and that I was meant to do something in this world that would be like what the lines in the Bible said when Mr Seadown spoke them. But I had to have money and soon two weeks passed and I remembered Hattie and her little dark flat and I went back and was excited to see her.

Soon six more months had passed and I had forgotten my restlessness and I noticed I whistled when I walked home from the store as though I had done something good there and was leaving it.

But I began to dream, suddenly, about the Seadowns again at night and always they were not smiling. Something was wrong in their faces. This worried me so, like the haunting of a ghost, that I would get drunk to keep from worrying. Then I would say to myself the Seadowns are dead now from all that age and trembling and I have Hattie and maybe when I get more money we can get married. Then I would wake up the next morning sober and relieved and I would find Hattie across from me.

Many years passed until I remembered the old house on the hill back in my town again. I knew the Seadowns were dead and gone now, but suddenly I wanted to go back.

I went on a Saturday, climbed the hill and was glad when I saw that the house was still there. There were people all about, children running playing and I knew that these people were strangers. I asked who lived there and the man at the door said they were the Grotons of course and what did I want. I asked where the Seadowns were and he said he did not know but that they had taken the house many years ago and that it was old and windy and not worth what they had had to pay for it.

I felt as if I had lost something and that I could not go away until I searched a place for where it might be, so I asked if I might go inside the house and look around, as an old friend of the Seadowns.

Inside I looked about and I saw in a dark corner the little wicker table of the Seadowns and on it I saw the Bible, as though it had been left for me. I went over and touched it and then I asked the man if I could have it. He said no that it belonged to the house and that it was late now and he had to go into the fields to do some more work before dark. Finally I said I will give you ten dollars for this Bible. He sold it to me. The Seadowns were gone arid this Bible was mine. I would take it away with me and read in it again and maybe read it to Hattie, which would somehow make her ail right.

I didn’t open the Bible until I got home. But when I tried to read it I could .not. When I would try it would sound dry and forced like a lot of words from a catalogue or like the numbers from a calendar. And I asked Hattie to read it out to me, but she was old and hard and bitter and the words sounded like the man calling inventory at the store the last of the month.

I felt lost and didn’t know what to do. I felt like I possessed a treasure but had lost the key to it. Then I thought, maybe this is not the Seadowns’ Bible at all. But on the front page it had their name in faded ink: Joseph and Sarah Seadown. I was proud of their name in my rooms.

But soon I could not read their name. The book was so old and the rooms so damp and dark. Their name had faded away.

I felt like searching the world for the old Seadowns, but I had the hopeless feeling that even if I found them somewhere they would no longer have any voice to read to me. Then I knew they were gone now and that those days and that feeling were gone with them forever.

And the next morning I awoke to one eternal day of darkness and lost hope and despair, and I never even tried to open the Bible again.

Author’s Note

"That I wrote early on in my sophomore year¹ at Rice and it truly is a forerunner of The House of Breath – it’s astonishing how it is –how much it is –[but again it’s a search and it’s a young man who is bound and in a way kind of cursed, bound, and in darkness, ad who is trying to find a vision that will save him – the vision will come. He remembers that he had it once and threw it away. It was the Bible itself which is the symbol of that vision of light and of escape, I mean, well, of freedom, of liberation, of deliverance is the word. And he threw it away and he can never find it again, you see,] so that it’s Berryben, it’s Boy Ganchion here, it’s that figure –[and what he remembers is the house, these things are always – isn’t it odd that the house could so often contain the means of deliverance. Or so the boy, so the person thinks, so the person is forever trying to return to that place.] It’s perhaps like the Ark, it may be the Ark of the Covenant, it may be the tabernacle, the place where the host is. It may be the Grail, it may be a Holy Grail, God knows, I don’t know. See how much is in there—God———it’s all there, all that So that that story is surely a part, so much part—of———. It means that I was trying to free myself, I was trying to be——go and search and – find my grass——like Glaucus."²

(1) That is to say in 1934.

(2) From an interview with Patrice Repusseau, New York City, June 1975.

The Children

I’m Vikor. I’m eight, but I’m not a boy I’m a deathless form, and I’m not eight, I’m a thousand. I’ve been living always and will live always.

When I was four we came into the city, my mother and me and Tangor and Nerea and Mabsum and little Oker, and my father who was dead. My father used to plough in the fields, and they were green, but when the winter came and the field all turned gray and crumbling everything died and my father died with it. So we came into the city, my mother and me and Tangor and Nerea and Mabsum and little Oker, and my father who was dead. And I cried because I loved the fields and the country and the hills and I prayed for God to make them green and living again so we wouldn’t have to leave them, but He didn’t hear me I guess, for everything stayed like it always was, and I wasn’t the only one he didn’t hear, for little Gantner who bved down the road and who was an old man also, he prayed too and everything was still grey and crumbling and dead in his fields just the same. So we came into the city where we could find something living and green, and so we could eat, but when we got there, everything was grey and dusty and dry and crumbling like in the country, but people still lived on in it and had become just like the city; grey and dusty and dry and crumbling.

But we stayed in the city and my mother went out into the streets filled with madness of wheels turning and noise boiling and searched for a way to keep life in me and Tangor and Nerea and Mabsum and little Oker, and my father who was dead. And she finally got in a laundry place where they wash everybody’s clothes because there’s no room for clothes lines in the choking city, and they gave her a little money for washing and ironing other people’s clothes and she brought it home to us, and when we bought stuff to eat with it she never ate because she was sick and shaking from washing clothes and ironing them all day. But my father never ate much, for he was dead from working in the fields that had dryed up and grown rotten. And I had to go to school in the city where you could hardly hear the teacher for the whistles, and wheels turning and screaming, and people rushing. And there the kids were not like those I went to school with in the country; they were all old and wrinkled and sad and silent and none of them knew how to laugh and pretty soon I didn’t either because I had forgotten, and when I went home I thought little Oker could teach me again, but he too had forgotten and he never played anymore; all he would do was sit and look and grow old and pale.

And soon a big rumbling thing with turning wheels ran over Nerea in the dark street where we lived and I heard a screeching noise and I ran out and found her lying still and quiet in the mud and blood, and I looked up and saw the rumbling thing with turning wheels roll off, and I picked up Nerea and took her into the room by the city street and little Oker and Mabsum and Tangor and my father who was dead came in and looked at her and sat still and silent and she was dead.

And soon little Oker got sick and pale and weak and I stayed home from the school to watch him and he never said anything, he just lay still and quiet like a ghost, and each day he got thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter, till one night he began to cry and I was glad to hear him utter a sound and I knew that he was getting better and I picked him up in my arms and walked about the street with him. The street was quiet now and some wind had got down our way and felt cool like the shade of chinaberry trees and I felt glad because I knew that little Oker was getting better and I prayed to God to make him well again and to leave the cool wind on our street, and I saw some shadows beginning to slip across the bricks on the street so I knew the sun must be coming up, and I heard the noises again as they gradually got louder and louder, and I knew little Oker feared those noises and I began to run as fast as I could, little Oker and I, for our room, but little Oker stopped crying and I knew that he was worse and I ran with all my might as fast as I could with him in my arms and as we ran I felt his thin little wisp of a body grow limper and limper and I felt his breath leave his pale little husk of a body and I knew he was dying. And when I got to the room little Oker was a still quiet form and I knew he was dead. And I brought him into the room and laid him on the floor, and they all, my father who was dead, Mabsum and Tangor, came in as silent as ghosts and looked at him and sat and watched over him as quiet as stone.

And soon I went back to the noisy school and every day at recess I went off to a corner and watched the other ones play and I was lonely for the sound of voices, but no one spoke to me, no one even saw me. No one spoke to anyone. Stone silence except for the roaring noise of rushing things and turning wheels in the streets of the city..

And I longed for the country and green things blowing in the wind and the sky you see by just looking up, with stars at night and real clouds in the day. And the more I thought about the country I began to wonder where it was and what had become of it and how long it had been since we had left and I counted up and figured and decided that it must have been two thousand years or more since we left it. And I longed for it, and seethed inside for it, and cried for it and prayed for it, and one day I decided I would go out and look for it and if I found it I would come back and get my mother from the laundry and my father who was dead, and Tangor and Mabsum and we would go back once more and act as if all was just a dream and as though it had never happened except for little Oker and Nerea who were dead.

So I walked and walked and walked across bridges, through musty, stinking tunnels, across hot, rusty railroad tracks, down swarming streets, across old vacant lots, and by old, rotten houses. And I walked and walked and walked for months and all I saw was old houses, turning, rushing wheels, smoke and railroad tracks and bridges and slimy water and huge buildings and old men and old women and silent, aged children. And it seemed as if I had been walking for years and years, and all I saw was the same thing, no green, no wind, no sky, no laughter. And finallly I gave up and cried and prayed and decided the whole earth was filled with tunnels and railroad tracks and muddy streets and stinking tunnels and rotten houses and old men and old women and aged children, and I felt lost and old and insane and I looked for my mother and my father who was dead and for Mabsum and Tangor but I couldn’t find them. And I grew brave and faced the street and shut my ears to the raucous noises and veiled my eyes to the miserable ghosts walking about the streets and decided that