Had I a Hundred Mouths (22 page)

“Don't I need a pass?” Quella asked.

“No, Quella. Run.”

She was alone in the hall again. The pudding will be ruined, she thought. If the school burns, they will have to save the pudding and the May Fete pretties. She could smell smoke, and then once she was sure she saw a flame lick out of Boys' Lavatory, but she would never go in
there
to put it out. She went very fast to Homemaking and in the room she went right to her and Helena's cup with the soft ball in it. She felt it. It was still soft. She went around looking at other cups. Margy Reynolds' was not ready but was still just ingredients in a cup of water. But some hand or finger had been in it all, in all the cups and pans, who had been meddling in Homemaking? She thought she heard the crackling of flames above her, so she rushed to close the windows, and as she ran out, she swiped her finger through her and Helena's ready mixture and strung it along the stove and floor and on her dress; but she licked it up quick and slammed the door.

Then she ran through the hall, not liking the halls this way, with no pass, without classes in the rooms, no different teachers standing or sitting there as she passed them. How scarey the school seemed now, full of the echoes of her clapping feet and her panting. She passed Miss Purlow's room and looked in through the door. On the blackboard were written the lines in beautiful penmanship:

and under the lines was—what? Was it a joke or what? There was a curious disheveled chaos of giant and dwarf runaway shapes, tumbled and humped and crazy… like the Devil's writing or like a ghost's. She ran.

Then she was by the auditorium and stopped to make sure there was no flame in there to eat up all the May Fete pretties—the dresses and the paper flowers, the paper wand and all the paper streamers. She could feel something in there! There was some live thing in there! She listened. No sound. She looked through the pane of the auditorium door and what should she spy but George Kurunus sitting on the King's Throne like a crazy king in a burning building. On his head was the silver crown and in his ruined hand the silver wand. He was into everything, who would keep him out of all the things at school; he was a disturbance in this world of school and in her own world, touching and tampering with everything she did. She thought she saw him rise and come down from the throne and down the aisle towards her, after her; and she ran away and down the hall, now full of smoke she was sure, hearing him after her—
sh-sh-sh-sh
—and seeing rags of flame waving out from alcoves and recesses at her. She ran out the door and into the open, without looking back. If the schoolhouse burned it would burn him like a cricket in it. She would not tell.

She was thrilled to see all the boys and all the girls lined under the trees and gladly joined them. She stood shivering under the trees in her place in line, waiting to see what was going to happen, in the unearthly quiet that lay over all the school people, over all the school building. Suddenly at a window on the second floor she saw his face, as if her fear of fire had a face and it was George Kurunus'. No one else seemed to see it—was she imagining it? for she now had the insect-headed and devil-bodied image of him in her head. No, there it was, his face, looking down at her, she was sure. And then she thought she saw him crying! If he was crying she wanted to save him from the burning building, to call out that he was in there, or to run in and save him herself; hurry! hurry! hurry! But suddenly the all-clear bell that would bring them all back to where he was, separate and waiting, but never back to him whirred out, convulsing through her whole body and through his own tilted body like electric shock…it was all a nightmare: if there had been no fire then there had been no George in the empty building, she thought.

Now they all began to move, in their colors like a field of flowers jostling in the wind; and she saw again, for sure, his grasshopper face at the window, watching them coming back to the skulled building of stone that held him like an appetite or a desire that would surely, one day, get them every one: all the beautiful schoolchildren gathered and moving like the chosen through the heavenly amber afternoon light and under the golden leaves—the lean ball-players, the agile jitterbuggers, the leaping perch of yell leaders, the golden-tongued winners of the declamation contests, Princes and Princesses, Duchesses and Kings, and she, Quella, among them, no safer than the rest but knowing, at least, one thing more than the rest.

C
HILDREN
OF
O
LD
S
OMEBODY

For Katherine Anne

On the road, the dust at his feet, where was he bound, where was he to go, our Old Ancestry? He seemed to find no rest for the sole of his foot. For he knew another country that had a landscape he could not wink or water out of his eye; and he had another language in his ears.

Where was the leader, whom to follow, shall we follow a follower? was the thought that hissed like a snake in the brake of the brain of his times and led to confusion in the flock, for a thought can destroy. It was a time when everything shifted and changed, swarmed around and clustered on an idea or a craving, used idea and craving up, or wearied of them, then scattered to pieces again; it was a time of confusion of cravings, it was like a bunch of sheep dispersed and broken, shepherd or no…he only followed when he was supposed to lead, another sheep, one of the broken flock, and could not summon them all together; or there was no shepherd (maybe that was the trouble), he was lost under the hill. Yet the permanent gesture was passing up and down, hovering, vanishing.

Fallen to the grasshopper, the plague year at hand; brother against brother, the community broken into Real Estate, a price on the head; flesh sealed up, men in a male prisonhouse, the women gone mad—where was the road, the wayfarer's flower, the bird in the air, the roadside spring? It was out of this broken flock that he broke, free and loose, to keep the idea of himself uneaten in his brain. Preserve my image of myself, he thought; set my skull over this image like a glass cover. Losing this, befouling this image is whoring all our hope, the fiendish betrayal of Satan, the destruction of our Old Ancestor.

So he was a shape of dust—and if all things return to dust, fall back into it, dust was his great pile, he the dust-grubber, himself formed of the dust of the ground, from which he would find the first things formed out of the ground and bring them to himself and to us all to see what would we call them. Breathed out of dust, he was yet the enemy of all dust-eaters; he would save the dust from the appetite, from the blind voracious driving bite of hunger: the grasshopper and the worm. Then, before it all is eaten, he would have his hands in it, on it, to touch it to smut it with his fingermarks—but even more: to shape it, out of its own dust and with the miraculous light of his own dust, and thus set it away, preserved. Shaped from no more than the small and agitated dust of dancers' feet on the side of the hill, all his aim and all his desire was to return to the dust to prospect in it and to save the grubbings. Consider this old road-runner: he is shuttler, hoverer: face at windows, fingers at panes, stick-knuckles on doors. But the dust is at his heels and his feet are on the road that he thinks to lead him for a little while to the blood beginnings of himself.

So the figure of Old Somebody comes to mind; this is to consider Old Somebody, who had no more of a name than what people gave him when he was not there to hear it.

Once, in another house, in another country, there passed on the road by the side of the house an old stranger who sometimes turned off to come to the back door and knock upon it with a stick he always carried. We of the house would know his knock on the house and though we seldom went to answer him with fear, unless it was after dark and a convict had escaped, we always felt a vague unearthly question in us as we went to answer his knock, as though some great unnameable phenomenon, like weather or like love, knocked on our house to call us away or to tell us something. This old stranger would knock and call out, “Somebody! Somebody! Hello-o-o!”; and for this we came to call him Old Somebody. What fears or visions the children of the house might have had of him no elder would ever know, for children's images sink into nameless depths of themselves—there is this loss to recapture, to salvage up from the fathoms, hovering over the depths to rescue the shape when it rises. We came, then, people of the house he knocked on, to the back door to see this old knocker covered with dust. Given a begging—some momentary mercy; a biscuit or a cold potato or a dipper of well water—he would turn away and we would watch him through the window as he took his road again and went on.

To threaten children in the house against the repetition of any mischief they had it in their minds to commit, the elders warned them that they should be given to Old Somebody to take away next time he came, as any begging, unless they corrected their ugliness in advance or dried up and straightened their face right that very minute. “Old Somebody's goan come get you and carry you off down the road if you don't hush it right up.” So they used Old Somebody for a threat: we would be delivered into the hands of a passing figure of dust if we did not behave. And what we had to grow into was the knowledge that, behave or no, his hands would have us, this old haunting threat, this old vagrant intimidation.

And so we learned that the dust trembles at the touch of dust, agitates its own kind, rouses it, bestirs it, recruits its gratuitous army of it, dust, that becomes a choir of dust; and everything is taken, behave or no, by Old Somebody. For in the winter the ghostly fruit that clove to the unleafed branches would crumble at the touch and fall to the ground, fruit of dust. We dug holes in the ground and cupped our hands around our mouth and cried into the dirtholes “Old Somebody! Old Somebody!” and covered up our cry with dirt, while elders thought it was a warning to a doodle-bug that his house was on fire.

Tales told of him tried to create him in the minds of us listeners. It was told how when the boardinghouse where Old Somebody once lived burnt to the ground, how he appeared suddenly as if risen up out of ash and was seen fingering the ash—and how he found something and disappeared with it. Was it some old ashen vanity of his past that he grubbed for and found, some object his flesh had loved, some locket or letter or picture frame with the face once in it vanished?

And it was also told how he lolled and haunted about in the winter orchards touching and gathering the ghosts of summer fruit that hung like balls of dust on the bare branches. Was it to save them? How moss was Old Somebody's beard, how the Devil's Snuffbox, sifting to rusty powder in the hand that picked it from the ground, was Old Somebody's dippingsnuff; how the urchins of dust in corners that the broom could not snare were the resdess children of Old Somebody. He belonged to all ghostly, elusive, vanishing things. All vanishing things! We would not give our life, our heart, our soul to the Devil of all vanishing things. Yet how they haunted and begged the heart and how one grieved after them. We knew that it was said to us that we must cleave to the permanent things and let all vanity pass; but think how because a life was given, haunted and called after by all vanishing things from the first, to vanishing things that appear and then slip away so suddenly, passing through the hands and on away, think how a life so given therefore suffered and was cursed and set on evil ground, unstable in unstable things. But what else could be done but to claim unto oneself,
passager
himself, what was his, all passing things. We pass with them and in them… they do not leave us behind but pull us on down and away with them. But to leave something of us both behind, a shape of dust in the dust, was the task, so early taken, of Old Somebody's children.

We grew into the kind of men who wished only that our life might be often enough in our own hands—something that arrives, knocks, announces itself, is looked upon in a clear, still moment, goes away, and appears again—to give us a feeling, and a sense of its shape, so that we could describe it and get that joy of recognition from it that comes from handling something one wants to
know
, all over, as a lover, though later lost. For such children made up their mind that in their time all their purpose and all their desire would be to discover and establish, for themselves, at least—and, they hoped, for many men—a sense of self as related to this coming and going that asked to be shaped; and if we could set down a line, a chain, a continuity to keep a touch between men before us and ourselves, all linked together through what happened, burst living again and into new being out of dust, then we might leave figures of dust in our time and out of our time, and go into the dust that was ours, waiting for other hands to shape us, and joined there. We grew into the kind of men who kept, by nature and as if we had made them and named them, a resdess, loving watch on things—there was some shape to this roving watch of ours. Beyond this, indeed all around this, lay a huge, roiled and anxious shapelessness, the impulsive and unquiet and suspicious doings of men, hunts to kill, plots to gain, plans to trick to glory or increase. But we knew where the exquisite and delicate morsels of dust were given to us: the sweet glaze on trees called rawsum, the little bled and crystalline droplet of gum on a fallen plum, the tiny single sup of nectar at the end of a shoot of sweetgrass. Exhalations, musks, juices, gums and icings, we knew them as well as any bee or hummingbird or butterfly that fell into insect of dust at the end of any summer. These were there, then, for us to come and see, come and get, for us to admire and touch, our own discovered shape of things.