Night Soul and Other Stories (30 page)

The first night, the man woke to a string of sounds, expelled, quite awful stabs of voice throat-rasped, deliberate, from the crib across the room. So that for a time he felt the person there to be his equal, and he feared for him. In trouble over there, in a small, accurate way the infant is possessed and on his own, and maybe the man can’t help his son, maybe he can’t do anything about it. It is even part of
him
out of control.

A shallow-sleeping family man who will wake in the middle of the night anyway, he woke to the woman breathing next to him, and to the room in the desert, his eyes opening on the window at the foot of the bed, where the screen was ripped, burst, jagged as a wave with an infinitesimal fire—like steel or flesh—telling him something has gotten in here, an animal, a hand. While the terrible sounds from the crib across the room—
ah, ih, uh, eh
—choked-out, cut-off, not asking for anything, were vowels, he realized. As if this is what you do waking alone: you speak, even if you are not talking yet; for anyhow the room is awake. So that getting out of bed beside the breathing of his wife, he would make a noise the baby would hear—who would want his company, or hers. But these vowels uncannily at work, the child is choking or being taken away or accosting whatever it is, so what’s his father doing here in bed? what is he waiting for?

Like a comrade he made his way across the cool bricks, he’s with his son in a moment—
flowed
there to him and stands above the crib in whose immaterial depths a blink of the mouth locates the face. Where are his eyes? Darkened, do they stare behind their lids? They’re asleep in some way and distinct from the child that is his, whose mouth moves as the moon in the window above the crib draws a cloud in front of it. The kid’s in one piece, thank God, thank the stars, thank the desert, but the sounds begin again, for they were no dream of the man’s zig-zagging away through low piñon pines and stunted, ancient-elbowed juniper the way the phone seems to have rung as you wake upon the waste of future and past which dreams are. But where are these sounds coming from if his son was not greeting a predator or giving a name to an intruder? Why, they’re just practical sounds the baby’s actually practicing which the father hears as if his own good depended on it and will try to answer.

And so it happens that he is learning these sounds, like letting them strike what hasn’t yet quite woken up in him: the
ah
, the
ih
. Squeezed off the palate hard, or choking, cut off, not hoarse at all in the dark but blunt, certain, and alone. The man’s no clawed intruder but the father here, a witness; ready for anything—to be his son’s equal, who is alone and launching these sounds, one that goes far, just the intent of it, while the next, you could swear, sends its breath at some near thing. Hearing is like answering him, even if they are no match for each other. He is to be answered. The man believes in it in the middle of the night. It’s what he will tell him one day: answer—not do what they
say
, but don’t not answer. If tongue-tied, at least make a noise. Go
agh
, go
aiee
. Come back at them in a whisper. But don’t not answer. Did the man just learn this, it feels so fresh? Seed planted in him in the middle of the night.

For the vowels are brave. They are things more right than words; but, as the man heard them,
there
and
here
are what they apparently say—
ah
and
ih
, a cast and a return; while the next, the
uh
, as in “mother,” accepts what belongs to you, to this basic person, it measures just this. So to the man it meant,
what you found;
while the next, the
eh
, as in “again,”
stops
what you found and holds it to what it is:
accosts
it; accosts what? the moon moving? a knife of reflected light cut by the ceiling beam? or a memory you can’t have all by yourself? As good as an owl whistling in the arroyo, hearing like this, or some fool—hearing
there, here, found, accosting.

The infant whispered like thought,
old
things are what he whispers into his thinking. The time has come, vowel cries that are about to come again that the man standing around naked in the middle of the night is learning, they are not to him, they are only what woke him. This creature in the crib talks out loud and with something at stake, but in an order more raw and stately—“
uh, ah, eh, ih, aw
.”
He
knows what he’s doing—and to his father’s ear it is
found, there, accosting, here,
just between the two of them a seesaw sense more theirs now, less to be feared.

Though hearing the
aw
sound hard and creaking as a bird, foraging and unconsciously alert, the man made little or nothing of it, and felt free to. So he stepped back so as not to wake the child with his body or familiarity; for if the kid is asleep after all, he could open his eyes that seem hidden by their lids from the darkness and the breathing of the man, and see the man, who now thinks proudly where this is, where they live—a desert state, vast or actually weird—“beloved,” he likes to think, who, waking to the gash in the screen enhanced by the moonlight, forgot he already knew how it got ripped. Waking to these god-awful sounds and the damaged window screen which his eyes told his brain was part of it, he thought
Animal
, an animal had leapt in out of the desert. But no high-hipped bobcat far from its rock or lost bear cub or snouted coati with a taste for the fruits of the night that jumped out of somebody’s truck on the Interstate is going to try a stunt like this. And in his heart like what he knew all along it was of course the same mange- and sore-ridden half-blind dog of yesterday who couldn’t bear the noonday sky, the bright ground, and, wanting the shadow of the house, went for the open bedroom window while the family were having lunch.

His son’s blood is safe from that dog who wouldn’t drink or eat and didn’t even roll his eyes up when he brought two dishes in and then brought the baby in to show him this hounded creature, muzzle on the brick, too tired to have rabies or plague, where he had ended up collapsed with one hind leg out, the hide caked with adobe dirt.

A personal sigh has deepened the room, his wife’s, and it threatens them with her perspective. She turns. She hears with her body, her mind, declines to talk in her sleep, hears her
husband
if necessary, yet will sleep on until, toward dawn, hearing the baby burst out crying, she will probably get out of bed in one motion, go and take him, hold him and nurse him. So the man knows from her breathing she is not doing any serious hearing of these sounds right now. Which come again in the moonlight, vowels in a whole
new
order, called and attempted, or brave; not crying, but uttered.

Plus the
o
-ish
aw
-ish one the man hears as
aw
now—vowel five, it’s his.

They open to each other without at all getting mixed up together, to his ear like talk he hears in the kitchen of a Hopi farmer, a dog barking outside in the dusty wind of the mesa. Sounds coming your way, stopping short.
What was there is here; and now that it’s found we accost it
. At nine months and five days, is his son at it already in a tongue of his own? What does it take? only the breath cut off in his throat that primitively rasps its old use. It goes back into him, a spirit—a way that’s all his. That’s what it is: his son’s language under cover of night brought here from far away. But the man is the father, he’s got too much at stake to let himself believe such things any longer tonight. But has he ever believed them? The
aw
pushes the speaker’s lips, he knows them in his sleep. He pushes them across, so self-possessed by the nighttime vowels.
There, here, found, accosting,
was where the man came in. But then,
found, there, accosting, here.

Are you all right? the woman murmurs more or less remote, as if she is thinking of him somewhere else. Mmhmm, he says, close to his son. Is it that his wife does so much, that she feeds the child? He does not envy her.
What was there is here; and now that it’s found we accost it
. Is it a madness in the infant’s voice which is only nature? And has the man ever believed such things as these coming to him in the baby’s voice? He is aware of a long, winding, affirmative answer but it is going out of him somewhere else and he does not get it. He is going to know his son’s language. It is a son’s language. You can do that much.

It’s changing, though, it’s “
eh, uh
”—
accosting, found
—yet the known sounds
ih
and
ah
after them have changed their feeling to
if
and
dark, ih, ah
—with once again that
aw
which is little more than a neighbor sound following from the “dark”
ah
that’s almost a stranger, an act. So what the man’s getting with
accosting
is:
Only by accosting, you find—and only if dark
.

Thinking it, he can understand it, the baby at nine months old years from such advice which comes best not from the father anyway but from elsewhere, from outside. Is it not from his son at all but
through
his son?—like how the man will speak to the baby (
You’re
ready for a
nap
) but be speaking to his wife, the real other person here? The baby’s mouth opening in the dark, or pursed; nursing the old life of these sounds, practicing it. But there’s a thing somewhere the
man
has to do. Is it the
aw
? On his breath almost more than his voice, he says back,
eh, uh, ih, ah
.

The moon widening from behind a map of clouds stands harsh. Well, the man might be wrong but it’s as if the mind of the probably sleeping infant thinks over what he just heard. There comes a startling new order, “uh”
before
“eh”—
found
; yet not
accosting
, but
again
. And
ih, ah
, but not with the feeling of
here, there
or
if dark
, but of a reaching, a stem. And
aw
. Which he thought was him, the father, taken down into what he might once have been—it shows him that these sounds might be not feelings
or
meanings. Does this baby blink at the moon, squint, not know the man leaning over the crib rail looking into the crib at him and the kicked-off blankets; or is he asleep?

The man crossing the room to go back to bed has his theory. It’s his way of being crazy about his son, of not completely waking when he’s hardly been asleep. The idea is that all this is coming
from
his son—it’s not the child waiting to have something to imitate. It’s late and not much of a theory, it helps the man hang onto the sounds.

Sleeping
or
waking he will go along with his son, who was asleep surely and the man heard him
talk
in his sleep as if it were himself for years and years. While during the next day the man didn’t think of it much at all. For during the day, in overalls, the child watches.

You were up and around last night, she says. The man tells her he might have been sleepwalking the way it felt. You were standing at the crib, she says, did you cover him up? He doesn’t think so. She tells him just how tired she was.
Go
on, he says, for she’ll hear what he means, they accept her stamina and will try not to waste it.
Go on?
she says, but they agree, she will go on being what she is. You were talking again, she adds, meaning in his sleep. Are you sure? he inquires. Closing in on baby as if there’s no difference between what she does and what the man does is the light of their attention powered by this chosen desert light let in by windows that belong to them embedded cave-like in huge, sandy-surfaced swells of adobe stucco. The baby, to whom the parents talk, sees them as if they’re just talking. The man goes
grrr,
and, suddenly airborne out there at a height of six feet above the ground, the road-runner, their rare, most serious and elusive, long, violently shy, narrow-bodied road-runner, is seen to fly exposed thirty yards across the front of the house. While, closer, against the broad window sash of unfinished oak a zebratail lizard not supposed to be in the area comes into focus unseen by their son, who smiles, as if he’s forgotten last night, and brags with a measured
Ha, ha
.

Yet at bedtime you forget that all day you’ve waited for when he won’t be imitating his parents, but sharing a language of his own. And in the man’s sleep it is the second night, and at the same hour the baby speaks out, nine months,
six
days.

And he’s there for him in five seconds to find spread upon his son’s nose and mouth like a flame of milk the pale seal of night-light from a moon gone no higher than the broad southern sky but ready to go higher hauling indifferently this southwestern sea the desert, and the boy with it. Last night’s launched vowelish tries go into each other with a speed of going
some
where, it’s practice but it’s a new night, it’s not a
thing
he’s saying or some outcry, but soundings. So last night’s work is left behind with the man. Not as if he’s stuck with it. But as if the names his son needed have now been given—to the neighbor’s wolf, the high call of the pallid bat feeding on the ground, faces of parents, the hand he examines in the moonlight with his shadowed eyes, the mobile that sways above an intruder’s hand meeting the crib rail, the dog you expelled that the baby would not be surprised to see couched low on the brick floor. These names now made into raw orisons equal what’s outside him, and the father can tell from the uninterrupted tone that the speaker is right. Is that it?