The Centaur (35 page)

“Hyar,
yaar
,” he said, and stood up, rescuing the Bible from his knee in the same motion.

“Doc Appleton called,” my mother said to my father.

“Huh? I thought the lines were out.”

“They came on this afternoon, after the electricity. I called Hummel’s and Vera said you had gone. She sounded more pleasant to me than I’ve ever heard her over the phone.”

“What did Appleton say?” my father asked, crossing the room and looking down at my globe of the Earth.

“He said the X-rays showed nothing.”

“Huh? Is that what he said? Do you think he’s lying, Cassie?”

“You know he never lies. Your X-rays are clear. He said it’s all in your nerves; he thinks you have a mild case of, now I forget—I wrote it down.” My mother passed to the telephone and read from a slip of paper she had left on top of the directory, “
Mucinous colitis
. We had a nice talk; but Doc sounds older.”

Abruptly I felt exhausted, empty; still in my jacket, I sat down on the sofa and leaned back into its cushions. It seemed imperative to do this. The dog rested her head on my lap and wriggled her ice-cold nose into place beneath my hand. Her fur felt stuffed fluffy with chill outdoor air. My parents looked enormous and dramatic above me.

My father turned, his great face tense, as if refusing to undo the last clamp on hope. “Is that what he said?”

“He did think, though, you need a rest. He thinks teaching is a strain for you and wondered if there was something else you could do.”

“Huh? Hell, it’s all I’m good for, Cassie. It’s my one talent. I can’t quit.”

“Well, that’s what he and I thought you’d say.”

“Do you think he can read X-rays, Cassie? Do you think the old bluffer knows what he’s talking about?”

I had closed my eyes by way of giving thanks. Now a large cool dry hand came and cupped itself over my forehead. My mother’s voice said, “George. What have you done with this child? He has a roaring fever.”

Muffled somewhat by the wooden wall of the staircase, my grandfather’s voice called down to us, “Pleasant dreams.”

My father strode across the vibrating kitchen floor and called up the stairs after him, “Don’t be sore about the
Sun
, Pop. I’ll get you one tomorrow. Nothing’ll happen until then, I promise you. The Russians are still in Moscow and Truman’s still king.”

My mother asked me, “How long has this been?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve felt sort of weak and unreal all afternoon.”

“Do you want some soup?”

“Maybe a little, not much. Isn’t it a relief about Daddy? His not having cancer.”

“Yes,” she said. “Now he’ll have to think up some new way of getting sympathy.” A quick bitter frown came and went in the soothing oval of her face.

I tried to get back into the little intricate world my mother and I had made, where my father was a fond strange joke, by agreeing, “He
is
good at that. Maybe that’s his talent.”

He came back into the room and announced to us, “Boy, that man has a temper! He is really and truly sore about my not bringing home a newspaper. He’s a powerhouse, Cassie; at his age I’ll be dead for twenty years.”

Though I was too dizzy and sleepy for calculations, this sounded like an upward revision in his expectations.

My parents fed me and put me to bed and took a blanket off their own bed so I would be warm. My teeth had begun to chatter and I made no attempt to repress this odd skeletal vibration, which both released swarms of chill spirits within me and brought down from my mother warm helpless fluttery gusts of concern. My father stood by kneading his knuckles.

“Poor kid he’s too ambitious,” he moaned aloud.

“My little sunbeam,” my mother seemed to say.

To the tune of their retreating voices I fell asleep. My
dreams did not embody them or Penny or Mrs. Hummel or Mr. Zimmerman or Deifendorf or Minor Kretz or Mr. Phillips but seemed to take place in a sluggish whirling world that preceded them all and where only my grandmother’s face, flashing by on the periphery with the startled fearful expression with which she used to call me down from a tree I was climbing, kept me company in the shifting rootless flux of unidentifiable things. My own voice seemed throughout to be raised in protest and when I awoke, with an urgent need to urinate, my parents’ voices below me seemed a grappling extension of my own. Morning light the tone of lemon filled the frame of my window. I remembered that in the middle of the night I had almost surfaced from my exitless nightmare at the touch of hands on my face and the sound of my father’s voice in a corner of my room saying, “Poor kid, I wish I could give him my mulish body.”

Now he was saying downstairs in the high strained pitch he used like a whip on my mother, “I tell you, Cassie, I have it licked. Kill or be killed, that’s my motto. Those bastards don’t give me any quarter and I don’t give them any.”

“Well that’s certainly a very poor attitude for a teacher to have. No wonder your insides are all mixed up.”

“It’s the
only
attitude, Cassie. Any other attitude is suicide. If I can just hang in there for ten more years, I’ll get my twenty-five years’ pension and have it licked. If Zimmerman and that Herzog bitch don’t have me canned, that is.”

“Because you saw her come out of a door? George, why do you exaggerate so? To drive us all wild? What good will it do you when we
are
wild?”

“I’m not exaggerating, Cassie. She knows I know and Zimmerman knows I know she knows.”

“It must be
ter
rible to know so much.”

A pause.

“It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.”

Another pause.

“I think the doctor’s right,” my mother said. “You should quit.”

“Don’t be a femme, Cassie. That’s just Doc Appleton baloney, he has to say something. What else could I do? I’m an unemployable.”

“Couldn’t you quit and, if you can’t find other work, farm this place with me?” Her voice had become shy and girlishly small; my throat contracted with grief for her. “It’s a good farm,” she said. “We could do like my parents, they were happy before they left this place. Weren’t you, Pop?”

My grandfather did not answer. My mother hurried nervous little jokes into the gap. “Work with your hands, George. Get close to Nature. It would make a whole man of you.”

My father’s voice in turn had become grave. “Cassie, I want to be frank with you, because you’re my wife. I hate Nature. It reminds me of death. All Nature means to me is garbage and confusion and the stink of skunk—
brroo!
”

“Nature,” my grandfather pronounced in his stately way, after clearing his throat vehemently, “is like a mother; she com-forts and chas-tises with the same hand.”

An invisible membranous tension spread through the house and I knew that my mother had begun to cry. Her tears were half my own yet I was glad she had been defeated, for the thought of my father as farmer frightened me. It would sink me too into the soil.

They had left a potty by the bed and, kneeling humbly, I used it. Only the medallions of my wallpaper watched. Like a flayed hide stiff with blood my red shirt lay crumpled on the floor against the baseboard. The action of getting out of
bed threw into relief my condition. I was weak-legged and headachy and my throat felt glazed with dry glass. But my nose had begun to run and I could scrape together a small cough. As I resettled myself in bed I relaxed into the comfortable foreknowledge of the familiar cycle of a cold: the loosening cough, the clogging nose, the subsiding fever, the sure three days in bed. It was during these convalescences that my future seemed closest to me, that the thought of painting excited me most and sprang the most hopeful conceptions. Lying in bed sick I marshalled vast phantoms of pigment, and the world seemed to exist as the occasion of my dreams.

My father had heard me get out of bed and he came upstairs. He was dressed in his too-short coat and his imbecile knit cap. He was ready to go, and today my sleepiness wouldn’t hold him back. His face wore a gaiety. “How is it, kid? Boy, I gave you a rough three days.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I’m glad it worked out.”

“Huh? You mean about the X-rays? Yeah, I’ve always been lucky. God takes care of you if you let Him.”

“Are you sure there’s school today?”

“Yep, the radio says they’re all ready to go. The monsters are ready to learn.”

“Hey. Daddy.”

“Huh?”

“If you want to quit or take a sabbatical or something, don’t not do it on my account.”

“Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry about your old man, you got enough on your mind. I never made a decision in my life that wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish.”

I turned my face away and looked through the window. In time my father appeared in this window, an erect figure dark
against the snow. His posture made no concession to the pull underfoot; upright he waded out through our yard and past the mailbox and up the hill until he was lost to my sight behind the trees of our orchard. The trees took white on their sun side. The two telephone wires diagonally cut the blank blue of the sky. The stone bare wall was a scumble of umber; my father’s footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was—a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947—and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

Then—as if by permitting this inchoate excitement to pass through me I had done an honest piece of work—I went weary and closed my eyes and nearly dozed, so that when my mother brought up my orange juice and cereal I ate with an unready mouth.

A
LONE HE WALKED
through the white width. His hooves clattered, the fourth scraping (bone against bone), on the limestone plateau, sunstruck from above. Was the dome bronze or iron? From Sky to Earth, they said, an anvil would fall nine days and nights; and from Earth again it would fall nine days and nights and on the tenth day strike
Tartaros. In the first days, when Uranus nightly coupled with Gaia, the distance must have been less. Perhaps now it was more, perhaps—the thought deepened his sickness—an anvil could fall forever from Sky and never strike Earth. For indeed, was not Mother Ge, who from her damp clefts had once freely brought forth the Hundred-handed, the metal-wielding One-eyed, deep-swirling Oceanus, Caeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys the mother of Philyra; Ge who when watered by the blood-drops of her consort’s mutilation brought forth the avenging Erinnyes and the gentler Meliai, the shadows of ash-trees and the nurses of Zeus; Ge who brought forth Pegasos from the drops of the Gorgon’s blood and who mating with Tartaros brought forth her youngest and most terrible son Typhoeus, whose lower body was two wrestling serpents and whose arms stretched from sunrise to sunset and who flung whole mountains daubed with his blood and for a time hid the sinews of Zeus himself in a bear’s pelt—was not Mother Ge who had summoned easily from her brown belly such prodigies now tranced by a strange quietude? White, she was white, death’s own color, sum of the spectrum, wherever the centaur’s eye searched. He wondered, Had not the castration of Sky worked a terrible sterility upon Gaia, though she herself had cried aloud for rescue?

The plants by the side of the road he walked were bare of leaves and sparse in variety. Orchard grass the signature of Ceres, sumac the dermal poison, dogwood whose bark was a mild purge, mulberry and pin oak and choke cherry, staple of hedgerows. Sticks. In this season they were barren of virtue and the ground of blank snow made them calligraphic. He
searched their scribble for a word and found none. There was no help. There was not one of the twelve he had not consulted and not one had given him the answer. Must he wander forever beneath the blank gaze of the gods?
. The pain in his tissues barked and tore like a penned pack of dogs. Set them free.
My Lord, set them free
. As if in fury at his prayer there poured through his mind like the foul congested breath of Hekate the monstrous tumble of aborted forms and raging giants that composed the sequence of creation: a ferment sucked from the lipless yawn of Chaos, the grisly All-father.
Brug
. His wise mind gaped helplessly ajar under this onrush of horror and he prayed now for only the blessing of ignorance, of forgetting. Politic, he had long ago made it his policy to ask of the gods only what he believed they could not help giving. The gates narrowed; he mercifully forgot a little of what he knew.

The scene he had left behind him came to trouble his mind. His child lying fevered. His heart moved in pity for Ocyrhoe, his one seedling, with her wealth of hair. Needed a haircut. Poor kid, needed everything. Poverty. His inheritance, deskful of debts and a Bible, he was passing it on. Poverty the true last child of Ge. Sky, emasculate, had flung himself far off raging in pain and left his progeny to parch upon a white waste that stretched its arms from sunrise to sunset.