Bright Flows the River Page 9

  He knew Mary was afraid of everything. She was afraid of the glorious terror of love, and had only sensed it at a far distance and had never approached it. She was afraid of “what people would think,” and afraid that she was not doing her “duty” at all times, afraid that she might be forced from a safe threshold into the enormous windy spaces of chaotic thought. Mary’s favorite word was “comfortable.” It was not “comfortable” to question where there was no answer, though, in truth, she did not fully know that there were no complete answers. Above all, it was sinful to question that which had been “proved” through the ages, and what had been written in Scripture. To accept was to be secure. Not to accept everything was to open yourself to danger and fear. She did not put these thoughts into words, for her mental vocabulary was very limited, but she felt them in her soul, and shivered. To have one’s neighbors think ill of you was to be rightfully ostracized; to live as you wished to live, in defiance of what was “moral” and approved and conventional, was to be an outlaw. She believed Tom was an outlaw, and was considering, more and more, leaving him. It was bad enough when he talked “crazy,” as he was doing now. But it was even worse when he “drank” and laughed and danced and sang. She shut herself out from the knowledge that he often did something unspeakable of a Saturday night. She knew, from whispered gossip, that he sometimes visited one of the few brothels in Cranston. She ignored this knowledge as much as possible, for it was a relief that he didn’t “demand anything” of her any longer. If she had ever loved him she had forgotten it. It had been enough that he had “a little money from the war,” and that he had a farm, if a poor one. Mary did not like the country, but land was land, and could be sold. Moreover, she was thirty years old at the time of her marriage and was weary of being a drudge in a dirty rooming house filled with raucous men who were attracted to her thin but pretty figure, her long smooth legs, the promise of fulfillment in a generous bosom, her dark but handsome face, her really beautiful black eyes and black hair. That she had a prim and forbidding expression was not at first noticed. She had never cut her hair and so it was a gleaming mass of braids wound about her small head, and seemed made of black glass. Moreover, she was clean and “tidy” and unapproachable, and this teased the earthy men in her aunt’s boardinghouse. Her voice, however, had no strong intonations; she spoke in a neutral way without inflections, and her little narrow convictions were outspoken and firm and inflexible.

  “Your mother,” Tom would say years later to his son, “was a ‘good’ woman, and that was her curse, poor thing.”

  Mary was also without true intelligence. Things were what they seemed to be, and had no subtleties, no protean character. The evidence of her senses was her only truth. She was as certain of her restricted religion as she was of her opinions, which were all based on what she had learned in church. Wonder was alien to her, delight was incomprehensible, laughter was suspect, “too much education” was effete. Work was her true god, and she totally believed that God labored without rest, and gloomily monitored His only world. A laughing God would have seemed blasphemous to her. She knew the cant that “God is Love,” but she did not know the meaning. She loathed sex, considered it “sinful” even in the marriage bed. She agreed with St. Paul on the subject. That God had created male and female to have joy and pleasure in each other would have seemed obscene to her, if she had ever given it a thought. Never once had she felt an exhilarating response to any man, never once had she trembled in his arms and felt the eager tremors of ecstasy. A wife did her “duty,” and above all she was responsible and worked every hour she was awake.

  She never recovered from the hot bloodiness of birth, and the “shame” of it. A child was living proof of lasciviousness, of hectic movements in the dark. She had been a virgin, of course, when she had married Tom Jerald. She could not now remember why she had married him, though marriage was the proper state of a woman. She never forgot her first night of marriage, and tried never to remember.

  “You are a Calvinist,” Tom once said to her in disgust, angrily disappointed that the promise of the full breast had been a lie.

  Mary did not know what Calvinism was. But it seemed to her that Tom had thrown a curse at her.

  It took him at least two years to learn to tolerate her, and even, at times, to be sardonically amused by her. He taunted her for her rigorous religion, and she prayed, somewhat vindictively, for his soul. She firmly believed in hell, and that hell was Tom’s ultimate destination. Now she was convinced that to live in the house of an unregenerate man doomed to damnation, was a sin, and that she must leave him if she were to escape the wrath of God. Even more, she must remove little Guy, for his father was a threat to his eventual salvation and his entry into heaven. As much as it was possible for her to love she loved her small son. She must teach him, unremittingly, that he had been born to work and to serve God and do his duty and accept whatever arduous responsibility God inflicted on him. His father, in short, was an evil influence. Guy would never know pleasure, if she could help it.

  The Roaring Twenties, with their hedonism, bootlegging, wantonness, and general disregard for the accepted moralities, had come belatedly to Cranston, and somewhat costively. Even Mary could not be unaware of all this, and so she clung with passionate sternness to her religion and her convictions. Her skirts never rose above her slender ankles. Her skin had never known rouge and powder; her lips were pale and unyielding. Now, at thirty-six, she was a paragon of grimness. Tom sometimes, and with amusement, considered safe ways to “put her out of her misery.”

  Once he had bought her a bottle of jasmine perfume. That was three years ago, on her birthday. He was quite aware that he was being teasing, but he could hardly wait for her remarks. She had opened the bottle and had sniffed at it and then had thrown back her head in repulsion, as if, he thought, she had smelled dung. She had poured it out on the ground in black silence, but had thriftily kept the bottle for condiments. She never started a flower garden. That was a waste of time. She had come to hate the farm. The lusty odors of earth and cattle became indecent to her, too reminiscent of the marital bed.

  Now it had become her “duty” to leave Tom. She had remained with him for nearly six years in the hope that she could “convert” him and save him from his heathen nature, and possibly save his soul. The hope was gone.

  Years later Tom was to say to his son, “A ‘good’ woman can do more evil in the world than Hitler or a Stalin, or any of the other monsters of history. Those bastards could only kill bodies. But women like your mother can, and do, kill souls.” He would add, “And they never know how much terror and death and agony they inflict on others, and how they deprive others of life. Stupidity is a worse crime than murder, and to believe that your truth is the only truth is an insult to the God of variety and versatility.”

  Mary never knew that her husband was an educated man. To her, education beyond the basics was decadent, a condition which was unnecessary, time-wasting, and contemptible. When Tom used words and phrases totally alien to her she would regard him with suspicion and would believe he was “showing off.” The “parlor,” a dank, dark little room, was filled with his many books, which she hated and suspected. They were “worldly.” She never asked where Tom had acquired them, but she resented his spending hours reading them when he could be “making the farm pay.”

  She now agreed with her neighbors that Tom was beyond redemption, and that he was a menace to herself and her son. She would take Guy and make him a “good man,” living always in the “fear of the Lord” and doing his duty, and shunning “sin.” Guy would never live as his father did, heedless, unworthy, lacking in ambition, disdainful of money, despising work, blaspheming God.

  It had taken this vernal evening, this evening full of the fragrance of the carnal earth, the voluptuous earth hinting of open thighs and procreation and wild exultant jubilation, to fix her “duty.” She clashed the stove lids with unusual vigor, and her pallid lips were a cruel and righteous slash in her face. H
er eyes almost disappeared in her taut and bony cheeks; they were merely a vicious glint in the falling light. All her gestures and motions expressed her deep rage and disgust. Tom did not appear to notice. He was still staring through the window, and Guy, in his rocking chair, was watching him, and his infant face was bright with love and expectation. When Tom was present the very air became alive and sparkling, and full of laughter. The more outrageous his words, the more gleeful, and though Guy rarely completely understood he felt the import, and would often clap his small hands. When Tom sang shrilly, in his high voice, Guy would sing with him, to Mary’s anger. “What filthy words!” she would cry.

  “Now, how would you know?” Tom would ask, reasonably. “Never thought you’d ever heard them. Maybe there’s more to you than I ever knew, hey?”

  “In front of an innocent child, too!” Mary would say.

  “No kid’s innocent, thank God. And how’s he going to learn about the world of men unless he knows the vulgar vernacular, too? Nothing wrong with good Anglo-Saxon words. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks.’ That’s what your Bible says, old girl.”

  He would grin at Mary without kindness. How in hell had he come to marry such a stupid wench, such a completely mindless female, if you could rightly call her female?

  “You’ll pay for it someday!” Mary would promise him, with a rare relish.

  “I started to pay the day I married you,” said Tom. Such altercations were the common way of his life. Mary kept a clean house and was a sound cook, if uninspired, but she never helped with farm chores. Otherwise, he ignored her. He accepted afflictions as casually as he accepted living. Nothing much enraged him except stupidity and “virtue,” and the general hypocrisy of mankind and its furious obsessions about the nature of the world, and its often stringent rectitude.

  Tonight Mary glanced at her husband with suppressed fury. “I wish you’d stop your crazy talk and get some more water for me,” she said. “Before you feed the stock. I can’t stand their bawling.”

  But Tom said, as if speaking to himself, “When I married you, old girl, I thought I was marrying the good earth. I didn’t know I was marrying a rock pile. If I can help it this kid here isn’t going to marry until he reaches the sense of years, say forty or so.”

  “Get me some water,” said Mary, who had heard this many times.

  “He’s going to have every hot little bitch he can lay his hands on, before he gets married, so he can learn about women. As if any man ever did learn much about them!”

  He smiled down at his little son and Guy had the impression of light. The kitchen was darkening rapidly, but the great stateliness of the land outside increased. Tom said, “Now, about this business of old Brownlow next door to this farm, kiddo. Your ma said he had ‘gone to heaven.’ Hell’s more likely, for if there was ever a pernicious old bastard he was the worst. Mean, grasping, covetous, hateful, malicious, and full of that hardheartedness your ma’s always talking about. His family hates him, and why shouldn’t they?

  “Son, we don’t know where his soul is, if he had one, which is very doubtful. He never committed what folks call a ‘sin’ in his whole life.”

  “Stop talking that way to that poor child!” cried Mary. “Of course Mr. Brownlow wasn’t a sinner. He was good to the church. He was saving and careful and has a fine farm, which is more than you can say of yourself, Tom. He knew his duty. Guy, Mr. Brownlow’s gone straight to heaven, which he earned.”

  But Tom was concentrating on the child and his face was unusually earnest. He said slowly and emphatically, gesturing at the land outside: “There’s heaven, sonny boy. There’s all the wisdom you need to know. There’s life and immortality. Nothing’s dead. Every stone has its being, every morsel of earth is living. Every grain of sand is sentient—I mean, it kmows. Everything has its destiny; it moves in harmony with inscrutable laws. Only man is tumult and confusion—because there is no law in him. He is the most lawless when he believes he is law-abiding. He obeys the laws of death, and not the laws of life.”

  “You think that little thing knows what you’re talking about?” demanded Mary, with contempt.

  But Tom was looking down into his son’s grave little face. “You know, don’t you?” he half whispered.

  Guy nodded. Tom held out his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go to the barn and feed the cows and then the pigs. Get your sweater and your cap.”

  They went out, hand in hand, Tom swinging a pail. The far mountains were outlined in pure scarlet and seemed to pulse, as if some gigantic heart was beating behind them. The wind was suddenly sweet if cold in Guy’s face, and the air was pungent. A pellucid light filled the arch of the sky. The earth was soft and yielding under the feet of the man and the child. There was that stillness all about them, that joyful waiting, that invisible upthrust of sentience. Guy felt his little heart rising and he was awesomely happy and did not know why. He wanted to shout, to cry, to run, to laugh. Yet something restrained him, and in restraining gave him love and set him free. He had no words for it.

  Tom gazed at the mountains. He said, “‘The mountains have no kings.’ Hosanna!”

  They went to the well together. The ropes creaked and squealed as the water was drawn up. Guy peered over the edge of the well and looked down at the darkly shining water. He saw, reflected in it, the sky and the hills and his own face, so like his mother’s, and the smiling face of his father. A bird called and Tom whistled in answer. There was the throb of wings and the bird came closer. It perched on a leafless tree and insistently queried, and again Tom replied. Guy was only a child but he thought there was something bird-like about his father and he would not have been surprised if wings had sprouted then on Tom’s shoulders. He glimpsed the bird’s red breast. It twisted its head and peered down inquisitively at the man and then groomed itself. It gave the impression that it was among friends and it had nothing to fear. Then it opened its beak and once again the air poignantly vibrated to the long drop of a robin’s song, cascading, as it were, from the very sky itself like the fall of silvery bubbles.

  “Sounds sad, doesn’t it?” said Tom. “Touches your damned heart. You could make up poetry hearing it. Yet, it’s only a male robin’s warning to other males not to intrude on its territory. That’s no poetry, though. It’s a fact. Still, without poetry the world would be a muddy place, wouldn’t it? Myths, I reckon, do have their place after all, if they don’t deceive you into believing they are truth. Sometimes I think myths, if they aren’t sniveling lies without any beauty at all, are God’s works of art. If they are beautiful—well, they do have a truth of their own. Like the symbols of ancient Greece. Not the modern ones, though.” He looked at the bird, who was still singing. “Go on, old fellow,” he said. “You are singing war songs, and establishing your territory. I wish men could do that as sweetly.”

  He put down the filled pail. “Let’s look at the cows,” he said. “I hear that young heifer complaining about something. Females are always doing that.”

  “Shouldn’t I take the water back to Ma first?” asked Guy.

  “Now why?” said his father. “She ain’t in no real hurry, and that heifer sounds like she’s in trouble. Hell, I hope she isn’t freshening too soon. Her first calf.”

  They went into the warm and musky barn. The building might be battered but the roof was tight against the weather and the floor was clean and the hayloft was still piled pungently high. The long light of the evening filled the barn, and the seven cows languidly looked at the boy and man, patiently standing in their stalls. The floor rumbled. Segregated, the young Holstein bull had decided to join the complaint of the young heifer. “Too bad about you, boy,” said Tom. “It’s you that caused the trouble. Want to help?”

  He said to Guy, “Take the water and bring back the milk pails. If your ma tries to keep you, tell her I just sent you and told you to come here for a while. She does talk all the time about honoring your father and mother, and obeying them.” He chuckled. Mary had always insisted that
Guy not be present at mating and birthing. She considered them lewd and revolting. “We mustn’t pollute his mind,” she would say of Guy.

  “If we don’t, God will,” Tom would answer. “God arranged it this way, and I say it’s blasphemous to consider His arrangements dirty, whether it’s man or beast.”

  When Guy gathered up the milk pails and his mother grumbled, he thought of something which had troubled him over his short years. “Ma,” he said, “why does Pa call me Jerry, and you call me Guy?”

  His mother looked down at him, the replica of her except for her expression. Her eyes smiled a little. “I like the name Guy. Read it in a book once, a novel, which was sinful, reading novels. The hero was called Guy. It sounded refined and good, and he was a good man. Your pa never liked the name but I had it given you in baptism.” She paused and her dark face became resentful. “He didn’t want you baptized, and he a Catholic, at that! I thought they was always for baptism and such, though I’m a Baptist and we don’t baptize until the age of reason, or something, about thirteen. He never did tell why he didn’t want you baptized then. Just being contrary, that’s all, and your pa’s a very contrary man. Just want something, and like as not he’ll say no, just to be contrary even if he wants it, too. Anyways, I took you to a Methodist church, and you was baptized Guy Somerset Jerald. Somerset’s my maiden name. Your pa never called you Guy. It was always Jerry, just to be mean. Well, run along with them pails and tell your pa as soon’s milking’s done he must hurry back. Want to listen to the gospel songs on the radio, after supper.”