The Hair of Harold Roux Page 34

  “But you know it didn’t melt,” Janie said. “Anyway, I liked the Timothy seeds.”

  “All right,” Aaron said. “Before she left the barn she reached into the gunnysack and filled her pocket with Timothy seeds.”

  “The chickadees would eat them all up,” Billy said.

  “Do you want to hear the story or not?” Janie said. She turned to Aaron. “He’s already heard about how smart Billy was to understand the hand language and make the medicine.”

  “He wants to hear about Janie, too,” Aaron said. “Anyway, the birds had all gone, remember? Even the chickadees.”

  “So, smarty,” Janie said.

  “Maybe you both know the story too well,” Aaron said.

  “No! No!” they said at once. That wasn’t the question; of course one knew a story, and the knowing of the story didn’t hurt the story. They were answering his tiredness, the suspicion that he would just as soon not tell the story now. “No, Dad! Come on!”

  “And don’t change it,” Janie added.

  “Everything changes unless it’s written down,” Aaron said. “And even then it changes.”

  “No, you can’t change it!” Janie was upset. She suspected betrayal; tears were moistening her eyes. She didn’t like paradoxical statements of any kind and refused to see any sense in them at all, just the cynical attitude behind them, which meant betrayal; was life so complicated one had to say what one didn’t mean in order to mean what one meant? Janie’s clear eyes, their wide pale look with all feelings there shining from inside would give the lie to all paradox if they could. On Billy’s longer face paradox got its recognition less grudgingly, and for him the story would no doubt soon change, though its words might not.

  “All right,” Aaron said. The children grew quiet, vibrant, tensely silent while he told them how Janie searched through the frozen forest and came, at dawn, to the terrifying waterfall and cliffs they had both seen in the old lady’s eye. Oka’s and a deer’s tracks led along a narrow trail in the sheer cliff, a trail no more than a foot wide in the cragged rock along the side of the cliff, and it led directly toward the thunder of the falling water.

  At this point Janie Benham held his arm in both her hands, her blond head pushed against him, half-hidden, fearful, trembling, proud. This was the little girl’s bravest moment. To go on because of love and duty, the terrible energy of the water on one side, the narrow path beneath her feet, the icy cliff at her small shoulder, ahead old stories of vicious gods and monsters. Had they taken Oka and killed her? Would she find Oka hung on a hook, her warm body turned into cold meat? Or was Oka now a battered wet cow-corpse tumbling over rocks in the chasm below?

  Now Aaron took them back to Tim Hemlock’s log cabin, back over the miles of iron-hard ice, through the frozen trees where no bird flew and no wind whispered. In the morning Billy and Eugenia discovered that Janie was gone. Billy found the crampon tracks like pricks made by needles in the ice, but Eugenia insisted that she herself follow Janie’s trail while Billy took care of his still-unconscious father.

  And so Eugenia made the long journey and came to the waterfall. She had always been afraid of heights, but it was her little daughter who was lost, and she made herself take the narrow trail along the misty cliff. She came to the end of the trail beneath the falling water and found nothing but a blank wall of stone. Convinced that Janie had fallen into the maelstrom and was dead, she wanted to let herself go, to die herself among the battered rocks far below. But Billy and Tim Hemlock still needed her, so gathering all her courage she returned home.

  Then it was Billy’s turn, in the night when his mother was asleep, to follow that hopeless trail himself. In the cold morning light he came to the falls and the dangerous trail along the cliff. He was tired and hungry, but he was nearly a man, the only man in his family now who was not sick, and he would go on until he saw for himself what had become of his little sister—or until what had happened to her happened to him. He had hurt himself before, and been hurt; he knew what happened to all living things: trees, animals, the tall grass cut down in summer and fall. But even so he found the tracks along the narrow ledge, read them as his father had taught him, and went on.

  Billy Benham was now tense beside Aaron, his small hands clenched as he stared straight ahead toward the mountain he could surely see. The dangers a boy was about to face, alone, only his small life going toward the indifferent world.

  When Eugenia awakened, back in the cabin, the fire was nearly out. Once again the gray light of dawn filtered wanly through the ice and the small windows. The cabin was cold —too cold, near to freezing. Immediately she felt its emptiness. Billy had gone while she slept; she had not taken care of her children. Her husband lay on his pallet, his breaths faint mists above his thin nostrils. She knew without looking or calling out that both of her children were gone, gone forever into the cold.

  Now Agnes, too, dreamed of the story, her book in her lap. And how would you like it, Agnes, if your husband might never awaken (as he sometime won’t) and your children were gone (as they will be)? Her eyes gathered them together this evening, in this warm enclosure.

  Billy and Janie had heard, again, that ending tonality: And now to bed.

  “We’ll finish it tomorrow night,” Aaron said.

  “Dad! Please! Please!”

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s late,” Agnes said. “School tomorrow.”

  “I want to hear when they’re happy again!” Janie said.

  “But you know they will be,” Aaron said.

  “No, I don’t!”

  Could he not believe her? Her wide face was flushed, dark with true feelings, the hurt of unfairness. About her compressed expression her light blond hair swirled almost weightlessly.

  “Oh, all right,” Billy said, disgusted—a beautiful simulation of utter disgust.

  Aaron almost said, Look, do you want me ever to tell you a story? Why do you act this way? “You’re both going to bed and that’s that,” he said.

  They had to go, of course, but with those particularly eloquent grudgeries children do so well with their postures, thus robbing him of the nice feeling that they would both be so safe upstairs in this fine house he had provided for his family.

  He would not look over at Agnes, who watched him, her eyes feeling out for him, showing her feelings. She always understood what was for that moment not to be understood, went toward levels of understanding that hurt him and ignored, as if willfully (but not willfully, he knew), the meanings he meant when he said what he didn’t mean. Why of all women had he chosen this one whose mind he could never predict, as though its turns and counterturns were of another age—the dark conclusions of a midwife, medium, oracle or coven witch. Conclusions always wrong and never wrong. She could be fooled, and had been. But she could not be fooled, and hadn’t been. She was a mystery, the only woman he had had to marry, whose central places he must enter but could never understand. Sometimes when they spoke to each other it was as if in a third language native to neither of them.

  The tour of Lilliputown’s wonders had been conducted by Harold for those who hadn’t seen them, and now in the slanting sunlight at the rocky pool Allard, Mary, Harold, Naomi, Nathan, Angela, Knuck and his girl from Litchwood, Vera Upstairs, were gathered listening to Hilary David Edward St. George, who played his ukulele and sang in his boyish tenor.

  “Let him go, let him tarry,

  Let him sink or swim.

  He doesn’t care for me,

  And I don’t care for him!”

  It had been the theme song of his flight during the Battle of Britain, he explained, and some daredevil types had sung it as they broke through formations of HE-lll’s, the jaunty words coming through their radios along with the stutter of machine-gun fire.

  “I’m going to marry

  A far nicer hoy!”

  Plinkety-plunk went the little ukulele. Hilary next sang “Roll Out the Barrel.” His flashing vaudeville smile was unaware that the others�
� enthusiasm was nowhere similar to his, but his blithe confidence in his talent was endearing.

  Cold brown bottles of beer were stashed beneath the silvery falls at the head of the pool, and Knuck, in his under-shorts, swam back and forth bringing bottles to everyone. Vera Upstairs sat primly on the ledge above him, refusing to get into the water.

  “Come on, Vera,” Knuck said, his politely wheedling tone false and out of character. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

  “I don’t have a bathing suit,” Vera said.

  “Who needs a goddam bathing suit? Strip down to your goddam skivvies and come on in.”

  Vera looked to the heavens, her face set. She was a muscular, somewhat clay-colored girl whose thick calves were iron-gray above her white bobbysocks. Knuck’s attitude, she seemed to indicate, was much too vulgar for a high-class party like this.

  “Aw, come on, Vera, don’t be so fuckin’ prissy.” Her face set harder. Knuck was a little drunk. In a loud aside to Allard he said, “Jesus, I can’t understand this broad.”

  Harold, too, thought Knuck’s behavior too crude for the party he had in mind. “Maybe we can fix Vera up with a bathing suit,” he said. “There’s a whole collection of odd clothes in the laundry room.” Mary, Naomi and Angela were going down to change into their swimming suits and they took Vera along to see if they could find something for her.

  Knuck surfaced, blowing spray. “I’ll never understand that broad,” he said. “She gimme a blowjob on the way over here and now she’s scared somebody’ll see her goddam knockers. Christ, I pull her out of a horseshit hogwrassle in Litchwood with Maloumian and all them crazy bastards and bring her to a high-class party like this and she gets all hoity-toity on me.”

  Harold shuddered at the name of Maloumian, and then said, “Knuck.”

  “What?”

  “I mean I hope you won’t get too …”

  “Too what?”

  “Well, embarrassing to people.”

  “Me?” Knuck shook his head as though to clear it for such a consideration. “Okay, Harold. From now on I’ll be a perfect goddam gentleman.” He retrieved his beer from the ledge and drank as he floated on his back. “If I get too bad just give me a kick in the ass. ‘Course, me and Vera’ll disappear into the boondocks from time to time. That all right?”

  “‘Oh, my name it is Sam Hall, it is Sam Hall,’” Hilary sang, plinkety-plunk.

  Harold, though proud to be host, was still worried; Knuck’s white body displaced the dark water with the powerful nakedness, even obscenity, of a shark’s rolling belly.

  While the girls were away Allard and Nathan changed into their trunks. Harold built a fire in the stone outdoor fireplace and arranged the blankets around it on the sparse grass and pine needles. The sun sank lower, warm and friendly to the skin but with a just perceptible lessening. They were friends in a private place surrounded by permission and the masking woods.

  Nathan’s pelt of black chest hair gave him that evening’s name, “The Otter.” After an awkward dive he swam back to the steeper bank and pulled himself shivering out of the water, saying that though he shivered he wasn’t cold—he always shivered. Allard watched him shiver from being alive and eager for events, for seeing great beautiful Angela, beautiful slim Mary, beautiful dark long-boned Naomi, even Vera Upstairs whose near-ugliness was the encapsulation of her selectively willing mouth, cunt—whatever the crude words were in the world of her men. Or maybe Allard was again investing himself in someone else’s anticipations. When he dove into the water himself it was all cool light hands.

  The girls came back and he stood facing them, hands on hips, the sun touching him with its warm distant regard on separately felt ridges of muscle. Angela in smooth white satin, the creamy giantess; he could understand Nathan’s feeling of bonanza. All that healthy, spanking flesh, every pound alive. She and Nathan dove into the pool and swam together, an otter darting about a great white seal. Mary and Naomi stood on the ledge for a moment, day and night, Allard’s light and dark Iseults. Vera appeared in a red bathing suit that must have been designed for a middle-aged woman, with a skirtlike apron in front meant to hide some kind of excess or other. She didn’t want to go into the water but hesitatingly waded in from the shallower side, standing inhibited by the chill, the water just up to her knees, her arms folded across her heavy breasts until Knuck arose from the shallows, a sea monster within a nimbus of spray, and grappled her as she screamed in real terror and was taken down into his deadly element where she was at once seemingly drowned, raped and eaten.

  Harold, kneeling carefully upon a blanket edge as he fed the fire, turned his face toward Mary and was visibly stunned by the slanting sun’s celebration of her. She dove into the pool, smooth as a returning minnow, followed by Naomi, a dusky golden nymph in black, and then by Allard to whom the pool became them and they were both his at once.

  Allard moved as though pulled through the water shadows toward where Mary flashed light gold and Naomi a darker gold, and came up next to them. He put his arms around them both and felt the immediate resistance, their backs tense but not really enough to be an overt signal to him; they wanted to pull apart from each other and from him. He couldn’t have both of them. He was supposed to be with Mary tonight, or maybe forever. No, no, said those faint but deep signals.

  Tonight Naomi was supposed to be with either Hilary or Harold—that would be decided politely, precisely, but later. As Naomi swam away from him he felt loss, even though Mary was here in his arms, her cool lips upon his collarbone. “You’re pretty,” he said. She said nothing and he was afraid she had read his mind. Not really afraid, for he felt that he had nothing, not one thing in the world, to be afraid of.

  They sat on the blankets around the fire, the girls having so delicately ripped their rubber bathing caps from their heads and shaken down their young hair in the last of the sunlight. Vera’s hair was wet because she hadn’t had a bathing cap, and her soggy, slate-colored hair made her sullen. She drank her beer in gulps, offended because (again Allard’s attention was perhaps going beyond its rights) she wanted to be here and wouldn’t think of going away but she hated the way Knuck was treating her. Allard tried to think of a time in his life when he had given up so much just to be somewhere not alone. It seemed that he could remember the feeling but not the actual circumstances.

  Hilary sang, urging them to join in.

  “Roll me over in the clover,

  Roll me over, lay me down and do it again”

  In its comradely bawdiness the most innocent of songs.

  Harold roasted hot dogs over the wire grill and they all tasted the bite of yellow mustard and the singed hot meat. There was plenty of light bitter beer and after a while an easy silence as the sun went behind the trees. Nathan, that mountaineering otter, held his great Angela or was held by her. Naomi and Harold sat Indian fashion on the blanket next to Mary and Allard, Naomi there because she had helped Harold serve the hot dogs. Hilary was the solitary, as so often happens, in the company of his ukulele. Though Knuck, beneath their folded blanket, had been trying to do something or other to Vera Upstairs that she found somewhat embarrassing, the easy silence had now come over them all. Harold was the agent responsible for their permission, whom they did not fear; only Knuck might act uncouth, but he was a friendly force not to be feared either. All of them were young enough to remember having been chased out of paradise.

  Harold sighed contentedly and said, “What would you consider a good life, Allard? I was just thinking that here we all are, pretty young. What are we going to do with our lives?”

  Allard wondered why Harold couldn’t live his life right now, beginning with Naomi. He saw Harold’s pale white nervousness as it might tremble under Naomi’s tender care. If she wanted she could lead him into tremendous changes.

  Harold said, “What do you see in your future, Allard?”

  “When I grow up?”

  “Yes, if you can be serious.” Harold’s voice meant Don’t break thi
s fine moment with sarcasm.

  “All right, Harold. Let me think.” He put his arm around Mary, feeling her deep pleasure, deep enough so that it met her desperation about him—an intensity that might have been frightening, but he had no fear. “I’m looking into the future,” he said, deciding to try not to be flippant. Why not reveal certain real daydreams now, silly and exciting as they might be? He was among friends and admirers, whether he deserved them or not. No, you never deserved such things; they came unquestioned, as rights. So he decided to tell them one of his fantasies: “I envision an apartment in Manhattan between 8th and 23rd Streets, not too many blocks east or west of Fifth Avenue. I see high ceilings, tall windows, many books, parchment yellow lampshades over comfortable chairs, some modern, some not, paintings and drawings of the same mixture on the walls, all interesting. It is a ground-floor room, and the plane tree, or maybe it’s a fig tree, in the small back garden through the French doors has turned yellow and dropped most of its leaves on this fine October evening. There are maybe ten people in the spacious room, all of them interesting friends, and next to me stands a lovely and intelligent woman. Although it is quiet, the thick brownstone walls admit some of the vibrations of Manhattan—just enough to let us know that the world continues. Champagne has been chilled and poured because it is an occasion, a surprise arranged by my friends. On the coffee table is a novel with a handsome dust jacket; it is mine. It was just published today.”

  “Ah,” Harold said. With his arms around his knees he stared into the fire. “Yes, that’s good. I’d like to be there, Allard.”

  “And your novel, Harold, is to be published the next week.”

  Harold laughed softly. “May it all come true.” His voice turned nervous as he said to Mary, “What about you, Mary? What would you like to see?”

  “I’d like,” Mary said. “I’d like … Why not say so? I’d like to be the woman standing next to Allard.”

  Allard felt pain he could not quite locate, as if he, not Mary, had been too much revealed by her candor. This made him thoughtful, a little cool, and they sat side by side quietly as the others took their turns at describing the future.