There is no Pegasus — imaginary — real — in the house of the Means. There is father floating among the couches, white as animals long in caves, quiet as a weed, his round mouth working, his eyes twitching, his fat fingers twisting a button on his sleeve.
Purple bath towels hang in the bathroom. I have seen them on the line. They have some colored sheets — one lavender, one rose, one wine — and some brightly yarned doilies you can buy in the living room of a house, a block away, where articles of religion are sold among candies and cozies and pickles in mason jars. The two ladies who make them are also immensely fat and immensely pious. They furthermore sell signs which gloomily, but with a touch, I fancy, of spiteful triumph, herald the Coming of the Lord and the Eventual Destruction of the World. There is a fine one I have noticed in their dining room window which says in scarlet letters simply, Armageddon, like an historical marker. The expectation is tastefully surrounded by a dark border of crosses and small skulls. Mr. Mean bore one of their placards home and tacked it up on the door of the small barn where he keeps his car. In silver script that glitters from the black card it warns of Eternity Tomorrow, and it must have cost him a dollar and a half. At least I take it as a warning. My wife says it reminds him to drive carefully. You see how easily and dangerously she is deceived. However, perhaps for the Means it is not a warning but a hope, a promise of reward; and it no doubt speaks plainly and poorly for my destination that I regard its message so pessimistically.
The Means are Calvinists, I’m certain. They may be unsure of heaven but hell is real. They must feel its warmth at their feet and the land tremble. Their meanness must proceed from that great sense of guilt which so readily becomes a sense for the sin of others, and poisons everything. There is no pleasure. There is only the biological propriety of the penis. In another, more forthright age, they would have read to their children from Slovenly Peter, the picture story book of the righteous, where the reward of moral weakness, of which it was an illustrated catalogue, was a severed limb, the loss of teeth and vision, the promise of a bloody and crippling accident, a painful and malignant disease, or fits of madness — all of these disasters tailored by a wise and benevolent Providence to fit the crime. I remember very well, too, a poem of our Puritan ancestors, in rather strenuous iambics, about a child called Harry, perverse to the heart, who went fishing against his father’s wishes, doubtless on the Lord’s day too, and with the devil’s pleasure.
Many a little fish he caught,
And pleased was he to look,
To see them writhe in agony,
And struggle on the hook.
At last when having caught enough,
And also tired himself,
He hastened home intending there
To put them on the shelf.
But as he jumped to reach a dish,
To put his fishes in,
A large meat hook, that hung close by,
Did catch him by the chin.
Poor Harry kicked and call’d aloud,
And screamed and cried and roared,
While from his wounds the crimson blood
In dreadful torrents poured.
The pattern of punishment here is based on the principle of a comparable eye for a comparable eye but I feel sure that while the Mean children might dread their moral transmigration into ants (a steamroller mash them flat) or butterflies (their arms fall off), all ants and butterflies would dread as much their total intersection. A butterfly, I think, would prefer to die of burned-off wings, with some immediacy, possessing beauty, than to be rubbed, pinched, and buffeted about, losing, before the power of flight, the desire, and before the desire, the eloquence of its design.
I should like to see Providence take the side of the dandelion. A tooth for a tooth would suit me fine.
But of course all the Means have suffered metamorphosis. They are fly-beleaguered bears in a poor zoo with nothing to claw but each other and a dead trunk and no one to hate but themselves, their flies, and the bare, hot, peanut-spotted ground.
4
Mr. Wallace has displayed a certain strength. I had thought him shorn but he has joined the Means. They gather now on cooler evenings on the Means’ front porch, the misters and the missuses, heads together. Shouts and wails of laughter, snorts and bellows as from steers rise out of the porch’s shadows as out of shadowing trees by a wallow bank. It is a juncture, I must confess, that had not occurred to me although I sometimes fancy I am master of the outside chance. It was a part of her that I let slip. Following her gyrations in the grass, her rush and whirl and roaring curse, I forgot her geologic depth, the vein of meanness deep within her earth. Against the mechanical flutter of appearance I failed to put the glacial movement of reality.
I drove them together… an unpleasant end for so pleasant a beginning.
Mr. Wallace was before at large, as I have said; gigantic in the landscape, swallowing life. There was, in him, no respect for my mysteries, only for his own: signs, omens, portents, signatures and symbolings whose meaning he alone was privy to. Mr. Wallace was the paramour of prophecy, yet it came to me when the boy Toll catted across his path that day that it was a stone symbolic more than real that struck the light from Goliath’s eyes. It was for prophecy that Jonah fled the Lord. For Jonah’s flight the tempest rose, and for the tempest was Jonah flung between the whale’s jaws. To be properly swallowed, then, was the secret; to cause, in going down, the oils to flow that would convulse the membranes of the stomach. What must that whale have felt, his moist cavernous maw reverberating prayers and pledges! Would Mr. Wallace be a dog and eat his vomit? I judged that I should soon be cast on dry land. Thenceforth the mystery would be mine, as it was Jonah’s. To be the bait, to carry the harpoon down and in that round and previously unshaken belly stick it, then escape — that would be the trick. And prophecy would do it.
How I was enamored of the notion! All day I lightly walked. Mr. Wallace obliged me by appearing almost at once to record his aches, to dilate upon the midnight’s weather, and to wallow surely, by absolutely predictable thrashes, toward the topic. I was on a vast dry plain. Red rock rose out of its distances. Behind me and before me there were multitudes embannered — murmuring. The sun’s light struck from shields and spears. I squinted at the giant. His figure wavered. I sensed the wet and dry together. Perhaps the ancient Greek philosophers were right about the wedding of these opposites. Dust clouded my shuffling feet. Spume flew to the giant’s face. It is amazing how the feelings of the universal fables sometimes focus in a single burning vision. Of course that singleness of sight has always been my special genius.
I waited. The ankles were painful. I said I had a mole that itched. A bad sign, Mr. Wallace said, and I saw the thought of cancer fly in his ear. Moles are special marks, he said. I was aware, I said, of how they were, but the places of my own were fortunate and I divined from them a long life. Moles go deep, I said. They tunnel to the heart. Mr. Wallace grinned and wished me well and with great effort turned away. It was a good start. Wonder and fear began in him and twitched his face. When again he came he thought aloud of moles and I discoursed upon them: causes, underflesh connections, cosmic parallels, relations to divinity. There was a fever in him, dew on his lip, brightness in his eye. Moles. Every day. At last there was no art in how he brought the subject up. I spoke of the mark of Cain. I mentioned the deformities of the devil. I talked of toads and warts. I discussed the placing of blemishes and the ordering of stars. Stigmata. The world of air is like the skin and signs without are only symbols of the world within. I referred to the moles of beauty, to those of avarice, cunning, gluttony and lust, to those which, when touched, made the eyes water, the ears itch, or caused the prick to stand and the shyest maid to flower. My fancy soared. I related moles and maps, moles and mountains, moles and the elements of interior earth. Oh it was wondrous done! How he shook and warmed his lips like an old roué and trembled and put anxiety in every place! I was everywhere specific and detailed. This may correspond to that. The region of the spine is like unto the polar axis. But I was at all times indeterminate and vague as well. A certain horn-shaped mole upon a certain place may signify a certain spiritual malignity. I informed him of everything and yet of nothing. I moved his sight from heaven to hell and drew from him the most naïve response of bliss, followed first by a childlike disappointment as our viewpoint fell, then a childlike fright. His cane quivered against the pavement. He was in the grip. To be so near, continually, to dying; to feel within yourself the chemistry of death; to see in the glass, day by day, your skull emerging; to rot while walking and to fear the sun; to pick over the folds of your loosening flesh like infested clothing; to know, not merely by the logician’s definition or the statistician’s count that men are mortal, but through the limpsting of your own blood — to know so surely so directly so immediately this, I thought, would be a burden needing, if a man were to bear up under it, a staff of self-deceiving hope as sturdy and leveling as the truth was not: an unquenchable, blasphemous, magical hope that the last gasp when it came would last forever, death’s rattle an eternity.