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 somewhere, 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?
And for the instant that the man adds to his theory that what his son learned by hearing himself voice last night he now puts to use, the man nearly sees what he and his wife were really talking about like almost recalling a dream he had on waking — but catches up with his son and with this old, direct way of doing things.
A joint tenderness of the parents — was that it? — the child who knows things from the very beginning? The man is not ashamed to hang onto it and to what he has heard in the night. Was he the intruder? Halfway to meet him he meets the baby’s glittering eyes, and he won’t back into the shadows. Nice person, he thought his wife murmured. Am I awake the way she is asleep? he thinks. He whispers his son’s name: it means that the child has at stake this awful, right way of putting things together. Mammal messages able to evolve privately between beings. The crib a little less dark tonight, his smile asks nothing, not that he be picked up. His eyes follow what he is uttering because it goes somewhere.