CHAPTER 3 Three Tales from His Childhood
TRUTHFULLY, I PLANNED from the beginning to bring into the narrative at precisely this point Rochelle’s version of three tales told to her by her father when she was a child. Or at least that is what she claims. It’s quite possible that she invented them herself (quite unlike her, however; her methods of composition depend heavily on observation and memory; she leaves formalism, fantasy, hallucination, meditation, etc., to others).
Let us think of this sequence of tales as coming from Rochelle’s own novel about her father, a project I will describe and speculate on in some detail later. At this moment I am concerned with her lovely, fragile ambivalence toward her father, a man she believes is either a demon himself or is merely possessed by one. I am also concerned that she believes it was not always true that her father either is a demon or is possessed by one. She believes that when she was a child, a young child, but one of indeterminate age, it seemed to her that her father loved her. That’s very important. It may be the hinge of her ambivalence. These tales are important to her (important to me for other reasons, which doubtless will soon become apparent) because it seemed to her that her father never loved her as much again as when he would take her like a flower into the curl of his huge arm and, at her urging, tell her tales from his childhood. Or so she believes.
Only three of those tales from the many that he told her remain with her today, perhaps because, above all his other stories, it was these three that bore significance for him, telling them, as he apparently did, three and four times over, when he never repeated any other tale even once. And too, it may be only that these three bore significance, later, for Rochelle herself, when, as emblems of an as-yet-unrevealed future, they foretold either the name of the demon he would become or the name of the demon who became him. Regardless, it was with stories such as these, tales from his childhood, that she first learned to perceive her father’s present perfected state (her very words), and that is the context in which, in her attempt at a novel, she offered them to others. It is not, of course, the context provided here, in spite of the fact that the prose style and narrative form are strictly Rochelle’s. The context offered here, my personal contribution, is merely the frame.
The Fighting Cocks
Every morning Hamilton Stark [in Rochelle’s ms., this character is named Alvin Stock; for obvious reasons, I have substituted the name of the person she was really writing about. More on this later. The author.] fed and watered his father’s fighting cocks. His father had told him that it was his “job,” and for doing it Ham received every Sunday a small amount of money, which his father told him was called an “allowance.”
Ham also had to feed and water the chickens, but because he enjoyed doing that, he didn’t consider it part of his “job.” He had chosen a name for each of the ten hens, and whenever he discovered a gravel-colored egg in one of the nests, he thanked whichever bird had laid it, saying quietly in the dusty light of the henhouse, “Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Harriet.”
Living in the henhouse with the hens was a fat old rooster named Henry. He was a Rhode Island red, like the hens. To Ham, Henry seemed shy, especially compared to the fighting cocks, because he only crowed twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, and quietly at that (unlike the fighting cocks, who crowed loudly and constantly). Ham liked Henry, and in spite of his shyness, Henry seemed pretty friendly toward Ham too. Not as friendly as the hens, maybe, but surely more friendly than those fighting cocks.