This is Subject A speaking. Am I speaking if I can’t hear anything but these scratches? No questions, just talk. No talk, just scratching. Where are the stitches for me to sew my hands off this paper? Will I blow the scratches off this paper? I have been making scratches outside, for the bird. The dirt is soft and I kick the messages into it, or I carve on the backs of the softer dogs. The cloth stacks are high, here, because we haven’t been making the fires. I can climb to the hot parts and scratch where the cloth is closest to the bird. How will the messenger know what is what. Is that a question?
[15]
This is what they did. They carried the hair on the sled. They went to the other hill and to the mountain, and also under the hill, where you can’t see what color is the bird. This is where the animals have stopped making weather and are resting. My overs say the mouths are stitched up so we won’t get blown on and go off the hill into the air. We never feel much of a blow here because we keep the mouths of the dogs stitched tight. I put mine on the mouth of Ken Green, the dog, and feel the hot blow out of his nose. I put his nose on me and get heated, and then I put the food up on him for a treat. They give me the hair they don’t burn. I also pull hair from the sled and stitch it into a snake until my father takes it from me to burn. He says if I keep the hair when the bird eats out of the black air, then the hair makes a sound I won’t like. He is wrong. I keep the hair and hear nothing.
I make announcements out of my Ben Marcus. I have food to put in it. It doesn’t have all the hair, so it won’t burn from the yellow hole in the bird. Where is the way for it to ride off the hill when there is no sled? No questions, just talk. It has food on it. I have the stick that puts out white air, so I can see even after the bird shuts down. My father uses a smaller stick to blacken his paper. He says that some people can hear with their eyes what he blackens onto the paper, the way we can hear spots on the bird above us and know how much of the weather bottle needs to be poured on the grass to keep the bird in place. I can’t hear his paper. I am supposed to make the bundles. He said that if he wasn’t here, I am supposed to tie up the bundle and give it to the messenger. He never said that, but the messenger is coming.
When the grandfather did his smashes over my father, I had the cloth in my mouth. It wasn’t stitched up. I got to be the one who crawled after them until I ran out of hill and couldn’t see them anymore. They went to where the bird couldn’t watch. The yellow hole on the bird made my hands hot, and I couldn’t blow on the hill through the cloth. I heard my mouth try to blow, and the bird was blue. I couldn’t look at it. There was Jason, Michael, Harold, and she. Then I was there. A gray bird flew out of the bird and fell up the hill. Will there be a visitor come? There were fires after the noises when they were up there smashing on the mountain, and the hair fell down in drops to our grass, where I could crawl on it. I am going to make an announcement soon. He had his arms and legs out in the way someone would show the bird their belly. Grandfather covered my father’s belly with his hands and my father made announcements. Can I ask a question now? The hair burned my hands when I crawled after them. Will the animal put food on me if I bring the hair in out from under the bird? They were the ones who could step on the feet to pull the stitches out. It was them, and then it was less of them, and now it is my Ben Marcus only. It has no stitches, the bird.
LEG OF BROTHER WHO DIED EARLY
The roarer is generally a flat, elongated piece, taken before burial, with a hole in one end, through which a string is fastened, often with serrated corners; by swinging it, it produces a whirling, muted speech; it shows affinity with the brother’s living voice, the rattle and other instruments imitating rain, wind traps, etc. It is used worldwide (from ancient America to the natives of Palmer). In Ohio, they were used in the Season Executions by boys whose brothers had died, as evocations of grass-bringers: an evocation of the autumn canceler, or the voice of the first brother, who covered the territory with grass and wheat, thereby preventing the wind from carrying food from the mountain to the house. It is also used in the foot and leg initiations of the males of a town; e.g. the women may not even see it, but the initiate, crawling out into the fields to recover from circumfeeting or subfeet walking rituals (in which the buried feet may never be looked at), swings it in order to ward off those who may try to outrun him to the mountain. Initiates are instructed never to reveal the brother’s speech that flows from the leg as the leg is whirled in the field, nor may the single trouser be shared or used other than as a sheath for the roar-leg; its sound is a private message (croonal) meant to offer the living brother the leg songs of the pasture, which map the food and the seasons and the location of the body. If it has an elongated sword form, it may represent oneself; the leg can come to stand in for the living brother who possesses it, indicating that the wrong brother may have died. Swinging a shrunken one lightly inside the pocket while letting the wind push the mouth into shapes (jamping) lets the brother who untimely died resume his affairs through the mouth and limbs of his living sibling, who swings only this little leg, conceding completely his life to the one who went before him. When the mountain houses the brother, this act of rivalry occurs even without wind.
HIDDEN BALL INSIDE A SONG
Mutilated Stephen on horseback chased into the forest, a game referred to as the “hidden-ball game” or the “bullet game” by the analysts. It is known that certain figures will chase circular objects when a song is played; the wider the song’s structure, the longer the person will hunt for the ball, stone, or bullet. Built into each song’s melody is a capacity for mutilation that can only emerge when the lyrics are excluded (the melody’s force is often muted by nonsensical words rattling at the surface). In hidden-ball, when the lyrics are forgotten (due to irretrievable dance steps that erase the memory for words), the melody slips unbridled to the foreground and crushes the horseman’s torso. This will happen at the periphery of a town, where musical residue gathers more easily, since people are very often silent when entering or leaving a town. Chatting naturally decreases the music’s power; therefore, the activity is performed with silence. Efforts to cheer are suppressed into dances or other occupations that distract people from speaking. Hidden musicians dot the landscape and emerge from the sand with boxy stringed instruments as soon as the riding Stephen is encircled. As previously seen in the ARKANSAS 9 series, games of musical mutilation last as long as musicians can sustain the song’s repetition, inventing songs within songs when the need arises. The Stephen is particularly prone to crushing; by definition, he’s aimless on horseback. The technique is to get him thinking ball when there is no ball, to surround him as he’s mutilated by the song and just beginning to search for a bullet, a pebble, a walnut. The forest should have been previously scoured of all things round, yet it should remain as the only possible field of search for the Stephen. This is achieved easily. He’ll be devoid of thought, crushed, a bloody man. Circular decoys (not actually round; inflatable, made of straw) should be littered in abundance at the edge of the woods so he’ll race there with a greedy mouth. Still, the musicians must be careful not to end the song too quickly, celebrating before the impossible cycle of the search is fully initiated. There is the further danger of drawing other horsemen into the fold by overamplifying the music and externalizing the lure. Teamed Stephens can easily find roundness where others cannot, so guards can prevent the intrusion of extra horsemen by dampening the field of sound with water skins, enclosing and further strengthening the one Stephen’s playing area. As the song escalates, skinning down around the forest like a horizon squeezing up the land from all sides, the only roundness is the mutilated Stephen’s eyes circling freely inside his boneless head like a voice behind a wall. He is horseless on his knees beneath a whirl of pitches and tones in the center of the forest, looking for something he already has, and the song opens up further and closes and opens and shuts down closed and open in a circle of noise around him.