The barrowfields, p.9
The Barrowfields, page 9
At long last, he exhausted himself and returned to the quiet and shadow of the burial tent to sit in vacant contemplation of nothing.
The time had come to return sweet Maddy to the earth. My father and the other pallbearers removed her austere wooden casket from the hearse and carried it with great difficulty to the grave. Father closed his eyes and wept when she was lowered into the ground.
He became a ghost, my father. In the days and weeks after Maddy’s funeral, he sat at his desk but no longer wrote and seldom read. Our house, at night, was quiet but for the saturnine sound of the piano coming from downstairs, but it was I who played, and not my father. As my artistic endeavors increased, his declined precipitously, as though in our house there was not room for both. This went on for months, with no end in sight.
Later that year when winter returned to Old Buckram and the anemic sky was invisible day and night, it seemed my father’s depression only deepened. One arctic morning while Father and Threnody slept, Mother and I got up before the sun to attend to the horses. The wind that had circled the house and cried at the windows all the previous night had gone elsewhere. Now the black-white winter world was still.
In the barn at the bottom of the hill I scooped the sweet feed with a discarded coffee can and smelled the black pelleted grains and molasses. A cold steam rose from the watering trough. As the horses worked their buckets, I climbed the ladder into the loft and threw down two bales of hay that bounced and cartwheeled to a stop at Mother’s waiting feet. With a hoof knife, she cut the twine and tore out a fistful of hay from the middle of the first bale, held it to her face, and breathed it into her lungs. “That smells so good I could eat it,” she said. Alfalfa was a delicacy to her.
“I’d like to see that,” I said, laughing.
“You don’t think I’ll do it?” She pulled down her scarf and put an alfalfa stem in her mouth, Huck Finn–style, and chewed on it. “Oh, that’s so good,” she said. “I should make myself a sandwich.” She saw me looking down skeptically from the loft. “You don’t believe me? You want to try a piece?” I climbed down and tried one. It was as advertised. Sweet and dusty and floral. “I can see why the horses like this stuff,” I said.
Father was at the piano when we came back inside, but he wasn’t playing. He was just sitting there upright, his hands folded in his lap. There was no decaying sound in the air and no lingering hint of a last-played chord. The piano was dormant. Mother and I, giddy and excited from our time outdoors, quickly realized from the abyssal silence that we had intruded upon Father’s realm of purgatorial quiet. He cocked his head to signify that we’d been observed and then returned his chin to his chest.
I walked quickly by and whispered an inaudible apology for our intrusion. On the steps I turned and looked upon him again. He was unmoved. Quietly, I said, “Good morning.” My voice broke and what emerged was surely unheard by him because he didn’t respond, so I repeated my greeting. He nodded without looking at me and tried to smile. “My ears are ringing a little,” he said. “I’ve noticed it happens when I play. It’s distracting me.” I looked and saw a tuft of white cotton protruding from one of his ears.
Mother drove me to school that morning. I walked in through the gymnasium and down the hallway to my first class. Ms. Williams, who taught English, caught me by the sleeve. She was a friend, or perhaps an ally, of my father. She seemed to understand him better than most people in Old Buckram did, which in general was not at all, and this understanding was rooted in their shared love for books and literature. She’d even come by the house a few times to peruse what she called his “staggering collection of books,” and usually when she spoke to me, it had something to do with Father. I’d never seen him say much to her and he’d never so far as I knew engaged her in any conversations that one might have with a close friend, but he clearly appreciated her interest in his books. I hadn’t yet had her for a class, but she’d always been very kind to me and so I was very fond of her in return.
Looking excited, her nose still red from the cold, she said, “I just found out—can you believe it? What did your father say?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, which she deduced from my baffled expression. “About the book! What’d your father say about it? Is he furious?” I was at a loss. At first I thought she was talking about Father’s book. “He hasn’t said anything,” I said. “What book are you—”
“Oh, you don’t know. Okay, well, then, I don’t feel so terrible for not knowing. The library—Mrs. Ester”—she indicated down the hall and mouthed the name with a scowl—“they’re trying to outlaw another book. In fact, they’ve done it already. This all happened last week.”
“I didn’t hear,” I said.
“Somehow I didn’t either,” she said. “I’m sure someone made a calculated decision to keep me uninformed as long as possible because they knew I’d raise hell about it. Do me a favor, please. When you see your dad today, tell him to call me. This time it’s Faulkner, of all people.”
On two earlier occasions, well prior to the point I attained meaningful literacy, the school had banned books from its library and the commissioners had followed suit, removing the same books from the county library as well. The books were, predictably enough, Lolita and Tropic of Cancer. (The school and county systems apparently did not have a copy of Tropic of Capricorn or know it existed, or that one doubtless would have been prohibited as well.) Father had appeared in a public forum and made a subtle and eloquent plea for an abrogation of the decrees on both occasions, and somehow won over a sufficient number of townspeople that the prohibitions were reluctantly reversed upon his recommendation—although, as an inevitable concession, certain age limitations were placed on the books that remain in effect to this day. He was the only one of them, naturally, who had read the books and therefore knew the contents and whether they were as irredeemably salacious as popularly claimed. I knew of these prior battles only because I had been so informed by the dear Ms. Williams, who spun these legendary tales of battle for me in fantastical, even improbable, terms, and regrettably I was too young and foolish then to doubt the veracity of the stories or to know that tales where good triumphs over evil become more fantastical and improbable over time.
Faulkner’s trouble in Old Buckram came at the behest of Mrs. Ephegene Ester, a prudish cousin of the aforementioned Mrs. Tichborne, maniacal librarian of note. Mrs. Ester, more formidable even than Mrs. Tichborne, wielded significant political clout with the board of education due to her family’s long tradition of service in the Old Buckram school system and their rigidly upright standing in the community (dare not describe it as erect). Upon hearing of the “unflattering discourse about the Holy Father” in As I Lay Dying, Mrs. Ester made the decision to interdict this masterpiece from the school library and all school reading lists. This was done with the full support of a coalition of local churches, including our occasional church. When the county commissioners were told what Mrs. Ester had done, they couldn’t get a quorum together fast enough to remove the offending book from the (rather paltry) county library as well. Disappointingly, the literary embargo barely made news in Old Buckram.
I daydreamed through my classes and fancied how Father would receive the news and fly into action. I foolishly saw this as an opportunity to return him to his previous vigor. At school I raised the issue with several teachers and classmates and proudly announced to anyone who would listen, “Believe me—my father is going to set these people straight.” I said things like “Oh yes, he’s a lawyer. I fully expect he’ll bring a lawsuit against the county if he has to,” and “There’s no way in creation he’s going to let this stand. Mrs. Ester is going to rue the day she pulled that book off the shelf!” I even lied once and said I’d talked to him and that he was livid.
When I got home that afternoon I went straight to Father’s library, where I found three copies of the book and promptly started reading the one that appeared to be the least expensive. It wasn’t as prurient as I had hoped, or prurient at all, for that matter. The part I read didn’t make a great deal of sense to me. Still, I couldn’t wait to tell Father. I knew he’d be furious and would rush to mount a spirited public defense. I waited that night bundled up and shivering on the terrace to see his headlights coming over the distant hill and caught him in the driveway.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, my teeth chattering out of my head. “Mrs. Ester and the commissioners banned Faulkner!” He walked by me in the dark.
“So I heard.”
“Can you believe it?”
The response he gave was the merest shrugging of his shoulders. His indifference went through me like a spear.
Dismayed, I trotted along after him and followed him inside. He took off his coat and laid it over a chair in the foyer. I sensed an unspoken irritation; an unidentified source of frustration. Hearing Mother coming down the stairs, he picked up his coat and quickly cut into the parlor and then down the corridor to the Great Room. When he entered the room he dimmed the lights with an abrupt thwack of the switch and, with visible impatience, began straightening a few items he perceived as being in a state of disorder, such as a pillow that had fallen forward in its chair and a stack of books that had been pushed aslant. He then ducked down behind the bar and reappeared with a dark liquor of some kind that was made no less opaque by the addition of water or mixer or ice. He glared at me with exasperation.
“Do you want one?”
He was destroying me, one word at a time.
I said nothing, so he talked to his glass: “An old client gave me a bottle of moonshine the other day as payment.”
“Did you try it?”
“Not yet. I’m saving it for a superior occasion.”
Drink consumed. Another poured. This one took ice. He looked around the room where evidence of passed time had begun to accumulate. A forlorn vase of forgotten spring flowers and a scattering of dried petals. Stacks of unread newspapers. A room redolent of promises made and unfulfilled.
“The book,” I said.
“Yes, the book. Tell me about it.” He was hardly paying me the slightest attention. I could have said “I’m going to set this house on fire,” and he would have said “Superb.” My enthusiasm routed, I said, “You honestly don’t care?” He said, “Tell me why I should.”
“It’s Faulkner,” I said. “They’re banning Faulkner. They’re banning As I Lay Dying, for god’s sake. You have three copies of it. Three hardcover copies. How can you not care?”
While Father and I talked, Old Buckram was abuzz with activity. Word of my boastings at school had gotten around. With all my talk I had unintentionally caused an escalation in the Faulkner affair. In response to my intimations of a swift and devastating reprisal by my father, literary hero to the masses, there had been a meeting of the church coalition, led by none other than Maynard Houck. In this case, after being notified by someone at the school that I had (unwittingly) issued a challenge on Father’s behalf, Maynard wasted no time in calling together his like-minded clergy to discuss strategy. Word was disseminated along the usual channels, and within a couple of hours an impromptu bonfire was organized at the Barrowfields, where copies of the offending text would be brought and returned to ashes and dust.
Our phone rang at eight thirty, well after dark, and long enough after Father’s arrival that he’d finished one bottle of spirits and started another. I could tell from Mother’s voice that the caller was not a stranger but also not a close friend, and that the news was something disconcerting.
“Where is this happening?” I thought I heard her say. “And why are they doing this? Yes, I’ll tell him, but—” I ran into the room and found her standing, hands on hips, in a posture of indecision.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s at his desk. Why? Did something happen?”
“I don’t even know if I should say anything. Come with me so I only have to say this once.”
We went upstairs and Mother spoke to Father’s back. He was not working or reading. A closed book sat on the desk to his right under the lamp, but I could tell from how it lay there that it wasn’t being read and would never be read. A serpentine trail of faded condensation rings, lately stained into the wood, made a loose spirograph on the desk, the last one partially occluded by the tumbler now resting in Father’s right hand.
“Henry,” said Mother, “that was Catherine Williams on the phone. She wants you to know that they’re going to…they’re going to burn the books tonight at the Barrowfields. She said she knew you’d want to know. She hopes there’s something you can do, but—” This dispatch was delivered with all the gusto of an executioner relaying a death sentence to a man on the gallows. Father turned to look at me but said nothing to Mother. “What books?”
“As I Lay Dying!” I shouted. “I told you earlier!” To Mother, I said, “They’re going to burn them?”
“Your mother said books, plural.”
“All the copies of As I Lay Dying,” I said in disbelief. “They’re all going to be burned.”
The news of the burning sent me into a wild delirium. In my adolescent paranoia, I interpreted the burning as a direct affront to my father in response to my boasting—an affront intended for our whole family. They were thumbing their noses at us. The open defiance was sickening to me.
My father stared into the well of his glass. Its contents snaked their way into his mouth and disappeared down his throat.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mother. “There’s nothing that can be done.”
“We have to do something,” I said to Father. “How—how can they do this? We have to go down there and stop them.” He remained unmoved.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Mother. “Think about it. Would you have your father ride in there on horseback and fire pistols into the air? And what do you think would happen if he did?”
I screamed “How can you not care?” at Father and went out to his library and brought back a book. “You don’t care that they’re going to take those books and set them on fire?” I opened the book and tore out a handful of pages and threw them on the ground.
“Stop it,” said Mother.
I went back to the bookshelf and came back with another book.
“Don’t you dare,” said Mother.
“You’re telling me you don’t care. Fine. If you don’t care—then I don’t care.” I ripped out another handful of pages and this time threw them on the desk in front of him.
“That’s enough!” said Mother.
“We have to stop them!” I cried. “We can’t let this happen!”
“Quiet,” said Mother sharply. “You’re going to wake Threnody.”
“What can we do to stop them?” said Father at last, his sudden words startling Mother.
“We have to go down there!”
“That’s not a good idea,” said Mother. “Someone could get hurt.”
“No one’s going to get hurt,” said Father, his tongue thick with brown liquor. “But, for god’s sake, as you say, there’s really nothing that can be done. We’re not vigilantes. There’s nothing strictly illegal about what they’re doing. If they want to burn the library of Alexandria, they can bloody well do it.”
Seizing on what I thought to be a clever technicality, I said, “They’re going to burn books that belong to the county. Tax dollars paid for those books. They’re public property!” Like a spoiled child, I pulled at Father’s arm to bring him to his feet.
He resisted and said again, “Son, there’s nothing to be done.”
“Then I’ll go,” I shouted. “I’ll go and handle it myself!”
I stormed out of the room and ran outside to the balcony of the porch. Through my heaving breath, I stared into the dark and looked across the valley for a glow from the Barrowfields. There wasn’t one—they hadn’t started yet. A dryness began to form in my mouth and in my throat. I thought for the first time about going down there alone—of going without him—and a crushing, overwhelming sadness moved through me. I was scared half to death. What would I say? Would I say anything? I knew I wouldn’t say a word.
The door opened quietly behind me. It was Father. I dried my tears with my shirtsleeve and turned to face him, trying to reassemble my courage and defiance. Before I could speak, he said, “Let’s go.”
Relief flooded through me and the feeling of deliverance was so great that I almost fell to my knees. Before I could reach him, he said, “Son, this is a mistake.”
“Why’s it a mistake?”
“Because no good will come from it.”
“I don’t understand. We have to do something. I said you’d—”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
We loaded up with warm clothes and got out to the driveway. Mother came outside with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a muted but insistent colloquy ensued between my parents. Father’s head dropped in resignation and then Mother’s did the same. She came over to talk to me.
She said, “You don’t have to do this,” but I couldn’t be persuaded. My passion had somehow become tied to an irrational belief that, with the gentle tug of my insistence, Father would rise up out of the ashes and find himself again. I started pleading my case to Mother, but she cut me off. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “Believe me, I know how you feel. You are, after all, your father’s son.”
“We need to go,” I said. “We’re going to miss it!”
“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
