Speaking Volumes Read online

  “Oh, I’ve had such treatment—or seen similar. Anyway, I still got all my limbs, if not shoes and gloves to cover them—though, who knows, someday I might not. But, no, I’ve not seen that yet in this country.”

  Sam snorted. “Today I won’t even say the word nigger, unless I’m talkin’ of my childhood, before I knew any other. Or to one who plays with it because that’s the only way you can feel that you have some control of what flays you when it’s wielded serious-like. I do it myself, and have certainly gotten my share of laughter and lightness from it. For the rest, bondsman will do. But I think there’s a place for it and there are places that it’s not for.”

  “Oh, that’s daft!” declared Paddy. “It’s just a word, boy. I used it all my life. I was just a little surprised to find I was one—when my grown sister brought me here on the cursed boat when I was ten. Sister?” He snorted. “Half the micks where we used to live before they done kicked me out said she was my mother and had come to this country to shake the shame of having a child by her own pa. Ehhh. I couldn’t care less. By this time shamin’s my bread and my water—I figure that’s what makes a nigger. At least I guess so, at any rate.”

  “And that’s why they call you a nigger as fast as they call me one,” Sam said. “Because you’re used to it, though, they think they can get you to do it again and be grateful in the bargain. That’s a black thing to have in your history.” Sam laughed. “Be glad that’s where you have it. Believe me, the day you forget it, they’ll win you over. So don’t. The world itself has its ways of remembering what everyone in it forgets. That’s one of the things my master explained to me he’d learned from his books, back when he still read them—before he grew angry enough to hack me into pieces. And did.” His eyes snagged on his childhood mutilation—and he took in a breath.

  “Today, they’ve started selling them cocoa leaves in the apothecaries to chew on for the pain—and they’ve always had that laudanum for ladies and light gentlemen. But that wasn’t what they gave no nigger boy in Virginia who’d run afoul of his owner. Bondsman, if you like—and I prefer that, yes, even when I don’t use it. Three days later, he called me in to apologize too. I stood there, with my bound-up hand throbbing, throbbing, throbbing with each heartbeat, as it had throbbed day and night for three days since he’d hacked my ability to work apart. My body was not going to let me forget what had happened, even while I stood and he sat behind his reading table and told he was now contrite. Under the influence, however, he’d simply been unable to think of any other punishment appropriate to a young thief. At the time, there’d been nothing else he could bring to mind to do. Did I understand?

  “I smiled, holding my hand to the belly of my shirt, where, when I moved too quickly or had to use the hand anyway, blood still leaked from the bandage and stiffened it.

  “‘Of course, sir,’ I said. ‘I know you didn’t mean it.’ And I smiled, while I wondered if I slipped half a cup—no, a whole one—of rat poison into his soup or his sauce, it might make him feel, perhaps, half as ill before he died as I felt in that room with him now, like I would pass out, unless I could sit awhile. Did I care whether he’d meant it or not?

  “He’d done it!

  “He smiled back and said I’d made him feel a great deal better, and thanked me for understanding his position. Oh, if I wanted to, I could go back to my work. ‘Certainly, sir,’ I told him, I who’d had only an hour off for my wound. Paddy, if I’d felt stronger, I’d have climbed into his bedroom window with a piece of fencing wire that night and strangled him while he slept.

  “Only I wouldn’t have wasted the strength I had left on him.

  “The first time I woke—at two o’clock in the morning, it was—feeling stronger enough and better than I had been since his drunken fit had shattered me, I rose, dressed by moonlight, and took off through the fields in the direction I’d been told was north. Hey, I won’t try to tell you what I suffered to get here.”

  More from fear of the fact that anyone should care what I wanted or, no, than from a desire to own it, I clutched the volume to the Sunday jacket Mother had made me wear because of the creditors’ coming—though it was still Tuesday before noon.

  “Mmmm.” Standing erect between the cart poles, Paddy grunted. “I was wonderin’ how you’d lost it. But I decided I wouldn’t ask.” He didn’t sound happy he had. “But now I ken it. Twelve, you say you was? Naw, that’s a little young for cuttin’ off body parts. Sixteen or over, at home I’ve seen folks do the same—but that was not in this country.” He shook his head. (I was thirteen, but I hadn’t been that much younger a year ago. Or had I …?) “Hands and feet crushed and broken, useless for life.” A small bull of a fellow, Paddy was half bald; reddish fur pushed from a largely buttonless shirt, torn at elbow and collar, white or ivory perhaps at one time, but now gray with what must have been six weeks’ continual wear. (As was Jonah’s fuzz; ’twas a different gray from that of the high silk hats. I began to wonder why we called them with the same word.) I could see stiff sections over his frayed shirt, which I thought might be splats of white paint—or, some of them, discolored to orange. “Come on. Let’s go!” In a haze of spirits and old sweat, he followed the darky, trudging behind his rumbling load from the house, as Jupe’s, then Jonah’s, own carts thundered up.

  Then thundered out.

  Helen let go her breath. (I think her foot still hurt.) “What awful things to talk about in front of children! It serves him right—that dreadful finger! ” She looked at me. She looked at the book—I could tell she was about to say something like, You’re not going to keep it, are you …?

  She looked at me, and for moments I thought she was going take it away. But she turned, intent on seeing to the needs of Mother, who, I realized, waited in the empty kitchen.

  And we had two beds in our house where, that morning, we’d had six. Once, however, they’d tugged their loud barrows and our belongings out the door, I realized—even at thirteen—I’d acclimated enough to their stink so that I’d have to get used to the house again without it.

  Deemed by the gray-hats unsalable, some bits of furniture remained upstairs. All the house’s bookshelves were now bare.

  As I blinked after the niggers and their barrows—still clutching my bit of the sea—fourteen-year-old Gansevoort stepped up and said, low enough so only I could hear, “I hate those black blaggards, Herman. I don’t care whether they’re from Africa or Ireland. They’re all niggers and they come in like that to rob a widow blind. It galls me and I hope it galls you, too,” while I remembered what it was like to be galled.

  The evening of the creditors, after her own trip around the house—to assess, I suppose, this American calamity that had overswept us like a typhoon—Mother walked into the sitting room and sat in the older of the two remaining kitchen chairs Gansevoort had brought in earlier. (Along with the sofa, three armchairs had gone in the barrows; so had a painting, once on the wall where a rectangular discoloration remained. Looking at the wall, I remembered it had been a landscape. But though I’d lived with it in three cities, in five or six houses, I couldn’t recall if, beyond the hills in the distance, there had or had not been a strip of bright ocean.) Gold and salmon light blazed through the naked panes and speared the room, to fall aslant the shelves, to bend at the wall’s blue corner.

  In the lap of her black dress, Mother counted twelve pennies. Two she’d found in the seams of one pocket, four more still at the bottom of her purse, and six in back of a slat-wood drawer bottom, still upstairs.

  “Oh, Mother, why didn’t you take some and hide it. Just a little—you knew this was going to happen …” Helen waved her fists around before her in frustration. “Oh, I’m sorry. You know I wouldn’t accuse you. But, well, you could have—”

  “Yes.” She looked up. “Yes. But I … because I’m … I’m an honest fool!” She drew in a sharp breath. “You’re right, of course. That’s what I should have don
e.” She looked down again at what chance rather than strategy had left us. “But I didn’t.”

  “They probably expect you to,” Gansevoort said.

  Maybe you remember.

  Back then a penny bought a loaf. (And I think I’ve spent my life since trying to restock my father’s library, buying all the books I’ve bought and sold again or, who knows, writing the dozen-odd I did.) The first night’s supper was another of bread without butter, but this time spring water instead of milk from the Hoydens next door—who sent as well some blankets—with slices of the last onion in the kitchen bin—instead of jam. Mother was pregnant with what would turn out to be Allan (Father’s farewell gift)—and that he would grow up a serious, sober boy who would become the mayor of a small town and, yes, take care of her and, now and again, of all of us is, I expect, the reason I never killed myself, despite the times in one hemisphere or another I’ve thought of it, on those swoops through deepest depression.

  So we ate after a fashion, but Mother did not have the fare we needed to take the train—all nine—to Boston and our own long-suffering grandparents. Two days later she did, though—borrowed, I believe, on an evening’s visit to Lawyer Abernathay, who had been looking out for my father’s foundering prospects and had a kind eye for the widow. She returned with the tickets folded in her shawl, having made whatever promise of recompense she had persuaded him to accept.

  That night, save for Mother, Helen, and the girls, we boys slept on the floor.

  Thus Hagar and her brood entered the lands of immiseration.

  In Boston, at my mother’s parents’, in our first night in their house as fatherless orphans, I slept with that book, first in my hand, then under my pillow, as if it had been a favored toy. Green and pink and brown, with a leather spine, gold stamped, already too worn to read, inside it had type in two columns down small pages of India paper. The next morning, the moment I woke with the Boston dawn gilding the window, I slid it from beneath my pillow, opened its cover, and, with morning itself pouring across it, first read its actual title page:

  Paradise Lost

  and

  Paradise Regained

  by John Milton—an edition rather like Gansevoort’s portable Bible.

  I made a few attempts at it, but was a full fourteen before I got through its first two books. By sixteen, though, I’d read it all, and a fair number of others besides. I was, of course, in love with Satan, as what young reader of that tome isn’t (Oh, if I ever wrote my own book, I’d make an equally hellish hero the center of my tale!) as he leads his dumb rebels to his and their doom.

  And Mother got up in the midst of the night, sometimes even in the rain, to walk out into the fields and woods, making us wonder what we were supposed to do, and feeling more abandoned, till Helen and Gansevoort would go looking for her and most times bring her back.

  Later I wondered if my grandparents hadn’t been happy we’d quit them. They worried about my mother seriously, but not having her there was easier than being reminded of her eccentricities one to three nights a week. I was told in no uncertain terms I had to work. So, for three months, I was a boy clerk in a bank.

  Once Allan got himself born, closer to Springfield, we ten moved into a house that would have been full with four. My grandparents could hope that, with all of us off in a farm toward the edge of the property of a Mr. Cowell of Amherst—the property ran all the way to Boston—Mother was at least in God’s and her children’s hands—and no longer in theirs. Fortunately, though, we soon forgot it.

  Still, when she went wandering, most times they found her, Gansevoort and Helen. (“No, you stay here, Herman,” Helen would say. “I don’t feel right leaving the little ones alone, even if they’re sleeping …”) But twice they came back from the moonlit fields and woods without her.

  We didn’t see her till she came back on her own, dress torn, face scratched. She said she had gone into the woods at night. No, she claimed, nothing untoward had happened.

  Hair darker than mine and pulled back in a bun, Helen wore high-necked dresses and aprons without appliquéd flowers or frilled edging—in order to seem adult. She said shopping for flour and butter and getting what we needed for dinner and cleanliness was easier if she acted the eldest, which she was.

  And so she rushed toward spinsterhood.

  Between her and me was my big brother Gansevoort, his curls lighter, except in summer when the Dutch in us came out, tow in me, chickadee yellow in him, at least during our childhood. Had I been the proverbial savage, noble and naked (and when I was away on what became my Typee, I was for a month, though I left that out of the book with a few other things as a concession to damned gentility), it would have been the same on my butt cheeks, the backs of my thighs, my flesh burned red brown as an Indian’s beneath the hemp and my hair gone gold above it—white gold.

  Everyone said we Melville boys were bears.

  If, in summer, I ran through the back fields without shirt or shoes, by the time I was fifteen, new and profuse on my chest and back, my shoulders and arms, the heavy hair went all but white blond. And what did I think as I stopped a moment, breathless, to stand, with the sunlight all around and gnats and midges swirling before and beside, and the sky limpid as spring water? Why I was the same age that Helen had been when, in Albany, we’d learned of Father’s death. And within the same breath, I realized: My sister had had no childhood at all. Yes, she had chosen to work for us and give every aspect of her life for ours, but it was the choice of a slave who decides to work for the harshest of masters because she fears the world outside is even harsher, so that such seems simply the sanest option.

  And what next did I think, feeling the dry earth under my bare feet, among the long grass my pants held away from my legs—save one spear that had got under a cuff to tickle my calf inside my pants leg—beside those woods from which Helen was always so afraid vagabonds would emerge in the evening who would do unspeakable things to our family, especially our wandering mother, in the night?

  I must escape this maelstrom of guilt and find the world, the America outside these sun- and cricket-filled hills, this fecund farmland, which, because of the guilt of we who moved here, might easily have been a wounding wilderness.

  In winter, from pate to merkin, my fur slipped back to Helen’s hue. At sixteen I had a beard like a man’s. Though he didn’t come into his own bearhood till seventeen, Gansevoort would fight for me at the drop of an insult, and, only slightly more reserved, I’d tussle and tumble with Josephus and Zachary and that tomboy Lucy and Annekin—two lived in one direction up the road and three lived down the other—for Gansevoort’s honor and rights. I’d even heard Helen screech like the mother of all banshees at one neighbor’s brat, who she feared had hurt one of us.

  Though Helen defended and more and more fed us, the five delightful nuisances (who doesn’t see his younger siblings so?) were my personal responsibility, I felt. On Monday nights I cooked their dinners and confused their names, so that they giggled and sometimes even answered to the wrong one, and, anyway, the cooking was only once a week, Mondays. Gansevoort did it Tuesdays. Mother did it Sundays, so that, those nights, Helen could study. We were all our sisters’ and our brothers’ keepers—

  Which is why you can’t call me Cain.

  Each of us idolized particularly the next oldest up and thought her or him our most perfect friend—Gansevoort in my case, Helen in his; down to little Thomas, who, through idolizing me, ended up far more of a sailor than I ever did, a captain of his own ship. But that was years later.

  Mother was a wonderful woman—presumably, mothers are—but she was not the sanest in the world. Why go into it more …?

  Once, sometime after sunrise, Mother came wandering in on her own, as if she’d done nothing unusual—though she was tired and stayed in bed most of the day. Not Helen or Gansevoort or I had even woken that night, and spent the morning chastising one another f
or our own exhaustion before her … well, her eccentricities.

  Indeed, that night she took all sense of parental security from us and scattered the ashes of her nocturnal wanderings throughout the country. We flayed each other for it—but never told anyone else about it.

  As with so much else it was our secret.

  Several times we switched farms. On one outside Troy we even built a wing: another sitting room, a small mudroom at the back entrance, and two more bedrooms that let Mother and Helen free up another room in the main part of the house for sleeping. And I was having those dreams that hound so many youngsters—I understand now—who live in several houses over a brief time, in which I leave a room in Albany only to step into a room in New York, or walk down a hall in Pittsfield and look out the upper Dutch door in the kitchen in Boston to see what I’d used to see outside on the kitchen steps in Albany.