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by Susan Marshall
A famous person once said that every man sees the devil before he dies. As I walk past the end of the private drive and brush my fingers against the grape scented flowers of the mountain laurel, arranging the boy's loose body on my other arm as I move, I begin to believe that I too am the devil. I look straight at the eyes of an unhappy face, sure that I am staring down evil. But the evil is really flowing out through tiny holes in the earth, up through my legs, into my arms, across the boy's rear end and out through the static of each fine hair. I conduct those dark elements that make him who he is. He looks at least fifty with his graying hair and sagging eyelids. He pleads with me to let him down.
"You queer," he says, in the usual fashion.
"Me not queer," I reply. "You very rude."
"I wanna build it." He squirms. I jolt him up. "But I wanna!"
"You can't," I say firmly.
"Grape," he says excitedly as we pass the laurel, "grape. I wanna touch it."
I let him lean across to hold his four fingered hand against the soft bush. He has no thumb there. It's difficult but he grasps a flower and pulls it from its branch. "Shame on you," I scold and rip the flower from his hand.
I throw the flower in the dirt. When I come back alone, later in the day, the flower is still there like a good dog who stays when you tell it to.
The boy's mother picks up sticks from the patio as I move closer to the house. I bring her the flower and tuck it against her auburn hair. She doesn't flinch or move back on her heels like the boy does when I touch him. She is kindly and resigned to being alone like me. Her wealth is musical; fountains everywhere. I sit on the edge of a stone basin and wipe my forehead with four fingers. I feel the oil of my own skin, thick like a fig. She hums and bends to collect another stick.
"How long you want him to stay in?" I ask.
Her glasses are very dark. She has rarely taken these off in the time that I've known her.
"You need me to re- do the bricks?"
Still, she does not respond. Her white robe flows in and out between her knees as she bends and straightens, bends and straightens. Her hands shake a little.
"Naw," she finally says. "Naw. The werkers'll get 'em."
"And what about him?" I persist.
"Leave 'im," she says and walks away toward the white gazebo to make art from her sticks. She works at a little table that wobbles back and forth. Everything seems lopsided.
I walk to the back porch of the house where at least twenty wasp nests lurk under the eaves. An assortment of children's books are spread on metal couches. I sit against the primrose pattern of a long cushion and run my hands over the shiny covers of the books until I feel that I am praying. The new smell of them lends a chill to the shade of the open room. I am hired both to entertain and dole out punishment.
Off in the distance, the clear light of the fish pond opens a small door in the lawn, a silver eye deceptive as glitter. When the boy is good, he tries to draw the lily leaves, the circumference, even the bloated bodies of the fish as his mother tells him sculptors have to do. When the boy is bad, like today, he must be locked in the springhouse with the cool onions, turnips and sausage, the water running below his feet, his eyes adjusting to the darkness until I let him out. The stream twists just beyond the road, down the steep banks of the ravine that borders my home near the end of the drive. It is my job to keep the key safe and the food nicely stored. It is my job to tell the boy how long his penance will last.
A young man steps onto the porch through a glass door to the house. His face seems familiar as if I had sung to him once in a dream or led him on an expedition through the forest on a midsummer night with only lanterns and the moon's stony face to keep us from the branches. The mother likes to entertain. Surely he drank at one or more of the parties for which I was hired. "Ask the hermit a question. Go on. He lives at the end of her road. He's never had a normal life. Go on. Ask him why she keeps him.''
"Nice day," the man says and exits to the lawn, a tumbler the color of orange juice gripped in his right hand like a cane. He staggers with his chronic hangover then stops and stands against the horizon. He becomes a thing.
The woman calls to me. "Noble! Get 'im back!" She has changed her mind about the boy.
The hinged door of her shelter creaks forward then backward in the breeze. Now she appears worried, a paintbrush captured in her lips like an old bone teethed down to almost nothing. Colors of a bird of paradise spread against her chest.
I take the book about trains and the one about hunting into my right hand and walk towards her shelter.
"What you paintin'?" I ask, but she chooses not to smile.
"There's a split in this table where I think I see something," she says. "It's dark and full of something I recognize from a child. Something that smells like wood. I think that's the only way to describe it. Something old as the trees.'
She turns to me and takes the flower from her hair.
"Make a story out of that," she says and dashes the flower under her feet.
"Yea," I reply. "I could make a story out of that. And your pretty flower, how it died. How it tried several different death throes but no one could see its expression."
"That's excellent," she says and dabs with the paintbrush at a wooden cutting board laid flat against the table. I see she has also painted spoons and knives with tiny pink scars.
I move up the steps of the gazebo and look at the face of the board The slender body of a woman sits curved near a river, a child between her arms and the salmon body of a sun arcing among the limbs of a forest. The woman and child grow roots into the river, their faces wash away so that all I can see is earth and all I can think of is the small building above the stream where I never sit alone to feel what the boy feels. I am surprised he has never punished me for being so uncreative. "I better go," I say.
She looks up from her work as if at the feel of some disastrous insect. In her quiet face I see the mystery of my life shunted up through the grass, trembling on chemical intuition. I see abstractly as I am meant to see and how she pays me well by knowing how to teach that silence. She sighs deeply and, like the trembling gnat itself, I leave. The man, or the thing in the grass, waits like stone. We both are her pupils. He must wonder, as I do, how this social creature comes to teach the art of aloneness. Perhaps I should nickname her Circe. A pile of bricks waits in the new courtyard for new builders. Early this morning, the boy rearranged them in a punishable, misunderstood creativity of his own.
The boy hears me approach, sees my grass- covered boots through the space in the wooden doorway. I put my face to the open groove and feel one hot and one cold breath. He's been eating onions again.
"Are you sorry enough now?" I ask through the open groove.
He mumbles, then presses his face closer. I hear it scratch against the surface as if he were a man with full grown stubble, chafing his beard.
"What'ya got in yer hand?"
I look down and then hold up one book about the railroads and one book about hunting. I move them closer to the crack in the doorway. There is no memory to compare it to. Once the boy asked me what a hermit was and I told him that a hermit is someone who lives in the past or hides in the present but fears them both in the future.
"Railroads," the boy says simply.
I unlock the door and sunlight melts the cold darkness inside the springhouse. Onion peel rests on a bench much like the flower on the dirt, the stone thing, waiting for any sized hand, any new builder. I pick up the conch- like layers and hold them to my ear for his benefit.
"Can almost hear the ocean," I say. But he does not understand. He will not understand for years and maybe not even then how free the world is for associations other than human.
"Am I goin'?" he asks.
"Yes. You're going Here." I hand him the books and send him back on the road, around the small corner of my house where the excess patio chairs are gathered in a circle.
Then I rub my fingers on the stone until I feel that I am praying. For a moment I almost believe that a hand is prettier with its thumb intact, perfect as a statue molded from the nightmare of bodies still complete. Then, each time his thumb grows in memory, I cut it back as a branch not quite able to flower. I know there was always some young boy in the morgue, laid out as best they could fashion him, an arm or leg missing in the gears of some machinery or accident of labor. A chest split open, forehead bruised, and sometimes the one hemisphere of a brain punctured like putty under a hard nail. How many men will peer that far inside? I want to ask them.
The door to the springhouse closes on its hinge. I love this Western country because I lose myself in the land. I lost myself in twenty- seven acres of someone else's ranch, she who found me and gave me a house and told me to either welcome people or scare them away. The woman reads about decorative hermits, men who lived at the edge of a garden and worked to sing and entertain. She wants one of her own. The bench is warm where the boy sat. I take out my knife and whittle a funny face in the wood, more sad and archaic than his. At least it smells like fields and when he gets out, the sun must shine a lot more brilliant. My work is to punish and entertain. All men are alone, together. I will think of the boy running the last few yards, picking several flowers off the bush just to spite me.
