Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame

Author:Janet Frame [Frame, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781619022164
Publisher: Counterpoint

The Silkworms

If only, he thought, I were God looking from my door upon completeness.

Before I die.

He was not old, only fifty-five. His hair was thin and faded, like desert grass, flattened by secret pressures from the sky. His head was land; within it he felled forests of beech, rimu, kauri, burned the scrub, hacked manuka for fences, measured and set the boundaries for paddocks.

‘Poor Edgar,’ the neighbours said. ‘The past has sprinkled salt on his tail, has trapped him in important flight.’

Only it was not that way at all. He was not a bird. Was he a cat, then? Had he swallowed the past, licking it from his life as a cat licks its fur until it winds into a ball inside, compact, soft, a nest-ball that causes pain?

Oh whatever was the matter with Edgar? Cat, bird, human being: it was yesterday that was the matter, and it was no use saying to him, Don’t groom your memory day after day on the hearth until you swallow it and it hurts you, stops your life!

Every morning he sunbathed, lying naked on a rug beside the east wall of the house, only a few feet away from the tomatoes (the stout Russian variety), the clump of garlic, the potatoes numerously leaved like bibles with the small bloodless fruit beneath, the swollen veined cabbages, airy parsley.

He sunbathed for an hour, taking stock of the sun and the secret growth of his vegetables.

Then he would go inside, dress, and using a pencil upon green paper because green was said to be kind to the eyes, he would sit at his homemade table to write his work of literature. He leaned over the table, his shoulders hunched, his face tensed, as if he were in a lavatory. The words came dropping from him tight, and round, and hard.

The compressed words came dropping slowly from him like childhood bullets. All morning he worked, writing, crossing out, writing again, and afterwards typing the fragment he had made, adding it to the pile of green sheets, counting them carefully, reckoning how many more he must squeeze from his head before he completed the work of literature.

Sometimes when he was reluctant to begin working he would sit on the stool near his kitchen window and look out, at the postman passing, throwing the letters in the old biscuit tin which Edgar had put inside the hedge, as letterbox; at the paperboy cycling by, aiming the paper through the gap in the hedge that served as a gate, onto the narrow path. Or he would watch people hurrying to work, to catch the bus and the ferry to the city. He would see his nextdoor neighbour whose face, on Mondays, had a satisfied expression — had he not mowed the lawn in the weekend with the new electric mower, cut down a troublesome tree in his garden with his new electric saw, built a kitchen table for his wife from the Do-It-Yourself kit, and then had time to spend

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