The House of Breath by Reginald Gibbons

Author:Reginald Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: The House of Breath
ISBN: 9781941531181
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1949-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

“Listen again, Mama, and I’ll try to tell you for the hundredth time what it was that made me go away.”

“I’m listenin, Ben, but let me see your face. I cain’t see your face, Berryben.”

“It’s because you don’t open the shutter, Mama, because you’ll never open the shutter. But let me tell you if I can. I really left so I could come back again.”

“But it’ll be too late, then. Either I’ll be too blind to see your face or I’ll be dead and gone.”

“It’s never too late to come back again, Mama. There was just something that called me away from the Sundays on the porch and the children in the yard, from the grieving and misery and bitterness of Aunty and Granny Ganchion, from the scrape and rusty screech of the cisternwheel. It called me when I sat in the black hen’s tree, when I stood in the fields, when I thumped on my cardboard piano in the woodshed. There seemed something more magnificent than the Charity loneliness. Somewhere there would be somebody to understand me–I could prove my blood-feel and find out the keys of a piano that played, not just a dumb-show. But more: an unnameable call away from all the withered quiet and dying old life and ways of this little world of Charity, hemmed in by a railroad track and a sawmill and a deserted meadow.

“All I know is that there was a change in me and, discovering that change in me, I would do anything to keep it unchanged I would not let it die in me. I had to keep listening, listening, listening to it, just as you listen to another thing in this shutter. The sawmill tried to drown it out, the cisternwheel tried to drown it out; I had to save it, hear it; so I went away. I don’t want to live if I can’t hear that voice. When I was home you followed me round through the rooms saying, ‘If you’ll just tell me what is wrong with you! What is changing you, if you’ll just put me straight on it all, Ben?’

“And when I would wipe you away then it would break my heart and break your heart and you would catch my face in your hands as if you could hold me there forever, caught in your poor old hands, and weep and say, ‘Ben Ben Berryben’; and then I knew that I could never never tell you what it was, only break your heart again and again.

“I tricked you all to get away, but I couldn’t tell the truth about the things that claimed me. Because you always said these things were sins. I always had that terrible guilt before you, had to tell lies and lies—you really made me evil, you made me be just what you were afraid I’d be. I served you all and let you all use me any way you wanted; anything you wanted me to be I was. Took care of little Jessy day in day out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.