American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (3 page)

           
"At this moment I am in this cage within a perfect death trap."

           
Theatrical pause.

           
"But," and here he knocked the tiger's nose with his whipstock, so that it howled with pain and affront, "but. . ."
 
and Lizzie saw the secret frog he kept within his trousers shift a little, ". . . but I'm not half so scared of the big brute as it is of me!"

           
He showed his red maw in a laugh.

           
"For I bring to bear upon its killer instinct a rational man's knowledge of the power of fear. The whip, the stool, are instruments of bluff with which I create his fear in my arena. In my cage, among my cats, I have established a hierarchy of fear and among my cats you might well say I am top dog, because I know that all the time they want to kill me, that is their project, that is their intention. . . but as for them, they just don't know what I might do next. No, sir!"

           
As if enchanted by the notion, he laughed out loud again, but by now the tiger, perhaps incensed by the unexpected blow on the nose, rumbled out a clear and incontrovertible message of disaffection and, with a quick jerk of its sculptured head, flung the man's foot away so that, caught off-balance, he half toppled over. And then the tiger was no longer a thing of stillness, of hard edges and clear outlines, but a whizz of black and red, maw and canines, in the air. On him.

           
The crowd immediately bayed.

           
But the tamer, with enormous presence of mind, seeing as how he was drunk, and, in the circumstances, with almost uncanny physical agility, bounced backwards on his boot-heels and thrust the tool he carried in his left hand into the fierce tiger's jaws, leaving the tiger worrying, gnawing, destroying the harmless thing, as a ragged black boy quickly unlatched the cage door and out the tamer leaped, unscathed, amidst hurrahs.

           
Lizzie's stunned little face was now mottled all over with a curious reddish-purple, with the heat of the tent, with passion, with the sudden access of enlightenment.

           
To see the rest of the stupendous cat act, the audience would have had to buy another ticket for the Big Top, besides the ticket for the menagerie, for which it had already paid, so, reluctant on the whole to do that, in spite of the promise of clowns and dancing ladies, it soon got bored with watching the tiger splintering the wooden stool, and drifted off.

           
"Eh bien, ma petite,"
said her boy-nurse to her in a sweet, singsong, crooning voice.
"Tu as vu la bête! La bête du cauchemar!"

           
The baby in the lace bonnet had slept peacefully through all this, but now began to stir and mumble. Its mother nudged her husband with her elbow.

           
"On va, Papa?"

           
The crooning, smiling boy brought his bright pink lips down on Lizzie's forehead for a farewell kiss. She could not bear that; she struggled furiously and shouted to be put down. With that, her cover broke and she burst out of her disguise of dirt and silence; half the remaining gawpers in the tent had kin been bleakly buried by her father, the rest owed him money. She was the most famous daughter in all Fall River.

           
"Well, if it ain't Andrew Borden's little girl! What are they Canucks doing with little Lizzie Borden?"

NOTE:

           
John Ford (1586-c.1639). English dramatist of the Jacobean period. His tragedy,
'Tis Pity She's a Wliore,
was published in 1633. "Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got/With folded arms and melancholy hat."
(Choice Drollery,
1656.)

           
John Ford (1895-1973). American film-maker. Filmography includes:
Stagecoach
(1938);
My Darling Clementine
(1946);
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(1949). "My name is John Ford. I make Westerns."
(John Ford,
Andrew Sinclair, New York 1979.)

           
There was a rancher had two children, a son and then a daughter. A while after that, his wife died and was buried under two sticks nailed together to make a cross because there was no time, yet, to carve a stone.

           
Did she die of the loneliness of the prairies? Or was it anguish that killed her, anguish, and nostalgia for the close, warm, neighbourly life she had left behind her when she came to this emptiness? Neither. She died of the pressure of that vast sky, that weighed down upon her and crushed her lungs until she could not breathe any more, as if the prairies were the bedrock of an ocean in which she drowned.

           
She told her boy: "Look after your sister." He, blond, solemn, little; he and Death sat with her in the room of logs her husband split to build. Death, with high cheek-bones, wore his hair in braids. His invisible presence in the cabin mocked the existence of the cabin. The round-eyed boy clutched his mother's dry hand. The girl was younger.

           
Then the mother lay with the prairies and all that careless sky upon her breast, and the children lived in their father's house. So they grew up. In his spare time the rancher chiselled at a rock: "Beloved wife of. . . mother of. . ." beneath the space at the top he had left for his own name.

           
America begins and ends in the cold and solitude. Up here, she pillows her head upon the Arctic snow. Down there, she dips her feet in the chilly waters of the South Atlantic, home of the perpetually restless albatross. America, with her torso of a woman at the time of this story, a woman with an hour-glass waist, a waist laced so tightly it snapped in two, and we put a belt of water there. America, with your child-bearing hips and
your crotch of jungle, your swelling bosom of a nursing mother and your cold head, your cold head.

           
Its central paradox resides in this: that the top half doesn't know what the bottom half is doing. When I say the two children of the prairie, suckled on those green breasts, were the pure children of the continent, you know at once that they were
norteamericanos,
or I would not speak of them in the English language, which was their language, the language that silences the babble of this continent's multitude of tongues.

           
Blond children with broad, freckled faces, the boy in dungarees and the little girl in gingham and sunbonnet. In the old play, one John Ford called them Giovanni and Annabella; the other John Ford, in the movie, might call them Johnny and Annie-Belle.

           
Annie-Belle will bake bread, tramp the linen clean and cook the beans and bacon; this lily of the West had not spare time enough to pause and consider the lilies of the field, who never do a hand's turn. No, sir. A woman's work is never done and she became a woman early.

           
The gaunt paterfamilias would drive them into town to church on Sundays with the black Bible on his knee wherein their names and dates of birth were
 
inscribed. In the buggy, his shy, big-boned, tow-headed son in best, dark, Sunday clothes, and Annie-Belle, at thirteen, fourteen, increasingly astonished at and rendered shy by her own lonely flowering. Fifteen. How pretty she was growing! They came to pray in God's house that, like their own, was built of split logs. Annie-Belle kept her eyes down; she was a good girl. They were good children. The widower drank, sometimes, but not much. They grew up in silence, in the enormous silence of the empty land, the silence that swallowed up the Saturday-night fiddler's tune, mocked the rare laughter at weddings and christenings, echoed, a vast margin, around the sermons of the preacher.

           
Silence and space and an unimaginable freedom which they dare not imagine.

           
Since his wife died, the rancher spoke rarely. They lived far out of town. He had no time for barn-raisings and church suppers. If she had lived, everything would have been different, but he occupied his spare moments in chiselling her gravestone. They did not celebrate Thanksgiving for he had nothing for which to give thanks. It was a hard life.

           
The Minister's wife made sure Annie-Belle knew a thing or two when she judged it about the time the girl's bleeding started. The Minister's wife, in a vague, pastoral way, thought about a husband for Annie-Belle, a wife for Johnny. "Out there, in that little house on the prairie, so lonesome. . . Nobody for those young folks to talk to 'cept cows, cows, cows."

           
What did the girl think? In summer, of the heat, and how to keep flies out of the butter; in winter, of the cold. I do not know what else she thought. Perhaps, as young girls do, she thought that a stranger would come to town and take her away to the city and so on, but, since her imagination began and ended with her experience, the farm, work, the seasons, I think she did not think so far, as if she knew already she was the object of the object of her own desire for, in the bright light of the New World, nothing is obscure. But when they were children, all they knew was they loved each other just as, surely, a brother or a sister should.

           
She washed her hair in a tub. She washed her long, yellow hair. She was fifteen. It was spring. She washed her hair. It was the first time that year. She sat on the porch to dry her hair, she sat in the rocking-chair which her mother selected from the Sears' Roebuck catalogue, where her father would never sit, now. She propped a bit of mirror on the porch railing. It caught the sun and flashed. She combed out her wet hair in the mirror. There seemed to be an awful lot of it, tangling up the comb. She wore only her petticoat, the men were off with the cattle, nobody to see her pale shoulders except that Johnny came back. The horse threw him, he knocked his head against the stone. Giddy, he came back to the house, leading his pony, and she was busy untangling her hair and did not see him, nor have a chance to cover herself.

           
"Why, Johnny, I declare --"

           
Imagine an orchestra behind them: the frame house, the porch, the rocking-chair endlessly rocking, like a cradle, the white petticoat with eyelet lace, her water-darkened hair hanging on her shoulders and little trickles running down between her shallow breasts, the young man leading the limping pony, and, inexhaustible as light, around them the tender land.

           
The "Love Theme" swells and rises. She jumps up to tend him. The jogged mirror falls.

           
"Seven years' bad luck --"

           
In the fragments of the mirror, they kneel to see their round, blond, innocent faces that, superimposed upon one another, would fit at every feature, their faces, all at once the same face, the face that never existed until now, the pure face of America.

                               
EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

                               
(Long shot) Farmhouse.

                               
(Close up) Petticoat falling on to porch of farmhouse.

           
Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana . . . Oh, those enormous territories! That green vastness, in which anything is possible.

                               
EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

                               
(Close up) Johnny and Annie-Belle kiss.

                               
"Love Theme" up.

                               
Dissolve.

           
No. It wasn't like that! Not in the least like that.

           
He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.

Annabella:
Methinks you are not well.

Giovanni:
Here's none but you and I. I think you love me, sister.

Annabella:
Yes, you know I do.

           
And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now, before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous plain they knew they must not do it. . .do what? How did they know what to do? From watching the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the cock. They were country children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the other's face as if it were their own.

[Music plays.]

Giovanni:
Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.

           
For pity's sake, I beg you!

[She kneels.]

Annabella:
On my knees,

           
Brother, even by our mother's dust, I charge you

           
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

           
Love me, or kill me, brother.

[He kneels.]

Giovanni:
On my knees,

           
Sister, even by our mother's dust, I charge you

           
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

           
Love me, or kill me, sister.

                               
EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

                               
Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.

                               
Empty rocking-chair, rocking, rocking.

           
It is the boy -- or young man, rather -- who is the most mysterious to me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he works the land, he toils and sweats. His work consists of the vague, undistinguished "work" of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never before broken until now.

           
And I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt.

           
For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!

           
Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? "Look after your sister." But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.

Giovanni:
I am lost forever.

           
Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes. She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.

                               
INTERIOR. MINISTER'S HOUSE. DAY

                               
Dinner-table. Minister's wife dishing portions from a pot for her husband and her son.

                               
MINISTER'S WIFE: 'Tain't right, just ain't right, those two out there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.

                               
MINISTER'S SON: She's terribly pretty, Mama.

                               
The Minister's wife and the Minister turn to look at the young man. He blushes slowly but comprehensively.