The Gift: Novel Read online

  It lay buried in the ground; in older countries, fragments of marble were brought to life again after long years. On these altars, flowers had lain, wild pansies, mountain laurel, roses. So we placed, in their season, daisies, roses, and peonies on those altars in the old graveyard where the stones lay flat, or in the new graveyard where the more worldly-minded newcomers to our town erected columns, artificially broken, around which carved ivy clung. They walled off their own personal little plots with white stones or low iron railings with chains, for to those newcomers to our town, death was a personal and private matter, not like the first Moravians who rested, more or less in the order of their going, under small stones that lay, even and symmetrical, like dominoes on a green baize cloth.

  There was Miss Helen at school. There was the Beaver Lesson; the chart of the Beaver was hung on the wall beside the black and white drawing of the Eskimo and the Eskimo snowhouse. The Eskimo lived in a snowhouse, rather like the ones we tried to build, though we never succeeded in rounding them off neatly or, if they were any size, getting the roof to stay on. There was Miss Helen. There was the map she cut out of brown paper and the offering of a camel of mine pasted on. We brought pictures, cut out from the advertisements at the backs of magazines; Miss Helen chose those suitable for her brown-paper map of Africa; she pasted the animal or the palm tree where it belonged on the map. There was an oasis which was, she said, an island in the desert.

  There were the Egyptians who lived along the river. They built little houses to live in when they were dead. In these underground houses they piled up furniture, chairs, tables, boxes, jars, food even. Some wheat taken out of a tomb (it had been buried thousands of years) grew when it was planted. The grain grew like the kernels of yellow corn we laid on a piece of mosquito-netting tied over a kitchen tumbler. We broke off the bare twigs of the chestnut trees, and the leaves came out, long before any green showed on the branches. The trees outside lined the brick walk that led up the slope from Church Street past the church and the dead-house (as we called the mortuary) to the school.

  Florence said one of the Sisters was lying in the dead-house, but we could not see her. The dead-house had little windows, too high up, but Florence said Melinda had said that Nettie had said there was a Sister in the dead-house. She would lie there until they carried her to the old graveyard or more likely to Nisky Hill, as the old graveyard was very crowded. Along the fence of the old graveyard, there were mounds without stones, which were the soldiers, grey and blue, who had died in the old seminary when Papalie was there, during the Civil War. They were being taken in wagons to Philadelphia to the hospitals, but if they were too weak or going to die, they were left in the seminary on Church Street where they lay in rows in the beds where the girls had been, before they broke up the school to make a hospital of it for the soldiers from Gettysburg. There had been wounded soldiers there too, during the War of Independence.

  Papa had been a soldier and Florence’s father, too. Papa was only seventeen; he told them he was eighteen. He and his brother Alvin had gone off, and Alvin had died of typhoid fever. Papa had had typhoid, too. He said his mother cried when she saw him come back; she said, “Oh, I thought it was Alvin, coming back.” Papa never told us much about himself except that his mother had been disappointed when she found it was Charles and not Alvin who had come back from the Civil War.

  Papa went out to look at the stars at night. He measured them or measured something, we didn’t know quite what. We could see what Papalie was doing with his microscope on his study table. But when Papa took us into his little domed house—with a dome like the Eskimo made of ice over their snow huts—and we asked to look into his telescope, he said that we would see nothing; you could not see what he was looking at, or looking for, in the daytime. Papa looked at a thermometer and opened or closed a shutter (that opened with ropes that pulled) in the curved roof or dome of his little house, which was built higher up the mountains, above the university buildings, the other side of the river. When we kept on asking him to let us see, he did let us see, but it was as he had told us; there was only a white glare and nothing to be seen and it hurt your eyes. It would be too late to go over there at night, he said, and anyhow, at night he was busy.

  I can not say that a story called Bluebeard that Ida read us from one of the fairy tales, actually linked up in thought—how could it?—with our kind father. There was a man called Bluebeard, and he murdered his wives. How was it that Edith and Alice and the Lady (the mother of Alfred and Eric) all belonged to Papa and were there in the graveyard? No, of course, I did not actually put this two-and-two together.

  “But why did they call him Bluebeard?” I asked Eric, who had time to answer questions that other people could not or would not answer. “His beard, was blue, was it?”

  “No,” said Eric, “it was just a way of saying that he had a very black beard.”

  Papa had a black beard. (A few years later, it was to turn white, almost overnight, but that comes later.) There was a man with a black beard and a dead wife or dead wives and there was Edith and there was Alice and there was the Lady whose name, written on stone, was, Ida told us (“but do not ask your mother questions”), Martha. The name Martha was written on a stone and Alice was written and Edith. My name was Hilda; Papa found the name in the dictionary, he said. He said he ran his finger down the names in the back of the dictionary, and his finger stopped at Huldah and then went back up the line to Hilda. What would I have been, who would I have been, if my initial had come at the beginning and he had put his finger on Alice? Had he put his finger on Alice?

  Papa went out of the house “like a thief” as he used to say, “or an astronomer,” every evening if the stars were shining. If the stars were shining—O God of stars, let the stars shine—then Mama would lift the lamp from the center round-table in the sitting room and fold up the embroidered table-cover and say to Gilbert or Harold or Hilda, “Just take this pile of books, don’t drop them, and put them on the piano; no, the piano is open, you can’t reach up, not the floor, you don’t put books on the floor, no, not the chair—here” and she would take them back and pile them on top of other books on the bookcase in the corner.

  There was the cuckoo clock that would strike (too soon) eight, to-bed. There was the desk in the corner, in one of the compartments of which there was a little box with some sort of eggs, we were not sure what kind of eggs, “But they won’t hatch now,” Papalie had said. Mama thought they might be dangerous, be snake’s eggs.

  “But if they won’t hatch. Mama, why don’t you throw them away?”

  “Oh—give me that box, I told you not to touch that box.”

  “But you said, Papalie said, they wouldn’t hatch, can’t I throw them in the garden?”

  “No—no.”

  “Why not?”

  “They might hatch.”

  “I thought you said, Papalie said, they wouldn’t hatch now.”

  “He said, he thought they wouldn’t hatch now.”

  “Then they might hatch—they might hatch here in the desk?”

  “No, no, no—put that box down. Don’t shake it.”

  “But I thought you said …”

  Papalie had an alligator in their attic, in a tank with thick netting, but anyhow, “you children must not go up there any more.”

  “But the alligator is asleep.”

  Mamalie would tell us how someone who knew Papalie had sent him two alligators, as small as very large lizards, in a cigar box from Florida. They were wrapped in Florida moss. Their names were Castor and Pollux; one had died and was varnished and mounted on a board and hung over the slippery horsehair sofa in Papalie’s study. Once a tarantula had dropped out of a bunch of bananas at Mr. Luckenbach’s, the grocer on the corner.

  Mr. Luckenbach had caught it in a shoe box and rushed across the street to ask Papalie what it was. Everyone brought things like that to our grandfather, because he had a microscope and studied things and drew pictures of branches of moss that you
could not see with your eyes. He put them on a glass slide or pressed a drop of water from a bottle (that he had brought back from trips to the mountains) between two glass slides. That (in time, it was explained) was freshwater algae, a sort of moss, invisible (for the most part) to the naked eye. The apple of my eye. He was the naked eye, he was the apple of God’s eye. He was a minister, he read things out of the Bible, he said I am the light of the world when the doors opened at the far end of the church and the trays of lighted beeswax candles were brought into the church by the Sisters in their caps and aprons, while Uncle Fred in the gallery, at the organ was playing very softly Holy Night.

  When Mama folded the embroidered table-cover and put it on top of the books, she might get out the jack-straws or she might get out of a box with a horseshoe that was a magnet and drew little bits of specks of iron in patterns after it. But she might turn over the cardboard box of yellow squares and say, “We will have some anagrams; Gilbert, you must help now.”

  There was not one single word that I could spell, not one, not c-a-t even, but if I shouldered over to Gilbert and clutched the edge of the table, I could from time to time select a letter; sometimes it was the right one, not very often.

  “Mimmie, he’s spelt a word,” says Mama very proudly to Mamalie, our grandmother, or if it’s Aunt Jennie, “Jean, look he’s spelt dog,” but Jean will push it back and say, “d-a-g doesn’t spell anything that I know of; Sister would know an a from an o if you don’t, Gibbie,” and it might even be perceived that miraculously, a round shape in black, on the yellow square of cardboard, was somehow alone and staring at me, by Aunt Jennie’s elbow.

  It was a game, it was a way of making words out of words, but what it was was a way of spelling words, in fact it was a spell. The cuckoo clock would not strike; it could not, because the world had stopped. It was not frozen in time, it was like one of Papalie’s water-drops that he had brought down from the mountains or from a trip to the Delaware Water Gap, in a jar. It was a drop of living and eternal life, perfected there; it was living, complete, not to be dried up in memory like pressed moss—Papalie had pressed moss, too. But there was a difference between Papalie’s pressed moss and the things that shone in the crystal lens of his microscope, on the glass plate that a moment ago had been empty and just two pieces of glass, like small empty magic lantern slides, stuck together.

  When Papalie lifted us, one by one in turn, to kneel on the chair by his worktable, we saw that it was true what he said, we saw that where there is nothing, there is something. We saw that an empty drop of water spread out branches, bright green or vermillion, in shape like a branch of a Christmas tree or in shape like a squashed peony or in shape like a lot of little green-glass beads, strung on a thick stem.

  They had so much to give us, Papa and Papalie and old Father Weiss, as the whole town had affectionately called our grandmother’s father. There were the others before these, who went back to the beginning of America and before America, but … we were none of us “gifted,” they would say.

  “How do you mean—what?”

  “Oh—I don’t mean—I don’t mean anything.”

  But they did mean something. They didn’t think any of us were marked with that strange thing they called a gift, the thing Uncle Fred had had from the beginning, the thing Papalie (they said) wasn’t sure about, so Uncle Fred was put in a drugstore. An errand-boy who crawls under the counter and hides there with stolen fragments of church music was not much good in a drugstore. So Papalie made sure of the gift that Uncle Fred had. We hadn’t any gift to make sure about.

  But where did he get the gift, just like that? Why didn’t Mama wait and teach us music like she did Uncle Fred when he was a little boy? Mama gave all her music to Uncle Fred, that is what she did. That is why we hadn’t the gift, because it was Mama who started being the musician, and then she said she taught Uncle Fred; she gave it away, she gave the gift to Uncle Fred, she should have waited and given the gift to us. But there were other gifts, it seemed.

  “What—what do you mean, Uncle Hartley?”

  “People draw, if a person draws or writes a book or something like that; a gift isn’t just music. Artists are people who are gifted.”

  “Is Uncle Fred an artist?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. Yes, of course Fred is an artist.”

  “But an artist is someone with a paintbox and a big hat?”

  “No, an artist is someone who—well—he can draw or paint or write a book or even do other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I don’t know—well—to be artistic—I suppose you might say your Aunt Belle was artistic.”

  “Then can ladies be just the same as men?”

  “Just the same what?”

  “I mean what you said—about writing a book?”

  “Why, yes, ladies write books of course, lots of ladies write very good books.”

  “Like Louisa M. Alcott?”

  “Yes, like Louisa Alcott and like Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, you know, you saw the procession and the play, didn’t you?”

  We saw Uncle Tom. He sat on a bench before a wooden hut that was drawn in a cart. The wooden hut was his cabin, and they told us that the book was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin and that the play we were going to be taken to see, in a real theater, on the other side of the river, was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it was the book that started it or it was the real story, in the beginning, that started it, because Uncle Tom was a real darkie in shape like a branch of a Christmas tree Way down upon the Sewanee river.

  That was before the Civil War; that happened a long time ago when Papa was seventeen, though he told them he was eighteen, so that he could run away with his brother Alvin in Indiana and help free the slaves.

  The slaves were roped together and they walked along tied together like that, in torn trousers and old shoes or no shoes, and a man with a big hat and a whip, slashed round them with the whip, but Ida said he wasn’t really hurting them, only cracking with his whip like that to show how Simon Legree (that was his name) drove the poor slaves in the cotton fields, down in the south.

  There was someone on the ice with a baby, but the baby, Ida said, was a doll, and the ice was not real because it was summer and it would have melted. But Eliza, I think it was, was pulled along with the ice on wheels, like Uncle Tom’s cabin. Then there were some horses and donkeys; it was a sort of golden cart or it was a chariot like Swing low, sweet chariot, and there was an angel, only it was made of wood and gilded over like the things on the Christmas tree, and it had a wreath in its hands. It was stretching out its wings and it was holding the wreath over the head of Little Eva who was the most important thing in the procession.

  There were real dogs pulling on straps, with collars round their necks. They were very big dogs. Ida said they were bloodhounds, they were to hunt the slaves, and the slaves went along and they sang songs out of Uncle Bob’s songbook on the top of the piano. They sang Massa’s in the cold, cold ground or they just hummed, and then Simon Legree cracked his whip and they stopped singing. The bloodhounds would chase them through the woods—only now they weren’t slaves any more.

  “It’s only a parade,” Gilbert said, “they are as free as you are.”

  The darkies tied together were as free as I was because our father and our Uncle Alvin had fought in the Civil War and now we all had the same flag that Betsy Ross made in a house in Philadelphia, which we have a picture of in school, with the thirteen original States which are the thirteen stripes and all the other States which are the Stars. Our State, which is Pennsylvania, is one of the thirteen original States.

  Once we had a procession, too; we all waved flags when we met other children from other schools. That was for 1492, I mean it was in 1892 which made four hundred years since Columbus discovered America.

  We were Americans and so were the darkies who were tied together and so was Simon Legr
ee and so was Little Eva. Little Eva died in a bed, we saw her die. It was a stage, Ida said. You call it the stage, and this was our first time at the theater. We knew it was a stage because we had our school entertainments on the stage in the big hall at school. Now Little Eva died and it was just as if she had died, but then she came back again in a long nightgown. Little Eva was not really dead at all. She was the same little girl with the long gold hair who was driven in the chariot down the street, and she would do it all over again in Allentown or Easton, Ida said. They went on to other towns like the circus did, but this was not the circus. Uncle Tom died too, and that was when Little Eva came back after she was dead and she was a dream or a vision, like something in the Bible, that Uncle Tom had when he died.

  That was how it was. Little Eva was really in a book, yet Little Eva was there on the stage and we saw her die, just like the book, Aunt Belle said, though we hadn’t read it. Aunt Belle sat in the row back of us with Tootie and Tootie changed places with Gilbert (because he couldn’t see very well) between the acts. Tootie liked Topsy best and Harold did too, I think.

  Ida and Aunt Belle liked the song Little Eva’s father sang when Little Eva’s mother played the piano. We had to wait for them to finish that before we could see the bloodhounds. The bloodhounds did really chase Eliza on the ice. She screamed and jumped on the pieces of ice and you forgot that it wasn’t ice at all. You forgot the people around you and that you were in the theater, you forgot you were in a town even, that you would have to go home after this. That is how it was. Everybody waited, and someone laughed when the bloodhounds sniffed round the lights in front of the stage and didn’t chase Eliza. But I could see that they were not real terrible dogs. I could see that they were really very good dogs, yet at the same time, something else in me that listened when Ida reads us a fairy tale, would know that they were terrible and horrible dogs, that they would rush at Eliza and her baby, which was only a big bundled-up doll or even only a bundle, and tear at her and bite her to death. I mean, I would know that we were there, that Harold was beside me, and that Tootie had the place on the end that Harold had had, so that he could see down the aisle. Harold was next to me, where Gilbert had been.