Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen Page A

brought some firewood to the parlor. “I thought we could build a fire in the fireplace,” I announced. “That’d be fine,” my father said. “You know how to do it, like I taught you.” I saw that he had made a pallet on the floor with the mattress from the daybed.
    â€œHelp me put our friend on the pallet,” father asked.
    When we lifted our friend I was at first afraid to touch him so close, to hold him, but in my trembling grasp his body felt friendly and like something of mine—and more: he felt beloved to me. He must have felt something of the same to my father, for I saw my father’s face filled with softness in the light of the fire. Now the fire was going and brightness and warmth were coming from it, suddenly bringing to life on the wall the faces of my grandmother and grandfather who had built fires in this fireplace; they looked down from their dusty frames upon us. Suddenly the man murmured, “Thank you.”
    â€œGod bless you, pardner,” my father said, and I patted the man’s head. My breath was caught in my throat, that he was with us.
    The storm was here, upon us. Our little house began to shudder and creak under it. Though we didn’t say anything, my father and I were afraid that Doctor Browder would never be able to get out to us now; for when we could see what would be the dirt road in front of our house we saw a flowing stream; and when we saw in the lightning some trees fall over the road along the field we knew the doctor could not get to us.
    We began to nurse the wounded stranger, my father and I. We washed his wounds. And my father prayed, there in the yellow firelight in the swaying little house my grandfather had built for his family and whose roof and walls and floor had been their safe haven and now ours, a shelter for generations in a world none of us had known beyond this place and a few nearby little towns. My father prayed over the young man, laying his carpenter’s hand on the brow of the suffering man and clasping his hand in love and hope. And then I heard my father’s words, “He’s dead.”
    We said the Lord’s prayer together on our knees by the dead stranger’s pallet. The rhythmic clanging of the wind against something of metal, our washtub maybe, tolled over our prayer. And when we opened our eyes at the end of the prayer, my father said, “He looks like somebody.” I knew he did, in that moment, for I saw in my sorrow his somehow blessed brow and his pale full lips, his dark bitter hair, familiar as kin. The wind tolled the washtub. My heart was heavy and aching and my face felt flooded but no tears came for a long time. And when they came, I sobbed aloud. My father held me and rocked me as though I were three, the way he used to when I was three; and I heard him cry, too.
    I felt for the first time the love that one person might have for another he did not know, for a stranger come suddenly close. The great new swelling love I had for the stranger visitor to our house now filled our parlor. And I hoped then, with a longing that first touched me there on that wild and tender night in our faraway parlor in that hidden little town, that one day I would know the love of another, no matter how bitter the loss of them would be.
    In the toiling hurricane that whipped at our house, our trees and fields, lightning showed us what the storm had already done to the world outside. “This must be the worst ever to hit this country,” my father said. “God hold down our roof over our heads and receive the spirit of this poor man.”
    â€œAnd protect Mama and Sister and Joe in the school basement,” I added.
    The flood rose to our front porch. My father and I sat lone with the stranger. My father had washed him and taken away his clothes that had been stained again by his wounds and dressed him in a fresh shirt and workpants. The dead being was a presence in the parlor. We