Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen Page B

waited.
    The sun flared out and streamed down on the waters that covered the town in the unsettled midafternoon. We looked out and saw a whole world of things floating by. We ourselves felt afloat, among them. And then the rain began again, right out of the sunshine, and put it out. It turned very dark.
    â€œWe’re lost,” my father told me. “We’ll all be washed away.”
    â€œGod please stop the rain,” I prayed. The fire had burnt our supply of wood and it was sinking fast.
    â€œGo get a candle from the bedroom, son,” my father asked. “We’ll put it by the body so that it won’t lie in the darkness.”
    When my father called the stranger “the body” I felt, for the first time, a sense of death and loss. Our friend whom I loved and grieved for, as though I had long known him, was gone. Only “the body” remained. Now I understood the hardest part of death, the grief at gravesides, and what was given up there so bitterly. It was the body.
    What interrupted our mourning was a figure at the window. A figure of flying hair and tearing clothes with wild eyes and a face of terror stared through veils of water.
    â€œSomebody,” I gasped to my father. “Somebody wants in from the storm.”
    â€œHot damn Lord help us!” my father cried out, as afraid as I had ever seen him.
    We struggled with the front door. When we unlocked it, it blasted against us and knocked us down to the floor, and it seemed to hurl the blowing figure into the house. We saw that it was a young man in tattered clothes and a thick beard. The three of us were able to close the front door and to barricade it with the heavy hat tree, oaken and immemorial, standing in the same place in the hallway since first my eyes found it. Suddenly it had life.
    â€œWorst storm I’ve ever seen,” my father said to the man. The man nodded and we could see that he was young.
    When he walked into the parlor, drawn there by the candlelight and the fire, he saw the man on the pallet and lunged to it and fell to his knees and cried out and wept over the dead man. My father and I waited with our heads bowed, holding together in bewilderment under the fire’s guttering sound and the soft sobbing of the young man. Finally my father said, “He was lying in the field. We tried to help him.” But the man stayed on his knees beside the figure on the pallet, sobbing and murmuring. “Boy, boy, boy, boy…”
    Then my father went to the kneeling man and put a blanket around his shoulders and said softly,
    â€œI’ll get some hot coffee, pardner.”
    I was alone with the two men, dead and alive, and I felt scared but full of pity. I heard the man speak softly, now, in a gasping language I could not understand—or I was too choked with astonishment. And then I heard him say clearly, “Put your head on my breast, boy! Here. Now, now boy, now; you’re all right, now. Head’s on my breast; now, now.”
    When my father came into the parlor with coffee, he put it down at the side of the grieving man. “Sit back, now,” he said, “and warm yourself.”
    When the man sat back and pulled the blanket around his shoulders, my father asked him for his name.
    â€œBen,” he said. “He and I are brothers. I brought him up.” He would not drink his coffee but looked down at the figure of his brother and said, “We were in the boxcar comin from Memphis. Goin to Port of Houston. We had a plan.” And then he cried out softly, “I didn’t go to hurt him. I swear to God I didn’t mean to hurt him.” And then he held his brother’s head to his breast and rocked him.
    My father and I were sitting on the cold springs of the daybed whose mattress was the dead man’s pallet, and I could feel the big, strong wrap of my father’s arm around me, pulling my head to his breast. I felt my everlasting love for him, my