He was continually in a clear acid delirium. Things leaped forward and would get brighter, so clearly he saw them. The unsteady table, the chipped dull blue porcelain coffee pot, the barred iron bedhead, all had outlines strong and burning. Now he lay in the wadded quilts and thought of her father, his face round and red. If you suddenly jabbed him with a pin behind his ear, wouldn’t his face pop and go to shreds like a balloon? He drank, and speculated that if you grasped a man’s mouth by its corner, you could rip away his meaningless little grin and expose to daylight the real expression on his face. And what would it be? Disgust? A terrible pitiless joy? Anything at all? But it couldn’t be done, the grin was too greasy to get a grip on. He drank quickly and regretfully. Or at times he would suddenly find himself on his knees, holding the bars of the bed’s footboard as tightly as he could. “Our Father who art,” he would say. “Our Father, Our Father, Our Father, Our Father.” He could get no further. He would bang his head against the bars until broad red welts appeared on his forehead. And then he would sweat and roll like a pig on the floor. Now tenderly he felt his cheeks; his face must be all ravaged with his own beatings and with Mina’s cold teeth. He didn’t need a shave. He couldn’t remember shaving. Had Mina shaved him? Nausea rose in him to think of her standing with a razor at his face.
Or he would talk, feverishly but clearly; he would actually hold forth with true brilliance, he thought. He spoke about the tragic inevitable division between the cultural aims of a civilization, any society whatever, and the aims of the religion which that culture included. He told how he had at last come to recognize the necessity for a diseased temperament in the understanding of any religious code. He slapped the table softly with open palm. “It’s only through suffering that one comes to realize this,” he said. “Only through the purest, most intense sort of suffering.” He wagged his head gravely. “That’s how I have come to know the things I know.” At these times he felt he was sixty-five or seventy years old, and a benevolent paternal feeling washed through him; he felt oddly protective of people. They would watch him with slow eyes and stolid expressions. He would expound elaborate theological justifications for suicide, for extreme poverty, for every emotional and physical excess. Sometimes he merely sat in the broken stained stuffed chair in the living room and stared into the tiny fireplace, where lay yet the powdery ashes of the last fire of the winter. He would mutter continuously to himself then, but he wasn’t certain what he was saying. It seemed to be a long disquisition on the nature of fault, whether it was ever entirely personal. But he would suddenly break off and shout for help, for it seemed to him that he had become very small and that he lay smothering in the pinkish-gray ash. Mina would come in and press his shoulders into the chair with her cold dark hands. “Hold on there,” she said. “You’re all right. You just hold on there.” She kept her face steady above his so long that he couldn’t avoid looking up into it. And then he couldn’t look away, and he was awed into silence. Into this unending monologue would creep nonsensical words, words he did not know, an unknown language of despair. “Yogg Sothoth…Cthulhu…Nephreu…” Then his mouth tasted bad, and he would drink again.
It was early July; it was scorching. In the fields the weeds—there didn’t seem to be any crops growing—drooped lank and fat in the sun, and there was the continual sawing of insects. Sunlight was hot and heavy in the air, and the tin roof banged like firecrackers sometimes, expanding in the heat. For a while there was no rain and the road was muffled with pinkish-yellow dust, which would rise in long tall plumes as cars passed and then settle, coating the leaves of the weeds and bushes. At night it was cooler and quieter; the crickets sang, but the darkness made the sound seem distant. Then he heard the stream running below and the infrequent splash of something small and dark entering the stream. He hoped it was one of Morgan’s muskrats.
Visitors were incessant, and Peter kept out of their sight as much as possible, where he could collect himself. They were mostly farmers, large taciturn men with large weathered rancid faces. He was startled to think how long it had taken him to realize how Morgan made his real living: he was a bootlegger. Somewhere on the farm his still was smoking away, digesting and distilling corn. He was even rather amused to think that Morgan must have to buy the grain from some of his customers; he certainly didn’t grow the stuff himself. Was it a profitable business, was Morgan—for all his outward poverty—actually a wealthy man? This thought too was amusing. And now he could account for the endless supply of the alcohol that Mina was fetching him.
But he didn’t like it when on some evenings there would be six or seven of Morgan’s customers gathered in the hot kitchen. Then he didn’t move, but lay stockstill in the raddled quilts, frozen like an animal trying to camouflage itself. He had to guess the number of them from the guttural muttering he heard and the occasional solemn clomp of a heavy shoe. Often enough there were furtive wheezy giggles uttered, and sometimes, there was a single voice shouting, not words, but merely a sound of…of…of fearful surprise, of quick pain, of pained delight. None of these kinds of sounds, and maybe all of them together. What? He struggled to imagine what Mina was doing in there among them. It would be Morgan’s idea, that Mina would encourage the men to drink. But he would not find out, he would not move to look. She would come in now and then to check on him, to bring him liquor if he needed it. She would toss a quilt over him and tuck it tightly and contemptuously under his chin. Her blouse would be unbuttoned at the top and when she bent over the bed he observed her small thick inexpressive breasts. Her skin would be warmer than usual from the heat of the kitchen, but it was still cool.
The next day there was a long massive July storm. It was the first time the light hadn’t seemed unbearable to him and he had gone out onto the narrow back porch which ran the length of the house. A cool wind, and the yearning stirring of the wild cherry tree below the house, the limbs asway; flies swarmed out of the wide air and gathered on his face and arms, and he didn’t brush them away. He sat in a slouched slat-bottomed rocking chair and moved nothing but the forefinger of his right hand, with which he tapped his knee slowly and steadily, in time to a rhythm by which he felt the storm was gathering. Very gradually he accelerated his tapping. Dark gray on gray: the sky was bunching its muscle; it was slow and broad as dreamless sleep. There seemed miles of air between the big first drops of rain. Then it was all loosened at once, noisily drenching the tin roof. The first stroke of lightning was blinding; it seemed that the nearest western hill cleft open, the lightning ascended the skies like something scurrying up a crooked ladder. There was no warning rumble, the thunder issued immediately all in a bang. He dropped to the worn boards of the porch on his hands and knees, heaving and shuddering like a shot dog. Momentarily he imagined the air full of electric particles; if he breathed, his lungs would be electrocuted. Then he was up and ran stumbling into the darkened living room and stood by the fireplace, clutching the daubed stream rock with both hands. He turned round and round. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked quite casually to the corner of the room and pressed his shoulders against the walls, pressed his face hard into the corner. He kept quivering, but he felt that now it was all right to breathe. When Mina passed her damp fingers along the back of his neck he didn’t move at first, but then turned around suddenly, his eyes unseeing and his face blanched. She grasped his shoulders and steered him into the stuffed chair before the fireplace, and he sat there watching it, turned away from the murderous storm. An inky ooze spread on the walls of the fireplace, the rain running down the chimney sides, and an occasional drop fell straight down the chimney, fell into the powdery ashes with a sound like someone letting out his breath suddenly. He gave no sign that he observed anything.
Later he had calmed a great deal, but was very voluble and seemed joyfully excited. The storm had gone away, but trees and the roof were letting down the final drops. The landscape burned with the reflected sunlight. “Look,” he said, “l
ook, it’s true what they said, that God does speak to you out of the storm cloud. I was sitting there, and my ears had never been more closed. It came to me when I was sitting there that I was dead, as dead as anyone buried in the ground. It seemed to me that I would like to struggle to come alive again, to make myself alive somehow, but I didn’t know how. Even if I knew how I wouldn’t have dared, I didn’t have courage, I didn’t have the strength to find courage. God spoke through the sky to me, and then I was dead, but I came back to life. I had to be killed first, you see, truly killed. The trouble was, you know, not that I didn’t have courage to come to life, but that I didn’t have courage to be truly dead. I had to accept that I was dead before anything good could happen like that for me. And then when it thundered I knew I was dead, and I remained dead for a long time. Whole ages passed while I was dead—I just vaguely knew they were passing. I was in a void, you know, I was where it was all darkness and empty space. Then at last I felt the breath of God, I actually felt it.” He ran his fingertips gently, reverently, across the back of his neck. “Here, right here. I literally felt the breath of God pass over my neck.”
Mina held him folded in her slow gaze. “That was just me,” she said. “I was just trying to get you to pay some mind.”
He appeared not to have heard her. He smiled in painful bewilderment. “But I can’t remember the words,” he said. “Not exactly, anyway. Not the exact words.…Isn’t it strange that I should forget the words? I can remember all sorts of other things, and none of that is important now. It’s very strange, don’t you think?”
“Anyhow, you’re okay now,” she said. “I guess I better get you something to drink.”
He shook his head, absently impatient. “I want to think,” he said. He felt he was on the verge of remembering, if not the words he so badly needed, then something equally important, a revelation.
Mina went off; she smiled carelessly. He sat where he was and slowly, helplessly, watched the bright event flicker in his mind and go out. For a panic moment he couldn’t remember even the flavor of what had happened to him; but something at least seemed to come back, and he felt happy again. Now he was sure that an important event had occurred, something happy and eminent. That was enough. You had to be happy with what you got, he thought. No use expecting too much, it wouldn’t be handed to you on a platter.
He rose and went to find Mina in the kitchen. “I think that was a good idea you had about having a drink.”
She stood with her legs apart, her hands on her hips. “You reckon?”
“Yes.” He chewed his upper lip.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I don’t see why I always got to be hauling liquor to you, just whenever you want. I don’t hardly see no good I get out of it.”
He looked at her uncertainly. “Well…”
“If I was to expect you to look after me hand and foot, you wouldn’t be doing it, I don’t reckon. I don’t see the good I get out of it at all.” She gazed steadily on his face.
“Well…” A slight perspiration came on his forehead.
She put her fingertips against his chest and shoved him backward lightly. “You better go and sit down,” she said. “I’ll bring it to you, I guess, when I get a chance.”
He went back and sat waiting, sadly puzzled. What made her act like that, anyway? What had he done? He rubbed his left side slowly and thoughtfully with a vague circular movement. Lately he had a recurrent pain, sharp at times but mostly a blunt heavy ache, and now it seemed to have settled there. The room was much too bright; there was too much light outside, as there always is after a storm has cleared.
In a while she came, bearing a quart Mason jar of the slightly yellow alcohol. No glass or cup this time, he would have to drink it from the jar. “There you are then,” she said. “Is there anything else I got to do to keep you satisfied?” When he looked up at her his face was unknowingly appealing. But she had no mercy.
He wiped his mouth and drank. It was too warm, almost hot, and his stomach surged in an effort to reject the stuff, but he made it stay down. He clenched the jar tightly with both hands and a few drops sloshed on his soiled shirt, a shirt stiff and filthy. The ridges of the edge of the jar rattled against his teeth. He felt better now, but had cleanly forgot the whole day, everything that had happened. It was gone from him immediately and silently, so that he sat drinking blankly for a time with no sense of loss. He was very tired. And then the feeling of having forgot something important began to gnaw in his mind and he became uneasy. He set the jar on the floor and began to rub his face with his hot palms. His chest and legs began to itch too and he scratched energetically. He shifted his feet about and tipped over the jar. He looked at it stupidly for a moment and then jerked down to set it upright. The oily liquid oozed slowly over the worn floor, and the odor of it rose all about the chair, surrounding him entirely, a heavy invisible curtain. There was only about an inch of it left in the jar and he swallowed it down quickly, as if it too might be lost to him. Then he held the jar languidly, and empty tears came into his eyes and rolled down his face. He was motionless, not sobbing, but hopelessly weeping and weeping, without sign of surcease. He was so stupid, so stupid. She wouldn’t bring him more after he had wasted it; she was implacable. Maybe he could keep her from knowing about it. And as soon as he thought, he was getting his shirt off. He was on his knees, trying to soak up the liquor with his shirt, which became black and smelly instantly. He turned to wring it out in the fireplace.
“Now what is it? What do you think you’re doing now?”
He jumped to his feet, dropped the wet shirt on the chair. He shook his head mutely.
“Get that goddam thing off the chair,” she said.
“What kind of a mess have you made now?” She was calm as ice, her voice expressionless.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You ain’t been getting sick, have you? Is that the kind of a mess you’re trying to clean up?”
“No,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
She came closer. “Oh. You’ve went and spilled that shine I brought you. What did you want to do that for? You was the one wanted it yourself. I got no call to go hauling liquor around for you.”
“It was an accident.”
“You don’t make no sense to me, did you know it? I can’t hardly get no sense out of you at all.”
“I’m sorry about it. I didn’t mean to spill it.”
“It ain’t hardly the craziest thing you ever done, now is it? You ain’t been doing nothing but crazy things around here. It’s enough to drive ever’ one of us crazy. And look how you was mopping it up. What are you going to wear for a shirt now? Or didn’t you think about that?”
He was still holding the soaked smelly shirt. He looked at it mournfully. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t think you got anything to know with,” she said. “You ain’t got no brains, that’s all.”
He grew sadder; it was clear she wouldn’t let him have any more to drink.
“Let me tell you what I want you to do with that shirt. You take it in there in the kitchen and put it in the stove. I don’t want to see no such of a mess as that around here. You go on and do it.” When he got to the kitchen door she said, “I guess we’ll just have to put you on a water ration.”
He went on in. He couldn’t find the handle to insert into the stove eye to lift it. He opened the high shelf on the range and took out a table fork; reversed it so he could lift with it.
“Now what do you think you’re doing?” She had come to the doorway.
“I couldn’t find the handle for it.”
“What? I can’t hear for you mumbling like that.”
“I couldn’t find the handle,” he said.
“It’s right there on top,” she said.
“Oh.” He put the table fork back and got down the handle and lifted off the eye. A few coals were live in the bottom of the firebox. He stuffed the shirt in—it didn’t seem likely that i
t would burn—and set the eye back. He got the handle out and held it, a curious warm cast-iron thing, the tip of it shaped like a square-toed shoe. He imagined hitting Mina with it; he would put blue and red streaks on her face, he would make blood come.
“You just better not, buddy boy,” she said. “You better not even think about it. You just put that goddam thing down and come on back here. I sure would like to know what’s got into you. You’re the craziest damn thing I ever seen. Go on, I said, and put it down.”
He hesitated no longer, put the handle on top of the shelf and came to the door.
She was back in the living room, regarded him with cold amusement. “There ain’t nobody in the world would be afraid of you no more. You couldn’t hurt a cat, and you can just go on pretending all you want but all you can do is just make trouble, make a little mess here and there. That’s all. Nobody is going to take you serious.” Again she came to him and put her fingertips on his bare thin chest and pushed him lightly backward. “I guess the best way I can think of to keep you from making trouble is just to put you in bed and let you drink. I don’t guess you can bother anything there but yourself.” She pushed him again. “You go on and get in the bed. I’ll be there in a minute and baby you.”
He went. He sat on the bed and stripped off his shoes and socks and pants, and then lay back wearily, wearing only his soiled underpants. He lay on his side and tried to go to sleep, but his nerves were acrawl with tiredness and unreleased anger, and he didn’t want to close his eyes. He breathed hoarsely. Then she came in, carrying another of the endless jars of corn whiskey. “Here,” she said, “and if you spill this or make a mess it’s the last of it you’ll get to drink in this house, I can tell you. I got more things to do than keep putting up with you.” She set the jar on the floor by the side of the bed, and as she straightened she looked flat into his eyes. “I mean it,” she said. Then she left, closing the door firmly behind her.