6
PARTISAN REVIEW
I wouldn't even go to town for bread and kerosene and matches. My
father went instead. He went to find somebody who would listen
to him.
The inside of my brain must have looked like that room. . . .
The green straw matting burned in spots around the stove, the sofa
covered with tumbled quilts in the corner where Aunt Freda slept at
night and lay awake in the daytime, the table where we ate in the
opposite corner, the clock, and the picture over the clock of a black
horse and a white horse tossing their manes in a high wind against
a sky shot with lightning. There was a calendar with bright Biblical
pictures. In one picture a young man in blue knelt on a leopard skin
before an old king in a red robe. " ...
and I said to the king, if it
please the king, if thy servant hast found favor in thy sight, that thou
wouldst send me into Judea, into the city of my fath er'S sepulchres
that I may rebuild them .
..."
The only sound the fire crackling in
the stove, the clock ticking, and my father's footsteps going up and
down.
"Here, I guess you can manage this better," my father would
say, passing Bran the softest food at table. My father crunched chicken
bones. Bran had ·been having trouble with his teeth for a long time.
Most of them were gone. He would eat the soft things and pretend
not to hear what was said to him. When my father had been with us
a month and felt more at home he said other things:
"Look at me," he would say, throwing his chest out. "A man
doesn't have to let himself go. I'm older than you but I look ten years
younger." He would walk up and down swinging his arms, bending
over to show he could touch the floor. Bran wouldn't say a word. He
acted as if my father weren't there. I didn't blame him.
I grew to depend on Bran's not saying anything. His silence was
something hard for me to put my back against, something stable and
solid. Then one day I heard him curse. He didn't know I was near
him. I came up behind him when he leaned over to scrape a plate
of scraps into the slop bucket. His pipe fell out of his mouth into thr
bucket. He didn't have enough teeth left to hold it in his mouth. He
didn't raise his voice as he fished the pipe out of the bucket and took
it to the sink to wash it; he didn't sound as if he were angry. The
words just came out as if they were already shaped in his mind and
he was only going on aloud with what he had been thinking.
If
he
felt that way the whole business must be pretty bad.
There was something terrible about Bran. He was like a man
on fire, slowly burning up inside, and he wouldn't ask anybody for
help and he wouldn't help himself. I think he wanted it over and done
with. He wouldn't go to see a dentist about his teeth. When another
