KNOXVILLE: SUMMER
OF 1915
23
that of the fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike
pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their
lawns. The hoses were attached at spiggots that stood out of the brick
foundations of the houses. The nozzles were variously set but usually so
there was a long sweet stream of .spray, the nozzle wet in the hand, the
water trickling the right forearm and the peeled-back cuff, and the water
whishing out a long loose and low-curved cone, and so gentle a sound. First
an insane noise of violence in the nozzle, then the still irregular sound of
adjustment, then the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch as accurately
tuned to the size and style of stream as any violin. So many qualities of
sound out of one hose: so many choral differences out of those several hoses
that were in earshot. Out of anyone hose, the almost dead silence of the
release, and the short still arch of the separate big drops, silent as a held
breath, and the only noise the flattering noise on leaves and the slapped
grass at the fall of each big drop. That, and the intense hiss with the intense
stream; that, and that same intensity not growing less but growing more
quiet and delicate with the turn of the nozzle, up to that extreme tender
whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film. Chiefly, though, the
hoses were set much alike, in a compromise between distance and tender–
ness of spray, (and quite surely a sense of art behind this compromise, and
a quiet, deep joy, too real to recognize itself), and the sounds therefore
were pitched much alike; pointed by the snorting start of a new hose;
decorated by some man playful with the nozzle; left empty, like God by the
sparrow's fall, when any single one of them desists: and all, though near
alike, of various pitch; and in this unison. These sweet pale streamings in
the light lift out their pallors and their voices all together, mothers hushing
their children, the hushing unnaturally prolonged, the men gentle and silent
and each snail-like withdrawn into the quietude of what he singly is doing,
the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible
wall, and gently happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their
living like the last of their suppers in their mouths; while the locusts carry
on this noise of hoses on their much higher and sharper key. The noise of
the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from
him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also
there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of
each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them
varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete
from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarce–
ly defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every
tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once,
from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your ear–
drums, the boldest of all the sounds of night. And yet it is habitual to
summer nights, and is of the great ordefy of noises, like the noi ses of the sea
