Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

She put her arms out for flight. She kept her knees together. She knew she was gone. She knew she would snap. She forecast for herself a lonely lingering coughing up of spinal fluid — she could hear all her sounds now — when fock , landing on the fish binding, she hit facedown on the boards as if entering water in a shallow dive.

The back of the house was black, such a black of hell’s own pit. Something was trying to stop her from going down there. Her breasts burned. The brooch had caught the wood and stopped her.

How wonderful of the brooch to act like a brake, Mother Rooney thought. She had slid only to the edge of the stairwell.

She might have butted through the kitchen door, clear out the back of the house and down the kudzu hill, where there was death by snakes at most, terror by entwinement and suffocation at least.

The house stood, slanting backward but not seriously dismantled yet, over a kudzu-covered cliff that dwindled into red clods upon the grounds of the Mississippi State Fair and Livestock Exhibition. Mother Rooney lived in only the bottom story of the brown middle box between two three-story tubular wings with yellow shingles. The brown box was frosted gingerbread-style in white wooden agates and scrolls, and had a sharp roof to it. In the yellow towers, upstairs, was nobody. She had her stove, pot, couch, bed and dining room, where the boarders ate.

But they were gone.

Her husband Hoover was dead since 1947.

Meager breezes of human odor fell and rose on the stairs.

Once last week she took herself up the stairs of the left wing and opened a room and buried her face in a curtain saturated still with cigarette smoke. She got in the curtain. This time she did not weep. She just held on, getting what she could.

Her rugs moved backward against the baseboards. You dropped a ball of yarn and it took off downhill; you spilled some tea and it streaked away from the dining room, over the threshold hump, and vaporized in the kitchen. The boards were really slick. But she would not nail things down or put gripper mats around everywhere. She wouldn’t surrender. The only concession she made to the house was the acceptance of the sneakers from Harry Monroe, the medical student, who told her they were strictly the newest development from the university, already tested and broken in for her. What they were, were wrestling shoes Monroe and his partner, Bobby Dove Fleece, had stolen off a dead woman in the emergency room, a lady wrestler who had been killed down at City Auditorium. Mother Rooney could make it, with these sneakers, even though her feet didn’t breathe well in them.

She lay hurt more than she then knew beside the stairs, and felt only as usual, surrounded by the towering vacant wings of her house. Now this horror that she had not personally cultivated at all, this queer renewal of sights and sounds in the air — ghosts — was with her.

Mr. Silas was whispering to her in the dining room. “You are living in the cocked twat of the house. This house has its legs in the air. Not only is it ugly, it’s an outrage, Mother. It’s a woman’s thing cocked beggingly between big old thighs. My shocked friends ask why I live here. I answer that it’s what I can afford. I was homeless driving my motorbike and saw the ‘Rooms’ sign. I chose at night. All I wanted was a pillow. Once on the porch, I fell in.”

“She snatched our money and gave us lard to eat,” said Bobby Dove Fleece.

This young man thought he was a genius. All of them were naughty, her boys.

The house tilted all of six inches. A black gap of air stood between the bottom of the porch and the top of the ferny foundation. A sweet waft of ruining potatoes hung in the gap. Hoover had buried the pile for winter-keeping in 1945. Was he ruining so sweetly in his grave? Mother Rooney wondered. Or did his soul lie like a dead putrescent snake in the plumbing under her commode? as she often thought.

But Jerry Silas, leaping from his motorcycle toward the cocked porch, smelled sperm , blowing him over from under the house: haphazard nature had approximated the smell with a rotting compost of yams.

Nature will always scandalize, Silas had told her. And since he was bare chested, as usual in the house, Mr. Silas had flexed all his upper body, a girl-murdering suavity in his eyes, and made the muscles of his chest, stomach and arms stand out most vulgarly in front of her.

Oh, Mother Rooney wished Mr. Silas and all the young men back now, filling the wings and the upstairs with cigar and cigarette smoke, music, whoops, nonsense, coming down and arranging themselves noisily around her table to eat what they called her Texas pie — because it was so ugly, they said. And she, scooping out the brown stringy beef and dumplings and setting it on their plates with insulted vigor, flak ! Oh, they kept her at the edge of weeping or of praying; she was hurt in her cook’s heart.

Some juice spattered on Mr. Delph, the young pharmacist, and he announced, wiping it away: “Fellows, Mother Rooney is not being a Christian again.”

They made her uncertain of even her best dishes, her squash casserole, her oyster patties. When they first had begun this business, she lingered in the kitchen while tears ran off her cheeks into her milky desserts.

But for them just to be here she wished, calling her anything they wanted to. Let them mimic Father Putee behind his back as he advises my poor carnal body, the two of us seated on the couch in the dining room.

Mother Rooney regained the picture of that rascal Mr. Worley, the student at Millsaps College. He was loitering up the stairway listening to Father Putee, and she saw him, dressed only in underwear for her benefit. When Father Putee would finish a sentence, Mr. Worley would snap the waist of his underwear and look upward to heaven. Finally, Father Putee, an old person himself, heard the underwear snap, and turned. But by then Worley was gone, and Harry Monroe was in his place, sitting fully dressed, waving his hand. “Hi, padre. I’m just chaperoning you two.”

Let them, let them, she wished.

Let them take me to another movie at the Royal Theater, telling me it is an epic of the Catholic faith, and then we sit down and see all of that Bulgarian woman in her nightgown prissing about until that sordid beast eats her neck, the moon in the window. Let them ride me by St. Thomas’s Church, as Mr. Worley says in the backseat to Mr. Hammack, the young man who tunes organs, and asking it again to Mr. Delph: “Don’t you hate a fish-eater? Hammack, Delph, don’t you?” They go on and on, pretending to be rural hard-shells, then stop the car under the shadowy cross in the street. “Let’s kill a fish-eater.” They ask me to find them one, describing how they will torture one like they did in the Middle Ages, only nastier, and especially an old woman fish-eater. Maybe let her live for a few weeks until she has to beat on the door with her own leg bone to be heard from the street.

Then let them all come down to the table in their underwear, all except Mr. Monroe, who is in on the joke so far as to have his shirt off. I’m in the kitchen and see Mr. Silas stand up and say this: “Predinner game tonight! Here it is! If any old, creeping, venerealized, moss-covered turtle of a Catholic scab-eating bimbo discarded from Pope Gregory’s lap and rejected by the leprous wino in back of the Twentieth Century Pool Hall comes in here serving up any scum-sucking plate of oysters of a fish-eating Friday night, we all pull off our jockey shorts and wave them over our heads, okay?” “Yahhhhh!” the rest of them agree, and I peep around and see Mr. Silas putting the written-up piece of paper in his elastic underwear. I wait, wait, not sure of anything except I am getting the treatment from them for asking each one if he was a Catholic by any chance when they first boarded with me. Then: “But where is our sweet Mother Rooney?” I hear Mr. Silas chiming, lilting. “With her charming glad old heart, the beam in her eye of a reconciled old age? Her mushrooms and asparagus, blessed by the Lord? Her twinkling calluses, proud to tote the ponderous barge of householdery? Benedictions and proverbs during the neat repast, and an Irish air or two over the piano afterwards, to bed at nine?” says Harry Monroe. “To flush at six,” says Bobby Dove Fleece.