Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

Like a comrade he made his way across the cool bricks, he’s with his son in a moment— flowed there to him and stands above the crib in whose immaterial depths a blink of the mouth locates the face. Where are his eyes? Darkened, do they stare behind their lids? They’re asleep in some way and distinct from the child that is his, whose mouth moves as the moon in the window above the crib draws a cloud in front of it. The kid’s in one piece, thank God, thank the stars, thank the desert, but the sounds begin again, for they were no dream of the man’s zig-zagging away through low piñon pines and stunted, ancient-elbowed juniper the way the phone seems to have rung as you wake upon the waste of future and past which dreams are. But where are these sounds coming from if his son was not greeting a predator or giving a name to an intruder? Why, they’re just practical sounds the baby’s actually practicing which the father hears as if his own good depended on it and will try to answer.

And so it happens that he is learning these sounds, like letting them strike what hasn’t yet quite woken up in him: the ah , the ih . Squeezed off the palate hard, or choking, cut off, not hoarse at all in the dark but blunt, certain, and alone. The man’s no clawed intruder but the father here, a witness; ready for anything — to be his son’s equal, who is alone and launching these sounds, one that goes far, just the intent of it, while the next, you could swear, sends its breath at some near thing. Hearing is like answering him, even if they are no match for each other. He is to be answered. The man believes in it in the middle of the night. It’s what he will tell him one day: answer — not do what they say , but don’t not answer. If tongue-tied, at least make a noise. Go agh , go aiee . Come back at them in a whisper. But don’t not answer. Did the man just learn this, it feels so fresh? Seed planted in him in the middle of the night.

For the vowels are brave. They are things more right than words; but, as the man heard them, there and here are what they apparently say— ah and ih , a cast and a return; while the next, the uh , as in “mother,” accepts what belongs to you, to this basic person, it measures just this. So to the man it meant, what you found; while the next, the eh , as in “again,” stops what you found and holds it to what it is: accosts it; accosts what? the moon moving? a knife of reflected light cut by the ceiling beam? or a memory you can’t have all by yourself? As good as an owl whistling in the arroyo, hearing like this, or some fool — hearing there, here, found, accosting.

The infant whispered like thought, old things are what he whispers into his thinking. The time has come, vowel cries that are about to come again that the man standing around naked in the middle of the night is learning, they are not to him, they are only what woke him. This creature in the crib talks out loud and with something at stake, but in an order more raw and stately—“ uh, ah, eh, ih, aw .” He knows what he’s doing — and to his father’s ear it is found, there, accosting, here, just between the two of them a seesaw sense more theirs now, less to be feared.

Though hearing the aw sound hard and creaking as a bird, foraging and unconsciously alert, the man made little or nothing of it, and felt free to. So he stepped back so as not to wake the child with his body or familiarity; for if the kid is asleep after all, he could open his eyes that seem hidden by their lids from the darkness and the breathing of the man, and see the man, who now thinks proudly where this is, where they live — a desert state, vast or actually weird—“beloved,” he likes to think, who, waking to the gash in the screen enhanced by the moonlight, forgot he already knew how it got ripped. Waking to these god-awful sounds and the damaged window screen which his eyes told his brain was part of it, he thought Animal , an animal had leapt in out of the desert. But no high-hipped bobcat far from its rock or lost bear cub or snouted coati with a taste for the fruits of the night that jumped out of somebody’s truck on the Interstate is going to try a stunt like this. And in his heart like what he knew all along it was of course the same mange- and sore-ridden half-blind dog of yesterday who couldn’t bear the noonday sky, the bright ground, and, wanting the shadow of the house, went for the open bedroom window while the family were having lunch.

His son’s blood is safe from that dog who wouldn’t drink or eat and didn’t even roll his eyes up when he brought two dishes in and then brought the baby in to show him this hounded creature, muzzle on the brick, too tired to have rabies or plague, where he had ended up collapsed with one hind leg out, the hide caked with adobe dirt.

A personal sigh has deepened the room, his wife’s, and it threatens them with her perspective. She turns. She hears with her body, her mind, declines to talk in her sleep, hears her husband if necessary, yet will sleep on until, toward dawn, hearing the baby burst out crying, she will probably get out of bed in one motion, go and take him, hold him and nurse him. So the man knows from her breathing she is not doing any serious hearing of these sounds right now. Which come again in the moonlight, vowels in a whole new order, called and attempted, or brave; not crying, but uttered.

Plus the o -ish aw -ish one the man hears as aw now — vowel five, it’s his.

They open to each other without at all getting mixed up together, to his ear like talk he hears in the kitchen of a Hopi farmer, a dog barking outside in the dusty wind of the mesa. Sounds coming your way, stopping short. What was there is here; and now that it’s found we accost it . At nine months and five days, is his son at it already in a tongue of his own? What does it take? only the breath cut off in his throat that primitively rasps its old use. It goes back into him, a spirit — a way that’s all his. That’s what it is: his son’s language under cover of night brought here from far away. But the man is the father, he’s got too much at stake to let himself believe such things any longer tonight. But has he ever believed them? The aw pushes the speaker’s lips, he knows them in his sleep. He pushes them across, so self-possessed by the nighttime vowels. There, here, found, accosting, was where the man came in. But then, found, there, accosting, here.

Are you all right? the woman murmurs more or less remote, as if she is thinking of him somewhere else. Mmhmm, he says, close to his son. Is it that his wife does so much, that she feeds the child? He does not envy her. What was there is here; and now that it’s found we accost it . Is it a madness in the infant’s voice which is only nature? And has the man ever believed such things as these coming to him in the baby’s voice? He is aware of a long, winding, affirmative answer but it is going out of him somewhere else and he does not get it. He is going to know his son’s language. It is a son’s language. You can do that much.

It’s changing, though, it’s “ eh, uh ”— accosting, found —yet the known sounds ih and ah after them have changed their feeling to if and dark, ih, ah —with once again that aw which is little more than a neighbor sound following from the “dark” ah that’s almost a stranger, an act. So what the man’s getting with accosting is: Only by accosting, you find — and only if dark .

Thinking it, he can understand it, the baby at nine months old years from such advice which comes best not from the father anyway but from elsewhere, from outside. Is it not from his son at all but through his son? — like how the man will speak to the baby ( You’re ready for a nap ) but be speaking to his wife, the real other person here? The baby’s mouth opening in the dark, or pursed; nursing the old life of these sounds, practicing it. But there’s a thing somewhere the man has to do. Is it the aw ? On his breath almost more than his voice, he says back, eh, uh, ih, ah .