Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

The moon widening from behind a map of clouds stands harsh. Well, the man might be wrong but it’s as if the mind of the probably sleeping infant thinks over what he just heard. There comes a startling new order, “uh” before “eh”— found ; yet not accosting , but again . And ih, ah , but not with the feeling of here, there or if dark , but of a reaching, a stem. And aw . Which he thought was him, the father, taken down into what he might once have been — it shows him that these sounds might be not feelings or meanings. Does this baby blink at the moon, squint, not know the man leaning over the crib rail looking into the crib at him and the kicked-off blankets; or is he asleep?

The man crossing the room to go back to bed has his theory. It’s his way of being crazy about his son, of not completely waking when he’s hardly been asleep. The idea is that all this is coming from his son — it’s not the child waiting to have something to imitate. It’s late and not much of a theory, it helps the man hang onto the sounds.

Sleeping or waking he will go along with his son, who was asleep surely and the man heard him talk in his sleep as if it were himself for years and years. While during the next day the man didn’t think of it much at all. For during the day, in overalls, the child watches.

You were up and around last night, she says. The man tells her he might have been sleepwalking the way it felt. You were standing at the crib, she says, did you cover him up? He doesn’t think so. She tells him just how tired she was. Go on, he says, for she’ll hear what he means, they accept her stamina and will try not to waste it. Go on? she says, but they agree, she will go on being what she is. You were talking again, she adds, meaning in his sleep. Are you sure? he inquires. Closing in on baby as if there’s no difference between what she does and what the man does is the light of their attention powered by this chosen desert light let in by windows that belong to them embedded cave-like in huge, sandy-surfaced swells of adobe stucco. The baby, to whom the parents talk, sees them as if they’re just talking. The man goes grrr, and, suddenly airborne out there at a height of six feet above the ground, the road-runner, their rare, most serious and elusive, long, violently shy, narrow-bodied road-runner, is seen to fly exposed thirty yards across the front of the house. While, closer, against the broad window sash of unfinished oak a zebratail lizard not supposed to be in the area comes into focus unseen by their son, who smiles, as if he’s forgotten last night, and brags with a measured Ha, ha .

Yet at bedtime you forget that all day you’ve waited for when he won’t be imitating his parents, but sharing a language of his own. And in the man’s sleep it is the second night, and at the same hour the baby speaks out, nine months, six days.

And he’s there for him in five seconds to find spread upon his son’s nose and mouth like a flame of milk the pale seal of night-light from a moon gone no higher than the broad southern sky but ready to go higher hauling indifferently this southwestern sea the desert, and the boy with it. Last night’s launched vowelish tries go into each other with a speed of going some where, it’s practice but it’s a new night, it’s not a thing he’s saying or some outcry, but soundings. So last night’s work is left behind with the man. Not as if he’s stuck with it. But as if the names his son needed have now been given — to the neighbor’s wolf, the high call of the pallid bat feeding on the ground, faces of parents, the hand he examines in the moonlight with his shadowed eyes, the mobile that sways above an intruder’s hand meeting the crib rail, the dog you expelled that the baby would not be surprised to see couched low on the brick floor. These names now made into raw orisons equal what’s outside him, and the father can tell from the uninterrupted tone that the speaker is right. Is that it?

And for the instant that the man adds to his theory that what his son learned by hearing himself voice last night he now puts to use, the man nearly sees what he and his wife were really talking about like almost recalling a dream he had on waking — but catches up with his son and with this old, direct way of doing things.

A joint tenderness of the parents — was that it? — the child who knows things from the very beginning? The man is not ashamed to hang onto it and to what he has heard in the night. Was he the intruder? Halfway to meet him he meets the baby’s glittering eyes, and he won’t back into the shadows. Nice person, he thought his wife murmured. Am I awake the way she is asleep? he thinks. He whispers his son’s name: it means that the child has at stake this awful, right way of putting things together. Mammal messages able to evolve privately between beings. The crib a little less dark tonight, his smile asks nothing, not that he be picked up. His eyes follow what he is uttering because it goes somewhere.

When did the vowels grow these lids, these frictions and touches of maturity expelled with them from his palate, almost a gh before the ah , almost an m before the eh ? The aw comes by itself still, but then is gaw , terribly alone like a watchman’s warning, the uh has acquired an “m” after it, the ih finds a dee but the speaker is sticking onto the sounds the father learned and thought he knew, more than one sound, and the man hears lah , which he puts together with the dee to sing without song, and again this gaw , like another go .

The man, who’s keeping up — all he wants is to know what the child knows. The infant isn’t your equal, no matter how you try the strength of this talk. The infant is almost not there, dead you might say to this world, not a fit companion. Still, the man’s idea is that these sounds now mix for work, and the child has sent them to a place away from him, and they join what they name or get stored in animals or what-all. Confident they’ve gone, he returns to the man, knowing him. You find a grin in the dark, and no complaint, no retort of, “You started it; you can pick me up.” His baby son is unusual in that he has now closed his eyes, his night’s work done. What is the father to do? Touch his wife and wake her? He hears his name but just murmured at a considerable distance.

The brick floor cool as tiles is lower than the outside ground, and he stands at the window by the bed and looks through the ripped screen at the desert risen by another scale entirely. The man was closing in on the infant’s way of sounding the distances between here and the life indifferently around him, no matter what the infant thinks he’s doing. Aren’t these older sounds a power that his son might for now give into his father’s keeping?

It is the second afternoon when she says, You were whispering to him last night. He was whispering, the man replies. Well, you were, because it kept waking me up, she insists. But it was hard to hear, her husband goes on. But that’s why I kept waking up, I had to strain my ears to hear; it wasn’t like when you talk in your sleep, if I only got it all, the woman replies. Aw, you were asleep, the man tells her, never asking what she heard him say, though sometimes it sounds like predictions, according to her. You weren’t whistling to the owl — were you calling to the ground bat again? she asks in friendship, it didn’t sound like you what I heard in my sleep. It wasn’t, he says. Maybe you were thinking out loud, she says to her husband. I wish I could, the man laughs. She laughs and then so does the baby, who says , more than laughs, ah ah ah , a baby in daylight. When are you going to fix the screen? she gets in as if this was what she really had in mind — don’t do that in the middle of the night. Gah , he tells his son softly, guh ; and la-dee , he practically whispers from memory.