Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

The child won’t answer, it doesn’t work like that at this age — won’t answer at all for a while. But then the man hears, Mmuh mmuh —the two parts it’s made of. Is it word from the night shared by son and father now going toward day? You don’t want what you said parroted back. Did you hear that? the woman asks. The man says he believes the baby’s putting two things together. What things? she would like to know. This uh , he says. What uh ?

Something he’s working on, the man reports. They contemplate each other, and contemplate the baby. Well, I thought it was “Mamma,” the woman says. Could be, her husband grants. Is it precocious? she wonders addressing him and only him. The man, who might be losing ground, picks his wristwatch off the kitchen table, remembering the screen. What do we really know, he replies. His son says a short “a,” as in man — a, a, a .

Three nights, three foolhardy nights he and his son almost spent together on this. Waking, the third night, to the now invisible screen by the bed, dogs to be heard from the ranch a mile and a half away, and, as if still further, the higher, thin-throated whoop of a coyote or two like answers of the land, the father doesn’t hear the son; and then he does. The man has slept way past the middle of the night. What has he missed?

The phone ringing? Would that be his talking in his sleep, predicting things according to his wife? He’s out of bed distracted for a second by a tiny fire a mile away, but it is his sleep still with him and with it names, a string of names. When did tonight’s soundings begin? He can hear the baby’s body. The woman breathes what sounds a little like Hi . Sure enough the moon’s in a new position (though why the man has seldom taken the trouble to learn, or remember), but through the crib bars the white-sleeved arms are pointing curiously and with that solitary power. Yet the man does not like what he hears so much. Less blunt, less certain. A nearly whispered “Da” does not mean the father, nor is it cut-off or terrible. The eyelids are illuminated by the moon. His child is beautiful. There is a meaningless gah with some rrr of the day caught inside it. An old eh that accosts nothing but itself and is less like breathing than like a willingness. An agh agh that is in the dark and neither there nor anywhere except dreaming maybe of day. And a slow ha ha ha , and the gaw that was alone but tentative. And, without the deh , another sound breathed with some prior seriousness the man’s heart hopes for or asks something of.

From his sleep names flood him, animals, places. Along the horizon of the Jemez Mountains dawn could look like this line of sky to the west below stratus and, he thinks, altostratus cloud lids. Two horses in the dark lift their muzzles and are shadowy friends of the house some nights so that you see them best by not looking right at them, the rump of the paler Appaloosa obscured by the thick, dark little quarter horse. The half moon passes among the clouds and his wife makes a curved shape asleep but readier than the man, who has never quite heard himself talking in his sleep — predicting, according to this woman — but has been dropping everything these last three nights to learn a language the speaker now may be letting go, or letting be, in favor of another. And what did the man drop, that went away through piñons and juniper like a snake that wanted no part of you. I tried, he says, and the child rolls to his knees and sits up waking. Yes? the man says — but the child is not talking, he’s getting set to cry and he cries terribly and piercingly, seeing the man: it means, You are not what I want, you are what I’m yelling at. The child, for the first time the man can recall, pulls up on the crib rail and stands screaming powerfully. And so it goes.

The man has seen the future and should find tomorrow night that his child has left him with elements no longer of much use and has gone on, although the man leaning down nakedly into the crib and lifting the child out now remembers when he dropped everything what it was he dropped. It was mountains far from here yet just out the window, a campfire, a dog, and two men talking. And he thought that if in his sleep he had put words to it he would see again who those men were.

So the three of them have been in bed for a while, the woman in the middle squeezing her breast from underneath to position the nipple maybe, the infant on the far side of the bed snorting quietly. He woke you up, she murmurs. We’re both talkers, he says, on his elbow, as if he could stay disturbed and awake for good or slip back into shallow sleep. You woke me before you woke up yourself, you said his name, she says, but then you said “uh”—I believe it was “uh”—you said it a couple of times, you were asleep, as if you were thinking something, getting ready to say it.

The man obviously wants to speak, and he covers her breast with his hand. What did you mean, “I tried”? she asks, I thought you were speaking to me .

That it could wait, he says. Oh, good, she sighs. I said his name ? he asks. She breathes. Maybe she isn’t answering. Who on earth cares except the man? The child seems done.

The man might be angry, or talking to himself. Drop everything. Drop everything when he needs you, when he calls. And in return he grows up strong. If he needs you or speaks, if he does anything new, drop everything. It was what you were equal to. What did you get out of being equal to it? Well, you got the name of one of those men by a campfire. You’re not really a night person, his wife goes on as if she’s only half asleep, as if this answers what he asked.

Ask him , he replies. And with that he is out of bed and around to the far side and slides an arm and an elbow under the child and the other arm under the head so that his wife lifts her arm which was above the child’s head and he takes the child from her while she turns to face the other way, her husband’s side.

The desert bricks bring some later cold like a harbinger of daybreak against the soles of his feet, and beyond the window screen a scratching on the ground, a jackrabbit’s claw, a neighbor dog remembering, is unanswered by the earth. You have to lower the child, you have to make it seem like there’s no difference between your hands and arms and bones and the crib mattress, almost no motion from one to the other, these are the things that are necessary.

JOSEPH McELROY was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He is the author of eight novels and has written dozens of stories, essays, and reviews. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.