William Gaddis - A Folic Of His Own

(PAUSING, AS SHE JUST LOOKS AT HIM, HE ADDS WITH BITTER AFTERTHOUGHT, LOOKING ROUND)

'One of the finest private mansions in the Carolinas,' and look at it. Look at it now. That's what my uncle called it that day, just to get rid of us. Lord! the way he described it. Had he ever come down here and seen it? Why, he talked as though he'd seen Quantness.

HIS MOTHER

(COLDLY DIRECT)

The way you did.

THOMAS

(DRAWN UP SHORT)

I…

HIS MOTHER

The way you saw it that first day we came, and you drove that old rig right up to Quantness as though you'd lived there all your life. Standing up as you drove and pointing things out with the whip, the house and the tall white columns, and seeing it all for the first time yourself. I might have thought that you'd been born there, if I wasn't your mother and knew.

THOMAS

(ANNOYED BUT TAKEN ABACK)

And why not? It was just a mistake, following what directions we had and after he'd described this place as 'one of the finest private mansions…'

HIS MOTHER

(CUTS IN SHARPLY)

And this now? This great fortune? No Thomas, your father had a friend, what was his name from back in the old whaling days, they called him the Sage of Sag Harbor and what he used to say. There is never a treasure without a following shade of care…

(HOLDING UP A HAND TO FORESTALL HIM)

And you sound like you did seven years ago, like you did when we drove into Quantness, standing up in that old rig and crowing. Pointing out things that you thought were yours, horses, stables, I won't forget, even that sundial by the drive, there wasn't a tree or a blade of grass, a dog or a darkie that wasn't yours the moment you saw it, not a fear or a doubt in your mind, and now…

THOMAS

(CUTTING HER OFF FIRMLY)

Quantness is my home now.

HIS MOTHER

(SNIFFING, FUMBLING AS THOUGH SEEKING A HANDKERCHIEF)

It has changed you, Thomas. A year from home and people.

THOMAS

And people! By heaven, people? What do you think war is?

HIS MOTHER

No, mindful of others, I mean to say. I cannot see you, a year ago, using such language in the parlour, lighting up your tobacco without excusing yourself, putting your feet up on the woodwork… No, not only this, only this as a part of you now. Coming so sudden at dawn, you look so big to me, so different, so like and so different. Some dream of yourself, coming in so rumpled, your beard not trimmed and the way your face is drawn on that one side… you look outraged. I've dreamt of you Thomas but not my dream. Someone's dream, someone else, yours perhaps, coming in with this letter from your Mister Bagby and your talk of going north now, today, when you've scarcely laid eyes on your family at Quantness, when you haven't been home yet once round the clock…

THOMAS

(BLURTS OUT)

Listen…! If all this is to keep me here, Mother? Because I can't stay, isn't that clear? If you'd… tell me what it is that you want. When war came you didn't want that, you didn't want me to go, and now you don't want me to leave it? When I planted tobacco you didn't want that, we couldn't eat it or wear it, and now you were proud of it. You said I was vain when I put on this uniform, now when I cross a boot over my knee… what is it you want? And when this fortune was out of our reach, why you… and now, you won't have it? What is it!

HIS MOTHER

(WITH REPROACHFUL CALM)

What I have always sought, for myself and those in my keeping Thomas. To know the Lord's will, and submit. To lay up treasures in heaven, Thomas, treasures even for you, while you seek here below…

THOMAS

(HOARSELY CHALLENGING)

Only justice!

THOMAS draws both hands down his face and stands staring.

All of this came when my spirit was almost broken… or when I suddenly knew that it could be, and that's the same thing…

He turns away slowly as he speaks, nearing the door and there staring at an old shotgun racked on the wall.

When I've laid out there with their screams in my throat, the screams of men being torn to pieces in my own throat because I had to be next, but I couldn't be…

He takes down the shotgun as he speaks and with the suppressed horror of somnambulism goes through the scene which he describes.

All of it couldn't be happening. There? to me? It couldn't be, no… But what happened once, what happened there, what happened before still happens at night. It happens the way it happened then, when I went up hunting on their property, over the rise where the chapel looks across the fields and over the creek, staring through rail fence and that creek to Quantness house itself. It was when we first came here, we knew no one, and I'd never hunted a thing in my life. With this gun… there's a path that runs up the rise and broadens into a wagonroad straight through a clearing a half mile long and brown with cornstalks standing uncut where the woods farther on fall back. And there, coming over the foot of that rise, three cock pheasants burst up off the ground with the terrible slowness of things in a dream. They wheeled, I fired, and they were gone… but there on the ground with a broken wing one of them struggled across the stones, and I fired again, and it kept on, struggling until it reached a wall where it fought its head in amongst the stones. I wanted to leave it, and let it live, to remember as something I hadn't seen. Worse happens in nature that we never see. Worse happened. I killed it cutting its throat, too kind to do it the violence of wringing its neck or snapping its head against a stone. But around its throat, the brilliant feathers, I couldn't get the knife through… It wouldn't cut without… God! The absurdity of it. It wouldn't stop fighting, and not fighting me… It was fighting to fly from what was happening.

(MORE DISTANTLY, STANDING AS THOUGH DAZED)

She was a child, Giulielma then, come up behind me demanding to know what I was doing on their property. And it was as though I'd strayed into a kingdom, a fool from nowhere with blood on my hands and that bird dropping blood on the ground between us. I gave her father the bird when I met him, as though I'd been out and shot it for sport. 'I never knew anyone to hunt without dogs,' was what she said when she took me in…

(SHUDDERING, HE CLUTCHES A HAND OVER HIS EYES)

And I never climb that rise today without seeing them wheel up before me, without a tearing ache in my stomach. I was hunting because we were hungry.

HIS MOTHER half rises from her chair, her arms tendering an embrace which she drops slowly as he stares without seeing her.

HIS MOTHER

(SINKING BACK IN CHAIR, QUAVERINGLY DIRECT)

And you married her… for Quantness and, you're going there? now?

THOMAS

(SPEAKING WITH EFFORT, NOT LOOKING AT HER)

Out to wake John Israel and Ambers, to pack up your things.

HIS MOTHER

(COLDLY)

John Israel's gone.

THOMAS

(STOPPING SHARPLY IN THE DOOR)

Gone?

HIS MOTHER

John Israel's gone, Thomas. He ran off.

THOMAS

(AMAZED, STEPPING BACK INTO THE ROOM)

But… why didn't you tell me? Or write?

HIS MOTHER

(WITH RUEFUL SATISFACTION)

What could you have done, so far away?

THOMAS

When? When did he go?

HIS MOTHER

In dead of winter. We worried sick, if he was running away up north, where it's colder.

THOMAS

But… him run off, and you worried for him?

(HE COMES SLOWLY TO REST AGAINST THE DOORFRAME)

And after I left him safe behind, instead of taking him up to the war…

HIS MOTHER

(DISTANTLY RESENTFUL)

The way you used to take him to work up at Quantness, and you and her brother used to devil him up there.

THOMAS

(WITH EFFORT AT WEARY INDULGENT LAUGH, AS THOUGH THIS IS AN OLD ARGUMENT)