William Gass - Middle C

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Portho? him I haven’t hide nor haired. The Major excluded him with a wave of her pencil.

Portho is not likely to challenge you again — not anytime soon.

Portho knows I always forgive him.

Oh, have you had run-ins before? … with Portho?

He isn’t important. Not that no-account. Not Portho.

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He remembered having to memorize in school “If I could ever be the last leaf upon the tree …” Unlike the initial robin or cuckoo of spring, no one ever noticed when the first twig lost its cover or, during an attack, some unnerved soldier initiated the retreat by dropping his weapon and turning his back. Indians, he’d read, buried their dead on elevated platforms as if they were already halfway to heaven. The sun would bleach the bones the birds cleaned. Skulls could be used to frighten trespassers, he supposed, or warn of their owners’ magical powers.

Fluff from the cottonwoods, as well as those released by milk- and bindweed packets — perhaps the souls of the Indians, too — sailed in the same errant way, scudding along like bits of cloud or bobbing gently at even the rumor of a wind, until suddenly a stave of locust fronds would spin like a dancer down the side of the sky and cause clusters of those seeds to waver out of the way like pedestrians maneuvering a congested walk.

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Miriam said that she had read in the Woodbine Times of the death of an old and much-beloved professor of music. She thought the college would surely be looking for a replacement. Joey should let them know he was nearby and available. Joseph tried to explain to her the absurdity of her suggestion, but Miriam just grew angry and started blaming him for a lack of ambition. This failure was soon attributed to his runaway father and then, after a moment’s reflection, pinned to most men because most men lived on the love of women like weevils in a biscuit. To conclude, she said: Debbie phoned; she phoned on that damned funnel. Really? Joey was surprised. It seemed to him that Debbie had run away as effectively as their father. Miriam’s glower was replaced by a gleam. Your sister is pregnant. I’m going to be a grandmother.

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On days of calm, Joseph watched white coils of smoke rise slowly from the coal fires still popular in a town so close to the mines. They were soothing, the way they grew, as if to hurry anywhere would be simply gauche. All over hillside, in icy air, the gray soot steamed straight as a palm until it cooled and gradually smeared the upper sky. The world was coming down with the cold.

Yes, there were so many causes for everything that nothing could be conjectured with any certainty. The apparently hollow firmament was a rush of rivers, streams, creeks, trickles of air, and frequencies of transmission, the earth itself was quietly shifting in its sleep, and through uncountable homes and firesides shivers of pleasure or apprehension were vibrating like the strings of an instrument. At twilight the intensity of every color became an outcry, and a step on the street an announcement as leaves rushed to be crushed by someone’s feet. Every evening, Joey watched the lights come on in much the same order: first in the house with the widow’s walk, then in the yellow cottage and the hired rooms of the bed-and-breakfast; door lights were notes in an expectant score, kitchens warmed the lower floors, while late at night bathrooms played at shining like a second sky. Yet the general scene was solemn, silent; the world went about its customary affairs as it had in other ages, other times. On the page of a picture book there could be peace.

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You will never gain weight, Joey, even if I were to put you to bed and feed you Würstelbraten by the fat forkful, Miriam said. You’d kick the covers and fever your fingers pretending to play the piano.

If the sausages you thread through the beef were the size of Faschingskrapfen , I wouldn’t need to sit stiller than my chair. Joey used the German to please her. She believed immobility encouraged one’s body fats to cool.

Joey, you ought to practice curling up in cold weather like the squirrels and bears do. For Christmas I will fry you some fritters if I can find a brick of white lard, but here … in this country …

Goose grease, Mother, Joey said, is the answer to everything.

Ach, who can afford a goose … in this country … it is chickens, chickens, chickens. Frozen in bags. In plastic. Their guts in cellyphane like gumdrops. Here everything is plastic, my job is plastic, spoons are plastic. They pretend they’ve made them from beans. Lieber Gott … raincoats are plastic. Old days, we had deer from the woods, ducks from the lakes, grouse, is it? sheep. We had geese.

You had plenty of chickens, too, Mother, didn’t you? dirtying the yard.

What would you know? hah! Britisher! we had chickens, but never chickens, chickens, chickens.

Well, dear, anyhow, the Braten was delicious.

It was all right, though the gravy could have used a plop of yogurt. Still, in this country …

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Miriam was somewhat reconciled to the fact that her son had a job in another town, though she frequently complained of his absence and his enslavement to civic virtue, since Joey had presented his occupation as a kind of social work, a contribution to his adopted country. To Miriam they had been kidnapped by Arabs, held captive in a leaky hold, and were now slave labor. It was Joey’s fault his poor mother had to be picked up Sundays like the sickly were and driven to mass. She believed that he had not tried hard enough to seek better-paying employment and accused him of finding a position that allowed him more leisure than work. I don’t have enough education to get a good job, he told her repeatedly, but I shall remedy that in time, he assured her just as frequently. He now had a diploma that awarded him a bachelor of arts and another that gave him a music degree, though he thought that he would save such good news and make her a gift of it later. Then she would praise him and wonder how he did it — to be so busy and still devoted to his studies. He worked, he drove, he could go into debt because he had what they called a charge account: that seemed to Joey quite sufficient for the present. And in contrast to the way he spent his time at college, now he only listened to what he liked, read what he liked, looked at what he liked, consequently he had the skills he was willing to have and knew only what he was willing to know.

Weekend had followed weekend with happy monotony until at last Miriam, who had kept her news in her purse for two months, as she confessed, told Joey he’d be — what was it? — an uncle. He hated the funnel then as much as his mother did. And the smug look of pregnant women. The contented pride contained in Debbie’s swollen sweater. He could see Miriam skewering the roast and then slowly patiently pushing sausage into the soft holes she’d made in the meat and feel his own belly swelling — not with sympathy, not with something he’d eaten — milk mit cookies — but with a kind of living wind, a palpable pushy balloonishness. Entire buildings, his car, his library, grew larger; their sides bulged with unwanted life. And now, Miriam said, I shall need to go out — go out often to the country — to see her. To see how she is faring. To hear first movements. To feel the child kicking. To press the button and touch the baby through her mommy’s belly. To press the button like you’ve come to call. It is all recovered to me now, you and your sister, how it felt when I was walking with you all the way to England, leaning back to stay upright, you, Joey, heavier than groceries. So your car needs to sit nearby me, Joey, and you can’t live at the dark bottom of a funnel either, nein to that because now I must get out in the country to see Debbie and the baby, since she has been such a stranger to us, gone as if to another part of the world, across seas of soybeans and fields of potatoes. It’s only a few miles, Joey said. That’s far if you’ve got to walk. That’s far if you’re a granny.