William Gass - Middle C

Joseph’s snuffy head stared at the sheet-white yard. Its dazzle did him in. A few withered rose hips, dark marks against the snow, a few bent dry fronds with enough substance to cast an insubstantial likeness, a few thin brittle sticks: they pierced the snow’s sturdy surface to lead the eye over one stretch of death to another and encouraged the rabbits to bound across it as if it were hot, and the squirrels race to a tree, snippily flashing their tails. His own fly strips fluttered like kite tails when he coughed. Elsewhere, beneath the now-solid sod, where there remained but little warmth from a sun a month old, moles in dark runnels rarely moved, and bulbs that would later bloom so raucously kept counsel to themselves as if indifferent to entreaties from their nature. Skizzen, always perverse on Tuesdays, and made worse by phlegm and fever, let his thoughts seek those buried green blades that were so eager to push through the first wet earth offered them and flaunt their true colors. That’s where growing went to winter. That was elsewhere’s elsewhere.

Skizzen’s present season wasn’t winter. Winter in Woodbine was crisp and clear and cold and clean. The trees were dark-barked, even a sharp wind could not bend their stiffened twigs. His present climate was a stew of steaming fluids. What he saw leaked out of his swollen eyes like an overfull cup. What he smelled fell into a hideous hankie he wadded in his fist and held helplessly to his mouth. In front of him hung a column of clippings that warned against eating Chinese chickens. He stifled a sneeze and sent it to his ribs, which responsively heaved.

Spring’s final frost would bite those bulbs for their boasting and bring their beauty, so fragilely composed, to a rude and cruel close, the way wily sovereigns tempt the tongues of their subjects in order to learn who might be bold enough to wag them and thus nip oppositions, as we customarily say, in the bud. Another human’s warmth might draw him out and leave him exposed, Skizzen concluded, especially when occupied by discomfort as he was now and dearly desiring a nurse. He considered it a thought worth noting down for use when he spoke to his class of music’s lulling little openings, childishly gleeful sometimes—“carefree” was the word … yes … sunny their disposition — strings of notes that did not pull a toy train clattering behind them as they seemed to promise but drew open suddenly the very door of war.

Once most of the birds flew away in winter, performing feats of navigation while on their many migrations that made the Magi seem novices at geography, since the three sages, at least, had a star; but now so many simply stay and tough it out, counting on the sentiments of humans who have for centuries protected those they couldn’t eat, and even kept some cozy in cages most artfully fashioned for them, or prized them for their plumage, or pitted them in fights, or said they sang at night when lovers … well … so it was rumored … did whatever they do … counting on others like his mother’s hand to feed them.

Hydrangea, or Lemon Daddy, the Fickle Bush .

Joseph tried to encourage the escape of the heat that built up in the house during the summer months by keeping the attic windows open, even if he risked, through one of his rusted screens, the entry of some unfriendly flying things, especially bats, which could hang as handily upside down as his flypapered chains of news clippings, the new group especially, strung near the opening of a dormer, that featured pederasts and their victims, a bunch he had with reluctance begun collecting because he had finally noticed the possibly suspicious absence of sex crimes and criminals — rapes, brises, and other genital deformations, gays and other aberrants, exhibitionists, porncones, sodomists, and other mysterious trans-mix-ups — an absence not to be pursued, but people and practices that nevertheless belonged in any proper inhumanity museum, the nutsy fagans and other detrolleyed toonervilles — others, aliens, weirdos, those were the words — the unlike and therefore unliked, whose unnatural acts promoted inhumane behavior in the species. It gave Joseph no pleasure at all to pursue these topics, in fact they made him queasy, but he felt it a duty to his dream.

Stir reet stir reet , he thought the wrens said, and then stir reet stir reet again. Not music, he suspected. Not conversation. Only pronouncement. Cheater , the cardinals insisted. Cheater cheater cheater .

Calamint, till frost, dainty of bloom and tart of odor .

A stinging wind brought tears to Joey’s eyes when Joseph looked down on Miriam’s garden filled with captured leaves. They flew just above the mums to be caught in hedges that had lost theirs and whose briars were now eager to seize any debris the wind blew in. I still have mine, Professor Skizzen thought, fly stuck and fluttery, though I’m not evergreen. Angered by the blurred vision in his watery eyes, Skizzen brought his fist down on his right thigh. The blow couldn’t reach through the cloth to cause a bruise.

We giggle together, that’s a good sign, Marjorie said.

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She stole nickels, she stole dimes. That’s no way to run a store.

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She was the head librarian once, now she’s just the basement dunce.

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I don’t know what I’d do without me.

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That Portho person took out a dirty blue bandanna to wipe the chair he’d chosen as if it were the seat of a public toilet.

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The pencil’s point should not be too fine. Otherwise it will scratch the paper and leave a trail that no eraser can rub away.

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I don’t like weather you can’t put a name to.

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Nobody has worked harder to get nowhere than I have.

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I hear that during the Depression famished poor kids used to eat library paste in their art classes. If you’re hungry enough you’ll eat earth. I wonder what sort of sounds they make, those inflated bellies? Do they growl? squeal? Can they catch cold? Can they cough? Not in the library. Of course anything you can hear in here I hear.

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I’m told your concerts in the church basement are pretty pop, Marjorie said, with an inquiring smile. I’m told you play gospel, too, as if you were born to be black.

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Good boy.

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I’m not sure I like the way you listen, Joey. You let me talk about myself until I feel bad.

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I never had it in for her, you know. My eye just caught her picking up the pennies and peering at the dates on them … or she was looking for Indian heads. So what, I thought. Until I caught her sneaking a dime from the overdue box. I bet she bought gum. We used to chew a lot of gum in here, we got so bored sitting at the front desk like an ink pad, you could have filled sacks with our yawns, but when I took charge I put a stop to it because it set a bad example for borrowers, you know, put ideas in their heads, we had enough trouble without aiding any of it, it didn’t need any aiding, so I put a stop to it. Full stop. To it.

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I hate Kleenex. If you blow your nose you put your blow in your purse. But no. Into a library book the soiled fold goes, stuffed between pages and infecting the words. Tissue with lipstick on it wedged between pride and prejudice. Pardon me, Joey, but you know what they can wipe with it.

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Before me, nobody thought about things. She didn’t. She sat here and smiled, stamped your book and smiled, said, Have a wordful day. Her smile was wan, though, with no conviction to it, not even a smile-filled smile, just a little twitch that widened the mouth, disturbed the lips. Wan, I would say it was. And have a wordful day was said in a whisper, as if it were between her and the book. Me — I have my great gray eyes. I look you in the face to say my say and I say sometimes, Have a nice day, okay, sometimes that’s what I say, I remind the moms, the kids, the occasionals — This book is due the twenty-first, remember — but you never know, I might say, Go away and jibber your jabber elsewhere, babble to your chums of your little life and loves, make out in the car, Carl — was that the skinny redhead’s name? who taught — would you believe it? — fencing.