William Gass - Omensetter’s Luck

Behind the wall, farther than the stair had been, he thought he heard them clearly: Omensetter and his dog, the children and the jays, floating sticks and splashing, the slow lap of the water on the shore. Well my watch won't run without me. I'm the works. Another one for Tott. Ghost, gnome, witch, companions of the night's mare (as Tott insisted, eyeing him eagerly to see how he took it, disappointed each time): at least they needed him if they wanted to exist at all. Cruel, frightening, wicked as they were they waited like a school of playmates underneath his window. Often, awake, he would hear them call.

Here I come a-riding

like a wild west scout, if I spy you hiding,

Pike, you're out out OUT.

Nevertheless, and it gave Furber courage to remember it in all of Gilean's amazement at Omensetter's luck there was suspicion; in all of their thanksgiving there was a measure of ingratitude; in all their admiration — yes, it would not be too strong to say their feverish love — there was no little envy. Well why not? Natural. Who hadn't envy of the animals? He had, certainly, his share. They were the trunk of his life — these envious feelings. He'd made his return on such a theme: Uncle Simon burning — the same theme that had earlier been his ruin, a poetically appropriate recovery, he thought. He'd pulled out his pockets. I am showing what's inside me: look. Right here. Toothpick. Corner of a coupon. Penny. Ball of lint. Then how he'd preached — preached burning — and got them back. Pride — confessed. Arrogance — confessed. Error — confessed. Anger — confessed. Sorrow, despair, failure, shame — confessed. Contrition, oh yes that — confessed. He might as well have advertised upon his sign: This Sunday: Your Well-loved Preacher's Personal Parts Exposed; Next Sunday: A Sooty Scoundrel's SelfAbuse. Humility, love, faith — confessed. So well confessed he was invited to do the toothpick bit in Windham. Uncle Simon, of course, was too local-river reference; but what a large career its burning had. Limb after limb, he said, the great proud church, he said, ulcerous and scaling, burned in the heart of the water. Burned on the skin of the river. Sank. Burned in the belly of the water. Burned. Moved in the blood of the river. Sank. Lodged in the muddy bottom, burning. Burned and burned. Ah, and they came like cattle, in droves, butting and shoving. Furber pulled at his shirt, undid his cuffs, released his collar. And you know more of God than I, he said. And he recited as much as he dared of his night at the stone — oh legendary Pike, oh worthy soulcollector — and of the whole desperate time preceding, and how he'd dragged himself before them, week after week, and watched them dwindle. Was I a king of Judah all that time? 1 was. I was. For I chattered like a swallow. Like a crane, I clamored, waving my arms. I moaned like a dove. My eyes were worn with weeping, with staring at my feet and at the floor, with the effort of going forth against new things. My hands were pinched with prayer and my ankles bruised. But He broke my bones like a lion. Day to night. He brought me to my end . No, by god, no tub-thumping for him, no rattling tambourines. He got them, even invented as it mostly was, with large words largely put — not a syllable of low speech — and he let this achievement quiet his conscience. When he had spoken, slowly, with long silences between them, his closing words (the same for each sermon in the series): He brought me to my end; he heard sniffling, and often saw a run of tears.

Like a schoolboy released to his summer, he capered in the garden. He knew how the orator, the actor, felt; what they sought in their success. He could tickle them and they would laugh; he could spank them and they'd howl; he could caress… and sighing, they'd respond. He was an honest preacher at last. Through this thicket, now, he could thrust his stick to stir the soul. It was better, he felt, touching them this way, than all the ways he had imagined would bring on rapture if he had only dared to reach out to employ them, boldly to stare or boldly speak, harshly to grasp and greedily to seize: that knee, for instance, for which he'd known such bitter regret, he might have moistened with his lips while his delicately socketed accompanist pretended that his passion was merely pity for her suffering and gently tangled her hands in his hair — how he might have made an altar, how he might have worshiped there! — or the crisp green girl who'd called one day like an eminent Cleveland lady to carry on such a sweet and holy conversation with him he felt licked clean and wished gratefully to embrace her; or all those times, his nose in the weeds, he had lain at the fence, watching the croquet, unable to ask if he might play; for fatty Ruth, or the plump girl on the train whom only his shadow had petted; or any of the thousand simple impulses that hurled themselves helplessly against the walls of his heart: to finger the lobe of a strange ear or sniff on hands and knees a patch of something wet, make bawdy verses up and sing them loudly, leap in the air, chew on the thumb of a leather glove, play soccer in the street… any sudden gesture of joy or love… but who could know, when he heard his heart, what the beating was? and who could be expected to understand these gestures, so out of character, so threatening, for weren't they the same moves that went with rage, with lust, with any molesting? well, no matter, it was all a dream, this rapture of touch; you'd taste the knee's rough cover with your tongue; the little girl would squeak and click her eyes; your sweetheart would wet on your hand; yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.

He, Olus Knox, Chamlay and Mat were fishing, not getting much, but fishing; trying the rocky point past the big bend, not getting much, but fishing in the very early morning; the boat passing across the long shale crop opposite the clay 'bank, bringing their bait from the deep to shallow, but with no success but fishing; and he, Olus Knox, Chamlay and Mat had nearly given up hope of fish and had got to that fine point of enjoying, as much as any fish they might have caught, the drops of water clinging to their lines, and the slowly widening rings they made on the surface of the river; when of all things to see floating on the river they saw a large straw hat bobbing on its crown, spinning very slowly, moving very patiently down between the lines toward the boat; and Olus Knox said immediately my god it's Omensetter's hat, but Jethro Furber said immediately oh no it's not, it's not his hat, while the hat drifted to the boat, its brim brushing against the side Chamlay and Mat were fishing from, Jethro Furber and Olus Knox craning to watch it, no one saying a word more or moving to pick it up; and the hat passed under Mat's front line and passed under Chamlay's and rubbed the side of the boat as it passed away around the stern; then Jethro Furber took from Chamlay's tackle box the largest, heaviest sinker he could find and lurching in the boat stood and hurled it into the hat as it went away. Then they drew in their lines and rowed in silence. Jethro Furber scrambled out with the mooring rope and crouched awkwardly on the dock with the rope in his fist thinking of Chamlay's sinker lying in the bottom of the hat and how the brim had curled like a yellow water flower. When the others had gathered their gear and the boat was tied, hearing the child in his voice, yet unable to prevent it, Furber turned to them with an angry face. Wait, he said, trembling all over, wait — just wait.

Thus. Everything so bitterly won, lost. His words had flown like finches. Then the trap of those hands. Why?

It had been raining hard, the wind driving through every protection into his face. He had untented his umbrella, darting for the door. There was the glow of a white shirt… not Mat's… and a rumpled burlap-colored man. But no one was wearing a white shirt, he remembered. Yet a paleness thatched by shadows from the forge floated before him like a cloud, and there was Mat, reassuringly familiar, his figure fringed by the light of the fire. Had he been able to recover the whole of that scene, even as dull as his senses had been while fleeing the downpour, he'd have found the sign on it somewhere, unmistakably stuck like a poster announcing the Ringlings; but it was all so provokingly vague; he'd been taken unfairly unaware; and there remained with him now only a few scattered impressions — the drifting light, the delicate lattices of shadow and the overwhelming sense of Omensetter's size, of his boundless immensity, with the astonishment which followed on it, and then the sudden inexplicable shame and fear — and even these had an unfortunate habit of mixing with those of later meetings… in the open air, in the hot sun, his huge feet shoveling dust, patches of sweat on his shirt like maps of the Great Lakes, the smell of weeds… so that sometimes he wondered whether that ghostly presence wasn't simply a flash from the lake or a limestone jut or a maple revolving its leaves employed by that earlier time to enliven it, as if that peculiar brightness were the sign he was hunting, the clown who burst the bright paper ring or the acrobat in silver tights, an hysterical smile painted on his face, who dangled from the trapeze by his knees.