William Gass: Omensetter’s Luck

Now folks we've got four fine beds here and we're going to sell them all. Kids, don't bounce on the beds. These are fine beds and the springs and mattresses all come with them. You can feel what shape they're in. It's first rate. Here's your chance to get a real good bed. Say can everybody hear me? There's too much talking, ladies, please. All right, fine. We might as well start right here and go right down the line. This here's solid cherry, and isn't she a beauty! There, just feel that mattress. Looks like new. Lot of use in them yet. Of course if you don't want to use the springs and mattress that is on it, you don't have to. You can put anything on it you want to. Look at that wood. Well now what'll you say to start for this cherry bedstead and this fine mattress and good springs. Who'll say twenty-five?

Gaiety was continuous.

Don't talk to dirty old men.

Henry Pimber had lain with lockjaw in that bed, and the Reverend Jethro Furber had planted prayers around it like a hedge, and later Israbestis had followed him downstairs, the minister cursing Nature, Man, and God, at every step.

Israbestis moved his feet with effort. He was tired and stiff. He made his way slowly to the back of the house through the crowd flung out now like a ragged shirt and cupped some water from an outside tap, rinsing the dust from his mouth. He spat and watched his spit ball up in the dirt under burned-out marigolds. At the frayed edge of the crowd the chief was gesturing to a man whom Israbestis didn't know. The chief held out his badge. The man craned to see Sam Peach. The chief touched the man's arm. The man moved away, turning his side, craning to see Sam Peach. The chief's badge gleamed. Israbestis counted balls of spit and made, with difficulty, three. His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green, remained — the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Israbestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea.

There was a tear in the paper that looked exactly like a railway and another that signified a range of hills. Some tiny drops of ink formed a chain of lakes. A darker decorative strip of Grecian pediments and interlacing ivy at the ceiling's edge kept the tribes of God and Magog from invasion. Once he had passed through it to the ceiling but it made him dizzy and afraid. Shadows moved quixotically over the whole wall, usually from left to right in tall thin bands, and sank behind a bureau or below the bed or disappeared suddenly in a corner.

Lying there staring at the wall in the partial darkness hour on hour, the pain rising as periodically as high water and leaving only a slight backwash of relief when it receded, Israbestis lamented bitterly his lack of education. He sent himself on journeys with an effort that brought sweat to his brow and moistened his palms and the back of his ears. He took ship down the faint crack rivers. He cut his way through matted, tortuous jungles designated by the pale leaves. He trudged across vast blanks of desert and drank thirstily at muddy holes. The days that he was in the wall he thought of himself primarily as a sailor. He conjured up bright images of sail, green swells on the reaches of the ocean, the brown slabs of river mouths and the awesome blue chop and the trailing spray of troubled weather. Climbing the shrouds, the springs of the bed squeaking like a rolling deck and hull and like the tackle in the block, he would sight a dark cloud puffing from the horizon. Funneling up, it would run at the ship and Israbestis would hitch himself on his elbow, waving his other arm free of the clothes, and shout, "Look out, she's coming on, look out, look out," for he knew no nautical terms and nothing of seamanly action. Pain would storm at his eyes. Sweat would drip from his nose. "She's a blower, captain, aye, she's a roller, captain," Israbestis would cry. "The worst I've seen in these seas." The hiss of his words was like the spray from the bow. Israbestis screamed in order to be heard above the wind in the rigging that was howling in the shrouds and through the ports of the ship. Then all of a sudden it would be gone. He would watch the paling cloud and the dimpled water disappear before he fell, for a moment, asleep.

In this way he visited the ports of the world. He was a Chinese, a Hindoo, a sheik; he rode upon wild Asian horses and on the back of elephants in India, while on camels he crossed the African wastes; but the farther he traveled, the more bizarre and remarkable his adventures, the less satisfying was his life in the wall. More and more his fancy bad to supply his vision with its objects, had to make up even the course and color of the sun, the feel of the ground, so different everywhere, and above all, the smells that inhabited the corners of the earth. He was conscious, always, of the inadequacy of his details, the vagueness of his pictures, the falsehood in all his implicit etceteras, because he knew nothing, had studied nothing, had traveled nowhere. Consequently he was never fully in the wall, he was partly clenched in the bedclothes, clawing at the skin of his legs and biting his arms. He was only partly bowed by rain or sand or sleet, crouched before the attack of lions or wild tribesmen, swimming for his life. The pain struck without obstruction then, and he closed like a spider on it.

On better days he left the wall although he always began in it. Gently closing his lids to allow an eyelash of light, he would push off from the bank and coast by the torn hills, poling the grease-spot marsh, and by the time he had baited his hook and dropped his line in the plaster chip he was in the history of his life, out of the wall, in the old slow world. He sat by Lloyd Cate's stove or he leaned back on a bench on Lloyd Cate's porch in finer weather. He took his early morning walk through the town, the anvil singing out, and he went to the depot three times a day for the mail. He would stop at Mossteller's to talk or at the bakery, passing the time in the pleasantest way with news of people, conditions of the land or crops, predictions of the weather. All his friends were clear in his imaginings. He knew them by their dress, by the mannerisms of their walk, by their characteristic tilts and gestures. His dreams were not embarrassed by clichés, but in each he always knew the precise feel of the air, what manner of birds were singing, the position of the sun, the kind of cloud, the form of emotion in himself and others, and every felicity of life. As his friends approached he called out gaily to them. "Hi there, Pete. 'Morning, Michael, Billy. Well if it ain't Claude Spink, by god, and Nichol Ames."They came to visit in his illness. Hog Bellman. Bullet in his back. Careful Lacy. Pants undone, silly grin on his face. Bob Stout with nails in his mouth. Samantha. Sister. Like a rod in watered silk. Tale after tale he told, each many times over, getting them right or trying to, amazed at what he forgot and what he remembered. There was a secret in every one and he tried to discover it. When the Hen Woods burned, for instance, the way he told it you could taste the ashes in Careful Lacy's mouth. Indecision was put as plain as a cow in a field. Luke Ford. Ben Jasper. Willie Amsterdam. And then May Cobb. Of course he hadn't, but he knew what it was like to be the man who'd had her. God. Not pretty. Not round in the rump or full in the bust, either, but god! Every line of her was essential. He put that plain too. He made it seem as if the juices of the body would all squeeze out. He often saw her up to her elbows in cream. Her twisted mouth. May I have more punch she asked politely. Damn loud band.