From A House All Stilled

A.G. Harmon

The following is an excerpt from A.G. Harmon’s novel A House All Stilled, winner of the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, scheduled for release this September from the University of Tennessee Press. Set in 1970s Mississippi, the story is told from the dual perspectives of Cox, a tractor salesman, and his twelve-year-old son, Henry. The two live on a farm with Cox’s often drunk father, Tollet, who spends his days singing old sacred harp music and spinning wild tales to his grandson. When a stranger in the woods inexplicably begins to attack Henry on his way to school, Cox gives the boy a blackjack and demands he avenge himself the next time they meet. He also hires a country woman, Shreva, to report what she sees. As the passage begins, Cox’s ex-wife and Henry’s mother, Martha, has just told Cox she suspects that he is the one beating Henry.

COX couldn’t sleep. He always ate too much when he was mad. He had followed his supper—chili and grilled-cheese sandwiches—with half a box of Eskimo Pies and two bottles of Coke. The food fizzed and boiled inside his belly. He rolled around on his water bed for an hour, then got up, poured a bottle of Pepto-Bismol into the milk carton, and drank down the whole thing.

It was after midnight when he plugged in the projector and threaded a new mail-order film through the reel. The customer who had first told him how to get the films highly recommended this one. It was set in a skyscraper office and had a surprise ending. Cox was ready for a surprise. He had a cigar box full of movies now, and after twenty or thirty showings, they got stale.

His fingers fumbled with the reel, feeding the end of the film through the slot. He flipped a switch and the projector started to run, making a loud clacking noise as it gorged itself on the tape. A pulsating square of white light appeared on the wall above the sofa, in a space Cox kept blank. He swiveled his recliner around and settled down.

Every movie started the same. Tease and bait, tease and bait, using a woman with melon-sized breasts hoisted up to her throat. She’d lean over, then fall against, a parade of slobbering men—neighbors, field hands, salesmen, or—in this particular movie—her boss. The movies were like silent films, simple enough to follow without words. In fact, that was what bothered him. They didn’t need words for what they were doing, so why bother him with a plot? This was a skin-flick, for God’s sake, so why not just show it? He wasn’t the kind that needed, or wanted, teasing—let alone a story. Just show it.

As he waited for the boss to make his move, he tried to think up what he should have said to Martha that afternoon. Her meaning hadn’t fully sunk in until he had gotten into the truck.

He clenched his jaw. She knew him better than that. Never, not once had he done anything to make her ask what she had. Like always, she had made it up and sold it to herself, so that now she was convinced of her own story. And as usual, it was just to get back at him for something. This time, it was because he wouldn’t let Henry go to school in Memphis.

But why should he? What good would it do to haul him up there every day? It would iron him out, change his blood to dishwater. Henry didn’t need any help being strange; he was practically a weirdo now. He didn’t have any friends, he listened—to radios and TVs and old people—more than he played, and he boxed himself inside his head for whole stretches of time.

Cox frowned at the film. The girl in the movie wasn’t the usual type. She was skinny, with brown hair piled on her head and a big horn-rimmed pair of glasses. She looked hateful, and too smart for the man playing her boss. He was the same pompadoured guy who had played a race car driver in another film. Despite his business suit and tie, he still looked like a race car driver.

Cox rocked back in his chair. The couple still had a ways to go. He closed his eyes.

Sometimes his heart would stop when he came across Henry staring, with his eyes hammer dead. Cox would stamp his foot, and the boy would surface and blink, like he had just awakened from a nap. Then, the next thing he knew, Henry would be asking questions—why this and what for that—as though he had been digging around for the answer to something Cox was keeping from him.

Cox opened his eyes. That’s what aggravated him the most: being looked at like he was keeping something back; something important, like the right way to breathe, or the real way your heart should beat. As though Cox would keep anything—anything—from him that he needed.

For a moment, he dug around in his mind to see if maybe he knew something that he hadn’t told. Maybe he was supposed to tell Henry something.

He shook his head. Tollet had never told him anything. He’d just made it through on his own. Of course, what could Tollet tell him? How to lift a bottle? How to lie in a bed? How to piss money?

His eyes felt for the flickering pictures on the wall.

The man was shutting his office door. The woman was lying over the desk, hiking her dress.

There, thought Cox. That there was what you needed to know. He turned sideways a bit, as the man tugged down the woman’s pantyhose.

That was the one thing Tollet could have helped him, Cox, with. He had never been any good at getting women. They said he was too rough, treated them like they were heifers in heat. In fact, one girl had even told him to go practice on a heifer, then come back.

But Tollet. He had been good with women. Cox knew that now, or at least he would admit it now. When he was a boy, he had lied to himself about his father. His mother—a thin, quiet little lady with iron-gray hair—had always worn a face that seemed freshly hurt, continually tricked in some unforgivable way that she was too brave to cry about. For her, Cox had told himself that he hadn’t seen his father in certain places, doing certain things. He would play like he had imagined the looks Tollet gave the girl at the feed store, barely older than Cox himself. But what was it? What was it his father had said, or how was it he had smiled, to make her whisper back?

If Tollet had told him that, then maybe the sight of the old man wouldn’t make him sick now. If he had helped him through back then, maybe things would be different. But all he had done was drink and lie, drink and lie, and make up stuff that embarrassed him when he found out it hadn’t really happened. Coming after lies like that, ones you had believed, the truth was too hard. When he had learned, Cox had felt shunted and small: a stunned pain, like he had fallen to packed earth from the top of a high tree.

He shuddered his shoulders, focused his eyes. He wouldn’t let that happen to Henry. And he wouldn’t let him be that kind of little liar either.

The springs of his recliner creaked under his weight. His gaze grew fixed, narrowed.

The woman was naked now. Her breasts were small, but firm. Her arms and legs were hard as cedar posts. She didn’t roll around with a dumb look, but kept her face straight. It was a smart face; the boss wasn’t fooling her.

Cox rolled his tongue over his bottom lip, then pulled it in and bit down, gently.

Martha had looked like that. Her hands were something like that too, but she used them in a different way. She could put them on the sides of his head, just so, like she was handling glass. And then, by God, all the stuff inside it would settle down, fade off into the soft pull and push of his breath. At times like that, she would keep very quiet, the air clean of words. She would almost smile. As smart as she was, right then, she could almost act like she liked him. And for a time, just that time, all the things he hadn’t believed in anymore, all he had come to think were just lies, seemed possible.

The film ended, clattering in a spin at the top of the projector arm.

Cox jumped. He rose, exchanged the reels, and watched the film again. It ran over and over, until morning light poured through the windows, fading the pictures away.

There had been no sign of the boy at the end of the previous week, but Henry was nervous again on Monday morning. Cox watched him take every bite of Frosted Flakes, so that his appetite left him entirely. He gave up on breakfast, grabbed his books, and set off for school with the money in his billfold. Before he got by the table, Cox leaned out of his chair and stopped him. He ran a hand over his front, frisking for the blackjack. When he felt it inside the coat, he let him pass.

With his gaze glued to his boots, Henry made his way through the dewy pasture. It was a quiet morning. What noises he heard—a dog barking, a tractor—were distant and faint.

After he entered the woods, it took a while to get close to Shreva’s trailer. But when he was near, her chickens always pulled at his attention. He glanced to the right, to find the sight that went with such a smell. This time, however, she stood there herself, between the trailer window and the sheet she used for drapes. She was smoking a cigarette and eating a Pop-Tart.

Henry swung his gaze around and tromped past the trailer, stopping at the place where he had first met the boy. The ground was spongy from an early morning rain, and the early heat of the sun brought out the stench of trash, rotting. He scanned the woods, then shouted.

“I got me ten dollars in my billfold right now!”

He moved his head an inch to one side, then an inch to the other. There was no wind. The creek sounded in its regular, slow babble. Some rustling came from the woods, but it was only birds building nests. He sighed. The boy wasn’t there. He couldn’t feel him this time. The place was empty.

Henry turned toward Shreva, looked straight at her and shouted.

“Said I got me two five dollar bills! Once! Twice! Gone!”

When he looked, Shreva had pulled out from beneath the sheet, letting it fall against the glass. Henry jerked his chin at her and ran on to the bus stop.

The boy wasn’t there in the afternoon either, or on either trip the next day, or for two days afterward. Henry grew less and less afraid. On Thursday afternoon, he had stopped directly across from Shreva’s window, with her staring tunnels through him, and shouted until his voice cracked.

“Said I got me ten dollars! Asshole. I said Asshole! Here I am! Come get me.”

His voice echoed and disappeared. And each time, when it was obvious that the boy wasn’t coming, he had raised his chin at Shreva, who moved away from the window, disappointed.

When he got back to the house, he sat on the floor in front of the television, looking at a Godzilla movie and eating Fig Newtons. Shreva was due for a visit, and he was eager to hear her report to Cox. He had to make sure she told the whole truth.

From time to time, he clambered to the back window to look for her. She was late today, for no reason. He took it personally and was about to give up. Then, as soon as supper was on the table, she appeared in the yard, hollering about her eggs. Cox got up to meet her; despite Tollet’s smacking and slurping, Henry could hear their conversation through the screen door.

“Hadn’t seen nothin’,” said Shreva. “Now gimme four dollars.”

“Hold on a minute,” Cox shot back. “Did you look both days? Yesterday and today?”

“I watched both days and nothing come of it. He passed my house and hollered. That’s all.”

“No sign of that boy?” asked Cox.

Shreva made a pestered sound. “That’s what I said.”

Henry looked up at Tollet. He’d stopped eating. His gaze lingered around Henry’s head, on the bandage. An expression that was both smirk and smile sat on his lips.

“And you heard him shout?”

“Raised hell,” said Shreva. A moment passed, and she spoke again. Her voice was low, as if she knew Henry was listening. He strained to hear.

“But that don’t prove nothin’. If he’s sorry, that don’t prove he’s not. Only been a week.”

Henry glanced at Tollet, who chuckled as he tore at his bread.

“Take this money and get your ass gone,” Cox said. “Come back here Tuesday and let me know what you see.” He changed his voice to a smug warning. “And by the way. I’m asking Henry to tell whether you’re watching too, so don’t think you can fool me.”

Henry blinked. Tollet coughed.

“What you gonna pay Henry?” asked the old man, as Cox stared at the two of them. Henry cut his eyes at his grandfather.

“Never mind,” said Cox, waving a hand. He walked over to the table, yanked the chair back and sat down with a rush of air. He was about to pick up his spoon when he stopped and leveled his gaze at the boy.

“Did you see Shreva looking out the window? Both times, both days? Tell me. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

Henry nodded. With an angry, disappointed look, like he had been disgraced, Cox lifted one hip from the chair and pulled fifty cents out of his pocket. He shoved it across the table, picked up his spoon, and began to ladle stew into his mouth.

Henry watched him for the rest of the meal, wondering why Cox didn’t like Shreva’s news. If the boy was gone, and nothing happened again, it would get Cox off the hook with Martha. Things would settle down. There would be nothing to misunderstand anymore. But it didn’t seem to matter.

Cox’s left forearm rested against the edge of his table as he ate. His chapped hand was clenched in a fist, and it tightened and relaxed as he leaned over and slurped his soup.

Henry frowned. Cox wouldn’t be satisfied unless there was a fight. He wouldn’t be happy unless Henry split the boy’s head open. Because Cox thought he was sorry, just like Shreva said.

At length, he dropped his spoon and went to his room, where he fell onto his bed. He rested his chin in his fist. For a long time, he’d known he didn’t exactly suit his father. But then, nothing suited his father exactly, so it hadn’t bothered him too much. Now, however, the thought stoked a fresh anger, banking ashes in his chest.

Then, happily, he spent a long time imagining Cox in jail. A deep satisfaction spread through his body, warm like syrup. He pictured Martha reporting him, calling the law out; Cox, pushed around, his hands behind his back, shoved into a car, laughed at. His body went tense thinking it; he felt better.

As the night wore on, he heard things begin to settle. Tollet was next door, flopping around in his chair. Later still, the old man burst out with parts of half-asleep sentences, bits of song, as he drank. Mi-Fa-Sol-La.

“It’s not what you think!” he screamed. Then quieter, “Yes, it is. Yes, it is.”

Henry turned over to search for a cool spot on the pillow. The silhouettes of the old furniture—black chifforobe, chest, chair and table—loomed about his room, in the same places where they had stood since it was Cox who slept in this bed, since it was Cox who was a boy here.

What difference did it make to Cox? If he got around the boy in his own way, what did he care? But no, it had to be Cox’s way. Nothing else mattered. The boy in the woods might be gone, but if it wasn’t Henry that ran him off, it was just another thing to be frustrated about.

Henry tightened the muscles in his chest and pushed all the air out of his lungs, squeezing until he shook. His mind grabbed at ways that would make his father sorry.

Let him come back. Let him beat me blind, like Tollet and them did to that boy. Then she’ll see. And tell. They’ll take him away then. Good. And maybe while he’s in there....

His lips curled over his teeth. The thought rolled in and out of his brain until he grew drowsy. Odd voices called in his sleep, people he knew—his teacher, his mother, his sisters—lulling and pulling him down into the dark. Words mostly. Senseless words.

But then, somebody was singing. Tollet? Old songs. Old, sad songs—threaded and laced with unanswered callings—notes without words. Sol-Fa-La...what Tollet sang, but with Cox’s voice. Couldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Then again, it sounded like Cox.

For a long while, he swam in and out, out and in, plunging and rising.

His left arm and knee spasmed; he jolted awake. His eyes shot open, darting along the lines of the room.

Was it day yet? He looked at the glow-in-the-dark alarm clock beside his bed. Only an hour had passed, but it felt like morning was just outside the window, over the hill. He picked up the clock to see if it had stopped, but it ticked in its dull, metallic rhythm. A heavy feeling grew over him, menaced him as though something were out of sequence—a confused wandering—a normal thing, outside its natural place.

He lifted his hand to graze his brow. It ached beneath the bandages, the wounds burning with a bright fever. The revenge that had burned in his chest had given place to queasiness now. Tollet’s snore was sawing through the wall, as always, but right then, he wanted to hear Cox; there was no reason he should, at that time, that hour, but still he wanted to, and listened for him.

He sat up and stared at the clock.

The boy would come back. He knew it, as surely as he knew it was night. And on top of what he was sure of, he knew one thing more: whatever Cox deserved, he didn’t want him to get it.

After a while, he turned on the light to think by. In time, it came to him. He left his bed and padded around the dark house. He dug loose change from beneath sofa cushions and took scattered dollar bills from the kitchen drawers. He emptied it all into the jelly glass full of money he kept under his bed, stuck the jar in his bag, then crawled beneath the covers.

The next morning, he grabbed a biscuit from the skillet and ate it standing up. Tollet, in a red flannel robe and leather house shoes, leaned against the sink, smoking a cigarette.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said Cox. He sat on the sofa, pulling on his boots. “Not so early.”

Henry started before he could finish. “I thought I’d go early this morning. Catch him.”

Bent over his feet, Cox narrowed his eyes. With his hands holding his laces in mid-knot, he hesitated, then pulled the strings together.

“No. Sit down. Leave when it’s the right time.”

Henry sat at the table and ate. The dough hung in his chest, trying to maneuver its way through his tight throat. Presently, Cox joined him.

“Go on then,” he said, after five minutes. “But take your coat.”

Henry grabbed his bag, careful not to let the jar shake, then his jacket. Out of sight, he tied his coat around his waist, the pipe making a strange angle in the cloth.
The field grass was coming back, a tender yellow-green rising out of the brown patches from last year’s dead. The ground was still soft under his step, despite the fact it hadn’t rained in days. The sky was a sanded, cloudless blue. A slight breeze moved the branches of the fence-row sumacs and black gums. The sun was strong and fresh, cracking the last scum of winter varnish off the ground. Henry’s feet alternated under him, taking him toward the hill and the woods at their base. For the first time that spring, he noticed a soft haze of green resting over the forest, a tender, juicy color brushed about the limbs. The color disappeared the closer he got to the trees themselves.

Even before he entered the forest’s lip, he felt the boy. Flares went off in his blood—on his face, on his back, in the bowl of his stomach. He tried to swallow.
The day was all quiet with morning sleep. He shuddered, but moved in deeper, wandering off the path, then back again. The trees seemed to step back from him as he walked.

As Henry passed the bend that gave out onto Shreva’s, he saw him standing further on, in plain view. This time, the boy didn’t step out from any place, or come up from behind. There was no surprise to him. Still, Henry stumbled backwards at the sight. His knees buckled, stooping him so that his torso turned to one side, his body preparing to bolt him away.

With a soft grunt, he forced himself on. His head throbbed in a rhythm that matched the pulsing along his back—each pain falling into slots left by the other—a music that hurt like torches being laid, then lifted from his skin. His heart rose into his throat, the thrusts of his blood killing him as he came to stop in front of the boy.

The long, threaded hair, the tattered pants, the triangle of red cloth he wore as a coat. He stood on a small incline in the path. He loomed over Henry, so that the stove wood he held in his hand already had a power to it, a hard promise made from the height at which it would swing. Henry’s eyes watered, his wounds sweating.

He forced his gaze to the boy’s face, to where his eyes smoked, a furnace smoldering in the lids. He was both old and young, his skin lined with trenches, but ruddy and flush. And he looked at Henry with a face so serious, so free of lies, or anything near lies, that standing there might have been all he was ever meant to do. And under the stare, Henry’s skin wept—with sweat or blood, he could not tell—so that he felt a trickle course across his head and back.

But before the blows came, he had to say his piece. Before the blows came, he had to talk.

He snatched his head to the side, yanking his lips apart.

“No,” he said—a whisper. He struggled his voice clear of the rock in his throat.

“Listen,” he began again. “I got ten dollars. More than ten. It’s yours. All of it. I’ll give it to you, then I’ll get you some more.”

The stick rose at an angle, creating a wind.

“I’m not through,” he rushed on, amazed his voice could come. “I’ll give it all to you, and then, if you still got to hit me, then hit me where it won’t show—where it won’t cause my daddy trouble. All right? Hit me,” he stopped to tug his shirttail up, holding it across his chest. “Here.”

His own gaze fell to where a breeze grazed his skin: his dark nipples, his bruised ribs. His voice came out mannered, desperate.

“You can still do it. I’m not saying you can’t. But just don’t let it show. Hurt me where it don’t show. So it’s just me. See? So it’s just me you’re hitting.”

The boy held the stick in a way that it seemed a part of his body, another arm, something to which he had grown fixed. Henry’s gaze traveled up his shoulder, fumbling for his face.

From his chapped red mouth came a sound, whispered—taps, like two drops of water—a word Henry recognized at once, in form and shape, but at once forgot. For the boy’s eyes bore down with a dreadful heat, burning up his thoughts. The light they carried reared, then lunged. Henry stumbled backward, his head falling to the side, dangling from his neck like a boulder. He clamped his eyes shut. A storm of heat rushed from an open oven door, scorching him. It cooked through his flesh, seeping into his bones, dividing and entering, dividing and entering—toward the place where he knelt, cowering within himself, curling into the smallest thing he could manage—the tightest cradle. The flame towered, then surged through his chest in a hot, furious plunder.

The first thing he heard was the creek, then the chickens, then the smaller sounds of branches moving in the woods. His eyes were open, not closed. He stared into a mesh of limbs and a small span of blue sky. When he could bring his head forward again, he was surprised to find himself erect, in the same place as before. Searching for the boy, he found the last of him in the distance, his head and shoulders still visible as he walked down the far side of a rise. The back of his head bobbed below the top of the ridge, and he was gone.

Henry looked at his fingers. He moved his right hand back to his pocket, felt for his billfold, and pulled it out.

The money was still there. He raised a cautious hand to his face, passed his palm over its glazed surface, then drew it away to look. Except for the glisten of sweat, his hand was clean. His head and back no longer throbbed. Cautious, he sawed a gust of air into his lungs. His ribs warmed in mute pain.

There were bubbles in his blood now, shimmering, exploding. He picked up the books that lay about his feet. Then he set trembling legs off toward the road. When he saw the yellow bus waiting for him, he thought to glance at his watch. Only ten minutes had passed, but the morning was already ancient.

Visit A.G. Harmon as Image Artist of the Month for September '02

Issue #35 • Summer 2002