The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

The water that bore him whispered in language of the trees. It was not of the lake. His canoe grated against a log, it nudged into a mound of moss. It shivered back, it stopped. A slow dark singing....

The boy drew his shoulders close and was afraid, and was afraid even to breathe, for what was he breathing? He was fast inclosed in a throbbing praying Thing.

His breath beat against his eyes. He drove his eyes to look into the trees. He saw chestnut-oak, basswood, willow. A circlet of stone tinkled in the pool of a log. Trees knotted over the earth, gnarled upward toward light. Young birch were a white chatter leading into the silence of forest. He saw trees. He saw through trees. He saw black trees flooded like sunny windows with a world beyond and within them.... He saw what stiffened him, stopped his blood. A face. The face of a life. He saw the white face of a man....

Chairs were thick on the porch: thicker still was the talking. David alone was silent. He was the sole ear in a close texture of words. And it was raining. The guests at The Villa were profuse in lamentation of the weather. “What a day!” “Won’t it ever stop?” they said. They were insincere. They were glad of the rain. It held them close together on the porch where they could talk, where there was much warm human flesh to talk to. David did not need to listen. He sat very still and looked beyond the porch. The Villa stood on the brow of a hill above the lake. His eyes fell down a flaunting cornpatch; the carriage road dawdled within low shrubs and the lake cut out, lead-blue and harried by the rain. The trees were gray with the rain, the tall grasses of August gleamed with it and swayed. David saw it sweep, like a phalanx, over the water. His senses dozed in the rain and the voices. The harsh note of a chair creaking was a rare break in cadence. Over the eaves of the porch, the drops gathered and broke in a quick flurry; there was a pause while the drops held, swelled, burst again. He saw beyond the two great elms flanking the house how the clouds were a veering maze of mist, how the lighter gray swerved down from the dank mass and filmed in shivering water toward the lake. He saw in the pent gray faces of his neighbors how the words gathered and broke forth.

This passion of talk was a new element to David. He sensed its kinship with the play of the clouds which he knew. His mother had been silent. In Mr. Devitt’s shop where he worked, the boys spoke when there was need. He had heard girls chatter chiefly from a distance. He dwelt on two planes. Part of him moved beyond the hotel porch. It shared the drowse of nature, it was drenched in the warm rain. The trees were subdued and satisfied. They were like women after words of love, they were like women glowing while love worked on them. The ground was still. When the sun came the ground of the woods rang with life. Now there was quiet. David thought of this: how the earth watched the trees, was slumberous and drank its potion. This was the forward part of David. In the back of his mind was the porch and the parlor where the children had been banished.

Each of these human beings seemed to have a passion: it was the burden of all their words. They could talk nothing else. They could partake of nothing foreign to their passion. If they could have changed their pasts, they might have spoken a different thing. David, relaxed in the play of words and rain, saw how the faces of these men and women were stamps of life: how life had branded each as with a burning iron.

He thought of his mother. Did she have a mark and a passion also? David was out of the group on the porch. Its passionate tourneys of talk were far away and yet their character was sharp. When he awoke in the morning in the room that had always been his—he would never see it again—he sat up in his bed, he looked about at the strange salience of familiar objects. The yellow oak bureau, the picture of Washington crossing the Delaware, his own black boots, his own gray cap stood forth with an uncanny clearness as if he had come from a two-dimensioned world. This feeling passed. Now here it was again, as he listened to words. He had it watching away at the drenched woods and the lake. His neighbors, tense in their chairs, took on the conciseness of automata. He felt them pour into words, he felt the unease of their restraint when they were interrupted, forced to listen to another, he felt how they crouched in these forced silences and hurled themselves back into speech at the first hint of pause. In silence they lay flopping like fishes out of water. Words were their element.... And David saw the breathing of the woods, the warm comfort of trees that had grown up together and knew their silences. They were clothed in a sweet sanctity of resolve and repose. They took the rain with faint bowed heads. They were alive, in David, and very thoughtful. For suddenly they too were remote. They too had the sharpness of the completely strange.

David had slipt from the reality of men and nature. He thought of his mother. All life about him was marvelous and clear like the objects in his old room—he would never see it again—when he saw them with eyes still full of his night’s dream.

She had died that May. Until a few years ago she had talked a great deal with him. Their talk dwindled. The open space of their few words became an easeful place for him to lie in. He withdrew more and more to it. She died almost silent.

They lived together in the white house where he remembered his father. His father left his violin, left always David’s picture of him. A heavy and loose man, ashift in his clothes, with long dead hands that came alive, at times, playing gigues. Then his feet danced along and his mother’s eyes were rigid. David played his violin when it was all of him left. He looked at his hands and began to play out of tune. His mother had no ear for that. She said: “Why do ye stop, dear?” “Mother,” he said, “aren’t my hands fat and childish?”