Night Soul and Other Stories (31 page)

And for the instant that the man adds to his theory that what his son learned by hearing himself voice last night he now puts to use, the man nearly sees what he and his wife were really talking about like almost recalling a dream he had on waking—but catches up with his son and with this old, direct way of doing things.

A joint tenderness of the parents—was that it?—the child who knows things from the very beginning? The man is not ashamed to hang onto it and to what he has heard in the night. Was
he
the intruder? Halfway to meet him he meets the baby’s glittering eyes, and he won’t back into the shadows. Nice person, he thought his wife murmured. Am I awake the way she is asleep? he thinks. He whispers his son’s name: it means that the child has at stake this awful, right way of putting things together. Mammal messages able to evolve privately between beings. The crib a little less dark tonight, his smile asks nothing, not that he be picked up. His eyes
follow
what he is uttering because it goes somewhere.

When did the vowels grow these lids, these frictions and touches of maturity expelled with them from his palate, almost a
gh
before the
ah
, almost an
m
before the
eh
? The
aw
comes by itself still, but then is
gaw
, terribly alone like a watchman’s warning, the
uh
has acquired an “m” after it, the
ih
finds a
dee
but the speaker is sticking onto the sounds the father learned and thought he knew, more than one sound, and the man hears
lah
, which he puts together with the
dee
to sing without song, and again this
gaw
, like another
go
.

The man, who’s keeping up—all he wants is to know what the child knows. The infant isn’t your equal, no matter how you try the strength of this talk. The infant is almost not there, dead you might say to this world, not a fit companion. Still, the man’s idea is that these sounds now mix for work, and the child has sent them to a place away from him, and they join what they name or get stored in animals or what-all. Confident they’ve gone, he returns to the man, knowing him. You find a grin in the dark, and no complaint, no retort of, “You started it; you can pick me up.” His baby son is unusual in that he has now closed his eyes, his night’s work done. What is the father to do? Touch his wife and wake her? He hears his name but just murmured at a considerable distance.

The brick floor cool as tiles is lower than the outside ground, and he stands at the window by the bed and looks through the ripped screen at the desert risen by another scale entirely. The man was closing in on the infant’s way of sounding the distances between here and the life indifferently around him, no matter what the infant
thinks
he’s doing. Aren’t these older sounds a power that his son might for now give into his father’s keeping?

It is the second afternoon when she says, You were whispering to him last night.
He
was whispering, the man replies. Well, you were, because it kept waking me up, she insists. But it was hard to hear, her husband goes on. But that’s why I kept waking up, I had to strain my ears to hear; it wasn’t like when you talk in your sleep, if I only got it all, the woman replies. Aw, you were asleep, the man tells her, never asking what she heard him say, though sometimes it sounds like predictions, according to her. You weren’t whistling to the owl—were you calling to the ground bat again? she asks in friendship, it didn’t sound like you what I heard in my sleep. It wasn’t, he says. Maybe you were thinking out loud, she says to her husband. I wish I could, the man laughs. She laughs and then so does the baby, who
says
, more than laughs,
ah ah ah
, a baby in daylight. When are you going to fix the screen? she gets in as if this was what she really had in mind—don’t do
that
in the middle of the night.
Gah
, he tells his son softly,
guh
; and
la-dee
, he practically whispers from memory.

The child won’t answer, it doesn’t work like that at this age—won’t answer at all for a while. But then the man hears,
Mmuh mmuh
—the two parts it’s made of. Is it word from the night shared by son and father now going toward day? You don’t want what you said parroted back. Did you hear that? the woman asks. The man says he believes the baby’s putting two things together. What things? she would like to know. This
uh
, he says. What
uh
?

Something he’s working on, the man reports. They contemplate each other, and contemplate the baby. Well,
I
thought it was “Mamma,” the woman says. Could be, her husband grants. Is it precocious? she wonders addressing him and only him. The man, who might be losing ground, picks his wristwatch off the kitchen table, remembering the screen. What do we really know, he replies. His son says a short “a,” as in
man—a, a, a
.

Three nights, three foolhardy nights he and his son almost spent together on this. Waking, the third night, to the now invisible screen by the bed, dogs to be heard from the ranch a mile and a half away, and, as if still further, the higher, thin-throated whoop of a coyote or two like answers of the land, the father doesn’t hear the son; and then he does. The man has slept way past the middle of the night. What has he missed?

The phone ringing? Would that be his talking in his sleep, predicting things according to his wife? He’s out of bed distracted for a second by a tiny fire a mile away, but it is his sleep still with him and with it names, a string of names. When did tonight’s soundings begin? He can hear the baby’s body. The woman breathes what sounds a little like
Hi
. Sure enough the moon’s in a new position (though
why
the man has seldom taken the trouble to learn, or remember), but through the crib bars the white-sleeved arms are pointing curiously and with that solitary power. Yet the man does not
like
what he hears so much. Less blunt, less certain. A nearly whispered “Da” does not mean the father, nor is it cut-off or terrible. The eyelids are illuminated by the moon. His child is beautiful. There is a meaningless
gah
with some
rrr
of the day caught inside it. An old
eh
that accosts nothing but itself and is less like breathing than like a willingness. An
agh agh
that is in the dark and neither there nor anywhere except dreaming maybe of day. And a slow
ha ha ha
, and the
gaw
that was alone but tentative. And, without the
deh
, another sound breathed with some prior seriousness the man’s heart hopes for or asks something of.

From his sleep names flood him, animals, places. Along the horizon of the Jemez Mountains dawn could look like this line of sky to the west below stratus and, he thinks, altostratus cloud lids. Two horses in the dark lift their muzzles and are shadowy friends of the house some nights so that you see them best by not looking right at them, the rump of the paler Appaloosa obscured by the thick, dark little quarter horse. The half moon passes among the clouds and his wife makes a curved shape asleep but readier than the man, who has never quite heard himself talking in his sleep—predicting, according to this woman—but has been dropping everything these last three nights to learn a language the speaker now may be letting go, or letting be, in favor of another. And what
did
the man drop, that went away through piñons and juniper like a snake that wanted no part of you. I tried, he says, and the child rolls to his knees and sits up waking. Yes? the man says—but the child is not talking, he’s getting set to cry and he cries terribly and piercingly, seeing the man: it means, You are not what I want, you are what I’m yelling at. The child, for the first time the man can recall, pulls up on the crib rail and stands screaming powerfully. And so it goes.

The man has seen the future and should find tomorrow night that his child has left him with elements no longer of much use and has gone on, although the man leaning down nakedly into the crib and lifting the child out now remembers when he dropped everything what it was he dropped. It was mountains far from here yet just out the window, a campfire, a dog, and two men talking. And he thought that if in his sleep he had put words to it he would see again who those men were.

So the three of them have been in bed for a while, the woman in the middle squeezing her breast from underneath to position the nipple maybe, the infant on the far side of the bed snorting quietly. He woke you up, she murmurs. We’re both talkers, he says, on his elbow, as if he could stay disturbed and awake for good or slip back into shallow sleep. You woke me before you woke up yourself, you said his name, she says, but then you said “uh”—I believe it was “uh”—you said it a couple of times, you were asleep, as if you were thinking something, getting ready to say it.

The man obviously wants to speak, and he covers her breast with his hand. What did you mean, “I tried”? she asks, I thought you were speaking to
me
.

That it could wait, he says. Oh, good, she sighs. I said his
name
? he asks. She breathes. Maybe she isn’t answering. Who on earth cares except the man? The child seems done.

The man might be angry, or talking to himself. Drop everything. Drop everything when he needs you, when he calls. And in return he grows up strong. If he needs you or speaks, if he does anything new, drop everything. It was what you were equal to. What did you get out of being equal to it? Well, you got the name of one of those men by a campfire. You’re not really a night person, his wife goes on as if she’s only half asleep, as if this answers what he asked.

Ask
him
, he replies. And with that he is out of bed and around to the far side and slides an arm and an elbow under the child and the other arm under the head so that his wife lifts her arm which was above the child’s head and he takes the child from her while she turns to face the other way, her husband’s side.

The desert bricks bring some later cold like a harbinger of daybreak against the soles of his feet, and beyond the window screen a scratching on the ground, a jackrabbit’s claw, a neighbor dog remembering, is unanswered by the earth. You have to lower the child, you have to make it seem like there’s no difference between your hands and arms and bones and the crib mattress, almost no motion from one to the other, these are the things that are necessary.