The Tongues of Men and of Angels
I didn’t belong in my family, right from the start. My parents were old when I was born, not too old to have a child but too old to want another one. My birth was a surprise, and I have never ceased to be an amazement, not always a happy wonder, to my parents, indeed to all the members of my family, members near in relation, and to those more removed as well.
My parents are both dead now, mother is long dead, and father died last Thursday. The rest of my relations, my sisters who are still alive, and all the others, haven’t spoken to me at all, not for several years, not until last week. I had doubted that would ever change, they had been too hurt, though I did not mean it to be so. I had come to accept their silence.
I had accepted my father’s silences long before that, though at the core of all that acceptance, deep inside it, was a small seed that would taste bitter, I feared, if I bit into it. And so I didn’t bite into it, but wrote father a card twice a year, because I was his son, and then once a year, and then some years not at all, and left it at that. The silences between us all just grew like evening shadows, which lengthen and darken until they merge with the night.
Though I came along as a surprise, those fifty-odd years ago, maybe something of a shock in fact, once I showed up, I was welcomed enough, especially by my mother and my six sisters, the youngest of whom was already eight years old when I was born. They tended to treat me like a little doll to be fed and clothed, dressed up and showed off, the first and last boy in the Meadows family.
My father was more reserved right from the start, as fathers were in those days, at least in the cotton country of southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas, where we lived, moving back and forth over the State Line five times before I was sixteen. But I suspect father, too, liked me well enough, liked me in spite of myself. But he never understood me, and he held that against me, and I held both those facts against him.
My being the only son in a family of seven children, was not the only aspect of my existence that set me apart. I started talking before I was one year old, and that, everyone thought, made me remarkable, made me peculiar. And though most people don’t believe it, I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t read. This latter is especially the one thing that made me so different from all my relations. That is, I read books. I was the only one in my family to do so, and that goes for grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, and all the rest.
My family wasn’t illiterate. It’s just that reading and writing was something they did out of necessity. Education consisted of reading and writing and counting, and these were practical matters of everyday existence, that and nothing more.
For me it was different from the start. I once read in a children’s encyclopedia in the school library that in ancient Egypt only the priests could read and write, and that these were skills considered magical and heavenly by the common people, which included everyone else except the pharaohs. When I read this, I recognized that this was exactly what I believed and had always believed.
I, too, considered reading to be mysterious, and now I pretended to myself that I was a priest of a high order, not related to any of those lesser mortals around me, but an initiate into wonders closed to the eyes of parents and sisters and other ordinary people, neighboring farmers, and such. No, I knew I really didn’t belong there.
When it came to talking, speaking, saying, telling, well, that was the province of my mother and sisters, though there was never much substance to their constant chatter. My mother did on occasion try to approach me about something or other important, but the truth is she was afraid of me, didn’t understand me or my books, and left me to my own ways.
My father was quiet, as I have said, so taciturn that I came to consider him almost an intruder when he was nearby.
So I escaped daily, escaped the babble of the women and the silence of my father, escaped in my reading, to worlds no one else around me even knew existed, and sometimes I inhabited those realms in my dreams at night. I did not live in the world of my family, the silences of my father or the chatter of my mother and sisters, which is just a different kind of silence really. They simply hid their own silences, which frightened them, with meaningless, idle words. No, I did not live in their world, but communed alone with books and dreams.
When I was eight, father sold our few belongings, offered them up for sale by auction, in order to move us back to Arkansas yet again. My father, and hence we all, migrated back and forth over the Mason-Dixon Line like transhumance nomads always seeking greener pastures.
Father always had a specifically stated reason for our moves, but I always knew there was another reason, unknown to us all, unknown this day to me though I have given it much thought. Maybe it was nothing more than a restlessness of spirit, a dissatisfaction with this world.
The world along the border between Arkansas and Missouri, that small piece of the earth with its imaginary boundary, was the whole world to father. And to mother and my sisters, too. I guess my father eventually realized with disappointment that life was the same on both sides of the State Line. The topography was the same, the crops, the farm animals, the people. And the smooth, hard silences between people.
What made this particular move the most memorable one for me was twofold. First, there was the auctioning off of our largest possessions, the things we could not afford to move. I had never in my short life heard anything like the way the auctioneer spoke, nor the intensity with which people held on to every word. I was enthralled and I never forgot that experience. It determined the whole course of my future life, the mysterious and surely sacred way that auctioneer spoke.
The second memorable fact about that first move was that once we arrived back in Arkansas my parents got heavily into the religion of my father’s family. What matters here is this: this was not the first time that I was in church for hours and hours every week, but it was the first time I was in a Pentecostal church. And I was old enough to pay attention when the preacher or members of the faithful congregation would feel the Spirit and begin speaking in other tongues.
At first, I thought something was being auctioned off, and I didn’t know what else we had left to offer for sale. But then I discerned a difference in the language being spoken. And I liked this tongue more than the auction man’s talk, the same way I had liked his talk more than common English.
Before long, just before I was nine, I too began speaking in other tongues. Not the way the old people at the church did. I didn’t become emotionally excited, I never trembled or fell down under the impact of the Holy Spirit, never rolled in the aisles of the church the way I saw some of them do. Nor did tears ever stream my face as I spoke out. I simply imitated, quite consciously, what I heard because I liked the music and the mystery of it.
The first time it happened, the kindly hell-fire-and-brimstone preacher was sweating and pounding the pulpit with his old, worn, soft-leather Bible, as he did every service, trying to work the folks up. But tonight, the people weren’t responding, weren’t getting aroused. There was an occasional “Amen,” and now and then a feeble “Hallelujah.” But all in all, it was a leaden and ponderous service, as occasionally happened. I was bored.
“Dehandayelomosatayleesaso,” I said in a loud, clear voice. Something happened in the church then. The church came alive and the preacher became agitated and hit the pulpit harder with his Bible, and now also with the palm of his hand, and then with his fist. He preached louder. “Amen, amen, brother,” shouted an old woman from one of the front pews.
“Elahandosatelayeekcondelemosanddreyaseya,” I said. Around me other people, adults of course, started speaking in tongues, and the rest of the evening was a Spirit-filled service with people dancing in the aisles, jumping up and down, rolling on the floor before the altar, and weeping and groaning loudly. I was no longer bored, but that was not my main reason for continuing to speak in other tongues. I did it because I liked the sound, and I liked the feeling of mystery I was creating inside my little self.
I was aware of all of that at the time, knew it irrationally as children know things, knew it magically, but I think I also knew it with a rational mind, which is supposed to be the province only of adult persons. I didn’t really like the reaction of the adults in the church that night, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself because the sensation of speaking a language no one else understood was just too much fun.
Mother and father looked at me strangely but didn’t seek to stop me. I believe they were confused about what was happening because I was so young. The younger of my sisters were embarrassed and the older sisters were proud. None of this mattered to me. I continued because I was speaking a rare language no one around me could understand. But I understood something.
Unfortunately, I got the reputation of being an anointed child, blessed by the Lord and destined for great spiritual things, preaching, and saving souls, or maybe even missionizing in dark and heathen lands. All this kind of attention had the effect of making me shyer that I already was, and so I kept more and more to myself and to my reading when I was not in the church house.
In church, I continued speaking in tongues, at almost every church service, once even at a wedding, and this latter manifestation surprised everyone. The young groom’s face pinched and reddened, but he didn’t say anything about this sign of spirituality in one so young. The bride got confused and the preacher dropped the wedding rings.
This whole matter of speaking in heavenly tongues was destined to cause me trouble, because soon, of course, I could not resist doing it outside of church. I began doing it when my mother said grace at the table. Then I did it once when father was buying gasoline. The whole family was piled in the old black Ford, headed God knows where. I remember that the service station attendant laughed at me, tousled my hair through the open car window, and asked me to do it again. I did, and my father and mother and sisters got very quiet. No one said anything the rest of the trip. I think they all began to suspect that maybe I wasn’t so holy, not anointed by the Lord after all.
I spoke in tongues one day at school, on the playground, and all the other children liked it immensely. This was the first time I was popular with the other children, usually I was so withdrawn.
That same day, later that afternoon in the classroom, the teacher asked me a question about geography, and I answered forthrightly.
“Aihandrolomoosaiyeekcondrysaaya,” I said.
The teacher and the students became utterly still. I could hear the insectss buzzing in the field outside the windows. I could smell the castile soap my mother always washed my clothes in. I set off on another string, speaking in tongues for all I was worth. Some boys in the back of the class started snickering. Pretty soon all the kids were laughing outright. I spoke louder and faster and with more conviction.
Mrs. Finnerty, the teacher, marched over to my desk. Her face was masked with an expression I had never seen on it before.
I looked her in the eye. “Dehandayel...”
She slapped me so hard that I bit my tongue. “The Lord will punish you for making light of the Spirit.”
And then she pulled me to the front of the classroom and proceeded with the Lord’s work. She hit me again and again with an oak paddle and with her hand. She was a member of the Pentecostal church, and I had heard her speaking in glossolalia at church many times while she was dancing under the Holy Spirit. I guess she thought I was mocking the religion, and today I can see why she would think that, though that was not the case at all.
I didn’t utter another sound the rest of the day. I didn’t speak, in fact, for thirty-four consecutive days after that, I kept track of them by writing small checkmarks in my notebook. I didn’t talk at school, neither in the class nor on the playground, I didn’t speak at home to my parents or sisters. I didn’t even talk to my cocker spaniel, or the three cows in our field, as I usually did. I gave up speaking in heavenly tongues inside church and refused to speak common English outside or to make any sound even when threatened with punishment.
This all ended by my parents worrying that something had happened to my hearing or my vocal cords when Mrs. Finnerty hauled off and slapped me with such vehemence, and they went from blaming me and being disappointed with my behavior to blaming the teacher, poor old, fearful Mrs. Evelyn Finnerty.
On my thirty-fourth day of silence, my father and mother loaded me into the old car and drove me to Memphis. They had made an appointment with an ear-nose-throat specialist there. It was my first trip to a big city, but I wouldn’t express my wonder or my fear to mother or father. However, when we arrived at last at the doctor’s building, I refused to get out of the car.
“I don’t want to go in there,” I said quietly. And as clearly as the glass bell my grandma kept on a shelf in her dark, little parlor.
Mother started weeping, whether from relief or exasperation I never divined, and father scowled and drove back to Arkansas too fast. He was hard-faced but remained silent for the entire trip. No one at home ever knew what had happened in Memphis. Except that I was speaking once again. No one ever knew except for mother and father.
I don’t think my parents ever trusted me again after that day, though I imagine they continued to love me as best they could.
That was the end of my self-enforced silence, but it was also the end of my speaking in heavenly tongues. Except in my dreams. In my dreams, I did it with regularity, but I was always alone in those dreamscapes, high on a hill, sometimes overlooking the ocean, which I had certainly never seen in waking life, never seen except in pictures. Sometimes I heard someone answering me back in those same unknown languages, but I never saw anyone there, high on the hill in my dreams. But someone was there.
I came to believe that the silence of peace and of love was the silence of the sun’s warmth and light on my face, the silence of the clouds on a summer’s day, the silence of the woods on the other side of our back forty. It was the quiet of cats in the barn, and cows standing patiently in the heavenly snow which came south so rarely, and it was the silence of the cotton bolls growing out of the black summer earth. The silence of the moon on Black River.
My father’s silence was different. He was silent the way river boulders are silent, lonely smooth rocks, with no sign of hurts or joys, past or present, smooth and silent like the inside of an abandoned carapace, silent and smooth as a secret.
There are secret hopes, secret dreams, secret beliefs, but this smelled to me more like secret fear, secret disappointment, secret unhappiness. I didn’t know exactly, it was hidden, but I took it all on myself, all the secrets I did not know. They became my secrets, too, and because I didn’t know what they were, they made me miserable.
When I wasn’t helping my silent father with chores around the farm, I continued to read a lot, and this took me further and further out of the little world I was born into.
More than anything else in my last days of primary school, I wanted to speak another language, to converse with someone in French or Spanish or Swahili. I imagined doing this while all the people would stand around respectfully and wonder what we were talking about.
My first year in high school, I learned a little French from a teacher, Mr. Homer Jones, whose lessons sounded like misshapen English to my ears. I was sorely disappointed and dropped his class, but I knew that mystical languages did exist, and I longed to speak words that no earthbound person would understand, words that would soar to highest heavens and be understood and accepted in those realms.
When I was 13, I converted to Catholicism. Mother was fearful for my soul and told me so and then never mentioned it again. Father just looked away and said nothing.
I remained a Catholic for three years until the Latin mass was thrown out the Vatican window by the Pope. Three months after my mother died.
Dehandeyelo, dehandeyelo, dehandeyelo kept running through my head at the Baptist funeral held in her family church in Missouri. In nomine patris et filii, I thought. Et spiritus sancti.
I continued to read and read and decided in my secret silent and broken heart that I wanted to become a writer.
My God above all others became Thoth, and after I left St. Jude’s Catholic Church, I had grandiose images of my God in the guise of an ibis, drinking only the purest of water and holding in his human hand the heart and tongue of the sun god, Ra.
When I was barely seventeen, I left home and went to the State University on a full scholarship. That was in Missouri for that was where my father had us living once again at the time I finished high school. It was at the university that I started to write, sketches and short stories and descriptions, sometimes just bits of imagined conversation between imagined people.
I never showed any of this to anyone. I sensed that I was afraid of something but refused to think or talk about it.
I studied the Russian language. French and German and Italian and Spanish now seemed too common to me, too much like English. I especially became fascinated by Old Church Slavonic, mostly because no one spoke it anymore, and because even its ancient alphabet was somewhat different from modern Cyrillic. I wanted to study Sanskrit and Mongolian and Tibetan, but they were not offered at the University of Missouri in those days.
After I graduated, it took me fifteen more years of living, travelling about the world and gathering experiences, before I turned to writing with a vengeance. I had waited for a long time, and once I started I seemed to be trying to write enough to make up for the lost years. As I had once passed thirty-four days of muteness, now I was coming out of my desert of writing silence.
After a few years of hard writing, I began to get stories published here and there in small literary journals. It was my first novel, however, that caused my final estrangement from my family.
As all writers do, I created stories from my own experience but used my life as a starting filament, spinning out from that thread imaginary characters and situations and relationships, weaving from the warp and woof of my time on the Arkansas-Missouri border, whole cloth of fictions. My book was probably the first entire book father or my sisters read since their own respective school days, and the fruit of my success, sweet on their tongues as they told everybody in the area about it, turned sour in their stomachs when they and their neighbors read all the words. There was just enough of the recognizable past in my characters and their lives for my sisters and my father, and everybody on the border who had ever known me, to feel betrayed.
They felt that I had lived in their midst all those past years as a traitorous spy, and one of my sisters even went so far as to say as much over the phone.
They felt that I was now becoming wealthy and well-known in the wide world by holding up the family to a cruel and unforgiving light, and especially by presenting our dead mother and our old father as Mason-Dixon curios for a soul-less world to place on their coffee tables and bookshelves.
The truth is that I was neither rich nor famous, except along the eastern Arkansas-Missouri border.
Many years passed. I buried myself in my amazing and holy world of writing, and I began to feel more and more estranged not just from my family but also from my own past selves. Though I still went back time and again to the dark well of childhood for short stories and novel writing, I was never able to dry up that lonely reservoir.
The phone rang last Thursday. It was my youngest sister, the one nearest in age to me. She sounded old and weary.
“Father is dying. Come home.”
I should have flown to Little Rock, but instead I took the plane to Memphis, I wanted to see the city a second time. I drove a rental car down through the Delta country of Mississippi, crossed the river into Helena, Arkansas and then on out to grandma and grandpa’s old house where my father now lived alone and was dying.
The three-room shot-gun house looked smaller and shabbier in the long shadows of the last light of the evening sun, but of course it was many years older, and my world had grown some since last I had been there.
An old woman came out the door, one of my sisters, though I couldn’t be sure which one. She looked like my mother. She gave me an embarrassed hug as I stepped up on the darkening porch, where the shadows were already melding together. She led the way into the house where a single floor lamp cast a yellow circle of light on an old easy chair and the plank floor and the faded wallpaper. On a small table, my dead grandma’s art objects, a clear plastic snowball from Little Rock, a cup and saucer from Hot Springs, her small glass bell.
“Father was talking to you last night, thought he was, and so we decided to call you out here.” She looked at me through dry, red-rimmed eyes. My mother’s disappointed, uncomprehending eyes, I thought. “Go on back into the bedroom, Will, and set a while.” She lowered herself into the chair. I walked back through the middle room, the little kitchen, to the bedroom. I could smell the heavy, sweet blossoms of honeysuckle outside the window. I had forgotten about the honeysuckle in Missouri and Arkansas.
Father lay still. The light in the room was off, but by the fading evening light I could make out two small dead lamps in the room. The thin gauze curtain over the window wavered with an unfelt breeze, pulling a light shadow back and forth across the darker shadow of father’s face. I turned on the smaller of the two lamps, the one on the little bureau, and sat down in the dim light, sat on a wooden chair in the corner. Father lay still.
I could hear murmuring voices coming through the back screen door, and I looked out. In the summer kitchen out back, away from the house, several figures moved around slowly. One of them was lighting a lantern. I could understand nothing of what they were saying, they were too far away and spoke too softly with voices like the quiet whisperings and ripplings of Black River I used to swim in as a boy. Crickets and night birds added their voices.
Dehandeyalo, I thought back. I swam down in the thick night air, back into the Arkansas and Missouri summers of boyhood and youth, darted and wove my way through the tones of my dead mother, tones spoken now with the tongues of my remaining sisters out in the summer kitchen. Our father, as usual, remained silent.
Then something strange happened. I began to speak to him. Haltingly, at first, but gradually more assured of what I had been unable to say throughout a lifetime. He did not respond, but I did not expect him to. He lay still. My words ran, then they swam through the thick night air, then flew and soared high, they might have made the stars sing and weep had the stars cared to listen to what I had waited oh so long to say. I felt warm tears welling up in my eyes, and realized I had never before cried, not even at mother’s death when I was sixteen. At last I had found my voice and my tears, had broken the silence of my father and of his son. And at last I too fell silent once again. But it seemed to me it was a different kind of silence.
Father still lay quietly, both hands on the counterpane. It’s too hot, I thought, for such a heavy coverlet. Too hot.
I stood up and walked silently to the door. “I’m here, Daddy. I’ll be back. Rest now.” Yet he lay still.
I walked through the empty house. I wiped my face with my handkerchief and walked outside to the little summer kitchen that grandpa Meadows had built behind the house long years ago. It, too, looked smaller and poorer now.
Mysterious sounds of my sisters and the others, husbands and children and neighbors I guessed, came across to me, indistinct, subdued, susurrus. Mysterious.
I walked into the feeble circle of light and they all fell silent. Then one of my sisters - was it Alma? - walked out to me. Yes, Alma. The oldest of all us children. Children, I thought. Yes, we are all children here tonight. And the thick summer air lay on my head and face like a wet and sticky caul. The last-born.
Sister walked up to me and touched my cheek. The others looked out at us through the filter of the screen wall of the summer kitchen.
“We’re all glad you have came. We should’ve called you sooner. We’re sorry, but it’s good you are here. Oh, we’re all so sorry, Will.”
She shifted her weight and pulled back a yellowed strand of gray hair. “Papa seemed peaceful enough when he died late last night, after I called you. He talked a lot last night, but we couldn’t understand most of what he said. I think he was talking to you, Will. I don’t know. Just mumbled a lot, nothing special, but, well.” Alma was mumbling now herself, almost stuttering.
I turned away and walked towards Black River. And have not love, I thought. And have not love. But I couldn’t remember where the words came from.
I reached the river. It was too dark to see, but I could hear its current. I could smell the mud and the catfish. I sat on a smooth, hard rock. Father was dead.
Already dead when my plane took off from L.A. Already dead when I landed in Memphis. Dead as I drove down across to Mississippi and through the Delta cotton country, dead when I crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas. Dead as I drove on out to Grandpa and Grandma Meadow’s old shack, Daddy’s old shack. Now our old shack.
As I had talked, he lay still.
And have not love. Where did they come from, those words? I was confused. I couldn’t remember. And have not love. I couldn’t remember where they were from, or what came next.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love
And they lay in my mouth, bloated and dead, and tasting of bereavement.
I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal
I remembered. Ist Corinthians. Chapter 13. Unlucky 13.
It was going to be harder. Father hadn’t been there to open or close any door, and he wasn’t ever going to be. I was going to have to try it all alone. Maybe I was too late.
I spoke not a word but tried to pull away the humidity which clung to my face and head.
