This Census-Taker(6)

Of the second book’s early pages that I have, the last-but-one-written—you can tell from the more formal older hand—is notes toward a catechism. I know because it’s labeled Notes toward my catechism.

It says The Hope, then that’s crossed out, and what hope was this? After that is written This Hate, which is crossed out too. Then starting again the words congregate in curious and precise lines, with a child’s care, for a reader to come:

The Hope Is So:

the catechism says, and then,

Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

Below that there’s a mess of scrawled, rejected, reworked, written and rewritten, arranged-just-so, and finally accepted lines.

This is all I have of the earlier story—scraps, notes, and the resulting catechism, finished in neat and left for me. That was the last page written and the first any reader sees. It was brought forward: it’s what opens the book.

I thought I understood it when I learned to read it: now, at last, perhaps I really do. If so, I have to decide what it’s my job to do. I’ll start with my own recitation, in answer at last, something important I’ve learned.

In

Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.

My second book comes fast, the noisiest of the three. I’m not writing it with a pen. My fingers quickstep on these keys and my second book rattles out.





When he met the man who became his line manager the boy was a child and na?ve but not quite ignorant, at least in letters, because of his mother’s lessons.

Sometimes she would bring home from the town new things to read. Catalogues for grain and agricultural machines, and instructions for cleaning metals, and almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out. All these in the formal voice of the language I grew up speaking, in which I don’t write this. A few folded cuttings from foreign newspapers—which we occasionally found tucked between pages as bookmarks or secreted in stashes and which were in this language—we ignored.

My mother made slow poems of the words as she read them flatly to show the boy how the letters sounded. When later the man who would become his manager met the boy he improved him by giving him endless dull texts and having him sound them out, asking questions about their context.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a “y” to an “e” in a name for power, “sun-writing” becomes “light-drawing.” The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

The boy always suspected his father could read and write, at least some, and that suspicion was to grow. Back in the first days of his curiosity the boy found cards tucked between boards in the outhouse, little pornographic pictures with cramped handwriting on the back, but then he was too young to read them and he was never to know if his father wrote them or received them or simply found them and liked the images or if they were his father’s at all. The old camera had demanded a long exposure, so the hand-tinted women and men crawled over each other in stilted and mannered lust. The boy put them back in their crevice and later they were gone.

He didn’t know what if anything it was his mother got from his father’s company. They lived together and passed each other every day and spoke a little to each other when they had to without viciousness or rancor but, so far as the boy saw and so far as he ever remembered, without pleasure or interest. From his father there was always a distant desperation.

His mother seemed always to know, and not to like it, when the boy’s father killed things. It roused in her a cold and anxious distaste. That boy was afraid of her, but at those rare times of his father’s blank-faced interventions he wanted the hurried and uncomfortable caretaking she offered.

—

After I saw him kill the dog I was more afraid of being alone with my father than I’d ever been of anything. But over the course of months every fear, however strong, ebbs or changes. My father treated me with the same flustered abstraction with which he always had.

Every day he was busy in his workroom. When he came up to the middle floor I would lie on the cold boards of the attic and listen to the murmurs of he and my mother talking. I couldn’t discern their words but I could hear them speaking with a care that sometimes sounded a little like affection.

People might come to order keys. When my father went down to deliver them he always went alone.

When my mother descended, one time in three she might take me.

—

In the center of the town was the bridge. Along its western edge ran black railings on which you could lean to overlook the foliage and rock and hills and the river. On the other side were stone buildings, shored up now with wood and concrete and iron girders. The bridge had been inhabited once but some ordinance had forbidden that practice, broken though it was by the parentless children who squatted collapsing derelicts between the shops.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. Where else could those children live?