On
account of the time elapsed since his last visit to their house, this spare
room bed again felt unfamiliar; it suddenly occurred to him that for no reason
he could fathom the more accustomed to a bed he became, the less likely it was
he might enjoy in it sleep of any benefit. Looking up at the sound from behind
the curtains he spoke out loud,
Skunk:
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
words
William Faulkner had attributed to the character Darl Bundren* in the fifth of
his novels, then silently appending that the worse the elements grew without,
the greater his capacity for comfort indoors.
In
the sober novelty of being tired enough to sleep he shivered and yawned often,
rotating his shoulders between the sheets’ chill hoping such friction might
generate warmth, and though too tired at this late hour to actually reread
anything of the little paperback accompanying him now with talismanic ubiquity,
still he indulged his urge to connect with the book’s eponymous toy characters
in the simple perusal of each exquisitely cross-hatched illustration.
From
previous readings he was aware that having sustained the first of its several
damagings, the faulty mechanism of the mouse father’s clockwork no longer
engaged his feet in the habitual orbit of their dance, prompting him instead to
forward motion in a near straight line.
Being
fastened to him at the hands and with no core motor of his own, the mouse child
was entirely reliant upon this volition of his father to force him backwards
into the world, and thus propelled found himself involuntarily constrained to
fixate upon their past from that immediate to them on back.
Where
before it had been other elements (perhaps the good luck coin, or some sense of
predestination) in either word or image as had caught him unawares, it was in
such particular revelation Brother Skunk tonight found himself manifest,
understanding the precedent months of accumulate grief to have rendered him
bereft of all hope, left then to back passively into his own future living not
in anticipation of what might yet happen, but in reflection of what actually
had.
He
set the book aside.
Here,
even at the outset of attempting to recoup whatever health had been squandered
across the summer, his continued abstinence and physical renourishment had
already proved restitutive, scalp and forearm both now calmed with healing.
Abruptly wakened, he began for the first time to actively and soberly question
the sense in concluding his past preferable to what he had felt his present
emptiness, especially since without the requisite perspective of passed time
those elements of the former most clearly visible to him were bereavement and
loss.
The
rain surged again at the windows.
He sat up to remove the tiny silver ear-ring, placing it alongside his Levi's watch beneath the bedside lamp before commencing his requiescat, suddenly overcome with his potential for forward motion.
*BUNDREN, DARL [ca.
1902- ] Eldest son of Anse and Addie
Bundren, and a character in As I Lay Dying.
An extremely sensitive and perceptive man, Darl suffers from his mother’s
emotional rejection of him, and is considered by the neighbours to be somewhat
“queer”. Of all the characters he is best able to intellectualize and verbalize
his experience, and narrates nearly a third of the sections of the novel. The
rivalry between him and Jewel, Addie’s favourite, is intense but unspoken, as
is the antagonism between Darl and Dewey Dell, a result of his knowledge that
she is pregnant. The events of the funeral journey completely destroy his
precarious mental balance, and at the end of the book he is sent off to the
insane asylum in a state of extreme derangement.
-A Handbook of Faulkner
-Dorothy Tuck
-Chatto
and Windus, 1965
