Tours of the Black Clock

22

ON CHRISTMAS DAY IN my tenth year the valley’s all snow. I can see it from any one of my bedroom windows. This morning my brothers and I get up and go out to the barn with my father to check out the horses. The horses are the main business of my father’s ranch, and these winters it’s a lot of trouble to make certain we don’t wake up every day to a lot of frozen horses. There doesn’t seem much doubt to anyone at this time that Oral and Henry will grow up and take over the ranch after my father’s gone, flip a coin for the house or give it to whichever of the two’s been lucky enough to find a woman foolish enough to spend her life with him, stick Alice in some little cottage to be built on the other side of the stable, build another house for the brother who’s left. That’s the plan anyway. Don’t know where I fit into it. As it happens one of them won’t grow up at all, and there won’t be any ranch house to take over for the one who does. On the Christmas Day of my tenth year we’re still six Christmases away from all that.

The horses are all right and we come back to the house. I’m the last one in. The fact is I like the horses and like to spend time out there with them. Two or three I’m particularly fond of, a spotted one and a white and a butterscotch. But now I’m in the house which is warm and filled with the smell of the fire and food. In the kitchen is our cook, Minnie, who’s been with the Jainlight household since before I was born. She’s from Virginia. She shows me what kindness she feels she can get away with, but she also regards me with a confusion that’s only another clue, among many I can’t understand, as to the truth of my presence and past. Helping her is the Indian woman Gayla. Minnie tends to send her out of the kitchen when I’m around. These Virginians don’t like the idea of mixing up white and colored before a boy’s old enough to understand there’s a difference. Gayla’s fairly light, actually. She lives on the outskirts of my father’s land with some of the other Indians. It isn’t her real name, her real name is something unpronounceable. She grew up with an Indian mother and sister out in Oklahoma, the white father having disappeared no later than he first showed up, and she came to Pennsylvania around the same time her sister named Rae married a white newspaperman near Chicago. Like a lot of Indians or half-breeds, Gayla could be any age at all.

As always when I go into the living room, the talk between my mother and my brothers seems to stop a little, and then they go on as before, adjusting to the interjection of my bigness into all their little coziness. The tree is bright. It’s green and silver. A fire roars in the hearth. I sort of shove my way into the festivities. Sometimes I say something and usually Alice will ask me what I mean by it. I could say the most routine thing and Alice acts like I’m talking in runes. “Nice fire,” I might say, and Alice’s face goes still and she finally answers, “Well Banning, I’m not really sure what you intended by that remark.” Actually, it’ll turn out to be a pretty funny remark at that. But all I know at this moment is that I’m a kid who wants to be a part of Christmas here and I can’t seem to get in. Whatever little breach of family bonds is left open for me to enter, I don’t fit through, and there I am outside, in the middle of the living room. Henry has a little set he got for Christmas, with a fort and men, and after a while when Oral gets bored with it Henry relents out of need for another player: he’s Santa Ana with ten thousand troops and I’m a hundred and fifty Texans defending the mission. I’m big enough that I just reach across the battlefield and my arm wipes out six or seven of Henry’s battalions. “You jackass,” he shrieks, “you’re supposed to die! All of you is supposed to die!” Henry packs up the set and goes back to talking with Oral and Alice. I head upstairs to my bedroom; on the way I knock over this or that of Alice’s bric-a-brac, reducing the Old World to rubble. A chair or a tablelamp. “For God’s sake,” Oral says scornfully. Henry shakes his head with contempt. Alice sighs, deep and wounded. Out with the fucking chair anyway, I say back, though not to them, or to anyone who can hear me for years to come.