American Ghosts & Old World Wonders Read Online Free PDF Page A

that! Not in the least like that.
                He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.
     
    Annabella: Methinks you are not well.
    Giovanni: Here's none but you and I. I think you love me, sister.
    Annabella: Yes, you know I do.
     
                And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now, before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous plain they knew they must not do it. . .do what? How did they know what to do? From watching the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the cock. They were country children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the other's face as if it were their own.
     
    [Music plays.]
    Giovanni: Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.
                For pity's sake, I beg you!
    [She kneels.]
    Annabella: On my knees,
                Brother, even by our mother's dust, I charge you
                Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
                Love me, or kill me, brother.
    [He kneels.]
    Giovanni: On my knees,
                Sister, even by our mother's dust, I charge you
                Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.
                Love me, or kill me, sister.
     
                                    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY
                                    Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.
                                    Empty rocking-chair, rocking, rocking.
     
                It is the boy -- or young man, rather -- who is the most mysterious to me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he works the land, he toils and sweats. His work consists of the vague, undistinguished "work" of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never before broken until now.
                And I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt.
                For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!
                Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? "Look after your sister." But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.
     
    Giovanni: I am lost forever.
     
                Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes. She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.
     
                                    INTERIOR. MINISTER'S HOUSE. DAY
                                    Dinner-table. Minister's wife dishing portions from a pot for her husband and her son.
     
                                    MINISTER'S WIFE: 'Tain't right, just ain't right, those two out there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.
     
                                    MINISTER'S SON: She's terribly pretty,