Read Online Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen - Free Book Online

father, but in my head rang Ben’s words, we had a plan . My blood rushed in exciting hope. And that hope was that one day I would have enough courage to be this tender as this man was now at this moment, if ever I was lucky enough to find someone who would take my tenderness. And to have, together with someone, a plan. I knew, at this moment, that that was the thing I would look for in my life. And who could hold that from me or tell me I could not have it, that unspeakable tenderness that already I felt to grow in my breast as my blood rushed through me and which was the gift of Ben and his brother to me.
    And out of this passion, as though I had been blinded by it and now could see again, I saw Ben lifting up the body of his dead brother from the pallet.
    â€œThank you for tending to my brother,” he said to us, solemnly, and turned to go. “My brother and me will go, now.”
    â€œBut you’ll drown,” my father told him. “Wait until the flood is over, for God’s sake.”
    My father stood in front of Ben as if to stop him; but in a growling voice and with a look of darkness, Ben said,
    â€œGet out of our way, my friend.”
    Ben was going, holding the nestled body against his breast. My father and I stood still as our visitors out of the flood went back into it, through the barricaded front door and into the storm.
    â€œGoodbye, goodbye,” I whispered.
    â€œGod be with you and God forgive me for letting a man who killed his brother go,” my father said, almost to himself.
    Through the window we saw, in the fading daylight, the brothers move through the water. Ben was nestling the body of his dead brother in his arms and pressing his head upon his breast. “They’ll never make it,” my father said.
    â€œBut where are they going?”
    â€œThey’re in God’s hands,” answered my father. “Although Ben was a murderer, I feel he is forgiven because he came back and asked forgiveness,” father said. “The love of God works through reconciliation.”
    â€œFather,” I asked. “What is reconciliation?”
    â€œIt means coming back together in peace,” my father answered. “Although there was torment between the two brothers, they have been brought back together in peace.”
    Through the gray rain, moving through the rising waters, they disappeared, the two men of “reconciliation” who had come back together in peace. My eyes clung to them as long as they could see, trying to hold the loving enemy brothers back from the mist they were slowly melting into.
    The days after the rain were worse than the rain. The river swelled and covered farms and roads and many people sat on top of their houses. Though the water around us fell to the lower land, since we were on a rise, my father and I were marooned. The sun had a new hotness, the world was sodden and the smell was of soaked things and rotting things. There were snakes and sobbing bullfrogs and there were crying peafowls in the trees and red crawfish flipped in the mud. In the remoteness and seclusion of our place, through the strangeness of our days, I wept for Ben and his brother so many times I can’t remember. A new feeling had been born in me, obscure then but clearer through time. A man in a boat stopped to tell us of the wonders of the storm: gin cotton lay over an acre of water like white flowers; a thousand sawmill logs were aloose, a church steeple had been carried away with its bell, miraculously afloat, and stood gonging like a buoy near Trinity bridge.
    And for a while it was reported that a floating door bearing the bodies of two men was seen moving on the wide river through several towns. At one town people had said that when it came through there, the raft was whirling in the currents as though a demon had hold of it; but the men stayed put, though it was considered that they were dead. And another time, near the river’s mouth