Mr. Cheung hoped that the deranged Israelite boat-builders, to whom his back was resolutely turned, these people who thought they had an agreement with him, were as basically muddled as this old Baptist sorceress. Under the pretext of scratching his shoulder, he threw in the Israelites’ direction a quick glance that gave him no comfort at all. The tide was creeping toward them and the air was full of words, but the dozen or so Israelites at the water’s edge applied themselves to their drill as busily and as certainly as insects.
Fire had come into Grandmother’s life. For the big stove in the kitchen Mr. Cheung had acquired a new door, one with a glass window in it, so that as the cooler season came on she had something to look at from her station nearest the heat.
The moments turned back and forth patched with blank spaces, people appeared and disappeared right while she watched them, visits with old friends suddenly became interviews with these mystifying figures who might be her relatives and might be her captors, and her breakfast could easily turn into a pillow of burlap she was supposed to lay her head on for a night’s sleep to be accomplished, by her reckoning, fifteen minutes after daybreak; but in the deep red event behind the stove’s glass window the filament of time was never tangled, nothing had a name or a reason, everything was itself, and the things she would always know, even if you took her head away, even if you killed her, were confirmed: It catches, then burns, then blazes; it rages and sings, it wanes, it shifts and flares, it burns a little longer and then weakens, whatever it is, and goes out. But if you lay the small wood across it in the morning, it all begins again. The little girl came often to sit on Grandmother’s lap, and went away, and then came back grown larger and louder. It was the same thing. Whatever it was, it was happening now, today, all of it, this very moment. This very moment—now, changing and staying the same — was the fire.
This morning she’d put on her white dress to go to Mass with her father. Pulling on her grey knee-socks, part of the uniform of Ste. Bernadette’s, her French girls’ school, she’d caressed her own thighs and spread her legs, feeling guilty but laughing, and then on these same legs she’d walked six blocks down Dien Tin Street, holding her father’s hand, to the Church of Ste. Therese. They’d entered the cathedral, nodding to old Pere Georges, who stood by the doors recognizing nobody and greeting each one with a glazed friendliness, and suddenly Marie had found herself traveling all alone toward a huge aquarium filled with fire. Now she sat before the kitchen stove and drowned in the wet cement of old age, hardly able to lift her hands to her face. Grief tightened her chest and she expected the tears to flow, but none came. The holes for tears were pinched shut, and her eyes were always as dry as two corks.
A man and a woman came into the room and tumbled yellow and green fruit onto the table.
After dropping the melons and yellow fruit onto the table, Mr. Cheung flexed his fingers and then rubbed the back of his neck, “I’m not the one to carry so many melons on such a long hike.”
“How are you today, Grandmother?” Eileen said.
The old woman turned her head toward Eileen, seemed not to recall why she’d turned her head, and said nothing.
It had been fun to go out, hear a sound-show, watch the weird doings of the Israelites, but now Eileen was weary. The day still held too much time to get through and too many things to bother her. “Tony, we can just eat the fruit, okay? My back is too tired and weak to make supper. I figure out the hot sun ate all my strength.”
Her husband wasn’t listening. He stood by the kitchen door and studied the dirt yard as if it were a book of words. She could see he was deep into his thinking. To bring him back she said, “Tell me the Constitution. Tell me the Declaration Indepension.”
He took his mind out of the yard and looked at her. “Independence,” he said.
“Go ’head, say to me.”
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” he told her.
Eileen felt better as he settled into all these words. Whenever he told someone the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution it took the lines out of his forehead. Eileen often asked him for one or the other, because he was always thinking too hard. It frightened her, his habit of trying to keep the world in his mind, the whole world, to keep it turning in the space of his brain, from the start of time to the last day — that’s what brought on the terrifying fits—
“. the establishment of an absolute Tyranny, with a capital T, over these States, with a capital S. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Period. Dash. ”
— explaining and explaining, working it all out in his head, coloring his attitude black, that’s what started the tiny cells in the brain popping and bursting—
“. swarms of Officers, capital O,” he said, “. and eat out their substance. ”
— four times she’d seen her husband go down, his eyeballs switched off, only the whites shimmering in the sockets, and it had crushed her heart, it had twisted the very life in her, to see his body with the soul gone out of it, jerking like a decked shark. I’m gonna slice some fruit, she thought, and that’s all the supper there is.
He went on and on without once having to stop and think. “. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our capital-C Coasts, burnt our towns. ” He was coming to her favorite part, the part about the capital-I, capital-S Indian Savages. “. and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless capital-I, capital-S Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. ” These Indian Savages had eventually warred-out almost everybody.
“. in the most humble terms. ”
Pretty soon he would get to the names. Eileen bit into the melon and only then realized how thirsty she was. She’d gotten too much sun. She dropped her slice of melon and covered her ears.
“. FREE AND INDEPENDENT,” he shouted, “STATES.”
Eileen wished he wouldn’t yell that part. She liked to hear him pull it out of his memory like a long necklace, every pearl the same. The Declaration of Independence was warm in her ears, and it soothed her to listen, just as it seemed a comfort to Grandmother that she could sit in this kitchen and look at the fire, chewing on something when there was nothing in her mouth, not even a tooth.
“Hancock,” Tony was saying, “Button Gwinnet, Lyman Hall, Geo period Walton, Wum period Hooper. ”
But this afternoon the Declaration only seemed to rouse his feeling, and now he wasn’t telling them the Declaration anymore — he was complaining about the names again. “You know Mrs. Castanette in our orchestra? She only calls herself that because she plays the castanets. It is a fact that her name is Margaret Swanson. But her husband now calls himself Swanson-Johnson. They don’t see how they themselves are the ones who — who mangle the way of things.” He moved his hands as if gnarling up a bunch of string. “In the time when it was cold, we, my family, we burned our copy of the Constitution to get the fire going one day. Everybody was in despair, the children were coming out crooked, every tide left dead poison fish, nobody put out the boats, nobody could get together and say, Let’s keep the fires going in our stoves — I remember this, my father told me and I remember a little bit. Our family burned a copy of the Constitution and all the books to stay alive, but first they memorized the Constitution, everyone took two paragraphs, they clung to the ways they knew — they did this, Eileen, because it would keep them going on, step by step. It isn’t good, calling yourself Swanson-Johnson, as if a name is a joke. Next a word will be a joke, and then comes a time when even a thought is a joke.” Worry swelled the tiny veins around his eyes. He sucked short gulps of air.