Had I a Hundred Mouths Read Online Free Page A

friends and I asked the birds, where’s Leander? And I saw a doe and her fawn and they perked up and looked right at me and I said, please tell me where has Leander gone. Because he’ll never make it all alone. And then when I shone a light into Leander’s old dark corner of the cave, something gleamed. And there, on a tree root, dangling on a string, was the red ring, the sad red ring. The uncle reached under the bed, drew up the bottle of whiskey to his mouth and took a deep swallow from it, the deepest of all. Then he was quiet for a long time. Finally the older nephew asked, “What happened to Leander?” and the uncle answered softly, “I never saw Leander again. I went away and never came back again to the cave in the sawmill woods. Wasn’t too long before bulldozers leveled the place and men came in and built the state highway through there: I-17. Underneath the highway lays forever the red ring.”
    And then they lay silent together for a long time, the uncle, the older nephew and the young one. And in a while the nephews heard their uncle sleeping. But the older nephew did not sleep. He lay fiercely awake and felt the flesh of his uncle against his side, the beat of his heart and the breeze of his breath, whiskey-laden, upon his cheek.
    Some years later, the older nephew, who had long ago left the place, came back home to his uncle’s funeral. He had died, they called and told him, alone in a drifter’s Mission, drunk on a cot, in Houston, where he’d gone to seek his brother and sister (who had renounced him) but had gone to the Methodist mission, Harbor Lights, near the Ship Channel on Navigation Boulevard. And as he stood at the grave, a group of hooded white figures came out from the trees and gathered around the coffin; and he saw, when one of them lifted for a moment his mask, the face of his young cousin. Did he want to speak, to tell something to him? The older cousin felt a chill of terror and rage; but he held still until the preacher, who had stepped forward and was reading Galatians 6:8, “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption,” had finished. And then he turned his back to the place and left it forever—or so he vowed.
    And then more years passed and the older nephew had drunk his uncle’s whiskey, had looked here and there, had lost love and speech, had been living hidden for nights and days away from life in a dark world of fear and dumbness, Leander’s brother, bound back to the land of his uncle. And returning home late one night on a darkened street in a cold city, the older cousin heard a ghostly sound of breaking glass, and he saw coming towards him out of the darkness a startling shape of beauty and oddness. As if drawn together, the figure and the cousin moved toward each other; and when they confronted each other it was as though they had come together out of the ages, face to face. The nephew looked upon a phantom face, as if what face had been there had been burned away and this was the painted mask of it. The creature’s head was covered with a rich mane of hair, and in the streetlight there appeared to be a red glow over it. The being was clothed in a glimmering garment of scales of glass; and colored feathers were reflected in their mirrors. And the nephew saw that gaudy rings glistened on scarred brown hands. Leander! he whispered. Why did he think that this was the burnt boy, the orphan child of lust, that on a long-ago Good Friday afternoon signaled the end of his boyhood? Leander! he called. But there was no sign of feeling in the shadowed ancient eyes which, for a searing moment, locked upon him. And then the phantom being moved around the nephew and went on, swathed in the delicate tinkling of glass.
    Leander! he softly called, once more, Leander! And he was calling to his uncle and his uncle’s sorrow and to all storytelling, all redemption: Leander, Leander. But the figure steadily