Lapham Rising Read Online Free

spare. They hung up on me. Then I phoned the stables in the neighboring town of Quiogue and asked, “Next time you take your horses to the barber, may I have the clippings?” They sent over a basketful without comment.
    Carefully I extract the horsehair from the large Mason jar in which I have been storing it, atop the one small hill on Noman.
    “Can I help?” says Hector. I would ask “How?” but that would prolong the conversation.
    Grasping one end of the sheaf of hair in each hand, I rotate my fists in opposite circles and slowly twist it, as the diagram indicated. It rolls easily, then springs back to its original state. I twist it again. I do this twice a day to maintain its bounce and torque.
    Why do I keep it in a jar on a hill? Because that is what Wallace Stevens wrote about doing in “Anecdote of a Jar.” He set down his jar on a hill in Tennessee, and Noman is shaped like Tennessee, and just as Stevens’s jar brought order to the “slovenly wilderness” of its surroundings, so my jar of horsehair, too, when put to proper use, will effect the imposition of order on my immediate surroundings, and indeed beyond, the same kind of order that the eighteenth century could have brought to the slovenly wilderness of the twentieth, had it not had the misfortune to precede it. I trust that is clear.
    “Señor March!” cries José from the other side of the creek. “You look like a conquistador on that heel!”
    “If I were a conquistador, guess where you’d be?”
    “Where all the conquistadors are now.” He laughs. “What are you doing?”
    I interpose my body between him and the jar, though he’s probably too far away too see it anyway. “Searching for serenity,” I tell him. “Trying to be where Lapham is not.”
    He swings his arm in a slow arc, as if presenting the universe to eighth graders at the planetarium. “But Señor Lapham is everywhere!” Bang bang bang bang bang .
    Would that he were speaking figuratively. Every time I take my eyes off the construction site, it seems to double its size, as though it were an endlessly enlarging mythical animal—one of those terrible Greek freak creations born of the forced copulation of a god with an animal, the god of cathedral ceilings or of mansard roofs with a toucan or a buffalo—producing a vague composite with indefinite haunches and misty tentacles; head of owl; horn of gnu; torso of panther; gills, claws, trunks; the tail of a langur; the feet of a fruit bat; a hundred legs splayed in a hundred different directions, the body parts continually ejected and becoming independent structures, outbuildings, each individually terrible yet bearing a ghastly resemblance to the mother animal. When the house is completed, will it expand of its own accord? In the middle of the night, will I be awakened by the bubble-bursts of skin, the popping of limbs and of eyes from their sockets, the elongation of a telescopic wing, and the screeching, the agonized screeching, of growing pains?
    Hector eyes me as though I were a squirrel eyeing him .“And by the way,” he says, “just where do your two little projects leave me? ” No matter how holy he may sound, he is driven solely by self-interest.
    “Don’t worry, I’ll take you to Chautauqua. You won’t be abandoned.”
    “And what if I don’t want to go to Chautauqua?”
    “Well, I can leave you here to deal with the police. You can explain what I did. They’ll doubtless arrest you as an accomplice.”
    “Not me,” he says. “I won’t say a word. I’ll just look cute and bewildered. ‘Oh, where is my master? Why did he desert me?’ Poor little doggie.” He goes through his curriculum of head tilts, including the Adorable; the What’s-Going-On?; the You-Must-Be-Kidding; the Quizzical (representing genuine confusion); and his choice of the moment, the Forlorn.
    “That’s why you’re coming with me,” I tell him. “I don’t want to leave any witnesses. Besides, you’ll enjoy hearing me