Song of Solomon: Chapters 1–2

...entrails the butcher might be giving away.

They had been watching from the windows—at first with mild curiosity, then, as the crowd seemed to swell to the very walls of the hospital, they watched with apprehension.

But when they saw neither placards nor speakers, they ventured outside into the cold: white-coated surgeons, dark-jacketed business and personnel clerks, and three nurses in starched jumpers.

One of the nurses, hoping to bring some efficiency into the disorder, searched the faces around her until she saw a stout woman who looked as though she might move the earth if she wanted to.

To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull even to the women who did not hate his mother.

The quiet that suffused the doctor’s house then, broken only by the murmur of the women eating sunshine cake, was only that: quiet.

As she unfolded the white linen and let it billow over the fine mahogany table, she would look once more at the large water mark.

And once exposed, it behaved as though it were itself a plant and flourished into a huge suede-gray flower that throbbed like fever, and sighed like the shift of sand dunes.

Something else is needed to get from sunup to sundown: a balm, a gentle touch or nuzzling of some sort.

So Ruth rose up and out of her guileless inefficiency to claim her bit of balm right after the preparation of dinner and just before the return of her husband from his office.

He fought the evergreen for a better look, hampered more by his laughter than by the branches.

Appreciative eyes that communicated some complicity she was excluded from.

How his father, confused and melancholy over his wife’s death in childbirth, had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome; saw in them a large figure that looked like a tree hanging in some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees.

She had cut the last thread of propriety.

Now she was odd, murky, and worst of all, unkempt.

Fond as he was of his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife had died, lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion.

In the middle of his reverie, Macon was interrupted by rapid tapping on the window.

For more than an hour Porter held them at bay: cowering, screaming, threatening, urinating, and interspersing all of it with pleas for a woman.

There was no one on the street that he could see; people were at supper, licking their fingers, blowing into saucers of coffee, and no doubt chattering about Porter’s escapade and Macon’s fearless confrontation of the wild man in the attic.

He was rapidly approaching a part of the road where the music could not follow, when he saw, like a scene on the back of a postcard, a picture of where he was headed—his own home; his wife’s narrow unyielding back; his daughters, boiled dry from years of yearning; his son, to whom he could speak only if his words held some command or criticism.

They alone had a sense of adventure and were flagrant in their enjoyment of the automobile’s plushness.

Guitar stopped feigning indifference.

The piny-winy smell was narcotic, and so was the sun streaming in, strong and unfettered because there were no curtains or shades at the windows that were all around the room, two in each of three walls, one on each side of the door, one on either side of the sink and the stove, and two on the farther wall.

The pebbly voice, the sun, and the narcotic wine smell weakened both the boys, and they sat in a pleasant semi-stupor, listening to her go on and on.