Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych Read online

  ANOTHER GOVERNESS

  THE LEAST BLACKSMITH

  A DIPTYCH

  JOANNA RUOCCO

  FOREWORD BY BEN MARCUS

  Copyright © 2012 by Joanna Ruocco

  The University of Alabama Press

  Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Book Design: Illinois State University's English Department's Publications Unit; Director: Tara Reeser; Assistant Director: Steve Halle; Production

  Assistant: Aida Giurgianu

  Cover Design: Lou Robinson

  Typefaces: Caslon Pro and Garamond

  The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ruocco, Joanna.

  Another governess ; The least blacksmith : a diptych / Joanna Ruocco ; foreword by Ben Marcus. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57366-165-2 (quality paper : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-57366-829-3 (electronic)

  I. Ruocco, Joanna. Least blacksmith. II. Title.

  PS3618.U568A84 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2011043108

  For my namesakes

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword by Ben Marcus

  Another Governess

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  The Least Blacksmith

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  FOREWORD

  by Ben Marcus

  What marks this severe book is an astounding level of discipline in the prose. Joanna Ruocco, a writer of stark effects, seems to have squeezed her sentences so tightly they are sheer muscle. Just read a few. They are simple, strict, rarely veering from the basic structure you might encounter in a children's book. I thought of the Dick and Jane books, the sing-song cadence of simple factual lines. But this is no children's book. What starts out innocently almost always veers into strangeness or violence. Ruocco does something wonderful here. She builds writing sentence by sentence until, by force of logic, she achieves a genuine discomfort. This is a literary discomfort, borne of that same discipline in the prose. One senses that perhaps Ruocco worked from a deliberately limited vocabulary. Certain words appear with regularity: cakes, glass, fluid, lump, glue, blood, dogs, moat, nits, butcher. She shuffles these words while remaining obedient to her narrative—and there is a beguiling, grisly, poignant narrative here (actually, there are many)—and somehow, through this deliberate practice, meaning grows, a world blooms, a story emerges. It's part fairy tale, part gothic, part domestic, and wholly its own odd species of writing. Listen:

  She must be like the mistress, red and fat like the mistress. There is no mistress. I would know if there were a mistress, a red, fat mistress. A mistress does not tolerate offal on the staircase, flies and hornets on the staircase. She does not tolerate boils on the meat. The mistress has gone away from the house. She is buried beneath the tree in the garden by the house. She is buried too deep to come up. The dogs cannot reach her.

  A violence is suggested here, but the effect is punishingly flat. Ruocco seems to go out of her way not to provide the usual assistance of adverbs and adjectives. Thank god. Without the symphonic soundtrack meant to telegraph feeling, we have only the haunted content itself, bravely stripped of cues and signals. What I most appreciate here is the sense of tremendous control on display. If these are strange narrative waters, if we are in the hands of an artist determined to navigate her own way, taking nothing for granted in the literary toolkit, we experience Ruocco's sheer control through every sentence, the comforting feeling that she has designed this book not as a container for self-expression, but as a piece of linguistic architecture that could not possibly have been built any other way. This strikes me as the brilliant, ideal approach to literary innovation, and it makes me surrender fully to the gorgeous, original world of Ruocco's narratives. It is so easy to submit to a writer who has this much power—we know there is nothing capricious or random here—and if we are unmoored or delirious or just unsure of what is happening, it is only for a moment, and that confusion turns out to be deliberate, in service of the dark art of this writing. Finishing this book, I thought: I must read everything this writer has written. And: I must tell people that the project of literature is in not just capable hands, but unusual, original ones.

  ANOTHER GOVERNESS

  1

  My hair is altogether changed. My face is altogether changed. I am very slim. The dress hangs on me. It slides from my shoulder and the cloth is newly stained. A button dangles. I must repair the button. There is a needle in the nursery. Somewhere there is a needle. I will use it to repair the button. There are children in the nursery. The grunting is the children, the sounds of the children. The children are grunting over the tray of cakes. On the iron table, a big tray of cakes, little cakes, dripping cakes. There are two children grunting over the big tray of cakes. They are on their knees by the cakes. The girl has reddish eyelids and nostrils. The boy is swollen, with dirty skin. Tamworth and Old Spot. I will call them Tamworth and Old Spot. The boy is nearly a man. Spot is a man. The children are grown. They are not children. They are on their knees. That is why they look so small. No one has noticed they are grown because they eat on their knees. Get up, I say to the children. Get up. Get up. The children grunt. Crumbs stick to their cheeks. They move closer to the tray. There are more cakes on the tray. There are more cakes for the children to eat. Get up, I say. Get up. Get up. I clap my hands. The children look up. They stare. Crumbs drop from their mouths. Fluids drip down their chins. They stare. I stand above them in the nursery so they know me even if they do not know my face.

  2

  I walk in a small circle on the carpet. Fluids have marked the carpet. I walk in small circles. There is a table in the nursery. There are two chairs. There is a rocking horse. The paint has chipped from the legs of the rocking horse and the tail is ragged, falling short of the fetlocks. Something has chewed the legs, chewed the tail of the rocking horse. Nits fly from the eggs in the gapped mane of the rocking horse. Nits s
warm above the crib. I walk to the crib. It is iron. I walk to the rocking horse. Ride on your rocking horse, I say to Spot, but he is too big for the rocking horse. His legs will bend at the knee, his feet on the carpet. He does not ride the rocking horse. There must be another child, a small child, under the linens in the crib. I walk to the window. I look down at the moat. There is a dirty white skin of mist on the moat. Beyond the moat the orchard thickens into the forest. The orchard is filled with pigs. The pigs are shoulder to shoulder, feeding in the orchard. The apples are soft and brown. They are dropping from the trees. They are rotting in the grass. The pigs are slipping in the thick brown flesh of the apples, the broken flesh of the apples. The brown skins of the apples hang in flaps from their bellies. The pigs nip at each other, squealing. The pigs are eating through the apples to the soil. They are eating through the soil. A pig drags a root from the soil, a pale, streaked root, long and stiff, tapered to a white hook. The pig is eating the white root and the root is moistening, blackening with fluids. I croon to the pigs. The pigs must think that they smell me beneath the soil, but I am behind the glass in the high window. I am high above the orchard. I will not go back there anymore. I have misted the window with my breath.

  3

  Open your books, I say. The children certainly have books. The nursery is filled with books. I see books on the desks by bottles of black fluid and I see books on the carpet. The crib is filled with books. There are no books on the table. On the table, there are cakes. The children wait by the cakes, on their knees by the cakes. It is not time for cakes. It is time for books. First, in the nursery, cakes. Then books. It is time for books. Not all little children have books. Tamworth and Spot must love their books. There is much to learn in their books. There are no books in the forest. I went to the forest. There were roots, there were rocks, there were leaves. There was mud. I fell in the mud. I slid in the leaves. I crawled over rocks. I lay in a field. I cut a lump on my foot and a worm came out. It was a very black worm. I dried my foot in the sun. There was a hole in the lump on my foot, and the hole leaked yellow fluid. I pulled dark strings from the hole with my fingernails. Pinched between my fingernails, the dark strings did not wiggle. I thought they were worms, but they did not wiggle. They were not worms. I rolled them hard between my fingers. They did not smear. They remained tiny dark strings. They were moist and they left no color on my skin. They were something, not worms or blood, a third thing that worms and blood made together in the lump on my foot. I hobbled to the low stone wall. I lay on top of the low stone wall. I thought about the dark strings in the lump on my foot. They were moving up my legs. I felt them behind my knees. They dammed and swelled in the crook of my arm, under my lower eyelids, curling around and around. I wrapped my foot with canvas that crusted with the yellow fluid. My foot smelled in its canvas wrapper. The farmer held me close then pushed me away. What is that smell? said the farmer. His face was pink, with white hairs, and his mouth was a ragged wet hole like the hole in my foot. My foot, I said, because I knew what smell the farmer meant. Open your foot, I say to the children. I laugh. The children have not noticed that I limp, that I drag myself across the carpet in circles, as though I fall, but every time I fall, I catch myself. I keep moving.

  4

  The baker had a daughter. The baker's daughter worked in the bakery. She cut the gray cakes of yeast. She mixed yeast and water for the baker. Her fingers were wrinkled with moisture and they gave off a sour odor. The nails had come loose in the nail beds. The skin that seals the nails in the nail beds was too soft to hold the nails in place. One day a man cut a loaf of bread and he found a string of hair. The string of hair passed lengthwise through the bread from end to end. The baker cut the hairs from the daughter's head. One day a man cut a loaf of bread and he found ten fingernails in the center of the loaf of bread. The baker cut the daughter's fingers at the first knuckles. One day a man cut a loaf of bread and he found the key to the bakery. The man did not tell the baker. The man came in the night to the bakery where the baker's daughter waited. The baker's daughter showed the man the sack of coins the baker hid beneath the floorboard and the man lifted out the sack of coins. He lifted the skirt around the waist of the baker's daughter and felt with his fingers beneath the skirt. His fingernails were ragged and the baker's daughter cried out so that the man put his forearm across her mouth. The baker's daughter did not cry out again. The baker was upstairs sleeping in his narrow bed. The man dropped one of the baker's coins on the floor for the baker's daughter. The next day a man cut a loaf of bread and he found a coin in the heel of the bread. The baker crushed his daughter's skull with the whetting stone. He put her beneath the floorboard in a sack.

  5

  The children eat and eat. The children cannot stop eating. They cannot stop while there are cakes on the tray. Even as they chew their cakes they shove more cakes into their mouths. Spot gags. He keeps chewing. He gags. Spit, I say to Spot. I put my hand below his mouth. Spit, I say. I put my fingers on his lips. The teeth are moving up and down, and the lips. The lips are wet and bits of cake cling to my fingers. My fingers are moving up and down on the lips. I want to push my fingers through Spot's lips and pull out the cake. I can see the cake between the teeth, the wet ball of cake, and the tongue swelling, and then the tongue jerks forward and the wet ball of cake rises. The wet ball of cake comes forward, comes through the teeth. It bulges through the lips. It hangs on the lips. I push the cake back into the mouth. Spot gags. I laugh. Spot reaches for another cake. Stop, I say to Spot. Spot looks at me. He pushes the cake through his lips. I push my finger through his lips. I feel the teeth. The teeth are hard in the wetness of the mouth. Ribs are hard in the wetness of the chest. I stepped between the ribs, the soft large bulge that rose between the ribs. She had lain in the field in the sun and the rain. For a moment, my foot pressed the surface, then the surface gave way. My foot pushed through the surface. There was a sound, the sound of the air going out. It smelled bad. My foot entered the cavity. Inside, it was wet. I felt the wetness seething on my skin. Her dress hung in a bush. Her dress flapped in the wind, threads caught in the thorns of the bush. A button dangled. There is no needle in the forest. I could not repair the button. It was a nice dress, stiffened with fluids. The rain could not wash the fluids from the dress. I could wash the dress in the river, the clean, cold river. I could beat the dress on the rocks. I did not want to bend too close. I did not push with my finger. I opened her lips with a stick. Her mouth was filled with fluids. She was very plump. She ate cakes with the children, cake after cake. The cakes turned to fluids in her mouth, or her mouth was open all night. Her mouth filled with rain.

  6

  There is a tray of cakes on the table. There is a pitcher of milk. Spot drinks from the pitcher. He coughs into the pitcher. Milk runs down Spot's chin as he puts the pitcher on the table. He lets the milk drip. He reaches for a cake. I should stop him. The cakes will sicken the children. The cook used bad flour. There is alum in the wheat. There is chalk in the wheat. The cook mixed rancid fat with the flour. She worked the fat and flour in the trough. Sweat ran down her arms. The air was hot and thick. The cook grunted. She could not see the changes to my hair and face. Not through the hot, thick air. In the kitchen, there is smoke in the air. There is soot in the air. There are flies in the air. I crouched by the trough. Lower down, the smoke clears. There is less smoke by the trough. I put my face in the trough. It smelled bad. Beneath the trough, something scurried. The cook put her heel down hard. She grunted. She scraped her heel on the edge of the table leg. Something dropped. The cook rubbed fat into the sores on her arms. She did not notice how I breathed with my face in the trough, how I gagged on the rancid smell from the trough. I crouch beside the table with the children. I break off a piece of cake and put it in my mouth. My mouth is dry. The cake comes apart. I breathe carefully, but the bits of cake fly against the back of my throat. I gag. My mouth itches. My tongue has grown fine white hairs like the hairs on Spot's cheeks. Fine white hair
s cluster on my tongue. I turn my back to the children to scrape at my tongue with my nails.

  7

  It is a grand house. There are many rooms, closed rooms, locked rooms. The nursery is a closed room. It is a locked room. There is a key to the nursery. She had a key. She must have had a key. She locked the children in the room. Otherwise the children would crawl down the halls. They would hide in the shadows in the halls, behind the paintings in the halls, between the drapes, beneath the rugs. In a grand house, it is hard to hunt the children. The halls go on and on. The fire-places have enormous mouths, deep black mouths. I would hurry down the halls. I would listen for the grunting in the drapes. I would sniff beneath the rugs. Where are the children? I would say. Where are the children? The children do not leave the nursery. They crouch by the table. They crawl to the corners. They make their mess in the corners. The carpet is marked with fluids. It is wet with fluids. The fluids have made marks on the walls. The children make their mess against the walls, against the door of the nursery. They scratch at the door. Their fluids spread to the other side of the door. Their fluids spread through the halls. The smell of the children fills the grand house. The cook smells the nursery from the kitchen. It is stronger than the smell that rises from the trough, than the smell that hangs between the buzzing meats above her head.