Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen Page B

to Houston. There he was going to look for his brother and sister; but we know that he never found them.
    T WO C OUSINS
    Now the old family land, accursed, had been disinherited by the uncle’s brother and sister in Houston—I will tell more about this later—and inherited by two cousins whose whereabouts was not readily known. When one, the older, was found and came to the town he heard all this story. Of course by the time he found out the story nobody knew how much had been added to it but he saved what he heard and what he knew.
    His one mission was to find his cousin. The city of Houston was reaching out seventy, eighty miles into towns that were no longer considered towns but additions to the city of Houston. What had been a quiet, ramshackled little town was now called a suburb, and Houston people were building fine homes in it. The chemical age was flourishing, its toxic waste dumps lay festering in hidden ravines or vacant lots, and choking smogs and acid rains seeped into the gigantic shopping malls. The fouled water of rivers choked its own fish. The family land was suddenly worth a good price. It lay, in its modest acreage, in bitterweed and mallow and thistle under half a dozen live oak trees as old as the county. Only some burnt timbers of the house and the cemented well gave signs of the former dark life on the land.
    The cousin sought his cousin. There was very little hearsay of him since he had been such a silent figure in the town. None of the Klu Klux would tell anything about him. It seemed to be a case of a person quite thoroughly disappeared from the face of the earth. The older cousin could not sell the land without his cousin’s signature. Yet if the cousin were never to come forth to claim his property would it become the possession of the next in line? It was said that fifty years would have to pass before this forfeiture could occur. This would make the older cousin over a hundred years old. The older cousin made a surprising decision and it was to stay home in the old town where he began his life. Why couldn’t he build a dwelling for himself on the land which was half his? He planted a grove of white and rose Oleander around the old well, and under two ancient live oaks he built a simple house. As soon as the house was finished—it hadn’t been a month—there appeared three blond women with news which the cousin had not been able to find out anywhere, and they brought it with odd good humor. These announced themselves as ex-wives, sisters, of the younger cousin. Each one had married him and divorced him in turn. They explained their ex-husband’s one annoying flaw—a defect of speech which turned him un-pleasantly silent most of the time, except when he was excited. This impediment was caused by a freak accident. The man had a habit of clenching his doubled tongue between his teeth when he strained at anything, and while sliding on his back under a sawed-off locked door he had slit his tongue down the middle on a protruding nail. It was ridiculous what some said, the women announced darkly. That the KKK had cut off their ex’s tongue for talking too much—could you imagine that! they exclaimed. Yet the KKK said that the man had divulged some of their secrets. But it had always been the man’s silence that soured marriage, the sisters declared, even before he’d slit his tongue under the door; although they well knew about it when they entered into wedlock. You never knew what he was feeling, the sisters complained. Was the dinner good? No answer. Do you love me? Silence. How could a person live with somebody who couldn’t comment on things, have an opinion? the women questioned. Each marriage had lasted only a few weeks. In turn each sister simply couldn’t make a go of it, yet each had been so challenged to accomplish what the other could not that she took on the silent one. “He ran through the whole crop of us,” the sisters