by Ben Metcalf
I do not refer here to time
He despised the trees. He would have charcoaled every one on our acreage had he not been so cheated on an allowance of life. I do not refer here to time, exactly, for he had a fair enough grasp and gander at that. (Two years before he was charcoal himself we shared a Christmas Eve conversation out on my brother’s deck, the both of us staring up at the stars with our drinks and our cigarettes and wondering whether mankind would ever break free of its fate, and get far enough gone before this galaxy began to collide with the next one over, which escape might happen only, we posited, given the vast and horrible distances involved, if in the interim we discovered how to harness a propulsive power at least as great as that of our sun, which in all probability would be our sun (had it not swelled up and fricasseed the lot of us by then), which after a gulp or two more we concluded, or rather he did, was impossible, since such an undertaking would require the energy of a second sun to pull the first off its axis, and send it spinning out away from the collision with us in tow, and a third to pull the second off its, and a fourth to pull the third off its, and there was not time enough at hand, or nearness, even if we left right now, to approach so much as a second sun (or did he call it the last?) in this bright and interminable queue.
(What a venturesome mind he had, this man who had ridden but once on an airplane that I know of, and had sweated his way throughout even that simple hop, sure all the while that the ground would rise up and smite him for the hubris (he was not disposed to think it a sin) of having put himself aloft in the first place, which only by luck (he would never have called it a miracle) the ground did not, nor did it take any immediate action against him once he had stepped down off that plane and onto a tarmac topping just as sown with hatred and decrease as what he had left behind him an hour or so ago, nor did it target him for cancellation in the hotel bed I can see him renting shyly for the night (was this Canada? Chicago? lovers of the saccharine “literature of place” will insist that the answer somehow matters here: I am confident in my ability to imply that it does not), nor was he thrown and killed later by a bump in or under the road along which he then secured for himself a tortuous if unelevated ride home.
(Nor, I might argue, by what powers of reason he partway encouraged in me, did this one useless trek away from and back to an oily, smelly patch just north and east of big rivers whose waters seemed always (but never quite were: by any measure, by any molecule) the same suffice to widen his own banks much. Nor would he subsequently see, this child of Moses, and of wandering Cain, and of every star shifting away as if his planet had by the mere fact of him committed a gross and terrible fart, how easily, how generously, it might have.) Nor would I call him a feckless man, for he worked hard in Virginia, and demanded that his children work hard also, and was still years away from final capitulation to that chair-bound sickness which slackens and slays so many of our American fathers, whose stores of weekend fury cannot possibly keep apace of their weekday earnings of boredom and injury and defeat. Surely he was symptomatic by then, in that his output ceased abruptly once he had chainsawed his latest victim to death, whereupon our own brutal efforts began, but I defy my reader to produce a father who, on his way back up to the house, encased as he normally was in sawdust, stopped to gaze out over the trees, and at the children now apprenticed beneath them, with a more thought-out plan and a more thoroughly vigorous intent.
By his crooked ledger
His Franklin stove, which was the house’s sole heat source once our sautéed portion of the planet had finally come to its senses and leaned back away from the sun, he ran like an all-night crematorium (the facility we employed later to dispose of his carcass spelt the first syllable of that word out, to our amused consternation, as “cream”), ayeing it always with an idée that it could and so ought to consume additional plant flesh until its sides glowed their familiar and accusatory orange. Whether we, who were his fetchers of fuel from the dark wet hardness of the yard, stuck fast to our duty or put off his demands while we struggled to complete one last homework assignment, the result was invariably the same: a room off the side porch warmed to an uncomfortable degree while all the jealous rest sucked the life out of any animal who came near, shaking his limbs to stay circulatory and hoping only to acquire his sleeping bag before more rigor was asked or any fresh new mortis set in.
That my father often curled around the claws of this dragon, the better to rouse himself every hour or so and appease it with pine chunks, was to his wife the start of an obsession to be watched and wondered over, and to his children proof of a long-suspected retardation. Had he but known to insulate his walls properly, and to tape plastic over his windows once the temperature had dropped (as the hippies all seemed to), and to purchase a second stove for the shelter’s front rooms (if by log alone he intended to preserve us), he might have won more hours abed, and not found himself so rigid when a rumor of daylight arrived and he was forced, by want or routine (which he treated anyway as the same thing), to make his way eastward along the roads toward Richmond, dodging deer by the minute, to hear him tell it, there to wreck an already delicate back lifting beams (which are wood) and stretching wire (which is metal) in service of an abstraction (call it town) he had once so hysterically fled.
I might deem it another joke, or only another sadness, that both wood and wire (if not also abstraction) had conspired in the initial insult to his spine, when he was but twenty or so, and had a college concern cutting staves for the area coopers (how many of these, honestly, could there have been?), and while listening to the car radio had felt, if not actually heard, both legs go out from under him on a patch of Illinois ice, and had felt, if not actually witnessed, the introduction of ass to ice with a log of great concern upon his shoulder, after which for a song cycle or two he could discern no practical feeling below his waist, and so prayed to a God he did not believe in (I refuse to believe he did otherwise) to allow sensation to flow back into him, which after a commercial break or three it finally did, though he may have neglected to ask that no part of said sensation be an undoffable girdle of pain.
I remember how in the evenings, and in the afternoons on weekends, he would kneel like a supplicant before his favorite chair, and would lay his torn torso across its padded seat, and with his head suspended upward and a-drool against what the catalogs still promoted then as a stiff back would try to achieve something like sleep. We pitied him on those occasions, for we were not monsters, or not yet, but of course we rejoiced in the chance to be free of him, and from his arbitrary orders and punishments, and I, for one, being no cynic as he might have been about prayer, asked God any number of times to burden him with what agony could be found at hand, and to cause him to yield his ground-down bone and expanding gut to whatever cushion was nearest by, and to visit him with oblivion especially during the working hours, when we most required our own little inheritance of rest and relief.
Yet our crippled father would not or could not forget, even in his sleep, that for him, and for all those confined to his tragic section of the American cone, working hours took up fully half the clock. He would therefore be damned (or only comically slighted, once we had grown large enough to ignore him) if any child of his had the insolence to board a bus, or to participate in this or that already pilloried after-school activity, so long as there was any “real” work left to be done around the house, which by his crooked ledger there always would be. Neither he nor his helpmeet evinced any hesitation (and, what is stranger, any shame) in their tacit agreement to chastise a child, by withholding permission to engage in whatever function the child had lately been fool enough to admit was most dear to it, for the crime of its having failed to complete a chore that had already, to their own perfect knowledge, been completed. Politest appeal of this decision risked seeing the injustice upheld, and the court costs writ in stripes across the defendant’s spindly legs, by an impartial length of copper wire.
Imprimatur
Out of fright, then, or o
nly as a collective-bargaining gesture, we signed up for nearly everything the school had to offer, faking his scribble (or hers: harder) where the authentic item would likely be refused (out of dug-in principle: the principle being that any country adult, by virtue of his decision to remain country, or to become country again, had won the right to interpret the law within his own home any way he saw fit, or to banish it altogether), and by our absence from this team practice and that drab spelling bee, or from rehearsals of a play we had won a small role in and then by a truancy lost, and by our failure to line up for a gymnastic exhibition or a 600-yard dash that I estimate bored even its few tiny entrants, or to board yet another yellow scow that might take us with bumps and misgivings to march with cheap student instruments in one more hopelessly crop-themed parade, sought at last to call the authorities down upon our quaintly corrupted household.
Plenty looked, and some even saw, but no one ever came (save witnesses), and I might make a fuss over that, except that I would then have to explain away all those A’s my siblings and I loudly made, and all those kitsch trophies and poorly lettered certificates we fetched home, which were insisted upon, yes, though only insofar as these accrued to our parents in a public sense while privately they represented yet another level on which we refused to do any “real” work. Once accomplished (the unreal work) and once earned (the marks and the trophies and certificates), this great leap forward in our line’s empty record of achievement met with no better than indifference from parents unable to accept that a child of theirs could somehow succeed in hopping over humanity’s petty obstacles when they themselves had not, or had not bothered to, and no better than outright shock, aped or honest, when it became clear that not one of their children but in fact all three, in open rebellion against a lie we had agreed to as a family, actually would.
And did sedition not somewhere inform the truth that these simple ink scratches on a cut of hard paper, when we had not physically made them ourselves, might allow the child to whom they appended (by man’s law alone, of course, not nature’s) the chance to choose for itself a destiny not in accordance with what its father (out of fear) and its mother (out of fear for the father) had so rashly chosen for it? Was a son of theirs (the first, say, whom they had treated in Virginia like a languageless mule, as I have largely here) rightly allowed by such markings to wish for and obtain, from Jefferson’s own university, degrees in both language and the law (the latter being but a paid perversion of the former), after which he would refuse all manner of contact with the countryside and would consent to revisit it only where it might be looked down on from the window of a passing jet? Should their daughter have been availed, by these same poor leavings, of the confidence required to fly her wooden cage at sixteen, once the panties in which her mother dressed by the side of the stove had become too embarrassingly done through with speakeasies for even a sober child to bear, after which she dwelt amid the God-awful racket in Richmond until this mother, in what underwear I cannot say (being by that point flown from those holes myself), sought to reestablish her fiat via an attempt to have this latest escapee committed (by man’s law alone, of course, not nature’s) to a mental home somewhere along the twisted route between them?
My father was by then a teacher, the builder in him having so gleefully demolished his spine that some years prior he, or my mother, had resolved that he should seek out and win a certificate, of all things, that would enable him to teach English and mathematics to the delinquents at her recent place of employment, thereafter his, which decision would condemn us all to a belief on his part that he had mastered not only words and numbers now but also psychology, since psychology was what presumably caused all those pimply-dicked offenders to grow agitated by the semi-confident drone of his voice (as we all had), and to question his legendarily cornfed but actually television-gorged machismo (as we all had), and to throw their books up into the air (as I did myself on more than one occasion) and try to make it out of his classroom, whereupon they found themselves tackled by his bulk and inherent hatred of them (a legal maneuver, he was forever at pains to point out, since the courts’ recognition of his right to employ restraint-type violence against a fed-up JD clearly forgave, and by Benthamesque sliding scale even sanctioned, his more extreme and less rational violence against us), after which these potential “runners” were “held down” and “reasoned with” until a “group meeting” could be called to address the “issues” beneath the “acting out” (never his, mind you, the issues or the acting out), which would (for want of imagination, or for want of language, which is anyway the same thing) be boiled down into an unresolved homosexuality (admittedly an overworked theme here, though only insofar as it was there) or, or and, a failure to acknowledge (not merely to recognize but finally to accept) an adult’s prerogative to dominate a child for whatever reason the adult saw fit to claim. Which is all anyone needs to know about psychology and the law.
This man did not offer up one word to me, that I can retrieve, on the subject of our fugitive poetess, nor had I honestly expected him to do so, since it was really only the boys he knew how to pin down against the earth, or the floorboards, or the nearest flower-patterned chair, until a confession could be publicly extracted, which confession was always given (what choice did we have?) but not once ever meant, so that his wife and daughter and spare son (that one not just recently assaulted) might be availed of the opportunity to watch their man swell with a copper’s pride in the time it took him afterward to realize that he had yet again been swindled. Not out of the confession, rest assured, this time any more than the last, nor out of the thrill of natural brutality he imagined himself entitled to by law, but out of that more precious thing he sought: being not nature’s imprimatur, which anyone could see was promiscuously granted, nor the law’s, every bit as whorishly had, so much as it was our own.
What he wanted we withheld, out of umbrage and by a hard-won personal law. Although any local resistance to his rule could be run out of us in a single session, or half that, we saw how the wider-ranging grievances might forever be detained. We saw how this man, no matter how he felt his neck re-redden when he heard our posthumiliation laughter upstairs, and raged not just at us but at the limits set against him by his status, and his statutes, and his not yet wholly intractable nature, would never permit himself the leniency (or was it really only the industry?) to whip a child of his twice in one day.
Kindness
We cherish the little kindnesses, I suppose, in them that are departed. (My father the teacher might insist upon a “those who” there, and also back in the last paragraph of the eighth part of my third attempt to end all this (not to mention the third paragraph of the eleventh part of my second, nor forgetting the second paragraph of the sixth part of my fifth, or is it now the seventh part of my sixth?), but the builder in him would at least acknowledge that the sentiment is right, and so perhaps also the sound.) I would follow this notion further, except that I think it a hair too late to introduce so fraught a motif as is kindness into what has thus far been an uncomplicated remembrance of the man.
It would not be a lie, exactly, to claim that he showed, concurrent with his spleen, some evidence of remorse after his most recent advances against us, and that he was quick to point out (as I have tried to here) what he thought might be amusing to a captive and terrified audience. It would not be a lie, exactly, to insist that we could eventually discern in his manner a more peaceable curiosity about what we were still refusing to learn in that place, with an emphasis shifted eerily one winter onto our reading, which he seemed almost pleased to know we could do, and which he afterward then encouraged with paperbacks only partially destroyed by the critical termites, and the scholarly silverfish, and those insufferable ABD chickens.
It would not be a lie, exactly, to add that he later then asked what was our opinion of these texts, and did not immediately explode if we conceded that we had avoided them altogether, or had read right over this crucial metaphor or that obvio
us pun, and could demonstrate no more idea of what went for irony in the 1860s than of what went for decency in our own multifarious decade. It would not be a lie, exactly, in craftsman’s terms, to maintain that his words on the original matter (the irony, I mean, not the decency, nor the time, though these are anyway the same thing, or had better be) were years on illuminating, as one might expect of a good teacher, and were in hindsight mostly constructive, as one might expect of a good builder, and were all the more powerful for their being in the moment so annoying.
Yet I do not think those few forced tutorials with a suddenly bookish father ever helped or learned us up so much as did our incessant slave-soldiery in his war against the trees, nor does his death without honor in the fallout from that war justify a perception now that I could see no worth in its waging then, or that I have failed, after years spent in study of this famous defeat, to locate within it some flaw I might in all decency, or in all irony, or perhaps only given the time, call kindness.
Borogoves
We started in early on our thoughts about why a man might have made so outgrabe a persecution of the borogoves, and it is upon this ancient archive of guesswork (I did not know “outgrabe” to be a verb then, past tense, nor “borogove” to denote a fanciful sort of parrot) that I must base my more modern conclusions here, not to mention any subsequent speculation as to why a father might have resolved to deal so harshly with creatures arguably as alive as he once was and inarguably as dead as he is today.