Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Books by Dale Peck

  Fiction

  Greenville

  Body Surfing

  Shift (with Tim Kring)

  Gospel Harmonies

  Martin and John

  The Law of Enclosures

  Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye

  The Garden of Lost and Found

  Nonfiction

  Hatchet Jobs

  Visions and Revisions

  Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

  Drift House

  The Lost Cities

  Sprout

  Copyright © 2018 by Dale Peck

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Soho Press

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Peck, Dale, author.

  Night soil / Dale Peck.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-780-3

  eISBN 978-1-61695-781-0

  1. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 2. Teenage boys—Fiction.

  3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Gay youth—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3566.E245 N54 2018 813’.54—dc23 2018004484

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Lou Peralta

  “High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever recreates man. When you have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountainhead. You presume to contend with a foe against whom West Point cadets and rifled cannon point not. Can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn against its maker? Is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more essential than the constitution of it and of himself?”

  —Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

  I

  Night Soil

  1

  I tried to be a good boy. I didn’t speak unless spoken to, and when I did speak I called men “sir” and women “ma’am.” I said “Please,” “Excuse me,” and “Pardon our appearance while we renovate,” placed my napkin in my lap when I sat down to eat, dropped my eyes when I caught people staring. By the time I was three I’d given up fingerpainting, used brushes instead, but only the ones my mother discarded, and only at the most distant edge of her work table. If I remember anything from my preschool days it’s this: my mother perched at the far end of those six rough-sawn planks whirling a disc of clay before her like a captain in her stern—a stern captain, I can’t resist saying—while I gadded about the prow, a gaudy figurehead stabbing his brush against the canvas as though trying to slice it open. When I’d finally conceded that I couldn’t make things any better—or, at any rate, that more paint would only make them worse—I closed my easel and ferried my supplies to the back of the apartment, where an enclosed porch hung off the kitchen in a crazy parallelogram, its floor slanting almost as much as its roof. I hooked my palette on one nail, hung my apron on another, then mounted a severed section of ladder (itself a rickety affair, its rungs twisting beneath my feet like a strand of DNA) in order to wash my brushes in an industrial-sized zinc sink nearly as deep as I was tall. Only after I’d cleaned and stowed everything did I go back for my painting. I was no one’s idea of an artistic prodigy but as a critic I was more precocious, by which I mean that even at three, four, five years old I recognized that the colors and shapes I’d chosen to combine were as incongruent as peanut butter, jelly, and mayonnaise smeared on the same slice of bread, and after a glance down the table for a reprieve from my mother—who probably hadn’t realized I’d left the room, let alone that I’d returned—I folded the wet canvas closed on itself, less like a sandwich than a book I’d abandoned, a story that could no longer pique even the most abbreviated narrative curiosity. Close the Aeneid after Dido “calls it marriage” and she and Aeneas stay together forever, if you never crack the cover again, if you can convince yourself that the story belongs not to posterity but to you. I wasn’t that strong. I painted every day for three years until finally my mother stopped giving me supplies. Even then I pressed on, diluting my pigments and painting on the halved versos of discarded canvases, the images growing smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, until at length the only thing they depicted was my desire, and its failure to fructify.

  It’s a dubious gift to be able to envision something without also being able to make it. One wants to say it’s the teacher’s burden, or the writer’s, or the male of the species’—his “burthen” I suppose I should call it. No doubt my dilemma was made more palpable by virtue of being Dixie Stammers’s son. My mother never paid attention to what people said about her work, cared only about what she made and how closely it corresponded to what she’d set out to produce. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t internalize that lesson from the time I was tall enough to recognize myself in a mirror, or at least until my mother replaced all the mirrors in our apartment with oxidized substitutes that reflected little more than shadows. It’s not just that I thought of myself as a terrible painter: I thought of myself as a failure. In this regard, at least, I was my mother’s son, and a budding Academy man to boot: I was interested only in what I could make paint show, not what it might show me. I’ve never looked at clouds and seen anything other than water vapor, and I’ve never been bothered by this. The fact that dihydrogen monoxide molecules clot together in denser and denser masses until finally precipitating in any of a half dozen different forms (my favorite being virga, the rain that falls but never touches the ground) seems to me more worthy of study than spurious fantasies that tell you only about the viewer, not what he’s looking at (although I suppose having a favorite kind of precipitation is its own projection, its own confession). They filled our heads with a lot of nonsense at the Academy, outdated, esoteric, idealistic fantasies that now seem as remote to me as the school itself, but one lesson that’s been hard to shake is the idea that the world doesn’t exist to elucidate you: you are the world’s elucidation, the only proof of its existence you will ever truly know.

  cogito

  sum

  is the inscription over the campus’s front gate, i think i am, the letters carved into an anthracite revetment mounted in a bluestone Gothic arch, as if truth were only as durable as the rock from which (into which?) it’s chiseled. I’m pretty sure the tablet was just a goof on the part of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, yet it stands as a measure of Academy belief in the literal meaning of words that I never once heard master or novice suggest there might be more than one way to read Great Grandpa Marcus’s bowdlerization. A carriage horse needs blinkers because it can’t keep its eyes on the road, a parrot forgets the sun is out when a curtain is draped over its cage, but an Academy man acknowledges only what is, and is misled by neither camouflage nor distraction.

  Maybe this is just a roundabout way of saying that I lacked any artistic talent as a child. But what I want you to realize at the outset is that abandoning my brushes was an ethical decision, not an aesthetic one. I gave up painting because I wasn’t good enough—not good enough for me (or, for that matter, my mother), nor even good enough for painting, but good enough for the world. There were simply more worthwhile things I could be doing with my life. For example: cleaning, a venerable vocation central to the Academy’s founding, and one that, in a house like ours, required a certain level of imagination to see how such a seemingly impossible task could be realized. Before she moved into our apartment my mother had lived in a six-bedroom mansion furn
ished with 150 years of family heirlooms. She claimed to have left most of that “Queen Anne garbage” behind, but our apartment was still crowded with sofas and chairs, bureaus and china cabinets pushed right up against each other like furniture in a junk shop. Ours was a house of pyramids, every reasonably flat surface stacked with boxes and baskets and bowls, tapering towers of pillows piled on foundations of folded blankets or yellowed newspapers and crowned by balls of yarn or rag dolls or smooth gray river stones, ziggurats of belted leather cases sporting vases filled with long-dead flowers or velveteen bags jumbled with tea lights and loose change and matchbooks and mismatched gloves. So there was no way the place was ever going to be neat. But it could at least be clean.

  Such was my epiphany, anyway, when one day in my first year at the Academy I walked into the apartment and saw more or less simultaneously the encrustations of clay that the wheels of my mother’s stool had ground into the floor and, hanging off the wall above it like a superannuated relic, an antique push broom whose straw bristles had been worn nearly to the nub. We’d been to the Lake that day. While the other boys stripped off their robes and jumped into the frigid water I sat on the bank and pretended to listen as Master McCauley told me for the tenth or hundredth time how my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had made it “his life’s mission” to “cleanse the waters” before me from the residue of a half century of coal mining, an act of “environmental largesse” from which the Academy had been born. Faint splashes came through the bathroom door, along with the sound of something classical sawing out of the radio my mother kept in the window ledge above the tub. I hung my gown on a hook next to her smock, pried the broom from the wall in a shower of plaster (it turned out to have been nailed in place) and, almost idly, began pushing its stubbled surface over the pale dried clay. I was thinking less about Great Grandpa Marcus or the crystal-clear waters of the Lake than about the bare smooth skin of my classmates as, one by one, in graceful dives or cannonballs or crookedly spoked limbs, they splashed off the end of the dock while I squatted beneath my tented robe like a thick-shelled tortoise who’d long since renounced aquatic life. The broom did little more than score staff lines across the clay’s surface, so I grabbed one of my mother’s palette knives and used it to shiv up the mess instead, turning it edgewise to score long-dried filaments from the gaps in the parquet. A dozen times I stopped and swept the sticky crumbs onto a square of old canvas and carried it back to the trash can on the porch. A trail of gray footprints marked my progress like the steps to a rhythmless, frenetic tango, but somehow I didn’t think of them as evidence of the futility of my labor, but, rather, as proof of how hard I was working. In this regard, at least, I was Marcus’s kin, though it would be years before I realized it.

  I’m not sure how far I got that first day, but I was at it again the next, and within a month or two had worked out a method that was to serve me for more than half a decade. I set to as soon as I got out of nones or, if I’d been at the hospital that day, as soon as my taxi returned me from Wye. I realized pretty quickly I had to begin with the ceiling or all the dust I dislodged would settle on the floor I’d just cleaned, and so I started at the top, coaxing spiderwebs from high corners with a dry mop, feathering lint from Murano glass chandeliers and crown moldings, whacking curtains, dry-wiping picture frames and faded patches of wallpaper and wainscoting, until eventually I’d made my way to the floor. I scraped up the worst of my mother’s clay first, then began shifting the furniture around like the pieces of a sliding puzzle in order to attack the smeared, scarred parquetry one latticed diamond at a time, scrubbing and mopping and buffing each exposed square with beeswax and sheepskin until the whole floor (or at least the minuscule portion that could be seen at any given moment) glittered like snakeskin and exuded a rich smell, leathery, fecund, warm.

  I sorted the glazes by hue then, weeding out and washing the empties, turned the grayware in the windows so it would dry evenly, and concluded each day’s labors by handwashing my mother’s smock, which couldn’t go down with the rest of the laundry because Mrs. Brown said the clay would gum up her machine—the only thing in Marcuse besides herself and Mr. Brown, she liked to joke, old enough to have watched Abraham Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation on the evening news. The gray scum from a thousand unconscious swipes of my mother’s hands across her lap had dried in a flaky circle as big around as a pizza, leaving the blousy garment looking like a snow angel that’d been gut shot. I cradled the corpse in both arms so the clay wouldn’t crumble onto my clean floor, walked on tiptoes and tenterhooks all the way back to the porch, where I unceremoniously drowned the smock in the sink and ground the soiled cambric into a washboard until every last speck of clay had been abraded away. I rinsed the sink and refilled it then, added a quarter cup of phosphate-free laundry detergent and two tablespoons of caustic soda. The lye stung my skin like chigger bites, turning it a florid salmon that melded with my birthmark where it cobwebbed across the back of my left hand, and sometimes the skin split and bled along the seam between purple and pink. (For a few months when I was seven I thought that if I used enough lye my birthmark might actually peel off, but though the cuts grew deeper, and burned and bled for hours, the only thing that ever fell off were two fingernails on my left hand, after which I took to wearing rubber gloves.) When the smock was finally clean I wrapped it around a steam pipe in order to wring the water from it, braiding the two halves together like one of Mr. Brown’s Easter loaves, then hung it on a hanger, shriveled but spotless, and needing only a pass with the iron before matins to complete its resurrection. Only then would I pull out a box of macaroni or rice for dinner, a jar of some sauce or other, salad vegetables to keep what Mrs. Brown called “the crickets” at bay. I set plates and forks on the table, stood a wine glass at my mother’s place, a cup of psyllium husk at mine, and when Mrs. B. came upstairs with the groceries I accepted today’s full bag for yesterday’s empty one, upon which I’d written what we needed for tomorrow.

  Sometime after that—an hour later or three, depending on how dirty she’d felt when she went in—my mother emerged from the bathroom to fix dinner. My mother claimed she didn’t get out of the tub until Mrs. Brown had come and gone because she found our septuagenarian housekeeper “judgmental” and “abusive” (“If she didn’t want to carry one bag of groceries up one flight of stairs she shouldn’t have taken the job—and I said ‘abrasive,’ Jude, not ‘abusive’”) but the truth is she’d done her own time at the Academy, and took her ablutions as seriously as did I. From forehead to toenails she glistened with whatever oil or lotion she’d coated her body with that day, but beneath the waxy sheen her skin was nearly as piebald as my own, so blotched and pruned from three or four or five hours of scourging that it looked as if she’d been whipped. The impression was only heightened by her slow, almost limping gait, as though her joints, grown accustomed to the buoyancy of soapy perfumed liquid, had difficulty supporting her weight. Only when I was older did I realize her body was in fact still recovering from its potting trance. That her muscles, like a cyclist’s, needed to be coaxed back to the quotidian tasks of walking, stirring, lifting, bending. We lived in the parlor-floor apartment above the Browns’ bakery until I was thirteen, the entirety of our lives crammed into four railroaded rooms taller than they were wide, so that my mother often said we needed to find a way to mount our furniture on the walls, or just knock the whole damn building on its side. Century-old Victorian moldings had softened into an antique vision of an edgeless future, a swoopy Deco facade from the thirties or a fifties Airstream trailer, simultaneously optimistic and archaic. But though the apartment wasn’t large by any measure, it somehow managed to house me and my mother and the usual array of domestic paraphernalia—knee chairs, yoga mats, bromeliads—plus her more esoteric collections and obsessions: her death masks (six) and shrunken heads (two), her Turkish birdcages and Soviet constructivist posters, her mobiles built from animal bones and spent shot and shell-casings from t
he Civil War, her complete set (1951–57) of (the shape reminds me of a lemniscate or a vesica piscis, but it was usually called Eclipse by those in the know), a general-interest quarterly magazine composed solely of found photographs in the belief that, verba docent exempla trahunt, inexpensive cameras and instant developing processes would soon make orthography obsolete—or at least I think that was the rationale, the magazine’s editors having left no (written) record to explain their motives.

  Then there were her toilet articles: her ear candles and neti pots and eye drops and enema balloons, an array of dental implements that looked less like instruments of hygiene than props from a torture porn, although these latter—along with her facial scrubs and body washes, her shampoos and conditioners and gels, her heel creams and knee creams and elbow creams and hand creams, pumice stones, sea sponges, loofahs, ayate cloths, bath salts, sugar scrubs, argan and almond and flaxseed oils and aromatic essences and astringents and antiseptics—oh, and her douches, of which there were more varieties than there are, as far as I know, types of vagina, let alone vaginal irritation, a venereal pharmacopeia arrayed across three shelves by scent, viscosity, and applicator shape and marked with a rufous smudge if they could be/had been used during menstruation—were less collection than confession, the obsession with cleanliness exposing not so much a guilty conscience as a dirty one, a mind fascinated by filth, failure, transgression. And let’s not forget the tools of her trade: her kilns (three of them, each the size of a safe in a gangster noir, though only two actually worked, the third being used to store clay in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment), and shelf upon shelf of glazes and brushes and wooden dowels and wire scrapers and, presiding like a Druidic altar over everything, her work table, three sawhorses across which lay six scaffold-grade planks of Douglas fir, each two inches thick, six inches wide, and fourteen feet long. When it was set up the table dominated the apartment’s double parlor, and on the rare occasions it was broken down it remained a presence, the planks being so long that the only place to put them was on the floor thirty inches below where they normally lay, so that it seemed you walked a wobbly bridge when you crossed from one half of the parlor to the other—the planks themselves were perfectly straight, but the floor beneath them curved like the ocean’s horizon.