Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  “Appointments?”

  “Yeah, they were like appointments. I guess he thought he ought to counsel me. Because that’s what our talks were all about, they were all about my getting counseled. It was a drag, it really was. Naturally I didn’t want him to know what was really happening, so I used to make up problems. Like, I’d say, Gee, Dad, my mind wanders during geometry. Why do you suppose that is? Then we’d spend the hour getting that all patched up, and I’d have him off my back for another couple of weeks.”

  “Was he on your back a lot?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. What I meant was his conscience would be clear because he’d been giving me all this counsel, you know what I mean?”

  Peter nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. How do you feel about him? Apart from thinking he’s an asshole. Do you like him at all?”

  “Once in a while I feel sorry for him. I tried to turn him on to grass once but it didn’t work.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told him about this friend I had that turned on with his father. There wasn’t anybody like that, I made it up. Anyway my old man said this other father must be a very disturbed man. He tends to think everybody needs professional attention.”

  “He knows you smoke grass?”

  “He knows I have. But I told him I quit.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to be hassled about it. I know that’s no good. I should’ve told him the truth, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think it’s all right to lie to them? Parents?”

  “I don’t know, I really don’t. Seems to me there are times when a person doesn’t have any choice. It takes support to tell the truth. You got to have something behind you, something underneath you, something to hold you together when the shit hits the fan. And if you don’t feel you’ve got that, then you lie.”

  “I should’ve had all that, though, right?”

  “I don’t know where in the hell you’d have gotten it—living at home. I was still lying to my father when I was thirty. Not that I’m carrying any big regrets either. I did what I had to do and to hell with it. Now, of course, I feel differently about all that. I won’t lie to people any more. Just to institutions. You know, the government, the telephone company, the Army. Institutions don’t have ears, so I just try to figure out what information works best—and feed them that. But people, I, uh, I just can’t do that any more. I can’t lie to people. I find it hurts me immediately! I get immediately depressed by it. So I’ve cut that out pretty much.”

  He’d been addressing a lot of these remarks to all of us, but at the end he swung his face toward Roy and said, “What about you? Do you still lie to people? I don’t mean your father. I guess he’s an institution, isn’t he?” His face cracked a little, so Roy snickered. And Peter said, “But what about now? Do you lie to your friends?”

  Roy said, “I don’t think I do. What about it, Witch, do I lie?”

  I said I thought he just lied to institutions and to people who acted like institutions. But never to me.

  Nyoom, who was having a ball playing Papa at the head of the table, picked up the subject of Archie. He said, “The episode earlier this evening, involving our pater familias and the, uh, erstwhile Mr. Tambourine Man, seems to present a fascinating ethical problem vis-à-vis the question of the state versus the individual.”

  Peter said, “Tell us about it, Nyoom.”

  It took Nyoom several minutes to find phrases pompous enough to cover the matter. But finally, after a few other people thinned it out for me, I got his point, and I found it just fantastically impertinent. He was saying that Peter had chosen to protect the household against Archie by throwing him out. Therefore, in his behavior he had actually sided with the state against the individual.

  But Peter wasn’t at all annoyed. He listened with perfect interest to the whole thing, even helped Nyoom find the right wording to make his point. Then Cary Colorado started defending Peter’s behavior. He said there was a revolution going on, and Archie’s behavior had placed us all in jeopardy. In an ideal society—pure anarchy, with everyone governing himself—people wouldn’t be going around shooting up hard drugs in the first place. Besides, he said, nothing would be illegal, so there wouldn’t be any police breathing down everyone’s neck.

  Peter interrupted. “Now hold it, whoah,” he said, “now just wait a minute! We’re going to have to have police, man! Oh, yes indeed! In these early stages of Utopia, a police force must be maintained! Absolutely. It’ll be needed, don’t you see, for maintaining public health when people are found running around spreading contagious diseases!”

  “Yes,” Cary said, “but that’s what you were doing—in a way. You were stopping the spread of a—”

  “Now please, man! My behavior can’t be justified! Forgive it, please do, but don’t justify it! You just cannot have police behaving the way I behaved with Archie! Throwing a boy down the stairs? That’s sick!”

  Doris said, “What do you suppose we’d better do, arrest you?”

  “No. Let me off. My record’s good. Besides, you’ve all rehabilitated me. I’m peaceable now. But listen! Think about this! What’s to be done when men in high places act like I did? Say they suggest warlike solutions to problems? Won’t those dangerous individuals have to be arrested? Won’t they have to be placed in isolation? For their own sakes as well as society’s?”

  Cary said, “What would we do with them, keep them in prison?”

  “No, no, no! Rehabilitate! Rehabilitate! And who knows, we may have to dedicate all the powers of science to the job—but that’s okay. Everybody’s worth the trouble. Everybody’s worth all the trouble in the world. Is there a kinder way—no, let me put it like this: Is there any other way at all to help carriers of the most virulent disease known to man? I don’t know. I can’t think of one. But you’d better, you kids had better get at it, figure out how to handle this thing. It’s all well and good to toss peace signs around in the streets, but how you going to handle it when you’re running the world? What are you going to do when some dear beloved brother goes berserk—like I did an hour ago, running around here like some Old Testament Jewish papa who’d as soon knock a—”

  Everybody interrupted at once, including Doris. But Peter kept raving on, like a man in the grips of some wild, marvelous obsession, and he was utter heaven the whole time. I adored him.

  “No, no, goddamnit, I’m serious,” he said. “I realize I pay most of the bills around here, but please, for Christ sake, all of us have got to remember that what we’ve got to form on this planet is a society where money doesn’t get any special privileges. Ideally, we do away with money entirely. But that’s not going to happen tomorrow, and it’s not going to happen next year. So we’ve got to learn to live with money. And the first rule is Don’t let the moneyman get away with any shit. In the past, money was influence. But not here. All of us at this table are compatriots in the future. We’ve got to do it right. And that means we’ve got to realize Peter Friedman is no fucking angel.

  “Let me tell you what happened in California last week. I’m sitting at my father’s bedside, holding his hand. I think he’s asleep, so I’m just sitting there looking at him, thinking what a tough old fucker he was, and how maybe he wouldn’t have had cancer if he’d been just a little less hard-ass. If he hadn’t been right all the time, and so goddam sure of himself—well, I don’t want to get into that. I don’t know what cancer’s all about. Forget I said that. All I want to tell is what happened. I’m sitting there thinking all this shit about him, when suddenly his eyes pop open and he’s looking straight at me, and he says—now get this—he says, ‘You are my immortality.’ And then, quick as a wink he shuts his eyes again. And that’s the last thing I heard out of him. Oh, he talked some more after that, but nothing very clear. From then on, he was on the way out. But that was the last thing he shot at me. He said, ‘You are my immortality.’

  “And let me tell you all s
omething right this goddam minute. He was right! He lives in me. . . . Who did you think that was this afternoon hollering his lungs out and throwing Archie Fiesta down those stairs? It wasn’t Moses and it wasn’t Eddie Fisher and it wasn’t Dick Nixon. It was me. I am my father’s immortality. And I proved it here about an hour ago. So watch me! This is exactly how the shit gets rolling in this world. The president of the United States drops a turd that burns millions of people, Asians and Americans alike, people—sacred human persons, dead and mutilated! And what happens? All his high-paid helpers, the Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff, all the advisers, they sit around forever after, telling him what a great man he is, and how dare these fucking gooks, these slanty-eyed Communist farmers try to run their own country and cause all this trouble for our president. He means well! He’s trying to protect us! So the fuck what? He’s still out of his goddam mind, isn’t he? Bullshit. I’m not getting into that act. I’d rather have Archie and every little speed freak in Manhattan descend upon this place and burn it to the ground.

  “By the way,” he said, “is Archie a speed freak?”

  Everyone looked at everyone else. Roy said, “You mean is he shooting speed? Or is he strung out on it? Because a speed freak is somebody that’s strung out on it, isn’t it?”

  “Well, either way,” Peter said. “What I’m wondering is what shape Archie’s in. That’s what I should have been thinking about when I found that shit in his room. Was he just selling it? Or is he shooting up, too? Do you know?” He put the question to Roy.

  Roy got flustered. It looked pretty obvious to me, probably to Peter, too, that Roy knew something.

  Nyoom said, “I get the impression Roy would like to invoke the dictum of, I think it might have been John Lennon or one of the Beatles, who, when asked by the press if some other famous personage was a marijuana smoker, simply said, I think everyone has a right to blow his own cool. And perhaps he has a point. Because you see—”

  “Nyoom,” Peter said, “let me interrupt, may I?”

  “I relinquish the floor.”

  “You just said something that strikes me as very serious, if I understood you right. You think Roy doesn’t want to rat on Archie. Right?”

  “Very succinct!”

  “Mm-hm. And you know what that means? That means I’m the fuzz in this situation.”

  Nyoom spoke up quickly. “I didn’t mean that!”

  Peter said, “Yes you did, Nyoom.” Then he put his arm on Roy’s shoulder and spoke softly. “Listen, son, how could I blame you? The first time you lay eyes on me an hour ago, what am I doing? I’m performing a raid, making a bust. Naturally you see me as someone to protect your friends from. In your shoes, I’d be doing the same thing, and for the same reasons. Furthermore, I admire you for it.”

  “Perhaps,” said Nyoom, “there is still another reason for which Roy is disinclined to share information about Archie’s, um, shall we say, habits.”

  “Shit!” said Jeanette. Her eyes were all a-snap with black anger. She looked marvelous. “Nyoom baby, I’m gonna tell you something. Your mouth thinks too much!”

  Then Doris spoke. “Let’s have a quiet moment now. Shall we?”

  Sally Sunflower, who had begun to look like she’d been rained on, suddenly bloomed again. “Oh, yes,” she cried. “Let’s!”

  We all held hands quietly for a while, and you could actually see and hear the return of peace to the room. Faces relaxed and smiled. We started tasting the food again. The fire crackled in the fireplace. Percy the Cat jumped into Peter’s lap. A foghorn belched and I felt we were all safe from darkness and from the sea and from everything outside the door.

  Peter was the first to speak. “Does anyone know where to find Archie?”

  Roy said, “I do. I think I do anyway.”

  “What do you all think of this idea?” Peter said. “I’ve got a truly righteous ounce in my pocket, superduper Santa Barbara hothouse shit. Maybe Roy wouldn’t mind going to fetch Archie, and we could all go up to the attic and have a powwow later on. I could use a little head-straightening. What do you think?”

  Everyone liked the idea, but Roy was thrilled by it. He left the table even before dessert and ran lickety-split down the stairs and into the street.

  When Roy returned with Archie about an hour later, Sally and Cary and Doris and I were still in the kitchen putting away dishes and cleaning up. A few minutes later, when we were finished, we went to the attic and found the others there silently passing joints.

  Peter and Archie had their arms around each other’s shoulders, and Roy was sitting across from them looking at them with open adoration.

  (Later, I said to Roy, “I guess they’ve talked it all out.” And Roy said, “No! No, they didn’t! They didn’t say a word! Archie came in. They looked at each other, and wham. That’s all there was to it!”)

  I had the feeling Roy had never in his life seen an older man and a younger one love each other in such a simple, open way. Like an ideal father and son. No, not even like that. Like friends! His mind was blown through the entire evening, and I know now that’s what blew it. There was a whole lot said by all of us last night, but not by Roy. He hardly opened his mouth, except when it fell open involuntarily from sheer amazement.

  Actually I didn’t say much either. I was getting Holy Family blasts one after another. We were really brothers and sisters, every last one of us, deeply and truly connected. I’d felt brotherhood before, but I think this was the first time I’d ever experienced family-hood.

  For the first half hour nothing was said that was worth writing down. The talk was beautiful but not very interesting. What I dug most was the way we ended up arranging ourselves on the floor in this kind of loose, happy circle, enjoying the closeness. Roy somehow angled his way over toward Doris, who was sitting next to Peter. Then he stretched out on the floor and made it quite clear his head wasn’t at all comfortable. Obviously he wanted a lap, and naturally Doris picked up on it. She’s not only an earth mother, she’s an old earth mother and she knows just how to do it without even thinking about it. She took hold of Roy’s face with one hand, patted her knee with the other and said, “Come here, Roy.” So he was lying on Mama’s lap, Mama was sitting next to Papa, and Papa had his arm around Roy’s beloved brother, Archie. And I was holding Roy’s foot. What more can a man ask for? He was in heaven and he knew it.

  After a while Peter began to talk about his father again. Mostly, I think, for Archie’s benefit, he repeated some of what he’d told the rest of us at the dinner table, and then he went into a fabulous rap about parents and children. He said one of the great differences between the new age and the past would be that, from now on, children would learn to inherit more and more light from their parents, and less and less darkness. We’ll learn to be aware, we’ll learn to watch ourselves in such a way that when the ghosts of our parents show themselves in our behavior, we’ll be free to pick and choose. We’ll take what’s wise and beautiful, and be happy that it’s a part of us, and we’ll simply reject what’s ugly and dark.

  “I don’t want to give the impression,” he said, “that my father was nothing but a bastard. He wasn’t. And none of your fathers was either. I hope you all realize that. I don’t suppose there’s a one of us who didn’t have some serious differences between himself and his old man—or his mother, or both of them. But when you really look, you can always see valuable stuff in them. And those are the things you want to inherit from them. The thing that scared me today was finding myself acting like the sonofabitch my father so often seemed to be. But who could have guessed he was an angel, too? He was though. My father was really a fucking angel. He was honest. By which I mean he honored himself, honored the things he believed in. That’s no small matter. I need that in myself. I pray for it. I do. I hereby pray that my father’s honor will move into me and live on forever. Who knows, maybe it will. Another thing, the fucker could sing. He was a real cantor. When a cantor sings, he’s calling God into the place. He’s calling
up all the powers of God to come and visit the tribe with strength and good health. And my father knew how to do that in spades. Maybe it wasn’t your God he called, and maybe it wasn’t mine, maybe it was some old power-mad prick of a God who had a temper like a bulldog and would tear apart anybody who crossed him up. No matter! The point is that when God was sung forth by my father, He came! He was there! You could feel Him in the whole synagogue! Now, to tell the truth, I found Him to be one highly spooky old fuck, and for my money he could’ve stayed where he came from before my father opened his mouth. But again, you see, what I’m trying to make clear is this: My father had this power! Now why shouldn’t that be my inheritance?

  “I want you all to help me. Will you? Will you help me right now? Everyone? Hold hands and make a prayer with me.”

  We all held hands. Percy the Cat moved closer to Peter, sat next to his leg. Roy gave up Doris’s lap long enough to sit up and get with what was happening.

  “I know a God,” Peter said. “He lives within me. He lives within each one of us. My prayer is that He’ll live our lives for us. My prayer is that whenever I’m unaware of his presence in me, I’ll remember to call Him out.” Peter closed his eyes.

  “My dear father, Sam, Samuel, Rabbi Friedman, I’ve felt you here ever since this morning when we covered up your grave. You’ve been inside of me ever since. I pray that you stay with me forever. I pray that your honor increases my own. I pray that your strength will add itself to mine. My dear father, splendid cantor, I pray that whenever my voice rises to sing forth the God that lives within me, all your beauty and light and power will come forward to help me.”

  Peter’s father was here. I know he was. I’m a witch, and I know these things.

  We stayed in the circle for a long time, maybe three or four minutes, it’s hard to judge. Just when I was beginning to feel we’d had the experience, because my hand was sweating and I was aware of a lot of stray thoughts trying to get into my head, Peter suddenly broke the circle. He jumped to his feet and said, “Did he shit, did he shit? Have I got any on me?”