by Robert Kloss
There were days when your father lay within this tub, nude and asleep, while robins plummeted from tree limbs and rabbits dropped belly up in the grass and moles died within their tunneled-soil although their stink was scarcely known for the fumes of your father’s chemicals. How he soaked his clothes in this tub and wandered tightly wrapped in them, and dressed as such your father seemed a living wick and you thought, “If only he would start one of his fires now—”
And from your room you watched him wandering and falling into the mud, sobbing within his sodden clothes, while along the lawn lay the emptied husks of bottles and jugs.
And your father stripped to his trousers and out-puffed his chest and said, “The hue seems improved.” He sought the lines of his skin to cease. And then your father tottered in the backyard, pale and naked, and soon laid writhing in the mud.
And in the morning you found him slick with dew and alcohols, unable to speak but in a voice of shattered teeth, his pupils lodged somewhere in the back of his skull, and you cried unto him, clutched his clammy frozen skin, watched while he woke into the world undead and yet still mortal.
And your father strode the outer edges of his lawn, unclothed or dressed only in mud-sooty trousers, pinching his skin, checking his pulse and muttering, “Is it the same?” and how he took your arm and told you to run in place and when you had done so he pressed his ear to your chest and counted in whispers. And your father felt no tightening in his organs, no fires along his veins, his heart and arteries not throbbing into something eternal.
Your father said unto you, “All of this will be gone soon” and he gestured to his house, his vats, his tub, his mud-lawn and all the land beyond, and then he gestured to you and to himself and said “and we will remain.”
And your father said, “Perhaps we need electricity” and when the storm clouds loomed he bound himself to steel rods with chemical sodden clothes and raged through the night while lightning tore the skies, his silhouette thrashing in the light, crazed within the smell of ozone. And from your bedroom, you prayed the lightning would not strike, or you prayed the lightning would devastate him to cinders.
And how many evenings you sat before your father in his trophy room, in the mustiness of his hides and furs, their cruel frozen postures, while he spoke of how men in the old days sought some source of eternal youth, how men in rusted armor stabbed and shot and force-marched entire civilizations, how men walked other men at bayonet tip and executed them in swamps and left the bodies to the humidity, flies, alligators hissing in the black green deep. And when soldiers lost their way and returned upon this path, those shot through bodies seemed much the same as when they had left them, days and weeks before, and how these soldiers gulped the muck and mud, their faces smeared with peat and moss, and they laughed, and they believed themselves eternal, and their bellies bulged, and soon they died of boils, of rashes, of retching and vomiting and dehydration.
Evenings you studied your Homer while your father paced his library. And your father said, “The ancients removed the organs,” and “They would remove from here and here and here” and, gesturing to regions various about his figure, “but it is apparent I need these to survive, so I have altered their process somewhat,” and your father lined the cellar walls with his mason jars, and your father said, “Ponce de Leon sought his life entire for this” and he gestured to his jars and the luminous liquor within, and your father wandered the house and yard, drinking until his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and the merest whiff of this solution sent you spiraling.
How many days did you find your father snoring and cluttered with emptied jars, crouched before your mother’s and Walter’s gravestones, mumbling, “I must be doing something wrong,” and later consulting his lists of chemicals, his notes, and muttering to himself, “I must have misheard.” And again he stirred the mixture, poured the liquor onto the lawn, pressed his head to the soil, saying, “This does not seem to be the thing we need.”
*
The president journeyed in railroad cars and carriages with his tucked away flasks, his pocket-sized whisky bottles, journeyed until he found your father, slick with fluids and raving of the dead, setting small fires along what was once the lawn, and the president sighed, and the president said unto your father in the black smear of ravaged grasses, “Well my friend, I see we have both lately fallen from the wagon.”
And the president said, “We need you, old friend.” Your father gazed along the landscape with milky eyes, while president continued, “We must finish the sacred task—the nation is not yet secured,” and your father wept in his fumes, he gnashed his teeth, he rent the last of his ragged clothes.
The president explained there were “insurrectionists” who left satchels of gunpowder near Abraham’s casket, and these exploded, scattering the arms and legs and heads of tourists into blood and char. And there were statesmen who called the insurrectionists “rebels” while others considered these some new menace altogether, and these statesmen cited the pamphlets insurrectionists circulated, demanding “equality for all” while others called for “the heads of tyrants” and left more satchels near monuments and these devastated carriages and street cars and sent seared bricks through windows and pellets through the skulls of elderly women.
These insurrectionists claimed they fought against the lowering of payment along the land, for it was said in those times if one man left his place of employ for another job he would be shackled and made to lay railroad lines, and it was also said that if a man journeyed along the land looking for new work he would be forced to labor in coal mines until death, and it was said that if a man seemed to stand around looking “shiftless” he could be beaten and shackled and forced to work coal mines. And all those who worked in mines and along railroads now lived in shantytowns called “Abraham Villages,” and it was said books were forbidden in these towns because Brown’s example taught that education becomes a devil in the mind of the unpaid, and religions and preachers too were forbidden, as Brown had preached in a language of fire and that must never happen again. Statesmen passed laws determining the inhabitants should be paid only in “lesser cuts of meat” and burlap, for it made no sense to pay wages to these who were not allowed to traffic the various stores and shops and markets. And these laws were heralded and trumpeted by all the papers of the land as a “great step forward” and there were those who called this change in law “Abraham’s Law” in honor of the sainted Emaciator, and all along the land those who owned these mines and railroads, and those who speculated, and those who banked, and those who passed the laws looked at what laws they had created and they agreed it was good.
And listening to the moans of insurrectionists, coal barons in their mansions said, “Man cannot live by bread alone, but man who cannot live by bread and water is not fit to live” and they sent messages to the statesmen along the land, saying, “If you want to keep your job, you will obliterate these menaces.”
And there were those who asked, “Should the unpaid again be made to labor at the tasks of our choosing, and for no wage but the worst cuts of meat, if their souls cry for something other?” and there were those who said, “Why don’t they just go back to wherever they came from?” and there were others who proposed sending the unpaid somewhere dense and white and subzero, for there were yet those who felt tender toward the unpaids, and there were those who could not bear the mustering of militias along the land, who could not again withstand the report of rifles and the burning of buildings and bodies.
And the president said to your father, “We need to clean them out. Don’t you see, dear fellow? We need to burn them up like in the old days.”
The president explained that the long rains floated alligators down rivers, through tall grasses and into towns. These alligators, grown fat from corpses mounded in rivers, their faces and eyes and snouts tangled with dead leaves and weeds, bulged and asleep along the banks, awake and sunning their mouths while overhead gulls swirled and shrieked.
He explained that alligators were invading cities, crashing general stores, slurping the syrup from peach tins. Jagged and blood-crusted they thrashed into butcher shops, devouring the best cuts of meat and the worst, the bone and the gristle, swallowing the head and the skin and the butcher’s knives as the butcher fended at them, and then the butcher’s bloody apron and the butcher’s bloody shoes. They hissed on the lawns and moaned in the coiled barbed-wire, barbs burrowing into their soft bellies the more they thrashed.
And veterans fired rifles from bedroom windows and front porches while their wives and sons lay maimed and rotting and disappearing into the bloody gullets of alligators.
And alligators scuttled after elderly men, the echoing thumps of canes against alligator leather, the writhing sounds, as a wretched body is broken in half, as an aged body dies, and they attacked elderly women, and their jewels and furs disappeared, bones crunched and gray-skin sucked. And when the elderly were gone the alligators consumed their dogs, and so the howling of dogs, the strangled yelping of dogs. And alligators devoured dandies, their velvet jackets and their silk trousers, and many heard the screams of rich sons and proclaimed this a divine justice, and now the hymns of the unpaid echoed from shantytowns throughout the land as they sang, “From the valleys of the dead come the alligators of Abraham.”
And now, everywhere, the oil-black spray of blood and the blood dripping from enormous gullets, the screams of men, the static of soldiers echoing from within caverns of meat and leather, and soon the weeping and gnashing of those who wondered of the cruelty of a god who would allow men to survive a noble war only to be devoured, pleading and pissing themselves, by mindless beasts.
And your father listened to the president with wide milky eyes, and when the president asked, “Will you again perform the great sacrifice for your nation?” your father gestured to the fields behind your lawn and spoke of the prairies he knew as a young soldier, how in the night these prairies were born into wild fires and from those years distant he still knew the heat upon his brow and thereafter the bloom of wild flowers from the ashen prairie soil, the grasses grown long and plentiful. “They seemed now as green oceans in their bounty” he insisted. And your father spoke of the figures of natives touching torches to the grasses, their shrieks as the valley entire lit into shimmering flame. And your father said, “These ancient peoples understood better than we the role fire plays in a rebirth” and your father mused, “Very likely they are near some original knowledge.”
And even after the president departed, your father read to him from his leather-bound bible, flipping to pages at random, reading again and again, no matter the page: “On the second day the Son of the Lord God journeyed to the valleys of flame and soot where he was scorched to a char. There devils danced along the molten shore while the Son writhed for our sins. The miracle of the resurrection came now from the char of this man-god, for the next day he rose again.”
*
“In search of you we wander the land”
And in the summer you returned to find the skies as if smote with locusts, for now your father burned the fields nearest your house and stood half-naked amidst his flames, conjuring them with a canister of fuel and subduing them with his steel shovel. And you watched from your bedroom window, the heat warming the yellowed-glass, until your father stood in the doorway, enflamed and blackened and bellowing your name until you attended his side. “I need you beside me out there,” he said. “I fear I may destroy us all.”
And your father gestured to your mother’s headstone, to Walter’s. And your father said of your half-brother, “If I pried open his casket, if I set his dust to flame, his particles and bones, would he rise again? Would he wrap his arms about my neck and speak again his sweet breath to my face? Would he say again in his voice of the angels my name as ‘Papa’?”
And at his commandment you wandered the fields he built into valleys of fire, gagging and coughing, blinded for the smoke and your tears. And you begged him to never again make you return. And you pulled at the cuffs of his trousers and wept, although by now you were taller than he. And your father gave you a white mask with a long beak and said “I have known these to do much good against the infectious atmosphere.”
And your father gestured to your house through the smoke and the waves of heat, stalked the hallways, his black boot-prints beaten into your mother’s carpets, and held your mother’s portrait, and drew soot lines in the dust of the glass, saying, “If I burn down our house will your mother return to those rooms? Will she grow from the soil as if newly budded? Will she smile at me as if she had never gone?” And your father curled onto your mother’s sofa, and there he forced himself to sleep, yet even in his dreams he understood she would never return to him.
And your father heaped his wheelbarrow with paintings pulled from the walls and portraits from your mother’s desk, cracked open their glass frames and cast the images to the mud-lawn, rolled your mother’s carpets and peeled her wallpaper in long strips, the yellowed dust of glue motes swirling, and he built towers of flame from these until your mother’s face, and your own face, puckered into ash. Your father returned from the house, his arms stacked with albums, and from these he tore portraits and cast them onto the burning heap until the hundred faces of your life and your father’s life and your mother’s life gathered into the fumes of oil and dust. And when he came to a photo of Walter your father grabbed hold of your collar and said, “Oh god, oh my boy.” He pressed the photo into your palm and said, “You do it, goddamn you. You burn my dear sweet boy.” And your father burned your mother’s sofa, her books, her photographs, her pens, her clothing, her buffalo boots, her china, and he sculpted the dust with mud and grass into figurines he called “Wife” and “Son.” And your father placed his lips upon these, their breasts, their various orifices, and he murmured mournful sounds unto them, saying, “My god, my darling, if I may redeem myself—” and, “Oh my boy how I have failed you.” And your father wandered the ash heaps of his construction, and, how he prayed not from his bible but from a language of his own creation, a language of dust and mold and an intonation heaved with sinew and blood.
And your father commanded the resurrection of your mother and your brother, and he jutted his saber against the sky, and your father stooped over the ashes, blew unto them as if from his lips whispered the breath of life, and your father bathed these in his elixirs, and you heard through your window the wail of his weeping as they dissolved into the mud. And your father stooped over the mud and the dust, and he spoke of the cities he would raze and the mothers and children he would see butchered and the rivers that would flow with red, the streets he would fill with decay if only they would return to life. You knew his rage when they did not. How your father bellowed and gnashed his teeth and wailed and lobbed his jars of elixir into bonfires along the fields until the basement shelves and trunks emptied, and your father stood nude and sooty amidst the explosions of his fields while the once grasses trembled into waves of fire and smoldering oxygen, and how the fields glowed, and how the fields throbbed, and how soon wagons arrived carrying copper vats and men in overalls with uncoiled canvas hoses, and they sprayed the fields and the now blazing houses, some of them boarded-over and some of them only now vacated of their occupants.
Explosions of fire and gasoline tore the skies, and those once green fields now smoldered to dust. And within your room and from your stoop you awaited your father’s return from the light he built, and you waited in the silence of his lapsed bellowing, within a world vacant of his horror. And when your father did not return you found unopened trunks within his office, and within these lay journals written in a language of smeared worms, of dead fish, and you found texts chronicling the campaigns of Napoleon, the campaigns of Caesar, the campaigns of Genghis Kahn, and you found images of your mother and his first wife in the place of words, bare-breasted and smiling, bent over and the darkness there, and you gazed upon the naked apparition of your mother, and you gazed upon the
woman who was his first wife, who for so many years you had contemplated as washed ashore, tangled in weeds and crabs. You gazed upon the black and white figment of her parted anus, and you tucked these pictures into your trousers and your shirt pockets, and you carried these with you wherever you went, through all your days remaining within this house.
And from the porch stoop you gazed over the black stubble landscape where no apparitions tread but the shadows of birds, and you wandered the blackened nothingness and everywhere underfoot the dull crunch of charcoaled-life, the scorched bones of birds and rabbits and gophers, but no where did you find your father preserved beneath the ash, lips blown away but teeth intact, sneering or gasping in horror. And you fell asleep with the photographs of your mother and your father’s first wife upon your chest, and you dreamed these women on either side of you, murmuring and kissing, the heat of their breath rank upon your neck. And when you woke the photographs were gone, and in their place a handprint stained in soot and gasoline.
And you woke in the night to the thumps you believed were his boots, and you woke to a smell you thought a mixture of gasoline and formaldehyde, and there in the doorway this image of a man in his uniform, the red plume from his hat, this image of a man and his saber, this image of a man in burned and oily rags, this image of a man stripped to nothing but his boots and half-burned skin.
You watched the moonlit valley of ash and mud and broken glass and at the merest creak in the floorboards your heart shuddered, and you prayed, “Oh Lord please no” and returned to waiting when it was not him. And when you again left by train, this time you vowed to never return.
*
“Let thine eyes beyond the things that are equal”