by Sam Michel
INTERRUPTION
—erase Mother—the relevance of breath—my wife stands before me—pressure of the forgotten purpose—a colony of independents—decorating the barn—ashtray in the horse hoof—too big for my britches—my gratefully excited side—bowing to a younger Mother—Mother dreams of Rome—my birth—my son’s birth—the Roxy once was also new—at war in the loft with The Little Lord—try to remember, in order to forget—try to forget, in order to remember—experience is too much in a word—peace be with you—the body has its countermandments—the lore of balconies and velvet—who would butcher?—you are not the man I married—something classic-drab and middle-lengthed—petting my erection—my father’s breathing—call me Pop—warm juice, hard butter—gratefully usurped—chicken-in-a-bucket-picnic—he hurt to touch me—pre-dawn in the birthday barnyard—I sit Whim—steadyness and horse warmth—the speed of the rising sun—the breathing basin—I watch our shadows go before us—
Likely we are better off here, for a time, to erase my mother, alive, or not, better to erase the boy. Maybe back up here to earlier today. Say noonish. Lunchtime. Predictably, perhaps, we find that I am sitting in my chair. I am alone. I had a thought. I thought I had a real desire. A premonition, maybe, of the day to come as it has come, and something of a real desire to forefend against this day, redirect its spirit. I was, as I recall, thinking of my breathing. I was conjuring analogies, a bellows, an accordion, a bagpipe to assist my understanding, a festive, musical conception of a breath I thought must be in keeping with a party. Certainly, I can recall a meatier, more birthlike version in my thinking of a breath, bloodier, I guess, fibrous and veined, ostensibly aortic. Yet what did I know? Sure enough, a horse lung, I have seen, pneumonia-choked, said Papa, “Solid as a liver.” Sure I saw my papa open up the brisket with a blade as big as a machete. A hot day, a rush of stink, I can remember, a groaning decompression of the carcass.
“Drownded,” said my papa. “Animal has got a lung like that, he’s walking through the air and breathing underwater.”
Yet what did I know for a human? How should breathing have informed a father’s thinking on a birthday? Well, I was getting there, I thought. I thought that I was somewhere on the road to answering my wife’s demand for progress, when there she came and entered in to interrupt me. Not that I should blame her. She had her reasons, good ones, as it happened, so that I am made to think our trouble was begun when it became apparent how entirely and quickly I’d forgot her reasons, having moved myself reflexively to ward them off, before I ever fully heard them. Not that I should either blame myself. I meant simply to sustain my peace, ride out what I thought might be a little relevant momentum. What would come? Who could say? The opacity of things as they unfold before us is impartially distributed. We all have learned that what divides the bread from nourishment divides as thoroughly as Avignon, in darker whiles, divides from Rome. A little closer here to home, we know my next breath comes to me with no more promise of another breath than will my last. The lung, I can remember thinking, collapses as the lung inflates, at times convulsively, in gasps, and sobs and shudders, sporadically, or evenly, and deeply, as if in easy sleep, in long, slow, sleepy draws, hitchless, I have heard, and right on schedule, until one day the murmur comes, unfelt, at first, unheard, until another day the murmur is a tickle, and the tickle scrapes, and rasps, and squeezes, unless there never was a murmur, no tickle, squeeze or scrape, but there rather comes abrupt, complete, and unforetellable arrest. This was the thought.
And then I thought, There she is. And then I asked, What is she doing here?
She was fearless, as I saw her, alarmingly in focus. Her eyes popped, strained to quit the rimwork of their proper sockets. She regrouped, or I regrouped her. She was fast becoming the composite wife, an assemblage I construct of biased snatches—the naked wife, the nude, lying on a hot night on the topside of the sheets, quietly perspiring in her secret creases; the clothed wife, the still-life, layman’s Madonna, suckling her babe at rodeos and supper-clubs; the wife of the morning trench-mouth, the wife of the abscessed ear, the wife of the homegrown, whipped potato. She was sketched by me as if in pencil-lead, then colored in, bluntly, crudely, as if by crayon, either ranging far outside the lines I give myself, or failing to approach them. In this, at least—our imperfections—I am willing to admit some aspect of inheritance, one Lincoln to another. The dialogues responsible for causing sons and fathers to abrade in life, we see, are very often harmonized in art. Consider how the boy Dahl sees the mother as a snowman, whereas the man Dahl sees her as a magpie. Nothing is the thing to us it is. Somewhere through the workings of the webby stuff that fastens eyes to hands in every Dahl, the vision balks, a ratio explodes from out to inward. A mother melts. She pecks at sores she opens on the daddy’s back where he is bent to rest and labor. Her voice sounds beakishly, her jags ascending and descending almost classically, insistently toward the end of love. Blame it on the brain. Or soul. Or heart. We man Dahls haven’t got the heart to love a thing in life except ourself with. According to my wife. According to my mother.
My mother says, “Your father didn’t lift a finger on your party.” She says, “If he loved you half as much as I did, don’t you think that he’d at least have run the backhoe through the stalls for me? Do you think that he’d’ve sat there eating beans while I was telling him about the barrowfulls of muck I hauled up on a pitchfork? So long as it’s not Lincoln’s back, it’s good for you. So long as meat is on the table, and the sky is blue, and the water’s wet—well, then,” says my mother, “if you’re Lincoln, then it’s love.”
“Oh, they’ll challenge you,” my papa always said. He said, “You take a thing like love, and put it in a woman’s mouth, nine times out of ten, it comes out sounding like a threat.”
And then sure enough, there she was, my wife, threatening love, right there, beside my chair, unbudgeably, unspeakingly disruptive. Possibly I inched a little upward in my chair and gathered in a breath as if to either speak, or else to trick her into speaking. But I did not trick my wife, nor did I myself decide to speak, having seen my words miscarry my ambition to define the moat we must negotiate between us. How many words, I wondered, in the hunt for definitions, have been cast by us to rot there? How many words expire through the narrow channels of their constant resurrection? Misborn, stillbirths, abortions, our words decay before we say them. They bubble up and simmer, lathered in the vernix bath, stinking in the dripping cave—our mouth—I can taste them, I smell them stinking by the speechful. This is not imagination. Nothing here is being too made-up. The air between us palpates with historical endearments and pejoratives, reiterations and retractions, contrition, diatribe, invective: to what illuminative purpose?
I say, “Pass the broccoli, please,” in order not to offer an assessment of the flank steak. I say, “Come-see, come-saw,” in order not to tell her how a day went.
If you can’t say something nice, our mothers tell us, then don’t say anything at all.
I have repeated this homily, warmly, occasionally, to benefit my wife—“The both of us,” I say—suggesting that it might be nicer if we sat a time in silence, respectfully acknowledged the profundity of our displacement, each of us toward the other. I tell her I am stymied, pooped, I advise her not to take my absence personally.
I say, “You could be anyone to me.”
Or, “Maybe it’s just women.”
And, “I am just a man.”
“Faith,” I used to tell her, “even Jesus slept.”
But I am not, my wife assures me, Jesus.
True enough, I say. Certainly, our Savior looms recedingly in my convictions, where I become recedingly convicted of myself. No, I say, it was my wife who moved through life according to convictions, her conviction that the boy was coming into the possession of his memory, in case she had forgotten, her conviction that the boy was coming into thought. Assuming she was not mistaken, and that memory did not exclude the possibility of thought, and that though
t did not exclude the possibility of memory, I bothered next to ask her which speech she would have the boy commemorate? Which words, in her own life, were the words to sound the deepest? Would she be patient with me? Or would she rush? Did my wife intend to push “the whole thing” of this birthday to my mother?
“Really,” I have told her, “my mother wonders shouldn’t Vernon be invited? She asked me did I have some room for Vernon’s wheelchair! What is Vernon for a boy’s fifth birthday? What on earth could be a wheelchair? She’ll grab,” I can remember saying, “she’ll steal this party right away, if you don’t watch it. I’m the one whose party it was. I’m the guy who knows the best exactly what he liked and what he didn’t, not my mother.”
Of course, I make mistakes. I cannot reconstruct myself with any more precision than I reconstruct my mother, or my wife, or my father and the boy or uncle Ikey. I am liable, through the course of my anticipations and assemblings, to distort the lot of us. The past, as I recount it, grows as wide for me as any future; I proceed with no more certitude in recollection than I do in my predictions. Procession is procession. More and more it seems to me that memory is the flaw through which the artistry of every Dahl advances. We are, at bottom, sloppy. So much furze. Such a band. The barn was not a barn, but was a dancehall. We did not eat, but dined. We did not drink, but sipped. We were mannered. We were groomed. And we were hicks, I must remind myself, despite my mother’s dream of us. We were a colony of independents sowing seed and reaping weedy hay from alkali and shadscale. The wind blew hard out there. The sun shone hard. I cannot see my mother any younger in her skin than roughly middle-fifties. When she swung a pick against a rocky plot I think she dreamed she worked ancestral loam in gloves cut from Italian leather. On the kitchen counter, just beside the sink, we kept a bucketful of slops for pigs; in the mudroom, in the bathroom, I remember fly-gobbed strips of sticky paper. Here were flowerboxes built of mismatched screws and rusty nails, leaky, heatsplit lumber painted sale-price colors, hung and waiting to be hung, needing to be pruned, weeded, watered, planted. What broke first? What broke next, broke least, broke most, broke once too many times for us to have the heart again for fixing?
I mean to say that I have tried. I have begun, backed up, filled in, discussed the fine points of my party with my wife, intending to commence and finish with this story for the boy in one clean take, a telling which might rival the day itself, a tale which might go riding through his heart in joyful sunbursts of enfabled distillations. Not long after she had made her first request, I told my wife, about the party, “Sometimes it’s an ordinary rush that sets a person diving headfirst into shallow water. Patience, said my mother, one problem at a time.”
I told my wife that she drew lines, my mother did, rows and columns. She divided plusses off from minuses. Spontaneity, by her lights, presupposed a graphic understanding. Her trick was seeing to the bottom of the trough and knowing that its transformation would be incomplete until the trough was rid of any tie to drinking. She said the woman who would fill her trough with ice and sodapop and call it Party Time would never hear her guests allude to magic. My mother saw the ashtray in the horsehoof, the hatrack in the bull’s horn. Stars shot from the beams of baling wire; baling wire moons hung palely off the stagework of the bandstand. My mother had imagination, I remember hearing, and a knack. Who but Bonnie Dahl would ever think to fill her troughs with dirt? And who would sculpt the dirt, build the little earthen mounds that Bonnie Dahl built? Because my mother did this. I helped her. I worked a trowel, mounded up the earthen hillocks and the hollows and distributed the sprigs of tree and straw across the earth where I was told to. I placed the plastic Jesuses and Mother Marys and a gang of other Holy Joes beside the water, where we meant for there to be some water, and on the pasture, where we meant for there to be a pasture, and where we meant for there to be a shade, I placed the Joes and Marys and the Jesuses where all of them might rest upon their way beneath it. Our job, my mother told me, was to make of the troughs all but several stations, “the slower,” said my mother, “less exciting stations” of the cross, and to fashion in the trough the nearest to the dancefloor and the band a creche, a reminder to prospective dancers of our commonground nativity, how it is we all had come to be there, and where it was we all would go, before we joined each other, man to woman, woman to man, to celebrate His birth, and mine, out there on the plywood, in a twostep, said my mother, or a waltz, moving through the sawdust in displays of thankful gaiety peculiar to each of us, to a simple country tune whose words and rhythms were familiar to us all. Full Moon Over Elko. Castration Of the Strawberry Roan. Porkpie Miller’s Sheepdog Shep. Coyote’s Last Lament.