by Sam Michel
So I forget the words, I tell my wife, when I can, the names, my game here is to cast away the traveler’s yearning from my mind for destination. Whatever comes to me, I let it go, quickly; the action of my memory, ideally, outpaces my ability to question or to comment on its content. My birthday. It will come to me, I tell myself, in time, intact, unannounced and roundly risen from the field in which it finds me, preoccupied and wandery, defenseless, unable to do other than receive it.
In the meantime, I explain, my tactic is to recollect the way the last few hours went. I put my feet up, recall the bad news I received about my mother’s permanent. I have, by now, a pretty fair impression of the curls that she describes, the liver-spotted patches on her scalp the tightness of her curls has left uncovered. I am reacquainted with her outrage, and my commiseration, the legions of commiserators we hypothesize whose “gut reactions” ought to move them, “in their hearts,” to villify the “penny-anny cheapsteaks” who decided on the hiring of student cosmotologists to treat the hair of seniors. Together, we are baffled by the absence of an “outcry.” My mother says that she herself has cried out “till the cows came home,” and cites this as the reason for her having kept what precious little hair that God, “in all his wisdom,” has seen it fit to leave her.
“Otherwise they’ll shave you,” says my mother, “or else they’ll clap a wig onto your head and keep your own hair fastened to your skull with stickpins. It’s how I kept my teeth,” she says. “They’ll tell you you are better off to let them cut your teeth out, how much easier it is to clean them, you know, how sweet your breath will be, but I told them, I says, You give me my six feet back of intestines, and then we’ll talk about my pearlies.”
She kept her pride, in other words, I recall her saying after all she’d lost to sickness and her husband (bless him) that she didn’t need a little girl in tennis shoes with scissors and a curling wand to steal the little she’d preserved. I recall her wondering what kind of “statement” she would make, looking like a “fright,” and what would Vernon think, and need she mention me, her son, my wife, all those young and pretty people who might see her at the party?
All of this comes easily of her, and is easily let go, so long as thought does not expand the interval between the mother I’ve recalled, and the mother I’ve forgotten. In the same way—if I am playing by my rules—I might recall and forget the broken fence, the ceiling, work, the Roxy, Hope. I unburden. I do not fall, I tell my wife, I see no pit, nothing dark or “awfully, awfully heavy.” I grow lighter, rather, rise, emergingly, an inertial heat appears to bear me up and outward as the past succeeds itself, accelerates and passes in and out of me, colliding with itself, disintegrating as it comes and goes, resolving finally into unfamiliar fragments, unwedded to the words and names through which such sounds and flashes once cohered and once enshrouded.
On a good day, the best day, when I am given time, and peace, no memory persists; I am spun out and abandoned where a great, blue dome appears above me and beneath me, suspends me, seems to beckon my approach and my desire to inscribe it. I could be anything. I am unaged, unsexed, unmothered and unfathered, refractive, brilliant, magnified, divided, recombinative and whole. My past appears to be a future whose dispersion through the world is immanent and universal. My apprehension is unbounded, undistanced, the little shocks of being unexclude me. Pale suns burn up from me by days and are returned in icy beams to me by nights when I am cold and silver. A leaf turns in my chest, my arms are feathered, I crow, am scaled and finning idly in the blazing eddy. Whatever thing I am I feel that I am also not. My ears pour out a brief and golden liquor. Beneath my ribs the arid blossoms sweeten. I tell my wife my cries are milk and cool caresses. I consume myself, greedily, urgently, I know that I must pass, and then I pass, fixed; I perceive a lag, observe the world form up apart from me. I must listen for myself. I watch the great, blue dome recede from me and cease to beckon. The leaf, I see, is turning out of reach. A flowered branch sings. I recognize a presentation, I feel the need to make some sort of an assessment. I coo. I gurgle, snatch the air and kick my feet and scream. Gradually, I am somebody’s raccoon. I am a pride and joy. I will go to Rome. I am told this is the orchard. This here is an apple. Can I say it, apple? This here is a peach. I’m your mama. This is mama’s garden. Corn. Peas. Tomatoes. In the fall, these seeds will be a pumpkin, and we will carve a face in it for Halloween. Can you say Halloween? How about Thanksgiving? Do you remember Christmas? Because pretty soon it’s Christmas, and then will be your birthday! Soon, I crawl. I walk, I skip, I hit, I catch. I plot, discern the merit in fulfilling obligation. I say, Mama. I say, Papa. What’s that? I say. A tractor. What’s that? I say. A bird. I say mine and mean a rope, say rope and mean it’s mine. Because I said it, I explain, because I learned the word. I repeat the words, believing I might draw the things they name a little nearer. It is as if I never saw the barn before I said it. Barn, I say, and see the tilted dream of it. My dream. My birthday. My pinata, I remember. My friends and hayfort and my cake and uncle Ikey. I show. I am antic, showing, I want everyone to know the troughs are mine; Jesus there and Mary, they are mine; and the band up there is mine, the music they are playing, too, is mine; the baling wire moons, the wire stars I pull down and untie and tie again to prove that they are mine, are mine; and the air, too, the cold, the frozen ground, the snow that falls and sticks there, the clouds the snow has fallen from, and on the other side, higher than the clouds, the constellations, they are mine, Orion and the Dipper, you can’t see them, or the planet Venus either, mine, I say it quickly, Venus, I do not want to hear it said by anybody else, nor Mars, and my Losivya—My milkcow, I explain—and walk away, and think that nobody must know that, none of this, not today; today I am the only seer, the only sayer, any other seeing, any other saying, I believe, will wake me from the dream, will return my party to the shadows, history, I think, perspective, I am terrified, today, at five, that the celebration of my birth could be much less fantastic. That man, I say, the little one, he’s my uncle Ikey. He can put a string into his nose and pull it through his mouth! I say, Look! Look at this! It’s a... it’s a... it’s a pigeon! I say, You can’t kill me! And, Did you ever smell a furzebox? I say, Everybody has to play by my rules, it’s my birthday!
That’s the game, I tell my wife. Sleight of hand, a magic trick. I tell her, when she sees me in my easy chair, it isn’t that my head is in the sand, but rather that the sand is pouring back into my head. First I empty it, and then I fill it up, though I only very rarely will succeed in either emptying or filling. I cannot forget enough. The similarities between my wife’s demands, and my mother’s having asked for my assistance in the preparation of the party are considerable. I suggest my wife is pressing too hard for performance here; vitality, I tell her, cannot be authored by coercion and rehearsal.
The truly festal memories I have are given to me by an accident. The sparrow in the gutter delivers me the blackbirds in the poplars; a phrase of music on the radio delivers me the band. Several times, I tell my wife, while pursuing Hope’s most recent stool, or on an evening when the cesspool clarifies itself on pungent, eastern breezes, I will be reminded of our son, of course, but also I am called to Owen Dangberg, whose “accidents” did not go undetected, neither by the soldiers he had fought beside, nor by any soldier who drew near enough to shoot him or to tie him up when he refused to die, despite his mother’s boasting over Owen’s talent for sustaining his ignominies in secret. There was no secret. Only anybody’s mother could believe in such a secret. The truer version of the story comes to me, no mother, when I am midway to the trashcan with my shovel, say, and the wind shifts, or the crusted surface of the stool breaks, and Owen’s face appears as if before me, a pinched and reddened Owen, clenched, I guess you’d say, unsecreted and “scared to death,” pale, in any case, drained, a ghost to me, a stiffened, floating angel.
I stand there with my shovel and then choppily, it seems to me, an interval compresses, my skin spreads,
seems as if it thins and spans; I am encouraged to regard with confidence the empty space of which I understand the skin is principally comprised, the gross imbalance we are told the skin’s comprisal designates, in ratio of space to hard stuff. Neurons, electrons, charged varieties of quark. I sense the vast, untrumpeted activity in me, the colossal energies involved in keeping up my simplest appearance, sensing, too, the boundless possibilities my simplest appearance must obscure, and the comprehension of these possibilities the lapsing of appearance might inspirit. I make room, despite myself, and Owen gets to be there. This is what it feels like. As if the harder, lesser stuff of me has lapsed at last, as if solidity and heat and light are transient reminders of the greater, stiller stuff that makes me and unmakes me: me, not me; Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln, eternally returning.
Had I foreseen at five what I am seeing now I may have been a little kinder to this Owen. Perhaps I never would have said he couldn’t ever fight on my side; perhaps I never would have called attention to his ears. What did I know? I was five. It was my birthday. I was persuaded by the war that said I did not have to die; I had faith in the appearance of my body, the permanence of prettiness; already I was cultivating habits whose directive was the staving off of interruption. No good to tell me that the interruption was my prettiness, my body an ephemeron, a hiatus, a displacement in the wider, timeless space to which my trunk and limbs and vital organs owe their brief appearance. Sequence, I am certain, would not have much impressed me. The future for a handsome youth must seem as handsome as the form from which he views it. I was not Owen. Very likely I was thinking: He crapped his pants. That kid crapped his pants. Thank God I’m not Owen. And then he came to me, an inspiration, heaven-sent, a grace, The Little Lord He Crapped His Pants, plain old Owen Dangberg.
But my wife can’t see it: Owen Dangberg, angel. Next thing I’d be telling her was that I saw him hovering on a pair of silver wings, or that he knelt right down beside me, rolled up his sleeves and pitched right in with the weeding.
“What kind of angel weeds?” she wants to know. “What kind of things did Owen tell you?”
Details, I insist, minutia, Owen Dangberg never said a word. And is it my fault if the places God provides me for my inspirations are occasionally unseemly? Am I to blame for finding out so little to describe there? The limitations of my intellect, my self-expression, I remind her, are not entirely my own achievement. Given who my mother is, and who my father was, and the patch of desert where they raised me, it cannot be too surprising that my spiritual experience articulates in phrases whose inelegance competes with sagebrush, creosote, and mud.
“I don’t know,” I tell my wife, “you take this day with Owen, looked like there was nothing there, except what’s always there, and still what I had seen was everything. There wasn’t anything to say. No true thing. I think I knew that once I started talking, I would never stop. Or if I stopped, then I’d be finished in a lie. The secret is there isn’t any secret. No mystery. We know it all. We’re afraid to believe in what we know, and talk is the sound of our terror. My mother, when she says she wants to recreate my birth, that’s her way of dodging that she doesn’t need to recreate it. But not needing is not enough for her. All of life is not enough. She wants more life, successive lives, some idea of succeeding futures. She used to tell me, she said, It’s hard, not to miss the life you never had. I remember, she said, The life you miss the most is the life you never lived. Probably I didn’t have a very clear idea of my life as separate from hers. I wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t bored. I didn’t need a party to supply myself with enemies. I was my own enemy. I fought my own wars. My fighting had a real effect. If I was the Indians, I really thought that I could help to make them win. We were smarter, tougher, braver. We knew the spirits in the land and knew the ways the land could take the fight out of a white man more completely than our clubs and arrows. We could say a prayer, smoke a pipe. As a kid, I didn’t think that history had the final word. We’re all accomplices,” I tell my wife, “fabricators. When the boy came out to ask me what I meant to do with that shovel, I think it was the first time that I really recognized him as my own. My son. Everything I saw so wrong in him was right. A perfection. What else could he be? I could have kissed him. I could have asked him for forgiveness. What was he? Two, then, maybe three? I know he wasn’t in his glasses, he wasn’t wearing his correctives. I was tempted to give him the entire run-down, all of this I just told you—how it was that I was seeing Owen—but in the end I only told him it was the dog. Kept it simple. You know. Showed him the shovel, what was in it. I was feeling very clean. We could have been anything. Any passerby would think we looked exactly how a son and father ought to.”
Any passerby, I might say now, except my wife. Naturally, my wife by turns is unpersuaded, unmoved, fatigued and skeptical and “frankly baffled.”
“Nothing,” she says, “anything, God. That shovel is the only truth in all of what you’re saying I believe in. And what’s in that? Dook’s what. Dog dook. A cesspool. You’re a case,” she says, “you know that? I don’t see a whiff of miracle in you. If you’ve never heard a secret it’s because nobody trusted you to keep it. So far all I see is one stink in your life reminding you of others. Tell me this, if you’re so smart—how come you don’t make more money? How come you don’t treat folks right? How come folks don’t like you?”
Close folks, she meant. Friends, and relatives, the memories of whom derive from stimuli, she hopes, more noble and more varied than the odor of excreta. My birthday cake. The roasted beef and lamb. Surely, says my wife, there is something fine and healthful of my papa born to me in well-used saddle leather; the scent of lilacs must occasion some remembrance of our infant son. His breath, she says, directing me to nights I used to lean across his crib to sample from his tiny mouth the sweetness he had once exuded through his fitful slumbers.
I do not act, she says. I know my son demands a tissue, but I seldom will supply it; I know the roof one day will come down on my head, but I cannot be moved to mend it. My behavior, given my experience, is inexplicable to me. I am the first peasant to stone the Jew in days of plague. I fornicate and spend. I drink up all my water at the forefringe of the desert, eat up my provisions on the eve of famine. I tell my wife it is with me as it is with her as we approach each New Year, and she resolves herself to diet, and on the days preceding her resolve will glut herself as if to prove the necessary merit and the pending burden of her resolution. The body has its countermandments, its historical imperative. Resolve is in the cell, and the cell is in the word; all our covenants are compromised in flesh as we conceive them. Thou shalt not because thou shalt. I tell my wife that my belief divides, compounds, dissolves, combusts, decays. I am my own contaminant. The flowers I might bear to her are wilting on the stalk before I pick them.
“I doubt a lot,” I say.
Just as she suspected. It is not for nothing, says my wife—a recent convert, I should say, to my mother’s church—not for nothing that a people’s faith has all these years been brought to market on the image of a rock. Some greater solid, anyway. A great big pile of rocks, she says, mortared, chiseled into whole cathedrals, or hewn of native woods, milled and hammered into little clapboard churches, naves and apses built of bricks of straw and mud, a place to congregate, she says, and to observe, and recognize, any kind of holy house and one believer. She herself believes. The cell of her resolve is in the wafer; a cell hangs bleeding from the cross.
“I’m not nothing,” she says. “I’m not anything. I’m me.”
She intends a scolding, jabs a finger once at me and then herself, as if to clarify our separation, the positive identity the spaces indicated by her jabbing guarantees us. To find my faith, she says, when I have lost myself, could not be more in keeping. Thin air, accidents, freaks of nature, numbers, signs, morbidities, conjunctions, logic, lapse—my trouble, says my wife, is that I want for weight, a staid and vigorous rebuke, sanction, Mass, the repetition of a regulated series.
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“Something along the lines of those candles,” says my wife. “And that smokepot. Or how about a simple kiss goodnight?”
How long had it been, she wonders, since I clasped my neighbor’s hand and wished that peace were with him? At the ceremony, at the courthouse, did I recall our vows, the words I wrote my mother spoke in honor of my father? She wonders does my wedding band mean nothing more to me than what its current worth is at the pawn shop where we purchased it? Do I ever look to it, she asks me, for some instruction more enduring than a vague assessment of the relative humidity and heat? Did I not know what a symbol was? Did I know the Word was more than just a word?
“Wishy-washy,” says my wife. “I don’t know why I bother asking.”
By and by, of course, she does not bother, but is “beaten back” by what she calls my chemical unbalance. She concluded I had nothing in the world to lose, since there was nothing in the world I had possessed, nothing I’d been on to, no place in the world where I was able to articulate I might be getting. She said that she, in fact, was on to me, knew exactly where I was, said she had me dead to rights, I was backed into a corner, it was time for me to fess up, be a man, put my money where my mouth was.