by Sam Michel
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Pop.”
I remember thinking that his eggs were dirty. Little flecks of dark, bits of stuff that spread apart and darkened up an over-easy yellow. Cold hotcakes. Warm juice. Hard butter. I nibbled and scraped, lagged and lacked. The light hummed. Something up between us must have told him he would never beat my mother to me; he would never wake so early; his place this early in a morning was alone. He did not bathe me. He did not leave his keys in Egypt. He remained, and went out, his place was unstill, not to bring forth, but to bring back, not to reside, but to return, fruitfully, with news, and goods, with health and luck and cheer, victorious, gratefully usurped. There I was. I was what he asked for. He tended to his herd, moved his water, mowed his fields, and when the sun set, and the wind died, and my father offered his return, he found my mother stooped across his son, caring for him, for me, I was there, cared for, where my father meant to make of his bones and shards a present. He kept them, his presents, in his pockets, took them back and left them in the desert. He held them in his eye, in his mind, he said, in the flights of birds and lengths of grasses he remembered. He meant to show me. There he was, I thought; Here I am, he seemed to say. These were his presents, his gift; his place was to show me out ahead of where I was, where I would come to, how I might be happiest beside a son one day, a daughter. We ate hotcakes. Passed butter. He said less, and more, everything I think he carried in himself with never saying, nothing. He welcomed me; he would see me joined to him by passing through his wake. Though had he known he would not see me joined to him, had he foreseen the briefness of his wake, would he have spoken outright? Out loud? And would the names of the things he might have called to me been felt by me more soundly than the names of the things he might have kept that day in thought? Later, years on, after he would suffer his first stroke, my father told me his was not the bigger world my mother meant to bring him into.
He said, “At first, see, I thought I’d get us all to Rome, all right. I was writing bigger checks back then. Your mommy, you could see you wouldn’t fetch her with a chicken-in-a-bucket picnic. She was wild about a horse, but you also saw she’d not be right unless you sat her down to violins and caviar when she was finished with her riding. She taught me courtesies. I was finer for it, you could say, the manners, but then you also could have said that by and by I wasn’t. Made me nervous, how fast I couldn’t recollect a wall as being anything except for where a person hung his pictures. Right off with your mommy’s moving in, I see her stick a nail into the plaster and the next thing is I’m looking at a picture of us in our wedding togs, and did you know what, I liked it. I liked the one of the boat. Used to be, when she would set those flowers on the windowsill, it felt to me like something I was meaning all along to do myself. I never had at first the feeling in me I was being too horned-in on. Felt more like I hadn’t been inclined until your mommy to much thinking. Thoughts were in me, see, it’s just I hadn’t thought them out yet. That’s what I thought. We think more than we think. Some folks think more on more, some folks think more on a little. I didn’t know it then, but it happens I am a little sort, your mommy is a more. Wasn’t natural of her to save. She left lights on. She let meat spoil. Those pictures, they cost. They cost money, and they also cost a person thinking. Myself, I think it took you being born to let me know the more of me was right there on our place, right out in the desert—plenty enough for me would be my horses and my sky. I liked an empty wall, just a quiet place where I could come and sit and see back from myself the things in me already there for seeing. Plain-old painted plaster. White. Wasn’t any accident, why I hadn’t picked a flower till your mommy. Isn’t any accident, what makes a person whistle while he works.
“Because what if your work was growing, see? Mine was to wake up mornings in the dark and help a calf be born. Your hands freeze, and your feet, and that cow, she won’t go down, and it’s dark and you can’t see too sure what you are seeing by your lamp—if it’s one hoof out and one hoof back, or if you’ve got the hind end where you want the front—and there you are, on your knees, out there in the frozen cold, at work. Felt right. How anybody feels when somebody he loves is passing. You don’t know. I couldn’t ever say was this one going to make it. What you have, you have a cow, her calf, a rope, yourself. Something living needs you. I’m scared, see, and I’m cussing that old cow for flopping down on me and cussing that old calf for turning blue and cussing God for giving us a life that can’t lick dying. But when I get the body clear, and the mama’s on her feet and bawling at me when I poke a stick into her baby’s nose to set her breathing, it’s then I know I’m doing right. I know how to feel, you know, if this baby lives, then I am happy for a little, and if she doesn’t, then I am sad a little and I leave her for the coyotes and the magpies, maybe save the mama out so she can milk the leppy calves and move on to the next one.
“Same way with the grass, now I’m thinking. Because did you know what, better than your mommy’s flowers, better than her pictures, better even than I liked to birth a calf, I also liked the grass. What I liked, I liked a dry field, see, spring field where the sun has got on it enough to tease it up and burn it. Maybe just a few days past its tender. Skinny grass, thirsty, yellowed up and crackly. I liked to turn the water on it. I lay down on my belly and I watched that water break about the stems and hurry down a crack in the ground and fill the crack and come again in tiny little floods across the flatter grasses and then break again about the stems of any grasses standing. I judged that if I was a big black ant, and I could stand up on my hindest legs, then I’d be neck deep in that water, nothing deeper, see, not something so you might start thinking happy. Happy, I thought, this grass here is happy. If you really watch, and you are young enough, you might see the grass there fatten up, you hear it sigh and sing, girl-like, from the movies. Grass unbends, goes a little limp and floaty. It’s grass. It’s a girl. It drinks and swells and by and by it stands up from the water, aims itself at the sun. I was young, young, young, and I’m remembering, but I believe I heard this blade there saying yes. I saw it growing in a field of other grasses, whole fields, big green grass, tall as my pockets. You could see in it wherever all the wind went. You felt it cold and wet against your legs when you were walking. I saw as much. I saw it flower out and go to seed. One blade. I saw it mowed and baled and burned back up and thirsting, everything it used to be, and wasn’t yet, and was still to be again if we would feed it water, well, I saw it.
“That was wanting to live. If a painter off in Italy could paint it any more alive, then I supposed I wouldn’t have the back to see it. Still, you live and you live and you think you might get braver. Or else you think you might not need to. Myself, I thought your mommy might quit wanting what she wanted. I thought maybe I would keep your mommy happy just enough to keep her still, until she saw that what we had was plenty. That’s why the pictures on the wall and why the flowers. More, too. Those parties. Things not mine or me, they came on in and I got crowded out, and when I saw it so I told myself that there was time for me, my time would come, even though a person knows it doesn’t. Isn’t time for both the being brave and not and thinking you will keep on needing not to.
“I know I loved all wrong. I don’t know how to love, had a stroke while I was waiting. Funny I was not surprised. Saw it with you. Day you were born. Here you come, there I go. Mother Nature. She needs the room, She takes you. Take a person who believes, then God makes room enough for all of us in Heaven—but earth, earth’s what I was seeing when that doctor came and took you from your mommy. I wasn’t seeing any Italy. Wished I could. Wished I could have said that Rome would help me live a little more, a little longer here on earth by being someways nearer up to Heaven, but did you know what, what I saw was insides. Your mommy’s insides. Doctor told me not to look. But I told him I had seen as much in cows. But that doctor said I hadn’t. I said I figured if it came to it, then I could sew her up as well as he could. But that doctor said I couldn’t. You haven’t
seen it all in folks until you’ve seen it all and when you have that isn’t happy. Doctor lifted you and gave you off to me and where you were were tubes and sacks. A person wished he’d seen an angel in there, a dry white room, clean white walls where on them was a secret message from the Everlasting. You saw enough, and not enough; you wanted more and knew you had too much already. Clumps of jelly stuff and too much color. That wasn’t what I thought was living. But it was. And it was happy. Happy so I didn’t want to give you over to your mommy. Happy so I got right on the telephone. Broke out the cigars and freezer meat. Recall I felt most often in a hurry. Wanted you to have your own room, your own bed, wanted you to hurry up and dress yourself and come on out and help me bale and sort and move the water. Seemed you would be living on your mommy just about forever. I kept not seeing any time for me.
“And there wasn’t. I waked you up. That would be my time with you. The best time. You were five. I could pick you up and hold you still and also we could go around alone together. Seemed like next day was the stroke. Never trust a man who plans his life as like he’ll live till eighty. That man isn’t honest. He’s me. There I was, see, happy as I might have been, and I could pick you up and hold you for awhile and let you ride my saddle, and then the next day I have got the doctor leaning over me, telling me I’ll likely wet myself forever, and I have got the feeling in my head that what he’s telling me was not like something being heard, but more like something I remembered. Something I knew. Something I had seen. Where you came from in your mommy. I saw my time, sure, and did you know what, from that very first day on, I remembered that I also saw for every time I held you, I could have thrown you down; for every time I went to wake you up, I wanted you to keep on sleeping.”
Yet he waked me. By his breath, its sound, its pace and odor, a bluish-yellow color he exhaled and showed me parts of him he only partly lived and had not lived at all yet. He made nothing up. He included me in his life by setting me far enough apart to see it. He must have thought that he would live to see me married. I would have a child. We would be increasingly complicit. And yet he must have known that we would not be. I would always want a cleaner egg from him. He would neither take us to, nor meet us coming back from Rome. Even then he must have known that we would lose our place. His breath, his posture, the way his posture let him breathe was what a five-year-old could tell you: Our place was lost; Daddy wanted me to see our place and someday maybe help him save it. But the butter was hard. The hotcakes were cold. I tried to spread the butter with a rounded knife and tore my hotcakes into sticky pieces. I scraped and ate them from the dirty yoke. I wanted Papa to be eating too but he had eaten once already. I thought if he would want to wake me up because it was my birthday, then why would he not also want to help my mama with the party. But I knew why. Papa held his cup up to his face and watched me try to eat and by his shoulders and the sound of his breath in his cup I knew he meant for this to be his party for me, his way for us to celebrate my being born and being here together. But he could not touch me. You could see he hurt to touch me. Pop. Poppy. Poppyseed. I did not think he cared less when he said less; I believed that someday I would hear him saying more. His care fell off the side of him. He chased it. He had yet to catch himself. I watched him. A blueish-yellow. Hazelike, like dust.
“I surprised myself,” he said. “Wasn’t my idea till I saw you at that table that we might go see a sunup. You were picky over eggs. Nearly put you back to bed. I was scared, see, things meant things to me. Didn’t want to see them not mean anything to you. Mornings, when it’s frozen yet, or when things have got a lick of dew on them, and haven’t started yet to perc and sound, that’s when things for me would mean the most. Miss Wright, you know, say I’m going down to milk—got my can, got my oats—and here I pass the schoolhouse and it happens I will hear Miss Wright, reading from our English how a lady rides a horse. There’s five of us she’s reading to this year, and four of us are boys, and none of us is following too much the lady on the horse because we all of us would rather follow Miss Wright. It’s winter out, and warm inside, and Miss Wright, something with the lady on the horse has made her want to leave off reading. We don’t know what it was, because we weren’t listening, but then she’s looking up at us as like she’s got a question, something she would like to know from us from what she’s read that she can’t ask. And sure you would have given anything you had inside your pockets if she could have asked and you could answer. Miss Wright. You wanted always to be grown enough to call her Margaret. You wanted always to wash the chalk off from her hands, ask her was there not a man she could have married. She wasn’t old. She was pretty. You could not have said exactly why, but on the days she started coming to us with her hair down, it made sense she read our English standing up and looking out the window. Seemed to me that any child who found a way to listen to his Miss Wright while he looked would know the best there ever was between our sexes. For me, she was alive those mornings as she ever was when I was just a kid before she left us. But if I said to you to listen, what could you have heard? There’s threads of her still stitched to me. Blood-threads and bone. The more the time, the thinner the thread. No, sir, I was thinking, sure it was your birthday, but I wasn’t taking you to show me what was left to me were ghosts and whispers.”
I was five, a birthday boy, and nearly forty. My father, in that kitchen, underneath that kitchen light, he was a disappointment, no larger off from me than was my mother. Hers was Rome, his was grass; I think they both had seen me as an easy way to keep themselves from what they really wholly wanted. He wanted me to ride his horse. Whim. Of all the names we gave to horses, Whim’s was truest. Whim, I thought, our smartest, fastest, smoothest horse; I was to “wait right there” while Papa fetched him. A gray horse, he was white. In the dark, saddled, monstrously calm, I thought, when the kitchen light fell out across his eye, there he stood, I was to ride him. Papa’s horse. Papa’s Whim. Days I watched my papa saddle Whim and ride out from the barnyard. Days I followed to the fence and waved, propped my chin up on the pine-pole gate and saw them moving sprightly in a single-footed trot to gather. That was size, forever-youngness and the way-to-do-it. Here we go, they seemed to say, hurray for us, yippee. He let me stroke his nose, Whim did. He let me work my finger through the one side of his mouth and feel around to where the bit lay in his teeth, where the oats were warm and wet between his teeth and I could smell a smell from there like something of my father’s. Like Papa’s coat in winter, like Papa’s arms in summer. He pushed his nose against my belly, and his breath came at me warm and wet and ticklingly and sort of red and even bigger than I thought. I thought how big his lung was and his heart. I wondered if I also smelled to him like anything of anybody else’s. When my papa lifted me to sit me in the saddle I can’t say for sure if I was ready yes or no to sit there. Papa lifted me, and then he stepped up from the stirrup, made his place behind me. This is what my papa was, where he best began, I think, when he first waked me. Himself, Pop. We were outside now, in the dark, stars out yet, traces yet of snow, an old snow and a heavy frost you heard beneath our hooves when Papa touched his heels to Whim and set us walking. Our house shined silver-white, and the tackroom, too, was silver-white, and the schoolhouse, smaller each time I would look around to see the barnyard, was also silvery and white and seemed to me to be unsolid, underwater-like, I thought, against the blackened windrow there of poplars. All things dark and tall were black and flat, cut-outs, liftable, it seemed to me, though I knew you could not lift a windrow, not a poplar. I knew seeming. I knew a rock was still and only looked to move as rocks would sometimes look to move in creekbeds, not a dream, not a cutout you might pick up from the night while you were sleeping. I had slept. While I slept, a lamb was dragged off by the coyotes. In the barn, the rats chewed holes through wooden kegs, the pigeons walked the rafters, Losivya made her milk, the cat lay on the rim of the trough and licked her paws, waiting on my papa. Who kept watch? Pop watched. He drove off in a pickup. He drove off
on a tractor. He rode away on Whim. He went and rode me with him. He showed me. Pop’s job was to keep in place the things I could not see that I would come to. He did not say so, perhaps could never say so, but he knew, it was a simple thing, his knowing, it was everything, the next thing, one thing following another to a view, a path he said he had forgotten we could follow up the hill behind our house to watch the sun rise. He said he had his doubts. Yet I do not remember doubt. I remember ease and power, steadyness and horse-warmth. I held the reins. I rose up in my skin and felt as if I crossed myself, repeatedly, as if I were charged, volted, as if I were an alternating current, crossed across my skin and back, outside myself, and in again, crossed and quickened, dizzied till I could not say of any moment whether I was wholly out or wholly in it. Nothing stirred save us. No bird sang, nothing of a cloud to tell of weather. We rode higher, climbed up to a wider open. The brush thinned, the sage shortened, you could make out nothing taller than my father’s knee. I leaned back into my father, reached up and put my hand against Whim’s withers. I recall I wanted then to be my father. I wanted not to sleep through nights. I wanted my breathing to have in it the feeling of a horse’s hooves on rocks and frost. I might speak, and in the time before I spoke, and after I had finished speaking, anyone could know that in me were the lives of calves and grasses. I held the wind inside myself, and might let it blow, or not, and might rather calm myself, gather in my clouds, build a rain inside myself, torrents, floods of lightning flash and thunder. I might shine. The sun could yet be in me. We rode, and though I can’t recall how we had come to stop and wait where we were waiting, I do remember while we waited feeling that I did not gauge my father by my mother’s absence. We were high up, on the rim of a basin, a blackened bowl, miles wide—who knew how deep—across which I could see the blackened ridgeline of a farther mountain. These, too, I thought, the mountain and the basin, were the flattened cutouts of the world my father watched while I was sleeping. Soon, I thought, they would be rounder. The basin, I was thinking, something shaped and colored would become of it, something motioney and living. My father, and his horse, the night that fell from him, and the days he rode that I was yet to see arise before me, they were his, he was giving them to me, I thought, this was my birthday, here would be my first true present. I watched how. I recounted from Whim’s eye, the light on his eye, and the power and the ease in him, his bit, the sour oats he let me finger in his mouth and leather. I watched the stars go bright, watched the stars go pale. We knew what was down there, out there; I think we breathed then in agreement, unwordedly; I think we understood how far away a word would take us from the scope and depth of where we met unworded.