by Sam Michel
How simple was this morning?
How true?
I mean only to recount a memory, a story I am pressed to tell as our own father. I don’t know why I say accordions when what I mean to say is father. I do not know why I am ashamed to say this story best begins for me with breathing. I say my father’s breath, and then my own, and then a horse’s breathing, and then the three of us together, our breathing there together, and what I took from us in knowing. I knew the sun would rise. Simple sun, I had never seen it. I watched the ridgeline lighten, pinken, fuzz off into purples and blues, into whitening, yokish yellows. I saw the flat black riven. Humps and shadowed crags appeared to me, a steep drop through a gentle curve into the dawning basin, the basin bottom neither quite so deep nor quite so far from me as I had thought it. It was surprising, I had never seen it, and yet I was not surprised. The speed of the sun, too, was new to me, its ascent, the lengthening and shrinking shadow, and yet I knew the sun, its compass, its crowning upward from the night, the long days and the short days and its life I carried off to sleep with me and waked up knowing as I knew my father. I was the best my father knew to need. He carried me, watched over me, saw me formed up from a blackness, limbed and leafed, rooted as a poplar, not so far from him, not so deep as he had thought me. I confirmed him, his place; here, from his sleeplessness, I emerged, was recovered to him from the silvered waters, mercurial, a squalling, quiversome solid. Where do we meet? What could he expect? I did not need him. I lived behind him. We would seldom meet. This was his gift. I would go a glimpse before him. I saw the place where I was born, our house, and the fullness of the basin, where I might walk and play and ride to gather. I might move the water. My life could be in growing. Fallow fields were there before me, fields burned off of winter-rye, frostbound, checkered acres. I watched over them. I was high, high up on my father’s shoulders. We sat Whim. We were still, and surging, on a moment, and out of a moment, I saw, for a time, as if out of time, as if seeing such as this had been and must forever be forever.
Me, I was a western boy, called, I heard, I felt myself step outward from my chest and saw my breath rise up away from me, saw my father’s breath rise up away, and Whim’s breath, too, rising now, upward and away from us, escaped, my father’s gift. A bird passed through from brush to brush, a solitary rabbit. I thought of the deer, and of the mustangs, and the coyotes and the antelope and cougar, all rising now, all breathing; thought of the hens down there below us, in the barnyard, the cock’s crow, the cattle, sheep, the goats, my mother. All rising, all breathing. I thought I saw their breath, and I saw how now the basin seemed to also breathe, saw the steam rise up from the basin bottom, watched to see where it would go, higher, higher still, until I could not see it any longer, and saw instead the sun, nothing, next to nothing, white, a blank, I thought, I could not see, was blinded, and afraid, and was happiest to come down from my father’s shoulders, happiest at last to have us turned back down the hill for Mother. I was innocent, the birthday boy, my father should have needed better. He gave me everything he could, a feeling and a vision, undirected, all I could imagine. I imagine he gave himself to me as a caution. I imagine he invited me. I do not doubt what I felt, my memory of his power, the restless, burdensome illusion he delivered me of self-creation. He made his own life. A man could make his life. I imagine he said: You are the proof of my making. I imagine he was saying: You unmade me. Nothing I imagine feels to me untrue. Nothing has happened. Nothing done or said. He wanted to kiss me. He wanted to throw me off that cliff, down into the basin. I imagine he foresaw me here, seated in my easy chair, teasing threads from an armrest, gripped, looking backward not toward my son, but to him, my father, thinking to begin my story there, trying to recover to myself another pulse of feeling from a morning singled out from every other morning I have lived through and forgotten. What better need? My wife, my son: What truer views of end and confirmation? She came to me, my chairside, stood before me with the news I had forgotten from the bigger world, just as my father’s wife had brought him news back from the bigger world before him. And where should I have been except within a littler world, my own, gone back to the morning I turned five? I remember I was really riding on my father’s lap then, not his saddle; he had taken back his reins and held me close against his chest and belly. I watched our shadows go before us. There was my father’s shadow, the tallest and the first, and Whim was there, and riding somewhere in the shapes we cast before us would be me, Lincoln Dahl, another.
ENORMOUS LANGUAGES WERE PITCHED AGAINST US
—Hope struck by a Buick—Hans’s sausage—Christmas at the Anchorage—save the chair, bury the dog—the boy is mute—the ground is frozen—God made Hope a schnauzer—remembered by the family vet—the pound was not a pound—someone there was there—what was really being rendered?—Chinese food!—the Asiatic physiognomy—boy not have dog for birthday—whose voice did I refuse to hear?—the cat still has his tongue—snow—your father’s life before you—the seed is customarily expulsed—God’s love covers us in dust—tremor, shudder, uproar, heat—candy at the Roxy—the herky, jerky Jesus—ballad of my wife’s more tragic lover—we might escape ourselves—I was asking you at least to fuck me—my wife’s dream of the son to come—preposterous nostalgias—what if?—I wish that love could last a little longer, please—my chair, my confidant—were we anybody’s dream?—the road was poorly marked—we come at last to Grandma’s—the possibility of Rome—a poem lay in my mother’s lap—she suffers upward to a sense of humor—he brought your grandson here to see you—our Hope was a rooster—
The news was Hope. Hope was often news. Old news, reported by my wife, and by my son, received, then typically forgotten, much as I receive and then forget the record of our daily weather. Like the pages in the County Crier dedicated to announcing births, engagements, and obituaries, she would always be there, Hope, a general condition of our local being. Yet the news today said Hope was not to always be there, the dog was dead, run down by a Buick. Had it been a European vehicle, or a luxury sedan, or had my neighbor named his dog a name like Ginger, or like Buck, or had my son been even second to attend to her, then I am certain that my wife would never have sustained herself beside my chair for long enough to make me Hope’s mortician.
“A Buick!” said my wife. “Hope! A hit-and-run, in Winnemucca! It isn’t right,” my wife was saying, “where on earth is common decency? How much younger can our children keep on losing innocence?”
Her question did not want for intrigue. I understood it, as she phrased it, though I knew enough by now to let my understanding lapse in silence. I knew enough to stand, fetch a shovel. My wife, unsurprisingly, pursued me in my search. It was fine of me to quit my chair, she was saying, it “certainly was a start;” but the trouble here with Hope required more of me than my provisions for her burial. Although I could not foresee each place to which she had it in her mind to send me, I had seen enough to know that once she had me up, and moving, there would be no peaceful termination to my movements till the day itself was terminated, and it was night, and movement found its terminus in darkness and in sleep. I looked forward, and saw as far out as my neighbor, the possibility of owing him apologies; I looked backward, and saw as far out as my fence, the likelihood of having finally to mend it. I saw no necessity in either chore, but only niceties, required by my wife, a middle-class diplomacy engaged to gratify the shames and mildnesses her people taught her were the bloodroot of their further being. She was right, of course. This is where we live. But it isn’t where I come from. I myself had grown up classless. Farther out. As a boy, I saw the mildness in the lamb and preferred to be the coyote. Why apologize? The dog was dead, wasn’t she? And if the dog was dead, and we did not anticipate her resurrection, then what reason could there be for any further talk of mending?
Well, the world seemed strange to me. The mists came down. I found my shovel, true, and I asked my wife if she’d been hoarding anything along the lines of burlap—but still I some
how seemed too stiff to myself, a long way off, I was afraid I might start shouting, asking questions, accepting answers, acting on good faith. Beyond the carcass and the hole, the shovel and the sack, I did not know what I was doing. I had been sitting for a long, long while. Where did I intend to dig the hole? What about the boy? Had I considered prayer? Wasn’t I, my wife kept asking, even just a little, “wee-bit-little” sorry? I felt as if I were a newborn, besieged by sudden light and consequence. I felt faces peering in at me, phantom sorrows, joys, and follies I was born to solace and perpetuate. My wife took hold of both my wrists, just there at the pulse-points, and she shook them, and I saw in her the causeways leading to the possible conclusion that a burial was not an end, but an invitation to innumerable, restorative beginnings. Begun is begun, I thought, the can of worms was open, the squirm and bore irrevocably commenced.
“You could take the boy to get a dog,” she said.
And as for my neighbor, my wife suggested as a “follow up” to an apology, an invitation to the party. My son’s party! No sense in our neighbor suffering alone, she thought. Party horns, pointed hats, balloons, a real-live birthday boy—well, such spectacle, she said, it would help the poor man take his mind off Hope.
“That’s right,” she said, “we’ll have him over here! He loves Hans’s sausage. Invite him. And then you come back here, and you and the boy—father and son—you two can go on down to the Humane Society—you know, across from the rendering plant, same block there as Lily Fong’s?—and let him pick exactly what he wants—and from there you’ll have it easy, you know, because you’ll end up not too far from the Anchorage, and you know as well as I do when the last time was you saw your mother. Think of your mother. And your son. Forget about me, just think what it was like to have a dog around the house! Think of who all you’ll be making happy!”
“Well, now,” I said, “hold your horses.”
First off, I explained to her, our neighbor wasn’t likely to derive much comfort from the company of children and a few odd strangers, imbibing punch and pinning tails on donkeys, wolfing cake and sausages in order to commemorate the passage of another year beyond our little Lincoln’s birth. Revelry, I said, was not a universal antidote to suffering. I suggested that our neighbor was a member of the old guard, not a public sufferer, a man no doubt inclined to fight the good wars on his loss and sorrows from the ramparts of his private heart. I didn’t mean to sound too corny. Not too flowery. I had no idea what a rampart of the heart was, neither a private one nor a public, or what either could have looked like, but was moved to figuration by my wife’s vitality, hoping an indulgent, desperate rhetoric might quell it. Less desperately, I reminded my wife that our neighbor, like my father, was prone to stroke. He walked with that cane, I said, and didn’t he have that diet? Feed him sausages and cake, he might croak, I told my wife. I conjured up scenarios for her in which our neighbor fell into the punchbowl, or sprawled himself across the floor and twitched, or else sustained a milder aneurysm, one that caused him merely to forget himself—where he was, to whom he spoke—so that we might catch him with a child across his lap, imparting to the child the vivid reminiscences of favors he, our neighbor, used to borrow from the fairer sex of sheep. I invoked our neighbor’s dignity, our culpability; I swerved toward my waxing, festal humor. The boy and I were getting on, I told her. Did I tell my wife, I wondered, that I’d helped the boy to open up the tin she’d brought him home of shoeblack? Did I describe to her my patience, while I sought to guide him in its application? Hope, no doubt, had put the kibosh on his spirits; no doubt, I told my wife, it was a little thing, compared with the dog, my having helped the boy to wash his face and scrub the shoeblack from his fingernails, but it was “progress,” as she called it, I thought it might be true that we were “getting somewhere,” I thought I had begun to work us toward a solvent destination.
The Humane Society, I told my wife, was nowhere near to where I thought we should be getting, and the only destination likelier to spoil the boy’s and my communion was my mother’s. I asked her had she thought these errands through? Had she foreseen the narrow kennels? Had she forgot the chainlink? I recalled her to the darkened corridors, the chilly concrete and the hoses, the stink of wastes and sicknesses and fear and even loneliness we doubted any hose would wash away and worried whether any animal we might adopt there wouldn’t carry out to our place with him. And what about the shaved ones? And the diabetic? And what about the clamor? And this was saying nothing of the other clamor she suggested, the other stinks and shocks of sight and texture she intended us to visit at my mother’s. Ping-pong and wheelchairs. Popcorn. Unguatine. Vitagel. The beseechers: Can you read this label? Will you push that button? Don’t I know you? And had my wife considered Christmas? Christmas, at the Anchorage? Never mind my mother; there was a seven-fingered man there, arthritis in the five of seven, no thumbs on him to speak of—what if our appearance should inspire him to wrap a present? Youth inspires. Even my youth, relative to theirs, even my appearance has inspired this old man to pull his comb out, in the past, despite his baldness, and to button up his pants—so what, I asked my wife, what if my appearance with the boy occasions this poor patriarch to try his hand at cutting out a cardboard angel? Scissorwork! Consider it, I told my wife—the resistance of the cardboard, the tricky contour of the wings, the halo, the pressure of performance, an audience, no thumbs!
“It’s nothing for a boy to see,” I told my wife. “And believe me, I don’t think I know the person who could keep himself from watching. Nearly all of what you see out there,” I said, “well, it’s more captivating than a train wreck.”
I recalled her to my mother’s latest romance, this fellow Vernon, as a further instance in this class of captivator, describing his ability to fit his fist into his mouth, once he took his plates out. The “fist pit,” Vernon called it, “the deflatable face.” I could see him putting on a show, I told my wife, really going “whole hog” to impress the grandson, reliving for the boy the kick that Vernon made to steal his third-place finish at the Wheelchair Jamboree, stretching out his neck beyond his kneecaps, edging by this legless, big-armed man a decade Vernon’s junior. I apologized, backed off a little, told my wife I didn’t mean to make a catalog of inmates at the Anchorage, neither their infirmities, nor how their infirmities might possibly display themselves through Holidays and competitions. I supposed my mother’s cohorts did not differ greatly in their phases of decrepitude from any other citizen expiring down the nation’s hallways of assisted living. In the long run, what troubled a person was their power to command the gaze. They were visions. Visionaries. This is what you wanted, this is what you’ll get. It was something like the county fair, I told my wife, going out to visit mother, like the funhouse mirror where you looked and saw yourself distorted and were sure, at first, that you could find a way to stand to undistort yourself, to show the people who were laughing at you that this wasn’t you—you had all ten fingers, both your legs, all your teeth, you were the person you remembered. The one who bought the ticket, paid his money, said he always wondered what went on inside there, went inside and saw. Laughable, I told my wife, nothing to be laughed at. Bad skin. Brittle bones. Beleaguered hearts. The spine shrinks. The stems relax; the eyeballs come unmoored; they float in roamy orbits through the sockets. The one eye fastens on the unborn grandchild, the other on the yellow swing, the other on a recipe for lemon pound-cake, the other on a pattern for an unmade dress, a missing drill bit, a fifth of bourbon, on a vintage starlet, a wad of chewing gum, the plot of ground, a bird, a rock, a shell, on you. These are your mottled, yellow children. By turns, you see their eyes will glitter, gleam, burn, water, flare and smoke. This is smugness, pity, fear, oblivion, indifference, love. I told my wife I thought the boy might be preserved from it, said our duty to him ought to be to keep his mysteries intact.
I said, “What kind of name is that, The Anchorage? Isn’t Hope enough already? He’ll go in there thinking that he’ll find a Schnau
zer, and his heart’ll break as soon as he can see that all they’ve got down there are dogs that look like dogs. I’ll let him help me bury her,” I said. “This time of year, we all have got a right to see about our comforts.”
Well, my wife ignored me. She let me go, at least, she didn’t interrupt me. I followed her around, and should be pictured through these prior arguments in postures of complaint. Bent a little at the waist. Flourishing my shovel. Simpering. On the verge of stamping feet. It wasn’t really argument at all. A real argument depends upon a real belief in the efficacy of argument. From the outset, I believed, but became an unbeliever when I saw my wife unwrap what looked to me like pretty near a pound of liver. Liver! That quakey, brown, gelatinous slab. I hadn’t seen one in awhile. It seemed to me she dropped the thing from a dramatic height. You forget how wet a piece of meat can sound. How final. But she wasn’t finished. She had first to salt the thing, then to pepper it, then to smack it with a waffled mallet. Too, there was the onion. No doubt, once I was reduced to talk, my talk was cued in part by her ensuing preparations. I know the meat was to the fire by the time I was concluded, and that the two of us were standing elbow then to elbow, I with my shovel, she with her fork, listening to the sizzle.