Strange Cowboy

by Sam Michel

  Nothing happened much. She waked. She came back home. She bore the child. We agreed to call him Lincoln. This was her dream, she said, here was her doll, through this son she said she felt she had been given back into a time when she could tell herself what she had come to live and die for. This is how she said it. She swaddled him and nursed him and she sang and spoke to him in darkened rooms and said that she would die for him for having given her such nearness.

  “I would die for him,” she said. “I can’t remember ever being half so sure of what I’m doing.”

  As for me, again, the husband, I was glad for her. I agreed with her. I said that I, too, had never felt so wholly and immediately alive. I had never noticed the variety of winterbirds that perched on the electric wires and chainlink, had never noticed either what a pretty shade of green the eyes were of the simple girl who bagged our groceries at the Bi Rite. In those days, I might possibly have understood the heart of the man who scrubbed his hubcaps with a toothbrush. Perhaps I thought I could articulate the gaze on the face of the woman at her kitchen sink, her rapt regard for daughters building castles in the sandbox, her beholdeness to staked tomatoes, ripening squash and the sunblown flap of line-dried laundry. I appreciated gossip, assignation, who did what and when and where and why; I was eager to see the brick I laid down in the fluid constructs of our smalltalk builded into pedestals and columns, buttressed domes and battlements, arches, vaults and spires, saints and gargoyles we invoked to welcome us within the high, reverberating spaces, the vast, handcut glasses stained in reverential hues, the portals of the holy, heaven-climbing monuments of local lore by which we meant to be illumined. Henry Ellard’s barbecue, Good Jane Button’s posies, word back on the fortunes and the fame accruing to the man who was refused by Grace in marriage. What extraordinary times, I must have thought, what a privileged people. I understood why Rome. Why grass. I was here for travel, said my mother; said my father, I was here to grow. One-hundred years from now, my parents might have said, when the orb is fastened to the spire, and the cross erected from the orb, it will be said of me that mine was a life of many distant capitols, scented soaps and fresh pressed linens; it will be said that mine was a life of simple stillness and repose; ours is a cathedral whose most outward stone was placed by a directive from the inmost altar. Mother, father, child: a dream of continuity, infinite perpetuations.

  For a time, I thought our boy excreted curdled gold. This was my dream. I dreamed that I, too, would die for him. In my dream, it sufficed for me to see how easily the child was moved to suck. Any working day, I might call home to hear him coo and gurgle. I delighted in his grasp. Enough to see him, unassisted, hold his head up on his neck; enough to sit up in my chair and witness his first inches gained by locomotion. While watching him at tub time I would ask myself what moral consequence might follow from a man who tried to pick the water up and hold it in his hand? How might I greet the postman should I live as if I must caress his buttons? In my dream, through my son, I saw myself completed by my indiscriminate desire to fondle silk, to rake the sand and lay my cheek against the heated pavement. I thought that I could live forever fully in those days when I believed my son first understood his space to be defined by an enclosure. An inside and an outside: Did my son derive from this distinction his confinement or his freedom? And what of extension and number? And the little spring-green lights at play between the leaves of cottonwood and poplar? I might have died content to know the native sense my son exhibited in naming his particulars from universals. In this dream, I require nothing for myself beyond the opportunity to hear the boy articulate his first irregular, create compound subordinates, a simple and a complex past, a not inelegant pluperfect.

  This was the dream, in any case, though I cannot say when I began to recollect how little faith I ever held in dreams, cannot think back to any singular event which caused me to acknowledge having always heard a voice which argued powerfully against the rescue of my son’s life by the forfeiture of mine. Die for him? Die for him? Always, from somewhere close to where the spine is fitted to the skull, there seemed to come the reptile’s voice in me that made it clear the boy could not be saved in life by any promises of death more resolutely than his own. I told myself it wasn’t mine, this voice, not me; it seemed to crouch in me, as if it knew it was unwholesome, unwelcome, as if it meant to hide itself, root itself, speak softly, incessantly, as if rationally and commonsensically against the kinder, clearer, prior voice I thought had best expressed me. Though gradually, as I listened, and this crouching voice was worked up forward from my spine, closer to my mouth, resting finally just behind my teeth, I came rather to suspect the voice I heard escape me was the voice that would betray me; I came to think perhaps that I was not so kind; I came to think I ought to have confessed to those occasions when some famous, firstmost intimation of my own mortality encouraged me to dwell more hopefully on my son’s. You owe me your life, I said. Your life was mine, I want it now, now give it back—a niggard Papa’s scared confession.

  Still, I opened up my mouth and heard a stranger uttering preposterous nostalgias. Did I really yearn to spit-up on my mama’s shoulder? Was my fondest want, in fact, to spread my legs and have myself be powdered, creamed and diapered? By and by I learned to keep my mouth shut. I sulked. I harbored. The little voice that rested at my teeth grew wilder from its root, seemed to press against my teeth and grow back down my throat and up into my brain. My chest filled, my belly, arms and legs. I complained of headaches and of heartburn, suffered footcramps and phallalgia. I assured my wife it wasn’t her. Not the child. I said I thought it only needed time, a change of diet, maybe, exercise; I told my wife about a man whose life was turned around by sleeping on his back. Yet perhaps it would have helped us, as a family, had I observed aloud the budding kinship I enjoyed to see between my piles and little Lincoln’s infantile proctitis. It was there, my pleasure, in simple English, it might have burst out plainly from behind my teeth, carrying with it all the innocent confusions of my lurching brain, my heart and lungs and wadded, looping bowels. Why should he not suffer? I might have called attention to my wife’s lumbago, her bleedy nipples and her tendinitis and her Kreuzerschmecht. So the boy must cut his teeth? He has a blistered lip? Parity, I might have said, tit for tat, some nights I just plain don’t like him.

  What if?

  Because it happened more and more that I could not recall the chastest hour with my son without recalling from the hour also some inveigling of fear to weigh corruptively against it. I cut his cord. I held him in my palms, a live thing, fisted, kicking, squinch-eyed, “a miracle of God,” coated still, glistening in the vernix dew, mine, ours, the desired end of seed and egg... and yet. And yet why should I be pleased to see how old and bluish-gray he looked, how shriveled up and miserable to be here? What dialogue, I wonder, might have followed had I told my wife that my distress was underlaid by something near to happiness, an ebullient fascination with the clamps and scissors, the bloody trimming of our manchild’s foreskin?

  “I sort of like to take him for his shots.”

  What if?

  Might my wife—given a tradition in our house of honest talk, the past experience and expectation in our lives that from such talk would fall our “growth” and “progress”—might my wife have been encouraged to confess her own conflicted pleasures? Might she have been freer to a moment, as I myself was not, some occasion on the other hand when we might be encouraged to confess to a repugnance? Perhaps there was this time my breath stank. Perhaps a time she gave me to believe that I could not be far enough inside her, when her desire was to work me up and squeeze me out and celebrate in silence my retiring disgorgement. For my part, occasions of this sort increasingly returned to me. Squanderings, bygone glimpses into what I meant and did not say, what I said and wished I meant that I were saying, what I felt and could not find it in myself to say that I was feeling. Possibly I did not trust what I was feeling. Likely I could not know what I meant. Perhaps I had convinced m
yself that I must always be forever later than the truth, or possibly I was afraid of coming to a truth I had suspected all along and did not want to come to.

  In this way, I believe, among the others, a person settles on a paralytic comfort, a simmering complacency he calls his habit, dresses up as ritual, exalts as a condition of his God-given soul. He rises from his chair, sits down to his table, nibbles limp asparagus; she pounds a slab of liver and alludes to the affections of a butcher. That’s just the way things are, we say; a person loves as a person is able; that’s just who I am. What could be achieved, I must have wondered, through the frank expression of a feeling, in the confrontation of a fact? Every understanding I might come to of my wife must be a halving; every protest I might issue for her hearing must be small and fleet against her person. Does a husband talk his way to sympathy? In the old days, our beginning, was it true I raised the blood up through the phallus by a fiction of the boy I was, that boy’s horse; did the visions I invoked beside my wife of mares and stallions speed her circulation? Did we determine anything at all by speech? Could the word be first for us, did we think our sustenance in love was ours to reinvent, or were we creatures moved by circumstance, random conjugations of a length and scent of hair, of brine and tang and ripeness, crossings of stars, alignments of planets, phases of the moon, accidents of mood, spilled salt, slain doves, an ignoble war and a depressed economy we heard persisted at the time of our conception?

  After the boy, I began to recollect the doubter at the center of my every act and story. When we were poor, I knew that we were poor and wished that we were not; when we were not poor, I knew we were not poor and wished we were. I wished that Beverly had not been diabetic. I wished that O Street had no precedent, no antecedent; I wished we could afford to live on streets named after trees; I wished we lived where neighbors paid their visits after having ridden half a day to you by horse. In the change-room, when we fucked there, I wished my wife had not wrenched her hip. I sat in my chair, watched her hold the boy against her chest and wished that sucking did not sound so much like sucking, wished that crying did not sound so much like crying, that shitting did not smell so much like shitting and that days did not transpire so much like weeks in convalescence. Some nights, long nights, early, early morning hours I might sit and wish that I could hurry our lives forward, see the boy off to a boarding school back east, see him grown up old as I was, see him to his marriage and paternity, his debts, his illnesses, his grave; wished that I could push him head-first back into his mother, press his swell out from her belly, mold him through her belly to the size he once was of a plum, the pit of a plum, his embryo, her egg, my seed, a precious little something bound at last for nothing. I sat and looked across the lampstand at the boy asleep beneath the naked gazing of his mother and I wished that love could last a little longer, please. I wished that I could be transported, sleep as he slept, where he slept, be him, loved, reloved, be born again into a self-created future.

  “If wishes came true,” I thought, “then beggars would ride.”

  This was Mother. My one true mother. Bow, she said, remember, don’t forget, don’t beg. So I did not beg. I kept my wishes to myself. I was my mother’s boy, after all, and my father’s, too, a stoic, a rural, a rustic in an easy chair, transplanted, bowed, cowed, mute. Urge and faith, please, I told myself, no further talk from me of love. I was who I was, made as I was made, an ejaculant, a dispensation, dispensed, precipitate, how protest? To whom? Overcome myself, I thought, and be where? Where were we? How had we come so quickly to be given what we told ourselves we wanted? How did what we wanted swerve so wildly from the things we had been told? My wife, what did she not trust herself to say? We sat, saying nothing, saying anything, talking smally while we knitted socks and read the evening paper and the weeds grew chokingly inside us every night we turned our backs away from one another to escape awhile in sleep. Sweet dreams, we said; kiss-kiss, night-night. I thought most everybody must be like us. I thought we glossed ourselves in talk and very few of us were really talking.

  A woman, I believed, any woman half a decade older in domestic life, whether she resided here on O Street, there on Elm, or over there in Rome or Paris, this woman, I believed, was choking. If I asked her, I believed that she would tell me of her husband that his early charms repulsed her now; his whistling, his humming and his clucking tongue, the pet name he still called her seemed by now to her to be a bit of shabby magic she reproached herself for having failed to see the slouching wizard who performed it. He stained himself. At the armpits, at the crotch. He yellowed. He shed hair. Forgot to flush. He spoke to her in shrugs and grunts and meant-to’s. Husband, she said, father, duty, law, lament. Paris, Rome, and O Street, I believe she must begin to shrink a little from the reach of her husband’s hand, the probings of his bristled lips, the hard, thin mouth he thrusts at her as if to say, Kiss this. She predicted him. Endured him. Found a man or two from town whom she could conjure while her husband jabbed away at her until he rolled away from her and she could hurry to the toilet. She became another woman on a telephone. She became another woman at a luncheon with her lady-friends, recapitulating interchangeable narrations from their weeks of longing and regret. She waked up tired, wept by noon and found by suppertime another way to blame her husband for her having come to be another woman. This isn’t me, she said. I don’t blame. I never gossip. I’m not really like that. She lifted her shoulders, as I saw her, showed her palms and said, That’s life.

  Nor did his life differ much, the husband’s in relation to the wife’s, not as I was living it. His life through her for me was an exhausting exercise in neediness. Her needs, my exhaustion, the impression I began to take away from her that I would never get it right. Say that it was bed. Say that it was how I dressed, my table manners, her need to have me hold her hand, caress her temples, tell her she was lovely when she needed me to say that she was lovely, without her having to suggest to me she needed. Her teeth seemed sharper, less enticingly suggestive, more cruelly ordered after an evolving, species-wide regime of rend and crush. She seemed a mill to me, a mill-mouth, a grist maker, a reducer of a blooded, whole-boned man to pulp. She wasn’t sweet; she was unfresh; I used to tell myself she smelled of her labors, the pulp she meant to make of me; I thought I might have fled the courthouse, had I known how often I would come to lie in bed and listen to her gargle sterile, mock-mint rinses. Then came plastic tubes, ceramic ramekins of firming gels, defoliating scrubs and foaming toners, wraps and masks of mud and weeds she wound about and slathered over her encurdled flesh, the arid, panting hide of her embarrassed carcass. She, too, yellowed. She, too, was an easy mark upon which I might fix a blame.

  This man, a lump of sallow putty, meat-pulp in an easy chair, a dreamless self-deceiver, who other than a wife could make him me? From across the lampstand, I would think, there she sat, a dilapidated house whose musty rooms I sometimes toured, spellbound, impotent, jealous and confused. I wanted to shake her, beat her rugs, strip the blankets from the tables, chairs and beds I sensed were looming heavily unused inside her. I wanted to repopulate my wife with happy girls who rushed to see a rainbow from a spotless pane. I wished that she could carry in herself the scent of fresh-baked gingermen. I wished that she could reproduce for me the face of the child she saw inside herself, a hurried, patient, grateful child who sat up in her bed one summer Sunday afternoon to listen for the first time to a brand new favorite record. I wished I weren’t such a wisher, such a sap. I felt sapped, slippered and pajamaed. Better, stronger off, I thought, to loathe the boy with his convertible and pot of beans. Better to stand, point a finger, arouse myself with those scenarios in which I asked my wife if she might love me with some gusto if I ceased to eat, as this boy had ceased to eat, if I ceased to sleep, as this boy had ceased to sleep, if, for my wife, in the spirit of the boy, I quit my work, knocked my head against the bricks, let myself grow very pale and threatened, on occasion, suicide by knife, or else by noose, or else to slowly die away by goo
d old-fashioned heartbreak.

  Or better maybe not to die, I told myself, safer to live, keep my seat, nurse the heartbreak, or deny it, find my way to strength through fruits and grains and vegetables, a cultivated trust and gratitude for all I had been given. Be strong in faith, the humble bounties. Home and hearth and family. The outward is the mirror of the inward. Make of your littleness a muchness. Were these the secrets shared among my more enabled neighbors? I wondered: Could my neighbors be as happy as their lawns? Were their hearts as clipped and ordered, as efficiently productive of a bloom as were their hedges? Surely, I began to tell myself, I have not been being honest. Possibly, my wife and I had not been so exclusively revered as we suspected. I told myself to look around a bit, relax, our lives were likely gentler than we had contrived them. O Street, I discovered, whose graded sage our house was first to call a home, well, I hardly knew it, never really fathomed its misleadingly prosaic human beauties. A kitty in the tree, a trike in the drive, a wading pool, an idle mower. All of these I sought to see renewly, as if at last beyond a third dimension. What met the eye in the form of that hydrant was transmuted to the spirit as security, good sense, communal care. I plunged ahead and called such caring love. Love, I told myself, love lay in those stumpish arms and iron head; love, I thought, the sublimely simple recognition that we all of us are in this life together. My neighbor waxed his car for me, for my eyes, perhaps because he loved me. Perhaps he voted Yes on No. 5 because he loved my son. Love, care, community, the human contribution to the Great Plan we detect in witnessing the sudden beauty in a swath of breeze-blown grass. I wanted to take part. In those early days of recognition, had the roof leaked I would certainly have fallen straight to fixing it. I would have held on to my job, foregone my surgery, repaired the fence; Hope, I thought, might still be with us.