by Sam Michel
I looked up from my lap. Red-cheeked boy, red lips, the white of his eyes a white-white white. He stared. He did not speak. I did not know him. Five years old, that old, so long I had lived with him, and what could I have said on his behalf? He sat. He said nothing. Certainly, I had never been so long with him alone. Calm yourself, I told myself, you are coming all undone here. I thought to touch him. I could give the dog a little pat, think up a persuasively conciliatory remembrance. We were Lincolns, I thought, Dahls. The son’s hand rested on a carcass. The father’s hand unfolded and refolded on the densening air. I watched the boy and thought then of my wife, her dream of caring, her night of oval rugs and tangled doll’s hair and a patch of sun when she was carrying the child and slept alone out in the desert. Were we anybody’s dream? Say we sat there, as we sat there, unspeaking, untouching, wanting to speak, perhaps, perhaps wanting to touch, yet not, and not, could we be felt? Would our wanting perish, having failed to find its first expression? What dreamer might revive us? Might we be remembered by a nun? Not our names, naturally, but I was thinking maybe something of our spirit, a time we had achieved together would survive precisely as it was, pungently intact, distilled, embedded somewhere somehow potently in wait. I saw this place ploughed under, no more rubble, no more renderer’s or Lily Fong’s, this place become a graveyard, where a woman someday came to lay a wreath of flowers at her husband’s feet, and paused, was rather seized by us, this woman caused by us to wonder for the first time in her many visits to her husband what this place had been before it was a graveyard, who had passed this way, who here seemed to speak to her, why she cared, so that my son and I, our time together here might live again, reembodied in this woman, pondered and feared, felt, tinglingly, in a spine, through the roots and stiffened shafts of tiny hairs, our ineffectualness in love recovered, lamented and redressed. Maybe she forgives us. Maybe she prays.
I told my son, I asked him, “You don’t remember anything at all about the Roxy?” I said, “I sure wish you’d talk to me. Certain words,” I said. “Steamed rice? Mama? Papa?”
I made faces, exaggerations through the mouth and eyes and brow, distortions in the manner of a native speaker seeking to be understood, reiterated in his native tongue by speakers of a foreign language.
“Now you,” I said, though not him, not this day, which is how it happens I am made to strike the wipers, shift to drive, and please to not forget the headlights. And how, we wonder, was the weather? And what was the hour? And can the boy have absented himself so far from physical description? Other than not speak, other than hold the dog, wipe his nose and stare, what else did he do? Had he lost his cap? Had he needed to relieve himself? Had he hungered? Across the road, behind the curtained window, the lights shone from the renderer’s. We recall the smoke rose from the chimney stack. A lot light had been lit. The snow fell straight. Underneath the weight of the snow the remnant, planted shrubs were imperceptibly collapsing. The sage collapsed. The earth stiffened. A wet bird rested on a broken brick. Dusk then—assume that from the pounded liver, from O Street through the vet’s, the renderer’s and Lily Fong’s had passed a couple, maybe several hours—the hour now was dusk.
To Damma’s, then, to Mother’s. From an unfamiliar place, we went to her an unfamiliar way. Little to see out there. More of graynesses, lowering, long planes of gray, no mountain now, no barn on a horizon, no horizon, nothing distanced, the great, long lengths contracting now, enfolding, closing down on us, road signs advancing and receding, nimbuses of glow and slope and bulky, curving motions, the sturdy posts of natural and human-built intrusions seldom showing now, passing by us hidden, wished for and implicit. Mother’s. I thought that I remembered a way there. We did not speed. The road was uncertain, unploughed, poorly marked. We were first, uncommon travelers. We went softly through the smoothened surface, slowed and quieted over the hushened pavement. That glow there, was it kitchen light? Were good people sitting down now to an early country supper? Was a pot stirred? Sure I was a boy who sat once in that house and listened to the panes shake in the sunwarped wooden casing. I ate my mama’s cornbread cut in slabs with honeyed butter. We warmed a bottle for the leppy in the mudroom. Snow seeped through the doorjambs, fell across the yardlight, cornices of snow were curling over on the driftfence.
Who lived here anymore? Was there any telling in these landmarks that the boy and I were on our way to Mother’s? When we came up to the driveway bordered by the failing, sapling poplars, saw the sign lit up with multi-colored bulbs—the N blown down, the O still unreplaced—then the boy and I would be there, the A CH RAGE, my mother’s home away from home, a tin tree in the picture-window, a gas log and a faux brick hearth. Sad, I thought, yet had anybody asked I could have said that I was happy, having fun. I could say I got a little jump up from my heart each time the car slipped; I could say I played a country station, say I sang some; I could say I chose to take a longer way than I remembered needing; I could say that all the longer way I talked.
I said, “Your grandma is your papa’s mama, did you know that? Well, did you know I had a papa too? He had strokes. A stroke can kill you. Kills your brain, where you talk, and it also kills you on one side, usually, all up and down your arm and leg. That’s why Hopey’s master and his cane. With my papa, after the one stroke, he couldn’t talk, said it was like he couldn’t quite remember how to talk, except then, same as Hopey’s master—what’s his name?—he could remember. Still, he couldn’t work right. He couldn’t heft a bale anymore, but he could drive truck when we were feeding from the flatbed, and I remember also how he rigged a belt up to the wheelshaft so that he could hoist himself inside the tractor and the combine. I don’t think he rode though. And he didn’t ask me anymore to feed with him or farm. He said he liked to turn around there in his tractor and to not see anyone behind him. Just to watch the earth turn over and to feel the jiggle in his seat and sunshine on his neck and know that this much anyway was his.
“That’s after number one. After number two you saw him working hard to keep his eggs from falling off his fork. A person almost never saw him not in slippers. I know that draggy, scratchy leather sound on the linoleum, it made me and my mama crazy. Sounded sick, like someone always must be sick, like if you lived with him, then you would catch whatever he had. I remember one day, one morning, when my mama banged the sugar bowl against the table and she hollered at him that he made her crazy, dragging all day long around the kitchen, and would he please just for the love of Jesus sit. But he wasn’t any sitter but was oftenest up, tipping flour, dropping coffee, burning up a pork chop. And then you have the night I can remember also that my mama waked me up to go and find your grandad leaning on his walker at the first check of our best alfalfa field, just leaning, hard to say, like he was planning to stay put awhile, like he had come to where he wanted. I don’t want to say the moon was full that night, but there was light enough to see by, silvery and white so you could see my papa, sure, and then also past where he was facing, over the fields, and out there to the alkali, and farther where the alkali gave out and you could see the long, dark gap of sage before the mountains. There was snow there on the mountains yet, and the fields were young and tender. How he looked, I thought we ought to go to him, but my mama, she held me and she shushed me up and said again that we should leave him be, that he was happy there, and I believe he was, and he stayed there all the night, where my mama sent me out to find him lying wide awake, real wet, and bugbit, really pretty chewed on, my papa pulling up the grasses with his better hand next morning.
“I guess it wasn’t too long after that we moved in here to town. I don’t say it killed him, but he started sitting more, traded in his walker for a wheelchair. He practiced talking. We fixed him up with a chalkboard that he carried in a basket on his lap. He talked maybe more to me in those days here in town than the days before them at the ranch all put together. One thing he told me—easiest thing your life will help you to forget—he said, Don’t put off. I don’t think—in town
, at least—I don’t think he liked to see your grandma very happy. I don’t think he wanted to see your gram as young as she was, having her way, being pretty still and starting out in something new. My mama asked me how I hardly stood him, cranky as he was, smelly and slow and given so much to repeating. She said for me to go on out and play, it wasn’t healthy, a boy to tend a sick old man, especially his father. “You are young,” she said, “go make a friend, leave your papa to your mama.” She was right, partly, and partly I believe that she was jealous. Because Pop and I, we used sometimes to walk down to the Rexall for a soda, just us two. Pop would sit and close his eyes and doze against the sun and I would watch for people. And if we couldn’t walk, if a place was too far off for walking, then my papa made my mama take and drop us. Rodeos, the fair, Fourth of July, like that. Pop once watched me ice skate. Not your grandma though. How I recall it, she got pretty mad at him one day and said for him to go ahead and take his time with me, she would have her time when he was dead and buried.
“Still, she cooked for him. Every now and then she said she hoped for early rhubarb. Or else she said it looked like rain and told me I should run and tell my papa, he might like to sit out in the car with me and listen. I recall she kept his station tuned, she didn’t mind as much to hear his futures. She cared for him how he would let her. Sure she would have liked to go if he had asked her once when we were going to the movies. I know I almost always wished she’d come, and then especially if I had known the movies was the place he’d have the stroke to kill him. I don’t say he died right there, right that minute, but the Roxy’s where he had the stroke, all right. What I think is that he’d sit there with me every week and get himself all cranked up inside about how long the movies kept a person sitting. He sat sort of crumpled up across the armrest, hung his elbow and his chin on my side, and I recall he kept his eyes throughout the most part of the movies on my lap or in the sack I’d brought of popcorn or of candies. Let me tell you, at the movies, you have got a hard time watching, sitting next to somebody who doesn’t really want to watch. And then his pawing at my sack because he said he didn’t want one when he did. And then whatever fell out from his mouth and on my wrist when he was chewing. I’ve got memories of that old Roxy. Your mama and your papa used to court there. And before I went there with my papa, I would go there with my mama. Mama liked to watch. She used to laugh and cry or scream and talk right out as like the people on the screen were folks she’d asked to stop and visit at our place for coffee, and the rest of us all sitting in the Roxy hadn’t been invited.
“Not Pop. He knew where he was sitting. So when this fellow, Leslie Little Dodd, right when we are in the quiet romance minutes of the movie, he starts to pissing on the concrete, well, you can bet my papa wasn’t last to hear him. Jesus Christ! a fellow hollers. Up behind us you start hearing, What the hell, what are you doing, this ain’t a stall, like that. And pretty soon you’ve got a real scuffle going on up there, and Pop and I, we make our way up to the action, and then the lights come up enough for us to see that it’s this Leslie, a fellow used to work for us, and he was drunk, bad drunk, everyday drunk, which is how he was for years, which is why my papa had to fire him. They were calling Leslie names—redskin, breed, and such—and they were telling him that if he couldn’t keep it in his pants, then to keep it on the reservation. Some men held him, and somebody threw soda in his face and someone turned a popcorn bucket over on his head and pushed it down across his eyes, and I remember seeing where he’d wet himself and how I couldn’t tell by looking at his mouth if he was laughing or was crying. He kept trying to say something, but nothing coming out of him was English or was word enough so anyone could understand him. Worse was Pop. Him, too, you couldn’t understand, only louder. Those men, they got the main part of his meaning, so they turned loose of Leslie, and things got simmered down, and folks were looking one and to the other to decide what next, when Leslie lifts that popcorn bucket from his head and sizes us all up as like he’s choosing which ones he’ll be wanting to remember. He was so big, and weaving, if he didn’t have so mean a purpose, I thought he’d fall right down. He had that butter smeared down from his forehead on his cheek, and that stringy hair and soda dripping from his chin and you could smell him stinking from bad wine and pee and throw-up. Pop, all he did to make himself stand out from all the rest, he lifted up his hand to help this Leslie leave the theater, and this Leslie, he looks at Pop and he says Dahl, and then he hauls off and he slugs Pop on the one side of his head and falls on top of Pop where he is sitting in that chair and there Pop’s had the stroke will kill him.
“Not that I remember much of how he finally died. Mama saw to that. I don’t think he fought her. He might not have known her. I never thought at least that he knew me. But then you couldn’t know because he couldn’t say. I wasn’t let to see him much. Run and play, that’s my general recollection of that time with him. My general picture of him sees an old guy looking mostly bone and mostly white. In bed, you know, white sheets pulled up to these white pajamas, white whiskers, white hair, white pillow, white curtains. Some of that might not be true, but it was Pop, how I remember Pop, and how I told myself it wasn’t Pop in there and dying.”
I said, “Pop grew.”
I said, “Winters, down there at the tall stacks on the heifer lot, he’d get a hayhook into each end of a bale and work it off his knees and line those bales out fast enough to keep two good men behind him busy cutting wire and feeding.”
I said, “People don’t know stacks and hayhooks. People don’t know crop.”
“Kickball,” I said. “That’s what we used to play. Baseball, slaughterball, war.”
Well, and so my son, what should he have said? Had he been willing, and were speaking, what was left to the boy for saying? We had come at last to Grandma’s house. I presented the boy the box of No. 7, hooked the little wire on his mittened thumb and coaxed him with some pressure at the elbow to give up his hold on Hope. Through the Visqueen you could see that she had ceased to leak. She had stiffened, her fur congealed and matted where it peeled and gathered from the shoulder at the forepaw.
“She’ll be fine,” I told the boy.
I reached across and opened up the door for him.
I said, “Shall we?”
Happily, no scene ensued. He went easily away with me, did not look back behind himself, nor especially before himself, but seemed content to hold my hand and let himself be led, as I imagined blind men let themselves be led, with neither fear, nor great excitement, but with quiet, central dignity, erect, benign, in pacific resignation to the good will and the able vision of their shepherds. I suggested the boy speed his pace, he speeded his pace. I suggested he lower his head, he lowered his head. So perhaps, I thought, despite the insults and the cool regard, the bumps and broken bones and minor lacerations he had suffered while enduring my sporadic care, he found it in himself to find in me an untried plain of fatherly affect on which to sow his seedling trust. Or perhaps he had forgotten who I was. Or else perhaps he loved me. Maybe this was the sort of love a connoisseur of love would know at once was blind. Poor boy. Creaturely thing. Pup, cub, cygnet, gosling. Whose claw did he hold here? From whose beak must he feed?
“Step,” I said, and he stepped.
“Branch,” I said, and he ducked.
“Speak,” I wanted to say, and did not say, not wanting to experience again, so soon, the diminished limit of my patriarchal charm. I guided us inside the vestibule, where I recall the rush of heated air, damp shag and urine, a view through the heavy glass of several muted inmates clumped about the gas log glowing in the common room. I passed the boy through several more commands—stamp, and head up, hat off, mittens, jacket—then crouched down to inspect the boy at wheelchair height, flattened his hair where it was mussed, mussed his hair where it was flattened. I retrieved my handkerchief from his jacket pocket, held it up against his face and gave him the command to blow. I am afraid I chucked him lightly on the shoulder, meaning to
assure him all was right, we had the tactical advantage here with Mother of surprise.
Yet where was she? Not, as I was thinking, in the common room. You grow up by her and you expect to find her there, in common rooms—kitchens, parlors, dens—any voice-imbued interior designed and furnished to facilitate communion. You expect to find her centered there, dispensing. A drink, a bite, a bit of gossip, candor, a solicitation and considerate response for anybody’s next best word. I like to go where there is talk, she said, I like a chair to face a chair and not a fireplace or window. So where was she? When we entered through the vestibule, and listened for her voice, and sought her face out from the others, and when we finally worked the courage up to ask, we neither found nor could be given any clear idea where to find her. We found this one gray, and that one gray, and this one we found blue, and bluer, verging on a modish, pinkish-purple, my mother’s housemates permed and curled, teased, sprayed, fluffed, and draped, thinned and widely, smartly parted, bald. Too, we found plenty of cologne, and scents a woman wears when she must feel her life achieve its unappealable decline, perfumes that I imagined had been purchased by the quart, Lilies of the Nile, Passions, Obsessions, and Escapes, all of which, conducted through the florid pores of their suspiring skins, summoned to my mind insecticides and tall, cold cans of aerosol repellents. My mother’s scent. Her hair. Yet not my mother. Not her chair, nor her cane nor walker, no extrusive tubing, no, not for mother, no tank for her, no oxygen, no buzzbox, not a wire, not a brace or clamp or bolt. With mother, you saw no outward evidence of metalwork; the foreign bodies salvaging her person were internal. She had that bag. She gets those shots. She’s the one whose son provided her the flow-chart and the wristwatch with the pre-programmable alarms to keep her straight on colors, times and doses.