by Sam Michel
The light cast briefly on her face, then passed her face, and in the dark I felt the rend in Mother closing when I asked and she could not recall the Russian’s name. The French name, when I pressed her for it, was a name she said she always had some difficulty in pronouncing. It was a lot to ask, she said; she repeated she was old; she thought if I would not be “half so pushy,” then the names would come to her; she said it was a lot of life here she was trying to account for, a lot to ask a woman I would not have asked except the woman was my mother.
I said, “What about the Little Lord, He Crapped His Pants? If you have been to Rome, then where are all your relics?”
“He’s mean,” my mother told the boy. “Is he so rough on you all?”
And yet I meant no harm. I had a story, too. All this day, other days, for weeks I think before this day, months maybe, maybe years since I first saw this child and understood I was a father, I have been trying here to tell the boy this story, recount a day for him that was for me the first remembered and the most enduring time through which I could sustain myself in the belief that all I saw was me and mine and all for me and could not be or ever once have been without me. I was needed. My mama and my papa, my guests, the desert hills and all its creatures I had loved—it was possible for me to feel they all were needing me to be there.
I drove, moved us past the town lights to Golconda. Traction was poor. The road was slow and steepening. The snow fell out before us as a tunnel, surging, closing down and opening up, white, and whiter; you saw out to the hood of your car, not out past your windshield and your wipers, then out and far enough again to guess the pavement from the ditch, the shoulder from the sagebrush. I hunched myself against the wheel, gripped the wheel and pulled at it as if I meant to strip it from the column. I did not think that either Mother or the boy took note much of our local danger, nor my effort to preserve us from it, nor the folly I foresaw in seeking out a view upon a snowbound summit.
I said, “I helped you set the whole thing up, remember? You had those seating cards. Don’t get yourself mistaken, that was your advice, don’t get yourself mistook. And you taught me how to bow, except, did you know what, I never really learned. I think partly why I never liked to dance was how important you said bowing would be after.”
I told my mother not to worry, I wasn’t blaming her about not dancing, dancing wasn’t me, I recounted for the two of them my thinking even then that dancing was for sissies. I drove on, recounting, too, the sawdust and the plywood, refreshing my mother with the memory of Poplar Juan and Uncle Ikey, Grandpa Al and furze, any salt-and-peppered dish or sour custard I believed was capable of contradicting Mother, failing to observe that Mother had retired from entertaining any contradiction. I pressed and pulled the wheel, felt us on the verge of cliffs and drifts, the riverbank, the hayfield, any greater solid than ourselves with which we might collide before the summit, and Mother wasn’t listening. Of course, if I myself had been more thoughtful of the summit, the idea might have come to me much sooner simply to pretend our having finally achieved it. No vista in this weather favored any other vista; the view from the top must be the same as the view from the bottom; any sense of privileged seeing must in any case be ours to bring about. At any point, I might have said, Here we are, and not been disbelieved; I might have quieted myself, left my mother and the boy a little nearer to the heights they had achieved before I started speaking. As it happened, I did not quiet, no, but drove and talked the two into themselves until their eyes descended several heads beneath their sockets and I understood their view must reach no further than the unlit skin that stretched across the ribcage.
“Almost there,” I got to saying, “almost there,” and, “here we are, we made it!”
I turned the dome light on, rolled the window down a crack. I commended the air. I asked the boy if he would like for me to roll his window down so he might put his hand out. He seemed not to want to. He seemed, along with my mother, to be carved of pine, sapless, lamps out, wind-pocked and shellacked. Stiffs, I thought, two stiffs now, three, if I should count the dog—one stiff dead, one dying, one unwarmed as yet to living.
“Mama,” I said, “here we are. Isn’t this the place you wanted us to come to? Golconda,” I was saying, “Pancake Summit?”
Failing to enchant, failing to revive. I stepped out, thinking to revive myself, at least, avert a further failure. There we were, in this pullout we had come to, a carwide swath of level ground where drivers could attend to their disasters free from traffic. Flat tire, radiator, transmissions, squabbles in the backseat, emergencies of nausea and urination, a feeling in the driver’s heart that he must pause, regroup, extract himself from motor-speed, recover to himself the still, atomic core from which he feels himself erratically disbanding. Too many irons and fires, I was thinking. Too many fathers, too many mothers, wives, and children. One of each. One of anything—a Humane Society, an Anchorage, a dead dog and an angry neighbor, a barn, a mailbox, and a ceiling—one present, one future and one past, too many and too much for me to govern in conjunction—each scent, each promise, wound, and color each discrete, and pulling outward, calling me away, and away, each away and outward from the other.
I stood a time outside the car and felt myself, the outward pull unspinning me; I stood out there and felt unspun, slowed down, the voices and the images and thoughts I heard and saw that day dispersing through the falling snow, coming each to rest, I felt, each thought to a flake, each fleeing voice and whispered image coming finally to rest, cooling and reposed, crystalline and falling over me again, onto my head, my shoulders and my arms, over on the earth where I might gather them and bring them back again to an enchanting, potent order. I saw Mother wave a gossamer scarf from the upper deck. Papa on his belly to a blade of wetted grass. Papa taller, saddled, he and Whim set out to gather. My wife, too, I saw, dressed in a cotton print, sitting by a river where she read a book, looked up from her book, closed her eyes and laid her head against a hollow in the silvered driftwood where she fell to sleep and waked up unalone and unremembering who she shared the shore with. I saw my son call out and lean and work the runners on his sled as if my son and speed were fast companions, unstuck from the level ground to which his age, his hands and eyes confined him. I saw myself in him, my son and I as one, careening, riding level ground through wild descents of seeing, and reseeing, my son and I revived, reenacted, able to act, acting, reenabled. I scooped the snow up from the hood of the car, I could do that now, used to do it all the time, I thought, thinking, Yes, well, pretty fun, a snowball! What you do, Dahl, is you take and shape out snowballs round and hard and packed together tight enough for throwing. You throw one. You watch it out into the dark and throw another. That’s your shoulder you feel, throwing, you can throw your shoulder out, remember? You blow into your hands. You stamp your feet. You pack another snowball and you pick a target. You let her rip. That’s how. Let her rip. Have a little fun. From the hips now, Dahl, you make a whip there, mister, shoulder, elbow, wrist, you let it fly, you snap it off, you really want to wing it.
In this way, or in some way very like it, I was made to wing one. And then I winged another. I clobbered a roadsign and a fencepost. I forgot myself, my volume and my tone, my frame of mind, I cleared the windshield, got back in the car and headed us, perhaps a bit too eagerly, downhill.
I suppose I hoped I would be seen as something of a hero. Athletic, after all, a performer for my mother and my son of a profoundly moral, spontaneous transformation, a Houdini of oppressive moods, a kid, at least, at heart. I had a pretty good arm. The snow, as I saw it in the mirror by the domelight, made a pretty, curling frosting of my hair. Next to them, I was bigger; I seemed to have assumed my bigness, gently; I suffused a human rendering of nature, beneficent and elemental. Was I a man to talk his mother out of Rome? Would I begrudge a boy a circus? Could they hope from all they’d seen that I might come around at last to asking their forgiveness? I acted. From here on out, I thought, I would dedicate my
self to words and deeds of restoration.
I said, “Mama, what did I do ever nice for Pop? Tell me more,” I said. “About the clowns, how about? Did we hire a clown, or was a clown just uncle Ikey?”
I was warming up, then, I think I was sincere. I drove us and I did not have the feeling anymore that we were playing games. My mother was old, and earnest, sicker than I thought, more deeply interrupted. This was not the time, perhaps, for a forgiveness, neither mine nor hers, not the time for an apology, an enthused contrition. Yet was I as serious, earnest, really, as a mother? Was I really seeing all that I am saying? I sat in my chair, today, this was, not so long ago, and saw another boy completely, a wheezy, stump-tongued creature, club-footed, excessively mucosic, an impossible, in any case, a catastrophic permutation of my seed—did I say that? Each succeeding birthday cause for his diminished celebration? Get the boy a nose job. Keep him in correctives. Was this me?
“Tell me more,” I said, “tell me more,” and when I understood that no more would be told, not soon, not by Mother, not by son, I said, “Okay, a little peace, then, here, a little quiet.”
Yet I could not keep quiet; I did not understand. All day long, I thought, I had been talking to myself, no kind of talking maybe, yet a kind of talking, no kind of listening, yet listening, a kind of hearing, a listening to myself, myself overheard. I did not understand myself. I could not resist myself. My day, this day, its perceptions and its memories, its distillations and its forecasts rose and formed in me, sailed and sunk in me without expression, uncontested. I repeated. I sifted, cycled, could not align myself, a mood in my wife with the thought in my head; I despaired that there might never come a day my son and I would each be hearing from a clear desire if I should call him sweetheart. I could say it now, say, sweetheart, and yet I could not. I was afraid the boy would fail to hear me; afraid my mother would insist I was too late. And yet by now I needed anyway at least to speak; it was as if I had been gaining to myself an irreproachable momentum; as if months and years in me of running-starts could finally not be turned away from leaping; if I should die, if I should die, my body, I was thinking, was a mailsack stuffed with unsent letters.
I drove. I took better care. To talk.
To say, “I think I’ll call it quits on the Humane Society.”
Or, “We’ll leave off Hope at Hans’s, see if he can keep her in his freezer.”
They made it easy for me. By their silence I began to see that I could say whatever thing I wanted. We made our turns, ploughed our way against the storm, and with the storm, and then again against the storm and to the butcher’s, and the glimpses I could fill out from my mother and my son appeared to me to be as trackless and as white of judgment or suggestion as the snow that lay before us. Whatever thing. Anything. I went ahead and told the boy what I intended by the freezer. I asked about my mother’s medication. I said maybe I would take her home with us tonight, dial the Anchorage for her, call in well, pour her out a good, stiff drink. I thought to lure them, I suppose, startle them into speech, though neither son nor mother were prepared as yet to say a word. I kept talking. Wrecklessness, abandon, an uncomplicated swell I felt at the root of my crotch, surprised to say, directed my mouth; I followed; I led; I spoke in low, coaxing tones, in chords and single notes, in gallops, trots, and canters, epigrams and anecdotes, reportage, biography, and idiot confession.
I don’t know but I felt really, really good.
I said, “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”
And, “Silence is golden.”
And, “I’ve always been a talker.”
I said, “Furze. One thing I keep coming back to is old grandpa Al’s furzebox. Listen, Lincoln. Did I tell you yet about your uncle Ikey? Guy who did the stunt with dental floss? Guy who let the sheep in?”
We were closing in here on an end. I hurried us. I was taking care of the dog. I could see the boy was thinking, trying to recall if he had ever heard of furze, perhaps, and if not, then what the sound of furze must mean it looks like, the size of the box it came in, and its shape, its texture and its odor. He was me, a boy, after all, I saw him sitting up, rising up inside himself, same as mother; they were looking through their eyes now, out, I thought, at me; I was a charmer, I was thinking, not unlike the gray man sitting on a clay floor with his whistle, erecting snakes from pots by strains of whistled stories. I knew this story. I knew the way. Through the dark, through the storm, to the butcher’s, and to home, to roof and to walls, to fire, respite, chair. Here I went, then, and here we were arrived to Hans’s! I parked the car. I told my mother and my son to wait right there. I crossed the lot. I found the place locked up, lights off, no note, shut down hours prior to his posted closing. I returned to the car, reported on our luck, assured the mother and the son that all was well, I had a plan, and drove us.
Well, how swift, I thought, the days must seem to men of action! How absented of longing and regret, fulfilled in promise, how narcotically performed! A man could cross a lot. He opened doors, closed doors, drove his miles and said his goodbyes and hellos to pretty faces. He packed himself. Stuff rushed in. He rushed through stuff, eyes open, mouth open, open-handedly, grabbing, letting go, his day a striding dream of brass knobs and pavement, cutlery and hems of skirts and handshakes and a key. He touched, glanced, dismissed, replaced, moved on through chips and beams and wires, by satellite, by accident, recovery, insights and oversights, hindsights and fore, a life evolving from the everyday parade of semi-directed nexts.
And my life, I asked myself, this day, what had it been, how much? How could I turn myself around, in ratios of thought to hard stuff? Was it too late, were the hours insufficient to reclaim the day to action? Were we too tired? Had I worn us out, I asked myself, could anybody bear to look at me and listen? I hoped so. I leaned on my wit. I recognized myself in terms of a financial indispensability. I could browbeat them with blood, as my mother browbeat us with blood. I was the patriarch, the household’s head, what could they expect to do without me? Who, save me, the father of the boy, could love the boy as Father?
I kept talking, hypothesizing on the butcher’s whereabouts, suggesting to my mother and my son that maybe Hans had swallowed down some tainted meat. I drove. I invited them to comment on my driving, tapped the brakes, sent us into safeish, playful skids I meant to simulate a frolic. We left the lighted districts back behind us. I turned us onto O Street, shifted our attentions to the charms along our block of Christmas cheer and landscape. Blinking lights, multi-colored, the single-colored, classy whites. Windows trimmed, and doorways, gables, eves and porchrails. Plastic Santas, plastic reindeer, plastic elves, a plastic creche. And underneath this snow, need I remind them, the green prides of our town, the clipped green squares of grass and dormant bulbs of summer? Leaves lay resting in those limbs; the green buds clenched and slumbered. Soon, the county plow would come and clear our road. Soon, the sun would rise again and see me hail my neighbors through the sparkling airs, a shovel in my hand, in their hands, too, a shovel, our warmth in work and greeting floated out from us in crystal-ridden plumes.
“O Street,” I said. “If you want to, tonight, you can stay with us.”
My mother looked at me, turned around to face the boy as if to know who I described when I said “us.”
Act, I told myself, keep us moving here, talk, park the car, get out, go around and help your mother. Sure, I meant to help her. I meant to help the boy. Tomorrow, we would bury Hope, find the boy another dog, his own; I would expose myself to the mercy of my neighbor. If the sun shined I would paint the mailbox, mend the fence, knock the snow off from the roof, strip the shingles, find the leak and fix it. Yet was I serious? Consult the wife? Mix the frosting? Surely, the boy and I could sit down on the kitchen floor and lick the beaters. Spoons and fingers in the beater bowl. Tousled hair, a woolly cap, jacket, snowpants, sledding. Was I serious? Would he look at me, speechless, his face arranged to ask me, Are you kidding? First step was to take a step. Take my mother’s han
d. Thin hand, light thing, hollow-filled and birdy. Tough old bird, I thought, tough old bird, she came along, kept her head down from the snow, pushed her shinbones through the snow without complaint.
I told the boy, I said, “Hopey will be fine there in the car. She’s a brave, good dog. We’ll take care of her, first thing in the morning.”
I kept us moving. I tried not to think. Not to slow down to remember. I was talking. Uninvented scenes, some lived, some not, lines from dialogues, spoken and unspoken, images and phrases fastened onto things before me, as if whatever thing I told or thought to tell was free of me, and lived or would be living through my mother’s hat, or through my son’s left mitten, as if the hedgerow were translucent, and the hayloft I described to them was shining from behind the matted branches. Translucensies, I thought, superimpositions. Anywhere I looked, the housefront, the sidewalk and the streetlight, there I saw whatever thing I had been saying, heard whatever thing was said, saw Grace Dendari chewing on a slab of roast, saw my papa’s thumbs hitched in his pockets, heard my mother asking did Amelia Dangberg need another glass of punch. Was this what it was to act? Sure I thought that this was acting, seeing. Yet I did not know how a person came to such a seeing. If I recall the day’s successions, one state from another, I find fatigue, and hunger, health, poor health, too many green pills, too few red, an ample wife, a silent son, a cloying need, desire. Perhaps it was this simple, to desire, people wanted. I wanted to feel as I felt, see as I saw, say as I said, act as I was acting. Here we came, up the walk, home at last, husband home with child to wife, how could she resist me? Should she rip the fabric from my chair because I had returned without an antidote to Hope? Should she cut the cushions into pieces, burn the frame and sell the springs for scrap for having brought along my mother? My wife, too, was a mother. She must see my place, my necessity, handsome Papa, hand-in-hand-in-hand, a family man, humbled, heightened, taking steps.