by Lee Gowan
But now I am old and no longer strong, and I have little time left to waste but apparently nothing else to do but waste what little time I have left. I spend most of my hours looking through this flyspecked window, watching John and his wife and their two boys crossing back and forth and getting on with the business of using up their lives. I watch a world I used to be part of, cut off from the land that was mine until I was stupid enough to give it away—my own stretch of earth that I sweated over for decade on decade on decade, and never a man to take my place in the saddle no matter how many nights of sleep I’d gone without.
What good is the world once it’s been sealed up behind a plate of glass?
The thing that hurts the most is that I did it to myself. Willingly. I cast my pearls before swine. I gave it all away to the son, believing, as I’d been told, that that was the way it was meant to be. Believing that it would provide me the time and the space to do exactly what I wanted to do: ride old Nitro, check the cattle, think about those better days. It’s a mistake you’ll find repeated throughout history. To give you one related for instance, the Indians gave away this land, which is the only reason I am here to begin with. They were as much fools as I am. Sure, you could say they had it taken from them, but in the end they signed it away, just like me. There’s little point in blaming your enemies for your weaknesses, even if your enemy is your own son. It’s a silly and sentimental idea to think of a son as anything but an enemy, so what use is there in blaming him when you discover his boot on your throat?
What I never would have believed if I’d found it written on the outhouse wall, I must confess, was the betrayal by my greatest friend and most loyal servant, old Nitro. He who had pulled me through a multitude of scrapes where I would have been pulverized under stampeding hooves or found frozen in the spring, clinging like a tumbleweed to a snow fence, was suddenly taken by some devilish spirit and galloped under a branch low enough to catch me square across the neck and wipe me clean off his back. The son found me lying under that tree twelve hours later, after Vern, the older grandson, came across Nitro in the barn, still in his bridle and saddle, waiting in his stall for some oats.
John says I’m lucky. It was a new moon and already deathly dark, and they wouldn’t have found me at all if I hadn’t managed to signal them by tying my bandanna to a branch and waving it around like I was surrendering to all the cruelties of the universe. My hip—according to the doctors, if you care to trust the words of men who make a habit of dressing in hairnets—was fractured like the dry old limb of the willow that caught me across the neck.
This gradual wasting away is what my son John calls luck. Well, if it’s luck, then I don’t deserve it. It’s not a prize I desire. And desiring is all I have left.
Any stranger might have already detected that my blaming of Nitro is but the weary rationalization of a sick old man, and that it was my own decrepitude that landed me here, in this La-Z-Boy that’s jammed in a slight recline, so that I find myself staring up into the sky and have to kink my neck to see the earth. I know all too well that the demon that urged Nitro under that branch has dwelt within his horseflesh all of his twenty-two circuits of the sun, and that it was only my mushy old brain that made me unwary enough to allow him to get the better of me, and only bitter and brittle age that allowed the result of his little practical joke to splinter my bones like kindling. I’ll wager Nitro was more surprised than I was when he looked back and saw me there on the ground, and I’ll bet my boots it was his fright at seeing his old friend laid so low that sent him galloping back to the barn.
That beast and I are of one blood.
Which is my chief worry at the moment, as I most certainly am my brother’s keeper, and I fear my brother has been ill-kept in my absence.
The small one let this possibility slip. My namesake, Sam the Younger, who, I must caution, has as much in common with Sam the Elder as an earthworm has with a rattlesnake. He is only nine, but already has a pair of plastic frames perched on his nose, the product of too many hours spent staring into that infernal picture box his father installed in the corner of the living room where the Victrola should properly stand. If the small one is not in front of the idiot box, you’ll find his nose in a book, or his ear tuned to the tinny blaring of a transistor radio some sadistically inclined jester bought him for Christmas. And, of course, he dresses like they all dress now: there’s enough denim in his trousers for three pairs, and when he walks across the corral his jeans flap like a matador’s cape—and then he wails like a baby when a tiny calf naturally becomes alarmed at all that flapping and kicks him a swift one in the shin.
The older boy, the one called Vern, dresses the same and has some of the same weaknesses—in fact, might even be blamed for instilling them in his younger brother—but at least he seems to have a bit of spunk in him. When I watch him cross the yard, I can see something of myself out there. But they call him Vern. Her father’s name. A man who I remember selling rotten bananas in that claptrap grocery store up by the highway back in the thirties. Who in hell names the oldest boy after the woman’s father? It ain’t right and it ain’t done; or it wasn’t until the world began to come apart and the women started dressing like men and the men started wearing women’s hairdos.
I suppose they named the next one Sam to try and sweeten me up. It didn’t work. When I face the child who is to carry my name on into the future, I am looking at a longhaired, four-eyed, weak-kneed, bed-wetting boy who is already old—who prefers to spend his days looking through glass rather than be out taking part in the world.
One might think by the way I’m carrying on that I have given up on the child. Don’t you believe it. Despite myself, I have a special fondness for him. I realize this soft spot is probably another sign of the rotting of my soul, and I’m only grateful to the useless excuse for a boy because he spends more time with me than the rest of them do, though I am well aware that his attention to me is nothing more than a consequence of the fact that my reclining throne is stationed in the living room, just opposite the television, making it impossible for him to partake of his narcotizing elixir without my resignation to his horrible need. It’s a pitiful bargain we’ve struck: I do my best to warn him away from the box’s evils by pointing out as many of its improbabilities as I can stomach myself to witness, urging him out the door every ten minutes, while all along trusting he won’t go away and leave his poor grandfather at the mercy of his mother’s whims. In return, the boy fetches what I need from my bedroom or the kitchen—be it whiskey or bread—and promises me he’ll go and help his father “just as soon as Bugs Bunny’s over.”
I must confess I have an affection for old Bugs. They can keep their Ki-yo-tee. They don’t even know how to properly pronounce the varmint’s name: it’s Ki-yoot, as anyone with half a mind should know.
According to his teachers, the small one has something more than half a mind, though their methods of measurement are suspect. So far as I’ve been able to decipher, the boy has nothing in the way of useful skills, and so I’ve taken it upon myself to teach him some. He’s my one remaining project: if I can save such a sorry soul, if I can temper his bookish and girlish mind with the hard lessons I was forced to learn, maybe I can still leave something significant in this world, something I failed to pass on to my own son. There’s the older boy too, it’s true, and he seems the more likely candidate, but he’s not so easily within reach. A bird in the hand, as they say. Yes, I’ve taken it upon myself to teach the sparrow a song or two. When his mother’s out of sight, I let him practise with my rolling papers and fixings. It’s little enough, but it’s a trick he might actually find use for some day, unlike algebra or reading about people on the other side of the earth he’s never likely to meet. So far, the lessons have amounted to a sad waste of paper and tobacco, but in time he’ll get the rope to hang down instead of up.
This afternoon we were in the middle of one of these educational sessions when the Chinaman who bought the McAllister place drove into
the yard and started talking with the son out by the barn. When I asked the small one what the hell that fool was doing here, he got all nervous and mumbled something about him buying eggs from us on a regular basis. I’ve only seen the Chinaman in my yard once before. A couple years back he showed up with a horse trailer, and it turned out the son had sold one of the mares to him, a gentle little thing called Willow that any fool should have been able to ride and keep happy. Well, I wasn’t too pleased about the transaction, but she was the son’s horse even before I’d signed the whole shitamaroo away, and so what could I do but tell him what I thought and leave it there. It wasn’t two weeks later that the phone rang, and since I was the only one in the house I answered, and who was it but the Chinaman telling me that Willow had tried to jump the fence and caught a hoof on the top wire and fallen, and as a consequence was in some difficulties. He calls himself an agricultural scientist, but he had no idea how to deal with the matter in a prompt and merciful manner. I scooted up and found her lying there, panting her lungs out with the pain but still trying to get to her feet, and the Chinaman standing by, shuffling from foot to foot, watching her suffer. He told me it was okay ’cause he’d called the vet and help was on its way.
“The vet? You might just as well throw your wallet in the crick,” I told him.
I walked back to the truck and got my rifle and fed in a shell and walked up to Willow and put the barrel against her forehead and pulled the trigger.
As I was walking back to my truck, the smoke from the spent shell still hanging in the air, Shanghai Sammy came up and started squealing at me about how she might have been okay and how I should have waited for the “pro-fessionals” and who the hell did I think I was, shooting his horse. So I told him that no “pro-fessional” was gonna save his horse and that he must have been torturing her something awful to make her jump over that fence and kill herself and that he was lucky I didn’t put him out of his misery too. Then I drove home and got the tractor and drove back up the hill to the Chinaman’s again and hooked a chain around Willow’s neck and dragged her sorry carcass to the burnhole, where I set her free from all China with a splash of diesel fuel and a match.
Well, you better believe the shit hit the fan. He was mad as hell that I’d burned his horse. Said she didn’t need to be shot in the first place and even if she did he could at least have used her for dog food. He threatened to take me in front of a judge for saving Willow another minute’s misery. Threatened to have me arrested for threatening his life.
Now, I know as well as anybody that Chinamen eat horses. It ain’t that I hold it against them: I suppose that poverty is generally responsible. But in the case of a man with a government job it could only be poverty of spirit we were dealing with. In the end, in order to get the fool to shut up, the son offered to pay him back his money. Well, damned if he don’t tell the son he’d just as soon have another horse as a replacement. I told the son that if he gave another horse to that slanty-eyed bastard to try and eat I’d sell him to the white slavers first chance I got. To which the son says that I can’t tell him what to do with his horses and blames me for “souring the relations with the neighbours.”
Anyway, that was two years ago, and I hadn’t in the meantime noticed any horses missing, so I figured the son and the good neighbour had settled the matter with money. Whatever they done, they must have since managed to re-sweeten relations, ’cause this afternoon I see the Chinaman out in the yard, and I ask the boy about him, and the kid spins me this yarn about him buying eggs, but meanwhile I can’t help thinking about the boys over there on the other side of the world being shot at by Chinamen everyday, while me and Young Sam watch them bloodied and dying on the black-and-white box, and here’s my own son in full living colour standing talking to the genuine article out in my yard. I’m thinking about that, but I know if I was to mention what I was thinking likely nobody would even see the connection. People have a way of refusing to see connections. Certainly Young Sam wouldn’t, and so I didn’t bother mentioning it. But I’m also thinking about the day Willow’s hoof caught the barbed wire, so instead of mentioning those men dying in the jungle I ask the boy to take an apple out to Nitro when he goes to help his dad, and the boy jerks his eyes up from the tobacco and rolling paper he’s managed to crumple into some kind of sorry paper doll, and he meets my eyes with his scared little puppy dog eyes and tells me he thinks maybe Nitro is gone.
“Gone? Gone where?” I say, and the boy drops the tobacco and the paper in the pouch and sets it on the arm of my La-Z-Boy, his hands shaking like a leaf in messy weather. He shuts off the television, sucking Bugs into that tiny white dot, and heads out the door, saying he’d better go and help his dad. He leaves me yelling for him to come back, yelling so hard I start to cough and cough and cough until I think my lungs are gonna come up into my lap, and by the time I get the best of that coughing spell all I can do is watch the young dodger crossing the yard the way I’ve crossed it a million times myself, except the small one never lifts his feet when he walks, so that if you look close you’ll probably be able to see his path as two parallel lines in the gravel.
He left me to sit here asking myself silly questions about who I’d be if I weren’t me, when I should be going out to that barn, crawling if I have to, and checking on Old Nitro.
The awful truth is that I am reluctant to go. It is easier to stay in this chair, staring out this window, and live up to my grandson’s name. Yes, I am tired. I am reluctant. If the truth be known—and I might as well state it, as the truth will always be known sooner or later, no matter how hard you try to hide it—I would prefer to sit right where I am until I die, and I would prefer that occasion to come sooner than later.
But this is 1970, and old men seldom get what they prefer.
And so I stretch back in permanent recline and do my best to travel off to a better day, a summer day fifty years past, a few days after a big rain, when everything was green except for the cuts in the draws where the runoff had chewed right through the grass. There was a glow to the world back then. I sit here stubbornly trying to restore the shine of it, but it’s painfully elusive. I begin with a sky that was as blue as the better skies now, and work my way down to the green, with only a breath of white dividing the earth from the heavens. I should point out that there was nothing all that special about the particular day I am trying to recreate—nothing special for those times. It was what anyone might have called an average day.
I was building fence. Had a load of split cedar posts piled on back of the Model T pickup, and I was hammering them in one at a time with a forty-pound maul. A mile of pasture, four square miles of fence, and this year’s chore was one whole side that Janson warned me needed to be done when he sold me the place—advising me that it was best to keep up with it a chunk at a time. But if Old Janson had been there to ask me that day, I would gladly have told the lazy old Scandahoovian that a mile was maybe more than should ever have been let go to rat-shit. A mile is a mean chunk of posts and wires.
So there I was for the sixth day in a row, hammering away at a post, then moving on to the next one, muttering curses at Old Janson under my breath, not really believing I’d ever see the spot where the corner post went, when what should come over the hill but my horse Dynamite, the grandfather of Nitro. The old stallion had heard me hammering away and decided to come and see if there were any oats on the truck. He flapped his lips at me the way a horse will when he wants to tell a man what a fool he is for wasting away a day by hammering bits of dead tree into the ground.
Well, it was too much for me. I dropped the hammer, went through the old leaning fence I’d left standing—I was building a few feet outside it, figuring it only made sense to expand your borders if you had to build fences—and swung myself up onto old Dynamite’s back, and he took off like a shot.
Oh, what a ride. It was the horse who was driving, not me. I hoped he was watching for holes. At first I figured he wanted us dead, and I considered jumping, but I decided
if that’s where he was going I’d let him take me. We were charging through some rosebushes, and a bunch of pheasants or grouse exploded up underneath us, and Dynamite reared, and I had to ride him back down to earth, smacking him on the neck with my right hand and only a hank of mane in my left and my knees gripping his sides, and all in a flash we were off again towards the crick.
There has never been a more glorious pursuit of happiness. I caught up to it that day. I felt the wind in my hair and realized I’d lost my hat.
In the end, of course, I had to ride back and collect my hat and continue with the hammering. When I picked up the hammer, I was still thinking about that wondrous ride and that bloody fence I couldn’t quite believe would ever be built, and all of a sudden I imagined myself in fifty years, sitting in a crippled La-Z-Boy, my hair white, my teeth gone, my backbone collapsed by all the years of hammering and riding, so that I’d be two inches shorter than I was that bright day. I actually saw myself sitting here, staring out this window, and I thought, “That old man will not recall a single moment of this day. Not one single solitary second. It’s too small. It don’t mean nothing. It’s just your average day.”
And, of course, I have always remembered that day, if only because that particular thought scratched my mind and stuck the image of it there, to repeat and repeat until I give up my average life.