Jernigan (3 page)

I thought about trying to find a saucepan and melting some snow on top of the woodstove, as if on an Everest expedition. Now there’s the real world for you, real factual information about what people do on Mount Everest. God damned good and tired around here listening to all this shit about how Jernigan only lives in his own head.

Thought, too, about trying to find some paper and writing to my son, asking his forgiveness. Oh, not for anything all that specific. It would be the thought that counted. Except what were you going to say after asking forgiveness? Pledge to do better? Right, I can see you now, doing better.

And then I thought about prostrating myself right that minute on the floor and just praying to be subsumed, if they were still subsuming people these days. The old
Not my will but Thine, 0 Lord, be done
. What I imagined I was hanging on to at that point I can’t imagine. Same shit probably that I’m hanging on to now. The people who run the program here say I have to give it up. But as a matter of fact, I already—though I haven’t told them this—I already made that surrender once, years ago. Sort of made it. The
last
time I found myself drinking a quart a day of whatever there was. Danny was two, screaming his head off about everything, and the walls of that apartment on Barrow Street were falling in on me, and an old friend of my father’s took me to his AA meeting. Sculptor. He’d once suggested, years before, taking my father to one. (You can imagine.) At any rate, I’d apparently broken into this guy’s studio and passed out on the floor. I was willing, at that point, to give anything a shot. Partly because it scared me that I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten into his studio. And partly for Danny, who hadn’t fucking asked to be born. They said,
Keep coming back; it works
. I did. It did. So there I was holding hands with everybody standing in a circle and saying the Lord’s Prayer, which I’d never learned as a child because Francis Jernigan was enlightened and my mother was an old party-line lefty. Well so of course I immediately loved the Lord’s Prayer. But later it began to scare me what I was praying for.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us?
I could hear an “insofar” in there,
the catch calculated to keep me forever unforgiven. And was I really ready for God’s Kingdom to come? I kept imagining a nuclear shit-storm. And of course eventually I became less keen on being led not into temptation. I finally got the thing down to
Our Father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread and deliver us from evil, amen
. And then I suspected there might be a catch even in
that
, that God could take it literally and you’d get nothing but bread. Anyway, by this time I was already telling myself Fuck it, you’re on top of it again so so what’s the big problem? I started having a beer once in a while and nothing terrible happened. So why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, I told myself, and hope you squeak by.

They hate this kind of thinking here.

But who
isn’t
just hoping to squeak by? Uncle Fred? Fine: let me tell you about Uncle Fred. This is Midsummer Acid Idyll Part II, okay? We’re up all night tripping and so forth and so on and we get back to the trailer in the morning and so on, this part you know. So we go into Uncle Fred’s room. Starting to come down, but hours from being able to sleep. And as the birdies sing outside the window, Uncle Fred explains to me exactly how he’s going to kill himself. He’s going to come up here in the wintertime, walk into the woods far beyond human earshot, chain and padlock himself to a tree and then toss the key away into the snow. He’s got the chain and padlock there under his bed! He lifted a corner of the blanket and dragged them out to show me. So just remember that the next time Uncle Fred greets somebody by saying
Stand and give the password
. Or any of the rest of that hearty horseshit.

And in case you think that was just adolescence, here’s another Uncle Fred story. Two summers ago I was up at the camp for a weekend. Or three, I don’t know. I know it was when Judith was still alive, because I remember how quick Uncle Fred and Penny were to accept my bullshit explanation of why she’d decided at the last minute to stay home with Danny. At that time Uncle Fred had added a boombox to the amenities, and a bunch of Merle Haggard and George Jones tapes. Country music for the country: you’d have to know Uncle Fred to see that what he was doing was parodying the whole idea that things fit together. Except that he’d also started to like country music. Penny had gone to bed and we were sitting outside
drinking Jack Daniel’s under the bug-zapper. No other light but its purple glow, and a crescent moon just above the hilltop. Stars. We’d brought the boombox out, and Merle Haggard was singing a song about how a shrink gives him a Rorschach test and the inkblots look like broken hearts—kind of strained, I thought—when Uncle Fred announced that he, Uncle Fred, was an apostrophe. I thought that what he meant was
apostate
and I asked for some clarification on that. “It’s like I’m what’s there to show that something’s missing,” he said. Then he leaned forward and vomited. When he sat up again, he wiped his mouth with his hand and begged me to get a shovel and cover over the vomit so Penny wouldn’t know in the morning. Which of course I did.

Well, the boombox didn’t seem to be here now. Either thieves had gotten it or Uncle Fred had taken it back to the city. But sitting down on the sofa again I felt something and I reached under me and found the empty plastic case for
Serving 190 Proof
. It made me want to hear Merle Haggard’s voice. I had my Walkman here somewhere, unless I’d left it back in the car. I thought about getting up and starting to lift sofa cushions and shit, looking for the tape itself. But the point is, here I was wanting one more fucking thing. And I could see that after that I was just going to keep wanting the next thing and the next thing and the next. Imagine thinking this was the end.

II

1

The Fourth of July had come around again. Even now, at eleven in the morning, you could hear firecrackers. Tonight, as dogs howled, they’d be setting off the big display over the lake.

Judith died a year ago today.

By way of commemoration I was going to mow the lawn and watch the Yankee game and try to figure out the evening from there. Oh, I know how bad this sounds: okay, fine. So what do
you
think would have been appropriate? There wasn’t even a grave to visit. Her brother, Rick, had remembered her saying once that when she died
she wanted her ashes scattered off Montauk Point. She was probably half in the bag, assuming Rick hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing up. But once he’d said it, we obviously had to do it. Now
there
was a day, the day we drove out there to scatter the fucking ashes. Day after the funeral. We had to walk with this cardboard box for what must have been a mile of beach looking for someplace where there wouldn’t be a hundred people on blankets watching you do this thing, which I think was against the law to boot. Just me and Rick along on this one. I thought it was something Danny could skip: he’d been taking the whole thing so calmly that it was scaring the shit out of me. By the time we found a spot, we weren’t really that near Montauk Point anymore. Even getting the box open was more hassle than you’d expect—I ended up cutting through the tape with the Powerful Pete on my key ring—and then the ashes didn’t scatter much, since there were chunks of bone and stuff and neither of us wanted to touch it with his hands. So I just kind of threw it out toward the water and some of the ashier shit came back down in a gray heap on the wet part of the sand where the waves didn’t quite reach. We didn’t know whether the tide was coming in or going out; if it was going out, the stuff was going to have to sit there for another eleven hours. Or was it another twenty-three? So I took the edge of my hand and brushed from side to side and they sort of smeared and we got the hell out of there.

Anyhow.

I went into the garage to get out the lawnmower, and there was my father’s old scythe hanging by its blade from a spike in one of the studs. I hadn’t had occasion to touch it since the day we moved here, when I drove the spike in, hung the scythe from it and steadied it with a fingertip to stop its swinging. Today I felt pity for the thing (yes, yes, displaced) and took it down. I hunted around for the whetstone, then spat on the blade and started honing, using the stroke he’d taught me: not back and forth, but going in little tight spirals, spitting and honing. A technique handed down, doubtless, to my father from his and so on. Unless my father had read it in
Popular Mechanics
or something. (He used to like
Popular Mechanics
for the pictures of machines, and the men wearing ties in their home workshops.) I will be
the last Jernigan, most likely, to know the Jernigan scythe-lore. Which might go all the way back to when the Jernigans were landless scum in whatever dismal county it was. My father hated all that wearin’-o’-the-green crap, wouldn’t even have Yeats in his library. Embarrassed, of course, by
his
father. Grandpa Jernigan. About whom I remember only the old Studebaker he drove, the liquor on his breath, and being taken to his wake and getting scared he was really going to wake up. So naturally my father hated having a grandson named Danny. The name was Judith’s idea. She had a dead uncle or something named Daniel, and I didn’t care one way or the other. At least not until that Elton John song came out about the scar that won’t heal, and by then Danny was a year or so old. At any rate, my father used to greet him by singing out “Oh Dahnny Biiy!” in a Dennis Day tenor. And then he wondered why Danny never came to visit.

He was giving me the scythe, my father had said, in honor of my coming to my senses and getting out of New York. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t dare use the son of a bitch anymore.” Talking about his heart.

“It’s a God damn tract house in New
Jersey
,” I said. “What am I going to do with a scythe on a quarter-acre lawn?”

“So what’re you doing pissing your money away on a place you don’t
like?”
he said. “Find yourself some handyman special in Westchester or something. Rockland. Something with a
little
charm to it. Christ’s sake.”

“Right,” I said. “You price any handyman specials in Westchester lately?”

“All right, all right, it
has
to be Jersey, then. All right? Then you look for something on one of your older streets, even if the house itself is a little run-down.”

“Pop,” I said. “Forget it. I’m into the degradation, you know?”

“You think you’re kidding,” he said. “Here, you better take this with you anyway. It’s a nice old thing. Even if you just hang it on the wall and think about mortality, for God’s sake. Hell, you’ll have
my
place one of these days. Then you’ll need three of these sons of bitches to keep ahead of the God damn sumac.”

I was wiping motor oil onto the now-silvery-edged blade when I saw Danny standing in the door to the breezeway. “Hey Dad?” he
said. “You got a minute? Can I just play you this one neat thing?”

The anniversary didn’t seem to be getting him down any, though with Danny you never knew. If he’d forgotten—though how could you forget the Fourth of July?—I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up. But wasn’t it my fatherly duty to draw him out about what he must be feeling? But on the other hand, might it not be my fatherly duty to shut the fuck up and let him handle it his own way? Certainly that was a more comfortable view of my fatherly duty. I followed him back into the house. In his bedroom, he handed me the Rockman I’d insisted he get as a condition of having an electric guitar in the house. So now I worried that he was deafening himself with the earphones. And worried, too, that I was a bad father for trading his hearing for my tranquillity. Such as it was.

“No way,” I said, handing it back, afraid of a blast of noise God knows how loud stabbing my eardrums. “Put it through your amp, why don’t you. Let’s hear what you got.”

“Sure, great,” he said. He unplugged and replugged cords; the amplifier gave an echoing pop, warning of the vast deep silence about to be filled.

“Just not
too
loud, right?” I said. “The old man doesn’t have mutant ears.”

He picked the guitar up off the bed and slung it around him on its strap. “Okay now, watch,” he said. “I just learned this. Ready?” And he ripped off an ascending snarl of notes, both hands tearing away at the strings. It certainly sounded plausible. Even exciting in that cheap way.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounding good on that, big guy.”

“Yeah, but did you see it?” he said. “What my hand was doing?”

“What was I supposed to see?”

“Watch me again,” he said. “No, look. Watch my
right
hand.” I watched, trying to ignore the godawful studded leather thing on his wrist, a gift from his little girlfriend. He played exactly the same sequence of notes again, as far as I could tell. (I’d wondered the first time if it had just been some random gabble spewed out any old way his fingers had happened to move.) “You see it?” he said.

“What am I missing?” I said.

“That last note,” he said. “To get it you have to come up
here
, see, with
this
hand. That’s what’s normally your picking hand. But you could never get your left hand all the way up from here to here that quick.”

“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” I said. “How come you don’t want to be in a band?” Mistake: asking Why Questions was just a way of giving people shit. Judith and I had learned that in cognitive therapy. One more thing we’d tried.

Danny said nothing. I stared, as I always did when I was in here, at his poster of blank-faced Elle Macpherson just about to rip open the front of her bathing suit. A Grecian Urn for the Dannys of the world. Well, at least we hadn’t made him a homosexual, although of course I knew that you didn’t
make
someone a homosexual. But thinking about Rick you wondered if Judith might have been carrying a homosexual gene or something that was in the family. I was relieved that it had stayed recessive (if it existed) although that was wrong too, to feel relieved, because homosexuality was just another way of being. And this guitar business was something else to be relieved about. True, he was getting C’s in school, but sitting down and actually working out something like the little move he’d just showed me argued that he wasn’t without some self-discipline, and that his attention span was all right even though I had taken LSD and he had watched so much television. Who knows, maybe the guitar might actually get him something. Oh, I know better than to think it’s all emperor’s new clothes and that you can be a rock-and-roll star without any talent whatsoever. But neither do you have to be a commanding genius; we all know that too. So why not Danny? And all that watch-me stuff: he seemed to be enough of a ham to get up in front of people. So why
wasn’t
he in some little band? And why wasn’t it all right to ask?