Strange Cowboy (22 page)

Through science, possibly, an immersion in the Universal Grammar, through an early
introduction to the classics, maybe, mosaic, paints and sculpted stone, perhaps, I
believed that I could etch into his brain those several contours whose extensions
through his life might find for him a haven in the Everlasting long forsaken by his
cohorts. I believed his life could “matter.” His death, as I conceived it, would be
the tragedy to raise against the deaths of tens of millions. I believed that where
his cohorts saw an outrage or irrelevance in Shakespeare, my son would see an invitation
to a
greatness. His learning from Pasteur would not conclude itself with milk. He would
not be bound by Newton, nor would he mistake himself in Einstein’s relativity, nor
the color-coded lachrymals and dentines or the various articulations he would see
depicted in his Gray. I studied up for him. I had fun. I clipped jewels I robbed from
dictionaries of quotations, thought to paste them to his nursery walls and ceiling,
build a mobile I might hang above his crib, loose assemblages of pith and time-entitled
moment.
The name of the slough was Despond. Life is too short to be small. Anybody can be
good in the country. The wink was not our best invention. A little sincerity is a
dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. Every stink in the ventilator
thinks it’s Don Quixote. Some things aren’t funny
.

I devoted mornings to athletics and the manly arts. I hung a backboard in the driveway.
I learned at last to know for certain which was meant by horsehide, which by pigskin;
I learned a balk from a pickle, a pop-up from a routine fly to right. By November,
I could troubleshoot a chainsaw. This was the fall when it was possible for me to
enter any Sunday beerhall, belly-up and cheerfully extemporize the virtues of a worm-driven
motor. I asked questions: Was Carnegie a great American? What went wrong with Caesar?
I read the life of Beethoven, and learned how Beethoven, on his deathbed, had thought
of his precursor, Haydn, and I hoped that there might come a man as great as Beethoven
to think upon the monuments to life recorded by my long-dead son. Think of it, I thought,
a man of genius and passion, come to marvel at a picture of my son’s house—my house!—just
as Beethoven had marveled at a picture of the house of Haydn, saying, “See the little
house, and such a great man was born in it; here was once a great man’s cradle.”

These were the times I last surprised myself, and was surprised I could surprise myself,
and I believed that my paternity would reinvigorate my faith in life’s white promise
to surprise, its infinite occasion to remake me.

Whereas my wife stuck closer through this time to home. The singularities she saw
for us and for our baby lived within the passage of a lunar month. Week by week she
read to me from books we thought had somehow used my wife as their example. Hers,
we thought, was the premiere stigma, hers the premiere Mittelschmerz; together we
impelled the premiere blastocyst to journey up the uterine canal, where it would burrow
into the wall of the uterus and undergo each weekly possibility of growth my wife
had read to me through its trimestral days as fetus. Can anyone have known, before
our son, how early on in life the neural groove is sealed? In my wife there were developing
the Optical Vesicles of optical vesicles, the Limb Buds of limb buds; right now, we
said, right now, we were the distant witness to the fusing of the heart tubes; we
believed that through my wife we heard the Heart of hearts’ first murmurous contractions.
It beat. It lived. It endured through threatened and inevitable, incomplete, habitual,
and missed abortions. One week it accrued to itself spina bifada, other weeks it suffered
cystic fibrosis, toxoplasmosis, Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s chorea. It grew hair. It grew
eyebrows and eyelids, its pancreas grew competent of rendering sugar. It swallowed.
It heard. It quickened. It was Lincoln Dahl, the junior. All tests placed it at the
apex of the norm. Its arrhythmia was exceptionally standard. My wife’s became the
pregnancy to which the questions bothering all other pregnancies throughout our county
were directed. How much should a woman worry blunt thracymia? What risks did she invite
by lunching on irradiated meats? What made a woman glow?

My wife believed she was the secret we were born desiring to recover. She recentered
us, our orbits, hers, mine, our town’s; my wife and I declared our pity for those
natives of the arctic, who must live their lives suspended in the darkness and the
chill of circles turned beyond the spark of her mysterious enkindlings. Truly, we
agreed, to see her coming was to see the sunrise, to see her leaving was to sorrow
for the passing of another day. We remarked the several instances of persons asking
whether they might rub my wife for luck. We recalled the woman who confessed to an
inordinate attraction to the lustre and the body of my wife’s unribboned hair. “Makes
me sick,” the woman said. “It’s scary.” Lovely, said my wife, she felt lovelier than
ever, wiser, more serene. This was the word from the pharmacist who filled out her
prescriptions, serene. “A mind reader,” said Grace Dendari. “How’d you know that I
was wondering why you didn’t get more fat?” Intuition, said my wife, she felt completed,
wholer, moved as if from undividedness to undividedness, as if she could not see without
her seeing being one with comprehension. She saw and she wept as she believed that
Jesus must have seen and wept. She gave a dollar to a dirty urchin selling kittens
in a parking lot, baked bread for the seniors, nursed a bird, shared a plate, coaxed
a grin, listened unimpatiently to ceaseless counsel from my mother. My wife converted.
She asked Father Mac if he believed that Jesus would have made a Super Mom, had Jesus
had a child or been a woman. She said for Father Mac to keep his chin up; she had
a sense; she saw people coming back to God and Nature.

She offered herself as proof. Her sense of herself. A natural divinity. A creator.
She had come back to herself, drove out to the desert once alone to build a fire and
to look upon the stars and learn what dreams might come to her through several nights
with
nothing save the earth and sky above and underneath to interrupt her. Out there, she
said, she stuffed her pillowcase with mugwort and she dreamed most memorably of a
ruin. In this dream she had no child nor any expectation of a child. She walked, and
when she thought what people were it seemed to her that she had never known a single
person. She could not say to herself what people said or did or what a person looked
like. She could not finish herself in talk. Talk fell out of her in remnants, tailings,
slag she rushed about throughout her mind to rescue from a swelling heap of prior
conversation. Something precious was being said. Up there, it seemed to her, away
from her, in her head, past that wall and around that corner, discards, a word, an
impurity, unassemblable, it fell out of her, she said, this word—
eyes
- and what were eyes, she said, what precious thing was being said of seeing? She
could lift a brick. She could pull her finger through the dust she found on any sunsplit
windowsill and tell herself,
A sill, a window, here a person leaned and looked and thought what precious thing
? What must a person tell herself? What could a person whisper? She pulled a finger
through the dust. In this dream she picked a doll up from the rubble and she had a
vivid, uncompleting sense of the child who held it. The doll was cracked and matted.
The room was roofless. Sand piled high up in the corners of the room and vinous, thorny
weeds spread out across the floorboards, though in the child’s time, in this dream,
my wife—who had never seen a child, nor a doll—my wife could hold this doll and know
the doll was once uncracked, combed and straightened, the care-thing of a caring child.
My wife recalls she listened, and she did not panic, and was calm, and she heard what
she could hear of caring and a child, and then she put the doll down in the rubble
where she found it and she listened further and believed that what she
heard were promises, bits of vow and curse and hope, a living syllable recovered from
a speech the child invented for the doll where they had played together on the oval
rug, on a Sunday, in a patch of winter sun, where a palsied woman rocked and muttered,
and a man embraced a woman on this swing, and a woman wept here on this stone, and
a warm breeze blew up from the west and brought a scent of rain across the playa to
the soul who stopped to breathe it from his labors with this shovel.
This ditch must be dug,
he said.
A rain is meant to fall.
This is the sense of what my wife had heard.
Not for nothing that I weep,
the woman said;
I cannot be this rocking, palsied body. Every day will be this Sunday,
said my wife.
There must always be this patch of sun and oval rug on which we meet. We will not
part, we must not pass, I will comb your hair and guard against our lives and love
forever.
How did they say it? How was it true? My wife walked, and in this dream she said
that she was calm and knew that soon the words she overheard would merge and shape
in her so she might say with those disintegrated voices she collected from the ruins:
This is who I am. This is what it means for me to be here.

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.