Strange Cowboy (4 page)

I saw the snow stick to his glasses, the pinkish stub of tongue between his missing
teeth begin to turning purple. He squinted. His eyes leaked, his lashes froze. A stranger
to the boy might say that he was suffering. I redirected him by the shoulder, sent
him off
across the frozen ground before me. He dragged his feet, his arms hung, his neck was
shrunken in his collar.

I hollered to him, “Your mommy says you’re getting bigger!”

I said, “She tells me that you have a birthday!”

But I did not suppose he heard me, for his hat, and for the wind or distance, anymore
than he had heard me rapping through the window. All the same, I hollered. It seemed
right, that I should holler. I called after him, asking him if he had lost another
tooth yet? And did he know I used to ride a horse? I told him my name, too, was Lincoln,
that I, too, was coming up on five once. I started to follow him, then held my hand
to shield my eyes, when I saw his mother squatting in the doorway to receive him.
They waited there, in the doorway, watching me approach them. They sized me up. They
clutched at one another, untrusting, jumpy-seeming, stunned, I thought, to hear my
voice assuming passion. I, too, was stunned; stunned and thinking, Does a father smile
now?

Later, I would tell my wife that we embraced, my son and I, or not embraced, exactly,
but had taken hold at least of hands, or not of hands exactly either, she amends me,
but only of our gloves. In any case, we had made our new beginning. We wiped his glasses
off. We got his nose blown. Jointly, we boiled water for a cup of chocolate. I made
no comment on his slurping, his breathing, or his teeth; I did not demand he try to
keep his tongue in. I was cordial, I told my wife. I provided him a napkin and a spoon.

I said, “Nothing in the world the matter with a hot dog.”

And, “Your pictures look real good there, on the fridge.”

I asked him if his face still hurt.

I said, “Is it tingly?”

I had him hold his face above his steaming cup, and told him I thought pretty soon
we’d get him into shoes a little bit more
regular. We discussed his Hot-and-Cold dreams, and I confessed to having had these
dreams I called my Light-and-Heavy. I assured him they would pass, I told my wife,
without informing him of which dreams would replace them.

“We made it to the bottoms of our cups,” I told my wife.

And then I said, to my son—after I had wiped the chocolate from his upper lip, and
from the corners of his mouth and from his nose and chin—I asked him, as nearly in
the jokey spirit of a father as a man can muster, “Well, then, so it’s true? It’s
true, son, what your mommy tells me? You have got a birthday?”

Naturally, I never doubted. You take the party hats away, then I remember. Unbake
the cake, uninvite the guests, undress the boy from bowtie to shoeblack, from his
silky socks to his suspenders, see him, naked, bent, stretched, susceptible, as I’ve
described him, and how do we forget a child has got his birthday? In a better life,
maybe we shake hands, my son and I; maybe, as we speed nearer to his date, I see my
son come dragging up to me, his sticky hand extended, his face congested with the
weight of his intention, my son wishing only just to say his thanks to me for having
had him.

“I’m glad,” he says, “I don’t deserve it.”

Of course, we have yet to come into that better life. I sit, think, remember, do not
suspect this story here will reckon much into the Outside past my mother, my wife,
my son and I, the arid lands and silent heights which circumscribe us. In retrospect,
I believe that I could find myself someday among those men who feel their better lives
are left behind them; I believe what really killed my father was the Outside coming
in.

“Even town ain’t town,” he said. “This one time I can tell you Tommy York is ready
to sell out, he’s feeling so behind of life, all
because a full grown child did not know what a crop was.
Crop,
says Tommy. Crop. And the child, six feet tall, he can’t tell Tommy if a crop is
corn or ore or if it’s something having more to do with hairstyle. Crop, says Tommy,
it would used to be my favorite word.”

I sit and listen for crop, my papa. I listen for my wife and son. I was five, just.
I listen and I watch for Mama, my first considerable reminder. She is there, dead,
or not, seated just beside me. Or I see her through these past few weeks there on
the bookshelf. Or the carpet. I see my mother in the ceiling where she gets herself
ganged up, a vision I might make out from the waterspot of dirty knees and hog slops,
a round and thinning woman, stooped, straightened, stooped, a brunette, graying, white
and whiskery and bald. She bore a child, she will remind me, buried a husband. It
is Bonnie Dahl, your mother who you want to ask about a party. I hear her gather in,
align herself, find a breath sufficient to her purpose, a conduit sufficient to her
breath. She will perform, exhalingly, will not be stopped, has extracted from the
great privation of her life a reason to believe she ought to stand forever forth on
stage before a sympathetic public. I am Mother’s public. It’s in me she lives. It’s
me who will anticipate, dis- and reassemble blocks of sentences from which my mother’s
past, her hopes of having any future influence in life, she says, will one day come
to rest. Yes, Mother lives. She complicates. She precedes my wife, obstructs my father.
She is the unacknowledged origin of our most turbulent domestic echoes: Fix the roof,
mend the fence, tell the boy a story.

My mother says, “I’ve lived, you know.” I can hear her, from that chair, from her
bed there at the Home, she says, “You might not believe it, but I could save you all
a pretty penny on this party, if you’d let me.”

She says, “You owe me your good looks, you know.”

Very often she reminds me she is dying.

She says, “I am dying. I keep having dreams, and in them I am dying. Only then I live.
I remember one year when I had these dreams, and didn’t die, and after I got through
the year I felt a whole lot stronger. But that was twenty years ago. I’m dying again.
Everything is gone. I’m going. I don’t have another thing to leave you.”

She says, “I was wishing you had had a girl.”

“I depend on you,” my mother says. “Be strict,” and, “Don’t forget me.”

She begs to be invited. She alludes to favorite cakes, strategies my son might put
to use for pinning tails on donkeys.

She says, “Folks out here are having birthdays too, you know.”

She says to me, “Tell the truth now, what made you want to name him Lincoln?”

She is quick, my mother, unrash, a surger and a natural. I think the lapses in her
monologues are timed by ghosts of ovaries, the musk of female intuition. She knows
I lose my appetite to hear the food cart squeak across the dining hall; I nearly weep
at sudden laughters from the gangs of bonesacks gathered in the recreation room to
watch a match of ping-pong. I hear the players falter, skip, accelerate, and cease,
and then the laughter, and applause, and then the nursemaid or a friend and relative
of someone telling someone else he’d better take it easy, or she’s maybe seen enough;
I hear the voice of health, a fulsome cheek and callused palm lay hold upon a rusted
ball-and-socket, saying, “It’s getting late now, Mr. Gabriel. I think we’re getting
tired. We ought to take you to your room now, don’t you think so, Mr. Gabriel?”

My mother waits, lets the line go quiet, feels me, I believe, becoming Mr. Gabriel.
I am recalled, vexed, resentful of the players and the hand I feel that urges me to
sleep. There is no
we
in the bed she’d have me come along to. I am alone. Gaunt. Salted. Dry.

I ask myself, Who the hell is Mr. Gabriel? What afflicts him? Is he really going off
so quiet?

“My God,” my mother says. “Excuse me. Oh, I sometimes feel so guilty, sweetheart.
Do you think I’m being over-Catholic?”

She is, I think, she isn’t.

I wonder how should I know?

She sits here with me, across the lamp stand in my wife’s recliner. I pull the boy
in close to me. I listen. From him I hear the little breaths, shallow in the chest,
dewey soundlings from an unarticulated life. But Mother, a riper child, from her you
hear the long desires swarming from a life too short, too mean, too burdened, too
frightening, I think, desires too true to herself for her to have the nerve to live
them. Yet she lived. She threw me a party. I was five. She rises from herself. She
busies, swarms, I listen...

“Oh, you know me,” she says, “I’m your mother. I’m your nuts-and-boltsy sort. Yours
were nuts-and-boltsy parties. Rule number one,” she says, “you can’t afford to hire
out. You take the Dangbergs, same as the Tolesruds—all the folks that one day or another
lost their places—they were always hiring out, buying on their credit. Robbing Peter
to pay Paul. I says to your daddy—bless him—I says,
Mark my words, those Dangbergs are on a fast track to the poorhouse.
Those billboards advertising slot machines: Ninety Nine Percent Payback? Well, here’s
a secret, sweetheart—you give them time they’ll kill you just as dead at one-percent
as fifty. I know who pays the bills to light those lights. I have got a friend
here at the Home named Vernon, who his son sometimes will pick him up and drive him
clear to Elko, and at the top of Pancake Summit, just before Golconda, Vernon says
that nowadays a person sees the lights from town as bright as sin from there, says
that you can tell the Owl Club from the Comstock! That’s the devil’s debt. You don’t
need it. I said to Amelia, I says,
What we did is kill a cow and barbecue our ownselves.
But she wouldn’t hear another word of me but said they had arranged to have their
party catered. Very hoighty toighty, like:
That’s a dear idea, but we have settled on the sweetest little Irish girl—the one
who did the mayor’s banquet?
I says to your daddy,
Lincoln, it isn’t decent, it isn’t right. Folks don’t want to see your quarter, if
all they have is just a dime.
We, for one, your daddy and myself, we were embarrassed. Ours was just a party in
a barn; ours was help-yourself. Mind you, we were young yet. Folks had fun at our
place. But you forget yourself, I think, when a combed poke in a dinner jacket comes
around and offers you a morsel you can’t say the name of.
Gravlax.
If you were me, then you felt old. Old and shabby, tired. I thought,
The help looks fancier than I do.
I didn’t know enough to put the onions with the fish eggs. I thought,
If you are going to make a show of it, then you had better eat these cheeses.
But I couldn’t. Beats me why so many of the finest things in life have got to stink
so bad. You wish you had the time to get the hang of it. Or money. If all I had to
do was sit around and criticize the furniture, then I could learn to like a stinking
cheese, I could learn to eat my meat before my lettuce. I was not alone, either, I
can tell you that much. Ruby Langley told me,
It sort of makes you sorry for your children, don’t it?
And she was right! After I had got off feeling sorry for myself, I felt sorry for
us all. From our sorry little garden, to our town car, to your daddy’s dirty collar
and the bowtie Joy Maquirquiaga asked me if it was the
same one you were wearing at your birthday. Oh, it’s green and spiteful of me, but
I was proud you were so pretty, next to Owen. I thanked God to watch you walking.
Next to you, he looked so, so—Owen looked so goofy! I’m not awful, am I? Am I bad?
You won’t remember this, but I didn’t even tell a soul about the time the party was
for you, at our place, and Owen crapped his pants! Amelia comes to me and whispers
in my ear if I have got an extra pair of pants,
Owen’s had an accident.
Well, I know how it is, when a child too old to crap his pants has crapped them.
Three times, he did it! Lord, I thought Amelia could have pulled the poor boy’s shoulder
from its socket. I says, pretty timid like, because I know Amelia, I says,
Amelia, what all do you feed him?
Looking back, I figure she was likely stuffing him with fish eggs and those cheeses.
Your daddy swears that he himself had got the squirts from eating too much liver mousse,
and your daddy was a man a pound of prunes could never loosen. It’s what killed him,
don’t forget. Stoppered stone-dead on the toilet! But Amelia, after she tells Owen
he had better stop his crying, she says,
I feed Owen same thing you feed Lincoln
! Either way, after half an hour of the la-de-da at her place, I would have spread
the word from here to Kingdom Come,
Psst—Owen stinks
! Lord! And, what’s more is she—but maybe I am being blabby. He was a boy the same
as you were. But is a boy a boy? My. I have got so old. The doctor says I oughtn’t
get my blood up, he tells me I should think of Lincoln Senior. I tell the doctor,
My husband was a seether. He might be with us here today,
I says,
if he’d’ve let a little steam off. I am hale,
I asked him,
aren’t I? And isn’t Lincoln dead?
I says,
What the difference is, if you want to know the truth, is that Lincoln was a man who
when he barked his shins against the running board would satisfy himself by saying
Uh-oh.
Not so nuts-and-boltsy, that. He jumps up out of bed, you know,
and I see him standing there against the window, looking out to where the barn is
burning down, and here your daddy’s saying,
Uh-oh.
His head was in the clouds, I tell the doctor, he had a crazy passion for his manners.
He was a dreamer. I don’t say he was afraid of muck. You could catch him with his
arm up to his elbow in the rear-end of a heifer almost any night through calving.
What it was, I says, is when he lost a calf he never cussed or punched the air or
kicked a fencepost, but only maybe dropped the piece of straw he’d used to poke the
nostrils of the calf with, saying,
Hmm,
or
Ah,
and
Well, we’ll get her next time.
I told the doctor it could make a real good study, if a person gathered up statistics,
comparing who dies when. I am not a woman given much to wagering, but I would bet
my bottom dollar that your dreamers die off sooner than your nuts-and-boltsy sort.
Look at me. I come from a family of cussers. If we felt blue, why, we said blue. Same
for red and black and purple. Did I say green? At Amelia’s party, did I? Oh, I was
so jealous. I don’t care. I’m old. It’s hell. I feel like a sack. The other day, for
kicks, I pinched the skin up on my cheek and lifted it a solid inch above my cheekbone!
You think you will be ready, well, you are not. You catch a little cancer, get your
teat cut off, survive it, then you think you’ve seen it all. Here’s a secret, sweetheart:
You have not. There’s still the bag for you to poop in. You get to lose your hair
still. And your teeth. But I says,
Vernon, I will gladly trade you every tooth here in my head if you will swap me your
intestines for this poop sack
! Oh, but we have fun. We have got our checkers. Parcheesi and what-have-you. Did
I tell you Vernon won a second place at the Wheelchair Jamboree? Nearly killed him!
But I’ll tell you what, he won a pile of money. Nobody that sees him ever bets on
Vernon. Old pencil neck, old spaghetti arms. He bet on himself. It’s in the head,
says Vernon. Long shot fetched him fifty greenback
dollars! And he bought me chocolates! Vernon says to me, he says,
I know you’ve got a tooth in there that’s sweet yet....
Lord. Ah, me. Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart—I don’t blame you that you don’t
come out and see me. Your mother is your mother. But here’s another little secret:
Next to nobody was dancing! They’d hired out this big band from the city, and folks
were standing all around the dance floor like they were a stranger to their feet!
I remember I was talking with Grace, Grace Dendari, and she took a little something
off the silver tray, and I could see she’d left off listening to me, and was worried
how it looked, a gal as big as she was, with a drink in one hand and another napkin
full of food there in the other. Personally, I was thinking that it didn’t look too
good, if she was looking for a man at least. Which she was. Poor Grace was always
looking. So what she did, to try and cover up, was she put the whole thing—a pizzette
type of thing—into her mouth at once, and I tell you, it was hot! Smoking! I told
her, I says,
Spit it out
! Well, she did, and then she stood there with this half-chewed pizzette spit out
in her napkin and she fanned her mouth with it and then apologized her head off. Then
she cried. I took her to the little girl’s room and she cried some more and told me
all her life she thought she’d meet a man for her at a party just like this one, and
here it was, and here she’s spitting pizza in her fist, and another party just like
this one wouldn’t ever come again, and I don’t remember what all else. The usual.
Worse. She was a sap, all right, but I blamed it on Amelia, who had got the dumb girl’s
hopes up. And it wasn’t even all that fancy. Grace had been to your party, which it
maybe wasn’t gloves and gravlax, but I thought she ought to see that this was only
Emmit and Amelia’s place, after all, some of us had been here. Wasn’t Emmit only Emmit?
And Owen only Owen? And Amelia, wasn’t she the one they caught down at the Bi
Rite, switching price tags on a dust mop? You forget. Give a man a silver tray, make
him wear a pair of gloves and you forget. She left the party early, Grace did. Then
the Tolesruds, too, left early, and the Smiths. The Irish girl, the caterer, she started
turning loose the help. My heart—should I be ashamed of it?—it felt a thousand years
much younger, to see the band boss ask Amelia should they quit now. Emmit tried to
tell her, I heard him, he said,
This thing is costing us an arm and a leg.
But Amelia looks at him as like to say she’d break his arm and leg before they cost
him, and so Emmit leaves off what he’s saying, and I’ll be damned if old Amelia didn’t
keep that band till after we all left. And we were last to leave! Your daddy, he kept
telling me to round you up and we should go now, it wasn’t decent, to watch Amelia’s
heart break, but I couldn’t help myself, anymore than Vernon could have helped himself
from looking at those lights from Pancake Summit.
Bright as sin.
All that food! And the band! And you kids there, wrestling on the dance floor. Oh,
it was so lonely! It tells you something, how a person celebrates. I thought I was
her friend. She says to me, when we were leaving, she hugs me tight and tells me,
Oh, Bonnie Dahl, you are my only friend.
Poor Amelia. Amelia Rebecca Dangberg. I wonder—is that Jewish, Dangberg? I know something,
something, plus a
stein
is. Rubenstein, Finkelstein, like that. But a
berg
? Amelia Dangberg? I wonder what she was, before she married? She could have been
an Olson, I suppose. Some thought she was called Levine, could have passed for French.
She wasn’t from here.
My life,
she’s always saying,
it is a tragedy. We’ll lose it all before it’s over...
Flighty, is what I say. A person needs to bite his tongue, he needs to hold his ground
and grin and bear it. Look at me. Do I complain? Did I ever say I suffered any more
than anybody else did? Some days you just wake up and you say,
Uh-oh, there goes that teat, uh-oh,
there sure goes the other.
No one ever promised me intestines everlasting. Sure you fight and cuss, but when
the folks you fight are dead and gone, well, then it’s God you’re cussing, you find
you’re fighting and you’re cussing your own life. Life is not cussed. Life gives,
life takes. Get born, have a party, end of story. In the long run, says your daddy,
the best thing was for us to write the Dangbergs and to compliment the food and music
and the decorations and to thank them. So I did. Still, he was a fool, your daddy,
he was every bit as proud as I was. Truth be told, I didn’t want to go, the next year
when she threw another party for her Little Lord He Crapped His Pants. But your daddy,
he says,
Get the boy his bowtie; we’re going to the Dangberg’s.
Well, I got your bowtie, and I shined your shoes and fetched you your suspenders.
But ask me did I go? Go ahead and wonder if I ate pizzettes that night, or if I ate
my own good Christian cooking. My daddy always told me,
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
He was very Biblical. He could really quote his Bible. It’s from him I learned that
God made up a woman from a rib of man, from Adam. But it’s also from my daddy—Daddy’s
smarts—the way I figured out He didn’t mean a woman’s coming from a rib would make
her any less than what the man it came from was. Because, I asked myself,
Where on earth did God get Adam from
? From mud, is where! And since when, I ask myself, did mud mean any more to you than
what you tried to never step in? Or where you saw the hogs wallow? I says to myself,
Who ever got you, Bonnie girl, to believing mud was any more than what you told a
man to knock from off his boots, before he came into your kitchen
? It didn’t take me long to figure out I’d rather be a rib than be a mudpie. I thought
I’d just as soon not need a God to breathe my life in me the way that Adam needed.
Because Adam needed. In my opinion, Adam was a sap. Honestly.
I never told my daddy this, but the way I saw it was—the reason for the rib and all—is
that God felt sorry for the man, because he couldn’t make a baby. This business with
the chicken-and-the-egg was always pretty clear to me.
There has always been a woman.
All that talk about the rib is talk. I think God prefers His women. If you look there
in your Bible, you will see He takes a lot more trouble saying how He got the woman
going, compared to how He got the man, and any mother knows it is the child who troubles
her the worst she ends up loving best. If you go slow enough, and be a little nuts-and-boltsy,
a girl begins to see things. She’d like to meet God’s mama. Myself, when your daddy
said for me to get my dress on, I told him I had seen enough the last year. I was
not about to spit my food into my fist. You looked fine. I saw you off. I’m sure that
I was wearing my old sweatshirt. But, listen, sweetheart, out here at the Anchorage,
did you ever hear the nurses compliment my posture? Did you ever see me duck my head
to eat my soup? I know when to fight. I know when a person says his uh-ohs. Did I
go to Amelia Dangberg’s party? Oh, my. Take a look around you, sweetheart, and ask
yourself if it’s your mommy, or your daddy who is living?”