Strange Cowboy (12 page)

He says, “Baby needs a nap.” He says, “Baby’s sad.” And, “Baby’s sleeping.”

“You’re not listening to me,” she says. She says, “Look. I said Hans is sweet on me.
I said he gets up from his chair, at least. The thing is that he looks at me, he moves,
he listens.”

So listen: She was seventeen. She said she was eleven, thirty-one, said that she was
twenty. She wore pointed shoes with pilgrim’s
buckles. She sang aloud, at noon, alone on crowded sidewalks. Summertimes, she walked
into the river naked, sat neck-deep in the flood and watched out through the reeds
while boys passed by on tubes and boats and fished and smoked and lied and laughed
and swam against the current. Suns set. Birds hatched. No scent or shade escaped her.
She was open to a song. A lyric moved her to resolve. Nights, in the desert, the fires
burned as high as churches. She sought there by the fire’s light the most aggresive
eye, prayed she might live out her years beside a man who caused in her the wanting
always to be seen. She said she felt herself to be exaltingly decided. Where was the
Nile, she said, the Euphrates? What was the sound she craved—a heel, at dawn, in flight
from love, and to it, a stroke on mossy stones, heard through a broken pane, a dream
of herself her lover wakes up missing, a scent and a sound of herself, passing, passing,
promised by a word and by a kiss will someday be returning. She was young. She was
long. She tapered. Men must wait on her. A man must wait at table; a man must watch
the clock; another, darker man must stand his hours in the sun, whistling at the sky
from down upon the blistered tarmac. There must be many, many men, a long, empurpled
wait. Rome, she said, was all she really ever truly cared for of my mother.

Once, she said—“let me tell you”—she received a postcard from a boy who went to France.
A museum card. A bowl of fruits, a knife, a rind, a bottle. He was coming well with
French. The women dressed in dresses. He himself was unafraid to wear a hat; he mentioned
his fondness for a supple glove. At the bottom of the card he wrote:
I embrace you.
She received the card by her mother’s hand. She was young then, hard to think, she
could blush to take the postcard from her mother and determine that the first word
written on behalf of her affections was
Cheri.
She read the card
where she received it, several times, entire, and then again, quickly, pausingly,
its opening and closing salutations:
Cheri, I embrace you; Cheri I embrace you.
She did not mind her mother, said my wife, until she saw a smudge of something kitcheny
encroaching on the margins of the card and understood she had been read. Her mother
loitered in the doorway, goofily omniscient, “spooney,” said my wife, for my wife’s
sake, for the sake of her mother, her mother standing in the doorway with her arms
crossed underneath her breasts, her breasts appearing to my wife to be the insupportable
expressions of a life consumed by folded sheets and meekness, a boney mob of thwarted
want a daughter hoped was not for her years to inherit.

“Letter?” said her mother. “What’s he say?”

“After that, when I grew up, I swore that I would never share a mailbox,” says my
wife. “I would have to have my own box, my own name, with a number, and a lock and
key.”

I hear her. I knew what garden. I have seen her river. She may stand before me, corduroys
and sweatshirt, and up from her I hear a velvet rush, her blouse, her hurry, the sound
come through the broken pane of her desire to escape me, and to return to me, the
inmate, tender traveler, me, Lincoln Dahl, husband, father, lover. Eventually, she
must mean to me what she meant, despite my reflex to defend against us.

Meantime, a husband lapses in his habit. He names his hours. Call this hour food.
This is the hour of work, to drink, of sleep. He looks beyond himself—a boy, a young
man, never to repeat his father—to his father. He lapses, relapses; he becomes a man.
Then one day he is seated. He is fogged. Nothing comes to him. Then a thought will
come where he is glad to follow, to his head, inside his head, gone, his body gone,
over there, in that chair, without him,
his body a respondent to a wife, a mother and a son, a mouth, a tongue, rote and droney:
Peas, it says, turnip, nothing much, 9:05, units-in, units-out, X, and X, and X and
X and X, a snow, it says, and no, and yes, and I will meet you there, in the sun,
where the calf is born, and the jonquil meets the bluebird. Kiss her, touch her, listen.
Too late? Too late? She is here, I told myself, beside me, there she is. I hear her,
hear myself, at a distance, a distance nears, a word is uttered, a time recalled,
I feel where I am most required. My child, mine, my wife’s child, ours, a child, a
son, our boy, a son, our oldest, simple story. Courage, I must tell myself: How would
you be read? Truly? Thoroughly? With humor, appreciation of an irony, compassion?

“Call me Pop,” my father said. He said, “When you get yourself in love, all the desert
is a present.”

Skulls, he meant. Bleached bones. A feather. He meant a tooth he carried in his pocket
to my mother from the splintered jaw he turned up on the refuge of a cougar.

Said my papa, “This one time—you won’t believe this was your pop, see—but this one
time I rode out with nothing on my head except for picking flowers.”

When I think of him, see us in the orchard, or his pickup, feeding winters with his
heifers, when I recall him in my room, come early, first thing in the morning to me,
I think I sensed his happiness did not derive from me. Not first. I think I understood
my father meant to tell me that his best days must predate me. I think he did not
know what he meant. I did not know what I understood. He came into my room, and somewhere
in the air he breathed I must have felt among the things he might have lost and did
not lose the absence of my mother. She was everywhere not there. Should I begin the
story rightly, and tell my son a truth,
I should say it felt to me as if my mother had been purposely excluded. My father
meant to beat her to me. I meant an end to him. He did not know what he meant, and
I could not have said what I had understood, yet I must have felt that I had somehow
come between them, my mother and my father; I rivaled, unculpably; my ascent was won
at my conception; he conceived me, conceded my ascent; we were unrivaling rivals;
he came into my room and I believe we neither of us felt that he was in his place;
when he knelt beside my bed, laid his hand against my back and waked me up and told
me that today would be my birthday, I think we understood that he was in the best
place given him to come to. He was happy. Happyish. He knew that I would sit his horse.
I was not too long surprised to see my father had it in his mind for me to watch the
sun rise from his shoulders. I do not recall his saying what I was to watch. He said
little. He said,
Hey, partner, wake up, it’s me, your pop, it’s your birthday.
He said,
Give me your foot. Hands,
he said,
syrup? butter?

“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Pop.”

I remember thinking that his eggs were dirty. Little flecks of dark, bits of stuff
that spread apart and darkened up an over-easy yellow. Cold hotcakes. Warm juice.
Hard butter. I nibbled and scraped, lagged and lacked. The light hummed. Something
up between us must have told him he would never beat my mother to me; he would never
wake so early; his place this early in a morning was alone. He did not bathe me. He
did not leave his keys in Egypt. He remained, and went out, his place was unstill,
not to bring forth, but to bring back, not to reside, but to return, fruitfully, with
news, and goods, with health and luck and cheer, victorious, gratefully usurped. There
I was. I was what he asked for. He tended to his herd, moved his water, mowed his
fields, and when the sun
set, and the wind died, and my father offered his return, he found my mother stooped
across his son, caring for him, for me, I was there, cared for, where my father meant
to make of his bones and shards a present. He kept them, his presents, in his pockets,
took them back and left them in the desert. He held them in his eye, in his mind,
he said, in the flights of birds and lengths of grasses he remembered. He meant to
show me.
There he was,
I thought;
Here I am,
he seemed to say. These were his presents, his gift; his place was to show me out
ahead of where I was, where I would come to, how I might be happiest beside a son
one day, a daughter. We ate hotcakes. Passed butter. He said less, and more, everything
I think he carried in himself with never saying, nothing. He welcomed me; he would
see me joined to him by passing through his wake. Though had he known he would not
see me joined to him, had he foreseen the briefness of his wake, would he have spoken
outright? Out loud? And would the names of the things he might have called to me been
felt by me more soundly than the names of the things he might have kept that day in
thought? Later, years on, after he would suffer his first stroke, my father told me
his was not the bigger world my mother meant to bring him into.

He said, “At first, see, I thought I’d get us all to Rome, all right. I was writing
bigger checks back then. Your mommy, you could see you wouldn’t fetch her with a chicken-in-a-bucket
picnic. She was wild about a horse, but you also saw she’d not be right unless you
sat her down to violins and caviar when she was finished with her riding. She taught
me courtesies. I was finer for it, you could say, the manners, but then you also could
have said that by and by I wasn’t. Made me nervous, how fast I couldn’t recollect
a wall as being anything except for where a person hung his pictures. Right off with
your mommy’s moving in, I see her stick a nail into
the plaster and the next thing is I’m looking at a picture of us in our wedding togs,
and did you know what, I liked it. I liked the one of the boat. Used to be, when she
would set those flowers on the windowsill, it felt to me like something I was meaning
all along to do myself. I never had at first the feeling in me I was being too horned-in
on. Felt more like I hadn’t been inclined until your mommy to much thinking. Thoughts
were in me, see, it’s just I hadn’t thought them out yet. That’s what I thought. We
think more than we think. Some folks think more on more, some folks think more on
a little. I didn’t know it then, but it happens I am a
little
sort, your mommy is a
more.
Wasn’t natural of her to save. She left lights on. She let meat spoil. Those pictures,
they cost. They cost money, and they also cost a person thinking. Myself, I think
it took you being born to let me know the more of me was right there on our place,
right out in the desert—plenty enough for me would be my horses and my sky. I liked
an empty wall, just a quiet place where I could come and sit and see back from myself
the things in me already there for seeing. Plain-old painted plaster. White. Wasn’t
any accident, why I hadn’t picked a flower till your mommy. Isn’t any accident, what
makes a person whistle while he works.

“Because what if your work was growing, see? Mine was to wake up mornings in the dark
and help a calf be born. Your hands freeze, and your feet, and that cow, she won’t
go down, and it’s dark and you can’t see too sure what you are seeing by your lamp—if
it’s one hoof out and one hoof back, or if you’ve got the hind end where you want
the front—and there you are, on your knees, out there in the frozen cold, at work.
Felt right. How anybody feels when somebody he loves is passing. You don’t know. I
couldn’t ever say was this one going to make it. What you have, you have a cow,
her calf, a rope, yourself. Something living needs you. I’m scared, see, and I’m cussing
that old cow for flopping down on me and cussing that old calf for turning blue and
cussing God for giving us a life that can’t lick dying. But when I get the body clear,
and the mama’s on her feet and bawling at me when I poke a stick into her baby’s nose
to set her breathing, it’s then I know I’m doing right. I know how to feel, you know,
if this baby lives, then I am happy for a little, and if she doesn’t, then I am sad
a little and I leave her for the coyotes and the magpies, maybe save the mama out
so she can milk the leppy calves and move on to the next one.

“Same way with the grass, now I’m thinking. Because did you know what, better than
your mommy’s flowers, better than her pictures, better even than I liked to birth
a calf, I also liked the grass. What I liked, I liked a dry field, see, spring field
where the sun has got on it enough to tease it up and burn it. Maybe just a few days
past its tender. Skinny grass, thirsty, yellowed up and crackly. I liked to turn the
water on it. I lay down on my belly and I watched that water break about the stems
and hurry down a crack in the ground and fill the crack and come again in tiny little
floods across the flatter grasses and then break again about the stems of any grasses
standing. I judged that if I was a big black ant, and I could stand up on my hindest
legs, then I’d be neck deep in that water, nothing deeper, see, not something so you
might start thinking
happy. Happy,
I thought,
this grass here is happy.
If you really watch, and you are young enough, you might see the grass there fatten
up, you hear it sigh and sing, girl-like, from the movies. Grass unbends, goes a little
limp and floaty. It’s grass. It’s a girl. It drinks and swells and by and by it stands
up from the water, aims itself at the sun. I was young, young, young, and I’m remembering,
but I believe I heard this blade there saying
yes.
I saw
it growing in a field of other grasses, whole fields, big green grass, tall as my
pockets. You could see in it wherever all the wind went. You felt it cold and wet
against your legs when you were walking. I saw as much. I saw it flower out and go
to seed. One blade. I saw it mowed and baled and burned back up and thirsting, everything
it used to be, and wasn’t yet, and was still to be again if we would feed it water,
well, I saw it.