Strange Cowboy (13 page)

“That was wanting to live. If a painter off in Italy could paint it any more alive,
then I supposed I wouldn’t have the back to see it. Still, you live and you live and
you think you might get braver. Or else you think you might not need to. Myself, I
thought your mommy might quit wanting what she wanted. I thought maybe I would keep
your mommy happy just enough to keep her still, until she saw that what we had was
plenty. That’s why the pictures on the wall and why the flowers. More, too. Those
parties. Things not mine or me, they came on in and I got crowded out, and when I
saw it so I told myself that there was time for me, my time would come, even though
a person knows it doesn’t. Isn’t time for both the being brave and not and thinking
you will keep on needing not to.

“I know I loved all wrong. I don’t know how to love, had a stroke while I was waiting.
Funny I was not surprised. Saw it with you. Day you were born. Here you come, there
I go. Mother Nature. She needs the room, She takes you. Take a person who believes,
then God makes room enough for all of us in Heaven—but earth, earth’s what I was seeing
when that doctor came and took you from your mommy. I wasn’t seeing any Italy. Wished
I could. Wished I could have said that Rome would help me live a little more, a little
longer here on earth by being someways nearer up to Heaven, but did you know what,
what I saw was insides.
Your mommy’s insides. Doctor told me not to look. But I told him I had seen as much
in cows. But that doctor said I hadn’t. I said I figured if it came to it, then I
could sew her up as well as he could. But that doctor said I couldn’t. You haven’t
seen it all in folks until you’ve seen it all and when you have that isn’t happy.
Doctor lifted you and gave you off to me and where you were were tubes and sacks.
A person wished he’d seen an angel in there, a dry white room, clean white walls where
on them was a secret message from the Everlasting. You saw enough, and not enough;
you wanted more and knew you had too much already. Clumps of jelly stuff and too much
color. That wasn’t what I thought was living. But it was. And it was happy. Happy
so I didn’t want to give you over to your mommy. Happy so I got right on the telephone.
Broke out the cigars and freezer meat. Recall I felt most often in a hurry. Wanted
you to have your own room, your own bed, wanted you to hurry up and dress yourself
and come on out and help me bale and sort and move the water. Seemed you would be
living on your mommy just about forever. I kept not seeing any time for me.

“And there wasn’t. I waked you up. That would be my time with you. The best time.
You were five. I could pick you up and hold you still and also we could go around
alone together. Seemed like next day was the stroke. Never trust a man who plans his
life as like he’ll live till eighty. That man isn’t honest. He’s me. There I was,
see, happy as I might have been, and I could pick you up and hold you for awhile and
let you ride my saddle, and then the next day I have got the doctor leaning over me,
telling me I’ll likely wet myself forever, and I have got the feeling in my head that
what he’s telling me was not like something being heard, but more like something I
remembered. Something I knew. Something I had seen. Where you came from in your mommy.
I saw my time, sure,
and did you know what, from that very first day on, I remembered that I also saw for
every time I held you, I could have thrown you down; for every time I went to wake
you up, I wanted you to keep on sleeping.”

Yet he waked me. By his breath, its sound, its pace and odor, a bluish-yellow color
he exhaled and showed me parts of him he only partly lived and had not lived at all
yet. He made nothing up. He included me in his life by setting me far enough apart
to see it. He must have thought that he would live to see me married. I would have
a child. We would be increasingly complicit. And yet he must have known that we would
not be. I would always want a cleaner egg from him. He would neither take us to, nor
meet us coming back from Rome. Even then he must have known that we would lose our
place. His breath, his posture, the way his posture let him breathe was what a five-year-old
could tell you: Our place was lost; Daddy wanted me to see our place and someday maybe
help him save it. But the butter was hard. The hotcakes were cold. I tried to spread
the butter with a rounded knife and tore my hotcakes into sticky pieces. I scraped
and ate them from the dirty yoke. I wanted Papa to be eating too but he had eaten
once already. I thought if he would want to wake me up because it was my birthday,
then why would he not also want to help my mama with the party. But I knew why. Papa
held his cup up to his face and watched me try to eat and by his shoulders and the
sound of his breath in his cup I knew he meant for this to be his party for me, his
way for us to celebrate my being born and being here together. But he could not touch
me. You could see he hurt to touch me. Pop. Poppy. Poppyseed. I did not think he cared
less when he said less; I believed that someday I would hear him saying more. His
care
fell off the side of him. He chased it. He had yet to catch himself. I watched him.
A blueish-yellow. Hazelike, like dust.

“I surprised myself,” he said. “Wasn’t my idea till I saw you at that table that we
might go see a sunup. You were picky over eggs. Nearly put you back to bed. I was
scared, see, things meant things to me. Didn’t want to see them not mean anything
to you. Mornings, when it’s frozen yet, or when things have got a lick of dew on them,
and haven’t started yet to perc and sound, that’s when things for me would mean the
most. Miss Wright, you know, say I’m going down to milk—got my can, got my oats—and
here I pass the schoolhouse and it happens I will hear Miss Wright, reading from our
English how a lady rides a horse. There’s five of us she’s reading to this year, and
four of us are boys, and none of us is following too much the lady on the horse because
we all of us would rather follow Miss Wright. It’s winter out, and warm inside, and
Miss Wright, something with the lady on the horse has made her want to leave off reading.
We don’t know what it was, because we weren’t listening, but then she’s looking up
at us as like she’s got a question, something she would like to know from us from
what she’s read that she can’t ask. And sure you would have given anything you had
inside your pockets if she could have asked and you could answer. Miss Wright. You
wanted always to be grown enough to call her Margaret. You wanted always to wash the
chalk off from her hands, ask her was there not a man she could have married. She
wasn’t old. She was pretty. You could not have said exactly why, but on the days she
started coming to us with her hair down, it made sense she read our English standing
up and looking out the window. Seemed to me that any child who found a way to listen
to his Miss Wright while he looked would know the best there ever was between our
sexes. For me, she was alive those
mornings as she ever was when I was just a kid before she left us. But if I said to
you to listen, what could you have heard? There’s threads of her still stitched to
me. Blood-threads and bone. The more the time, the thinner the thread. No, sir, I
was thinking, sure it was your birthday, but I wasn’t taking you to show me what was
left to me were ghosts and whispers.”

I was five, a birthday boy, and nearly forty. My father, in that kitchen, underneath
that kitchen light, he was a disappointment, no larger off from me than was my mother.
Hers was Rome, his was grass; I think they both had seen me as an easy way to keep
themselves from what they really wholly wanted. He wanted me to ride his horse. Whim.
Of all the names we gave to horses, Whim’s was truest. Whim, I thought, our smartest,
fastest, smoothest horse; I was to “wait right there” while Papa fetched him. A gray
horse, he was white. In the dark, saddled, monstrously calm, I thought, when the kitchen
light fell out across his eye, there he stood, I was to ride him. Papa’s horse. Papa’s
Whim. Days I watched my papa saddle Whim and ride out from the barnyard. Days I followed
to the fence and waved, propped my chin up on the pine-pole gate and saw them moving
sprightly in a single-footed trot to gather. That was size, forever-youngness and
the way-to-do-it.
Here we go,
they seemed to say,
hurray for us, yippee.
He let me stroke his nose, Whim did. He let me work my finger through the one side
of his mouth and feel around to where the bit lay in his teeth, where the oats were
warm and wet between his teeth and I could smell a smell from there like something
of my father’s. Like Papa’s coat in winter, like Papa’s arms in summer. He pushed
his nose against my belly, and his breath came at me warm and wet and ticklingly and
sort of red and even bigger than I thought. I thought how big his lung was and his
heart. I wondered if I also smelled to him like anything of
anybody else’s. When my papa lifted me to sit me in the saddle I can’t say for sure
if I was ready yes or no to sit there. Papa lifted me, and then he stepped up from
the stirrup, made his place behind me. This is what my papa was, where he best began,
I think, when he first waked me. Himself, Pop. We were outside now, in the dark, stars
out yet, traces yet of snow, an old snow and a heavy frost you heard beneath our hooves
when Papa touched his heels to Whim and set us walking. Our house shined silver-white,
and the tackroom, too, was silver-white, and the schoolhouse, smaller each time I
would look around to see the barnyard, was also silvery and white and seemed to me
to be unsolid, underwater-like, I thought, against the blackened windrow there of
poplars. All things dark and tall were black and flat, cut-outs, liftable, it seemed
to me, though I knew you could not lift a windrow, not a poplar. I knew seeming. I
knew a rock was still and only looked to move as rocks would sometimes look to move
in creekbeds, not a dream, not a cutout you might pick up from the night while you
were sleeping. I had slept. While I slept, a lamb was dragged off by the coyotes.
In the barn, the rats chewed holes through wooden kegs, the pigeons walked the rafters,
Losivya made her milk, the cat lay on the rim of the trough and licked her paws, waiting
on my papa. Who kept watch? Pop watched. He drove off in a pickup. He drove off on
a tractor. He rode away on Whim. He went and rode me with him. He showed me. Pop’s
job was to keep in place the things I could not see that I would come to. He did not
say so, perhaps could never say so, but he knew, it was a simple thing, his knowing,
it was everything, the next thing, one thing following another to a view, a path he
said he had forgotten we could follow up the hill behind our house to watch the sun
rise. He said he had his doubts. Yet I do not remember doubt. I remember ease and
power, steadyness
and horse-warmth. I held the reins. I rose up in my skin and felt as if I crossed
myself, repeatedly, as if I were charged, volted, as if I were an alternating current,
crossed across my skin and back, outside myself, and in again, crossed and quickened,
dizzied till I could not say of any moment whether I was wholly out or wholly in it.
Nothing stirred save us. No bird sang, nothing of a cloud to tell of weather. We rode
higher, climbed up to a wider open. The brush thinned, the sage shortened, you could
make out nothing taller than my father’s knee. I leaned back into my father, reached
up and put my hand against Whim’s withers. I recall I wanted then to be my father.
I wanted not to sleep through nights. I wanted my breathing to have in it the feeling
of a horse’s hooves on rocks and frost. I might speak, and in the time before I spoke,
and after I had finished speaking, anyone could know that in me were the lives of
calves and grasses. I held the wind inside myself, and might let it blow, or not,
and might rather calm myself, gather in my clouds, build a rain inside myself, torrents,
floods of lightning flash and thunder. I might shine. The sun could yet be in me.
We rode, and though I can’t recall how we had come to stop and wait where we were
waiting, I do remember while we waited feeling that I did not gauge my father by my
mother’s absence. We were high up, on the rim of a basin, a blackened bowl, miles
wide—who knew how deep—across which I could see the blackened ridgeline of a farther
mountain. These, too, I thought, the mountain and the basin, were the flattened cutouts
of the world my father watched while I was sleeping. Soon, I thought, they would be
rounder. The basin, I was thinking, something shaped and colored would become of it,
something motioney and living. My father, and his horse, the night that fell from
him, and the days he rode that I was yet to see arise before me, they were his, he
was giving them to
me, I thought, this was my birthday, here would be my first true present. I watched
how. I recounted from Whim’s eye, the light on his eye, and the power and the ease
in him, his bit, the sour oats he let me finger in his mouth and leather. I watched
the stars go bright, watched the stars go pale. We knew what was down there, out there;
I think we breathed then in agreement, unwordedly; I think we understood how far away
a word would take us from the scope and depth of where we met unworded.

How simple was this morning?

How true?

I mean only to recount a memory, a story I am pressed to tell as our own father. I
don’t know why I say accordions when what I mean to say is father. I do not know why
I am ashamed to say this story best begins for me with breathing. I say my father’s
breath, and then my own, and then a horse’s breathing, and then the three of us together,
our breathing there together, and what I took from us in knowing. I knew the sun would
rise. Simple sun, I had never seen it. I watched the ridgeline lighten, pinken, fuzz
off into purples and blues, into whitening, yokish yellows. I saw the flat black riven.
Humps and shadowed crags appeared to me, a steep drop through a gentle curve into
the dawning basin, the basin bottom neither quite so deep nor quite so far from me
as I had thought it. It was surprising, I had never seen it, and yet I was not surprised.
The speed of the sun, too, was new to me, its ascent, the lengthening and shrinking
shadow, and yet I knew the sun, its compass, its crowning upward from the night, the
long days and the short days and its life I carried off to sleep with me and waked
up knowing as I knew my father. I was the best my father knew to need. He carried
me, watched over me, saw me formed up from a blackness, limbed and leafed, rooted
as a poplar, not so
far from him, not so deep as he had thought me. I confirmed him, his place; here,
from his sleeplessness, I emerged, was recovered to him from the silvered waters,
mercurial, a squalling, quiversome solid. Where do we meet? What could he expect?
I did not need him. I lived behind him. We would seldom meet. This was his gift. I
would go a glimpse before him. I saw the place where I was born, our house, and the
fullness of the basin, where I might walk and play and ride to gather. I might move
the water. My life could be in growing. Fallow fields were there before me, fields
burned off of winter-rye, frostbound, checkered acres. I watched over them. I was
high, high up on my father’s shoulders. We sat Whim. We were still, and surging, on
a moment, and out of a moment, I saw, for a time, as if out of time, as if seeing
such as this had been and must forever be forever.