Strange Cowboy (30 page)

We were closing in here on an end. I hurried us. I was taking care of the dog. I could
see the boy was thinking, trying to recall if he had ever heard of furze, perhaps,
and if not, then what the sound of furze must mean it looks like, the size of the
box it came in, and its shape, its texture and its odor. He was me, a boy, after all,
I saw him sitting up, rising up inside himself, same as mother; they were looking
through their eyes now, out, I thought, at me; I was a charmer, I was thinking, not
unlike the gray man sitting on a clay floor with his whistle, erecting snakes from
pots by strains of whistled stories. I knew this story. I knew the way. Through the
dark, through the storm, to the butcher’s, and to home, to roof and to walls, to fire,
respite, chair. Here I went, then, and here we were arrived to Hans’s! I parked the
car. I told my mother and my son
to wait right there. I crossed the lot. I found the place locked up, lights off, no
note, shut down hours prior to his posted closing. I returned to the car, reported
on our luck, assured the mother and the son that all was well, I had a plan, and drove
us.

Well, how swift, I thought, the days must seem to men of action! How absented of longing
and regret, fulfilled in promise, how narcotically performed! A man could cross a
lot. He opened doors, closed doors, drove his miles and said his goodbyes and hellos
to pretty faces. He packed himself. Stuff rushed in. He rushed through stuff, eyes
open, mouth open, open-handedly, grabbing, letting go, his day a striding dream of
brass knobs and pavement, cutlery and hems of skirts and handshakes and a key. He
touched, glanced, dismissed, replaced, moved on through chips and beams and wires,
by satellite, by accident, recovery, insights and oversights, hindsights and fore,
a life evolving from the everyday parade of semi-directed nexts.

And my life, I asked myself, this day, what had it been, how much? How could I turn
myself around, in ratios of thought to hard stuff? Was it too late, were the hours
insufficient to reclaim the day to action? Were we too tired? Had I worn us out, I
asked myself, could anybody bear to look at me and listen? I hoped so. I leaned on
my wit. I recognized myself in terms of a financial indispensability. I could browbeat
them with blood, as my mother browbeat us with blood. I was the patriarch, the household’s
head, what could they expect to do without me? Who, save me, the father of the boy,
could love the boy as Father?

I kept talking, hypothesizing on the butcher’s whereabouts, suggesting to my mother
and my son that maybe Hans had swallowed down some tainted meat. I drove. I invited
them to comment on my driving, tapped the brakes, sent us into safeish,
playful skids I meant to simulate a frolic. We left the lighted districts back behind
us. I turned us onto O Street, shifted our attentions to the charms along our block
of Christmas cheer and landscape. Blinking lights, multi-colored, the single-colored,
classy whites. Windows trimmed, and doorways, gables, eves and porchrails. Plastic
Santas, plastic reindeer, plastic elves, a plastic creche. And underneath this snow,
need I remind them, the green prides of our town, the clipped green squares of grass
and dormant bulbs of summer? Leaves lay resting in those limbs; the green buds clenched
and slumbered. Soon, the county plow would come and clear our road. Soon, the sun
would rise again and see me hail my neighbors through the sparkling airs, a shovel
in my hand, in their hands, too, a shovel, our warmth in work and greeting floated
out from us in crystal-ridden plumes.

“O Street,” I said. “If you want to, tonight, you can stay with us.”

My mother looked at me, turned around to face the boy as if to know who I described
when I said “us.”

Act
, I told myself, keep us moving here, talk, park the car, get out, go around and help
your mother. Sure, I meant to help her. I meant to help the boy. Tomorrow, we would
bury Hope, find the boy another dog, his own; I would expose myself to the mercy of
my neighbor. If the sun shined I would paint the mailbox, mend the fence, knock the
snow off from the roof, strip the shingles, find the leak and fix it. Yet was I serious?
Consult the wife? Mix the frosting? Surely, the boy and I could sit down on the kitchen
floor and lick the beaters. Spoons and fingers in the beater bowl. Tousled hair, a
woolly cap, jacket, snowpants, sledding. Was I serious? Would he look at me, speechless,
his face arranged to ask me,
Are you kidding
? First step was to take a step. Take my mother’s hand.
Thin hand, light thing, hollow-filled and birdy. Tough old bird, I thought, tough
old bird, she came along, kept her head down from the snow, pushed her shinbones through
the snow without complaint.

I told the boy, I said, “Hopey will be fine there in the car. She’s a brave, good
dog. We’ll take care of her, first thing in the morning.”

I kept us moving. I tried not to think. Not to slow down to remember. I was talking.
Uninvented scenes, some lived, some not, lines from dialogues, spoken and unspoken,
images and phrases fastened onto things before me, as if whatever thing I told or
thought to tell was free of me, and lived or would be living through my mother’s hat,
or through my son’s left mitten, as if the hedgerow were translucent, and the hayloft
I described to them was shining from behind the matted branches. Translucensies, I
thought, superimpositions. Anywhere I looked, the housefront, the sidewalk and the
streetlight, there I saw whatever thing I had been saying, heard whatever thing was
said, saw Grace Dendari chewing on a slab of roast, saw my papa’s thumbs hitched in
his pockets, heard my mother asking did Amelia Dangberg need another glass of punch.
Was this what it was to act? Sure I thought that this was acting, seeing. Yet I did
not know how a person came to such a seeing. If I recall the day’s successions, one
state from another, I find fatigue, and hunger, health, poor health, too many green
pills, too few red, an ample wife, a silent son, a cloying need, desire. Perhaps it
was this simple, to desire,
people wanted.
I wanted to feel as I felt, see as I saw, say as I said, act as I was acting. Here
we came, up the walk, home at last, husband home with child to wife, how could she
resist me? Should she rip the fabric from my chair because I had returned without
an antidote to Hope? Should she
cut the cushions into pieces, burn the frame and sell the springs for scrap for having
brought along my mother? My wife, too, was a mother. She must see my place, my necessity,
handsome Papa, hand-in-hand-in-hand, a family man, humbled, heightened, taking steps.

Though I did not see the light.

“Light,” my mother said, having chosen finally to speak, “no light.”

True, I saw, no light. The house was dark. There wasn’t any car, no footsteps and
no tiretrack, strange to say and to infer, no wife. I moved, babbled, became a spokesman
for the staggeringly apparent.
Must have gone somewhere,
I said,
must have left before it started snowing.
I put the key to the door, let us in. I stripped the boy of mittens, hat, and jacket,
overboots and sweater. I helped my mother with her wind-resistant sportsuit. I said
the house was warm, was nice, was likely homier than she remembered. I asked my mother
please to sit while I hung hats and jackets in the closet. She could sit in my chair,
I said, or my wife’s chair, didn’t matter. I asked did anybody want a cup of cocoa,
a night like this, would anybody like a bowl of soup? I went quickly. I must have
felt that I could do without her, my wife, for the moment, could wash and rinse and
stack, begin again, as my mother had begun, at the same beginning, with a difference.
Just the other day it was I boiled water, measured out the powdered chocolate and
stirred. What difference? What change? I went out to them. I saw my son had got up
into my chair, my mother sat down in my wife’s. My mother cared for neither chocolate
nor soup. A glass of water for my mother, for a pill—she wasn’t sure which one—if
I could read the label?

“I’m way past time,” she said. “It’s nice you brought me here, but I’m afraid I won’t
be very lively.”

Not to fret, I said; said that if she wanted to, it wouldn’t bother us, then she could
go ahead and sleep. She seemed very near to sleep. The boy seemed near to sleep. I
left them. I filled a glass. I filled a pot and put it on the burner. I kept moving,
I was calm, I would come to things, our house, a job, our family, my story. What was
wanted now was ice. Crushed, or cubed, I wondered, crushed or cubed or crushed. I
stood and filled the glass and saw beneath a magnet on the freezer door a note there
from my wife. Four words—three words, really, and a name—a neat scrawl underneath
the drawing I mistakenly believed my son made of the lizard that was me.

Lincoln—Gone for sausage.

I read,
Lincoln—Gone for sausage.

That meant me, the Lincoln, the sausage meant the butcher. I told myself that I did
not know what that meant. I went. I gave the glass of water to my mother. I read her
label. I tapped her out two pills. I passed the boy and touched his shoulder on the
way back to the kitchen, told him, “Chocolate.”

I measured out our cups. I waited on the whistle.

I read,
Lincoln—

Then I took the drawing and the note from off the freezer door, struck a match, held
the paper where I stood and burned it. This seemed new to me, that I should burn it,
crush the ashes to the floor, another new beginning. When the whistle blew I stirred
the water in the cups, put the cups onto a tray and served us.

My mother seemed tireder, the boy seemed tireder, both of them seemed less likely
to be listening, more likely to be dreaming, now that I had come to see a way to tell
the boy a story. Still, I
thought, I might still be heard; it made sense, this late in a day, that I be heard
by sleepers. I climbed in with the boy. Here the hours were begun. From this chair
I stood from my repose to man a shovel. From this chair, with this boy and with a
dog I made a day of it, discovered holes that were not for digging, healers not for
healing; I recalled the oceans from my deserts, recalled a tribe within a solitude,
a health within a sickness, a forgotten way remembered, recalled the boy, my father,
wife, and mother. There she was, across the table, made up, powdered, rouged, and
scented, a long glimpse of my future bride, the drugged and slumberous look into myself.
I asked myself: Am I serious? If I took a reading on myself, could I name a change?
This was the moment my life changed? And then I knew my life would never be the same
again forever?
Here went a day, the hours passed, a distance crossed, a place I had returned to,
yet I found myself no less confused, in sense, equally afraid, unchanged to myself,
save for how I sounded to myself in speaking. Sure I fetched no living dog, had not
managed even to provide a place in which to rest the dead one. Had no pretty bone
or button, could not ask my wife to close her eyes, place a penny-candy on her tongue
and tell her,
Here, this here is a little token from our journey.
No, I thought, here, from home, were I my wife, I see my husband has departed, crossed
his distance and his hours and delivered back the same dead dog, a mute son and a
husband’s mother.

Yet here I found another mother, something other than a muted son, here I sounded
different to myself, at least, I really listened. I was a different kind of quiet.
I heard a different kind of sound. I heard the furnace click, combust, heard the heated
air pushed through the ducts to warm us, and I could not say
louder, softer, smoother, grayer,
only
different,
only
I
must be the difference.
I sensed differently, more presently, I was present for the water resting quiet in
the pipes, the wires in the wall, the expansions and contractions in the studs and
joists, the loaded, groaning rafters. I could not be calm. I was remembering. I was
talking. I was telling. I knew my son and mother were as good as sleeping, briefly
thought that maybe I should better call it practice, what I felt, I was practicing,
maybe what a person ever does is getting ready, his every act is a preparing. Sure
I told the boy about my father’s horse; from me he learned about our wars; doubtless
his description to you of our barn should lead you to the hayloft no less easily than
mine should. Sure I said so just this day, and almost any other day, on the telephone,
I loved my mother, but to say it now, what difference,
Mother,
just right there,
I love you?

I was saying, “You could see the steam come up from off the basin, way down way below
us.”

I went slowly, giddily, from my father to my mother, surface to surface of that day,
one thing following another as the day began itself for me at dark, and lived on through
the sun, and passed into the dark again when Mama turned the light off in my bedroom
and my day was finished. I would finish, I could see that, an end now, having finally
begun at a beginning. One day. A birthday.
One day,
I was saying,
I waked up and I was five.
My son’s head was rested in my chest. I turned his face to me and took his glasses
off. He saw me. His cheek flushed. He pushed farther into me, seemed again to sleep.
Still I think he heard. He must have felt me, the stuff at work inside me, stomach
stuff and stuff for air and heart.

I kept on talking. I said
and then
a lot.
And then
I went with Mama for another look around the barn;
and then
the guests came and the band played;
and then
the snow fell;
and then
the guests were driving off and honking horns and happy.

I said, “You would have liked your grandad.”

I said, “Remember, Mama, what Owen gave me, the best thing from a kid-guest I remember
getting—that old quiver made of stitched-together feedsack and a strip of sheepskin
leather?”