Strange Cowboy (31 page)

I said, “Wasn’t all bad, uncle Ikey and the goats. I think most folks thought that
it was pretty funny. I did. And the cows. Who was it started milking Losivya straight
into the punch bowl? Folks liked the snow. Big people, hollering and running, throwing
snowballs at the barn—you could hear somebody’s pickup starting up, and then another,
and you heard those snowballs folks were throwing at the barn and ladies being lifted
up and squealing how I didn’t know a lady could just like a girl. I think really if
they were a little peeved about a cow or goat then they forgot. You could hear it
in the way they hollered their goodbyes.
Goodbye, goodnight, goodbye
—sounding more to me like how you feel when you are stepping out to see a sweetheart.
Cars warming up, wipers and smoke, those wet flakes coming down as big as hands and
fingery and laceylike with spikey, lacy, fingers you could catch and run inside and
study till they melted. One thing I saw, a man help out a lady with her coat. They
stood just inside the barn door, looking out, and the thing I saw that made me know
what kind of time they had was how she looked when he pulled back her hair and put
his mouth up to her ear and told her something it was just for him and her for hearing.
You know how a lady lets her eyes shut. You know how her mouth goes in a way that
you would stab your own eyes out if only you could see what hers were seeing. She
had a night. She had herself a time, I’d say. Her night wasn’t any uncle’s time to
ruin.”

I recalled a great big man who seemed to be the center of a top, a dust-devil, Papa
called him, a man you saw was hardly
moving but he sent the ladies spinning out and all about him so you wondered that
they did not either break a neck or fly off like a scrap of something papery and blown
off high and drifting down across the desert. One man limp as his scarf, one man starched
as his collar. I recall a man he did not dance at all but stood outside against a
post and smoked. This man waxed his mustache and he mostly ever said to folks that
I heard,
Yah
, and
Yah, could be.
To me, he said, “Smoke, kid?” And he let me puff a time so I was feeling pretty green
to go back in and play at war or watch those spinning dancers.

“I never danced,” I said. “Not with anybody other. What the young ones did was more
like jump around or run and skid across the sawdust on the plywood. You might see
a lady take a kid and push and pull its hands around a bit for pictures, but I was
never keeping still enough for taking. Only picture I remember me for sure in is the
one where I am blowing out the candles.”

Lighting candles, blowing candles out, second-helpings and a third I could recall
of cake; I was saying I was thinking for the first time I remember I preferred a pie.

I asked my mother, I said, “Do you remember how you used to save some strawberries
and rhubarb out to freeze so you could bake my pie clear in December?”

But my mother was asleep.

Mother. Mama. Ma.

Ah, ma, c’mon, ma, you remember?

We dressed together. Stood naked in her bedroom, clean; our party clothes were laid
out on my mother’s bed, arranged how we would wear them. I recall I liked it that
she wasn’t wearing western. Mama wore her black. Pearls and that crazy mateless earring.
She asked me please to zip her. Zip her, brush her hair, hold the heel of
her foot in your hand and say you like the polish on her toenails. Do not ask why
polish if she’s also wearing stockings. Do not wonder why she fusses over shades of
red if she is wearing shoes that do not let her toes show. Do not bother telling her
you think she might do better by that second earring. She knew. Let her tell you why
the best shoes are Italian. Watch her. That was the rule I understood. Listen. Learn
that here was the supplest leather, an exquisite line, a poised, a modest, an aristocratic
lift. Attend. The pearl rests at the collarbone. The breast must never shine. Recognize
a powder. See what happens to a woman’s face to have her hair brushed. Grow up. Learn
how else a woman is a mother.

But Mama was asleep.

I said, “You had such pretty hair. How come you never wore your hair down?”

But Mama slept.

The boy, too, slept.

I said, “Papa tied a Windsor.”

I told them I remembered standing in the kitchen, me, my mama and my papa, clean,
the three of us, dressed, finished with my mama’s lists and waiting quiet with the
kitchen clock to tell us we were ready hours early.

I said, “Somewhere we have lost a picture of the three of us together.”

Whereas I might have said I loved her. And the boy. Any time now, I was ready, I could
say it, say,
I love you,
just like that, and trust that I would mean it. Maybe earlier had been too early.
I felt it coming now, you feel it, just before you say it, you clear a way for it
and know the time when it has come and when the time has passed if you have kept your
peace and missed it. Though not peace. Not for me. In me, what came and went, comes
and
goes by my affections has not come and gone in peace, not easily, not readily, but
has come and gone in worries and in dreads, an escalating, chicken-hearted question:
Do you mind this, that I touch you? Are you laughing? Do you like me?

They were sleeping.

I was saying, “We took that bath together.”

Not a soak, I said, no bubbles and no steam; this day Mama drew us up a bath of coolish,
glassy water. She got us stripped. She was rough, said we had to hurry, wouldn’t let
me do it on my own. Knocked my head against the wall, pulled my nose and ears off
with my collar, grabbed up hanks of hair without a sorry or excuse me. Yet why hurry?
This was hours early, stark daylight. I recall the sky up through the window just
as hard and bright as sky could be and seeming cold against the branches. The floor
was cold, and the tubwalls, and my mama’s hands were cold and hard and so were Mama’s
eyes though not so cold and hard that I would not want them to touch me. She surprised
me. I wanted her to look at me. Time enough, I thought, for her to look a little more
at me and not my fingernails so much and toenails or behind my ears and in my ears
where she was saying there was dirt enough for planting in potatoes.
My birthday,
I was saying, feeling something must be due to me,
a present,
I kept saying, some respect I must have thought should be accorded my authority,
without my knowing also what I might be author of or how a person came to think his
being born deserved a present. I told my mama she was hurting me and she said not
to be a baby. I wasn’t hurt, she said, the water wasn’t cold, she was in the same
tub I was, and would I look at her, just listen, did it sound as if she were complaining?
Naturally, I looked. I always looked and saw my mother as a person sees the bar of
soap, the soapdish and the spigot. That body had been home, food
to me and drink and shelter. I used it. Used it up, perhaps, took another, harder
look at her and saw how far along her way away from me my mother had proceeded in
her body to reclaim it. I wanted her to feel how hard I saw her, to respond to me
in kind, to look at me and know that I, too, had proceeded. Yet she did not look at
me. She scrubbed, wiped and blotted, looked and saw my body, “my hide,” she said,
another needy, dirt-streaked surface. She scrubbed. She pried. She used the washcloth
and the clipper and the brush. She used her thumb to lift my chin up. She looked me
in the eye, I thought, and still I wasn’t there for her except as she might see a
duty more or less completed. No Lincoln. Nothing like the son. She flicked, her eyes
were flicking, narrowing and gray, palpably incisive. I think nobody must see by lights
more surgical than Mother’s. I think nobody but Mother operates toward more isolating
theaters of self.

Me, I wanted out. I wanted my boat. I saw too much. I saw my mother’s breasts. I saw
Mother in those breasts, her determination, an allure, Mother’s pride, something to
be dressed, lifted up and scented, lightly powdered and admired that way and wanted.
Fatty things. Useless.
Boo,
I used to call them, pale, crinkly-tipped and wobbly. Baubles, icons, eyetraps, I
was not to touch them. How was I to see them? And what of Mother’s shins, and Mother’s
leg, the way she pointed her toes to shave her leg, how was I to watch my mother’s
mouth, the pleasure I could see she took there from her leg, its shape, perhaps, its
toneyness and its proportion, the time she saved out from her hurry to caress her
leg when she was finished? Two hands. From the ankle way up past the knee. A red soap
I was not to mention to my father which I figured smelled like money. She soaped her
throat, under her breasts, the hair between her legs, between her legs, in that crack,
where I knew
I should have come from, though I did not know what to call it. I knew
icky,
and
winky,
and
carrot,
but I did not know what my mama’s was, not to say it, but only knew it was the place
where you could see a calf pulled, or a lamb, and also where I saw my papa push it
back inside itself and stitch it. I did not come from there. I knew this much. I came
from Mama’s scar. Mama soaped herself and I remember thinking that I came from Mama’s
scar, but here I did not see her scar and could not think if I had really ever seen
it or had only ever heard it,
You came out of here, through this scar,
though I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t say it past the word if I had ever seen it.
Scar.
My mama’s word. Was it true? Or had Mama rather I had not come from the other how
I ought to? Had she fibbed? She said,
The doctor had to cut me.
Why? I was five. I thought already it seemed long ago my papa waked me up to see
the sunrise. Fast, and long ago, anything I might have said was passing much too quickly.
My mother was saying for me to hurry. I wasn’t hurt, she said, she wasn’t hurting
me, she was saying please be still.
It hurts,
I said,
it hurts.
Yet I did not say why a scar, or through the belly, did not ask what the place between
her legs was called if mine was called a carrot.
It tickles,
I was saying,
let me do it, stop,
and then my mother stopped, she let me, said,
You’re right, you do it, you’re a big boy now, it’s your birthday.

“But I still liked for you to do it,” I was saying. “I didn’t think I was that big.”

I said that I was awkward with myself. I only wanted us to take our time. I wasn’t
ready yet to learn how hard it was to feel myself without the touch of other persons.
I told my mother not to worry, I was not ascribing sex, not to her, nor to myself,
not desire, I didn’t mean to make of the tub the mess of Mamas-Sons-and-Papas. I meant
I was growing up and did and did not
want to. No fault of ours. We were clean, soaping up. I think of mine as the sex and
the desire, the priapic panic that must come from being made aware of being seen alone.
She knew I watched, was all. We had caught each other out, we evened, I would bathe
myself from here on out, from here on out we two would mark a little closer to ourselves
what we were showing to the other. After we had dressed, stood before my mother’s
mirror, combed and brushed and scented, I recall that I was happy, yes, inevitably,
and also saddened to be welcomed to an older age, our necessary days of mildening,
shameless guilts and glancing ardors.

My mama’s talk, for instance, was returned to guests. She gentled. She toweled me
dry, would touch me, hold me, kiss me on the cheek goodnight, but I believe I sensed
my difference to her in how she touched me, what she said and how she looked at me
and listened. I felt limits—whether suddenly, from our time there in the bath, or
more gradually, less perceptibly, from sometime shortly prior to the bath, then incrementally,
broadly after—I felt our time together cool, become less intimate, more mannerly,
routined, as if I were another person now, a little man out on my own to whom my mother
paid her kind respects in passing. She slowed. She engaged me, let me know she was
attending, had her eye on me, I could not look at her without believing she must know
what I was up to. She must know I thought that she was pretty. She must know I wanted
her to let me brush her hair.
You want first dance with me,
she might have thought,
you are surprised to see me eat with other men, you never thought another man might
chase me.
That man, I think she meant to say to me, his name is What If, and it’s for him a
mother paints the nails she hides inside her shoes, “It’s for Grace Dendari,” she
was saying, “why we keep our backs straight.”

Mama said, “A lady, who she doesn’t need to just be Grace, she gets herself up. Same
as we do. Take Amelia Dangberg, my friend, Amelia. She doesn’t love her husband. She
doesn’t not love him, but she wouldn’t say she loved him either. She’s ashamed of
Owen. Said she’s glad she waited not to have another. Truth be told, Owen’s nothing
worse or better than what made him. He’s not pretty. He wets the bed yet. He’ll be
that pock-marked boy you worry where he’s got to, all because his mama tried to comb
a part into his hair and threw the comb at him and said for him to comb his own hair
when it wouldn’t part right. She’s got guilt, my friend Amelia, understand? I know
what she’s wearing. Underneath, I mean. I know she’ll be the only one to see it. Here’s
a man she lives with, her husband, and she’ll keep it from him same as she would keep
it from a perfect stranger. Understand? My guess is they’re on their way right now.
Two hour drive, and she tells me she’ll be early. Tells me she sweeps. Says she’s
tired of dust. Said that yesterday she pulled a fingerful of dust from off a sill
she dusted just the day before. She wiped it on her pantleg, got herself a rag and
then she stops and asks herself,
Why this?
Dirty pants, worn-out cotton bra—she said she hadn’t had a window open since September.
She’d rather that the whole entire house burn down. She’d rather drive on into town
and run down Main Street raving naked.
Thank God for your party, Bonnie Dahl.
That is what she tells me. Wasn’t for this party, she might not have seen the reason
she should buy herself a little something silk and dainty, a new, clean thing she
could wear and feel more how she used to mean to. So I’ll tell you,” said my mother,
“it’s for her we hang the stars and run the goats out. A person doesn’t know what
he is doing in the country, not the desert. You drive two hours with this man and
child and neither one of them has looked enough to think
what you are wearing underneath and what’s against you. You will know. I’ll know.
Other folks will guess. It’s what she wants. What will people make of her? True or
not, you get the feeling from your loved ones you’ve been made and fixed. Amelia,
Grace, Vernon, even your old uncle Ikey, anybody you invite, they will hop alive to
have that chance of feeling not quite made yet. You watch your daddy,” Mama said,
“and see if he is standing any straighter. Listen to him when he talks and tell me
you can’t hear the clean-cheeked boy there in his voice. See if when he’s got a pretty
lady looking you don’t find a man who feels he’s being guessed at.
What funny thing could this man tell me.
That’s what I would used to wonder with your daddy.
Does he save the bone out for his dog when he is out to supper? If he thinks I look
like a deer, or like a girl, will he keep it to himself, or will he say so
? I’ll confess, with him, I don’t guess much anymore myself. Good is good. I made
him good. He’s head-shy. He’s a dreamer. What’s best in him is simple, that’s what
I believe, same as anybody, simple and unfinished and forgotten. It’s work, remembering.
You live side-by-side-by-side like us, you get too tired to guess. But a party,” said
my mother. “One night. Some brighter, brand new hours. Tonight, after folks have got
beyond their gossiping and meanness, I believe they will remember how they felt when
they were getting dressed. What their drive was like, how they felt when they walked
in our barn and saw what all was done for them. They will eat, and they will dance,
and they’ll tell their jokes and laugh and talk as people talk when they are guessing
good of one another, and for tonight we’ll know that all good guesses will be true.
Give them something to take home with them,” said Mama, “a thing to last them through
their drives and long enough to take to bed before they fall to sleeping. Let Amelia’s
husband guess what she is wearing underneath is true, let Amelia
be surprised to know she hasn’t really finished with her husband. His name is Emmit.
He has a name, after all. She might say it, say
Emmit.
Your papa might say
Bonnie.
His name is Lincoln. Same as yours. You are Lincoln,” said my mother, “Lincoln Dahl,
and tonight these folks will have a time they’ll always think back on that was your
birthday.”