Strange Cowboy (5 page)

—erase Mother—the relevance of breath—my wife stands before me—pressure of the forgotten
purpose—a colony of independents—decorating the barn—ashtray in the horse hoof—too
big for my britches—my gratefully excited side—bowing to a younger Mother—Mother dreams
of Rome—my birth—my son’s birth—the Roxy once was also new—at war in the loft with
The Little Lord—try to remember, in order to forget—try to forget, in order to remember—experience
is too much in a word—peace be with you—the body has its countermandments—the lore
of balconies and velvet—who would butcher?—you are not the man I married—something
classic-drab and middle-lengthed—petting my erection—my father’s breathing—call me
Pop—warm juice, hard butter—gratefully usurped—chicken-in-a-bucket-picnic—he hurt
to touch me—pre-dawn in the birthday barnyard—I sit Whim—steadyness and horse warmth—the
speed of the rising sun—the breathing basin—I watch our shadows go before us—

Likely we are better off here, for a time, to erase my mother, alive, or not, better
to erase the boy. Maybe back up here to earlier today. Say noonish. Lunchtime. Predictably,
perhaps, we find that I am sitting in my chair. I am alone. I had a thought. I thought
I had a real desire. A premonition, maybe, of the day to come as it has come, and
something of a real desire to forefend against this
day, redirect its spirit. I was, as I recall, thinking of my breathing. I was conjuring
analogies, a bellows, an accordion, a bagpipe to assist my understanding, a festive,
musical conception of a breath I thought must be in keeping with a party. Certainly,
I can recall a meatier, more birthlike version in my thinking of a breath, bloodier,
I guess, fibrous and veined, ostensibly aortic. Yet what did I know? Sure enough,
a horse lung, I have seen, pneumonia-choked, said Papa, “Solid as a liver.” Sure I
saw my papa open up the brisket with a blade as big as a machete. A hot day, a rush
of stink, I can remember, a groaning decompression of the carcass.

“Drownded,” said my papa. “Animal has got a lung like that, he’s walking through the
air and breathing underwater.”

Yet what did I know for a human? How should breathing have informed a father’s thinking
on a birthday? Well, I was getting there, I thought. I thought that I was somewhere
on the road to answering my wife’s demand for progress, when there she came and entered
in to interrupt me. Not that I should blame her. She had her reasons, good ones, as
it happened, so that I am made to think our trouble was begun when it became apparent
how entirely and quickly I’d forgot her reasons, having moved myself reflexively to
ward them off, before I ever fully heard them. Not that I should either blame myself.
I meant simply to sustain my peace, ride out what I thought might be a little relevant
momentum. What would come? Who could say? The opacity of things as they unfold before
us is impartially distributed. We all have learned that what divides the bread from
nourishment divides as thoroughly as Avignon, in darker whiles, divides from Rome.
A little closer here to home, we know my next breath comes to me with no more promise
of another breath than will my last. The lung, I can remember thinking, collapses
as the lung inflates, at times convulsively, in
gasps, and sobs and shudders, sporadically, or evenly, and deeply, as if in easy sleep,
in long, slow, sleepy draws, hitchless, I have heard, and right on schedule, until
one day the murmur comes, unfelt, at first, unheard, until another day the murmur
is a tickle, and the tickle scrapes, and rasps, and squeezes, unless there never was
a murmur, no tickle, squeeze or scrape, but there rather comes abrupt, complete, and
unforetellable arrest. This was the thought.

And then I thought, There she is. And then I asked, What is she doing here?

She was fearless, as I saw her, alarmingly in focus. Her eyes popped, strained to
quit the rimwork of their proper sockets. She regrouped, or I regrouped her. She was
fast becoming the composite wife, an assemblage I construct of biased snatches—the
naked wife, the nude, lying on a hot night on the topside of the sheets, quietly perspiring
in her secret creases; the clothed wife, the still-life, layman’s Madonna, suckling
her babe at rodeos and supper-clubs; the wife of the morning trench-mouth, the wife
of the abscessed ear, the wife of the homegrown, whipped potato. She was sketched
by me as if in pencil-lead, then colored in, bluntly, crudely, as if by crayon, either
ranging far outside the lines I give myself, or failing to approach them. In this,
at least—our imperfections—I am willing to admit some aspect of inheritance, one Lincoln
to another. The dialogues responsible for causing sons and fathers to abrade in life,
we see, are very often harmonized in art. Consider how the boy Dahl sees the mother
as a snowman, whereas the man Dahl sees her as a magpie. Nothing is the thing to us
it is. Somewhere through the workings of the webby stuff that fastens eyes to hands
in every Dahl, the vision balks, a ratio explodes from out to inward. A mother melts.
She pecks at sores she opens on the daddy’s back where he is bent to rest and labor.
Her voice sounds beakishly, her jags ascending and descending almost classically,
insistently toward the end of love. Blame it on the brain. Or soul. Or heart. We man
Dahls haven’t got the heart to love a thing in life except ourself with. According
to my wife. According to my mother.

My mother says, “Your father didn’t lift a finger on your party.” She says, “If he
loved you half as much as I did, don’t you think that he’d at least have run the backhoe
through the stalls for me? Do you think that he’d’ve sat there eating beans while
I was telling him about the barrowfulls of muck I hauled up on a pitchfork? So long
as it’s not Lincoln’s back, it’s good for you. So long as meat is on the table, and
the sky is blue, and the water’s wet—well, then,” says my mother, “if you’re Lincoln,
then it’s love.”

“Oh, they’ll challenge you,” my papa always said. He said, “You take a thing like
love, and put it in a woman’s mouth, nine times out of ten, it comes out sounding
like a threat.”

And then sure enough, there she was, my wife, threatening love, right there, beside
my chair, unbudgeably, unspeakingly disruptive. Possibly I inched a little upward
in my chair and gathered in a breath as if to either speak, or else to trick her into
speaking. But I did not trick my wife, nor did I myself decide to speak, having seen
my words miscarry my ambition to define the moat we must negotiate between us. How
many words, I wondered, in the hunt for definitions, have been cast by us to rot there?
How many words expire through the narrow channels of their constant resurrection?
Misborn, stillbirths, abortions, our words decay before we say them. They bubble up
and simmer, lathered in the vernix bath, stinking in the dripping cave—our mouth—I
can taste them, I smell them stinking by the speechful. This is not imagination. Nothing
here is being too made-up. The
air between us palpates with historical endearments and pejoratives, reiterations
and retractions, contrition, diatribe, invective: to what illuminative purpose?

I say, “Pass the broccoli, please,” in order not to offer an assessment of the flank
steak. I say, “Come-see, come-saw,” in order not to tell her how a day went.

If you can’t say something nice,
our mothers tell us,
then don’t say anything at all.

I have repeated this homily, warmly, occasionally, to benefit my wife—“The both of
us,” I say—suggesting that it might be nicer if we sat a time in silence, respectfully
acknowledged the profundity of our displacement, each of us toward the other. I tell
her I am stymied, pooped, I advise her not to take my absence personally.

I say, “You could be anyone to me.”

Or, “Maybe it’s just women.”

And, “I am just a man.”

“Faith,” I used to tell her, “even Jesus slept.”

But I am not, my wife assures me, Jesus.

True enough, I say. Certainly, our Savior looms recedingly in my convictions, where
I become recedingly convicted of myself. No, I say, it was my wife who moved through
life according to convictions, her conviction that the boy was coming into the possession
of his memory, in case she had forgotten, her conviction that the boy was coming into
thought. Assuming she was not mistaken, and that memory did not exclude the possibility
of thought, and that thought did not exclude the possibility of memory, I bothered
next to ask her which speech she would have the boy commemorate? Which words, in her
own life, were the words to sound the deepest? Would she be patient with me? Or
would she rush? Did my wife intend to push “the whole thing” of this birthday to my
mother?

“Really,” I have told her, “my mother wonders shouldn’t Vernon be invited? She asked
me did I have some room for Vernon’s wheelchair! What is Vernon for a boy’s fifth
birthday? What on earth could be a wheelchair? She’ll grab,” I can remember saying,
“she’ll steal this party right away, if you don’t watch it. I’m the one whose party
it was. I’m the guy who knows the best exactly what he liked and what he didn’t, not
my mother.”

Of course, I make mistakes. I cannot reconstruct myself with any more precision than
I reconstruct my mother, or my wife, or my father and the boy or uncle Ikey. I am
liable, through the course of my anticipations and assemblings, to distort the lot
of us. The past, as I recount it, grows as wide for me as any future; I proceed with
no more certitude in recollection than I do in my predictions. Procession is procession.
More and more it seems to me that memory is the flaw through which the artistry of
every Dahl advances. We are, at bottom, sloppy. So much furze. Such a band. The barn
was not a barn, but was a dancehall. We did not eat, but dined. We did not drink,
but sipped. We were mannered. We were groomed. And we were hicks, I must remind myself,
despite my mother’s dream of us. We were a colony of independents sowing seed and
reaping weedy hay from alkali and shadscale. The wind blew hard out there. The sun
shone hard. I cannot see my mother any younger in her skin than roughly middle-fifties.
When she swung a pick against a rocky plot I think she dreamed she worked ancestral
loam in gloves cut from Italian leather. On the kitchen counter, just beside the sink,
we kept a bucketful of slops for pigs; in the mudroom, in the bathroom, I remember
fly-gobbed strips of sticky paper. Here were flowerboxes built of mismatched screws
and rusty nails, leaky, heatsplit lumber painted sale-price colors, hung and waiting
to be hung, needing to be pruned, weeded, watered, planted. What broke first? What
broke next, broke least, broke most, broke once too many times for us to have the
heart again for fixing?

I mean to say that I have tried. I have begun, backed up, filled in, discussed the
fine points of my party with my wife, intending to commence and finish with this story
for the boy in one clean take, a telling which might rival the day itself, a tale
which might go riding through his heart in joyful sunbursts of enfabled distillations.
Not long after she had made her first request, I told my wife, about the party, “Sometimes
it’s an ordinary rush that sets a person diving headfirst into shallow water.
Patience,
said my mother,
one problem at a time
.”

I told my wife that she drew lines, my mother did, rows and columns. She divided plusses
off from minuses. Spontaneity, by her lights, presupposed a graphic understanding.
Her trick was seeing to the bottom of the trough and knowing that its transformation
would be incomplete until the trough was rid of any tie to drinking. She said the
woman who would fill her trough with ice and sodapop and call it Party Time would
never hear her guests allude to magic. My mother saw the ashtray in the horsehoof,
the hatrack in the bull’s horn. Stars shot from the beams of baling wire; baling wire
moons hung palely off the stagework of the bandstand. My mother had
imagination,
I remember hearing, and
a knack.
Who but Bonnie Dahl would ever think to fill her troughs with dirt? And who would
sculpt the dirt, build the little earthen mounds that Bonnie Dahl built? Because my
mother did this. I helped her. I worked a trowel, mounded up the earthen hillocks
and the hollows and distributed the sprigs of tree and straw across the earth
where I was told to. I placed the plastic Jesuses and Mother Marys and a gang of other
Holy Joes beside the water, where we meant for there to be some water, and on the
pasture, where we meant for there to be a pasture, and where we meant for there to
be a shade, I placed the Joes and Marys and the Jesuses where all of them might rest
upon their way beneath it. Our job, my mother told me, was to make of the troughs
all but several stations, “the slower,” said my mother, “less exciting stations” of
the cross, and to fashion in the trough the nearest to the dancefloor and the band
a creche, a reminder to prospective dancers of our commonground nativity, how it is
we all had come to be there, and where it was we all would go, before we joined each
other, man to woman, woman to man, to celebrate His birth, and mine, out there on
the plywood, in a twostep, said my mother, or a waltz, moving through the sawdust
in displays of thankful gaiety peculiar to each of us, to a simple country tune whose
words and rhythms were familiar to us all. Full Moon Over Elko. Castration Of the
Strawberry Roan. Porkpie Miller’s Sheepdog Shep. Coyote’s Last Lament.

“You wouldn’t think she had such taste,” I heard, “you wouldn’t guess a woman of her
size could be so delicate.”

So far out, they said, so little here to work with, well, the ladies simply failed
to see the way my mother did it. But I saw how she did it.
Elbow grease,
is how. Boots and nails, hammers, boards and muckrakes. Foresight, I remember, hindsight.
I tell my wife I can recall my mother running all the stock out from the barn a good
week prior to the party and opening all the doors up. She hung braids of herbs and
pine wreathes on the stall doors. She burned, sprayed, and scoured, set up rat traps
for the pigeons in the rafters, played a radio throughout the night to warn the skunks
off. She said she did not want to hear a single woman moaning over stink
this year; she didn’t want to see a single man embarrassed over what he’d stepped
on in his town shoes. She said she did it all for me. Without me, she said, none of
this would come to pass. Looking back, I see I must have been as wise to her as I
was pretty. I see me walk about the barn with both thumbs hooked into the pockets
of my blue jeans, squinch-eyed, head-high to a hipbone, undeluded by the management
of surface. I weigh maybe fifty pounds. Too big for my britches, said my mother. She
said it never bothered her, my being lost to Easter bunnies and to Santa Claus, but
her heart aged for me sorrowfully the day she saw me sitting on the fencerail with
my legs crossed. Next thing she could see for me was hand-rolled cigarettes, a cafe
in a European capitol, a sneer, a book, contempt for her and for my father, a closet
full of black. One day I would be too clever to discover anything at all I could believe
in; I would lay my head against my horse’s chest and not be moved to love him. With
me, she said, there would be no reason for a dance; no drink, she said, no food, no
party. Apparently, I was a complicated boy. What would come to pass, it seemed, would
pass with me as well as it would pass without. I didn’t say so at the time, but I
remember thinking if this party truly was for me, and my mother meant this party to
be blessed for me by magic, then she ought not to have made me an accomplice in its
fabrication.