Strange Cowboy (6 page)

Still, I knew enough to show my gratefully excited side. I was eager, for her sake,
to call our barn a dancehall. On the party’s eve, I was happy to
conduct a tour
with her, jotting down minutia on a notepad with a pencil. She held my hand, I can
recall, and led me from the door the guests would pass through, to the tables, and
the places at the tables where my mother had arranged the cards that told each guest
where he or she would sit. We blew up balloons. We raised and lowered strings of lights,
determined
whether we preferred it if the lights were blinking, or were steady, or if they might
be festivest in combination. We sat in Papa’s place, pretended we were Uncle Ikey,
said that we were Grandpa Al. We admired, from each place, and we corrected, according
to the eyes we were pretending we were seeing through of Grace Dendari, or Amelia
Dangberg, and Vernon’s first dead wife, Althea. If we were sitting at a table for
the fat folks, we pretended we were fat. Or else we sat across the barn, pretending
we were thin, or loud, and quiet, politically inclined, or agriculturally, or were
inclined to tell a joke, or not, and were inclined to feel that jokes were told by
those who felt their lives were jokes, whose punchline would not overcome them, so
long as they foresaw it. My mother and I, we foresaw enough to bend our knuckles over
sticks, pretending we were arthritic. Or else we ate our food off hayhooks, pretending
we were droll. We stepped onto the dancefloor, where my mother picked me up, and we
pretended we were two, a newborn, flushing couple, sated, wary, looking out for tricky
seamsplits in the plywood.

I had my one arm hooked around my mother’s neck, the other arm extended where she
led it. She was strong, she carried me; my bottom rested in her elbowcrook, my lap
supported Mother’s bosom. She said for me to hold on tight, at certain times, and
at other times she said for me to try and seem as if I hardly touched her. I remember
she smelled mothery to me, like her favorite sweatshirt, maybe, nice, voluminous and
sort of pissy, really, regular. Her voice was soothing, dancing, I liked to feel it
through her chest against my lap. I told my mother,
No, ma’am,
when she asked me could I smell a barn nearby, and,
Yes, ma’am,
when she asked me could I understand at all what we were doing. I did not tell her
I thought dancing without music was for sissies. Nor did I tell her I thought only
sissies would be caught out
dancing with their mothers. I think I told her only that I thought I must be learning.
My mother rubbed her cheek to mine, said,
Yes, that’s right,
she thought I must be learning. She squeezed me, said I’d grown so big, so fast;
she said it made her tired to try and hold me. She let me down, and then she thanked
me, and she curtsied, and then she seemed to study me before she said it might be
time for me to learn the proper way of bowing. She stood the two of us apart. I was
to watch. I saw the funny, silky way her eyes would close and open at the bottom of
the bow and at the top, how her eyelids seemed to be descending at the same rate as
her bow descended, slowly, falling finally closed when she had gone as low as she
would go, and then opening, slowly once again, but not too slowly, following a kind
of nod her head made at the bottom of the bow to indicate that she was coming up now,
my mother’s eyelids coming open from the little nod and looking like to say, “Don’t
mention it,” only nearer to the classy way she thought the same thing might be said
by men of finer breeding.
My pleasure, Not at all,
my mother said,
like that.

As for me, I botched it. I bent too far, too low; I closed my eyes, my mother said,
as if I had a dirty trick in mind; I opened them as if I thought my partner ought
to be amazed with me, as if the thing that I had done—bowed—required of my partner
an ovation. It would not do, my mother said. If I wanted to attract the cows, she
said, then keep on acting like an ox. She told me that my father might have been no
good for town, but one thing he could do was dance, and the other thing he did was
bow. She put my one hand on my belly and my one hand on my back. She reshowed me how
to do my eyes. My mother was explaining how the best of women shunted men who seemed
too green, or insincere, or men who were too proud to think that bowing to a woman
was
important. I did not want a woman who would find my wink too fetching. I did not want
a woman who was taken up by gifts of rhinestones, or by women’s magazines and talkshows
on the radio or TV. I did not want a woman who required much improvement.

All of this I understood. But still I struggled. I felt spastic, gawky, severed—“a
chicken with his head cut off”—I feared I was a little ox, a lumox, a lumberer whose
bones had grown beyond the jurisdiction of the signalways that meant to move them.
I could not feel myself. My mother must have seen this. She held me, put her one hand
at my waist, pressed me with the other at the shoulderblades. She put her fingertips
against my eyelids. She said, “Feel?” She asked me, “Can you tell the difference?”
And then my mother let me
go it on my own
awhile; and then she picked me up again, and we rehearsed the whole routine, from
the proper introductions and the proper dance, to the proper curtsies, bows, and proper
partings. My mother said, “That’s it,” and, “Yes, you’re doing fine,” but I knew I
was not. My mother tapped me on the forehead, told me I should think, and don’t forget,
but it was more to me like giving up then than succeeding, it felt to me as if remembering
would be unthinkable, a willful reproduction of a tender failure—masochistic, in the
long run, awfully Catholic, maybe, not too shrewd.

She walked away from me. And then my mother asked me, as if she had forgotten she
had asked me once already, “Does it smell much like a barn in here?” She said, “Are
you sure you know what we are doing?”

My mother turned to me, just enough to show me what I thought of as her good side,
where her hair came down across the eyebrow, just above the cheekbone, exposing just
the very bottom of her earlobe, where she wore an earring, a tremendous, mateless,
silver hoop, which put me at the time in mind of someone not a mother, a woman more
alone than mothers were, and prettier, I might say now, predatory, I suppose, wan
and catlike; she must have seemed to me a great, hunted cat, wounded, abandoned in
the dusk to pant and bleed and wanly ponder what had struck her.

I think I knew that it was Papa.

I think my mother knew I knew that it was Papa.

My mother pinched this earring, she rubbed it; she was thinking, I thought, looking
forward to the end of something she was trying to remember.

My mother said, “I wasn’t going to have you with your daddy. I wanted you to see the
world, all the oceans and museums. When I was just a little girl,” she said, “I used
to play-pretend that you were walking with me through a slew of foreign airports.
You were just as pretty as you are. We were both so pretty. I was younger. People
looked at us. We wore the smartest clothes. We were mostly on our way to see St. Peter’s.
Or we were coming back from there. My friend, Amelia, Mrs. Dangberg—Owen’s mommy?—she
went over there and brought back home a T-shirt and a metal pigeon. She said that
giant negroes sold them. Skinny ones. She says if I could see how beautiful—and also
scary—a giant, skinny negro was, then I wouldn’t be so quick to call her metal pigeon
ticky-tack. But in my heart, I wasn’t having any piece of Rome Amelia Dangberg was
describing. I went right on having us be over there. For us, whenever we would go,
we had a favorite secret color. It was blue. That way, every day the sun was shining,
we could always see a little bit of home, when we were at St. Peter’s, and we could
always see a little of St. Peter’s, when we were back at home. I was just a girl.
Teenaged. Funny, how much clearer of her life a girl can be then. We were lying on
our backs, and it was cool, like maybe
May is on the mountain, with the wild iris, and the lupine, and the creek full up
with melt and sounding over in the aspens. You could smell the snow still. You knew
the dirt was good and dark, and it seemed as like the meadowlarks could sing through
noon in August, and when we reached our hands up, it was just like we had grown the
muscles of that painted Adam—we were strong—and God was reaching down His hand from
Rome to touch us.”

My mother said, “We could have done it, you know, gone there. This place wasn’t always
in a pinch. But do you know what your papa says? He says that he does not believe
he left his keys in Egypt. Everything he needs is here, he says. He said it when the
place was flush, says it now we’re looking broke, and I suspect that he’ll be saying
it when he is dead and gone to heaven, so as not to look back down and see how little
this place ever needed him to need it.
We’ll recover,
he keeps saying,
we’ll get over there, don’t worry.
But in the meantime, how about us? There isn’t any place for us, not even any placecard,
did you notice? You forget yourself,” my mother said. “Don’t do it.” She said, “This
place here is Grace Dendari’s. Do you remember her? The lady-baker? Know why I have
got her sitting here? Men. Men is why. Ten men I have got her sitting with, and a
lady way too young to go by Velma. Ugly, ugly Velma. Mean, too. But I will wager Velma
will have made her way up to the dance floor times enough that Jesus in His cradle
might mistake her for His Mary, while poor Gracey won’t have caused a man to take
her past His manger even once. Different folks don’t go together. That’s why the fat
with the fat, and the old with the old. That’s why I believe that Gracey is a baker,
because she doesn’t go with anyone. Grace goes with the cold and dark, her flour and
her oven. But she is starved for men, you know, so I give her ten men who are starved
for women, and a woman who is cactus on
the palate. But you watch and see. I’ll bet you Grace won’t dance enough for Jesus
even to mistake her as herself, let alone save Mary. There’s a lesson here: Do not
get yourself mistaken. We are not Grace. Myself, I am your mother, your daddy’s wife.
In my heart, where it counts, I know I’m not mistook. When you were born, it hurt.
Pain is proof. Your daddy says it’s just like with a heifer, but it isn’t. I’ve got
feelings. I wanted you. I’ve seen mothers thinking they were martyrs. Not me. There’s
human dignity in me. I only asked your papa for the doctor. I think I knew that you
would be the only one. I wasn’t trying out for drama. I could have bled to death.
To this day, I think it was the phone call. Doctor said he’d come for free, but your
daddy, I believe that he was thinking what it cost to make the phone call. Roberto
was the one who finally called. Said he was afraid your papa was about to reach his
hand in me and find a hoof on you so he could winch it. Doctor shamed your papa. He
told your papa he had half a mind to strap him down and have a go at him with the
emasculators for pulling such a stunt as not to call him. No local, says the doctor.
Rusty cutters. That doctor, he didn’t want to let your papa hold you. But when you
came, and I first held you on my chest here, I didn’t have a bone of grudge in my
entire body. I let your daddy hold you same as if he’d had as much to do with you
as I did. I was so happy then. You were my boy. You were red. And mad. Wasn’t till
you fell asleep that we could see what you might look like. Myself, I wanted just
to look. My only want while I was healing up was just to be alone with you and look
and care for you and look. I talked to you. I thought I understood you. I called you
my raccoon. Every day I tried to see myself in you but didn’t. Your daddy kept on
opening the curtains. Took to sleeping down the hall. He said he’d give you just one
month of sleeping in our bed
before we moved you to your own room. Seemed like nothing I could hear or see was
not a cause to start me crying. If you peed on me I cried. I cried to hear the geese.
I was dopey, understand. I wasn’t right. Doctor didn’t need to tell me. You would
be my first and only. I wanted to save you. Everything. My idea was to just be quiet
for awhile, and private, study on the shape of things, what came when, why it was
I felt the way that I was feeling, how I might arrange to feel that way again some
day when I was blue or ever lonely in the future. I don’t know why we try so hard
to have our hearts break. You broke my heart. I told your daddy, I said,
I don’t want you and your buddies parading through my room to see me when I’m hurting.
But he never listened. He said,
Isn’t you they’re coming out to look at.
Proud, I suppose. It’s pride sometimes will make a person disrespect another person’s
dignity. I’m telling you, you never saw your daddy on the phone so much as after you
were born. Come and see, come and see. Passing out cigars. Entertaining with champagne
and pricey whiskey. Fed folks our entire winter’s worth of freezer meat. It’s you
he said would put us in the poorhouse in the name of celebration. Do you think that’s
true?” my mother said. “Do you think you’ll put us in the poorhouse? Poor boy, are
you hungry? Are you freezing? You’re my little man now, aren’t you Lincoln? You know
I love you, don’t you? Tell me, is the debt owed on a mother’s love too onerous for
sons to service? Your papa thinks so.
Onerous,
he says. Here he’s spending interest on a gang of bulls that don’t know steers from
heifers, pays out by the month on tractors, oats, and combines, floats a loan to drill
a well, pumps the water from the desert’s heart to get its skin wet; but here we see
the debt that sends your daddy to a dictionary to say how hard it is to service, is
the debt of love he took on from his mother.” My mother said, “Not with us, okay?
With you and
me, there won’t be any payback. No
onerous.
It’s your birthday. You’re the birthday boy. Your mommy’s love is not a loan, you
can keep it all your life,” she told me, “as a present.”