Strange Cowboy (7 page)

“Well, I was scared,” I tell my wife. “I was a real boy. I liked dirt. I might have
had to pee. I don’t think it was a child on earth my mother had the mind or heart
for raising.”

I tell my wife that she seemed swimmy to me, Mother did; I thought it looked as if
she’d crossed the barnyard on an icy day, when the wind was dry, and grainy, and her
eyes had watered up to keep themselves from cracking. I watched her. She was on the
second go-around. She fingered bulbs, adjusted tablecloths, eyed the shadows for the
maverick pigeon scratching in the rafters. She moved trees; she redirected creeks;
she plucked her sweatshirt from her body where it stuck from where I pressed it. I
recall my mother’s want for quiet. To study. See the shape of things. She bore me
once, she said, and then was barren. She said that she would recreate me. She recreates
me still, she says, when she is lonely, and is blue, and would rather not be holding
any grudges. She says she wants to keep it light these days. But she cannot be light.
There is no levity in recreation. Each remembrance, she discovers, is a memory of
a memory, and memory is the warp through which experience is leavened into weight.

“Do you understand me?” says my mother. “Not good,” she says, “not bad. Just awfully,
awfully heavy. You get to be your mother’s age, remembering begins to feel like faith.
I do not ask questions. The hows and whys and wherefores. There isn’t anything to
know, nothing to get. You’ve just got it, your life, and it sits there like this lump
of coal inside you, just waiting for some blessed soul to come around and light it
up or help you to forget how fast the lump is growing. Vernon does that,” says my
mother. “Helps me
to forget, puts a match to what’s remembered. Vernon’s grateful. It’s a brand new
desert Vernon sees. He’s still got the old one, says he knows it’s right directly
underneath the new, it’s what the new one’s built on. You know, the Roxy once was
also new. My grandad said he could remember going down to watch them turn the earth
up when they built it. Imagine, what a novelty, balconies, loveseats and those velvet
curtains! And you watched them tear it down, did you? And now you’re crying
none of this was here
with all the rest? Let me tell you something, there will come a day when
none of this was here
will be a whole lot truer than you want it to. That lump of coal grows like a cancer.
It splits. It scatters off itself in pieces. I look some days at one teat and I can’t
imagine that I ever had the other. Or another day I look at the one and can’t imagine
how it got to be the one I’m seeing. I saw it every day, washed it, dressed it, sprayed
it with perfume. But I never saw it getting stretched. I think I just waked up one
day and said,
Well, what on earth! When did all this happen?
Same with burying your daddy, you know, or getting thrown by Jelly Bean, or ever
being young enough to dream I’d be a girl who spoke another language in a foreign
city. Italian!” says my mother. “Rome! It’s all my life,” she says, “but I’ve felt
it move through me so many times, so many different places, it starts to seem like
I keep bumping into parts of me and asking,
Don’t I know you? Have we been introduced?
I get to saying,
None of that was there,
you know, I think:
Bonnie Dahl, you must be terribly mistaken.
”

“Thank God I’m not Grace,” my mother said. “Thank God you’re not Owen.”

My mother said, “Your papa isn’t bad, I’m not saying that. He just doesn’t know the
right way from the wrong way, when he comes to be excited.”

“Metal pigeons,” said my mother.

She said, “The doctor had to open me to get you. I think your papa was a witness.”

“Come here sweetheart,” said my mother. “Come a little closer to your mama.”

So I went a little closer. If I want to, I can see the greenish and the whitish stains
my mother never quite got rid of on her sweatshirt. I can feel my face pressed into
her and I can feel this cleanser smell and sour smell and I can feel my mother’s voice
come down to me against my ear the same as if I listened to her through a pipe or
culvert. I feel her telling me to keep on coming closer, I feel her voice divide and
grow throughout me, telling me she loves me.

“You could see how it might ruin her a little bit,” I told my wife, “when grandpa
Al decided he would let the lambs in. He let in the calves, and when the lambs and
calves have chased the ladies up onto the bandstand, he lets in the milkcow. It was
just a stunt of his. He was his daughter’s father. He knew his categories. My mother
always said you never have to look much past the family tree to see who’s tearing
all your roots up.”

I tell my wife my mother sat.

I said, “I was up there in the hayloft still, hiding out with Owen Dangberg and a
kid named Dewey. I remember I was looking straight down on her head where she was
sitting on the bottom rung of the loft ladder. And then she put her head into her
hands and I was looking at her neck. The skin of it. I remember because it looked
so white and rashy. I didn’t want Owen or Dewey to see it. She looked wrong, I thought,
to sit there on a ladder in a dress and show her neck like that.”

My wife, when I reach my mother’s neck, and feel myself at some conclusion, is not
remotely moved. She says she cannot picture it. She wonders what do lambs and milkcows
have to do with us. Our milk comes from cartons, she reminds me, and doesn’t Hans
provide our meat? This is the twenty-first century, my wife informs me. In her opinion,
we don’t need to be reminded of the technical embarrassments a mother stuck in nineteen-ought
would use to suffer for a party.

“It doesn’t sound like any fun,” my wife protests. “I thought you said that it was
fun.”

“It was something I was looking forward to,” I say. “I said parts of it were fun.
Nothing is all fun. Go ahead and name me one good thing that’s pure.”

I have suggested that my wife observe herself, asked her if her pregnancy and labor
with the boy was not in some way an adulterated bliss.
A bag of waters,
I believe the saying was, she was a waterbag, remember? Did she not recall the retention
of her menses, the growths of bones inside her, her bloat and her thrombosis, the
kicks and shoves, the hiccups and the heartbeat? I myself recall she wept, just as
our physician had foretold it. Her ankles swelled. Her gums bled. She described for
me the bloody show; acquainted me with the mucous plug. Sure, we told each other this
was what we wanted. We dined out, looked the other way, blamed the broken crystal
on a raging hormone. My wife, we said, had got the “dropsies.” She said, “Whoops,”
a lot or, “Whoopsey, someone’s got the dropseys!” We knew some items were irreparable.
Some took glue. True, my wife directed me to look onto the bright side, where she
foresaw a family trip to an exotic beach in no time. We would sun ourselves, boil
a lobster, teach the boy to float. No
regrets, she would say, all’s not lost, we are at a new beginning. I concurred, in
part, and asked her was there nothing I might do for her. She began to smell of Pine
Sol. Her knees chapped. Her ligaments, I reminded her, were killing her. Even so,
the days were rare when she was not pursuing dust and cobwebs, committing suicide
by rubber glove and plastic bucket. I told her, I said, “You are killing yourself.”
She said, “I know it,” and suggested I might help her. She pressed brooms on me, and
clothespins, and a book describing fifty-seven ways in which a father might be useful.
She was repeatedly astounded by how many products dear to her are causing birth defects,
in the state of California. So much we saw was
dear
to us.
Dearness
colored every shirt and shoe sized zero. So much to us became
so cute.
My wife held up the sailor’s blouse, the coveralls, and blazer, asking me to picture
in these flattened fabrics the cherubic figure of a milk-plumped son. She moved a
sleeve about, to stimulate my vision, assisting me to see our sailor’s first salute,
this kick our future farmer was to give me in the region of my shinbone.

I told her I could see it, saw it all, just today, in her face, its distortional facility,
even as she stood beside my chair and looked down from above me. Items: Why we absolutely
must possess a wicker bassinette; why the boy requires seven sleepers; why the room
cannot be painted white, but must be painted blue; why I, and only I, should be the
one to paint it. I am made to see the need for sacrifice. My wife, I see her purge.
I watch her “cut the fat out,” pare her fingernails and dress for comfort. She models
for me, asks me whether she is just as ugly as she feels, and as pretty, and as sotted.
She milks herself, in the bathtub, or in bed, wants to know if I have given any thought
to formulas, or if I ever worry over the efficacy of breast pumps. We make love, at
her request,
athletically, and partially, owing to her bulk, and my reluctance. We experiment with
pillows, using them as props, where props are necessary, or as cushions, where necessity
appears to call for cushions, or else we substitute a pillow for my arm, or for my
wife’s arm, should our making love compel my wife to bite, or scratch, or gnash her
teeth, destructively, the uppers on the lowers. We get her “all set up.” I pat her
on the bottom. She quivers, ripples fatly from the lumbar to the shoulderblade, the
shank down to the kneecap. I prod, searching for the crease in her of least resistance.
She assists me, reaches back for me and guides me to the place where she would have
me. I am had, easily, hardly sensing it, thanks to the enlargement of her orifice,
and to the abundance of her discharge. This is highly normal. Authorites assure us
that the woman and the man, from this time forth, may very well experience a diminution,
in their acts of love, of feeling. To be sure, my wife may do her Kegels, or employ
medicinal devices, there is the theory of a pre-delivery massage, as applied, professionally,
to the perineum; but better off to not expect a miracle
in corporalis,
and to focus rather on the “concrete possibilities” residing in a mirror, or in the
video cassette; better to derive our pleasures from the spousal yip, the whimper,
groan, and scream. “Some stretches,” says the doctor, “take the snap from the elastic.”
If he were not a man of faith, the doctor tells us, he would say the vaginal canal
was not designed to pass an object sized, and shaped, and builded of such obdurate
materials as those we find conspiring in the human skull. My wife and I, we understand
this, my wife more clearly than myself. Screaming, she explains, has pleasured her
since childhood; it would not surprise her if a scream or two from me might “tickle
her to pieces.” For love, she thinks I ought to try at least to whimper. It wouldn’t
hurt me, she believes. She says that I, too, must know
from time to time an urge to scream; I, too, when feeling lags, and the room is dark,
and we are grappling toward the consummation of our fleshly passions, then I, too,
must be mindful of the strain love suffers through the willed, enduring silence. My
wife, near here, will giggle. When I return from work she tells me she is apt to “break
up” over nothing. She says that she is so afraid. A foot, she says, is in her rib.
Her cyst grows. So many birds, she says, what happens to them? What makes a lip a
lip? What makes a palate cleft? Did I know a turtle lays her eggs in clutches numbering
the hundreds? My wife sits on the bed and holds her belly. She holds her knees. She
will not let me turn the light on. She naps, sleeps in, says her dreams repeat: abruption,
breach, and strangulation; abruption, breach, and strangulation. Our sheets are drenched.
Our night is short. She knows that she is being silly. She knows she shouldn’t, but
she wonders what the odds are they will cut her. She says she wants to know just who
on earth is Braxton Hicks, says she’d take the general over epidural, the analgesic
over a narcotic, asks me often why the several, wretched good things in her life are
always passing by so quickly.
Oh, Lincoln,
she says,
Lincoln, I’m so lonely. I was seventeen once,
she explains.
I had time to watch the light go out of days. I liked to cheer. I thought that I would
always have a closest friend. In lines, Lincoln, when we are standing in a line, I
never thought that you would be a man to stand so far apart from me that anybody else
could come between us. Go away,
she says,
come back,
and, on a night she wakes to find me gone off from our bed, my wife will call out
through the darkened halls that she’s got
two hearts now, four lungs, Lincoln, I’ve got forty toes and fingers! Come touch,
she says,
come feel! Hey, Lincoln,
says my wife,
Lincoln, dear, where are you
? And then another night, another day, the thing is truly passed, born into another
morning. She breaks. She floods. She deflates
before me, slackens out into a squalling, prunish wind. I coach her. I interpret data.
I clock her, offer ice chips, I suggest she breathe. My duty is to ask her please
to focus on that quiet place inside her, a brook, could be, falling high up through
a mountain meadow, or underneath that cottonwood beside the stilled and deepening
river; I describe for her the pebbled seaside she once went to as a girl, where she
must have walked once, and had watched once, and had heard and felt the storied waters
turn the pebbles clicking each one over on the other—waters-in, waters-out—smoothening,
and polishing, talkingly, to her, through the bottoms of her feet, perhaps, and through
her nose, and pores, inspiring confidence, and continuity, whispering to her,
this is as it shall be and has forever been,
and she is this, and this is she—the waters-in, the waters-out, the smoothened pebble
clicking in the rocking tidal wash—at rest in motion, in motion cleansed, safe in
rest, undangered and unpained, so long as she remains inside there.
Push,
I tell her. She must push, scream and count; I tell her, coachingly, that she must
breathe.
So she pushes, screams and breathes, and breathing she becomes the boy to me, the
birth again, again she smiles as she describes the boy’s smile, as I describe my father’s.
And then I ask her: Was it ecstasy she felt while chewing through her bottom lip?
Did her veins burst from her face for happiness? If it is happiness recorded in the
photographs she ordered me to take of her, then why should she be saddened by the
image she perceives there?