Strange Cowboy (9 page)

The truly festal memories I have are given to me by an accident. The sparrow in the
gutter delivers me the blackbirds in the poplars; a phrase of music on the radio delivers
me the band. Several times, I tell my wife, while pursuing Hope’s most recent stool,
or on an evening when the cesspool clarifies itself on pungent, eastern breezes, I
will be reminded of our son, of course, but also I am called to Owen Dangberg, whose
“accidents” did not go undetected, neither by the soldiers he had fought beside, nor
by any soldier who drew near enough to shoot him or to tie him up when he refused
to die, despite his mother’s boasting over Owen’s talent for sustaining his ignominies
in secret. There was no secret. Only anybody’s mother could believe in such a secret.
The truer version of the story comes to me, no mother, when I am midway to the trashcan
with my shovel, say, and the wind shifts, or the crusted surface of the stool breaks,
and Owen’s face appears as if before me, a pinched and reddened Owen, clenched, I
guess you’d say, unsecreted and “scared to death,” pale, in any case, drained, a ghost
to me, a stiffened, floating angel.

I stand there with my shovel and then choppily, it seems to me, an interval compresses,
my skin spreads, seems as if it thins and spans; I am encouraged to regard with confidence
the empty space of which I understand the skin is principally comprised, the gross
imbalance we are told the skin’s comprisal designates, in ratio of space to hard stuff.
Neurons, electrons, charged varieties of quark. I sense the vast, untrumpeted activity
in me, the colossal energies involved in keeping up my simplest appearance, sensing,
too, the boundless possibilities my simplest appearance must obscure, and the comprehension
of these possibilities the lapsing of appearance might inspirit. I make room, despite
myself, and Owen gets to be there. This is what it feels like. As if the harder, lesser
stuff of me has lapsed at last, as if solidity and heat and light are transient reminders
of the greater, stiller stuff that makes me and unmakes me: me, not me; Lincoln, Lincoln,
Lincoln, eternally returning.

Had I foreseen at five what I am seeing now I may have been a little kinder to this
Owen. Perhaps I never would have said he couldn’t ever fight on my side; perhaps I
never would have called attention to his ears. What did I know? I was five. It was
my birthday. I was persuaded by the war that said I did not have to die; I had faith
in the appearance of my body, the permanence of prettiness; already I was cultivating
habits whose directive was the staving off of interruption. No good to tell me that
the interruption was my prettiness, my body an ephemeron, a hiatus, a displacement
in the wider, timeless space to which my trunk and limbs and vital organs owe their
brief appearance. Sequence, I am certain, would not have much impressed me. The future
for a handsome youth must seem as handsome as the form from which he views it. I was
not Owen. Very likely I was thinking:
He crapped his pants. That kid crapped his pants. Thank God I’m not Owen.
And then he came to me, an
inspiration, heaven-sent, a grace, The Little Lord He Crapped His Pants, plain old
Owen Dangberg.

But my wife can’t see it: Owen Dangberg, angel. Next thing I’d be telling her was
that I saw him hovering on a pair of silver wings, or that he knelt right down beside
me, rolled up his sleeves and pitched right in with the weeding.

“What kind of angel weeds?” she wants to know. “What kind of things did Owen tell
you?”

Details, I insist, minutia, Owen Dangberg never said a word. And is it my fault if
the places God provides me for my inspirations are occasionally unseemly? Am I to
blame for finding out so little to describe there? The limitations of my intellect,
my self-expression, I remind her, are not entirely my own achievement. Given who my
mother is, and who my father was, and the patch of desert where they raised me, it
cannot be too surprising that my spiritual experience articulates in phrases whose
inelegance competes with sagebrush, creosote, and mud.

“I don’t know,” I tell my wife, “you take this day with Owen, looked like there was
nothing there, except what’s always there, and still what I had seen was everything.
There wasn’t anything to say. No true thing. I think I knew that once I started talking,
I would never stop. Or if I stopped, then I’d be finished in a lie. The secret is
there isn’t any secret. No mystery. We know it all. We’re afraid to believe in what
we know, and talk is the sound of our terror. My mother, when she says she wants to
recreate my birth, that’s her way of dodging that she doesn’t need to recreate it.
But not needing is not enough for her. All of life is not enough. She wants more life,
successive lives, some idea of succeeding futures. She used to tell me, she said,
It’s hard, not to miss the life you never had.
I remember, she said,
The life you miss the most is the life you
never lived.
Probably I didn’t have a very clear idea of my life as separate from hers. I wasn’t
lonely. I wasn’t bored. I didn’t need a party to supply myself with enemies. I was
my own enemy. I fought my own wars. My fighting had a real effect. If I was the Indians,
I really thought that I could help to make them win. We were smarter, tougher, braver.
We knew the spirits in the land and knew the ways the land could take the fight out
of a white man more completely than our clubs and arrows. We could say a prayer, smoke
a pipe. As a kid, I didn’t think that history had the final word. We’re all accomplices,”
I tell my wife, “fabricators. When the boy came out to ask me what I meant to do with
that shovel, I think it was the first time that I really recognized him as my own.
My son. Everything I saw so wrong in him was right. A perfection. What else could
he be? I could have kissed him. I could have asked him for forgiveness. What was he?
Two, then, maybe three? I know he wasn’t in his glasses, he wasn’t wearing his correctives.
I was tempted to give him the entire run-down, all of this I just told you—how it
was that I was seeing Owen—but in the end I only told him it was the dog. Kept it
simple. You know. Showed him the shovel, what was in it. I was feeling very clean.
We could have been anything. Any passerby would think we looked exactly how a son
and father ought to.”

Any passerby, I might say now, except my wife. Naturally, my wife by turns is unpersuaded,
unmoved, fatigued and skeptical and “frankly baffled.”

“Nothing,” she says, “anything, God. That shovel is the only truth in all of what
you’re saying I believe in. And what’s in that?
Dook’s
what.
Dog
dook. A cesspool. You’re a case,” she says, “you know that? I don’t see a whiff of
miracle in you. If you’ve never heard a secret it’s because nobody trusted you to
keep it. So far all
I see is one stink in your life reminding you of others. Tell me this, if you’re so
smart—how come you don’t make more money? How come you don’t treat folks right? How
come folks don’t like you?”

Close folks, she meant. Friends, and relatives, the memories of whom derive from stimuli,
she hopes, more noble and more varied than the odor of excreta. My birthday cake.
The roasted beef and lamb. Surely, says my wife, there is something fine and healthful
of my papa born to me in well-used saddle leather; the scent of lilacs must occasion
some remembrance of our infant son. His breath, she says, directing me to nights I
used to lean across his crib to sample from his tiny mouth the sweetness he had once
exuded through his fitful slumbers.

I do not
act,
she says. I know my son demands a tissue, but I seldom will supply it; I know the
roof one day will come down on my head, but I cannot be moved to mend it. My behavior,
given my experience, is inexplicable to me. I am the first peasant to stone the Jew
in days of plague. I fornicate and spend. I drink up all my water at the forefringe
of the desert, eat up my provisions on the eve of famine. I tell my wife it is with
me as it is with her as we approach each New Year, and she resolves herself to diet,
and on the days preceding her resolve will glut herself as if to prove the necessary
merit and the pending burden of her resolution. The body has its countermandments,
its historical imperative. Resolve is in the cell, and the cell is in the word; all
our covenants are compromised in flesh as we conceive them. Thou shalt not because
thou shalt. I tell my wife that my belief divides, compounds, dissolves, combusts,
decays. I am my own contaminant. The flowers I might bear to her are wilting on the
stalk before I pick them.

“I doubt a lot,” I say.

Just as she suspected. It is not for nothing, says my wife—a recent convert, I should
say, to my mother’s church—not for nothing that a people’s faith has all these years
been brought to market on the image of a rock. Some greater solid, anyway. A great
big pile of rocks, she says, mortared, chiseled into whole cathedrals, or hewn of
native woods, milled and hammered into little clapboard churches, naves and apses
built of bricks of straw and mud, a place to congregate, she says, and to observe,
and recognize, any kind of holy house and one believer. She herself believes. The
cell of her resolve is in the wafer; a cell hangs bleeding from the cross.

“I’m not nothing,” she says. “I’m not anything. I’m me.”

She intends a scolding, jabs a finger once at me and then herself, as if to clarify
our separation, the positive identity the spaces indicated by her jabbing guarantees
us. To find my faith, she says, when I have lost myself, could not be more in keeping.
Thin air, accidents, freaks of nature, numbers, signs, morbidities, conjunctions,
logic, lapse—my trouble, says my wife, is that I want for weight, a staid and vigorous
rebuke, sanction, Mass, the repetition of a regulated series.

“Something along the lines of those candles,” says my wife. “And that smokepot. Or
how about a simple kiss goodnight?”

How long had it been, she wonders, since I clasped my neighbor’s hand and wished that
peace were with him? At the ceremony, at the courthouse, did I recall our vows, the
words I wrote my mother spoke in honor of my father? She wonders does my wedding band
mean nothing more to me than what its current worth is at the pawn shop where we purchased
it? Do I ever look to it, she asks me, for some instruction more enduring than a vague
assessment of the relative humidity and heat? Did I not know what a symbol was? Did
I know the Word was more than just a word?

“Wishy-washy,” says my wife. “I don’t know why I bother asking.”

By and by, of course, she does not bother, but is “beaten back” by what she calls
my chemical unbalance. She concluded I had nothing in the world to lose, since there
was nothing in the world I had possessed, nothing I’d been on to, no place in the
world where I was able to articulate I might be getting. She said that she, in fact,
was on to me, knew exactly where I was, said she had me
dead to rights,
I was
backed into a corner,
it was time for me to
fess up, be a man, put my money where my mouth was.

This, then, is the impasse we had come to, how it was that I was sitting, out of mouth,
out of money, just this afternoon, thinking about breathing, when I heard my wife
call out to me, and saw my wife come out to me, where she stood beside me, requiring
me to see to some disaster whose specifics I had thoroughly forgotten. I could have
simply asked. Yet there I sat, silent, nearly silent, wondering could this disaster
be my mother. Was her sack come unattached, I asked myself, had she eloped with Vernon?
Would she describe to me a kiss they shared, some means they had contrived to join
in copulation? Or had she finally died? Or, what? What did she want, my wife? What
was I doing? A bagpipe, was I thinking, an accordion, St. Pete’s? Undoubtedly, I am
an imaginative laggard, my own most eager interrupter. I go so far, up to points,
advance and loiter on a lifelong precipice commanding fog-choked basins of aboutness.
If I stand beside a point, it is for the perfect reason that I cannot see one. The
principles associating the commemoration of a boy’s fifth year of
life with Bonnie Dahl’s Catholicism, we learn, are not too handily apparent. The catholicity
of mind, in my experience, exceeds the senses, and also vice versa. I see, and cannot
think what I am seeing; I think, and cannot see what I am thinking. Bury my head,
or pull it out; open my eyes or close them: too much from the easy chair is brutely
present. My wife, for instance. Who is she, in the long run, what was my wife before
she called out for her life and found it was beyond her calling? She used to lie down
with a friend, a girl, nine or ten, beneath a cottonwood in autumn. They were girls
in jeans and flannel. They held hands. The dry grass pricked and tickled at their
necks. They had a favorite, softest place, a narrow gully in the rootswells. They
said,
What do you want to do? We could, no....
they said,
we could, Well...
and,
No...
they said, and so on, says my wife, “forever.”

“The sky,” she says, “where you could see it through the leaves, it was so blue and
hard around the edges, but when I see it now I always think of butter.”

Not so long ago, last week, I believe, we stood together, hovered at the louver slats
and watched our son entice the neighbor-dog with bones the butcher Hans stopped off
to make the boy a gift of. We pressed our cheeks against the slats, our foreheads,
we leaned our hips and shoulders to the windowframe and doodled on the smudgy glass.
The day was brilliant. The very air suspired glint and salutation. The fenceposts
and the flagpoles, the hubcaps, hoods, and rearviews, the trashcans, even, the tin
lids and the corrugated ribbing—every surface dense enough to take a shine was winking.
It hurt to look and not to look there, to see and not believe what you were thinking.
I thought I heard the leaves sing on the chainlink, I thought I heard the grass rhyme.