Against the Country (22 page)

Within this dilated moment, as we stared out over the jagged black remains of a hundred-acre wood (poor Pooh! poor Piglet!), and took in that panel of red and gold sky newly visible just beyond it, I swear I could almost smell the synapses firing within my father’s brain so as to tug toward his skull what rainbow array of wires our great God-arsonist had laid beneath his cheeks all those fond years prior, which gift and which foresight produced a smile I think anyone would want to call explosive.

An excellent theory, and one we might still hear raised by the surviving members of our party, but I ask you this:

What claustrophobe, really, would have shown such a calmness as my father did when the snow came down like a beeless quilt over house and yard and field and tree, and put an end to any long-term thinking on his part or on ours, and by the hush that followed drew all near to all? what claustrophobe would not have lumbered away from that hokey gulag after the first foot had fallen, rather than slump beside a stove whose fumes (and those of the cigarettes he lit one after the other with matches scraped across her pouty lower lip) robbed him breath by breath of the wind required to order his children out into the yard to gather what scraps of firewood there could still be construed as dry? what claustrophobe would not have gone naked and expansively mobile at these times, rather than swaddle himself fashionably in layers of flannel and denim and down, and tuck himself supine into a dirt-backed snow, and offer his beard to a lowering sky determined by its flakes to cover him completely? what claustrophobe would then have so stoically scooted, with atrophied legs, the whole of his torso up under a house he knew all the while to be sinking down onto him, there to tarry in that tomb for hours and for eras, melting with a blowtorch what ice had formed in, and clogged, and threatened
as usual to burst (though we had left all the faucets trickling at night, as he ever commanded we do), a hieroglyph of town pipes his floor had neither the aptitude to decipher nor the historical expectation to suspend?

What claustrophobe, I ask you, would have shown so cramped a mercy as he did when it was finally uncovered that his sons floated close to their bedding of a frigid night, and emptied themselves (shyly at first, though later in more expressive torrents) against what breach had formed, almost conveniently, between the upper and lower sashes of a chattering window in their chamber, so as to cause (or by these efforts contribute to) a frozen yellow seepage that began well within the confines of the capsule itself and proceeded, seeking gravity and some semblance of atmosphere, down the outer face of the bottom pane and along a sloping sheet of metal miles below (or was it inches? we could not tell), at whose far end it terminated, on your colder orbits anyway, in a stalactite depending from, and drawing special attention to, a stopped if formerly earthbound gutter?

What claustrophobe, or besides that what agoraphobe (what flasher, i.e., what slinker? what promoter of his children? what tucker away of them? what facilitator, by word, of their passage through this void? what destroyer, by wire, of any hope they may have had not to fear its wide expanse?), mindful that our little rock-candy formulation might be spotted easily from the road below and denounced for the shamelessness of its artistry, with perhaps some few points tacked on for the veracity of the statement being made (or was it the statement that would call down the censure, on account of a gaucherie, with some ground given grudgingly on the more delicate matter of form? one could never be sure), would not then have whaled on his sons for such an offense, and held them in suspicion ever after, and laid upon them a penance more severe than the quiet
moonlight removal, by stick and stove-boiled water, of what sculpture their penises had planned out (on the theme of mortality and immediate need), and by a personal warmth carved into, across a rusted stretch of porchtop their father would in time demand rent from his sight and appraisal altogether?

If he was a claustrophobe, then, I cannot show it to my satisfaction, nor I expect to anyone else’s, since the replays here will tend to confuse. His one recorded text, entitled “The Suicide of Salinger’s Seymour Glass,” and afforded four whole pages in the aforementioned
Studies in Short Fiction
(summer 1972; Newberry College; Newberry, South Carolina), strikes me as a little like that: it counts itself bold where it has been only careful; it holds itself safe on innovation’s bag where it has been called out paragraphs ago, by contact with any number of missed opportunities, such as when my father came up short in this inning yet awarded himself a remarkable run:

The first sentence there is a perfunctory swing whose back half is convinced that it has reached base easily, I suppose on an error. The next is so steeped in a dead Viennese’s weak tea, or deprived of his cocaine, as to be judged no better than an understimulated attempt to steal second. (That high-school hop
from “nearly conscious” to “fully conscious,” and of course the tossing off of “erotic pretense” and “kiss on her foot,” could not help but stay even the swiftest runner.) (So why do I pursue this? Under whose aegis? Chasing what result? My father did not follow, nor that I know of know the first thing about, baseball, and so the fun that it is by far the least claustrophobic of our national sports can earn me next to nothing here, whereas his already established interest in basketball, America’s purer pastime and a much more intimate undertaking, might at a minimum allow me to ask how closely he ever observed that game’s playing, and how consciously he ever considered its less crickety metaphor to hug our more crickety predicament. Perhaps I should have gone instead, as he surely would have, with a literary analogy, or a theft: Would not the time-honored, or -forged (or is it really only the imitated?),
Odyssey
have gone better in this spot? Better even than the more Iliadic to-and-fro of basketball? Or of that girded and chaotic scrum we call football, which I never once watched him watch? Would it not have smacked the ear sounder, this round and salty sea tale, than ever could the squared-off, corn-syrup argument of baseball?) That last sentence there is your classic bunt: well executed, I agree, but not subtle enough to promote a player already thrown out at first all the way to third, let alone to bring him triumphantly (or was it really only vengefully?) home.

There persists a desire in children, however damaged (the children or the desire), for their parents to be, in some inevitable way, right. I cannot with much probity pooh-pooh that hope, having once been a child myself, nor can I overlook now, out of childish sentiment, the blur in its pus-speckled mirror: that there persists in adults a desire, however damaged (the desire or the adults), for their children to be, in some inevitable way, wrong. My own close shave with American parents has led me to conclude that these images might be interchangeable, insofar as they come up against (if from different angles, and at different
times) the same impassable barrier across what still (faint flashes!) exists of my moral-aesthetic continuum. I too find it repulsive to blame a parent in and by our literature for any crime perpetrated against a young and defenseless (or was it really only a memorable?) me, but I find it equally repulsive to pardon a parent in and by that same literature, comprising as it can but impressions of thoughts about memories of thoughts about memories of events I may not have remembered all that well to begin with, or thought about with any great clarity since.

With that baseball foolery, for example (
let’s play two!
), I was probably only groping at, or toward, as I completed the loop metaphorically but left metaphysical matters caught in a rundown between second and third, untrustworthy thoughts about untrustworthy remembrances of untrustworthy objects being hurled at my unmetaphorical (at the time) and (at the same time) unmetaphysical head like nature’s outré chin music. That is, my father would, on occasion, fell a tree whose chunks were not so easily split as were pine’s into pieces small enough for the stove’s little strike zone to admit, which decision would see us out swinging exhaustedly in the yard for hours on end, using his maul to drive iron wedges into the petrified wood until it spread open like a schoolgirl beneath the bleachers at the bottom of the seventh (“Which wedge did it? Really? I thought sure you’d put that in the wrong crack”), or else seized up and blew one of these intrusions past our iced and idiot skulls at an audible velocity, in what I took at the time to be a willful attempt by God, or by the log,
but surely not by our own manager
, to brain us.

Still, this manager would, I know, could I cool his ash down and interview it (postgame) on the matter, be forced, out of a lingering American parenthoodness, to quibble with me there: not so much on the particulars of my conclusion, which he would get at soon enough, as on its pretense to being, by way of that patently faked desperation, and that hardly-to-be-humored-anymore anger, and that damnable glibness, an innocent string of guesses, as opposed to what it more obviously was: a couched and perverted stab at him.

(My father, forgive me, was a man to toss homegrown insults around, and puppies, but never a factory-stitched ball.)

Stabs, perverted or no, he could stomach and even admire, whether directed at his individualistic fat (now rendered) or at yours. Guesses he would cock an atheistic eye (hole? pearl?) at and pay no further attention to, so long as these could be imagined (by a once imaginative brain, now simple salts and vapors) to be, after the fashion then (which I hear tell is the fashion yet again), “genuine.” A couched anything, easily tolerated in his personal misbehavior, and absolutely prized in the work of those “real” writers he referenced or read out loud to us (through a vicarious vanity of his own, I imagine, or I guess), tended nonetheless to confound him in any doing of ours, as if both doing and doer were akin somehow to that overrun (or was it already a granulated?) beachhead in his spine, which joist (or which column, or which question mark) would shortly go the same fiery way as all the meat that had dared to conceal it, and all the flab that had hidden away all the meat, and all the thinness of skin that might have encouraged, rather than hindered, his turning a hot head around to cast one last melting malocchio upon a stretch of oily back a-blister like a curtain pushed playfully from behind by the company cutup and then caused, by way of a single faulty footlight (
pop!
), too dramatically, if alas too tardo, to immolate.

The killer-log conceit he would dismiss as a Romantic silliness: “The cure for that sort of thing is Ruskin. Ruskin’s
really something. You should try Ruskin.
”
(
SON
:
I like Ruskin fine. I just think the fun in it all may have eluded him
.
FATHER
:
Well, I doubt you’d get anywhere with Ruskin there. Ruskin always thought the problem through
.
SON
:
By half, maybe. Bathetic fallacy is more what I say. Wasn’t he the one afraid of pubic hair?
FATHER
:
Well
—
SON
:
You know, we ought to have employed a playwright here, if we couldn’t afford the librettist. Sophocles? O’Neill? Synge?
FATHER
:
Well, Ruskin tended to wrestle with his subject. You should probably give Ruskin a try
.)

The killer-God idea he would counter with a grunt, or a sniff, or a grunt-sniff, so as to demonstrate by this gesture how ontologically brave he was (and I will allow that he did die bravely: it was only his living that could have done with more panache), which would leave us here with but his “genuine” motivations to sift through, and his by now burnt-up rendition of the erstwhile sun-faded facts, and his eventual homing back in on, as the one worthy topic of talk between us (correct!), not the
meanness
I had meant when I implied that he both had and had not wished to see us killed by those wedges out in the yard but rather the
meantness
I had meant when I implied that neither one of us had necessarily meant to mean either.

Meanness, you see, came so easily to the earthly him that I would be shocked if his expirant too did not consider it almost a trivial subject, like breathing might be to those who have never known trouble breathing. (Deep inhale …) Meantness, on the other hand, or lung, gave him regular hiccups, and was a constant bellows to his own Romantic sillinesses, which blew across my childhood as delectably as did all those smelly little zephyrs bearing with them the news, if never quite the word, that a too-proud manse to the east of us (
FATHER
:
Wasn’t Zephyrus the west wind?
), or else a too-ashamed shack nearer by, had the night before been consumed innard-outward by flame (and how unlike what will happen to humans!) on account of its having been occupied by “morons” with no idea how “properly”
to “tend” a stove, which attitude presented even when the cause of the fire was clearly electrical (as our novice noses could readily detect and his, a guilded wirer’s, surely must have), and which attitude could not then help but alarm us, given that our father had for years played the stooge to his too-well-tended Franklin (inventor of wood heaters and fire departments alike, the bastard), and had stuffed it so full of tar-drunk pine, and lead-painted boards, and anything else that would hotly and unsafely burn, as to send God knows what future incendiaries up the chimney to clutch at its innards like gargoyles and await their inevitable crack at revanche.

The worst of these Romantic sillinesses (my father’s, I mean, or mean mostly) was a confused New Critic’s conviction that whereas a log might be no more than a log, and a wedge might be no more than a wedge, and a childhood might be no more than a childhood, the same could not be said of “log” and “wedge” and “childhood” and “might” and “be” and “no” and “more” and “than” and “a,” which totems he refused to accept for what they plainly were: descriptive (and therefore only proximate, and therefore ever maddening)
occurrences
that by eye and ear, or by ear and fingertip (thinking now of the blind), or by eye alone (thinking ever of the deaf), took a measurable, material form while fairly flaunting their refusal to make manifest those allegedly more “real” things, or imagined relationships between said “real” things, they were shaped millennia ago to represent, yes, but then were prophesied (Who did this?
Why?
) one day, impossibly, to become.