Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (71 page)

And stories about the First World War, and the army then, the American Expeditionary Force, and about men he knew, and about battles, and French whores, and the 1920s, and making money then in a small town. And the priest who tried to convert him was not a Catholic priest but a Presbyterian minister, strong-minded, devouringly competitive: he wanted to be S.L.’s lover in Christ and also in sin—he detected in S.L. the lecher’s love of fire, of punishment, the great heat of guilt that lies inside those who fuck.

He and I have a brotherhood of error in the name of God and man, sort of. We’re not quite crypto-Christians but it’s one of Dad’s secrets that he’s a better “Christian and neighbor than most of our Christian neighbors are: I’m a helluva lot sweeter,” he said. He said to me, “I don’t like people much, I dislike a lot of people, I dislike most people, to tell
you the truth, Ah hates peeuhpull … but hold on, who-uhhhhm I shuhuh dooo lyek youuu.…”

Notions of redemption, of absolution, and of repentance and inner peace are complex in this man. For instance, he believes that no one
blames
“A Real Man”—a strong man—but that you should—you should blame such a man at times, using Christian notions of meekness and of camels caught in the eye of needles; but at the same time, if he admires such a man, then for as long as he admires him, he, S.L., believes A Real Man is blameless—it’s almost a species thing with him.

“Why are you strutting?” he asks me.

I have backed off from his arms and am moving in the center of the still drum of air on the platform.

I look at him.

“Well,” he said, “be a man about it, give us a hug—the royal us—” He has a version of male swagger. He directs me, he wants a “delicately” knowing hug with some of the “delicacy” hidden, with it as implicit, a submission to the imperial glory of this man of charity. But then he wants the hug to be sheer openness, too, one man to another, on the trail, with a Western tale’s apocalypse near: “Give us a hug for the last roundup, kiddo—I’m wounded unto death, Wileykins—” He arranges and rearranges me; I hear his heartbeat through his shirt, under the folded wings of the lapels of his jacket. “I’m just a poor error-stricken bastard,” he says. “You’re a beaut—” he says. “You’re not really trash—” My lineage. The look on his face, in his eyes, changes into and out of dialect; he shows what he wants to show; he has a kind of circus pain about life. Now he gets sophisticated: “Come on, you little angel, another hug—your hugs are what get me through the day—” My arms go around his neck—my forehead touches his cheek. I don’t like to kiss with my lips—but he butts his head onto my small, startled lips; I purse, peck, pull my head back. “You kiss like a
goy,
you know that? Can’t you kiss like a Jew with a heart?” He is in his anti-Christian mode. Christ, the misery in his face. Behind his amusement, a storming and continuous wretchedness shows: it is male pain, male braggadocio, real life in him, his life in the world of men.

The shirt he wore was whitish, with gray and white and black lines in it in checks, I think: I remember it
clearly
but ignorantly, damp cotton cloth, its smell, and his heartbeat and breath, the smells on his skin, the meaty smell of his breath, the smell of damp in his hair.…

The Agreement Between S.L. and Me

H
E PICKED
me up and carried me across the grass in the gray and blowing light: “Now here’s a real treat for you—” A wall that comes almost to the top of Dad’s thigh
runs
here like a series of waves along the uneven edge of the park. It undulates and is hard for me to understand or figure out, and I never did come to know it clearly. At its base is wet and shadowed grass. It resembles a narrow path but it is in the air like a bridge or the upper part of a stepladder. Da lifted me onto its pathlike or steplike top. I looked out and I ignored or couldn’t see what was there—then I saw the massive descent and ascent of air, differently lit in its parts, a view.

The view was of the Mississippi River in a wide valley from the top of a limestone bluff perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high and maybe an eighth of a mile long. An enormous ballooning drum, bandstandlike, of open air rose and stretched and fell in front of me—and rose and stretched and fell some more as I blinked and breathed. The wind hisses, a gray-y swan—its hiss of divinity is incessant; its feathery assault makes it that I am thrilled and suffering both—fog, mist, raindrop-filled air: I shift myself from leg to leg. “Are you dancing?” Daddy asks. “How do you like these potatoes?”

The air, the masked rainlight—pounding and webbed feet, hissing beak, it pushes me with its fat, huge breast—the wind is monstrous.

Dad says, “You don’t laugh enough, it’s nice to see you laugh—”

His nose snuffles and snuggles in my hair—his breath is a lesser swan in my ear. Bits of drizzle prick my face. He says, “Blow, blow, blow the man down—do you love me, Sweetiepie-Sweetiekins—you love me or not? Tell me right now.”

It is the sky of not-sleep; I know it is real even though it has limited light in it. In recognition and the conceit of recognition, I am dizzy.

“That’s the west wind,” Daddy says. “You know about the west wind, it likes to blow at nice kids—”

Shapely arcs of sky, the stairs and windows of my experience are knotted into stairs of space, into innumerably petaled pale roses of air, doors and sidewalks of air, boxes of air, stacked, transparent windows—they fell and rose.

“You like that?” Da said. “He liked to ‘a’ died—is that it? Wait till you see what fucking’s like: he thought he saw the end of the world, I guess—” He rehearsed talking about me.

In the pre- and post-rain brown and green and black air, I saw threads and slices of pastels flittering in the mucky light—luminous strips and rosettes of color. I shivered with crazedness, with chill and nerves. In the windily flexing local air now appear gleams of yellow in scatterings. Then those bits expand and become bands and depths of subdued rainy-day clearing-up light for the moment. Now that is encroached on by streamers of stormy milk and bronze. What I see is weird—it is not all fixed and flat—what I am seeing is in part what I am going to see in a moment and is not yet known.

A muddied flutter of near blue, the soul of windows, holds numinous fragments in it—birds, bits of smoke—in this recess of the storm. The light alters steadily, blowingly. I blink into and out of sight, into and out of dream under the boiling upside-down floor-ceiling of clouds. Daddy says, “Hey, what about me, remember me?” Expanses of thickened and dramatic bruises of air, in wavering buntings, have scratches of light in them. The thin whee of astonishment in my mind rose and grew. A long road of water is the river: a path of light, pure gleam in the grammar of sight, an arrangement of rules, physical sensation corrected by notions of truth. I can’t see everything at once but have to proceed in stages, with withdrawal, elevation, return, or arrival: I invent a sense of the whole like a picture inside a hole in the ground, a hole in me, and this is what I will see, this construct of my mind in its den, when I say to myself, I
saw it.

Da says, “You act like you just seen God—once you see battle, you go either way—I went atheist—join me in a little doubt, Wileykins—well, enjoy yourself if you want—but if you ask me, I say God is filth—”

The rapid mud-brown sulks of the water down below become
the pure gleam
far away: grammar is a bunch of rules of physical sequence for a physical form of an idea that does not have that sequence in itself.

Look at me: I’ve been brought here.

Alongside the river are railroad tracks, barge locks, oil storage tanks, a grain elevator—I see them. They are visible in the shifting light while slanted shadows—rain—move here and there behind them, in the distance. I think babies are probably mad from confinement and ontogeny, the upsetting-to-the-memory recapitulation and mad fetal discipline and whatnot, the discontinuities of the other logic—not the mind’s but
reality’s—hammering at the blurred mind in the womb’s dulled air, in the pewteriness. I can’t see all at once or merely sensibly: one specializes for a second or two, now on notations of shadow, now on rayed glimpses of cars on roads across the river: distraught and mindful, I frequently collapse and merely lick the air—with my tongue—and then after a few seconds with my eyelids. I went on learning in the prolonged spasm of vision; distance and compendiousness did it: shabby kingdom with a river—it’s me who’s here.

The enameling of the light moves and shifts: I see a bridge downstream—metallic ripples—metal braid—webby glosses of air in a rain haze at this moment, this pedestal of mind: my attention has two forms—as light and as a river on no clear geographical plane.

On an aerial diagonal I see
the tops
of spindly trees behind a bitten-at low muddy mound of a levee. Farther back, fields start shabbily among weeds, old fences, shabby fencelets of trees. Husbandry at its sentinel work. Meaning is movable because of the indiscretions of my mind: without wind or anomaly, and diffusely lit, the view exists in me: it is not itself first seen but is a summary now, off and on: I am expert in it—expert and brief, so that I laughed. Leaning outward, I saw the chalky and sporadically tufted face of the bluff: I was as immodest with mind as a girl is: this occurred on the high-angled shore of an ocean of phenomena. River gulls and crows and starlings fly
below
me—in the speaking light. Above the perceptible counties in the bruise-colored light, mountain-sized brackish clouds move like barracks or fat wooden ships, dragging giant disks of further shadow over wetly shimmering brown and green fields. Little here is like anything to be found in a famous poem, Chinese or Greek—this isn’t light of a decimal clarity. What has occurred here of statement and denunciation has little resonance with us. We have here a landscape of envy and emptiness—a place of temporary and embattled
comforts,
an American beauty (that which results from a meeting of what was here and a society of grand acquisitors). I am an acquired child. Simple violence will do here usually. What I saw was a milieu of economic liveliness—I remember the level stillness under everything, which is to say the remaining shape of the prairie. The rainlight is so real to me it can be taken as given that this is remembered in the absence of photography. No photograph can reproduce that place or that light. Or that child. We are so much more than our means to know give us to know. A flickering moment of actual rain blinded the kid and he can’t see the hospitalities and eccentric poverties
of the habitable valley, so shabbily used and so delectable. I cleared my eyes; the ocean eye’s pearl distances were unveiled. Small bits of grit strike my face. In the increasing wind, the increasing darkness, the child is in the rain latrine, the exciting foulness of storm; the duties and pornographies of childhood include being thrilled by this parading and now shouting wind, natural Armageddon of the locale. Across the unhistorical model of the world, the massive ill nature of the universe comes pouring in a whistling and howling rapacity of outriders and plumes and holy swans and shouting devastators of wind—or merely Indian warriors in dark colors—sabers of wind, bullets of rain, arrows and catapults, and regiments and battalions of slow and armored clouds, phalanxes and elephants, whale brows—what a barbaric and real incursion—the vast army of whistlers and frowners: the frowning air.

My partly restored heart likes the onward bumping air, stampeding and galloping, the parade of hooting winds, the deaf-to-me forces of the sky, of everything. The mouths of air become sharp near my face, the beaks of cranes and herons. American enormity. Bird kisses, pale-eyed, scratch me—the eye of childhood flinches at the saltily spitting tears above the pearl froth of distances.

I am a tremor of acceptance here—a local boy. In the round of my eyes, I have a wakeful fear and self-love again after the debacle, the chagrin of insanity; I am maybe jerry-built like much that is in the view. This immoderate window above the suburban plenum in the now carpentered, wind-distracted view and panicked air holds my semicompre-hension of the casual and hardly pharaonic or permanent buildings—amateur monuments glintingly alight or shadowed according to the oncoming rain.

“Hold still, hold still; don’t be as wild as a Red Indian: you know what happened to the Indians, don’t you? Play it safe, be a cowboy like your old man—like me, I’m your new old man. We have to go home; it’s getting dark. You’ve had enough, we’ve had enough—Hold on, now: stop being so stiff—hold on to Old Faithful—Old Faithful Essel is able and willing—Upsy-daisy, off we go—”

He started to gallop. He carries, as if in a warm pouch next to his chest, my dead mother’s otherwise silenced voice in this world; I am her voice being Americaned—although I do not speak yet. I hear my own small maybe mock-national heart next to S.L.’s enormous heartbeat.

I’m not capable of any further well-fathered ordering of so sloppy a slice of air and earth and affection and what-have-you as this plowed
day, dirtied now. The wind is a bunch of black dogs that push at me, they’re drooling on my eyes; they’re tickling and choking me; I kept my face outward in the airily strangling fur—the drool. I’m rolled over and over inside myself, belabored by so big a chunk of feeling as being carried so gallopingly causes and as the day sponsors. The whale’s head, the wooden latrine of the rain, the foul circus elephants of the day, of the circus-odorous day in its rainstink, the earth goes thud-thud with wind, with thunder from the next county (Da explains), and he says, “Don’t be wicked—you’ll bring on the deluge, we ain’t got no ark—”
Wicked
to him means
foolish.
“Don’t be foolish,” he says, touching bases. “You want Beelzebub to get us?—Let’s get someplace dry—”

D
AD
is carrying me rapidly—I lie against his warm ribs—I’m in his arms—he mutters, “The air is like wet noodles.” He gives birth to metaphor. Wind elongates and splinters raindrops—damp strings in the air—cap-pistol pops of some drops on Dad’s arms, near my ear; storm flags of scuttering brown light. I have riddle points of curiosity about Pa’s downhill march—bumpety-bump—his noisy, smelly, big-footed, big-legged trot; in the moving field of my character, my attention, the gladioli are metronomic gobbets of bloom, smeared arcs. The noises of his and my clothes and breath are strangely syllabic—ah, ah, ah. Soulful particles of practice tears lie in my eyes, pleated and whispering sensations of rain, alphabet dragons of noise.