The Centaur (8 page)

The country staircase, descending between a plaster wall and a wood partition, was narrow and steep. At the bottom, the steps curved in narrow worn wedges; there should have been a railing. My father was sure that my grandfather with his clouded downward vision was going to fall some day; he kept vowing to put up a bannister. He had even bought the bannister, for a dollar in an Alton junk shop. But it leaned forgotten in the barn. Most of my father’s projects around this place were like that. Tripping in grace notes like Fred Astaire, I went downstairs, in my descent stroking the bare plaster on my right. So smooth-skinned, this wall shallowly
undulated like the flank of a great calm creature alive with the chill communicated through stone from the outdoors. The walls of this house were thick sandstone uplifted by mythically strong masons a century ago.

“Close the stair door,” my mother said. We didn’t want heat to escape the downstairs.

I can still see everything. The downstairs was two long rooms, the kitchen and the living-room, connected by two doorways side by side. The kitchen floor was of broad old pine boards, recently sanded and waxed. A hot-air register cut into these boards at the foot of the stairs breathed warmly on my ankles. A newspaper, the Alton
Sun
, that had fallen to the floor kept lifting one corner in the draft, as if begging to be read. Our house was full of newspapers and magazines; they flooded the windowsills and spilled from the sofa. My father brought them home by the bale; they had some connection with the Boy Scout scrap-paper drive, but never seemed to get delivered. Instead they slithered around waiting to be read, and on an evening when he was caught in the house with nowhere to go, my father would disconsolately plow through a whole pile. He could read at terrific speed, and claimed never to learn or remember a thing.

“I hate to get you up, Peter,” he called to me. “If there’s anything a kid your age needs, it’s sleep.”

I couldn’t see him; he was in the living-room. Through the first doorway I glimpsed three chunks of cherry wood burning in the fireplace, though the new furnace in the basement was running as well. In the narrow space of kitchen wall between the two doorways hung a painting I had done of our back yard in Olinger. My mother’s shoulder eclipsed it. In the country she had taken to wearing a heavy-knit man’s sweater, though in her youth, and in Olinger, when she was slimmer,
and when I first recognized her as my mother, she had been what they called in the county a “fancy dresser.” With a click like an unspoken scolding she set a tumbler of orange juice at my place at the table. Between the table and the wall was a kind of corridor she filled. Balked by her body, I stamped my foot. She moved away. I walked past her and past the second doorway, through which I glimpsed my grandfather slumped on the sofa beside a stack of magazines, his head bowed as if in prayer or sleep and his fastidious old hands daintily folded across the belly of his soft gray sweater. I walked past the high mantel where two clocks said 7:30 and 7:23 respectively. The faster clock was red and electric and plastic and had been purchased by my father at a discount. The slower was dark and wooden and ornamented and key-wound and had been inherited from my grandfather’s father, a man long dead when I was born. The older clock sat on the mantel; the electric was hung on a nail below. I went past the white slab of the new refrigerator’s side and out the doors. There were two; the door and the storm door, a wide sandstone sill compelling a space between them. From between the two, I heard my father saying, “Jesus Pop, when I was a kid, I never had any sleep at all. That’s why I’m in agony now.”

There was a little cement porch where our pump stood. Though we had electricity, we had no indoor plumbing yet. The ground beyond the porch, damp in summer, had contracted in freezing, so the brittle grass contained crisp caves that snapped shut under my feet. Eddies of frost like paralyzed mist whitened the long grass of the orchard slope. I went behind a forsythia bush too close to the house. My mother often complained about the stink; the country represented purity to her but I couldn’t take her seriously. As far as I could see, the land was built on rot and excrement.

I suffered a grotesque vision of my urine freezing in midair and becoming attached to me. In fact, it steamed on the mulch intimately flooring the interlaced petticoats of the leafless forsythia bush. Lady in her pen scrabbled out of her house, spilling straw, and pushed her black nostrils through the wire fencing to look at me. “Good morning,” I said, gentlemanly. When I went to the pen, she leaped high in the air, and when I thrust my hands through the frosty lattice of metal to stroke her, she kept wiggling and threatening to uncoil into another leap. Her coat was fluffed against the cold and bits and wands of straw clung in it. The texture of her throat was feathery, the top of her head waxen. Under her hair, her bones and muscles felt tepid and slender. From the way she kept hungrily twisting her long skull, as if to seize more of my touch, I was afraid my fingers would slip into her eyes, which protruded so vulnerably; lenses of dark jelly. “How are
you?
” I asked. “Sleep well? Dream of rabbits?
Rabbits!
” It was delicious, the way my voice made her swirl, thrust, wag, and whine.

As I squatted, the cold came up behind me and squeezed my back. When I stood, the squares of wire my hands had touched were black, my skin having melted the patina of frost. Lady leaped like a spring released. She came down with a foot on her pan and flipped it over and I expected to see water spill. But the water was ice solid with the pan. For the instant before my brain caught up with my eyes, it seemed a miracle.

Now the air, unflawed by any motion of wind, began to cake around me, and I moved quickly. My toothbrush, glazed rigid, was of a piece with the aluminum holder screwed to the porch post. I snapped it free. The pump dragged dry for four heaves of the handle. The water, on the fifth stroke rising from deep in the stricken earth, smoked faintly as it splashed
the grooved brown glacier that had built up in the pump trough. The rusty water purged the brush of its stiff jacket, but when I put it in my mouth it was like a flavorless square lollipop. My molars stung along the edges of their fillings. The toothpaste secreted in the bristles melted into a mint taste. All the time, Lady watched my performance with a wild delight that swelled and twitched her body, and when I spat, she barked in applause, each bark a puff of frost. I replaced the brush and bowed, and had the satisfaction of hearing the applause continue as I retired behind the double curtain, the storm door and the main door.

The clocks now said 7:35 and 7:28. The great wash of warm air within the honey-colored kitchen made my movements lazy, though the clocks jabbed at me. “Why is the dog barking?” my mother asked.

“She’s freezing to death,” I said. “It’s too cold out there; why can’t she come in?”

“Cruellest thing you can do to a dog, Peter,” my father called, invisible. “Get her used to being in the house she’ll die of pneumonia like the last dog we had. Don’t take an animal out of nature. Hey Cassie: what time is it?”

“Which clock?”

“My clock.”

“A little after seven-thirty. The other has it before.”

“We gotta go, kid. We gotta move.”

My mother said to me, “Eat up, Peter,” and to him, “That cheap clock of yours runs ahead of time, George. Grandad’s clock says you have five minutes.”

“That’s not a cheap clock. That clock was thirteen dollars retail, Cassie. It’s General Electric. If it says twenty of, I’m late already. Gobble your coffee, kid. Time and tide for no man wait.”

“For a man with a spider in his bowel,” my mother said, “you’re awfully full of pep.” To me she said, “Peter, don’t you hear your father?”

I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn’t it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity?

“Peter.”
My mother said it in the voice that had no margin left.

I drank the orange juice in two swigs and said, to worry her, “The poor dog is out there without even anything to drink, she’s just licking this big chunk of ice in her pan.”

My grandfather stirred in the other room and pronounced, “Now that was a favorite saying of Jake Beam’s, who used to be stationmaster at the old Bertha Furnace station, before they discon-tinued the passenger station. ‘Time and tide,’ he would say, so solemn, ‘and the Alton Railroad wait for no man.’ ”

“Yeah but Pop,” my father said, “did you ever stop to think, does any man wait for time and tide?”

At this absurdity my grandfather fell silent, and my mother, carrying a pot of simmering water for my coffee, went into the other room to defend him. “George,” she said, “why don’t
you go out and start the car instead of tormenting everybody with your nonsense?”

“Huh?” he said. “Did I hurt Pop’s feelings? Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I meant what I said. I’ve been hearing that time and tide line all my life, and I don’t know what it means. What does it mean? You ask anybody, and the bastards won’t tell you. But they won’t be honest. They won’t admit they don’t know.”

“Why, it means,” my mother said, and then hesitated, finding, as I had, that my father’s anxious curiosity had quite drained the saying’s simple sense away, “it means we can’t have the impossible.”

“No, now look,” my father said, going on in that slightly high voice that forever sought a handhold on sheer surfaces, “I was a minister’s son. I was brought up to believe, and I still believe it, that God made Man as the last best thing in His Creation. If that’s the case, who are this time and tide that are so almighty superior to us?”

My mother came back into the kitchen, bent over me, and poured the smoking water into my cup. I snickered up at her conspiratorily; my father was often a joke between us. But she kept her eyes on my cup as, holding the handle of the pan with a flowered potholder, she filled it without spilling. The brown powder, Maxwell’s Instant, made a tiny terrain on the surface of steaming water, and then dissolved, dyeing the water black. My mother stirred with my spoon and a spiral of tan suds revolved in the cup. “Eat your cereal, Peter,” she said.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I’m too upset. My stomach hurts.” I wanted revenge for her snub of my flirting overture. It dismayed me that my father, that silly sad man whom I thought our romance had long since excluded, had this morning stolen the chief place in her mind.

He was saying, “Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; it’s just that those old expressions get me so goddam mad I see red when I hear ’em. They’re so damn smug, is what gets my goat. If those old peasants or whoever the hell invented ’em have something to say to me, I wish they’d come right out and say it.”

“George, it was
you
,” my mother called, “who brought it up in the first place.”

He changed the subject. “Hey what time is it?”

The milk was too cold, the coffee too hot. I took a sip and scalded my palate; following this the chill mush of the corn flakes was nauseous. As if to make good my lie, my stomach
did
begin to hurt; the ticking minutes pinched it.

“I’m ready,” I shouted, “I’m ready, I’m ready.” I was like my father in performing for an unseen audience, but his was far off and needed to be shouted at, whereas mine was just over the footlights.
Boy, clutching stomach comically, crosses stage left
. I went into the living-room to gather up my coat and my books. My pea jacket, crusty, faithful, was hanging behind one door. My father was sitting in a rocking chair turned away from the fire that hissed and danced in the fireplace. He had on his overcoat, a tattered checkered castoff with mismatching buttons, which he had rescued from a church sale, though it was too small and barely reached his knees. On his head he wore a hideous blue knitted cap that he had plucked out of a trash barrel at school. Pulled down over his ears, it made him look like an overgrown dimwit in a comic strip. He had just recently taken to wearing this cap, and I wondered why. He still had a full head of hair, barely touched by gray. Understand that to me my father seemed changeless. In fact he did look younger than his years. When he turned his head toward me, his face was that of a sly street urchin prematurely toughened.
He had been a child in an humble neighborhood of Passaic. His face, compounded of shiny lumps and sallow slack folds, to me seemed both tender and brutal, wise and unseeing; it was still dignified by the great distance that in the beginning had lifted it halfway to the sky. Once I had stood beside his knees on the brick walk leading to the grape arbor of our house in Olinger and felt him look level into the tops of the horsechestnut trees and believed that nothing could ever go wrong as long as we stood so.

“Your books are on the windowsill,” he said. “Did you eat your cereal?”

I rebuked him sharply. “There isn’t
time
, you keep telling me.” I gathered up my books. Faded blue Latin, its covers all but unhinged. Smart red algebra, freshly issued this year; every time I turned a page, the paper released a tangy virginal scent. And a weary big gray book, General Science, my father’s subject. Its cover was stamped with a triangular design of a dinosaur, an atom blazing like a star, and a microscope. On its side and butts a previous possessor had lettered in blue ink the huge word FIDO. The size of this inscription seemed pathetic and abject, like an abandoned religious monument. Fido Hornbecker had been a football hero when I was in the seventh grade. In the list of names written inside the cover, where my own was last, I had never been able to locate the girl who had loved him. In five years, I was the first boy to be assigned the book. The four names written above mine—