How is it that in all my adult life I have never thought to purchase a flyswatter? Is it only because I suspected in my youth, and by now am wholly convinced, that the swatter somehow brings the fly? And for whose sake, regardless, have I refused (or forgotten, which is anyway the same thing) to be seen holding even a fly’s chance at salvation in my no less mortal hand?
How those Witnesses
How those Witnesses in the yard dealt with life’s little nuisances I cannot say. I can describe only the broader differences between us: We were white; they were black. Our hands were dirty; theirs were clean, that I could see. They wore nice suits; we wore clothes not conscionably to be shown at school, since they were likely purchased on the cheap from the dying grocery store near the dead landing on the decomposing river. They offered us heaven; we offered them nothing. They were morons in our eyes, not on account of their skin or their outfits but because they adhered to a faith less popular even than our own yet took such pains to promote it. As to who was poorer, we were probably a draw there, though certainly we possessed nothing like their suits and had never known anything like their joy.
The youngest among them, and to my mind the brightest, was a kid a year or two behind me at school in whose talk and bearing I had detected an insouciance that made it impossible now to accept him as a deliverer of my soul, nor for him to behave as such. He was clearly an old hand at being found out for a missionary, though, and met my awareness of his embarrassment (and delight over it, since it might prevent him from telling tales on my family at school) with a quick nod at me and an interest in something more pressing stage left. While the adults in his party came forward with their handshakes and jabber about Jehovah and so forth, he disappeared coolly around the back of the house.
A short time later, after I had explained to the others that my parents were not home, and that I was not authorized to make large-scale spiritual decisions on behalf of the family, and had seen them safely back to their car (a nice big Buick, as I remember it, though possibly it was a Monte Carlo), my schoolmate emerged with great fanfare into the side yard, engaged in a deadly tussle with Ginger Snap, the violent little half-bred hound we had adopted almost without knowing it and then, to our eternal regret, ignored. He pulled at something while she pulled too, thrilled by the company and of course by the game, which eventually he won, which I thought a bit hard-hearted, and which success seemed almost to propel him toward me, his face made up in its usual mix of boredom and amusement while the dog leapt after him and failed always to reclaim her prize. When he reached me he handed over (with a new look now of dramatic concern, though it was hardly a match for the dog’s) one of those wedged-shaped boxes of d-Con rat poison my parents had placed in and under and around the house so as to help along the fiction that rats never fancied and overran country homes, especially those occupied by intelligent and well-meaning white people. This accomplished, he said, as he walked past me toward that big Buick (or Monte Carlo, it might have been), “At least we saved your dog.”
Beckett
What threw me about a troupe of Witnesses descending upon us in or around the summer of 1982, I am ashamed to say, was not really that we were seen (or perhaps only I was) in clothes more ludicrous than what we normally put on for school, or that we had failed to offer these visitors so much as an ordinary glass of water, or that our faith both seemed and was a small thing in comparison with theirs, or that the youngest among them had removed from the mouth of our littlest bitch a box of rat poison whose contents she would otherwise have got at and died from, which incident then became the basis of a semicomic routine between the kid and myself at school, wherein when we passed each other in the hall he would call out, “I saved your dog,” and I would answer, “You saved my dog,” with much laughter on his part, and a lesser amount on mine, until finally, after a six-month run of this inane and almost daily performance, I was taken with a sudden horror at its sameness, and wondered if it did not constitute a hex thrown up between us in order to fill with simulacrum the space where an actual friendship might have formed, whereupon I resolved to break the curse, if it was one, with a threat to kick the boy’s ass could he not come up with something better to say to me at school, after which I was greeted always with the mock tremble of “But … but I saved your dog,” to which I had no choice but to respond, as I did for the remainder of the time we passed and failed to know each other, “But you saved my dog.”
That dog, by the way, met a terrible fate. I would discuss it here except that I do not care to see my personal tribulations shown up just yet by what ordinarily befalls dogs out in the American countryside, where they are commonly assumed to enjoy long and happy and touchingly purposeful lives. My own touching purpose was chores. My happiness, where there was to be had any, was derived from those moments when I found myself able to sneak off into the chicken coop with a pinched cigarette, or else my pinched penis, so as to blow smoke or spermatophore out the mesh-covered window in the southernmost wall. The other walls there were to be avoided, at least by my cigarette, as they had boxes up against them full of books our father had not yet consigned to the maw of his insatiable stove. I recall that Joyce and Pound and Eliot and Stein lay stacked in those cardboard coffins, as did Woolf and Dos Passos and Porter and Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Cather and Ellison and Baldwin and Williams (W. C.). Twain was interred out there too, as were Melville and Hawthorne and Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Grant and Howells and Du Bois. Welty and O’Connor; Bellow and Roth; Salinger, Kerouac, Kesey, Vonnegut; Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Blake; Shakespeare and Defoe; Carlyle and Dickens; Thackeray, Hardy, Huxley, Waugh: all these and more were given over to the termites and the silverfish and whatever else cared to have at them. The Henry James books alone were so crawled over and bit through that I wondered at the time whether Goochland’s insects did not harbor a particular taste for his prose.
“Recall,” though, is imprecise here and so really the same as dishonest. I ought better to have written “surmise” or some such, since my recollection of which books were in what box, and what condition they were in, could not possibly have predated the day my father abruptly ordered them all removed from their exile in the coop and set up on shelves in the house’s front room, which action I would like very much to say heralded his return to sanity but I know now resulted only from the fact that the books were proving a confusion to the chickens we had by then, to my detriment, acquired. The one volume I can remember taking out of its box, prechicken, was a paperback of three novels by Samuel Beckett, and I remember this only because I had recently been bused into Richmond to see, in an educational matinée at the Virginia Museum, a performance of his play Waiting for Godot that employed as an actor a live chicken.
We were meant to be impressed by the chicken, even if it did not have one of the speaking parts. In the question-and-answer period that followed the several unasked-for curtain calls, the student actors who had so recently bored us all to death (and besides our meager busload there was only an assortment of pink- and blue-haired old ladies in the rows that day: about an hour or so in we had begun to take bets on which one of their cotton-candy noggins would nod off next) tried to soften up what they apparently mistook for an audience of spellbound suburban teenagers (and recently revived old biddies) by means of a humorous reference to the chicken. They assumed this would lead on to more serious matters; it did not. Being not suburban in our sensibility (though even then we might have been, if you consider all those vehicles afforded us, and those kept-up state roads, and those town jobs to be had for a mere fifty- or eighty-mile round-trip) but dug-in rural, and so bound to be miserly with our trust, and pissed off about the length of the play, and sure to think any farm animal onstage an intentional jab at us, we asked no question that was not along the lines of “Was that a real chicken?” and “How would that chicken know where to stand?” and “Do you ever have to hit it, or does it remember on its own?” and “Do you use the same chicken each time, or do you eat it after and audition a new one?” In time some telepathy between the adults in the room ascertained that the lesson was best ended here, and we were stood up with apologetic glances from our teachers toward the stage and hustled back onto the bus.