Usually I deplore the attitude that turns us away from language on the grounds that most talk, and all writing, is no better than condescension, but in this case I must admit it was real fun, and I can therefore imagine how it might also be fun, and not the grave and patriotic business our louder scolds make it out to be, to vote in such a way that denies funding to our schools (which do at times place a troublesome emphasis on words), and to the too-literate social programs sustaining an overly talkative poor, not despite how this condemns America to ruin but because it does, which I agree is the funnier idea; to swallow and pollute as we do not despite how this will one day erase our kind from the planet but because it will, which, again, is much funnier; to sanction and celebrate, in the meantime, a bacchanal of torture and death not despite how this might lower us in the eyes of an omniscient God but because it will, if He is anything like our rendition of Him, and so might want us to accomplish more with His gifts of life and word and will, and the science and settlements built upon these things, than the mere obliteration of ourselves and all wordless beings besides, however funny that may one day prove to be.
No joke
My father, with no joke to bring before God beyond his own discovery that humanity is impossible to abide and somewhat harder to escape, and with no share in the popular gibes of the day (see above, and below) than what deceitful politicians were able by his vote to put him in for, and with no real desire (notwithstanding those oiled and death-ready guns in his closet) to down any complex being save himself, was nonetheless availed of a gaiety that we, who were his children, ordinarily sought to avoid. This attitude was not wanting in and of itself, but we had seen too often the hope of it dashed, with disastrous results for the rest of us, to rekindle and fan it without good provocation.
We had seen him crush out his cigarette and spring up from the table, with fire in his stomach, and a coal on his tongue, and who can say what in his heart, to proclaim before visiting angels the news that this was a house held wholly by Satan, or might as well be, for all it would ever have of God. And we had felt firsthand the darkness that swallowed the rest of his day when these apparitions did not engage him on the matter but simply fluttered away. Given his stance and his temperament, we were not about to inform him of the opportunity he had missed, by mere minutes, to set upon witnesses (not common word-spreaders, mind you, but witnesses, like you might get in town!), now that he was surrounded at last by a landscape capable of supporting his claims. We chose to keep our silence, and to live with the fear that he would somehow discover this treachery, and extract a common payment for it, so long as there remained even a small hope that he might hunt for his amusement elsewhere.
Inner tube/Loon
It must have amused our father, on some level, to see his children crawl out a second-story window and hurl themselves off a rusted tin roof; it certainly did us. He might have proscribed such an activity in town, where we were liable to light on concrete, but in the country a child met no worse than clay if he made it past the nail-ridden boards in the yard, and so our “suicide leaps” were generally tolerated and, by that tolerance, encouraged. Tree skinning was also a potential pleaser, even if the skinner had it in mind to throw himself out of the uppermost boughs, provided he went up properly, with arms and legs wrapped around the trunk, and did not simply reach for the lower branches and monkey up that way, which was not so exhausting an enterprise and far less funny when the child finally succumbed to gravity and fell. Our mother, the hydrophobe, played Ophelia whenever one of us spilt blood from a wound that would likely scar, but our father kept his grip then, and by his calm made it clear that he expected and perhaps even wanted the scars, and on that count we dared not disappoint.
This man wished no serious injury upon his children, I am sure, and was not so broken himself as to laugh outright at their hurts, but he did show something beyond the ordinary schadenfreude when one of us (say, I) felt a thorn driven so deeply into a knuckle during a “sword fight” that the quack on call at the local clinic was forced to dig the foreign material out through the opposite side (though that might have happened back in Illinois, at a cut-rate day camp there), or when one of us (we are safely returned to Virginia now) shinnied up the wrong side of a tree, and so found himself overwhelmed by poison ivy, or oak (I could never tell one from the other), which lotions could not tame and even the slightest scratch would spark, until the whole of the body was subsumed by chancres and all chance of sleep was gone, as was all hope of my thinking that tree or any other a friend. Rubbing alcohol, which I had seen my mother use to cut and evaporate the muck that accumulated on her face in the thick southern air, proved the only means of lessening my skin’s whorish welcome to these sores, though I would never quite vanquish them. Almost as soon as they scabbed over there began on my face a new set of eruptions, which heralded the onset of pubescence, a state for which my pornographic rides on the bus had readied me, yes, but had taught me no gentlemanly cure.
I would not be held accountable for my actions during that time, just as I would not see my father held accountable for his, though he did take an unworthy interest in this new set of blemishes on me, and poked much fun at them, and in time pronounced them evidence of his theory that we should each of us bathe less often, lest we relinquish to the creek, or to the sump (where, really, did all that water go?), our “essential oils.” Whether this thought resulted from an honest consideration of the evidence before him, or from a madness brought on by the land’s constant pestering, I do not know, but I did notice that he seemed never to apply his new science to the pond just behind and to the north of us.
Being on someone else’s property, and so not by law afforded him, this pond yet attached itself to my father by another law. Not a law above mankind’s, exactly, as the God-fearing folk will always cite, but a law deeper than and far, far below it, by which not only that forfeited barn across the southern pasture testated to him but also what inheritance had been frittered away all those miles and years to the west. By this law he decreed that his children should cast themselves upon those waters whenever the heat oppressed, and at other times besides, and would not retreat from that position even when he heard gunplay in the woods all around and remembered that this was an acreage owned, according to man’s law, by an inebriation of weekend hunters too daft or too blind to tell a deer in a field from a child in an inner tube on a pond.