(I have named him, yes. I had not meant to, any more than he had meant to die, which of course he always had, and I am ashamed to see that so paltry a trap of diction, met up with fatigue and a hand-me-down languor, has led me now to do so. He was not directly of Frankish heritage, that I can trace, nor was he forthright enough in his motives to deserve that name otherwise, but was only called such as a compromise, since one parent had hoped him christened Claude and the other had said it put him in mind of a clump of dirt, which was nonetheless how the child was then treated, and how he subsequently came to treat all of us: not as walkers upon this Earth but as bothersome detachments from it, to be avoided, or tripped over, or picked up and hurled out of anger and frustration (or hilarity, which may one day prove the same thing), until at last we could be ridden over and ground down into something fine and wet enough to catch hold of his seed, which he had apparently forgotten we already were.)
My own thoughts concerning those trees, and his children’s crusade against them, and what turned soil held these two ruinous concepts fast (three if you count the soil, four if you count the thoughts), were at first a leaning toward, and then away from, my brother’s confusion, followed by a leaning toward, and then away from, my sister’s, until at last I was flung free of this cracked seesaw and alit in a position to decide for myself, by a more objective subjectivity (or was it the other way around?), what plausible explanation of our reality might suffice. None, I came to worry, ever would.
“The patterns, incidents, and images noted do exist”
I had heard our father say, apropos of what I cannot recall, that he felt himself made “claustrophobic” by the trees in Virginia, and out of that small sliver, and out of a supposition that he meant not only the increased number of leaves and needles along the Eastern seaboard but also the great earthen breasts that raised them up over us, and bestowed upon mere hairs such a frightful prominence, I formed an idea that he was simply expressing a nostalgia for the flatter, less festooned vistas of his youth back in southern Illinois, which philosophy saw me through several winters hauling his logs up into that hateful yard, my hands encased in sweatsocks for their protection (he would never consent to see them in perfectly affordable work-gloves) and my mind racing over what cold calculations his own might have made when, with me beside him in the cab one sunset, he came upon a hundred acres or so of what was intended for pulpwood (from which is got paper), burnt and obliterated now by what I hoped to have been a can of gasoline and a JD’s last roach but was probably only God’s latest lucky strike, which vision then caused him to stop, and to extinguish his engine, and to sit in silence before that razed and blackened topography where just the week prior he had known but a daunting sheet of white, shot through with green (lest this sentence run out and convey only part of the pathos I once envisioned for it, I should mention that my father, like so many others before him, half fancied himself an American bard, despite the fact that his production was limited, that I know of, to a single well-premised note on J. D. Salinger, taken finally, when I was already a belt-beaten six, by the journal Studies in Short Fiction, volume 9, number 3 (the ending especially I have returned to eagerly and often, wherein my father’s pride in having all but completed a “publishable” essay has led him to attempt what he assumes will be recognized, and of course loudly applauded, as a well-earned “poetic” dismount—
The patterns, incidents, and images noted do exist; and while I might be accused of committing a critical fallacy in supposing that Salinger consciously planned them along the line of my discussion, they do offer themselves to my argument, whatever Buddy Glass, mixing memory and desire, might want to say about it.
— but is actually worth only a collective gasp or two, since following the appalling laziness of the “my discussion”/“my argument” switcheroo he finds no better way to achieve his unstuck landing than to lift, in toto, right there before the regrettable tough-guy cliché, a phrase Salinger had Seymour Glass, not Buddy, bum off of T. S. Eliot, who himself got it God knows where, and from whom I would not separate my father now as a fan (of Eliot’s, I mean, not God’s), except to say that he (my father), this hanged man who made us to stir dull roots with spring rain, or without it, and who in winter never kept us warm, and who showed us fear in a handful of wire, would at least practice later to disguise his stealings rather than invite so wide a scrutiny of them, such as when he kept a hand truck off the U-Haul that had so rudely forced us out into the undead land and, in his paranoia (which even as children we laughed at, our arms full of wood, our hair wet with snow in this sylvan scene), painted over its telltale orange (why Poe of a sudden? or is it Burgess?) in order that he might, without worry of a knock upon his door (now I see), roll before us an instrument we were forbidden to employ in any wood- or resentment-gathering activities of our own), followed in his middle fifties by an “unpublishable” novel (why is it that I have set this cruellest mouthful in quotes? is it only because I gave matching barrettes to her better-off cousin, above? am I trying, that is, to be fair? and would that not constitute, in this charred and violent hour, a critical fallacy?) on the theme of Jefferson and his own vainglorious self (my father’s, I mean, or mean mostly), once he had squandered off (again, my father), in the near thirty-year interregnum between these disparate efforts (during which he expressed himself primarily through those studied grunts and silences and lashings out), what chance he ever had to grow himself up against the language, and to gain some purchase on it that might have loosened, if not avoided entirely, its kudzu-like purchase on me) where the page before him had rotted with envy and unuse.
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
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?