I might have sunk him for that, or for a thousand and one other slights, but in the moment, or those, I refrained, hoping I might eventually be gifted the chance to vouch him a hero in this report and not its abject suzerain. I made no direct move against him when he raised me up out of a smelly bag the night before a failed chemistry exam (or was it English?) to top off an already wood-drunk dragon whose sleepy burps would never reach the frigid corner where I myself lay dying, nor did I anywise plot to kill him on that parentless, pointless snow day when his misguided firstborn, bored and possibly as crazed as I was by the work and isolation imposed upon us by a stupidly clever (or was it a cleverly stupid?) sire, wondered aloud, this future chemist of the language, what the result would be if he let some drops of his urine fall upon a stovetop he had seen make dancing and ephemeral beads out of our spit, which assay my sister and I begged him please to abort but could stay neither his curiosity nor his pee, whose instant, acrid stench upon the creature’s hunched back (so much worse than my ejaculate had smelled!) drove us deep into the yard, nauseated and quickly ashiver, to stare at one another with a wild surmise over the scale of this calamity, which hours’ worth of running back into the house, in shifts based on birth order (our breath held at first, then taken), to throw open a window and make it safely out to gag in the snow again (or else to toss heavy panfuls of gyroscoping water onto a devil we had never imagined had the means to do so pungent an evil unto us), could not dispel, nor could it prevent (given the surety of meltdown) our dragon from proclaiming, come dinnertime, that his lair was “too fucking cold” and that someone (staring directly down at me) royally stank.
Yet was this ogre-king, teched and repatriated by the Cold War countryside, with its Potemkin charms and samizdat horrors, at all the same as the young czarevitch who had once traded sleep and sobriety to write, during a foiled escape to town (1965–1976: hunted by the land, ratted out by the in-laws), that Salinger’s lovely “Hapworth 16, 1924,” while not my father’s ostensible subject in 1972, any more than it is mine today, seemed
intended to be a demonstration of Seymour’s genius and an indication that Seymour is fully versed in oriental religion and remembers well his former states of existence …
and was there really, if the answer is no, any harm in killing such a one?
What, then, will it win your occidental son to save him?
Past performances
I myself can recall but a few past performances, bleeding too easily into that singular sentence of childhood I try (partly) and fail (completely) to reconstruct (unfaithfully) here. Yet I suppose it at least conceivable that my unborn-again father, soon enough to present as mortuary smoke, might more accurately have remembered, and based his decisions about our future former selves upon, some several.
I suppose it likely as not that he stayed close pals with that boyhood him, who came to associate “farm” with “work,” yes, but also with a kind of freedom, et into only when he heard his mother’s screams from the fields abutting his wooded playpen, or from farther on up at the house, and knew then to run and fetch her into a vehicle he would by dial or happenstance steer, at nine or ten or eleven (his profligate father away at clocked work on the railroad), into the nearest approximation of town, so that she might there be delivered of a tenth or eleventh or twelfth child those fields could not feed, nor those trees hope to shelter, nor that encumbrance-hating boy ever bring himself fully to ignore.
He might have maintained a shy contact with that terrified teenage him, tossed too late into a town high school once his parents had concluded that their surviving children would not warrant the epithet much longer without infrastructural assistance. The only fun to be had there was basketball, which an older him admitted the younger him had played poorly. The college-bound him he would have admired and felt a sharp pang for, as I do now, not knowing which response applies more properly to the farmboy muscles, say, secretly acquired in town, or to the south-midland accent dropped in favor of a Confederate professor’s more sonorous snarl, or to the “choice” to attend classes nearby, when he might have gone anywhere, so as to hasten him home each weekend to chop wood on the farm his parents had since, in their stubbornness, returned to, with so many hungry children in tow that he was forced on those occasions to sleep out on straw in the barn.
Even I would exchange Christmas cards with that him of hims, were I at all the sort to exchange Christmas cards.
The remainder of my fathers I knew personally, with the possible exception of his sportsfan ghost, and I assume these all to have chatted incessantly: on how best, and how often, to whip an unwanted child; on what it meant, or did not mean, to whip an unwanted child; on whether the whipping of an unwanted child was proof enough, if only for the unwanted child, of the nonexistence of God; on the ways in which psychology might be used to explain away the need to whip an unwanted child, just as philosophy might be used to explain the need to whip away an unwanted God; on how literature (being what psychology and philosophy would ever amount to anyway) might provide any number of neat justifications for it: the whipping, I mean here, not the deity, and certainly not the child.
I was just fiddling with one of these neat justifications myself when our stove took Romantically ill, and although tamped down for the night, and so shut of any unfresh new air, could not contain what dispute had burgeoned within its belly that day, and so sent great bursts of superheated gas up the stovepipe in a forgivable attempt to relieve itself, which then lent holy succor to the creosotic rebellion that had clung to the house’s butthole in a long and patient abeyance there.