These were the days as well of hunters parking pickups along the ditch to the north of our land, and setting up lawnchairs and coolers in the truck beds while the short straw took the hounds around back, behind those woods that hid our father’s unpurchased pond, and said something sad into a walkie-talkie, after which a whistle was blown to summon the dogs (our own being tied up on these occasions and evincing a touchingly desperate fascination with the scene), who then ran happily through the trees toward their masters, flushing does and fawns out into the field that fronted the road, all of whom were then laid low, along with the occasional dog, by gunmen who never raised, that I saw, one hemisphere of ass up out of those sagging lawnchairs.
But that also would have been in the winter months, and was too common a sight anyway for even a selective memory to assign to a particular year, let alone to a short span of months. And the Assumption (or that particular Holy Night I most associate with this period, when my faith and fervor were at their hormonal apices, and my unsanctioned communion with the land was at its most perilous height, and I had become humble where the land had wanted me humble, and smug where the land had wanted me smug, and abstemious where the land had wanted me abstemious, and profligate where the land had wanted me profligate, and I trusted more in Bible than in bile, though these were often enough the same thing): When did that occur? when exactly?
I know by my calendar that The Mother of God is sucked up into heaven each year on August 15, nine days shy of my birthday, except that it felt no worse than spring when those chickens (and I) suffered as they (and I) did, and we drove (short a disintegrating father) along the cool road to the west one starry night, and up the hill that held the hamlet, so as to park in the gravel parking lot and be astonished by the glow of candles stuck into the ground and shielded from the wind by white paper bags, which intrigue lit our path to the church door, where we were met and handed candles of our own, with doilies around them to catch the wax, so that we might illuminate by flicker the glorious cavern within.
Do I fabricate now what I felt then, with that soft candle in my hardened hand, as I climbed (briskly? painfully?) the stairs to the choir loft, where I knew there still to be seats, and looked up into the rafters above, and down onto the congregation below, and felt the Holy Ghost surge into me where before It had merely licked at my sides? Did I not wonder then why It had done neither that foggy morning when I went out to chop wood, and paid too little attention to my task, and let the axe glance off the rounded barkside of an already split segment and lodge, the far corner of the blade, so neatly in my shoe? Did I not stare down at where the axe had entered, near the tip, and pull on the handle and feel, admittedly, a tug but no pain? Did I not toss my implement aside, and kneel down to examine that tear in the upper? (Was this a boot? Was it a slipper? A boot, surely, but can that matter now, since said boot was not availed of a perfectly affordable steel toe?) Did I not pull the hole apart and look down into it, and was I not at once struck in the face by a warm geyser of my own blood?
I hopped up to the house then, and screamed to my brother that I had murdered myself, and this formerly prophetic being, who was by this point merely magical, and blessed with the knowledge that no matter what happened to the rest of us he and his seed would find a way to survive (which, I agree, is magic enough), responded that he was “busy” watching television. (should I call him today (he is bless’d still!) and ask which program? Should I? I should call him.) In time he left Good Morning America and found me in the bathtub, which was by then painted red, to match my eyes, the second toe on my right foot split brutally from pristine nail to half-cloven metatarsal. “Wrap that up in something,” he said, “and I’ll drive you in.” I thought he meant to Richmond, but he meant only to the county clinic, where a medic numbed my toe, and reconstituted the spread-out knuckle, and sewed the little piggy back up while my disinterested savior looked on.
I spent the next two months, as was ordered, with my foot elevated and kept dry, and we watched, late at night, The Benny Hill Show and, in the afternoons, General Hospital and, where we could get it to come in, Soccer Made in Germany. We also watched, because our Anglophilic mother always insisted, Breakfast at Wimbledon. (Vitas Gerulaitis! Or had he asphyxiated by then? And why was the breakfast not “made” at Wimbledon, as opposed to the soccer, in Germany? Might not this simple difference account for at least two world wars?) It was during this period, so late in our life together, that I learned my mother was the absolute best person in the world to watch television with. I have not encountered her equal since, and I expect I never will. Her comments hugged and enhanced the words from the set, and the gestures on it, and never once ran over either, and we watched all of Brideshead Revisited together (I suppose I could look up now when that first aired in Virginia, and be done with this charade of not knowing, except that I refuse to cheat where I might not appreciate the answer) while she explained, by her side notes, and her own delicate gestures toward the screen, and those throaty little laughs, what subtexts even a literate country boy (who had himself, quite recently in her memory, walked around with a teddy bear in his arms, and had just now done a ridiculous injury to his foot that demanded he be coddled and looked after, though our family could not afford to put up with that for as long as the Flytes) might miss out on: being, primarily, homosexuality among “creative” young types, which, she made it comfortably clear, she was open to having a frank and nonjudgmental discussion about, though how does one confess to one’s mother that one wishes she had been special enough to produce something so interesting as a homosexual, one truly does, but this angel had passed over her, and her boy was but a boy, interested in homosexuality, as was Waugh (and as was she, if she only stopped to think about it), largely for its value as a literary trope (for which see the sixth through the eighth parts of my third attempt to end all this), and so was unable to grant her recourse to that convenient sin by which she might believably make her protagonist long for redemption via the joyous sacrifice of natural desire that was, and remains, her Catholic Church.
Which was the other great subtext at work here, and that Church, and her sense that I sensed how It might one day save me, even when we both knew It would not, so overwhelmed her watching of Brideshead Revisited as to make her gloss over those lovely, crucial speeches by the stuttering homosexual Anthony Blanche, wherein he warns against “charm” (the Flytes’, yes, but then there are so many other kinds (and how akin was this “charm” to Holden’s “phoniness,” so important to both the atheistic and the worshipful elements in my household, and never once ignored there as was charm)), and this moved me, I think, her subterfuge (for my mother was, and is, a charming woman), and beyond anything she wanted me to notice in the episodes themselves sent me up into that choir-loft one Holy Night without television, with a candle in my grateful hand, to look down on the poor chiaroscuros below, and wonder what sins they had committed to gather them all here, and whether these sins could possibly be as bad as mine (and I would like to say that I pondered just then what Waugh or Salinger might have done with a scene such as this, but I am neither phony enough to claim it nor charming enough to pull it off), until someone down below leaned back on the light switch near the entrance and showed, in one ugly flash, our prefab chapel for what it truly was.