When I spot my wife at a distance gamboling freely over hill and dale there is a small throating of sadness. I wish I had been smarter at marriage. I was not altogether smart. It is, a divorce, not unlike bringing a meal along slowly and then through neglect burning this dish or that, and then perhaps another, and ultimately facing the situation, after long work, of an inedible repast, guests milling around unsatisfied and ready to head out for fast food. All that was needed was an ounce or two more of circumspection and caution and witness. The vision of the ruined meal will linger.
Yesterday at the market I saw a bright and well-fed child with a parrot on her shoulder. I have not ventured out of doors with mine. I inquired of the child why her bird did not fly away. “Because his wings are clipped,” she said, in a crisp British accent.
“And he knows that?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, confident of this intelligence. “He sticks his head in my mouth,” she added, as if to bolster the case for the knowingness of her bird. She opened her mouth and turned to the bird, which did incline his head into her mouth.
“He eats from there.”
“You put seed on your tongue?”
“No, food, when I’m chewing.” The bird looked at me as if to suggest I was not quite with it. The child was looking elsewhere, through with my not being with it.
I was comfortable with not being with it. That is a function, I think, of the New World: not only is angst for being out of it gone, the matter is somewhat to be chuckled at that one ever fretted about being in the know, about anything. Here’s a good saying: It is quite all right to put all the eggs in one basket if you watch that basket.
Today there was a roundup of the cute pink pigs. They were assembled into the town square and told to sit and they did, like dogs. They were examined by a person in a white coat whom I took to be a veterinarian but who I also suspected was merely a person in a white coat, perhaps a steward’s coat from a ship. At the terminus of each examination he whistled and a child came from the surrounding audience and gave the pig completing his examination a candy bar. This the pig deftly unwrapped with clever hooves that surprised me, and devoured swiftly—“devoured swiftly” is archaic-sounding but perfectly apt. The pig then also spoke to the child: “Thank you, sir,” or “Thank you, madam.” Most of the children bowed or curtsied then to the pig. What was most startling in this perhaps hallucinatory vision was not the dexterity of the unwrapping or the pigs’ speaking in human tongue but their use of these terms “sir” and “madam” and the formal bowing and curtsying by the children. These were things I thought from the Old World and I did not know how or why they got in the New World, and why they would be regarded fondly, these old manners. The pigs, when all had been examined and fed, were dismissed, and I came to realize I had just witnessed some kind of mythological, or myth-making, amalgam of rituaclass="underline" of, say, The Three Pigs (With No Wolf) and Halloween. There seemed an affinity between this affair without its wolf and its costumes and my country club without its golf and its liquor; in the New World we made a strength of absence. Everyone was much pleased with this afternoon of nice pigs and manners.
I trot in pink and green flying silks, I cavort with Evita on crisp white sheets, I see pigs behave, I have not a trouble in the world, I despair. What is it about me? Is it the shadow of the gamboling ex-wife, the retardation that having a gamboling ex-wife suggests? As a human being, I realize, I am a nubbin. The pigs are ambassadors next to me. They take candy from children with grace. Could I yet perhaps learn, myself, how to behave?
I lay down in front of the bungalow as it started to rain and observed, for hours, the square foot or so of dirt before my head. I saw a preponderance of animals so small I was not sure they were not grains of the soil, and indeed the matter of classifying animal/vegetable/mineral became a task beyond me as the earth was bombarded by the huge and fat explosions of rain pocking the ground. Once a centipede hove into view. Three segments of a worm bent into and out of sight. An ant was struck by a drop of rain and shook his head to clear it. The dirt itself moved, buoying the lighter components of itself up, the heavier down, and migrating onto my face. Evita came and picked me up. She put me in the shower and braced me against a wall of it with her forearm and washed me roughly with a rag, as if I were a dog. She put us to bed and lay with me gently and said, “I am Our Lady of Eternal Succor.” Polly was up on the cornice as if she were observing us and I thought it a perfect time for her to say, a second time, if in fact she said it the first time, that she wanted a cracker, but Polly did not open her mouth.
Evita is most tender and I continue to regard Polly, and Polly us, and I cop an epiphanic glow. I have a tincture of an inkling of a good saying, and suddenly see that a good approach, instead of waiting for a bird to say something again that it might not have already said, is to assume that a bird wants a cracker whether it can say so or not, and to get your ass up and give a bird a cracker and ask yourself, motivationally, just what the hell is wrong with you that you have not been providing all birds crackers with all you have. A good saying: in a New World behave in a new way as a new man. Unhorse the conquistador.
Wagons, Ho!
Wagon boss: Today there are fewer Indians than before. Clouds are swaying up there in the big sky like the bellies of belly dancers. Our teeth feel loose. We are not possessed of resolve. We wonder if the same doubt has seized the red man. We do not think of him as often subject to doubt. The idea of him in his teepee cowering from a want of self-confidence disturbs us as much or more than the idea of our own cowering. We are not afraid of him, mind you, but of something less tangible that we cannot name. It is precisely the murkiness of this fear that makes it disturbing. Alas, I suppose I am saying we fear fear itself far more than a thing to be feared. As cornball as that may sound, I am afraid it is true. We do not fear resolve, right or wrong, but we are made much uncomfortable by want of resolve. It is easy to understand in this light how General Custer appeared so delighted at the end. The music was about to stop playing for him and his band, but until it did his needle was in the groove.
The only party not unhappy in this camp is Cook, who pounds away at something too hard to eat in its native state and all day has in his brain the notion delicious. Or maybe the notion is good enough that these bastards will not complain within earshot. Either way, he beats food with resolve. We sit here without.
We will need move all these wagon wheels, broken or not, over here, and leave those skulls alone, and push these tiara sets into the woods. (We never contest the unfathomable on the Inventory; the labor required to fill out Form 0009.09, Derequisitioning Items on the Inventory for Which No Earthly Use Can Be Divined, dwarfs the labor to carry the unfathomable to California; we can possibly use the tiaras for a Little Miss Prairie Beauty Contest; possibly put them on the bulls for a rodeo.) We will be firm with our untoward and uncharitable desires, and forsake fresh meat, and be so incredibly generous with children that we burst into tears and spook the children, and fear the Indians but never show it, except as we run like hell, and just in general I think we are ready to accede that it is all pretty much too much for us, the ordnance questions, the panniers, the supply lines, the weather, the hearty meals or not and the hearty hopes or not, it’s all just. .