It has come to me to introduce tonight’s reader.
My wife asked would I. She said it’s easy, easier for you, you do it easily. She makes it difficult — to stand here, to open her mouth, it’s a struggle, she says. I said, Yes, dear.
Yes hello, dear. Our director. There she is, everybody. Give a wave.
You mostly know me. What I mean to say. I know some of you from class, I see, the ones I’ve been thrown, I see you out there.
I’m not ungrateful. It can’t be easy. For my wife, I mean, not to seem, you know, it’s very delicate — she is partial, she’s not impartial, after all, no sense pretending. Still she has managed to throw me work. It clears my head some — to stand up here and talk to you in a grownup sort of way.
We have, as you know, the two children. The girl, a boy. They are thinking she is going to get better, our girl. Give her time, they say, some months to grow—
Yes, come in, come in. I’m glad you made it, every one of you. Blinking into the snow.
I was talking about our children. The girl, a boy.
I taught our boy to ride his bike. That was nice. He skids out, lays a patch, wants to show me. Shows everybody his scabs. Lookit look: a scab on every joint he can get to. Point of pride.
He says, “Our baby’s name is Noodle and I like to suck her hair.”
And so he does, I let him, no harm in that. He sets his lips around the hole in her headbone, slurps in a satiny frill. I think she likes it.
How nice to see you. You few I know. You look lovely, really you do. Hello, darling up there. I like your muffler. I like your hats and shoes.
She missed the winters, my wife, it’s why we came here. She missed all the different clothes — the heavy coats, the bundling up. You could pass your long life in a halter top in the town we came north to get out of.
The air velvet. Squinch owls and duckweed, pickled eggs. A pontoon boat with the radio on making laps on the side-by lake. Our boy was small there, he was a baby. You could sit him in his bucket on the lakeside in the sun. We had egrets. Once a wood stork. Peahens on the roof of the cabin — tatting at the nailheads, the pipe coming up. Anything bright they could get to.
She comes from Akron, tonight’s reader. Akron by way of Toledo. By way of Mayor’s Income. That’s in Tennessee.
She writes poems. This is my introduction. Wrote a book of stories, skinny thing, lot of white on the page. She’s got two kids same as our two kids. A good gig in Tuscaloosa. A hottie in the chute, have a look at her, some lanky buckaroo. It’s what I’ve heard.
You ever hear of the ones they break the bones on young to get them back set right?
And it works!
While they’re small. Little miracles. Such a miraculous day and age with all they know and do.
Hey and look. They are spot fucking on with this weather — it’s doing just what it is supposed to do. Your wintry mix. The old standby. Three feet on the ground and now it’s — raining swords, our boy says. You’ve got to really run.
I said Akron, right? She writes poems. Said that. I don’t get out much. I’ve half forgotten — what it feels like, what all I mean to say.
Our boy said, “Papa.”
We were lying in bed and he was messing with himself, his little package, trying to make the hole bigger he said. “Papa, look.” He stretched it up to show me. “Doesn’t it look good?”
His woowoo, he used to call it.
“In a few days your woowoo will bloom into a thousand flowers.”
He’s got the skin on still and he forces it back and out comes this purple ball. It looks all wrong, it looks rotted.
He says, “When you die I hope you’re a frog and I will catch you and I will keep you in my bucket.”
I liked to think of him there in the heat where we lived rounding up snakes and frogs, growing up, fishing. Little barebacked nutbrown boy. Swinging through the trees on a strangler fig. I liked thinking of him being a man there sitting on an overturned bucket.
He’d have a pontoon boat. He could think there. He’d have a radio, a little old crackly transistor of the sort that will hang in your shirtfront pocket. A gentle man. A party of one, making his pointy rounds.
A simpler life.
Of course we’re lucky. It is easy to feel pretty lucky. I think she likes it, my wife, this job of hers, directing. It isn’t easy, I think you see that, all the details, all the many tiny important things a woman of our day and age has to do.
Plus a mother, don’t forget.
Plus the baby. She’s not old enough, the baby, you can’t break them yet, little buttery bones, no sense pretending. So we keep her stuffed into her harness. Keep our chins up. As per. We think in pictures. It’s a help.
She wags her arms a bit, but otherwise—
I’ll just say it. I’m not cut out for it, we’re not. I mean men, I mean. We’re cut to gather. Gather and hunt and think — I used to think, have a thought through in my chair. My chair! Shoved into the corner of my room.
I lay the girl down at the back of the house, pull the door to, steal away. Have a sit.
She has to lie there. She’s just little, little bunch, just a nugget. I could drop her through the mouth of the woodstove, be done with her in a day.
Who am I?
Because who am I really, do you think, to her?
She’s just little. She doesn’t know me. Give her time, time enough, some months to grow, she will point me out, say, “Bapa.” The ennobling moment.
The blow to the head. Then the knees go.
Like the heartbeat, first time, the first picture, her little face full on through the tissue, the fiber and brine, and she waved. Here I come, she seemed to say, don’t try to stop me.
You do what you have to do. Burn through. Drop into my hands, big Papa’s hands, and he flinches. I gave her up to her mother: glistening, blue, the cord in my hand still humming. And her mother’s first word? Luscious. Think of that.
They say it’s easy, it is all she knows: harness, plaster, spreading bar. Bapa. Hot. Brother. Dog. All the little cups and pulleys.
Her brother drew on her face with a crayon, drew a face.
I was elsewhere. I was taking my ten deep breaths. As per.
You take a breath, keep moving. They can’t move, you think you’re safe, you think they lie there, okay, and what could come? Well here we come. Bapa. Mama. Brother. Dog.
My wife busts through the door going, “Mama. Come to mama, baby, I’m home.”
The old egg clutch. The gladdened hand. She is spitting milk, she is weeping. Bringing the bacon home.
What I like?
I liked lying on the bed on the phone with her, nothing left to say.
I like a good outside shower, looking up through the moss and leaves. Our man in his boat, turning circles. Little lake.
Our lake was shrinking. It was dirtier every year we lived there, the water siphoned oil. Lake Rosa. After Rosa.
It was storied. All the good stuff — rape and pillage, dirty Feds. Stills in the woods and sink holes you could drop your murdered through. Gothic excess. I always liked it. I liked the old gin joint sloughing on the banks, the desolated piers. Our boy was small there. Sit him on the slope in his bucket in the sun and the peahens would stroll down and gawk at him.
Then the rumors flared up. Something had killed a peahen, a fellow was missing his dogs. Two, and then another, and then somebody else, and pretty soon they had gotten a posse up and were combing the lake for gators. They came upon an ancient bull in the muck, bellowing and sluggish, and everybody had a go at him, and beat him on the head with pipes. They opened him up and, lookyloo, found a dew claw, hair balls, gizzards. A broken chain of vertabrae, a clutch of radio collars.