Cadillac, after Mancelona and Kalkaska, then Leroy and Ashton where I turned left on a gravel road for a quick detour to the lake. But I stopped after a few miles. It was over ten years since I had been there and I decided against seeing it again. Three blue herons were always in a particular giant fir across the lake. Two readily identifiable loons, male and female, a limited number of large snapping turtles which were nearly familiar enough to be named. And the first few years after the war a family of bobcats back in the woods with their own particular music, a high snarling shriek. Perhaps it meant I love you in bobcat language. I made a U-turn nearly getting stuck in the ditch. The second pint was beginning to do its splendid work. Then I became sensible again and threw it out the window into the ditch though it was half full. It was evening and I wanted to sleep. I parked in a farm lane and curled up in the back seat in my sleeping bag. If I want to be nothing it's my business. Absolutely nothing to which I may add something later but at the moment nothing. Wish I had some boiled pig hocks with bread and butter and hot mustard. Tentative: maybe I've had enough to drink like the apparent though mythic number of Chinese orgasms. My father and I had built a dormer on the house, an extra bedroom and a garage with a screened-in porch and patio. Took over a month, and then I stood on the roof we had built and decided to go to New York City. We sat in the yellow kitchen at the yellow kitchen table.
—Why do you want to go to New York?
—Because I don't want to stay here.
—You've been there once.
—I want to try it again.
—Where will you work?
—I don't know. I have ninety dollars.
Then I went upstairs and packed the carton. A few clothes that were ill fitting. My typewriter which he had bought for twenty dollars two years before. And five or six books—my Scholfield Reference Bible, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky's The Possessed, The Portable Faulkner, Mann's Death in Venice and Ulysses. Exactly. I got some clothesline rope in the basement and bound up the carton. My father was sitting at the kitchen table.
—You can have my suitcase.
—I can't get a typewriter into the suitcase. Besides you need it.
—I wish I had some money to give you.
—I don't need any.
We sat at the table and I drank a can of beer. We talked about the addition to the house we had built during his vacation. Then he got up and took a bottle of whiskey out of the broom closet and we each had a few shots. He went into the bedroom and got two of his ties and knotted them for me. I wedged them under the lid of my carton.
In the morning my mother and brothers and sisters wept because I was going away, except for my older brother who was in the navy and stationed at Guantanamo Bay, and my father drove me down to the bus station.
—You're always welcome at home.
I awoke in the middle of the night in the back seat with a very dry mouth and a measure of self-disgust. I started the car and turned on the radio to find out the time. Only eleven. The Everly Brothers sang “Love Is Strange.” Yes it is providing you can manage it. I drove back through Reed City and had coffee at a cafe where twenty-five years before I had eaten cereal in the dark before going trout fishing. I was the envy of others in the first grade because I got to tag along like a dog on fishing trips. Buckhorn Creek and only a few small ones. Quickly past the old house and the violet glade near the row of huge willows. Nothing is haunted and sentiment is a lid I don't need to manage the present. Repainted linoleum and a pantry. Small hospital behind which in a woodlot and a pile of cinders my eye was put out with a broken bottle. Didn't seem to hurt but when I walked home there were screams. When I was “saved” at the Baptist church I stayed saved for two years and read the Bible a dozen times—church twice on Sunday and Wednesday night prayer meeting when people gave testimony to the matchless grace of Jesus in their day-by-day lives. I spoke to a group using Paul's Ephesians about putting on the whole armor of God. Religion enlivens loins—when it's forbidden even a small peek up the dress means instant hard-on. I wish you were hot or cold in Laodicea but since you're lukewarm I'll utterly cast you out. Torpor. Disinherited children. How true. Milling about the country, the pilgrims of the age who don't want to be insurance adjusters. You only say no, said someone, and the whole bloody fucking mess passes you by. Don't let its slipstream catch you. At the after-hours place in Lansing the Negro said to me, Don't cross that line and drew an invisible line with his foot. And I didn't but we got drunk and forgot about it. Ate big buffalo which is carp. But I'm not sure of myself like the young are. Pre-Sputnik. Can't manage to stay married. There is a woman out there in the passing dark I know but doubt it. There never was any question of co-operating after reading Isaiah and Jeremiah anyway. I heard there are Jesus freaks now but my mind is set convexly against the grain so keep out of my room. A true lapsarian with bugle breath. Horrified by Cain and Ishmael's mother. How could Abraham be willing to kill his son? Then I went to Colorado and lost my religion when she pulled down her Levi's in the abandoned fire tower. At least ten seconds of pleasure, then again and again. New discoveries. I pulled into the parking lot of the tavern in Paris, Michigan, a town of about two hundred. Another thirst coming upon me.
I slowed down by the fish hatchery. Despite night I should make them open it up at gunpoint and let me see the two sturgeons and all the huge brown and rainbow trout they use for breeding. Who said the predator husbands his prey? We didn't or said so because they weren't. I quit art history in disgust when I learned the temples hadn't been white but were garishly painted. Diana's red spangles and blue hounds. Years later I liked the idea. In an alley in New York the only time I sniffed cocaine I walked through a metal fire door into a room where in a far corner a man held a baby and seeing me, dropped it. The baby was yellow and I think a fake because its hollow head broke open on the floor. When I looked back up the man was gone and when I looked down the baby was gone. I was sure then that I hadn't seen anything but I turned around and the door wasn't there, then farther around and the room had disappeared. I clenched my fist but didn't have any and my teeth wouldn't click either. I wasn't any longer. Bad stuff, cocaine, and what is the American urge so stupidly put over and over: “I'll try anything once.” The man who lived behind us had his ears flooded with gas in 1918 and never heard again but tended the largest raspberry patch in town. Across from his house in a meadow there was oil-drilling equipment and a steam engine you could climb into and lean against the boiler holes. Shot an arrow into the air and it came down sticking into my sister's head which was to be macerated fifteen years later. At the fish hatchery my uncle had been caught trying to pull a trout with hook and line up his pantleg in broad daylight. But the fish was too large and flopped madly and wetly around his cuff as he tried to run from the conservation officer, dragging the fish by his ankle. Poaching as always. Shining deer. Running into a grocery store with an oil truck. My dad tipped over a beer truck and spent a day cleaning up the mess at the main intersection in town. And he told me he once got drunk and crawled under another beer truck in the parking lot to go to sleep. Said somebody drove the truck away and the tire tracks missed his head by not more than three inches. Says the song “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.” Ho. The tavern was empty except for one table of men playing euchre at the end of the bar. I had a double and bought some cigarettes, recognizing the bartender from years before. Might be a third cousin. We talked for a while and then played three games of pool and he won two. The house “stick” knowing even the slightest imperfections of the table, which cushions were dead, and where a ball would roll falsely because the table wasn't flawlessly level. I left at closing time with no sense of being juiced. I couldn't seem to get the whiskey past my Adam's apple so I drank several ginger ales.
Two years after I had seen Barbara for the last time I had a note forwarded with a “Just to let you know I'm married now and we have a son.” Husband named Paul and the same apartment. Then I heard through a friend that Laurie
was married. And my Worcester girl was married. And my wretched high school cheerleader sweetheart with her candy heart and sissbooombahs. Hands above the waist mister. There is something peculiar in the institution that makes talking about its problems bathetic. All the average griefs of the mating process. Smoke gets in your eyes. And the whole “our song” bit as if that were the end of the organic process. Cottage with myrtled lawn and cones of mauve wisteria. I've been an attendant in several divorces and it always resembles the kennel master or the veterinarian examining the puke or shit to see what's making the dogs sick. A thirty-three-foot tapeworm with sapphire eyes of course. All those people colliding and sticking for wordless reasons. The GNP people. I am one and over and above the average simplicities of love monogamy usually involves retreat and cowardice. Necessary. To be sure. Sirens and lotuses strewn. A mechanistic coil which has taken place, we're told, in only the last one-thousandth of human life of earth. Must carbon-date marriage, rain, homesickness, the hearth. Better to run around the tent three times and start over in the dark with no street lights, factories or bungalows. A Spanish cavalier. Strange how you can't say anything to most people without their assuming you mean it didactically as law. Thus I express a seven-word sentence about the Bill of Rights and a man turns from a bar stool and says, “You Abbie Hoffman commies ought to go to Russia.” I offered obscenely to kick in his fat face. I'm talking about my own particular, harmless sort of freedom. I don't want anyone to adopt my mannerisms, or opinions. If I had those instincts I'd run for office. My interests are anachronistic—fishing, forests, alcohol, food, art, in that order. Kropotkin is fine but Nechayev is too programmatic. I don't think I'm meant to be part of anything or to raise my hand and ask a question.
I backtracked as far as the road that led past the house. No one had lived there since 1938 but it was still standing with a yard full of weeds, and glass from the broken windows, fallen eaves-troughs among the burdocks. A neighbor farmed the land desultorily but let most of it return to fern, sumac, canary grass. I turned off the car lights and sat in the total darkness listening to the engine ticking as it cooled and the crickets through the window. Something dank and sweet in the air, cattails and wild clover from the marsh across the road. And someone had taken in hay. My dad had been born in the house. I wanted the impact of this to sink in but nothing happened; further back in time his great-grandfather had homesteaded here after the Civil War but this meant nothing—I didn't remember the man's name. I didn't know my mothers ancestors either; if I ever went to Umshaldsvik in the north of Sweden on the coast I might find out. But it isn't the sort of journey I'm liable to take. A towhead comes over to escape the draft thirty years after another walked north exhausted from war. They settle finally thirty or so miles from one another, not knowing one another, and years later I am begot by their accidental conjunction. A lumberjack's son marries a farmer's daughter after meeting her at a dance in a roadhouse along the Muskegon River. Still nothing stirs; it would if I had a journal of their individual voyages, a topographical map of the clipper's route or a photo of a man walking. Where did he stop in Kentucky and Ohio each day? What did he eat and drink and what were his thoughts; and with the other, were there storms in the North Atlantic and what was the character of his fear? A grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Nothing could be expected, nothing in particular had been accomplished. A heritage of sloth and witlessness and poverty. Seemed splendid. A new freedom as when the father dies there is no one left to judge even though he didn't judge before death. An implicit “Do as you will.” Generosity and arrogance and strength. In that farmer's house the mongoloid child sat with its forehead against the coolness of the pot-bellied stove. We pumped some cold water and they talked while we sat at a table covered with an oilcloth. A sticky fly strip hanging from a string, coated with trapped houseflies. The child crawled over and leaned its Oriental head against his father's knee and kept on staring at me. The house smelled like cow shit and milk and kerosene, a cream separator in the kitchen. I turned the one at my grandfather's then carried the pails of skimmed milk out to the calves and pigs.
Barely a quarter of a moon. I think of those years 1957 through 1960 as unbearably convulsive but then the years after that seem strangely blank and a few of them have no isolatable events. When books were physical events and capable of overwhelming you for weeks; they entered your breath and you adopted their conversational patterns and thoughts as your own. Tintype Myshkin. The laughter, actually extended hysterical laughter, when the funeral director said that all “cosmetic” efforts had failed and both caskets would have to be closed. Why not? A carcass is a carcass, asshole. A wish now to be in Antwerp in 1643. As our preacher said that Golgotha was in reality Jerusalem's garbage dump and I never went to a garbage dump again without thinking of that sermon, however obtuse and antique it became in my memory. Miscarriages, greenish lamb bones, entrails of goats and perhaps lepers wandering about with their bells tinkling, and the small hill or knoll with the crosses. Who could truly envision the crosses and this was the base of history since then. Someone said the science of what happened only once. You came over in the hold of the ship only once and you died in the hold of the ship only once. A sailor was drunk and gave you salt water by mistake. The squaw slit her baby's throat and then her own to avoid the indignity of capture. Twice in dreams the dead had become birds, one a mourning dove and the other a crow though both with human faces and flew away when I tried to talk to them.
I started the car and turned on the radio again. Three. It would begin to get light in another half hour; I turned on the lights briefly to see the house. The front door was open and I could walk through that black hole if I had any guts but the floors may not be solid and I would fall through to the basement and its dirt floor might give way to yet another, deeper basement. . . . A kerosene lamp at the table with the wick burning brightly. I was fifteen and they took all my money playing poker and tripoli. My father and two of his brothers. A quarrel about who got “into” a girl first twenty years before. Cheap A & P beer and a fifth of rye. They were experienced and got my money after I drank too much of the beer and then a single shot of rye sent me puking out into the snow which they thought was very funny. I went up to the loft and in the morning tried to avoid going hunting by saying I was sick. More laughter: Get up it's only a hangover. God it is cold. And when we left I was the only one without a deer. I missed three running shots.
Whippoorwill now. Always thought them errie. Only snow haunts—if I were here in winter when it was below zero and the snow was a bluish white drifting across the yard into the open door and broken windows. Old newspapers in one of the upstairs bedrooms will reveal that nothing has changed except the entire world and at the speed of light. I was at the other place the day after the barn blew down and my grandfather was already salvaging lumber to build a garage. He was straddling the ridge beam and we all asked him to please get off the roof because he was eighty-five and senile. He wouldn't come down so we went into the house and had a nervous lunch while he tore off roof boards from his precarious height. An aunt reported the progress of her father from the window with her mouth full of food. He built a garage against the back of the house, out of plumb and tilted crazily and leaky. Then he drove into it too fast one day and wedged the car hopelessly against the side. He died two years later after walking home twelve miles in the middle of the night in his hospital nightdress. Buried him in a small country cemetery next to his daughter Charlotte who died from the flu during World War One. Many graves added now. I thought stupidly that when everyone I know is dead there will be no more cause for grief. Up the road in the schoolhouse there were Communist Party meetings during the Depression.
A little light in the east now and I got out of the car and stretched, wishing I hadn't thrown away my bottle. Like burying the cigarettes that morning. Willing to shed this old skin and add a new one within hours. Exhausted from volatility. I want something more final but doubt I'll get it barring dying. I walked fro
m the cottage to a farm to pick up a sack of groceries the farmer's wife bought for us in Ashton and on the way back I took a shortcut through the woods. It was very hot so when I reached a favorite clearing I picked a milkweed pod and sat down and broke it open; glaucous milk and sticky with light fluffy down on the inside and a nest of dark brown seeds. Then the breeze changed and there was a stench in the air and I walked over to the far edge of the clearing toward a mound of fur: a deer with eyes gone and insects in the sockets and grizzled muzzle from age, a cavity torn open in the stomach probably by a fox and in the cavity an incredibly thick pile of white maggots working at the meat. I remembered that in the grocery sack there was a can of lighter fluid for my father. I knelt and ripped and dug the dry grass away and took out the can of fluid from between the hamburger and milk and squirted its contents all over the maggots and the flies who bred them and then touched a match to the whole mess and backed away. A horrible stink from the burning which didn't last long. I walked back over to the carcass and already live maggots were working up through the scorched surface of the dead ones. When I got back I told my mother that the woman must have forgotten the lighter fluid. Odd to remember something for the first time—no particular hate for the maggots but a curiosity about burning them.
I lit a cigarette and had a fit of coughing which left my throat raw and dry. There was more light in the air now, smeared and pearlish. A cat crossed the road behind me. Ground mist was floating across the road and around my waist from the marsh, past the car and through the weeds around the house, one slender flume entering the door. I lit another cigarette and wondered why I was standing before an empty house at dawn as if I expected my father to appear at the door in his cavalry breeches from college inviting me in for coffee. He wouldn't recognize me as his son because of course he wasn't married yet and I'd already be ten years older than he. His own father would be up getting ready for the rural mail route he got after the timber gave out. He would tell my dad to take off those goddamn silly breeches and to cultivate the corn on the front forty. I would follow my father to the barn where he would spend a half hour harnessing the horses. Then while we were talking he would lean against the fencepost and tell me he would be glad to get back to college because farm work was boring. I agreed—it was hard and the pay was low. Then he would hitch up the cultivator and walk off with the horses and I would say pleasant talking to you and walk back out to my car.