Wednesday, December 31, 2008

14. Insurrection

I avoided my body whenever possible and felt queasy if I went near it, like an illness I just had to live with. Who needs a body, I decided, if you can have a library instead? I thought it was brave and honest to remove myself from circulation, to stamp myself Discard.

Sex, of course, paid no attention to any of this nonsense: bounded right along, puts its paws on my chest and began to slobber. The bears at the zoo began losing hair in places, jimmying the locks, shoving their shorts to the floor, and letting themselves out of their cages.

Monday, December 29, 2008

13. Departure

The cats got leukemia and died one after another. Ninety-three slowed down, his belly bloated. I sat with him, fed with sardines, and he purred until he died. A boy should have a dog, my father said, and got me a golden retriever from the pound, a bright generous creature who stayed three days. On the third day it darted across the road and, even though I screamed at it to stay, ran back toward me and was killed by a car. Without animals, the house was uninhabitable. I said I wanted to go away to school. My father had been in that house fifty years; he didn't want to stay there either. He sold it to my brother and later I heard he'd told people, "There was just no way to live there after the dog died."

Friday, December 26, 2008

12. Heart

I believed the farm had a heart. I had found it. In the middle of the swamp the beavers had made, there was thin finger of land that jutted out with tall grass, pricker bushes and saplings. At the tip of it was a stand of bamboo grass with plumes that stayed golden in winter. This was the heart of the farm. It wasn't easy to access but I went there sometimes, if I needed to pray about something important. One afternoon I walked into the swamp and discovered that my father -- because he was a dangerous lunatic -- had taken out the tractor and mowed the spit of land. I did not investigate further but ran home yelling. That night I had a dream that the tractor had stopped just in time and left the golden feathery heart of the farm intact. The next day I walked further into the swamp and discovered that this was true. I extracted a promise from my father to never mow again. I still sometimes call home to check.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

11. Brother

My brother was ten years older than I was. He went away to school, and then to jail; he became a far right reactionary, and through it all he drank. But there was a time, while our mother was still alive, when no one loved the world as much as my brother did. The farmhouse was a zoo. Snakes my brother caught at the well, frogs from the pond; an injured owl lived in his bedroom closet.

Nothing compared to the day he walked down the hill to the house, shouting out my name, calling me to come and see. My mother saw. "God, be careful" and even my father was amazed. I was allowed to look and, with one careful finger, to stroke the wet fur. My brother was famous forever after as the boy who stuck his hand in the pond and pulled out a beaver.

Monday, December 22, 2008

10. Experiments

The cats were all female -- the only tom cat a visiting stray. Thus every cat had the same grandfather, father and husband. The kittens were increasingly strange. When two were born deformed and died I christened them Orpheus and Icarus and buried them in a tube sock. I was lucky, I think, to have been taught mythology at school.

Friday, December 19, 2008

9. Ninety-three

Ninety-three was most beloved of the cats -- we named him after the interstate my brother found him on. He'd lost his tail, one foot was on backwards, and another was off to the side. He had a peculiar cock-eyed cat grin and couldn't ever quite get his mouth to close. Ninety-three's purr was like an outboard motor. He loved everyone. Many nights I was halfway into the demons' mouths, when Ninety-three hobbled amiably through the doorway to rescue me, grinning in his odd cat way, which meant, "Do not be afraid."

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

8. Cats

Tragedy earned me sympathy: I saved up all the sympathy I earned, supplemented with paternal guilt, and spent it all on cats. A long line of cats, from the Humane Society at first, then the strays and kittens came. (Many cats were required; the farm was bisected by a brutal road.) My father worked, he fell in love, he was important in the town. Many nights I was alone, the farmhouse had fourteen rooms, and the only rooms safe were rooms with cats in them. At night I ran from room to room through the dark with a cat in my arms.

Monday, December 15, 2008

7. Comforter

I remember my mother beneath her green velveteen comforter, her tired and pale face as she studied me in the darkened bedroom. "Don't be like me," she said. "Learn to ride a bicycle. Learn to swim." My father borrowed my toy stethoscope, the night she said her heart felt funny. She died on the operating table. I was seven. Because children were not allowed in hospital rooms, I sat in the lobby and read illustrated Bible stories.

Friday, December 12, 2008

6. Feet

When I was a very small child, my feet had conversations. My hands talked too, of course, but weren't so interesting -- they were too nearby. My right foot was a gregarious bully, making plans and talking television -- an all-American boy foot. My left foot, the crippled one, was quieter. He let the right foot do most of the talking and when he did speak, he apologized. He was a crippled foot and expected everything he said to be mistaken.

Still, he wasn't really so helpless -- or so agreeable. Never mind that he was more or less frozen and resembled a hoof. His leg, it's true, was not as long as the other. Still, he reached the ground and that is the number one qualification for a foot. He had his own resources. Already he was a specialist in mythology. Sometimes he performed in Bible stories and always he trembled when he heard the words: and the angels stirred David's heart with courage.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

5. Destiny

The way some children know, at a tender age, that they will be a doctor or a painter -- in that same way I knew, at the age of four, that I was ugly. I was fitted for bifocals -- I had a lazy eye -- and I remember the shame I felt to be an ugly boy. My ugliness was the plot of nightmares. An evil old man with greasy gray hair waited for me on the stairs and chased me through black corridors. If he caught me, he'd tickle me and his touch would make me ugly, even uglier than now. Here was the thing: I was acceptable, barely acceptable, by just a fraction of a hair. If I became point-zero-five percent more ugly, I'd be cast out.

The first time I lost a fingernail, I didn't know they grew back. I looked at that black fingernail and thought, "That's it for me. I'm a goner."

Monday, December 08, 2008

4. Nature

A thousand times I was told to go outdoors but I was an inside child and did not want to go. I wanted to read my books. Nature, I was told, would make me strong. I was dubious. Nature had made me what I was already -- a crippled boy, my left leg withered beneath the knee and, instead of a foot, a crumpled hoof. Many times I had been told that my mother and I had nearly died the day that I was born. That was nature. Nature was not nearly as wholesome or straightforward as people claimed.

Friday, December 05, 2008

3. Surprise

I worried the trash bag under the Christmas tree meant I had been bad. My mother laughed. "We were out of paper, honey. And I was tired." In the trash bag was a gorgeous stuffed bear, not like a toy, but like a real bear, a Kodiak, with realistic mottled fur. Later, I heard my parents fight about the bear. She'd spent more than a hundred dollars. She'd driven all the way to Maine. Still, I can't blame my mother for going to so much trouble, just for some silly bear, that Christmas that was the model of a perfect Christmas ever after, the last Christmas she was alive.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

2. Bears

When I was six, I lay in a sunbeam on a gold sofa and dreamt of bears. I wanted to get into the cage with them. To bury myself in fur, and be held between dark heavy paws. Each afternoon I slept an hour that way, folded into bears.

Monday, December 01, 2008

1. Apple Tree

When I was eight, my father dug a hole in the backyard, filled it with cement, and planted a dead apple tree. I was supposed to climb on that tree and become healthy and strong -- a real boy. Never mind that the backyard was full of living trees: maple, beech, crabapple, black walnut, pine. Never mind the hundred acres of pear and apple orchards. My father had stripped off all the bark and all little branches. (It must have been a jungle gym he had in mind.) For years that skeleton tree stood in the middle of the backyard. I was careful to never go near it.