Dissemblings
Still More Short Stories
by S. P. Elledge
for anyone I've forgotten
Twenty-One Stories
1. Writing to Sell
2. Cruel
3. A Story for Young Moderns
4. The Temptation of Cotton Matthias: Parts I and II
5. Hypatia Kentworth's Importation of Edmund Wellington to America
6. Twist Twist
7. Losses
8. Rourke and Andy
9. The White Party
10. Sand
11. Arms Outstretched and Head Bowed
12. In Veracruz
13. Unfinished Dance for Girl and Boy on a Porch
14. Painters of Shadows
15. Cicisbeo
16. Hearken, Carlotta!
17. Angel
18. The Sixth of July
19. Islands
20. Once On an Afternoon
21. In the Afterlife
WRITING TO SELL
"The story that will sell is a story people like to read. Most people do not like to read about unpleasant subjects. Since they identify with the hero or heroine, they do not like to read stories in which those characters come to grief or end up in a state of bewilderment .... For example, a young man falls in love with his employer's daughter; the employer makes their marriage contingent on the young man's selling a large insurance policy to a miserly millionaire; the young man manages to sell the policy and he and the girl are united .... He might rescue the millionaire's grandchild from drowning. He might learn that the millionaire was a stamp collector and find a rare stamp for him. He might make a bet with the millionaire. Or the girl might solve the problem instead of the young man. There is no end to the possible variations..."
The Consolidated-Webster Comprehensive Encyclopedic Writers' Guide, 21st edition
"There is no end to the possible variations," the young man repeated to himself as he entered the chrome-embellished sanctum of his employer—a man who we might here call "imposing," inevitably stout and undeniably balding (puffing the requisite fat cigar)–who motioned him to sit in an armchair several feet from a desk as broad as a billiards table. The young man, in this instance playing the "hero," sank into the prickly upholstery, making meek sounds in the back of his throat and feeling the cushion springs pressing against his delicate backside.
"Late yet again," said employer began at last from across the gleaming teak expanse of his desk, "I can guess that you have still not sold our millionaire that policy. I would think a person who expects to be my future son-in-law could think of some way."
From the depths of his chair the aforementioned young man explained: "Well, I thought of saving his grandchild from drowning, but I couldn't get the little devil near water. And it seems that rare stamp I discovered for his collection is nothing but a Tuvan counterfeit. I did make a bet with him, though—on a squash match—and now I'm afraid I owe him a thousand dollars. It's a damn shame, sir—excuse my language—but I don't think I'll be able to marry your daughter after all, at least under your, dare I say, rigorous contractual terms, and as long as this millionaire is so miserly."
A bureaucratic sigh from the employer as he stamped out his cigar in a malachite ashtray. "You do realize," he warned, "that you are in awful danger of ending this little romantic episode of yours in grief. And then where would we all be?"
"Yes, sir, I fully understand—I'd hate for us to become .... ahem, unsympathetic. Who would then be able to identify with us? That's why, after long consideration on my part, I have decided that we should be somewhat unconventional under the circumstances and have your daughter try her luck with the millionaire. Surely someone so beautiful and yet so witty can think of a way to sell a policy to that old Silas."
The employer leaned back in his chair and sighed again, beating a bolero on the desktop with his fat, nicotine-yellowed fingertips. "This is of course an unusual proposition, but I'll call her in." He pressed the intercom button and asked to have his daughter sent in; she arrived at once, hands clasped before her and crocodile-hide briefcase under her arm. "Daughter, your fiancé here is in dire straits."
The girl, every corpuscle a heroine, glanced from older to younger man and said, "Yes, I know. We've been having quite a dramatic conflict so far. But even I had no inkling it would proceed as it has. I expect now you want me to find a, dare I say, resolution."
"If you don't," the young man said, rising from his seat, "we might lose whatever romantic impetus we had going for us. Do you want to end up disrupting time-honored societal sensibilities? Marriage is our only fitting resolution, but I've tried my best and failed." He reached for her hand, took both hands, and held them in his own. The girl did not respond any more than a manikin would.
Instead she confronted her father: "If it hadn't been for your impossible demands! As if I'm some princess in a fairy tale... Though as a matter of fact I'm one step ahead of the both of you. Today I went to see the millionaire and he agreed to buy a policy."
"Jubilation!" the employer exclaimed, rushing to embrace his daughter and future son-in-law. "The happy couple! Looks like the wedding's on."
The girl broke away from their stranglehold. "He agreed to buy a policy," she stated in a well-modulated purr of a voice, only very slightly reminiscent of the late Miss Bankhead, "on one condition, and on one condition only: that I become his mistress and bear him a child. He says it's probably the only way to rescue me from such a humdrum, predictable existence."
In unison, short deep gasps from the men, as the young one grew pale and the old one red in the face. "Predictable!" the employer bellowed, crushing his cigar into the desktop. "Do you realize you've completely ruined our chances for making a sale? Who's going to want to have anything to do with the exploits of a young woman so, so... amoral and licentious that she'd do whatever filthy deeds an old lecher asks of her just to sell him a life insurance policy? My own daughter! What a horrid, unpleasant turn of events. I feel like I've been cast into the lowest sort of pulp novel."
"Personally, dear," the young man interrupted, having sufficiently regained a modicum of composure, "even though I think your father is terribly old-fashioned and wrong for acting so vehemently when, after all, those were his demands that led us into this state of affairs, I am shocked in my own modest way that you would have such disregard for orthodoxy. Oh, illegitimate children and illicit sex do not bother me—in their proper context—but your flippant tone certainly does. Suddenly I envy those quiet, serious young men in other stories with their quiet, serious girlfriends and their conformities to more shall we say 'accepted' modes of storytelling."
"Too late for arguments and animosity," she said, lurching back against her father's desk like a caged beast and spreading her well-manicured nails before her. "You see how inappropriate metaphors—or is it similes?—have already begun creeping in, attended by a rather weary cynicism. Soon there will be allusions and poetic license and who knows what else." She slapped her briefcase onto the desk and withdrew several official-looking documents from its reptilian innards. "Here are the contracts, all signed and legally binding. I shall continue as the millionaire's mistress for the first five years or one novella's worth of our now imminent marriage, with an option for another five and subsequent novelization—our millionaire, of course, has full creative control, although I do have veto power on any moving picture deals. Also, I shall bear him an heir, and provided there are sequels, others as well. This first offspring, however, must out of artistic integrity be completely different from the ungrateful and unprintable ones he's already sired and will be the sole recipient of his vast fortunes and copyrights. In fact, if we were successful, this child has already been conceived, as of just about twelve twenty-seven today. Oh, yes! Besides, he is a very interesting man, and I quite like him. You know how he made all his money? By writing stories. In fact, he's been wondering all along as to just how he could best put us to use in his line of work, thought it might be amusing if instead of the same old things happening he'd—how did he put it?—'muck up' our plot a bit." Speech over, she placed hands on hips and gave her head a little toss, looking as statuesque and streamlined as the bonnet ornament of a vintage Silver Shadow.
"I should say we've been mucked around enough already," her father rejoined, annoyed by the authorial Anglicisms. "In my day heroes were heroes and heroines kept downstage left. Once something was inaugurated after a fashion you damned well expected it to abide by the party line. Self-conscious stylization and literary affectation to their own table in the kitchen, I say. Do you follow me? None of this bungling about with bohemian metafabulation. Well, our world is crumbling around us. The very rhythm of my speech has changed and I'm powerless as a pawn."
The young man had meanwhile assumed a sort of expressionist posture in the door frame, one hand at his waist and the other clutching at the transom. "I'm afraid," he said, or more accurately, declaimed, "marriage is out of the question under these conditions set by your millionaire author. And to come clean, I am in a way glad. From the very first paragraph you were saying and doing things that had me wondering if you truly cared if this relationship of ours was (if I may be so crass) marketable or not. Look at me—I've become as angular and contrived as a character out of Caligari, and these Rumpelstiltskinizations of our wealthy writer are archaic to say the least. Besides, to be absolutely frank, you are not half so pretty as you are described." Now he had gone to the window and was staring many stories below at the traffic on the freeway streaming like aphids over rosebushes, wondering if the world would change at all if he jumped and thinking of that perfect day a year before when he had gone sailing alone on the river in a ripping little Cris-Craft and contemplating the fact that this was the first time he had been allowed even the hint of an interior monologue since he had met the girl so many months and pages ago. As he was meditating upon all this, the intercom emitted a lambish bleat; the girl answered it and told the personage in question to enter.
It was of course her lover, the millionaire, a seasoned but still remarkably dashing gentleman in a glossy grizzly-fur coat that fell to his argyled ankles—the man rapped his malacca cane on the desk to draw further attention to himself (as if it were needed), then cleared his throat with a suitably ursine growl. "Gads, but how splendid to see you all together," he announced, in an accent not truly English and not quite American, as if he were reading lines set before him on an easel. "Looking for all the world like a finely balanced still-life I'm about to throw wickedly off-kilter with just one little finger. Excuse me, but I am known for creating scenes. Only this very evening after our dear lady left my most private chambers I was working on a story about a young man very much like you with an employer almost exactly like you and a clever beauty who truth to say is you precisely," he explicated, pointing at the parties in turn with his theatrically handled cane. "Just when I was at a loss for material this slip of a 'girl' (as she always seems to be called) inspired in me a novel twist in the plot—what if the millionaire turned out to be one just like me and, furthermore, one in desperate need of selling a story to keep his reputation afloat? To continue that halfhearted metaphor, our girl threw me just the lifeline I needed. "There is an end to all these impossible variations. The girl, you see, in return for which the millionaire buys a wholly unnecessary life insurance policy, will supply him with an idea that's sure to sell the damned thing, which is: to write a story about a millionaire who needs to sell a story in which the girl gives him the idea to sell the story in return for a policy, which is an idea for a story in which the girl—well, my head is simply swimming, too, but you've got the point, haven't you? Like two mirrors facing one another."
The girl's face had become suffused with something like iridescence, lit up with light seemingly cast through an unseen prismatic gel—maybe that's the one, up there in the rafters. "I think it's a perfectly marvelous solution!" she exclaimed before a writerly shadow flitted momentarily across her brow. "So long as... So long as we're not—well, considering this audience before me—so long as we're not considered too progressive..."
"I believe you've left me in a state of bewilderment as well as anyone else left out there," her father said, stamping out his cigar for the third time before this story is ended. "All this self-referential posturing should be left to unknown European authors writing for unreadable literary journals. And these extraneous details! Why, for God's sake, malachite?" He saw that he had put out the cigar in his palm.
"And," the young man said with a touch of regret for those idyllic days on the river last spring with the cherry-blossoms along the shore in full bloom like a row of maidens in pink petticoats and the larks practicing their arias in the reeds and the sturdy masculine feel of an oar in his hands (idyllic days which there simply won't be time to reflect upon now), "I am certain it will never sell."
CRUEL
Chang was an enormous, cantankerous, highly musical, wholly male Siamese cat, glossy blue-black in all his "points"—nose, ears, paws, tail—fading into a burnished chestnut color across the rest of his sinewy body, with sapphire-blue eyes I'd never seen before or since in any other animal or human; they were as jewel-like and unreal as those in the life-sized, painted statue of the Virgin Mary at St. Boniface's down the paved county road that curved close to one side of our farmhouse. Compared to the rest of the farm cats and kittens, who were invariably tabbies or calicoes and sometimes numbered as many as a dozen, he was as regal and serene as a Bengal tiger among cowering panthers. His origins were as mysterious as most of the cats who hadn't actually been born on the property: he might have been a stray whose people had never advertised for his return, or he might even have escaped from a pet shop or a breeder's, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of miles away. I must have been about six when he first appeared, strutting about and acting even then like the world-wise prodigal son back in the land of abundance. Whatever his birthright, he was well-respected by all our other pets, which included dogs of course and ponies and sometimes a kid goat or lamb and even the tame geese my mother cosseted like exotic birds—but they were every one outdoor animals who preferred the outdoors, while Chang had the rare privilege of coming and going as he liked in our old and large but generally untidy house. He wore no collar. Once in a while he deigned to allow me to brush him from the tip of his satin nose to the tip of his tail, which had a kink in it like a question mark and gave all his movements an especially inquisitive air. Chang often slept at my feet or, on cold nights, curled into my side. Sometimes he would leave bloodless velvety moles or beheaded grasshoppers at my bedroom door, like a king who must offer sacrifices to an even greater power.
Every now and then Chang would go off "tom-catting," as the farmhands called it, disappearing for days or even a week or so to roam the hills, probably in search of more distant female companionship or a battle with those females' erstwhile suitors (battles I am certain that because of his size he always won). Once, in the midst of a light spring rain and across a sweetly scented hay meadow, I had heard him gallantly singing—for his vocalizations could never be categorized as mere "yowls," as with other cats—and I imagined him serenading an attractive ginger-colored female lolling like the favorite of a harem in the white pine above him, as love-struck as the medieval troubadours beneath their ladies' balconies I'd read about in certain old schoolbooks. Over time he acquired a few scars and an elegant limp in his front left forepaw, but nevertheless he grew stronger with the years and even more rakish.
Often I wished I'd had Chang to follow me to school instead of Kaiser, our aging German shepherd who looked martial and intimidating but would roll on his back like a puppy even in front of the toughest bullies. The nuns would shoo him away from beneath the parochial school's windows, where he'd come to whimper for a biscuit, and by recess he would have already loped home, to sleep square in the middle of the muddy barnyard. It was of course only a matter of time before he was trampled to death by our dairy cows. But this is Chang's story, and when Chang wasn't off prowling the ravines or disciplining kittens in the empty horse-stalls, he would be sleeping, too, in the warm hayloft or, on summer days, on sunny boulders along the south-facing brook. As with the other cats, the plump mice in the barn kept him well-fed, and there were always table-scraps around our back-porch door even the dogs had missed. At night, when he stretched and stretched his whole almost serpentine body across the foot of my bed, I'd scratch his chin, press the palm of my hand across his wide Asian face, and rub his belly until he'd fall asleep with a deeply satisfied purr. As I encircled him under my blankets I'd think of the indignities I'd suffered that day in school and fall asleep, too, comforted by his presence and his very substantial warmth and weight.
Like Chang, I was outsized, but I had none of his grace or agility. I stood several inches taller than most boys my age, but I was skinny and wobbly and easily stumbled, no good at ball-games and too much of a stutterer to impress anyone when called to the front of the class to explain Galileo's quarrel with the pope or why we sometimes said Holy Ghost and sometimes Holy Spirit. Even the meekest girls would giggle when I approached the blackboard, and though I could do sums with a speed that more than satisfied the meanest nuns (the ones who taught mathematics), and though I could read almost as fast, I did not excel in or outside of the classroom. My parents were too busy with the farm, which was failing as so many were even in those days, to notice my troubles—and even if they could have, there would have been very little for them to do but go to Sister Agnes, the principal, and ask that I be held back a grade, which would have made me appear even more ridiculous among my shorter but more able-bodied schoolmates. I was also that rare commodity among Catholic families: an only child and probably, the nuns would believe, one who got too much coddling. And so I struggled on through the grades, more fearful of the schoolyard, actually, than the school: the schoolyard where I would be left on the sidelines during noon-hour games of four-square or basketball. Or where I'd hear even the mildest, most devout girls call me "string bean" and tease me into games of hopscotch or jump-rope, realms these girls ruled, where I would trip or be tripped. "He'll grow out of it," was my parents' catch-phrase and catch-all for the wisdom they could impart to me; they knew that if I continued along my awkward but unprotested path in life, I would inevitably become something like a well-paid bookkeeper or, if they were so blessed, a priest. Because I was so useless at all things requiring any physical strength, they left most of the chores to the two old farmhands, retired farmers themselves who lived down the road and came by to help with the milking or horse-shoeing or hay-mowing as often as they could.
School-years and holidays and summers came and went, in memory seemingly so quick to pass but of course endlessly slow while I endured them. We had many animals and many nearby relatives as well, and one cat was only one cat, even if he was as beautifully noticeable as a genuine seal-point Siamese. There is little else I could relate, even remember of Chang's life that stands out in my mind until I was nearly ten years of age, when my parents were actually the first to mention that they hadn't seen the big tom since the night of the early August hailstorm, which had already been two weeks before. Chastened by my forgetfulness—negligence probably being a venial sin—I slipped away as soon as supper was over and began searching our twenty-five acres, calling for Chang across the pastures, between the rows of sweet-corn, down by the brook and up to the pine-ridge, calling more loudly as I trotted down the gravel road and as far as the Munsons' farm; I backtracked and interrogated all the calicoes and tabbies in the barn, overturned bales in the hayloft, and looked in all the darkest stalls, the clean little milk-house, the wash-room, the tool-sheds, pump-house, woodshed, and tack-room. Chang was not in the abandoned outhouse with its Sears catalogue pages still pasted to the walls, and he was not in the half-collapsed out-buildings where we stored broken machinery, old furniture, and other junk. I had almost given up when I heard a faint strangled cry coming out of the disused chicken-coop, a corrugated tin-roofed building so low and fallen-in from recent storms that I had to get down on my hands and knees to make a passage through the ferns and Joe Pye weed and then the splintered timbers to reach the old brooding area, where I recalled images and sounds, from the farthest corners of my memories, of guinea fowl and Rhode Island reds competing for feed-corn scattered on the cracked cement floor. You could still smell the moldy corn and the poultry droppings. It was there in the forgotten coop-house, far under a low shelf where a half-empty sack of crushed gravel and a rusted incubator still sat, that I came across Chang.
At first, in the shadows and slanted light, he looked perfectly fine and I cajoled him for playing hide-and-seek like this. But he did not move, only meowed in a disdainful way, and I saw that he was stretched out here on the dirty cement because his left hind-leg was twisted outwards and had fresh wounds along its upper thigh. Even so, I still thought Chang must be basically all right, and I tried to move him, or to make him stand, but then I saw he could do neither, in fact was in pain when I touched any part of his hindquarters. He even hissed a little and folded back his ears in anger, something he had never done with me before—I who had always saved the choicest scraps when I could for him and who allowed him the lion's share of my bed when he wanted it. But then I soothed him with a head- and neck-rub and assured him that I would do whatever it was I could do to help him. I really had no idea that he was already dying.
I did know, however, that my parents would never pay for any doctoring; they went to the veterinarian rarely even for the livestock, and I'd seen many other pets die or be "put down" before; I would be the only one to cry at these events, but already, by the age of nine and several months, I had come to accept such deaths as inevitable and unremarkable. I'd seen dogs hit by cars and cats fall to their deaths from a barn roof or a tree limb. Once I'd watched my visiting grandfather drown an unwanted litter of kittens in a horse-trough. My parents' and their parents' attitude, I suppose, was cruel, but it was not unusual; they did love their animals, but as farmers love animals, with no time for pity or sentimentality or even much mercy, because if you allowed such time, life in the country would be all that much more harder to imagine, if not impossible to bear.
There, in that broken-down chicken coop, I caressed the kingly Chang and spoke words of tenderness to him. I did what I could do to clean his wounds with iodine I filched from the bathroom cabinet and I told him long stories, borrowed from the Children's Arabian Nights, about his own romantic exploits and brave adventures. The iodine made him thrash his tail but he could not get up to run away. His formerly sleek fur was now matted and crusty in spots, however much I tried to brush it. I bathed him regularly with cotton rags despite the scratches I received in return and fanned him when the afternoon heat became oppressive and his surprisingly pink tongue hung from his mouth. Of none of this did I tell my parents: this would be the first of many secrets I would keep from them—some much worse secrets, but even at my young age I knew this was the type of behavior that I would pay in unforeseen ways for later. For now, I allowed my parents to believe Chang had simply disappeared the way he had simply appeared on the farm; other cats would soon be allowed in the house to chase any mice in the kitchen or basement; they might even ask a neighbor for a similar Siamese should one ever show up. My parents were as always very busy, but when they did notice my absence here and there I let them assume I was off somewhere reading my fairy tales or playing or simply dozing in the sun. They knew there were few other children nearby for me to play with and that even if there had been more, I would have avoided their mischief—their matches or chewing tobacco or suggestive comic books. I was, after all, a good boy. A boy who might become a priest.
Several times a day I brought Chang scraps of food, and I always kept a plastic jug of water and a bowl by his side. I still could not make him move, and he had taken to mewling in a most disheartening way almost constantly, but I pretended to myself that he was getting better and batted the horse-flies away from his wounds and his still crystalline-blue eyes. When he saw me enter the coop along the passage I had made through the weeds and timber, his tail would twitch and his eyes would narrow, but in some strange way this was his new way of greeting me—and he always gobbled the food I lay before him with the same vigor and delicacy he had always approached his dinner. And often as not he ended his meal with a roaring purr that only subsided as he drifted off into a new type of deeper, more troubled sleep.
The hot summer days went by and Chang seemed no better and no worse. I still maintained the belief that one morning soon he would rise strong and healthy with the sun and come pouncing onto my bed. Sometimes I awoke squeezing my pillow, thinking it was Chang I held in my arms. But I was as unsentimental as my parents and though I felt vaguely sad and a little angry, I did not feel the need to cry or even to pray to Jesus—who, I had been told well enough, did love animals but, it could be inferred, was obviously too busy caring for the hungry and sick humans of the world to be able to do much for one poor cat (who was probably, I knew even at that age, a Buddhist). I speculated instead on how he had been hurt—was it a duel to the death with a neighboring tomcat, one who had inevitably died under the conquering Chang's claws? (If so, I hoped the female in dispute appreciated the power of her allure!) Or was it some other animal—a fisher martin, perhaps, or even a coyote or bear cub—who had wounded and mangled Chang's hind leg? Had it been instead an old fur-trap he had just managed to escape from? A tumble down a slippery mountain crevice? Then again, he might have only caught and scraped the leg between the nail-studded beams of a storm-damaged shed before he limped here. Whatever had befallen him, day after day I came to him and sat by his side for hours. I still remember his breath, which grew more rancid and primitively feline by the day and, much worse, the smell from his shattered leg, already beginning to pustulate in the heat. I could not chase away the flies all day, and often when I came to him a quarter of Chang's body was covered with a glistening, writhing sheathe of blue-bottles and green-bottles; I scattered and squashed all I could, but as soon as my back was turned, I knew there would be more.
Through it all Chang's eyes remained vivid and wise as the sapphire-inset eyes of an immense far-eastern bronze Buddha, like one I'd seen in a junior encyclopedia, and he really seemed to listen when I brought him storybooks to read those long afternoons—both he and I would grow drowsy with the travels of Sinbad or Gulliver, and I imagined Chang as a sort of scimitar-wielding cat-king who one of those adventurers might meet in a far-off, magical land. Things might have continued like this for some time, as long as I could douse Chang with enough iodine or rubbing alcohol and ward off enough flies—but the end of August came and with it the first week of school. Once again I was the tallest in class, though not by as much as I had the previous spring, despite being ganglier and more prone to falling over my own feet than ever. I had always been a loner, but then again many country kids are loners; it was just that this year of school, fifth grade, I felt lonelier than ever when all the boys gathered between classes to compare baseball cards or the girls chattered on about who was the prettiest movie actress during lunch. Recess as usual was the worst, and this year Sister Agnes had sponsored a special initiative to get all children to be included in all games equally—divided by gender, of course. With the sun beating upon my head as I stood there on the blacktop, I would go into a kind of swoon as large red rubber balls and somewhat smaller orange basketballs shot past me, hardly aware of when I was called to block or guard or pass or whatever it was I was supposed to do. Truth was, I was thinking of Chang, wondering how fast I could run home down the gravel roads and then the county road to my house to bring him his morsels of tuna and fresh water and as always to fan away the flies.
That very first week I was somehow to blame for the fifth-grade boys whose homeroom was Sister Anastasia's losing at kick-ball to the fifth-grade boys whose homeroom was Sister Carmel's. I do remember it was over ninety degrees out, and I was wearing shoes I hadn't yet grown into, and the sweat had made my hair fall into my eyes: none of this was a proper excuse for the boys who surrounded me now in the side-yard, half in the shade of the locust trees and half in the blinding whiteness outside of that shade. The circle of boys grew tighter, and though I was taller than them all, I felt the sheer power of their boyish strength hemming me in, and watched with increasing alarm as the red kick-ball they bounced back and forth on all sides, passing it in this fashion from one to another, careened faster and harder from boy to boy—and then I was suddenly struck in the stomach by the ball with the full force of their fury; I dropped to my knees, and before I could beg or plead or anything they began spitting on the crown of my head, full in my face if they could aim low enough, and beat the rubber ball hard against my back. That didn't really hurt, though their silence frightened me more than anything. Not a word was said until the next-tallest boy from our homeroom, who was as stocky and strong as I was slender and brittle, hissed the worst word a boy of that age could call another boy of his age at that time, in that era, at our parish school: "Girl!" It was a word calculated not to send the one who taunted to hell but the one who was taunted. Why? Because he was everything a boy should not be, he did everything a boy should not do, he had dishonored an entire homeroom. I held back the tears, demonstrating that my enemies hadn't yet fully conquered me, but my brave face proved nothing; they had already scattered like sparrows with one warning from the little silver whistle hanging with her rosary around Sister Carmel's waist. She pulled me up from the ground with a look that might have been pity or might have been contempt and told me to get back to class and stop my stuttering, there was nothing to be done about such piddling incidents.
As soon as I arrived back at the chicken coop that afternoon I repeated to Chang the whole story of my injustice, but he was not listening. Instead, he had now subsided into a steady low panting, and for the first time I noticed that the fur was coming off his back leg in small clumps, revealing raw pink flesh underneath that oozed with whitish-yellowish pus. His body, once as muscular as a man's, now seemed skeletal, like the mummified Egyptian cats I'd seen in an archeology book. No longer did I want to touch or caress him and I felt ashamed for that, that shame we all feel I suppose for doubting the touch upon a sick person's head, for a moment more concerned about our own health than theirs. For the first time, too, I felt that Chang didn't want me there at all, since he had removed himself to this out-of-the-way place to die and to die alone. His eyes, half-closed, had lost much of their life, and a milky film had at last covered the blue sapphires. He refused to drink any water and merely tasted the chicken leg I had stolen for him. More than anything else I felt furious, especially after my ignominious defeat on the playground earlier that afternoon, and so I was glad to leave him behind after a half-hour, behind to the strangling heat and the stench and the flies.
Within another day or two the maggots started crawling on him. Somehow I had never even anticipated them and I was out of iodine, which seemed to have been of no use, anyway. With a piece of broken pine-board I tried scraping the plump revolting things off him, but when I returned after a few hours there were more stirring in his flesh and Chang's low vocalizations were more strained and frightful than ever. I spent as much time as I could with him those late August afternoons, but my parents were now growing suspicious of my long absences from the house and barnyard and started to accuse me of ignoring the few chores they did provide me. Therefore I retreated to my duties and schoolwork and tried to put Chang out of my mind when I was away from him, but still I kept coming back. And still Chang refused to die.
It wasn't until this point, indeed, that I had even acknowledged to myself that he was truly dying. I'd been told before how animals prefer to go off to die alone, and I knew I was invading the sanctity of an animal's most sacred moments, but still I returned again and again to Chang's side, trying to eradicate the maggots and to ease his pain. To enter the broken-beamed chicken coop now was a harder task than ever, both because of the increasing reek of approaching death and the pitiful caterwauling of Chang, who now hardly seemed to notice me as I tried to force some water down his throat or cover his rear end with fresh wash-cloths (that would soon be kicked off). The days and the nights too were hotter now than they had been all year, and under the tin roof the old chicken coop was hotter than black granite boulders in the sun. That week in my febrile dreams Chang pressed his bleeding body against my side, and his purring was an ocean roar. I considered the nuns at school and their fierce faith in something unfathomable by me, so I resolved to try harder: like a night nurse I would come and go hour in and hour out, as long as my absence wasn't noticed—and still Chang refused to die.
Sundays I always went to St. Boniface's with my mother and grandmother while my father and grandfather puttered about, mending small things on the farm, and this one would be no exception. I could have feigned sickness, but I knew that to be one of the worst sort of sins of all. I could have pleaded that I had to tend to a dying friend, but I knew that would only bring derision or confusion. There was a stern look or two as I hesitated at the kitchen table, that was all. So I went off in the family car with the women, forced to sit between them on the sticky front seat of Grandmother's Rambler and breathe their Sunday perfume and pretend nothing was troubling me. My grandmother stuck to the old ways and wore her small lace veil, but my mother's head was bare and she only extinguished her cigarette just as she approached the holy-water font. It was the torrid end of summer and I wore shorts even to church, and during the long homily I studied how scratched and bruised my knees and legs were, how dirty my socks, how scuffed my sneakers. No wonder I seemed such a disappointment to my parents and grandparents. No wonder the pretty golden Jesus above the altar had no time for my woes.
After church there followed that immemorial hour or so at my grandparents' bungalow in town as we waited for the men to arrive back from the farm, when we would trade the more distinguished Rambler for my parents' second-hand Buick and return to the cows and horses and fields. As usual, my grandmother served homemade root beer (winters it would be hot chocolate), and I sat on the hard old horsehair sofa opposite the women in their cane rockers as they exchanged gossip about our neighbors and the general decline of the valley. I politely refused the sugar wafers and barely sipped the bitter root beer, infuriated inwardly by their inane chatter and the glorious sunshine and blue sky outside. "And when he does talk," I heard my mother saying across the miles I felt separated from this room and this situation, "he stutters worse than ever."
"He'll grow out of it," my grandmother said, crumbling a wafer between her dentures, continuing this illusion that I was nowhere nearby, "just like he'll grow out of those shoes. And they all have to learn to recite clear and loud in catechism this fall. Sister Mike always sees to that!" Sister Michael was the fat, gravel-voiced, bespectacled dragon I'd so often been warned of—and I immediately wanted to run from the room and back to Chang. Instead, I waited patient and silent for the men and the long drive back to the farm and tolerated having to rake a few stalls before I could return to my invalid, this secret sin that now felt more shameful and dishonorable than ever.
It was almost impossible now to stand the heat of the coop or the smell of infection and rotting flesh. Chang was barely able to open his eyes when he heard me scramble through the dried-up weeds and fallen beams to where he lay under the work-shelf. I saw that he had drunk none of the water but once again had kicked off most of the moist wash-cloth; the maggots were worse and small bright new flies now buzzed around us both. For one last time I considered going to my parents, to at least have Chang gently "put to sleep," the way I heard vets did to beloved pets, but I knew more than ever now that they would only tell me to leave this place and leave the cat to die in peace. I stroked Chang's head, closed his eyes against the heat, sprinkled a little more water over his body to cool him… At that moment I knew what it was I wanted to do. It would mean a bit of stealth on my part. If my mother was taking her usual Sunday after-church nap it would be easier than it might be otherwise to take the crucifix from the parlor wall, the Bible from the bookshelf below, and a clean white towel from the linen closet…
There is something in the Catholic religion called "extreme unction" which had always fascinated me, and I had witnessed it once or twice in a television movie and heard about it from relatives. I also knew that this crucifix was a special one handed down by my father's parents, who were dead: it had a cobalt-glass facing with the little bronze Jesus fixed to it in such a way that if you turned the figure a little door would spring open in the back, revealing two tiny pale yellow beeswax candles, like a baby's fingers, and two tiny bottles: one of holy water and one of what I supposed could be called holy oil. Many times I had surreptitiously handled the crucifix and longed to set the fancy little bottles on my dresser bureau, and many times my mother had told me that it came from a place far away called Bavaria and it was more precious than anything else in the house, even her own grandmother's wedding dress. She never explained if it had ever actually been used for extreme unction, the last rites, but I suspected anything this important must have been, and must have been blessed by the most important bishop in all of Bavaria, perhaps by the pope himself. So while my mother lay sleeping and snoring with the smell of her church perfume and cigarette smoke still clinging to her, I stole the cross, a linen tea-towel, and one or two other items from the house and returned to Chang, who managed more of a growl than a meow when he felt my presence near.
I had no idea what to do, so I twisted the little Jesus and popped open the clever door that concealed the candles and crystal-glass bottles. Matches I had from the kitchen drawer, and in the half-dark the quavering halo of candlelight on the work-shelf illuminated our chamber like that corner of St. Boniface's aglow with votive offerings. Even with Chang's smells all around us, the candles emitted a faint fragrance like a wasp's paper nest and like Castile soap, and I thought: this is what death smells like, then, not urine or rotting flesh. Unfortunately, the bottle for holy water was dried up, and the other one only contained a minimal amount of liquid that was congealed and golden like amber. It had no smell, or maybe it smelled a bit like castor oil. Though I knew nothing would now be official, I poured a little water from Chang's dish into the empty bottle and "blessed" it by saying the Our Father while doing so. (I wished I could say it in Latin like my grandmother.) Chang lay before me, panting heavily in the heat, his sides heaving and his leg looking like a hunk of discarded meat and bone. Not knowing where to turn, I opened the Bible to a random page and, bowing low under the candles, read a passage out loud: "And lo, Ezekiel saw the burning wheel…" As a random passage from any book, even the TV Guide, might do, it seemed oddly appropriate with its talk of "dry bones," and I felt pleased with my performance as I shook a little of the congealed amber over the poor animal's shuddering body, set the bottle carefully down next to its mate, and genuflected like the best of altar boys in that unsteady light. The tea-towel I then placed over Chang like a shroud, while from under it he kicked a little and gave out a menacing grumble that was unfortunately not the death rattle. Still he did not die, and the exercise of this rite and the heat and the fetid odor in that low space had exhausted me, so I lay down on the dirty, cracked, dung-splattered cement and, the dying candles still ablaze in my eyes, fell into a sleep perhaps not as deep but certainly more hallucinogenic than I'd ever known—no illusions of imagery or sound, however, but of pure bodily sensation—a vivid pulsing orange heat so oppressive upon my body I felt I was the one who was buried, I was in the oven of the earth, I was smothered in honey and oil like an Egyptian mummy and left a thousand years for dead.
When I opened my eyes again the candles had melted away to nothing, and the atmosphere was infused with the darkly intense rose-pink and rose-yellow hues of dusk—and so I knew I must have missed supper and my parents were probably out combing the pastures and fields for me, waving flashlights already and calling across the dried-up corn-rows for help from the neighbors. No doubt they'd notice the missing crucifix, maybe the Bible, too, even the towel. What could they think I was doing? Where did they think I could have run away to? And why?
In the fading light I looked over to Chang's body under his "shroud," but it still wasn't quite just a body—for some small part of him was still alive, still breathing, in out in out, slow, slow. Some part of him was still the cat I had known and loved, though I knew I would never dare touch him again, never press water to his mouth or scratch his ears. By morning I knew without a doubt he would be dead. By morning I would have to begin the long unstoppable task of forgetting. Forgetting him as this dying animal and forgetting these forbidden times we had spent together over the past two weeks. Oh, Chang, Chang, Chang, how I loved you, King of Cats.
By morning Chang would be dead and I would go on living. There could be no worse punishment for me.
Once I had witnessed my father and my father's father take a badly deformed calf from its mother in the early hours of a dark February morning, lit by flashlights and a kerosene lamp where the electric light would not reach. Revealed in the flickering, moving light was bloody straw and a mucus-like substance smeared on their dungarees and rubber boots. Why I had been called from my bed to officiate this act I will never know. The kerosene, I do know, had a strange exciting smell I would henceforth always associate with calamity and chaos; the mother cow was kneeling in the filth, moaning like a man who has been crushed under the wheels of a wagon; but the calf with its poor twisted legs made no sound though its frozen breath filled the stall, and that was more awful. I remember the kerosene light rising up with an almost human intensity, like a fist of flame, and how my grandfather spat tobacco and seized a shovel from the wall of the barn nearest him. Even my father fell back in surprise when the strong old man, the old man who had once mined coal and toted crates of cabbage in the old country, brought the shovel down hard onto the dazed calf's slick wet head, brought it down hard with a crack and a smile on his grizzled old face and killed that calf instantly. It fell at its mother's legs, and its mother merely moved a little to one side and I realized she wasn't actually making any noise at all, perhaps never had, perhaps it had all been my imagination. Soon the two men were lighting cigarettes and laughing as they led the mother away and left the broken body of the calf where it lay. Somehow they must have forgotten about me. Maybe I was never there. Maybe this was only a story I'd heard told to me again and again in later years, for I was so young then.
Not long after, my father's father was dead, anyway, and so was my father's mother, and it seemed Chang had always been a part of our household and our lives. As I lay there on the floor of the abandoned chicken coop, with Chang's heavy body heaving and shifting by my side, I wondered if I now knew death any better than I had then. I wondered in that pink-and-yellow dusk if I had been the cruel one, to prolong a poor cat's death the way I had, if I shouldn't have just left him to die alone the way all animals are supposed to want to die. I'll never know which was worse or who was more cruel, what was more kind: the blow to the head of the calf my grandfather delivered or myself, alone in the rapidly descending darkness as my parents searched the fields, having called Chief, the successor to Kaiser the German shepherd, and the two old farmhands to help, searching and calling out the name I heard at last.
in memory of Cyril Osbert Jones
A STORY FOR YOUNG MODERNS
A gloomy Sunday. The art museum. We go there with the children, all of them. The guards appear to be the only things on exhibit. We admire their new royal-blue suits, the gold braiding, the epaulets. They are extremely suspicious of the children—afraid of being defaced? Surely the brats would scrawl mustaches and goatees across their faces, but they (the many guards) are already sporting the classic Van Dyke, Fu Manchu, Dalí, Alfred Jarry, walrus, handlebar, and pencil-thin varieties.
The children are acting like monsters. Want to know what's happened to all the paintings (they are of course wrapped up and stored away during the latest occupation). Bloody little beasts, I say to you, not being in a paternal mood. (Who's to say a single one is mine, anyway?) Do not touch the guards, I tell them (the children) one by one.
Outside it is snowing. The city police have thrown themselves into the streets, body to body like biscuits upright in a tin, blocking the route of a proposed protest march. In the distance you can hear the protesters chanting—soon they are in the trees, throwing snowballs at one another. On closer inspection one sees that they are mere children, none over twelve years old. The headlines in the Sunday papers read: CITY FEARS MORE TERRORISM. ENEMIES PLANNING MORE SUBVERSIONS.
Your children are in fact actual monsters. We drive them home, send them off to the icy woods behind the house. The wolves, I have heard, have come down out of the mountains this year, lean with hunger. Imagining their howls of pleasure, I am driven by a mad desire to make love to you.
Belinda, I say, ravish me, and I shall ravish you. Make me feel like anyone but the humble but still frightfully arch art historian I am. Make me feel like Frederick Church (1823-98) of the Hudson River School as he stood before the yawning chasms of the Orinoco and painted his rainbow-crowned masterpiece, Rainy Season in the Tropics.
These are modern times, you say with a shake of your silver-gray Hapsburgian curls, and we, they all say, live our lives in fragments. To make sense of anything is like piecing together tiny shards of Etruscan pottery and then trying to read the inscriptions of a forgotten language.
Always the philologist, I say. One fits one's metaphors and allusions to one's occupational framework. No wonder you are a celebrated professoress at our largest (though now sadly shuttered) university and no wonder I love you like money. And I simply don't care what the press says about your first three husbands.
But I am, you say with a bit of a wheeze, merely a specialist in Sub-Neo-Platonics. You are at the window, shivering. The snow is still falling, always falling. But really did I ever really love you and all your monstrous children, really?
Many days later. At the movies. A documentary of the life of Marinetti, Italian futurist (1874-1935). The kiddies are enthralled. I am bored and restless and bite your shoulder playfully. This movie has been playing to packed theaters for months, the critics have raved, sequels are in the works, yet all it arouses in me is a great nostalgic hunger for your flesh.
Outside it is raining. I've left you all back at the Automatic Vaudeville, our oldest movie house. The city has strung colored lights and tinsel between the trees on either side of the main boulevard and the effect is dismal, the appearance of a festival that is no longer celebrated except by government officials in need of a holiday. I feel very forlorn and gaze upon the monumental statue of Renée Maladroit, French actress and Situationist theorist (1931-1969) in the city square. Graffiti has been scrawled across the base of the statue: NO GODS NO MASTERS.
Then I notice a rat dragging a child's torn red shoe into the gutter. The rat is bleeding as if it has just escaped a cat, and when I run after it, it drops the little shoe and disappears down a drain. The shoe, I see when I pick it up, is a very expensive designer slipper, and there is a bit of a torn cloth nestled in its mouth: a child's tiny ruffled sock. All at once I begin to cry. It is the seventh and last year of the plague.
A year or so later. After the last occupation. We are all somehow alive. Your children are all grown now and away at foreign colleges studying medicine and law and journalism. They are still bloody monsters and write solely to ask for funds, gold Krugerrands only please. You have borrowed against your inheritance like the tragic character in a ha'penny melodrama and yet you continue to send them more. They are all working for revolutionary causes and claim to need the cash for ammunition, though I suspect they are spending it on records, clothes, comic books, milkshakes.
Belinda, I am fond of saying to you, we are old now and no longer truly love one another and your children have reached the plurality of their majority and we live in a police state now the war is over. Don't you think it's time we took a rest?
This year we do. There is rioting in the south, hence we go there with our antiquated digital video equipment, hoping even so to catch something to sell to the nine-o-clock news. One must earn a living somehow. The train down is crowded with religious separatists fleeing the country. They are a very amusing lot; we all drink too much and all wind up sleeping with each other's wives or husbands. I think.
The woman I wake with is fat and smells of polyvinyl chloride and she is wearing the blue uniform of a museum guard. Aha, I say, fondling her epaulets: thematic repetition.
You wait until we are leaning over the Bridge of That Sinking Feeling into the Questionable Alibi Gorge to tell me that you are pregnant once again—this time with my child. I wonder whether to kiss you, ignore you, or knock your body into the raging waters below. We go out dancing instead. I think I think.
A little while later. A Monday afternoon, terribly hot. Some palm-shadowed serai's honeymoon suite with no running water or clean towels. We have just finished reading Sir Thomas Mandeville's Jacobean play, "1623?!" to one another in a torrent of emotion. I have never seen you look quite this way, with your hair down, your makeup smudged with tears, your ears red as poppies. I think I think too much.
Outside we hear submachine-gun fire. Nothing to worry about: just the reactionaries fending off the post-reactionaries. There is also a children's choir practicing scales in a nearby church, one that had its roof torn off in some previous or concurrent war. It is a very melancholy but somehow anesthetic sound. They are singing "O Brave Souls of Canaan," an old American spiritual I should have learned at someone else's mammy's knee.
There is also a military parade somewhere—but, no, I think that was another day just like this one. The past can overlap in that way: sometimes, especially since the children left, I don't know where I am in time. Sometimes I don't know whose story I am telling. Maybe this is just senility's way to make things more interesting. Then again, we all repeat ourselves, right down to the dots on our semicolons.
Manuel, you whisper to me, half-asleep, let us go tomorrow to the exhibit of Renji-Moro tribal totems on the village green. It is perhaps the most romantic thing you have ever said to me. Call it animal magic, but we were made for one another after all.
An hour later. I have been called before the local magistrates, representatives of the Bilateral Commission; there is the snout of a rifle tickling between my shoulder blades. The jig is up. They want to know what I have done with the body. They want to know our secret bank account numbers. They want the blueprints for the laser-firing robotic antimissile carrier. They want to know what our beloved leader said to his mistress the night of the inauguration, the night before she died. They want to know just exactly how Egon Schiele, German artist (1888-1930) revolutionized the self-portrait.
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