The many ‘Me’s of Jonathan Wesley Bell were delivered without fanfare or rococo splendor onto the lone prairie. I was shoved out into atmosphere at more than a height of 1800 feet. On the Plain of Western Kansas, in the ranching community of Stockton, Rooks County, in the desolate place were the High Plains begin their inexorable rise, climbing in their peculiar terrain of low, empty, undulating land to more than 4,000 feet at the Colorado border. Then going onwards, upwards even more, struggling with infinity, until stopped short by the inevitability of the Rockies.
I came into an upstairs bedroom of a quite humble white clapboard house. My birth came in January. The early morning hour was inescapably one of deep winter cold, snow all about, deeply dark without a moon but so cold the stars shown starkly clear.
The village or little town, as you will, was no more than an atoll of a few uncertain street lights breaking that High Plains obsessive obscurity. At that hour all had frozen still, no cars, trucks and not a single body about. Silence ruled, a muted oceanic isolation abounded. Waves upon waves of ranch land beat on the place’s barren shore.
I can see, hear, feel it with total clarity. This because it hasn’t changed in the past 70 years, except for being emptier, lonelier. Stockton dies, losing almost half its population since my birth. There’s nothing left to do there, no one wants to live there.
I was born in the parsonage of the Methodist church, the largest in town and less than a half block of weed strewn brick pavement away from the parsonage.
Just my mother, Frances Eleanor Bell, and an anonymous midwife were witnesses to the holy event. The parsonage would have been shuddering in the unremitting Rocky Mountain winds blowing 500 miles to reach the small house with a swing on the porch, a tornado cellar out back, the upstairs a basic A frame with one small window. The parsonage would have been lit up against the heavy gloom, the cold, the demonic wind. Lit to welcome me.
I see my mother’s familiar wide thick muff. It’s parted for my wet head of hair oozing through. Of course I wailed, we who survive birth all do so.
First cry and the midwife lay me onto my mothers tit, a nice full one, that rubenesque pillow. My father, the reverend, has now come into the room and to the bedside. He kisses my mother with the ardor he has for her, will have until she dies. An ardor she returns with quiet decorum.
He says something like “Honey, did you hear? It’s a boy! He’s got a nice set. Most of his arms and legs too. Not sure about his fingers and toes. I didn’t stop to count. Two eyes for sure. I can tell he’s just as smart as you are.”
My father is in one of his bipolar ecstasies, glad tidings and mirth all about. I wonder how long that one lasted.
My mother characteristically smiled, earthy lips in a sweet small upturning, her signature expression, hiding her toothiness that alone marred her beauty.
“Of course he’s a boy, Mancil.” She says so to my father, the reverend S. Mancil Bell, who stands grinning stupidly by the bed, lights dancing in the lens of his glasses. In a suit, tie and white shirt. As he always dressed. That foxy charming grin of his is worn that night for me.
“Boys, that’s what you make, Mancil. Where are his brothers? They should come and see him too.”
I fought some to keep the nipple in my mouth. It had been a natural birth so I showed the anger of taking my place, the squeezed red face of being forced into the world through the vaginal passage.
My tormentors, my heroes for life, who I hate and love to this day, now appear in the room. My brothers are Stephen Mancil, 10 years and Alan David, seven years. Tellingly we are separated in age by a War. World War II.
Mother had pulled the sheet up over my head to hide her breast from the curious glances of the boys. That too was typical of her, decorum always, ever the lady in all things, quietly speaking in her being of class and self containment, stoicism and a mystic calm.
Steve and Alan peer down at me. Already plotting? Jealousy percolates thick and sad.
Steve makes an ugly face at me, too intelligent and hyper active. “Is he alive?”
Alan pokes a finger at me and laughs, a truly beautiful little boy hiding a broken heart.
My mother was 32, and handsome. Father was 35, and handsome. Steve and Alan were handsome. We were a good looking family, which bade no good, to none of us. Intelligence and ego were our hallmarks. Pride was our greatest nemesis. There were no people, none around anything at all like us. We were one offs, will always be so, bespoke Brahmins in a strange land.
A gusting howl in the night. For some reason the dog answered the wind with a bark, he was called Vicar. He is only here to complete the attendants of this event.
“What in the name of plus perfect hell, get that damnable low down cur out of this room! There’s a new Bell in here! The only thing dirtier than a dog is the human hand!”
My father would have enunciated this very clearly. Father was prone to giving declarative military orders in disturbing ways. Delivered to us from his invisible pulpit in the sweet Alabama accent of the gulf region, which even Boston University could not eradicate.
We had no luck with pets, they never lasted, neither dogs nor cats. Even our one parakeet, Jollycholly, flying free and jollyin the dining room dipped before our eyes to be boiled alive in a rare freedom flight. Dying stick legs going straight up in mother’s Thanksgiving dinner gravy.
The baby was content. At that time kept always content. Kept content as long as possible in a self conscious way that would come to mask many lies. There were secrets and shrouded things in all our Parsonages—I lived in seven.
I would be registered at the Rooks County Courthouse in Stockton as Jonathan Wesley Bell. The Courthouse still stands, the largest and grandest structure by far in Rooks county, a place of only 5,000 people sprinkled over an area of about 1,000 sq miles.
My parents had agreed to Jonathan Edwards, to honor the early notable American theologian and writer. But in registering me my infamously absent minded father slipped a cog and made me ‘Wesley’ after the founder of Methodism—of myriad examples he once drove more than 50 miles through Kansas with his Bible flapping on the car roof, on comers tooting and flashing their brights.
This mistake I think, the first of many, was a quite early manifestation of just how fucked up my life would be. And of how divided and dissolute and disappointed our family would become once fate stopped applauding our looks and wit.
On the High Plains that night emptiness received me all about compounded by abounding self destructiveness. Emptiness plus silence plus aloneness plus error. My soul came cleft at birth.