Originally published in Volunteer Periwinkles, Lantana Press
We drank gin all summer in Florida, the sun eating our brains, while back home in Kansas our father went blind. None of us were there, but I can imagine it clearly, those brown eyes strangling in wrinkles, his congregation panicking, his last strained glimpse of Heaven coming through stained‑glass windows.
Righteously, we never drank before four o’clock. Almost on the stroke of the hour a kid would run from the house, an arm held out, holding up to the light a cold, sweating‑wet quart jar of gin and tonic, limes and ice swimming in it like fish, the drink sloshing, brim full, as the youngster trotted. We drank until supper, and we drank after supper into the night. The dogs barking in our ears, we fell into sleep like echoes through deep caves, our bodies numb, our brains still burning. Day in day out, you can live that way on a north Florida farm.
I don’t remember what we drank to, but it wasn’t to death. There was too much of that around us, the soil of Florida drinks death as if it were rain. There were layers of rot underfoot, carcasses, deadly worms, and maggots swarmed in the meat, dead rabbits lay scattered about the field, where vultures circled even in the midday heat.
We didn’t drink to life either, no Bacchus pranced around the house. We had no single images to cling to, no cross, empty tomb, acorn, or torch. Too much life fought for the available space and light, while too much death cornered it. Dogs, kids, every inch of earth, of air too, held its breath‑‑a man, a mite, something organic, eating and shitting.
I was confused, so I drank to be merry. If a man could concentrate like a poet on that farm he would be mad in a day. A scientist perhaps could stand it, his philosophy keeping everything at bay. My brother is a scientist, he has had to become one or else go crazy. That’s why he drank, to enforce his scientific experiment. My sister‑in‑law drank to be a little less of a woman, and to cool down from the heat of living. When I drank I could be witty but not wise, I could forget my elaborate systems, my powers. I wanted to be a dog on two legs with my teeth chasing a flea through short coarse hair.
In from work, the empty quart jars in our hands, our shoes off, our shirts off, we lay beaten on the living room couches, our toes curling. Lola yelled at one of the kinds. Her biscuits were burning. The television whispered at us, nothing alive in its fleeting forms; Chicago burned, Russians invaded a European country, there was war in Asia. Bone crushing to cymbals and invisible laughter, there was a murder on every channel. But we were made numb, too much in life and death near, an ocean of imagery had engulfed us and pushed the world away. It still whispered; we didn’t listen. Instead we laughed, drank, ate huge suppers, our stomachs distended like starving children’s, and we slept, with our legs twitching, kicking out, like old dogs will who dream. Work handled the days for us, gin got us through the nights. My father went blind.
Like a giant locust, we heard the telephone ringing across the farm. Lola squatted among the puppies, a pan of milk between her legs. Sam had just finished feeding the brood bitches, and meat dangled from his fingers. Off in the field Buddy sat by the pond, cooling his black feet. In one hand he held a pair of gloves, pliers in the other. I had just decided to sneak off to the house. It had been no hotter than any other day, but since noon I’d thrown forty bales
up into the barn, standing on the truck bed, my legs spread, thinking back to the time in Kansas when I thought farm work made a man of you; throwing hay hadn’t done anything for me, my chest sprouted no more hair.
The telephone brought us around. Sam waved me back to the house, Lola cocked her head up from the puppies.
I wiped the receiver before I picked it up, there were pieces of meat on it. Sam took another line so we were both standing in the house, apart, listening. Mother’s voice faded in and out, as if she were dead and talking to us through a wall.
“Boys? Both of you on? How nice. Before we hang up I want you to tell me exactly what you were doing. I wanted to call before your aunt could and got you all excited. She hasn’t called has she?” That calm Yankee voice never quavered. “I wanted to tell you about Dad.”
“He’s alright, isn’t he?”
“Well, he is in good spirits and he’s feeling fine, but yesterday in church, in the middle of his sermon, in the middle of a sentence in fact, he seems to have lost his sight. He stopped, stepped back from the pulpit, shook his head, and said ‘If you think something is wrong, you’re correct. You can see me, but I can’t see you.’ As soon as the service was over we got him out to the car, the ushers helped. He’s in the Great Bend hospital now.”
“You mean he finished the service?”
She laughed at me. “Why yes, your father knows those old sermons by heart.”
“What about his eyes, have the doctors said anything yet?”
“They’re not sure what happened. If it was a stroke of some kind he might recover. They think it’s something else, though. You know, Sammy, the way he’s been feeling I just knew he shouldn’t have tried to get back in the pulpit.”
We asked her if she was all right. She said yes. We asked her if she wanted one of us to come home. She said no. We asked her again how she was. Again she said fine. When we hung up neither of us wanted to talk, but Sam said, looking out at the live oaks, Spanish moss hung from them like sad decorations, “It’s a shame the old man’s health has gone bad on him.” He could only say that, and I winced at the Spanish moss.
Back up among the bales, my throat tight, the loft suffocating, fly ridden, I leaned on dry prickly hay trying to recall what I’d expected when I was a boy‑‑no one to grow old and sicken. Nothing had prepared me I felt that bitterly, for the braying dogs, the flies, or the deadening knowledge that back home, where harvesters were already moving through the wheat fields, something had been lost that I didn’t want to know about.
When I stood on earth again, no wind, no clouds in the sky, Lola weeping over the puppies, her hair hanging over their faces as they too whimpered and nudged, Sam standing like a lonely biologist with a bottle of worm caps in his hand, I couldn’t see beyond the sparkling jar of booze that held the light like a blessing. Kansas had become a frozen plain, the parsonage a dark cell, my parents were imprisoned in books.
We bred bitches the next afternoon, Buddy and I together. I held the females, dancing frightened, straining against me, their flesh ruffing my jeans. Buddy brought out the dogs, and time after time I strained too, kneeling, while the black man, who had three thumbs, and at fifty was still so good looking that every black mamma in the county tried to get his pants off, helped the dog mount, holding them, male and female together, tight, the dog’s back legs up off the ground, his tail and rear clamped into Buddy’s chest. The dog would whine, the bitch drool, snap, sometimes fall down, completely limp, but held fast by me, Buddy, and the dog.
“Has mamma got a cold? Poor mamma, daddy’s gonna be good to you, you be all right.” Buddy chanted that to the animals while I knelt almost in a trance, overwhelmed by the two we’d pushed together, by Buddy, who had become a Black God in Eden, cleaving Adam to Eve with a grin.
That night in the darkness of the house, I sweated in my bed, Sam and Lola slept in the next room with their doors and windows open wide. The kids moved in their sleep, while the man and woman together made harsh cries and motions. I imagined them; Sam mounted, his head and shoulders fading into the torso, the lashing haunches of a dog, Lola baring her teeth, her hair draping them both. It didn’t make sense to me, all the commotion in life to breed. Men and dogs, where was the difference. I saw that for an instant, and then I saw nothing.
At dawn all of us were out at the training track, the dogs screaming at us as it grew light. We took them out on leashes, by threes. They made us fight them, trembling in excitement. They could smell the rabbits. The younger dogs we held at the starting line with their heads poking out between our legs. The lure went round once, twice, the ropes singing, a white rabbit kicking upside down, whirled around on a devilish merry‑go‑round. When we turned loose the dogs they’d shoot up into the air, running crazy, everything in the world rushing ahead of them, and when they caught the rabbit fur exploded. There was a wail. We left them alone to play with the bodies, blood in their mouths, their whole beings tight as fists.
We brought out two brothers and their sister, trim, young, you could see muscle moving beneath their short hair and thin skin. They stood under us wriggling, their bright eyes bobbing up to us. Their noses black, wet, pink inside, rubbed our hands. The lure came by, the rabbit a victim like a worm on a hook. Buddy said “Now!” his voice high, almost a bark, they leapt away from us, ears back, wind streaked, their chests bulging, haunches moving with the power of wind. On the far side, as they came down spraying up dirt, a rope snapped, tore out like lightning, and one black pup suddenly flew onto the rail, sparks and blood shooting about him.
By the time we got to him, he was dying, a limp hide tangled in ropes. His intestines hung in shreds from his belly. He was still beautiful, his paws stained with sand. Later, we had to take his body to the dump, hidden off in a corner of the field, and throw it in.
When the dog had had his last breath, Sam stood where he’d crouched to help, his face a stone and his hands motioning like knives. “We won’t race anymore today, take the dogs back to the kennel.” He pointed with his foot. “Get this down to the dump, we don’t need it around here anymore.”
We were feeding the dogs when the poet arrived, our arms dug up to the elbows in steaming tubs of meat and onions. The dogs raced up and down their runs barking. Lola brought him into the bitch yard, her green eyes still troubled.
“This is Anthony. And this is Sam, husband and King‑daddy. That’s little brother James.” She had found the poet at the store in town asking for work. He looked like a poet, and by saying very little he made his silence an art.
Reed like, no strength in his walk or manner, power concentrated in his eyes, but they had no direction, his eyes followed us as a cat’s will, inflamed by our motions, life flickering in them savagely, dying as we moved from bursts of light into shadows. Subtle changes prompted a flutter in him, a thin tension that collapsed easily.
For a time he filled the vacant post of poet laureate, the seat my brother had resigned. The poet stayed two days, he never showed us a poem‑‑his silence had the force of poetry. Sleeping out in the small trailer, it was for me to wake him for work, coming at dawn to pull his foot, a body like a Goya saint stretched in sheets. I watched him prepare for work, like a saint going to his martyrdom. Work did not agree with Anthony‑‑scarred hands, bent back, burnt flesh and aching hands; work crushed the grandeur of his silence.
Sam had him shoveling dog shit into buckets. The art of shoveling shit is not an easy one. Gently you nudge the nugget with the sharp point of the spade, slipping the metal noiselessly with a swift, flipping motion, between earth and shit. It is not at all like spooning peas from a plate.
Anthony worked that morning with his shirt off, brown, skinny, his body pushed up into a boney, high chest, black hair on his skin. I watched him fighting the work, forcing his body against the laboring, resentful of the sweat, the stench, of the flies and wormy excrement.
Sam once observed, “If you work like this you better learn to free your mind from it.” Anthony couldn’t. He would push the shovel deep into mother Florida and lift shit and earth, heaping, into the bucket. My buckets were light; his were hellishly heavy.
After lunch he told us he needed to rest or he’d be sick, and I knew he wouldn’t last long. He hid in the trailer all afternoon, pretending to read. He carried Ezra Pound and Yeats in his knapsack. Later, I saw them on his table and he handed them to me carefully. They were heat warped and torn, like holy books plundered from a monastery.
We had supper together, after the quart jars we tingled, we fed on exhilaration. Anthony beside me, I could smell him as I ate, his long hair hiding his face. You could hear him eat, his mouth sucking, his jaw bones grating. His hands clutched for food. Usually we never talked about the dogs, but that evening Sam talked about nothing else and never gave the poet a chance to say anything. Lola kept pulling us back to Anthony, she wanted us to sit around him and listen. She wished we had a fire, that we were hungry for him and hadn’t drunk or eaten so much.
Sam worked at being rude to Anthony, he interrupted him, laughed mockingly. Lola and Sam fought after supper, and I had no choice but to follow Anthony out to his trailer.
Together we smoked a handful of his black dope, seeds popping in the flame. It became difficult to think, my tongue drowsed, my thoughts like dogs, running. For the first time the poet talked, for a moment about literature, but with real enjoyment about revolution, dope, and women. Into that stinging‑bright trailer he brought an outside world, an inferno. He had become a reporter, a messenger; unlike the television he made me listen. Like the television, he spit out images, unconnected, fleeting.
“San Francisco is something else. Unbelievable. There’s a million pushers. And those people’s heads are fucked up. Freaked out, man. It’s another trip.”
Listening detached, feeling humbled, I couldn’t help the suspicion which I barely felt, that after all the poet had no story. He used words like revolving lights, a side‑show among others for cave men who wanted to leap in fire light, howling in wolf skins, their spirits leaping too.
“Yeats and Pound‑‑you need a dictionary to read them. Heavy dudes.”
Wind pushed in at us, we felt it and went out. A full moon on us, dogs around us heads up, moving uneasily in the strong light, Anthony put his hand on my shoulder.
I moved away; there was no kinship‑‑he knew nothing about the lonely, waiting prairie. He had never seen Florida, the blood running in its soil. I don’t understand why he touched me.
Perhaps he needed someone close because everything he knew had become absurd against the stronger reality of the moonlight, the barking dogs, the rhythm of Sam and Lola, of their kids, of me‑‑rhythms tugging him like tides pulled by the moon, and Anthony had never learned to swim, couldn’t begin now.
When I went in to bed I knew about Anthony’s fear, I had it too. All of us, it seemed then, were growing old and losing our sight. I couldn’t separate breeding from death, Sam and Lola from the dogs. We were being pulled or pushed by something we couldn’t name or talk about. Here on the farm you felt it tough as a current around your legs, you could even see it. It was too fantastic for my brain‑‑the rhythm of the farm, the shrill effort of living. Partially because of Anthony, his fear, and against my will, I began slipping down from consciousness towards a clear, cool, existence. I fought it in vain. I was miserable, sorry for myself‑‑I had two homelands and I loved them both, but instead I was bogging down in limbo.
The next morning the telephone rang again. No, the doctor had spoken, he would not see again. He is blind. My mother before the phone clicked silent sounded like a pioneer woman, her voice soft and roughened by sorrow, her skirts invisibly swishing through weed, prairie grass, stained with the earth.
Early in the afternoon I walked back towards the house from the field, so thirsty I ached. I left the tractor behind me, a vulture circled above thinking it was dead. Far off a layer of dust held Sam and Buddy. They were sprinting the older dogs with the motorcycle.
Inside the house I couldn’t find Lola or Anthony in the kitchen or living room. Holding my breath I almost choked tiptoeing down the hall. The door stood closed but through the key hole I could see Anthony’s long bare back, thin hips comically moving. Lola’s mouth stretched‑‑she was a peasant woman in the heat of a vision.
I left them to work out their own story. The last I heard, the poet was grinding put his reality with a curse. It began to look to me like we’d let in a wooden horse‑‑dope and revolution.
Back in the left, the world shut out, my times and adventures strewn about me like bales of hay, I wanted to ooze self‑pitying tears‑‑papa couldn’t see, we’d all been betrayed. My eyes stayed dry though and dust settled around me. The air cleared. In about half an hour Lola would kick the poet off the farm. I’d have bet on that‑‑she wasn’t anyone’s fool for long.
Right then, I decided to go back to Kansas and get straightened out. There in the hay, feeling glad I wasn’t a poet, I had my first real vision.
In the rough unpainted beams of the barn I saw my father’s fireplace, on the mantle the Seth‑Thomas clock struck three o’clock, and then the loft became our parsonage on Sunday afternoon. A picture of Christ blue robed, hands clasped in the Garden of Gethsemane, hung above the piano. Old blue flowered curtains parted and it was spring. The house heavy and silent, was an ark slowly turning, revolving in its own infinity, its walls, ceiling and floor worn by our uses; and my mother, her body also worn by our use, reading, reading, sitting in her chair. My father rested in their bedroom, his eyes open wide, fixed on the ceiling. His prayers still hung in the air, as did the memory of the hymns, the breathlessness of singing and listening.