Particularly hot day, so I took off my shirt when I worked. And just took lots of breaks, so you don’t get heat-tired. I was happy to have gotten up earlier than usual, got a head start first of all and also got to roll my cigarettes beforehand. Mr. and Mrs. T didn’t eye me too close anymore because I had been working for a few years then and had more responsibilities, so it’s not that I couldn’t roll them during my breaks, taking a couple more minutes than I might usually. As long as I get the work done, that’s all they cared about, and I always did. But it’s nice to have them already rolled so you don’t have to do that. Especially when it’s so hot.
Also so hot the birds aren’t flying around near me like they usually do. I do like birds, I think they’re so funny to watch, as far as creatures go. They don’t walk around, or at least not these ones. They just hop, hop, hop. I’m supposed to chase them off, too, but if they’re just hopping around the plants I already picked from I leave them be. If they go ahead of me, I’ll run up to them then. At first they just hop, hop, hop away from me but when they realize I mean business they take off. Real interesting how they fly. I guess it’s the same birds that are around everyday, there’s usually about four of them who I guess are either friends or otherwise they’re all the same family. Sometimes they just hop up real close to each other and sit around, or even sometimes they startle one another and they fly off a few feet in the air when their other friend gets too close, then eventually they just fly off somewhere completely different, either when I chase them or they just get tired of hopping around in the dirt. So interesting, these creatures, they make me smile, and when they’re sitting way up high on the telephone wires I can’t help but thinking what it is they’re thinking about. My older brother used to say growing up that they don’t think nothing at all, they’re just birds he said, only humans think, but the way I figure if I am thinking stuff, and I always seem to be, then why not birds, or dogs or cows for that matter.
Eventually after quite a few different threads of my thoughts much like these, threads I couldn’t remember how to unravel even if I wanted to, I finished up all the picking I had to do and finally went into the shade. By then it was about 3 o’clock, I had been working for 9 hours, minus the time I spent sitting down and smoking on my breaks, and the time it took for me to run over to the hose and refill my water canteen. I had filled up about 5 sacks with potatoes, which is a whole lot to dig up in one day. Though maybe not so much it should have taken 9 hours, but again, I liked to take lots of breaks when it was so hot. It was so much though because we really only pick the potatoes from the ground a couple of days every few weeks, the rest of the time is spent watering the soil and caring for it with compost and such, or by raking it with the hoes. But today we were picking it, I had my section, my older brother had his, my dad had his. By the time dad finished it was 5 o’clock, Mrs. T had prepared dinner. He came over to the shade first where me and my brother were smoking cigarettes. Mrs. T also picks up tobacco from the main general store that’s just a quick drive away once every week or so. Sometimes more often, if we’ve gone through it a little more quickly than usual, which she never minds and for which I was always very grateful.
Roll me a cigarette, my dad said to me. Of course, when I rolled them for myself they were just fine, but the one I rolled for dad then turned out a little wonky and the paper didn’t stick together real well. I pinched the left over tobacco from either end anyway and handed it to him. He looked it over and could tell it was a little loose and that’s what he told me. He still smoked it anyway. I tossed him the book of matches me and my older brother were using and he joined us in the shade.
As he smoked he talked to us all while looking straight ahead. He asked us how the work was today, we answered it was good, just the same as usual. Some of the birds that are always around came hopping near us because we were in the shady area they liked and my dad bet my older brother he couldn’t catch one. This was a game we usually liked to play. I had never managed to grab one myself but my brother had a few different times. The trick is to sneak up behind them real slow and clap your hands like an alligator mouth, not right at the bird, you see, but right above it, in the air where you think it’ll fly to. That’s what my brother said, and he had caught them that way so I guess he knew what he was talking about. One time I had almost done it, caught a bird in my hands, but they flap their wings so hard they’re hard as all hell to grab onto.
He got up real slow, my brother did, and he did a sort of run-walk on his tippy toes over to where the birds were congregating. They side-eyed him a little but obviously didn’t perceive him as too great a threat. They might have seen the mistake of their thinking not a moment later—there he went, he swept his arms out and before the bird he was eyeing could take flight he had it in his hands. Me and dad both cheered. I said he had caught a few before, but it was still a mighty occasion when he did manage to do it, we played the game almost every day. Or at least, every day we work, most the year it’s too cold and the birds don’t come there.
Wow, I can’t believe you caught him, my dad must have said. Very quickly, because the bird didn’t like being caught, obviously, and was ferociously flapping about in my older brother’s hands, he snapped the neck of the bird and it slowed down quite a lot. Then he bit on the head just enough to make the skull crack, which with birds isn’t too difficult. He had let me do it once after he caught one. Then it went completely limp. My brother spat the blood and brains out. The reason he did all this was so that we could eat it. Now, we ate these birds quite a lot and this is not the only way we kill them, obviously, it couldn’t be or otherwise we wouldn’t be able to eat them so often. Usually Mr. T brings his old shotguns out and we shoot at them, me and my brother share a gun and take turns shooting at the birds. Out of all of us my dad was the best shot, which made me proud. Mr. T was a close second, then probably my older brother, and I was last but it was also just because I was the youngest.
But catching them like this, with your own hands, was just for fun, not for sustenance. Don’t think we wouldn’t still eat it though, we would. For my money, these birds taste better than chicken, and besides for these birds, they’re just free and you don’t need to spend your hard earned money on chickens at either the general store in town or at Mr. and Mrs. R’s chicken farm. Mr. and Mrs. R lived very close to us, within walking distance, and even sometimes traded with us, chickens for potatoes. But we couldn’t very well just get chickens like this whenever we wanted, obviously, so otherwise we had to buy them from the R’s or from the store, when the R’s weren’t selling. But the birds we shot were free, and, Mr. T says, when we catch them with our hands they’re even cheaper because we don’t use any shotgun shells, just the hands God gave us. That’s an approximation on how Mr. T talks, by the way, he is a very reverent man. He goes to church every Sunday, and he’s taken me and my older brother along a few times, or sometimes just me by myself. Mrs. T just stays home and makes the Sunday meal, which is by far the biggest of the week, and my dad just prays at home because he doesn’t like going to the church, which Mr. T respects. Anyway, that’s why I really wanted to catch one of those birds with my own hands, so I could tell Mr. T that I got us a bird without wasting any shotgun shells.
One bird certainly wasn’t enough for all of us to eat. They were smaller even than a small-ish chicken. And well, that’s why we usually just shot at them. But Mrs. T was going to fry this one up as a dessert tonight.
When I look back at this time now these are the memories that come to me. Of my dad looking straight ahead out at the field as he talked to us, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He had the habit of sucking the paper at the end of it, so that by the time he was halfway finished smoking, the cigarette would be falling apart and he’d have to spit the tobacco out of his mouth. He says this was because he was used to smoking cigarettes from packs. They used to sell packs of cigarettes like that at the general store in town, but since then they had switched to just the pouches because that’s all people would buy out here, anyway. He said the cigarettes in the packs wouldn’t fall apart no matter how wet you got the ends of them.
I think about that, and I think about my dad chuckling over something my older brother did or said. Like that day, when he caught the bird, my dad was probably chuckling to himself, looking straight ahead, and congratulating him on his quick hands. He held his right hand out and said my older brother probably got that from him, he has good hands and always had had. Then he showed his right hand to me and said I had good hands too. My dad has a crease in his palm on his right hand that’s just a straight line right across the whole thing, like his hand was folded perfectly in half when they were making him, and I had the same thing. He told me he was so proud when I was born and he checked my right hand and saw that same crease on my palm, running straight across. My dad’s hands, and my older brother’s too, were big as mitts. Mine weren’t, they were even half the size, like little paws. I was always jealous as to how big my older brother’s hands were, and other kids used to make fun of me for having small little hands but I had since stopped caring about stuff like that, because I knew I was good at other things and besides couldn’t control how big my hands were. I also think, when I think back to this time in my life, how jealous I was that my older brother could make dad laugh just like that, and how they seemed to relate to each other a lot better than I could. I always guessed it was because since he had a few years on me, my dad just felt closer to him since he was there first, which I considered fair enough. But now I think I’ve always just been a little bit off-beat to the rest of everybody else, and dad and my older brother were just a part of that. I always liked doing my own thing and hanging out in my mind by myself. I set little challenges for myself, like how I learned how to roll cigarettes really good just by practicing, or how I liked to see how far I could walk when I went on walks to just think, and always tried to beat how long I walked the night before, like it was some record I had to beat or something, like a competition just with me. I also liked to just read because then I could just sit alone and have all these interesting thoughts that kept me way more entertained than other things.
There were other kids around where we lived, not too far of walks away. My older brother had a few friends at some other houses with their own farms, or sometimes a couple houses shared the same field, either growing plants separately on the same ground or entering into business together with the same plants and everything, just helping each other out with the work. Which I guess is what we did with Mr. T, but we just had the one house where we all slept. We all had our own room, though, of course. Early on, me and my older brother shared a room, but it was a happy day when Mr. and Mrs. T built an extra part of the house so that I could get the room to myself. We all helped build the new part of the house, and I was particularly proud I had contributed to putting it all together. I remember putting little “trademarks” on the slats of wood that I nailed on by myself. I didn’t put them on the ones I set up with my older brother, just the ones I did all by myself. All together, there were 12 little knicks on the slats of wood I did, and I knew where every one of them in the new part of the house was by heart. The only person who nailed on more slats of wood was my dad.
One kid I was particularly friends with used to live just two houses down on the main stretch of road in front of our property. He and his family moved away to Olympia, Washington, when I must have been 13 or 14. Since then no one moved onto their property for as long as I lived at that house. At this point I must have mostly hung out with my older brother, his friends, but as I said before I mostly liked keeping to myself, which suited me just fine.
My dad made particularly good friends with some folks who ran a cattle ranch not too far from us, but still closer to town, and usually he would drive over there with Mrs. T’s truck to have some drinks and talk or what not. They were the S’s. He said that their cattle ranch was very successful and made them quite a lot of money. He always talked about how rich they were and how nice the liquor they had was, that’s why he liked to go drink there every time he was invited. He also said they had a brand new truck, and that one of their cows made just as much money as we were liable to make in half the entire selling season. He made friends with Mr. S when he went to town one time, and they got to talking about muscle cars, which my father happened to know quite a lot about. Mr. S was also quite passionate about muscle cars so they hit it off right away. I had only met Mr. S the one time he came over to our house for dinner. All he seemed to be able to talk about was muscle cars and trucks, and I could tell how excited my dad was to have a chance to talk about it too. The rest of us were really bored with their conversation, but it was nice to have one of my dad’s friends over for dinner. Mr. T always makes a big show of being a welcoming house and making sure no guest can leave there without some food and at least one drink. Mrs. T is less hospitable in this way since she usually goes to her room or, if it’s not too loud in the room where we eat when my dad and Mr. T are having conversations with these guests, the room she calls the study. I always like it when Mrs. T goes away to read her books because it gives me an excuse to excuse myself over to my room where I can read my books or just think about some dreams I want to have. When I get really bored I used to just go to bed and think about all the different things I wanted, which at that time would have been a wife, and probably a house with a library that had every book from every catalogue so I could read whatever I want when I get bored.
By that afternoon when my older brother caught the bird, though, and it was hot and we were all sitting smoking in the shade, me being professional cigarette roller, my dad was no longer great friends with Mr. S. This was due, he said, to the fact that he had gotten too drunk, blind drunk he said, one night at their house and caused a big mess. It was true, sometimes when he got drunk with Mr. T I could hear him from my room shouting things I would never expect to hear him say when he wasn’t drinking, waking me up in the middle of the night by how loud he was. When I was way younger I’d ask him about it the next morning, but I learned pretty quickly, especially after some experience drinking myself, that he probably didn’t remember any of the stuff he yelled. Usually it would be him saying he was going to go out and shoot himself in the head and kill himself, which was very scary to hear your dad say when you were as young as I was. But of course that was just the liquor talking, and every time, the next morning he would be back to normal, and more often than not he would feel really bad and be especially nice to us the morning after going on a bender like that. Or when he came back from drinking in the town sometimes, which he usually did after we finished selling everything at the end of selling season, he would park the truck just out in the field and come inside waking everybody up.
My first time drinking that much was with my older brother and his friends in his friend’s family’s horse stable. I didn’t know how much was too much and I ended up getting bit by a horse, which I didn’t remember save for the bite mark on my left arm the next morning, which woke me up it stung so bad. I thought this was a pretty funny story, and I was pretty proud I had a drinking story like that. My older brother would tell me drinking stories all the time. His favorite thing in the world to do, the way he told it, was to go drinking at the bars in town and find a girl to get friendly with. They would suck on his neck and leave hickey marks, and he and his friends used to brag to each other about the hickey marks. Then, of course, they’d always ask me, Hey, where are your hickey marks? Of course I never had any and they all laughed. I would have been just 15 then, and my older brother 18. I never went drinking in the town once during my time living at the house there, although if I had my way about it when I was that age I would have done anything to go with him and his friends.
The farthest I had ever walked was past town, past the patch of properties past town, and up the little hiking path that went through a tiny bit of forest and up to a little wooden lookout hut someone a long time ago had made on one of the mountains over there. It was just an hour or so hike, halfway up the mountain, from the start of the forest, but when I turned around to go back it was already dark and I didn’t get home until around 9 o’clock at night. This was because I started late in the day, not til about 1 or 2 o’clock. What this meant, essentially, is that I couldn’t really see anything from the lookout hut, and I had hoped to see if I could see our property from that point up the mountain. There were mountains all around us, but this one was the only one with a path someone had carved out and a lookout hut. What this also meant was that walking back through the forest was a little difficult, and certainly a little scary, since I couldn’t have been too old. Luckily the forest was only a small little stretch and past that was basically just a straight shot on the main road that went right to our house.
Soon enough, Mrs. T rang the dinner bell and we all got up and walked to the front stoop of the house and finished smoking our cigarettes, since Mr. T didn’t like anyone smoking inside. Dad was probably the last to have finished, and he spat out some loose tobacco that got in his mouth and followed us up the stairs to the front porch.
Probably the worst day of my entire life was the day my younger brother drowned and died. It’s funny, when I think back about all the time I spent living at that house there, I don’t really think of my younger brother at all, even though I probably spent my most time with him, and this is even when he died when I was around 12. I still never spent much time with anyone else after that, so he remained the person I spent most my time with. There was a creek right by the house that I used to walk along when I got bored. Even when I was 11 years old I would steal a flask from the plate cabinet and fill it up with a mix of liquors, a little from each bottle so no one would notice my taking. Not that anyone would have noticed, but when first committing a crime, one is always overly cautious. To me at that time, nothing was more fun than getting a little woozy from the liquor, and I couldn’t stomach much at all at this point so I wasn’t getting too, too woozy, and walking along the creek thinking just whatever I wanted. There was an old wooden fence on the other side of the creek, which wasn’t so wide you couldn’t jump over it, and even if you fell in a little it would only get to your ankles, because the property next to us reared horses. The creek kind of acted as a natural boundary between our property and theirs, but because they had horses running around they needed the fence. There was an old hat on one of the fence posts that I used to stash the flask under for later if I hadn’t finished all the liquor by the time I had to head back.
I remember one other specific instance, of me sitting on the old fence on the slats next to the post with the old hat, taking glugs from the old flask, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t have been older than 11, maybe just turned 12. My little brother came up to me and said that Mrs. T had rung the bell for dinner, which meant it was time for me to head in. I was never the excited drunk my dad was, for me the alcohol calmed me down and muddled my spirit down in the bottom of its well, where it settled in a sort of drowsiness, almost dreariness. When my little brother came up to me like this, I would have felt calm, not surprised suddenly, not trying to hide anything. Even though when I got older I came to smoke with my father, Mr. and Mrs. T, when I was this age it might have been out of the question, I didn’t even dare to ask so I don’t know for sure, but I knew my little brother wouldn’t tell on me, not about the flask neither. I calmly took a last nip from the flask and carefully put the top on, rested it on its side under the big sun hat that remained on the fence post for as long as I lived at that house. Threw my cigarette, almost finished, maybe after one or two final puffs, into the creek to be dissolved or otherwise washed out to sea.
What are you doing out here all by yourself, I remember him asking me, don’t you get bored out here all by yourself?
No, I answered him, and then I probably told him to quit bothering me by asking questions like that. I just like being out here, and when I’m by myself I can do whatever I please, I told him.
What’re you drinking in the flask?
I explained to him my method of filling up the flask with the various liquors from the liquor cabinet back home. He thought it was quite clever, and even though he was so much younger than me I was proud because I had come up with it. Looking back it was a pretty obvious way of stealing the booze from Mr. T, but back then, you know, every thought that’s original to you feels like it’s original to the entire world. He asked to try a little, and my first instinct was to say No, just like my older brother used to do with me, I used to follow him around and want to do everything he did, which he put up with to a certain extent but always drew the line at things like this, drinking liquor or smoking cigarettes or the like. But then I figured, and keep in mind I was probably sporting a healthy buzz by this point, why, I didn’t quite like it when my older brother did this, and maybe I could set an example for my younger brother just in a different way. I gave the flask to him and watched as he knocked it back. I had every intention to moderate his taste if he held the flask up for too long, but within just a second or so he ripped the thing from his lips, gagging. I realized I didn’t have to worry none at all, because the liquor I mixed up tasted so bad it worked as better encouragement not to start drinking than anything I could’ve done or said. He spat and spat and leaned against the fence coughing for a couple seconds, I just watched, laughing, laughing.
What did it taste like?, I goaded.
Bunghole!, he shot back. Why do you always sit out here and drink that then?, he asked me after he had settled back down. We started walking back to the house, it wouldn’t take more than five minutes before we were kicking the dust off our shoes on the front steps, walking inside and sitting down for dinner. Eating at other family’s houses, dad would have us wash up before dinner, but at home he never bothered because he said it was good for us. Which I liked, it made me feel like I had more free reign than the other kids did with their families.
Well, I started to tell him, if you drink it enough it stops tasting so strong, first of all. Not that you should be drinking like that, I added as an additional warning. I continued on explaining. Also, when you stop tasting it and just get it down, it makes you feel light and funny and good, that’s why everyone older does it. And I don’t mind just sitting out there by myself, because I get lots of interesting thoughts that I like to chase around in my head, and I don’t have to worry about talking to anyone else and saying the wrong thing, or saying anything to make myself seem interesting to them. I can just be by myself, read a book or just drink my liquor and then I think every weirder, more interesting thoughts.
You’re just set in your ways, aren’t you?, he said back to me after I finished.
Yeah, I guess I am. I’m a love the one you’re with kinda guy.
I remember saying that very clearly because to this day I still think it’s true. Every woman I’ve ever had, has let go of me, not me of her. I’m usually not quick to decide, but when I do, I make peace with my decision, I don’t ever regret it. Living on the farm, well, I had no choice in the matter, did I, so I made the most of it. I loved it through and through. I took my walks, drank alone outside, or otherwise with my older brother and his friends, when I got older, read books outside, and helped with the work in the fields during picking season. I loved the creek, I loved watching the cows at the little cow ranch across the street from our front porch there.
I must have spent countless afternoons with my little brother just like that one. It was like we were our own little grouping in the family, our older brother and my father their own, and then of course Mr. and Mrs. T. He drowned at a swimming hole with his friends the summer I would turn 13. The fact of his passing never really hit me all in one stroke as I suspected it might, but I just felt pieces of my spirit which once brought me happiness slowly deaden each time I looked for him around the house, then remembered. The day I found out he died I didn’t react maybe as strongly as I should have but if I had to look back and pinpoint the worst, saddest day I’ve ever experienced it would have to be then.
Now, when I sat and ate dinner with everybody I sat on one side of the table, my father and older brother on one side, unless we had a guest, then my older brother came and sat on my side, and with Mr. and Mrs. T always flanking us at the heads of the table. After coming in from the field after my older brother killed the pigeon, my older brother handed his trophy to Mrs. T who took it to the kitchen to throw in the freezer, where she would retrieve it after she served us, defeather it, and fry it up. For dinner we had, of course, roasted potatoes, but also a stew with chicken and lots of different vegetables in the broth. One thing was for sure when Mrs. T made a stew, and that was that was all we would be eating for lunch and dinner for at least 3 or 4 days. Not that any of us would complain, we loved the stews she made, but even if we didn’t we wouldn’t dare say a thing to Mrs. T, because Mr. T would give us a look. If you ask me, the stews got better as the days went on.
One of the later times I got drunk with my older brother and his friends I met a girl a year older than me by the name of Genevieve, who went by Jenny for short. I told her it was a French sounding name, it is French, she replied, but I go by Jenny anyway. And so it was, and honestly, I preferred Jenny. We immediately took to talking and, naturally, she immediately took to my liking. Her older sister was a friend of my older brother’s, which excited me because the potentiality for us seeing each other regularly was built in by that very fact. As always when I am excited in this way, I began to think about potentialities far and beyond, based solely off the success of this first conversation, potentialities like not only us seeing each other regularly, becoming friendly, but also us becoming an item, me asking her out, and even us growing older, me asking her to marry me, us becoming man and wife, having children. These weren’t concrete ambitions of mine, but instead more ineffable, fleeting desires I would have that would race off and burn out as quickly as they arose, almost something Darwinian or elemental about them I’m sure. And of course, if I did actually keep the thoughts in my mind, of us becoming an item, marrying one day, and analyzed them as we do concrete ambitions, I would have just laughed them off. Because they were laughable, I barely knew her, she barely knew me, it was only one meeting. But I didn’t analyze them too closely, felt their closeness by keeping them at bay. That first night I don’t remember too clearly what is was we did talk about. I could tell you in great detail what I thought about. I hadn’t had much experience with girls my age as it was back then. The prospect of meeting one, entering into a circle with one, a circle I had access to by virtue of my older brother. Great to think about. I had often thought about girls my age.
The next morning I felt elated. I usually never felt anything but tired in the morning. I ran the night through my head again and again. The funny thing is, I didn’t remember her face per se, but knew if I saw it I’d recognize it better than any other face. I remembered she was quite pretty. I remember we talked about living here on this same main road, and that her parents were farmers, wheat farmers. She had an older sister, the friend of my brother, who I remember distinctly being not as pretty as Jenny, and a younger brother. I didn’t mention I used to have a younger brother, too, but I hoped to mention it one day to her. Talking to people was always hard for me, not because I was shy or felt embarrassed, like some other kids I knew, but because I wasn’t good at trading pleasantries during the first parts of a conversation, and I was bad at paying attention to what the other person was saying, and just wanted to say the stuff I had in mind to say about whatever we happened to be talking about. I also found it to take a lot of effort to care about what the other person might have been happening to be saying. When I drank this wasn’t a problem so much and the conversation became something that not only did you not have to think about, because I don’t think thinking was my problem per se, but it became something as natural to maneuver as my arms reaching for something or my legs when I’m walking. The right things that the people I’m talking to wanted to hear just came out, and I re-discovered with each new person that I am indeed kind of funny, that I could make people laugh without breaking too much of a sweat. Each time I said a thing that made Jenny laugh I felt something like nervous energy course through the entire length of my spine into my feet. But I’d forget it the next second. I had no reason to be elated per se, but felt that way nonetheless. My father took a heaping spoonful of the soft brown coffee powder and threw it in the bottom of his mug, then a smaller one of the powdered coffee creamer, and doused the whole thing in boiling water from the kettle on the stove. I never quite liked the taste of coffee but I surprised my father that morning by standing up from the table to follow his suit. When I reached for the coffee creamer he asked me if I had ever drinken a cup of coffee in the morning before. I said no and he told me to put the coffee creamer away because I should try it black to see if I liked it. I didn’t really care either way so I said OK and put the jar of coffee creamer to the side and told him that I was only copying what he always does. He said, and for some reason I remember this quite clearly, Monkey see, monkey do. I thought it was a funny expression because I bet my father never saw a monkey in his life, but somehow little one liners like these snuck into his everyday usage, this was one of many.
Later that day, the day after I met Jenny for the first time, I went for a walk in the evening like I usually do. I went for a walk most nights, either before or after dinner. This is usually my time to just think about nothing, let my thoughts wander the way I do. When I first left the house, walking on the long path along the field up to the main road, she was the only thing I could think about and remained that way until I had walked almost halfway to town, from where my mind began to drift, and drift, and I didn’t think about her, probably some internal mechanism to protect my sanity. Once I was almost back home again, though, she came to mind again, almost as if the air there were suffused with her presence, inescapable. I don’t remember anything of the long middle section between leaving and arriving back home again, mindless drifting, the kind that fills our days like the sound of the cicada that we only notice in their absence. I can’t imagine it would have been too important, what it was I was thinking about then, but for all I knew I might have thought to myself, Remember this, whatever this was, and figured to myself, No need to write this down you will for sure remember this, it’s important. I have such thoughts often but of course, I don’t remember them, which is why I’ve taken to writing thoughts down, because I know I won’t remember, and even if I lose that slip of paper and don’t find it for many years at least the thought that was so important to me isn’t lost for the remainder of my life.
I’m not married now, so of course the saga with Jenny didn’t have any impactful happy ending. I’m not sure exactly how it happened but we drifted apart, eventually, just like I’ve drifted from everyone I knew from this time, though I’m not sure if we were close up to my departure, or if she moved away first like my old friend whose family left to Olympia.
Maybe it was then that I discovered some primal need of mine, a woman for the object of my longing, but to be kept always at arm’s reach, an arrested stasis of plausible deniability. A thwarted longing, this, like the buzz you get off just a single beer, but longing nonetheless, something with which to tether yourself to this earth.
The chicken in the stew had the presence of blood and phlegm on the base of my throat that blocks you from swallowing, a distinct earthy taste. My brother’s, my older brother’s, Adam’s apple moved up and down like a bobber as he ate. My father was silent but Mr. T was talking about something or other, Mrs. T was listening, she got up, she brought the coffee powder and the coffee creamer to the table, then the kettle, nodding along and chiming in with her husband every once in a while. Mr. and Mrs. T had coffee, my father went out for a smoke. My older brother asked if he could go get the bird ready, she just nodded in his direction as she kept talking to her husband. I was excited for the fried bird because that was really a treat.
I asked to be excused to read my book, but Mrs. T said I should really wait for dessert and then we could all be done. So I sat at the table. I thought about Jenny, as I often did back then at that house. She truly was beautiful, and she could have only done that, be beautiful, her whole life and I think she would have been worthy of heaven or anything else. I of course was woefully inexperienced, I wouldn’t touch a breast at this point for a couple more years yet. I knew that as much as I enjoyed thinking about beauty and sex, and I must have enjoyed it a lot, seeing as to how much time I spent doing so, I knew that nothing in thinking could probably compare to the tactility of such an act. The window was open. I to this day know few pleasures greater than summers during this point of my life. Even on the hottest of days like that one, the air was never heavy or imposing, it was just like you were wearing the sun like a nice shirt. It made working harder, sure, or at least a little sweatier, but I also thought that sweating was good for you. It was nothing I read, or anything anyone ever told me, but I always felt healthy after I sweat a lot. Then after you worked nothing was better than going swimming, at the swimming hole or at a lake that was in the other direction as town was, and about the same distance. I didn’t walk there was much because it was the direction of Jenny’s house, first of all, and I didn’t want her to see me all by myself as if I had nothing better to do, and also because I always preferred how cool the swimming hole was to the lake, which was probably just as cool but didn’t feel as clean somehow. And just to walk around there wasn’t much by the lake, there was a lot more near town. The lake pretty much sat out there by itself, almost like a drawing of a desert oasis, there were no trees around it or anything, just some rocks and sand and dirt. Dirt, turning into rocks, turning into sand, and then the ground sloped down a little and that was the lake. My older brother and his friends liked to go there to drink and indeed that was what Mr. T had to say about the lake, that no one who had self respect spent a Saturday swimming at the lake, because it was just where the kids went to drink. A couple of the farmers and ranchers did take their families for picnics at the lake on Saturdays, though.
The swimming hole was behind our property out by the outcrop of trees that went all the way from about a half mile behind us all the way to the crest of the mountain, then up for a little while. You followed the creek when you got to the trees and after five minutes you’d get there. Here there was a bald patch in the outcrop, so it got nice and sunnied during the middle of the day, but it got darker earlier, and also it would take longer for the sun to reach it in the morning. Everybody who did swim there swam naked. I went there with Jenny and my older brother and his friends once, and when her work shirt got wet I could make out very well the bulges of her breasts and the dark spots that were her nipples.
I would walk to there a lot after working. You’d get all sweaty and it was nice to rinse off. Also during the summer I’d walk over there and dip in if I was bored and had nothing else to do. It was bitingly cold. But when it got hot enough it meant when you got out the swimming hole it was just perfect. You dried pretty much right away, except for your feet which got all muddy, and then I would go out for a longer walk. There was no path back there, which could be annoying because you didn’t know which parts you knew or not, until, of course, you knew them really well, which I eventually did, but that was also the fun of walking there. Going between the trees, walking around the huge bushes and weeds that blocked off certain parts. There were huge snakes back there, and to this day I am terrified of snakes, which is another reason I didn’t love walking back there. When I was a kid, a real little kid, I saw a huge one when we all went out swimming and ever since I keep a look out when I go to the swimming hole.
Dad came in from his cigarette. Mr. T had stopped his talking and was just drinking his coffee. Mrs. T prepared herself another cup of the stuff, and one for my father as well when he asked. When my older brother came back he told Mrs. T all the feathers were off and she went back to fry it up. I sat patiently, observing everyone from my seat of the table. They were like an ecosystem you’d see at a zoo, and I might as well have been behind a glass pane while I watched them.
The bird was de-spined, split like a butterfly, fried, cut up and eaten by us men at the table, Mrs. T enjoying her umpeenth glass of coffee, my father and Mr. T going into the kitchen to sit around the table in there on the high chairs, each with a drink, me finally going to my room to read my book, not sure which one it would have been then, Mrs. T whipping her book almost out of nowhere, reading it right at the kitchen table, content with her pot of water, powdered coffee, which she took black, and of course my older brother, going to his room as well, although the funny thing is I’m not sure what he was doing in there. He might have read a book, he might have smoked a cigarette, resting his head on his arms crossed on the little ledge hanging out his window. The funny thing is we shared our blood, our genetic makeup, and lived together for all those years and I couldn’t even tell you my damndest guess as to what he did in his room when he split off, when we all split off from each other. It’s funny I still remember this day in particular, I just had a feeling when I was out in the field on that particularly hot day, a piercing reflex like your leg kicking out when the doctor knocks on your knee, a thought ringing not in words at first but a signal in my cortex, Remember this, remember this, such a strong feeling for such an insignificant moment, and indeed, I still remember, I remember that day more clearly than I remember events much more recent. I suppose I thought I’d find something important if I began to write about it, my thoughts and my feelings at that time, everything I remember. Maybe I thought I’d be able to contextualize the life I’ve lived since then, because maybe I’ve finally come to realize the happiest I ever was in my life was roasting the skin that should have been covered by a shirt in the glaring sun while I bent over, picked potatoes, walked a few steps, bent over, picked potatoes. And then walked behind the house, with steps leading up to it, an exposed gap underneath that snakes used to live in, and the cat from the other farm that was just a quarter mile or so right next to us used to sneak under sometimes, and its garrisoned second floor, where my room and my brother’s room and my father’s room were, walked past there and past the creek and by all the horses that belonged to the property on our other side, and to the little outcrop of trees that led up the mountain and alongside the creek for a couple minutes til I got to the swimming hole, where my little brother, maybe the closest to anyone I’ve ever gotten to in my life, when I was so young I can barely remember what it was we cared about or even talked about or what we did, besides try to catch birds like our older brother, and running around the huge property we had, and hearing stories read to both of us by Mrs. T, and when I was a certain age I would make her read me a different story than him, because I was older and I thought I had outgrown the type of stories she read to my younger brother, and she did, she read a story to him, sitting next to his body covered in his blanket on the mattress, then she put the book away, took out another, and scooted my body over under the blanket, smoothed the surface of the bed and sat on the mattress, and I got to hear two stories every night, and the favorite part of every day was hearing those stories, and me and him would make little inside jokes, I guess I would label them as such now that I know little phrases and terminologies like “inside jokes,” but back then they were just the building blocks of how we talked to each other, we knew our house and we knew the field and the swimming hole and beyond that we knew the stories Mrs. T read to us. Well anyway and he died out in the swimming hole and it was my father who had to find him out there. I thought if I wrote it all out, crystallized the one memory I managed to hang onto I’d feel better about where I am today, but it doesn’t seem fair that I was so happy then and that now I have to be so sad, so unfailingly sad, inescapably just now matter what it is I try to do. I had hopes like the hope of love, like with Jenny, and I suppose if you were to find her and ask her about me she wouldn’t even remember, or if she did she wouldn’t remember like I remember, in detail, like the way she smelt, which I couldn’t describe, it’s a smell I associate with her, “Jenny” in a smell, she smelled like girls and was one of the first girls I knew. I also couldn’t tell you what she looked like, because I’m not good at describing faces like that, like how some people like to run their mouths talking about how that guy has a square jaw, pouty nose, thin mouth, meaningless descriptions to me, Jenny looked like Jenny, Mr. T looked how he looked and the people I meet look like themselves when I meet them, and I don’t spend too much time detailing them the way some people do, or maybe to them descriptions and facial features come to them naturally without them even having to think about it. I suppose that’s a good gift, one that would come in handy if they were deposed by a police sketch artist. Me I know people how I relate to them, that’s what I’m seeing now, I’m blinded like a racehorse, thinking I understood people for who they were, but only now realizing I understood people only as much as I understood myself, I understood them by the empty space between them and me. I still smoke cigarettes and I still just read books, sticking to myself usually, sending off a smile or a letter to those I miss, hoping for their congruous reply and sometimes getting it, sometimes not. But try as I might I cannot think of dying or death, and look forward to waking up each day, at 4 AM, always, waking up each day and carrying on, still like a racehorse carrying on and not thinking about much, and if I think about my sadness it’s just that, it’s something incomprehensible to me, something I can’t grapple with by itself, only by how it is I see it. As I write these words I see flashes of the familiar characteristics of the hand of my father’s, like that line across my palm. Mostly I see my older brother’s handwriting, like I used to see in his notebooks, reading them without permission on nights he was out with his friends, the comfortable lodgings of another mind, some sort of friction. As I write these words, however, I feel this singular, singular feeling of sadness, that these words, despite their appearance, could only be my own.
And night comes, I sit outside and I smoke a cigarette, I still roll cigarettes the way I taught myself when I was 15, though I like to think I’m a lot better at it now. Recently I’ve been remembering the scenes I’ve just described, they stick fonder than I might have thought, and I realize that although there are many things that I regret from then and onwards what I regret most is the contempt I might have shown, towards those closest to me, to strangers and to people I might have met. The air settles into a heavy groove when the sun goes down. It’s nice to sit and think no matter what else. I always think of something, there’s always funny and interesting things for me to cover myself with like a blanket.