The World Is the Home of Love and Death (22 page)

Daddy’s face is almost at a forty-five degree angle to the dashboard, a sign that he is intent: this has something to do with his eyesight, something to do with the mystery of having a face.

His open and fleshily vulnerable features, his blond beard stubble, shine with sweat and light. He means to have a deadpan look but his face is theatrically naked, blurred, oscillant: I have taken and keep most of these things, these qualities of his face. S.L. has a look of soft, other-minded insolence—and irony—when he drives: it looks funny on the kid. It looks funny on me now.

S.L. was a genius at some things:
You think people would understand, a car is not a horse, you think people would understand what’s going on, it’s like you’re wearing seven league boots, it’s not like with horses, you haven’t got no time to think, I drove horse wagons, when I was a kid I knew about horses, I had good hands, but you got to have a special kind of mind for a car, you got to let the world go and you got to admit that when science comes in, then what you thought was common sense goes out the window because it ain’t common sense no more; I ain’t talking like a professor because I want to make a point here and I can’t do that when I use my dress up language. Listen to me: once you got a machine of any kind what you thought before was common sense is crazy now. I can give you a good example: with a horse, it’s all rhythm, you get your butt into it, you get your pulse into it; but a car ain’t no animal, it ain’t got no rhythm, it’s got steadiness or unsteadiness, pardon my country English, I’m talking like a mechanic, one of the ones who knows what he’s doing, a car ain’t got any of that kind of rhythm, it ain’t like a horse, it’s like a clock: it’s like a clock but when the hands go ’round, you’re in a different place, you’re passing a different tree: now this is crazy, and you got to be crazy to do it, you got to understand you’re crazy to get into the car in the first place. Would you climb into a clock to spend an hour or two? You got to understand the clock ain’t got nothing to do with you sitting there, except you’re the reason, but the car seat don’t matter, the axles matter, the flywheel matters, what’s going on in the cylinders matters. Wheels don’t sit on the ground like feet do, and horses don’t have gears. Horses get set and pull, a lot of times they balk, like a woman, but in a car, it’s all clock stuff, you can’t change the speed on this kind of clock, it’s rolling along, and you change the way it rolls, and it keeps ticking just as fast, and it’s got to fly straight up: well, not straight up, it depends on the hill, it depends on what you got in the backseat, how fat your mother-in-law is, that settles a lot of questions about how it rolls or how it climbs; you got to realize that when it’s standing still, it’s in a hole, and it’s got to get up and get out of the hole: standing still for any kind of clock is a hole, but every single minute it’s on, it’s got to tick. People think cars and watches is pure convenience, they’re crazy, they got their feet on the ground all right, but they’re not in that car if they think that they just can get in and go, they think they can just wind and wind a watch, they’re butchers, they got no feel, that’s how come they get killed; these wonderful machines is wasted on them; you have to do it by feel and knowledge, you have to be smart, I drive by the seat of my pants and I tick off the miles, it takes brain, it takes brain power, real brain power, you have to know how to hold your horses, ha-ha, you have to fit yourself to what’s there, I know whereof I speak.

(S.L. ought to teach a class in it, Lila said,
I know a lot of men who don’t know as much as he does about these things. People don’t like to listen to him any more than they like to listen to a pretty woman but he knows whereof he speaks. He’s done some thinking. )

Out the windows, now, the roofs of the town appear even with us. The tops of trees, like the sky edge of fountains, or eruptions from water mains, are balls of points or of a bubbling and rounded glare. The leaves with their summer skins, that shiny skin on them, glare as much almost as glass does. A minute passes and now the roofs form a broken rug and the silent sky flows into the basins of the windows.

We climb into a more and more simplified air almost as if we are climbing the tightly wound stairs inside a church steeple that is largely open to the light.

“This road tests a driver; I don’t know how your bitch mother manages it; how does she manage to get home, the way she drives?”

By nerve and speeding.

The road heads into the west at an upward slant, into an afternoon’s real sunlight spread at this altitude through larger and clearer and yet clearer volumes of space.

I don’t understand how this road is attached to the town behind (and below) us or how the car fits itself to it, but I already know more about how this moment fits with others than Daddy does although he would deny it—he would stake his life, his sanity, such as it is, his soul, too on his being right about these connections.

But he is mad—foolish—and he finds the best transitions to be mad ones, as if the world, like the moment, was newborn; he closes and slams the books on moments in a kind of applause. Those points of actuality—sex and a kind of wit in some events and kinds of courage and kinds of cowardice and his knowledge of cars and his powers of theory apart from books and set in specialized tones and languages—are points where this flying and hurdling man, a horse-bird-plane-motor-and-lecher of a creature, touches down on sanity and is reorganized: one might say he is held together by the glances he exchanges with someone twice a day—anyone—and by certain things having to do with material objects, cars, asparagus plants and asparagus farms (in sandy river bottom soil). When I am not there, he has no compass reading for goodness. When I am there, I am a compass set up as a knower or indicator of true worth. These are my dad’s secret terms, his private rhetoric that he uses only with men: he says now, “Level and true, lower a plumb line, and you are there.” A measure of the vertical? The perpendicular, like a steeple? An indicator of other meanings? His voice has a certain loud, inflected humming that I, the child, have to translate down into a thin sound, shrinking the symphonic tones to a solo piping, thinly inflected: “Daddy, I like this car.”

I hold his hand.

“Lower a plumb line and you are there—”

He is in motion, Dad and the wheels and gearings of his mental states, as well as the outer revolutions of the wheel of fate, and I am the axis, the still point for him—and this is suffocating: I feel it as a gift I give him, as a duty.

I felt myself being absorbed into his physical existence, creeks and plowed fields and nearby Mississippi (heart and big emotions), and into the lights and flows of force and of electricity of the amusement park, the roller coaster and dodgem and racing cars, gloom and joy, madness and specialness,
a park
of
his mind
—his mind thinking, handling things, in and out of the light, taking up and dropping subjects.

He shifts me half onto his lap. “You drive, I may want a chauffeur one of these days.” His hands cover mine. His breath riffles the hair on the top of my head. His large thigh pushes against my buttocks.

The growing extent of daylight moved around us. Dad said, “Well, it’s hot but it’s not such a bad day after all, you got yourself all cheered up, you’re not such a bad driver, here, sit on the seat right here, and practice your smile, I want a new chapter, we soldiers got to stick together, we got to smile, we got to earn our keep, where do you keep your smiles, show me the drawer you keep them in, I’ll show you the one to wear, where is it, where is the smile you owe me, you want me to give you a good tickle, you need that kind of boost to do a decent job in the world.”

He stroked—with his large hand—his giant hand—my side, my ribs; he made me wriggle once or twice, convulse really, that kind of agony, do you know it? The idea, the model of smiling—even of laughing—was invoked: a dark smile flew through my inner dark toward my nose and eyes as much as toward my mouth: I snorted and my eyes watered; then my mouth tasted some of the white water, enamel and warm ice and sky quality of a kind of smile.

I touched his sleeve so that he turned to look and saw me smiling in that fashion.

While I crawled up and over the back of the seat, my father said, “I knew I could cheer you up like you never been cheered up before.”

He said, “I want you to remember this: it was no ordinary whatsis; this was special, and I did it for you, boogiekins. Now we’re turning over a new leaf—you ain’t never going to be sad again: I hear the wind telling me, I hear the birds saying it, it’s a rule, it’s a rule of nature. The bad stuff’s over—what do you think of that
, pisherkins?”

“That’s fine.”

Daddy shifted up, the car noise lessened. Our neighborhood, which began at Cherry’s house, unscrolled out the windows, houses, and park, until we came to the driveway of our house. How complicated our degree of wealth is: see the poorly tended gravel and the row of ratty azaleas—but the driveway is gravel. Daddy was the first unghettoed man in his family and he knew precious little about lawns and flowers. He had taste, though. But he was sloppy and forgetful so the house looks like
a slum farmhouse
, Momma said, which is to say, a little overgrown and natural, and not citylike. I remember it as strange and lovely—beautiful and big: but that’s probably just me.

The history of the house covers a lot of different matters.

The front porch rides on its trellised substructure—brick columns and a hidden, dirty shade where lozenges of light from the trellis lay on strange, lighter-than-ordinary (almost indoor) dust.

“Honk the horn, let’s get your mother out here to see what we’ve got for her.” He whispered and nuzzled me and said, “You got a great big car for her.”

The horn was a trio of long silvery trumpets on the fender that blasted out Apocalypse—they were so loud and so tuned and toned that I heard the noises shoot off the wooden wall of our house and then off the wall of the clapboard house nearest us and the strange clarion notes were doubled and quadrupled and overlapping: birds flew up, leaves stirred. “That’s enough,” Daddy said.

He opened the door, the car door—the lecher is aware in part of him of my physical restlessness, its range—he lowers me casually by one arm: that is he holds my wrist and I twist and descend. My foot hits the edge of the running board, and I prop it there and lean out as if to be upside down or merely parallel, bandaged head risked like that. I jump and am held midair and am lowered finally to the gravel.

“Enough!” he said. A house window opened, and from behind the screen, Nonie said, “What is it?”

I grew still at once—a pale fox of a child in the shadow of a copper beech.

Daddy moved his big head to a funny angle so that he could look out the car window and up toward the house window. He said, “Come see what we’ve got for you, darling. Nonie, go get your mother and come outside, Wiley has a present for you. And your mother.”

“No,” I said, but to him. “No!” I turned and then I turned back because I heard him getting out the car. I ran to him and he picked me up and I yanked at his shirt—I pulled myself partway up, I pulled two childish handsful of his shirt—he didn’t notice. He said, “We like everybody and everybody likes us. Ah, home sweet home, it’s good up here, this is a good place to live, Wileykins.”

He was putting me in my place, he was using his child-hand, he was getting his money’s worth and his applause, so to speak; and maybe, chiefly, he was getting his sense of a happy home back, the atmosphere of charity and loyalty we had had in the house—he had brought it back, bought it; now he was enjoying it—which is to say, he was enforcing it; or rather, that he had made a mad leap, and in no natural way, but only in his way, to the new moment. And tone. I stared into his face with terrible reproach that was hardly final because he would not look at me and much of what was on my face was the request,
Look at me.
He ducked his head and avoided me and said, to the house, to vanished Nonie, “Hurry up, get your mother and come outside—hurry up—it’s time to be happy.”

“Daddy—”

“Be still, be nice, pussycatkins.”

“It’s not for Nonie—No. No!”

“What’s the matter, you going to be selfish now? Haven’t you had a good time? Didn’t you like the automobile place?”

“I liked it, Daddy. Nonie hurt me.”

“It was an accident.”

“It was not.”

“Stop this, Wileykins, as a favor to God and a summer day—” he said that in his role as great poet. Then he said, in his harassed and fleeing self, man attacked by Furies daily, their dark wings and stink covering us, “Let her have a little pleasure, too. Be good. I’m good to you: you be good to me. Have pity on a working man. Be a scholar and a gentleman, like you really are. Are you a son who rises and sets or are you a pain in the neck? Show your good side, Little Sunshine.”

Dad is breasting the moments—his and the world’s that are focused here—and everything is surrounded by terror and light for him. He said almost dreamily, panting a little with pain in abeyance, he spoke without judgment, “I surely do like to live well—This is a nice moment, Wileykins—take my word for it—”