Jernigan, page 2
Late on a Friday afternoon, we bumped down the rutted track, kicking up a dustcloud, then straight across the big field, milkweed and goldenrod on both sides as high as the car windows. Right around the trailer itself the grass was kept down with a lawnmower, less grass really than dandelions and fuzzy pale-green lamb’s-tongue. It was a plain old white house trailer, sitting out in the middle of things at the far end of the field. (It didn’t get painted blue until years later, after Mr. Warriner died and Uncle Fred got the place.) A cinderblock for a doorstep. Behind the trailer the woods began, and above the treetops rose a hill shaped like the side view of the old Studebaker Grandpa Jernigan used to drive: a round peak, left side sloping away gradually, right side dropping steeply like the windshield of a car that was moving from left to right, the direction of time. Such a hill, I remembered from eighth-grade Earth Science, was called a roche moutonnée: that is, a sheep-shaped rock. Years later, when Judith and I had taken over the place on Barrow Street, we came in with groceries one afternoon and found the kitchen counter alive with cockroaches. “Well well,” I said, always lightsome, “a roach matinee.” She didn’t seem to get it. And I thought, Oh well, so one more little thing.
But we’re jumping all around here and losing track. Not that I mind losing track, far from it. But.
The camp had no electricity then: just kerosene lamps and an ice chest. An outhouse, since the bathroom in the trailer wasn’t hooked up to anything yet. I was given Diane’s tiny room, and I remember quietly sneaking her bureau drawer open and looking at her underwear and then feeling ashamed of myself. When everybody went to bed, I got stoned in there all alone, knowing it was piggish not to share with Uncle Fred. I was careful to light up by the window and blow the smoke out through the aluminum screen. Then, in that soft yellow light, I tried to read the Wallace Stevens book I’d brought, until the name Wallace started to sound funny: Wallace Wallace Wallace Wallace Wallace.
The Warriners had a croquet set and an aluminum rowboat you could put on the roof of the car and take to the pond a mile farther up the town road. And an old lever-action Winchester, the kind of rifle on tv westerns. They just left all this stuff there: no problem in those days with anybody coming in and stealing. Saturday afternoon Mr. Warriner knocked off work on the lean-to and we all drank beer out of the ice chest and shot the Winchester at the empty cans, each shot just echoing and echoing again off those hills. He turned out to be a great guy, Mr. Warriner, and not the Nazi I’d expected because he worked in a machine shop. That night he took us to a bar, a small cinderblock building with a big gravel parking lot, where they had a country-western band and didn’t card me and Uncle Fred. The two of us by ourselves probably would’ve gotten in trouble because of our hair, but Mr. Warriner looked like everybody else in there with his burr haircut and his green work pants.
We got back to the camp drunk and Mr. Warriner went right to bed. Uncle Fred and I went into my room and took apart the last cap of the acid we’d brought from the city, divided the powder with a matchbook and washed it down with a beer from the ice chest. When the acid came on we prowled in the scary woods and walked what seemed to be miles of dirt roads under the full moon, the dirt still warm to our bare feet. Then the sun came up and we were swimming naked in a muck-bottomed pond somewhere and mist was rising from the surface. I thought of my breast-stroking arms as wings, and the water as viscous air through which I flew in slow motion. At some point I left Uncle Fred alone in the water, knowing in one part of my mind—I also knew it was a bad idea to think about your mind too much—that you shouldn’t leave somebody alone in the water on LSD. I walked, naked, in the dewy grass, hoping it would feel like a dawn-of-man thing but actually shivering and worrying that the radiation in early-morning sunlight, slanting through the atmosphere at a special penetrating angle, would wither my dick or that some buzzy insect might sting it. Then I panicked about Uncle Fred drowning and went running back to the pond. Which turned out to be about ten steps away: the music I’d been listening to all this time, which I’d been assuming was just a pleasant hallucination, was actually Uncle Fred singing arpeggios—ha ha ha HA ha ha ha—slapping his palms on the surface of the water in rhythm and marvelling at the echoes. Of which there were many, many. I told Uncle Fred—and I wasn’t trying to flatter him at all—that it was the most incredible music I’d ever heard, more incredible than, like, Mahler. Don’t ask me why Mahler. Then we found our way back to the trailer, with the sun making jewels of dew in the grass, and managed to stay pretty much out of Mr. Warriner’s way until we’d come down enough to get to sleep, which wasn’t until fairly late that afternoon.
End of reminiscence.
3
I woke up in the cold, in gray light. So the fire had gone out while I’d slept the day away, on the floor, in this musty-smelling shithole of a trailer. I took my hands out of my armpits and put them over my cold face, cold nose especially. All that accomplished was to make the hands cold too. Left hand still hurt like a bastard, plainly not healing at all, and now that I was awake enough to think a little, I wondered if it wasn’t the pain that had finally awakened me, and not the cold. Although it could also have been the other pain: the headache going in like a drillbit above the right eye. I threw off the blankets, squirmed back into my cold overcoat and got to my feet so as to be up off that cold floor. Better drag one of the mattresses in here; make a good little project for later. I switched on the floorlamp next to the sofa, but the son of a bitch didn’t go on. I lifted the shade and tilted my head: oh, there was a bulb in there all right. I pulled the string hanging from the fluorescent ring on the kitchen ceiling: that wouldn’t go on either. So no power, apparently. On the kitchen counter I found a kerosene lamp with a couple of fingers of kerosene in it. The wick was all fucked up, but I didn’t feel like hunting around for scissors that I’d end up not finding anyway, so I just lit the thing and it seemed to do okay, considering. I located the bottle of Pamprin in my overcoat pocket. Only four left. I swallowed all of them, fuck it. Except then they got stuck in my throat and I could feel them caught down in there. So I went out the back door and knelt by the woodpile and ate snow until I felt the sons of bitches break loose and go down. I looked up and saw a last pulsation of sun behind Studebaker Hill: then it was gone and instantly the air got even colder although I was probably just imagining it. I brought in another few armloads of logs and finally got the stove roaring again.
Then I didn’t know what to do next.
I tried sitting in different places: the stinky sofa, then a red-painted wooden dinette chair, then the stinky easychair covered in some kind of old brownish fabric with flowers or shrimps or something. The problem was, I didn’t know how to be still. I got up and walked down the hall to the room that used to be Diane’s. She’d gotten married to somebody years ago and they’d built a house on some island near Seattle where they still are for all I know. Or fucking care. There was a pinstriped single mattress, the old kind with buttons, still on the little maple bedstead. I hauled it off the bed by its handles and walked it back down the hall to where the stove was and flopped it down on the floor, puffing up dust. I lay down on it, still in my overcoat. On my side. On my back. On my other side. On my stomach. So much for the possibilities. But I couldn’t get myself to where I felt like I was lying flat enough. I got up again and went looking for something to read. The table at one end of the sofa turned out to have books on its bottom shelf. Books that years ago Mr. and Mrs. Warriner must have thought of as light weekend reading for the country: Thorne Smith, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, single volumes containing three Ellery Queens apiece. Unless of course this was more of the Uncle Fred touch, books he’d chosen to parody the idea of light weekend reading for the country. So I took the P. G. Wodehouse over to the easychair. To sit in this trailer and be able to fix your mind on Blandings Castle—hey, if only.
Well, I could stay with P. G. Wodehouse for about two sentences.
Then I got afraid the telephone was going to ring. It was the old kind you can’t unplug. Not modular is what I’m trying to say. I picked up the receiver to check, and the phone was dead too. I mean, use your head: would Uncle Fred have left the phone hooked up, for Christ’s sake, so people could break in, not even break in for Christ’s sake, and call places and he’s stuck with the bill? The power either. People coming in with, I don’t know, electric space heaters or something.
I thought about trying to find a saucepan and melting some snow on top of the woodstove, as if on an Everest expedition. Now there’s the real world for you, real factual information about what people do on Mount Everest. God damned good and tired around here listening to all this shit about how Jernigan only lives in his own head.
Thought, too, about trying to find some paper and writing to my son, asking his forgiveness. Oh, not for anything all that specific. It would be the thought that counted. Except what were you going to say after asking forgiveness? Pledge to do better? Right, I can see you now, doing better.
And then I thought about prostrating myself right that minute on the floor and just praying to be subsumed, if they were still subsuming people these days. The old Not my will but Thine, 0 Lord, be done. What I imagined I was hanging on to at that point I can’t imagine. Same shit probably that I’m hanging on to now. The people who run the program here say I have to give it up. But as a matter of fact, I already—though I haven’t told them this—I already made that surrender once, years ago. Sort of made it. The last time I found myself drinking a quart a day of whatever there was. Danny was two, screaming his head off about everything, and the walls of that apartment on Barrow Street were falling in on me, and an old friend of my father’s took me to his AA meeting. Sculptor. He’d once suggested, years before, taking my father to one. (You can imagine.) At any rate, I’d apparently broken into this guy’s studio and passed out on the floor. I was willing, at that point, to give anything a shot. Partly because it scared me that I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten into his studio. And partly for Danny, who hadn’t fucking asked to be born. They said, Keep coming back; it works. I did. It did. So there I was holding hands with everybody standing in a circle and saying the Lord’s Prayer, which I’d never learned as a child because Francis Jernigan was enlightened and my mother was an old party-line lefty. Well so of course I immediately loved the Lord’s Prayer. But later it began to scare me what I was praying for. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us? I could hear an “insofar” in there, the catch calculated to keep me forever unforgiven. And was I really ready for God’s Kingdom to come? I kept imagining a nuclear shit-storm. And of course eventually I became less keen on being led not into temptation. I finally got the thing down to Our Father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread and deliver us from evil, amen. And then I suspected there might be a catch even in that, that God could take it literally and you’d get nothing but bread. Anyway, by this time I was already telling myself Fuck it, you’re on top of it again so so what’s the big problem? I started having a beer once in a while and nothing terrible happened. So why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, I told myself, and hope you squeak by.
They hate this kind of thinking here.
But who isn’t just hoping to squeak by? Uncle Fred? Fine: let me tell you about Uncle Fred. This is Midsummer Acid Idyll Part II, okay? We’re up all night tripping and so forth and so on and we get back to the trailer in the morning and so on, this part you know. So we go into Uncle Fred’s room. Starting to come down, but hours from being able to sleep. And as the birdies sing outside the window, Uncle Fred explains to me exactly how he’s going to kill himself. He’s going to come up here in the wintertime, walk into the woods far beyond human earshot, chain and padlock himself to a tree and then toss the key away into the snow. He’s got the chain and padlock there under his bed! He lifted a corner of the blanket and dragged them out to show me. So just remember that the next time Uncle Fred greets somebody by saying Stand and give the password. Or any of the rest of that hearty horseshit.
And in case you think that was just adolescence, here’s another Uncle Fred story. Two summers ago I was up at the camp for a weekend. Or three, I don’t know. I know it was when Judith was still alive, because I remember how quick Uncle Fred and Penny were to accept my bullshit explanation of why she’d decided at the last minute to stay home with Danny. At that time Uncle Fred had added a boombox to the amenities, and a bunch of Merle Haggard and George Jones tapes. Country music for the country: you’d have to know Uncle Fred to see that what he was doing was parodying the whole idea that things fit together. Except that he’d also started to like country music. Penny had gone to bed and we were sitting outside drinking Jack Daniel’s under the bug-zapper. No other light but its purple glow, and a crescent moon just above the hilltop. Stars. We’d brought the boombox out, and Merle Haggard was singing a song about how a shrink gives him a Rorschach test and the inkblots look like broken hearts—kind of strained, I thought—when Uncle Fred announced that he, Uncle Fred, was an apostrophe. I thought that what he meant was apostate and I asked for some clarification on that. “It’s like I’m what’s there to show that something’s missing,” he said. Then he leaned forward and vomited. When he sat up again, he wiped his mouth with his hand and begged me to get a shovel and cover over the vomit so Penny wouldn’t know in the morning. Which of course I did.
Well, the boombox didn’t seem to be here now. Either thieves had gotten it or Uncle Fred had taken it back to the city. But sitting down on the sofa again I felt something and I reached under me and found the empty plastic case for Serving 190 Proof. It made me want to hear Merle Haggard’s voice. I had my Walkman here somewhere, unless I’d left it back in the car. I thought about getting up and starting to lift sofa cushions and shit, looking for the tape itself. But the point is, here I was wanting one more fucking thing. And I could see that after that I was just going to keep wanting the next thing and the next thing and the next. Imagine thinking this was the end.
II
1
The Fourth of July had come around again. Even now, at eleven in the morning, you could hear firecrackers. Tonight, as dogs howled, they’d be setting off the big display over the lake.
Judith died a year ago today.
By way of commemoration I was going to mow the lawn and watch the Yankee game and try to figure out the evening from there. Oh, I know how bad this sounds: okay, fine. So what do you think would have been appropriate? There wasn’t even a grave to visit. Her brother, Rick, had remembered her saying once that when she died she wanted her ashes scattered off Montauk Point. She was probably half in the bag, assuming Rick hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing up. But once he’d said it, we obviously had to do it. Now there was a day, the day we drove out there to scatter the fucking ashes. Day after the funeral. We had to walk with this cardboard box for what must have been a mile of beach looking for someplace where there wouldn’t be a hundred people on blankets watching you do this thing, which I think was against the law to boot. Just me and Rick along on this one. I thought it was something Danny could skip: he’d been taking the whole thing so calmly that it was scaring the shit out of me. By the time we found a spot, we weren’t really that near Montauk Point anymore. Even getting the box open was more hassle than you’d expect—I ended up cutting through the tape with the Powerful Pete on my key ring—and then the ashes didn’t scatter much, since there were chunks of bone and stuff and neither of us wanted to touch it with his hands. So I just kind of threw it out toward the water and some of the ashier shit came back down in a gray heap on the wet part of the sand where the waves didn’t quite reach. We didn’t know whether the tide was coming in or going out; if it was going out, the stuff was going to have to sit there for another eleven hours. Or was it another twenty-three? So I took the edge of my hand and brushed from side to side and they sort of smeared and we got the hell out of there.
Anyhow.
I went into the garage to get out the lawnmower, and there was my father’s old scythe hanging by its blade from a spike in one of the studs. I hadn’t had occasion to touch it since the day we moved here, when I drove the spike in, hung the scythe from it and steadied it with a fingertip to stop its swinging. Today I felt pity for the thing (yes, yes, displaced) and took it down. I hunted around for the whetstone, then spat on the blade and started honing, using the stroke he’d taught me: not back and forth, but going in little tight spirals, spitting and honing. A technique handed down, doubtless, to my father from his and so on. Unless my father had read it in Popular Mechanics or something. (He used to like Popular Mechanics for the pictures of machines, and the men wearing ties in their home workshops.) I will be the last Jernigan, most likely, to know the Jernigan scythe-lore. Which might go all the way back to when the Jernigans were landless scum in whatever dismal county it was. My father hated all that wearin’-o’-the-green crap, wouldn’t even have Yeats in his library. Embarrassed, of course, by his father. Grandpa Jernigan. About whom I remember only the old Studebaker he drove, the liquor on his breath, and being taken to his wake and getting scared he was really going to wake up. So naturally my father hated having a grandson named Danny. The name was Judith’s idea. She had a dead uncle or something named Daniel, and I didn’t care one way or the other. At least not until that Elton John song came out about the scar that won’t heal, and by then Danny was a year or so old. At any rate, my father used to greet him by singing out “Oh Dahnny Biiy!” in a Dennis Day tenor. And then he wondered why Danny never came to visit.
