We orgasm. That’s the proper word, since you don’t seem to know.
Orgasm is not a verb. No. My anger was stirred again; this really roused me. Not a verb. Never was, never will be, not once.
It is now. Orgasming is a verb.
God’s curse on such a verb. You can’t do that to our noble American language. You shall not verbalize nouns. I hate that bastard jargon: She “orgasmed” all over the croutons. Mr. & Mrs. Turkeyballs “parented” three kids from birth to the Juvenile Detention Center. The critics “savaged” his latest masterpiece. You can’t do that. I hate it hate it hate it.
You’re going to have to change your ways and attitudes, Henry. Join the modern world. You’re thirty years behind the times.
That’s too close.
Screwing her courage to the sticking point, she stuck it to me. I hate to say this, Henry, but—you know, you’re not a good lover. You’re lousy, in fact. You’ve got to learn some technique.
Ah, I thought, technique, technique—another ominous and chilling word. And when they say I hate to say this you know they love it.
Nevertheless: I tried. I was a dutiful husband, in my humble fashion, and I wanted to be a good husband. A modern American hubby. So we worked at it. For an hour that night. And for hours and hours every night for weeks, for months. Refining the old technique. I worked hard, tinkering with her delicate and complicated genitalia, especially the kleitoris (Gr.), key to a woman’s heart. Studied the cliterature. Learned to eyeball the labia minor at close range without blinking. And as we know but few will confess, the female sexual organism—and I do mean organism—is not in itself, considered apart from context, what you might consider a thing of beauty. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
We worked hard at sex. And when you have to work at it it’s hard work. Every time I pulled off my jeans I felt I should be punching a time clock.
The Joy of Sex!—Elaine brought home that dreary tract one day, those tidings of comfort and joy by some Californicated Englishman, and we studied the ghastly pictures, the two hundred different positions. What a joyless book. That poor fucker the instructor-model, performing his gymnastic routines over and over, with slight variations, for three hundred pages, each and every time upon the same woman. No wonder he has that look on his soft hairy degenerate face of a bored he-dog hooked up on the street with an exhausted bitch, longing to leave but unable to extricate himself from what breeders call a “tie.” The woman in the book looks only slightly happier; somebody out of mercy should have emptied a bucket of ice water on the miserable couple. Technique, technique, technical engineering, curse of the modern world, debasing what should be a wild, free, spontaneous act of violent delight into an industrial procedure. Comfort’s treatise is a training manual, a workbook which might better have been entitled The Job of Sex.
Christ, Elaine, Playboy’s better than this.
Playboy is a sexist magazine.
I know, it exploits men, three dollars a copy now. But at least there’s a faintly erotic aspect to the pictures. At least there’s some dim humor in the cartoons.
Sex is not a laughing matter.
How true. Yes, she actually said that, I heard it. That’s what those dreadful women and those insidious books had done to my good sweet innocent young Elaine. The seduction of ideas. But even she grew weary of it.
We haven’t tried this one yet. Number 149.
I don’t want to, she said.
Why not?
It’s too humiliating.
This book is humiliating. A sick commercial insult to the human soul. And I flung it—flang it!—against the bedroom wall. As I would an obnoxious cat. To hell with that garbage, Elaine, let’s just fuck for the fun of it. No more contortions. No more pretzels. No more Hindu-Hebrew-California masochism. Fucking can be fun, honey, honest. Let’s throw this Levantine garbage away and make a baby.
That shook her. A baby? With you?
Why not?
I’m too young. I have my career ahead of me. (Which career is that, I wondered.) I refuse to be forced into woman’s traditional role. Would you help?
Help what?
Change diapers? Bathe it? Feed it?
Feed it? You’re the one with the tits, how could I feed it? That’s your job. Would I feed it, of course not; I’ll keep you fed though, that’s my job, I’ll bring home the pigmeat, keep a roof above our heads in wintertime; I won’t change diapers but I’ll buy the damn things.
Thinking, What would my friend George Santayana say to this? He said, It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss. My friend Nietzsche? He said, The married philosopher is a figure out of a stage farce. And Montaigne? He said—but I forget. No I don’t. He said, Marriage is like a gilded birdcage: the birds on the outside want in, those on the inside want out. Aloud I said, You know how an Eskimo woman cleans her baby? up there in the frozen North?
I hate know-it-alls.
I know it. Do you know?
No. And I don’t care.
With her tongue, that’s how. In the winter, when there’s nothing else available. But that was before ski planes, snow machines, Prudhoe Bay, Pampers, welfare checks and progress. Did you come this time?
You mean did I orgasm? No.
Poor Elaine. I cuddled her close, kissed and caressed her, murmured sweet lies into her ear—and dozed off. Dimly as in a dream I felt her slip from our bed, sobbing, and creep on bare feet into the bathroom. I cried too and fell asleep. I did not hear her return.
All that hard work and nothing gained. Love in the Western world. High cuisine and gourmet sex, nothing worked. Disaster loomed above us like the ninth wave at Massacre Beach. Sure, I loved her as much or more than ever but love alone is not enough for anybody. Some poet said, We must love one another or die. (Auden—that queer creepy fellow.) But we’re going to die anyway—he forgot about that.
Elaine needed something more than mere love, whether romantic, matrimonial, conjugal or sexual. She needed something that neither I nor any man, alone or unaided, could give her. What is it? I have my theories. She needed what humans need: a sense of community. Interesting, dignified and essential work to do. (Like finding food or raising a baby.) She needed connection with the past and future of family, clan, kinfolk and tribe. And most of all she needed ownership of a piece of earth, possession of enough land to guarantee the pride and dignity and freedom that only economic independence can bestow. Without that, what are we? Dependents, that’s what. Employees. Personnel. Peasants. Serfs. Slaves. Less than men, less than women. Subhumans. But this need is so deep and ancient that most people have lost even the consciousness of it. Only the instinct remains. What’s the first thing the nouveaux riches do with their money? They buy a big place in the country with barns, pastures, horses, whitewashed fences, fields. And rightly so.
Meantime her feminism hardened, becoming militant and embittered. She not only read but thrust into my hands those awful books by that maddened horde of scribbling women. Fascinated, I learned that ever since the end of the mythical Golden Age of Matriarchy, human society has been operated solely and exclusively for the benefit of men, that men have conspired for twenty thousand years to enslave our own wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, nieces, sweethearts, lovers, mistresses and female friends.
A fascinating and fantastical tale. An intellectual neurosis for which our psychiatric technicians have yet to devise a name. But as always, the more preposterous the doctrine the more fanatic its adherents. There is no animal so spooky as the true believer. We argued, in and out of bed, for hours, days, weeks.
Certainly, I agreed, males dominate females. In every known human (and mammalian) society this is the case. The explanation however is so obvious it escapes the observation of feminist intellectuals: men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. Intelligence, morality, justice have little to do with it. The rule of law means the rule of those who make the law, interpret it, enforce it. Bulk counts. Might does not make right but it s
ure makes what is. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pointed out, in his twenty-six-volume footnote to Plato, Vat effer iss, iss right.
But, Elaine said—
I ranted on: Women the victims, men the victors? Tell it to the Marines. Tell it to those grunts, all boys, who sweated, fought, suffered and died in the green hell of Vietnam while their majors and colonels circled above in helicopters, observing, chewing cigars, barking insane irratioinal incomprehensible commands. Tell it to the serfs of merrie olde England who plowed, sowed, reaped, and saw the fruits of their labor stolen from them by the lords—and ladies—who claimed ownership of the land. A claim enforced by sword lance club mace the noose the rack the wheel the fire. Tell it to Faulkner and the slaves of the Deep South (“God shat upon the earth and He called it—Mississippi”). Tell it to the indentured bondsmen of colonial Pennsylvania. Of Old Virginia. Tell it to Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, Wesley Everest and the ghosts of the IWW. Tell it to Jack Cade, Wat Tyler, Ned Ludd, Nat Turner, John Brown. Tell it to Diogenes and H. Thoreau. Tell it to those who died in the Colosseum, to Spartacus and the twenty thousand slaves, all men, who were crucified with him by the victorious Romans. Tell it to the slaves—men, women, children—who built the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, the Appian viaducts, the walls of Toledo and Burgos, the Taj Mahal, the city of Machu Picchu, the cannibal temples of Mexico, the lost and forgotten horrors of imperial Africa. Tell it to the people who pick our bananas, our coffee beans, our tea leaves, our tomatoes strawberries grapes and lettuce. Tell it to Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and the surviving zeks of the Gulag and the KGB. Tell it to Lech Walesa. Tell it to the ghosts of Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, John L. Lewis. Tell it to the coal miners, the steel puddlers, the chemical workers, the uranium miners, the schoolteachers. Tell it to Jean Valjean. Tell it to Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Nestor Makhno, Taras Bulba, Enrico Malatesta, Ramón Sender, Pablo Barruti, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and B. Traven.
But, Elaine began again—
Yes, I agreed, most women have been victims, right alongside their husbands, sons and brothers, ever since the invention of agriculture and the urban conglomeration (two dreadful setbacks for humanity). Most women, like their men, have been peons and cotton pickers, factory hands and office clerks, service workers and wage slaves—subjects. Yes. But—
But, Elaine insisted—
—but, I agreed, not all women, not all men. For the women of the rich and powerful, life is different. Do you think the lady of the manor would change places with a male field hand? Would Princess Diana give up her role for the part of a dock worker tramping home to his kennel in the slums? Huh? The great division in the social pyramid is not between the sexes but between the classes. The gulf is horizontal not vertical. Sixty percent of the wealth of the USA belongs to 2 percent of American families. When the manly galley slaves of imperial Egypt toiled so desperately at the oars of the great trireme, who was that long-haired dark and comely personage being towed behind on water skis? Antony? No ma’am, it was Cleopatra. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
Adam? she suggested.
Shut up! I explained.
But what I’m trying to tell you—
Please. Let me finish. The debate dragged on for another hour, another month, then collapsed without warning when she abruptly gave up feminism for aerobic dancing. Every evening. Feminism was bad for her figure. First things first. Me, neglected husband, I retreated into celibacy. For a week. Then resumed slipping around on the sly, sneaky as a tomcat, subtle as a rooster.
Leading to further controversy. She screamed, I shouted, she quoted, I sneered, she cried I bellowed she slammed the door. Our house crumbled. I won the argument, I think, but lost my third and final wife.
And I never could make her come. Instead of coming she went.
VII
He eats his eggs and sausage, drinks his coffee, gnaws his crust of bread. April sunlight, bright, cruel, heartbreaking, pours into the kitchen through the morning window. The music of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, pours from the stereophonic speakers. Good man, old Waters.
Henry eats his breakfast, bleak and lonely, and makes his plans. Plug in phone, call welfare office, tell them he’s taking another leave without pay, they won’t mind. Visit bank, empty checking account, pick up needed cash. Load up the old Dodge with camping gear, essential firearms, spare parts, a certain few books. Write a farewell letter to Elaine. Shoot the dog. Get in truck and point its battered nose eastward, toward the world of the rising sun and Stump Creek, West Virginia. Home.
Only three thousand five hundred miles to go. Brother Will, I say to my shattered heart, my private little secret, here I come.
Prepare thyself.
2
1927-37:
Stump Creek, West Virginia
I
Lorraine my mother lay in bed in the antique gothic farmhouse, in the little bedroom on the second floor where the child was conceived. She was breathing the fumes from an ether-soaked bandana held under her nose by Joe Lightcap her husband, while bald wrinkled Doc Wynkoop pulled the baby gently, fairly easily, from the exit of the womb.
According to the father, a minute before actual birth the baby’s head had emerged from the natal aperture, opened its eyes, took one quick look around—saw the light of the kerosene lamp glimmering on the floral wallpaper, saw Joe’s dark anxious aboriginal face, the red face and bloodshot eyes of the doctor, the ancestral portraits of old Lightcaps, Shawnees, Gatlins and Holyoaks hung on the walls, saw the double-barreled twelve-gauge, loaded, which stood in the corner near the head of the bed, saw the Bible on the night table, Mother’s cedar chest, the wardrobe closet, the lace curtains, etc.—took everything in and then retreated, withdrew, slid right back into the dark radiant chamber of conception.
No thanks. Thanks but no thanks.
At that point Doc Wynkoop grasped the baby firmly by the ears and head, rotating the body forty-five degrees, and drew it forth. Drew me forth, protesting mightily—no need here for a whack on the rump—and tied off the cord, knotting the umbilicus in a knot that’s held to this very day. He swabbed away the silvery caul, that shining suit of lights, like the garb of a traveler from outer space, smeared the tender parts with unguent oil, and laid the child on his mother’s breast. She took him to suck at once, silencing for a time the howls of indignation. She named the boy Henry.
The doctor passed the afterbirth to Joe, who probably fed it to the hogs. Grandmother Gatlin arrived soon afterward, a little late. Joe passed a five-dollar bill to the doctor and the promise to deliver, within a week, five bushel of potatoes and a home-cured ham.
Doc Wynkoop climbed into his black Model A Ford and drove down the rutted red-dog road through night and falling curtains of snow toward the highway and the town of Shawnee, ten miles south. We had no doctor in Stump Creek. Not since the death of Doctor Jim fifty years before—and Doctor Jim was an Indian, a shaman Shawnee medicine man, not an M.D.
Henry Holyoak Lightcap was the second child. My brother William, about two years older, complained loudly from his crib in the adjoining room, beneath the sloping ceiling of the east roof, under the impression that he’d been temporarily forgotten. Correct.
Winter nights. In frozen February the child lay snug in his mother’s arms. Outside, beyond frost-covered windows, the ice-shagged pines stood under the Appalachian moon, mute with suffering. Frost glittered on crusty waves of snow that covered the pasture, the frozen brook, the stubble of the cornfields. The moonlight tinted the snow with the pale blue tones of skim milk. Through the stillness came the sound of an old oak cracking in the woods, branch split by freezing sap. Then came the wail of the iron locomotive on the C&O line, burning coal as it chugged up grade toward Trimble’s crossing a mile away, pulling fifty-five gondola cars of bituminous coal to the coke ovens of Morgantown and Wheeling and Pittsburgh.
Desolation of the iron cry—Song of the Old 97—lonelin
ess of the silent hills, silvered furl of black smoke and white steam rising toward the moon.
The moon shone down on rigid ice floes in Crooked Creek, on Stump Creek, Rocky Glen and Cherry Run, on the nameless streamlet that drained the wooded hillsides of Lightcap Hollow. The moonlight glanced and glinted on the ice-filled ruts of the road, lay on the granite and sandstone monuments of the Jefferson Church graveyard where tiny American flags hung stiff in the gelid air above brass stars bearing the initials GAR—Grand Army of the Republic. The winter moon was so bright, so clear, you could read the names on the stone, the names of our buried neighbors: Ginter, Gatlin, Hinton, Hankerson, Fetterman, Finley, Rayne, Risheberger, Holyoak, Mears, Lightcap, Clymer, Trumbull, Trimble, Stuart, Stewart, Stitler, Prothrow, Groft, Bennett, Duncan, Dalton…to name but the oldtimers, kinsmen and neighbors, enemies and strangers.
Economists would have called it a “depressed area.” A land of marginal and submarginal farms, small coal-mine operations, third-growth timber cutting, crossroad market towns like Shawnee, seat of Shawnee County. Haunted country—haunted by the ghosts of the Indians who gave the place its title, who left little but their name when they were driven out late in the eighteenth century by a Colonel George Rogers Clark who burned their villages, torched their cornfields and ruined the survivors with smallpox, alcohol and tuberculosis.
II
Inconsolable memories:
Pump and pump handle sheathed in ice on winter mornings; my first chore of the day, recalled Henry, was taking a hot kettle from the kitchen stove to thaw and prime that pump and fill the kitchen water buckets.
Herding in the milk cows on frosty mornings, I’d stand where the cows had lain to keep my bare feet warm.
With a green willow stick, whipping a crab apple halfway across the valley, I aimed at my big brother, Will, or at little brother, Paul, or at our baby sister, Marcie.
The smell of the flowering dogwood in April.
Summer: heat lightning. Thunder above the hayfield. Fireflies and lightning bugs. The June bug game. The leap from crossbeam into haymow twenty feet above the floor, high in the dusty air of the barn.