Sourland Read online

  Not-knowing was the scary thing. At four years of age so much is not-knowing like crossing a stream of rushing water on just rocks—this, Tod had seen on TV—a boy only a little older than Tod fleeing a black bear—in Alaska—having to put his trust in these rocks, to save him—a desperate boy—Tod had shut his eyes not wanting to see the boy fall into the stream and the black bear catching and devouring him…Magdalena had quickly switched channels.

  “Here! Here we are.”

  In triumph the daddy pulled Tod into a clearing—it was a large open space, in the forest—they were entering the open space from the rear—an outdoor amphitheater with a crude stone stage and six rows of stone benches lifting in a semi-circle. The daddy had seemed to know that this was here, he was very pleased to have found it. On the stone benches moss grew in leprous patches and here and there were ugly red graffiti-scrawls like those on the restroom walls. On the stage lay broken tree limbs and other debris. The outdoor theater was in poor repair as if it were centuries old and long abandoned yet still the daddy seemed pleased and excited and in a burst of sudden energy bounded up onto the stage as if his name had been called.

  “Hello—hello—hel-lo! Thank you thank you!”

  Quivering with gratitude—unless it was in mockery of gratitude—the daddy smiled out at the (invisible) audience lifting his hands as if to quell a wave of deafening applause.

  “I hope I have not made you good people wait impatiently.”

  More applause!—the daddy lifted his hands as if overcome with emotion. His expression was both apologetic and eager.

  “You say you want—who? Li’l dude? My son Tod Falmouth—you’re awaiting him?”

  Tod giggled wildly, this was so silly! Empty stone benches in the ruin of an outdoor theater and the daddy’s loud voice echoing. Out of shyness Tod hadn’t followed his father out onto the stage. In public places the son did not entirely trust the daddy for the daddy frequently teased the son, exposed him to the eyes of strangers as the butt of jokes the son did not comprehend. Strange and disconcerting to Tod to hear his name uttered in this way. No one in sight—empty stone benches—yet Tod felt embarrassed, the daddy spoke in that bright loud TV voice.

  The daddy turned to Tod now, beckoning.

  “Son! Come join Daddy onstage! These good people demand it.”

  Tod shook his head no. How silly this was!—yet a sickish sensation stirred in the pit of his belly as if in the ruin of the old theater there was yet an audience, staring at him. They were not so welcoming as the daddy seemed to think. Their blurred eyes sought him out where he was hiding amid rubble at the foot of the stage.

  In his sparkly mood the daddy wasn’t at all intimidated by the buzzing audience. As Tod stared in astonishment the daddy began to dance—tap-dance—flailing his arms in a comical fashion. The daddy continued to address the audience in a familiar way as if they were all old friends. The daddy’s silky thinning dust-colored hair was disheveled in the wind and his face was unusually warm, ruddy. The daddy looked so eager, and so happy!—as Tod hadn’t seen his father in a long time.

  After a few minutes the tap-dancing ceased. The daddy stopped to catch his breath—a new mood was summoned. Advancing to the very edge of the stage the daddy clasped his hands to his chest and spoke in a grave voice: “‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound;…/I grow. I prosper: / Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”

  Tod laughed as if he’d been roughly tickled—bastard was one of the bad words. Yet the daddy pronounced bastard happily, like the words of a song.

  Another time the daddy paused to wait out the applause of the audience. Then with a dramatic flourish the daddy rubbed his face as if erasing its features to begin again, with a look now of grief. His voice thickened as if he were about to cry. “‘All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, / At one fell swoop?’”

  Hearing these utterly perplexing words Tod became frightened. He had no idea why his father was speaking of chickens but by the tone of his father’s voice he understood that something very bad had happened to the chickens.

  The daddy’s voice trailed off. The daddy seemed less pleased with this recitation. Perhaps the applause was less enthusiastic—the daddy waved it away negligently as if brushing away flies.

  Now the daddy repositioned himself on the stage, as if beginning again. He kicked aside several broken tree limbs then thought to pick up one of the smaller branches which he broke in two. Across the daddy’s flushed face came a look of something furtive and eager.

  “Tod—come up here. I will need you for this, Tod. Daddy insists.”

  Quickly Tod shook his head no. Between his legs he felt a pinching sensation, a sudden need to pee. The daddy onstage regarding him expectantly and the blurred faces of the invisible audience turned to him were making Tod very nervous though he knew that no one was seated on the stone benches—of course. It was what the mommy called All in your head.

  “Tod! Don’t you hear me? Come.”

  The daddy had been brandishing the stick which now he hid behind his back in a playful manner. Tod had seen that the broken-off end looked sharp as a knife. He felt a thrill of childish fear, the daddy meant to hurt him.

  Like a large predator bird the daddy paced about the stage flapping his arms. In his right hand he held the sharp-ended stick. His voice was deep and quavering like a voice out of a well.

  “‘And it came to pass that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell you of”…And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and laid it onto Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son…’” Gripping the sharp-ended stick in both hands and in a crouched-over posture like a wicked old man Tod’s father approached the edge of the stage where Tod was cowering. Tod scrambled away, tripped and fell amid rubble but managed to scramble to his feet like a panicked rat.

  At the edge of the stage the daddy squatted glaring at Tod. “What God has decreed isn’t for us to countermand. Daddy is telling you, Tod—come up here.”

  Still Tod held back. Still Tod dared to disobey. That look in the daddy’s eyes was scary to him.

  For a long moment the daddy glared at Tod. Tod saw the daddy’s mouth working as if something had gotten inside his mouth he had to chew, chew, chew in order to swallow.

  At last the daddy straightened out of his strained squatting position. His knees ached, he made a blowing noise with his lips. “Christ! You don’t trust your own father! This is unacceptable.”

  Tod jammed his thumb in his mouth. Tod was ready to giggle, if the daddy relented.

  Still the daddy said, in disgust: “Tod, for Christ sake this is just a stick. It is not a knife and I am not the Biblical Abraham—far from it. And this crummy setting is just a stage, you must have noticed—a ruin of a stage. None of this is real. Did you think that Daddy was real?—or you? You are just some ejaculate that got lucky.”

  Some ejaculate. Tod understood that it was something nasty. The daddy’s face was red-flushed and creased and the daddy’s eyes shone with indignation.

  “Which brings us to—‘destiny.’ Humankind is the only species besotted and beset, beguiled and bespoiled by its own destiny. Long ago—before you were born—your daddy was not your daddy but a student—a graduate student in biology—your daddy immersed himself in studying ‘the teeming life of multitudes’—in a lab, we were studying a species of cuttlefish—not a fish but ‘most intelligent invertebrate’—a fist-sized thing the shape of a clam with tentacles—slimy—sharp-eyed—color-blind yet camouflages itself in coral reefs of the most exquisite colors. It was our task to try to comprehend how the cuttlefish can ‘instruct’ its body
to change color when its eyes can’t see color. Why we knew, but not how—never any mystery about why in animal/plant camouflaging—but how eluded us. Such design, such complexity in something of such little consequence as a cuttlefish means that for higher primates like Homo sapiens a more meaningful destiny might not be utterly absurd…”

  Yet another time the daddy’s voice trailed off. Tod could not fail to note how, as soon as his father ceased speaking, the silence returned.

  In the distance were muffled voices, or wind—far distant. Here in the ruin of the outdoor theater there was a sudden terrible silence. As soon as you ceased speaking this terrible silence oozed back.

  Then, suddenly, unexpectedly—“Bra-vo! En-core!”

  There was someone in the audience after all. Suddenly now a sound of clapping—loud frantic clapping—coming from the rear, right-hand side of the stone benches. About forty feet away on the ground beside one of the benches was what appeared to be a bundle of rags—a bundle of rags that had stirred into life.

  “Bravo! Bravo!”—the bundle of rags clapped and whistled.

  The daddy was taken utterly by surprise. The daddy blinked and shaded his eyes to stare though there was no sun to obscure his vision. At last with a wry, rueful smile the daddy said, “Well—thank you, sir. We didn’t see you over there. We appreciate your applause.”

  The clapping man was old, or old-seeming—of that category of individual the mommy called homeless. If Tod had been alone, he’d have run from such a person. The man had very dirty matted white hair and his jaws sprouted whiskers like a dirty broom. He had wrapped himself in what appeared to be an old blanket or tarpaulin. In his face there was something livid and pitted like the skin of a fricasseed chicken.

  The daddy thanked the wild-white-haired man for his applause and “good taste”—the daddy said he’d had an “aborted career in the theater”—his “destiny” had derailed him in other less rewarding directions. The daddy said that he had a “very bad” child in his keeping—and wondered if the white-haired man wanted him?—“His name is Tod. He’s four years old. He’d been a reasonably good baby, a promising toddler, now he’s a very spoiled little boy who believes he can disobey his father with impunity for his father is not of God’s Hebrew chosen.”

  Stricken with shame Tod heard these words of his father’s flung out carelessly and with a strange sort of daddy-elation. The white-haired old man laughed heartily. In horror Tod saw the old man wriggle erect, like some sort of nasty big insect out of a cocoon. His eyes shone with merriment in the fricassee-face. In his hand was a grimy paper bag he lifted to his mouth, to take a swig from a bottle inside.

  “Yah? Y’say so, mister? Shit how much you askin for him?”

  “One hundred dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

  “One hunnert! So why’d I want to pay so much for a brat like that, that nobody wants?”

  “Sir, this boy may be bad but he’s a bargain. He’s been discounted for the month of April, forty percent off his usual price. Do I have a bid?”

  The wild-white-haired old man took another swig from the bottle inside the paper bag. Wiped his whiskery mouth on the edge of a filthy sleeve. “Nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. That’s a bargain.”

  As Tod listened in disbelief the daddy and the old man shouted back and forth like TV characters. You could almost hear the audience laughing—you could almost see the ugly contorted faces. Tod was crying, he’d become so frightened. He knew—he believed he knew—that his father was only joking yet there was something so terrible—so final-sounding—in the daddy’s words and the wild-white-haired old man’s rejoinders that Tod couldn’t stop his tears. To his distress, his nose was running. He no longer had the big wad of tissue the daddy had given him and so had to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his jacket and the daddy looked at him in disgust.

  “Christ son it’s a joke, why are you so literal. Like your prig of a mother is so fucking literal. Can’t think outside the fucking box.”

  The daddy had the power to make you cry and when you cried the daddy was disgusted and angry with you so that you cried harder which was really upsetting to the daddy.

  Even a child of four felt this injustice. As his father and the old white-haired man hurtled jokes at each other like lightning bolts Tod crept away like a wounded dog. As soon as he was out of his father’s sight he began to run along the trail—wasn’t sure in which direction he was going, ahead or back the way they’d come—the trail was overgrown, brambles tore at his clothes and scratched his face—the little blue triangles on trees were nowhere to be seen.

  Very bad. Spoiled. Brat!

  Was that the daddy calling after him? Tod stopped to listen—the daddy’s voice was so faint, Tod couldn’t tell if the daddy was angry with him or sorry. Tod was frightened of the daddy and did not ever want to see the daddy again! He ran, until his breath was ragged. He ran, until his heart beat like a crazed little toad inside his rib cage. He ran, until he came to another clearing, that looked as if part of a hill had slid down in a heap. Here the earth was pocked with stones—you couldn’t run here, you would turn your ankle and hurt yourself. It was a place of rust-colored rocks and boulders and a deep ravine inside which, some thirty feet below, Tod saw something slithery and gleaming that might have been a shiny snake, or trickling water.

  He was so tired! He’d been sobbing and was so tired, he could only just crawl now. Amid the rust-colored boulders was a fallen tree sprawling in all directions and Tod hid behind the trunk, panting and shivering and anxious that the daddy would find him and give him to the wild-white-haired old man.

  The daddy was calling faintly and fearfully—“Tod? Christ sake son where are you?”

  The daddy could not see Tod, evidently. For a long time it had seemed that both the daddy and the mommy could see Tod even if he was hiding as they could hear his thoughts inside his head but recently Tod had come to believe that this was not so. The way the daddy called “Tod? Tod?”—you could tell that the daddy didn’t know how close Tod was.

  In surprise Tod saw a smear of blood on his hand—a smear of blood on his jacket. There must have been blood on his face—he’d struck his nose, falling. He’d slipped on the rocks, and fallen. Sometimes when he stuck a furtive forefinger into his nose his nose began to bleed as if in derision or accusation and so now Tod’s nose began to bleed, he would be terribly shamed if the daddy saw.

  “Tod? Where are you? You’ve gotten us both lost.”

  Tod peeked through the desiccated old leaves of the fallen tree and saw his father making his way along the trail slowly. And now in the rock-strewn clearing. The daddy was climbing the hill—there was a hill here—slowly and wincing as if his legs hurt. The daddy was yet ruddy-faced like something skinned. Looking for Tod—where he thought Tod might be hiding—the daddy blinked in frustration and helplessness as if peering into a bright blinding sun.

  “Tod? We’re lost, son. That’s what you’ve done—you’re to blame—we are fucking lost.”

  The daddy’s voice was petulant, furious. The daddy’s voice sounded as if it might break into sobs. Tod believed it must be true—the daddy was lost—the little blue triangles on the trees had vanished utterly.

  Such disgust he felt for the daddy!—he rocked back on his heels. He was thinking he would not go back to the daddy—he would not show the daddy where he was—not ever! He would find the river by himself if it took the remainder of the day and all of the next. He would find the river and he would find the medical center, he would find his mother though he wasn’t sure of her name—her doctor-name, that would be in a clip-thing on her white jacket.

  The mommy would smile at him in surprise. The mommy would not ask Where is your father? How on earth did you get here? The mommy would drive them home just the two of them, in the mommy’s car.

  At home the house would be empty, awaiting them.

  The kitchen where the Formica counters were yet sticky, and the air smelled of egg-batter scorch. This ro
om like the others empty and yet Tod’s mother would not say Oh but where is your father? What have you done with Daddy?

  In the quiet of the house they would laugh together. Tod would tell his mother about swinging on the swing—in the park—swinging so high, he’d swung over the top—and she would want to hear, every word. She would feed him, and she would bathe him, and she would read to him out of his favorite storybook until he fell asleep in his bed.

  So clearly Tod knew this would happen, it was as if it had already happened. Not once but many times.

  Here was danger!—the daddy was approaching Tod’s hiding place behind the fallen tree. The daddy could have no idea where his son was hiding yet blindly tramping along the overgrown trail the daddy was blundering near—Tod could hear him panting, cursing under his breath.

  “Christ sake son where are you! Your daddy never meant to scare you! God damn obey me.”

  The daddy must have fallen, his khaki pants were muddy and torn at the knees. The daddy’s mouth was the mouth of a panting dog that is furious but baffled where to attack.

  With the desperation of a wounded snake Tod crawled behind the fallen tree, to the very tip of the tree where limbs and branches were spread out in all directions and where he couldn’t make his way any farther. The desiccated leaves through which Tod crawled made a harsh rattling noise but the daddy who was only a few yards away seemed not to hear. How labored the daddy’s breathing, and how distraught the daddy was! Nearby was one of the huge rust-colored boulders and beneath the boulder was a hollow place into which Tod could force himself—like a rabbit hole it was, a burrow, a small creature could crawl into, where a larger predator could not follow.

  The daddy was pleading, half-sobbing they were lost. For God’s sake where was Tod, where was the son, the daddy had to rescue them from this fucking place before dark.

  Tod took a deep breath—crawled beneath the boulder—slipping sideways inside—the hardest part was to force his head inside, and under—into a kind of carved-seeming cavity—here was a smell of the dark, dank earth—a smell of rock—the danger was, the immense boulder might loosen, fall and crush the child but this was a risk worth taking.