How I Got This Way, Part I
A FEW YEARS ago, my friend Dave Lisaius and I were in my pickup camper, waiting out a storm high up in the Idaho Rockies. Dave sprawled on the cab-over bed while I prepared lunch. The conversation turned to hospitals, possibly because I was preparing lunch, and I remarked that I hadn't been hospitalized since I was five years old.
"How come you were in the hospital then?" Dave asked, careful to conceal behind a yawn his fascination with this intriguing bit of McManus lore.
"Oh, I fell out of a moving bus and landed on my head," I explained.
Dave laughed so hard he almost fell off the bed and landed on his head. Eventually, his paroxysm of mirth subsided to a few spasmodic shrieks and howls.
"I didn't think breaking my head was that funny," I said, still puzzled by Dave's unseemly outburst.
"Oh, it isn't!" he choked out, mopping up tears with his shirtsleeve. "But it explains so much!"
Dave at the time was a bank president but otherwise fairly decent, often enjoying extended periods of lucidity. Had I evoked this mirthful reaction only from Dave, I would have thought nothing of it. He is not exactly the epitome of normality himself. The problem was, I had provoked similar responses from other individuals on countless occasions. Melba Peachbottom, the prettiest girl in our high school, had almost burst a gut when I casually asked her out on a date. "You're so funny!" she cried. When I turned out for baseball, the coach laughed himself sick. "Stop! Please! No more jokes, McManus!" Sometimes in a restaurant I will glance up and notice a pretty woman across the room smiling at me in obvious bemusement. All I'm doing is drinking a glass of water. Suavely. I smile back and dribble water down my tie. The woman laughs and returns to her salad. I've never been much good at flirtation.
Just this morning I rushed onto a plane at the Minneapolis airport. My boarding pass indicated my seat was 17F. The rows of seats stopped at 16. It's fortunate that they did. Otherwise, I would have ended up in Baltimore instead of Spokane, my intended destination. No doubt a flight attendant would have announced that the plane was headed for Baltimore, but I never listen to those announcements. They get on my nerves. It's possible that the flight attendants would have noticed they had one more passenger for Baltimore than they were supposed to have, but that assumes some guy bound for Baltimore didn't absentmindedly get on the plane for Spokane—such a coincidence is commonplace in my life. Therefore each plane would have had the proper number of passengers, and I would have ended up walking around an airport parking garage in Baltimore looking for my car and eventually reporting it as stolen. "We've located your car, sir," the police would say. "The thieves left it at an airport garage in Spokane."
I have a lot of trouble finding my car. A few weeks ago, I came out of our local library and checked every space in the parking lot, my standard ritual, and my car wasn't in any of them. Just as I was about to report it as stolen, I remembered that I had walked to the library, not driven. My wife, Bun, doesn't like me to go out alone anymore.
Once, I returned home from work, hung up my coat, dropped my briefcase on the floor, and walked into the kitchen. Bun was at the stove cooking supper. She seemed different. "You're home early," she said, without looking up. She sounded different, too. Oddly, she appeared much taller than she had that morning. Then she turned around. There was a strange woman in my house cooking supper! We went through the usual leaping and yelling and feinting at each other that occurs on such occasions, until at last recognition dawned, she being the wife and mother of the family to whom I had sold our house the previous month. It was an exhilarating and memorable experience for both of us, and I know it considerably enriched the lady's conversational repertoire of humorous anecdotes, because I heard the story repeated around town for some years afterwards. It's that sort of thing that can easily give rise to a mistaken impression in a person's community that he possesses certain peculiarities. No one seemed to believe that the fault lay with my car, which, forgetting we had moved, returned to the same old garage it had been using for the previous five years and deposited me at a house that was no longer mine. Stupid car!
During a hunting trip in the wintry mountains of Idaho, I injured my leg in a fall through a tangle of fallen trees. It soon became apparent that I wouldn't be able to make it to the rendezvous with my hunting companions, so I did the only sensible thing. I built a lean-to and a fire and prepared to spend the night out. Every year people die in the woods, because they don't have enough sense to follow this practice. I was perfectly safe and comfortable and enjoying the experience, except for the occasional sounds of Sasquatches passing by. About two o'clock in the morning, I was found by a search-and-rescue team out of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Local weekly newspaper headline: LOST PAT MCMANUS SAVED BY SEARCHERS, FAKES LEG INJURY. That headline could just as easily have read, SERIOUSLY INJURED PAT MCMANUS, USING EXPERT WOODSMAN SKILLS, SAVES OWN LIFE AGAINST IMPOSSIBLE ODDS. But no, the headline writer had to contribute to the legend of Pat McManus as inept person, lost person, absentminded person. Once one becomes a legend, it is impossible to outlive it. I have always wanted to become a legend, but this isn't the one.
People are always rushing to my aid when I'm not in trouble. They seem to relish rescuing me. If you were to believe the stories, I have been rescued by approximately 5,000 people. Once I was standing at a candy vending machine with nothing more on my mind than trying to choose between a Milky Way and a Snickers. A woman I scarcely knew came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. "I don't know what's troubling you," she said, "but it can't be that bad, dear. Sometimes problems can just seem overwhelming. Let's go have a cup of coffee and talk about it." What could I do, tell her my only problem was choosing between a Milky Way and a Snickers? I went and had coffee with her and made up a cock-and-bull story about an identity crisis or some such thing. After we had talked, she said, "Don't you feel better now?" I said yes, and I did, too, because I had made up my mind. I'd go for the Snickers.
What got me to thinking about all this was Dave Lisaius's comment about my falling on my head at age five: "It explains so much!" I decided the time had come to reveal how I got this way.
Falling on my head had nothing to do with it, but here's what happened anyway. My family and I were transferring between trains on different sides of a city. The railroad bus that transported us had a door at each row of seats, for what reason I don't know, unless for instant evacuation of all passengers in case of a calamity. As the bus sped on its way, I began exploring the mechanism of the door handle. Through no fault of my own—even our lawyers said so—the door popped open and shot me into empty space. To this day I can remember the exhilaration of that first flight, even though it lasted but a second. I didn't land on my head right away, choosing to put that off until the second or third bounce, an early indication of my inherent good sense. By the time I stopped bouncing, I had pretty well concluded that tinkering with the door mechanism hadn't been such a good idea, as various parts of my anatomy seemed to have undergone major rearrangement. The worst was yet to come, however.
Although the visits to doctors and clinics and hospitals continued for several years, the worst part was my imprisonment in a hospital. Within a couple of days, I was up and around, much to the consternation of the nurses, who were of the opinion that some of my essential parts might fall off. The nurses raised a big fuss, apparently for the purpose of impressing upon me that I was supposed to stay in bed instead of fiddling with the mechanism that opened the window above a parking lot five stories down. After being subjected to a frightening display of hysteria by the nurses, I decided it was better to stay in bed, rather than put up with their ranting and raving and screeching. My only entertainment was a little man who marched around inside my head beating a drum, and that quickly palled. Endless waves of boredom washed over me for hours, days, and weeks, with no land in sight. I began to make up little stories, often about nurses being eaten by monsters, one of my favorite plots. The nurses must have liked me, though, because when the day finally came for me to leave the hospital, a group of them gathered around laughing and smiling and applauding my departure. Several even leaped in the air and clicked their heels, which I thought a bit excessive but appreciated anyway.
My father died when I was six years old, leaving my mother as the sole support of our family, which then consisted of Mom, my grandmother, my sister, Patricia "The Troll," and me, now the lone male in a family of women. Mom earned our livelihood by teaching school, an occupation that at the time absolutely forbid its practitioners to smoke, drink, or gamble, none of which my mother did to excess. Well, at least she never drank to excess or even much at all. Two out of three ain't bad.
In addition to her teaching, Mom also farmed. She pretty much single-handedly built a large farmhouse, then cleared the land, and raised wheat and chickens. I think that may have been why she gambled and smoked so much, to take her mind off farming. All by itself, you would think farming might have satisfied her appetite for gambling. It didn't. Then there was her other hobby: smoking. Besides helping to relieve stress, cigarettes at the time were considered particularly good for the heart and lungs. And they were. Without sucking in great deep draughts of smoke and tar and nicotine, most folks wouldn't have got any aerobic benefits at all. A good coughing fit served as a workout. Dedicated smokers could work up a good sweat just from coughing. When they got done with a coughing fit, they relaxed with a cigarette. Smokers didn't worry about getting killed by cigarettes in those days, mostly because they figured something else would get them first. Usually it did. As Mom used to say, something's always stalking you.
I doubt most of the people in our little logging community thought much about death or were even terribly concerned about it. Dying was fairly common among members of our family, and our friends and neighbors did a fair amount of it, too. I don't mean to imply that dying ranked high on anyone's list of favorite activities. But when Death knocked, the person went along with it as best he could, and tried not to raise too much fuss. Death didn't have quite the bad reputation it does now, probably because people were more familiar with it, as if it were some eccentric character in the neighborhood who made a pest of himself: "Oh, for gosh sakes, weird old Mort is knocking on the door again. I wonder who he wants this time?"
I should point out, by the way, that I'm not writing about death merely for the purpose of depressing the reader, nor to get one to stop smoking, cut down on cholesterol, wear a seat belt, take out a membership in a health club, avoid late-night walks through the park, nor jog five miles before work every morning. It seems that if you even mention the word "death" today, your listeners immediately burst into a frenzy of healthful activity. No, my only purpose here is to set in perspective a way of life in a distant time and place that may seem to the modern reader to be crude and harsh and uncivilized, but which in truth was a way of life that was, well, crude and harsh and uncivilized. It explains to some degree how I got this way.
Our lives in those years alternated between famine and famine with an occasional feast as a surprise. Mom taught mostly in little one-room schools scattered throughout the mountains of Idaho. The Great Depression was still under way, and a great many people had retreated into the mountains for its duration. They built little cabins, cut their own firewood, grew big gardens, and harvested fish and game from the streams and forests. They got their light from kerosene lanterns, their water from the creek, and their entertainment from wherever they could find it. It was not a bad life and required very little money, which was a good thing, because that's what most people had.
Mom got a job teaching in a little log-cabin school in a remote mountain valley near Priest Lake in the Panhandle of Idaho. It was there that I entered first grade. I learned to read in approximately one day, and from then on took an extended vacation from the tedium of school. While the other kids were hunched over their books, my mother cracking the whip of learning over their heads, I would wander outside, roam the woods, try to catch trout from the creek, and enjoyed a great sense of freedom. It was a nice way to spend first grade. Mom didn't seem to mind. During the long winters, I exhausted most of the books in the school, not one of which was particularly interesting but better than nothing. Mom spiced up each day by reading for fifteen minutes from books by Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and other of her favorite authors, thereby giving me a taste for actual literature. During my second grade at this same school, I again roamed far and wide while school was in session, returning to it only when I felt the risk of being subjected to education had sufficiently diminished for the day. Once again, Mom showed no disapproval of my freewheeling ways, and it began to appear that she and I shared the same theories regarding the proper schooling for a young boy. The next year, however, Mom got a job teaching in town, where I assumed I would attend third grade. "Nope," Mom told me. "Second grade." I was astonished and enraged. My own mother had flunked me! The reason for this act of maternal treason, as she wrote on my report card, was "Too many absences." Since we had lived right in the schoolroom, I eventually regarded my flunking second grade on the grounds of too many absences as being a major achievement, and I still do. Much later, as an adult, I realized that my mother had given me a great gift in allowing me to wander in joy and wild abandonment during my first two years of school, and that gift was a sense of freedom. From then on my life was set on a course of someday achieving that same actual freedom once again. I haven't succeeded, but I'm still trying.
The following year we returned to live full time at our farm, where my mother attempted to achieve total self-reliance. She had no faith in the beneficence of government and would have grimly starved us all before accepting charity in any form. I for my part would gladly have voted for charity, but our family didn't operate under a democratic form of government. Mom despised weakness, not of body but of will. She was not particularly fond of order, either, but thrived on chaos, confusion, and crisis, all of which are bountiful in the lives of people who attempt to achieve total self-reliance. Take chickens for instance.
Every year Mom and Gram and Troll took dozens of chicken lives there on the farm, committed these tiny murders and never even thought twice about it. Probably never even thought once about it. I myself was much too sensitive to participate in the callous slaughter of chickens and rabbits and the occasional hog or steer. In fact, when I was six, I was ridiculed at length by the women for crying over the death of a flower, a trillium I had found growing in the woods. The real reason for my tears, however, I never revealed to anyone. I figured it was better to stick with the trillium and not stretch my luck.
The winter of 1939, the year of first grade, was a particularly hard one, even for North Idaho, and we had been snowbound at the log-cabin school in the mountains for at least half a century, probably longer. Then, suddenly, in early April, chinook winds came up and almost overnight wiped out the snow. Soon bright green blades of grass shot up in the pools of sunshine scattered through the woods, pussy willows budded out along the banks of overflowing creeks, and robins drifted in to check out the new worm crop. Finding ourselves free from winter at last, my mother cranked up our cantankerous old Chevy sedan, and we set off for a wild spree in town. Ten miles or so down the road, the car stopped, possibly because the radiator boiled over or one of the tires had gone flat. I can't remember the exact cause, because I paid little attention to calamities not of my own making. We piled out. I saw right away that this was a problem Mom could solve, whatever it was. She shook a Camel cigarette out of her pack, tapped it on the back of her hand, lit up, and blew a cloud of smoke up into the blue spring sky. Seeing her smoke a cigarette during a predicament always had a calming effect on me. I knew whatever was wrong, she and her cigarette could fix it. Thusly comforted, I wandered off into the boggy woods to explore, and there I came upon the little white trillium. I gouged it up, bulb and all, and carried it back to the car.
"Look, Mom!" I yelled. "I found a flower for you."
Mom glanced up from repairing the car, took a drag on her cigarette, wiped some grease off her face, and, squinting hard through the stream of exhaled smoke, said, "Thanks." She was not one of those gushy mothers who go overboard in expressing gratitude for small cheap gifts clutched in grubby little paws.
On our way back from town, a terrible thing happened. A blizzard blew in. I was sitting in the backseat of the car with the trillium resting on my lap. Our car was a very basic model, and I'm not sure it even had a heater, but if so, it was not one that had worked in my lifetime. Pretty soon we had about as much blizzard inside the car as there was outside. The family started to succumb to frost, as did the trillium. The flower gasped, gave a couple of shudders, wilted over, and died in my lap. As I stared down at it, a great sadness engulfed me.
"My trillium died!" I yelled at my mother. And that's when I began to cry. Mom squinted out through a quartersize hole she had scraped in the frost on the windshield. The car alternately bucked through snowdrifts and cut figure eights on the icy road.
"Let me get this straight," Mom growled, the tip of the cigarette clamped between her lips glowing brighter in the dark. "You're crying over a stupid flower?" That was when the womenfolk burst into gales of laughter, forgetting for the moment that we might all be found frozen solid in a snowdrift on a remote road in the mountains some weeks hence. I stopped crying, pleased to have introduced a bit of levity into an otherwise tense situation. It occurred to me I might have a talent for humor.
There was something about this incident I never explained to my family, and which has remained a secret all these many years of my having to listen to the story being told about that trillium: I wasn't crying over the death of a flower, but over the death of spring. Anyone with an iota of sensibility could have perceived that.
I recount this miserable anecdote only for the purpose of establishing my own keen sensitivity. Otherwise, I wish to hear nothing more of it.
The women in my family, by contrast, possessed approximately the same emotional makeup as a sack of nails. My grandmother, Gram, a short, stout pioneer woman, had spent most of her life cooking in logging camps, where breakfast consisted of five gallons of coffee, fifty steaks, five dozen eggs, ten pounds of bacon, a hundred pancakes, a flatcar of fried potatoes, and a truckload of toast. She got up at three in the morning to prepare breakfast and went to bed after washing the supper dishes. Both her arms would be blistered to the elbows from the wood-fired cookstoves and the huge hot pans and kettles and splattering grease and scalding water. After Gram came to live with us, I'd run in the house yelling, "Ow! Ow! I'm hurt! I'm hurt! Ow! Ow!" Gram would leap up in a panic, crossing herself and murmuring a brief prayer. She assumed anyone making that much of a ruckus must have broken at least two legs and an arm and be bleeding to death for good measure.
"Look, Gram!" I'd yell at her. "I skinned my knee! Ow! Ow!"
"You scared me half to death over a skinned knee?" she would snarl. "Why you big calf!" After a while, I realized there wasn't much point in expecting a lot of sympathy from an old woman who had spent so much of her life cooking in logging camps.
It was almost unheard of for anyone in our family to go to a hospital or even a doctor. My mother's view seemed to be that either you got better or you didn't. Once, Troll got a thorn stuck in her hand, which swelled up into the general shape and size of a catcher's mitt. The swelling soon went up her arm, turning it a nice shade of blue-green, one of my favorite colors at the time. Troll's arm became so ghastly I would usher my little friends into her room so they could look at it and see if it made them sick to their stomachs, as I had predicted.
"There's the arm."
"Yeeesh!"
Still Mom refused to take Troll to the doctor. Even at that young age, I could see that the Troll's condition might be terminal, and so I tried to be as nice to her as I could, being careful to shield her from the fact that bit by bit I was moving my belongings into her room. One tries to be considerate. Mom eventually hauled the Troll off to the doctor, who said she only had a bad case of blood poisoning, and, for a couple of bucks and a modicum of pain, he cured her arm. Typically, Troll had been fussing about nothing.
Troll, six years older than I, was a powerful creature, fond of picking me up and bouncing me against a wall or a tree, apparently as a form of entertainment or, in later years, merely from force of habit. I was defenseless against her onslaughts, which could occur at any time of day or night. She knew magic, too, basic troll magic. She could create illusions out of nothing more than thin air and a shadow or two. Once, as the two of us were tramping home in winter along a narrow wooded trail, she stopped and pointed into the shadows. "Shhhh," she said.
"What is it?" I whispered, peering intently into the shadows, knowing from experience it wouldn't be anything good.
"Wolves. Don't you see them?"
"N-no!"
"Are you blind or what?" she hissed. "Can't you see that big shaggy one with the spit dribbling off his jaws?"
"Cripes!"
Not only could I see the wolf, I saw it in perfect detail, a big ol' red tongue lolling out from between sharp white teeth, the frosty fur bristling on the back of his neck, the mean, fiery eyes.
"And here he comes!" the Troll screeched.
My feet spun down through the ice on the trail, found traction in the dirt beneath, and sent me on a flat screaming trajectory toward home, the wolf snapping at my heels all the way. Bursting into the house, I told Mom about the wolves, that they must have got Troll. She said, "Well, in that case, set the table for only three tonight." Troll strolled in a half hour later, claiming to know nothing of wolves. It's a terrible thing for a boy to have a sister six years older than he, and one that does troll magic besides. To this day, many of my lesser organs believe in ghosts, even if my mind doesn't, apparently as a result of Troll having shown me so many apparitions during my formative years.
"See that old man? He's not real."
"He isn't?"
"No, he's a ghost."
"How do you know?"
"'Cause you can see right through him, dummy."
"You can?"
"Yes!"
"He looks just like old Mr. Ferguson."
"It's his ghost. Mr. Ferguson died last week, you know."
"Cripes!"
A week later I'd almost died myself, bumping into Mr. Ferguson coming out of a store. "What's wrong, son? You look like you've just seen a ghost."
A night at home alone with my sister was like being trapped in a Stephen King novel. So many ghosts, monsters, maniacs, and werewolves would show up, you would have thought they were holding a convention of things that go bump in the night. Oddly, Troll never seemed the least bit disturbed by all the phantoms flitting about. She carried on a running account of their hideous doings, much like Edward R. Murrow broadcasting radio reports of the London blitz. On one of our dark and stormy nights alone, Troll as usual was doing her spook report for my benefit. "Hear that creaky sound up in the attic? Restless human skeletons often make that sound when they—" Suddenly, she emitted a scream so filled with quavering terror that I had not the slightest doubt of its sincerity and authenticity. If ever I needed proof of the existence of actual ghosts, this was it.
"Cripes!" I thought. "This has got to be a real bad one, if it scares even a troll that much."
Actually, that is only the gist of the impression that zapped my nervous system and short-circuited my brain. That poor tormented organ was instantly rendered incapable of any thought whatsoever, let alone regulation of normal bodily functions, which were left to their own devices. Typically under such circumstances, my legs would have assumed command and propelled me home, without awaiting orders from higher authority. Since I was already home, however, they apparently became confused as to a proper route of retreat, with the result that they degenerated to a consistency somewhere between that of jelly and spaghetti al dente.
The true culprit was presently revealed to be nothing more than a mouse, which, for reasons known only to itself, had charged across the living-room floor and attempted an ascent of one of Troll's legs. I recovered my senses just in time to see the mouse ricocheting about the room, although at that point I was still unclear as to its involvement in the affair. Maybe it had seen the ghost, too. If my legs hadn't been in such bad shape, I would have joined it in ricocheting about the room.
I have always been fairly religious, not so much in my mind as in my blood and bones. It comes from being raised a Catholic. A novelist friend recently asked me whether I got my load of guilt from being Catholic. I said yes, that was it. "Where do you get your guilt from, Peter?"
"From being raised an Episcopalian."
"Ha!" I said. "You don't even know guilt!"
I spent much of my early life in the company of priests. For the most part, they regarded me less than highly, not that they should have been exceptions to the rule. I regarded them at best as nuisances and, at worst, as spoilsports. Most of them loved hunting and fishing, and our farm offered them easy access to both. They freely and frequently made use of that access. At least once a month Mom invited the parish priest out for Sunday dinner—chicken dinner. Perhaps that is why my memory tends to associate priests and chickens, no offense intended toward either.
Every spring my mother ordered a hundred or so chicks from the co-op farm store. The fluffy yellow balls arrived sometime in March, long before the outside temperature permitted putting them in one of the unheated outbuildings. To solve this problem, Mom built a pen in the unfinished upstairs of our house, carpeted it with newspaper and straw, and installed a lightbulb-heated brooder for the comfort and well-being of the chicks. Within a few weeks, the weather warmed and the chicks had developed enough to be moved outside.
One spring, however, the weather remained cold and wet well into May. As the weeks passed, the cute little yellow chicks evolved into homely little white chickens. Day by day the chickens got bigger and bigger, homelier and homelier. Busy with school, Mom had only enough time in the evening to extend the sides of the pen up to the ceiling, try to close the gaps in the chicken-wire fencing, and capture any escapees, who had spent the day exploring the nooks and crannies of the upstairs. Having cute little chicks in the house was one thing; having adolescent chickens was another. The chickens became a major embarrassment. What would the neighbors think if they knew we lived with our chickens in the house? Despite constant cleaning of the pen—my job—the upstairs began to take on the unmistakable odor of a chicken pen. And the chickens continued to grow and grow and grow.
Mom canceled all social activities at the house, and I was forbidden even to have friends over, for fear they might discover our terrible secret and broadcast it to the world: "The McManuses keep their chickens in their house!" All a playmate would have to do was open the door to the stairwell, and he would instantly hear chicken sounds drifting down, and chicken sounds were the least of what might be drifting down.
As bad luck would have it, Mom stopped to chat with the parish priest after Mass one Sunday, and he mentioned that he hadn't been out to our place for dinner in a long while, a hint that hung heavily in the air while Mom, smiling fixedly, searched vainly for a way out. She found none.
"Oh, we'd love to have you out for dinner," she finally blurted. "How about next … ?"
"Today would be perfect!"
"Today. Yes, that's nice. See you this afternoon then." Smile. Smile.
Father O'Toole, a redheaded Irishman, had a particular fondness for our farm and visited it every chance he got. He was a good deal less fond of me, for what fault in his character I can't imagine. Clearly, he perceived of me as a wild and undisciplined child, and no doubt a practitioner of sins I hadn't even discovered yet. My older cousin Buck was a terrific mimic, and I eventually came to suspect him of imitating my voice at confession. I could never prove anything, even though the priest clearly viewed me as a little sinner of the first order, for whatever reason. There certainly was no sex in my life. I hadn't even heard of sex yet, although I did have the distinct feeling I was missing out on something pretty darn interesting.
It was Buck who explained the birds and the bees to me, although without reference to either. I couldn't believe it.
"Nooo!" I said. "You're pulling my leg!"
"Yeah, really, that's how it works."
"Go wahnnn! You expect me to believe that?"
"I'm tellin' ya, dummy, that's how it is."
"No way," I said, giggling. "The church wouldn't allow it."
"It don't!"
"So where does the stork come in, tell me that, Buck?"
"So where does the stork come in?" Buck said, mimicking me perfectly. "Gimme a break!"
"Yeah, well I bet you get a whole lot worse penances than I do, if you go around telling nasty lies like that."
"Something on the order of an Act of Contrition, an Our Father, and two hundred Hail Marys."
"Wow!" It was pretty clear Buck had a lot more fun than I did. "But I bet you're pretty embarrassed when you meet Father O'Toole outside the confessional. He can recognize your voice, you know."
"I wouldn't bet on it."
Whatever the reason, whether Buck was the problem or not, Father O'Toole simply didn't seem to believe I met his standards for young boys. On this particular day not only did I have to spend the afternoon in excruciating boredom, but Mom insisted that I try to act normal. No relief was in sight. A whole Sunday shot, and beyond that another endless week of school! Cripes!
Father O'Toole showed up for dinner fairly bursting with good humor. It was my impression that the church didn't feed priests during the week, and that they survived only on prayer and eating dinner out on Sundays, which possibly explained Father O'Toole's jolly mood.
"What's that I smell?" he roared cheerfully. "Chicken?"
"Chickens?" Mom said. "I don't smell chickens. Anybody else smell chickens?"
I thought maybe I smelled chickens, but I shook my head dutifully.
"Must be ham then," the priest said, removing his coat and tossing it over a chair.
"Oh, yes, ham it is," Mom said. "Ham for dinner. What ever was I thinking?"
Upstairs, the feathered horror pressed restlessly against the bulging sides of its prison.
Dinner moved along at the pace of a lethargic snail, with Father O'Toole occasionally looking me up and down as though trying to place me in the context of some of the sins he had heard mentioned in my voice during confessions.
"Is the boy rather advanced for his age?" he asked my mother.
"Goodness no," Mom said. "Rather the opposite. He flunked second grade. Why do you ask?"
"No reason."
About then a muffled fluttering sound came from behind the staircase door. Father O'Toole glanced idly in its direction, then turned back to his ham and the account of a strange experience that had happened to him as a young boy in Ireland.
"I was but a wee lad when the awfullest thing happened. My brother Sean came in with an injured bird he'd found in the yard, held it out for me to see, and the bird suddenly revived and flew right into my face and began to peck at me and beat me furiously about the head with its wings. Oh, it was a terrible shock! Even now that I'm a grown man, I can't stand to have a live bird near me. Constricts my throat, it does, and I break into an awful sweat. Nearly pass out, I do, like a timid wee schoolgirl in a faint. It's a dreadful burden and an awful embarrassment at times." Little did he realize that he was on the verge of one of those times. He dabbed with his napkin at a few beads of perspiration the mere telling of the story had raised on his forehead. "But I do love a nice piece of fried chicken now and again!" He led us all in a rollicking laugh, his a bit more rollicking than ours.
Another muffled fluttering sound came from behind the door. The priest glanced again in the direction of the fluttering. "What is that strange noise?"
"The wind," Mom said. "Must be a window open upstairs."
"Could be a ghost," I said, trying to be helpful. "The upstairs is haunted." The priest gave me a stern look and shook his head.
More fluttering sounds drifted out from behind the door. The women darted little puzzled worried looks at each other. Then we heard faint scratching sounds.
"I do believe you might have a rat in the house," Father O'Toole said, leaping up. "I'd better check this out."
Mom uttered a startled cry and tried to fling herself between the priest and the door. Not quick enough. Father O'Toole hurled the door wide, as if hoping to catch the rat in the act.
There, compressed, filling the doorway, was a white feathery wall of chickens, with dozens of little beaked chicken heads protruding and looking about in amazement at the wonders of the world that had suddenly been revealed to them. No less amazed was Father O'Toole, who gave a small hop, and then staggered backwards, clutching his throat and making strange gurgling sounds. Mom, too, made strange gurgling sounds. The rest of us watched in awe as the great white wall of chickens began to topple forward into the living room. A moment later, there were chickens everywhere, running and flying, chirping and squawking, a half dozen or so perched happily on the prostrate body of the priest, who had collapsed backwards stiff as a board against an overstuffed chair. As sheer spectacle, it was better than anything I could ever have imagined, my elation dampened only by the possibility that we might be held accountable for our chickens having snuffed the parish priest.
We rounded up the chickens one by one and hauled them out to the chicken house where they might freeze, but, as Mom said, that was nothing more than they deserved. Father O'Toole finally revived, and we finished dinner and even dessert without further distractions, except for blowing the occasional feather away from our plates. Mom explained how the situation arose that we had chickens in the attic, and the priest thought it all a rather good joke. By the time he left, he was once again in a jolly mood and even patted me on the head. I knew what he was thinking, though, Better slow up, young man. Two hundred Hail Marys is a bit much for a boy your age.
Dang that Buck!
Father O'Toole could very well have overdosed on chickens and died on the spot. No doubt he thought the birds were plotting to kill him, possibly because they had something against organized religion. Whatever he thought, he did manage to get his revenge. He owned a big old Irish setter, Butch Garrion III, who had a significantly better family tree than I did. One day Father O'Toole asked my mother if he could leave Butch at the farm for a couple of weeks. Mom said sure, the dog would be no problem. Scarcely had the priest driven off than the dog sneaked into the henhouse and killed most of the chickens. Mom was furious, possibly suspecting that the dog had been acting on orders. If that were in fact the case, the priest probably hadn't told Butch that he was being sent on a suicide mission. When Mom found most of her chickens slaughtered, she headed for the shotgun, clearly intent on turning Irish setter into Irish Stew. The only thing that stopped her, in my opinion, was the thought that killing a priest's beloved dog might result in excommunication.
Father O'Toole excused away his dog's murder spree on the grounds that Butch was merely acting on an irresistible impulse, a popular defense nowadays but rare back then. Mom would have preferred plain old vigilante justice, and during our many chickenless meals that year, I'm sure she regretted not resorting to it, even if it meant becoming a Baptist.
Just looking at a live chicken for the first time you would not suppose it was anything good to eat. This theory can be tested out. Take any two-year-old child and show him a live chicken running around pecking at bugs, and tell him, "Tonight you get to eat that thing for supper." The child will immediately fly into a screaming, crying, kicking fit. I used to run this experiment on my own children, and, until my wife, Bun, made me stop, it worked every time. A live chicken simply does not look like anything a normal person would care to eat. Suppose a fast-food restaurant kept a cage of live chickens near its entrance with a sign on the cage bragging, "This is how fresh our chicken morsels are!" That fast-food business would be sucked into oblivion quicker than you could say, "I think I'll have a Big Mac instead." Or suppose a waiter brings a live chicken to a diner's table.
"Sir, this is the chicken we'll prepare for your supper tonight, if you approve. Notice how plump and firm it is, the healthy pink of the comb, the luster of the feathers, the sparkle of the eyes."
"I'll have the prime rib."
"Very good, sir. Hey, Tony, bring in the cow!"
My point is that the typical modern eater simply does not have the stomach for confronting his dinner eye to eye in its live state. Maybe it's the guilt thing, with people simply not wanting to share directly the responsibility for killing their own food. People get enough guilt at the office, without feeling remorse over their Chicken McNuggets. Or it could be a combination of guilt and the fact that the typical animal protein doesn't look all that appetizing in its natural state. "And these are the snails, madam, for your escargot. Notice how nice and frisky they are." Americans nowadays generally insist that their food come suitably disguised from its origins. They don't like to think of the B of their BLTs wallowing about in the muck of a pigpen.
It was different when I was a boy. First of all, you had a long and meaningful relationship with most of your food before you got around to, uh, breaking off the relationship. Chickens started out as cute little yellow balls of fuzz, cuteness being one of Mother Nature's major ways of protecting the young of various species. Countless puppies are rescued each year from the pound precisely because of their cuteness. A year later the rescuers are thinking, "Now, exactly why did I get this mutt, which is more trouble than the average child and just as expensive, if you count a college education?" Chickens, however, stay cute for only a couple of weeks at most, and soon reach that lanky, homely stage referred to as "spring fryers." Mom could hardly wait for her chickens to reach that stage, which, depending upon the level of our poverty in a given year, could be very early indeed. I remember wishbones so small you had to use tweezers to perform the wishing ritual.
As I mentioned previously in this report, I was a very sensitive child, and for that reason alone one might think that I would be excused from participating in the executions of chickens. I cannot even imagine saying to my four daughters, "Come on, girls, you have to help me kill a chicken for supper." Why, there would have been such shrieking and hollering and banging shut and locking of doors that surely the neighbors would have called the police to report rampant child abuse in progress. And, of course, their mother would have yelled at me, "Stop with your teasing! You'll give the girls nightmares! Don't you know how sensitive women are about such things?" To tell the truth, no.
My grandmother was the chief hatchetperson in our family, and she had absolutely no regard for my tender years or feelings. I was no more than six when I first became an accessory to one of her chicken murders. I say "murder," because the act had the necessary requirements. There was premeditation, Gram and Mom having previously planned the hit. And there was motive, namely fried chicken for supper.
"Get your nose out of that comic book," Gram ordered me. "I want you to help me kill a chicken."
"No, I hate killing stuff. Do it by yourself."
"You will, or I'll teach you a good lesson. I ain't gonna tell you twice."
"Don't you remember how I cried when that trillium died?"
Gram burst out laughing. "How could I forget! Now, I want you out here in five seconds. And I ain't gonna tell you twice."
"You already told me twice."
"Why, that's right." Whap! Thusly did I learn not to quibble over didactic details.
I had no choice. I knew Gram was too slow to run down one of the flighty creatures, and I, too, wanted fried chicken for supper. Gram and I walked out to the chicken pen. The chickens watched us approach, suspicion furrowing their very limited brows. "What do they want? Feeding time isn't for another three hours. This doesn't look good. That weird old lady and the kid are up to something. Watch out! The crazy old lady's got the hatchet! Run for your lives!"
There was nothing for me to do but chase down a chicken and haul it back to Gram for execution. I tried not to think about my helping her to end that chicken's dreams and desires, its hopes and aspirations, its future. Probably all we ended was its future, which, to the chicken, was probably more than enough. I doubt it was the Einstein of chickens, poised on the brink of discovering the poultry equivalent of E=mc2. But who knows what mysteries lurk in the chicken mind?
Few Americans associate closely with chickens anymore, and those who do generally work in chicken factories, where their charges are scarcely more than feathered zombies. Our chickens, by contrast, ran wild and thus had the opportunity to acquire individual identities and personalities, not that it did them much good when chicken was on the supper menu. A chicken could have been tap dancing across the yard with top hat and cane, and Gram, hatchet in hand, would have ordered, "Get me Fred Astaire over there." There was one notable exception—Old Biddy. This little disheveled hen learned how to talk. When spoken to, she would respond with a chickenized impersonation of human speech, often going on at great length, presumably about the latest doings in the henhouse. Head cocked to one side, she would listen attentively as her human conversationalist responded to her gossip, and then she'd take off again on some rambling discourse. Biddy also took on the duty of protecting the family from intruders, perhaps because she had observed that my dog, Strange, ignored this responsibility, as he did all his other responsibilities. The hen started patrolling the road that led to our house. Troll once waited at home all day for a friend to come over and spend the night, but the girl never showed up. When Troll later asked her why she hadn't come over, the girl replied, "I tried to, but some stupid chicken kept attacking me and wouldn't let me walk down the road, so I went home." Old Biddy knew a criminal when she saw one.
The sketches of the characters who dominated my childhood would be incomplete without further mention of my dog, Strange. As I have written in other places, a stray dog showed up at our farm one morning wagging his tail and begging for a handout. He seemed harmless enough. My mother called him Stranger, in hope, as she said later, that he was just passing through. He stayed on for nearly fifteen years, biting the hands that fed him and criticizing my grandmother's cooking: "You expect me to eat this slop, old woman?" Gram hated the dog, although the neighbors were fond of him. No matter how bad their own dog might be, even a scruffy, smelly, barking, biting, whining, chicken-killing, egg-sucking, deer-chasing mongrel, he seemed like a regular Lassie when compared with Stranger. Mom later shortened the dog's name to Strange, which, given his character and tenure, seemed much more appropriate.
Few things shape a boy's character more than his close association with his dog. My friend Merle had a fine old dog named Bo. That's a great name for a dog, Bo. It's limited to a single syllable, so the dog doesn't have to take a course in linguistics to know that he's being called. "Here, Bo!" Merle would call. "C'mon, boy! Here, Bo!" And good old Bo would come tearing in and leap up on Merle and cover his face with kisses, his tail doing sixty wags a second from sheer happiness that his boy, his master, had called him. I'd go home and try the routine on Strange.
"Here, Strange! C'mon, boy! Here, Strange!"
Strange would stick his head out of the doghouse. "What?"
"C'mon, Strange! C'mon, boy!"
"Would you knock it off! I'm trying to get some sleep here. What a dope!" Then he'd go back to bed, muttering.
Strange was an embarrassment to the whole family. My mother gave him away once to a lonely old man who lived way back in the mountains. The man said he could use a companion. A few days later he brought Strange back, explaining that he guessed he preferred his own company. Strange watched him leave. "Crazy old fool," he said. "Cooked worse than Gram, if you can believe that!"
The best thing that could be said about Strange was that he didn't kill chickens. An intelligent dog, he apparently understood that such a crime resulted in capital punishment, after a very brief trial. He would occasionally slap a chicken around, though. "You stupid chicken, this'll teach you not to drink out of my dish! Take that! And that!" He was suspected of being on hand when Father O'Toole's dog, Butch, killed Mom's chickens, although Strange was not regarded as an actual participant. He probably stood by with his hands in his pockets and watched, though, grinning, occasionally calling out bits of advice. "There's one you missed, Butch, hiding over in the corner."
Strange regarded squirrels as terrorists, and frequently came into the house wagging and bragging that he had just saved the whole family by chasing one of them up a tree. "He was carrying a grenade," he'd say. Gram would sweep him out of the house with her broom. Strange hated my sister's big yellow tomcat, Matilda Jean, even more than he did squirrels. He also feared the cat, who would tear into him at the slightest provocation, and Strange was nothing if not provocative. Matilda Jean enjoyed lying in ambush for the dog, often on top of his house. For this reason, Strange's standard mode of leaving his house when he smelled the cat overhead was to streak out, tail tucked between his legs, jaws snapping wildly back over his shoulder. A friend who observed one of these exits, after the cat had long since sneaked off the doghouse roof, wondered aloud if maybe my dog didn't have rabies or a nervous disease of some sort. "Probably," I said. I didn't want a friend to think my dog was afraid of cats.
Despite his slovenly, cowardly, and generally despicable life, Strange died a hero's death. By then we had acquired Tippy, a happy-go-lucky dog who bounded hither and yon without a care in the world, and with no more brains than he had cares. Strange now hobbled about complaining loudly about his arthritis, Gram's cooking, Tippy, chickens, the weather, me, and just about anything else that crossed his mind. He had not improved with age. Whenever we thought he couldn't get any worse, he did, perhaps because he felt challenged to do so. He had no use for Tippy, and would have taught the young whippersnapper a good lesson for getting on his nerves, if he could have moved fast enough to catch the pup. Oddly enough, the brainless Tippy proved the undoing of Strange. One morning the sappy pup pranced out to engage in conversation one of the timber wolves our neighbors kept for watchdogs. The wolf snarled and lunged at Tippy, who immediately flipped over on his back in the traditional posture of canine submission. Tippy was dumb but no fool. This disgusting display proved too much for Strange, which was odd, because he all by himself had raised disgusting to record heights. Forgetting his arthritis, his aches and pains, his old age, and that he probably would come out second best in a fight with a squirrel, he tore into the wolf, who was at least four times his size. It was a fatal mistake. I carried the mortally wounded Strange back to the house. "I must have been out of my mind to pull a dumb stunt like that," he muttered. "Gimme a cigarette." And then he died.
Nothing improves character so much as death. I once knew a man, Pete by name, who abused his family unmercifully, stole, robbed, lied, cheated, and was suspected of at least one murder. Pete himself came to a violent end at the hands of an unknown assailant who may have been of the opinion he was performing a public service. Others thought so. Within a day of Pete's demise, however, somebody recalled a good deed the deceased had once performed, possibly an incident in which he had met a stranger on a lonely road and hadn't robbed him. Soon, even his victims were concluding that he hadn't been such a bad sort after all, merely misunderstood. Then someone recalled that the fellow had been a good worker on occasion, and someone else remembered his actually having repaid a debt. By the time of the funeral, the man's character had improved so much that he had become one of our town's leading citizens, widely revered for his acts of charity, courage, honesty, and kindness, and if he had a fun-loving tendency to pull the occasional prank, why that was to be forgiven on the grounds that nobody's perfect. Well, that was the case with Strange, too. My family and friends now remember him as a fine, upstanding dog, friendly, brave, loyal, affectionate, a dog for all seasons. "Good old Strange," they say. As for my own relationship with Strange, all I can report is that he helps explain how I got this way. If I'd had a real dog, I might have turned out differently.
In contrast to my own existence, my friends in town led orderly and peaceful lives. Their fathers worked, their mothers stayed home, they took piano lessons, did their homework, studied, got good grades, played basketball after school, went on family vacations to the seashore, mowed the lawn, got a weekly allowance, and never had chickens upstairs in their houses. I felt sorry for them, but who ever said life is fair?
From age twelve on, I ran traplines, hunted with my own shotgun, fished every spare moment, roamed wild and free in the woods and mountains, and cultivated the company of ornery old men who smelled of tobacco, whiskey, and hard living. It was nice. My friends and I often went on expeditions deep into the mountains, and it was there I first explored the fine, sweet, secret terror of wilderness and the night, and the heavy tread of Sasquatches passing near.
Some persons may find it strange that major influences on how I came to be this way consist of such mundane things as chickens and dogs and trilliums and mountain trails and lakes, with the occasional wolf or ghost passing through. I wish there were something of more significance, some great mystery to reveal, but there isn't. My family performed me a great disservice in its failure to be dysfunctional, when it had every opportunity to be so. Oh, what I could have done with that! Instead, it chose to be happy in its sublime chaos and confusion, even when we didn't know where our next meal was coming from, or sometimes worse, when we did know.
It may be, as my friend Dave surmised, that the fall on my head contributed something of significance to how I came to be this way. Ever since that bonk, I see everything twice. It can be a distraction, seeing everything twice, because it requires more time, and by then you're lost, or have forgotten to pick up the dry cleaning, or return home to find a strange woman cooking supper in your kitchen, or land in Baltimore when you were supposed to land in Spokane. But seeing everything twice has its advantages. When I return from an outing with friends and report to our wives what happened, my friends think they have been on a different trip. "I don't remember it like that," they say. "Is that how it happened?" Of course that's the way it happened, if you see everything twice. Their problem is, they see everything only once. It's a pity. And it's just a darn good thing they have me along to tell them how it was. Otherwise, they would miss out on so much.
Copyright © 1994 by Patrick F. McManus