A Dutiful Son wds 6,300
The foundation slab poured and screeded, the Mexican kid (a three hundred pound kid!) walked around the slab thrusting bottom plate bolts into the wet concrete. He shoved in the bolts at odd angles, out of line with the edge of the slab and not deep enough of too deep, moving along quickly, too quickly. Set in the concrete to secure the the exterior walls to the foundation, if these bolts are installed wrong, they would have to be torn out and reset at great expense.
The owner’s son spoke to the kid, “Eh amigo, can you put those anchor bolts in right, straight and in line?”
“Sure, amigo,” the kid smiled.
“You know, think of it as your house. Tu sabe?” The kid would know the phrase, “Mi casa es tu casa.”
“You got it, hombre,” the kid said and continued the same; bolts out of line, angled too deep or shallow.
Seeing this, the son followed behind, straightening each bolt, repositioning them to a proper depth in the concrete and troweling smooth the hardening stone around them. The concrete setting up fast in the Texas heat allowed no time for discussion or debate. And demonstrating how to do the job right, the owner’s son thought, might shame/teach the kid.
Following the kid around the foundation, the son thought, ‘How does he think of himself or his job, how does he think of his body with all that extra weight? why no pride in himself and his work? He’s 16 or17, obviously gets enough to eat. Spoiled; given all without requirements, caring for nothing, maybe he thinks himself as some kind of free spirit.’
Age twenty three, the son felt the meager difference in their ages should be insignificant; age is a number, not a measure of experience.
His father was off site, had left him to oversee the concrete finishing and as the job, overall went well, the son said nothing to ‘el jefe,’ the finishing crew boss about the big kid’s lousy work.
The slab finished, tools packed up, the son delivered the check and broke out the ‘cerveza’ which the crew stowed in their truck. After they drove away his father arrived and in a verbal report the son mentioned straightening the anchor bolts as, “The only problem, a minor irritation.”
“That’s who the man hired. Did you talk to him or the kid?” his father said.
“Yeah, talked to the kid, but no, i was too busy fixing that dummy’s screw-ups.”
“It’s the way the system works; it’s the other man’s crew, some of them mess up, some pull more weight than others. You did good to jump on it yourself.”
“He sure had a lot of weight to pull.”
“Okay then, you did good, day is done, let’s have a beer.”
Three weeks before this day they started job. The first thing they built was a secure tool shed twenty feet from the slab and at quitting time most days they sat in the shade and drank a few. On a tree shaded corner of the site stood the son’s tent. He slept in it four nights a week, as his father required, to secure the site.
The evening of the day the slab was poured and finished they dined at a local restaurant, the only one in town. They often dined there and discussed the events of the day.
A college student, fit and athletic but new to construction work, the son believed in an absolute right or wrong way of doing the job. In connection with this, he mentioned the concept of quality versus quantity, but his father was reluctant, said “That’s something to think about,” nothing more. As in the past, much remained unspoken.
His father left him at the job site to stay in his tent and drove to his home and wife in a small town fifty miles away. Four nights a week his son camped at the site. On Friday they packed up tools and returned to the home of his father and his father’s new wife, unknown to the son until now and very accommodating. A pleasant arrangement; evenings at the site cool, (his father had provided a battery powered head lamp and fan) perfect for reading and sturdy, very quiet. No houses stood visible from the site. The son felt utterly alone there in the air fresh and clean and only crickets singing.
The weekends in town were “an interesting small town experience,” as the son wrote in his notes. “Mostly quiet, population five or six thousand, a shabby theater, no newspaper or bookstore and a very small library, plenty of potholes. The eyes briefly, furtively follow me, silent.”
In a coffee/ice cream shop he spoke to the friendliest person in town, a pretty latina barista with a sweet Texas twang.
“I couldn’t live for long in this town,” he wrote, “but it makes a definitive urban/rural contrast.”
Alone on site, the son stripped and washed beside the well pump spigot by his father’s pear trees, filling a bucket and dumping the extremely cold water on his head.
“Jesus F Christ!”
Soaping up, he dumped another bucket and another on his head.
All day in the heat his skin flowed with sweat. Now he flushed off the crust of sweat and chilled shut the pores of his skin. Encased in tightened skin and muscle, he toweled off in the cooling air.
In the tent he lay naked on his cot. Tomorrow morning his father would return with coffee and breakfast. They would thoroughly review a construction manual issued by the state, make a plan and schedule for the raising of the walls.
In the darkening tent he lay hoping to rest. He did not rest; he thought of his school and what were the people doing there now? He punched up a pillow to elevate his head and opened a book.
For half an hour he failed to read. It grew dark, he closed his eyes and almost dozed off, then woke and tried to read again using his head lamp. His mind strayed, the book fell aside.
Awake, looking at the tent fabric above, he imagined a confrontation.
“Get off this job,” he heard himself say to the Mexican kid. “Get all three hundred pounds of your dead ass off this site.”
The kid says, “What chew want, gringo?”
The son says, “Get off this job, you’re second rate. There’s the gate, go out of it.”
The kid goes to the crew boss, ‘el jefe,’ the man contracted to do the job; handsome, with the strong, square face, white smile and confident manner even when speaking to the client, the father. The kid complains and the boss tells the kid, likely a family member otherwise how else would he get the job, to stand aside. He says to the son, “He’ll do the job right. I’ll talk to him.”
“No, get him off the job, now.”
‘El jefe’ looks at him, smiling slowly and saying, “I gotta have this guy to help.”
“Now you get off the job, you’re fired,” the son says. “I can finish this job my own self.”
“Now hold on a minute, hombrcito.”
“Get off my land!”
At this moment in the imaginary confrontation the son holds a pistol. Men in the line of fire scatter.
Snapping out of the dream, no pistol in his hand, the son sees the canvas tent ceiling above.
He thinks of his friend, Gregory. In college he enjoyed handling the long barreled .44 revolver Greg kept in a drawer of his study table. Occasionally Greg tucked the weapon under his belt and walked around the rooming house or lay the weapon, gleaming and potent, on the end table in the common room as they watched tv. If a tv face, a public official, sports commentator or athlete Greg disliked said something stupid, a loud click might sound and, turning, the son saw the long silver barrel and gleaming cylinder rotate, Greg squeezing the trigger, the hammer backing up and falling on an empty chamber.
Click.
“Dead,” Greg said. “Cold dead. Can you imagine what a .44 slug, a hollow point would do? It would completely clean out a man’s cranium vault.”
“Yep. Tear the brain right in half and spread it out on the wall behind.”
“Enormous exit wound.”
“That’s a fact.”
In his tent the son held no pistol. In Texas to help his father build a house, he mused on having a pistol and his recent effort to buy one.
In Texas for the summer, possibly longer, and determined to fit in, he stepped into a bait/gun shop. Fifty miles from the building site, in the town where his father and step-parent (only a decade older than him, ‘mother’ was not the right word for her) lived he walked into the store stacked with fishing and hunting supplies asked about buying a pistol. It was affordable, but at the moment his cash was still in the bank. He left saying he would give it thought. The store clerk called his parents and asked them, because their boy, he said, asked too many questions and appeared not to know anything about firearms, what kind of pistol did they think he needed? At dinner his step-parent asked why he wanted a pistol.
Instead of stating the obvious; carrying a pistol is what people do in Texas, he said, “I just wanted it in case someone tried to rob me.”
His father said nothing.
Annoyed by this small town nosiness/solidarity, he called the gun/bait shop and told the man he only called to say thanks but he had found a store in Austin that had the side arm he was looking for. Missing a sale might teach that gun man to clamp a lip.
With almost no one he knew to talk to (when he arrived he met his father’s wife for the first time) and many evening hours in his tent thinking, the son often reflected on what brought him to be alone in a tent at a construction site in the middle of Texas. Was it fate or the sub-conscious drive to bond with his father, to meet, merge in purpose with or surpass his father?
The plan which his father made for him was to build a house, a job lasting at least all summer, instead of going to the Boundary Waters and elsewhere with a slim woman named Clella.
In the mid-May haze of studying for final exams the telephone rang. He answered it, “Hello Pops, what’s up?”
The caller’s brief silence indicated he, the father, was annoyed, as his son knew he would be, by being called Pops.
His father said, “I have a dream working.”
“What? A dream working?”
“I have a dream working. It goes like this;” and his father unfolded his vision. It was well progressed, the site was chosen, the trees planted, all that remained was to build the house.
“That’s what i need you for.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know anything about driving nails.”
“They don’t drive nails anymore, they shoot them in with compressed air guns.”
“Interesting.”
“I’m glad you think so. It’s a chance to put your book smarts to good use and it will be a bond between us.”
Bond, the word was most impactful.
His father said, “The old Germans believed, and it might be somewhere in Aristotle, that a man should do three things in life; plant a tree, have a son and build a house. I have a son and planted four pear trees. I’ll pay you well.”
As he was paying his son’s college tuition it was financially hazardous to refuse.
The call ended, the son turned to a person in the room. She was tying her shoes.
“By the look on your face i would say no boundary waters for us, maybe?” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“No way out?”
“I guess not, but since i gotta go i can use the job to really get to know the old man. I don’t know my dad, not really, he’s always been kinda mysterious, kinda business-like. Even though he read the classics, you know, mysterious. Not easy to know.”
She nodded.
“This can be an opportunity to really know where he’s coming from.”
“Where might that be?”
“He studied the classics, yet he’s basically a business man too, involved in the real world. He was in Vietnam, so he knows that period, but he was never very clear about it. And he wasn’t very clear about his dad. His dad seemed so much more competent and intresting. He was in the Pacific theater the Second World War. He died before i was born. My dad said he learned everything he knew, all the important stuff, from him.”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Yeah Clella, this is a chance to go way back to really understand it all.”
“Good that you get paid. Is there white water in Texas?”
“If there is i’ll find it.”
“You have the gift of optimism. I hope it works for you.”
Later he would think it more than a point of view, more than a state of mind; it’s in the blood, a physical presence calling; a call to do his duty.
He ciphered out this concept of duty later; at the moment he was happy his dad needed him, had asked him to do something, and at the same time worried about losing Clella.
She stood up and left the room. He heard her in the bathroom, the hall, then she left the house. That was Clella; doing instead of talking.
After he arrived in Texas they spoke by telephone. He had found white water very near the building site. She wasn’t, he felt, impressed. Something neither was able or willing to define was gone.
In the first days starting the project having a beer in the late evenings fading into night, the son sought to probe his father for that bond of deeper knowledge, turning points and experiences of his father’s younger years. For instance, his father’s first marriage; life with the boy’s mother (a delicate subject) might be, spanned and clarified. He waited for an opportunity.
A student of journalism with the long goal of writing novels, (he studied French, read Balzac) and practiced precise data collection by direct questioning.
“Sounds to me like you’re no longer interested in fiction,” his father said. “Are you moving on to non-fiction, like shadow biography?”
That was a hint worth taking, for the moment; men shut up and listen then act decisively. On another day he resumed from a different angle.
“Why do you ask that?” the father said.
“Just curious,” the son said.
“Sounds like your mother; she went right for the jugular.”
“Was she really that bad?”
“Yes. If she wasn’t that bad i wouldn’t say she was that bad.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really, for the last time, yes.”
In his notes the son wrote; “Pops said this with a glare that would roast a smoke detector.”
Faced with failure, the inquisitor grew hesitant, watchful, his notes more speculative.
“How did i get here? he wrote, “Trace it back to the turning point in this story, the moment destiny unloaded onto the head and crushed the heart of our protagonist, me, scourged, a tragic figure, to the middle of Texas to serve a father’s whim and drink beer with him.”
He paused, looked out at the quiet, dark countryside around the building site. He continued.
“Here is where it truly began; one afternoon following a cont lit comp class. I joined a group discussion including a crookedly smiling young woman with round red earrings with whom i would share much love. The professor in the group casually mused, “Everyone winds up back where they started.” This is my theme; a statement that set in motion deep forces of mind and memory long before (a month) the telephone call. This was the definitive pivot. It was easy to accept Pops offer, not alone because my academic career depended on it.”
“We end up where we started” shows how a trivial statement can have outsized impact. ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ is an example from grandfather’s time.”
The professor’s statement hovered foremost in his mind until later when the telephone rang.
“I’ve got a dream working,” his father said.
Then his father gently reminded him he’s paying his tuition and will pay a wage; carrot and stick all in one.
And therefore the son gave up his summer plans, his love, his slim companion, their physical and intellectual prose and poetry and white water canoeing, and came to Texas.
It went well the first week. For the first time son and father got drunk together. Even when drunk his father revealed little.
That night was good except for the old guy with the cowboy hat. Many had cowboy hats but this was a great-grampa hat last seen at the Alamo older than dirt and the eyes looking out from under the tattered brim would scare a snake. The son crossed a line with the man by over-interpreting country western music. On the job site they listened to country western music and liked it; it tells a story, generally a tale of woe. Then this guy with a worn out face and hat so old it looked like it growed roots in his head said, “What the hell do you mean by that?”
The son followed the voice to the face in the crowd and said, “I mean what i said, they like to whine, you know, make a song of their misery.”
The man was small, about sixty. He said, “Why don’t you git your smart ass back to New York if you don’t like it.”
“I’m not from New York, and there’s nothing wrong with whining if you can make a buck at it.”
“We don’t need your shit here, go back to fag town.” He held an empty glass beer mug by his hip upside down, heavy and ready, thick bottom up.
His father stepped between them, “Stop talking and start walking. Outside,” he said. His sudden broad shoulders shadowing, he turned to the little man and peacefully ended it.
In the fresh air outside the son said, “Why was that guy pissed off?”
“He was pissed off because he was pissed on.”
“That’s no reason.”
“It’s probably the only one he’s got.”
“He’s a bonehead.”
“An ability to deal with stupid people,” his father said, “it is a great talent to have.”
The son revised his method of inquiry; he would seek out and study the feel.
Again in the shade his father said, “What’s the real question?”
His son repeated the question.
“Why do you want to know about all that? That’s trifling, that’s over.”
“I’m beginning to wonder, where to start.”
His father said, “Son, there are things that are not for you to know.” They were silent for a long moment, until his father said, “The best way forward is not to look back. And it’s not even important that you know any of it. It’s over.”
Yet compelled by curiosity, what else could he do? He continued to take notes, striving eventually to delve back, even as far as his grandfather’s time. These notes grew poetic, a striving for definitions beyond factual analysis.
But for now, shut up, listen, record, remember and sort it out later. It’s hot and the work is hard.
On his cot gazing up, he thought about the women in the neighborhood. There were few. Compared to a college town, women were mighty scarce here in Rural America.
The only close women were Alvaro’s sisters, all pretty and very nice but heavy. Alvaro was a local ‘obrero’ his father called “my muy hombre yard man,” who helped fence the site and plant the four pear trees and mowed the lawn. Alvaro’s sisters were the son’s age, more or less, short and dark eyed which suggested possibilities; his size and a bit more. When he and his father visited they sat around the kitchen table talking. He thought these women did little more than go to work or the grocery store and home again.
He preferred a lean, adventurous woman, who did things like Francine Flammonde in Two Can Play That Game, or Saralinda in Breakneck, and there are sexy, active, black women too, someplace else, not this place.
His friend from school, Gregory, gave advice; “If you date a hefty take her to a cafeteria, if lean, choose a classy joint.” The ideal was if she had less appetite go to an expensive restaurant. A hefty will empty the Kitchen and lick the plates. His friend read Male and Stud magazines (same publisher), so he knew how to handle a woman. According to an article titled ‘Fear of Fat’ concluded that size is no impediment but rather “cushion for the pushin.” An educated man, no matter how bookish, still inhabits a body of muscle, bone, blood and other vital fluids. To summarize, women like a man with “a clean collar and a dirty mind.” The son thought, ‘Crude, yes, but it’s just between us guys.’
In addition to this, Alvaro’s sisters, though nice now, would turn mean. This is what he saw; although nice to him they snapped at each other. Thus they would, over time, do likewise unto him. He concluded; we forget how to be nice to people closest to us.
However, the meal they shared was great, none better, ‘muy mucho mejor que’ the one fast food dump in town or the little restaurant. Quaint mom and pop cuisine my ass and to get there he had to drive five miles one way just to get a greasy horse meat burger; so much for Texas cuisine right off the hoof and tasting like the hoof.
In three weeks he learned he had to control his thinking. He concluded, “I’ve got to get out of here, back to the real world. We’ve got to finish this house and we haven’t even started framing it.”
One obstacle stood in the way; “My word is my bond,” he told his father, who liked old sayings. He agreed to work until the house stood complete. The best estimate, one summer, was looking short. He wondered if his father felt any urgency to finish. He asked and was told, “It will take as long as it takes.”
Always an optimist, he thought learning residential house construction is valuable knowledge for the home owner as much as a construction worker. Learn this first, then the personal goal, to discover what made the man, and the family they came from ~ all the way back into the dark days, tick.
For example; he never before thought his Pops could possibly “have a dream working.”
More important than knowledge was the bond, the ‘soul tie’ with his father, the ultimate goal; to know the passing generation. The grave is mute. When one loses a father, a world vanishes. In this summer he would learn more than a dozen hairy faced professors could teach; perhaps he would find the genesis of his own spirit.
Clella, given up for the dream, was the main loss; lively and smart, but her teeth were crooked and you can’t trust a person with crooked teeth. That is what he told himself, to make losing her easy.
Thus far all he had learned was what they both focused on; the construction business.
In that little town two cement contractors competed. His father hired Miller, a cut rate operator who recently set up shop. The older, established concrete man was Jackson; big and round, tan, smiling and jolly. The town and county and parts beyond had been Jackson’s hunting grounds for years. Miller arrived, a shabby intruder judging by the way he dressed and slouched and talked big when he came to look at the job. When he failed to deliver on time he whined about conditions.
Jackson had an office in a strip mall, neat and clean, his receptionist, pretty and pleasant, a niece. When the son came to see Jackson they flirted, she said, “I’m only here for the summer. I’m going back to school.”
It made him wonder, will i ever get back to school?
Miller’s office was in a trailer surrounded by equipment on a muddy, weedy lot, all inside a galvanized mesh fence leaning this way and that at the end of a gravel road. He had no receptionist, not even an ugly one.
Miller was the low bid for the slab foundation. His trucks poured it and he provided the crew to finish, the crew including the big Mexican kid.
The day before the slab was poured and finished, his father sent him to see Jackson and get the name and number of Jackson’s grader blade driver to smooth and compact the gravel driveway. Jackson hired out the man and his machine so it was about money.
“I talked to Jackson on the phone and he said come on in, but i can’t go now,” his father said. “Just get the blade driver’s number and try not to gab with Jackson too long.”
Gab with him too long? This Jackson must be a very friendly fellow, the son thought, even though he didn’t get the job.
“Why didn’t he just tell you the number over the phone?” the son asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
Jackson sat behind his desk and wrote out a name and number on a sheet of paper and handed it over.
He said, “I hope you like that piece of shit slab you gonna get from Miller.”
The son said nothing.
Jackson, steely eyed, said, “I want you to go back to your daddy and ask him how come all those three college degrees don’t get him no better than half-assed concrete work.”
The son looked at Jackson and at the name and number of the blade driver on the piece of paper. He said, “Thanks for the number,” turned and left the office. He expected a shouted insult or a paper weight heaved from Jackson’s desk bouncing off the back of his head. In silence he cleared the door unharmed.
In his car he paused to think; did my old man just set me up to catch some shit?
Back at the job site he handed his father the paper Jackson had given him and his father said, “What did old Jackson have to say?”
“Nothing. His receptionist had the number.”
So Pops brags about his college degrees, does he? He did have the wall paper to prove it. The diplomas in his home office hung beside his honorable discharge. The son wondered, is this a sign of insecurity? At home that education was sacred ground, among strangers, something to brag about. Here was a curious twist.
An encounter of the aforementioned type happened once before; different man, similar story. This man, his father’s neighbor, approached the son in their back yard.
The neighbor said, “Can i ask you something?”
“Sure.”
The man was a plumber, short, stout and bald with clear blue eyes that suggested a keen intelligence until you knew him. He was hired to work on the house and when his work failed to meet the level of quality required by the inspector. His father had the work redone by another plumber at company expense. It was a subject of conversation at the dinner table.
“Chester is dim,” said his father. “It took him years to pass the plumbing test they give those guys. He took the same test over and over for years until he passed it. Passing it had something to do with him having a relative in the company. The skinny on Chester is other plumbers need to work close behind him and correct his screw-ups.”
That afternoon in the back yard he said to the plumber, Chester, “What’s the question?”
Chester said, “Who does your father think he is, some kind of boss man in town?”
“What’s this about?”
The plumber said, “I do good work for thirty years and nobody ever said different.” Chester concluded, “I’d like to turn him upside down and drop him on his head.”
“Wait a minute, Chester” the son said. “I’ll go get him and you can tell him that yourself.”
“Is he home?”
“I think so, i’ll get him.”
“No, don’t bother, don’t get him, just forget it, forget it.” The plumber walked away.
Chester would not have come over to speak to him, the son thought, had his father’s truck been parked in the driveway. The truck was not parked in the driveway because his father was away in town running errands.
His father told stories about army life and his father’s (the grandfather’s) war in the South Pacific, tales that thrilled the son. “My dad called General Douglas MacArthur “Mac’ and General Dwight Eisenhower ‘Ike,’” his father said. As for Colonel Oliver North; “Sure, he broke the law, but he did his duty. He’s a marine.”
His father had no combat experience. This is why he referred to himself as “in service during the Vietnam era.” A peacetime soldier for one tour, he said he loved the uniform, military order and the discipline of service but went into business instead.
“More money out here,” he said.
The son suspected the real reason was his father’s military service never came close to that of his father’s in “the good war.” A Vietnam vet was not part of “The Greatest Generation.”
Or could it be his father feared the ultimate sacrifice required of a soldier? All the philosophy in the world, old or new never stopped a bullet. A thread of blood meanders through history and it all comes back to where it started. Maybe this fear is what “is not for you to know.”
A lack of self-esteem, that’s new, a fresh subject to probe. His father covered his lack, the son thought, by speaking of Plato or Aristotle; one of those diplomas hanging on the home office wall was for studies in classical philosophy. The subject was his alone and off limits for the rest of the family. All knew this was his citadel, his private domain, his Athens, his Rome; a challenge in discussing it was forbidden. One particular diatribe, cornerstone of his father’s intellectual estate was The Apology of Socrates, a book he was seen reading and from which he appeared to derive a sage attitude; smug, certain and calm as in it Socrates appears to face death.
To his son The Apology was unconvincing, mostly because a last concern of Socrates before the hemlock nixes him is a chicken; he owed someone a chicken and as death creeps up Socrates thinks of a chicken! It sounded brave, but who could take it seriously?
As far as the man his father was, early or late, what motivated him and what he valued beyond his pose as a man of wisdom, work, the flag and all the rest, was unclear to the son. It’s possible nothing was there.
On the other hand, his father had said, quoting Plato or some other Greek egghead, “Seek the truth, it wants to be found.”
It was a confusing situation and possibly no way to think it out. A man in the oil drilling business might call his father and Socrates and all the rest ‘dry holes.’
Moreover, the best definition might be a Spanish phrase ~ a theme on which the class was to write an essay ~ Es la vida un sueno? Is life a dream?
His dream: on a visit to his father's ofice, or was it jackson's office? he was, as usual, on edge, his employer behind the desk while above him on the wall was an enormaous clock with a dozen or more hands. All the hands of the clock ointed to his father, or the fat jolly man who poired concrete and challanged the authority of his father.
A boss buys time, life and love.
Is this whole thing a dream?
If so, who is awake of asleep, father or son? Over vast reaches of the globe, are there entire regions where everyone is asleep?
If the house building project fused anything like a bond between father and son it happened (and continued to happen) the night of the day the slab was poured and screeded smooth, the anchor bolts set right.
In the cool soft Texas Hill country air the son did his duty and yet for his father, “it is not for him to know.”
Too irritated to sleep and thinking too long, the son’s legs starting to jump; he had to walk. He rose from his cot.
Alone, naked, with no need to put on his shorts, he left the tent and walked into the warm moonlight, barefoot on the rough Johnson grass. He often walked on the site at night naked. The lights of an approaching car would show so far away he had time to get back into his tent and dress. At the end of a cul-de-sac, a gnarly forest of oak and mesquite beyond the fence, the nearest house was under a distant, dim street light. A soft wind brushed away mosquitoes. Tonight was different; something new and out of the ordinary was up.
The air soft as silk brushed his skin. He walked out to the barbed wire fence inhaling long and deep. The air clean and fresh, smelling of damp earth, rose in his blood and muscles. This made it worth being here, this feeling of strength in health.
‘Sometimes all a man has is the strength of his own body,’ he thought.
A quarter of a mile from the site the Guadalupe River ~ he heard murmuring waters ~ ran narrowly though scrubby, rocky forest hills from the dam at Canyon Lake, past the flood plain and their new slab, through to New Braunfels and on to the Gulf of Mexico.
‘I need to canoe down that river,’ he thought, ‘on that river and all the way down and away from here.’
He thought of Clella. The sudden bright memory of Clella’s laughing eyes, her dancing round red earrings ~ she didn’t take them off ~ and her crooked smile, of holding her hands, her hips; skin on his skin ~ his body, his blood spoke, made him snap erect with a vascular twang.
He folded his arms across his chest, turned toward his tent and stopped.
I will not touch myself, he thought, i will be resolute. He closed his eyes and saw Clella smiling, felt her skin on his skin. They heaved together, gripping and fluid their skin, a word so much like sin.
He paused by one of his father‘s pear trees.
He touched himself, just fingertips ~ no, it was Clella’s touch taking him in hand ~ and in a moment her hand propelled his seed onto the trunk and into mulch at the base of the pear tree. There goes protein rich fertilizer.
The son’s spirit sank. ‘A woman needed that fluid,’ he thought, ‘and i shot it away, i wasted it. They want and need my substance. I have done wrong. The Book says abiding with the grossest whore is better than spilling thy seed in solitude.’
Yet his body felt easy and loose-jointed, an excess drained, steam released.
As he was naked he had only one thing to hold onto. He had no clothing to grip or hide in, no pockets to fill. This awareness forced a question; what do we have in this world outside our skin? The mind! The projection of the mind!
‘Funny; he may not want me to get into his head or search his soul,’ the son thought, ‘but i can fertilize his dream.’
The warm, soft air brushed his skin and memory rose, heat rushing, his ardor again probed the darkness.
This method of fertilization his father would never know of, for it was not for him to know.
Casual in the soft air, the dutiful son moved on to the next pear tree.
End of “A Dutiful Son.”
Read books deliberately and reservedly as they were written. HD Thoreau fro Walden.