David Gates - Jernigan

Anyhow.

I went into the garage to get out the lawnmower, and there was my father’s old scythe hanging by its blade from a spike in one of the studs. I hadn’t had occasion to touch it since the day we moved here, when I drove the spike in, hung the scythe from it and steadied it with a fingertip to stop its swinging. Today I felt pity for the thing (yes, yes, displaced) and took it down. I hunted around for the whetstone, then spat on the blade and started honing, using the stroke he’d taught me: not back and forth, but going in little tight spirals, spitting and honing. A technique handed down, doubtless, to my father from his and so on. Unless my father had read it in Popular Mechanics or something. (He used to like Popular Mechanics for the pictures of machines, and the men wearing ties in their home workshops.) I will be the last Jernigan, most likely, to know the Jernigan scythe-lore. Which might go all the way back to when the Jernigans were landless scum in whatever dismal county it was. My father hated all that wearin’-o’-the-green crap, wouldn’t even have Yeats in his library. Embarrassed, of course, by his father. Grandpa Jernigan. About whom I remember only the old Studebaker he drove, the liquor on his breath, and being taken to his wake and getting scared he was really going to wake up. So naturally my father hated having a grandson named Danny. The name was Judith’s idea. She had a dead uncle or something named Daniel, and I didn’t care one way or the other. At least not until that Elton John song came out about the scar that won’t heal, and by then Danny was a year or so old. At any rate, my father used to greet him by singing out “Oh Dahnny Biiy!” in a Dennis Day tenor. And then he wondered why Danny never came to visit.

He was giving me the scythe, my father had said, in honor of my coming to my senses and getting out of New York. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t dare use the son of a bitch anymore.” Talking about his heart.

“It’s a God damn tract house in New Jersey ,” I said. “What am I going to do with a scythe on a quarter-acre lawn?”

“So what’re you doing pissing your money away on a place you don’t like?” he said. “Find yourself some handyman special in Westchester or something. Rockland. Something with a little charm to it. Christ’s sake.”

“Right,” I said. “You price any handyman specials in Westchester lately?”

“All right, all right, it has to be Jersey, then. All right? Then you look for something on one of your older streets, even if the house itself is a little run-down.”

“Pop,” I said. “Forget it. I’m into the degradation, you know?”

“You think you’re kidding,” he said. “Here, you better take this with you anyway. It’s a nice old thing. Even if you just hang it on the wall and think about mortality, for God’s sake. Hell, you’ll have my place one of these days. Then you’ll need three of these sons of bitches to keep ahead of the God damn sumac.”

I was wiping motor oil onto the now-silvery-edged blade when I saw Danny standing in the door to the breezeway. “Hey Dad?” he said. “You got a minute? Can I just play you this one neat thing?”

The anniversary didn’t seem to be getting him down any, though with Danny you never knew. If he’d forgotten — though how could you forget the Fourth of July? — I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up. But wasn’t it my fatherly duty to draw him out about what he must be feeling? But on the other hand, might it not be my fatherly duty to shut the fuck up and let him handle it his own way? Certainly that was a more comfortable view of my fatherly duty. I followed him back into the house. In his bedroom, he handed me the Rockman I’d insisted he get as a condition of having an electric guitar in the house. So now I worried that he was deafening himself with the earphones. And worried, too, that I was a bad father for trading his hearing for my tranquillity. Such as it was.

“No way,” I said, handing it back, afraid of a blast of noise God knows how loud stabbing my eardrums. “Put it through your amp, why don’t you. Let’s hear what you got.”

“Sure, great,” he said. He unplugged and replugged cords; the amplifier gave an echoing pop, warning of the vast deep silence about to be filled.

“Just not too loud, right?” I said. “The old man doesn’t have mutant ears.”

He picked the guitar up off the bed and slung it around him on its strap. “Okay now, watch,” he said. “I just learned this. Ready?” And he ripped off an ascending snarl of notes, both hands tearing away at the strings. It certainly sounded plausible. Even exciting in that cheap way.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounding good on that, big guy.”

“Yeah, but did you see it?” he said. “What my hand was doing?”

“What was I supposed to see?”

“Watch me again,” he said. “No, look. Watch my right hand.” I watched, trying to ignore the godawful studded leather thing on his wrist, a gift from his little girlfriend. He played exactly the same sequence of notes again, as far as I could tell. (I’d wondered the first time if it had just been some random gabble spewed out any old way his fingers had happened to move.) “You see it?” he said.

“What am I missing?” I said.

“That last note,” he said. “To get it you have to come up here , see, with this hand. That’s what’s normally your picking hand. But you could never get your left hand all the way up from here to here that quick.”

“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” I said. “How come you don’t want to be in a band?” Mistake: asking Why Questions was just a way of giving people shit. Judith and I had learned that in cognitive therapy. One more thing we’d tried.

Danny said nothing. I stared, as I always did when I was in here, at his poster of blank-faced Elle Macpherson just about to rip open the front of her bathing suit. A Grecian Urn for the Dannys of the world. Well, at least we hadn’t made him a homosexual, although of course I knew that you didn’t make someone a homosexual. But thinking about Rick you wondered if Judith might have been carrying a homosexual gene or something that was in the family. I was relieved that it had stayed recessive (if it existed) although that was wrong too, to feel relieved, because homosexuality was just another way of being. And this guitar business was something else to be relieved about. True, he was getting C’s in school, but sitting down and actually working out something like the little move he’d just showed me argued that he wasn’t without some self-discipline, and that his attention span was all right even though I had taken LSD and he had watched so much television. Who knows, maybe the guitar might actually get him something. Oh, I know better than to think it’s all emperor’s new clothes and that you can be a rock-and-roll star without any talent whatsoever. But neither do you have to be a commanding genius; we all know that too. So why not Danny? And all that watch-me stuff: he seemed to be enough of a ham to get up in front of people. So why wasn’t he in some little band? And why wasn’t it all right to ask?

“Forget it,” I said. “Look, I’m not trying to tell you how to have fun. The only thing I want to say about it is, if you ever do want to have some kids over to the house to play or something, it’s fine with me.” Part of why I was offering this was that he was spending too much time at the girlfriend’s and I had an idea the girlfriend’s mother wasn’t providing much supervision. Though I was a great one to talk.

He shrugged. “Okay,” he said. I marvelled at the fine balance of his mind: my offer had just enough of an undertone so that to have thanked me would have compromised his dignity. It was neurotic to worry that he’d been born with something wrong.