Norman Rush - Mating

So out in a clear space in a madrone thicket sat his concretion. I think his brother was at select times permitted to visit this holy of older brother holies. His father’s bottle dump was much closer to the house, in an arroyo. Nelson’s site is safe, he assumes, because both his parents are so demonstrably indoor-oriented. If his mother goes out, it’s out the front door to shop or go to church or to the doctor. Nelson’s father has a den and uses it.

It’s early evening. Nelson has evolved the custom of going out and lighting up his bottle structure and looking at it for a while before dinner. He has latitude, because dinner is usually late because his father has important things to do in his den before dinner — id est drinking, in fact — which usually enormously protracts things. Nelson accepts but hates dinner being late, because he and his brother have to do the dishes, which he had no objection to except that there was never a fixed time he could look forward to when he would be free, done. Sometimes dinner is even brought to his father at his desk.

I wanted to know what his father had been doing, ostensibly, in his solitude. There were two things. One was keeping up with his important reading, meaning in those days the Socialist Call, which he subscribed to, and the Militant and the Weekly People, which he brought home with him and all of which he gave Nelson in a bundle once a week to burn for him. He also got somewhere the Despatcher, a publication of the longshoremen’s union, which was then an organization terribly feared by the powers that were. In those days, Nelson said, this is how left San Francisco was: you could get the Militant and the Weekly People on newsstands the same as you got the Chronicle or the vicious Examiner. Nelson saw his father as a fan of the left, generically. His father belonged to nothing, did nothing left — either of which might have been dangerous. Nelson’s explanation for his father’s having become a passive admirer of the left had to do with his heart’s having been broken when something called the End Poverty in California Campaign had been defeated through chicanery and vile propaganda tricks orchestrated by the movie industry, this in the thirties. Also he hated Stalin for what he had done to the good part of the left. When he could finally have adult discussions about socialism with his father, it emerged that the idea of joining anything openly had been impossible because he had a wife and children. Nelson believed him. The other thing he was doing was working on charts supposed to predict when the next depression would come. This entailed heavy use of an adding machine, whose noise, I pointed out, would also serve to remind the family that serious business was taking place.

In any case here is Nelson squatting down in the gloaming contemplating his creation. The dimensions of the object were considerable, with a bottom tier about five feet across and the pinnacle reaching four feet. The one not purely aesthetic impulse he conceded might have gotten admixed into his project was what he called cathedralism, the impression osmosing to him from his church-mad mother that the most significant human creation of all time is the cathedral.

Nelson hears someone coming furtively up.

It’s his father, drunk, and, as he gets close enough to really discern the thing Nelson has built, incredulous, and then affronted, and then enraged by it.

Clearly he instantly categorizes this thing as a mockery of his drinking: all his hidden fifths have been retrieved and refilled and lit up for all the world to see. Nelson cringes, but his father turns on his heel and strides back into the darkness toward the house. But this is not the end. Nelson knows it and stays there, frozen. No words have been spoken.

Nelson’s father returns, this time carrying a Stillson wrench and a pickax. Nelson’s heart clenches. He has never been physically afraid of his father. In fact his father has always been principled against corporal punishment, and Nelson has seen his mother reprimanded by him over her lapses in this regard.

Denoon’s father was on the small side, faircomplected, with a blond toothbrush mustache, not threatening. Nelson had his mother’s dark complexion, although she was rather slightly built, so where Nelson’s bearlike form came from is unclear. She had a dead brother Nelson was supposed to be the image of.

Nelson hears the word cocksucker for the first time in his life.

His father slings the wrench at the bottlements.

Some damage is done, but the wrench has been badly aimed. The flashlight or candle is still burning, so there is still this illuminated statement.

Nelson was given no chance to explain his structure.

In any case the wrench has smashed through the bottles in the outer part of the lowest tier, but the heart of the insult is still glowing.

So now comes the time to wield the second weapon, the pickax.

Nelson is in agony, dancing around the perimeter but being careful to be ready to dodge when pater monster lets fly for the second time.

He said something to try to get his father to stop, but he has no memory of what it was. His father begins to swing the pickax around in the air.

All I could think the first time I heard this story was If you marry you will regret it, If you fail to marry you will regret it. This was one of the few things I was able to bring to Denoon’s already topheavy intellectual armamentarium. He had somehow missed reading the great Either/Or of Kierkegaard, which is an ordeal except for the one small section whose name I forget that contains that gem. And what I was thinking, of course, was if you have a father you will regret it, If you have no father you will regret it: I was thinking of myself. This became one of Nelson’s favorite quotes, somewhat to my chagrin as to what it meant vis-à-vis being with me. But if we had I would have gotten an agreement out of him not to use it in public when I was around. He always used the aphorism in the most general or comic sense as a way of saying nothing ever works out, but still it stung me slightly. There was a period when we were in effect married, by most criteria.

Did you scream or cry? I asked him. How did you feel seeing he was about to destroy this thing without showing even for an instant that he knew it was remarkable?

What adds to the pathos of this is that Nelson knew stories about his father’s deprived early life — he was fostered to a farm family, for example, where he was told he had to drink the water for the animals as opposed to the water that was for the family — and that once he knew these stories a consuming fantasy of his was to go back in time and appear at his father’s side, as a buddy, and to fight the injustices he was enduring, get him out of things.

Did you beg, did you plead? I asked him. He had protested, but he couldn’t say how exactly.

Did he show any sign he appreciated even just the industriousness behind your creation, which is exactly the kind of creative thing you presumably want your children to do, if only to keep out of mischief? He was drunk, Nelson said.

His father whirls the pickax awkwardly around his head like someone tossing the caber but he is in fact so drunk that when he lets go, the pickax flies off, missing the bottlements altogether, through the madrones, down a slope into long grass where it is lost.

The detail is horrible.

Get me it, Nelson’s father says or screams, meaning the lost pickax. Clearly this would be so he can have another try. And clearly he knows he is too wobbly with drink to go and find the thing himself.

Couldn’t you have gone to get your mother? was my question. This is what we’re for, I said. But he claimed it never occurred to him, which makes me suspect that his father’s praxis toward Nelson’s mother was cruel enough, whatever Nelson says, to make him want to leave her out of this, that it might be dangerous for her.