The Reasons I Won't Be Coming Read online

“You gotta do that?”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you. Got to keep things clean.”

  “You gotta do that now?”

  “We’ll be seeing some foals pretty soon. Foaling season is when things have to be put down, the ones that won’t make it.”

  I started to wonder if I did not actually create more work for Neil, given that he had to check everything I was doing. Some days I would quit soon after lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon reading on the verandah. Andy had made me a chair out of some wood we had lying around. He had stripped it, sanded it, sealed it and then tacked a padded leather pouch on the seat and another at the back. He put some springs on the back legs so that it rocked or tilted a little. Then he painted all the wood pastel blue. I had become a man colored pastel blue. The color made it ugly but I could only thank him. It was very comfortable. It became my chair.

  Andy liked doing things with his hands. He was good with them. He started restoring secondhand furniture at O’Meara’s in town, and before long they were even selling new chairs, tables and cabinets that Andy had made. Sarah had put him in touch with O’Meara. They had started seeing each other. She would visit him occasionally in the shed. I would hear the car. More often he visited her. It must have been difficult for her to come to our place, given the circumstances in which she had met me. And I would see her again in similar circumstances.

  Instructions can be given in many ways: as advice, as suggestions, as orders. Even orders can be given in more than one way. I did not own the land that Neil and I worked. I did not work properly the land my wife owned, and I seemed incapable, through any exertion, of earning my wife’s respect. Whether or not poetry, the writing of it, was an activity capable of squeezing even the barest regard from Madeline, I was not the poet to do it. Somehow Neil knew all of this and he gave me instructions accordingly. After a while he spoke to me as I had once heard him speak to one of his children, in sharp, matter-of-fact barks.

  Very early on, in the days when we still took our breaks together, I had made the mistake, while searching for something to say, of commenting on the beauty of a bluish flower that grew confidently in clumps by the front gate. It was our enemy, he told me. It was Patterson’s Curse. It was a weed. We had to eradicate it. If the cows ate it they would spread it through their manure and get sick themselves. I thought it was pretty, but apparently it would take over the grass if we let it. We could get rid of it by hand where it grew in little clumps by the gate or the house but if it was in the open, we had to use a tractor.

  Together and separately we had cut grass, leaving it to dry and become hay, which we either fed to our cattle in winter or else sold at the market. As with most other jobs, Neil had shown me how to make hay and how to sell it. Sometimes we would do it together and other times separately, on our own. From early on, though, I noticed that he almost always wanted me to take the hay to market on my own. At first I did not think too much about it, but then I realized why he was sending me there alone. He was ashamed to be working another man’s land, at his age. His family and personal circumstances were known throughout the area, and as hard as it was for him to work someone else’s land, it was unbearable for him to be seen doing it. Later I realized it was more than just this. The indignity was that much greater for him if he was seen driving in, unloading and selling the hay with me.

  So I was alone with my hay in the market the day a cattle farmer, a neighbor, found some tiny bluey-purple petals among my bales. There were not many, but there did not need to be. It was a disgrace. Word of it spread like fire, and each telling pinned me tighter to the disgrace. Everybody heard. “Deliberate,” some said. “A fool” was the verdict of others. How slowly the people in town moved along the main street, until I came near them. I heard whispers in the aisle of the Welcome Mart. The scrambled-egg hair girl at the checkout looked up at me. In the time we had been living there she had dug herself deeply into her adolescence. She showed no sign of leaving.

  “How can I help you?” she asked me rhetorically, focusing all her boredom and contempt somewhere below my eyes, between my chest and my belt buckle. The man in the stockfeed and merchandise center grimaced when he saw me walk through the door. It was bad enough to be found writhing in the dirt near Lake Eildon, but now it was widely thought that I had tried to sell hay laced with Patterson’s Curse to my competitors, to my neighbors. In the way of small towns and large offices, no explicit allegations were made to my face, so there was no right of reply, no one to whom I could direct an apology. It was not possible to explain that it was not deliberate, that it might not have been me. When I told Neil what had happened, he said that he already knew. He sniffed and looked at his hands. That was all he said.

  He was not there when some men came to the house to talk about it. They said I should be prohibited from selling at the market. It was not clear whether they meant hay or everything. This was their view irrespective of whether the Patterson’s Curse had been deliberate or an accident. They would not stay for a cup of tea or a beer. They would not sit down. Andy was out with Sarah. There was just Madeline and me.

  I had ruined everything for her. I could not be trusted, not even to work. She feared that we would not be able to make a living even if we were able to coax life from the sullen earth her father had left her. In disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I felt her shoe hit me in the back of the neck without warning. It was nine days after the men had come and still she would not speak to me. But she spoke to Neil. I heard her.

  “I’ve got to do something.”

  I was outside. It was quiet but I did not hear a response. They did not know I was there.

  When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips involuntarily as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. That was the way Hugh Brasnett described it. He was still there. He had not left. His father, a thickset man, was the town butcher. Everyone knew him and therefore knew what had happened to his son Hugh. There was no incentive for Hugh to recover. If he left the hospital he would need to leave town in order to start again. He was still an involuntary, but this time I was a voluntary.

  “Tell me again about Mandelstam,” Hugh demanded. He was so happy to have me back. At first I thought it was simply because he was bored, but after a few days I could see that he was often engaged in something, even busy. He flirted with some of the female patients, regardless of age, over the smorgasbords of watery tuna and stale bread. He traded successfully in tobacco and marijuana.

  “It’s five dollars a joint here,” he explained, and when I said nothing he added, “Look, I don’t set the price . . . and . . . and it’s not my fault. Myself, I don’t smoke. That shit does nothing for me.”

  He kept an interested eye on the transient female patients and slept with quite a few of them, sometimes in our room, sometimes in theirs or else in the bathroom. The woman he kept coming back to was a quiet older woman, about my age. She was really quite pretty. He seemed to regard sleeping with her merely as an extension of his friendship with her. One night they were in our room. I had the covers over my head but I could still hear them.

  “You take me to another place . . . to another time,” she whispered, “but I have a son about your age. He doesn’t want to see me.”

  Sarah was less delighted to see me. Still sympathetic, the meeting of her personal and her professional lives clearly made her uncomfortable. Though we acknowledged the connection, I was much too ashamed to exploit her love for my son. This time I was embarrassed for her, for her having to work there, for her seeing me see her having to interact with the other patients. There was little room for dignity. Within a few days she asked me privately whether there was anything I would like Andy to bring me. I made a list of books and got them ten days later. She brought them, not Andy. He did not visit this time.

  “What are you reading? Is it Mandelstam?” Hugh asked. “Does it have the poem that got him into trouble?”

  “They all got him into trouble, but I know the one you mean.
The one about Stalin?”

  “Yes, the one they were looking for the night of the knock at the door, the night the men in overcoats came . . . when he was with his wife and that pain-in-the-arse translator and Akhmatova.”

  Hugh remembered everything I had told him about Mandelstam’s arrest in 1934. He seemed to take pride in remembering.

  “When did he write it?”

  “About six months before his arrest.”

  “Find it, will you. Read it to me.”“We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

  Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

  But where there’s so much as half a conversation

  The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.

  His fingers are fat as grubs

  And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

  His cockroach whiskers leer

  And his boot tops gleam.

  Around him a rabble of thin-necked bosses—

  fawning half-men for him to play with.

  They whinny, purr or whine

  As he prates and points a finger,

  One by one forging his laws, to be flung

  Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

  And every killing is a treat

  For the broad-chested Ossete.”

  “He sounds like my father, fingers fat as grubs. What’s an Ossete?”

  “An Ossete is a person from Ossetia, which is just above Georgia in the former Soviet Union. Stalin was supposed to have come from Georgia, but there were rumors that he was part Ossetian. I’d imagine the rumors were meant to cast doubt on his ethnic origins and parentage. For Mandelstam it was probably a way of naming him without naming him while reminding the reader or the listener how hateful he was.”

  “Who, Stalin?”

  “Yes. How hateful Stalin was.”

  “And that was the poem they came looking for six months later?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Hugh sat up against the bed head and spoke quietly, almost reverentially. It was as though he knew his words could hurt me but he had to say them anyway.

  “It’s not just his poetry, is it? I mean, it’s not just what he wrote that makes you . . . feel him so much.” There was a gentleness to his voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to be him, don’t you?”

  I smiled. “That’s crazy, Hugh.”

  “Well, maybe, but . . . that’s why you’re here.”

  “I don’t know why you say that.”

  “He’s like a . . . role model for you.”

  “Mandelstam? Mandelstam . . . suffered quite incredibly. His life was miserable. Separated from his wife, he lived in poverty in an insane and brutal time, in an insane and brutal place. His work was banned. Why . . . why would I want to be him?”

  “Because you’re a poet. I have heard you. When you came in, that night. I heard you.”

  “Oh, come on, Hugh. Is this some sort of a game, telling me things I’ve said in a delirium, because if it is, it’s beneath you. It’s pretty . . . facile.”

  “Calm down, will you. I’m not trying to be offensive.”

  “No . . . but when did you gain this sudden expertise in poetry, Russian history and psychoanalysis?”

  “But you do.”

  “Do what?”

  “You do want to . . . be him. He was a great poet, a true original, and he was . . . deeply loved . . . so deeply loved . . . by his wife. You need him to . . . help get you through.”

  When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. Hugh continued.

  “It’s okay, you know. I understand it. See, you’re not really crazy. It’s just how you get through. You’re . . . only in a childish way connected to the established order.”

  The nurses liked to have us out of bed. They kept a book in which they recorded our responses to their instructions, whether we were cooperative, how willing we were to take a shower. A doctor would occasionally read the book and this was called treatment.

  I liked to think that I was a good influence on Hugh. I never balked at getting up, taking a shower or cleaning up the ward: the cleaners did not have to touch our area. In all the time I was there, Hugh did not give them any trouble, either, until the end.

  We were playing chess in the dayroom. The television was on in the corner. The screen showed some very good-looking people in a hospital setting, some of them patients, some of them staff, all of them tanned. Apart from the sound from the TV, the room—the ward, as it was called—was fairly quiet. It was at this point that Hugh was distracted, not by the television but by a nearby conversation. A young man had come in to see Hugh’s friend, the older woman. The young man, who I later learned was her son, held in his fist a tiny bunch of flowers, which she took from him apprehensively. Hugh watched as she brushed hair out of the young man’s eyes. I tried to renew his interest in the game but could not, particularly once he had heard his own name.

  The woman mentioned Hugh’s name a few times and the young man looked in our direction. Then his voice started to get louder. As its volume increased, so did the overall tension in the room. In the television hospital a man and a woman were hugging. But in our ward the young man was shouting at Hugh’s friend. She pulled her dressing gown tighter around her, just as ashamed as he said he was.

  “No, it’s not like that.” She smiled.

  But it was, and it wasn’t, like that.

  “You’re fucking sick, you know that? You really are.” It was already too late to say anything. Hugh stood up, knocking over the chessboard. A pawn fell in my lap. Everyone watched as Hugh approached the shouting young man.

  “Stop talking to her like that.”

  They pushed one another. One of the nurses ran off to call for assistance. No one from the staff was on hand to see Hugh get punched in the face, on the side of his jaw. Some of the patients moved in to get a closer look. The quiet older woman had torn her gown trying to come between them. Hugh was laying into her son’s face with a maniacal speed by the time he was outnumbered by hospital staff.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder as I sat there without moving.

  “Just stay there. Don’t get involved.”

  It was Sarah. I listened to her and watched them overpower Hugh. The woman was shouting at him. He had battered her son. A doctor, two nurses and a maintenance man held him. He was twisting, trying to break free, trying to make them see that he was defending the woman’s honor. He was trying to convince them that he was still “the funny guy, the joker, the good normal guy” of the ward. But his protests became increasingly frenzied, hysterical and futile as he twisted and thrashed his legs about with everyone watching. A procession of patients accompanied him and his captors, some cheering him on, some shouting abuse, others just watching, fascinated by his pain or pleased that this was happening to someone else. There were not enough staff on hand to keep the patients away. They all saw how he kicked and struggled as the nurses pulled his pants down and gave him a shot. It was terrifying to see it, to see his anger, to see my young friend’s transformation, his degradation. His inability to distinguish between his status in the ward and that of any visitor would have made the apparent arbitrariness of their intervention all the more intolerable. Why did they not constrain the other man? Why did they not give him a chance to explain that this was not a psychotic episode? This was a fight, well-intentioned, even gallant.

  Sarah’s hand stayed on my shoulder. No one saw me weep. Hugh was taken to a padded cell in the isolation wing. I had done nothing at all while this was going on. The next morning one of the doctors approached me and suggested that I was ready to rejoin my family, that I should leave that day. It was thought that I was better.

  Having dressed, shaved and packed, I waited in the room all day for Hugh to come back. But he did not. One of the nurses asked me if I wanted to call home to arrange to be picked up. I said that I would make my own way home. The
walk would take me an hour or so, but I felt I needed it. Before leaving, I wrote Hugh a note. I did not refer to the events of the previous day but instead reminded him that in Mandelstam’s time people used to copy out poems as gifts for each other. The gift was all the more valuable if the publication of the poem was proscribed. Then I wrote out the one he liked most, his favorite, thanked him and wished him luck. The note, I knew, would do nothing for him. I was only in a childish way connected to the established order.

  By not even trying to help him during the disturbance, I had demonstrated that I was ready to join the outside world. This was the world Sarah would have me rejoin. It contained my son, whom she loved. I could imagine the way they talked to each other, the way she loved him in spite of the embarrassment that was his father, the way they promised to take each other away from all that smacked of their parents’ generation. If I had done nothing else for him, I had brought them to each other. Now she brought me back to him. And I had done nothing else for him. That he had grown up solid as a tree, strong, uncomplicated and good with his hands, all of it had nothing to do with me.

  The fruit was falling from the trees by the side of the road. Sometimes it rolled away, far from the trees. I walked into town. It was almost deserted at that time of day. The dogs were asleep on the steps of the public library. The hairdresser was closed. Through the window of the butcher shop I saw a man hosing down drip trays and wondered if it was Hugh’s father. Fat pink sausages hung in the window like Stalin’s fingers. The man looked up at me with suspicion. His face was the face of a tyrant. Hugh had fought him just as he had fought what he perceived as injustice a day earlier. His father had so often sworn at him, demeaned him, hit him. When Hugh had fought back, the local police made a deal with the butcher and Hugh became a local involuntary patient.

  A couple of Harley-Davidsons were parked on the grassy median strip in the center of the main street opposite the hotel. The bank and even the bakery were closed. It was night by then. The streetlights had come on and I walked home knowing that when I left the precincts of the town I would be walking in the dark. There I was under a streetlight, moths overhead, looking at my reflection in O’Meara’s Furniture, where Andy worked. By changing my position and orientation I could manipulate my reflection into chairs my son had built or helped restore. I wished so much that I could have given him something. When I cry I suck on my front teeth and purse my lips involuntarily as though in anticipation of an onslaught of kisses. I saw it in the window. I sat on my pastel blue chair, the one Andy had made for me. When I moved away, it remained in the window. It was for sale.