by Jack Carneal
Shit happens.
Is there a worse saying than that one?
Tick was in the garage about to varnish the bench seat to the Whaler runabout. The seat was mahogany or teak, the boat bought the year Fitzgerald was born, perhaps it was Corbin, not Ogden because he recalls Ogden skiing behind it the day they bought it, a four year-old there behind the boat pulling himself up onto the old broad skis, a diamond-bright being who did not yet know fear and maybe never figured it out the way most of us do. Those bright eyes, hair slicked back, the color of that hair, salt-scoured, not blond, not brown, before Ogden lost the other eye, the eyepatch not yet a part of the visible world but there already in Ogden, somehow. The seat of the Whaler was a single three foot long piece of seamless plank, the brace it rested on mahogany also, front and middle benches the same, the boat just 13 feet long but a beautiful little piece of sculpture with its molded fiberglass shell and mahogany woodwork. He rubbed the seat with fine grit sandpaper, blowing away the dust with pursed lips.
I just cannot stand it when people say that, he said. Can you?
He turned to Sally lying on a squashed hay bale, her chin on her crossed paws. Her eyebrows twitched in his direction.
It shouldn’t anger me so much but it does. Shit does not happen. It does not. I don’t like kneejerk whatever it is. Cynicism. Nihilism.
He turned back to the bench and lowered the sheet of sandpaper against the bench and watched his hand move back and forth as if it was someone else’s hand.
We’ve got everything to do with what happens, Sally. Shit absolutely does not happen. It just doesn’t happen, like that, ex nihilio. Everything’s got a root that it grows from.
Sally looked up at him, licked her chops a few times, and repositioned her head on the bale.
It’s all connected. Feed the root. Sit back and watch. Starve the root, pay the price later.
His voice was measured, reasonable.
All connected. All one.
Out the barn door he watched Eugenie in her big straw hat bending over and picking up branches in the meadow. She looked the same now as she ever did but when she bent she did so with a slowness that made Tick sad.
He thought of Tu Fu: life passing in a wildfire.
Past Eugenie a thin stand of pines swayed in a soft afternoon breeze and beyond the pines the bay was the deep blue of a peacock's fan. Of the color of Kali's skin that he'd seen in Hindu paintings.
Tick could sense why people of limited intellect would adopt shit happens as a way to explain the world. It reflected so much of what he hated about contemporary Americans: spoiled, glib, prone to intellectual shortcuts, absolving them—us—of blame for anything, shifting the emphasis away not just from responsibility but from historical narrative and precedent. It was the response of someone who’d forgotten (or never knew) that each discrete event in the whole world when pieced together became a tragedy of infinite gravity that even now makes Tick’s insides shake. There's just no other way to look at it, he considered.
The girl Sophie would be forever changed, forever marked, by her abandonment, by being witness to her father’s breakdown, the murder of the dogs, the hippie parents like two wisps of milkweed, undernourished and loose, who’d danced at Ogden and Patty’s wedding like a couple of rutting stoats.
Son Ogden and ex-wife-now-girlfriend Patty, too, Patty’s own belly now growing and holding a baby born to older parents who had their own problems, God knew, a child marked for life by his parents’ being divorced during his conception and very possibly during his life, whatever oath they’d sworn that day in Charlottesville already broken. Now they had a teenage girl to take care of until of course her parents returned to retrieve Sophie, if they ever did. And then what if those two fruitcakes decided they wanted their daughter back? Should Ogden and Patty let the girl go with those two fuckups? And then there is Corbin’s meeting after so many years the boy who was with Ogden the day he lost his eye at Dovecote, and over the course of time falling in love with that same boy, the son of a man Tick admires greatly but with whom he has not spoken in years, a black man, and that at a benefit for Tim Kaine, now the governor, then running for city council. And now probably the next time he would see this man, Darryl’s father—they’d gone up to New York once for a Democratic rally in the seventies before Manhattan rebounded, sharing a hotel room in midtown with velour bedspreads, they each having consumed pitchersfull of some drink like Tom Collinses, with then-mayor Henry Marsh and future governor Doug Wilder, the streets in midtown dark and empty, Manhattan in the seventies—would be to welcome him into the Tyndall family and meanwhile be welcomed into his.
Corbin and Darryl would be married in a few weeks.
Behind each event was an unknowably complex combination of unpredictable factors. To be an intelligent human being was to desire to know the patterns that lead to events. To want to know those patterns, to have events line up like the corduroy-legged corn rows whipping by in those long strips of green, that desire was the root of intelligence, that sense of unfolding out into the world, of discovering rather than covering.
You should want to know what happens, he said to Sally, shrugging his shoulders. Or what happened. How things line up. What does the result…result in.
In the cool barn a scent strikes him: the desiccation on the other side of the door before he even opened it, the old smokehouse next to the tobacco curing shed where in his youth his grandfather had slaughtered his own pigs and hung their hams in that room at Dovecote built by slaves where you stepped down a foot into a dank cool pyramid, the floor black from fire, walls and ceiling black also, the salt-reek of meat thick inside, and finding within it the large wooden locker and flipping open the lid to find all of those masks and amulets nestled among a collection of not masks but skulls; the locker was one of seven or eight large wooden boxes, a few of them six feet by four, and all filled with pieces of human skulls.
He told Sally that he’d heard that the construction of Indo-European sentences with noun then verb then direct object created a linear and deductive pattern that served as a basis for Western thought and perhaps even Christianity: this pattern of sentence structure reflected the not just the Western desire but the expectation that we must progress towards something conclusive, finite, empirical. Something that points us towards Enlightenment, the light, salvation. If we follow these paths, of course. We are always thinking about where we will be and not where we are. He knows that it's a sin to the Mohamedans to think not just about what will happen in a year but what will happen in ten seconds; doing so presumes that Allah will allow you to live for another ten seconds. You must not presume to know the will of God. So grew the idea that now is more important than what will be.
Tick granted there was something mysterious about chance and it was probably chance and coincidence that lead people to invent gods.
Speaking of Easterners, maybe shit happens was just a vulgar way to describe what he’d always admired about the Buddhists and the Mohamedans: Not everything could be explained in a post-enlightenment, science-based framework. It was the same as Keats’s negative capability, the desire to be still and quiet and patient inside of a mystery without having to try to deduce what makes it mysterious or to explain it in the language of our world.
What happens to happen is what’s important, and that it happened, but not necessarily how or why it happened, which, that last part, is the part that Tick wonders if we Westerners don’t get a little bogged down—
Tick poured more varnish onto the wood. The rag he’d been using to spread the varnish—a cotton diaper he sees now, old, far older than grandson Joe Bird, than grand-daughter Sam, which left his own children, all in their forties, as those who sullied this white cotton so long ago, Tick becoming not so much sentimental as awestruck looking at the diaper—was beginning to drop some pills onto the surface of the bench seat so he went to the cabinet along the barn wall where he kept his painting supplies lined up in neat rows and removed a 3 inch brush. He bent the brush into a can of thinner and marveled at how well the thinner did its job of removing the old crust from the brush, the bristles clean, healthy. It was a nice brush, the only kind Tick would buy. The thinner was cool against his skin and he recalls now being washed in thinner by his father when Tick upset a barrel of roofing tar when he was on the roof at Dovecote’s barn with Henry one summer. He watched his father circling a field in the tractor as the tar tipped and covered his own legs and before the General could see him he slid down the roof and dropped to the ground, Henry yelling at him as he escaped into the woods along the river before the General could find him and beat him senseless as he had in the past, his legs growing slower and heavier as the tar dried. Finally he came to a break in the shoreline and jumped in the river but only felt the tar drawing up against his legs beneath the cool water. It was the same summer, that same one that his mother was struck by lightning while standing in the hayloft door of the same barn as Tick watched from the open door of the kitchen, her hair smoldering
the thinner cold then burning, skin sloughing off over the course of days.
Which is worse, Sally? Shit Happens or It’s all good? he says quickly. Which one of those is more idiotic?
Sally whined and rolled over on to her side. Tick cracked the brush with a wrist-snap, the cloud of thinner dissipating in the sun falling in through the open barn door. He recalled pulling into the gas station down at Middlesex courthouse a little too fast not too long ago and tapping bumpers with a young kid in a pickup truck. The kid hopped out cocky as a bantam rooster until he saw Tick in his old man’s sunglasses crouched behind the wheel of the Subaru. The boy rubbed his bumper and said It’s all good, Pops.
Tick couldn’t believe it. He leaned out his window and said right back to him, It’s not all good. Very little of it is good. It would make more sense, much more sense, to say it’s all bad. Everything. It’s rotten to the goddam core. Always has been, from the start. It’s better that way.
The kid backed away from Tick and reached for his door handle.
This is something to take relief in, believe me! Tick yelled. It’s better this way!
Were Americans growing dumber? Was the world? Does the obvious entropy of the world, the universe still expanding like a matchflame eventually to collapse on itself, mirror also an entropy of human intelligence? Was it better when we thought there was less to know?
There is the stereotype, Sally dear, that evolution is progressive, that we were all getting smarter as we progress, but this guy—he puts the brush and the varnish down on the boat bench and points both thumbs towards his chest—sees the opposite.
Tick was well past 60 when he finally learned that intelligence was as liquid a concept as any. It was when Joe Bird was born and when he got to watch the boy’s bright eyes following him as he walked across the room, watching Joe Bird learn to eat, to walk, to speak, to run, to converse, a little machine of learning and doing. It was easy to see that his first grandson Joe Bird was a genius and certainly no other children were this bright or smart…until he learned that they all were. They were all little computing machines who could perform miracles. All of them. And then he had to think that probably he’d spent much of his life having defined the concept of intelligence too narrowly: who went to what school, what kind of job did they have, could they converse without making an ass of themselves. There were many different types of intelligence, of course, and only one of them was connected in any way to one’s ability to think or analyze.
It was obvious to him now that he was cursed with the reflex to define intelligence as a function of intellect rather than as a social tool. Intelligence had always been connected to one’s ability to analyze something in a deductive way and again he recognized how tethered he was to his respect and adoration of old academic concepts: art, music, law, literature, movies, broader social or political issues, cultural developments in any of the above. It was cocktail party chatter. Now, nearly seventy, he knew intelligence had little or nothing to do with how much money one might make, with how well one navigated the wider world, and in fact intelligence could be used as a monkey uses a tool, a manifestation of a type of animal cleverness, by people who he considered might not have a brain in their heads. He had a sense earlier in his life that such might be true; that is, that one didn’t need to be smart necessarily to be successful in business or life generally, or that base animal intelligence was hundreds of degrees different from that intelligence tied however tenuously to a moral or artistic imperative, but he assumed that most rich people were smart enough to figure out how to get rich because they were smart. And not animals. But now he wondered.
Tick watched it the varnish spread over the wood. It smelled clean and sweet. The teak soaked it in and seemed to thank Tick for pouring the varnish on its back. Out in the meadow he saw that Eugenie’s shadow—she now crouched on her knees, her hands down in the earth, barely visible—gathered around her like a pool of water, the sun directly above. It was like she was disappearing into a hole, feet first. He stood still and watched her. Sally was on her hay-bed dreaming. He could hear her little moans and whimpers, see her legs twitch. The children would come soon, Corbin and Darryl, to scout out places for the tent people from Gloucester, Fitz and Kath, and their kids too, obliterating even the chance for these quiet moments where he could varnish the boat and Eugenie could replant dahlias and Sally could sleep. Ogden and pregnant Patty, the teenage daughter who would not speak to Fitz and who only sat there chewing on her fingers.
Turning back to the boat and the can of varnish he knew this also as if the thought had been placed in his imagination by an invisible smoke-shaped hand: His entire life had been shaped by death. Even those moments of purest joy that even now flashed in his memory with palpable immediacy so vivid he believed for a moment he could touch them, those that reflected as pure an ideal of joy as could be imagined, were lit so brightly because next to them, in the same room if not the same bed or chair, sharing his eyes and mind, was the shadow of death. Or not shadow: a voice maybe, a whispering of wind under a loose window sash, the muffled klonk of a radiator pipe, the moan of wind out beyond the point, the ghostly flicker of moonlight on rising whitecaps out on the river. Lifting his daughter for the first time, feeling her little perfectly balanced body, tight and muscular, even as he lifted her and watched her solid little form in silhouette against the chandelier at Dovecote he knew that this purest joy of lifting his daughter was so pure not solely because of her new life but because both she and he would one day die. And why not? The week after re-tarring the barnroof, his mother standing in the doorway of the hayloft, waving across the yard to him standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a separate building across a brick sidewalk next to a brick wall designed by Jefferson, the light green out on the river, a weird cloud over the corn at the edge of the yard, a lick of lightning, a shriek that was not a shriek, the body dropping with its hands crossed in front, hair a’smolder. But even before: remembering as a child hearing about Henry’s brother, lynched in Suffolk having gone there to find work at a peanut farm. The skulls his father kept in the smokehouse, collected from the riverbed and the far cornfields where the barracoom stood. As a young man he’d watched in horror as a car hit a tree on Route 5, the end of the car bouncing back up so hard and high it, the rear of the automobile hit the tree as well, coming to rest with the headlights now crosseyed; he watched as the ambulance attendant pulled a large woman from the car, her legs as loose in their hands as jelly. He turned from the wreck knowing nothing that he hadn’t known before and walked away from it knowing that it was better to be alive than dead.
He’d had 70 odd years to reflect on all of this and he knew now that age hadn’t focused his knowledge or forced him to focus on the matter of death. He had carried it with him since birth, at least as long as he could remember.
Once he was pretending to be the owl that lived in the hollow oak out along the river, one of the owls that lived in the woods along the fields, able to scout small animals rambling through the cut corn from the fields' edges, when he saw Henry who he knew not to be black or white but instead looked made of wood, carrying a bundle of feathers so large it appeared to be a suitcase out onto the black field, the boy all the while remaining still and turning his head slowly on his neck and pretending to scan the yard surrounding for field mice or possum, watching Henry now walking out among the nter brown grass with his suitcase then recognizing the single yellow eye peering out at him from the bundle of feathers and he knowing that what he was pretending to be was now dead, voided of spirit and being taken far enough away from the house that the dogs might not get into it or at least not in front of grandmother, who sat nightly watching for the owl to leave the live oak on the edge of the yard.
It had eaten a poisoned mole.
Later in the summer cousin George shouldered the 410 and shot up in to the poplars and Tick walking with him saw the squirrel jumping panicked from one branch to the next as George walked calmly on the ground below firing until the squirrel cartwheeled down, its paws outstretched, landing in a pile at George’s feet, its white belly spotted with impossibly bright red. The dog Mark being killed in a fight with a raccoon, his father the general taking him out to the edge of the marsh and there they saw the footprints of the dance of death: raccoon/dog/dog/raccoon, round pad, small oblong, the beautiful carving of their nails in the black mud.
Am I being too serious, Sally?
He realized now he’d been talking to her, telling her these things, her paws crossing, uncrossing, she shifting to her side, her eyes closing as he spoke.
Because before anyone accuses me of being humorless I’ll tell anyone who asks that William Faulkner is the greatest comedy writer of the 20th century.
At a recent cocktail party over in Kilmarnock he told Dr. Beazley that he thought Absalom! Absalom! was the funniest book ever written, bar none.
Who but a completely perverse person would write such a book and foist it upon the public in hopes that they’d wade through it? he’d argued.
The doc answered, Well, by that token then probably you find Ulysses pretty funny and Tick answered, I’d say Ulysses was funnier but I never met a truly funny Irishman. I don’t like sentimental humor and that’s all the Irish know. And Joyce was too mean by half, mean because he was blind and had the retarded daughter who made his life so difficult, he was too mean to write a book as funny as Absalom! Absalom! Only a person with an extraordinarily well-developed sense of humor could write such a book as Absalom! Absalom! and have it published. I’m sure Faulkner was laughing as he wrote it.”
That scene in the beginning with the old lady and her feet dangling from the chair with mute truculence or whatever it was, outside the swallows tittering in the dusty wisteria, or however it is he writes it, made Tick laugh out loud and he tells Sally, trying to sleep now, that he claims to try to imagine that very scene every time he gets upset. When Ogden and Patty separated. When Louis hurt Corbin’s feelings so. When the old Chris Craft sank. When they sold Dovecote a year or so ago, the old house barely able to stand, the ridgepole sagging, slates loose, window sashes lopsided, mullions cracked.
Little old lady’s legs can’t reach the ground, he said, the kids looking down from the barn at the fight their daddy’s in with the slaves. Funniest book ever written, Sally. He was an odd duck but not so odd that he couldn’t figure out how funny it would be to publish that book.
Beazley said, “You met him once, didn’t you Tick?”
“Why, yes. Back when I was just starting out working for the city…”
(part two of TICK STORY will appear in the 15 December issue of EAP, and I wouldn't miss it, if I were you, since in it, Tick manages to beat William Faulkner himself at his own game…)