Mark Slouka - Gods Fool

My sincere thanksyet againto Sloan Harris, Jordan Pavlin, and Colin Harrison, exhorter extraordinaire, my students and colleagues at the Columbia University Writing Division, for providing encouragement or commiseration as needed, and the National Endowment for the Arts, for shrinking the bills.

I am indebted, however, not only to friends and governmental agencies, but to certain books as well, particularly Lawrence Weschlers Dr. Wilsons Cabinet of Wonders, which sharpened my sense of the nineteenth centurys appetite for curiosities, and Henry Mayhews magisterial London Labour and the London Poor, which made the costermongers stalls along Petticoat-lane as vivid and familiar to me as anything on Broadway.

In a vertical world, a world of men like pines, or posts, more separate than they know, we were born with a bridge. A small, fleshy bridge, a hand span long and half as thick (thick enough for a boy to march his soldiers across if he watched their steps and they kept in file), forever connecting our two principalities like an act of God, the will of the citizens to hate one another be damned. If a life were measured by the number of metaphors it gives occasion to, the opportunities it presents to journalistic hacks and carnival barkers, ours has been rich indeed; in the field of grammar alone we have been wealthy beyond measure, a veritable primer made flesh. We were the hyphenated twins, as that nice young man writing for La Quotidienne once put it. We were a living conjunction, an if or an and or a but where a full stop would have been both correct and kind. We were separate sentences spliced with a comma, an error come alive. I could go on.

The day we were born, the midwives ran from our monstrous birth, leaving our mother to cut her own cord, untwist and bathe us. Twenty years later, the citizens of two continents came running to stare. I despised them about equally. I never changed. I see this now as my essential trait: Pushed to the wall by man or God, I pushed back. If the world showed its teeth, I rubbed it against the fur. I was born that way, and if I were to live to be as old as Methuselah, Id be that way still.

Little Charlie Stratton, who could stand in a teacup, once preached me a sermon on Christian acceptance. We must accept our fate with humility and gra-titude, he hectored me in that mad-duck voice of his, and I remember being tempted to add, and milk it like an udder until it runs dry, but didnt, distracted, I suppose, by the furious little digit he poked at my stomach with each stressed syllable (ac-cept our fate with hu-mi-lity and gratitude), like a schoolteacher trapped in a childs dream. Oh, but how he made us cringe, Barnums little brick, posing and primping for councillors and queens: now Romulus bravely attacking a vase, now Cain with a club the size of a quill, now Crusoe in furs like a shipwrecked squirrel. But we were separate cases, Charlie and I. Humility is prudent when youre the size of a hat.

Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldnt bear to call it right. It seemed unjust to me that those we had come to know should have to leave us, that the mowers resting in the shade had to rise, that perfection passed. Gideon liked to claim that my melancholy grew the more I watered it, but it wasnt the wine that made the passing of things so hard for me, just as it isnt the port by my side that makes me miss him now. No, like God, I had a jealous nature. I would have kept him here, you see. Drawn a circle around him, as I would around all the ones Ive known and loved. And some besides. And in that circle, their heads thrown back through a warm ray of sun (the mark of my benediction), the mowers could laugh forever, one leg up and one leg out as the handles of their tools slowly moldered to dust and the blades of their scythes sank down in the grass. But the circle didnt hold. I couldnt hold it. Except once, maybe.

Before the attack on Cemetery Ridge, they say, Picketts men waited in the woods by the edge of the open fields, watching the milkweed drifting in the air like a lost squall. They knew. Every man and boy among them. Some scribbled quick notes against the stocks of their rifles or their brothers backs or the stones of the old mossed walls that ran through those woods like a stitch through a quilt, marking borders long forgottenTo Miss Masie, To My Father, In Case of My Deaththen pinned them to their shirts. Most just sat with their backs against the trees, their caps hung lightly on their bayonets, waiting.

No one spoke. A bee buzzed on a turtlehead blooming in the damp, climbed up the tongue. A hot blade of sun lit the moss on a boulder, cut the toes off a boot. Here and there men lay sprawled on the previous seasons leaves, staring up through the layered branches as if into the milky eye of heaven itself. Further off, where an old road cut light through the roof of leaves, a photographer in a black vest and a wide-brimmed hat went about his business, hurrying back and forth from a small, square wagon.