A THING LIKE THIS

When my father built the barn, he used rough-cut hemlock; long thin boards that looked split by an axe, as if the wood was pried apart. He was broke and okay with being rustic. He nailed each board vertically around the three long sides, meeting the stone-wall still there from the previous barn, still strong, holding up the hill.
      He did it alone because we were indoor boys with computers, staring into screens to ask girls questions we hadn't learned to ask properly or in person, spending the whole summer doing just this. And because he was gentle, and understood, and was okay with working alone. His marriage was showing its wrinkles; it splintered in places, being pried apart. This was just at the beginning, but he could feel it coming. Ended each tired night sitting on the gate of his pickup truck, throwing cans at the fire. Some mornings he woke up there and got right back to work.
      By the time the barn turned grey, the marriage had been lost and gained, and the barn had filled with animals that too were gained and lost. It only takes a couple winters.
      The first to die was one of a pair of ducks; accidentally had his legs crushed by a horse, and became too crippled to live, sores on his chest from dragging on the ground. When he was gone, we'd find his partner every morning in the driveway, far from the barn, staring into the round wheel-well of my mother's Bronco, at his reflection in the hubcap. Trying, we thought, to find his friend inside.
      This past winter was one of cold and loss. Everyone I know lost someone or something; grandfathers or the will to face the next frozen day. The world had turned wicked on us in a way we could feel with our skin. The cold seemed unfair, the way it did over and over again that summer before that I spent mostly at funerals. I'd never been to one before; thought of them selfishly, not wanting to see my friends shiny as bell peppers, different than I remember. Sheena taught me that you go for the family, not for yourself, and in three short months I got very familiar with this, and also with how important it is to bring your kids to these things. There are other things than this right here, this winter will break.
      It was the same winter someone left the fire on without the flame, and gassed my mother's crow in the living room. She woke up, feeling hungover from tainted air, and went downstairs to find her best friend in the world lying in newspaper and shit, all worn feathers and feet frozen, branchlike. Opera, which was his favorite, still played on the radio from the night before.
      It was always the mornings after the frozen nights when we'd wake up to things like this. My father's story from last winter is the worst. Morning, still dark, coffee and the news, then the barn to feed and change the sawdust on the stall floors, meant for soaking piss. This was the routine. This morning, sliding open the large grey barndoor, something was strange. The horses, usually eager for handfuls of hay and peppermint treats, were instead somber and restless. They were like ghosts, he said, standing in the dark. He flicked on the old ceiling lamps that take a long time to warm up, especially in the cold. Still dim, he opened the second stall to see the goat on the cold ground, legs twisted under him. He had been getting old. He must have fallen, lay too long to recover, pissing, and when finally the time came to rise, found himself stuck to sawdust and ground and frozen piss. The whole night like this. He's dead, my father thought, touching his hard fur. He would need to be buried when the ground thawed out; this would be the next step to this. This was a problem with a solution. The goat's eyes whirled a bit in their sockets, he tried to raise his heavy head and showed his tongue and teeth. The frozen goat was still alive.
      He went to the garage, then to the house, digging frantically in drawers for the tool that would make some other thing possible in this moment, for something that could rearrange this morning. Something that would make this a better story. He wanted, he said, to wake my mother, but thought it seemed unfair and a bad use of time. The goat still lay frozen to the ground, voice too frozen to cry, just eyes still holding on to life.
      He came back to the barn, the horses still ghostly, hungry but having a sense of priority in this. The lights were up to full strength by then. My father plugged a hairdryer into the extension cord, and sat on his knees in the sawdust and frozen piss, trying to warm the goat with his body and melt the hold the earth had to his skin. The goats eyes, he said, he couldn't look at them. He just tried, he said, to stick to this one small task. Melt this ice, then the day will be different than this.
      He melted the ice, but the goat couldn't stand; the frozen ran deep, was there too long, changed the way his body knew to work. He finally died, unlocked from the ground, my father on his knees, pushing at his heavy haunches, trying to help him stand. The thaw was just too much, his blood was too confused at this place between worlds. But neither of them gave up.
      I have read that children survive better than adults in survival situations. That a child six or under has better chances than a strong adult when faced with an avalanche or a plane crash in dense forest. An adult will panic, dart, scream, try to be clever, will look frantically for tools. They will lose themselves and lose themselves again, trying to retrace their steps. Tired, they will collapse in a new, even stranger place, to do the same again tomorrow. On and on until we lose them. A child, frightened, will hide in the first warm place it finds and stay there, crying, until the rescue comes, which it often does, eventually. They just wait it out. We need something to do with our hands, need to know we still have the power to change this thing that we cannot. Action lets us think we can change some small part of the parts of life that are so tragically out of our hands. That we can fix the broken bits somehow.
      I remember my father telling me the story of his first dog, Sam. Sam went missing Christmas morning, my father eleven or twelve. He didn't wake his parents; it was Christmas, and he was gentle. He left his presents wrapped by the tree and went out looking for Sam. The morning was quiet and still dark. Peaceful. Eventually found him, almost delicate, broken by a car and frozen to a curb. He dug him out, tried to melt the bond by breathing hard through his two cupped hands at the place Sam's body stuck to earth. Hacked at it with a rock, got a shovel from the garage to pry him up like a heavy stone, dirt and gravel frozen to his flat underside. He marched home with him in his arms, fingers trembling in his mittens, tears and snot freezing to his frozen face. He would have to wait until the ground softened to bury him.
      It is a cruel trick of life that makes any man do this kind of thing more than once; that makes a thing like this familiar.

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HOW IT WORKS

My mother called yesterday to say the snow horse had to go; bad heart, won't make it through winter. She listened to it herself. She said "A horse heart sounds like this: ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. His sounds like this: ba-ssssss ba-sssss ba-sssss." She made a sound like fizz in the spaces between the healthy beats. She detailed the grisly task of burying a horse; the chains, the dozer, the winch winding like a spool, dragging its weight through sawdust, leaving a trail as wide as two sidewalks. The hole and the hill beside it. The burial permit. She can't, she said, talk about it, but then continued to. It is also my father's birthday. She made manicotti.
      My father had little to share; one sister's half-house grew to three quarters, the brother still at home got a beagle pup and so has recovered fully from the botched coke drop that ended with a gun in his mouth. Still no word from the oldest; "the bunker's still quiet," my father said. Everyone, though, is doing fine.
      I remember when the man came to castrate the snow horse, right after we brought it home. I was surprised he wore jeans. His drugs made it wobble like a shitty table, its barrel finally finding, with no uncertain grace, the ground. He used a rope to part its legs then what seemed like a dull-knife tearing, then two skinned rabbits lying in the gravel, seeming to throb. It's the last memory I have of being a child. I left later that day on the first plane of many. Sometimes I'm back for Christmas.
      I did not tell my mother, when it happens, I want her to send me a video of the snow horse falling; want to see her feed it last carrots, last peppermints, to wrap it in the too-small blankets she stitched together just for this. Want to watch it pulled into the hole, disappearing out of the frame. I want to see the camera shake as my mother walks over, and then the tender view from above. I want to watch it. I want to learn how it works. "You can always tell when it's someone's birthday around here," she said laughing.

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EPITOME: TO CUT SHORT, AS IN "TUSK"

Ronald Reagan bought an elephant, his party's symbol, from Harrod's in 1967. They also sold alligators and lions. He was, allegedly, given the choice between Indian and African. They call it an epidemic now. That means white folks are doing it.
     When Ronald Reagan met Richard Pryor, he wore his whiteness like pajamas; the clown on the bag of wonderbread, Jack. He offered jellybeans and vacant eyes: You can tell a lot about a fella's character by whether he picks out all one color or just grabs a handful.
     Pryor: Motherfucker looked at me like I owed him money.
     Two years before, Jelly Belly had introduced the blue jellybean so that Reagan could have red, white, and blue candies on Air Force One, held in a specially-designed bowl that wouldn't spill in turbulence. Invented just for this. Coincidentally, this was the same year he fired 11,345 air traffic controllers. They draped their transceivers by coiled cords and climbed down the ladders of their lookout towers rung by rung. New men with flashlights like orange cone torches showed them which way to walk away from their lives.
     The year before that, Richard Pryor lit himself on fire. Poured rum into his hair, lit a pipe, and covered himself in flames. Well, that's a pretty blue. He burst down the street, starlike, shoes melting to the blacktop and leaving sticky tracks until he fell and rolled and slept. When you burn up, he said, your skin goes to sleep. Elsewhere: Fire is inspirational. They should use it in the Olympics.
     For his big return show on the Sunset Strip, in a red suit and gold shoes, his last joke was someone else's: One he'd heard in the hospital. Lit a match and held it up: What's this? he asked and answered himself: Richard Pryor running down the street.
     Joseph Merrick, whose skin grew like tombs and rose like bread from his face and shoulders, and as he grew older, limbs and lungs, kept a picture of his mother, always, with him. Found the cage in '84. His mother was pushed down by a fairground elephant while he was inside her and so he turned this way, he thought. It was a common belief at the time. He slept with his head on his knees to keep it from crushing his chest. He could speak less and less as time went on.
     The process of domesticating wild elephants is called crushing. They are kept in cages, beaten with bullhooks and chains, starved, and kept from sleep. Thirst is used as punishment. Cigars too.
     In his later years, Pryor went by wheelchair to fight to ban the bullhooks. He saw, he said, parallels to slavery. A bullhook is a shard of steel shaped like a fireplace poker, used for moving logs, pushing cinders into a piles, and yanking holes into skin; press like a dull knife into the soft places behind the ears or where the legs meet the body until it tears through to the inside, like a burst seam.
     A more humane method has since been introduced: Making fences out of beehives to keep elephants from humans. Things are quite simple when you stop to think about them. They are scared of bees, and gladly avoid these areas, catching a signal from the air: The eighteenth is the Blessing of the Bikes: All Bikers Welcome. On Livingston, off of Ronald Reagan Highway. The fights are so clean you can see your teeth on the floor, Jack.
     His bones pressed roundly outward, growing like plants toward the light; the skin starting to buckle like a barrel. Deformed. Hanging a magnet over a beehive will cause the shape to deform as they build; the bees are disoriented, and their neat combs melt and blur. There are magnetic bones in the human nose.
     Elephants can mourn the dead. Can recognize bones. Can pull branches from trees to cover the bodies. They get very quiet. When you burn up, he said, your skin goes to sleep. The Elephant Man died with a broken neck in a room with no mirrors, learning to sleep how people do.

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