There was a little cement porch where our pump stood. Though we had electricity, we had no indoor plumbing yet. The ground beyond the porch, damp in summer, had contracted in freezing, so the brittle grass contained crisp caves that snapped shut under my feet. Eddies of frost like paralyzed mist whitened the long grass of the orchard slope. I went behind a forsythia bush too close to the house. My mother often complained about the stink; the country represented purity to her but I couldn’t take her seriously. As far as I could see, the land was built on rot and excrement.
I suffered a grotesque vision of my urine freezing in mid air and becoming attached to me. In fact, it steamed on the mulch intimately flooring the interlaced petticoats of the leaf less forsythia bush. Lady in her pen scrabbled out of her house, spilling straw, and pushed her black nostrils through the wire fencing to look at me. “Good morning,” I said, gentlemanly. When I went to the pen, she leaped high in the air, and when I thrust my hands through the frosty lattice of metal to stroke her, she kept wiggling and threatening to uncoil into another leap. Her coat was fluffed against the cold and bits and wands of straw clung in it. The texture of her throat was feathery, the top of her head waxen. Under her hair, her bones and muscles felt tepid and slender. From the way she kept hungrily twisting her long skull, as if to seize more of my touch, I was afraid my fingers would slip into her eyes, which protruded so vulnerably; lenses of dark jelly. “How are you?” I asked. “Sleep well? Dream of rabbits? Rabbits!” It was delicious, the way my voice made her swirl, thrust, wag and whine.
As I squatted, the cold came up behind me and squeezed my back. When I stood, the squares of wire my hands had touched were black, my skin having melted the patina of frost. Lady leaped like a spring released. She came down with a foot on her pan and flipped it over and I expected to see water spill. But the water was ice solid with the pan. For the instant before my brain caught up with my eyes, it seemed a miracle.
Now the air, unflawed by any motion of wind, began to cake around me, and I moved quickly. My toothbrush, glazed rigid, was of a piece with the aluminum holder screwed to the porch post. I snapped it free. The pump dragged dry for four heaves of the handle. The water, on the fifth stroke rising from deep in the stricken earth, smoked faintly as it splashed the grooved brown glacier that had built up in the pump trough. The rusty water purged the brush of its stiff jacket, but when I put it in my mouth it was like a flavorless square lollipop. My molars stung along the edges of their fillings. The toothpaste secreted in the bristles melted into a mint taste. All the time, Lady watched my performance with a wild delight that swelled and twitched her body, and when I spat, she barked in applause, each bark a puff of frost. I replaced the brush and bowed, and had the satisfaction of hearing the applause continue as I retired behind the double curtain, the storm door and the main door.
The clocks now said 7:35 and 7:28. The great wash of warm air within the honey-colored kitchen made my movements lazy, though the clocks jabbed at me. “Why is the dog barking?” my mother asked.
“She’s freezing to death,” I said. “It’s too cold out there; why can’t she come in?”
“Cruellest thing you can do to a dog, Peter,” my father called, invisible. “Get her used to being in the house she’ll die of pneumonia like the last dog we had. Don’t take an animal out of nature. Hey Cassie: what time is it?”
“Which clock?”
“My clock.”
“A little after seven-thirty. The other has it before.”
“We gotta go, kid. We gotta move.”
My mother said to me, “Eat up, Peter,” and him, “That cheap clock of yours runs ahead of time, George. Grandad’s clock says you have five minutes.”
“That’s not a cheap clock. That clock was thirteen dollars retail, Cassie. It’s General Electric. If it says twenty of, I’m late already. Gobble your coffee, kid. Time and tide for no man wait.”
“For a man with a spider in his bowel,” my mother said, “you’re awfully full of pep.” To me she said, “Peter, don’t you hear your father?”
I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn’t it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity?
“Peter.” My mother said it in the voice that had no margin left.
I drank the orange juice in two swigs and said, to worry her, “The poor dog is out there without even anything to drink, she’s just licking this big chunk of ice in her pan.”
My grandfather stirred in the other room and pronounced, “Now that was a favorite saying of Jake Beam’s, who used to be stationmaster at the old Bertha Furnace station, before they discontinued the passenger station. Time and tide,’ he would say, so solemn, ‘and the Alton Railroad wait for no man.’”
“Yeah but Pop,” my father said, “did you ever stop to think, does any man wait for time and tide?”
At this absurdity my grandfather fell silent, and my mother, carrying a pot of simmering water for my coffee, went into the other room to defend him. “George,” she said, “why don’t you go out and start the car instead of tormenting everybody with your nonsense?”
“Huh?” he said. “Did I hurt Pop’s feelings? Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I meant what I said. I’ve been hearing that time and tide line all my life, and I don’t know what it means. What does it mean? You ask anybody, and the bastards won’t tell you. But they won’t be honest. They won’t admit they don’t know.”
“Why, it means,” my mother said, and then hesitated, finding, as I had, that my father’s anxious curiosity had quite drained-the-saying’s simple sense away, “it means we can’t have the impossible.”
“No, now look,” my father said, going on in that slightly high voice that forever sought a handhold on sheer surfaces, “I was a minister’s son. I was brought up to believe, and I still believe it, that God made Man as the last best thing in His Creation. If that’s the case, who are this time and tide that are so almighty superior to us?”
My mother came back into the kitchen, bent over me, and poured the smoking water into my cup. I snickered up at her conspiratorially; my father was often a joke between us. But she kept her eyes on my cup as, holding the handle of the pan with a flowered potholder, she filled it without spilling. The brown powder, Maxwell’s Instant, made a tiny terrain on the surface of steaming water, and then dissolved, dyeing the water black. My mother stirred with my spoon and a spiral of tan suds revolved in the cup. “Eat your cereal, Peter,” she said.
“I can’t,” I told her. “I’m too upset. My stomach hurts.” I wanted revenge for her snub of my flirting overture. It dismayed me that my father, that silly sad man whom I thought our romance had long since excluded, had this morning stolen the chief place in her mind.
He was saying, “Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; it’s just that those old expressions get me so goddam mad I see red when I hear ‘em. They’re so damn smug, is what gets my goat. If those old peasants or whoever the hell invented ‘em have something to say to me, I wish they’d come right out and say it.”