BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 51

MARCH 2012

DAVID

Their encounter is brief, Doyle needing to do further chores and Temple work—baptism for the dead.

David has lived in a trailer. That's not new. But he's not directed a museum. His mother would be proud of him—until she saw the nature of this museum.

She ranked social prestige high, having lost it when she left post WWII Germany. She derived a poor substitute by sharing credit for her offspring's accomplishments—much as Mormon matriarchs acquired social capital by having vast numbers of grand- and great-grandchildren. "My son the museum director," she would brag if she were alive, while privately haranguing him: living in a trailer at age 56! He hears her scoff at the inflated title, deride the notion of 'museum'.

He was out of the will—the lawyer had read it to the family after the funeral last spring. And yet, he was the estate's executor. An ironic touch, though irony would be unintended—that subtle emotion wasn't in his mother's repertoire. It had been a parting shot across his bow. He had, in his thirties, become aware that he was the whipping boy, suddenly realizing that, just as his half-brother Wulf served as his father's misplaced target for anger toward his mother, he was her retaliatory equivalent.

He could have declined the executor position but he was accustomed to duty, to avoiding guilt for not performing it, so just shrugged the slight off. His oldest sister Irma had stifled a laugh—so subtly as to make her seem innocent of the derision she was guilty of. It was a talent she had honed over the years. His other sister, a Mormon convert, consoled him unnecessarily. He barely heard the platitudes—no sentence emerged from Jana's mouth that didn't echo the Brethren's weltanschauung.

Jana, with whom he stayed in occasional contact, had asked him for his chest x-ray update but he had waved her inquiry away. He instead relayed the radiologist's question: had he broken his sternum and ribs when he was younger? "I think I'd have known if that happened," was David's response.

Her brain had lit up and she passed on her instigating insight: "Wulf smacked you when you were a baby," she told him. "I thought you knew." She had waited for him to reply, then added, shaking her head, "Daddy beat the hell out of him with a belt for it. You probably didn't know it but he had a mean streak."

David had only felt shifted, mentally turned around. In another person the revelation may have inspired revenge or retaliation. Indignation. Betrayal. But he lapsed instead to the precise instant of change, the world being one way one moment and another the next. It fit with a topic he'd been working on for two decades—he'd run the idea of conducting a seminar at his last three teaching stops—Cheney, Washington; Bend, Oregon; Coos Bay—with no success. Saltology—the study of changing moments, an academic sub-discipline that had never, like him, gotten off the ground. But he still kept at it, collecting transitional moments to add to the someday seminar, moments to illuminate the moment of the "twist" between this now and the next one. He might be, he knows, the only person thinking upon this particular subject, at least under the rubric of 'saltology'.

Still in analytic mode, a related concept, syncope, comes to mind—the space where an apostrophe in a contraction goes. He taught the term in "Grammar Hacks". It was stolen from the medical community, where it meant to faint or pass out. The notion of naming areas of emptiness enchanted him, it reminded him of staring at the river, trying to focus on a particular bit of water. Particularly whirlpools as they shifted place. Dizzying. Something is there but it is as if instead nothing is.

Absence. A hole in the thought process—he has many, and he suspects everyone does but just doesn't say. Or notice. Maybe they spackle it over with denial.

He would have been too young to remember being beaten. He doubts it happened, suspecting his sister's veracity. If it did occur, it seems late to be angry. He had given her an unsatisfying facial expression as a response, one newly invented, specific to his past's sudden rearrangement.

He steps inside the trailer. It's not so bad. It's not some old FEMA trailer with a history of post-hurricane use, nor one of the flimsy structures he grew up with that farmers repurposed for Mexican housing. It has sheetrock instead of cheap paneling, might be mistaken for a real building were it not for its rectangular, factory-built shape. It had been a classroom up in Pingree until just recently, when they closed the school after another district consolidation. It's clean, then, relatively new, unlived in though used, and Doyle has furnished the back section with a bed and a dresser, put a table and chairs in the small kitchen. In front the barbed wire collection is ready to be mounted and other items await placement. Stacks of boxes, presumably of historical nature.

David swings the screen door open, sets the sliding clasp so the door stays sprung wide, starts unloading boxes from the truck and setting them in the living quarters. There isn't much to move—clothes, papers, toiletries. His books and record collection are in a storage facility in Coos Bay, his last academic stop, along with his furniture. His mother's papers, just two boxes, get moved next. He still hasn't gone through them. Then Henry Herr's papers, stored in a single piece of flimsy, duct-taped cardboard luggage. He understands why his father kept Henry's papers, but how they survived his mother's care for the next twenty years after his death he can't imagine. She had been shedding belongings for years, anticipating her demise, so it's out of character for her to have kept them. But then, it's out of character for David to have kept them, too.

The move is surreal. But moves are. He's watching himself do what he's doing, experiencing it as a cosmic joke. "Everything isn't funny," a girlfriend had said once, exasperated. He chuckles to himself, in a silent British accent—which he acknowledges is poorly done, even in silence—says, "How very Hindoo of you, David. It's all a joke to the East. All illusion."

He brings his irony closer, starts an inside joke. "Here in the wake of death"—he often spontaneously starts bad, solemn prose in his head, a habit acquired as an undergrad and never extinguished. He'd been young and serious, at a stage when hope, faith and belief existed and he was always on the cusp of strong emotions. He sometimes misses that self, is paradoxically glad it's all but gone. By mocking himself he furthers its demise. It makes sense to him, maybe wouldn't to others.

The bad prose reminds him how hard it was to gather the courage to attend university—not a small thing for him, though small for his high school cohorts who made the transition eight years before he did. He imagines they didn't gain the facetiousness he did, or absorb a sense of humor, two tools to deal with overwrought rigidity—and failure. "O' brown smudge," his sophisticated housemate orated in a Shakespearean voice, never tiring of the line. David, though laughing along, never fully understood the boundary being made between the pompous and the profound.

He grafted his university acquaintances' character traits to himself as best he could, exchanging one part at a time—like Theseus' ship, its wooden components replaced by metal ones a piece at a time: was it still Theseus' ship after all the original parts had been removed? Is he still himself?

If I could absorb my friends' habits, David thinks, why didn't my colleagues' traits osmose? Particularly Carl Greenberg's, philosophy professor and now, he's heard, a rabbi. Perennial teacher of the year. Beloved by all, a line of students outside his office at all times. David had sat outside Greenberg's classes, eavesdropping, on multiple occasions, was drawn in by his delivery just as students were. The voice, the cadence, the stress, the content, the respect he showed even the stupidest question—Greenberg was a Pied Piper. David felt exalted after listening for just a few minutes. Carl's skills, David knew, were far beyond him. Greenberg radiated sincerity, David had none. Irony and doubt would have to do. "Irony is a hollow existence," Carl once told him, perhaps as a subtle bit of advice. "Like one of those cheesy crackers, the ones shaped like goldfish?" David had replied.

David transformed song lyrics, as his friends did, into bad puns—music he once experienced as almost sacred devolved, collected a mocking shadow. He derided everything from religiosity to causiness. Those friends being from big cities back East, hurled out West for various (never elaborated upon) reasons—was tuition cheaper here? had they been shamed? were they running?—, drew David's awe. Later, he learned that he had been a pet to them.

Such epiphanies come to him often, always come late. He was a walking example of l'esprit de l'escalier: "the feeling on the staircase", when you think of the perfect reply too late after leaving a party. He had been a stray dog brought in from the cold, a source of amusement. Still, he gained something. A satirical bent. His overblown prose feeds him energy, the derisive act a kind of emotional murder.

It was, though, getting back to being an executor expelled from a will, a pretty good joke his mother had made. Cruel, but funny.

He had taught 'The History of Humor,' another professor's specialty—said professor canned for sexual improprieties with a student, his termination agreement including surrender of his notes to David. He'd thought himself unemployed until he got that call (one which contained a greater desperation than even his own, or so he recalled).

The Greek comedies. Shakespearean comedies. Most students found neither funny. Bergson and Freud (which no student found humorous), and then a rundown of comedy in the twentieth century, from slapstick to satire—which, being on film, they did enjoy. It was his favorite class, every day bringing him joy not because of the humor but because of the fact talking about humor wasn't funny—which he found funny. His finding it funny pleased him, too, the layers of amusement stacking ad infinitum.

From looking at how a joke is constructed, David tried to teach, you derive an aesthetic pleasure that bridges the gap between the beautiful and the sublime—between that constructed by man and that intrinsically given by the universe. Here he borrowed a distinction he heard Carl Greenberg make: "The Hebrews contrasted tohu, the chaos before God established order, with tikkun, repairing that world—you might compare the kinds of humor to those two categories. Does a joke fix the world or tear it apart? Does the world need to be fixed or does it need to destroyed?" He was pretty sure he failed to convey the notion to his pupils, considering their blank looks.

He sits on the unmade bed, his incongruent existence grinding out unformed thoughts. Coughing—goddamn lungs—he leans back, drops to a supine position and places his hands behind his head, taking in the walls of his residence for the next year—but only a year. He doesn't imagine the gig lasting forever, though even if it did, staying in a trailer is not very high on the agony scale. He didn't know where it would fit in Dante's Inferno or even in the Buddhist ladder of Hells. Maybe the Mormon's Telestial Kingdom—the lowest of their three hells (below the Celestial and the Terrestrial) where whoremongers, blasphemers and murderers went—would be an accurate description. And it could always be worse, he could be waking up tomorrow to find out he guessed wrong about the afterlife—whoops!

His tasks are few. Finish up negotiations with the County for his family's land—they want it for gravel. Disburse the funds when received. Go through his mother's papers, the family pictures, and sort through Henry's stuff. As for his own future, he's already started applying for positions for next year's summer's term. Something will pop up, it's just a matter of lowering his expectations. Who knows, maybe he'll end up teaching high school. He draws the line at kindergarten, though.

You can wait out emotions and he intends to do it now. Eventually, you win—if you can withstand the siege. Each emotion has its own half-life, of course, dependent on the type, its volume, the circumstances surrounding it. But it is always subject to deterioration, which a child can't discern but which an adult should figure out: wait out anger, lust, sorrow—and faith, which David considers just another emotion encompassing others, among them endurance and stubbornness.

He is amidst a swirling mass of unresolved and unnameable emotions now—a hurricane and he's in its eye—but he intends to wait it, them, out. Let them fight it out, he thinks: O' swarm of insistence, be ye gone, he amusedly mouths out loud in a booming voice, lifting himself up from the bed to tackle the job ahead.

It's not going away.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston