Tag: men

The Men’s Writing Group

Posted on by sterlingbennett

 

The Men’s Writing Group

 

They approach the house in one’s and two’s. Some of them have been coming for fifteen years or more. Still, there is fear, the urge to pee. Instead, they reach down, gather up loops of dirty blue intestines, their own, pieces they have dragged along behind them for years, the result of encounters with other men. They draw in half-breaths to ease the tension, so their wounds can recede like so many snails’ heads. They smooth a hand over a place on their stomachs, just above the other vulnerable place, which rides along shriveled and apprehensive. They knock, open the door, shake off the rain. Like small boys, their eyes are wide and alert, and they hope for the best. They talk in short bursts. They want to feel affection and gentleness directed at them from the other men who are already in the house. But they themselves, the new arrivals, are not accustomed to offering affection, and so little of it is passed forward in either direction. They do not know whether to shake hands, whether to stand up from the sofa for the greeting, whether to proffer a hug, and with what intensity, and for how long, and how close to bring their heads or their already stricken stomachs where there is now no feeling whatsoever. Because there is something profoundly off-putting about a gathering of men, if you are a man, and if you are not an up-and-at ‘em kind of fellow, triumphant in card playing, business, sports and war, or some other kind of plotting and trouble.

 And how is it even possible to gauge openness, if we have not ever really mastered the art of openness, not in the course of forty-five, fifty, sixty or two million years? And why should we really, when we sense, just behind it all, the hidden carcass that one of us may have placed in a cave or the crook of tree or under a heavy rock before entering the house? Meat that will not be shared. And isn’t that the smell of woman that someone has carried in on his clothing, the scent that narrows eyes, flares nostrils and evokes the question: In exactly what place have I left my sling and stones, my obsidian knife, my Navy Colt.45, and am I sure that all seven chambers are oiled, and primed with cap and ball?

 But still, we ease ourselves into our chairs. The smiles seem inviting, but is it just the tendency to over-compensate? At intervals, there is wheezing laughter, snorts, sweet moments of more than a little letting down, when abruptly something changes, and we are brainless beady-eyed chickens again that have spotted a weakness and we begin to peck at the one who through too much exposure and brief forgetting has called attention to himself and immediately becomes the recognizable sacrificial runt.

The boundary between concerned inquiry and beaked irony is obsidian thin. The self-revealing phrase is met with a response that drips with cleverness and irony. And so, it is safer to say nothing. Nothing real like doubt, worry or sadness that afflicts the stomach and the sad little boy place below it. And so, but for an obsidian syllable or two, this time blood was not spilt, because none was offered.

 And when we trundle home and crawl into our dark warm beds and meet our mate’s sleepy inquiries, we are at a loss to explain how our male companions were that night. Was so and so healthy? she asks. Did he mention his woman friend? Did you talk about hope, dreams, fears, illness, death? Sexual tenderness, the miracle of touching, success or failure in closeness with this or that companion, lover or wife? And when our mate begins her deep breathing, a soft engine re-starting at our side, we lie awake and run through the evening again, like old bears who have come back from lumbering through cold forests, where we smelled scat and urine, took in scratch marks on fifty trees and pondered the prints and tracks and sweep of tail of countless other lonely co-dwellers who also wander across hollow, ridge, and swale, looking for food and meaning. We squint out into the bedroom’s darkness and re-measure what we thought we had measured the first time. An unnatural increase in volume, a sudden unexplained movement, a missed inference, the possible intent of all the words uttered. We noted exhaustion, boredom, isolation, pinched souls, perhaps a lover’s bloom. The whole time, behind them we’re sure we see flickering images of their dogs watching us, for now, leashed, but also showing curled lips and yellow teeth and eyes dark with fear. Like us, seeking soft longing in their masters’ generous hands, and in the hidden pulse of hearts beating out, each in a different rhythm, what remains of the five billion heart beats each of us is granted.

 And as we wrote, at the men’s group, we forgot for a while the meat, the scent of the carcass placed in the crotch of a tree, the stiffening hunted flesh that will belong to the strongest of us in the end. But still, I have to say what I am thinking. I do not trust these men. We hunt momentarily together, as if in a truce required by nature, so that we do not die of starvation and loneliness. If the conditions were right and we were fishermen and our boat was sinking, would I give up my survival suit for any of them? Or they for me? I would for either of my children. I would give it up for my mate – the one who sleeps on, leaving behind for the moment her amazement at how little men know about each other.

 Or would I give it to one of them as well? Since each one may be as kind as he is dangerous, as generous as he is treacherous, as much soft as competitive. Then, when the steel plates pop, in the middle of an icy night, as my mate sleeps warmly on beside me, and sixty tons of trawler roars and moans and plunges out of sight, nearly sucking me and one other writer down with it in exactly ninety seconds, you have one survival suit between the two of you, and you say to your companion: No, you take it, your children are young. And he says: No, you take it, you are older than I am and not as strong. And in the end one of us holds the other in his arms, and when he can no longer keep his gaze on you and eyes start to break, you hold his face close to yours, and you say: O my dear friend, I love you, I love you. I have always loved you.

The Fence and the Sadness of Men

Posted on by sterlingbennett

 

The Fence and the Sadness of Men

 

I was standing by the fence on the morning of the stillest day of the winter. Frost clung to the ground, the eucalyptus were mute and dying, their outer branches at least. I saw him at some distance. John Burrows on his 1949 John Deere row tractor, the high ping ping of the engine carrying across the cold fields.  It was the A model with the close-together front wheels and the overall tricycle look. Its twenty-five or thirty horses were geared down to make a powerful ploughing machine and an unstoppable widow-maker when one of the two rear wheels climbed a stump or dropped into a hollow, tipping the tractor over sideways and pinning the driver under too much weight for him to breathe.

I imagined him smoking but had heard he’d stopped since Alice had died. The one thing he treasured most he gave up as a way of being with her when he normally would have been with himself. A neighbor said he also wore his wife’s scarf, a cream-colored Angora sort of thing that farmers did not wear and felt uncomfortable about even when their wives wore them. But John had changed, and he was dangerous to laugh at. At least, no one dared to and wouldn’t have anyway.

We talked about him in Booth’s Cafe. How he wore the scarf, and the pipe in his mouth, upside down because of the rain—except that it wasn’t raining, therefore some sort of half-mast gesture. We talked about his farm and how it needed painting and plumbing and tanks that needed to be cleaned and cows attended to. Gary the vet had come of his own accord finally, with an excuse that the county required it of him—an inspection for sleeping sickness, or something like that. But we all knew that Gary had come because of John’s grief and had spent as much time watching his friend as feeling cows’ udders and the veins in their necks.

 

The whole time Gary was there, John drove the tractor out across the corn stubble and frost, leaving herring-bone tractor tire tracks, crisscrossing the fields enshrouded in frost and cold and bereft of meaning, navigating this way and that with no discernable pattern. That was what worried Gary, whose father had walked across his own fields with a shotgun and blown off an ear out of desolation when Gary’s mom died. Gary had come after him, found him, and led him home, the old man not being able to hear a thing, weeping, and laughing about how he’d missed and what a goddamn fool he’d been and how much he loved Gary. And then he had stumbled, and the two of them went down, fell and then got up on their knees and held each other for the first time in their lives and wept and held each other the way the frost held the fields.

Gary couldn’t keep inventing reasons to watch over John. He’d made four long veterinary visits that same week, and his receipts were showing it. He called and suggested maybe I should find something to do up by the fence, that John would come by eventually—and so I’d just gone straight over, driving the pickup up the gorge road, stopping briefly to see if I could see trout in the black icy water beside it, then on up to the ridge that separated the Burrows farm from ours.

I could hear the tractor long before it came up over the horizon. Then I could see him. There was purpose in his life again, at least enough to have him follow the line of the fence and not just make crisscrosses all over the fields. I tapped the fence post in front of me as if it needed something, banged on the top strip of the barbed wire a few times, testing for tension. I walked around the pickup, kicking the tires, checking the pressure. And then it occurred to me what needed to be done. I opened the hood and pulled one of the distributor wires off and dropped it down through the engine onto the ground and continued bending over the engine, poking around at nothing.

I heard the tractor stop. That was a good sign. John sat looking at me, and I watched him, gazing into his sad eyes, looking for some indication of what his intentions were. He sat for a long time, his Alice scarf hanging down like a college boy’s, his pipe inverted, his hands red and blue from gripping the iron steering wheel. I said nothing. No greeting seemed appropriate. And he—I hadn’t required anything of him—he just sat there, the engine running, the white sun above us sailing slowly toward the dying eucalyptus grove to the west.

“My truck won’t start,” I managed to say eventually. His face remained as before. With just the hint of a smile appearing at the edges of his mouth, as if he saw through my ruse.

His lips moved.

“What?” I shouted. But not that loud. His mouth opened further. I wanted to say, “How are you?” But I already knew how he was.

“I miss Alice,” he said.

I was unprepared for that. He reached up and took the pipe out of his mouth. I mounted the wire fence, jumped down on the other side and approached the tractor. He handed me his pipe, stem-first but didn’t let go when I took it. His eyes brimmed and filled so much I wasn’t sure he couldn’t see me. The pipe trembled and I continued pulling him by the pipe, at the same time taking another step toward him, pulling him past his tipping point, until he came away from the tractor, slipping down onto the field, and I knew what to do, although I had never done it before and held him while he cried and then couldn’t hold back myself and let loose, the two of us howling like two sad dogs, Gary said, who had returned for the fifth time that week and had followed the most recent herring bones across the field and along the fence until he saw us. He stopped his truck a little way off and shut off his engine and listened to the cries and howls, he said, coming across the dark field, the ping ping of the tractor swallowed up by the silent clinging frost, and the cold white sun curving westward.

The next day, at the Booth’s café, where the town’s most silent farmers—all of them my friends—met for coffee late mornings after milking, feeding and mucking, someone asked Gary how John Burrow’s cows were doing, as if Gary might have veterinary information that could be useful to all of them. The question was slow and neutral. And so Gary began to tell the story. Everyone stopped talking. Even fierce Agnes Booth stacked dishes in slow motion so she wouldn’t miss a word. Not a farmer met Gary’s gaze as he spoke, he said later. He told about telling me to go up and wait by the fence, that John would come along. How he had let himself in the field and had followed the most recent herring bone tire track until he had seen the John Deere and me standing beside it. He said he couldn’t tell whether we were talking. That I was just standing there, and John was holding out what appeared to be his pipe. A farmer stirred sugar into his cup, clinking the spoon against porcelain. A big red hand came out from the man beside him and calmed the stirring. Someone else blew his nose quietly into a red bandana with his eyes closed. One or two others rubbed at something in their eyes with their forefingers. Men folded the flap of an ear forward to hear better. Gary told how I had pulled on the pipe until John had swiveled around in the steel bucket seat and come down into my arms. That was when Agnes Booth, without a sound, and with her head down, withdrew through the swinging door to the kitchen, easing the door shut behind her and studying the farmers for a moment through the round window, as if realizing the gathering had suddenly become something very private and foreign. Then Gary told them about John and me howling like sad dogs. Which is when the men gasped, coughed, sniffed in mucous, and said “God!” to explain why they were crying and suppressing the tears with heels of their powerful hands, trying to recover with deep, deep breaths.

A week later, in a soft voice, Agnes told me she had thought a dam was about to burst and that that was the the reason she had left the room, that she hadn’t known whether it would be water she would be able to swim in. A week later, I was there when John Burrows walked into Booth’s Cafe without the scarf, sat down, ordered Agnes’s coffee and lit his pipe.