This is a continuation of Post #3, “My Brother’s Lodge - Part 1.”
I really would have loved doing the lamb scene though. That was the most tantalizing thing that came to me when my reality became too surreal to grapple with directly. But a writer should never continue a story because of their attachment to some idea. In this case, given the presence of lamb and the notion of faith...my mind immediately went to John Cheever’s 1962 short story “Goodbye, My Brother.” That was my first thought. That story comes exactly first in my edition of Cheever’s collected stories, and that’s leading a fleet of 70 stories of varying excellence. Of course, this collection was the subject of my critical dissertation in graduate school (Peanut Gallery: “Previous century!”). Well, be sure to add that to the CV anyway. As I reached the end of my stay, the only way to deal with the whole idea of The Lodge and all it had come to represent was to imagine a story as good and as heart-wrenching. Because that’s, sadly, what it all comes down to. My heart was broken for the loss of my brother. Seeing him do this stuff, I knew he was gone. Absolutely gone. Not a trace left of the man I had known. Call up The Atlantic, let’s get a profile on this trend in the Midwest, and be sure to retrace the redistricting terrors. Is he fully red-pilled? What church did he go to? What influencers does he follow?
None! It wasn’t like that. His place wasn’t a lodge either. Just a regular lake house. There was, however, a former restaurant, now someone’s home. My nephew and wife and I biked there …
Again, the doctor implores the patient to stay with it, and this describes the condition perfectly: because the ailment all along has been to feel the feeling, and turn to story to … to do what with it? Something like what Cheever had done? Or something totally unlike it? As long as it intellectualized the feeling and locked the pain into the past of some people with different names who live on paper, in type.
I saw that pipe coming out of the house, an open drain on the yard. Detergents and whatever else were now going into the lake and groundwater rather than being broken down by the bacteria and whatnot that’s present in a septic tank expressly for that purpose. Down to the water table, I suppose. Into the fish’s habitat.
“Everyone’s does it, the plumber says.” This from a man—Rodney—who studied business ethics at the master’s level. A naturalist. A complete diehard fanatic lake fisherman. Swims in lakes, his sons swim in the lakes. An educated man from the upper middle class. This to me felt like a great loss to the nation—hence the idea of national brotherhood. Of course, it’s endemic, and regional, and documented by journalists and historians. But that would not be my point.
Organized religion? My brother was, like me, “raised Catholic,” receiving all the sacraments right up to Confirmation. And he did indeed hang ironwork on the fireplace mantel. Ah, but there was an early lapse, because remember the story that mother repeats so often, how Rodney announced at 18 that he would no longer be joining for Sunday mass. Which prompted my mother to call him a “heathen like your dad.”
So the question becomes, can I imagine a scrape with death?
I suppose the scrape with death brought him back to Christ. Me, I’m like the musician/narrator in the story—living out of state and wrapped up in my own life. My brother had told a story about seeing Jesus in his hospital room, when he was hospitalized for his myositis. That seems like decades ago—though it was only December 2019, as far as I can calculate. I remember that he told it to me in a plastic hexagonal bubble in the backyard of a restaurant. We were masked. His condition had come on before the pandemic, was now managed by steroids and infusions, but now the virus threatened everything.
See, a writer starts something with good intentions, looking to learn from it. But he becomes obligated. How much of all this would I have to give to poor Rodney? And how well could I do it, given the daily panics that arrive in the news? Is it even nice to give stuff like this to a Rodney? Anyway aren’t we all Rodneys?
More importantly: How has it become my life’s habit to give traits like these to such unwitting inventions of the mind?
Friends and fellow writers, if we gain nothing else from 2021, let it be that we learn how to enjoy the freedom to write however we like, regardless of who will or will not read it.
Wouldn’t it be swell if this were the new frontier in art? A laying down of narrative weapons. Maybe there’s no other way forward.
Armchair insights. Someone bring me brandy in a snifter and a fresh ashtray.
Thinking so strongly and so directly of Cheever’s lamenting dirge of a story, I believe, doomed it to a certain sad tone. And that is maybe what a person like me can no longer maintain. I can’t choose to dwell in a sad tone. There’s no room for it. Choosing the name Rodney surely was an expression of either my wish to make him come off like a dope, or to take the piece in a more comic, or perhaps pornographic, direction. Something that would be as defamatory as porn, anyway, to a Christian. I felt defamed during my stay, that’s for sure, by finding myself to be a family member of Rodney.
But, having established all that, let’s buck up, then, and resume on the lake. It’s dusk. The sun is low on the horizon, reflecting on the rippling water. The musician/narrator and Rodney are in Rodney’s fishing boat, and he’s showing me…I mean him, … no, no, make it me. He’s showing me how to use the trolling motor foot controls, on which he reads the depth readings. “This is where the fuckers hang out. Right here.”
He’s talking about muskies of course.
“Really?” I say. “Well, let’s go there.”
“Well, I don’t fucking know. So they say! I paid a guy eight hundred bucks to tell me that.”
No less than half a dozen times in the past decade I’ve thought to get my brother a copy of Barry Hannah’s short story “Water Railers,” which is about fisherpersons. For a time I was scanning stories for classes quite often and surely from Hannah’s collection Long, Last Happy, and perhaps even that story itself, or the one that ends so hilariously with the frustrated fisherman who let the big one get away, and he’s dancing out in the surf, yelling at passersby, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” That’s how the story ends—it’s genius.
Anyway, well, I never did get this story into my brother’s hands. My brother and stories don’t seem to go together anymore. Everything he wishes to learn he can learn at the Dollar General or by dragging different jigs and seeing what happens. Eventually, he’ll unlearn everything he learned in college and with the nuts and berries girl with whom he used he used to perfect the salad.
Maybe that’s just the point. That’s exactly how my brother seems to want to go out, jumping up and down in place on his shoreline, yelling “Fuck You!” Because that’s what he was doing with the neighbor. Sorry, I forgot about that part. See, he’d only had the place a year and he’d made enemies with the neighbor. He was telling the story on the pontoon, telling it mainly to my mother. My wife and I were listening in total disbelief, or denial about the sheer baldness of everything. See, what happened was, Rodney had some crushed rock delivered, and the driver came up the neighbors’ driveway. The neighbor alleged damage to his property. There was an offer of money, but then the demand for a receipt, and a photo of an apparently phony receipt—no shit—and then, the big kicker. The end to the whole show: my brother drops: I love you, Scott in a text message, and Scott replies something like You must want your ass kicked.
After that, the wife jumped in, texting my brother, I mean Rodney, that she was taking over since he and Scott couldn’t get along. Well, then there we are at the lakeside lodge, the restaurant, eating on the patio, and we’re all elbow deep in perch, walleye, blue gills, and potato wedges, of course Budweiser in the bottle, and he’s wrapping up the story, and ultimately my Christian brother, after taunting the man with his inappropriate homophobic threats of man-love (or failed attempt at disarmament), basically assures us all that he’s “being royally screwed.”
Can my mother think of a single line of scripture? Turn the other cheek? Eye for an eye? Something obvious. No. Nothing.
Everyone has a laugh, Rodney, his wife, and our mother, who hasn’t even been introduced properly in this story, call Scott a real jerk.
Another scene (fragments are all we can expect now, be okay with it), it’s dusk, on a windy, dry night. I’ve been working days from the guest bedroom of The Lodge, or what I’m calling The Lodge. I’ve been Zooming with clients, reading client manuscripts, writing my reports. My brother works from 7 am till about 2 most days, then goes outside and mutilates the shorelines. He does, to his credit, plant 350 saplings of some other type of plants from a store, and he’s hired two teenage boys for two days, shaping this lovely reeded low-water lakeshore, on the very northern tip of 7-mile long lake.
Oh, god, but when we laid that tarp, and started dropping stones, how the dead frog rose up in the water right by my foot, and all the snails that floated to the top and the slugs and worms under the rocks that we lifted out of the mud.
The cuts on my nephew’s arms, from the weeds, and then Rebecca’s too. Lacerations on people who, if you ask me, suffer on behalf of Rodney. Suffer because of him. And then of course I would get them, too, the cuts, and rashes, after finally agreeing to help out, though for days I worked until dinnertime, even if it meant reading more student fiction than I could bear. One day, though, I took off for a bike ride when Rodney wasn’t looking, leaving him waiting for me to emerge in his backyard and pass through the cluster of unused Adirondack chairs and join him down at the shore, which to me felt like a type of Ground Zero twenty years later.
I finally helped, and the most innocent of looking weeds had the kind of fine tough fur that bristles when it’s rubbed against the grain, and the fur is laced with these oils that when they get in your pores, your skin itches. It was a sharp, cutting pain, like a razor is being used on you.
I called myself stupid for not putting on the long-sleeve shirt I had in my suitcase. But maybe I wanted the lashes to prove something to myself. To have some outward sign of what I felt like. Christ, you take a summer vacation and find out you have a Christ complex.
I shit you not, I was the only one with anti-itch cream packed in my Dopp kit, and my brother came to my room that night, asked for the tube. I threw it to him as he stood out in the hall. I didn’t see it for two days.
I scratched and scratched.
And not an antihistamine in sight, and for dinner one night I made loaves and fishes.
The lamb! Shit, I almost forgot. The lamb thing was our mother’s birthday dinner, where I grilled all the meat that Rebecca had bought, which included two seasoned fish filets, two rib-eyes, chicken, and two lamb chops. Mother and brother, both churchgoers, took the lamb, when asked.
(See, in this profession one learns to think like a lawyer, and I can imagine a narrative that casts it all in its justified form, one that would be agreeable to the right audience, since I had done the grilling, and I had neutrally asked my mother and brother which they wanted. A neutral party, see. A keen observer, absolved, righteous. Subtly, subtly dogmatic in a blurb-y kind of way.)
“Gimme the lamb.”
“Oh, the lamb definitely.”
Yet I was drinking those beers from the Minneapolis brewery that I love, which are strong beers, and I was really close to adding, “The lamb of God? Is that what you want me to grill you? Shall I grill you your Lord and Savior, so you can eat him like the Hindu goddess Kali eats the faults and woes and struggles of her devotees?” There might have been bitterness in my heart, and I wasn’t calling up scripture either, any more than my mother. But we’re a Midwestern family—we don’t talk about anything real! So I stared out to the water like everyone else, and there was no apparent dissent among us. That’s what passes for harmony these days.
In truth, and from this distance, I don’t blame them, Rodney or my mother. In other words, I forgive them! This thing is more about forgiveness than ever now. How cool is that? I’d eat lamb too if I believed it healed me. That’s all they want. I’d just be too self-conscious to enact the sacrament, knowing how stagey it would look, with the elbows up and the clanking of the silverware, the mmms and lip smacking, and the horrible napkin dabs. It’s that kind of dinner scene that an Orson Welles type would really go bananas with. Oh, god, you’d have to keep it short with that stuff and get to the cake and presents.
So me and my wife and brother go in the house, and we put the 7 and the 8 in the icing (I bought them at Dollar General—my first time in a Dollar General, because I’m a liberal who lives in a bubble in upstate NY), and I light the wicks, and I carry the cake out to the porch, a little boy part of me mortified I’ll trip and send it flying, and set it in front of mom. (For the sake of sanity, I’ve skipped the unwrapping of the book by the Christian scholar, who is quote/unquote, “a genius,” according to Rodney. Rodney read a bit from the back cover, and it was about the speed of light, and how it proved God’s glory. Nuff sed.)
From where I sat on The Lodge’s massive wrap-around deck, the tracks in the yard from the front end loader, or “Bobcat,” were just over Rodney’s right shoulder as we watched mom read her birthday cards and open presents. Torn sod, bare earth. The Bobcat that carried the sand to the shore spelling out a truly biblical kind of hubris, something in the annals filled with hashtags “Adam” and “seventh day” and “dominion over the earth.”
At one time I sang the hymns with these two, my mother and brother. We were much younger then. And we lived in a place nothing like Cheever’s New England. There was no gin and no gentility. There was chow mein and denial.
I’ve purged a lot, and feel I can call on some new strength and clarity to try to offer something more uplifting. Okay, so picture a wooded lot, with a packed dirt driveway except for the pad before the garage. And there’s trees down, it’s dense woods, and the dead needles of firs and pines are brown, and out this driveway is a paved road, and just down from there is a public boat launch. It’s out of this driveway that me and my wife and my nephew pedal out on our bikes, going to see The Lodge.
Yes! Queue some cool tune to play while there's a cut of slow-motion me on my blue and white Trek 1, a road bike; and now slow-motion of my wife riding her Cannondale hybrid, which was tuned up specificity for the Midwest trip (we came from the east, not Portland, like the musician/narrator), with its knobby tires and forward profile; and lastly sweet Josh, 15, long-haired, riding this upright bicycle that’s like a family truckster of a bike. I don’t know where Rodney got this bike. It’s clunky but all-purpose, for renters. It’s got a back rack and a big triangle seat with springs under it. My nephew looks like Pee Wee Herman or something.
We pump up an incline, and Josh is telling stories and talking shit about what we see, remarking on nature. This kid is completely boss, so just basically picture the coolest sweetest, smartest, good-looking kid with a great smile, and a pure soul, and a kind heart, and there you are. Not bad. I’ve got my water bottle in the cage, and I’m often in the lead, riding no-handed while I look around drinking water and turning back and waiting for them to catch up.
We reach a curving county highway. On it, occasionally a truck would roar by, but everyone was safe and friendly. We passed a farm. Shots of horses eating from jungle gyms stuffed with hay that’s been pulled apart from a bale.
The sun.
My dappled brow.
The cracks in the asphalt. Weeds growing on the shoulder in the gravel, the sound of crickets, the hot summer wind. The squeak of my bike’s crank.
My wife sings or calls out something about a bird to Josh, who rides attentively, hugging the white line on the shoulder, and pumping his knobby knees high in the air, his long hair blown back.
And then the huge turtle that was crossing the road, and we turn right at the old sign with the faded paint, reading “Whatever the Name of the Real Lodge Was.”
We coast down under a Norway pine canopy on a road that curves into a clearing to reveal The Lodge itself, right at the edge of a minor cliff, with stairs down to the shore, the lakeshore. No electric lift—that was for dramatic effect. But you do see those on the shores.
Now we step off our bikes, and lean them against the tree, and take off our helmets, and approach the building.
The Lodge.
Except there is no Lodge. All that happened was that my nephew repeated things he’d probably overheard from locals he’d met on the water while fishing with his dad, or chewing the fat with a nightcrawler salesman in some gas station or sharing a chat in the donut room of some church. I don’t know. But the facts were, the place used to be a family restaurant and inn, and now it was someone’s house.
There was no one home on the afternoon of our visit. A nothingburger. Still, my wife and I weren’t about to teach the kid trespassing.
This thing’s a real shattered mirror. None of the coherence of a Cheever story. Put that on my watery tombstone. But is the construction of literature even necessary anymore? I didn’t aim to take it apart and lay it out on the table like some kind of autopsy patient. I’m just grabbing at the scraps that I find bobbing in the waters around me.
But it’s a free country, allegedly, so if anyone wants, print up the pronouncements, and be sure to laminate them, because the high is 110 next week, and people’s hands will be sweaty carting them around up and down the block, burning up their last hours on earth. Me, I hope to be playing tennis, loving my wife, or listening to African music on Spotify.
Literature as patriarchal slaves hip. Whoa. Radical. Story making, the literary life, as a kind of indentured servitude. What will you call it? What font will you use for the logo? What platform will stream the symposium?
The corpse twitches one last time. I’ve remembered my nephew’s words. “I should go pro.” This kid. This was his line when playing catch, when biking, when using the TV remotes that the adults could not figure out. But he had humility too, see—he freely admitted his curve ball didn’t curve, and we all saw him leave the lawnmower in the yard, claiming it’d run out of gas, only to be shown by Rodney the next day that the gas tank was bone dry.
Well, despite this, he felt he should go pro at many things. He said it in the water as well. See, we canoed out to the sandbar, where we played frisbee and swam, and invented contests, including breath holding, an endurance event naturally. We were treading water just off a steep shelf, so that swim for ten seconds and you’re standing. When my nephew is in water, his lips twitch; he’s not cold or suffering, they just do that. It took me a few summers to figure that out.
When I was underwater, I felt he counted too slow. I’d count myself, down there in the black, behind closed eye, the sounds of the world muted, and I’d come up, and he’d be short.
Eleven? That was fifteen!
No way, dude!
And the thing is, he felt the same about me. I felt shorted. Now, there was no shortage of love between us, and yet still we believed what we believed. We didn't argue or belabor it. There were other games to play. But before I could move on, I wished so badly that I could rectify this phenomenon for him—correct it, that I became abstracted, lost in thought. I chose that moment to swim a short ways away, relieve myself, looking to the far shore, looking at the lapping waves nearby, just letting my body bob, working strangely at some place in my cranium, in some way I cannot explain, to override control of my bladder, using my arms to stay afloat so that I maintain my life, breathing, and for my nephew, who is also my godson, comporting my face so that it would show no signs of worry.
After that, we paddled back, singing rowing songs, and me dreading more than Josh the approach of the shoreline.