Posted by nigel1 on May 04, 2002 at 17:32:29:
His pathetic "Thanksgiveness", as he called it, was about to begin. His left foot bubbled in a roasting pan, with carrots, onions, and potatoes. There would not be so much meat on his foot, but it would be better than having no meat at all. You had to figure the cost effectiveness of such a move as sawing off a leg below the knee. Besides, he lacked a suitable saw, like a real bone saw. Some people would say, he was sure, that he was too miserable a creature, too stupid, too poor and craven, to deserve any kind of Thanksgiveness at all. Hah! Let them gawk! With all of his doors and windows open (it was a mild day) he fanned the meaty odors outdoors, to compete with the heady aromas of hams and sucking pigs, and turkeys, or "turdees" as he liked to say. No doubt, some of his contemptable neighbors roasted goats. BRRRRR! What was happening to America, he wondered. It did smell good! His foot smelled better than them all! When he got tired of waving his arms around (he tired easily), he peeked into the oven, lifted the lid of the old roasting pan, same one his mother used to use, and basted the foot with its own rich ichor. Although it really wasn't so rich, truth be told, just fat and water, with the various vegetable juices simmering. It was still much like a foot in appearence. What a lot of tendons! All the parts he'd thought of as holding edible flesh had sort of shriveled, and the skin held intact, like a parchment sack. The sight of the toenails made his stomach queasy for a moment. He had cleaned them, cleaned the whole thing thoroughly with soap and water prior to dissecting it off, but he regreted not thinking to pull the toenails out. He had a pair of pliers handy that would have served perfectly. The toenails were curling up and turning translucent. Perhaps that was the reason they looked so unappetizing.
The roasting pan, his modest frame house, the surgical kit with which he'd amputed his left foot, all were relics of an earlier and happier time, a time spent living with his dear Mother after his Father died suddenly and unexpectedly in his office, with a patient. The details were sketchy, never adequately explained, and, really, he had made no great efforts to inquire. His Mother, so pained, could not be tortured further by any inquiry of his. An only child, twelve years old, shy and sensative beyond his years, he settled into a routine of life with Mother, living quietly, quietly, helping in any way he could, doing odd jobs around the High School, janitorial work, whatever he could find that would not throw him into excessive and unwanted contact with others. There was really not much money-- only a modest nestegg. Someone shouted at him once "Fucking Abortionist! Back alley Butcher!" He had been confused. He and his mother only retreated further. He sighed. A lonely life, he thought, but surely a life of quiet dignity. There was even an old wooden crutch he valued highly, grey and grimy and webbed with spider nests, hiding behind the water heater in the bathroom closet. That had been his Mother's crutch, much used as the sciatica wore her away, and even more when she skidded off the toilet seat and broke her hip. She seemed to have been standing on the toilet seat, which, slick with her urine, provided no purchase, no sure and firm support to one as heavy and infirm as she. Sometimes he had to wonder what she had been doing, and he himself, after she became bedridden, planted his feet on the seat of that toilet, and looked about, and felt for loose boards, some kind of hidden shelf or cubby accessible from such a position, but he found nothing.
Vegetables! Now there was something good. One could grow them one's self, and tuck them away for years and years in a cool cupboard, or better yet, in the cellar. Yes, they would shrink and turn gray and lose almost all color and flavor, becoming effectively mummified, still they could be eaten. His Mother and he had shared many meals of desiccated tubors, and tiny shriveled carrots, as his Mother explained how the process of mummification concentrated and amplified the vitamins, and made the natural essences that were not pure and essential part company from the glowing goodness that defined a carrot, or a potato, or an onion, or a turnip, or a parsnip, or a gray bundle of papery greens. Ahhh, so it was with the spirit! Let the body dry and contract, turn papery and fragile, and the inner fire bloomed the more, for those with the spiritual eye. If there was anything to give thanks for, it was the humble vegetable, teacher of so many lessons. And the harvests had been bountiful. He tilled the little garden patch faithfully, despite the efforts of little heathens, hurling bags of dogshit into his potato beds. Little did they know, the uses of such excrement, to build soil! He had even fresh carrots, and potatoes, and onions, for his Thanksgiveness! He chuckled with satisfaction when he thought of the onions, still in the ground! He liked onions! He seated himself at the kitchen table, because he tended toward dizziness and nausea that day, though he had lost only a little blood. Feebly, he fanned more odors out the door. By turning his head to the left, he could see, through the kitchen screen door, a clump of green shoots, nestling near the fence.
Holidays were simply awful. All the neighbors seemed always to have relatives visiting. When he'd gone out in the early morning, hobbling on his crutch, to relieve himself in the toolshed (the toilet had not worked in years), the neighbor children were already outdoors, playing noisy, destructive, games, running up and down the alley. He'd hoped for cold weather, but no such luck. In fact, the day threatened to turn hot. Halfway to the shed, a dozen of them, it seemed, all with the same flat and brutish brown faces, some he'd never seen before, draped themselves over his rickety fence. "Hey! Mr. Geezer! Mr. Geezer! You old fart!" Much laughter. He could never be sure exactly where they lived. They were all colored people, as far as he could tell, some maybe from alien lands and with alien gods. They all looked alike. They wanted to know what happened to his foot. "Oh," he said, "I was just chopping some weeds out here, and like a dummy I took a cut at my foot." "Does it hurt?" "Nah, not a bit. It's just a little cut. And please, get off that fence-- you're going to tear it down!" What a nightmare that would be! He'd never be able to repair or replace that fence, and with the fence breached, they would swarm over his property and claim it as their own. Gone would be his vestiges of privacy, his garden, his sacred things. They ignored him and pushed harder on the fence. His heart twinged. A little girl among them said it looked like he cut his foot off, and the rest of them laughed their rotten heads off. By that time he was in the tool shed, unable to hold it any longer. It was going to be a hell of a holiday if he'd have to deal with those little savages all day. Why couldn't they leave him alone? He heard them yelling something about seeing the old man in the outhouse, and he burned. Goddamn them! Stinky stinky poo poo, and damn their eyes, too. He know perfectly well he didn't stink. He buried his shit, like a cat. He'd had a cat, once, until he found it, cold and stiff in his garden one morning. Its skull was crushed. He had buried it among the vegetables. He was sure no one knew what he did in the toolshed, and he vowed that the filthy creatures weren't going to ruin his day. They were only tormenting him, and he was strong enough to endure that. But he also needed relief. God forbid that he should have the runs today, since that would necessitate many trips back and forth to the toolshed, in full view of the neighborhood, and he didn't think he could take that. He really did not feel very good.
Yes, by God, it was really going to be hot! His stump, that he'd ligatured and swathed in bed linen, clean bed linen, and not the soiled rags he shot his semen into, felt like it might be bleeding. The bandages were becoming soiled,too. But he was eager to get his foot out of the oven, and sit down to the finest of all meals, the meal of self, and get the ball rolling, even if it killed him. But before anything else, he had, again, to shit. It was so cool and dark in the shed, so nice and musty. The way he did it, he cut the bottom out of a galvanized tin bucket and wired the toilet lid, the same lid his mother had stood up on, to her ultimate grief, to the narrow end of the bucket. It was just necessary to find a relatively unused spot, defecate, and cover the deposit of "royal jelly" with the aid of one of his garden trowels. Later, as if by a miracle, and really it was a miracle, one could remove the mound of earth one had built, and place it in the garden to hasten the growing things. It was obvious something was wrong. He hardly noticed the neighbor children this time. He was not sure they had noticed him. He felt very light headed. And it was not until he had begun to relieve himself that he realized he had forgotten to sneak out a roll of toilet paper. Even worse luck, he was going to have an especially violent experience, full of exploding gas, splattering fecal projectiles, splashing and spattering of dirt and waste matter upon his buttocks, and testicles. Every burst of gas brought a hail of rocks and pebbles, pelting the shed on all sides, it seemed, and shrieks of childish laughter.
This, he thought, is the price a superior man pays-- this is the ultimate sacrifice. He couldn't help but think of Socrates, and, yes, even Jesus.