'That's not what I mean,' she said. 'I mean, if you could be content like Couth. You know, peaceful?'
I knew.
In the morning from Biggie's lower bunk we watched Couth and Colm out of the boathouse porthole. On the low-tide mudflats, Couth was taking Colm exploring, carrying his camera and a burlap potato sack to gather the odd sea-leavings off the mud.
In the breakfast nook of the Big House, Biggie served blueberry pancakes to a silent Bobby Pillsbury, a nervous Nell, Couth and Colm, a bubble of display. The contents of the potato sack were for us all to enjoy: a razor-clam shell, a skate's tail, the transparent, paper-thin skeleton of a sculpin, a dead gull, the severed head of a bright-billed tern and the jutting lower jawbone of what might be a seal, a sheep, or a man.
After breakfast, Couth arranged the carnage on our plates and photographed it, suggesting some weird, cannibalistic meal. Though Nell's interest in Couth's photography seemed to end with this, I watched Biggie watching Couth patiently arranging his table settings. Colm appeared to find Couth's work the logical extension of child's play.
'Do you ever do nudes?' asked Nell.
'Models are expensive,' Couth said.
'Well, you should ask your friends,' Nell told him, smiling.
'Biggie?' Couth asked, but he looked at me. I was balancing Colm on his head on the pool table.
'Search me,' I told him. 'Ask her.'
'Biggie?' Couth called. She was in the kitchen with the breakfast pans. Bobby Pillsbury and Nell handled the long pool cues at the end of the living room. 'Will you model for me, Biggie?' I could hear him asking her in the kitchen.
Bobby Pillsbury flexed his pool cue like a fly-fisherman's rod. Nell bent hers like a bow, and I was suddenly aware of how red in the face poor, upside-down Colm was. I righted him dizzily on the pool table, and heard Couth add cautiously, 'I mean, you know, naked ...'
'Yeah, just a minute, Couth,' said Biggie. 'Let me finish these dishes first.'
But Couth envied children more than wives. He used to tell me that he thought more of offspring than of mates. Though Biggie touched him, I think Colm got to him more. He used to ask me what I did with Colm; he was amazed that I had to think hard for an answer. All I could tell him was that children changed your life.
'Well, sure, I'd think they would,' he said.
'But I mean, they make you paranoid.'
'You were always paranoid.'
'But with children, it's different,' I said, not knowing how to explain what was so different. I once wrote Merrill about it. I said that children gave you a sudden sense of your own mortality, which was clearly something that Merrill Overturf had no sense of; he never answered me. But I simply meant that you noticed how your priorities had changed. For example, I used to like motorcycles; I couldn't ride one after Colm was born. I don't think it was just responsibility; it's just that children give you a sense of time. It was as if I'd never realized how time moved before.
Also, I had this feeling about Colm that seemed unnatural. That is I desired to bring him up in some sort of simulated natural habitat - some kind of pasture or corral - rather than the gruesome real natural habitat itself, which seemed too unsafe. Bring him up in a sort of dome! Create his friends, invent a satisfying job, induce limited problems, simulate hardships (to a degree), fake a few careful threats, have him win in the end - nothing too unreasonable.
'You mean, sort of graze him, like a cow?' Couth said. 'Well, but he'd become a little bovine, wouldn't he?'
'Cattle are safe, Couth, and they're content.'
'Cattle are cattle, Bogus.'
Biggie agreed with Couth. When Colm was allowed to tricycle around our block, I fretted. Biggie said it was necessary to give the child self-confidence. I knew that; still, I lurked in the bushes around the block, following him unseen. I had a notion of the father as guardian angel. When Colm would see me peeling back a branch and peering out at him from the hedge, I'd tell him that it was actually the hedge that interested me. I was looking for something; I'd try to interest him in such safe scrutiny too. Better than riding your tricycle into danger! Come live a placid life in the untroubled hedge.
I even found a place I thought was suitable for a controlled environment: the Iowa City zoo. No life and death struggles or failures there.
'We always come here,' Colm would complain.
'Don't you like the animals?'
'Yes ...' But in winter there were only four or five animals. 'Mommy takes me there,' Colm would say, pointing across the river to downtown Iowa City and the university buildings.
'There's just people there,' I'd tell him. 'No raccoons.' Just people; if we went there, we might see one of them crying - or worse.
So coming home from People's Market, I'd take Colm through the zoo. In November, when the monkeys had gone south or indoors, and Biggie and I had been waiting a week to hear from my offended father, Colm and I brought the breakfast bread home through the zoo, and left most of it there.
Feeding the vile raccoons, an entire snarling clan of them in their stony cell, Colm was always concerned that the smaller ones got no bread. 'That one,' he'd say, pointing to a cowardly one, and I'd try to reach the little bastard with a wad of bread. Every time, some fat and surly one would get there first, bite the coward in the ass, steal the bread and wait for more. Is this good for a child to see?