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Tom Paine

Edward G. Nilges

He woke up early, his wife slept beside him, like a mountain blocking the rising sun. The cat had found a comfortable spot in the curve of her hip and was busy doing its feline snore which he thought could be illustrated by a sequence of ys and not zs.

They had fought. He’d found a cheap copy of The Year of Living Dangerously on DVD and they’d watched Peter Weir’s story of an Australian journalist and British embassy spook and Chinese dwarf. But she’d annoyed him by asking why people were begging for mercy at the airport.  Even though she had a PhD in English (and he most assuredly did not) she did not know, as he knew, that in 1965 Moslem generals had the jump on the Indonesian commies, and those Moslem generals did the job.

He paused the DVD, turned angrily to her, and told her the facts (with a couple of embellishments about CIA involvement) but then asked her why it was that he, a machinist in a struggling custom tool shop near LAX, could get this goddamn information at the public library and she could not.

By this time they knew by heart how to start a fight, like chess players executing their favorite openings. She: but you like being a machinist, you told me that it’s real science without academic bullshit and base to all superstructure. He: yeah, well you don’t have to work standin’ up all day in 35 centigrade sweatin’ inside eye protection, and you’re not patronized by college kids, and your union goes to bat for working conditions, not just pay and benefits.

Oh well tell me about it, she said. Try grading essays. Eighty-five of these goddamn essays and every year they get worse. Try having to explain to some kid why Donne is not only thinking of sex in The Flea, but also the Holy Trinity, when that kid’s pastor would call it blasphemy.

These were the opening gambits but the fight luxuriated through in-laws and old hurts and if they’d had an extra bed he’d be in it. Later, much later, he was relegated to the basement with his tools, and later, a bit later, to a Motel Six. By that time he was writing poetry and there’s a hell of a rhyme between the Motel Six and the River Styx, but I digress.

Before all that, on that morning in question when he woke up early and saw that beyond the mountain range of her still firm body, beyond the cat, the window was open to a warm spring day.  Their child nearby was beginning to make small sounds as he arose from the deep sea of a child’s sleep, smiling at what he must have found in dreaming: bunnies ridden by fairies, and possibly a puppy. Christ, he thought, I gotta make this marriage work.

Then he remembered. His dream had been about Tom Paine, a gnomic figure used and thrown away by Washington to encourage the troops, driven to England by Hamilton and the boys, not welcome there as a Yank and thence to France only to be considered irrelevant, and American, which was worse. Little better than an Indian, which was how folks thought back then.

Tom Paine had come to him with shabby-genteel hose drooping down and said, my pain was not your pain, and her pain is hers. Above all, do not race with her to the bottom, do not compare notes on how terrible your life is. I, Tom Paine said, lived in a world lit by fire, where women were burned to death regularly doing everyday chores. You, Tom Paine said to him, live in a world in which my afterlife only became familiar after raiders burned New York.

Go now and play with your son when he wakes. God be with you, assuming he or she exists. God be with you, assuming she or he cares.