A man of unusual means

Chapter 2   A man of unusual means

 

 

 

Tom walked back to the cabin. His mind was in a daze. In the mountains, everything happens for a reason and at a certain pace.  But generally, whatever the pace is, that was it.

 

Instinctively, he walked to the back of the cabin and viewed again the remains of the burnt out home in the dim light. To have someone share in the thought of something, appeared as important as sharing in one's feelings.

 

He had thought that it was the ghosts of the Algonquin that had helped him with the crunch in his feelings about the family. For almost two years, a few summers back, he experienced a series of images about his father and mother that reshaped the experience of his childhood in the home. But he hadn't been sure.

 

When he heard from Charles about ancient Scythia, he remembered something he had read on the net about the way the Scythia buried gold figurines of animals  along with the deceased.  Would be fun to think that there are Scythia graves in the Appalachia with gold buried in them, he wondered aloud.

 

He recalled how his mother was a decisive and effective person in all that she undertook. But she needed someone to share her life, in a special way, in the world that she lived in, away from the life of the American society that was rising as the leader of the free world. She finally couldn't deal with her world and take responsibility for the reality of the modern world they were living in. It was too much.

 

It confused father and eventually he moved from platonic to stoic, evading the torrents of impulses that rushed at him like water down a mountain. He kept trying to get back to the top and stay on top of things but each time, it meant a swim upstream that was getting longer and further. Finally, he gave up.

 

Tom took his love of cars and converted that into a career. For a while it thrived but the towns in the vicinity were growing and it became a competitive business. It was no longer a way of life that you lived with people that you identified as a community.

 

His thoughts returned to Songnat, the Laotian he employed in the garage. It  was a miracle the way he seemed to take away from Tom the burdens of the world and allowed him to live as himself. Speaking in what passed for the English language, through teeth that was stained and crooked, Songnat's life, that survived the Vietnam war and the killing fields of Cambodia represented to Tom a life of purpose. For him, Songnat would always be his Christ.

 

He built the cabin himself after the police released him from any involvement in the deaths of his parents. It had no electricity or running water. He was married briefly but she left to go to her sister's in Ohio and never returned. He never had any children. Perhaps that explained the way he related to young people as the continuity of life, in an lifetime that threatened him with the possibility, always, of extinction.

 

From Songnat, he inherited a leafy kingdom of the birds, trees and animals. He came to hear how mynahs are very forceful in their habits and drive away other birds from places that they habitat. How a person would catch a catfish with the fingers placed carefully around the stingers. That in a miraculous way, a rotting fruit is the mother of the worm, an anima that is born in fruit, in what Songnat calls the magic of the white serpent.

 

Curiously, in growing up in the mountains, Tom figured he had experienced the same things but here was an individual from another part of the world, a man like him, who experienced the same phenomenon like a smurf or a pixie that lived his life as a part of the life of birds and the trees.

 

It raised a strange sense of being in him, something he thought he had lost when his parents died and his home was burnt down. But he wasn't yet relating to it as an individual. The experience left him a little lost, feeling like a native sometimes of the ancient days when man identified himself with animals.

 

He had taken an instant liking to Charles. Here was a man in his thirties, possibly of mixed parentage, with a keen sense of observation, living a life to prove something about himself. Tom had felt his mind move again by what he translated as a collective purpose.

 

When he had met Sally and in the years following their marriage, he had felt purpose. It affirmed his own experiences as a child and overcame the gap of the loss of his home. It felt more real with Sally, but the world had just been too much. Like his mother, he realized he couldn't live his life for everybody else.

 

On some strange nights, when the loneliness became  the spine of life, he would encounter possibilities of survival that went beyond anything he saw in the world. That's when the voices began. It disturbed him.

 

However, in a 1995 issue of the Readers' Digest, he encountered a painting by the Filipino artist, Vicente S. Manansala, that resembled a strange dream he had, in which the voices had told him to find a guide from within himself. Gradually he started to take it more seriously and stopped trying to avoid the experience.

 

He eventually met some such person in himself who claimed to resemble the principle of true love. He called himself CP. CP was much of the time like a little child, but after two years, Tom was coming out of his dementia and was soon able to relate better socially. The headaches slowed down.

 

The experience helped him relate to his childhood better. Just about then, Songnat had turned up and it soon snowballed into a live one.

 

His love of the woods had returned. He went back to fishing and hunting and would spend days camping out in the forest listening to the voices and his own responses to them. One time he had thought he had met the captain of the star-ship Enterprise, that was popular as the TV series, Star Trek.

 

But in all that time, he had not figured that there was a line of history linking the soil on which he lived with the history of the world, beyond the world of the native Americans. The suggestion had a profound effect on his mind. It reminded him of his father's talk of the Levi as the Source and as manifest destiny in American affairs.

 

As he went in to fix a cup of coffee, he was reminded of the legend of King Cepheus of the constellations. The legends report him as saying, “ I am the home. Find me.”

 

Tom smiled broadly. In an experience of the greatest irony, he realized that his father, who always appeared like a leafy king, may have been right about some things.  But when all is said and done, a person might have suggested that his father had begun too early a home.

 

Reviews

[Shep]

Lots of life changing advents going on in this wwchapter. Love the hackstory of his life. Now I have to see where you are taking me. But not tonight.

[patricia]

How organised and methodical you are, with headings for all your chapters, you have a tidy mind and I am jealous!
The second paragraph voices a wonderful insight. How people hunger for others who have similar interests.
What treasures and interesting things the ground holds. I have often thought so myself.
I liked the move from Platonic to stoic line.

Songnat would always be his Christ - Wow!

The...he built the cabin paragraph seems to have AN instead of A before lifetime.

Loved the feeling like a native sometimes of the ancient days.

Interesting thought how a person might evaluate another as coming from mixed parentage. Do people still do that? I suppose they do. I liked the collective purpose that he evolved into.

Good point how he couldn't life his life for everybody else. Thought provoking.

When loneliness became the spine of life...sounded strangely beautiful.

Love all the ancient root connections, and the wonderful history lessons ou so subtly include.

Fabulous chapter. Thanks.