Living with a Wild God

Sometime in my thirteenth year, but a little before I actually achieved that age, things began to assemble themselves into what I called “the situation.” By this I did not mean anything peculiar to myself—from the conditions of my family to the historical moment—but things more generally shared by humankind: ecstatic springtimes and bitter winters, swirlings and shrinkings, yearning and terror. All followed by death.

At this point I set my goal for life, which was to find out why. What is the point of our brief existence? What are we doing here and to what end? I had no plan of attack because I had no notion of what form the answer might take or where it might be found. Would it be in a book or in a place? Coded or in plain sight? Would it take years of patient study to comprehend or would it come in a rush of revelation? And if it was easily available, say in a library book, why didn’t anyone ever mention it? Because one thing you learn early in this line of work is that you can’t go around telling people, “I’m on a mission to discover the purpose of life.” Not if you’re hoping to prolong the conversation.

I read everything I could lay my hands on, from popularized science to the Romantic poets, and just in case the answer lay all around me in some more hidden form, I looked for patterns everywhere—​anagrams, number sequences, clusters, and coincidences. I still do these things and tend to think of them as a normal requirement of the waking state: counting whatever items pre­sent themselves, checking for prime numbers, monitoring for tiny trends in the number of birds or the passage of cars as seen from a hotel window, inventing elaborate backstories for everyone I encounter.

The one place I never thought to look for answers was religion. That approach had been foreclosed at some point in the late nineteenth century when, according to my father, his grandmother Mamie McLaughlin renounced the Catholic faith. When her father was dying she had sent for a priest, only to get word back many hours later that the priest would come for no less than twenty-five dollars. Perhaps the priest could be forgiven for dodging the long ride by horse or mule to whatever makeshift, mudbound mining camp she and her family lived in. But Mamie did not forgive him. When she herself lay dying in childbirth a few years later, the priest, who may have been in the neighborhood anyway this time, showed up unbidden and started administering the last rites. At which point, as my father told the story, she used her last ounce of strength to hurl the crucifix off her chest and across the room.

How much of this story is true I don’t know, but the fact that he liked to tell it testifies to the strength of my father’s undying antagonism to religion. When he was a boy he had used some subterfuge to get a peek at the atheist texts kept out of public view in the Butte library, and when he grew up he bought himself a set of the complete works of Robert Ingersoll, the late-​nineteenth-​century American atheist lecturer, and sometimes bored us by reading aloud from these on Sunday mornings. What he could not have guessed and I only dimly understood at first was that his insistence on utter rationality could cut the other way and eventually lead to doubts about the entire system that my parents held up as “reality.”

So I did not come to atheism the hard way, by risking the blows of nuns and irate parents, and maybe I would have been more steadfast if I had. I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe, and what this meant, when I started on the path of metaphysical questioning, was that there were no ready answers at hand. My religious friends—and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox—were convinced that God had a “plan” for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don’t overintellectualize.

My parents never discouraged me from accompanying friends to religious services or events, and even once a sorry weekend of Baptist summer camp. I’d like to think they understood that any encounters with religion as actually practiced would only deepen my disbelief, but it may be that they just weren’t noticing. When I was very young, still in the single-digit ages, I went with my friend Gail to her summer Bible class, where the instructor wound up the lesson by asking everyone to raise their hands if they had “acknowledged Jesus Christ as [their] personal savior.” My hand stayed down, not because I was so honest but because I was afraid of follow-up questions about, for example, the details of my “acknowledgment” and to whom it had been addressed. What was she asking—that we not only accept the world as it is, but that we should be grateful for it? So the instructor kept me after class, although this was, for Christ’s sake, only Bible class—and filled me in on the torments sweet Jesus had in store for an unsaved child. I wasn’t frightened by her vision of hell, only anxious about how long she intended to hold me captive, because there was no way for a child to get past a looming grown-up and out the door.

It wasn’t easy being a child atheist during the great Cold War or, for that matter, probably any time in human history outside of a few short-lived communist states. At school, I tried to blend in by mouthing the Lord’s Prayer along with everyone else, which was mandatory in those days in the public schools, only sometimes permitting myself to slip into inaudible mocking gibberish. But I couldn’t hide my peculiarity on Wednesday afternoons, when all the other kids were bused off to “religious study” at various churches while I remained behind at my desk under the grudging supervision of a teacher who might otherwise have been free to leave. There were times when I was taunted after school for being a “communist,” which I understood only as a derogatory term for “atheist.” Once some boys picked up rocks and chased me home, but I outran them.

How would I have turned out if I had not been set apart by this irreconcilable difference, if when I first started asking why, I had been given that great non-answer, “God”? I like to think that I would not have been satisfied and would have persisted, taking my question why right up to him. But then again, maybe I would have ended up as some denatured version of myself, content with whatever anodyne explanation was being handed out.

Certainly there were things other than atheism that distinguished my family, like our leaps-and-bounds upward mobility from the tenements of uptown Butte, Montana, to, by the time I became a teenager, the leafy exurbs of New England. My parents had eloped at the ages of eighteen and nineteen, bringing me into existence a decorous ten months or so later. At the time of my birth, my father was a copper miner in Butte, his father was a switchman for the Union Pacific, and my mother was cleaning boardinghouses. Thanks to a series of scholarships, my father made an almost unprecedented climb out of the mines, sweeping us along with him to Pittsburgh for graduate school in metallurgy, then through a series of white-collar jobs that took us to New York, Massachusetts, and finally Southern California, where we ran up against the irrefutable barrier of the Pacific Ocean and stopped right there.

Through all these moves—and there were enough so that I went to eleven different schools before entering college—Butte was our mythical touchstone and standard of authenticity. My parents had left when I was only two, but I treasured the summers when we got to return for a month or two, thanks to reductions in train ticket prices conferred by my paternal grandfather, the railroad switchman. I knew it was a hallowed place, and not only for the mountains. When anyone in the family did something heroic, criminal, or just plain self-destructive, my aunt Marcia would credit “the Butte in him [or her].” It wasn’t a place, this Butte that lived on inside all its children, it was a condition of permanent defiance. All the generations of class struggle—miners’ strikes, unexplained explosions, marches, and street brawls—boiled down to this, in my father and Marcia’s exegesis: We don’t take crap from anyone, never have and never will.

As a geographical place, Butte always takes a little explaining. Outsiders want to locate it in “Big Sky Country,” where of course it is, and imagine it populated with cowboys, so I have to start by telling them that Butte was a city, a dense cosmopolitan city that had at its peak drawn sixty thousand people, mostly from Europe, to man its copper mines: Italy, Ireland, Wales, Serbo-Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania. In the Butte cemetery where my son and I went to lay wildflowers on the grave of IWW organizer Frank Little last summer, we found tombstones from the last century in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Chinese. There were Jews, too, probably from Russia—​at least enough to form a minyan for the first synagogue ever built in Montana.

Butte people—“Butteans,” you could call them, though I never heard anyone do so—did everything they could to distance themselves from the mythical cowboy-land of Montana, to the point of calling their city “Butte, USA.” They even liked to extract it from the larger nation, quoting with pride the County Cork woman who saw her sons off from famine-ridden Ireland with the instruction, “Don’t stop in America. Go straight on to Butte.” Physically, Butte remains an anomaly: a cluster of multistory brick buildings, mostly empty now, and long-dead mining rigs jutting out from a mountainside like a quartz crystal sprouting out of a sheer rock face.

But today, in the shell that remains of postindustrial uptown Butte, there is no escaping the Big Sky anymore, no air pollution, for example, to shelter you from the all-encircling violence of the light. The other day I heard a Hidatsa man in Havre, Montana, struggling to answer an NPR interviewer who wanted to know what that “Big Sky” is like, and finally coming up with something about how it has “no edges,” meaning, as I heard him, that it is every­where and could swallow you up. You could be standing firmly on the ground, trusting in gravity to keep you earthbound, and then—poof—some part of you gets sucked up into the sky, leaving just a crisp of a person behind. This is what I always imagined must have happened to a cousin of my mother’s, who lived on a farm in eastern Montana and out of the blue shot himself dead with a rifle when he was only nineteen. It was the blue, I guess, that got to him.

Copper had drawn people to Butte—the mine owners looking to get richer and the miners hoping to feed their children while their wives took in laundry. But when I went there on an achingly bright day last summer I formed a different impression—​that Butte is where men went to escape from the sky. First they dug mines that ran a mile deep into the earth, which was about as far from the sky as you could get, and you had to be so desperate to get there that you’d risk being crushed in a collapsing tunnel or atomized in an explosion. Then they built the smelters to blur the sky with toxic smoke so that no miner emerging from the end of a shift would be exposed to the naked firmament, even for the short time it took him to get into the reassuring darkness of the bars, where you could count on the cigarette smoke to soften any stray intrusions of natural light. These are the lengths men will go to avoid being eaten alive by the emptiness, or at least that’s how I began to see it as a child.

But I didn’t know any history then and “class” was not available to me anyway as a category of analysis. No, the categories that shaped my childhood were much more primal than class or anything else, like gender, the sociologists have to offer. My childhood world was defined by desire and oppression, yearning and resistance, the push out and the shove back. You peek out and get poked in the eye; you reach out with your hand and it gets slapped down. So you try new angles for peeking and reaching, only to find new barriers thrown up in your way. You press against the wall, you jump to look over the top, you try crawling under until your knees are scraped and bloody.

If there was a recognizable demographic category in my childhood it was age. I entered the world as a child, of course, and I entered a world engaged in a war against children. We were the intruders; we could do nothing right; we were subject to constant rebuke. At home we were expected to work off our uselessness through chores—I was assigned, for example, to washing the dinner dishes at age six, when I had to stand on a chair to reach the sink, and when my brother was old enough, he dried. But we never did that task or any other well enough; dishes had to be rewashed, pots were not allowed to soak until the crust came off by itself. School was another site of correction. The penmanship was not neat enough, or I had neglected to carry a number while adding. Miss Sabatini, my third-grade teacher in Queens, made us sit with our hands crossed on our desks and our feet flat on the floor, all the time insisting that we “must learn self-control.” Although clearly if we had any real measure of control over ourselves and our lives we would be out in the playground, running and screaming.

In this war against children we all enter on the losing side and carry our wounds along to the next generation. My mother had been abandoned as a small child to her maternal grandparents, ostensibly because her parents couldn’t afford her, which may have been true at the time, because her father was drinking so heavily, in the normal way of miners, that her mother had had to humiliate herself by going to the shift boss at the mine and asking him for help, requesting that he give her the paychecks directly. But my mother’s parents did manage to raise their two younger children on their own, no problem, while my mother, the unwanted one, suffocated in the Victorian prison of her grandmother’s house in Nelson, British Columbia, which was devoted to the display of precious teacups and silver spoons commemorating important events in Canadian history. Maybe, in defense of my maternal grandparents, the reason they didn’t take my mother back even when they had the means to do so was that she was supposed to function as a replacement child for the daughter (who would have grown up to be my mother’s aunt) my great-​grandparents had lost at any early age to some routine early-twentieth-century infectious disease. My mother’s job was to drive the sadness out of that house in Nelson, but I suspect the sadness won.

According to my mother, there had been a similar deficit in my father’s past. He worshipped his mother, whom I remember as an obese, perpetually sedentary woman with stringy hair pulled back in a bun. But his mother had eyes—and what eyes, so fascinatingly deep-set and blue!—only for her eldest son, Gordon, who was by reputation in Butte not only a drunkard, brawler, and fornicator, but a murderer too. (He was not the only man on my paternal side who was said to have killed another man. Murder was apparently not such a serious crime in Butte.) Uncle Gordon, a railroad worker like his father, was crushed under his own train at the age of thirty, either pushed or falling-down drunk. But nothing my father achieved—his degrees and eventually, by working-class Butte standards, his wealth—ever threatened Gordon’s primacy in his mother’s heart.

The loathsomeness and dependency of children seemed to drag down the entire adult female sex; at least that was the impression I formed from the vantage point of my own family, My mother’s anger was the central force field in our home, its targets divided between my father, who got to leave every morning and often delayed his return till late at night, and me. She cleaned and scrubbed and seethed and cursed, to what I saw early on was an unusual degree, since my playmates judged her to be “mean.” When in an outbreak of defiance I passed this information on to her, along with a personal declaration of hatred, she washed my mouth out with soap.

Home, in those earliest years, was a standoff between my mother’s dreams of middle-class orderliness and the routine chaos of life. When we lived in Pittsburgh I shared a tiny bedroom with my little brother where I once woke up to find him painting the wall with shit mined from his diaper. One bedroom—there must have been three total—was occupied by a married couple we took in as boarders, whose nightly fights—or, as my mother suggested by saying, “Some people enjoy that kind of thing,” sadomasochistic rituals—shook the house. When I was about twelve, at least old enough to have sprouted the first appalling pubic hairs, I slept on a fold-out coach in the “den” in our house in Waltham, Massachusetts. To get to the bathroom I had to pass through the living room, where at night my mother would be alone, ironing and working herself into rage at my father’s perpetual absence. Once, I was too terrified to get up and walk by her for a second time and resorted to wetting the bed. When I gave up on sleep and confessed, she slapped me hard before allowing me to change the sheet.