The Wallaby Skin

It’s draped over the back of my uncomfortable chair right now. A pelt, I guess you’d call it, with a hairy side, from a species of small kangaroo.

I’ve had it for years and years, going back to whenever I liberated it from Granny’s attic back in Maryland. That could have been in ’75, but probably happened much, much earlier. I happened to mention it recently, and it just came up again in conversation. The wallaby skin, getting kind of ratty now, the leather cracking more and shedding hair… (Is this spooking you out? It’s giving me the willies, just wait a bit.)

The other night I had a dream about chopping down giant dried-out dead weeds with a shovel. The stalks were the size of tree trunks, as thick as my thigh, but they were hollow inside, not woody, and soft and soggy at the bottom. I could cut through with a determined thrust of my pointed shovel. There was a body of water nearby, and a lot of giant weeds. My wife was standing in the road nearby, watching.

Today was difficult. I’d vowed we’d never spend another winter in this house, but we woke up to overnight wet snow frozen solid all around. It looks like winter is starting early in these parts, and I’m resisting. The old adobe is cozy, warm, and cheap. It’s also “old Taos” funky in ways that tourists never see and a dead end for me and my wife. That’s it, a dead end. As charming and decent as it is, it can’t ever be more than a temporary home, the same as all of them we’ve had since moving here from Maryland. I don’t know if ownership itself is all that important, but feeling secure in being able to stay sure is. So is something simple like having a closet and all her clothes in one place, instead of a piece of conduit hung from the vigas with chains and wardrobe boxes in the storage unit. Trivial in the short term, something else entirely over time, and now with winter coming on again, a stab.

The funny thing is, I always felt our old house in Maryland was temporary, too, that there was something else beyond. And for all the times I still look back in wonder, nostalgia, or regret, I also remember what it was like to crawl underneath the porch and find the termites, the ancient “mouseways” through the interior walls, the tangle of corroded pipes and scary wiring in the basement, the smell of urine on wet days in the back corner of the old garage where the previous owner, an alcoholic house painter, used to hang out with his bottle and piss into a funnel stuck into a knothole, I kid you not. You know, an old wooden house in the country. For me, at least, the joy of being there was frequently dampened by the guilt from all the things that needed fixing. To live in such a place, you need to reach a point of what the hell, and then keep going. (Even so, you don’t get rid of it.)

And so the wallaby skin, the thing I’ve had for such a long time…

My aunt, an U.S. Army nurse, brought it home from Australia in ’45 along with other souvenirs and trinkets. Opal earrings, funny ashtrays, children’s books. The wallaby skin is something I’ve almost thrown away a dozen times, except — it’s a wallaby skin, and who has one of those? Besides, it’s always lent an air of manliness and hunter karma to the scene. It’s like I needed it, and in more ways than one. When you’re raised in certain ways, you look in attics and dresser drawers for proof of love, for something you can take and keep that makes real those who hid themselves away. An animal skin will work. From my father’s sister, the fact that someone shot it, probably a man. The evidence of a man.

Tonight, though, trying to remember just how old it is, I realized something that no one will believe had never occurred to me before: my aunt bought it and brought it home in ’45. I was born in ’45.

The goddamned thing is just as old as I am!

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