The Narcissist Way

Continuing The Undressing of America: the coming of age of Bernard "Barney" McFadden. I'm playing here with some quasi-fictional techniques here, still developing the book's voice. I'm also seizing the excuse to post a couple of paintings by Charles Burchfield, whom I'm crazy about.

At the age of twelve, Barney began to grow. Not so much in height—he’d stop at five foot six for the rest of his life—but his shoulders broadened and his torso thickened and he discovered that he could add still more muscular power to what he had. His body was filled with new energies, too. There were stirrings of interest in girls and sex, although those still occupied only a corner of his thoughts, and the world in which he grew up hardly cultivated them. Mostly he became more restless, argumentative, and contrary. He began to question Jenkins’s commands and mock church sermons out loud. Jenkins and his wife became more convinced than ever that Barney was trouble, and sought to break him like a horse.

       In that struggle, soon after he turned thirteen, Barney found his God.

       Riding with the family back from church one Sunday, he asked Jenkins for money he felt was owed him. Jenkins refused. Barney accused him of not paying him what he was supposed to. Jenkins told him that to speak so on Sunday was blasphemous. Had he not heard the sermon just an hour before about the virtue of poverty and the evil of money?

       “I guess you know all about the evil of money!” Barney shouted. “That must be why you’re the cheapest son of a bitch in the county!”

       Jenkins’s wife blanched. Jenkins said he hoped God would strike him right there and then.

       “I’ll believe your God can strike somebody down when I damn well see it happen,” Barney said.

       Instantly, Jenkins tossed the buckboard reins to his wife and went for his whip. Barney vaulted from the wagon, paused to glare blackly back and Jenkins, and ran. He ran not in fear of the whip, he would insist later, but in fear what he might do to Jenkins in his rage. Off the road and down a slope he ran. Through a stone-littered field, vaulting over a neighbor’s fence, across a pasture pocked with gopher holes, down into a hollow at the bottom of a rise. The ground softened under his feet. Water filled his shoes. He plunged into a bog, its shallow water and soft vegetation warm in the afternoon sun.

       As the muck and water reached his knees he thought he should turn back, but he didn’t want to. He liked the warm wetness flowing over his skin, softening the hard, dirty denim of his trousers. He slogged deeper toward the center of the bog, not thinking about how he would get back out, how deep or insistent the mud at the bottom might be, wanting only to feel the water and mud surging up along his thighs. Deeper in, the water grew cooler, cold jets thrilling his inner thighs and groin. The thrill was electric. Energy, he believed, coursed from the earth itself into his limbs. His blood flowed as it never had, a warmth surged from him to mingle with the cool of the bog, the hard, hot swelling in his groin pressed against his trousers with a sweet pain. He had never felt so alive, and that life, he thought, came from the soil and the water and the whole vegetal world beneath his feet.

       Barney stopped with the bog up to his waist. He looked around himself. The sun glistened on the surface of the water. Small gnats lit by the sun zipped like fragments of lightning in and out of view. A cool breeze came from the hills, and Barney’s flesh rose to meet it in a thrill. He looked out across the fields at a world that he felt for the first time might meant him well. In later years he sought a word for what he felt and found the same one Victoria Woodhull had grown up believing was the essence of life: magnetism. A magnetic god of nature, health, and sexual energy, the earth’s “natural vitality,” ready to course through a man’s body like electricity through a wire. In that moment, in the bog, he had no words for it and no need of words.

       Eventually Barney slogged his way to dry land and hiked back to the Jenkins farm. The muck and water soaking his clothes grew cold, and his muscles tightened in anticipation of trouble with the farmer and his wife, but the memory of ecstasy sustained him. He believed he could overcome anything now. As it turned out, Jenkins contented himself with a few sharp words, a promise not to pay him any cash for a month, and a prediction that a vengeful Lord would punish his pride one day. He may have realized that Barney was no longer a boy to be physically confronted, and perhaps assumed that he would be grateful to be allowed back into the family with no severe punishment.

       He was mistaken. Barney stayed a few more weeks, doing his work in silence, and then he packed a bag and left. Early one morning without a word he finished his breakfast and walked out the door and down the path to the road. He turned west, away from the sun and toward St. Louis. He had no idea what he would do on his own in the city, but he knew he need never again serve anyone else, and he believed that he was capable, somehow, of wresting wealth and respect from the world. How, he had no idea, but he believed in his own unassailable wisdom and infinite possibility. 

       At thirteen, Barney McFadden had found a third way out of the Ozarks, a way that was not the heaven of a cruel church or the hell of the bottle. He had found narcissism.

To be continued...