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KNOX'S 'NGA
Avram Davidson
Belle Abernathy was not Grandmother Welles's favorite grandchild, in fact, GW
had said semi-publicly more than once that Belle looked "like a plucked chicken,"
and that, although perhaps Belle could not help being skinny, she needn't show it off
like that. These criticisms were heard no more after the skinny chickenny Belle had
whispered in Grand's ear the Dreadful News; another grandchild, Lou Anne, who
had married Robert Owens in A Lovely Church Wedding following upon a mere
Civil Ceremony of vague circumstance, and was now expecting a child ? Well, Belle
hated to have to say it, but the birth was a mere five months after the church
wedding, and as for the civil wedding, there had been no civil wedding.
"They were just shacked up, that's all," Belle said brutally.
Well, figure it out. Although in her very heart of hearts Grand would have been
able to forgive, had they come to her and confessed— had they? No. Tried to pull
the wool over her eyes. Country going to damnation. Her own grandchild. Hippies.
Probably smoked hish-hash, or whatever it was called.
So, to the Quarterly Dinner at the old Welles house, who were not invited?
Well, well : what to do. Bob Owens didn't care. Lou didn't care much. Lou's
mother cared. Lots.
"Only one thing to do," Lou said. "Baby must be named 'Philander Knox'."
"'Must'?" asked Bob. "Is 'Must' a word to be used to fathers?" Just the sort of
thing he would have said. Dry sense of humor. Quiet man, and, well, small . To tell
the truth. Shacking up hadn't really been his idea. Like more than a mere few men of
nowadays he had come home one day to find that the lady who held the extra key
had moved in, and that they were now, well, no , not shacking up , did one shack
down ? But certainly, a fact: living together. "Why, 'Philander Knox'?"
The women exchanged looks. "An ancestor," they said.
"Well, yes, understandable. But surely there are others. Why not, ah, Welles'?
Welles Owens, sounds classy. No like? Too many sibilants?" They shook their
heads. "Oh, Zz not a sibilant? Oh—"
His wife now pronounced his name in a manner which gave it a sound of having
several syllables and a warning to shut his mouth.
"Welles, well, Welles is my mother-in-law's married name. Just as it's mine . But
Philander Knox was a cabinet member, oh, TR and Taft—"
"Ancestors?"
Getting near the knuckle, Owens. Want a knuckle sandwich, Owens? Want to be
accused of implicit misogyny, Owens? Whose enormous phallus rapted and rupted
 
this virginal little girl, three inches your taller and three years your elder? Owens. Shut
the funk up and lissen.
Philander Knox had held cabinet positions. He was a distant cousin of
Grandmother Welles's grandmother. True, there had been a Welles who'd been in
Lincoln's cabinet but those were different Welleses. Spelled the same? Philander
Chase Knox, Secretary of the Whatever It Was. No body anymore knew who he
was. But Grand thought they did! And if The Baby were to be named Philander
Knox Owens, people were bound to ask How, Come? Enter Ye Dowager Mrs.
Welles, with a muscle in her bustle, and Able to Explain.
Well, there are those who say that God is a Woman and this might explain why
the baby was a boy, was named Philander Knox, did reduce Old
Great-Grand-mother to a puddle of pink flesh and Instant Reconciliation.
Belle Abernathy shrank even further into her plucked chickenanity and was never
heard from, almost, again.
The baby was called The Baby as long as was reasonable, and then a bit more.
The Baby began to walk, lurch, stagger, teeter, totter, "Come to Great-Grandmother,
Knox. Come to Grand," said Guess Who: "Knox."
"Knox" came. Totter, teeter, stagger, lurch, walk. Collapse. " There , see he knows
who he is and he knows who I am," said the Dragon Lady.
The three Owenses are at home. "Knox," said Bob.
His firstborn shows no sign.
"I know ," says Lou.
"We could call him 'Philander'."
"No, we could-n't !"
Bob bares all, did his wife think there was no gamey secret she did not know?
Hah! "I had a great-aunt named Rectalyna," says he. Lou screams.
No he did- n't! Oh yeah, yes he did. She was long ago and far back on the
Coonass and Peckerwood sides of the family, gummed snuff and thought shit was a
household word. Her most famous, well, only well-known, wehhell only known
utterance, was, "The government is going to punish this nation because poor Mr.
Bryan is dead," came to the attention of H.L Mencken, who said Hot diggetty ! and
made a note and on finding out the woman's name said, "Hot diggetty , poor old
Jehovah, woo-hoo, Rectalina with a long i ? Oh with a y . Godfrey Daniel!" and it
appeared in some preliminary work on The American Language but got cut out of
the regular editions. "So my sweet, compared to Rectalyna, I guess we can live with
Knox, hey we could call him ' Phil' !"
It was all in vain. No, they couldn't. He simply was too young and a baby to be a
Phil.
They took to calling him My Son. Where's My Son. Come here My Son.
Grand of course, well, what do you think. Grand liked a ride in the country but
 
Grand did not like to drive. Once there had been a chauffeur, or, as he was called in
the highly democratic Welles house, a driver. McDowd. McDowd, returning to
Antrim for a visit, had been convicted of an uncommonly brutal murder and jerked
to Jesus in no time at all. Anyway . Grand dearly loved to be called for and driven
around with her descendants, whom she would treat to ice-cream cones and
Coca-Cola and suggest they drop into country sales and so on and afterwards she
would slip something into Bob Owens's hand. He said that at first he thought it was
a Merry Widow (Lou: A what?) a French letter (Lou: a WHAT?). Oh Hell. But it
was a twenty-dollar bill, folded small and thick.
"Oh look there. What does the sign-y say, Knox? Read it for Grand. It says,
Ya-a-r-d Sale. Yard sale. Oh Bob do you think we—"
Bob plays it up. Milk-buckets? he asks. If Grand wants a nice bucket he Bob has
a friend who can make them a good price for a dozen. Soon the old lady has passed
from pshaw and the idea into giggles, and there they are, Rumplemayer's or
whatever the name of the place was, the worn inhabitata of three generations, out for
sale, nary a tear. "What, those old pie-an-o rolls," says Mrs. Rumplemayer, "Oh they
blonged to my older sister she had infantile pralysis and my folks got her the player
pie-an-o but then she got like pralysis of the brain so nobody had no more use for
them, why she died years ago, how much the tag says? Three dollars? Shucks. Why
you just take 'em all for two."
Knox is a little bit testy. He does not exactly reject Grand, would he dare , all
those gravel road bonds, but he doesn't want his parents to move away, either. "He
wants his bottle," Grand remarks.
"Want must be his master," Lou says. She read that somewhere.
" I always—"
"You had Colored Emma."
Well. True. Mrs. Welles the Elder did have, or had had Colored Emma. It may be
thought that the adjective was here used as a title. But it was really used to
distinguish her from Dutch Emma, a foreigner, who was dumb enough to do the
heavy dirt work in spite of being in a house with a Nigger in it.
"Well," said Grand, deliberately quirking the corners of her mouth, "I can see that
Bob wants to get over and look at the books ," you rogue , you, Bob. Books . "So let
Mamma and Grand take one each of Knox's hands and we'll go for a little walk-y of
our own, did you see any old dress patterns, Lou-lou, dear?"
Philander Knox Owens was not a year and a half, quite. His hair was light silky
brown, his skin was a pinkish-brown showing white-white inside the elbows and
behind the knees, and his eyes were hazel. Sometimes he strode along, sometimes he
dawdled, sometimes he swung, now he began to grizzle and mizzle and whimper the
syllable, "Da…" The old woman wanted to console him and wanted to carry him but
neither was allowed. Suddenly he was leaning against a pile of things For Sale and he
put out his arms around it and he said, distinctly, the syllable, ' "Nga" (ng as in
singing). A bit harder to interpret than Da .
 
Afterwards Lou said that her grandmother had paid for it. Later Grand said she
had done so because Lou said, "Oh, he might as well have it." All minor parts in the
eternal game of trying to assign blame in order that the decrees of the fates might
somehow be recalled and reissued. Changed.
Well, Grand did find some old dress patterns. Lou had gotten a damn fine
bargain on the player piano rolls, sure Bob found not only books but some excellent
early paperbacks at an excellent two-bits each. "And Knox has his taxidermical
item." said Bob, feeling good for all of them. "Was it a bargain My Son? Is that what
happens with my loose change?
What has it got in its pocketses? What in the Hell IS this thang?" Just then old
Mrs. Welles espied a store which sold what to her was a Sunday afternoon
special/staple. "Oh what kinds of ice-cream do they have?" And the choice between
them caused the other things to be forgotten.
Knox, a.k.a. My Son, who has begun—with weaning—to be rather querulous of
nights, sleeps like slugged. Satisfaction changes in Lou's bosom to something like
alarm, "Oh I was going to take it away and have it dry-cleaned or washed or
something." She gets up, returns soonly. My Son, a.k.a. Knox, is wrapped all
around it. In the morning.
In the morning everybody feels just fine. Everybody has had a good night's sleep.
Mom and Dad have by the way had more than just sleep, being undisturbed
throughout every inch and sigh of sweet dalliance, but it melted sweetly into sleep,
so—same thing. Argal, instead of the day's being Rotten Monday it is Marvelous
Monday. Followed by Tremendous Tuesday, Wonderful Wednesday… well,
wonderful until about half-way through din-din with My Son ("Knox") in his hi-chair,
zumbling and drooling… but eating , mind you: eating … hear Louie give a frightful
scream, worthy of the discovery that one has on the wrong nail polish—
The Kid seems mildly interested, rewards the scream with the word,
" 'Nga!"
The Dad has no such thing to say. Gapes. Why is his wife screaming, why
waving her hands and why writhing? He would know these answers? Would he?
Tough. The Mom has become aware of something very urgent, it requires her to get
out of the breakfast nook, fast ! Her figure is still, a year and a half after childbirth,
thicker than it was when she was a junior in high school: good , though.
Good.
But she cannot simply slip out from behind the bar. The too, too solid flesh
refuses to melt. Why doesn't her husband realize that she, needs , to get out ? Why
doesn't she just tell him? A dumb question. Her mouth is still full, that's why.
"My God, Lou-lou, what's the matter ?"
The dumb son of a bitch; finally she, with upturned face and look of agony,
Belinda going down for the third time in the whirlpool, sucks in her gut, slides under
the immovable and comes up the other side; see Knox give a gurgle of delight, cry,
 
"'Nga, 'Nga," and throw up his tiny arms. What is that which falls to the floor, p'tah-
thud , upon which Louis all but throws herself: " Here it is! I don't know, maybe
some kind of irradiation would be best to get rid of all those germs, no: I'm going to
throw it out." Her march towards the neat-and-clean plastic-bag-lined garbage cans
in The Back is arrested.
Knox is screaming. Face red as not before, ever. Arms waving wildly. Drool,
slaver, howl. And before his Da can seize hold and turn him upside down to
dislodge the tessaract or what is it, Knox finds enough breath to scream, clearly as
clear can be, " 'Nga! 'Nga! 'Nga!"— glottal stops and all.
How is it that, already, so soon? at once they understand?
"It's his security blanket! He wants it!"
"He wants it! It's his security blanket!"
Knox the Kid, with a strangled "sob", takes the thing in his arms and buries his
face in its surface. There are no more screams.
"After all," says Lou, "he's had it all night Sunday night, all day Monday morning,
all day Monday afternoon, all night Monday night," Bob nods and nods and when
she concludes with "… all day Wednesday afternoon," Bob says: "And his dick
didn't drop off, either." They nod solemnly. Lou says, " A , it's got to be washed , I'm
an American mother , you see how my teeth are clenched? And B , what the Hell is
it?"
Debating A reminds them of old middle-aged Dr. Horn whose word of wisdom
was, "No miracle drug has ever equalled the miracle of warm, soapy water." A
solution of such is made, a clean sponge by Du Pont is broken out of wrapping,
and, very, very cautiously and while Knox grasps one side in a deathgrip, his mother
slowly soaps it. What is it ?
Well, really, it is not a blanket. But what ? Well, it is about half the size of a
rather small cheap kiddy blanket. It is rather thinner than a cushion and it is stuffed
with something. The top half is a sort of fur and the bottom half is a sort of hide, a
very soft leather, rather like chamois. "Some home-made combo comforter and
stuffed animal," says Bob.
"Yes. There's… sort of… the head… see, the ah, nose ? and oh look the eyes."
Really, no, there are no eyes. But suppose at one time there to have been eyes? the
eyes say of glass to have been firmly tied on? and some other child to have tugged…
tugged… tugged… night after night, year after year… The "eyes" had long ago
vanished. But there were two, well, sort of, very small protuberances. Where the
"eyes" had been. "Are those legs ? Here? Here?"
Bob has a different idea. It was never intended to be a real animal stuffed toy. It
had no existence in zoology, anymore than the Country Dutch Distelfink had in
ornithology. " We see eyes and ah arms and legs because we expect to see 'um, old
Hans Yost or gee whatever, he or rather she, Tanta Tessa Hoo-Hah, merely cut and
sewed in a sort of dream-state. No eyes, no arms, no legs, no tail."
 

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