Masculinity comes in many forms. Height, build, protectiveness, resolve, muscles, decisiveness, sensitivity, strength, courage, taking charge, heroism, bravery. And I witnessed all of those things in my man one day 16 years ago.
We were living on a bayou in Dickinson, Texas. Our estuary was alive with fish, ducks, and herons, and our neighbor’s geese patrolled the waters regularly for insects. Dark, furry nutria and their young came out from the bayou’s banks at twilight to feed, like lumbering Lovecraftian rats patrolling the water’s edge. Floodwaters had once filled our house halfway up our living room wall. A neighbor told us she’d seen an alligator climb out of the water and grab and eat somebody’s puppy. Happy Texans in motorboats, jet skis, and canoes plied up and down our bayou. It was raw nature out there. But one day the bayou washed up something that wasn’t so happy or so natural.
Perhaps the thing was beached after one of the estuarial floods that occasionally inundated our back yard. Maybe the being had floated many miles down streams feeding into the bayou. However it traveled, the thing seemed to be only a part, a leftover, of something: maybe an animal that somebody was butchering and then tossed into the water. There was an eye, an ear, and part of a torso I think I remember before I ran from the shore retching. My husband and I gathered the kids and hoped some boatman’s wake or a violent storm would eventually take the thing back into the water and carry it down to the bay. But no wakes or storms seemed strong enough to lift the thing from our banks.
I remember not being able to go out to the west side of the house at all. We didn’t swim in the bayou for weeks. The boys stayed inside. My husband and I had difficulty talking about it; the thing was too upsetting and we didn’t know quite what to do. We didn’t walk out on the pier at sunset as we liked to do because of the thing lying there. One night I woke up hallucinating that it had somehow come alive and was dragging itself toward the house.
The next morning my husband said he was tired of worrying about the thing. He went down to the water and–I don’t want to know or remember his description how–he John Wayned it into a trash bag, stuffed it into one of our bins, and slammed the lid. Perhaps strong liquor was involved. I don’t know if he told me what he thought it was–a deer, a cow, or somebody’s old dog. I’ve blocked out any details for my own sanity. I just know that his manliness that day meant more to me than any rose, chocolates, medal, award, or dinner at the finest restaurant in Paris.
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