Heaven & Earth Holding Company

Mr. Muckle

57 Mr. Muckle I am teaching my four-year-old granddaughter about Mr. Muckle, the deaf and blind man in the 1934 W. C. Fields movie It’s a Gift, Mr. Muckle, who along with being deaf and blind, is also a mean-spirited, cantankerous son of a bitch, possessing none of the tender humility we’ve come to expect and even demand from our deaf and blind men, Muckle, who white-sticks his way into Fields’s hardware store, first poking his cane right through one of the two glass front doors, then knocking over and falling on twenty boxes of imported glassware, crushing them utterly, then imperiously and without any regret whatsoever, ordering a pack of chewing gum, which he refuses to take with him, choosing instead to have it wrapped and delivered, and who then, agitated, waving his cane at the world, proceeds to destroy, one by one, an entire display of light bulbs, unwrapped, stacked individually, piled so high that no one, absolutely no one in his right mind or otherwise, would ever stack them that way, or go anywhere near them, or ever consider even touching them, one bulb displaced causing them all to fall down, a slowly building cacophony of small explosions, one right after the other, bulb after bulb, wattage after wattage, popping into splinters, shattering like all the lost bright ideas of the world. And I know already in my heart that this movie, ancient now, its humor so droll, so far removed from her world that it is like news from some alternate universe of comportment and neglect, will make my granddaughter a little more odd or standoffish, a little more vulnerable, a little more likely to be bullied or tormented with text messages in junior high, a little bit more like the uppermost light bulb on an enormous pile of adolescent light bulbs just waiting to be smashed and broken. And it’s not about laughing at a deaf and blind man. It’s Fields who’s the funny one, so beset by all his customers, a man demanding cumquats, a wife who’s a shrew, an assistant on roller skates, molasses on the floor, Fields who’s so flustered, so pointlessly caught up in wrapping a package of bubblegum that he misgauges the oncoming danger, calling out to Mr. Muckle as he sees too late the inevitability of it all, Muckle’s cane swinging wildly, the endcap 58 of light bulbs like some fragile iceberg, Muckle a blind Titanic with a stick, Fields almost singing as he cries out, repeatedly, “Look out, Mr. Muckle! Look out! Look out!” as if Muckle could hear him, as if he actually could look out, and then, magically, (there is no other word for it) Fields as his last resort calling him “Honey,” the word hanging in the air, as if that would help, as if some felicitous endearment would calm him, stop him in his tracks, save the store from imminent disaster, or perhaps actually restore Mr. Muckle’s sight. But by then it’s too late, Muckle strolling out, putting his cane perfectly through the other glass front door on the way, then walking across Main Street through crosstown traffic, cars, ambulances, even fire trucks, careening around him while he blithely walks on, never missing a beat, the deaf and blind Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse wandering into the hinterlands, unseen, eternal, unscathed. Ultimately, of course, it’s not Fields or even Muckle I’m trying to teach you, my granddaughter. It’s the Apocalypse, the way we’re all getting muckled each and every day, the way it keeps coming for us, mean-spirited sometimes, deaf and blind to us all, waving its white stick, unceremoniously knocking us down when we’re not looking, when we’re just minding the store, when we lose sight momentarily of what’s always coming for us, what’s trying, according to all the intransigent, indefatigable laws of Nature, to do nothing less than kill us every day, the day that’s been coming for us since the day we were born, how we fail to appreciate, fail to propitiate, how we see it too late every time, how it might have been appeased, a stick of gum held out, perhaps, some sweetness we had within us that we could have offered all too easily, a simple word we could have said to the hellhounds, the hellmouth awaiting us all, “Honey,” perhaps, just the...