`Thy High Requiem Become a Sod'

We spent much of Saturday flaying my brother-in-law’s front lawn – dirty, tedious, oddly satisfying work. He rented a sod-cutter, a sort of roto-tiller with lateral rather than rotary blades, to slice grass off the ground with the roots intact so you can roll it up like carpeting. He also hired three day-laborers to help – two Mexicans and a black guy from Alaska.

The latter told me his family has been in the military “since they were buffalo soldiers,” and that his father was killed in Vietnam and buried at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage. He’s writing a book titled My Sin Is My Skin, which he insisted is not about race. Besides his book, his favorite subjects were firearms, martial arts, hunting and fishing. When I asked how many blacks live in his native state, he said, “About seven, counting me.” He made me promise to visit him in Alaska so he could take me salmon fishing – “for free, no charge” – and wrote his telephone number on paper torn from a pocket notebook, adding this inscription:

“Come to Alaska land of the free and home of the fucking brave.”

I thanked him and, for no good reason, as we pushed wheel barrows full of sod up the sloping lawn, asked if he knew what the “Old Sod” referred to. No, he didn’t, so I tried to paraphrase this entry from Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable:

“A nickname for Ireland in the mouth of exiles, used mostly with genuine affection but in recent times with a strong element of mockery. The word `sod’ is the equivalent of the English `turf’…”

Emphasis on “mockery,” I’d say, as in Beckett and Flann O’Brien. I told my Alaskan friend about the scene in Finnegans Wake, the vaudeville-like bit involving Butt and Taff, in which an Irish soldier takes aim at a Russian general in the Crimea. The Irishman pauses as the Russian lowers his pants to defecate, but changes his mind and shoots when the general wipes himself with a bit of green sod. Like many Wake readers, my friend needed a bit of exegesis on Irish nationalism before he laughed. Only on the drive home could I remember most of the sixth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale,” a great favorite of Beckett’s:

“Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.”