The Folded Leaf

by William Maxwell

  With his tongue he touched the cut on the inside of his cheek. There was a slight taste in his mouth which was blood. His shirt was torn all the way down his back. His hair was full of dirt and leaves. He was glad his mother hadn’t waited up for him. It would upset her if she knew he had been fighting.

  He tried not to make a sound going through Helen’s room but he miscalculated the position of a small rocking chair and fell over it. Picking himself up he was as conscious of his sister’s irritation as if she had spoken out loud, but there was no sound from the bed, not even the creaking of springs.

  When Spud got his clothes off he was too tired to do anything but crawl in between the covers. Too tired and too happy. For the first time the room seemed his. It was a nice room, better than he had thought. It had all these windows. The blond boy began to give way, to defend himself. Foot by foot they fought their way across the open space in the shrubbery, their breathing and the impact of their fists the only sound, their bodies the whole field of vision. When the blond boy, stepping backward, tripped and lost his balance, Spud fell on top of him. Carlson, his name was: Verne Carlson. So he must have been a Swede. He was not especially different from a lot of guys in Wisconsin. Guys like Logan Anderson or Bob Trask, who think they are a lot tougher than they really are. But on the other hand (Spud yawned) not bad when you get to know them.

  The night sky was split wide open by a flash of lightning and then another paler one. If it rained it would probably get the window sill and the floor wet but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now. The blond boy was tired. He got his legs around Spud’s waist and then didn’t have the strength to cut off Spud’s wind. They lay that way, locked and not moving, until a sudden jerk pried the heavy legs apart and Spud rolled free. He twisted around in the bed until he found the place he was looking for. The blond boy made a grab for him and missed and grabbed again, but Spud knew what he was doing. He waited and saw his chance and pinned the blond boy’s shoulders to the ground. Give up? he asked. Do you give up? The blond boy lay there panting, his eyes closed, his face streaked with sweat and dirt, and didn’t answer. Spud wanted to stay awake until he heard the sound of rain but his eyelids closed of their own accord and it didn’t seem worth while opening them. Somewhere down the block a car started up and there were voices, people saying good night. And then his mother’s voice saying … and the voice of the woman who passed him on the sidewalk…. No, that was what his mother said. Sleep well, she said. He flexed his fingers, sighed, and was almost gone when he remembered something. The splashing and the shouting in the pool. But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t while they were playing water polo, it was afterward. It was that skinny kid who….

  BOOK TWO

  Partly Pride and Partly Envy

  12

  Of the many ways of knowing people, the eye’s appraisal is surely the most complete; but Spud Latham’s eyes, which saw only enemies, would never have perceived that the boy ahead of him was not like the others. Spud’s eyes were bandaged now and for guidance he had to depend on his right hand, which was resting on a naked shoulder. The shoulder was very thin. The boy ahead of Spud (whoever it was) would have been no great help in a fight, but then this wasn’t a fight exactly. The shoulder stiffened when there was danger, and when the danger was safely past, the shoulder relaxed. With a kind of wonder Spud felt the fragile collarbone moving, and the tendons, and made up his mind to follow trustingly.

  The initiation should have been held in a long hut under the darkest trees in a forest, but that couldn’t be managed; there are no forests, strictly speaking, anywhere near Chicago. The fraternity had engaged a suite of rooms on the fourth floor of a North Side residential hotel. The committee in charge had come early, bringing with them the paraphernalia for the initiation. They had unfortunately no masks, no slit gongs, no bullroarer. No one had told them about these things. But they had bananas, limburger cheese, a ball of kitchen string, French dressing, soured milk, tartar sauce, oysters, and a quart milk bottle full of stale tea. Because they were obliged to perform in one evening a ritual that, done properly, requires from two to three months, they yanked the shades down and hurriedly pushed the furniture out of the way. It would have saved them embarrassment later and also some expense if they had rolled up the rugs, which were a bloody shade of red, but they didn’t think about it. Dede Sandstrom tore an old sheet of his mother’s into strips that could be used for blindfolds. The other boys cut several lengths of string and on the end of each one they fastened an oyster.

  Shortly after seven o’clock the pledges appeared, one at a time, in the hotel lobby. Their pockets were stuffed with chocolate bars, Life Savers, candy, and chewing gum. Their faces were scrubbed and shining, and they were dressed as for a Friday night date at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. This was a Wednesday—Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of January. The elevator boy delivered them, one at a time, at the fourth floor, where they parted from him reluctantly as though from a friend and made their way along the corridor, reading the room numbers. Lynch’s hand sought his striped bow tie, lest it be at an angle, and two minutes later, at almost the same spot, Carson felt his wavy hair, plastered to his skull with water. Catanzano, caught off guard by a Florentine mirror, reassured himself by stretching his bull neck and squaring his heavy shoulders. In spite of the red arrows painted on the wall opposite the elevator shaft, Lymie Peters went the wrong way and had to retrace his steps. His face was flushed and he had a stitch in his side, from running. He had left home in what he thought was plenty of time, but then he had lingered in front of a butcher shop on Sheridan Road between Albion and Northshore Avenues. The shop was closed for the night and the floor was strewn with fresh sawdust, and in a row facing the plate-glass door stood a plaster sow and four little pigs. Caught in a timeless pink light they looked out at Lymie and he looked in at them until the big round clock on the wall of the butcher shop released him from this trap for children and sent him running down the street.

  Spud Latham was the last to come, and he was several minutes late. This tardiness was intentional. His clothes had changed since last October. He wore plus eights, like Mark Wheeler and Ray Snyder, whom he counted among his innumerable enemies. He knew that they hated him (or at least that they didn’t like his attitude) and he stood and faced the door of Room 418 with his jaw set, waiting for somebody to make a false move. When there was only silence he grew impatient, raised his fist, and rapped on the door with his bare knuckles.

  “Who’s there?”

  The voice that spoke through the closed door was hollow and sinister.

  Spud answered according to previous instructions: “Neophyte wishing admission to the Isle of Thura.”

  “Shut your eyes, neophyte, and face the other way on pain of deadly punishment.”

  The door was opened behind his back. Hands blindfolded him, and other hands pulled him roughly into the room, where they stripped him and disfigured his body with Carter’s drawing ink and tincture of iodine. He submitted to this without protest, but then his coming here at all was an act of submission. Along with Spud’s need for enemies was also the need to have friends, to be accepted by the right people.

  He was pushed into the straggling line of naked, blindfolded neophytes, between Lymie Peters and Carson. After Carson came Lynch, with his bow tie retied around his bare neck. Then Ford, Catanzano, and deFresne—each with his right hand on the shoulder of the boy ahead of him. They were driven round and round the room, walking, running, hopping on one leg, and squatting duck-fashion until their knees went soft. They were driven over and under chairs, into the next room and out again, to the sound of paddles slapping, feet stomping, voices shouting, the whoosh of a broom descending (on whose buttocks?) and other often inexplicable noises.

  During most of the time this was going on, Spud had only one idea in his mind: If anything happened to the boy ahead of him, if he were hurt in any way, every son-of-a-bitch and bastard in the place would answer for it.

  The members of the
initiation committee were enjoying themselves thoroughly. They had once undergone this same abuse and so it satisfied their sense of justice. But the real reason for their pleasure was probably more obscure. They were re-enacting, without knowing it, a play from the most primitive time of man. In this play the men of the village had a grudge against the nearly grown boys, or were afraid of them perhaps. In retaliation for some crime which the boys had committed or were about to commit (possibly some crime which the men themselves had once committed against men who were older than they) the boys of the village were torn from the arms of their mothers, rounded up, and made to undergo a period of intense torture. This torture may even have been a symbolic substitution for punishment by death. At all events it kept the committee busy from twenty minutes after seven until a quarter of eleven.

  The neophytes were only kept in line half an hour. The more refined torment had to be administered singly. Carson wrestled for a long time with temptation. Lynch had to scramble like an egg, and Ford ate a square meal. DeFresne wore the skin off the end of his nose pushing a penny along the red carpet. And Catanzano, who was the biggest of the pledges and played guard on the football team, had to do as many push-ups as he could and then ten more. With the third he felt a hand on the small of his back. The hand pushed down cruelly whenever he pushed up. After a time he collapsed and lay still, not minding the catcalls and the obscene noises. He was a wop. His natural place was with the excluded. He was surprised to be here at all.

  The fact that Lymie Peters was no good at games and that he never was seen in LeClerc’s should have been enough to keep him from being pledged also, but Mark Wheeler had decided it would be a good thing for the fraternity to have somebody whose grades they could point to, if they ever got called up before the principal, and Mark Wheeler had persuaded the others. Having done that much for Lymie, he now knocked him off his feet with a frying pan. Bob Edwards made Lymie read a section of the classified telephone directory with the hot end of a cigarette directly under his nose. The others were fairly considerate. Lymie without his clothes on looked more delicate than he actually was, and they were afraid of injuring him. Also they were waiting for Frenchie deFresne. They wanted to see if they could make Frenchie cry.

  When it was his turn they began by beating him with a broom to teach him that no one was kidding. They made him shadowbox blindfolded, hitting him occasionally and shoving him so that he scraped his knuckles on the rough plaster wall. They rubbed hard on the short hair at the back of his neck and also pounded incessantly on his collarbone (this produced an immediate and subtle pain) and made him do alternate knee-bends while they counted: 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 2, 10, 6, 14, 19, 9 … When he had reached what they hoped was a state of physical exhaustion, Ray Snyder shouted: “Think of a nine-letter word beginning with S and ending with N or you’ll be in a hell of a SituatioN. We’ll throw you in the SheboygaN River, neophyte. It’s damn cold there and no good SamaritaN can save you from pneumonia. The SuspicioN will be thrown elsewhere, neophyte, so don’t try for revenge”—all the while pounding Frenchie’s biceps and slapping his chest. Frenchie couldn’t think of any nine-letter word beginning with S and ending with N, so they slapped him across the face several times. When he flinched, they slapped him harder until he quit flinching. After they had slapped him as hard as they could, fifteen or twenty times on both sides of his face, Frenchie cried and they were free to go on with the next part of the initiation. The neophytes were lined up once more and subjected to divination to determine whether or not they had been experimenting with sex. All seven of them were found guilty and made to swallow a pill. To test their courage they were pushed one at a time up a tall stepladder from which, at a given signal, they were to throw themselves into space. Their blindfolds were raised for a second only, so that they could look down at the board full of rusty nails that they would land on. Carson’s blindfold was not as tight as it should have been. He saw the rubber mat being substituted at the last moment for the board, but Lymie flung himself believing in the rusty nails and trusting that Mark Wheeler would be there to catch him. Nobody caught him. He landed on his hands and feet, unhurt, and the voice that cried out in pain was not his voice.

  Spud Latham, who was next in line, jerked his blindfold off and saw that he had been fooled. The committee was astonished by this action, and somewhat at a loss to deal with it. They decided that there was no point in making Spud jump off the ladder after he knew what the trick was, so they tied his blindfold on tighter than before, and shoved him out of the way. Catanzano came next, then Ford, who hesitated when the signal was given and tried to back down the ladder. He had stepped on a rusty nail the summer before, at Lake Geneva, and he kept trying to explain about this; in the end they had to push him off.

  The earth is wonderfully large and capable of infinite repetition. At no time is it necessary to restrict the eye in search of truth to one particular scene. Torture is to be found in many places besides the Hotel Balmoral, and if it is the rites of puberty that you are interested in, you can watch the same thing (or better) in New Guinea or New South Wales. All you have to do is locate a large rectangular hut in the forest with two enormous eyes painted over the entrance. You will need a certain amount of foolhardy courage to pass through this doorway and you may never come out again, but in any case once you are inside you will learn what it feels like to be in the belly of Thuremlin (or Daramulun, or Twanyirika, or Katajalina—the name varies in different tribes), that Being who swallows young boys and after the period of digestion is completed restores them to life, sometimes with a tooth missing, and always minus their foreskin.

  When you have found your place in the circle on the dirt floor, it will not matter to you that Pokenau, the boy on your right, and Talikai, the boy on your left, are darker skinned than Ford and Lynch, and have black kinky hair. In that continual darkness, the texture of your own hair and the color of your skin and eyes will not be noticeable. The odor that you detect will be that which you were aware of in the Hotel Balmoral. The odor of fear is everywhere the same.

  In the belly of Thuremlin a comradeship is established which will last Pokenau and Talikai and Dobomugan, and Mudjulamon and Baimal and Ombomb and Yabinigi and Wabe and Nyelahai the rest of their lives. They can never meet one another on any mountain path or in a flotilla of outriggers and not remember how month after month they sat in a crouching position, cross-legged, without moving; how they heard, not with their ears but through their hands, the strange tones which are the voices of spirits; how they learned to make the loud humming noise which so terrifies women; how one by one the mysteries were revealed to them—the sacred masks, the slit gongs, the manikin with the huge head and the gleaming mother-of-pearl eyes.

  Along with the singing and eating, the boys are reminded again and again of how, as children, they were never far from their father’s arms, and how their elder brothers hunted for them. Flutes play in the morning and evening, and when the boys are led to the bathing pool, the ghosts of their ancestors bend back the brambles from the path.

  In a primitive society the impulses that run contrary to the patterns of civilization, the dark impulses of envy, jealousy, and hate, are tolerated and understood and eventually released through public ritual, through cutting with crocodiles’ teeth, burning, beating, incisions in the boy’s penis. This primitive ritual of torture is more painful, perhaps, but no more cruel than the humor of high school boys. Each stage of the torture is related to a sacred object, and the novices are convinced that, as a result of running the gantlet and being switched with nettles, they will have muscle and bone, they will grow tall and broad in the shoulders, their spirit will be warlike, and they will have the strength between their legs to beget many children.

  Occasionally in New Guinea a boy will get into the wrong stomach of the Being, the stomach that is intended for pigs; and that boy cannot be restored to life with the others. But as a rule when the period of seclusion is over, all of the boys appear once more in the village, sple
ndidly dressed in feathers and shell ornaments. Their eyes are closed. They still have to be led by their guardians and though they feel their mother’s arms around them, they cannot respond. Even after they have been commanded to open their eyes, the most ordinary acts of life remain for a time beyond their understanding. If the support of their guardian is withdrawn, they totter. They do not remember how to sit down, or how to talk, or which door you enter a house by. When a plate of food is given them, they hold it upside down. Gradually they learn all over again what to do and how to take care of themselves, and the use of their new freedom. They can carry iron weapons after the initiation, and they are free to marry. And they neither fear death nor long for it, because death is behind them.

  All this requires the presence and active participation of grown men. Boys like Mark Wheeler, Ray Snyder, and Dede Sandstrom aren’t equal to it. In their hands, the rites of puberty are reduced to a hazing; and what survives afterwards is merely the idea of exclusion, or of revenge. The novices are in no way prepared to pass over into the world of maturity and be a companion to their fathers.

  The night that Lynch was born, his father, then a young man of twenty-four, stood and stared at his son through the window in the hospital corridor with the tears streaming down his cheeks. Where was he now? Catanzano’s father was dead, but why wasn’t Mr. Ford at the Hotel Balmoral that evening? He could have talked to his son quietly and perhaps coaxed him until Ford jumped from the stepladder of his own free will. Where was Carson’s father? And Frenchie deFresne’s? And what about Mr. Latham? That stupid pursuit of enemies that were sometimes imaginary and sometimes flesh and blood, to which Spud devoted so much of his time—Mr. Latham must have known, even though Spud didn’t, who Spud’s real enemy was, whose death he desired. The rites of puberty allow the father to punish the son, the son to murder his father, without actual harm to either. If Mr. Latham had been present and had taken part in the initiation, he might have been able to release Spud forever from the basis of all his hostilities. And Mr. Peters should have been there certainly. The call he made from the corner cigar store was not important even to him. It could have been made the next night, just as well. Now instead of being freed of his childhood, Lymie will have to go on smearing his face up with taffy-apples of one kind or another and being stopped by every plaster pig that he encounters, for years to come.