Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “I love her,” I'd said.

  I hadn't even said it to her yet.

  He smiled. I understand he took her in off the streets. Maybe some mad Celtic connection between an Irish lass and a Scotsman so far from home in the Big Apple—both of them having learned the hard way that the streets of those cities, seeming so dreamlike in their distance, aren't always paved with gold— maybe it was that brought them together. I hadn't thanked him yet for saving her from herself, just like I hadn't told her that I loved her yet.

  But I would.

  In the months to come I would tell her, in a little bar in the East Village, that in the year or so we'd been together I'd come alive as a person and as a writer, that it was her story and Thomas's, the little snippets I had of them, that finally brought the Songs together, made them whole the way she made me whole.

  “Does that sound awful?” I'd said. “I don't want you to think I see you as … material.”

  She slid her hand into mine, fondled knuckles, fingernails.

  “We're all material,” she said. “We're all stuff.”

  And my Jack had leapt from my knuckle to the inside of her wrist and executed the most elegant bow to her Thomas, her Puck.

  Where the Hazels Mingle with the Elms

  Jack stands up, stands over Puck, hands on his hips.

  “Ah, Puck,” he says, “since we're so matched a pair, you with your pipe, me with my lips, why don't we rest… where? Over there, where hazels mingle with the elms?”

  Puck, resting on his elbows, cranes his neck to gaze at Jack, chin on his fists, arching his back. He rolls over, puts his hands behind his head.

  “I guess I should do what you say, old man. Age before beauty, then; which way? There where the west winds shift the flickering shades? Or with that cavern as our resting place? See, how the wild vine of the woodland scatters her thin clusters over it.”

  Jack reaches down a hand to pull him to his feet.

  “On our hills,” he says, “there's only Mint can claim to sing as well as you.”

  Puck pulls his hand away. You andyerfuckinMint!

  “Oh, aye,” he snorts, “but that one thinks he can beat anybody, even Apple, when he sings!”

  “Hop, Rabbit! Jump, Rabbit! Run, run, run!”

  Joshua sings his favorite song as we trek up the path, Anna in front, her hair tucked up under the skip cap, me behind with Joshua riding on my shoulders. I look at my huntress in her state-of-the-art Kevlar-lined hunting vest, red-checked shirt, jeans and hiking boots. I wear pretty much the same, as does Joshua—who's currently bouncing Rabbit back and forth across the top of my head—though only Anna carries a rifle.

  “There are bear in these woods, you know,” she'd said, tightening the straps on my own vest as I stood there feeling like another child of hers, looking at Joshua, whom she'd been similarly buckling into his own miniature version of the same garb only moments before.

  “You know I don't like guns,” I'd said.

  “Hippie,” she'd said.

  “Nazi,” I'd said.

  She kissed me on the cheek, slapped a shoulder—done.

  “You don't mind eating the deer, do you?”

  “Don't confuse me with your logic.”

  “It's just for safety,” she says. “Same with the vests. If anyone else is out there… it's best to be safe.”

  “Hop, Rabbit! Jump, Rabbit! Run, run, run!” sings Joshua, blithely indifferent to the dangers of wild animals and hunters with too many beers in their coolers.

  “Here comes the farmer with his gun, gun, gun,” I join in.

  Anna looks over her shoulder. It was me who taught him the song, of course.

  “You first, O Puck,” says Jack. “What have you got? Paeans of passion for our Filth? Verses of reverence for Halogen? Or songs of scorn for Coder? Get stuck in.”

  Puck looks down at the flocks now far below, but Jack just grins, moves on uphill.

  “Tightarse will keep the grazing kids,” he says. “Begin.”

  “No, none of that old shit,” says Puck. “I've got new songs just written down, here on the bark of a green beech—I've even marked the music, here between the lines, you see? It's these I'll offer you. These are my best.”

  He leans upon a tree to rest.

  “And after that,” says Puck, “you let me know if you'd still bet on Mint if that bumfuck had the audacity to contest my skill.”

  Jack laughs, holding his hands up—chill.

  “Just as the supple osier,” he says, “gives up its ground to the gray olive groves, as the low scent of reed surrenders to aromas of red rose, if you ask me— so far? Mint could not win. He'd have to yield to thee.”

  Jack looks shy as Puck walks by, all of a sudden not so brave.

  “But, wait,” he says. “No further, scrag: we've reached the cave.”

  “We're here,” says Anna.

  I walk up the low slope of rock, holding Joshua's hand tight in my own and with him walking on the inside, beneath the overhang, so he's quite safe from the edge. Ducking to round the outcrop, I follow her path and come out on a broad flat ledge of granite, looking out over the valley and the vista of rolling mountains in the beyond. It's … majestic is the only word for it. These hills worn down in the distant past by glaciation, mostly covered in thick-piled green and rounded to shapes not unlike tumuli but vast in scale, the earth seems like some giant burial field of the gods, an illusion of Elysium.

  “You're catching flies,” she says as she takes my other hand. “Come here. I want to show you something. You'll love this.”

  She turns me round, leads me to where the ledge is overhung by the solid rock that our eagle's perch is just a little notch in. She points up, just above head height—not quite too high to reach but high enough that to do so would be not exactly comfortable—and I see the faint ocher marks on the gray stone, cartoon-ish, primitive, like something Joshua would daub in paint with a thick brush. One might be a bear, another a deer. Many of them seem entirely creatures out of fancy.

  “Lemme see,” says Joshua. “Lemme see.”

  I hold him up under his armpits and he reaches out his hand, fingers splayed, to see if it fits within an outline; I hold him just close enough that he can not quite touch it, not wishing to spoil his wonder with a warning, but knowing just how delicate such treasures of prehistory can be.

  I look over my shoulder at Anna's broad smile.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  As Vines Adorn the Tree

  “When Dovenest died,” sings Puck—”and what a bitter loss it was—the nymphs sobbed, as the hazels and the rivers saw and won't deny. While his poor mother clasped her son's corpse to her, how they cried. But though his mother called on gods and stars, these things of heaven had no pity.”

  Puck looks out on the valley far below, the town, another town off to the west, and far off, where the sun will set, a city. He brings out his pipe and blows softly upon its reed, a single long and plaintive note.

  “In those days,” he sings, “none drove their cows from pastures to cool springs. The wild things, even they refused to taste the streams and touched the grass of meadows only with their hooves. Dovenest, the wild hills and the woodlands still recall, and call, and call in echoes how African lions roared with sorrow at your death. Oh it was you, oh it was you, Dovenest, who taught us how to tie Armenian tigers to the car, to lead the revelers of Iacchus in his dance, soft foliage wound around our supple shafts.”

  “Just as the vines adorn a tree, and as grapes decorate the vine, just as the bellow of a bull embellishes the herd, and ripe corn makes the fields happy and rich… so you, Dovenest, enhanced your kith and kin. And since the Fates ripped you from us, oh, even Palace, and Apple too, have left the woodlands to be grim.”

  Puck brings the pipe up to his lips again, to give a flurry of notes that dart and dash this way and that, that way and this, a flutter of hearts on his fingers and his lips pursing as if to kiss.

  “And in the fur
rows where we used to find our grains of barley, fat and good,” he sings, “only the darnel and wild oats spring now, these barren plants that have no fruit. Where violets were once soft and the narcissus used to shine, the thistle rises now, and thorns with their sharp pricking spines.”

  He feels Jack's hand rest on the back of his neck.

  “So scatter the ground with leaves,” he sings, “and shade your springs, O shepherds, from the sun. Dovenest deserves his memory to be served; his memory demands this to be done. Pile up the earth. Pile up the earth into a mound, and on that monument let's add this verse:”

  He turns to Jack, to look deep in his flashing eyes.

  “I am Dovenest the forester, known from down here in the green woods up to the blue skies. I kept a flock so fair—oh, but not half as fair as I.”

  Sleep in the Long Grass

  “A poetry born from the heavens, Puck,” says Jack, “such is your song to me. It is like sleep in the long grass is to a soul too tired to dream, or, in the dustbowl heat of noon, to quench your thirst from a sweet sparkling stream. Not on the reeds alone, but with your voice as well, even compared with Mint your teacher, you excel.”

  Jack's hand runs down Puck's neck and to his shoulder, under his exomis and soft across the skin.

  “My boy,” he says, “my joy, his are the footsteps you shall follow in.”

  “Come on,” says Anna. “Don't be such a pussy.”

  “I'm really not fond of heights,” I say. “I get that thing where you just can't help but wonder what it would be like to jump. I mean, I'm not even remotely the suicidal type, but heights just bring out the worst in me, you know? I suppose it could be vertigo though I'm not sure I'd go so far as—”

  “Oh, for fuck's sake, Guy.”

  I look at her standing out there near to the edge of the ledge, the velvet sweep of green hills behind her. She turns her head to look out over the valley and for a second I imagine the skip of her cap as a beak and her some great raptor in its eyrie. I have a quirky imagination sometimes, I think, as when I watch all the hi-jinks that Rabbit gets up to in Joshua's bouncing hand, and wonder if maybe that animal trickster of the fables can emerge even from the mind of a child who knows next to nothing of mythology and folklore. Or when I stand at the edge of a cliff and feel this overpowering desire to find out what it would be like to jump.

  Anna reaches out her hand.

  “Come on. We're nowhere near the edge.”

  I make sure that Joshua's still safely playing in the cranny of the overhang, down on his knees to let Rabbit explore, and I step out toward her.

  “You're bloody crazy,” I say.

  “Not anymore,” she says. “Crazy for you, maybe.”

  “And now, in turn,” says Jack, “I'll sing my songs… as best I can. For all they are, for all it's worth, I'll try and raise your Dovenest to the stars. Yes, if I can, I'll set him in the sky, because he loved, I think, both you and I.”

  His nose nuzzles behind Puck's ear. His hand slips the lad's waist, smooths up and round, across his midriff.

  “Could anything in my eyes,” says Puck, “be worth as much as such a gift?

  The boy himself was worthy of the song and, after all, Stomach has sung your praises—praised your songs, I should say—loud and long.”

  “Stomach,” says Jack, “is always going on.”

  “Look,” she says.

  A butterfly sits on a flower growing from a crack at the edge of the ledge, its blue and green and red wings opening and closing slowly.

  “There are butterflies up this high?” I say with amazement.

  “We're not really that high,” she says.

  Her voice has a wry, amused tone to it. She thinks I'm being ridiculous, of course. It's only a drop of… what?… fifty feet at the most to the trees down below, and just because the slope of thick trees goes steeply down and down to the valley far below, just because it seems like we're on top of the world, to someone like me not terribly familiar with nature at its most grandiose and sublime, well, just because you're afraid of it doesn't make it dangerous.

  She snugs her arm around my waist.

  “Don't worry,” she says. “I won't let you fall.”

  “Many thanks,” I say. “I feel so safe in your arms.”

  She laughs. I look at her. She shakes her head.

  “Sorry, it's just… the gender-role thing… Sort of ironic, given that…”

  Her face becomes serious.

  “I have something to give you… if you want it.”

  She presses it into my hand, small and metal, a ring. I take it without question, with a wide smile rather than words, slipping it on my finger and nodding, looking down at the butterfly, which I realize still shouldn't be here, not at this time of the year, not in spring surely. Surely it's too early in the year. Surely it's impossible.

  Then the butterfly is fluttering up into the air and away, Jack and Puck riding on its back, back to the never that it came from.

  Dovenest at Heaven's Gate

  “He is in wonder as he stands there,” Jack sings, “sun upon his face, clothed in new glory, in a rapture: Dovenest at Heaven's Gate. He sees the stone unwalked before his feet, the clouds and stars now down beneath in the blue sky. And this, yes, this is why gay laughter rules the woods and forests, all the groves and glades, the laughter of Pine, the shepherds and the dry-eyed maids.”

  Jack slips away from Puck, who turns to see him duck into the cave. Still singing, Jack is back out in a flash, a parcel wrapped in cloth held in his hands. He lays it down upon the ground. He chants:

  “No hunter's nets are laid for deer,” he sings, “no ambush waiting for the flock, no wolf hidden beneath the fleece … for gentle Dovenest is in love with peace. The hoary mountains are so joyous, to the skies they raise a royal ruckus. Yes, the very rocks, the very woods now echo with a song sung in a single line.”

  He opens up the folds of cloth. Two beechwood cups. A flask of olive oil. Bread. And an amphora full of wine.

  “He is divine, they cry,” chants Jack. “He is divine.”

  And, laughing, Puck holds up a finger, turns and darts off to a bush not very far away, not very far away at all, returns with his own bundle and unwinds, revealing his own treasure, his own plan for simple pleasure. Two more cups. A bottle filled with stolen milk. More bread. More wine.

  Looks like they both had the same thing in mind.

  “Ah, be gracious to your own,” sings Jack, “and kind. You see, Dovenest? You see? We have four altars of the same design. That's more than ample. Two of them shall be for you, Dovenest, and two we'll keep for offerings to Apple. Yes, we'll come up every year and pour fresh frothing milk in double cups. Two bowls of olive oil we'll lay before you, me and Puck.”

  Jack takes the wine, pulls out the stopper and pours some into one of his cups, hands it to Puck. He reaches out to grab a cup and serve himself, and feels Puck's hand on his. The boy picks up his own wine, pulls the stopper with his teeth and fills one of his own cups to the brim for Jack, a simple offering, a libation, the true reverence of lovers offered back.

  “Above all else,” says Jack, “we'll make our feasts flow merrily with wine, pouring it out before the hearth in winter, underneath the shade at harvest time.”

  They raise the cups up to their lips, eyes locked upon each other as they sip.

  “I'll fill our tankards with fresh nectar squeezed from the Chianti grape. I'll make that dumbass and that cretin Argon sing. Old Fussyboy will dance like prancing satires. And, my love, my nest of doves, this will be yours forever, like the customary vows to nymphs, or just as we bless our lands with hymns. As long as the wild boar haunts the mountain ridge, as long as the fish dart in the river, as long as the bees feed on the thyme and grasshoppers on dew, your honor, dignity and name will live forever.”

  Jack lays his cup down on the cloth, tears off a hunk of bread to dip it in the wine, to pop it in between Puck's lips.

  “Just as we do to the god
of wine and the goddess of the grain, so too we shepherds of the fields shall make our annual vows to you. And you, like them, will claim your due.”

  The whispering Music

  “What can I do?” says Puck. “What gift can I give to pay for such a song? Nothing delights me so, Jack, I've heard nothing that's so sweet, neither the whispering music of a rising south wind, nor waves breaking on a beach, nor streams racing down through rocky vales …”

  Puck tries to find the words, and fails, so he just picks up the cups, the open wine, and lays them to the side. He gathers the rest of the feast into a bundle of cloth, puts it all out of the way, and slides across the grass, close in to Jack, hand moving up along his thigh as Jack, with both his hands, unbelts and slides Puck's exomis up, baring his ass. Puck peels the tunic off over his head, baring the rest. Jack smooths a hand across Puck's chest.

  “First, then,” says Jack with a sly smile upon his face, “this dainty pipe of hemlock, this shall be my gift to you. It shall be yours to keep, the pipe that taught me why Accordion burned with desire for beautiful Elixir … and how Old Mellowbow masters his sheep.”

  Puck laughs and takes the offering in his hand, running his fingers from the root of it up to the tip, curling those fingers to a tighter grip and bringing them down again, to unsheathe the glans.

  “Only,” says Puck, “if you will take this handsome crook, this shepherd's staff. Is such a thing not more wonderful with brazen studs to decorate its shaft?”

  Jack shakes his head—-you slut—but Puck just lies back in the grass, pulls Jack around and down on top of him, the two of them face-to-face, Jack's body—and his hand—between Puck's legs. Puck feels the first touch and the answering twitch, the muscles tensing in him, licks his lips. Jack glances down at the kick of prick, angling his hips.

  “Many's the time,” says Puck, “Antagonist gazed on it with a longing look, begged just a touch of my proud shepherd's crook. But, even though he was a lad you might well love, Jack, he got none of it from me. O Jack, my Jack, it's all for thee.”

  I leave it there. It's where Virgil's Eclogue ends after all, though the original's not quite so flagrant in its sensual delight. I don't think I've done the old boy too much of a disservice though; I'm sure a million Latin masters would insist that it's all meant in the purest, most Platonic terms, but, really, in all honesty, I find it hard to read those pastoral poems without hearing what's left unsaid, what's written between the lines, not in the words, perhaps, but in the whispering music which flows through them. And Corydon burning with desire for beautiful Alexis is not exactly the height of ambiguity.