She is looking me up and down and all over, as if she’s never seen me before. Maybe she hasn’t, in a way. “My, you’re getting to be withy and big,” she says, as if she’s not noticed before. “And you’re not even twelve yet, are you?”
“Will be soon,” I declare.
“I hear you’re in the club now,” she says.
“Yup,” I say, not trying to sound too self-proud.
“We have a club too,” she declares.
“I know it,” I say, and I do. The girls call themselves the SS, which I think stands for Secret Society. A pink hair ribbon is the badge, and Violate is wearing hers.
“And,” she says, with a kind of a leer, “Hattie Rose Pearl told what you did.”‘
“I was bounden,” I tell her. “The club obliged me to do it.”
“Also,” she says, “Hattie Rose Pearl told that your perkin is purple as a plum.”
God rot that Hattie Rose Pearl! Now my face must be purple as a plum. “That…that’s the club’s doing, too,” I say. “They did it. It’s not but pokeberry stain, is all it is.”
She smiles. She says, low and quiet, “Let me see.”
Damn me if I will. I’ve already frightened one girl off, showing it, I’m not going to scare another. “It’s not fit to be seen,” I say.
She pouts. “You’re just afraid to show me.”
“No, I’m not, neither. I’d show you if the stain was off.”
“I’ll wager it’s bonny and sightly, even with the stain.”
I shake my head.
“I’m not squeamish like Hattie Rose Pearl,” she says. She puts her hand on my leg, up on the upper part. I have never had a girl’s hand on my leg. Hattie Rose Pearl never did that. It is as if she is showing me that she’s not like Hattie Rose Pearl. Now she says something else, too: “I’ll do anything you want me to, if you’ll show me.”
Will you prime my pump for me? I nearly ask, but she might think that’s too forward. Instead I say, “Fair enough.” Then I show her. I watch her face closely. She does not blanch. Her eyes glitter and her mouth beams. “See?” I say. “All over it’s purple.”
“No,” she says. “Violet. Like my name.” She laughs. “They’ve made it violet for Violate!” She gives me a hug. My violet starts rising. She looks at it again. “It won’t come off?” she says. She wipes her fingertips across her mouth and dabs at my violet, as if to rub it off. It won’t rub off, but the stroke of her fingers gives me a quick stiff stand. “Good heavens!” she says, and leaps back a little, as if from a snake. Then she asks, “Is that for me too?” And then she asks, “Danny, have you ever been primed?”
Now this is when I begin to smell a dinge in the stovewood; this is when I hunch that maybe they’ve put her up to something. But the trouble is, I don’t care. I’m too excited. I shake my head.
“Do you want I should prime you?” she says.
I nod, I nod.
“All right,” she says. “Just lie back down.” I lie back down ’twixt the corn rows, and she kneels between my legs. She takes hold of the pump handle and starts lowering it and raising it. She giggles and covers the giggle with her other hand. The giggle is suspicious too, but I make one myself, it is all kind of silly, this girl pumping the pump handle of me. She pumps the handle up and down, the downstroke is even more painful than when I tried it myself, I’m afraid it will break off. She raises and lowers, and lowers and raises. But nothing happens. My skin is crawling and my heart is thumping like a runaway wagon and I am sweating. But all her pumping brings nothing out of me.
After a long time she stops and says, “Well well, I guess you’re just not man enough yet.” The way she says this is like she has rehearsed it, as if someone has told her to say it. I am bilked and cast down.
But she is not grinning. She is staring at my perkin, which stands as before. Her face is empty and absent, save for a twitch at one corner of her mouth.
Suddenly she is falling on me, hiking her dress hem, whispering in my ear, “Danny, will you promise never never to tell in the club what we did?” I nod, I nod.
And then down below I feel the hair silks of her vale brushing down on me, and I know then why it’s a vale, a valley, a dell down riding, up through the vale riding, my perkin, my violet perking perkin caught and taken, up through the vale riding.
I knew it, I tell myself I knew it all along, that this was the way it was really supposed to go.
“If you tell Renz, he’ll kill me,” she says. “He’ll kill you too.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” I say, “I won’t tell a soul.”
And on me she rides, and I riding with her, and she panting, and saying, “I wasn’t supposed to do this,” and saying, “But I am,” and saying, “I had to,” and asking, “Do you like it?” and me panting, and saying back, “Pretty fine,” and then both of us not saying anything more because we can’t talk.
And there in the corn with the breeze dancing the corn leaves over us, in tune to the dance of our thrashing, I begin to become a man, knowing the wet is going to surge and break out, feeling her vale milking me, waiting, working and waiting for it.
But then she does a strange thing: she stops. Of a sudden she stops thrashing and lies hard upon me, squeezing me, hugging all heck out of me, as if she is trying to mash me right into the earth. I cannot move beneath her. For a while her vale itself alone goes on milking and stripping, but then it too is stilled and tight, in the long still squeeze that goes on until I cry for breath.
At last, when I cry for breath, she eases up and rolls off me, and lies there beside me smiling and looking dreamy-eyed, so I know she hasn’t really been hurt. I am relieved, for I thought I’d broken something in her, but she isn’t hurt at all.
I pant my question: “Why did you stop?”
“Why—” she pants back at me, giving me an odd look, “why, I finished. Didn’t you?”
“Finished?” I say.
She looks down at my perkin. It stands taut as ever. It is wet all over, but I think it’s hers, not mine. I’m pleased to see that some of the poke stain has been scrubbed away. “Lordy goodness,” she says. “I thought you’d fetched. Didn’t you fetch?”
“Fetch what?” I wonder.
She looks closer. “Well, I ’spose I didn’t prime you, after all, did I? Fetch is when you’re done and your quid spurts out. Maybe you don’t have any.”
“I do too,” I protest. “I bet I do. It was on the way, you just didn’t give it time enough.”
She is doing some thinking, and I am hoping that she is thinking about trying again. But then she seems to get nervous, and says, “I wasn’t supposed to do this. And now if you tell on me I’m going to be in for it.”
“I told you I won’t ever tell.”
“You’ll forget, and brag.”
“Cross my heart,” I cross my heart.
But she stands up, and smoothes down her dress. “You had better not,” she says, and she turns to leave me, but turns back to say one more thing: “They wouldn’t believe you if you did.”
Then she disappears through the corn.
I try to follow her, but my witnesses are so sore I can’t walk. I sit down in the corn again, and wonder if she’s done some everlasting harm to them. Maybe I am too young. I’m afraid to touch them for fear they will fall off. But I sit and study their stinging, and at last it comes to me that this is not pain of overwork but ache of unfinishment, as when you swing an axe at a sapling and miss it and your arms and shoulders twinge and suffer with the empty missing. I have missed. I’d like to catch Violate and throw her down, I’m big as she. I need a vale. I funicle the air, and imagine, but it’s no good.
Now I discover again my hands. I line one hand with cornsilks. It is a poor and sorry make-believe, but it is all I have. I am furious and impatient. I close my eyes to see Violate.
I fetch alone, and when at last I do, and have become a man, it hits me on the chin. I wipe it off and study it. She’d called it quid, but it isn
’t anything at all like a quid. Like the milk in a kernel of corn if you pierce it with your thumbnail. My man-slick. I’m proud. More, I’m lightened and eased, happy as an earworm in a cornpatch.
At the next meeting of the club, Renz pops me on the shoulder and says, “Well, have you got yourself primed yet?” “No,” I say. “I guess I aint man enough.”
8
A single entry in Diana’s diary, that for June 31, is somewhat longer than those before it:
I have been rereading what I’ve written here so far, and it strikes me that I’ve placed undue emphasis on what we’ve been eating, as if all of this is only one big glorious picnic and my chief interest is in the menu. Well, it is true that sometimes I’m having such fun at mealtime that I forget what we’re here for. And I’ve put on a little weight. And Day, who needs it more, has also. But I don’t want to leave the impression that food matters all that much. (Occasionally I’ve wondered if perhaps the food is a replacement—or displacement—for sex.)
If I were required to list formally my (I should say our) concerns or interests or involvements, food wouldn’t be very high up the list. I suppose the list would look something like this
The life of Daniel Lyam Montross.
The death of Dudleytown, Conn.
The possibility of the actuality of reincarnation.
Nature—the woods and everything in it.
Amateur “archaeology”—exploring what is left.
Day Whittacker as a person (he grows on me).
Fresh air and sunshine, and stillness and peace.
Sex (some of Daniel’s exploits titillate me).
Food (oh be honest, Diana, it comes before #8). [No it doesn’t]
But take Number Four for example. I’ve never before had much interest in “nature study.” Before, I could identify birch trees because they’re white, but that’s about all. Now I’m getting a new education…from Day, who seems to know everything. He’s always pointing out things and explaining things.
Like this morning he showed me some cocoons, and gave me a little lecture. Of course I knew that moths and butterflies go through a caterpillar stage, but what I didn’t know is that the larva itself goes through several successive changes—sheddings of its skin—before becoming a caterpillar. Day injected a little allusion to the idea of reincarnation, or karma, the idea that the person goes through successive incarnations on the route to perfection, to the butterfly stage. The Greeks, he says, identified the butterfly with the goddess Psyche. I remember pictures and sculptures of her, she is beautiful. I’d like to be a butterfly.
Much of Day’s nature teaching seems filled with subtle and not-so-subtle allusions. An example of the latter: I was admiring a green carpet of lichen the other day, and Day explained to me that lichens aren’t one plant but two: the “symbiotic” union of two completely different plants, alga and fungus. They (or it) couldn’t exist without each other: the fungus furnishes the support and the water, and the alga provides the food. In a sense, they’re parasites on each other.
I caught the allusion quickly (or thought I did), and in jest I’ve nick named him “Fungus” and he’s nicknamed me “Alga.”
“Fungus,” I will say, “the water bucket’s empty. Haul some more.”
Or he will say, “On your next trip to the store, Alga, pick us up another bag of flour.”
But it’s not just water and food, not just sustenance. He’s giving me an education (and of course he’s “giving” me Daniel, too), and I’m giving him…well, I’m giving him companionship. And I bought him a radio. Or, I should say, I bought us a radio. But it was his idea. A four-battery portable, which, at night, will pick up WQXR. Our woods are full of music now.
Now I will tell about our first kiss. (Apparently all courtships go through three stages: first, holding hands, second, kissing, and third, sex—and it seems strange that Daniel missed the second stage; whether or not we ever get to the third stage remains to be seen, and I’ve promised myself that if he doesn’t make an overture before long I’m going to have to start something myself.) Well, tonight after supper, with the radio turned up full blast to a baroque recorder ensemble (with no neighbors to disturb, it’s better than stereo, it’s like being in a concert hall), Day asked me to dance for him. So I got out my black leotard and changed into it (I didn’t go into the tent to change, and I didn’t care whether he was watching me or not), and then, while the radio was playing something by Telemann, I improvised a dance, our mountain laurel glade for a stage, our Coleman lanterns for footlights, throwing my shadow against the trees. The dance of that shadow was like nothing seen before, and it inspired me. It awed Day, too.
Afterwards he modestly asked me to explain what I had done, to interpret it for him. So it was my turn to lecture him, and I laid on a glib elucidation about how Telemann’s music, to me, seems to have something important to do with the body-mind relationship, and how, in my dance, I was trying to evoke both the conflict and the accord between mind and body. Day thought it over for a while, and seemed to understand.
The baroque ensemble had finished, and the announcer said the next selection after the station break would be Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony—I half-expected to hear him add: “at the request of Miss Diana Stoving and Mr. Day Whittacker,” it was so right, so perfect. “Come and dance with me,” I said to Day.
“I can’t dance,” he said. “I never tried to learn.”
“Forget that,” I said. “Come on.” I took his hand and pulled him out into the open space of the glade. He stood awkwardly with his hands in his pockets. “Now,” I said, with a large smile, “we are going to perform ‘The Symbiotic Affiliation of One Alga and One Fungus in a Pastoral Setting Furnished by Vaughan Williams.’” He laughed.
As the languid first movement began, molto moderato, I began to drift and sway, my arms floating. “I am air,” I said to Day. “I have air, I exist in air.” I danced a while through air. “You,” I said, “by just standing there like a bump on a log, symbolize support…roots…inertia.” He shifted his weight from one foot to another. “Just stand,” I said, “while I do my dance. The first movement is mine.” I danced. “In the air is food and sunshine,” I said and kept my mouth open as if to infuse the food and sunshine from the air. “Wherever I go I can effortlessly find it. Nature provides. The country is mine. But I am lonely.” My dance was of searching, of a drifting search. “What do I yearn for? I am thirsty and need water. And I am loose and need roots.” I executed a series of leaps. “I relish my freedom!” But the leaps took me nowhere. “But I yearn for a toehold, for a home place.” I finished my dance. “I am air, and food, and yearning.”
The first movement ended, and the second began, sluggish but lithe, lento moderato. “Now all of this movement is yours,” I said to him. “You are water. You are fluid but listless.” He began making a slow swimming breaststroke with his arms. “Oh, no, Day!” I said. “Too literal!” He stopped and stuck his hands into his pockets again, and glowered at me. He was too self-conscious. “Turn around,” I said. He did. “Look at your shadow up there on the trees.” He looked up at his giant shadow projected by the Coleman lanterns against the trees. “Now just listen to the music,” I said, “and watch what that shadow becomes.”
He just stood there for a while, his back to me, just listening to the music—which was all right, for he also symbolized support and roots. But then he began to move. And it was beautiful. Truly beautiful. I was astounded. He was watching his shadow, and at first it was as if he were only moving his body to project a shadow dance, but that shadow dance was the essence of water, flowing and coursing. After a while I said, “But you are yearning too. Though you have roots and water, though your water is lovely and pastoral, you are starving. For air and food.” And believe me, diary, that water starved for air and food! It was an abstraction, of course, nothing whatever literal about it—Day moving with studied aimlessness and searching, around the glade and around, his long body just as l
ithe as the music, and in nearly perfect time to the music.
In the third movement, moderato pesante, we danced together. This was the happy meeting of water and air, of roots and food, of—oh, I can’t describe it. (The nice thing about the dance is that, like music, it is so nonverbal—is that why I switched, at college, from writing to dancing?) I didn’t have to give Day very many instructions. “Don’t touch me yet.” “You’re a little too slow there.” “Now, pick me up!” “Am I too heavy?” I was not, and he held me aloft with his hands on my waist, and I continued my dance up there, really in the air now, the alga attached to the fungus, the fungus anchored to the earth and holding, and sending up “water,” and the alga breathing the air and its food.
We never finished. That strange vocal descant in the fourth movement was just too glorious. That wordless song, like an echo heard from a distant hillside, it was the love song of the air, of the alga, the air singing through the alga, singing its love for the fungus. I don’t see how Day held me up there so long, his arms straight up over his head, unless the sheer beauty of that song was giving him some uncustomary strength. He held me up there while I finished my dance, which ended as he lowered me slowly down to him and kissed me—or did I kiss him?—his face was waiting there, and his mouth was in the way of my mouth, which met it, and for the last minute or so of that spine-tingling vocal descant the only movement we were making was of our mouths together, the alga and the fungus completely wedded at last.
Then he lowered me on to the ground, and we just stood there for a while looking at each other. He put his hands back into his pockets. “I guess,” I said, awkwardly, “that I don’t know how to do the rest of it. But there’s just a minute or so left until the end.”
“You were beautiful,” he said, “while it lasted.”
“So were you,” I returned.
“We’ll have to make up some more dances, sometime,” he said.
“You’re good,” I said. “You make a perfect partner.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 38
