He didn't always hate his mother. Wh|h she was even partly well, she could manage to look incredibly young and alive. They would go for walks or even skate together and she could he incredibly young, as young as he, and totally enter his child's world. He was intensely proud of her during these times and wanted everyone to see her. He would forget the unreasonable nagging and the hateful lying she seemed unable to control. But then she would get sick and nervous again.
"Listen, Greg," the Governor would say. "I know it's hard with your mom and dad, but a man can abide. It don't matter what others do to you. Why, it just don't matter at all because you can always come to me. The Governor's always here to help you."
And Greg would nod and be comforted because it was true. The Governor managed to abide all these years, and his wife, Greg's grandmother, was a Christian Scientist, to Greg a fanatic. He thought the old man was right, he could live in peace with someone he didn't respect as long as he just didn't show them how he felt. He only had to pretend to go along and do things his own way when he could. The Governor was always there to help, except that the Governor died in 1947.
They were in the big two-story wood frame house in Cadillac then. It had a large yard and there was a fish pond in back, room for dogs and cats and birds and fish, and even without the Governor things were bearable. Except that his mother started to get well.
At first it was a subtle change. Douglas, the youngest, was now well past the toddler stage and with Rusty teaching music, life was indeed much easier. Ethel Powell began fixing her face every day, paying attention to her hair, and her clothes and person. Then there were touches to the house here and there. Bright things, a preponderence of reds, lots of bright cloth-wrapped wires which only remotely resembled plants, and would later give way to a taste for plastic gimcracks. And then she, not Greg, started disciplining the younger ones: Sharon, Lei Lani, Douglas. Ethel Powell began to do the shopping, and assumed responsibility for paying the bills, and suddenly it was all too much for Greg, who was now fourteen. The fights started and were only bitter at first. Finally, outright warfare ensued. _ *
"Why should you listen to her?" Greg would say to tfie younger ones. "I always told you right, didn't I? I took whippings for you when you were bad and never opened my mouth, didn't I? I took care of you all your lives, didn't I? How come now you got to do what she says? You always did what I said, didn't you? It's not gonna change around here, you hear me?"
"But Mom says, Greg. Mom says"
And tearful battles were waged over the dinner table for many months to come.
"You're just gonna have to learn who's the boss around here, young man," Ethel Powell would warn. "You don't just run things around here no more."
"I don't, huh?" the boy would answer, his blue eyes sparking, his head turning on the swivel of a neck longer than his father's.
All of the children were blonds and rather fair, and the other three were better looking than Greg. They would remain silent during the flare-ups, not certain whose side to take, not certain whose authority was supreme.
"Now all of a sudden you start bossing the house, huh?" he said, tears of wrath spilling. "Well how come you wasn't bossing when Doug needed his drawers changed, or when the girls needed help with arithmetic, or when somebody had to get up an hour early every morning so's to get them all off to school? I wanted to be a crossing guard and couldn't because I had to get the kids off to school. You wasn't the one taking care of them. It was me. Me."
"You sound like you don't care that I'm well now. Like you wish I was still sick."
"I don't give a damn either way."
"That's enough," his father would thunder. "No one's had an easy time around here."
"You can't side with her now, Dad. You can't. Who'd you always come to with the money for the shopping? To me, that's who. Who'd Sharon and Lei Lani and Doug always run to if they was hurt? Huh? Did they go to her? To you? No, they damn sure didn't. To me, that's who. To me!"
Greg would sit in class that year, in junior high school, and his thoughts would be in the big two-story frame house: She's a liar, that's what she is. She's always been a liar and he's a coward and takes anything she hands him and now they're trying to turn the kids against me. Against me.
It was about this time that his performance began to suffer both academically and in extracurricular endeavors. He no longer asserted himself in sports. He'd always considered himself a good athlete, especially in winter sports, and now he didn't seem to care. He even lost interest in his saxophone and in music in general. He began losing weight and dropped off the football squad.
Then, when he was fifteen, he ran away. There were many times on the road that he regretted his decision, especially when he stood on the mountain highway in Kentucky in the rain, and the rain turned to sleet and made heaps of gray-brown slush, and the sky blackened before his eyes so that the boy had a feeling that the sun would never return. All the cars passed without slowing and he counted his money for the tenth time, but it still totaled three dollars and some pennies. He was wheezing, rattling, ripping phlegm from deep within. Then a big sedan stopped, skidding a little on the wet asphalt.
"Want a lift?" asked the man holding the door open and Greg splashed through a puddle and fairly leaped into the car.
"Thanks," said the boy when his teeth stopped chattering.
"Going far?" the man asked, and for the first time the boy looked at him. He wore a black topcoat and black pants. He had dark hair and eyes, wore glasses, was both tall and big.
"I'm going to Florida."
"Well." The man laughed softly. "You have a ways to go. Do you have money?"
"Enough," the boy said suspiciously.
"Where do you come from?"
"Cadillac. That's in Michigan."
"Thumbing all the way?"
"No, I came by train most of the way."
"Where're your parents? Michigan?"
"I don't know where my parents are and I don't care. Now maybe you better just let me out if you care so much."
"Hold on." He laughed. "Don't get angry. I didn't mean to pry. What's your name?"
"Greg."
"I'm Father Charles, Greg," the man said, and it startled the boy. For the first time he noticed the Roman collar barely showing beneath the black topcoat.
"I never met a priest," said the boy. "Do they call you 'Father' or what?"
"Most people do." The priest laughed. "Some less charitable Protestant neighbors call me other things. I have a parish in Georgia. You can ride a piece of your journey with me."
And then the priest began suggesting, gently at first, that Greg should at least call his parents, and he was saying something else, something about traveling like this, and the conversation seemed to have religious overtones but Greg couldn't tell. His eyelids were closing and his head was nodding forward onto his chest. He woke up in the state of Georgia.
"This is where I stay, son," said Father Charles as Greg rode with him to the rectory, planning to leave after a promised hot meal. It was a small poor parish in a region of Baptists and Methodists, but the parish house was clean and warm, and there was a part-time housekeeper to help the priest keep things tidy. Despite his long sleep in the car, the boy was glad to accept the invitation to stay another night. He slept thirteen hours in a warm clean bed.
The next morning Father Charles said, "I can't persuade you to wire your folks?"
"No sir."
"You're determined to go on?"
"Yes sir."
"Well then, would you consider staying here for a while? I know a man who has a job putting up galvanized siding on buildings. I spoke to him about you. He has a job for you."
"He does? Well I . . . well . . . yes. I guess so. Yes, I can stay. For a little while."
And the boy went to work that very day, and in the evening after dinner, when the priest returned from visiting a sick parishioner, Greg surprised him by joining in when the priest sang a popular song as they washed the dis
hes.
"Greg, you have a nice voice."
"My dad's a music teacher. He went to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. I been playing music and singing since I was a little kid. I can just pick up an instrument and you tell me the scale and I can play. I got perfect pitch."
"Oh you do, do you?" The priest grinned, and took off his glasses looking at the boy more closely.
They spent the rest of the evening singing together and Greg thought that his voice blended nicely with the clear booming baritone of the priest.
The next morning at breakfast the priest said, "There's going to be a dance in the parish hall next week. Would you like to go?"
"Sure."
"I can arrange that you escort a young lady. We've got lots of pretty belles around this part of the country, you know."
"Thanks, but I'd just as soon go stag."
"Can you dance?"
"Sure."
"Have you ever dated a girl, Greg?"
"No, I guess not."
"Really? And why not?"
"I been too busy raising my sisters and my brother. And going to school and working."
The priest seemed to notice the catch in the boy's voice and didn't pursue it.
"It's time you became interested in girls," he said, picking up the dishes, turning his back as he walked to the sink.
"I don't care about them," Greg said.
"You should. You're not a bad looking boy. A bit skinny but we can fix that up." He laughed. Then he came over to the table and put his hand on Greg's head. "You have very handsome hair. Most girls are partial to blond wavy hair, you know."
A few nights later the priest took Greg to bed with him.
"Was that the very first time you've done that with a man?" the priest asked afterward, lying beside him.
"Yes. The first time with anyone, Father."
"Greg, God permits men . . . people ... all people ... to express love in many ways. What I've . . . we've . . . done is a gesture of love. Shame and delight... well... these are man's responses, not God's. With us it was just our way of loving, a moment of love. The only emotion man can ever know for sure he shares with Our Lord. Do you understand, son?"
"Yes, Father. I understand. I'm not sorry. I feel the love. I really do."
And the priest looked sadly at the boy, then turned his back. Greg was puzzled, provoked, impassioned. He had difficulty sleeping.
One evening after a dinner discussion about the intimate sensual beauty of Christ and his world, Greg suddenly craved the darkness and the priest's bed, and there in the small living room of the rectory, he threw his arms around the tall man and touched the priest's fine maple brown hair.
"Father. Father. Oh, Father," he whispered, and was startled when the priest roughly pushed him away.
"Greg, I've got to talk to you."
"What is it, Father?"
"You've got to leave here. You've got to go home to your family."
"Why? What did 1 do wrong?"
"Nothing. You've just got to go. Your parents have undoubtedly notified authorities about you and it's not right for you to be here."
"I done something wrong, didn't I?" asked Greg, eyes already wet.
"No. Yes. Greg, it's becoming obvious ... I mean, about us . . . what . . . the way we express love. It's that . . . you're so clingy. You're getting like a girl. People are bound to notice. Already have, I fear. You've got to leave here, son."
Greg left the next day when the priest was saying mass. He had been awake all night thinking of the virulent letter he would leave. Now he hated the priest, and couldn't understand how he could have felt anything for this Judas. He had a delectable vision of himself walking into the church during mass, mounting the altar, and addressing the congregation, telling them about their priest who seduced fifteen-year-old boys. But two things stopped him: his vanity for one. He couldn't bear to think there had been others. He had to have been the only one. And if so, he couldn't have Father punished for it. Secondly, he knew he had not been seduced. It had taken no coaxing. He had been ready.
Gregory Powell took to the road early that day, bitter, betrayed, bewildered. He strode along the shoulder of the highway kicking stones and gravel until his toe was battered, enduring the pain and confusion, hating the dismal Georgia countryside and the cold rain starting to fall, taking solace in the blackened stormy sky which aped his mood. Then he saw a dot in the sky, suspended, shimmering against a lighted streak of cloud like the eye of God. He watched it become bigger, yet still it hung. Then it dropped suddenly, without warning, taking shape as it fell-down, down-and then the wings spread majestically. Not twenty yards away in the field it silently struck something vulnerable. Seconds later Greg saw it swoop up: coppery triumphant wings, hooked bloody beak, soft furry thing dead in the talons.
By the time he hitchhiked into Lake Wales, Florida, he had learned things, and it was a more cynical manipulative boy who affected what he hoped was a passable southern accent. He prepared a story for meddlesome adults that he lived in the next town and was just hitchhiking to his grandfather's house.
Greg was not even remotely effeminate in appearance, but there was something, some hint in the promising gaze of the boy that was a sign for even a mouse-faced bell captain who hired him as the hotel elevator boy at first glance, and who propositioned him the first moment they were alone. Greg accepted with lip-jutting brazen defiance, but he learned that there was great danger in homosexual encounters. He barely escaped the bell captain with his wolf breath and his studded leather belt.
His sexual appetite was not nearly as sharp then when finally he trudged into Orlando, Florida, neglecting his southern accent when stopped by the local police.
Gregory Powell didn't want to go home, but it was either that or a Florida reformatory for runaway boys and he reluctantly agreed to tell them to contact his mother, who, with her newfound health, set out to be a solicitous mother. She came personally to Orlando and took her eldest son home to Cadillac, but things were no better at home. In fact they were infinitely worse.
In Greg's absence his mother had totally dominated the household and the boy could see that any resistance his father may have offered previously was finished now. Greg tested his authority with the children and it was the same. They turned to her for approval or usurpation of his commands. He still found her to be a consummate liar, yet he made allowances, always at night, to himself. Filled with confusion over his feelings toward his mother and father, he made allowances. His mother had been ill for years, and weren't some of her lies just harmless fantasies? And wasn't she just now beginning a normal life? And his father, well, he had to get by, didn't he?
And then he would hate himself for excusing them, and would actually despise them for a long blistering moment. That would lead to thoughts about himself, the way he was, the undeniable hatred of school and the attraction for a curly haired boy named Archie. So he and Archie stole a car in Big Rapids and drove exultant and free to Indiana, where he engaged Archie sexually in the back seat of the car, afterwards falling asleep, only to be awakened by Indiana police. Once again he was returned home by out-of-state authorities. Archie, being older, was given one year's summary probation for the car theft.
This time Greg could live at home for only a week. The Powells had taken in a roving orphan boy named Harold-a boy slightly older than Greg-big, blond, silent, a masculine boy close to being movie star handsome. Perhaps to the Powells he was a surrogate for the son they had all but lost, another chance with another troubled boy. But it was too late for the surrogate as well as the actual son.
By now Gregory Powell's weight had fallen from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighteen pounds. He was succumbing to one virus after another and when Harold told him he was going to join the navy it was more than Greg could bear. He idolized the older boy, wanted only to be with him, was sickened and worried by his secret desires, telling himself a thousand times he was no queer.
A few days later Harold s
tole some money from a sister and Greg stole a car and they were eventually arrested in Yellowstone National Park. This time Gregory Powell was not released to his mother. Barely sixteen years old, he was convicted under the Dyer Act and sentenced to a juvenile facility at Englewood, Colorado. Harold was by law an adult and was sent to an adult facility.
Five months later, Gregory Powell, found to be bright but emotionally unstable, was transferred to the National Training School for boys in Washington, D. C. Ten months after that he escaped, was recaptured in two weeks, and sentenced to the federal reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio. He was released the next year, having served twenty-two months in all, and returned home just before his eighteenth birthday, a swishing, emaciated, self-proclaimed faggot.
His first weeks at home were a nightmare. He walked with iron in his back to correct the exaggerated queen's step he had consciously acquired in the reformatory. And he thought of the reformatory and wondered how he had found it so hateful, why he had wanted to escape. There were worse things. This, for instance. His nerves were ragged. He was concentrating on being a man, afraid every moment he would betray what he was. He began experimenting with marijuana and would use it sporadically, mixing it with liquor all of his adult life when he wasn't in prison. And this time he would make what he would later confess to the others in group therapy was a conscious effort to get back inside. He admitted and surrendered at once and irrevocably to a hateful notion: he was in fact an institutional man.
the Onion Field (1973) Page 5
