Thomas, A Secret Life

by A. J. B. Johnston

  So be it, thinks Thomas beneath blankets turned warm and the weight of Mother’s moving hand upon his back. Of the two gifts, he supposes he is happier with the one sent his way. A book it really isn’t, just two hard covers held together by what once must have been a complete spine. That spine is now threadbare thin and ripped here and there. Still, the boards are solid. And they have endpapers coloured with swerves of mauve and cream. Thomas keeps his verses between the boards of that book long gone, for he a sometimes secret poet is. When words come to him he sets them down upon paper he’s taken from his father’s ledgers, sheets severed with a razor, carefully done. He knows not to take too much or too often. Waste not, want not is a lesson he’s learned more than once. Father would tan his arse if he found out what he’s been doing, if not for the stolen paper then for the slyness of the taking. So Thomas does not ask or tell.

  His limbs are suddenly heavy under the blankets and he feels his thing begin to grow. He tenses his entire body to make it stop, and shifts his weight to release the urge his legs have to move. Thomas is able to face the window now, its moonlit glow having lessened and the light in the room gone dull and flat. It is no longer the moonlight of his dream. Gone are the snowy woods and snarling wolves on the run.

  Marie lifts her hand as her son rolls over, lowering it when he settles again to rest. There comes from her a soft sigh, then a shiver. The single thin blanket wrapped round her shoulders is not enough anymore. She tells herself that since her boy has settled down she’ll soon be able to go back to her husband’s bed two flights of stairs below.

  Thomas purses his lips and shoots his breath spiralling upward. The wisps writhe in the moon’s faint glow. One puff then another uncoils toward the sloping roof. Seen through the haze of exhale, the other mother, the heavenly one engraved on paper and suspended above the mantle, begins to wear a veil. The boy stays silent but mouths a few lines.

  Virgin, Virgin, on the wall

  See me here, sweet and small.

  Mother Mary keep me warm.

  Guard me from the other’s storm.

  The verse brings to his lips a contented smile. It’s something he came up with a few weeks ago and he likes to say it from time to time. Because it’s his, and his alone, he finds it more of a comfort than the routine prayers the church teaches everyone to say.

  Thomas’s mother, the real woman not the one on paper in the ghostly air, leans forward. She catches her son’s full lips at the end of his verse, his face in a crinkle. Clearly, her boy is past the scary dream. She ceases caressing his shoulder. At once Thomas shifts to lie upon his back. He returns her gaze. Her face, the dark mouth and black eyes, is the one face he has always known. His sometime wish, never spoken to anyone, is that there would be but the two of them in this the house they share with Jean Pichon and sister Anne.

  A cloud must blanket the unseen moon, because his mother’s face goes dark. Thomas closes his eyes and lets his head roll away. Marie’s seated body shifts, making ready to rise. First though, she rubs both hands together to generate warmth. Then she looks again at her son’s face in profile, the angelic nose and the now shut eyes. How this boy needs her so. Yes, he needs time to grow up into a man, but he must be sheltered until that comes about.

  The lift of Marie Pichon’s body off Thomas’s bed does not come right away. She stays despite the hour and the chill, the thin blanket pulled tighter still round her cold shoulders and back. Then all at once, with a breath sucked in, she stirs and straightens. She is up and across the room. Thomas opens his eyes to see. He catches the hesitation and the last look from the doorway. An instant later his mother’s footfalls flutter down the stairs.

  The moon emerges from hiding. Like before, when the nightmare was fresh, the celestial body lights up the room. To Thomas, now warmed, the brightness is a summons, no longer a threat. The running hounds and dark woods are all gone. He wants to see what’s beyond the glass panes. He eases from beneath the weight of blankets, clothed in only a chemise that descends to just below his bony knees. Socked feet – he sleeps with them on – slide across the battered floor. Here and there, a few lifted slats click his advance. Thomas doesn’t want the sound to carry below. His mother might think him a fraud. So he jumps over to the nearby rug and slip-slides the old oval woven mat across the remaining boards.

  He propels himself over to the little mirror his mother gave him a few months ago. She said it was important always to present himself in the best possible light. How he tied back his hair in a queue, how he kept his hands and face clean, these things mattered. To become a priest he had to start looking and acting the part.

  Thomas squints at the reflection of his face. Where the mercury has not faded and been scraped away on the glass, two large dark eyes stare back. He wonders what secrets those eyes might one day hold. He knows there’s not much hidden behind his boyish face yet, but he aspires to change that as he goes along. Yes, he wishes that his face were leaner than it is now, and that maybe he had more than the one little thin line of a scar on his cheek beside his nose. He has to thank Jean-Chrysostome for that. Oh how Jean-Chrys used to love waving that stick of his, a stand-in for a real wooden sword. Thomas can’t wait to get older and lose some of the softness and roundness he sees in his face, what his mother calls his innocent good looks. Father’s mother, the nasty grande-mère who died last year, she put it differently. Thomas has to give the old biddy her due for that. She spoke the truth two Easters ago when she said to his father in a loud whisper in the kitchen, loud enough for Thomas to hear, “That son of yours, he’s too pretty, you know. It’s bad enough he has the temperament he does, but he almost looks like a girl.” Thomas sticks out his tongue at the mirror. Yes, he would like what he hasn’t yet got. He wants to look and act like a man.

  The boy steps off the oval woven mat and steps over to the moonlit window. It surprises him, as it always does when he gets up at night, to see the town in something other than light of day. Vire on an especially moonlit night is anything but its ordinary self. The latest couche of snow, thin white with shadows of blue, gives crisp lines to rooftops and dormers. He quickly finds what before were just sounds: the wail of a west wind, in off distant ocean waters, and the moan of the tradesmen’s swinging signs.

  Vire by night, moon on high,

  Yes I like and know not why

  Thomas closes his eyes and squeezes them shut. He knows at once there is no point in keeping such an empty verse. “Tired,” he mumbles. He blinks the lines away.

  Left and right then up and down, Thomas scans the rooftops. His gaze comes to rest on the clock-tower gate. As always, it’s the dominant shape from his window. It pleases the boy in a manner the rest of the town does not. It is so much taller than the jagged jumble. He likes its bulk and its shape, each of its segments set at a different angle atop the one below. The whole is a hulk of pleasing layered shapes. He especially likes how the high stretch on the vertical is ever so slightly turned to distinguish itself from the direction of the vaulted arch where it rests on the ground below.

  A gust rattles the attic window, announcing a flotilla of dark clouds on their way from the west. Thomas hears fresh lines.

  The crenellated walls are black tonight

  And in the darkness each will find his sight.

  Or should that be “his light”? Thomas shakes his head then makes a tentative nod. Yes, he’ll change the ending to: “each will find his light.” That decision brings a second and more decisive nod. There it is, right there in the verse, the answer to the question that’s been on his mind. The one about whether he is good or bad. He has to find his light. He must jot the couplet down. He throws a glance toward the table where in the drawer he keeps his poetic pages out of sight. He’s learned that it’s important to get the words down right away. Verses come and go with a will all their own. It’s only when he puts them down, on his razor-lifted paper taken from his
father’s sheath, that the lines really become his own. With the moon so bright he’ll not even need to light a candle this night.

  When Thomas pulls out the drawer to get his paper he spies the short length of blue silk he also keeps in there. He likes its feel when he has the itch. It allows him to make a spill into the chamber pot without even touching what he’s not supposed to touch. He’s in no mood for it right now, but maybe later on. He pushes the silk to the back of the drawer and picks up his sheets, then the inkpot and one of the two quills. He has to capture the lines he just heard.

  April 1713

  The boy rises early, before the others. He flexes his muscles with a stretch and a twitch, and gives passing thought to changing his chemise. He’s worn it for two days, slept in it too, so he holds his arms above him and turns his head quickly to either side, sniffing the air. Not bad. There’s a scent, but it’s only his. It’s a heaviness to the air that tells him he’s doing fine. A couple of drops of orange water, a tiny bottle that is a recent gift from his mother, will add to and mask the natural perfume. Besides, the shirt is already warm to the body and therefore feels good. He’ll leave well enough alone.

  Thomas takes the breeches and socks off the nearby chair where he put them last night so dressing this morning would be quick. It takes but a moment to pull them on. Next he splashes his hands in the washbowl then brings up a bit of water to wet his face. There, he’s done. He goes to the window to see what he should expect at this the peep of day.

  No one is in the streets yet. There looks to be little or no wind. The sun is starting to do its work. The clock tower is a rosy glow. The slate shingles on the roofs across the way are gleaming. In the pale blue sky puffy white clouds are taking shape.

  “As they should,” Thomas says in affirmation.

  The young man makes his way down the stairs carefully as he can. Silence does not come easily. Stealth from a growing body is difficult to find. Yet he knows he has to go slowly past his parents’ room and next to theirs that of his sister too. The boards that squeak – the third and seventh steps – he avoids by stepping long and over. Nothing stirs from inside either of their closed doors as he stretches slowly past.

  In the kitchen, which still carries the smell of onions, garlic and last evening’s fire, when the chicken cooked on the turnspit, he bends to pick up his shoes. They are where he left them, hidden behind the pile of split firewood near the hearth. He will not slip them on until he’s outside of the house, out on the stone steps that descend to the cobbled street.

  Thomas goes to the heavy door that leads outdoors but his hand freezes on the latch. He turns to stare at a different door, the lightweight one that makes private a little space on the far side of the kitchen. The door does not look ajar, but he knows it likely is. He wedged a little wooden sliver into the mechanism yesterday afternoon. That was to prevent a complete closure and locking click. Shoes still in hand, Thomas moves toward the beckoning door, his steps long and carefully lifted across the kitchen’s wooden floor.

  He comes to the door of the servant’s room without a squeak from the floorboards beneath his socked feet. He waits for the thumping in his chest to slow, for controlled breathing to come. His ears pick up the tick of a distant clock, the one in the salon, beyond the quiet kitchen. Yes, it’s true, he thinks with a frown, tick-tock. Time does not wait. Hurry. Must.

  The touch upon the jimmied door becomes a careful push. The lightweight wooden door opens a bit. He makes it wider still.

  Thomas peers into the waiting shadow. He makes out the rosary hanging from a nail on the facing wooden wall. And there’s the shelf with its basket of wool in billows and coils of blue and red. Nothing has changed since the last time he peeked in, nearly two weeks ago. His eyes shift to the chair, where a long white ribbon lies unfurled on the seat. That is new. Best for last, Thomas lowers his eyes to take in what he has really come to see.

  Servanne is sprawled on her back. The last time he dared put a piece of wood in the door latch to her room, so he could steal a glance at her sleeping self, she was facing the wooden partition wall. Before that, a month earlier, she was on her stomach. Always is she draped by the same solitary cover, an old white blanket with the blue fleur-de-lys resting on her hips. Thomas thinks Servanne treasures the blanket because it carries the recollection of some lost love, a soldier or a tradesman who had lain with her and maybe come and gone the same night.

  In truth, it is the only blanket Servanne has in her room. It is the only blanket Thomas’s parents have given the seventeen-year-old who does the household cleaning. Some nights the cover is enough to keep her warm, sometimes it is not. Such practicalities do not occur to the thirteen-year-old boy peering at her through the haze of morning lust. All he can think of is her face and form. She has a body that curves like a serpent through his waking thoughts and sometimes turns up in his bedtime dreams. He’s used his silken cloth more than a few times thinking of how he’d like to touch her intimate seat. He’d like nothing better than to join her right now beneath her blanket frayed and worn.

  One arm, the left, rests on the bolster, close to Servanne’s face; the other is out of sight. Her hair seems darker than usual to Thomas in the room’s dim light. It is thick and undone, and looks to be the colour of his mother’s. He blinks away the resemblance. The servant’s face is pretty, full and puffy at this hour, a sleeper’s look. Her smell, or rather the smell of the room, is the scent of morning. No, Thomas corrects himself as he looks on. The scent he’s picking up is coming from the bundle of lavender hanging from a string above her bed.

  He holds his breath as he pulls Servanne’s door back to nearly shut. He has other fish to fry this morning and scurries across the kitchen floor. A click, a pull, a step and he is out of the house, the door pulled shut behind. Only now, safely out, does Thomas fully exhale. He lays his shoes upon the top step, slips them on then leaps to the cobbles. He is away.

  The leather soles of Thomas’s shoes slap through Vire’s enclos, the air heavy with the weighted moisture of the rainy night just past. He avoids the channel in the centre of the street, containing as it does the late-night emptying of dozens of chamber pots from all along the street. Some turds are always worse than others. He wants to look somewhere else, and keep his nose high and away, but as he hurries along it’s hard not to glance down at the stinking mess people cast away.

  His head is full of purpose. He knows just where he’s going and why. He follows the familiar route, though it feels anything but ordinary at this time of day. A peal of bells begins from one of the cloistered orders. It’s lauds, or no, maybe prime. It depends on the hour. It is a ringing reminder of why he no longer wants to be a monk or priest. Whichever call to prayer it is, down the rue du Pont Thomas goes, a street that at the moment he has all to himself.

  He moves swiftly under the half-timbered overhangs of the buildings of the enclos. Every so often as he goes along he reaches out to touch a surface as he passes it by. It’s a habit he has, though he does not know he does it. He could not say why if ever anyone pointed it out and asked point blank. It’s just something that makes him feel at ease, reassured. He likes to make contact with the physical world around him as he goes by. Thomas brushes his hand lightly along the top of the bright red geraniums in the planter box of one house and next touches the dark heavy wood that frames the house on the corner. There’s a cart up ahead, one left out in the street overnight. He’ll tap that as he goes by as well.

  The morning is warmer than he thought it would be. The dark stains and tiny puddles on the cobbles from last night’s downpour will be gone by the time everyone else in Vire is up. The thought of all those risings makes Thomas pick up his pace. It won’t be long before the town begins to stir, the masters in their beds and the servants at their chores.

  The fountain of Esmangard comes into view. After the fountain comes the church where he is bound.

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  The twin doors are heavy. Of course they are, being so huge. Thomas admires the figures carved in wood. Their names he doesn’t know, but they are holy heroes from the Bible, from some story about long ago. Each figure is kept from the others by dividing lines made up of long, thin crosses finely traced atop the wood. Thomas pulls hard to open the door on the left. He steps over the ankle-high wooden threshold and quickly pulls the door to close behind him. He stays put for six long breaths as he waits for the inside darkness to lighten a little, then takes two steps and reaches for the next door. This small interior door he imagines comes from a faraway forest, across an ocean or two. Brazil, he thinks. He has seen an engraving of some of their feathered Indians’ visit to France. Tupinamba was their name, if he recalls. He remembers practicing pronouncing the name many times so he could say it right for the brother who taught him geography in school.

  Thomas takes another breath and makes the next step, the one that carries him through the smaller doorway and within.

  The air on the other side is much colder than outdoors. It tastes of age and dust. No surprise that, for it is exactly the suffocating quality of the church that he savours. Where once he believed everything the priests and the brothers told him, he no longer does. Oh some of it still sounds right, but not all. Nonetheless, he loves the smell of his Roman and Catholic apostolic faith and the feeling of completeness it brings.