The View From Castle Rock Part 11

By the end of the Christmas holidays, the Wainwrights' house was empty. The snow was so heavy that year that the kitchen roof caved in. Even after that n.o.body bothered to pull the house down or to put up a NO TRESPa.s.sING sign, and for years children-I was among them-poked around in the risky ruins just to see what they could find. n.o.body seemed to worry then about injuries or liability.

No movie magazines came to light.

I did tell about Dahlia. By then I was an entirely different person, to my own way of thinking, than the girl who had been in the Wainwrights' house. In my early teens I had become the entertainer around home. I don't mean that I was always trying to make the family laugh-though I did that too-but that I relayed news and gossip. I told about things that had happened at school but also about things that had happened in town. Or I just described the looks or speech of somebody I had seen on the street. I had learned how to do this in a way that would not get me rebuked for being sarcastic or vulgar or told that I was too smart for my own good. I had mastered a deadpan, even demure style that could make people laugh even when they thought they shouldn't and that made it hard to tell whether I was innocent or malicious.

That was the way I told about Dahlia's creeping around in the sumacs spying on her father, about her hatred of him and her mention of murder. And that was the way any story about the Newcombes had to be told, not just the way it had to be told by me. Any story about them ought to confirm, to everybody's satisfaction, just how thoroughly and faithfully they played out their roles. And now Dahlia, as well, was seen to belong to this picture. The spying, the threats, the melodrama. His coming after her with the shovel. Her thoughts that if he had killed her, he would have been hanged. And that she couldn't be, if she killed him while she was still a juvenile.

My father agreed.

"Hard to get a court around here to convict her."

My mother said that it was a shame, what a man like that had made of his daughter.

It seems strange to me now that we could conduct this conversation so easily, without its seeming ever to enter our heads that my father had beaten me, at times, and that I had screamed out not that I wanted to kill him, but that I wanted to die. And that this had happened not so long ago-three or four times, I would think, in the years when I was around eleven or twelve. It happened in between my knowing Frances and my knowing Dahlia. I was being punished at those times for some falling-out with my mother, some back talk or smart talk or intransigence. She would fetch my father from his outside work to deal with me, and I would await his arrival, first in balked fury, and then in a sickening despair. I felt as if it must be my very self that they were after, and in a way I think it was. The self-important disputatious part of my self that had to be beaten out of me. When my father began to remove his belt-that was what he beat me with-I would begin to scream No, No, and plead my case incoherently, in a way that seemed to make him despise me. And indeed my behavior then would arouse contempt, it did not show a proud or even a self-respecting nature. I did not care. And when the belt was raised-in the second before it descended-there was a moment of terrible revelation. Injustice ruled. I could never tell my side of things, my father's detestation of me was supreme. How could I not find myself howling at such perversion in nature?

If he were alive now I am sure my father would say that I exaggerate, that the humiliation he meant to inflict was not so great, and that my offenses were perplexing and whatever other way is there to handle children? I was causing trouble for him and grief for my mother and I had to be convinced to change my ways.

And I did. I grew older. I became useful around the house. I learned not to give lip. I found ways to make myself agreeable.

And when I was with Dahlia, listening to her, when I was walking home by myself, when I was telling the story to my family, I never once thought to compare my situation with hers. Of course not. We were decent people. My mother, though sometimes grieved by the behavior of her family, did not go into town with snaggly hair, or wear floppy rubber galoshes. My father did not swear. He was a man of honor and competence and humor, and he was the parent I sorely wanted to please. I did not hate him, could not consider hating him. Instead, I saw what he hated in me. A shaky arrogance in my nature, something brazen yet cowardly, that woke in him this fury.

Shame. The shame of being beaten, and the shame of cringing from the beating. Perpetual shame. Exposure. And something connects this, as I feel it now, with the shame, the queasiness, that crept up on me when I heard the padding of Mr. Wainwright's slippered feet, and his breathing. There were demands that seemed indecent, there were horrid invasions, both sneaky and straightforward. Some that I could tighten my skin against, others that left it raw. All in the hazards of life as a child.

And as the saying goes, about this matter of what molds or warps us, if it's not one thing it will be another. At least that was a saying of my elders in those days. Mysterious, uncomforting, unaccusing.

On Friday morning last Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Towns.h.i.+p, lost his life due to electrocution. He was the beloved husband of Dorothy (Morris) Newcombe, and he leaves to mourn his pa.s.sing his daughters Mrs. Joseph (April) McConachie, of Sarnia, Mrs. Evan (Corinne) Wilson of Kaslo, British Columbia, Mrs. Hugh (Gloria) Whitehead of town, Misses Susannah and Dahlia, also of town, and one son Raymond, at home, also seven grandchildren. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident. It happened when he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging metal socket, while standing on a wet floor in a neighbor's stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull, and he was arguing at that moment about the fee. For some reason that n.o.body could understand, he was not wearing his rubber boots, which everybody said might have saved his life.

Lying Under the Apple Tree Over on the other side of town lived a woman named Miriam McAlpin, who kept horses. These were not horses that belonged to her-she boarded them and exercised them for their owners, who were harness-racing people. She lived in a house that had been the original farmhouse, close to the horse barns, with her old parents, who seldom came outside. Beyond the house and the barns was an oval track on which Miriam or her stable boy, or sometimes the owners themselves, could be seen now and then on the low seat of a flimsy-looking sulky, flying along and beating up the dust.

In one of the pasture fields for the horses, next to the town street, there were three apple trees, the remains of an old orchard. Two of them were small and bent and one was quite large, like a nearly grown maple. They were never pruned or sprayed and the apples were scabby, not worth stealing, but most years there was an abundant flowering, apple blossoms hanging on everywhere, so that the branches looked from a little way off to be absolutely clotted with snow.

I had inherited a bicycle, or at least I had the use of one left behind by our part-time hired man when he went away to work in an aircraft factory. It was a man's bike, of course, high- seated and lightweight, of some odd-looking make long discontinued.

"You're not going to ride that to school, are you?" my sister said, when I had started practice rides up and down our lane. My sister was younger than I was, but she sometimes suffered anxiety on my behalf, understanding perhaps before I did the various ways in which I could risk making a fool of myself. She was thinking not just of the look of the bike but of the fact that I was thirteen and in my first year at high school, and that this was a watershed year as far as girls riding bikes to school was concerned. All girls who wanted to establish their femininity had to quit riding them. Girls who continued to ride either lived too far out in the country to walk-and had parents who could not afford to board them in town-or were simply eccentric and unable to take account of certain unstated but far-reaching rules. We lived just beyond the town limits, so if I showed up riding a bicycle-and particularly this bicycle-it would put me in the category of such girls. Those who wore women's oxford shoes and lisle stockings and rolled their hair.

"Not to school," I said. But I did start making use of the bike, riding it out to the country along the back roads on Sunday afternoons. There was hardly a chance then of meeting anybody I knew, and sometimes I met n.o.body at all.

I liked to do this because I was secretly devoted to Nature. The feeling came from books, at first. It came from the girls' stories by the writer L. M. Montgomery, who often inserted some sentences describing a snowy field in moonlight or a pine forest or a still pond mirroring the evening sky. Then it had merged with another private pa.s.sion I had, which was for lines of poetry. I went rampaging through my school texts to uncover them before they could be read and despised in cla.s.s.

To betray either of these addictions, at home or at school, would have put me into a condition of permanent vulnerability. Which I felt that I was in already, to some extent. All someone had to say, in a certain voice, was you would, or how like you, and I felt the taunt, the chastening air, the lines drawn. But now that I had the bike, I could ride on Sunday afternoons into territory that seemed waiting for the kind of homage I ached to offer. Here were the sheets of water from the flooded creeks flas.h.i.+ng over the land, and here were the banks of milium under the red-budded trees. And the chokecherries, the pin cherries, in the fencerows, breaking into tender bits of bloom before there was a leaf on them.

The cherry blossoms got me thinking about the trees in Miriam McAlpin's field. I wanted to look at them when they flowered. And not just to look at them-as you could do from the street-but to get underneath those branches, to lie down on my back with my head against the trunk of the tree and to see how it rose, as if out of my own skull, rose up and lost itself in an upside-down sea of blossom. Also to see if there were bits of sky showing through, so that I could screw up my eyes to make them foreground not background, bright-blue fragments on that puffy white sea. There was a formality about this idea that I longed for. It was almost like kneeling down in church, which in our church we didn't do. I had done it once, when I was friends with Delia Cavanaugh and her mother took us to the Catholic church on a Sat.u.r.day to arrange the flowers. I crossed myself and knelt in a pew and Delia said-not even whispering-"What are you doing that for? You're not supposed to do that. Just us."

I left the bike lying in the gra.s.s. It was evening, I had ridden through town on back streets. There was n.o.body in the stable yard or around the house. I got myself over the fence. I tried to go as quickly as possible, without running, over the ground where the horses had been cropping the early gra.s.s. I ducked under the branches of the big tree and went on stooping and stumbling, sometimes. .h.i.t in the face by the blossoms, till I reached the trunk and could do what I'd come to do.

I lay down flat on my back. There was a root of the tree making a hard ridge under me, so I had to s.h.i.+ft around. And there were last year's apples, dark as chunks of dried meat, that I had to get out of the way before I could settle. Even then, when I composed myself, I was aware of my body's being in an odd and unnatural situation. And when I looked up at all the dangling pearly petals with their faint rosy smear, all the prearranged nosegays, I was not quite swept into the state of mind, of wors.h.i.+p, that I had been hoping for. The sky was thinly clouded, and what I could see of it reminded me of dingy bits of china.

Not that this wasn't worth doing. At least-as I began to understand as I got to my feet and scrambled out of there-it was worth having done. It was along the lines of an acknowledgment, rather than an experience. I hurried across the field and over the fence, retrieved my bicycle, and was in fact starting to ride away when I heard a loud whistle, and my name.

"Hey. You. Yeah. You."

It was Miriam McAlpin.

"You come on over here for a minute."

I wheeled around. There in the driveway between the old house and the horse barns, Miriam was talking to two men, who must have driven up in the car parked beside the road. They were wearing white s.h.i.+rts, suit vests, and trousers-just the same thing any man who worked at a desk or behind a counter in those days would be wearing from the time he got dressed in the morning till he got undressed to go to bed. Next to them, Miriam in her work pants and loose checked s.h.i.+rt looked like a c.o.c.ky twelve-year-old boy, though she was a woman of between twenty-five and thirty. Either that, or she looked like a jockey. Cropped hair, hunched shoulders, raw skin. She gave me a look that was threatening and derisive.

"I saw you," she said. "Over in our field."

I said nothing. I knew what the next question would be and I was trying to think of an answer.

"So. What were you doing there?"

"Looking for something," I said.

"Looking for something. Yeah. What?"

"A bracelet."

I had never owned a bracelet in my life.

"So. Why did you think it was in there?"

"I thought I'd lost it."

"Yeah. In there. How come?"

"Because I was in there the other day looking for morels," I floundered. "I had it on then and I thought it could have slipped off."

It was true enough that people looked for morels under old apple trees in the spring. Though I don't suppose they wore bracelets while they were at it.

"Unh-hunh," said Miriam. "Did you find any? Whatchama-callums? Morels?"

I said no.

"That's good. 'Cause they would've been mine."

She looked me up and down and said what she'd been wanting to say all along. "You're starting early, aren't you?"

One of the men was looking at the ground, but I thought he was smiling. The other looked straight at me, raising his eyebrows slightly in droll reproach. Men who knew who I was, men who knew my father, would probably not have let their looks say so much.

I understood. She thought-they all thought-that I had been under the tree, yesterday evening or some other evening, with a man or a boy.

"You go on home," Miriam said. "You and your bracelets go on home and don't ever come back monkeying around on my property in the future. Go on."

Miriam McAlpin was well known for her tendency to bawl people out. I had once heard her in the grocery store, carrying on at the top of her voice about some bruised peaches. The way she was treating me was predictable, and the suspicions she had of me seemed to rouse an unambiguous feeling in her-pure disgust-which did not surprise me.

It was the men who made me sick. The looks they gave me, of proper disapproval and sneaky appraisal. The slight dull droop and thickening of their features, as the level of sludge rose in their heads.

The stable boy had come out while this was going on. He was leading a horse belonging to one or both of the men. He halted in the yard, did not come closer. He seemed not to be looking at his boss, or the horse owners, or at me, not to take any interest in the scene. He would be used to Miriam's way of telling people off.

People's thoughts about me-not just the kind of thoughts the men or Miriam might be having, each kind rather dangerous in its own way-but any thoughts at all, seemed to me a mysterious threat, a gross impertinence. I hated even to hear a person say something relatively harmless.

"I seen you walking down the street the other day. Looked like you were off in the clouds."

Judgments and speculations all like a swarm of bugs trying to get into my mouth and eyes. I could have swatted them, I could have spat.

"Dirt," my sister whispered to me when I got home. "Dirt on the back of your blouse."

She watched me take it off in the bathroom, and scrub at it with a hard bar of soap. We didn't have running hot water except in the winter, so she offered to get me some from the kettle. She didn't ask me how the dirt had got there, she was only hoping to get rid of the evidence, keep me out of trouble.

On Sat.u.r.day nights there was always a crowd on the main street. At that time there wasn't such a thing as a mall anywhere in the county, and it wasn't until several years after the war that the big shopping night would s.h.i.+ft to Friday. The year I'm talking about is 1944, when we still had ration books and there were a lot of things you couldn't buy-like new cars and silk stockings-but the farmers came into town with some money in their pockets and the stores had brightened up after the Depression doldrums and everything stayed open till ten o'clock.

Most town people did their shopping during the week and in the daytime. Unless they worked in the stores or restaurants they stayed out of the way on Sat.u.r.day evenings, playing cards with their neighbors or listening to the radio. Newly married couples, engaged couples, couples who were "going out," cuddled in the movie house or drove, if they could get the gas coupons, to one of the dance halls on the lakesh.o.r.e. It was the country people who took over the street and the country men and girls on the loose who went into Neddy's Night Owl, where the platform was raised above a dirt floor and every dance cost ten cents.

I stood close to the platform with some friends of my own age. n.o.body came along to pay ten cents for any of us. No wonder. We laughed loudly, we criticized the dancing, the haircuts, the clothes. We sometimes spoke of a girl as a s.l.u.t, or a man as a fairy, though we did not have a precise definition of either of these words.

Neddy himself, who sold the tickets, was apt to turn to us and say, "Don't you think you girls need some fresh air?" And we would swagger off. Or else we would get bored and leave on our own initiative. We bought ice-cream cones and gave each other licks to try the different flavors, and walked along the street in a haughty style, swinging around the knots of talkers and through the swarms of children squirting water at each other from the drinking fountain. n.o.body was worth our notice.

The girls who took part in this parade were not out of the top drawer-as my mother would have said, with a wistful and lightly sarcastic edge to her voice. Not one of them had a sun-room on their house or a father who wore a suit on any day but Sunday. Girls of that sort were at home now, or in each other's houses, playing Monopoly or making fudge or trying out hairstyles. My mother was sorry not to see me accepted into that crowd.

But it was all right with me. This way, I could be a ringleader and a loudmouth. If that was a disguise it was one that I managed easily. Or it might not have been a disguise, but just one of the entirely disjointed and dissimilar personalities I seemed to be made up of.

On a vacant lot at the north end of town some members of the Salvation Army had set up their post. There was a preacher and a small choir to sing the hymns and a fat boy on the drum. Also a tall boy to play the trombone, a girl playing the clarinet, some half-grown children equipped with tambourines.

Salvation Army people were even less top drawer than the girls I was with. The man who was doing the preaching was the drayman who delivered coal. No doubt he had washed himself clean, but his face still had a gray shadow. Sweat was running down it from the exertion of his preaching and it seemed as if his sweat must be gray too. Some cars would honk to drown him out as they pa.s.sed. (In spite of the waste of gas, there were certain cars driven, by young men, up the street to the north end, and down the street to the south end, over and over again.) Most people walked past with uneasy but respectful faces, but some halted to watch. As we did, waiting for something to laugh at.

The instruments were raised for a hymn, and I saw that the boy who lifted the trombone was the same stable boy who had stood in the yard while Miriam McAlpin was giving me the dressing-down. He smiled at me with his eyes as he began to play, and he seemed to be smiling not to recall my humiliation but with irrepressible pleasure, as if the sight of me woke the memory of something quite different from that scene, a natural happiness.

"There is Power, Power, Power, Power, Power in the Blood," sang the choir. The tambourines were waved above the players' heads. Joy and l.u.s.tiness infected the bystanders, so that most people began to sing along with a jolly irony. And we permitted ourselves to sing with the others.

Soon after that the service was at an end. The stores were closing up, and we took our separate ways home. There was a shortcut for me, a footbridge over the river. When I had nearly reached the end of it I heard heavy running, some sort of thumping, behind me. The boards shuddered under my feet. I turned sideways, backing against the railing, slightly scared but concerned not to show it. There were no lights near the footbridge and now it was quite dark.

When he got close I saw that it was the trombone player in his heavy dark uniform. The trombone case made the thumping sound, knocking against the railing.

"Okay," he said, out of breath. "It's just me. I was only trying to catch up with you."

"How did you know it was me?" I said.

"I could see a little. I knew you lived out this way. I could tell it was you by the way you walk."

"How?" I said. With most people, such presumption would have made me too angry to ask.

"I don't know. It's just the way you walk."

His name was Russell Craik. His family belonged to the Salvation Army, his father being the drayman-preacher and his mother one of the hymn-singers. Because he had worked with his father and got used to horses, he had been hired by Miriam McAlpin as soon as he left school. That was after Grade Eight. It was not at all uncommon in those years for boys to do that. Because of the war, there were lots of jobs for them to take up while they were waiting, as he was, to be old enough to go into the Army. He would be old enough in September.

If Russell Craik had wanted to take me out in the usual way, to take me to the movies or to dances, there would not have been a chance of its being allowed. My mother would have p.r.o.nounced that I was too young. Probably she would have felt it was not necessary to say that he worked as a stable boy and his father delivered coal and his whole family put on Salvation Army outfits and regularly testified on the street. Those considerations would have meant something to me too, if it had come to displaying him publicly as my boyfriend. They would have meant something at least until he got into the Army and became presentable. But as it was, I didn't have to think about any of that. Russell could not take me to the movies or to a dance hall because his religion forbade him to go there himself. The arrangement that developed between us seemed easy, almost natural, to me because it was in some ways-not all-much like the casual, hardly recognized, and temporary pairing off of boys and girls of my age, not his.

We rode bicycles, for one thing. Russell did not own a car and did not have any access to one, though he could drive-he drove the horse-barn truck. He never called for me at my house and I never suggested it. We rode out of town separately on Sunday afternoons and met always at the same place, a crossroads school two or three miles out of town. All the country schools had names by which they were known, rather than by the official numbers carved above their doors. Never S.S. No. 11, or S.S. No. 5, but Lambs' School and Brewsters' School and the Red Brick School and the Stone School. The one we chose, already familiar to me, was called the School of the Flowing Well. A thin stream of water flowed continuously out of a pipe in a corner of the school yard, to justify this name.

Around that yard, which was kept mowed even in the summer holidays, there were mature maple trees that cast nearly black pools of shade. In one corner was a stone pile with long gra.s.s growing out of it, where we concealed our bikes.

The road in front of the school yard was neat and gravelled, but the side road, climbing a hill, was not much more than a lane in a field, or a dirt track. On one side of it was pasture field dotted with hawthorns and juniper, and on the other a stand of oak and pine trees, with a hollow between it and the bank of the road. In this hollow was a dump-not the official towns.h.i.+p dump, just an informal dump that the country people had made. This interested Russell, and every time we pa.s.sed it we had to lean over and peer down into the hollow, to see if there was anything new in it. There never was, the dump had probably not been used for years-but quite often he could pick out something that he had not noticed before.

"See? That's the grille of a V-8."

"See under the buggy wheel? That's an old battery radio."

I had been on this road a few times by myself and had not once seen that the dump was there, but I knew about other things. I knew that when we went over the hill the oak and pine trees would be swallowed up in spruce and tamarack and cedar, and so would the b.u.mpy pasture, and all that we would see, for a long time, would be swamp growth on either side, with glimpses of high-bush cranberries n.o.body could ever get to, and some formal-looking crimson flower I was not sure of the name of-I thought it was called the Devil's paintbrush. On a branch of cedar somebody had hung the skull of a small animal, and this Russell would take note of, wondering every time if it was a ferret's or a weasel's or a mink's.

It was proof anyway, he said, that somebody had been on this road before us. Probably walking, probably not in a car-the cedars grew in too close, and the plank bridge over the creek at the lowest level of the swamp was a primitive affair, springy under our feet and without railings. Beyond that the land rose slowly, and the mucky ground was left behind and finally there were farm fields on either side, glimpsed through large beech trees. Such heavy trees and so many of them that their smooth gray light seemed actually to make a change in the air, cooling it down as if you had entered some high hall or church.

And the track would end, after the usual mile and a quarter measurement of country blocks, running into another straight gravel road. We turned and walked back the same way.

There were hardly any birds to be heard in the hot middle of the day, and none to be seen, and there were not many mosquitos because the ponds in the low ground had mostly dried up. But there were dragonflies over the creek and often clouds of very small b.u.t.terflies, such a pale green that you thought maybe they were just catching a reflection of the leaves.

What there was to be heard at every stage of the walk was Russell's unhurried, pleased voice. He talked about his family-there were two older sisters who were gone from home and a younger brother and two younger sisters and they were all musical, each one playing some instrument. The younger brother's name was Jackie-he was learning the trombone, to take over from Russell. The sisters at home were Mavis and Annie and the grown-up ones were lona and Isabel. lona was married to a man who worked on the Hydro lines, and Isabel was a chambermaid in a large hotel. Another sister, Edna, had died of polio in an iron lung after being sick for only two days at the age of twelve. She was the only one in the family to have blond hair. The brother Jackie had nearly died also, of blood poison from stepping on a board with a rusty nail. Russell himself used to have tough feet from going barefoot in the summer. He could walk on gravel or thistles or stubble and he never got any kind of wound.

He had shot up in height in Grade Eight to be nearly as tall as he was now, and he got the part of Ali Baba in the school operetta. That was because he could sing, as well as being tall.

He had learned to drive his uncle's car when his uncle came over from Port Huron. His uncle was in the plumbing business and he traded in his car for a new one every two years. He let Russell drive before he was old enough to get a license. But Miriam McAlpin would not let him drive her truck until he got one. He drove it now, with and without the horse trailer hitched on. To Elmira, to Hamilton, once to Peterborough. It was tricky driving because a horse trailer could roll over. She came with him sometimes, but she let him drive.

His voice changed when he talked of Miriam McAlpin. It became wary, half-contemptuous, half-amused. She was a Tartar, he said. But okay if you knew how to handle her. She liked horses better than she liked people. She would have been married by now if she could have married a horse.

I did not speak much about myself and I did not listen to him all that closely. His talk was like a curtain of easy rain between me and the trees, the light and shadows on the road, the clear-running creek, the b.u.t.terflies, and all that part of myself that would have paid attention to these things if I had been alone. A lot of me was under cover, as it was with my friends on Sat.u.r.day nights. But the change now was not so deliberate and voluntary. I was half-hypnotized, not just by the sound of his voice but by the bright breadth of his shoulders in a clean, short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt, by his tawny throat and thick arms. He had washed himself with Lifebuoy soap-I knew the smell of it as everybody did-but was.h.i.+ng was as far as most men went in those days, they didn't bother about the sweat that would acc.u.mulate in the near future. So I could smell that too. And just faintly the smell of horses, bridles, barns, and hay.

When I wasn't with him I would try to remember-was he good-looking or was he not? His body was fairly lean but he had a slight fles.h.i.+ness about the face, an authoritative pout to his lips, and his wide-open clear blue eyes showed something like an obstinate naivete, an innocent self-regard. All that I might not have cared for much in another person.

"I grind my teeth at night," he said, "I never wake up, but it wakes Jackie up and is he ever mad. He gives me a kick and I turn over in my sleep and that fixes it. Because I only do it when I'm laying on my back."

"Would you kick me?" he said, and he reached across the foot or so of air that was between us, shot full of sunlight, and picked up my hand. He said that he got so hot in bed he kicked all the covers off, and that made Jackie mad as well.

I wanted to ask him if he wore just his pyjama tops or just the bottoms, or both, or nothing at all, but the last possibility made me feel too weak to open my mouth. Our fingers worked together, all on their own, until they got so sweaty that they gave up, and separated.

It was not until we got back to the school yard and were about to pick up our bikes and ride back to town-separately-that the reason for our walk, the only reason as far as I could understand it, received our whole attention. He would pull me into the shade and put his arms around me and begin to kiss me. Hidden from the road he would press me up against a tree trunk and we would kiss chastely at first and then more fervently, and wind ourselves together-still upright-with a shaky urgency. And after-how long?-five or ten minutes of this we would separate and pick up our bikes and say good-bye. My mouth would be rubbed sore and my cheeks and chin sc.r.a.ped by bristles that were not visible on his face. My back would hurt from being shoved against the tree and the front of my body would ache from the pressure of his. My stomach, though quite flat, had a little give to it, but I had noted that his had none. I thought that men must have a firmness and even a protuberance to their stomachs, that was not evident until you were held very tightly against them.

It seems so strange that knowing as much as I knew, I did not realize what this pressure was. I had a fairly accurate idea of a man's body, but somehow I had missed the information that there was this change in size and condition. I seem to have believed that a p.e.n.i.s was at maximum size all the time, and in its cla.s.sic shape, but in spite of this could be kept dangling down inside the leg of the pants, not hoisted up to put pressure against another body in this way. I had heard a lot of jokes, and I had seen animals coupling, but somehow, when education is informal, gaps can occur.

Now and then he would speak about G.o.d. His tone at such times was firm and factual, as if G.o.d were a superior officer, was occasionally gracious but often inflexible and impatient, in a manly way. When the war was over and he was out of the Army ("If I'm not killed," he said cheerfully), there would still be the commands of G.o.d and his Army to be reckoned with.

"I'll have to do what G.o.d wants me to."

That struck me. What terrible docility it took, to be such a believer.