Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:09:58 -0800 (PST)
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: m/m Adult-young friend "The Boy Who Was Closest to the Sun"

		    The Boy Who Was Closest To the Sun
				    By
			       Tim Stillman


He was sixteen or fifteen or somewhere around there. His hair was the
color of wheat straw in summer sunshine. I missed the sun. The warmth. We
all did. It was the dead of winter and snowfall after snowfall unending,
in the Kansas plains. He was as close to the missing sun as I could
imagine and remember the sun looking and feeling.

Bakus looked at me as I taught the children their lessons. It unnerved me
sometimes and made my slight stutter a bit worse.

The wind bit hard. The sky, gray and of snow, was like an old song you
remember vaguely. There was nothing more than this rude cold schoolhouse.
And my fifteen. Sitting there with their pinchy clothes on, rude, as were
the coats of sorts they tried to bundle up in.

Bakus looked at me. And sometimes while I was reading Dickens to my
fifteen, I would look up knowing his eyes were on me. I am a man in my
thirties. I am thin and awkward. I do not believe I could survive these
massive Kansas winters without my books. I am somewhat cloddish and have
big feet and hair that is a bird's nest of already gray and already a
bald spot getting bigger.

I have finished class for the day. It is a cheerless bunch that comes
here to this little building of boards and windows, where there are the
cold winds that blow throughout. In an incipient mood, a stranger looks
out of Bakus' eyes and turns quite bold, this very odd child, who is
ignored. This turncoat to childhood who had wiped away any romantic
memories I had let myself foster on my own childhood, while I read my
books by flickering lamp light that painted sometimes frightening shadows
of movement on the walls of my small one room cabin, if cabin it can be
called. For that would surely be too grand a name for it.

The schoolbook is put away. The children close their notes and put away
their pencils to their pockets of shirts or pants or coats. Their clothes
are torn and worn, as are they. There is no solace to or from any of
them. And they have gradually made me older than I am, because they are
already my age inside, in the eyes, and growing older at an alarming
rate.

They shuffle as though they had chains on their ankles, as though they
are to be transported to court for their trial of magisterial means to
their very insignificance, and their eyes are not quarters of the moon
even in wintertime. They seem to not exist sometimes. More and more.

They shamble. They know what their lives are to be. Working their bones
raw on some scrub marble ground farm with a sod hut shared by them and
their solemn and equal or worse lachrymose mate. Or work hunting. Or at
one of our three stores in town. As time ticks with maddening slowness,
coupled with equally maddening quickness, away. The girls at the Lady
Gayoso, the ones who graduate to whoredom. And the men who graduate or
who already are drinkers who will frequent that establishment. As we
pretend they do not already.

The minister has a sole one hundred residents of this town, all of whom
attend church every Sunday to be made to feel horrible about themselves,
most of whom sold those requisite souls long ago to the blistering heat,
to the bone chill snow hell of winter, then again, the baking dry raging
eternal blister furnace of summer, and the bringing children into the
world because there has to be some kind of recreation, some kind of hope
and pleasure of any sort in this world of theirs, and that sometimes
creates children. And that is one more substantial mouth to feed, and
another cry in the night, and more berating and looking at their sons or
daughters as the subsequent propriety of a jealous and mean-spirited god
who has given them these things for punishment of carnal lust.

I knew, sitting at my scarred little desk that Bakus was still in his
chair. I did not look at him. It would only be repetition of all the
other children, now gone. Bakus was still here, still as though washing
himself in his eyes, in a way that only a madman could explain. Me? I
stirred the fire in the old pot bellied stove now, a small flame crackles
and cinders heat a bit more.

I said, my back to him, as I tended the stove, "Better be off with you,
Bakus. Two more days till Christmas."

I was chagrined it, the moment I said it. What difference did Christmass
mean to these poor children of rock bottom soil poor parents. The sheriff
locked up drunks and cowboys who would hurrah the town. And he would go
to the Lady Gayosa and drink, because there was dying here. In the midst
of breathing, there was a requisite desire of hatred for that continued
breathing. Break the law? Getting up at the crack of dawn to tend
whatever meager livestock or grain or wheat, or work to the gen'ral
store, there was enough to do and there was nothing to rob. The poverty
everywhere here stank. The bank had maybe a few hundred dollars. It need
not bother. Ever.

This was a town given up on life but keeping on with it cause Rev. Rogers
said hell is for those who don't bow down gracefully and thank god for
their burdens. Damn Rev. Rogers, he poor as a church mouse himself, this
churchly mousy little man with the thick big knotty Adam's apple that
went chuck a luck up and down, when he orated with the great big mouth
that was always shoveling damnation on decent folk, and when he
swallowed, he was like the prophet of^Å.

"Yaw looks like Ichavod Cran," Bakus said. Well, somebody had been
listening to my reading of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and got the
name almost right. I am a terrible teacher. My voice is soft and I
virtually have to scream to get it heard, if anyone cared.

Bakus came equipped with a younger sister. They were the only people I
ever saw when I went to their tarpaper shack. I visited all the
children's homes monthly, to talk to the parents who try to find
interest in their children's schooling. Mostly there is just a washed
out tiredness to them. As for Bakus, well, sometimes the children early
on played in the school yard before I rang the bell, before it was
knocked into their heads by the every dayness of it, that how the adults
lived, thus would they also, but Bakus never did.

I never asked Bakus or his sister where their parents were, or was anyone
at all looking after them. It was something I just didn't want to know.
Bakus was virtually a man and could look after her and himself enough. It
was, shameful on my part, just one more grief I didn't want to know. I
knew quite enough already, and how could I help anyway?

Bakus had strong arms and his hands were big and calloused from working
in other peoples' barns and field for tuppence, his body was between mid
teens and somewhat older. His eyes were him washing himself. His hair
was^×as close so close---

And Bakus's cloddy boots were hobbling to me. The wrong size boots for
feet too large. Growing is a meanness visited on poor children
everywhere. Nature says grow, mature. Poverty says you are grown already,
but it doesn't let you grow and mature at all. The edifices of childhood
hang on for the rest of your life, if you are poor. And I felt a sullen
resentment toward these children because they taught me my own childhood
had been just like theirs. Books I ran to. Reality ran to me. Like death.

This was a mortuary. This was where a boy/man, who was a soul mangled
boy, stood behind me, and I faced the stove already gone cold, stirring
it was useless, though I still held the tong and stood like Ichabod
Crane. Waiting for his sentence to be posited on him. Head bowed. In a
way, like a little child praying.

My shirt was white and torn at the right sleeve. My coat and pants,
shiny, and black, my clodhopper shoes too small for me as well.

"I did it again, Mr. Taylor." His voice cracked and was deep sometimes.
When I didn't respond, after a minute of waiting, me hardly breathing,
"I did it again."

My face did not blush. It used to blush quite often. That was long ago.
There is no reason to blush. There is no reason to smile. The snow is
deep and I wanted out in it to go home and to light my candle and to read
from my little library, which of course are the schoolbooks too. Town
council? Budget? Laugh clowns laugh.

I walked back to my desk, feeling somewhat dizzy and fell over my chair.
Crumpled. Hurt. My leg torn at the ankle. The fall knocking the very wind
out of me and so embarrassed, me the adult and he the child whose hands
were on my shoulders and hauling the thin angular sack of me up to my
chair and seating me there with a very kind generous gentleness I was
quite unused to in a world where you are thrown around, where a rattler
can reach up at your front door just as you are going out, and bite you,
or fixing a wooden wheel for your wagon, you get a splinter in your hand,
if the doc who covers wide territory, isn't around soon enough, you
could get blood poisoning and die.


She's not long for this world, Bakus. She looks more and more sickly
every time I visit. She is always in bed. There are rings round her eyes
so thickly she looks like she is already dead. She shivers. The blankets
are too few and too thin and your shack is colder than the winter
outside, and there is nothing worth a damn to eat, and milk? who has a
cow left that can give milk that is not of the sickly kind? And what can
I do? We are all in the same boat with little changes here and there. I
can't help her, Bakus, and I can't help a boy who reminds me of the
sun. I close my eyes. I realize I am weeping.

The Kansas plains are vast. The sky when it resumes its place, if it ever
does, is vast. They stretch out to forever, then finally encounter
forever, and stretch further than that. It is so lonely, so immensely
lonely, and we are such small creatures that even the friendly summer sky
all blue and clouds, even that is a threatening thing. We live on the
edge of a knife blade.

"I did it again, Mr. Taylor," Bakus said, mournfully, a funeral
procession making way to Boot Hill.

I took off my wire rims and pinched my nose and said tiredly, angrily,
"Oh good god, Bakus, all boys do that. It will not send you to hell and
make hair grow on your palms."

I kept my eyes closed. Sex, stupid sex, rears its head where it is
neither needed nor wanted^×for that means life and that means moments of
happiness, sliding down into yourself, and afterwards the emptiness
challenges the vast prairie itself.

Bakus knelt down to me. I felt his hand on my knees. I didn't care. I
was long past caring about anyone or anything, as Bakus unbuttoned me and
pulled out my engorged member, such as it was, and began moving his hand
over it, and gripping it, I let him, because it occurred to me I had
never been held in all my days, save at babyhood. I have never been held
in love. I have never been a part of anyone's life. And he stroked me
and I let him, and when I climaxed, I felt no shame. I also felt no
pleasure. I felt a sad release. I had always been alone with this before.
Someone being with me. Causing it was an oddity. It made me
feel---abandoned.

Then I did the same to Bakus. How truly difficult it is to feel someone
there and not feel yourself like always. And later, Bakus sat in the
first row chair. I sat in mine. We had buttoned up. I could not look at
him. What if I had seen him no longer washing in his eyes, that
observation I made often, that only a mad man could explain? How would I
live with that, though he was no child, none of them were.

"I did it, Mr. Taylor," Bakus said, his voice slow and determined as
the snow came bundling down as I watched the window. The winters here
have, snow has a purity that is like too much oxygen that is a shrill
taste in the nose and mouth, and it is a caricature of purity that has a
too silver taste and smell to it.

"I wanted ta help yaw, Mr. Taylor. I wanted to see what it was like." A
long pause as I looked at his hands on his small desk, too small for him,
his hands were formed into fists, his knuckles looked huge. That
hard-calloused hand had been so gentle on me, so coaxing on me, and when
I did^×I looked at him and his eyes flashed a little second of pleasure
as I had stroked his cock.

"I wanted ta know, before yaw tooks me to the Sheriff."

I looked now at his face, the first time I had since we had done this
thing, fully and openly as he looked at mine. He had the oddest hurt
little smile on it that I had ever seen; it was grief to look at it. How
much more grief could it be on the inside of it?

Our eyes locked and I wanted to stroke his gold straw in the summer sun
hair. And then it clicked, and I knew. It clicked, and oh god I knew. As
I pulled back in squeaky chair, I wanted to run out of here and into the
snow and run cross the plains till my heart stopped, till I froze to
death, till I got that image out of my mind. My heart thudded. The hand
that had been on me, the face that had looked at me when he was rubbing
me and when I did that to him^×his hands so gentle. So delicate. The
child inside. After all. Calling to the child in me all along, and was I
wrong all this time? About all of them? Had I been part of the mix that
had killed them inside?

So, profoundly shaken, I asked, "This time^Åfor real?"

He nodded. My head ached smartly in my stupidity.

"I jest could not see her laying there. Dying. Slowly. She wuz in such
pain. The doc says there waddnt nothing a'tal he could do."

And then Bakus broke down and wept. And I went to him and I held his
shoulders and put his head on my chest, being suddenly at long last an
adult, when I had thought I was so all along, so all alone.

After a long time, full night now, darker than pitch, I let him go and
said, "Let's go say goodbye to her."

He looked at me.

"What does I do, Mr. Taylor?"

"Leave it to me, Bakus. I'll take care of it. Let's go say goodbye to
your little sister who God has taken mercy on and who is in heaven and
who is now at peace."

I stood up. I extended a slightly trembling hand. Years had gone from me,
been added and taken away at the same time, and I had turned into someone
I didn't know. And it was time.

Bakus took my hand. Our coats, such as they were, still on and buttoned,
as had been all the children's. We walked to the door. I opened it. The
chill, which was so hard and so bitterly cold carrying all that immense
wilderness of winter, was even worse than inside.

And in the heavy snow and freezing wind, we walked to his home to see
Deidre that one last time. Bakus and I helped each other all the way
there.