Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 23:19:21 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Tender Wild

				Tender Wild

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


"Why don't you tell us, lad? Why do you want to waste
your life on the likes of him? Come on, boy, speak up now,
and there's another cracker and more chocolate for you, then
we'll send you on your way. What say?"

I sat there in their little room, in the tiny police station, and I
put my hands on my lap, my legs straight, my feet firmly on
the gritty wooden floor, my butt placed firmly in that ladder
back hard chair. I sat there and I stared at them, as though I
didn't understand, as though I was a half wit that they took
me for in the first place. Why didn't I tell
them--this--mayhaps he was tender; mayhaps I liked to lie in
the crook of his arm; mayhaps I liked that he taught me
things by pretending that I was teaching him things and there
was a wondrous feeling to that, that we were lying together
and lying not to hurt each other, but to help each other;
mayhaps he was the only adult I had ever met who was hurt
and admitted it; mayhaps he needed me, and none ever had
before.

Da with his strap of leather on my butt, hard flick cut
remove, then repeat the process; Mam with her hands red
always, from the washing of dishes and the cleaning of
clothes in the old wash tub out back, and her head always
turned conveniently away while Da whipped me within an
inch of my life, and me like a empty coal sack over his knees
as he popped and popped me. So it was a sad hard tossed life
the three of us lived; Da with his pipe and his scrawny body
and his hacking cough and his yellow teeth; Mam with her
fear of him because she was bigger than he and he never let
her forget it either; for she was his escape and he was hers;
and me, I was the botheration. There was always something
wild and untorn about me that bothered them both, that
bothered the school mistress too, and the parson--something
in me that hadn't been broken in this harsh rocky land with
the moors nearby; something in me that somehow fed on all
of this rotten house and the rotted fallin' down barn behind
it, and the old skies that always seemed like curdled milk
even in the most molten summer.

But it wasn't summer when I found him, the straggler, the
wanted man, out in the barn, that late Fall night. The weather
was comin' up an awful blower. The wind had northern
knives in it, the kind that sting at a slanting angle especially
your bare arms and face and ears and neck and prickles like
the night knows you're there and you would just as rather it
did not.  The house in fall and winter cold was always
sweaty, the kitchen that is, where we spent our time, save for
our chilly little rockabye beds, all three so small, you'd think
children slept in them, and perhaps that is not so far wrong;
anyways, it was the kitchen we sat in and ate in and I did my
lessons in and Da and Mam had their blowzy rows with each
gettin' a little tiddly on pit cider and not lettin' me have but a
small jar or two every now and then. At ten each night they
left the kitchen and went to their bedroom and they dressed
heavily for bed for there weren't much covers and what there
was was pretty thin, and that was when I went to the barn
with its hollow echoes and his piles of grass and hay and
lumber for the wood burner that made the kitchen so hot,
that was where I went to curl up in a cow stall, though we
had not cows, the last one dying earlier that Fall,
consumption and starvation and a lack of love and a lack of
life and the ceasing of the compelling need to breathe and all
sorts of other lies. And it was there in the cold hay and the
smart sharp air that dove through the rents on the broken and
filleted roof that I would curl up with my heavy jacket and
clothes, in a fetal position, and I would do the dreams as
usual. I can't say when I knew I was being watched, soon or
later, but I buttoned my pants one night after I had finished,
and the night was dark; a gale was blowing; the night was
wild; and I knew I wasn't alone.

I wasn't surprised or startled even to see him standing there
in the moon splinters in front of me, looking down at me.
Perhaps I thought it was just another dream, just another
flight of eagles in my head, which was a funny thing to say
because I've never seen an eagle, in person, or in eagle, or in
a film or a picture or anything, so I got to conjure them as
noble and as brave as I wanted them to be, which was a nice
thing. Maybe I thought there in the drafts and the creaking of
the boards, and the smell of the cold earth all shattered there
around me like a pomegranate smashed to bits, that he was
an eagle come down from the sky to shelter me in his warm
wide wings; not that I minded the cold and damp mind you,
I'm a tough boy, but still and all it would be nice to be
protected by eagle wings that would sail me onto morning
light more prosperous than that of the day before and the one
before that. He was tattered, this man, as was I, as was Mam
and Da and the place where we lived, and I knowed he came
from the moors and I knowed he was a runnin' from
something because he looked fierce, he looked like there was
a deep kind of death in him that others wished him and he
had begun wishing it for himself too.

He was shy. He was shamed. He was scared. I knew, I don't
know how I did, I just did, and I extended my arms to him
and was embarrassed my jacket sleeves rode up so high
because I hadn't fit into it for some years, and he trembled,
and he fell like an empty sack of coal, the kind I felt like
when Da whipped me in front of the wood stove in the
kitchen; he fell down to the ground and the ground was sod
and the ground was electric with shivers, and we held
because we had nothing else to hold on to. There was a
growl in him. An unintentional ladder inside his eyes that I
knew I would have to begin climbing; not that I didn't want
to, had no idea what it meant or how to do it; it was just
something like this--he needed help and he held me like the
world was not sure whether to spit him off it or not, so he
clung to me like I had clung to no one before. My arms at my
side; my dream having concluded, and sleep should have
come round to blank everything out again, which was always
what happened when I finished, buttoned myself and fell
asleep on the little pile of ancient frail dry hay. I could sleep
there till morning if I wished; Mam and Da didn't care. I
performed my chores round our little bit of farm and that
was what was required of me; that and the fortnightly
thrashing Da gave me because I was the cause of everything
and I had begun believing it myself.

We lay there for a time, in discomfort, we held to each other
now, I put my arms delicately around him because I thought
he was an egg and might break and I knew he was on the lam
from the cops and I knew he was on the lam for a crime that
did not matter in the least to me, because I felt the same way;
because finally you got to stop being scared and running
inside yourself deeper and deeper, and you gotta reach out;
because this was safe--the long arm of the law would end us;
he would not end me, nor I him; it was beyond the both of
us, and that was what made it safe--none of the ending
would be our fault, and I think both of us felt lucky on that
score.The walls blew inward as though taking a deep breath;
the night and sky and moon and earth seemed to almost be
pulled from their moorings with the black madness goin' on
our there, and there was nothing in him but cold, and there
was nothing in me but cold, and somehow together we made
warm out of it, in some mysterious happy way.

I hid him there for some time. There were berries and things
I could sneak from the house now and then, but not much,
and milk we bought in town with what little food we could
purchase. We were all thin people, me and them, and my
quiet secret friend, and we hid at night and he hid during the
day and enough salvation came that late Fall, and we taught
each other in the barn or sometimes on a windy heath with
the sky all bitter and full of disappointment. I was the boy
and he was the man. I never knew his name and he never
knew mine. We were blown together by the gale like leaves
clapping together and trying to pretend that we would have
picked the other if the situation had been different, but we
hadn't; and we knew we wouldn't; we were part of an
accident, but then when you think of it everybody meets by
accident and sometimes stays together for that reason too. I
don't think I loved him. I know he did not love me. But we
were together and his hands were nice on me. And he
stopped trembling after a time, and I put his hands on me,
and it was right good to feel someone else doin' it for me
and likin' me for it. I think at any rate he liked me.

He was a scarecrow man. Scrawny. Not very old but older
than me by a long shot. He was a man who talked little and
always seemed to hurt as though he had a bullet inside him
that kept drifting to different parts of him, as though he had
all the pain in him there needed to be so why did anyone
want to give him any more of it? It was good to do the
private thing with him. I was of the age that I could think of
little more than my constant raging member. And though I
knew my friend was married and had two children and was
wanted because he was poor and had robbed a business and
had almost gotten away with it except a cop happened to
pass by at exactly the wrong moment for him and cosed him
one but good with that truncheon they all carry so I'm told,
never been in the big city myself, and he had to run and leave
his family behind him. He had to move to the moors and live
on grass and whatever little life forms he was able to catch
and eat--gor--raw. And he was with me as though I had
knitted him out of my dreams. I had always had this figure in
them who knew more than I did, but who needed me like
someone needs someone, like the old songs sound on this
thick fat discs the old Victrola plays sometimes when Da and
Mam try to pretend they're young and life hasn't handed
them the greasy short end of the stick just yet.

He was no song. Neither was I. But he loved to doff my
clothes and he loved to listen to my heart beat and that in
itself made me feel so warm out in all that dusty dusky cold
where the land listens to no man, but goes on its own
independent way, and if you want on for the ride, then get
on, and if you don't, then 'op it, because it's no need of you.
And in the day time, early morning rime, as I do the chores,
and then rush off to the school house, I stopped by the barn
and we kissed and he patted my back and I felt like I really
had someone to come home to, not Da and Mam, who
seemed like total strangers--if we hadn't gone and had you
we wouldn't be in this chiggery mess would we you little
ingrate?--Da's words, Mam's by dent of her silence as she
was mending cooking cleaning clothes scubbin' me behind
the ears doing all those things that I had to go and make her
do and she would never so world weary and thin and
crumpled together let me forget it either--and Da sitting in
the chair at the little table, smoking his pipe and closing his
eyes and talkin' to hisself like he always did, to shut up the
world and kiss it goodnight forever after in whatever little
marble forest he had up there in his cranium there
somewhere--but my friend--I would come home to him; it
was like we were married; it was not love, but it was a whole
trundle lot better than Da and Mam had it, that was for sure.

The little one room all grades school room was hot because
the wood stove there was larger than the one at home and
heated a much larger room far too successfully. Us kids
would look out the window on the right side of the room,
opposite the wall with the blackboard and the ill tempered
teacher, every chance we got, and we got rapped knuckles
for it too, but it was worth it, seein' all that gray wind and
cold skies and how we wished to be out in it and be able to
breathe the comin' winter in and now caught up in this wood
box like chicks in a warmin' crate, so play time at noon after
lunch was looked forward to, you can believe, but I looked
forward to also my friend, the man who took me in his
mouth one night and showed me how heaven could be, who
showed me how bodies can be fitted together and in a world
where it seems no one and nothing fits, they did, and it seems
right, and all the seams of cold in the barn were cut off,
papered over by us and by the mouth he used to bring me off
and the mouth I finally got the nerve to use to bring him off
as well.

Mam and Da stayed out of the barn. There was little sense of
discovery. They had a little potato crop and a little tomato
crop on the other side of the house, and Da worked on a
slightly wealthier man's farm a little distance from here. Mam
was too busy with house chores though I never thought it
took so much time to clean such a tiny place and always
secretly believed she spent at least some time in bed, drinking
her pit cider and remembering herself as young and free
while the Victrola played on and on and time got mixed up.
Well, time got mixed up for us as well, as we nuzzled into
each other, and we slept together, and we delighted in
making electric currents in each other's nipples. It was good
to be with a man, not that I had ever really thought of it
before. It was good to think that he was older than me, that
he was already 14 when I was born. It was a curious thing as
I stroked his hair, as I traced my finger down his soft hairless
cheek, as I lay my head on his stomach and he stroked my
flanks and stoked the fires that were in me I honestly didn't
know I had had before. He was already in the world before I
even existed. Therefore, I must have existed in him in some
way before I was born and before he ever saw me. I guess
you could say I wanted him to be my Da and my Mam both.
I don't think that's so wrong.

I had some friends. Not many. But some. But mostly I was
on the outside looking in. All of us kids here were poor. All
had patched and repatched clothes. None of us was terrible
bright. The teacher took the job for whatever little money
she could make at it and didn't overpower herself teachin' us
much or teachin' us much of any importance. Not that we
went to school that often, because we had to help out round
the farm and it all ran on our timetable and not the school's.
But Bright was a good boy and a friend of mine. And he was
bright as the sun and he was nice to be around. And Tremble
was a nice girl and she was pretty and always made me feel
happy being around her. Or used to at least, but not now, not
now that Bright and Tremble were going with each other and
I was kind of left out holding the sack. We weren't friends as
much as we used to be, and it did hurt me and make me sad
especially at night, but I had less pain now. Now that my
friend was here.

He knew he should never say he loved me. He knew I would
never say I loved him. Cause love binds a person and you
can't knit him after that. Somehow it makes a person want to
be an eagle and to take the sky home and never think of you
again without rue and deepest regret. I didn't think that then,
but now, years later, on reflection, I do think it and I've
never told anyone I loved them and no one has ever told me
they felt that way about me. So with my nameless friend,
coming home to him, in the wild blows of snows of winter,
rushing and racing my heart beating so hard and the wind so
sharp and airless that I thought I was being crushed to death,
me, singular, me 14 and three quarters, me rushing
somewhere and not stopping to see the things around me or
catch the occasional frog or polliwog, me, nobody and no
one in a place where no one really seemed to exist,
momentary spasms of human flame, cut off at the top and
then gone, I raced through work and my studies, ate fast,
begged ten p.m. to roll round yet again in the ages it took to
do so, smuggled some pit cider out to the barn and we
toasted each other and we were bare together almost all the
time and winter cleaved us not apart.

He told me once that I looked not unlike his daughter, at
which I took immediate offense, but he told me that I was
beautiful and just fine for his hands and for his lips, and I was
most unlike a girl where it counted most and he would jolly
me and we would laugh and I let him penetrate me once, but
it hurt and he pulled away from me and we hugged and went
back to doing the things we had fun doing.  A school book I
was reading at the time and having a devil of a time
following it though actually it was pretty interesting was a
book by Charles Dickens called "Great Expectations." About
this convict loose on the moors, who saves all this money to
give to Pip, a boy who saved his life and was good to him, so
Pip could finance his own great expectations, for Pip was
poor as a church mouse as was I. The convict's name was
Magwitch and there were all these cases of mistaken identity
and all that. But this escaped man was no Magwitch, no
creaky scary old man. This man I knew was of the moors,
like he was something really lovely that had blossomed
where few lovely things blossom.

We were one in the Fall and in the winter. In the cold. With
an old horse blanket to cuddle under sometimes. It scratched
us and rubbed us raw. Sometimes we did it under the
blanket. Most times we did it out with no protection but each
other. I doubt if we could have been anything to one another
at all in summer or in a warm cozy room no matter how
elegant.  I would examine his penis, the lumbering largeness
of it. He would examine mine, far smaller, with no hair and
too tiny balls that I was ashamed for him to see, but he bent
to me and took each ball in his hand--how warm it made me
feel, how important and unique and alive finally--and told me
I was endearing, charming, told me I would never be a girl, I
would never wear a dress, as I had kidded him when he told
me I looked like his daughter, that I would always be me and
I should never forget that, no matter how they try to force
me to be something else. That, he said, is when it is most
important to always remember where you came from, who
you are, where you are going, and that for a while--and this
he said with forlorn sad voice and eyes as he turned from me
a bit because he couldn't dare tell me any other way--I
happened into your life, poor as that memory is, it would be
nice if you would remember me. Then he said, please. That
broke my heart and we made especially love that night, silent
and secret as it was.

The coppers had been to the house, Mam and Da's house
that is; I no longer laid claim to it. The barn and my friend
were where my home was. They had been several times, had
checked the fields of stubble and wilderness a number of
times, the barn included. And my friend always hid safely and
far away but not too far, and he always came home to me.
To Mam and Da I was always an inconvenience, and as such,
after they had done their rudimentary job as parents, they
were well rid of me until they had to fake it through one
more day with each other and with me. I can't imagine them
doing it. I can't imagine they even kissing or touching at all.
I've tried and even now I can't imagine it. It would seem, if
they did, that it was--unholy. Then the police came again.
And they caught him almost in the barn. We had not been
careful enough. They saw him push through the open back
door as they came in the front of the barn. They ran after
him. They had torn his lips from mine and he was running
and they took me to police headquarters and I was silently
pleading as I closed my eyes, run run free run away run far
and fast and never let the bastards catch you you did the only
thing you could do run.

They told me at police headquarters that he had done more
than he said, that he had done this and not robbing someone
alone, and I refused to hear what they said; for it was quite
horrendous, the way they looked when they told me, the
world scraping me rawer than that horse blanket, making the
snowy world outside filled with footprints, and you could
never erase them; the snow would never go away; the
footprints were there to prove you were not who you said
you were; that you were forever caught and revealed in the
footprints in the snow that was for time eternal. And I
refused to hear the words. I heard their voices as they leaned
over me as they made me drink my chocolate and eat a
cracker or two. I never knew what they said. I still don't
know. I only know he ran away and I never heard from or of
him again. And now the most difficult of all part. The real
rock bottom reason I couldn't tell them the information
about him that I knew--and if he lied, then why would they
want to know what he said about anything?--because I knew
if I said anything at all, they would coax me into telling him
what we were doing all those months. And that meant
admitting it. And that meant to more questions. More
humiliation. More chance of being sent to an orphanage
which must be far worse than even being with Da and Mam.
I did not tell them anything. I never did tell them. Because
how do you admit what we did? How do you admit
something like that to anyone at all?

I just kept thinking, run run and never stop till the day you
die. It was a verse a piece of scripture that I held onto for a
long time. Even now. With the shame or without it, he was
my friend and made me do things I did not want to do. Oh I
wanted to do them at the time, I very much did, he coaxed
me and forced me into nothing. And that's all I can say about
it. To those policemen with their shiny black uniforms and
their stupid looking hats, or to the alienist they sent to talk to
me or any of them. That is my private little winter world.
I've held onto it as long as I could. I wish I could now let go.
But I can't see how.

After some more scalding chocolate and another cracker they
forced on me, and constant questioning, they sighed,
yawned, and one of them took me home. To Mam and Da,
to who I had some tall explaining to do. How very much I
wanted to run away. How very much I envied my friend.

			  the end