Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  “I ain’t bad-looking. Everything’s still where it’s supposed to be. Mostly.”

  The man’s pubic hair was as gray and threadbare as old bed sheets (as my bed sheets anyway), and when sometimes I pulled back for breath I caught glimpses of a stomach that was flat but soft—not soft really, but rippled, like a poorly hung tapestry that’s begun to sag under its own weight. That didn’t turn me off exactly, but I had no desire to see what it was connected to. The man-breasts drooping off the ribs like discarded coffee filters or the skinny legs with shiny sandbars at thigh and calf where the hair had been abraded away by pilling polyester. And of course if I was seeing the failings of his body, he was seeing mine, and somehow I knew that if even one person rejected me because of my birthmark, the illusion of my desirability would be shattered. The rest stop would become as useless to me as my brooms and mops and scrub brushes, and god only knew where I’d go from there.

  “Yeah, you probably want someone your own age. I would too.”

  You do too, I thought, but that wasn’t fair. For all I knew he’d fuck a sixty-year-old if that’s what was waiting for him. Whereas I was terrified of fucking someone my age, couldn’t begin to contemplate a sexual exchange based on parity, let alone mutual desire. But even so, my dick was fully erect again.

  “You ever try the Academy?”

  I’d love to tell you I came when he mentioned the Academy, but that’s not exactly what happened. What happened was my vision narrowed, my ears rang, the toilet beneath my ass disappeared and I was four years old, sitting on the edge of one of my mother’s pots and moving my bowels so she could check for blood, and out of nowhere I remembered that that’s why she’d made her first pot all those years ago—so that she could take care of me—and then the pot opened up and swallowed me in a pool of my own excreta. That’s when I came.

  “The Academy’s a school,” I said when I could speak again.

  “Holy crap. You just shot another load, didn’t you? How young are you?”

  “A boarding school. You prolly need ID to get into the dorms.”

  An ID card was no more welcome at the Academy than a branding iron and the Foundry’s less dorm than harem, but I thought it was a pretty good improvisation under the circumstances. And that “prolly”? I should be on the stage.

  “Don’t need no ID card. Don’t need to go to the dorm either. There’s a spot in the library. Basement bathroom.”

  “There’s no bathroom in the basement of the library.”

  “You sure you’re not a student there? Whatever. All the way in back. Behind the stacks. No one ever goes there except to go there, if you know what I mean.”

  “Whatever, Edward Albee,” I said, but I was trying to picture the basement of Stammers Hall, which I hadn’t been down to in years. The family papers were down there somewhere, including the mining archives, which was probably why I never went. Or maybe it was because it was just a basement full of old books, and I already had all the books I’d ever need at the Field.

  “If this was an Albee play,” the man said, “we’d’ve been talking to each other through this glory hole for the past nine months. We’d’ve invented tortured pasts for each other, one violent, the other lonely, but both full of self-hatred, so that even though we made out like it was the world that had left us emotionally crippled, it would be obvious to anyone watching that we were really doing it to ourselves.”

  “And when we finally saw each other we would’ve been disappointed,” I said, wondering if he was the Academy man. “Also, that sounds more like Genet, or maybe Manuel Puig.”

  “Hey, you ever think maybe people don’t sound like plays? Plays sound like people?”

  “Aaaaand scene.”

  “Whatever, kid. You tough, I get it. But you ever get tired of sitting on a shit pot when you suck dick, check out the bathroom in that library. At least they keep it clean.”

  And no, he didn’t say “shit pot.” I made that up. But it’s what he meant, even if he didn’t know it.

  5

  And time continued to pass. The present, once acknowledged, refuses to stick around, but rushes by like Heraclitus’s river. The three and a half years my mother and I lived at the Field together are mostly a blur, of books and dicks, of pots and floods, and often when I try to zero in on one experience it dissolves into all the others, white penises on brown bodies, Gilgamesh popping up in Song of Myself to spout lovelorn rubaiyat, a succession of purple orbs bowling over a glassy stream before knocking down the mountains massed on the other side, which explode in a shower of dollar bills and copper coins.

  More distinct are the things I wasn’t obsessed with, the things I took for granted, like the flowers that showed up with each spring’s flood: sunflowers one year; snapdragons the next, their orange blooms shimmering behind the wings of hummingbirds we’d also never seen before and never saw again; or a scattering of poppies that dotted the phragmites like the smears of blood from a coyote’s meal (prompting my mother to look in the direction of Wye, six miles north, and say, “Someone’s running an opium den out of their basement”). The flowers thrived for a season, only to be washed away by the following year’s flood. Trees popped up too, at the edge of the phragmites, but most couldn’t survive the acid in the soil and annual inundations, and even more were killed when the masters burned off the reeds every few years. The fate of the few that endured long enough to grow bark, to cast shade, to house a bird’s nest or squirrel or possum or raccoon was evident in the whitened trunks that lay across the streambed—like sutures, my mother said once, sealing some ancient wound (never mind that in almost every other regard she spoke of the White Woman as progenitive, catalytic, nurturing), whereas I saw them less grandly as laces, of shoes or a corset or whatever else you tie up temporarily. Something utilitarian but also incidental, so that if they came unraveled (and every spring a few more washed away, ended up wedged in or across the streambed or lodged under the dock behind the Foundry) nothing terrible would happen, because their bond was never meant to be permanent. The creek had disappeared once, after all, and made no promises when it returned.

  I remember the January afternoon in the winter of 1996 when Master Grissom deigned to acknowledge my request to begin the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow,” the elenctic allegory which, though never actually discussed in class, still dominated both years of fifth form. I knew it was coming, of course. Most of lower fifth was already at it, for one thing, and, for another, my mother dated Gaius’s disappearance to the parable’s conclusion (which, if he did in fact claim that he had to “find his own path,” gives his parting words nihilistic, if not simply suicidal, overtones). And as skeptical as I was of Academy pedagogy, I was still a little excited. I felt I was beginning a rite of passage, like a pork-loving, shiksa-dating Jewish teenager who nevertheless takes the time to memorize the Hebrew for his bar mitzvah—but whatever discoveries I might’ve made were forgone when, that evening, my mother saw me reading “To Build a Fire” and, sussing the sitch, gave away the parable’s secret, which pissed me off but touched me too, a little, because I knew she’d played spoiler so I wouldn’t run away like her brother.

  I remember a January or February night the same year, when I snuck into the house in the wee hours and looked out my window to see no fewer than twenty-two deer feasting on corn stalks in my mother’s garden—twenty-two deer and, towering over them like a giant among dwarfs, one enormous moose, who worked his way down the rows like a king greeting peasants, his cello-sized head reaching over the backs of does to cherry pick the ears at the tops of the stalks, his enormous rack, which looked in the moonlight like the whitened skeleton of some long-extinct cephalopod, sweeping a ten-pointed buck out of his way with the gentleness only the truly strong can muster. My mother burst that bubble too. “There isn’t a moose for a thousand miles,” she told me the following morning. “Not out of a zoo anyway. Tell me you’re not doing drugs.” An
d indeed, when I went out to the garden the only thing I found was a dead nutria, which had fallen into one of my mother’s pits who knows how long ago, and starved or frozen before it could dig its way out.

  And I remember an afternoon the following summer when my mother called me as I was hopping on my Vespa and dragged me out to what I’d always thought was nothing more than an overgrown bramble but turned out to be a tiny shed coccooned by a three-foot-thick wall of Rosa multiflora. My mother’d cleared a path to the door but couldn’t open it. The door’s boards had long since swollen into the frame, and in lieu of a knob there were only the friable fibers of what had apparently been a pull-rope, which powdered like dead vines when I pinched at them. The shed was barely wider than the doorframe and perhaps twice as long. I dismissed it as an outhouse (and not just because I wanted to get to the rest stop), but my mother insisted it was a gardener’s shed, said maybe it held fifty- or hundred-year-old seeds and would I help her open it, it would be like planting the past? A couple blows of an axe would have done the trick but clearly she wanted a gentler approach. I fetched a small crowbar and, working with the patience of a philatelist, shimmed the door loose, which, after a half hour of ignoring my advances, sighed free from its frame and fell into my arms like an anorexic cheerleader. If there’s any magic at all in this story, it was in that shed. Green-tinted light poured in through one tiny window, giving the room the look of an underwater cave. The first thing I saw was the crowbar I held in my hands (its twin, of course, and nothing magical about it, since this one had been in the house when we moved in). But the second crowbar was pristine, as was everything else in the shed. Not a film of dust or rust marred the trowels and edgers and shears and aerators and augers that hung from nails in the walls. No spider webs or wasps’ nests, no mouse or rat holes, and the earthen pots of mustard and cucumber and tomato and celery and pumpkin seeds—yes, and dill and strawberry too—had been nibbled by not even an ant and remained untainted by the faintest speckle of mold or mildew. My mother and I stared into this aqueous, ageless chamber for perhaps seven or eight seconds, and then, with a sigh and a twist, like a little girl in a pinafore spinning down to the floor, the shed spiraled in on itself and collapsed to the ground, as if only its vacuum seal had held it up all these years. The rose bower held its shape though, and for the rest of that summer, and the summer after—the last of her life—my mother picnicked in its hollowed womb at least once a week. Indeed, it’s standing still, even as the mountains cave in on themselves on the other side of the creekbed.

  And a dozen other memories, little spots of color in an otherwise muddy swill of sex. But the most persistent of them all is less memory than feeling, a longing, one that’s never left me, even to this day. If it seems strange that it took me nearly a year to talk to someone at the rest stop, it’ll probably seem even stranger that, piebald hide or no, I never tried to hook up with one of my fellow novices. Don’t get me wrong. I thought about it. A lot. Like every all-male institution from gay bar to monastery, the Academy was steeped in regimented, eroticized cruelty. My classmates recited Catullus 16 not as insult or manifesto but come-on, and I was pretty sure they were sucking each other off in the locker room and fucking each other in the Foundry and linking up in three- and six- and ten-person daisy chains on their hikes through the conservancy. I’m not saying they were all gay, or even more gay than the general population. I’m just saying they were 384 parentless boys who ate, studied, played, and slept together 24/7 for twelve years. They were going to fuck.

  But though I floated in a river of boys, I couldn’t get wet to save my life. Their hazing never escalated beyond anonymous notes or catcalls, the foot stuck out as I walked down the hall, the shoulder that “accidentally” smashed into mine, the soccer balls—and basketballs, footballs, baseballs—lobbed at me (“Oh shit, C., sorry ’bout that!”) when my back just happened to be turned. (“C.” was short for “Caesar,” by the way, a reference to the color purple, and also, by the same logic, “Celie” [give it a moment, or google it]). But it was never said to my face. I was reviled for my birthmark, but only when the bulk of it was covered. When it was fully exposed all eyes turned away. In the locker room a dozen asses presented themselves for inspection, but they were closed to me, to my penis and tongue, to my fingers and anything I might wield with them, but above all to my imagination. God knows I tried. But though I reinvented myself in a thousand different guises in my fantasies, I couldn’t do the same with my classmates. Even in reverie their bodies repelled me like the walls of Jericho or Troy or Constantinople, and I was never able to summon shofar or wooden horse or cannon to breach them.

  And I write “bodies” but of course I mean “skin.” Black skin. Brown skin. Skin whose gradations from one boy to the next attested to the nation’s fraught racial history, yet was never other than smoothly blended in each iteration, unmottled, unblemished (except, of course, in my own). “Their skin repelled me” reads rather differently than the sentence I put down, but I’ll own it. As a Stammers, I’d be disingenuous if I did anything else. (“Disingenuous,” from the Latin “ingenuus,” meaning “native” or “freeborn”: by the time English speakers added the prefix “dis” in the 17th century, “ingenuous” had come to mean “innocent” or “lacking guile,” and as such “disingenuous” never literally meant “slave,” but the connotation seems apposite.) Although it was commonly assumed that the Academy’s students were descended from Great Grandpa Marcus’s slaves, or at least his employees, by the middle of the twentieth century virtually all the novices were recruited from orphanages across the country. Fewer than a dozen members of the student body were townies, allowed in on sufferance because of a clause in the Academy’s charter that guaranteed admission to any descendant of the slaves and freedmen who’d toiled in Stammers Coal. But all of them, legacies and orphans alike, were aware of the provenance of the Academy’s coffers, not to mention its philosophy, and to survive this affront to their psyches they united behind a collective identity that recast themselves not as victims of a tradition but usurpers of it, an army of Toussaint Louvertures liberating Haiti from colonial Saint-Domingue. (Indeed, in the masters’ absence the novices called each other “maroon” the same way their hipper contemporaries used “nigga”; the term originated with 16th- and 17th-century slaves on the northeast coast of South America, who fled bondage to create independent communities beyond the colonial frontier, many of which endured for as long as the Academy did.) As the last descendant of the original master, I was allowed to remain on sufferance, but only so long as my presence, my identity as a Stammers, remained as oblique as my skin (which is why the maroon nickname they bestowed on me was Sinestro—dog Latin for Lefty—rather than the more obvious, well, Maroon). I could be a Stammers, in other words, I just couldn’t act like one. This wasn’t a condition I could protest, or, for that matter, one I found particularly unjust. Absurd maybe, but everything about the Academy was tinged with absurdity and contradiction: the 2,400 acres of garden and forest that novices spent thousands of hours maintaining over the course of twelve years; the incantatory feats of memorization required to pass between forms; the essays and drawings and models produced to ritualistic specification and destroyed with even more ceremonial fervor; but above all the second half of that mission statement—“to Brighten the Lot of the Darker Races”—in which context the commandment to “make nothing” carried more than a hint of eugenic contempt. All things considered, I wouldn’t have blamed my fellow novices if they’d lynched me. I just wished they’d fuck me first.

  But if desire’s a carrot, it can also be the stick. A hundred times over the next several months I found myself lingering in Stammers Hall, before classes, between classes, after they let out. The entrance to the basement was tucked behind the main staircase. All I had to do was feint toward the back door and hang a uey. No one would notice, and if they did they wouldn’t think anything. It was a library, after all. In a school. People need books in schools. E
specially students. But once the story made the rounds that Judas Stammers was trolling for dick the jig would be up. My pariah status would go from de facto to de jure, and neither hoodie nor robe would be enough to hide the marks of my caste.

  But, you know. I also really wanted to have sex with one of my classmates . . .

  Family legend had it that at some point Marcus planned to divert the White Woman to the top of Mt. Inverna so he could fill the basement of Stammers Hall like a Roman baths, an engineering feat that would have involved raising the stream a thousand feet above the water table, and heating it too. That seems excessive, even for him. (I did once see a diagram of a series of capstans and norias and Archimedes screws, but it looked more like a steampunk fantasy, Da Vinci by way of Rube Goldberg, than an actual hydraulic model.) Another story said that in keeping with his agrarian roots he wanted to sleep under the same roof as his animals, but that tale ignores both the massive stables erected at the same time as the house, as well as the fact that the only access to the basement lies beneath the mansion’s main staircase. Though I have no problem envisioning Marcus parading mules and cattle and hogs over the brilliant mosaics that pave his entrance hall, not even he could have gotten them to walk down a flight of thirty steps. The basement was to have been the family crypt, the family dungeon, the family museum . . . all equally improbable, but equally likely as well, given the person; given his house.

  In any event, the ceiling in the basement of Stammers Hall is twenty feet high, a good five feet taller than that of the piano nobile (which Marcus quaintly called the “parlor floor” till the end of his life). Stone pillars thicker than redwoods run the length of the space, dividing it into three parallel naves, groin-vaulted, ecclesiastic. Clerestory windows paned with forest glass line the ceilings, through which crepuscular rays beam with unabashed stereotypicality. The vaults immediately surrounding the central staircase contained the card catalog and a pair of library tables each as long as a bowling alley, but the flanks had been closed off piecemeal during the ’20s and ’30s to house the stacks. At some point the novices started calling them the crypts, and it was easy to see why. Sagging shelves wedged between the pillars had made a catacomb of the vast space, and the spindly scaffolding that provided access to the higher shelves only reinforced the warrenlike feeling. The scaffolding was floored with rough-sawn fir. I knew it was fir because they were the same planks my mother had used to make her work table—knew it, I should say, the moment I walked downstairs, though I’d never remarked it before. Nor had it consciously occurred to me during previous visits that the shelves and scaffolding postdated Marcus’s tenure, though it seemed obvious now. If Marcus had built them, the shelves would have been carved with reliefs of the Muses and Furies and fronted with beveled glass. The balconies would have been floored with limewood or walnut and probably carpeted too, the staircases wrought-iron corkscrews rather than rickety ladders as wobbly as the one in the back porch of the High Street apartment. They still would’ve been called crypts though. He’d’ve liked that.