—Long hairy feet on the floor, said Mariana, who wore a shirt of Hugo’s for a nightgown, square pink-toed feet on the floor, shapely girl’s feet on the floor, plop, slap, and gracefully silent. Who lost a Band-Aid in the bed? Your T-shirt fits Franklin like a potato sack on a weasel.
HOLLYHOCKS
Hugo’s run before breakfast was along a macadam road through pinewoods with an undergrowth of fern and laurel. He freed himself with every stride of the residue of dreams, of warm lethargies that had nested in his muscles, of anxieties that had made trash in his mind. He spoke to rabbits hopping across the road, to a cheeky fox doing a little dance in a clearing. The light was silver, early, cold. He had dreamed of his mother standing beside hollyhocks 222 coleus. Idiotically, he had said, They’re dead, aren’t they? She’d said, with her usual placid composure, Why no, dear, they’re not dead. And indeed nothing could have been more alive than these dream hollyhocks and coleus, so crisply beautiful in the accurate light of the dream. And his mother’s kindly ghost was like a blessing. She wore her apron, as for housework, and her voice was as sweet as springwater. White latticework of the back porch door behind her. A perfectly temperate summer day. Why no, dear, they’re not dead at all.
CABIN WITH SKYLIGHT
Stables once, Hugo’s room was designed and appointed by a drawing master who, having made it into a Danish Modern oblong of continuous space with a skylight, left to take a position elsewhere. Bed and worktable under the skylight, bookcases, chairs beyond, toward the kitchen area, which had a small barn window over the sink and cabinets. On the walls were a large photograph of Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer, a Mondriaan of the severest geometric period, a Paul Klee angel grinning about some sacred mischief, a photograph of Brancusi’s Torso d’un jeune homme, and three paintings by Hugo: Mariana naked, slouched reading in a chair, a still life of meadow flowers in a coffee mug, and a large painting that had once been of the Bicycle Rider, repainted with Tom Agernkop as model.
GARDEN
The colors in the dream where his mother stood placidly in her coverall, print cotton polka-dot gloves, and straw hat were those of photographs in The Country Garden and House and Family: early greens, soft browns, reticent blues in sharp silvery focus.
WATER
—This is Franklin the Rabbit Who Invented Electricity, Hugo said to Rutger, Kim, Asgar, Tom, and Anders in the showers.
—We’ve run six kilometres, Franklin said. Oof! These wolfcub mystery knots you did my laces in, Hugo, won’t come loose.
Hugo! Knowing eyes found laughing eyes.
—Let me, Rutger said kneeling.
Franklin, looking hard at Kim and Anders under a shower together, soaping each other, wiggled his fingers at his ears and ruckled like a dove.
—They like each other, Skipper, Hugo said.
WHEAT
—He wasn’t out to set himself up through signs and wonders, Hugo said to his Sunday School class. He was not concerned about who he was. That showed in everything he did. And from moment to moment he was the people he suffered with, whom he could comfort or cure or free. Most of these were people estranged from themselves by pain or deformity. People who are out of their minds are no good to anybody else, and Yeshua’s idea of us is that first of all we are someone who can help another.
EYES BLUE WITH FATE
—A nipper, Mariana sighed, locked herself in the laundry room and no amount of cajoling or instructions about the latch did anything but make her howl the louder, so I had to climb onto the roof and jimmy open a window the size of a handkerchief and plead with the little demon to listen while I showed her how to let herself out, and another nipper stuck modelling clay up his nose and turned blue, and another had hiccups for an hour, and another was passing around color Polaroids of her big brother doing it with his girl on the sunroom floor, and another barfed on the vocabulary cards. So I’ve had it and want love, sympathy, and sour cream pineapple pancakes for supper.
She was holding an ice cube to Franklin’s knee, which was skinned bloody. His silkflop thatch had leaftrash and twigs in it. A smutch of mud saddled his nose. The seat of his pants was piped with clay. They had all converged at the bus stop, Franklin from the soccer field, Mariana off the bus, and Hugo from class, going home.
While Mariana set up a field hospital to deal with Franklin, Hugo, out of his jeans, exiguous briefs taxed by a randy flex, said that he would provide love, Franklin sympathy, and Mariana sour cream pineapple pancakes.
—Iodine, Mariana ordered, and fill the sink with hot soapy water, skin Franklin of his pants and underpants and put the one in the other.
—The two in the other, Franklin said. Hugo is hanging out like the donkey in the zoo.
—Better still, Mariana said, strip the lout and stand him in the sink, soap him up, and pour potfuls of water over his head.
—Family life is wonderfully exciting, Hugo said lifting Franklin into the sink.
—You know Pascal? Franklin asked.
—I know Pascal, Hugo said. He is the apple of Holger Sigurjonsson’s eye, as everybody from the kitchen staff to the headmaster knows.
—He, Franklin said around the washcloth, lost one of his shoes. So I told him to throw the other away. What good is one shoe? They tease him real pitiful about hr. Sigurjonsson, so we beat up Otto with the weasel eyes. He was picking on Pascal. I heard him.
—I didn’t know, Hugo said, that you were friends with Pascal.
—I am now, Franklin said. After we beat up Otto.
—Well yes, Hugo said, let’s hear about that.
—I booted him in the butt, Franklin said, hard. He called Pascal a name, and Pascal just took it. I was behind them both, you see, and here was Otto’s butt for the kicking. That’s when he tried to pin me, and I did my knee there.
—I’m not listening, Mariana said, I’m not hearing a word of this.
—So, Franklin said, Pascal got in it then. He pushed Otto on his shoulder while hooking his ankle: laid him flat. Then we both jumped on him. Hr. Sigurjonsson’s showed Pascal how to defend himself.
YESHUA IN THE WHEAT
—Goose grass, Hugo said, found with knotweed in hard poor soil cinder paths. Old meadows are thick with it, an archaic wheat from which the horse-riding plunderers made bread and foddered their shaggy Shetlands. It came to Eleusis, Joseph Gaertner thought, by way of India. That’s why he named it Eleusine indica. Crabgrass and crowfoot are of the same family. The florets are ashlared thick along the spikes, see? And there’s no awn.
—Grass, Franklin said, is just grass.
—Here, said Mariana, is where we get Hugo’s handsome blond cross-eyed stare. Meaning I hear it but I don’t believe it. The pathfinders never get it, only us, and the occasional Grundtvigger.
Franklin calm and unheeding. What Mariana says is what Mariana says. Nothing to do with him until she starts shouting.
—Emmer of the prophets embedded in the clay of Ugaritic pots under the botanist’s microscope is like implicit information in a text. It came along, like Franklin underfoot, of itself.
—Now I’m grass, Franklin said.
ACORN IN ITS CUP
To get to the bus stop where Mariana with shining eyes and bright smile arrived at afternoon’s end, Hugo damp from his second gym class, his book bag charged with Latin and Greek exercises to correct, had but to cross the soccer field and amble along two blocks of guardedly prosperous houses with colorful gardens behind low front walls. If he let the class go ten minutes early and skipped a shower, he had time to walk to the bus stop by way of the meadow beyond the wood where he could sit under a favorite oak, elbows on knees, and have a rich moment of calm and anticipation. The river shone at the other side of the meadow, if the light was right. Here passages of the thesis on Yeshua took form and texture, the day disclosed patterns, abrasions healed, letters were opened and read.
Papa’s hollyhocks. Papa’s reading, the lectures and concerts he had been to. A note on a Hebrew word.
Aakjaer Minor had b
egun a cataleptic syndrome that was as yet more comic than serious. He hugged people and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let go. In the locker room he’d seen Golo Hansen embarrassed and helpless in Alexander Aakjaer’s grasp. I don’t want to hurt him, Golo had wailed to Hugo. He grabs people like this, his eyes go blank, and he won’t turn loose. Hugo had said, quit trying to pull him loose. Just stand cool. He got me the other day, Asgar said, and two people couldn’t pry him off. It’s mental. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about when it’s over. Hugo had studied the unfocussed eyes, the sweaty back of the neck, cold wrists, locked knees and elbows. Gently he’d guided Golo out of Alexander’s gripping arms, hoisted the suddenly slack Alexander onto his shoulders and carried him to the infirmary where he said to Nurse that Aakjaer Minor had had a dizzy spell in gym and only needed to lie still for a while. Nurse nevertheless stuck a thermometer in Alexander’s mouth and took his pulse, seeing nothing interesting in either.
JONAS
The pompion or million creeps upon the ground if nothing be by it whereon it may take hold and climb with very great ribbed rough and prickly branches whereon are set large rough leaves cut in on the edges with deep gashes and dented besides, with many claspers also, which wind about everything they meet. The flowers are great and large, hollow and yellow, divided at the brim into five parts, at the bottom of which grows the fruit sometimes of the bigness of a man’s body and oftentimes less, in some ribbed or bunched, in others plain and either long or round, green or yellow. The seed is great flat and white, lying in the middle of the watery pulp. The root is of the bigness of a man’s thumb, dispersed underground with many small fibers. They are boiled in fair water and salt, or in powdered beef broth, sometimes in milk, and so eaten, or else buttered. The seed, as well as of cowcumbers and melons, are cooling, and serve for emulsions in the like manner as almond milks, for those troubled with the stone.
BLUE PUP TENT
In the ferns beyond birches, Hugo slowed, running in place, and hollered ho!
—Whoever you are, he sang in stentorian buffo, I come in peace.
Silence. Brilliant early morning light.
—Ho! from the pup tent.
—I’ll go away, Hugo said, if you want me to. This is school property. Grundtviggers are you? Tvemunding here, having a run before breakfast.
A head, bare shoulders, an ironic sleepy grin. Anders. Out of the tent on knuckles and toes, mother naked.
—Morning, he said.
Through the birches, behind Anders, Quark on a silver wolf loping.
—Kim and I, Anders said.
Kim looked out, blond hair over eyes. He crawled out monkey-nimble. A hug from Anders.
RIVER
The divestment of Franklin in the meadow by the river. Mariana flourished an imaginary trumpet.
—The grasses, Hugo said, go from Tolland Man’s gruel of flaxseed and goosegrass to Roman porridge, which was linseed roasted with barley and coriander, pounded in a mortar, salted, boiled, and served in a bowl to Horace dining with Virgil. Columella fancied it, and Pliny mentions the toothsomeness of rustic Tuscan porridge on a winter morning. Meadow with goats to gaze at as he ate.
—Like us, Mariana said, bleating and folding Franklin’s togs.
—There were Iron Age grape pips at Donja Dolina.
—Bet they ate frogs too, Mariana said, and green lizards.
—People upstream in a boat, Franklin said. Voices carry over water. It’s Master Sigurjonsson and Pascal without a stitch.
—Ho, said Mariana.
—Pascal I mean, Franklin said, climbing Hugo to stand on his shoulders. Hr. Ess has on a cap, wristwatch, and little triangle underpants like Hugo’s.
—Swim out, Hugo said, and climb aboard.
OLD MIRRORS FLECKED AND TARNISHED
On a long walk that took him near the Nordkalsten seawall and warehouses, Hugo had seen the Bicycle Rider hefting his bike up the stone steps, swinging onto it in the road. Their eyes met, with no recognition in the Rider’s, though he was already a day student at NFS Grundtvig but not yet someone Hugo had tried to be friendly toward. His jeans were unzipped, the pod of his dingy briefs pouching through. His eyes had been dead, as when Hugo had last seen them in the police morgue.
ASTERS AND ZINNIAS
Papa in a folding hammock chair by his hollyhocks, straw boater over his eyes.
—Hugo’s theology, he said, is of course his need to undo me. Not by cracking my head on a dusty road in Greece, but as an intelligent child takes its toys apart to see what makes them go. Ridiculous, but there you are.
—Papa, Hugo said, I know what makes you go. And the machinery is too fine for my fingers. I hope I’m something like.
—Peas in a pod, Mariana said, if you know what to look for. You have the same sense of house, of space, of time. You eat alike. I didn’t know how to take a walk until Hugo annexed me. Or how a room can be the whole world.
—It’s awful, Franklin said, but it’s fun.
—Tell me, Pastor Tvemunding said from under his hat, holding out an arm to invite Franklin over.
Franklin came, got hugged, and climbed astride.
—Papa, Hugo said, keeps his hat over his eyes so as not to look at Franklin snake naked.
—How modern I’m willing to be, Pastor Tvemunding said, is, I see, still a matter for doubt.
—Notice everything, Franklin said. Know where everything comes from, a hundred years back.
ANEMONE
—Matter, the physicists seem to be saying, was not stuff before creation: critical tensions in nothingness, the universal emptiness, became so energetic that they blew up.
—Critical tensions? Papa asked.
—Force, Hugo said. The only thing the physicists can reach back to is a great force present in all matter and space.
—Well then, Papa said, scattering leaves with his stick, there’s God. As they see Him.
—If, Hugo said, man in God’s image was Adam, God in man’s image was Yeshua. If matter was not stuff before creation, then God can be a pattern of energy rather than an oxygen breather and processor of carbohydrates. That we are in His image then means that He is and we are animations of the same energy system. Except, perhaps, His anima occupies the whole sea of neutrinos that’s boundless but limited, and we each occupy bodies only, energy systems that are limited but boundless, exchanging love and conversation, procreating both bodies and minds. God’s procreation is continuous, ours occasional. Yeshua is an occasional aspect of a continuity.
BREAKFAST
Franklin. Hair carrot and brass. Irides seagreen, pupils hyacinth. Pathfinder brogans, collapsed socks. Lots of practical irony and cautious reticence, the hippety-hop who invented electricity. Love me some geography, he says to the mush bowl, because a map is a jigsaw puzzle. What I like is where the driblet islands make a trail at the south poke of things, left behind, all on a drift to the west. And to the north, crumbly islands. Love islands. Show him the inland island in France, bounded by four rivers. Plains islands bounded by mountains. A country, then, he opines, is a lot of people pretending they’re an island, because they all speak the same language. Well, sometimes. Or because they have a common interest, like the Swiss. There is no place without time, no time without place. So, says Franklin, knuckling his nose, you can’t say where without saying when. The Mediterranean when it had seals in it. Holland before tulips. Everything wanders, he says. Land, people, animals, trees.
OUT FROM JOPPA
Two ways, Hugo said, and Papa cocked his head to listen. Like John, as in eleven Matthaeus, neither eating nor drinking, and the opinion of the public is that you are owned and operated by a devil, or like Yeshua, eating and drinking, and the people say here’s a glutton and a drunkard, the friend of tax collectors and sinners. And, Papa said, that’s yet another logion where the sign of Jonas is the pivot. The vine is to be judged by its gourd.
DOVE
By wholeness of being.
FIG
Neutrin
o here, Hugo said, our Franklin, is as yet all luck. Whenever the angel rings the silver run in a sound of trumpets, he thrusts his sickle in, the wheat topples in a golden rush, the chaff dances in the air, and the harvest song is the only one his red tongue knows morning noon and night. Whereas those of us who shave and pay taxes always seem to get in line at the post office behind an Oriental trying to mail a live chicken to Sri Lanka. Look at McTaggart the English master. He loses his car habitually in the parking lot. That his disciples in Transcendental Meditation and Buddhist raising of the consciousness are all feebleminded hankerers who will clot around any mountebank he does not notice. He walks across flower beds puffing the beauties of nature to one of his morons. He was the only one of the faculty the Bicycle Rider esteemed and thought a bright teacher. To blow like a dead leaf in the wind, irresponsible, irresponsive. Which beautiful teaching, Mariana said, laid the Bicycle Rider out on the slab at the police morgue.
MONKEYS AND PARROTS
If, Mariana read to Franklin lying on the carpet and rolling a soccer ball inchmeal from crotch to chin, the forest were darker it did not seem to be more silent. They could hear a kind of buzzing in the treetops, a vague noise coming from the branches. Looking upwards, the three men could see indistinctly something like a great platform stretched out some forty meters above the ground. There must be at that height a tremendous entanglement of branches without any cranny through which the daylight could pierce. A thatched roof would not have been more lightproof. This explained the darkness that prevailed beneath the trees. Where they had camped that night the nature of the ground had changed greatly. No more intermingled branches or brambles, no more of those thorns that had kept them from leaving the footpath. A scanty grass, like a prairie that neither rain nor spring ever watered. The trees, at intervals from seven to ten meters, resembled pillars supporting some colossal edifice, and their branches must cover an area of several thousand hectares. There were masses of African sycamores whose trunks were formed of a number of stems firmly united toward the ground, bob bobs.
—Baobabs, Hugo said from his desk, a majestic great graygreen tree that huddles its trunks like celery.
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