He twisted flat on his back, looking up at the waving leaves, translucent with sunshine, and watching the birds flitting from branch to branch, chattering and fighting and picking. He could hear faintly in the distance an occasional bobwhite calling out its two notes. A squirrel ran into his view now and then as it scurried from tree trunk to branch. All his muscles and sinews were relaxed. There was no tension. He was sharing through body and mind in some unperturbed softness and wholeness, but not an immobile or silent wholeness. All and everything was moving, doing, becoming. And, as he now remembers it, instinctively he listened to the wind in the trees as a voice, as voices, as a message of this great, whole softness. The rising and falling ring of the tractor became a background music. He felt unaccountable tears in his eyes and an ache that gave him peculiar pleasure somewhere deep in him.
Years later and in much more critical circumstances, he would admit to himself that those sounds and sensations, particularly the wind, had been the vehicle of some news, some information. It seemed, in retrospect, as if he had been told something and later remembered the secret meaning of the message, but could not recall the words used or the tone and identity of the messenger.
The tractor finally drew up beside him, his uncle climbed down, and they both walked slowly back to the house.
Richard had two more days on the farm before returning home to Detroit. He spent them wandering in the vegetable garden, lying in the woods, or sitting on the edge of the pond. He was trying to recapture that magic moment of the previous evening. But he found only silence. He was, as he put it later, encased again in the hard shell of his body.
His uncle and aunt took his behavior as a sign of unhappiness because he would be leaving soon for Detroit. And when he cried as they turned out of the driveway onto the main road which led them to St. Joseph and his train, they took his sadness as a compliment to them: their nephew wanted to stay. The vacation had been a success. “I will come back. I will come back,” Richard remembers saying to nobody in particular. “Please, let me come back.”
On his return home, his suntan, the acquired strength of his arms, his healthy complexion, his new and detailed knowledge of farm and country delighted his family. His father was proud: “Now, Richard, you’re becoming a real man!”
But it was his mother and sisters who caught Richard’s attention. When they talked or laughed or moved, he had feelings indefinably similar to those moments on the edge of the wood. Sisters and mother seemed to carry some detailed mystery, some wholeness, to be supple and malleable. His father and brothers—quick in their movements, deliberate in gestures, assured in their walk, purposeful in whatever they did—seemed to Richard to be wrapped in hard shells. They repelled him. And, at the same time, he felt ashamed at being repelled by what should be his ideal. The voices of his father and brothers had no overtones for him, no wisps of meaning, no subtle resonances.
Although he could not analyze all this at that time, he felt it. Of course, he could not mention it or discuss it with anyone there. All he could do, he did. As if speaking to the wind and the trees and the colors and the birds of the farm, he thought (perhaps felt is the better expression): “I don’t want to leave you. I want to be as you.” At that age and for quite some time afterward, he did not know exactly who that “you” was.
Daily life at home and at school closed in around him. In athletics he was as good as the next boy. He always got good grades. After his twelfth year, he became an avid reader. At home and in school he was known as a normal boy, more studious than outdoor, not overly gentle, not exceptionally shy, not in any way a “sissy” or a weakling, one who easily joined in groups and teams, and exceptionally affectionate and warm as an individual.
Nothing ever obliterated his memory of the farm incident, but he never returned to St. Joseph. Subsequent vacations were spent with his father and brothers in Canada. And it was only toward the end of his seventeenth year that another incident occurred which again effected a profound change in Richard.
He had joined a group of his own classmates who, under the supervision of an ex-forest ranger named Captain Nicholas, were to spend three weeks camping out in Colorado. The purpose of the vacation was to learn some of the arts of survival in the wilderness. Their schedule was a full and very active one. When it was over, they would know something about mountain climbing, swimming, life saving, gathering food, making fires, cooking, trapping, scaling trees, first aid, and seemingly anything else that Captain Nicholas could manage to teach them in those few weeks. When the vacation was finished, the eight had been invited to spend a last evening in the ranch house belonging to Captain Nicholas and his family.
As part of survival training, each boy was to spend one night alone at some distance from the base camp. When Richard’s turn for a night “out there alone” came around, he was instructed to spend it in a small clearing on a hillside overlooking a lake about a mile from the camp. He was given a whistle and told to signal in case he needed help. According to camp rules, the other boys and the forest ranger left him at nightfall.
As their footsteps and shouts died away, Richard turned around to gather some brushwood for his fire. He was facing the lake about 150 feet above its surface. It was ringed around with mountains covered with forests. The moon had already appeared full-faced over the rim of the mountainside and cast a sheen of light on the water below and on the silhouettes of the trees around him. The smell of resin was an abiding atmosphere in which he felt as a welcomed stranger. He was aware of very little sound except for the wind shaking the pine trees and skimming the water’s surface with light ripples. The air was still warm, with a little chill just creeping into it.
He stood for a moment to take his bearings so he would not get lost as he gathered his firewood. But the hush all around him seemed in a sudden instant to have opened. An invisible veil fell aside, and he was no longer a separate and distinct being from it all.
His first reaction was fear and he groped for his whistle. The rule was: any sense of fear or apprehension must be signaled to the base camp by one long and one short whistle. No stigma was attached to this. It was part of the training program to recognize and respect such feelings.
That first reaction, however, was almost immediately lost in a deeper sensation. Richard will swear today it was the same as if the night with its light, its weaving voice in the pine trees, its smells, and its seeming stillness was remonstrating with him and saying: “I am only secret. Not threat. I don’t hurt. I reveal. Do not repel me.”
He dropped the whistle from his mouth and sat down on the slope, overwhelmed with one idea that kept drumming quietly at him in words that sounded like his own: “I have yielded. I am going against my training. But I want…I have yielded…against my training…” About this time he felt surrounded by shapes and presences which had lain hidden or dormant up to this point. He was sure they were there, although he could not see them. Fear was gone. Only perplexity remained. The wind in the pines and the light on the water were part and parcel of those presences. But there was something else he could not recognize, could only accept or struggle to reject. Something spoke in the wind and shone in the light. All together, these mysterious things wove a web around his perplexity, washing it in a strange grace and, at the same time, softening some part inside him, some part of him that was supposed to be hard and insoluble, but that now was becoming soft, supple, diffuse, flowing into some mystery. He remembers murmuring again and again: “I have yielded…I want to…against my training…”
Then, even in the darkness, he began to notice details: the variant colors of rocks around him, different kinds of ruffles on the water, various shades to the trees, successive notes in the wind. And, in flashes of memory, was back in the past: on the edge of the woods in St. Joseph, listening to his sisters and his mother chatter and talk, watching his father dancing with his mother at a family celebration the previous winter, holding the hand of a high-school girlfriend as they walked home from the cinema.
And, as that deep core of him melted, he heard his father’s voice in a frequent phrase used to his sons, “Chin up, young man!” dying away into repulsive jumble, “We men must be strong. Chin up chin up young man chin man strong chin up man…”
He felt his body shudder as if shaking off scales or armor. It did not go limp or cling to the ground. Rather, it was now a supple continuation of ground, light, the voice of the wind, the silver of the moon, the silence. His body seemed to hold the possibility of all natural things at once. He knew it was incredible. There was one last, clutching moment when something in him warned with a sharp voice.
But, after an instant’s inner pause, he appeared to himself to let go, willingly to accept, and to do so in almost poetic language: “I don’t know you. I want what you are. I want to be in that mystery. I don’t want a man’s hardness and strength. I want your wholeness.” He actually spoke the words. They tumbled out half-whispered, incredulous—for his brain kept telling him he was alone at night on the mountainside. But something more powerful, not in his brain, kept enticing him. He responded: “I want to be a woman…yes…man woman.” He did not know the sense of what he was saying, but he kept saying it. And everything that night responded to him in turn—infallibly, it seemed to him—and said: “You will be. You can be. You will be. Secret. Strong. Mystery. Open. You will be. You can be. Woman. Man. Soft. Hard. All. You will be. You can be.”
He lost track of time. He lit no fire. He did not budge from where he sat. The moon rose and set. The wind waxed and waned. There were occasional cries from night owls, and once or twice the scream of a bird surprised by some night killer. Richard’s memory recorded all this indirectly. Filling those hours was something else: the voice or the sensation of a voice which soared and sank in a melody of notes.
Richard now underlines two things in his memory of that song. It had no particular rhythm, no detectable beat. It seemed to be fully and completely, but only, melody. More significantly, it told him nothing new or shocking or awesomely strange—he seemed to himself to have had all its notes already recorded in him; but now they were evoked as echoes to the melody. And, as they resonated, they delineated a quality or condition in which he always was but had never realized, much less ever expressed it in his taste, walk, glance, in the corners of his words where meaning’s shadow hid, or even in his perception of the world around him.
But no longer now was knowledge a thrust outward to grasp an objective, to obtain an exact pinpointing with the lens of logic—“fixing the cross-hairs on it,” as his shooting-enthusiast father used to put it. In that melodized condition, all objectives were received within a delicate maze of sensibilities, emotions, reactions, intuitions. And, over all, a sense of sacrament, of pact with what made water and earth and air simultaneously strong and tender, soft and unyielding, masculine and feminine. For this sense of the possibilities of all natural things at once, in one condition, was an inner persuasion now. And he felt a light-footed, almost unstable touching on all things, with strength that was gentle, with firmness but no pride, with definitive choice but no violence.
On and on that melody went throughout the night, until at sunrise his classmates and Captain Nicholas found him sitting on the slope, fresh-faced, smiling, a little dreamy, but fully awake.
Only Captain Nicholas noticed the change in Richard: the peculiar haze at the back of his eyes and the way he turned his head to greet them as they approached him. After the first bantering, as they were all clambering down the slope toward the camp for breakfast, the captain drew abreast of Richard and said: “You okay, kid?” When Richard turned his head to the ranger, the haze Captain Nicholas had caught in his eyes before was gone, just as if Richard had pulled veils down closing off his inner state. His answer was normal: “I had a ball. Did I do okay?”
A week later the vacation was over. The entire party left the mountains in the late afternoon, climbed down the slopes, and walked to the forest ranger’s wayside post where they had left their station wagon. After an hour’s ride, they arrived at the ranch house, where Captain Nicholas’ wife and daughter, Moira, greeted them. They were all tired; and after dinner all went to bed.
Richard, however, did not sleep very much. From the moment he met Moira, he had a renewal of his recent experience on the mountainside.
Fresh from that experience and still full of the pact he had made with the air and the water and the earth—the ecstasy of it all was quite vividly present to him for weeks after—Moira seemed to Richard to be a walking, breathing embodiment of a secret figure he carried in his memory. She seemed an answer to his prayer uttered on the mountainside, and the model he had felt promised him in the shadow of that slope. He saw the unconscious gravity of her head, the light strength of her figure as the light strength of that figure he had felt beside him on the mountainside that memorable night; the gentle swaying of her walk as an expression of its freedom. And all the details of her appearance and person were a revelation of what he desired to have most: the husky tones of her voice together with the natural grace of her hand movements, the sense of privileged look her eyes carried, at least for him, and the soft bed of feeling that he knew cushioned her laughter and made it utterly different from the loud laughter of his companions.
Some of the other boys had noticed his fascinated look on the evening of their arrival at the ranch, and he became the immediate butt of their banter. “Richard wants to make her! Richard has the hots! Richard wants to lay her!” He took it all in good part, even when one of them seriously offered to “fix him up” with Moira.
Moira herself recalls being quite aware of the joke during that evening. At first, she had the usual reactions, half-amused, half-embarrassed. And she probably would never have been of any help to Richard if she had not taken the initiative. It was in the morning before their departure. Richard came down early to find Moira preparing for breakfast.
From the beginning Moira quickly sensed that this was not just another young man flirting with her. Nor did he act shyly. Beyond a cheerful “Hi, good-mornin’,” he said little in the beginning, but started automatically to help her in the breakfast preparations. But she had a strange conviction that she and he had an unconscious agreement or bond. The feeling was disturbing at first; then it became a surprising pleasure.
As they worked she asked if he had any sisters.
“Three.” His expression was blank, neither pleasured nor disdainful.
They busied themselves setting the table. He glanced at her once or twice. Then: “The trip was fantastic. Ever been out there?” She shook her head, waiting for the usual litany of events, feats of male endurance and strength. But Richard continued: “I found what I want to be out there.”
She asked if he wanted to be a forest ranger. “No! No!” Richard answered. He had found out, he explained, what sort of person he wanted to be. He looked up at her, his eyes shining. Moira braced herself for some protestation of eternal love and irresistible attraction. But Richard, eyes still shining, said only: “On the level, Moira, I want to be like you.”
Moira’s first impulse was to burst out laughing, make a wisecrack, and carry on. But something stirred within her cautioning her. She turned away quickly to the stove, disturbed, a little frightened. He worked on, talking all the while.
He said he knew he sounded funny, but he meant what he was saying; it was hard to explain, but he wanted to tell her. She tried to interrupt, but his voice cut across hers hard, almost in reproach. She looked around at him. His eyes were filled with tears. He still had the shining look, but a strange expression of an apologetic grimace touched his mouth fleetingly. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout.”
“You weren’t shouting. I just opened my big mouth.” She followed his glance out the wide floor-to-ceiling windows of the kitchen. The mountains covered with forests crouched out there, their distance foreshortened in the morning haze; they looked as if the boy and girl in the kitchen could touch them with outstretched hands.
&nbs
p; “Whatever it was, Richard, it was very beautiful,” she said to break the tension of the silence. “I hope you get what you want. It must be very beautiful.”
“You know, then. You know.” He was excited and boyish, still looking out. “I will get it. For sure, now.”
Moira had no clear idea of what he was thinking. Since her early teenage she had been used to boys of various types for which she had her own names—the “brawns (athletes, outdoor types), the “softies” (nice but weak), the “teddy bears” (effeminate), the “profs” (studious, serious). They all talked about themselves and nearly always in terms of achievement in school, in business, in sport, or with other girls. She was sure now that Richard fitted into none of her categories. The caution about him she had felt earlier in the conversation had given away now to a sensation of fragility in him matching her own. She felt that he knew—even if he did not possess the instinct for—that detailed intimacy so characteristically feminine and the real bond between all women as compared to and distinct from men.
Richard talked on happily while they finished the breakfast preparations. He spoke of feelings and tastes, of touching trees, leaves, grass, flowers, of the smell in the air, of the wind, of the silence, and of his desire to be as “inside” himself as she was and as independent as his father was. It was a staccato speech, punctuated with pauses, over forks and spoons and glasses, running on pleasantly and softly. Just before the first pair of legs bounded down the stairs, he paused; and she, looking him straight in the eye, said: “Richard, shouldn’t you ask someone…?”
“No one of them will understand. You know that,” he answered immediately but not abruptly. “Don’t worry. I have plenty of advice. From the right ones. When they’re finished, I’ll know how to feel things, to be really boy and girl. All in one.”
Hostage to the Devil Page 27