A Table of Green Fields

by Guy Davenport

  In times of temptation you must think of the angels. Their wide ears are always before your mouth. They move beside you tread for tread. No man is ever utterly alone. They are in trees. They love a thicket and a still place. Yet Grandmama says they have houses of their own for all their sitting in nooks of ours and cities of their own.

  She has seen her grandfather the sea captain against the ceiling of the library as if he were floating upward and could get no farther. She says I must look for the angels in my rambles. She says that with my innocent eyes I should be able to see the most distinguished spirits. Gold or silver they will seem to my eyes. I am to remember that in seeing one angel I am seeing all of heaven.

  The angels are clothed in a vesture of light. The best are dressed in clinging fire. All is by degree with Swedenborg and the angels inmost to God are naked and are the beautifullest of all. I think I have seen what Grandmama and old Emmanuel mean by angel. You go by signs. The sign of an angel is influx. One of her words. One of his words. There is an influx of angel body into a hedge of wild roses when the light is level at morning and when it is downward at noon and level again toward evening. There are tall angels in the larches. Round angels in sunflowers.

  Stirk everybody said he was. I could not tell luck from pitfall. I followed him down the thistle path to the willows by the river. He went to a sand bank where the bears fish in winter. He pushed his breeches down. I played at chucking rocks and poking around the place as if it were new to me. I gave several interested glances and said I had to be going. He looked hurt and had just been thrashed. That we were not friends did not help my feelings as I walked away. If he was a halfwit I was a liar. Two kinds of shame tussled in me. But I kept climbing the path. Stubbornness is always a kind of treason.

  I could not look into the microscope without thinking of him. He was in the stereopticon. He haunted me under the covers. Everywhere. Let the air be as thick with angels as snow I would still be jealous of his doings. Better a halfwit than a prig. I caught glimpses of him along the river or on the knolls. He was always alone.

  I made myself a promise. I would not walk away the next time. The promise itself was a pleasure.

  The pounce came one afternoon when I saw Tarpy squatting in the river sand drawing with a stick. All I saw from above was the mess of hair. Strudel as it was you could see the verticillus commanding the whorl. I chucked a rock over his head to splash just beyond him. He looked miserable and lonely. He jumped at the splash and I hollered cheerfully to reassure him. His eyes were suspicious. I looked at his drawing. An eddy of lines like water or hair.

  He asked me right off if I wanted to see a fox's den. I squatted beside him to add closeness to my bravery. Did he feel like playing with his peter? I whispered. He grinned.

  I led this time and in a roundabout way that was meant to be casual brought us to our barn from the back where a ladder goes up to the loft. We looked at the tracks of a hare on the way. He said it was a buck in its first year. He showed me deer droppings. An owl's nest.

  The loft was dim and cozy. I was sorry to be so clean when he was shoddy and dirty. I shamelessly took my breeches off and made myself comfortable on a heap of feed sacks. My forehead and the back of my neck tingled because I'd not done it with anybody watching. Only in bed or in the copse or back of the stables. Or secretly in my breeches. Tarpy used a slower pull and tigged his chin with his tongue.

  I'd seen Pelser the blacksmith's boy jiggling away at his lizard's tail of a peter and Nock the stablehand swanking his stang from pucker to stark but the one was being silly and the other larking on a dare. Here was Tarpy with his big peter in his neaf all rumpled with knobs and veins and the mull of its nozzle fat as a table plum with a slanting warp from the thirl of the tuck to the belling out of the rim. It made my mouth dry to watch him thwack it full stretch.

  He had less hair than I above his peter. His was ginger. Mine was springy and black. He asked if mine felt good. He slid his foot out and waggled it against mine. We were friends. He said we could make it last or come quick and then come again. I was near enough to my sneeze to say quick. My milky drop jumped out. Tarpy took longer to reach his sneeze and a hot blush spread up my back and slid down again as a chill when I saw the amount of spunk that he spurted. A blob spattered two feet away. Another fell just short of the first. A third ran into his fingers.

  We did it again later in the afternoon on the sand bank where the bears fish in winter. He let me feel his peter. He asked me if I could get him a piece of pie. I told him to meet me just before sunset between the knoll and the river. I brought him the drumstick of a hen and a fair slab of gooseberry pie. I had never seen anyone eat so. He cleaned the bone with his teeth and broke it and sucked out the marrow.

  He could not read. I told him Robinson Crusoe. He said he knew the ABCs but had the order all crazy when he tried to say them. He made some of the letters backward in the sand where we wrote them out.

  We met every day. I would see Tarpy in the sunflowers from my window and put down my Fenimore Cooper or Baron von Humboldt and go out with my beetle bottle and kit. Matilda would cry that I needed a straw hat against sun stroke. I would head for the woods on the bluff over the sea. Tarpy would bob up to my left when we were out of sight of the house. In a glacial scoop ringed with a haw of bushes under a boulder we shed our breeches and fell to. I liked to loll awhile before the delicious business and pry into Tarpy's abandon with curiosity and envy. He would have come several times since we'd jacked off the day before.

  He lay back in the grass with one hand under his head and the other on his peter like a big stemmed pink mushroom. It is as I've measured fourteen centimetres long. And there is a mushroom like Tarpy's peter. Phallus impudicus. Mine is twelve but growing. The more you play with it the bigger it gets. Three times and we would go on a ramble for beetles. One more time standing in the wheatfield dangerously near the house before I was expected to be in.

  Morning and afternoon we zinged our spunk in the woods along the river and above the sea. I got bolder and sneaked out after dark to meet Tarpy in the barn loft. Sometimes he did me and I him.

  We met Old Sollander on the road. He started right in. No good would come of our playing together. He tapped his open hand with his stick. What if he told the squire what we did? Tarpy pulled my shirt so that I would be with him when he ran. I said that I could be friends with who I wanted.

  He showed me a long flat rock way back in a part of the woods where I had never been. It had pictures chiselled into it. He showed me how to see the reindeer. We cleared some moss and lichen away and found a dragon boat. The mast. The oars. Vikings in it rowing. And there was a Viking with his peter up.

  One day I turned up at the river with a bundle and said he would see when he asked what I had. Breechesless we got snug shoulder to shoulder in a bush and jacked a sweetness into our peters. We took our time. We were learning to make it last for a lovely long time. The sunshine was scattered in the trees and made the river blue in its middle.

  The crickets sang as loud as a waterfall. Swarms of midges hung out over the water. He let me feel the knobby stalk of his peter and jack it for awhile. After we shot off I asked him to do me a favor and ask no questions until I was through with what I was going to do. I unwrapped my bundle. First scissors and comb. He sat crosslegged and naked while I cut his hair. I combed out the rat's nests and elf locks. I knew how to get a strand in the comb and clip it even with the scissors. How to keep combing it down until I had it all of a length across the neck and forehead. I trimmed allowances for the ears.

  Then the shampoo. We stood in the river up to our butts. There were welts across his back from beatings that must have cut to the ribs. I lathered up his hair and dug around in it with my fingers. He rinsed it with a duck. I lathered it again. We kept it up until no more black clouded into the water when he ducked. Then the soap. I stood him on a rock and had him all suds. I even brought a wash rag. He jibed only at the hard work in the ears. He squealed when
I washed his peter and behind as clean as the river itself. His knees and elbows took some doing. I trimmed his nails and reamed the gunk out from under them with a green twig.

  His hair was drying a different color by the time we'd lain on the rock and dried good. I showed him the rest of the bundle. He put the clean shirt on and did a prance like a dandy. Then breeches that might split in the crotch before the day was out. We looked like brothers. We threw his rotten clothes in the river. I told him his new name. Sven.

  But he wouldn't have a new name. He would go to the big house with me and walk boldly in past Thesmond and Matilda and act like a friend I had met but he would not have a new name. I argued that if I told them he was Tarpy they would shoo him out. I would go too. He would get me chased out of my own house. He said that they would know he was Tarpy.

  I would teach him botany and algebra. I would write Papa and tell him that Tarpy the miller's bastard is not an idiot as people say. That I have given him a bath and some of my clothes and am teaching him subjects. After I teach him to read and write. That he is really clever and deserves better than to live with Old Sollander who is an ignorant man and beats him without cause.

  My room is at the top of the house with a window in a gable that looks out into the same larches that Grandmama can see from her window and a window that looks over the sward where the drive comes up. I have a map of the world in colors. A picture of Alexander von Humboldt in the Amazon jungle with his friend Bonpland and an Indian. A cabinet of beetles and moths. A long table with a microscope. Fossils. Books.

  My fireplace has a brass bonnet and a fender.

  This is where I brought Tarpy the day I washed him and dressed him in clean decent clothes. He ran his fingers along the edges of things as if to appreciate the carpentry. He was looking at the rug when I tried to show him the microscope. Then he was interested in the windowpanes. He made on over the turned mahogany handle of the poker. He wondered at the lamp. And he was anxious to leave.

  Once we were well into the wood on the way to the bluffs he said that Thesmond's eyes had been on us all the time. Had I not heard him tiptoe upstairs? Had I not seen him behind the door as we left?

  Then he said he would be beaten for the clothes I had put on him. And for being clean. Things not talked about go away so I jollied him into going to our place on the bluffs and told him more of Robinson Crusoe. I was carefully keeping Friday back until the right moment.

  We had found a sloughed snake skin on the way. A tortoise shell. A coughball from an owl which Tarpy saw and I would have missed. A cockchafer. A hawk feather.

  There were seals among the islands which we watched for a long while. The woadwaxen was in flower. The whin. His hand slid under me as we lay on the moss looking down onto the inlet and gave me a fine squeeze. I rolled over and unbuttoned. He was better at it than I could be. I studied his face. The blue of his eyes was speckled gold. I poked a dimple to see the smile. I told him that I thought the world of him and would give him as stout a pleasure as I could once I had shivered and shot off. Don't I know it? he said.

  When I got back toward suppertime Matilda hailed me in. I had a green snake and she kept her distance. She had a letter from Papa in which he said he was sending up a person who was to help around the grounds and who was to be a kind of companion to me for the summer. It was a university student who wanted a rural place for the vacations. What did I think of that? She pushed her glasses up onto her hair. I didn't like it.

  When was he coming? The letter didn't say. But soon. Matilda said she couldn't think what Papa meant by help around the grounds. He was to have the room above the stables. That was hopeful. I could not imagine Stilt in the room above the stables.

  I told Tarpy and Tarpy opened his eyes round and wide and whistled. I said that I could always get away. Mayhap this intruder took naps like Stilt. I explained to Tarpy that people from far away wrote letters and read books. He was not to worry.

  When a rainy day kept us apart I looked out the windows and fidgeted. Cook chased me out of the kitchen for inspecting the potato bin and talking about poison. I curled up in a window seat with Canot's Natural Philosophy. I looked at the pictures of Pompeii in the big French book. In the stereopticon I looked at the Suez Canal. The Tour Eiffel. The Hague. Steamboats on the Mississippi. Indian sachems who looked like Lapps.

  If I made a dash from the carriage porch to the great oak to the well I would be close enough to sprint to the barn. It was the Algonquin Lapp in the stereopticon gave me the idea. They have second sight. They know things at a distance. Like old Swedenborg who was part Lapp. I have known before that Tarpy would be in our place on the knoll and got there so sure that I unbreeched before I arrived and jumped the brim of the hollow bare butt. He was there. Waiting. Tarpy was for a certainty in the cozy barn loft watching the rain through the hay door and waiting for me.

  It was dry under the oak though I was wet from the run. I was wetter when I got to the well house and drenched when I got to the high dark of the barn where the wet lifted all the smells to a pitch. The roast smell of oats. The dusty smell of burlap and the cold smell of graith and shares.

  Tarpy grinned down at me from the top of the ladder. I sneezed going up. We hung my blouse and breeches on nails and dried me on Tarpy's shirt. I did him first. His fun is transitive and makes me all hot cheeked and dry mouthed so that my turn goes the better for it. We spurted again with our own hands.

  He had brought me a freckled snail shell which he said I could have. It was a species I had not seen. Would I show him its picture in a book? And how did it get there? I told him. He was getting the grasp of things in their kinship. He liked it that a cow is a kind of deer and the raccoon a cousin of the bear.

  Spiders walked down the air. Birds chittered. Tarpy asked me if I had brought something to eat and I was ashamed that I had not thought of it. He knew things to eat in the forest. Sour berries and roots with the taste of ginger and peppergrass.

  There were days when I did not see him at all and I knew that he was kept in by Old Sollander. There would be new welts when I saw him again. He never mentioned them. I learned to wait patiently for him in one of our places with meat that I had pocketed at table and pie filched from the kitchen. I sneaked him clean shirts and breeches. The deliciousness I was learning to play into my peter was sweeter and grander by the day.

  One afternoon after our ramble I was told that I was to go see Matilda as soon as I got home. Thesmond said so with a singsong in his voice. She had a lace handkerchief crushed in her knuckles when I went to her room. She was sipping tea. For strength. Jens. I don't know what we're going to do with you. Your Papa asked me to write him all about your taking up with this wild boy Tarpy. Is that not his name?

  I nodded that it was.

  She touched the handkerchief to the corner of an eye and said in a sagging voice that she had written Papa as truthfully as she knew how. There are some things which a woman cannot say to a man. I said that you had done just that. Taken up with this boy who is not bright. In his reply (she touched her fingers to the envelope on the table) he says that you are to be commended for sharing your clothes with one so unfortunate and for introducing him to hygiene.

  Is that all? I asked.

  She sighed and gave me one of her looks. She added that I was to expect a parcel in the post. From Papa. She mashed the handkerchief and clearly had something else to say. What it was she kept to herself.

  Get what for? Thesmond asked outside.

  For what? I replied in my best teasing voice.

  He stiffened and raised his eyebrows. He remarked that it is written in Scripture that thy foot shall slip in time. I was to remember that. I was to remember that as you remember stepping barefoot on a rotten pear thick with hornets.

  The fine summer morning when the urge was warm and tingly in my peter I felt as randy about my new canvas satchel with its specimen vials which Papa had sent me as the expectation of meeting Tarpy for a rich long pull. I had a new natural
ist's journal and a box of colored pencils smelling cedary from being sharpened before I set out. I was spry and giddy. I even wore the straw hat without being told to by Matilda. The journal had a canvas envelope all its own with a flap that buckled down. I would draw every leaf and inflorescence and write its name and Linnaean binomial beneath.

  I was over the knoll and into the spinney when the wonder of the satchel and bottles and journal all rucked in my ballocks like beady cider and I began looking for Tarpy. I whistled for him at the river. He was not about.

  So I patiently drew an oxalis with its pale yellow pentad of petals and its cloverish leaves. Wood sorrel. The pencils shaded well and I'd never drawn better. I wanted a splendid page that I could show with pride. My hope was that Tarpy would come through the thicket behind me and double my pleasure with surprise. Down the knoll. Up the other side of the river. The sun on his hair. I wanted to see him shining in his grin and pugging the snoot of his breeches with a frisky hand.

  I moseyed up to the sea bluffs. He was not in the scoop. I drew the leaf and acorn of a white oak. A woodpecker thucked in flurries high up. A spink fifed in the service and was answered with a trill from the beech. I gave the hoot hoot we used. And sharpened my ears. There was only the woods rustle and wash of the sea. The birds. The crazy woodpecker.

  I maundered over most of our rambling ground before I went back for lunch. At first I had been disappointed and this was selfish I told myself. Then I was put out. Selfish too. Then wondering. But he would come from nowhere in the afternoon as was his way.

  Except that he didn't. I looked in the barn loft. Even around Old Sollander's. I kept my ears cocked for the hoot or the whistle far into the night. I fell asleep in my clothes in a chair by the window.

  Next morning I watched Old Sollander's cabin through the rush brake. I had a slice of ham still hot in my satchel and a sandwich of gooseberry jam. If Tarpy was ill I ought to go direct to the door and ask. I should have asked yesterday.