A Table of Green Fields

by Guy Davenport

  Looking for Tarpy? Sollander said from behind me.

  I jumped. He studied my face. He seemed to have on too many clothes. Strings tied everywhere. Strings holding his waistcoat together at the buttonholes. Waistcoats. At least two of them. Strings closing the collar of his shirt. Strings tying his cuffs.

  Tarpy's gone. You won't see Tarpy anymore.

  I heard the words but could not think what they meant.

  Aye. To an institution we've sent him. For his own good. Mind you that. For his own good.

  Tears blinded my eyes or I would have spoken. Or asked how and when. Or bloodied him with a rock. As it was I could only swing my canvas satchel from my shoulder and with a windup once around my head hit him full in the face with it. But his stick was up. It hit with a whomp.

  I ran. I wanted to run anywhere but home but that is where I went. Awful ideas got into my head. It numbed me that perhaps Papa had arranged for it all. I rejected that. The miller did it. Not that either. The miller was as ignorant as Sollander. Did they do it for meanness? Had Tarpy done something I didn't know about?

  I ran past Thesmond and to my room. I wouldn't come out when they shouted at me in the hall. I lay across the bed and cried until I saw how selfish that was. For Tarpy's trouble I was doing the crying. Helping nothing and nobody.

  First of all I would kill Sollander. Horribly. To pay him for every welt on Tarpy's body. He had earned his death and I was the one to give him payment in full. I had given Tarpy pleasure and warmth and friendliness and he had given him pain. He would have all the pain back. I would do it with an ax. Slowly. So that he could dread the next blow.

  Then I would make a speech before everybody so that Papa could understand. And Stilt. And Thesmond and Matilda. No. That was not the thing to do. I would kill him and say nothing. People would talk for years about the mystery of his death and I would gloat over my secret.

  Getting Tarpy out of the institution would be harder than killing Sollander. I would get Tarpy out instead of wasting time butchering Sollander. I would show him. Then we would run off together.

  Matilda and Thesmond had got into the room I don't know how. They made me drink spoonsful of something black and bitter. Even Grandmama came.

  I dreamed all night of lumber shifting in a room. I was trying to arrange it. It slid away from itself when I stacked it. I stumbled. Sweated. The room was hot. The lumber was rough and splintery. It crashed around me. I moved it piece by piece only to have it tumble back.

  They dried me with towels and kept a fire all day in the room. I stared at the window with its curtains half drawn and then I was in the museum Papa took me to and Tarpy was with us. We were all three in a carriage that rolled down the turnpike. It was a frosty morning and we were happy. The happiness turned to dread for no reason that I could understand. We were in North Harbor. We had rugs over our knees.

  We stopped for hot milk and honey bread at an inn. Everybody stood around a great fire. The floor was brick like our kitchen. Papa drank an akvavit from a little glass with a stem.

  Then we were on a schooner. So many tackles slide up and down and the sailors wind the anchor out of the sea. The sails go up and you feel the living shiver as it starts to move.

  By night we put in at a city with many ships docked right at a street. We are on a train.

  I scream. Matilda is on the train except that it is not a train but my room and she is folding a wet washcloth and pressing it cool against my forehead.

  We are in a museum in the city where Papa has taken us. We see a narwhale. Minerals. Cabinets of wax fruit. There is a dragon ship of the Vikings filling a whole room. The reared snake's head of its prow rises above us.

  We are very busy in the city. We must buy Grandmama a shawl from Scotland. Matilda has specified many spools of thread that we are to bring back. I am in a sailor suit. Tarpy is in a sailor suit. We sleep in the same deep bed in the hotel in the city. Our peters are as sweet as jam and as tingling as cider when we push them together side by side under the eiderdown.

  There is a man with a peg leg selling newspapers in the street. A Negro with a red kerchief for a hat. Horses in slings loaded onto ships. A military band marches past the King's palace. We eat roast chestnuts at a stand.

  I have peed the bed. Thesmond washes me in alcohol. A doctor has come. He does not look alarmed like the others. He looks at my tongue and holds it down with a flat stick. He listens to me with a stethoscope and holds my wrist in his fingers. I vomit while he is there. I have to take red medicine from a large spoon. It is cool in my mouth.

  I dreamed that I was a hare bounding through the forest all of a night. It was a joy to run. A joy to have four swift strong legs.

  One morning I woke to find a stranger looking at me with a grin. He said right off that I would have to get well or he would have nothing to do. His hair was both dark and light like a copper kettle that has been polished so that where the light catches it on a turn it is as bright as new money but leaf-brown in the shadows. His eyes were blue. Florent he said I was to call him.

  He was the person Papa said was coming up for the summer. He helped me dress one morning and we went out to see his room over the stables. The sunlight looked strange. I was uncertain of my step. He had swept and scrubbed the room as clean as a box from the store. Bucket after bucket of water he'd brought up from the river and sloshed it down. All while I was being burnt out by fever and crazy with dreams that I didn't want to remember.

  A camping cot with two blankets folded square and a chair and table with books were all the furniture he had. Over a dowel between two beams in a corner hung some clothes as neatly folded as maps. A rucksack. A towel and washcloth. A razor and brush. And a little silver mirror on a nail in which I saw that I had dark rings around my eyes and that my lips were as pale as a water slug.

  He said he had fallen in love with our place and the woods and the river. He spoke as I'd never heard anyone speak before. He said that I needed fattening up. Something Matilda would say. He had had marvellous talks with Grandmama and was reading Swedenborg. He had combed and exercised the horses. What light. What air.

  He picked me up by the armpits and put me over his shoulder like a sack. He took me down into the stable and set me on old Meg the carriage mare. He had harnessed her without a bit or reins. There was no saddle. No one had ever ridden Meg.

  But there she was. Florent led her out by the bridle. I explained from my unsteady perch on her flat old back that you don't ride Meg. I saw Matilda and Thesmond watching from the door. Florent waved to them. Meg walked easily. She nudged Florent's hair. He kissed her on the nose and called her a good old girl. I laughed.

  I saw Matilda poke Thesmond in the ribs. I waved to them. We went down the meadow path. It was a new world which I kept wondering if I had ever seen. After a while Florent took his hand from the bridle so that Meg followed on her own. We wandered over the pasture. The daisies were deep and thick islands in billows of clover. Meg stopped to munch. I watched Florent's wide shoulders. He had rolled his shirt sleeves above the elbow. Papa would never do that. Or Stilt. His trousers were grey and tight like a soldier's. They tucked in an orderly way into plain scuffed rawhide hunter's boots.

  We did not go near the river or the knolls.

  There was milk and raisin bran cakes for us in the kitchen. Matilda and Florent seemed to be old friends. Even Thesmond had a pleasant and familiar voice for him. Afterwards we went up and sat with Grandmama. She was having herb tea and reading Scripture. She leaned forward for me to hug her and gave me a sip of the tea and asked Florent whatever shittim wood might be. He replied that doubtless it was the acacia. The wood of which is hard and durable. She cackled with glee.

  Ah! Jens.

  She bobbed her head at me. All the ribbons shook on her cap. Would Stilt have given us so direct an answer? She instructed me to notice that Florent had bon ton.

  I was ordered to bed for a nap. Florent saw me into my gown and into bed. He gave me a tap on the bu
tt before he left. I slept easy and cool. I was not afraid to go to sleep.

  Next morning we both rode Meg bareback to the sea. Florent guided her with his knees and gee and haw. He clucked at her and talked to her. Meg seemed happily bewildered by it all. She strayed to munch red berries with our indulgence and gave important switches with her tail.

  We undressed on the rocks back of the beach. I liked it that he took it for granted that we would be naked as the soldiers were when they bivouacked here. I feigned indifference to his body for though he was not yet a man and therefore no longer interested in peters he was also no longer a boy. He was a naked Mohawk. He was not upholstered with flesh like the statues in the Latin book with their thick waists and bullish shoulders and womanish butts. He was trim and lean and brown. You could see my ribs.

  He lifted me onto Meg and walked us in the waves. He left us to swim out beyond the breakers. I remembered the soldiers. He spooked Meg when he thrashed back and comforted her by rubbing his cheek against her muzzle.

  We raced on the beach and lay in the sun. He said that I must soak up sunlight. And eat. He held my ankles for sit ups. I did them in a kind of rage. I wanted a chest as leavened as Florent's and shoulders as knobby and broad. I wanted my arms and legs to be as sinewy and clean of line. And as horsy a peter and balls as plump.

  We went on grand rambles. My canvas satchel and journal were in my room one morning. I wondered how they had been retrieved and who put them there. I knew that I could not look at the journal. I put it in a drawer and set the satchel in the back of the closet. I did not ask how they came to be there. No one mentioned them.

  I showed Florent the drawings on the rocks. We traced their outlines with chalk. A Viking ship with shields over the gunwales and oars and a mast. A reindeer. A man with his peter up. Oho! Florent laughed. Signs for the moon and the sun. Shapes that might be houses. Florent said that the drawings were thousands of years old. They were drawings by the Vikings when they sailed in dragon ships. That was the age of bronze. We made copies and inked them in back in my room and wrote a description of their whereabouts and sent them to Papa.

  Florent began to teach me geology. I heard about Agassiz and Lyell and Hugh Miller.

  I liked going to Florent's room above the stables. Its neatness and bareness fascinated me. I was fleshing out again and was getting to be as brown as he.

  One morning when I went down to the stables Florent had hitched Meg to the buckboard. We were going down to the port. Matilda had packed us a lunch in a basket. I would see what I would see when we got there. Was Papa coming home for a visit? It was not that. Florent was not going away? My heart went sick. Not that either. When we were out on the turnpike going a good clip he said that my curiosity was such a misery that it was mean not to put an end to it in spite of the surprise. He took a paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a bill of lading. I figured out its matter. One lightweight camping tent with stays and pegs. One haversack. Two sets of tinware mess kits. The list went on. I stared at him with a howl of delight. I hugged him. Meg tossed her head at the fuss I made.

  We ate our lunch by a stream in a pleasant copse before we got to the town. Florent had a burlap half bag of oats which he held for Meg. We ate impatiently. Matilda had packed enough for four. There were sugar cubes for Meg which I fed her.

  Our stuff was packaged in a large cardboard box and two smaller ones. Whole blocks of postage stamps were pasted on them. I had to sign with an indelible pencil the purple of which was proudly on my fingers for days.

  We opened the boxes in Florent's room over the stables. The tent was russet and its manufacturer's name was printed on it in an elegant oval of blue lettering. Nothing was ever so wonderful. We inspected the tinware. The ropes. The pegs. My rucksack.

  There was a pair of boots for me like Florent's. A twill shirt with four pockets on the front and a pocket on each of the sleeves high on the arm. And short pants just big enough to have four pockets with flaps that snapped to. Two in front. Two in back. There were but three buttons to the fly. And in foreign looking tissue wrappers with German labels were pairs of thin cotton underpants with no legs to them. Small ones for me and slightly bigger ones for Florent.

  I stripped and put them on and the twill pants and pockety shirt and heavy ribbed long socks and the rawhide boots which Florent helped me with. I tried to act natural but my peter was as stiff as a bone and I blushed beet red. Florent yelled with laughter. I said in confusion that it would go down. He remarked in an easy way that I would paste myself to the sheets tonight. But a wet dream is more fun if you're wide awake helping it along with your fingers. I must have looked as if I didn't believe he was saying what he was saying. Jens! he said with a smile and the friendliest eyes in the world. Matilda and Thesmond were civilized people with an old-world sense of other people's privacy. This was his room and in it I could do whatever I wanted to whenever I wanted to. He knelt and we rubbed noses. If I ever thought he would peach on a friend I was wrong. With him I was to be free. Agreed?

  Agreed. I was looking at my boots when I said it. But I looked up and sealed my words with a smile.

  We went to the big house to show off my outfit. We packed the rucksack with oddments to square it into shape. I was as proud as a peacock and blushed again for being so happy. Matilda said that except for the scandalously short pants I looked like a soldier. Thesmond who studied the magazines said that I was most stylish.

  I was to break the boots in by wearing them for a while every day. I tramped about in them like a wound up toy. I wore them and only the little German underpants to the beach. I chinned myself on limbs to build up my chest. Florent taught me how to walk on my hands. Most importantly he taught me how to swim in the ocean. I learned to float in the river. Breast stroke and frog kick. Not till I had got good at the crawl and scissors kick did we try the inlet. I had not known that it would be so cold.

  I began to spend the night with Florent. I slept in the camper's bedroll on the floor. The night before our expedition I was so happy I walked around with nothing on but an open shirt. We had spent the afternoon checking our gear. For breakfast every morning we were to have porridge and blueberries if we were near them. Tinned evaporated milk and cocoa. Cheese and biscuits for lunch. For our dinners we would catch trout to be eaten with bran cakes made in the skillet. We also had lemons and cookies and dried fruit.

  Once I stopped what I was doing to look at my peter good. I hoped in a sneaky way Florent was watching. He was not so busy that he didn't give me a hard hug one time or another.

  We cleared the big house with our farewells and promises so that we could set out before dawn going north up the peninsula. Florent pointed out that we could strap up and horseshoe the bedroll over a rucksack now if we were both to sleep on the cot. There was room. We would in any case be sleeping together in the bedroll for two weeks thereafter. For the first time in my life I would not be sleeping in my gown. In a bedroll you sleep naked. Florent knew how things are done.

  We undressed and laid our clothes out for the morning. Excitement scatters attention. I was wondering about wet dreams helped along by wide-awake fingers. And about sleeping beside Florent. But the camping trip crowded my mind most of all. My imagination jumped like a grasshopper. I was a mess.

  Florence looked all around and said we were ready for bed.

  I said I was confused.

  What a goose! he said. What a wonderful goose. He held my shoulders and kneaded them and knuckled my nose and mussed my hair. His body against mine was an unfamiliar strangeness and wonderfully welcome. We were so close his peter touched my legs. I dared all and scrunched closer. He nudged my ear in response.

  We untangled and lay on our backs each on the other's arm. The wadded hair under his arms smelled of dry grass and vinegar. I asked the directest question. He answered that friends can do anything they want to. He asked about my friend who had been sent to an institution. I wanted to cry. He said that I mustn't talk about my friend until
I needed to. He would listen when I was ready. I was silent. He tugged my ear to show that he understood. We got snug under the blanket and fell asleep.

  It was dark when Florent woke me. I could see him already dressed in the half light. I put on my clothes as he handed them to me. He tightened the buckles on my pack and I his. We oated Meg and scritched her nose and set out across the yard. We crossed the meadow in the clean cool and the knolls and bore north with the sea beginning to shine on our left. We walked at a good clip for two hours. Florent said it was wrong to have breakfast close to home and feel that we had yet to start our journey. We were in woods I'd never seen when we fancied a fine open place for our first stop. Florent made a fire in a ring of stones. We munched dried prunes while the water beaded over the fire for the porridge. I felt free and wild and important. I asked Florent if all this were real. The utter freedom. Us.

  I had a vague memory of a dream in which Tarpy was naked and just out of sight of a roomful of people. Our neighbors in crinoline and Prince Alberts chatting and taking tea in the library and through the door Tarpy in the middy and ribboned hat of my sailor suit but nothing else and with the big pink acorn of his peter standing straight out. Then there was a stagecoach full of fine folk and Tarpy snake naked at the edge of the road sticking out his tongue. I liked the dream but recalled it with a chill.

  Florent said he thought I'd had a wet dream and that if I were older he would know better. He stirred the porridge and we ate from the pot. We sipped our coffee sitting knee to knee looking sly quiver nimbles into each other's eyes. He tweaked my nose.

  The land became rocky. The trees were taller. The light was lonelier and more northern. We caught our salmon in a swift white stream. Its meat was lovely on the tongue. The bran cakes were of my mixing and cooking by Florent's instructions. Our tent looked splendidly shipshape and cozy as it stood on its ground of larchfall. The light went gold as we were washing up and blue in the long twilight. Florent sitting against a pine filled and lit a pipe that smelled of spices and molasses. I propped myself between his knees and watched.