*****
As a boy, I attended a parochial school for adolescents. My father had insisted that I do, and my mother, although doubtful of its benefits, had at last complied. As a result, I was placed in the care of priests. Of course, there were many lessons I learned in the Bible and in Latin and Greek – lessons I would carry with me throughout the rest of my life, and which would serve me to a greater and lesser extent accordingly. But the one lesson that I most remembered, the one that took the deepest hold of my young imagination, and has haunted my adulthood, was the one tendered to me by a certain Father Bartholomew who felt compelled to take me aside and instruct me personally in the perils of being a man.
I was delicate in those days; budding poets often are. So much so that my fellows often referred to me as “le joli garçon,” or “Pretty Boy.” No doubt this quality was what worried the good Father. He suspected I was sure to fall victim of the more squalid sides of men, and so he felt compelled to take me under his cloak, instructing me in the arts of avoidance of the more heinous sins.
“I, too, was a sensitive lad,” he told me. “I understand what confusions you must be feeling.”
Although I did not feel particularly confused at the time, I went along, as I found private tutelage did have its benefits. Namely, the priests often held secret stashes of tasty treats – fruit pastries and candies not allowed to we students otherwise – and so it was ultimately my sweet tooth that betrayed me and led me into Father Bartholomew’s private cell.
I prefer not to dwell on the particulars of the encounter that has since so hauntingly consumed my imagination. Suffice it to say that I found myself in close quarters with a naked man. Although the good Father did not lay a hand upon me, I felt myself being used for inspiration as he gazed upon me and masturbated. This was a selfless act on his part, he assured me. He was merely showing me what was not allowed so that I might never be in doubt as to what was “wickedly wicked.” He was, in pure soteriological fashion, risking his own salvation for my soul’s edification. Although disgusted, I felt obliged to be grateful.
“Do not turn away,” he instructed. “You must lay your eyes on the sins of men so that you yourself will not succumb.”
The bon-bon he gave me turned sour on my tongue as he reached his convulsive conclusion. Then, weeping like a wretch, he handed me a leather strap.
“Now you must flagellate me,” he instructed. “I must pay with mortal pain for my offenses. Self-abuse is a direct ticket to the deepest pits of hell!”
I half-heartedly let the strap fall against his bare backside.
“Harder!” he commanded. “Harder! And harder still!”
I endeavored to placate his unholy need, eventually coming down hard enough so that the strap made a sickeningly satisfying slap, again and again and again, as he elaborated on the details of the fiery black hole of hell.
By end of night, I had raised a multitude of bloody stripes from his skin.
I had as well scarred my own consciousness with the experience.
*****
Alas, this was the doppelgänger that so impinged my mind whenever I prepared to self-serve – the memory of myself before a weeping man coupled to the hellish image of a flaming vagina. So impressive had it been on my young and formative mind. So unshakably tight was its hold on my integrity.
I drew one more deep breath. “Om.” And then, peremptorily wiggling my fingers in the air, I took hold of my self.
As I feared, that was all it took.
Brother Bartholomew grimaced from my mind’s eye. “Mon Dieu!” he moaned.
Directly, my hardness softened, turning to a fleshiful putty in my palm.
“Damn!”
Try as I might, I could not enthuse it back to rigidity, and therefore could not draw forth the venom poisoning my pilgrim’s progress.
I stood there over the mud, tugging and rubbing.
“Please,” I begged.
But to no avail.
My eyes were watering, and a large lump of dust had settled in behind my Adam’s apple. I angrily hitched up my pants, knowing full well what would happen as soon as I did. Sure enough. I had not taken two steps back toward the animals when I felt the rigidity return down below. The ache, if anything, had compounded. I could hardly walk. I could hardly see where to place my steps.
*****
The gang waited in the shade of the willow, tails swishing at the mosquitoes and flies. Brownie stood over Virtue, doing his best to keep the pests off his blond-headed charge. They all looked at me, expectant and bemused.
What next?
I paced in the sunshine, gritting my teeth.
“It is so goddam hot!” I complained.
No one replied.
I gazed at the goat. She was once again full of milk – a mammalian wonder to behold! – and I knew it was time once again to place the child at her udders.
“Damn inconvenient,” I muttered.
Virtue gazed up at me, waving off a biting insect wanting to light on her dainty cheek.
I rubbed my face in my hands. “Oh, all right.”
I wonkily marched over and grabbed the goat and dragged her toward the blanket, positioning her sideways and so. I then snatched up Virtue and, working around my tender impediment, I knelt on one knee, holding the girl in feeding position beneath her shaggy wet nurse.
Virtue did not at first engage.
“Well?”
I knew I had offended the little girl’s feelings with my rudeness, but I was too uncomfortable and put out to apologize.
“Oh, bother, child! I do not have time or patience for this indulgence. Either you take your meal now, or we will be on our way.”
Reluctantly, the girl began to do her business, although it was with considerably diminished gusto from other repasts in the past.
I did my duty, but it was not with my customary tolerance and kindhearted maternity.
The goat nonchalantly chewed on a willow twig, seemingly undistracted by the work going on beneath her belly.
I ached.
Some minutes passed – a small eternity – until Virtue, at last, finished.
I plopped her back onto her blanket and stood, thinking what to do.
“Baah!” said the goat, in some pagan argot lost to the world, and she peered up at me with her sand-colored eyes.
“Oh, shut up!”
That was when I hit upon, what seemed at the moment, a good idea.
I rubbed my chin, considering.
I blinked my bleary eyes, sizing up the goat’s assets.
I grabbed her by a horn. “Come on, goat.”
And then I led her over the rise to the wallow and out of sight of the others.
*****
Admittedly, it was not one of my more chivalrous deeds. Far from it. And aside from the animal satisfaction I personally derived from the encounter, I mostly marveled at how similar it had been to many of my other experiences with professionals of my own species. The parallels were alarmingly many. And I will advise the novice that, outside of true love – the merits of which I have heard many a troubadour sing – no-name nanny goats are, more or less, as satisfying as your typical whore. Maybe even more so, as they do not require monetary payment in return for their ministrations.
At any rate, I achieved my relief.
The nanny and I sauntered back to the group, somewhat flushed from our tryst.
The others all seemed to know what had occurred.
Brownie looked away from me and pretended to be licking at the flies hovering over Virtue’s head.
Virtue sat quiet on her blanket, hands folded in her lap.
Puck snorted his derision, and showed me his teeth.
“What are you grinning at, eunuch?”
It was a mean-spirited thing to say, and I immediately felt ashamed for it. He was a good horse, and no one likes to be called a eunuch. Least of all a eunuch.
NEXT MORNING, THE GOAT was dead. A victim, I deduced, of some noxious wildflower sh
e had found along the riverbank and indiscriminately ingested.
She lay stiff and bloated, with her legs sticking out straight. Bluebottle flies had already settled in for a feast around her various openings. A whiff of mortality hovered above her.
“Merde!” I mumbled, when I first made the discovery.
I readied Virtue and the horses for the trail, and then they waited with their heads bowed behind me. I felt compelled to voice a reverential panegyric for their benefit. But try as I might to find a preordained oration befitting to the occasion of a goat’s funeral, no poem immediately came to me, and so I was forced to ad lib with a tribute of my own. I held my hat in my hands before me.
“She was a good goat,” I said prosaically. “Uncomplaining and willing to do what was asked of her for the greater good. She will be sorely missed.”
I cleared my throat, for strangely, although my makeshift requiem was undoubtedly insipid, I found myself tearing up like some heart-broke sissy.
“She…” I said, and wiped my nose. “The nanny never had a name in this life, but forever will she be remembered for her servitude and gentle ways. Perhaps the angels will find a fitting tag by which to call her on the other side. That is,” I shrugged, “assuming goats are allowed into heaven.”
I considered this.
I tipped back and gazed into the cloudless sky, wondering.
Then I nodded and knelt before the goat’s carcass. Reaching out, I laid a fingertip on her eyelid, attempting to slide it closed as a sign of harmonious finality. But the eye would not stay shut. I tried again. But it just snapped back open and stared up at me, dry and sandy and busy with bugs.
“Well, anyway.” I stood, and put on my hat. “Amen, goat. And rest in peace.”
THE GOAT’S DEMISE PUT us in a pickle that, at first glance, I did not fully appreciate. On the contrary. I suppose it was merely a sublimated shame that made me feel this way, but I found myself greatly gladdened not to have that bleating, horned creature tagging at our heels. She had always perturbed me in some inexplicable way – her annoyingly homogenized sandiness, her penchant for unceasing mastication – and now, especially after our love affair, her presence would only have served to remind me of my errant ways.
“So long, Old Sarah.” I smiled secretly as we rode away. “Bless thee!”
Alas, we had not travelled many miles before it occurred to me that the nanny had been the little girl’s primary source of food. I peered down at where the back of Virtue’s blond head was resting close against my chest. Hmm, I thought. The girl was now able to nibble an occasional hardtack, or suck on a dried apple that I had mashed into a fruity wad of pulp – the only two good options out of the Spartan stuffs provided by Thurman’s people – but I knew enough to realize that such fare was not sufficient for a growing child. Her innards were not yet established for such taxing acts of digestion. She needed the liquid nutrients of milk if she were to remain healthy, build her bone-works, and continue her vigorous rate of growth.
What to do?
I gazed down the trail ahead of us, cogitating speculatively on what lay ahead.
I glanced back over my shoulder, reviewing what we had left behind.
For one quick instant I contemplated the burgeoning milk-laden breasts of Shadrach. Surely their devout and indoctrinated proprietor would feel honored to provide sustenance for the Holy Betrothed. But once again I found myself appalled to be in league with such a dismal lot as that one led by Timotheus McDonald, and I could not make myself turn our course in reverse and travel all that long way back. Besides, hot as it was, I was still able to sniff the inevitable approach of winter lurking over the horizon. Time was our most valuable commodity, and not to be wasted.
At the end of my deliberations, both directions of forward and backward seemed equally lacking in immediate promise, so we just continued our onward-plodding course.
“Oh, well,” I told myself. “Perhaps Jehovah and Zeus will collaborate to provide us with a cool river of milk.”
I seriously doubted this, but it was an amusing distraction with which to pass the time. I even attempted to turn my clever notion into a poem, but lost interest when I could (with the exception of galactic) find no fitting rhyme for lactic.
BY AND BY THAT searing day passed beneath our thudding hooves.
We had gone well beyond Virtue’s regular stopping time for a meal, and I could tell by the way she fidgeted, and then decidedly, and somewhat downheartedly, ceased to fidget, that the thought of milk was on her mind. She must have understood that the goat was no more, and then surmised what that meant. She played distractedly with Brownie’s mane. More than once I heard her little tummy rumble with hunger.
We encountered no one all afternoon – no settlers or nomads or derelicts of any kind. An occasional rabbit. A few birds. But no people.
Virtue grew listless and withdrawn.
I started to worry.
*****
We stopped at day’s end and built a fire on which to attempt the conjuration of a delicious supper.
“Try this,” I said, and held a spoon to Virtue’s pouting lips.
She timidly pecked at my offering of glop, but I knew straight away that I had no future as a cuisinèire for children.
“It is just a biscuit,” I enticed, “softened to perfection with water, and then puréed into a scrumptious, one-of-a-kind pâté.”
When she showed no interest, I put a bit of the grayish matter into my own mouth, testing its palatability. “Mmm!” It was admittedly unappetizing, almost, one might say, repulsive. It tasted something like wet paper mixed with a soupçon of river mud, and I could not justifiably blame Virtue for her lack of enthusiasm.
“Maybe if I put a bit of sugar in it.”
Virtue shook her head.
“You are right. Sugar-coated shit is still just shit.” I tossed the spoon back into the pot and turned to spit into the fire. “Pardon my French,” I said. “Well, we need to find something you can eat.”
I regarded the river and considered trying to catch a fish. Maybe I could make a nice broth from a carp’s head.
Virtue looked at me, and, reading my mind in that we way that she could, she shook her head once more.
I nodded. “Yes. You are probably right. A foolish idea.” I rubbed my palms on my thighs. “Should I try to snare some game then? Maybe a partridge, or one of these marsh hares we see scampering about?”
She regarded me, giving me to know by the forward tilt of her head that such ideas were not appropriate. Not to mention that they were in direct contradiction to the seemingly evermore-ridiculous agreement I had signed way back in Independence.
I stood and walked over and brushed my hand along Puck’s shoulder. “How are you holding up, Old Boy?” But he could tell that I was thinking of other things, and so did not indulge me with an answer.
I pondered, looking over the horse’s back and on up the Platte moving slowly toward us in the failing light. I turned and peered into the sky. The first stars were just winking on in the east. It was a juvenile notion that came to me right then, and tellingly desperate, but I considered making a wish on one of those miniature candle points of light. Childish hope dies hard, it seems, even in a man’s most secret heart.
I picked out one of the stars. Not the biggest of the bunch, but for some reason it caught my eye. It appeared to burn bluer than the rest, and seemed to have a sympathetic personality. I swallowed, and then whispered, “Oh, Star in the night, Oh, Star so bright, I wish I will…”
Before I could finish my exhortation, I heard another whisper joining with my own, overstepping and finishing my sentence before I had even mouthed the words and sent them out to heaven on a puff of my breath.
“I wish…” I said.
And then, “Milk.”
I was greatly surprised, and stared more deeply at my star. Then I spun around, paranoid, half expecting to be ambushed or otherwise pillaged by some milk-maddened pervert hiding in the willows.
> But there was no one there, just Puck and Brownie and Virtue.
Brownie’s eyes shimmered with the firelight.
Virtue gazed up at me from where she sat near the pot of glop. She held her palms up to me. This time, with the full volume of her girlish voice, she said, clear as you please, “Milk.”
Dazzled, I slowly bobbed my head. “Sure,” I mumbled. “Of course. Milk.”
Virtue let her hands drop slowly to her sides, seemingly satisfied that I had gotten her message. Then she busied herself with straightening the folds in her dress, before lying on her side in a restful position on the blanket.
I examined the stars for a long time, but could not find the one upon which I had originally begun to cast my wish. The sky seemed suddenly awash with innumerable shining eyes. Then I squinted up the dark river, hitting upon the only idea I could find in my taxed bonce.
“Well, we all need to get some good sleep.” I spoke to the horses. “I am going to ask for much effort of you on the morrow. A forced march through even more perils.”
Brownie whinnied, reassuring me that he was up to the task.
I went over and laid next to Virtue, once again peering up into the firmament. It occurred to me that I was, rather coincidentally, observing the Milky Way. It was like a great river surging through the sky. How deep it was! Going on for a billion miles. And I felt the overpowering sensation of being messed with for the amusement of the gods and their minions. I smiled at this great cosmic joke to which I was most assuredly the butt.
“Say,” I whispered over to Virtue. “When did you learn to talk anyway?”
But the little wonder did not answer.
She was already somewhere in her dreams.
AMERICA!
The land for those seeking supreme satisfaction.
Be it God, gold nuggets, or syllabic idioms, there is something for everyone in this Garden of Earthly Delights.
And although I am reasonably certain historians will someday argue that this country was built up and made great by industrious entrepreneurs and enlightened spiritual mystics, a closer and more cynical peek beneath the ruins might reveal that it was just as soon raped and plundered by avaricious self-serving opportunists and delusional charismatic goofs who were merely erecting churches to house their own fantasies and most primitive, if cunningly masked, hungers.
Delivering Virtue Page 7