Delivering Virtue

by Brian Kindall

  A farewell volley had nearly hit me in the back of the head.

  I suppose I should have been grateful I was alive, but I could only lament that my head – already so badly burned and bashed and peeled – was now further despoiled by the shredded and dangling adornment of what remained of my left ear.

  “Zounds!”

  WE RODE HARD ALL morning, somewhat in fear that our tormentors might have mustered more endurance and were still on our trail. They were, after all, not your typical flat-footed trappers. But by middle of the day, with the horses exhausted and slathered in sweat, we trusted we had outrun them for good, and so we slowed to a trot, albeit, with much glancing back over our shoulders.

  Virtue rode beside me, leaning over and scrutinizing the damage to my earflap.

  “I have known dandies,” I said, “who have pierced their lobes with awls so that they might wear gold hoops. But the results were largely cleaner and more exact than this makeshift method of using a musket ball fired at a hundred paces.”

  Virtue squinted at the side of my head, trying to discern my ear from the gore. I felt embarrassed, ludicrous, and more unbeautiful than ever in my life. My arse-hole burned. My head felt like a child’s kickball. My right eye was blackened and swollen shut. My left ear – what remained of it – dangled from the side of my head like a piece of chewed-up, spit-out gristle.

  And I was wearing a dress!

  In that moment, seeing myself from the young lady’s vantage, I began to giggle. It made my ribs hurt, but I could not help myself. For I was greatly relieved, and strangely giddy.

  Virtue regarded me with a puzzled smile.

  “Darling,” I said. “I am just so pleased that you avoided that particular peril. It was most unsavory, and not something I would have wished you to endure.” I shifted in my saddle. “And I am, likewise, so thankful that you were able to procure my rescue.” I lifted my hands in a gesture to include the horses. “Thank you all.” And then I giggled some more.

  Of course, my merriment was in bad taste considering that we had just lost our dear Sabrina, and so with some considerable effort, I forced myself to stop. The recollection of my cannibalism made this easier to do. The sober thought that some of Sabrina’s flesh might still be rotting in my belly shut me up quick.

  “We should stop soon,” I suggested, “and respect a moment for our lost friend.”

  It seemed to me that Genevieve grew sad at the mention of her golden partner.

  Puck and Brownie, too, became noticeably introspective.

  We plodded in silence for a ways, our thoughts full of mortality’s omnipresence, and of our narrow escape from its ever-grasping clutches.

  *****

  And so it came to pass that we paused on a high hill, gazing out in the easterly direction from where we had come. I had lost my hat somewhere along the way, or I would have taken it off in reverence. As it were, we just bowed our heads and turned our minds to Sabrina, and, at least for myself, to Turtle Dove as well.

  I sighed at last, folded my hands against my dress front, and raised my eye to the scene.

  A hawk wheeled loftily in the blue sky.

  The land seemed profoundly indifferent to our plight and paltry human struggles. It just was. Whatever that might mean.

  Maybe this whole life, I considered, is nothing but an accident – just something that happens because something must.

  I could not have begun to explain this sentiment, as it made that kind of oblique sense to me that is impossible to elucidate, even to oneself. But I felt no need to utter a line from a poem, or even mumble some condoling eulogy ad libitum. Words can be so tiresome at times. So meaningless.

  So hollow.

  So full of wind and feathers.

  THAT NIGHT IN CAMP, Virtue stitched my ear back together with needle and thread. She then swabbed it with Turtle Dove’s potent herbal ointment. Yes, it hurt something awful. But pain had become my constant state of being. I had grown accustomed to its irritations, and so I did not so much as cringe throughout the entire operation. I was most manly, even considering my velvety choice of eveningwear.

  “Merci bien,” I said.

  Virtue put away her kit. She placed a stick onto our little campfire and sat opposite me, wrapped in a blanket.

  The air was nippy, and I tucked my velvet folds around me, holding myself within the embrace of my own two arms.

  A single coyote sang us a serenade from afar.

  A whisper of moon traveled like a distant sail over Virtue’s shoulder – a delightful and befitting backdrop to her feminine presence. Except that we were fully surrounded by the American wilderness – with all of its perfidy and peril – the feeling as a whole was one of domestic calm, somewhat like sitting of an evening in one’s cozy parlor.

  “I used to read poems to my mother,” I said, “while she worked at her dress designs.”

  Virtue looked at me and nodded.

  “She was a seamstress – the best in Cherbourg, it was said by those who appreciated such things.” I laughed to myself. “I do not believe I have worn a dress since she had me pose as a mannequin so that she might work a hem into one of her gowns.”

  I ran my fingers against the nap of velvet on my sleeve, remembering.

  “I read her all of the English Romantics, of whom I was most enamored, even though she did not know English well enough to understand the words. She always told me that it was pleasant and adequate just to hear the rhythms and sounds – those galloping thuds and bumps and sighs. She believed that that was all one need hear in order to comprehend the deeper resonance of the poetry’s meaning.”

  I pondered this. As a youth – arrogant and book-learned – I had considered that idea somewhat ignorant, but now, listening to that coyote singing his aria of loneliness and open spaces, I came to believe that maybe my mother had been correct. After all, she was a sensitive woman.

  “O, Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

  Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchantress fleeing.”

  I regarded Virtue over the wavering flames. “Shelly,” I explained. “He was our favorite.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He had a lovely way with words.”

  I found it immensely pleasing to talk about my mother and my boyhood. I had not done so for many years, and had all but forgotten anything that had ever happened to me before growing into an adult. Virtue had stirred those memories, all throughout this long journey, like some revelatory agent to a dream I had believed to be irrevocably submerged.

  “Life is mysterious.” I said. “We go around in a state of sleepwalk, oblivious to those miracles that surround us at every turn, too entrenched in our own misery to take notice of the magic.” I nodded philosophically to the flames. “Sometimes it seems we are all just pieces of a big game, pushed around willy-nilly by some invisible hand. One surely sees where a man’s ideas of God come from. What better explanation for the way one’s life keeps looping back around on itself in ever-widening circles?”

  Now sometimes talk can be a salve. It eases the heart pains and the soul weariness of one’s tawdry existence. Surely that is why a person has friends. Undoubtedly, at the bottom of it, that is why one so willingly airs his sins to a priest. It feels good to confess, to admit that you are fallible and astray in those dark proverbial woods. One wants to explain himself. I do not know why this is so, only that it most assuredly is. And I had gone too many years without anyone to whom I might speak so freely. Virtue did not seem to mind my cathartic blabber. If anything, she was waiting for me to continue. She peered at me over the fire and smiled. There was nothing in the world like that smile for putting me at ease. I took it as my cue to continue and, rather sybaritically, began a rambling, free-flowing monologue. Once begun, I could not seem to stop.

  The floodgates had been flung wide open.

  I LIVED WITH MY mother above her dress shop. Her na
me was Marie DeRosier. My father, you see, lived across town with his wife, inhabiting one of those big houses looking out over the shipyards. His name was Horatio Rain – an American entrepreneur who made his fortune in shipping goods between the continents. My mother had been his callow mistress, and I, regrettably, had been the mishap who complicated their whole clandestine arrangement. From what I inferred, after my birth my father withheld his affections. This caused my mother great loneliness and stress. She had, in that unreasonable bent of an idealistic demoiselle, loved him, and had hoped he would divorce his wife and marry her instead, maybe even taking her to America where they could start anew. But that was not to be. And now as a girl in her situation – a young woman with a child, but no man – she was in danger of being poorly regarded by society. Such a deflowered lass is destined to live a life of loneliness and seclusion, eking out a livelihood as a washerwoman, a rag picker, or even a prostitute. She was fraught with despair. Fortunately for my mother, Monsieur Rain felt the inclination to set her up with her own trade. He provided the secret funding for her dress shop, and even encouraged a clientele by way of his wife and her friends. Although I am sure this was a humiliation to my mother, she accepted it without complaint. Understand, I was Horatio Rain’s only child – his Ishmael, so to speak. His wife Chantal must have been unable to bring forth offspring. And so somehow, by what must have seemed a cruel twist, I was the sole heir to his fortune. This no doubt vexed him. And yet, a man’s prideful sense of legacy can overwhelm his reason. He wants to hand something forward through the generations. He wants his name and enterprise to survive as a monument to his existence. As a result of this vanity, I was provided for.

  My mother and I were close. Too close, I suppose. We had only each other to turn to. If I bumped my chin, my mother was there to give it a kiss. If she was feeling gloomy, I was the living doll she held while she wept. Which is not to say she was one much given to weeping. If anything, she taught me the trick of putting on a smile even in the most dire of situations.

  I helped her in her shop. I especially liked to sort needles, or wind the colored threads onto spools. As I have said, she often employed me as a mannequin, and I would stand there on a stool for hours while she measured and cut and stitched. I enjoyed this enormously. It was like a game to see how long I could hold myself still.

  In the evenings, after long days of toil, she told me stories of courtly love and valor – tall tales in which knights or heroic shepherd boys would overcome villains or slay dragons to win the heart of some fair-skinned beauty. I would often fall to sleep with these romantic images in my head, the sound of the sea beyond the window, sometimes with raindrops tapping against the glass. I fancied myself as that hero. I vanquished demons and saved damsels. My mother and I shared a bed, and I would snuggle up to her as she sang a lullaby in the darkness, happy as a lamb. At that point I was quite oblivious to the complications that shadowed my life. Everything seemed blissful and good in my boyish mind.

  Horatio Rain never came around. I would not have known him if I had seen him on the street. But one day a stranger stepped into my mother’s shop to speak to her of business matters. He was a popinjay who sported drooping mustaches and the eyes of a fox. He carried a little pearl-handled pistol on his hip. He smelled of cigars and sweet cologne. I developed an intuitive hatred for the man at once. I would have gladly left the room, but I was in a vulnerable position. I was at my station balancing atop my stool, adorned in a gown undergoing the process of alteration. It was – even now, I remember clearly – of a chiffon silk, peach in color, with billowing sleeves. I held these sleeves out straight from my sides, my shoulders burning with fatigue. I urgently needed for my mother to remove the pins that threatened to pierce me if I should lower my trembling arms, but this self-important fop had interrupted her task, profoundly agitating her with his presence.

  “Maman,” I muttered. “S’il vous plait.”

  But she paid me no heed.

  Who was this man who made me so suddenly invisible? Who was he who could so easily befuddle my mother and move her to a state of happy tears?

  She leaned into him, pressing her bosom against his chest, and kissing his hand. Confused and uncomfortable, I could only watch. I grew even more bewildered when the man led my mother into her fitting room and began making love to her, right there in the light of day. Apparently her forthcoming charms had overwhelmed his good sense and commitment to abstinence in regard to her sensual bounties. The two of them made quite a lot of noise. Much moaning and rhythmic thumping, the very essence of a primordial poesy.

  I stood there awkwardly throughout, doing my best not to harm the expensive, pin-laden piece of fabric in which I was so cumbersomely swathed. My quivering arms remained spread wide. I felt very much like pictures I had seen of Prometheus chained to a stone, or Christ nailed to a cross.

  When they were quite finished, and had put themselves back together, they came into the room where I still awaited help. By now sweat was poring down my backbone. My shoulder muscles were on fire. Still, my mother, flushed and happy, paid me no attention. She tucked the disheveled tendrils of her hair back into place behind her ears, doing her best, it seemed, to pretty up for this rooster bird.

  The man then stepped toward me, his face close to mine. His breath reeked of wormwood. He combed his mustache with his fingers and scrutinized me closely.

  “Il est une fille,” he said, and smirked. He is a girl.

  “Mais non!” replied my mother. “Il est un bon garçon.”

  The man guffawed and shook his head, regarding me there in my eveningwear. “Sissy!” he said. “Pansy!”

  And then with a laugh, he left the shop.

  I did not remember letting my arms fall to my sides. I did not notice the pins sticking me all over, piercing me and leaving me in the attitude of some Saint Sebastian. For my father’s disdainful words had cut me far more deeply.

  “Ah!” yelled my mother.

  She stepped forward and raised my arms.

  “Zut alors!”

  There, all down my sides, and on the insides of my arms, were a dozen little droplets of my bright red blood seeping through that silk chiffon.

  *****

  Soon after, Horatio Rain decided that I should be sent off to the country to attend a parochial school for boys. It was not the religious education that my father so wanted me to have, but rather a more rugged life among other lads, one full of scrapping and spitting and developing my more masculine characteristics. I needed to be a man if I were to someday represent his name. My mother was against the idea. “Who will help me in the shop?” she asked. But Monsieur Rain was adamant, and so off to school I went.

  I missed my mother terribly, and wept into my pillow most nights of those first few months. The other boys were cruel and cunning and took advantage of my ignorance and delicate nature. I did not know how to be a boy myself. I had had no male upon whom to model myself, and I was way behind in all those little traits and talents that a would-be man must acquire in order to prosper in this world. Still, I enjoyed the formal learning. I loved the smell of the books in the library, and I was deeply moved by the sounds of Latin and Greek Bible stories uttered forth from the professors’ lips within those stone halls. I proved to have quite a talent for those languages myself, and soon impressed my mentors.

  On holidays I was allowed to travel back to Cherbourg and visit my mother. That is when I read her the poems. I had just discovered the poets, and was eager to share with her what I had learned. Our bond never weakened, although I would be remiss to say it had not changed. In my absence my mother had taken on an orphan girl as her apprentice – one Marguerite. She had appropriated my role as thread-winder and mannequin. She also was learning how to do some sewing herself, and my mother’s business was expanding with her skillful help. At first I was as jealous as a cuckold. How could my mother dare to replace me with this waif? But soon, rather strangely, my jealousy of the girl evolved to admiration, moved on to
fondness, and then finally grew into a most staggering infatuation.

  Ah, Marguerite!

  She became my star, my blue light, the very point around which all my life revolved. I felt that destiny had brought her to me. Although looking back, I would be hard pressed to explain why this was so. I put it down to my boyish stupidity and longing for a maiden toward whom I could direct my burgeoning romantic sensibilities.

  She was not at all like the fair maidens my mother had so often mentioned in her fairytales. A drop of gypsy blood ran in her veins. Her eyes were dark, her hair. She had a smile that came easily, but did not reveal its meaning. Was she hiding a secret? It seemed she was. And I made it my objective in life to find it out, be a part of that secret, to wrap myself around it and become it. Although, in truth, Marguerite generally paid me no mind. My passion was my own to hide away in my heart. But I vowed that someday I would find a way to offer it up to her. And then… Ah, and then she would be mine!

  My school years passed, and upon the day of my graduation I was introduced to a man named Winston Dirge. That truly was his name.

  “I am a friend of your father’s,” he told me. “He and I have enjoyed many an adventure together. He has asked that I take you into my tutelage, and guide you in some of life’s more valuable lessons.”

  He was charming and well mannered, with broad shoulders and a whimsical, but wise, demeanor. I liked him at once. It also turned out that Mister Dirge was a talented linguist. This was his primary diversion. He was, rather optimistically, amassing a dictionary of all the languages of the world, complete with cross-references, and he was now on his way to Greece and the Holy Land to trace down some long lost derivations.