Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  Upstairs in the back are Bob’s bedroom, a few guest rooms, the ritual room for Sabbat-celebrations in inclement weather, when the stone circle out back would prove too exposed to the elements. And, in the very front of the house, my bedroom, where, of course, I choose to feed occasionally rather than sleep. Here are an obligatory four-poster, built strong to withstand struggles both mock and earnest, and another great window overlooking the valley. Here also is a small locked door leading to tight corkscrew stairs which ascend to the tower room, my one concession to the Gothic, my one architectural echo of my family’s castle at Lochbuie.

  No one else ever comes to the tower. Not even my furry caretaker. From the windows I watch the moon rise over the Alleghenies’ black ridges as if its silver shield rose over the sea. The mountains are like waves, if waves could be frozen, made suddenly solid in their crests and their troughs. Sometimes my airy solitude is as sweet as any hairy man’s blood or semen. Sometimes I light a candle, sip Drambuie alone, the taste of Scotland’s heather-honey, and I long for Angus to touch me again. Sometimes I think of the key, here in my prison. Sometimes, with a momentary perverse whimsy, I consider staying in the tower to face the rising sun. But it is a whim that passes long before Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn stains the horizon and the eastern clouds look like bloody thumbprints. Life is still too sweet, there is too much beauty left to be tasted.

  Now Bob leads me outside to admire the new beds of poppies and foxgloves, and, farther off, the vegetable garden, larger than ever, with its rows of half-runners, potatoes, peas, and pepper plants. In the woods beyond the barn, the black locusts are blooming, their butter-scotch scent mingling with the aroma of honeysuckle, the honeysuckle I won’t let Bob tear down. He’s definitely Apollo when it comes to landscaping. Such a neoclassicist sometimes: everything neatly ordered, every weed eradicated, no matter how lovely its serendipitous bloom. I’m a romantic, of course, like anyone addicted to intensity, to thirst. I love the way the wilderness sprawls. Inside and out.

  A full Flower Moon is rising through the eastern line of pines. I wrap one arm around his furry shoulders. “Considering the size of the white oak leaves—far larger than squirrel ears—I assume you have the corn in. Planted pecker-deep, as usual?”

  Bob laughs, patting the front of his jeans. “Yes,” he drawls, “and I’ve been patiently waiting for you to get home so you could help me insure a good crop in the time-honored way.” In the months I’ve been in Europe, I’ve missed the soft-toned, rough-edged accents of these Southern mountains, the accent that has subsumed my own Scots burr after several hundred years here.

  Bob leads me by the hand to the garden’s far end, where corn plants sprout like tiny fountains. He peels off his jeans, turns to me, then swats one thigh. “Could you do something about the bugs? The winter here was mild, and they’re already fierce.”

  I nod, wave my hand, focus for a second: “Git!” It’s what we mountaineers say to pests. Not as dramatic as dismissing a pack of wolves, but for our present purposes, a practical skill.

  He helps me off with my shirt, then strokes my left shoulder. “I love the new tattoo. Stag horns and beard. The Celtic god Cernunnos?”

  I nod again. “Yep. Got it in Edinburgh.”

  “Uh, how do you . . . I mean, if swords and bullets don’t have an effect?”

  “It’s in the choice, Bob. Like choosing to spread leather wings. I choose to be marked.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about sunlight fading your tattoos,” he laughs.

  “True enough. This tattoo artist was very sexy and very smart. We talked about Kirkegaard and Nietzsche for an hour and a half. Der Ubermensch, c’est moi? The aesthetic versus the ethical. God, it’s great when the pretty ones turn out to be bright,” I sigh, tweaking his chin.

  There’s that noon-sun grin again. I gently tug one nipple ring—gold against his thick chest hair like that moon rising through the black limbs of pines—then lower him into the dry dirt between the rows of corn.

  Angus, here is some remnant of you, blood as salty as the moon-sap I lapped from your thighs, your kilt folds falling over my shoulders, your hands gripping my head. For me and my true love will never meet again. Here is the blood I never tasted in life. The blood I wiped from your face by the standing stones, the blood that soaked into the soil and took your breath with it.

  Even vampires have nightmares. In this one I’m in the graveyard on the hill above the loch. I’m naked, lying in the grass, watching the slow revolutions of the stars over Scotland. Then I hear him speak my name.

  It’s Angus. He’s sitting on his gravestone, the one I’ve never had the courage to visit. He’s wearing his kilt, the red/black/bluegreen tartan of the clan, and short boots. No shirt, his muscles as big as they were in life. His beard’s a little longer, and still red-gold. His legs are spread, and I can see his pale cock in the darkness beneath his kilt. Between his calves, the name and dates carved on the stone are almost illegible after centuries of Hebridean rain.

  “New scars, see? Touch them.” I do, running my fingers along their raised ridges, scars curved as the scythe blades we used to clear off the hay, scars over his ribs, in the curly hair above his heart.

  “Look, they’re ripe.” He holds out two earthenware bowls full of berries. One bowl of red berries, one of white. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been saving them for you.” He proffers the white berries. They seem to squirm.

  “I want the red ones,” I beg. I pluck one, crush it between thumb and forefinger, and mark his forehead with a ruddy rune. I crush another, reach beneath his kilt to anoint, then stroke, his cock. But when I kiss his lips, his beard scalds my face. I pull back. Red-gold. Color of the dawn. I turn to see the sky brightening over the eastern mountain.

  “Stay here and eat the white berries with me,” Angus pleads.

  But I am racing away, toward the shadows of the Maclaine mausoleum. The dew is cold on my feet. The mausoleum door is locked. I am fumbling with it when the spear of the sun strikes me between the shoulder blades.

  I start awake and bang my head on the coffin lid.

  All my senses tell me it is noon. Bob is whistling somewhere, no doubt pulling lamb’s quarter and raceweed from the Anaheim peppers and the strawberry plants.

  It’s a lie, a dream sent from the Gates of Ivory, not Horn. I’ve lived long enough to know that, if Angus waits for me, he waits not in the grave, but in the body of a man walking this earth.

  The first of June, and I’m looking for Swann’s Way. David had a copy in his room in Edinburgh but was in no position to discuss it with a sock crammed in his mouth. The title of the newest translation is In Search of Lost Time, a phrase we’ll all have to get used to. It’s a series I’ve put off for almost a century—along with some of the plumper novels of Thomas Mann—but tonight I’m in the mood to tackle Proust.

  The several hours of tortuous car travel between Mount Storm and Charleston, the state capital, are reduced dramatically as the bat flies, to adapt a regional phrase. I can really move when I have a mind to. Up German Valley and over the sheer sandstone outcrop of Seneca Rocks—where I once snagged a solitary rock-climber who lingered too long in the lavender dusk. Then, veering southwest, watching the sparse lights of rural homes twinkle below, a few tiny communities here and there spangling the riverbanks. Oh, bless the darkness gliding beneath me, the black-wooded hills still free of human nuisance.

  A couple hours’ flight, and the Kanawha Valley curves below me now, its great ditch cutting through the center of the state. Tonight, as always, it’s edged with interstate traffic, simmering with the lights of Marmet, Malden, Belle, and the gleam of uremic chemical factories. Far too populous for my taste. I follow the river northwest to Charleston, where the lights thicken and spread by the black band of the Kanawha River. On the topmost spire of the golden Capitol dome I perch briefly, steeling myself. Like Byron’s Childe Harold, I’m likely to overboil in the hot throng, but, amidst the annoyances of this city,
there’s a good bookstore, even a leather bar.

  In an alley I land and recompose a human image: the usual jeans and boots, plus a Maclaine of Lochbuie T-shirt Bob found for me at a Highland festival. Capitol Street is pretty enough, lined with sycamores and honey locust trees. The buildings’ handsome original facades were exposed several years back, when folk finally mustered enough sense to remove the ugly 1960s’ “improvements.” Outside Eppson Books, a few toughs congregate. Perhaps some junk food later?

  For now, there it is in the fiction section, Swann’s Way, the fat Modern Library paperback. Thomas Wolfe would envy me. As an undergraduate, he stood in the stacks of the Harvard library, despairing that he would never have the time, no matter how long he lived, to read all those books. I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world.

  There’s a gay poet I want to read as well. Allen Ferrell. I’ve seen his name in RFD, a gay magazine Bob receives. Yes, I have insisted on an isolated existence, high in the mountains, far from most humanity—partly for my own protection, partly from deepening misanthropy. Such solitude has grown easier as my appetites have lessened in ferocity over the centuries. But Bob has insisted on keeping us in touch with the outside world through magazine subscriptions, television, stereo, phone and cable modem, and I have indulged him. The coffee-table in the living room constantly hosts odd juxtapositions. Magazines like Martha Stewart Living, Bound and Gagged, Appalachian Journal, and Drummer are neatly stacked cheek by jowl beside an edition of Juvenal, a book on Wicca, a volume of poetry by Mark Doty, a Scottish cookbook. The stereo alternates between Puccini and Steve Earle, Joni Mitchell, Rachmaninoff, and Tim McGraw. Occasionally, when Bob begs, even a little Broadway. “Educated hillbillies,” Bob calls us. “Ridge-runner Rump-rangers.” The phrase would make a nice T-shirt, a gift for Bob’s next birthday.

  Ferrell’s latest book is Risk, which I find in the Local Authors section. As I pluck it from the shelf, a deep voice behind me says, “You like him? I just finished that book. It’s good stuff, but pretty morose! He can sure squeeze music out of unrequited love, though.”

  I turn my head, look down, and suppress a growl of lust. He’s about 5 foot 8, about 35 years old. Thick brown hair to his shoulders, hazel eyes, thick eyebrows meeting werewolf-fashion over the bridge of his nose. Bushy biker goatee, grading into several days’ worth of stubble. Hillbilly-length sideburns. His T-shirt—“Fuck Mountaintop Removal, Fuck Arch Coal” it blares—is taut over a meaty chest, taut over that little curve of belly I’ve come to relish on many mountain men, that belly which so often bespeaks an enthusiasm for beer, country food and the occasional box of doughnuts.

  “I’ve seen Ferrell read here. Sort of sexy. Big chest, shaved head, graying beard. Looks a little like you might look in ten years’ time. If he weren’t married, I’d jump him. His lover has a great ass.”

  This is the sort of guy I want to punish and protect. What is it about the little ones, the short, stocky, beefy ones, that makes me ache to tie them tight, hurt them hard, drink them deep, then protect them from the world?

  “You’re the silent type? Big ole guy like you, shy?” He grabs my hand and pumps it with polite good-old-boy enthusiasm. His grip is strong. His forearms are thick, and that thickness ascends into almost disproportionate biceps before disappearing into the sleeves of his shirt. “Howdy, I’m Matt. Matthew Taylor. That’s my name out on the chalkboard out front. Did you come just to browse queer hillbilly poetry? Or to hear me sing my infamous queer-hillbilly songs? You missed the first set, but we’re on again in ten minutes.”

  “Uh, Derek.” Almost three hundred years old, and still tongue-tied around ones this hot. “Derek, uh, Maclaine,” I manage, silently cursing myself. My Kind are supposed to be suave, debonair, mysterious. Tonight, perhaps, I’ll manage mysterious only because there’s so much blood rushing to my dick that my brain and vocal chords have stopped functioning.

  “Well, hell, Derek, good to meet you. Let’s have us some wine. Eppson Books here serves wine this time of night. You gonna buy that poetry book? C’mon. Bring it along and I’ll show you the tastiest parts before I hit the stage again.”

  He’s given me no time to intone sonorously, “I don’t drink . . . wine.” Already he’s heading for the café, and, stunned, I’m trailing obediently behind him, snuffling the wake of his scent. Hayfields at night, the cumin seeds Bob toasts for his Indian meals. The last remnant of this morning’s Old Spice losing its battle with his natural armpit musk.

  “Now I ain’t much of a wine snob like some of my buddies here in the audience, but this here vintage is tasty enough,” Matt exclaims, ordering us both pinot noir and then seating us at one of the café tables. “Better than that elderberry syrup my uncle used to make,” he promises, taking a gulp.

  Even his accent makes me hard, that accent the outside world has so often mocked but which I’ve come to find appealing after centuries in these mountains. Yes, it’s often fused with fundamentalist rant and conservative rhetoric, but more often it’s an accent wrapped around words of welcome, of good country manners and neighborly concern. So I must remind myself, misanthrope that I am. Sometimes the human world surprises me.

  As it has tonight. “Now this one”—I can relax, no need to muster sufficient composure to speak, because he’s not leaving room for me to wedge a word in—“this poem is hot. Dripping wax on nipples. Yeeow! Ain’t tried that. Yet. And this one . . .” he enthuses on, as we bend over the book together. This close, beneath the stubble extending down his neck, I can see his carotid artery throb.

  “Okay, buddy, time for the band to go on again,” Matt exclaims, checking his wristwatch. “Hang around, and maybe we’ll play something you know.”

  Is he always this on, I wonder, or have several cappuccinos served as a prelude to this wine? Before the front windows of the bookstore’s café, stools and microphones stand, and soon he and the other two members of his band are seated, situated, tuned up, and ready to begin.

  Matt props his wineglass on the windowsill, checks his Martin’s bass string one more time, then bends so close to the microphone I think he’s going to take the thing into his mouth. “Howdy, folks,” he drawls huskily, and I’m suddenly hoping that the depth of his voice is directly correlated to the abundance of his body hair. “Thanks for staying. We’re the Ridgerunners, and we’re gonna stuff this set with some folk ballads. So old they’re anonymous, so fuck you, ASCAP! This one’s called ’round here ‘The House Carpenter,’ but in the British Isles, where the thing came from, courtesy of those Scots-Irish ancestors of ours, it’s called ‘The Demon Lover.’”

  Luckily I do not have a mouth full of wine, else I might spew it across the table. How rich. Matt might as well be chanting an invocation, not singing a ballad. Invoking his future, his fate. Character is fate, the scholars say of Oedipus. So, sometimes, is physique.

  “Well met, well met, my own true love

  Well met, well met,” said he.

  “I’ve just returned from the salt, salt sea,

  And it’s all for the love of thee.”

  Something in the curve of his brow reminds me of Angus, something in the curve of those big biceps, in the way his thick hair frames his face. And his voice is like a good single malt from Islay, rough-edged with peat smoke, an undertone of honey.

  I’m sounding like the write-up on the back of a Scotch bottle, I realize, shuddering at the first symptoms of infatuation. Matt’s finger-picking the chords with surprising delicacy for such a beefy boy—I love the minor nines—and his buddies follow skillfully along with banjo and fiddle, moving through the familiar stanzas. It’s a song I used to hum as I prowled the mountains during America’s Civil War. Those were the years I loved and then lost Mark Carden, the soft-spoken Confederate soldier I met one summer evening at the Glen Ferris Inn. Those were the years I entertained myself by hunting down troops of Yankees, pilfering them from their bivouac campfires, youth by dirty youth. One could get away with so much during a war. Feas
ts without caution or concern. Feeding was so much simpler then.

  I’m pulled back from my bloody nostalgia by the song’s last stanzas, and Matt’s baritone roughens with the denouement. The woman’s left her husband, the house carpenter, and abandoned her child, all to run off with her old lover. Now his ship’s sinking, and the silly wench has suddenly noticed, a little too late, that her lover’s feet are cloven.

  “What banks, what banks before us now

  As white as any snow?”

  “Those are the banks of heaven, my love,

  Where all God’s chosen go.”

  “What banks, what banks before us now

  As black as any crow?”

  “Those are the banks of hell, my love,

  Where you and I must go.”

  The fiddle draws out a last mournful note, the banjo fades away, and now it’s only Matt, finger-picking slowly and sadly—waves are curling creamily over the deck, the regretful woman is led by the hand up a beach of finely ground black volcanic sand—before he comes to a stop.

  The crowd applauds and shouts. For a moment, I’m too distracted by the imprint of Matt’s nipples against his T-shirt to notice that the audience is almost entirely composed of gay men and lesbians. This little trio of musicians seems to have a coterie of groupies, a good bunch of them Bears and Leather types. Two or three are just the kind of men I like to strip to the waist and tie to my four-poster. Normally, I’d be delighted at such a potential harvest, but tonight there’s something about Matt that pulls my roving eyes back to focus on him.

  “Thanks, guys. Guess she chose the wrong squeeze. I can relate. Stick to those House Carpenters, you can count on ’em.