A Table of Green Fields (17 page)

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.

We talked about everything that came into our heads. I heard about the university and lectures. I learned the nature of girls. He explained socialism and free love among his student friends. I kept saying O and
why.
I undid a button of his fly and he undid a button of mine while we talked. He was surprised that I had not read the
Iliad.
It was the book he had brought. He would show me how to read it if I wanted to. He undid the next button. I countered.

A mist stretched spooky and white from bush to bush and smoked along the ground. We put more sticks on the fire and 
by its light we squared our quarters away and undressed. I snuggled in while Florent banked the fire with dirt. He sat crosslegged beside me on the bedroll. We heard owls as we went to sleep and unknown animals treading without caution on their rounds. The white river crashed cold over its rocks.

We were stiff from the ungivingness of our bed and stretched gratefully and naked in the pale morning warmth. We splashed clean in the dashing river and dried on the rocks with tin mugs of coffee to sip. I wanted to stay naked but Florent said that could wait until we were days further up the peninsula.

We climbed a great deal of the morning but crossed level highlands deep in strange and enormous ferns all afternoon. We saw hares and deer and the dead kingdoms of the beavers.

There was no river at our second station. We had dried beef in gravy made from an essence that came in cubes. We'd gathered wild plums yellow and tasty which we ate for dessert.

We'd cleaned and stashed our supper ware when Florent made himself comfortable with a rucksack under his shoulders. He had his pipe handy but did not light it. There was mischief in his eyes. His hand with fingers shoved between the buttons of his fly interested me greatly. Because of the sweetness of his smile I came to sit on his thighs and play the monkey with his fingers and buttons. His eyes said yes. He wrecked my hair and remarked on how the evening came on as much from below in green and blue darkenings among the trees as in a softening of departing light above. He put his hands on my legs and slid them up to my tummy and around my waist. I had unbuttoned him and made a clumsy disarrangement of everything. He pulled me to his shoulder with his cheek against my hipbone and with a heave and wiggle and two kicks got his trousers and underpants off and lowered me back to where I was. I had listened carefully over the past days to his saying that the Greek god Eros was a boy my age.

He taught me names. The head of the peter is the Latin for acorn. Its rim is the Latin for crown. Its bag with the twin 
eggs is the scrotum. That the sleeve is the prepuce or as the Latin translates the foreskin I knew from Scripture.

He explained while my heart was thumping at a gallop how the foreskin is like an eyelid. It too was a sensitive soft moving protector of a surface wonderfully tender. The two are where the flesh engages the spirit in its most sensual experiences.

There are our sensors of heat and cold and of textures in the world. Of sound and smell and taste. But the eye is the world. The eye and the glans or acorn are curiously alike and different. The eye is open to light. The glans is hidden except of course among lovers and frank honest people of good will. And friends.

They are like Swedenborg's heaven and hell. The healthy eye is cool and bright. The glans as you can feel is warm as blood and as dark as the inside of the body.

My mouth was as dry as the day Tarpy and I played with ourselves. Florent said in his friendliest way that if the god Eros was with us here in the dark deep of a Swedish forest and the nays of the world many miles away we would know it both by his famous cunning and his shameless boldness. Did he play with himself like a boy?

Lots. It is nature and good for the spirit. But only if Eros is running the show. Were we friends? I am if you are.

We put our foreheads and noses together and laughed. He took off my breeches. Tarpy's big business was a parsnip compared to Florent's.

I had squeezed and pulled and caressed and he had replied in kind. Eros was happily busy and inventive.

But as things got more wonderful Florent disentangled us and whistled cheerfully while he poked up the fire and put our coffee pot on to heat. I was dancing with impatience. This got me laughed at and a hug. He said we would learn to play with each other well. We would both teach the other. So we had our coffee as the dark came on. I would have liked it better if I hadn't been half out of my mind. Maybe wholly out of my 
mind. The second time was longer and sweeter. Florent said we were still initiates in the rites of Eros who needed to know if we were of his ilk before his magic eyes and fingers did what they do best.

The wilderness was grander day by day. The forest darker. The rocks greyer and sharper. The streams whiter and swifter. Florent taught me the Greek alphabet on our marches and I would recite it first thing every morning. He began to tell me the
Iliad.
It had all happened three thousand years ago. He told me about Schliemann and Hissarlik.

On a wide shale beach under a cliff shelved with ferns and topped with larches that went up to the sky we pitched our tent and jacked each other off for the first time in broad daylight. In spite of breaking them in my boots had made a blister on my left big toe and heel. Florent said we would give them a chance to get well. I held my foot in the cold dashing water of the stream. Florent fished above the shoals. We did our wash and laid our shirts and breeches on the clean shale to dry. Our underpants and stockings hung on the tent ropes.

Florent put a blanket in the sun and painted my blisters with iodine. I yowled. He slid his hands along my legs and rolled my balls against my crotch. He lay on his elbows and lazily worked a good feeling into my peter with his fingers. For mischief he tickled around the eyelet with his tongue. I straddled his tummy when it was time and jacked him from the front while he kept an idling hand on my peter. The second time we lay head to hip and did it together and decided that getting and giving at the same time was sort of crowded and too much of a good thing. His spunk on the tip of my finger tasted like soda and green grass. He licked some puddled in my belly button and agreed.

We explored the woods naked. We found long humps of moss that was like a deep carpet to walk over. Pitcher plants. A lady slipper all by itself. A mouse's round nest in saw grass. Snow hawks wheeling overhead. Knee-deep in a clearing of daisies and quitch grass we stood nose to nose and peter to peter. On my toes. It was a pledge.

We played leapfrog and Florent told more of the
Iliad.
We cooked our fish and oat cakes and stewed dried apples. Ruckled sooty clouds filled the sky by sunset. We got our clothes in and trenched around the tent and floored it with our rosined tarpaulin. The rain came with a whomp. I was never snugger. We sat and watched the windy warp of the downpour from the front of the tent. Our arms around each other's shoulders. While Florent sat with his knees up and smoked his pipe I lay in front of him and fiddled with his peter. I fingered and studied the conic obliquity of its nozzle. Its sumptuous vascularity. The gutty crimple of the balls. It crested as I meddled and spanged proud in my hand. I worked it into tone. You can tell by Florent's eyes and the polish of the stud. And by his saying so. I tried a boldness. I flicked my tongue against the little link of flesh that checks the underslide of the foreskin. The frenum. He liked it. He wiggled his toes and flossed my hair. He called me goose and rascal. I tongued the full contour of the glans and swivelled my lips on the flare. He throbbed and gushed. He flinched and shoved my head back. I panicked. I think he panicked. He swore. A flaw of wind worried the tent flaps. The rain slapped down in torrents.

I asked what the matter was. He didn't answer. There was just enough light to see him huddled. Biting his lip. He said 
J
ens.
Not
goose.
Or
chief.
But
J
ens.
We sat in the dark for the longest.

Finally he scrounged in the rucksack and got something out. And something else. A candle. The tinder box. He lit the candle and set it in a tin cup between us. The rain was chilly and we put on our shirts.

He smiled at me. I think some tears had run down my cheek more from confusion than anything to cry about. Their salt mixed with the alkaline taste in my mouth. He stuffed his pipe with the cidery tobacco and lit it with the candle. I asked for a puff. I filled my mouth with the sweet smoke. My stomach listed crazily as I blew it out but I gave no sign. It was Florent too.

How the rain came down! He said he thought we had 
gone too far. Was it wrong? It was wrong in that a game which we played casually for the lust of the flesh might become a bond which we could only break along with our hearts. You have already had your heart broken.