Fool School (22 page)

"Good!" Perille exclaims. "You might have a
shot."

"Why does Ab'ly do the arranging?" I ask.

Perille drifts into a cloud of thought, but shakes
his head. "I would tink that Nuncle would make the arrangements,
too, but he usually stays at the campsite."

I try to return to Malcolm, but Perille grasps my
shirt from behind and directs me to sit beside him. I look over my
shoulder, feeling like I'm leaving my friends behind, then I find
myself sitting next to this musk-smelling stick-insect boy. I'm
thrown back to the perfume in his room, it seems a dreamlike
eternity since I was jammed in there--no, I wasn't jammed in, that
was my lie, I went in to spy on him. Anyway, I sit and listen to
Dag telling Perille about the surgeons in Brystow, it makes me very
uncomfortable, Dag is right on the other side of Perille, I was the
reason he had to get sewn up, but Dag is aware of my presence and
has become docile. I shield my eyes from blue-eyed Wolf across the
granite slab table and imagine her snickering at me.

As one, the table rises for acrobatics. Malcolm and
Hero look despondent, so I grab Malcolm by the shoulder and bring
him into the fold. I see Dag suppress a sneer. None of us speaks.
Hero keeps close to Malcolm's side, and I wonder at the speed with
which we have become tribes. Am I treasonous?

We ascend the stairs, suspicious and in judgment, and
I'm not certain I haven't at last driven my Malcolm away.

Ab'ly has wrapped the rocks in leather, and as I
watch Hero boil with his tiny ineffectual rage at my betrayal, I
catch rocks. I've come to trust Ab'ly, and I wonder what his views
of our two warring tribes would be. A series of emotionally charged
glances hang in the air like Yuletide decorations, draped between
the five of us--Dag has returned to his room to rest. Wolf seems to
take pleasure in the discomfort, in the fact that I've been
converted to her table. Hero's stone-throws to me seem tempered
with betrayal, the leather orbs hurled with repressed ferocity. I
will speak to him later, tell him we are always brothers, that he
is still a hero in my eyes.

Tambrel lessons are a welcome respite. It's
impossible to maintain passionate emotions while tumping a tiny
drum. Try it if you don't believe me. Nuncle prances at the front
of the classroom like a billygoat, his curly shoes lifting off the
ground, knees angular, the beat kept precise in time.

At lines with Hamlin I am alone.

And now I have brought my shawm up the stairs--I and
Perille are the only ones with our own, and I'm cautious about
keeping it in the music room, there are no locks--and I'm faced
with a room in two halves, Perille and Wolfweir on one side--Dag is
still in bed, Nuncle has ordered it--and Malcolm and Hero on the
other.

Cautious. Cautiously I step into the music room, and
I feel the heat of expectations. From one side, blue eyes glazed
with evil and power look up at me from a face I cannot believe I
once mistook for a boy's. From the other are too-large brown eyes
filled with newly-born contempt under a whiff of flat brown hair.
Hero is Anglian, I decide, from the east half of the island, and
he's really started to fill in, still very small but rising in
strength. I want to bridge the breach here, so I choose a seat in
the middle, triangulating between these four opponents, but Hero
stands, picks the two reeds out of his teeth and says: "No."

Nuncle's eyes brows, which arch anyways, I suspect he
plucks them, they arch higher. Stan says, "No what?"

"Tom," says Hero. I am a blithe kitten in a valley of
dogs. "Who are you sitting with?"

Anticipation. Wolfweir smiles with her teeth, a smile
of raw contentment. This is her territory. Perille makes a variety
of dour motions with his thick lips, smacking, scowling, shrugging.
As a man with an entire roast chicken stuck in his teeth. Malcolm
rolls his eyes, and I love him.

I shrug and move a desk forward. Neither to my left,
where Perille sits, nor to my right, where Malcolm is. I am closer
to Stan. Perille lifts his oboe and aims it at Hero and tootles a
pair of notes at the boy, tweetleetleetle. I fasten my reeds to
their clasps and play a careful scale. Stan keeps eye contact with
me. I feign innocence. I am never innocent. Many things, but not
that.

Class begins.

Scales and simple songs.

Class ends.

The staircase up. A darkness I'm unfamiliar with
fills the space, steps are stone the way a potter's field under the
clay is stone, I am deeply aware of the great staircase-spiral I'm
a part of, the twisting, as an assassin's knives, and I have a
vision, I hear spectral voice my sight fills there are no angels
now I am captive on the stairs and I see Father Bellows growing
great spade-like claws from his forearms, a badger's claws, he's
beneath the gravemound of dirt, digging not out but downwards, his
snout is becoming irregular and pronounced not a wolf but a warthog
yes with his teeth bursting through his nose as tusks Father
Bellows doesn't mind but his spade claws dig downward in a spiral
just like this staircase and in my mind I see him developing a
secret room beneath his grave, in this room he can be alone with
the devil that he has chosen to welcome into his soul the room is
not merely a dirt hole but opens out like a private cathedral, I
see it forming under him built into the hard clay I see it like a
drop of wine flowering in a pail of clear water. The devil is
beneath us, he is in the earth. He can flit through stone and clay
the way we walk through air.

He is under me right now.

I press my will through the vision and there are
stairs I may ascend to reach Hamlin and the strength and integrity
of the thorned lanthorn. Do we not all crave light?

After a progress of letters, the day has come to an
end and a faintness takes me. Malcolm and I leave Classics
together, he senses my instability, my hand is on his arm and I
imagine Wolf grinning, every three seconds I seem to be thinking of
her, which is probably exactly what she wants. Malcolm and I retire
to our room.

Just outside is a sharp stone with a cutting edge. A
pleasurable breath catches me and I stoop and pocket the stone.
Malcolm doesn't notice. I wonder how Wolf got outside to find
it.

"Ye've been far from yourself lately," Malcolm says
to the darkness as the door closes behind us. We have no candle,
our eyes will adjust. A green streak burns in through the glass
skylight. The moon.

"I had a vision today," I say, stretching out on the
pebble bed, which has become unexpectedly welcoming. Green eyes
brighten in the green light. In what words I can muster I describe
what I saw. The devil's underground cathedral. Malcolm sits and
stares down into my eyes, a shadow cut by green.

"I'll tell you somewhat, you're not alone," he says,
but a grand spatial sense has switched on in my mind and I believe
we are indeed all alone, I have a picture of a world empty of all
life, all that's left on Earth is two boys in an underground room,
we will open the door to a fogplastered space where no man lives,
all the doors we open will be deserted and there will be no key to
the outer lock, and I conceive of spending weeks carving at the
great oak around the iron hinges with Wolf's stone tooth, trying to
cut our way out of the prison school, boosting each other to the
arrowslit windows to see if we can squeeze out, days pass and our
bodies change, devolving into subhumans, I imagine two naked boys
striking the door with fists, trying to leave through the midden
pipes, we are caught underground, this place is a tomb, and my mind
rises toward God looking down at us, he has condemned us--no, I'm
mistaken about this, he's condemned everyone but us, this prison
school is the ark of Noah, like the man Edward described to me in
our discourses, we two are chosen as the only worthy boys, the rest
of humanity is gone, we must give birth to a new civilization,
there is a way for two boys to make a child, only no one has found
it yet, it's a secret of my body, there is a womb hidden in my
butt. The nonsense of this overcomes my vision and I laugh out
loud, helplessly, it's so funny, oh udstears it's funny, Malcolm
asks what, and it takes me some time to put the words together.

A smile, and more laughter, and we curl up together
and laugh and laugh. He reclines onto my chest and I kiss him, and
he kisses me back. We are friends. He's mine. I'm his. I'm
frightened by everything but him.

In the morning I rise early and make a white mark in
the brown door with Wolf's tooth.

She catches my eye at breakfast and pure pleasure
expands in her smile. I don't mind. I'm protected.

* * *

Days pass, small notches accumulate, not every night,
we aren't fiends, and next Sunday arrives.

The silver clarion blows. Nuncle and Stan summon us
for Mass, we assemble, the door is unlocked, and the dewy walk lies
ahead of us. As I step out, welcomed by crisp sunlight, Wolfweir
leans over to me. There is space between me and the others, so it's
somewhat private.

"More," I hear from her slim boyish mouth. "I want
more."

"Okay." I've found pride in what she's told me to do
so far, I don't mind.

"Tonight, tell Malcolm what I make you do. Tell him
you're both mine. Explain my power. And leave your door
unlatched."

I look into very frightening eyes on the face of a
very young boy, only it's not a boy, but I was convinced for a
moment. Wolf allows herself to drift away from me towards Perille,
whom she is comfortable with.

Hero: "Why do you even talk to him?"

Me: "I didn't. He talked to me." I enjoy keeping her
boy-girl secret, it gives me confidence to have the power to expose
her at my will.

Hero: "Tell him to get lost next time."

Me: "They were really mean to you, weren't they?"

Hero: "Shya. I was a shitbreath cabbagehead to them.
But now I've got you, right?"

Me: "Right."

Hero: "Hey checkitout, I've been practicing
this."

Hero gets a running start and does four cartwheels in
a row, without a pause between them.

Me: "You've got skill as an acrobat. But tumbling
isn't everything--"

Hero: "You're such a jerk to me!"

He runs off ahead, following Stan's footsteps--oh,
he's just accidentally stepped on the back of Stan's shoes. Stan
slaps him, and the boy scurries away.

Bells ring us to church, they have different bells in
England than they do in France, they toll more warmly, they are
truly bells of love, whereas our French bells are scolding. But
conversely, Tourum is much warmer this time of year, sometimes the
leaves don't yet change color, whereas here all the apple trees
that line the city are a tartan of red and green. Bet Malcolm likes
them. Tartans. Scottish.

It's as we enter the church that Nuncle notices the
absence of Hero. Mass has not yet begun, they're lighting censers,
and Nuncle ducks back out of the narthex, then reappears, backlit
in the candlelit cathedral, and he hisses, "Stan! The boy's run off
again!"

Stan rolls his eyes--he must be cursing himself for
slapping Hero--and he grabs me and Perille. "You've still got all
your wind and young legs, c'mon," he says, and we exit the church.
"Hustle," he adds, looking over his shoulder at the cathedral as we
follow Nuncle toward the fields.

Nuncle raises a hand to his lips and begins to call
out. "Boy!" he calls, as if this is all that Hero is. Not Eadmun,
which I now know is his name, merely "Boy!" Loudly, over and over
into the fields.

The stalks of grasses fold and crunch, the puddles
have the faintest crust of ice above the water, I feel like I'm
walking on good glass. The skies are white but clear, both of these
characteristics at the same time. Autumn and winter are staring,
and summer retreats. Nuncle calls out, "Boy!" and I feel the wheel
of fortune turning as the seasons turn, something is coming, the
harvest is laden with chaff and damselflies, the winter will be
bad, the firewood will give out and we will have to gather cowchips
and the dead stalks of bulb flowers to burn for warmth, pagan
fingers will sprinkle blue frost over our corner of England, the
Greenman with his beard of flowers waits over us, bent to be
beheaded, and the white mother in turn, and from her frozen ashes
next year's flowers will be born. The boy Hero will rise and become
powerful, but there is a winter for him, an unfinishedness.

"Mass is starting, Nuncle," calls Stan. The
headmaster continues to call and call, but receives no reply on the
downs.

"Hero!" I call. I call again, "Hero!" but I summon
only a pair of inquisitive mallards paddling past me. Stan would
shoot them, I bow to them politely instead. I believe them to be
barons among ducks.

"He'll come back," says Stan, patting Nuncle's
shoulder.

Perille is taller than any of us, he's--where?--ah,
he's climbed a tree and slides down to report that young Eadmun
isn't visible.

As we return into town, jogging, Stan says, "He'll
come back," again. Nuncle is frenzied, an absolute fury, not
exactly consumed with anger, nor despair, but frenzy. I don't
understand.

After Mass and a very brief confession--I tell the
priest (I don't know his name, he's younger, with a friar's
tonsure, and I don't like him) I tell him I know I made a mistake
this week and I told myself I'd confess but I don't remember the
mistake. He tells me to recall it when I can and tell him next
Sunday. Malcolm informs me that at the beginning of Mass a service
was held for the resting of Father Bellows' soul. Together we find
the chapel of Mary and kneel and as I think of poor Father Bellows
and that surreal, fateful meeting with the rabid clerk, I realize
two things: one, Malcolm has a secret he hasn't told me, he said so
way back at another chapel of Mary, the chapel in the church of St.
Martin's in Cherbourg; and two, we were never registered with the
Bath hundreds. After I pray for God to take Bellows out of the
devil's underground cathedral--I believe my vision to have been a
true one--I tell Malcolm I have several things to tell him, and
together we drift to the farthest corner of the cathedral and plant
ourselves on a bench and I ask what secret he'd planned to tell me
back in Normandy.