The Farmer's Daughter (24 page)

We spent the afternoon sleeping and swimming in the gentle surf, and in the evening drove south to Riviera Beach where I ate a prodigious amount of fresh seafood. It was still light on the way home and she pulled off on a deserted road and began weeping. She was so sorry about the terrible thing we had done. It was her fault and must forever be our secret. It hadn't been mentioned all day and I was surprised that I hadn't thought about it that much in my fatigue as if it had happened in another life.

It was Thursday and there was a vacancy and she had managed to get me a room down the way from her own. She loaned me a Goya book about the horrors of war with drawings of battles and dismembered bodies hanging from trees. At the seafood restaurant I had watched a group of businessmen enter all puffed up as if they were much larger than they were. My mother owned a book of Mathew Brady's photos of the Civil War and I recalled my incomprehension about the way men rend each other. I walked down the beach until it was dark and the top of the moon began to rise above the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. In the darkness I pulled down my trousers and tried to fuck the wet sand but it hurt. I walked up to the deck in front of Laurel's room but the sliding doors were locked and her drapes were drawn though I could hear music from her radio and an announcer say, “Scarlatti.” I sat there with my brain seeming to bubble and my muscles clench and unclench. I wondered at my inability to think. A group of seabirds flew across the moon and my skin prickled at the beauty of it. It occurred to me that I could sense beauty even if I couldn't think other than to be sure I scented Laurel. I whispered through the crack in the door and finally she opened it. She said that we must never see each other again as if in a language I couldn't understand. We lay down on the bed and she sucked at me several times saying she was too sore. She put lotion on her anus and I made love to her there. She gave me several tranquilizers with a water glass of tequila. She looked at my raw penis with horror. She helped me on with my trousers and pushed me out the door.

At dawn a ranger from the Padre Island National Seashore found me lying facedown at the edge of the surf and thought I was dead. I was so weak and shaky that he gave me a ride the fifteen miles back to the motel. I certainly didn't remember wandering that far. We passed two policemen talking to a group of campers and the ranger said someone had tried to chase the “weird” stranger away from their campfire. One man had a broken arm and the stranger had tried to drown the other man in the surf. I remembered the incident very well and was amused when the ranger said the attacker had been described as a “great big guy.”

Needless to say Laurel was relieved to see me. We packed up and drove to Houston. At the hospital they said I had an “acute blood virus” and gave us a big bottle of antiviral pills. We went to the airport and flew to El Paso where we picked up Laurel's vehicle and then drove to Alpine where my mother was overjoyed to see us. I was relieved to hear my father was down in Big Bend birding but was saddened to learn that Emelia and her family had moved to Albuquerque that morning. Laurel quickly excused herself as if in a slight panic to be rid of my company. Nevertheless I walked her out to her car and said, “I love you,” which brought tears to her eyes. “God help you whoever he is,” she said.

Back in the house my mother said she couldn't believe how changed I was in a month. She looked at my ugly throat scar and then the prescription on the big bottle of pills and then a page of the doctor's instructions which were beyond my immediate interest. My own aim was to stay free of doctors after a grueling month of them. We talked for an hour about her grand time at Radcliffe. I wanted to tell her to leave Father but I didn't have the courage. I felt utterly depleted and went to bed early, quite relieved that the moon through the east bedroom window had no effect on me. Early in the morning I walked over to Emelia's and looked into the windows of her empty house.

In the ensuing months I was to discover the awful side effects of the antiviral drugs I only took a few days before the moon was at its largest. I was a bright lad and it didn't take much energy in terms of reading and study to perceive that if the moon had such a mighty effect on the tides of the world's oceans it could have at least a minor effect on the closed system of our blood.

Late in August we moved to Cincinnati dragging the usual budget U-Haul. I sat in the back seat not exactly savoring our boloney sandwiches and making mental notes on which landscapes I might want to visit when I was finally liberated from my parents, especially the Black Jack Hills of northern Oklahoma, and the tallgrass prairie in southern Kansas.

Of course this is a cursory view looking back at my raw youth from the vantage of thirty-two years. In your early teens your perceptions are incapable of providing any reassuring conclusion. That's why I used the word “raw” to mean abraded, sore, the metaphoric tongue always probing life's sore truth. I remember kneeling in the water tank and nuzzling Emelia's tailbone. Why should a pretty girl have a tailbone? I was disturbed daily because I had overheard in Houston a doctor saying to Laurel, “This boy has enough testosterone to fuel a football team.” I wished not to be the stranger I was. Why did I love a rich girl who totally ignored me? My relative salvation in Cincinnati was hard study and exercise to improve myself and making friends with a mulatto boy who lived two blocks away in the Tenderloin. His name was Cedric and he was being raised by his grandfather who was a retired railroad employee who spent his days playing the piano and reading history books from Cincinnati's splendid library. Their little house was immaculate except for the kitchen which was a jumble. The grandfather was a tad obese and obsessed by the idea that man had eaten wild meat for a couple million years and should continue doing so. Cedric taught me to hunt and snare along the Ohio River and in whatever farm woodlots we could manage to poach. We'd ride our bikes east, west, south at least twenty miles from the city once or twice a week and come back with squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, muskrats, opossum, and occasionally ducks which were a prize. We ignored hunting seasons and no one cared or noticed. Cedric had a Stevens single-shot .22 which I carried strapped across my bike's handlebars because it was a time of racial unrest and it looked better for a white boy to have a rifle than a black. Early on a cop stopped us but when we explained what we were doing he gave us his phone number in case we got an extra muskrat which he favored fried up in pork fat. Over the next few years we brought him a lot of game and sometimes he'd come over and eat at Cedric's house. He was a great big man and would always bring a poorly made cake and a pint of whiskey. Cedric's grandfather was the finest rudimentary cook in my life and far later in the bistros of Lyon I recognized him in the divinity of the ordinary food that springs unbidden from the earth. Most would make light of a possum pie but they are fools indeed. When you're roasting, a young female raccoon is best and I preferred muskrat and cottontail simply fried after marinating it in buttermilk and Tabasco.

Meanwhile my parents were appalled that I had become a hunter. My father was speechless with disgust while my mother's dismay turned into curiosity but then she let it drop. My answer to them was the anthropological fact that people have always hunted. They would have been more upset if they had known that by age fourteen I was visiting this big black single mother named Charlene once a month, always near the big moon when despite the antiviral pills I was highly agitated. Charlene was amused by my energies. Cedric caught on to my strangeness one afternoon while we were hunting and were too far from our bikes to reach them by dark unless we cut across a marsh which he dreaded. I weighed only one hundred sixty at the time and he one hundred eighty but I carried him over my shoulder across the wide bog and still visited Charlene that evening with my ten-dollar bill.

Of course at odd moments we wonder who we truly are beneath the layers of paint the culture has applied to us. I was struggling to do no harm within the human construct of a permanent stranger. I read widely in all of the historical nonsense considering lycanthropy arriving at the conclusion that all of the cases, including those from thirteenth-century France, might resemble my own a bit but I was ultimately a child and I didn't resemble those subjects. The only magic was in the infinite varieties of blood chemistry and the viral interlopers that could not totally be extinguished any more than they later could with HIV. By my late teens I had been so winnowed and withered by the medical profession that I shuddered when passing by any medical facility. My father was without much curiosity about my condition and my classicist mother only thought I had a blood condition and valued the palliative of pills. It was Laurel who kept me before the Stone Age fire, Stone Age because for all the vast knowledge in medical research there were equally vast lacunae in blood diseases. This fact came into play because of Laurel with whom I had an intermittent correspondence that made no mention of our two sexual nights. She had left George and her letters were either from Seville or Granada in Spain. Through her Cornell University contacts she had been in touch with a young hematologist in Chicago. When I wrote that I was off to Northwestern University the die was cast. I arrived in Evanston near Chicago quite happy because my mother had fled my irascible nitwit father. I was starting a new life in which the only people I'd miss were Mother, Cedric, and big Charlene for whom I felt a great deal of affection.

I met with Laurel at a medical center in Chicago early one morning after taking a bus in from Evanston and my instantly dreary dormitory room. Laurel was worn from jet lag but still lovely and I was palpably excited when we embraced. The young doctor was at the same time cold and goofy, a pure scientist of the body who didn't want to recognize the human within it. I immediately had blood drawn into the different vials and then a disgustingly unpleasant spinal tap. This was on a Thursday and I spent a long weekend with Laurel at the Drake. I was curiously intimidated by the immense vase of flowers in the lobby. Back to the rawness of an eighteen-year-old's perceptions, and a relatively poor young man at that. Chicago seemed so grand compared to Cincinnati mostly because Chicago is a grand city. I was near my monthly frenzy and had cut back on my antivirals to have the energies that I could sense Laurel was expecting. It was all reminiscent of Padre Island because during our spells of rest we could look out at the moon glistening on Lake Michigan's wave caps.

On Saturday Laurel bought me some clothes because that evening we were to have dinner with her father. He was an arch and cynical New Englander who split his time between Beverly, Massachusetts, and New York City. He had a peculiar accent and teased his daughter about “robbing the cradle” with me. She blushed and denied that we were lovers and he said, “Oh, nonsense,” and laughed. He gave me some investment advice which in itself was laughable because though I was on a full scholarship my main problem would be affording enough to eat, especially in the time surrounding the efflorescence of my infirmity. That evening I ate five dozen oysters and a very large porterhouse which amused him. They were the first oysters of my life and I was ever after an addict.

On Monday morning we returned to the hospital and Laurel's hotshot young doctor said I had both avian and canine viruses that were apparently incurable and had become neural. He referred to the diseases as “zoonotic.” He knew about the wolf pup and I explained about the hummingbird wound adding that on the way down the mountain several hummingbirds had been attached to my bloody throat. I told him that my father and his ornithologist friends were forever looking for a rare semicarnivorous hummingbird that lived in southern Chihuahua. He was clearly fascinated and said he would do further pro bono research on my problem and see me again. I joked that it was unlikely because dogs hate to go to the vet's.

That early afternoon I rode out to the airport with Laurel who was on her way back to Spain to study art. She had her driver drop me off in Evanston in a wonderful thunderstorm. Our leave-taking had been melancholy and I refused to accept any money from her. At the time money was quite confusing to me and I felt better living on the edge on the minimal budget I would be earning as a busboy in an Italian restaurant. I had resolved that because of my physical problems I had to run what people call a “tight ship.” Ultimately the nature of viruses is far more interesting, complicated, and mysterious than the nature of superstition which is only an amalgam of ignorance and the predictable consequences of fear. My problem demanded that I become an ardent student of natural causes. The direct meaning of “zoonotic” is that I have been invaded by invisible creatures. There was simply not a moment available for the very human emotion of fear or the disastrous effects of self-pity.

Here's what I mean: after returning to Evanston from saying good-bye to Laurel I took a long walk in hopes of burning off my excess energies. By nightfall I was twenty miles north up near Lake Forest with my feet hurting from my cheap shoes. It was then I remembered the lesson of the stray dogs I used to walk with on the outskirts of Alpine. Such dogs have a level of attention unknown to us. They are worthy of imitation. They know they are strays so they don't go “astray” as it were. Sitting on a park bench near Lake Michigan far from my pathetically ugly dorm room I resolved that I must always be able to locate myself geographically down to a millimeter, also historically, botanically, and sociologically if I were to survive with my problem. To maintain a level of attention I also had to ignore my moods which were only the content of billions of neurons at play.

There is a great deal that is wretchedly tentative about living within the confines of an institution. A university is a process that is always trying to interfere with its contents. Despite the institutional interruptions I was an obsessive student though I would have been well ahead if I had devoted my time to libraries and the splendid museums of the arts and sciences in Chicago. I was a speed reader like my mother who could finish an English mystery in an hour. There is a grueling punishment to nearly all academic prose which encourages speed reading. Naturally one slowed down in literature and the humanities where the aesthetic component offers reason to pause. When I became bleary from reading in my major, economics (again, I didn't want to be poor like my parents), I would return for a half hour to Ovid or Virgil, Walt Whitman or Chaucer. Also to beginning Spanish, French, and Italian because foreign languages are playful. I took botany and zoology for the same reason. Simply enough, I could see the spirit of random play in all living creatures.