Every Boy Should Have a Man
by
Preston L. Allen
To Dawn, with love
in lesser darkness, in greater darkness, in brighter light that follows
ever by my side
ever holding my hand
Now consider the man. He does not overhunt. He does not overeat. Man is one with great nature. The oaf can learn much from the man. His sun rises in gold but sets in blood. His fire burns the world.
Acknoledgements
Many thanks to my readers Ellen Milmed, Tiina Lombard, Edward Glenn, Jason Murray, William Durnell, and Kevin Eady, to my editor Ibrahim Ahmad, to my publisher Johnny Temple, to my agent Eleanor Jackson, and to the Earth Ethics Institute at Miami Dade College, whose class in the swamps inspired this book.
Much props, all.
1
Every Boy Should Have a Man
He was not unusual because he had a man. In those days every boy had a man or wanted one.
He was not unusual because he had a man that talked. With the boom in mining and the approaching war, they were breeding more talking mans, and many boys — at least those born to well-to-do families — had mans that talked.
What made this boy unusual was that he was born to a poor family and he had a man that talked.
He was playing in the bramble after school one day when he spotted the man.
“A man!” the boy exclaimed.
The man said, “Hello there.”
“A man that talks!” squealed the delighted boy.
He did not look like a wild or dangerous man, so the boy fashioned a leash out of string from his sack and led the man home.
He played with him in his room until just before his mother came home. He told the man, “Don’t say anything or I will be punished.”
The man, who seemed to have understanding, said, “Okay.”
Then the boy put him under the bed.
The mother came home, and then the father. The man under the bed said nothing, and the evening ended with night as it always did.
In the morning before the boy left for school, he checked under his bed.
“I’m hungry,” said the man.
“Hungry?”
“At the place where I was before, they fed me.”
“What do you eat?”
“I don’t know. What do you eat?”
The boy went out into the kitchen and brought back his meager breakfast which his mother had left for him and gave it to the man. The boy watched as the man ate. The man ate everything. The boy’s hungry stomach growled as he watched.
The man looked up from the plate he had licked clean. “Now I’m thirsty.”
The boy came back with water and watched as the man drank. Then he put the man back under the bed and left for school.
After school the boy raced home and checked under his bed. The man’s snore was a steady buzz. The boy shook him until his eyes drooped open.
“Come on, let’s play.”
“I’m hungry again.”
“Uh… okay.”
The man followed as the boy checked the house for food. Sometimes when the boy turned, the man would be inspecting some object in his hand — Mother’s prized glass bowl, a dish towel, the shiny tin of cooking oil, the small singing harp — and the boy would invariably order the man to put the thing down and he would do so obediently, for he was an obedient man.
Opening a cupboard, the boy discovered the scraps of meat his mother had hung to dry. The man took them from him and devoured them quickly. But afterward he was playful and talkative. All in all, the boy was having a good time, though he worried what would happen when his parents found the scraps of meat were missing.
Just before it was time for his parents to arrive home, the boy put the man back under the bed and prepared for the worst.
His mother would be wroth. She would scold and threaten with punishments severe. But he would stand his ground. He would cry, “But Mom, every boy should have a man. All the other kids have one. Why can’t I? It’s just not fair.”
Maybe it would work. Maybe.
That evening when his parents arrived home, they were in a grand mood, having stopped off at the festival and come back with sacks full of food. At the festival there is much food and everyone is free to eat. No one is supposed to eat to excess or put the food in sacks and take it home, but his parents were known to be poor and so the authorities, as usual, looked the other way.
The evening became night, the boy’s mother did not mention the missing scraps of dried meat, and the boy went to bed believing that he had gotten away with it.
Under the bed, his man was talking. He was saying silly things and singing silly songs: “Fly me to the moon. Fly me to the stars. Fe, fe, fe! Victory!” The words made no sense, but the boy listened, enchanted, until he fell asleep.
The next day, the boy raced home after school to be with his man, but he found his mother fussing around the kitchen — his mother, who almost never came home early. Before the boy could say a word, his mother scolded, “Let me see this man of yours.”
The boy was frightened speechless. Mother didn’t look angry, not exactly, but she continued to scold: “What have you been feeding him? All of our food? I was saving that meat. They don’t eat that. He’s going to get sick and make a big mess. When your father finds out, what do you think he’s going to say? You know his temper. You didn’t steal this man, did you?”
He led her into his room and bid the man come out from under the bed.
The man emerged timidly. First his head popped out, then his limbs. Unfolding himself, he stood to his full height. He was tall — almost as tall as the boy. He was a tall man, but thin. His ribs showed through his skin. He hadn’t been eating properly since even before the boy had found him, and they lose weight so fast when they do not eat.
His hair was matted with dirt, bramble, and what appeared to be bird droppings. He smelled like feces. He looked like a well-bred man, so the mother didn’t imagine that he had messed on himself — but she knew that somewhere under the bed was a pile of his droppings that she would have to locate and remove before the whole place smelled like a zoo.
The boy’s mother took the man out back and washed him down with soapy water and a sponge. The man shivered as she dried his body with the fluffy towel Grandmother had given them. He had brownish skin, with areas around his elbows and knees darker than everywhere else.
She scratched his head with one of her combs, and when she had the hairs on his head under control, she tied the ends of them with little bits of colored cloth. She trimmed the coarse hairs on his chest and loins with clippers of brass, and then she pinched his loins into a crisp red pouch retrieved from her room.
The man was very pretty after the mother was done with him — him with his new hair cloths and fancy loin pouch. He looked like the man of a wealthy family now and this troubled her.
The mother went out to the market and returned with some vegetables and grains. She explained to the boy: “This is what they eat.”
“But he ate all the meat that I gave him. He seemed to like it.”
The mother shook her head. “They are not cannibals. Eating of his own flesh will make him sick.”
She set the food in a bowl before the man, and she and the boy watched as he ate. He was a well-trained man, who ate without spilling. As the man ate, the boy petted his head and the mother, caught up in nostalgia, told him, “I had a man when I was a little girl.”