“But he has latterly had a death in the family, and I must be tentative. But I have not forgotten the children. And I wonder if the recent death will not be powerful motive for him to lend us a hand.”
She moved her own hand and cradled me in it, cock and balls at rest. It was as if she held the whole of me.
Uncle Sidney Cowper, I came to realize, had admirably demonstrated the kind of discipline and restraint about which he had preached. This came to me of a wet, cold afternoon in my fourteenth year when I was out and at my chores — weather was no obstacle to the performance of duty, Uncle Sidney preached, and besides, we did need the wood to warm the house. I was splitting some limbs of birch to use as kindling in our kitchen stove and was concentrating on the blade of the axe in the greasy, chilly rain. I brought in an armful and was about to go out for another, pausing to filch a carrot from the simmering kettle of soup on the stove, when I heard a kind of snuffling from the pantry. It occurred to me that something large, say a raccoon, had got into our stores. At the door, just slightly ajar, I paused, for the snuffling had been joined by a lighter sound, as of panting, and it sounded more like a person, and less like a raccoon. I went to one knee at the door and listened, pressing my ear to the space between the door and the jamb.
The lighter sound became “He … will … hear,” whispered in my mother’s voice.
The deeper snuffling was, of course, the energetic gasping for breath as he grasped for my mother of Uncle Sidney Cowper.
I do not know what caused me to stand and kick the door shut, but I did, still dripping in my soaked canvas coat, before I went outside and set to splitting thick, heavy sections of birch. It was pleasing that no thoughts came into my head or, if they did, were instantly banished by my care with the heavy axe and my concentration on meeting the top of each section with the wet, sharp blade. When I heard the door from the mudroom off the kitchen slam to, I knew to stand and catch my breath. I held the axe across my body with both hands, and I was uncertain about my intentions with it.
This thought seemed to catch Uncle Sidney, for he stopped in his progress toward me and studied his nephew, but then, to his credit, he came up within inches of me and looked into my eyes. He wrapped the skirts of his long coat beneath his legs, and he sat on the chopping block. I stepped back a pace, whether for the easier placement of a blow or for safety’s sake, I do not know.
Water poured off the shakes of the roof and into a couple of barrels, while the wind blew rain upon us and the spruces about the house nodded under the onslaught. My uncle said, “So what do you say, Billy? Was the slamming necessary? A gentleman doesn’t slam doors. Nor does he invade the privacy of others. Don’t pout, son.”
“Uncle, would you not call me ‘son’?”
“It’s your dear father’s prerogative, eh?”
I didn’t know what prerogative was, but I nodded.
“Understood. Next?”
“Pardon, sir?”
“What’s on your mind, Billy? Come along.”
“Why … my mother, Uncle Sidney.”
“Yes. We were conferring, she and I.” He stared hard into my eyes, defying me to comment. “On matters of great moment.”
“I don’t think my father would approve, Uncle Sidney. I — may I speak frankly, sir?”
“As I’ve taught you, son — ah: lad. As you know to do. With courtesy.”
“Sir, I don’t think it’s right, you making the beast with my mother.”
I waited for the blow. None came. He smiled. He reached out his hand and cupped my thigh from behind. He kneaded gently and most intimately. He said, “I don’t actually care very much which one of you it is,” he said. “It could be you. It could be her. I’m pleased to let you choose which one.” His hand came around to the front of my thigh and began to climb. I stepped back and raised the axe to my shoulder. “There are virtues to each,” he said, smiling as if she had just set down his evening meal.
I said the only thought I had: “Do you mean, sir, that my mother is … with you because she’s keeping you off me?”
His smile went wider, his eyes disappeared between the folds of skin beneath and around them, and then the smile faded and his eyes returned. He studied me, and I knew he knew me very well. He was certain, I thought, that I would permit her to sacrifice the wholeness of her intimate being to preserve the wholeness of mine.
I lifted the axe from my shoulder and my body tensed. So did his. He stood as I raised the axe above my head, and he moved backward, straddling the block, as I brought it down. He skipped backward, nimbly for such a large man, and I missed by him little. The blade was buried deep in the chopping block.
“You might have hurt me!” he said, his feelings apparently damaged though his body was sadly unscarred.
“I regret that I did not, Uncle Sidney.”
“I suppose you do. I’m going back inside, Billy. Your mother and I must … talk. Why don’t you stay out here and split more wood. Say for another half an hour? You won’t get too wet, I pray.”
He could dominate me physically, unless I killed him while he slept or while his back was turned. He would have me in a fashion I had heard about from boys in the district, but which I didn’t entirely understand. I had to push and pry to get the axe out of the block, and I worked at that as I thought. Or he would have my mother — I again heard the snuffling of his breath, and the sound of my mother panting. I would have to kill him, I thought. I could not permit my mother to give herself to him, in violation of my father’s memory and of herself.
Though she had not been weeping. I was certain of that. She had been concerned for their privacy, I thought, hearing again the way she said her concerns that someone might hear.
I would have to kill him, I thought again.
We sat in Madison Square and watched as a pointy-snouted street dog stalked doves. M was to imminently depart for his office, and I was coming off a night’s wandering, intending to walk downtown with him in the direction of Mr. Lapham Dumont, whose services I had to enlist. He ate a small green apple that was sour-tasting, he said around small nibbles of the tight flesh of the fruit, as traffic pounded and whinnied and rattled on the stones where Broadway and Fifth Avenue crossed, the western street going east and the eastern going west. The island there was a cinched-in belt, a kind of waist of an X, a collection point for streams of commerce and conveyance and noise.
“Dr. Osgood read from 15th Corinthians,” he said, as if to the apple. “Mal’s company of volunteers was present, a good number of them, strapping and sorrowing lads. They carried his coffin from the house to the funeral cars — black vehicles, several black horses, though a few of them were chestnut; none were white. A white horse, I think, would have been frightening somehow. They first walked through the hall, single file, orderly, attentive, somber. They looked on Mal and then passed through. They returned again to take his coffin up. They, alive, in their uniforms, and he, so dead, in his. Elizabeth had dressed him. I know not how. The wound was so apparent, despite everyone’s best efforts. Such wounds, you know, are taken up by those who live. Do you not think so? You have had experience—”
“In wounds? Oh, yes.”
“No, Bill. In surviving the wounded dead and assuming their wounds. On the body of the soul, I say. Am I wrong?”
“No. I remember a man who was shot in the lungs. Whenever I cough, I think of his blood coming out between his lips.”
“A fallen comrade,” he said.
I made no reply.
“He was a boy. He was dressed as a man. Why not? He wished to be one. He even wore the ceremonial sword.”