“So rather than stealing money from the college, you’re stealing food from its students.”
“I could never appreciate this carrot,” he said, holding one aloft next to Galahad, “the way she appreciates it.” He smiled at me. The Bible makes no distinction between a smiling sinner and a sneaking one, but I felt then and I still feel after searching and prayer the conviction that it is a meaningful one.
“You don’t understand—”
“That’s not a very Christian welcome.” Eli spoke from the doorway, where I’d been standing before I’d advanced on Hugo. Eli nodded me out of the barn, and as I went he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.” Remember that at the time I had not learned to distrust him.
The next day Columbia’s milk turned pink, and we called the vet, thinking she had an infection. The vet smelled the milk, and then tasted it, surprising all of us there in the barn who thought it harbored deadly bacteria. He said he’d seen it before, mostly with gentle old timers and farm dowagers. The color was from the carotene and was perfectly harmless. If we stopped feeding her carrots, he said, it would return to normal in a few days. But the milk never went back to white.
ELI
Irrigation amounts to making sure the right dirt is wet, and thus it’s muddy work. But it was even muddier than usual the day in October when we found a dog struggling to swim in the canal out by the nut trees. I kid you not, it was a corgi, scratching with its stub legs at the bank but unable to claw its way out and about dead with exhaustion. I leapt in with my boots on and grabbed the poor thing, which was like a soaked and wriggling roll of carpet, and leaned against the wall of the ditch to hand it off to Hugo and Claude. We rode back to the main campus with me coated in mud all down my front side and with my boots, which had about turned into pitchers of slop, in my saddlebags. Hugo led his horse with one hand and the surprisingly obedient corgi with the other, by a lead rope he’d tied around her belly. Claude jabbered the whole way back about how corgis were supposed to be a smart breed so he didn’t know why one would jump into an irrigation ditch with the body type of a hot dog.
The outdoor shower on the back side of the house was like the stall in a cheap bathroom, with just walls on either side but no door. I’d been in the hot water a long time, getting my fingernails clean, degunking the creases between my toes, the cracks of my thighs, mud just about everywhere it can go, before I looked over my shoulder and saw Hugo standing where he had a line of sight. This was far from the first time I’d caught one of the guys here watching me, but it was the first time the culprit had the nerve to keep watching, to smile openly, after being discovered, rather than tucking his head and hurrying off. So what the hell, I thought. I closed my eyes, tilted my head back, and ran my hands through my hair as I turned around to give him the full show.
WESLEY
You can tell a thing by its absence. The first absence I noticed was Hugo’s during breaks and study hours and our nightly stretches of free time. It was common enough for Eli to be off during these stretches, pounding stakes or killing snakes or fixing up the truck. All the details that didn’t fall within student work routines were his domain. Because Columbia’s milk remained pink, I knew I should be able to catch Hugo pilfering from the garden or in the barn, and yet I could never find him at either. Then I noticed I could never find him at all during those hours. Then I noticed that when I tried to find Eli to express my concern, I could never find Eli either. But the idea did not occur to me then. It remained too impossible for even the imagination.
It was with genuine curiosity, genuine worry, that I too disappeared from our unscheduled hours, searching every corner and level of the barn, searching in and under the pickup, and riding horseback down the alleys between fields and along the perimeter of campus, searching for my missing compatriots, to no avail. I’ll admit that I began to despair, as if it were an important page missing from a book of philosophy I was reading, a page offering definitions that would be referenced again later.
A broken sprinkler head shifted me from one despair to another. I found it flooding the corner of the farmhouse green on one of those dusk rides, and I hopped off and waded into the mud to screw a cap onto it. I went out to clean off at the mud shower, which no one used at that time because it was too cold and work hours were long over, but as I rounded the corner to the back side of the dormitory, I spotted a pair of boots under the wall of the cubby, the feet in them shifting gently from side to side. As I crept around to see in the faint purple light, the scene revealed itself: they were both clothed, but Eli had Hugo lifted and pressed against the back wall of the shower, and Hugo’s legs were wrapped around Eli’s waist, crossed at the ankles, and the two of them were kissing.
“The Devil has brought you together, but I will pry you apart,” I shouted, but it came out as a whisper. The Devil had quieted my voice, I thought, and I confess that I fled. When I came back again on several other evenings, I also found my voice missing and my conviction sapped. I could not even speak on the one when I found them both nude, and Hugo kneeling in front of Eli, working Eli’s lap with his mouth. The greater their indiscretions, the more my power was blocked, such that I found myself paralyzed by the spectacle and unable to look away. Eli’s eyes were closed so he could not see my face, but I could see his, and it was caught in a fire of what at the time I called ecstasy. But the roots of the word ecstasy are the Greek ek, for “out of,” and stasis, for “the place where one stands,” though it was not that he was outside of himself. No, the right word was the one that means to be held by, to be occupied. The look on his face was that of a man possessed.
ELI
How many months does it take to fall in love?
The question is phrased wrong.
It doesn’t happen like the flipping of a switch, like the addition of a current to a dormant wire. Falling in love is like being flooded with water so that you feel it running down your head and body even as it rises around your ankles and immerses you.
Hugo named the damn dog Mavis and taught her to live in the southwest corner of the barn near the door, next to Columbia. The cattle didn’t have stalls like the horses did; they could wander into any place they liked, but after Hugo had guided Columbia enough times to her place near the door, through which the snowcapped mountains could be seen sleeping on top of the orchard, she had adopted it as her own.
The students did not like the idea of adopting a pet and grumbled indistinctly about it, but really making that kind of call was something about which they knew to defer to me. I fended them off by arguing she was a herding breed, though she did not herd and seemed only to care for food and petting. In truth, the dog would have gone to a shelter, kill- or non-, on the day she showed up if anyone but Hugo had taken her in. That was one of the things that drew me to him—his renunciation of the utilitarian view of the land we all took, and the way he looked at a dog or a cow or a horse and wanted it to be nothing more than what it was. When we weren’t sneaking off, he spent most of his free time in the barn, rubbing Mavis’s belly, talking to Columbia, and currying and otherwise tending to Galahad. The way he acted not just with these animals but with an onion, a lizard, made me believe that I myself should love them all better too.
WESLEY
As I have said, the gravity of their sins somehow prevented me from acting. A much smaller sin, a simpler one, is what freed me. Early one morning I walked by the barn and saw Eli inside, offering a carrot to Columbia all by himself. That was it. Let it not be said that I took rash or hasty action. I sought first the counsel of Pastor Dale. I waited for him to ride out on Lancelot one Tuesday after our theology class, and I rode out after him on Gawain, neglecting my work duties to do so, though for the purpose of speaking to the pastor, allowances were made.