Ink (79 page)

“Oh but how Galaxy will whisper in my ear,” Puck sings. “And what she says to me! Winds, carry her sweet nothings that the gods might hear!”

He throws himself backward into the grass, arms wide in invocation, to beseech the breezes. Jack rolls over onto his front, tucks a fist under his chin and gazes down at the gymnast, miming desolation.

“I know, my Mint,” says Jack, “you love me in your heart. How does that help me if I mind the nets at home while you roam, hunting boar, and we're so far and long apart?”

I make some quick notes on the pages scattered all across the table while I'm waiting for the steel pot of coffee to boil on the stove, in between flipping pancakes, forking bacon over on the grill. I have that sort of muted but insistent mix of guilt and worry that comes from doing too many things at once and therefore— perhaps—neglecting all of them. A sizzle, a scribble, a sniff of burning.

“Fuck! Bloody fucking… fuck!”

I jot a last quick note, dump the pen, tong overdone bacon between the two plates of pancake, then start scraping the unsalvageable mess of burnt mix off onto the draining board by the sink, muttering more imprecations.

“You'll wake the toe-rag if you keep swearing like that.”

Anna stands in the doorway to our bedroom, wearing blue jeans now. I claimed my boxers back for cooking in.

“With you for a mother?” I say. “Swearing's a lullaby for our Joshua.”

I pick up one of the plates.

“Thought you wanted this in bed?”

She slides past me, scrapes a chair back.

“Fuck it, I'm fucking well up and about now.”

Jack and Puck glint gold and green in her eyes as she reaches for the maple syrup, licking lips already sweet with the swearing.

“Send me your girlfriend,” Puck says—”what's her name? pretty Filth?—send her to me as a birthday treat. Then when I'm offering a young cow for the wheat, oh,
then
send me your jealous self.”

“Why, I love Filth before all girls,” says Jack. “But
jealous?
You should have seen her weeping, sighing, when I left her crying,
O my fair boy, o, farewell, so long, goodbye.”

He wipes imaginary tears out of his eyes.

“True
sorrow is a wolf among the flocks,” says Puck, “rain on ripe corn, winds whistling through the trees … or when my Moral's in a mood with me.”

He pouts.

“True
joy
is a nanny goat in her willow bower,” says Jack; “it's arbutus for her weaned kids, or a shower for green crops. Oh, but for me there's no joy that my Mint can't top.”

Flash.

Doom.

His eyes widen as he looks at me, eyebrows disappearing under his red mop of hair at the thunder following so close behind the lightning. He turns back to the window, wiping condensation with a frenzy of fist and pressing his nose to the rain-streamed glass in keen anticipation of more flickerings and rumblings.

“Rabbit and me are counting the lightning time,” he says in a voice reserved for Things of Importance.” ‘Cause that's how far away it is.”

“Is that right?” I say. “Do you think two heffalumps is close then?”

“One and a
hit,”
he corrects me. “I think that's really
really
close.”

He bounces Rabbit up and down on the windowsill.

“Boingy boingy boingy. Rabbit likes the lightning. He's not scared.”

Flash.

“One heffalump.”

Doom.

Joshua's
wow
is long and round as only a child's can be.

Puck nods at a discus thrower down below.

“My Pillow loves,” he says, “my rural music. So, you maids of Pyre, reward your student with a heifer as his dues.”

“My
Pillow likes
new
music too,” says Jack. “So make it a bull of butting horns who'll scratch the sand up with his hoof, for me.”

Puck sighs, his hand stretched out dramatically toward the athlete drawing back now, whirling out in the release. The discus soars into the sky. Puck cups his hands around his mouth to cry:

“May those of us who
truly
love you, Pillow, reach your heights, where honey runs for him and thorny brambles yield Assyrian spice.”

Down below, visoring his eyes with a hand, the discus thrower peers up toward them.

“And let me yoke a fox and milk a billy goat!” says Jack. “Only those who love the song of beehives love your songs, you buzzing mayfly. They're your only hope!”

I pick my mug of tea up from the table and wander to the open front door, pondering on how I'm going to rewrite this part of the Third Eclogue I'm working on, an exchange full of references to Virgil's peers—Pollio, Bevius, Mevius— meaningless in a modern context. I never do straight translations, preferring to take the original text as … architecture, substructure, to let it serve as a seed from which strange shoots may sprout, even if it means the source is obscured, palimpsested beneath an organic growth, an arbitrary arbutus of ideas.

Outside, the air is filled with the drum of rain battering down through leaves and bushes, down onto mud and gravel, the wood of the cabin's roof, the metal of the car's hood. The day is cloud dark, but not heavy, not humid, not a summer storm but a spring shower. Anna stands outside on the porch, smoking a cigarette. She flicks her hand at a mayfly buzzing her ear.

An old beehive sits in the trees.

A buzzing whine in my ear seems the song of a Puck sung in fairy time, a whole verse in a millisecond.

“You kids there gathering strawberries and flowers in the fields,” calls Puck.

He points at Jack with one hand, grabs his shoulder with the other.

“Lookout!” he shouts. “Acold snake lurking in the grass. You better run. Take to your heels!”

Jack chucks him off and tussles Puck into a headlock, hand over his mouth.

“Hey there, you sheep,” he shouts. “Don't stray too far and wide. The river-bank's unsound. Stay near. Look at your ram; his fleece is not yet dried—” [He scuffles knuckles on Puck's scalp.] “See? He's still wet behind the ears. Ah!”

Jack's hand jerks away from nimble nipping teeth.

“Tightarse, head off the kids who're grazing down there by the river and I'll dip them in the spring myself,” sings Puck… “whenever.”

“Sheep in the folds, lads. If this son steals all their milk again, our hands will work their teats all day in vain.”

He tweaks a nipple and Puck yelps.

I ask her about Joshua's father as we sit in the evening by the fire, Joshua in his bed and the two of us wrapped together in a patchwork quilt. She's just shut me up,
interrupting as I waffle on about the stitching of Harlequin's suit, the stitching of fragments, of history, of identity, all rumpled together in folds, you see, like this quilt, so they touch each other; and under it all two lovers, naked as Adam and—

“You know,” she's just said, “it's always the woman who gets blasted for lust, for loving just a little too much.”

So I ask her if she's talking about her own past, about Joshua and his being illegitimate—not that it matters in this day and age, not in the big city. In the small towns perhaps, but not in the city. Or here where there's only us two and the wonderful, precious son of her so-called sin.

She doesn't speak much about her past, but I know she was something of a wild child, ended up disowned by her own family. Working the street for a while.

“Sin is the snake in the grass of all modern religion,” I say. “The pagans turned prostitution into a holy ritual. You would have been a priestess in ancient Sumer.”

She laughs.

“Does everything come back to Sumer with you?”

I shrug, walk two fingers across the landscape of the quilt, a giant striding across the green and yellow and brown patches of field and meadow in which Puck and Jack lie, singing against each other, singing for each other. The giant strides up the mountain of us toward the soft breast of this woman too vast in the scale of my imagination to be just a mother, just a whore.

“Alas, look at my gloomy bull” [Puck jabs Jack's chest] “how lean he is, even surrounded with a feast of vetch. To this dumb brute as much as to the herdsman, love is death.”

“My tender lambs,” says Jack, “all skin and bone, are wasting from a bug far worse than love. An evil eye is on my flock, some kind of curse depletes them slowly, one by one.”

You nick one goat, thinks Puck. He still won't let it lie. He sighs.

“OK, we'll call it quits if you give this a try. Tell in what lands the open space of sky's no more than three yards wide and you'll be Apple's equal in my eye.”

“OK,” says Jack, “if you can answer
this
, I'll leave you be. Tell in what lands the flowers spring all graven with the names of kings, and you'll have Filth, with no more meddling from me.”

“Ah'm sure ye'll be guid to her, lad,” Don had said one night round at his, with Anna through in the spare bedroom, putting Joshua down, and the whisky in our glasses. “Course ye'll huv me tae answer tae if no,” he'd said. “Ye unnerstaun?”

He'd smiled as he said it—the grizzly old codger's bark is worse than his bite—but you can't mistake how much he cares for his surrogate… niece? sister? daughter? God knows what they are to each other, Anna and Don, but she's known him long enough that Joshua calls him “Unca Don.”

“I love her,” I'd said.

I hadn't even said it to her yet.

He smiled. I understand he took her in off the streets. Maybe some mad Celtic connection between an Irish lass and a Scotsman so far from home in the Big Apple—both of them having learned the hard way that the streets of those cities, seeming so dreamlike in their distance, aren't always paved with gold— maybe it was that brought them together. I hadn't thanked him yet for saving her from herself, just like I hadn't told her that I loved her yet.

But I would.

In the months to come I would tell her, in a little bar in the East Village, that in the year or so we'd been together I'd come alive as a person and as a writer, that it was her story and Thomas's, the little snippets I had of them, that finally brought the Songs together, made them whole the way she made me whole.

“Does that sound awful?” I'd said. “I don't want you to think I see you as … material.”

She slid her hand into mine, fondled knuckles, fingernails.

“We're all material,” she said. “We're all
stuff.”

And my Jack had leapt from my knuckle to the inside of her wrist and executed the most elegant bow to her Thomas, her Puck.

Jack stands up, stands over Puck, hands on his hips.

“Ah, Puck,” he says, “since we're so matched a pair, you with your pipe, me with my lips, why don't we rest… where? Over there, where hazels mingle with the elms?”

Puck, resting on his elbows, cranes his neck to gaze at Jack, chin on his fists, arching his back. He rolls over, puts his hands behind his head.

“I guess I
should
do what you say, old man. Age before beauty, then; which way? There where the west winds shift the flickering shades? Or with that cavern as our resting place? See, how the wild vine of the woodland scatters her thin clusters over it.”

Jack reaches down a hand to pull him to his feet.

“On our hills,” he says, “there's only Mint can claim to sing as well as you.”

Puck pulls his hand away.
You andyerfuckinMint!

“Oh, aye,” he snorts, “but that one thinks he can beat anybody, even Apple, when he sings!”

“Hop, Rabbit! Jump, Rabbit! Run, run, run!”

Joshua sings his favorite song as we trek up the path, Anna in front, her hair tucked up under the skip cap, me behind with Joshua riding on my shoulders. I look at my huntress in her state-of-the-art Kevlar-lined hunting vest, red-checked shirt, jeans and hiking boots. I wear pretty much the same, as does Joshua—who's currently bouncing Rabbit back and forth across the top of my head—though only Anna carries a rifle.

“There are bear in these woods, you know,” she'd said, tightening the straps on my own vest as I stood there feeling like another child of hers, looking at Joshua, whom she'd been similarly buckling into his own miniature version of the same garb only moments before.

“You know I don't like guns,” I'd said.

“Hippie,” she'd said.

“Nazi,” I'd said.

She kissed me on the cheek, slapped a shoulder—
done.

“You don't mind eating the deer, do you?”

“Don't confuse me with your logic.”

“It's just for safety,” she says. “Same with the vests. If anyone else is out there… it's best to be safe.”

“Hop, Rabbit! Jump, Rabbit! Run, run, run!” sings Joshua, blithely indifferent to the dangers of wild animals and hunters with too many beers in their coolers.

“You first, O Puck,” says Jack. “What have you got? Paeans of passion for our Filth? Verses of reverence for Halogen? Or songs of scorn for Coder? Get stuck in.”

Puck looks down at the flocks now far below, but Jack just grins, moves on uphill.

“Tightarse will keep the grazing kids,” he says. “Begin.”

“No, none of that old shit,” says Puck. “I've got new songs just written down,
here on the bark of a green beech—I've even marked the music, here between the lines, you see? It's these I'll offer you. These are my best.”

He leans upon a tree to rest.

“And after that,” says Puck, “you let me know if you'd still bet on Mint if that bumfuck had the audacity to contest my skill.”

Jack laughs, holding his hands up—
chill.

“Just as the supple osier,” he says, “gives up its ground to the gray olive groves, as the low scent of reed surrenders to aromas of red rose, if you ask me— so far? Mint could not win. He'd have to yield to thee.”

Jack looks shy as Puck walks by, all of a sudden not so brave.