A cascade of memories starts the moment I hear that rough, rumbly bass say my name.
Five years we knew each other, were with each other as and when we could be, moments stolen here and there, precious fruit plucked from exotic and dangerous trees.
Our time was choked with too many emotions, too many things, but guilt most of all, a gray kind of thing that blunted color and sound and the pleasure we sought from each other.
The first:
The threshold of seventh grade, when the childhood we knew turned over into something astonishing and dark, as we watched our bodies yield to biology and the exigencies of adulthood. On us: voices cracking and deepening, hair there and there and there, that dollop of flesh which defined our sex finding its own clamorous voice and a newfound ability, passion wracking us day and night. On our sisters: the budding of breast, widening of hip, the scarlet call of fecundity announcing itself as it must, the pleated declivity there a mysterious inversion of our own proud flesh.
He and I were a study in opposites, comical in contrast. I, tall, gangly, unable to get out of my own way at times, huddling in on myself; he, compact and powerful, all shoulders and chest and sinew. I the cantering colt to his stalwart solidity.
But at the core of us, a sameness that crocused out in the frost-chewed spring of our adolescence, flowers that only we could see, we whom this thing had chosen, had plucked us unwilling from the ranks of our brethren.
Both of us danced around it, poking it, daring it to burst forth.
And one day, it did.
We were in my room, after school, talking of nothing in particular, the habit of idle prattle that boys hold in common with girls, even if they wouldn’t admit to it. I was changing my shirt from some mishap at lunch, rucking the thing up and over my head, tossing it in the general direction of my closet. He was there, stretched out on my bed, watching me silently. I reached into a drawer for a t-shirt; before I put it on he called my name. I turned to him. I watched him watching me, eyes glittering in the sepia gloom of my curtained room, and nothing became something.
I went to him, stood at the edge of the bed. He looked up at me, smiled, hoisted himself up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, a leg to each side of me, pinning me. He reached up, laid a hand flat on my flat belly, open invitation, first salvo, pawn advanced onto the battlefield.
And I responded, hand reaching out to his kinked curls, across his brow, down his broad nose, to the bow of his mouth.
Nothing but touch that first time, as we lay side by side on my bed, naked, delighting in our samenesses and our differences, drawing together, hip grinding against hip, mouth upon mouth as we found ourselves in each other.
The last:
Our final summer together drew to a close. Summer relinquished its hold on this country only grudgingly; the trees and fields were still green, but there was a hint to it, a note of relaxation as the earth prepared her bed for sleep.
We were down at the river behind the dairy; tiers and terraces of limestone wedding-caked down and down to a flat gray-green ribbon of water snaking past us. Many of us had been here; many of us would follow. This day, though, only he and I were here, together and alone.
The intervening years had worked themselves upon us. I was still stringy, still lean, but my body had found itself in that time and I had become the solitary runner locked up inside me. He, too, had changed; there was something fierce and ursine in him, in his hairiness, in his rolling musculature. He was track and field, was wrestling, was brooding and brutish maleness to my spidery and delicate spareness.
We sat side by side, arms and legs akimbo, naked again, having just come up from the cool water, basking in the August heat baking up from the broad, flat slabs of limestone into our buttocks and our heels.
A third thing lay between us, had done so all summer: the fact of my leaving.
Atlanta had beckoned; I’d responded. There was nothing to tie me here except for him, and it was a strong attraction. But school was school, and Teresa would stay here, with our mother. She’d met someone and things were promising. I wanted to leave; I had to leave.
But, him.
We looked at each other across our bent arms.
“Don’t go,” he murmured.
I looked away, as I always did whenever he asked this question.
“I have to.”
He smiled and I could see the pain behind it. He knew I was leaving him behind; he was tied to his family where I was not, was destined to take over the business where I was not.
He unkinked his arms and legs, stretched himself out before me, and I looked down at his body and there, to his profligate maleness, coiled serpent-like between his thighs. More than that bound us, but that alone was powerful enough, and I felt myself responding in turn.
I leaned over and kissed him, tongues slipping past open mouths. I could feel his hand on the back of my head, but he didn’t need to convince me, to force me there. I went willingly, helpless slave to it even as I took him first into my mouth and some small while later into me as I straddled him and willed him inside me.
We worked at each other under the sun. There was little that two men could do with each other that we had left undone save for those things that seemed to bring nothing but pain and misery; our lovemaking was simple and pure, the purest thing I had ever discovered in my life. I arched my body as I sat astride him, my hips flexing, my breast bared to him and to the burning sun. I looked down at him and even in this erotic transport he wept, even as I wept.
The sounds of our passion echoed across and around the rock-lined chasm as we found our completion; I leaned forward and kissed him again. I would take him inside me, all of him, if I could, bite him in and drink him in until he was one with me, seeing with my eyes, hearing with my ears, twinned to me.
Afterwards, as we unknitted ourselves to lie side by side on the rock, he came up on one elbow, traced delicate arabesques on my chest.
“Don’t go,” he murmured.
“I have to,” I replied, and I didn’t look away, not this time.
—
I force myself back to the here and now of this. “Tom,” I say, as he walks towards me, footsteps crunching on gravel.
I didn’t seen him inside, in the crowd, when I tried to speak. What would I have said, have done, if I had glimpsed him? My heart thumps in my chest.
“Mark,” he answers. “Mark Davenport.”
Around and between us circles a mad storm of infinities great and small, futures waiting to be teased out from whatever we say and do in the next few moments. I don’t want to move, don’t want to risk making a choice. But not making a choice is a choice as well. I step gingerly. I am conscious of everything: my breathing, the movements of my eyes, the faint tease of wind through my hair.
“You came.”
He smiles. “Of course. I had to.”
“Thank you.” I gesture towards the building; faint sounds of some kind of hymn drift out and I think of my sister and her family, trapped in there. “I… had to get out of there. I couldn’t… ”
“I understand.”
Something occurs to me; I gesture vaguely back at the humble metal shed of a church. “That isn’t… ? I mean… ”
His brow furrows, but then he understands and smiles. “No, no. That’s not where I… well, I don’t, anyway.”
I try for humor. “Good… because those are some of the craziest motherfuckers I’ve ever seen.”
It works; he chuckles. “That’s pretty much the consensus around here.”
The now seems to be nothing more than a cautious meeting of old friends; whatever else that existed between us remains to be discovered.
“They were good enough for my mother, I guess.” I sigh; I’m tired and… I’m not sure what else. “I don’t want to talk about my mother. I’m tired of talking about my mother. I need to get away from here.”
“I understand.” As he speaks, a slight smile plays on his mouth, his face, underneath the thick, dark thatch of his beard. I think he, too, understands what’s at play here.
“Tom, I… ” want to apologize for everything is on my lips. He holds up a hand, stopping me.
“No. Not yet.” He turns slightly, then back and gestures at me. Come on.
And I want to. I do, but there’s a sound from behind us and I turn: Teresa, barging out the front door of the church, making a beeline towards us. Even from this distance I can tell that she’s angry. As she has every right to be.
As she gets closer, the frown on her face deepens, intensifies… the faint wisp of clouds on the horizon gathering for a surprise storm that no one had predicted.
As she gets closer, Tom steps out of the shadows, and she stops. We stand there, some strange trinity, not speaking. Tom clears his throat. “Teresa?”
She glances at him, then back at me. “What are you doing?” Her voice is flat and leaden.
“I had to get out of there, Teresa. I just… I couldn’t… ” I’m floundering, backpedaling.
“Say anything about our mother,” she finishes.
“To those people?” I shake my head. “No. They don’t know her. The real her.”
“Your real her.”
The strange words make sense to me. My version of my mother is not the version that Teresa knows (close, but different) or the one that the people inside that metal box of a church think they know. “Does it matter?”
“It does to me. I have to live here, Mark. You get to go back to goddamned New York. I have to look at these people. Duane has to work with these people. Word will get around.”
“So you let these people control your life? Strangers? Crazy people?”
“They meant something to her, Mark.” She waves an arm vaguely in the air behind her. “This meant something to her.”
Despite myself, despite the altostratonimbocumulus cloud of Teresa’s anger, I chuckle. “Teresa… c’mon. Seriously? This is just the last place she ended up before she died. It could have been anywhere. If she’d lived longer, it would have been somewhere else. Don’t you remember what it was like? Every month or two, it was something different. How many churches did we pass through when we were with her? I lost track. I stopped counting. I stopped going.”
Teresa’s gaze flickers between me and Tom; she knows something of what transpired between the two of us back then, knows something about that which replaced the church in my life. “So… what are you going to do, Mark? Go off with him? Now?”
I sigh. “I don’t know,” I mutter. I look back up at her, can see Tom out of the corner of my eye; his face is cast-in-stone neutral. “What do you want me to do, Teresa?”
“I want you to go back inside, say something.”
“You want me to lie? In a church?” I smile to take the sting out of my words, but she’s not buying.
“You can’t find one nice thing to say about her?”
“Not what these people want to hear. What did you say?”
“That she tried. That she kept trying. That she loved this place the best. That she truly appreciated what they did for her.”
“Okay. Fine. I never saw any of that, because I wasn’t here.”
Teresa says nothing. Smart of her. She sighs, turns back to the church, turns back again to me. “Are you at least going to be here when we’re done?”
I look at Tom; if Teresa is a summer thunderstorm, Tom is a glacier, locked deep inside himself. I can see nothing on his face.
“I should go,” he mutters. “This was… ” He shakes his head.
“Tom,” I call out, to his retreating back, but he continues on. Away from me. I turn back to Teresa, suddenly angry. “Look, Teresa—I don’t give a fuck what you tell them. Tell them… tell them I was too overcome by emotion to say anything.” I chuckle, but there’s no humor in it. “That may even be true.”
Teresa opens her mouth to say something—I’m almost certain that the word she’s looking for is asshole, and I wouldn’t blame her for saying it—but says nothing, instead.
“Mark… ” she begins. But she can see that it’s useless. She turns back to the church, walks away from me, arms at her side, fists clenched, head bowed. I look back at where Tom was.
Of course, he’s gone.
—
I am here when they’re done. I wait by the van, arms crossed, staring into the night. The sounds of whatever’s going on inside the church waft out on the breeze, rising and falling as Bobby works the crowd. I wonder if they resent it, this manipulation, but I realize that if they did, they wouldn’t be here. They enjoy it. They need it.
My mother always enjoyed it, up until she didn’t. She enjoyed being taken along for the trip, she used to say; I always pitied the poor hapless priests, pressed into service as unwitting drivers of my mother’s faith, unaware that at some point they were going to take an unwelcome detour and she would bail on them.
The doors to the church open, people start filing out in small groups; Bobby is there, at the door, to bid them fond adieu, or something like it.
The first to leave are now even with Teresa’s van; they pass by me, staring down at the ground, unable to meet my eye; what did Teresa tell them? Some risk a glance; some even risk a small smile of sympathy but nothing else.
Then, there are Duane and Teresa and the children, facing Bobby. I watch as he embraces Teresa, murmurs something in her ear; Bobby turns to Duane and the two men look at each other and Bobby extends a hand. More words are spoken, but I can’t hear them. Bobby’s head nicks in my direction as he allows himself to almost-see me. I suppress the childish urge to give him the finger.
Duane and Teresa manage to break away and start towards the car. Bobby slips back inside his church, pulls the doors shut behind him. My mother’s history in this community is officially done.
—
Teresa says nothing to me as they approach the car; her face is a stony mask of stubborn dismissal. Duane essays a small smile/grimace—what are you gonna do, right?—and grips my shoulder as he unlocks the doors and we all climb inside. Corbin heads immediately to the third seat, lumbers himself into it and pulls out his phone and earbuds, plugs himself in to something thumpy and angrily vocal—some kind of rap that Teresa probably doesn’t approve of, if she’s even heard it. Grace and I sit side-by-side in the middle bench.
I stare out the window; the ride home is silent save for the sound of Corbin’s heathen music.
Posted 11 December 2024