A small town approaches the doings of its past with a heel on a spade in the dirt, digging up where you set it or leaving set what you’d rather not unearth.
When people want to know your business, in time they make it their business to root in your dirt and come up a fistful. If it’s something you have and they want it they’ll step hard on that spade and grind their boot heel on its edge for as long as it takes to break the hardest earth to get at it. But if it’s something you’ve done that they’ve done themselves or want to do, then that spade turns tender tungsten around the tiniest roots and leaves alone what they’d just as soon not have you stir up in them. So, a child gets hit or bit or worse in a house across town, or a dalliance in the shadows produces one man’s sprout from another man’s seed, or a suffering love that was already secret is snuffed out in secret with no chance to suffer it out in the wide open, or a spooking is blamed for a man gone ghost, or half a dozen more doings the Good Book says are bad get done, get done again, and again, and again, and no one says one word, and more than likely it’s happening in more than one house. Time notches its bedpost on comings and doings like these.
As a town digs, so does a single man. When the game of Adam and Abel first began, Kennesaw was too young to understand what was happening to him, happening upon him. He thought perhaps that this was as it should be between fathers and sons, he didn’t question it or even speak of it, an unspoken voice in him said don’t, so he didn’t. His reasoning was sound for a boy who followed his father’s orders. If you dug a hole in clay, clay is what you’d find and clay, as his father assured him, is as normal as dirt. He had no reason to suspect that if he dug down deeper, there might be clay of a deeper hue, more rust than brown, like dirt mixed with blood. Or, if in another spot entirely he shivved his spade into soil of an exotically different composition such as the mulch of decayed plants, the fistful he’d find would be a version of the story altogether different than the one his father learned him. But if Kennesaw had believed wholeheartedly what his father said, if all clay was indeed as normal as dirt as his father had assured him, he might have traded stories with Carnival or Luddy or Mawz as one would boast openly about a first slug of applejack or a stolen toke on a briar pipe. An open boast would have echoed across Grunts Pond, and had it, a groin-busting Godourfather! would have been as often a grunt-out out there as the more common yeahverily! and comeallyefaithful! and even Brisket Whiskerhooven’s nasal, but potent, Knotsthy!
Yet, as Kennesaw matured, he sensed that an open boast this was not. Open boasts were Columbine Buckett and Russet Aspetuck and their mutual mooniness over his ax and his long thumb, or the seventy-two hours in an airless shack when Hock Hackensack marinated his new bride Anamana in the ever-funky musk of his skunk loving. Open boasts are titter-makers even a spinster can approve of, they’re gasps and giggles straight out of the Good Book chapter and verse that come at you winking like a drunken limerick. Open boasts get passed with the peas at Sunday Sit Down, they’re stitched like an old dress hem into a trousseau quilt to inspire the next bed, they’re stories the old folks bring out into the night without mosquito netting on them that raise the kind of bumps nearly everyone present is happy for.
A closed boast is a private suffering that everybody knows about yet keeps their hush about. It’s a Carnival Aspetuck unable to conceal his celebration of his sister Jubilee. And it’s certainly a Flummox raising Cain on Kennesaw in the game of Adam and Abel. A closed boast is right there on the table next to the peas at Sunday Sit Down, a mouth-watering temptation in a ladle-less china tureen that everyone seated has the phantom taste of on their tongue, but unlike the peas swimming in the butter of acceptability, not a one will risk asking for it to be passed. A closed boast is too close to the bone of human weakness, the raw matter of lust in unfettered free-for-all that courses deep and concealed within us all.
A closed boast is a Hunko Minton, clandestine and pulsing behind a pond-side boulder, with his boyish love down around his ankles and his mannish heart in both hands, pining for Kennesaw, pining, pining. A boast more closed, so closed it had no name, was a Kennesaw and his own ongoing indulgence of Hunko’s clandestine curiosity down on that rocky shore of Grunts Pond, and his own clandestine curiosity about that curiosity that kept him coming back for more. Add to that the matter of clay, shovels full of it on a daily basis. With his father, the clay had an unexpectedly earthy air: there was a light dusting of pleasure in the uncertain doings for Kennesaw—a pleasure that he wished he could resist but couldn’t. It was to his relief, though, that the pleasure reached a quick, violent peak, and like an air-borne scent, dissipated just as soon as his father let him go. The curiosity with Hunko, however, was as different as a cyclone is to a sigh. That pleasure for Kennesaw wasn’t a dusting, that pleasure was a hole-filler, and as uncertain as he was about the air he shared with his father, his doings with Hunko blew onto him a pleasure that long clung to him like Hock Hackensack’s stink. And, oh how he wished he didn’t so completely enjoy that smell.
The heel on the spade can only sink the spade so deep. Kennesaw’s father said clay was as normal as dirt, yet no one else ever iterated that aphorism at Sunday Sit Down, nor stitched it into a quilt, nor grunted it under the stars. A grunt here, a grunt there, a chorus of grunts in the moonlight air as far as Kennesaw could tell were not about clay at all—they were about pink velvet ribbons and skirts tumbled high and the farm-fresh smell of a girl’s slightly dirty wrist as she passed you the peas.
Why Kennesaw refused entry to any possibility that there were others who staked the same claim to clay is as big a riddle as those cobra-headed colossi along the Euphrates. After all, right in front of his own nose was clay of the purest form. It was clay that didn’t parade itself as dirt, didn’t even try to sell you on any comparison at all, it just dropped its pants and said to the world: I’m clay—want to get dirty?
The nakedness of a Hunko of clay both thrilled Kennesaw and unsettled him. The beaming willingness of the boy to wait out his own maturation until it could swim itself upstream, and then present the bounty of himself to Kennesaw as he would a cupped palmful of tadpoles fresh from the first spring run-off, was the single most nakedly pure act of humanity that Kennesaw had ever experienced. There on the pond shore for all the fluidity they shared until Kennesaw closed the tap of his heart, their daily play was everything his father’s game of Adam and Abel wasn’t. Now it was Kennesaw who was the older one, the larger one, the one more into his manhood. He could bend the rules of their play, bind them with his own belt to a post if it so disposed him, whenever he so wanted, and more to the point, if. He, Kennesaw, could take from Hunko as Flummox took from him, exert a captor’s power over his pulsing young admirer as his father did over him; take the boy, spend him, and always keep the boy guessing as to the next opportune moment he’d be able to get at him again.
But Kennesaw wasn’t Flummox, and in Hunko he did not see what his father saw in him, whatever it was that his father saw in him. With Hunko, Kennesaw was one—a pound of iron on a farrier’s scale, no better, no bigger; ounce for ounce, no different than a pound of feathers. This little stub was his equal in ardor, if not in measure, and the delight they simultaneously showered upon one another should have been enough to overflow a china tureen for a lifetime of Sunday Sit Downs. Hunko happily would have been the bowl to Kennesaw’s ladle for the pleasure of a table ever set for two. He by himself would build them a foundation of clay by hand, build walls of clay, a roof of clay, and in such the solid structure clay would be as normal as clay and whoever did not like it could eat their own dirt. But it was Kennesaw, with his heel on the spade and the spade digging, digging, at some layer deep down who one day wouldn’t dig any deeper; he hit a rock or a root, and he left the shovel stuck there, and left Hunko stuck there, too.
Fathers. These men whose biology turns them brute and who repent for nothing—why does our blood compel us to love them? In the privacy of their individual confusions, Kennesaw and True asked of themselves this same question for the many remaining years of their lives, and for the many remaining years of their lives conclusions eluded them.
Kennesaw let slip his uncertainty to her one afternoon, one winter’s day one foot at a time on brittle ice. He hadn’t called it a name yet, in his heart it did not answer to “shame,” but in his head—happy as he was—the moniker stuck, and stuck as sharp as a spade’s honed edge. He couldn’t align his bluer-than-blues on True’s browns when he told her what was happening in his own home, no more so than he could look her in the browns when he told her what was happiness on the shore’s edge. But her browns had a way of piercing his blues with an honesty as sure as her name. She told him a story that she had heard at a Sunday Sit Down not too long after Mawz Engersol had been turned out, and Bull Engersol had been turned under, and her mother Cozy had turned her own disenchantment with life into a decanter of sweet venom from which she filled her glass nightly until she was ready to turn in.
That Flummox, Cozy said between heaving gulps, like father, like son. His old man, Congress, was bad weather blowing south, and that Flummox turns his weathervane the same direction, too. I’d watch out for that Kennesaw if he ever has a son.
To Kennesaw, True uttered this rebuttal: you’re no more Flummox than Hunko is you, she told him, and although her words reeked of logic and clarity, Kennesaw nearly puked from confusion. That one thing could be two things was not a plateau of reason Kennesaw had ever himself ascended to. The result was a teeter-totter of mind and heart, one up, one down, one down, one up, with his life, he felt, hinged on a swivel.
Kennesaw never figured need to watch out for what old winds blew. It was hard to imagine any other son in town set upon by the man who begot him, but here it was in his own family, a closed boast with its own history of shame. How far back a hush was kept is another poser for those cobra-headed colossi. Here was his father, Flummox, doing to his son, Kennesaw, what he knew to do because it was done to him. And here was his father, Congress, doing to his son, Flummox, what he knew to do no doubt because it was done to him. And here’s his father, Plato, no doubt doing to his son, Congress, what he knew to do because it was no doubt done to him … a closed boast that, for all Kennesaw knew, went all the way back to Noah, to Lamech, to Methuselah, to Enoch, to Cain, to Adam, to clay, to air.
If clay was as normal as dirt, was clay as normal as clay as Hunko would have him believe? Was there no relationship to dirt at all? Was what existed between him and Hunko as different from his doings with his father as clay is from mulch? Was there such a finely tilled soil where good and bad could grow from the same seed? He had wanted to believe it. Hunko had pressed him to believe it. Even True in her own brown-eyed honesty had given him the wink of her approval. Believe it. But he couldn’t. Hunko was like a son to him. And if Hunko was like a son, what did that make him?
Delight too often is turned soil that loses its sweetness if nothing is planted in it to grow. From seeing his young stub as his equal to seeing himself as the lad’s abuser was all in a day’s plowing. Kennesaw turned his back on clay then and there. Shut himself off from dirt, too. Scraped his heels clean of anything that might cling.