AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT DAY, AIDAN’S SPOON STOPPED MIDWAY between his oatmeal bowl and his mouth.
Dec and Tink were engaged in an argument that had escalated to the point where Bill was trying to mediate before the matron gave them all a demerit for excessive volume. This allowed Aidan to nudge Charles’s elbow undetected.
“Lookit,” Aidan murmured, and he gestured with his chin to the demerit chart on the wall.
“What? The chart?” Charles didn’t see any new demerits on either of their names.
“’Bout halfway down, first column. Last name Thomas,” Aidan said to his bowl.
Charles squinted and scanned down the list of names until he came to it. His mouth briefly hung open before he quietly said to Aidan, “Talk in the yard.”
With the bell signaling the end of breakfast, they filed outside. Dec called to Aidan, “Hey, Sully, ya comin’ down to Starlight for your first clarinet lesson this morning?” During band the day prior, the bandleader had asked both Charles and Aidan to consider learning clarinet, explaining that the band had lost two clarinetists when the last two boys were placed out. Charles had truthfully pleaded a tin ear, which, fortunately for everyone, he had not been asked to prove, but Aidan had accepted and only found out later that Dec also played clarinet.
Aidan gave Dec the thumbs-up as Charles dragged him to a quiet corner of the yard.
“It can’t be him,” Charles stated flat out.
Aidan raised an eyebrow. “And why is that?”
“There has to be some grown feller here on the island named Cole or something.”
“Naw,” said Aidan with a growing smile. “I’ll bet my hat on it. Miss Turner’s man ain’t a man at all—he’s a First Classer.”
“You’re bettin’ your hat on the notion that Miss Turner is drop-pin’ her drawers with a fifteen-year-old student on this here island?”
“Could be fourteen, even.”
“Why would she do it?” Charles could all too well imagine why a boy would want such an arrangement, but a beauty like Lydia Turner wanting one of the students?
“I dunno. What other choice has she got here?”
None of the women Charles had seen working the waterfront had shown any enthusiasm for their job—only for the money it provided. He had heard men discussing with their hired pleasures how their wives wouldn’t give them what they needed. This pretty much summed up what Charles had known about women and sex before he had come to the island. The idea that a woman could want what men wanted, could feel what he had felt in the rose-scented darkness of Lydia Turner’s room, was a thought he was just getting used to. He realized that the most intoxicating part of his two seconds of paradise with her was the strength of her want—her delicate hand gripping his skull with surprising force, pulling her own head off the pillow, the way her tongue worked its way past his ignorant lips and teeth. Charles put his hand in his trouser pocket to hide the growing result of reliving these memories.
“And think about it,” added Aidan, “she musta been expecting some kinda boy. If she was waiting for, say, Mr. Croft, she wouldn’t have thunk it was you.”
Charles thought of Mr. Croft’s pendulous belly and hair slick with fragrant Macassar oil. It was hard to imagine Lydia kissing Charles for two seconds thinking it was Mr. Croft.
Aidan slapped Charles’s arm. “Hey, we gotta see this Cole Thomas. We gotta get Dec or Bill to point him out. The lucky duck.”
“But we can’t let on why we wanna know,” Charles insisted.
“’Course, brother. Your secret’s safe with me. And as long as you don’t take that hand outta your pocket, you probably won’t give your own self away.”
Soon the bell rang for a lineup, a deviation from the normal schedule of farm work right after Saturday breakfast. This morning, Bradley stood at the head of the line, hands clasped behind his back, projecting his voice to penetrate the murmur of the crowd.
“As I’m sure I needn’t remind the First Class,” he began as the hum died off voice by voice, “this morning marks the end of Master William Thayer’s laudable matriculation here at the Farm School and the beginning of his adulthood. He begins his apprenticeship at the telegraph company on Monday after spending the weekend settling into his new living quarters on the mainland. I speak for all the staff here at the school when I say we have every confidence that Master Thayer will lead a good Christian life and make us proud to list him as an alumnus. We will now proceed to the wharf after lineup in reverse order—First Class at the head of the line today.”
Once they had cleared the decline of the hill and were on flat land, two of the boys at the front hoisted Thayer onto their shoulders and began a round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Fielding was waiting on the steamer, and Thayer’s one suitcase and small box of possessions were loaded onto the boat. All the boys gathered in a semicircle on the beach to hear Thayer’s final words, which seemed to go on and on.
“But,” Thayer concluded at long last, “the thing I’m gonna miss the most is these dunderheads in First Class. You’re a grand bunch. And I’m sure gonna miss cleaning your clocks at baseball!”
With that, five of Thayer’s friends rushed up to the wharf and delivered manly expressions of their friendship: clapped handshakes, back slaps, ruffling of hair.
“For cryin’ out loud,” grumbled Charles into Aidan’s ear. “Will he get on the boat already?”
“Hey, I gotta hunch,” said Aidan, oblivious to Charles’s complaints. “Let’s go talk to Bill. He’s right over there.” Aidan pulled Charles along until they were positioned next to Bill.
“So, Bill, who are them mugs up there with Thayer?”
“Well, let’s see,” said Bill as he squinted to see better. “That’s John Pedgrift on the right of him with Lester Adams, and on the left you have Webber, the mail carrier—remember, we told you about how he—”
“And who else?”
“Well, also on the left is Cole Thomas and Phillip Scott.”
“Thomas, he’s the one with the black hair?” asked Aidan.
“Naw, he’s got that dirty straw-colored hair, sorta like Charles.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Aidan, smiling now, “just yesterday I tapped Charles on the back only to have him turn around and it was that one instead. Easy to mistake the two, don’t you think?”
“From behind, sure,” Bill agreed.
Or, Charles thought, in the dark.