Rat Creek ran deep the year August turned thirteen, rising up in its gully to form more of a river than Fairview had ever known. Just where the muddy turn of it came snaking into town, the water pooled to meet a flat outcropping of rock. Normally good for nothing, the rock made a natural pier, a black magnet for teenage boys.
August could hear them from where he sat sinking into the old horsehair loveseat his mother had finally relinquished to the porch. Their sound splashed up out of the coulee and washed toward him across the side field—the laughter boyish, cresting at times into a squeal or an abandoned yelp, then shifting to something deeper, a bellowed threat, the tried-on shout of a man. August listened to them day after day, poring over the latest book he’d borrowed from the church office, all the time telling himself he couldn’t possibly care less.
Then one day—a day so hot he felt the bare soles of his feet would ignite—he stood and pivoted toward their swimming sound. He knew what awaited him. As far back as he could remember, he’d been resolving to give up trying to fit in.
There were six of them, all around August’s age. He watched them from behind the old willow that had its roots spread out crazily down the bank. They were jumping in one after the other—cannonballs, scissor-legs, awkward, splashy dives—disappearing and bobbing back, stroking hard for the outcropping and hauling themselves out, as though there were no pleasure to be had in the water, but only in breaking its surface, in feeling it rush up around you and swallow your yelling head. From where August was standing, they made a circle of sorts, their brown bodies rotating in a wheel.
Until one of them chanced to look up.
“Hey!” The boy’s fat finger rose to inform. “It’s him. It’s that son of a bitch.”
Burnt necks swivelled.
“What’cha doin’ out, sonny?” said another. “Your mama got a gentleman caller?”
Yes, thought August, your father. Didn’t speak it, though, kept his tongue. He’d learned long ago there was no right answer, just as he’d learned they couldn’t chase him if he could force himself never to run, or that it was no fun for them to beat on something that wouldn’t fight back and wouldn’t even cry.
Now it was almost always just words, and even those lacked their former force. As little boys they had understood how wrong, how downright evil it was for a woman—no matter how lovely, and even then they knew she was—for a woman with no husband to receive paying gentlemen in her home. Now those same boys could feel manhood beginning to colour their blood, and the change made them not so sure. Some of the wilder ones made it their business to pass close by Aggie’s place on their way fishing. Some even stole into her backyard to slide silk stockings from the line—stockings they would press to their faces, even to their bare bellies, once they were safe in their beds.
Still, the son of a woman like that—
They left off jumping into the creek. When the last boy hauled himself out dripping, they spread out in a line, hardening their bodies to make certain August understood.
They were like one of those cut-out garlands, six little figures in a row. August looked down through the spaces between their legs and saw the water, six muddy triangles of cool. Maybe, he thought slowly, if I walk upstream a ways, I’ll chance upon a better place.
He turned to go, but instead of the wide field his eyes met three big, bare chests—more brown, rippling triangles, only these were turned tip-down. Two of the men had soiled undershirts hanging like tails from the hips of their pants, but the middle one had his tied in a headdress, Lawrence of Arabia—style. Their hands and heavy work-boots were black with grease. Railway men. August stole a look at their hard faces, figuring the middle one had been to see Aggie for sure.
“Ain’t you goin’ in, boy?” Arabia’s hand came down on August’s thin shoulder, black hair steaming from the pit of his arm.
“I—I—” August stammered.
“C’mon.” The hand spun him lightly, and then August was slipping down the bank with Arabia right behind him, to where the other two were already stripping to their shorts. Arabia reached up to tighten the shirt’s knot, then unbuckled his belt, motioning for August to do the same. Together they stepped out of their pants, and then the four of them tossed their clothing onto the bushes and walked out onto the coveted face of the rock. The boys broke and parted like a gate. Arabia’s two buddies strode through like it was their birthright and jumped in tandem, throwing up a watery wall. But Arabia was different. He took his time, nodded hello to both sides, then pressed the palms of his hands together and followed his fingertips through the air, parting the surface with his nails and sliding into the creek like a knife through chocolate cream.
The boys began to smile now, relaxing their formation, a few of them whistling approval through their teeth. August held back. Arabia was underwater, nowhere to be seen. The two buddies were already climbing out, one with the look of twisted cable, the other hard in his own way, more like the rock they stood on, substantial and smooth. The boys elbowed each other to let them pass. Finally, a white cloth sphere surfaced on the far side of the creek, more than a little way down.
“Hey, boy,” Arabia called out, and it was perfectly clear which boy he meant. “Ain’t you comin’ in?”
So August did. Took the rock at a run and launched himself flailing into the creek. It took him in whole. With a sucking, silty rush it drew him down until his feet met snaky weeds, then pushed him gently back up to the air. Back on the rock, the others were following Arabia’s two buddies like ducklings, trying their best to stand out from the brood.
August stayed in, partly because Arabia did too—each of them a little apart, submerging to pull through the water, surfacing to let the water pull at them—but mostly for the feel. Smooth enough on the face of things, the creek was strangely alive below. It touched him all over—his chest and legs, his hands and throat, even the patch of new down at the small of his back. He turned that patch to the mild current, felt the shorts flatten to his behind while they billowed out bag-like in front. The water reached up through the leg holes, stroking him there.
Suddenly Arabia was hauling himself out, the other two shaking water from their hair. August struck for the rock—he wasn’t waiting to find himself unwelcome once they’d gone. Back on dry land, his body lost its fluid grace, returning to the unwieldy collection of bones he’d come to know—with one small but immeasurable difference. The same boy who had pointed before now pointed again, though this time he aimed lower, as though his finger’s trajectory was meant to pierce August through the belly rather than the eye. They stared—the boys, then the men—every one of them bent his gaze to the swelling in August’s shorts. His hands came together to shield it. He looked up to meet grin after wicked grin.
“What’re you starin’ at?” Arabia reached up to untie the undershirt, uncovering a mass of coal-black, curling hair. The armpit hair that matched it bled out over his chest before narrowing to divide his belly with a line. “Never had a hard-on, I guess.” He wrung out the water. “Must be babies still.”
August watched the pointing hand fall, then the turned-up corners of all those grinning lips. Arabia pulled the damp undershirt on, drawing it slowly over his shoulders and down his front. “That means you’re a man, is all,” he told August, and the other two nodded and smiled. Then, like a team of workhorses, they turned as one body and started away up the bank.
August struggled into his pants. Around him the boys were getting fidgety, the railway men above them now, nearly cresting the bank. A man. He knew better than any of them what that meant.
There were those who preferred the back door. August watched them out his narrow bedroom window, so many shadow puppets against the shed—the postmaster’s jabbing chin, the blacksmith’s nose, a certain town councillor’s jowls. Then there were those he didn’t have to spy on, the ones who came brazenly up the front steps, who knew to wait if Aggie’s tasselled shade was down, and often did so on the porch, helping themselves to beers from the cooler. Sometimes, during the harvest, there’d be two or three of them waiting their turn. Men with no wives, or wives in other provinces, or wives who wouldn’t dare open their mouths to complain.
August didn’t stay with the boys, and he didn’t follow the railway men either. Instead, he scrambled up the far side of the old willow and started running, following the creek’s cutting shape away from town.
He kept on long after the stitch took hold in his side. When he finally reached the bluff, he dropped to his knees in the poison ivy patch and, like a dog in any carcass it finds, began to roll. Saint Benedict threw himself into the nettle bed to fend off the demon lust—August knew this for a fact, one of many he’d swallowed whole from the pages of Father Felix’s books. But even there, down on his belly among the venomous leaves, he could feel himself growing hard. There was nothing to do but stand. And once standing, to run.
Back at the house, Aggie was lying down in the parlour with a cigarette between her lips and a pink washcloth draped damply over her eyes. August ignored her, stalking through to the kitchen, where he dragged the carving knife from its shallow drawer.
“August,” his mother called out, “be a love and stick the kettle on.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t comply. Instead, he laid the blade flat against the fly of his pants and, with a slow chopping motion, slid it down.
“August?” Aggie called.
He could feel the leafy poison in his blood, the itch spreading out to open him in a patchwork rash.
“Honey? Are you all right?”
The knife clattered to the floor. Aggie pulled off the washcloth in time to catch the back of him, his angry hand slamming the door.
He was winded, his legs jelly, by the time he reached St. Paul’s. “I—have to—huh, huh—confess,” he wailed like a stuck bagpipe, his mouth inches from Father Felix’s face. Then he sprinted for the stuffy box.
It was some time before the two came to understand one another, Father Felix questioning softly, August weeping wretchedly, scratching like a primate between replies.
“My son,” the old priest said finally, “this is no great sin. Becoming—excited is, well, inevitable. It’s what you do with that feeling that matters.”
“It is?”
“It is.”
“But, Father, don’t you ever feel like you’d be better off—you know—without it?”
“Without it, my son? You mean desire?”
The word flared hotly in August’s ears. “No,” he muttered urgently, “I mean it.”
Father Felix drew back from the lattice. “August, you haven’t been thinking of—?”
August didn’t answer.
“Now, August,” Father Felix began severely, “you remember the words of Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased him.’ ”
“But—”
“He also wrote, ‘And such as we think to be the less honourable members of the body, about those we put more abundant honour; and those that are our uncomely parts, have more abundant comeliness.’ ”
August sniffled. “But he didn’t mean the body, did he, Father? He meant the Church.”
“Well, yes,” Father Felix admitted. “The Church is a body with Christ at its head. But you mustn’t forget, August, Christ was also a man. He had all the—parts you and I do. He too was created in the image of God.”
“Yes,” August assented miserably. “But didn’t Christ—”
Father Felix waited a moment before asking, “Didn’t Christ what?”
“Didn’t he say, ‘—and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’?”
The priest shook his head hard in the gloom. “Eunuchs in the figurative sense only. He meant celibates, my boy, priests.”
“Listen to me.” Father Felix sat forward again. “He meant spiritual eunuchs, August. Real eunuchs aren’t even allowed to become priests in God’s Church.”
“They aren’t?”
“No, they aren’t. It’s like free will. How can God be sure you want Him if you haven’t any other choice?”
Choice. August felt himself nodding, calm coming over him like a spell.
“Do you see, my boy?” Father Felix said anxiously.
“Yes, Father.” The reply was honest, absolute. “I do.”