Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 05:01:50 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: "Jesse and Kenny: A Romance"

		       "Jesse and Kenny: A Romance"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 The soldier, uniform of dusty gray, was with his brother.

  He slept by his fellow soldiers and he yearned in his sleep.
The windows of sleep and portals and memories of towering clouds
of childhood summers. He remembered deeply, as he slept lightly.
There was the momentary battle lull. There was the smell of hot
perspiring flesh and wool all round. It seeped into the rocky hillock
ground. It was attended by a certain glade that held constant in his
troop's memories as they too slept lightly, like children on a
summer day that had turned into a sudden thunderstorm where there
were only tatters of life left them. To these tatters, they clung with
intense strength in bodies that were weak with fighting, want of
food; their nostrils insulted by the acrid stench of battle, musket and
cannon that overpowered the close green onion smell of summer
ground and hot still air

 The soldier's name was Jesse. He was 16. He was no longer
smooth of face. He had a grizzled beard. Eyes red rimmed and no
longer shocked. He did not succumb. He would not die. Because if
he did, then so would Kenny. And Kenny was his brother and
Kenny was his succor, in the endless days before these, when, as a
matter of course, he woke always seeing a pistol aimed squarely
between his eyes. In his dreams, it was safe. In his dreams, there
was the arbor of home and the secret sweet shadowy ground of the
attic with the fanlight of red glow and persimmon smell, the attic of
memories and a steamer trunk held together with rope. Where the
afternoons of the seasons of their brotherhood brought life to them,
as they explored giddy and secret places. The places where brothers
explore when the world is not burst into war. Where nothing could
ever be wrong anywhere ever.

 How Kenny loved to giggle into Jesse's bare skinned
stomach. How they learned to love the little hillocks of each other
there, in the dusty rust colored smell of things in corners, in the
attic soft dim lit glades--mother's dolls from childhood, dolls with
big button eyes, and frayed wool bodies, Father's stern paintings,
visage sharp and shrewd and keen in his art work solely of himself
being whatever addition to human houses must have so they will
not fall. So his family would be protected. But Kenny and Jesse
required an addition that was concealed from the world,
unnecessarily in Kenny's eyes. But Jesse always told him, be still,
be careful, for there were traps laid.

 Jesse's hand now, in sleep, on that hillock of grass bled
down deeper than the earth surely had ever been before, reached for
his pistol, close by him always, his eyes stirred against the flies and
the gnats of summer that fed on human flesh, alive or dead, they all
seemed the same. They slept like fetuses of war, these men, and in
their halls of minds, they ran down corridors where the day was
brighter, where the sunshine seemed still, in spite of everything, to
be. The name "Kenny" might have formed on Jesse's lips,
unbidden. A boy with a parasol standing in the strawberry light of
the attic of a late summer Saturday afternoon. A boy twirling the
parasol of linen from their mother's attic storage, the feel of the
sanded wood on the boy's bare feet, laughter in his smile, the way
ghost berries shown in his cheeks. And his little erection a flag of
pride and dexterity and mechanism most human and most warm.
And his tiny balls sacs sweet and fine.

 As Jesse laughed at him. Jesse, sitting naked save for his
breeches, cross legged in front of the boy who parodied the way
fancy and fine ladies walked in the Sunday summer breezes on their
ways to and from church. Kenny with his buttocks poked out and
his stomach drawn inward, thin though he was, as though he were
wearing a bustle; his cheeks in time become drawn from the lack of
food there had been, the clouds coming on even then, a nation at
unrest, needful of splitting in half to find the whole, but the two
boys unaware of it. Determinedly so, therefore: Kenny bustling
along naked as a jaybird, twirling his parasol in the bright and briny
red sea air, and Jesse laughing secretly, and soundlessly applauding
his brother who had gotten their mother and the ladies of the church
league down so perfectly. And so funny to see that short thin boy
pretend at womanhood and to get it right with a child's perfect
mimicry that was more of an art than a joke.

 How Jesse loved the bony curves of his brother. The
boxiness of the waist that depended to hips and groin. The eyes that
looked right at Jesse and saw the all of his soul, eyes that were wise
and blue as all the most beautiful sun glint seas. The chest that was
full of ribs, and the secret between his legs that he loved to show
Jesse because it pleased them both. If there was spectral now, in the
dreams of this, the memories of this, it was also a glad abandoning
of reality, to go in search of what used to be. How wise, Kenny,
with the birdcage heart and the sloping shoulders. How pale he was
and shy but given to redolent smells of his golden hair long and to
his shoulders, and his face that was shaped like that of a fox face.
Jesse loved to sit naked on the attic floor, with his brother resting
his head on Jesse's crotch and member which he moved against the
smaller boy's hair. And Jesse leaning over to trace his hands on
Kenny's unclothed abdomen and chest. Jesse loved to look down at
his brother's face, upside down. Like a friendly fox's or kitten's.
The planes of it and the structure of the button nose. The eyes that
closed comfortably with his brother's ministrations, and seemed to
make the very world itself rest.

 Saturday was a place. The attic was for the country of
Saturday. There were no mountains then or shady groves where a
boy might stroll. There were no streams where boys might bathe
and have their secret hands in shadows of mulberry trees. There was
no sky limned with sunset and night winds that would scare up
spring or winter and have its birthright in them. There was no world
outside the fanlight of the attic. No worlds that had ground to walk
on, hard and flinty, or redolent with summer grass or dandelions.
No, the real world was the attic and the country of Saturday that
was therein. Jesse had been there one day, when the secret world
with his brother started, four years ago. He had been pleasuring
himself with the idle chatter of girls he had heard in the school
house. Filtered as though through a fog horn on a distant shore not
to be reached beyond barb and pigtail pulling that the other boys,
never Jesse, excelled in.

 There had been no noise on the squeaking attic steps. No
sign that anyone was to find Jesse there with his pants flap open,
but then suddenly as though from a squall of summers, escaped
Kenny's laugh, a shy laugh, like the fanlight in its inverted commas
had had enough of Jesse's loneliness, always close to tears when he
hid himself away in the attic those days. And Jesse had opened his
eyelids, fearing to find mother, or far worse, Father, there, to scold
him. But only Kenny and his eyes that made everything else go
away-- the talks his parents had at the dinner table about the
impending war; the nervousness of the tall gruff teacher that
reached into the man and his angry voice and turned it fearful,
delicate as a May apple, and so tender for his charges who would
one day soon fight in this dreadful conflict--the constant buzz in
Jesse's head, even when he was committing self-pleasure--all of
this espied from his kid brother's eyes, and Jesse felt suddenly
remarkably clean and fresh and new.

 Kenny came to him, those distant and distinct and so close
few feet. Jesse holding onto his member, and Kenny kneeling in
front of him, reaching down to Jesse's opened breeches. The
shadow of sexuality was allowed. The doing of it to fear was from
that day forward discarded. Kenny was nine and he was as old as
Jesse because he held the secrets in the loins of a kid brother who
knew what the passage of time does and knows sometime a kid
brother may be needed to cease time's stately linkage with the
future. Which may not be a pleasant one.

 He lay his head on Jesse's legs. Jesse who lay sideways on
his left hip. Kenny studied his brother as he had studied him,
unknown to Jesse, all those nights they slept in the same little
trundle bed, even though Jesse's arms and legs and body had grown
too long for it. Kenny leaning over. His elbow on the pillow next to
his brother. His head leaned sideways on his hand, taking account
this boy who was his brother. Wanting so much to lift his night shirt
and Jesse's and place their bodies finally, finally together, skin to
skin. The red of hair, the freckles on the bridge of the slim nose, the
breath of his sleeping blowing sweet as summer crops in a torpid
breeze, on Kenny's face. Kenny loved his brother and hung onto
every word, every nuance, every shadow that Jesse made. When
Kenny was shown by Jesse how to make shadow puppets on the
wall, he treasured them, and formed his own hand to equal his
brother's shadow shows, to make the dog bark, to make the rabbit's
ears turn like swivets in the summer field at the first sign of a ghost
hunter.

 And now, in the last of this civil war, each dreamed of the
other, each became the shadow show for the other. They fought the
terrain. They tried to make the mountains smaller. They fought
against the barbarity that soldiers find too easy, too safe to make a
home in, for the two boys had no need of it, out of all these boys,
for ships call to ships, hearts to hearts. That still breathless day,
with the sweat rivulets in the closeness and locked box heat going
down their sides, from their arm pits, that day Kenny had surprised
Jesse at a most delicate moment made them both feel like Dresden
dolls, with those glass faces, with those breakable bodies, with such
time and distance steaming into the harbor of Saturday landscape
kept precise, kept like a delicate snow ball of glass and dreams in
the attic world of their childhood. Jesse's hand stopping its
stroking. His eyes wide on his brother. His member not shrinking as
perhaps it should have on being found out. That first day of Kenny
and Jesse.

 Jesse was to be awoken in an hour. To be watchman for the
rest of the night to come. He blended both worlds, the world of war,
the world of deepest love, together. He was not of either of them
now. He dreamed he could touch his brother's warm face, seeing it
upside down from the v of his own naked legs. They had done so
much. They had carved their love, their days, their summers and
winters into a moment that was of the attic, of the house, that was
so different from the silence of stealth and fear their Father brought
with him wherever he went, as though he could tighten the
sternness in his face even more so and thus keep the world from
spinning off its axis as everyone knew it would one day. The
shadow of war lengthened until even Father could not deny it.

 Brother to brother. Mouths in secret places. Hands to
lengthen the members of their owners'. Kenny's amazement at how
large Jesse's penis was. Kenny's delight in making the milky white
come charging out. Quiet in the skins of boys. Quiet in the sounds
of summer Saturdays--other afternoons as well, but Saturday
always, and every day in the attic was summer Saturday, regardless
of how cold or hot it was in there then. Still charged with the
topography that needn't be tackled. That could be roughhoused a
bit. Silently. Still as shadows that have life in them. Shadows that
can't be told to anyone for they would not believe. It would not be
right. Kenny never believing, but his big brother told him it was so,
and thus it was.

 And in the hot night, the soldiers stirred with their own
dreamy keepsakes. Their hands reached to the ground sometimes to
remind themselves the ground was still there. Still of summer grass,
still of green fronds that did not yet have the daubs of soaked in
blood on them, far grimmer than the visage of Jesse's father's face
in itself and in the paintings that stood there like soldiers one
behind the other, straight up, not leaning, against the wall of the
attic, the painting in the front always turned around, so the boys
would not have to be afraid of it when they made their plays with
each other, their plays of taking off the other's clothes, of being
dressed while the other was naked. Reveling in one another. Of
Kenny imitating to perfection the walk of a bustled woman on her
way to church.

 Dreaming of that, this night, Jesse smiled. It was the smile
of a boy, not a man, not a soldier. A boy who didn't know what all
of this was about. Only that his time had come. Only that Father had
mustered Jesse out of their rambling two story paint peeling house,
and had turned him over to Confederate soldiers then in the yard,
asking, demanding, swords clattering, for any able bodied men here
to fight for the cause and for God's own people. Father shoving
Jesse out. Jesse walking like a man. Pretending. As did the soldiers
he marched away with, regardless of their age.

 Marching rows of soldier toys. Jesse in the back of them,
straggling in the dusty devil July inferno heat. Looking over his
shoulder at the house he might never see again. Its sagging front
porch. Its swing off its chains and laying cantilevered on the side
yard. The house once well repaired, now tattered as though its flesh
would be a causality even sooner than Jesse who looked up to the
fanlights of the attic through which the summer dust motes were
slanting even then, and who knew that his brother was looking out
of one of those inverted commas and wept at his love's leaving.
Then Jesse turned his head back into the heat of battles to come,
marched into the dust, and through it, down the country lane with
the hot bothered fragrant pregnant leaves of the trees on either side,
as Jesse walked further and further away, into memory. And all the
songs of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" would not stir
their notes for him, no matter how hard he might try to come back
alive.

 War was guns and cannons exploding and dust and blood
and faces that saw things faces should never see. War was fought by
the young men, the children, for the old men, the war mongers
safely back home and ensconced in their studies, following the
patterns of blood letting on their safe yellowing wall maps with the
campaigns noted and celebrated, through newspaper articles, and
pins stuck in those wall maps. And Jesse cursed them. He cursed
such a huge hatred. Such a huge insanity. As did all the boys, men,
in the growing up process, grown as much as they ever would in
this world.

 A hand reached out of the darkness. Jesse jumped. His hand
flashed with his pistol at the mid section of the man who had woken
him, who wanted Jesse to relieve him on guard duty. Jesse's eyes
opened and his brain aware, alert immediately. The hand on his
shoulder might have been that of Kenny's. Kenny who kept watch
over his brother as they lay in bed in their nightshirts, when Jesse
went far away in his mind, before Kenny found him in the attic and
kissed him where Jesse had never known it was even conceivable
for a boy to be kissed before. Jesse put his pistol firing end down,
and the man above him did not smile, did not say I had hoped you
would put a cannon ball through me with that dilapidated old
musket of yours, but they both knew it. Words were not necessary.

 Jesse then, guarding. His pistol at the ready. His sword
broken but still in its scabbard and ready to use if necessary. He
rubbed his hand over his beard and thought himself a man and
hated the whole wide world for making him into one. The night
before the soldiers came to the yard of his parents' house, Jesse and
Kenny, having heard the battles far too close to home, having seen
the smoke and tumultuousness of it take place not that far a
distance from their bedroom window, until Jesse pulled down the
shade and held onto his brother as tightly as he knew how, that last
night they had made love in their bedroom, their door securely
locked. Their lips met each others' for the first time. Their bodies
strained against each other. Their eyes were like flintlocks cocked
at each other. They tried to lose each other and themselves in the
intensity of what they were, of what they had shared, in their
hammock of summer that surely would have kept them young and
tender feeling for each other for the rest of their long lazy days. But
the scythe of battle was calling. The scythe that took the latest crop
of lives and put them in the war machine and made them nameless
and called murder for love, and love of brothers dare not speak it
name.

 Their bodies, that last night, joined to each other. Their
groins rubbing hard against each other. Jesse had put his lips to his
brother's outstretched neck, and he had kissed that pale vibrant
beating neck's pulse. He had rubbed his hand over his brother's
body, as Kenny did over Jesse's, and they were a sea unto
themselves, their berry nipples, their cocks, Kenny's small one, and
Jesse's larger one, kneeling against their stomachs. Their hands
playful no longer, but at each other's buttocks in the small stifling
bedroom, the wool of tomorrow already getting in their eyes, as
they rolled together on the floor because the bed squeaked too
much to make love there. They held each other. They grabbed each
other and Jesse lay down then on his back, and put his ankles on his
brother's so thin so sloping shoulders, and he guided the little boy's
stick into him, and the night was far too short, and Kenny far too
eager to crawl into his brother, his lover, and hide there forever
more. Thus the goodbye, the going away and the always longing it
would leave them with that no one else could ever satisfy. Were
there to be anyone else.

 Their Father dressed in gray slacks and gray frocked coat,
his face sour, full of thunder clouds, the next morning, at breakfast
in the cheerless day when even the sun had bowed out of shining
because of the sorrows befallen the land. Their Father looking at his
wife as she bowed her head over the table, as did the boys, and they
prayed, mechanical, hopeless, full of night in the air already
betoken with the smell of death and wounds and acrid cannon and
gunfire that was closer so much so, that it was under their skins. It
had become them. It did not assuage. It did not blame or affirm or
deny or explain itself. It simply was, and that was the beginning and
the end of it. A monstrous destructive lover come to bear the
cannon fodder home wherever home might be.

  And Father--knew! He knew what his sons had been doing.
It trilled suddenly through Jesse's bones, his bowels, as he
suddeenlystopped eating breakfast. Father had not seen them, Jesse
believed. But somehow he knew. It came to the boy like another
sense. Jesse turned his eyes to the table. Blushing and ashamed. He
would be able to blush and feel ashamed only a very little from this
point onward. But Father said nothing. There was only the somber
ochre of breakfast table talk, during which, oddly enough, Father
seemed--kind? Those ponderous hands thick and hairy were put
palm out after they had finished breaking fast. He said let us stay
together, in the parlor today, let us talk of old times and be together
as a family should. And thus both boys and their mother knew this
was the day. Not presentment or foretelling by their Father, just the
sagacious following of facts laid out like the bones of God at their
feet. Facts that said no one escapes this war. No one. No matter
how rich or fine or protected. Though the Arthur family, this family
here, were no longer rich or fine or protected. Save the gold coinage
of their sons gone away, even the one who stayed, gone away.

 The clock of time began to tune toward morning. And Jesse
was on point. He watched the copse of trees down the hillock. He
watched the sky getting bloody as it readied itself for another day of
battle and sums and totals of lives lost for cost, life lost because
somehow that would make a man out of the wounded and those
wounded beyond repair. Jesse's head sunk on his chest suddenly.
He was seated on a rock cairn and the gun slipped out of his long
wiry fingers, silently to the ground, and he was suddenly asleep,
deeply asleep, as though an ague had come upon him. His tall thin
body in the Confederate uniform that fit so badly this boy so far
slighter than it, that it seemed to engulf him like a mad turtle shell,
fell over slowly with bodily decision and giving up and going home.
He fell onto the ground as the sky blistered lighter and redder.

  His brain felt the words more than thought them--I am now
in the attic and in the Saturday of it, where Kenny will play, until
his own time of war, if this dreadful carnage is not stopped before
then. Jesse felt the summer in him. The summers with his brother.
Who had kept watch over him, as smaller boys might for their older
brothers when such things of future are known without being
known.

 There was a rustle. A whisper of wind not made by the wind
in the trees or sky. There was an intake of breath. There was a
stealthy walking of shadows. There was only the sky as witness.
The Confederate soldiers slept on, thinking themselves watched
over by their guard. But Jesse was not as good a guard as Kenny
was all those years making sure his brother was safe from harm.
The Union soldiers, dressed in their wet sweaty blue wool, walked
as with deer steppings to the man, the boy, on the ground, curled
round a dream.

 They withdrew their pistols. They put their other hands on
their sword hilts. The day would be a hot one. And when it
happened, Kenny at home, in the attic, sleeping on some of his
brother's clothing, knew. As the red morning light no longer came
through the inverted commas of the fan light. As Kenny felt as cold
as the clay and was, himself, no longer a child.

 And Kenny began to remember. And was to spend the rest
of his life remembering. For that is all love can do sometimes. In a
world such as this, that is all it can do.

				  the end