Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:09:58 -0800 (PST) From: Tim Stillman Subject: m/m Adult-young friend "The Boy Who Was Closest to the Sun" The Boy Who Was Closest To the Sun By Tim Stillman He was sixteen or fifteen or somewhere around there. His hair was the color of wheat straw in summer sunshine. I missed the sun. The warmth. We all did. It was the dead of winter and snowfall after snowfall unending, in the Kansas plains. He was as close to the missing sun as I could imagine and remember the sun looking and feeling. Bakus looked at me as I taught the children their lessons. It unnerved me sometimes and made my slight stutter a bit worse. The wind bit hard. The sky, gray and of snow, was like an old song you remember vaguely. There was nothing more than this rude cold schoolhouse. And my fifteen. Sitting there with their pinchy clothes on, rude, as were the coats of sorts they tried to bundle up in. Bakus looked at me. And sometimes while I was reading Dickens to my fifteen, I would look up knowing his eyes were on me. I am a man in my thirties. I am thin and awkward. I do not believe I could survive these massive Kansas winters without my books. I am somewhat cloddish and have big feet and hair that is a bird's nest of already gray and already a bald spot getting bigger. I have finished class for the day. It is a cheerless bunch that comes here to this little building of boards and windows, where there are the cold winds that blow throughout. In an incipient mood, a stranger looks out of Bakus' eyes and turns quite bold, this very odd child, who is ignored. This turncoat to childhood who had wiped away any romantic memories I had let myself foster on my own childhood, while I read my books by flickering lamp light that painted sometimes frightening shadows of movement on the walls of my small one room cabin, if cabin it can be called. For that would surely be too grand a name for it. The schoolbook is put away. The children close their notes and put away their pencils to their pockets of shirts or pants or coats. Their clothes are torn and worn, as are they. There is no solace to or from any of them. And they have gradually made me older than I am, because they are already my age inside, in the eyes, and growing older at an alarming rate. They shuffle as though they had chains on their ankles, as though they are to be transported to court for their trial of magisterial means to their very insignificance, and their eyes are not quarters of the moon even in wintertime. They seem to not exist sometimes. More and more. They shamble. They know what their lives are to be. Working their bones raw on some scrub marble ground farm with a sod hut shared by them and their solemn and equal or worse lachrymose mate. Or work hunting. Or at one of our three stores in town. As time ticks with maddening slowness, coupled with equally maddening quickness, away. The girls at the Lady Gayoso, the ones who graduate to whoredom. And the men who graduate or who already are drinkers who will frequent that establishment. As we pretend they do not already. The minister has a sole one hundred residents of this town, all of whom attend church every Sunday to be made to feel horrible about themselves, most of whom sold those requisite souls long ago to the blistering heat, to the bone chill snow hell of winter, then again, the baking dry raging eternal blister furnace of summer, and the bringing children into the world because there has to be some kind of recreation, some kind of hope and pleasure of any sort in this world of theirs, and that sometimes creates children. And that is one more substantial mouth to feed, and another cry in the night, and more berating and looking at their sons or daughters as the subsequent propriety of a jealous and mean-spirited god who has given them these things for punishment of carnal lust. I knew, sitting at my scarred little desk that Bakus was still in his chair. I did not look at him. It would only be repetition of all the other children, now gone. Bakus was still here, still as though washing himself in his eyes, in a way that only a madman could explain. Me? I stirred the fire in the old pot bellied stove now, a small flame crackles and cinders heat a bit more. I said, my back to him, as I tended the stove, "Better be off with you, Bakus. Two more days till Christmas." I was chagrined it, the moment I said it. What difference did Christmass mean to these poor children of rock bottom soil poor parents. The sheriff locked up drunks and cowboys who would hurrah the town. And he would go to the Lady Gayosa and drink, because there was dying here. In the midst of breathing, there was a requisite desire of hatred for that continued breathing. Break the law? Getting up at the crack of dawn to tend whatever meager livestock or grain or wheat, or work to the gen'ral store, there was enough to do and there was nothing to rob. The poverty everywhere here stank. The bank had maybe a few hundred dollars. It need not bother. Ever. This was a town given up on life but keeping on with it cause Rev. Rogers said hell is for those who don't bow down gracefully and thank god for their burdens. Damn Rev. Rogers, he poor as a church mouse himself, this churchly mousy little man with the thick big knotty Adam's apple that went chuck a luck up and down, when he orated with the great big mouth that was always shoveling damnation on decent folk, and when he swallowed, he was like the prophet of^Å. "Yaw looks like Ichavod Cran," Bakus said. Well, somebody had been listening to my reading of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and got the name almost right. I am a terrible teacher. My voice is soft and I virtually have to scream to get it heard, if anyone cared. Bakus came equipped with a younger sister. They were the only people I ever saw when I went to their tarpaper shack. I visited all the children's homes monthly, to talk to the parents who try to find interest in their children's schooling. Mostly there is just a washed out tiredness to them. As for Bakus, well, sometimes the children early on played in the school yard before I rang the bell, before it was knocked into their heads by the every dayness of it, that how the adults lived, thus would they also, but Bakus never did. I never asked Bakus or his sister where their parents were, or was anyone at all looking after them. It was something I just didn't want to know. Bakus was virtually a man and could look after her and himself enough. It was, shameful on my part, just one more grief I didn't want to know. I knew quite enough already, and how could I help anyway? Bakus had strong arms and his hands were big and calloused from working in other peoples' barns and field for tuppence, his body was between mid teens and somewhat older. His eyes were him washing himself. His hair was^×as close so close--- And Bakus's cloddy boots were hobbling to me. The wrong size boots for feet too large. Growing is a meanness visited on poor children everywhere. Nature says grow, mature. Poverty says you are grown already, but it doesn't let you grow and mature at all. The edifices of childhood hang on for the rest of your life, if you are poor. And I felt a sullen resentment toward these children because they taught me my own childhood had been just like theirs. Books I ran to. Reality ran to me. Like death. This was a mortuary. This was where a boy/man, who was a soul mangled boy, stood behind me, and I faced the stove already gone cold, stirring it was useless, though I still held the tong and stood like Ichabod Crane. Waiting for his sentence to be posited on him. Head bowed. In a way, like a little child praying. My shirt was white and torn at the right sleeve. My coat and pants, shiny, and black, my clodhopper shoes too small for me as well. "I did it again, Mr. Taylor." His voice cracked and was deep sometimes. When I didn't respond, after a minute of waiting, me hardly breathing, "I did it again." My face did not blush. It used to blush quite often. That was long ago. There is no reason to blush. There is no reason to smile. The snow is deep and I wanted out in it to go home and to light my candle and to read from my little library, which of course are the schoolbooks too. Town council? Budget? Laugh clowns laugh. I walked back to my desk, feeling somewhat dizzy and fell over my chair. Crumpled. Hurt. My leg torn at the ankle. The fall knocking the very wind out of me and so embarrassed, me the adult and he the child whose hands were on my shoulders and hauling the thin angular sack of me up to my chair and seating me there with a very kind generous gentleness I was quite unused to in a world where you are thrown around, where a rattler can reach up at your front door just as you are going out, and bite you, or fixing a wooden wheel for your wagon, you get a splinter in your hand, if the doc who covers wide territory, isn't around soon enough, you could get blood poisoning and die. She's not long for this world, Bakus. She looks more and more sickly every time I visit. She is always in bed. There are rings round her eyes so thickly she looks like she is already dead. She shivers. The blankets are too few and too thin and your shack is colder than the winter outside, and there is nothing worth a damn to eat, and milk? who has a cow left that can give milk that is not of the sickly kind? And what can I do? We are all in the same boat with little changes here and there. I can't help her, Bakus, and I can't help a boy who reminds me of the sun. I close my eyes. I realize I am weeping. The Kansas plains are vast. The sky when it resumes its place, if it ever does, is vast. They stretch out to forever, then finally encounter forever, and stretch further than that. It is so lonely, so immensely lonely, and we are such small creatures that even the friendly summer sky all blue and clouds, even that is a threatening thing. We live on the edge of a knife blade. "I did it again, Mr. Taylor," Bakus said, mournfully, a funeral procession making way to Boot Hill. I took off my wire rims and pinched my nose and said tiredly, angrily, "Oh good god, Bakus, all boys do that. It will not send you to hell and make hair grow on your palms." I kept my eyes closed. Sex, stupid sex, rears its head where it is neither needed nor wanted^×for that means life and that means moments of happiness, sliding down into yourself, and afterwards the emptiness challenges the vast prairie itself. Bakus knelt down to me. I felt his hand on my knees. I didn't care. I was long past caring about anyone or anything, as Bakus unbuttoned me and pulled out my engorged member, such as it was, and began moving his hand over it, and gripping it, I let him, because it occurred to me I had never been held in all my days, save at babyhood. I have never been held in love. I have never been a part of anyone's life. And he stroked me and I let him, and when I climaxed, I felt no shame. I also felt no pleasure. I felt a sad release. I had always been alone with this before. Someone being with me. Causing it was an oddity. It made me feel---abandoned. Then I did the same to Bakus. How truly difficult it is to feel someone there and not feel yourself like always. And later, Bakus sat in the first row chair. I sat in mine. We had buttoned up. I could not look at him. What if I had seen him no longer washing in his eyes, that observation I made often, that only a mad man could explain? How would I live with that, though he was no child, none of them were. "I did it, Mr. Taylor," Bakus said, his voice slow and determined as the snow came bundling down as I watched the window. The winters here have, snow has a purity that is like too much oxygen that is a shrill taste in the nose and mouth, and it is a caricature of purity that has a too silver taste and smell to it. "I wanted ta help yaw, Mr. Taylor. I wanted to see what it was like." A long pause as I looked at his hands on his small desk, too small for him, his hands were formed into fists, his knuckles looked huge. That hard-calloused hand had been so gentle on me, so coaxing on me, and when I did^×I looked at him and his eyes flashed a little second of pleasure as I had stroked his cock. "I wanted ta know, before yaw tooks me to the Sheriff." I looked now at his face, the first time I had since we had done this thing, fully and openly as he looked at mine. He had the oddest hurt little smile on it that I had ever seen; it was grief to look at it. How much more grief could it be on the inside of it? Our eyes locked and I wanted to stroke his gold straw in the summer sun hair. And then it clicked, and I knew. It clicked, and oh god I knew. As I pulled back in squeaky chair, I wanted to run out of here and into the snow and run cross the plains till my heart stopped, till I froze to death, till I got that image out of my mind. My heart thudded. The hand that had been on me, the face that had looked at me when he was rubbing me and when I did that to him^×his hands so gentle. So delicate. The child inside. After all. Calling to the child in me all along, and was I wrong all this time? About all of them? Had I been part of the mix that had killed them inside? So, profoundly shaken, I asked, "This time^Åfor real?" He nodded. My head ached smartly in my stupidity. "I jest could not see her laying there. Dying. Slowly. She wuz in such pain. The doc says there waddnt nothing a'tal he could do." And then Bakus broke down and wept. And I went to him and I held his shoulders and put his head on my chest, being suddenly at long last an adult, when I had thought I was so all along, so all alone. After a long time, full night now, darker than pitch, I let him go and said, "Let's go say goodbye to her." He looked at me. "What does I do, Mr. Taylor?" "Leave it to me, Bakus. I'll take care of it. Let's go say goodbye to your little sister who God has taken mercy on and who is in heaven and who is now at peace." I stood up. I extended a slightly trembling hand. Years had gone from me, been added and taken away at the same time, and I had turned into someone I didn't know. And it was time. Bakus took my hand. Our coats, such as they were, still on and buttoned, as had been all the children's. We walked to the door. I opened it. The chill, which was so hard and so bitterly cold carrying all that immense wilderness of winter, was even worse than inside. And in the heavy snow and freezing wind, we walked to his home to see Deidre that one last time. Bakus and I helped each other all the way there.