A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

He would go to the big house with me and walk boldly in past Thesmond and Matilda and act like a friend I had met but he would not have a new name. I argued that if I told them he was Tarpy they would shoo him out. I would go too. He would get me chased out of my own house. He said that they would know he was Tarpy.

I would teach him botany and algebra. I would write Papa and tell him that Tarpy the miller's bastard is not an idiot as people say. That I have given him a bath and some of my clothes and am teaching him subjects. After I teach him to read and write. That he is really clever and deserves better than to live with Old Sollander who is an ignorant man and beats him without cause.

My room is at the top of the house with a window in a gable that looks out into the same larches that Grandmama can see from her window and a window that looks over the sward where the drive comes up. I have a map of the world in colors. A picture of Alexander von Humboldt in the Amazon jungle with his friend Bonpland and an Indian. A cabinet of beetles and moths. A long table with a microscope. Fossils. Books.

My fireplace has a brass bonnet and a fender.

This is where I brought Tarpy the day I washed him and dressed him in clean decent clothes. He ran his fingers along the edges of things as if to appreciate the carpentry. He was looking at the rug when I tried to show him the microscope. Then he was interested in the windowpanes. He made on over the turned mahogany handle of the poker. He wondered at the lamp. And he was anxious to leave.

Once we were well into the wood on the way to the bluffs he said that Thesmond's eyes had been on us all the time. Had I not heard him tiptoe upstairs? Had I not seen him behind the door as we left?

Then he said he would be beaten for the clothes I had put on him. And for being clean. Things not talked about go away so I jollied him into going to our place on the bluffs and told him more of Robinson Crusoe. I was carefully keeping Friday back until the right moment.

We had found a sloughed snake skin on the way. A tortoise shell. A coughball from an owl which Tarpy saw and I would have missed. A cockchafer. A hawk feather.

There were seals among the islands which we watched for a long while. The woadwaxen was in flower. The whin. His hand slid under me as we lay on the moss looking down onto the inlet and gave me a fine squeeze. I rolled over and unbuttoned. He was better at it than I could be. I studied his face. The blue of his eyes was speckled gold. I poked a dimple to see the smile. I told him that I thought the world of him and would give him as stout a pleasure as I could once I had shivered and shot off. Don't I know it? he said.

When I got back toward suppertime Matilda hailed me in. I had a green snake and she kept her distance. She had a letter from Papa in which he said he was sending up a person who was to help around the grounds and who was to be a kind of companion to me for the summer. It was a university student who wanted a rural place for the vacations. What did I think of that? She pushed her glasses up onto her hair. I didn't like it.

When was he coming? The letter didn't say. But soon. Matilda said she couldn't think what Papa meant by help around the grounds. He was to have the room above the stables. That was hopeful. I could not imagine Stilt in the room above the stables.

I told Tarpy and Tarpy opened his eyes round and wide and whistled. I said that I could always get away. Mayhap this intruder took naps like Stilt. I explained to Tarpy that people from far away wrote letters and read books. He was not to worry.

When a rainy day kept us apart I looked out the windows and fidgeted. Cook chased me out of the kitchen for inspecting the potato bin and talking about poison. I curled up in a window seat with Canot's Natural Philosophy. I looked at the pictures of Pompeii in the big French book. In the stereopticon I looked at the Suez Canal. The Tour Eiffel. The Hague. Steamboats on the Mississippi. Indian sachems who looked like Lapps.

If I made a dash from the carriage porch to the great oak to the well I would be close enough to sprint to the barn. It was the Algonquin Lapp in the stereopticon gave me the idea. They have second sight. They know things at a distance. Like old Swedenborg who was part Lapp. I have known before that Tarpy would be in our place on the knoll and got there so sure that I unbreeched before I arrived and jumped the brim of the hollow bare butt. He was there. Waiting. Tarpy was for a certainty in the cozy barn loft watching the rain through the hay door and waiting for me.

It was dry under the oak though I was wet from the run. I was wetter when I got to the well house and drenched when I got to the high dark of the barn where the wet lifted all the smells to a pitch. The roast smell of oats. The dusty smell of burlap and the cold smell of graith and shares.

Tarpy grinned down at me from the top of the ladder. I sneezed going up. We hung my blouse and breeches on nails and dried me on Tarpy's shirt. I did him first. His fun is transitive and makes me all hot cheeked and dry mouthed so that my turn goes the better for it. We spurted again with our own hands.

He had brought me a freckled snail shell which he said I could have. It was a species I had not seen. Would I