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

show him its picture in a book? And how did it get there? I told him. He was getting the grasp of things in their kinship. He liked it that a cow is a kind of deer and the raccoon a cousin of the bear.

Spiders walked down the air. Birds chittered. Tarpy asked me if I had brought something to eat and I was ashamed that I had not thought of it. He knew things to eat in the forest. Sour berries and roots with the taste of ginger and peppergrass.

There were days when I did not see him at all and I knew that he was kept in by Old Sollander. There would be new welts when I saw him again. He never mentioned them. I learned to wait patiently for him in one of our places with meat that I had pocketed at table and pie filched from the kitchen. I sneaked him clean shirts and breeches. The deliciousness I was learning to play into my peter was sweeter and grander by the day.

One afternoon after our ramble I was told that I was to go see Matilda as soon as I got home. Thesmond said so with a singsong in his voice. She had a lace handkerchief crushed in her knuckles when I went to her room. She was sipping tea. For strength. Jens. I don't know what we're going to do with you. Your Papa asked me to write him all about your taking up with this wild boy Tarpy. Is that not his name?

I nodded that it was.

She touched the handkerchief to the corner of an eye and said in a sagging voice that she had written Papa as truthfully as she knew how. There are some things which a woman cannot say to a man. I said that you had done just that. Taken up with this boy who is not bright. In his reply (she touched her fingers to the envelope on the table) he says that you are to be commended for sharing your clothes with one so unfortunate and for introducing him to hygiene.

Is that all? I asked.

She sighed and gave me one of her looks. She added that I was to expect a parcel in the post. From Papa. She mashed the handkerchief and clearly had something else to say. What it was she kept to herself.

Get what for? Thesmond asked outside.

For what? I replied in my best teasing voice.

He stiffened and raised his eyebrows. He remarked that it is written in Scripture that thy foot shall slip in time. I was to remember that. I was to remember that as you remember stepping barefoot on a rotten pear thick with hornets.

The fine summer morning when the urge was warm and tingly in my peter I felt as randy about my new canvas satchel with its specimen vials which Papa had sent me as the expectation of meeting Tarpy for a rich long pull. I had a new naturalist's journal and a box of colored pencils smelling cedary from being sharpened before I set out. I was spry and giddy. I even wore the straw hat without being told to by Matilda. The journal had a canvas envelope all its own with a flap that buckled down. I would draw every leaf and inflorescence and write its name and Linnaean binomial beneath.

I was over the knoll and into the spinney when the wonder of the satchel and bottles and journal all rucked in my ballocks like beady cider and I began looking for Tarpy. I whistled for him at the river. He was not about.

So I patiently drew an oxalis with its pale yellow pentad of petals and its cloverish leaves. Wood sorrel. The pencils shaded well and I'd never drawn better. I wanted a splendid page that I could show with pride. My hope was that Tarpy would come through the thicket behind me and double my pleasure with surprise. Down the knoll. Up the other side of the river. The sun on his hair. I wanted to see him shining in his grin and pugging the snoot of his breeches with a frisky hand.

I moseyed up to the sea bluffs. He was not in the scoop. I drew the leaf and acorn of a white oak. A woodpecker thucked in flurries high up. A spink fifed in the service and was answered with a trill from the beech. I gave the hoot hoot we used. And sharpened my ears. There was only the woods rustle and wash of the sea. The birds. The crazy woodpecker.

I maundered over most of our rambling ground before I went back for lunch. At first I had been disappointed and this was selfish I told myself. Then I was put out. Selfish too. Then wondering. But he would come from nowhere in the afternoon as was his way.

Except that he didn't. I looked in the barn loft. Even around Old Sollander's. I kept my ears cocked for the hoot or the whistle far into the night. I fell asleep in my clothes in a chair by the window.

Next morning I watched Old Sollander's cabin through the rush brake. I had a slice of ham still hot in my satchel and a sandwich of gooseberry jam. If Tarpy was ill I ought to go direct to the door and ask. I should have asked yesterday.

Looking for Tarpy? Sollander said from behind me.

I jumped. He studied my face. He seemed to have on too many clothes. Strings tied everywhere. Strings holding his waistcoat together at the buttonholes. Waistcoats. At least two of them. Strings closing the collar of his shirt. Strings tying his cuffs.

Tarpy's gone. You won't see Tarpy anymore.

I heard the words but could not think what they meant.

Aye. To an institution we've sent him. For his own good. Mind you that. For his own good.

Tears blinded my eyes or I would have spoken. Or asked how and when. Or bloodied him with a rock. As it was I could only swing my canvas satchel from my shoulder and with a windup once around my head hit him full in the face with it. But his stick was up. It hit with a whomp.

I ran. I wanted to run anywhere but home but that