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

is where I went. Awful ideas got into my head. It numbed me that perhaps Papa had arranged for it all. I rejected that. The miller did it. Not that either. The miller was as ignorant as Sollander. Did they do it for meanness? Had Tarpy done something I didn't know about?

I ran past Thesmond and to my room. I wouldn't come out when they shouted at me in the hall. I lay across the bed and cried until I saw how selfish that was. For Tarpy's trouble I was doing the crying. Helping nothing and nobody.

First of all I would kill Sollander. Horribly. To pay him for every welt on Tarpy's body. He had earned his death and I was the one to give him payment in full. I had given Tarpy pleasure and warmth and friendliness and he had given him pain. He would have all the pain back. I would do it with an ax. Slowly. So that he could dread the next blow.

Then I would make a speech before everybody so that Papa could understand. And Stilt. And Thesmond and Matilda. No. That was not the thing to do. I would kill him and say nothing. People would talk for years about the mystery of his death and I would gloat over my secret.

Getting Tarpy out of the institution would be harder than killing Sollander. I would get Tarpy out instead of wasting time butchering Sollander. I would show him. Then we would run off together.

Matilda and Thesmond had got into the room I don't know how. They made me drink spoonsful of something black and bitter. Even Grandmama came.

I dreamed all night of lumber shifting in a room. I was trying to arrange it. It slid away from itself when I stacked it. I stumbled. Sweated. The room was hot. The lumber was rough and splintery. It crashed around me. I moved it piece by piece only to have it tumble back.

They dried me with towels and kept a fire all day in the room. I stared at the window with its curtains half drawn and then I was in the museum Papa took me to and Tarpy was with us. We were all three in a carriage that rolled down the turnpike. It was a frosty morning and we were happy. The happiness turned to dread for no reason that I could understand. We were in North Harbor. We had rugs over our knees.

We stopped for hot milk and honey bread at an inn. Everybody stood around a great fire. The floor was brick like our kitchen. Papa drank an akvavit from a little glass with a stem.

Then we were on a schooner. So many tackles slide up and down and the sailors wind the anchor out of the sea. The sails go up and you feel the living shiver as it starts to move.

By night we put in at a city with many ships docked right at a street. We are on a train.

I scream. Matilda is on the train except that it is not a train but my room and she is folding a wet washcloth and pressing it cool against my forehead.

We are in a museum in the city where Papa has taken us. We see a narwhale. Minerals. Cabinets of wax fruit. There is a dragon ship of the Vikings filling a whole room. The reared snake's head of its prow rises above us.

We are very busy in the city. We must buy Grandmama a shawl from Scotland. Matilda has specified many spools of thread that we are to bring back. I am in a sailor suit. Tarpy is in a sailor suit. We sleep in the same deep bed in the hotel in the city. Our peters are as sweet as jam and as tingling as cider when we push them together side by side under the eiderdown.

There is a man with a peg leg selling newspapers in the street. A Negro with a red kerchief for a hat. Horses in slings loaded onto ships. A military band marches past the King's palace. We eat roast chestnuts at a stand.

I have peed the bed. Thesmond washes me in alcohol. A doctor has come. He does not look alarmed like the others. He looks at my tongue and holds it down with a flat stick. He listens to me with a stethoscope and holds my wrist in his fingers. I vomit while he is there. I have to take red medicine from a large spoon. It is cool in my mouth.

I dreamed that I was a hare bounding through the forest all of a night. It was a joy to run. A joy to have four swift strong legs.

One morning I woke to find a stranger looking at me with a grin. He said right off that I would have to get well or he would have nothing to do. His hair was both dark and light like a copper kettle that has been polished so that where the light catches it on a turn it is as bright as new money but leaf-brown in the shadows. His eyes were blue. Florent he said I was to call him.

He was the person Papa said was coming up for the summer. He helped me dress one morning and we went out to see his room over the stables. The sunlight looked strange. I was uncertain of my step. He had swept and scrubbed the room as clean as a box from the store. Bucket after bucket of water he'd brought up from the river and sloshed it down. All while I was being burnt out by fever and crazy with dreams that I didn't want to remember.

A camping cot with two blankets folded square and a chair and table with books were all the furniture he had. Over a dowel between two beams in a corner hung some clothes as neatly folded as maps. A rucksack. A towel and washcloth. A razor and brush. And a little silver mirror on a nail in which I saw that I had dark rings around my eyes and that my lips were as pale as a water slug.

He said he had fallen in love with our place and the woods and the river. He