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

and I his. We oated Meg and scritched her nose and set out across the yard. We crossed the meadow in the clean cool and the knolls and bore north with the sea beginning to shine on our left. We walked at a good clip for two hours. Florent said it was wrong to have breakfast close to home and feel that we had yet to start our journey. We were in woods I'd never seen when we fancied a fine open place for our first stop. Florent made a fire in a ring of stones. We munched dried prunes while the water beaded over the fire for the porridge. I felt free and wild and important. I asked Florent if all this were real. The utter freedom. Us.

I had a vague memory of a dream in which Tarpy was naked and just out of sight of a roomful of people. Our neighbors in crinoline and Prince Alberts chatting and taking tea in the library and through the door Tarpy in the middy and ribboned hat of my sailor suit but nothing else and with the big pink acorn of his peter standing straight out. Then there was a stagecoach full of fine folk and Tarpy snake naked at the edge of the road sticking out his tongue. I liked the dream but recalled it with a chill.

Florent said he thought I'd had a wet dream and that if I were older he would know better. He stirred the porridge and we ate from the pot. We sipped our coffee sitting knee to knee looking sly quiver nimbles into each other's eyes. He tweaked my nose.

The land became rocky. The trees were taller. The light was lonelier and more northern. We caught our salmon in a swift white stream. Its meat was lovely on the tongue. The bran cakes were of my mixing and cooking by Florent's instructions. Our tent looked splendidly shipshape and cozy as it stood on its ground of larchfall. The light went gold as we were washing up and blue in the long twilight. Florent sitting against a pine filled and lit a pipe that smelled of spices and molasses. I propped myself between his knees and watched.

We talked about everything that came into our heads. I heard about the university and lectures. I learned the nature of girls. He explained socialism and free love among his student friends. I kept saying O and why. I undid a button of his fly and he undid a button of mine while we talked. He was surprised that I had not read the Iliad. It was the book he had brought. He would show me how to read it if I wanted to. He undid the next button. I countered.

A mist stretched spooky and white from bush to bush and smoked along the ground. We put more sticks on the fire and by its light we squared our quarters away and undressed. I snuggled in while Florent banked the fire with dirt. He sat crosslegged beside me on the bedroll. We heard owls as we went to sleep and unknown animals treading without caution on their rounds. The white river crashed cold over its rocks.

We were stiff from the ungivingness of our bed and stretched gratefully and naked in the pale morning warmth. We splashed clean in the dashing river and dried on the rocks with tin mugs of coffee to sip. I wanted to stay naked but Florent said that could wait until we were days further up the peninsula.

We climbed a great deal of the morning but crossed level highlands deep in strange and enormous ferns all afternoon. We saw hares and deer and the dead kingdoms of the beavers.

There was no river at our second station. We had dried beef in gravy made from an essence that came in cubes. We'd gathered wild plums yellow and tasty which we ate for dessert.

We'd cleaned and stashed our supper ware when Florent made himself comfortable with a rucksack under his shoulders. He had his pipe handy but did not light it. There was mischief in his eyes. His hand with fingers shoved between the buttons of his fly interested me greatly. Because of the sweetness of his smile I came to sit on his thighs and play the monkey with his fingers and buttons. His eyes said yes. He wrecked my hair and remarked on how the evening came on as much from below in green and blue darkenings among the trees as in a softening of departing light above. He put his hands on my legs and slid them up to my tummy and around my waist. I had unbuttoned him and made a clumsy disarrangement of everything. He pulled me to his shoulder with his cheek against my hipbone and with a heave and wiggle and two kicks got his trousers and underpants off and lowered me back to where I was. I had listened carefully over the past days to his saying that the Greek god Eros was a boy my age.

He taught me names. The head of the peter is the Latin for acorn. Its rim is the Latin for crown. Its bag with the twin eggs is the scrotum. That the sleeve is the prepuce or as the Latin translates the foreskin I knew from Scripture.

He explained while my heart was thumping at a gallop how the foreskin is like an eyelid. It too was a sensitive soft moving protector of a surface wonderfully tender. The two are where the flesh engages the spirit in its most sensual experiences.

There are our sensors of heat and cold and of textures in the world. Of sound and smell and taste. But the eye is the world. The eye and the glans or acorn are curiously alike and different. The eye is open to light. The glans is hidden except of course among lovers and frank honest people of good will. And friends.

They are like Swedenborg's heaven and hell. The healthy eye is cool and bright. The glans as you can feel is warm as blood and as dark as the inside of the body.

My mouth was as dry as the day Tarpy and I played with ourselves. Florent said in his friendliest way that if the god Eros was with us here in the dark deep