A Secret of Men (Part 1 of 3)

The pale malnourished kid had been watching the thinly visible stream of smoke slither up the thin chimney from the dying embers.  He had backed himself into the small space between the cot and the stone wall and was pretending to be asleep, but when the new jailer entered, he could see the small reflection of the kid’s eyes as he placed kindling over the embers, and its light reached beyond the end of the small desk and into the cell.  When he could finally see the kid, he made a quick turn to the small cupboard, just out of the kid’s view.  Lower than the rising crackle of the kindling, he repeated the common prayer that both had heard at Grein Hubarts memorial two weeks ago.  He asked the kid if he wanted a cup of tea, to which he received no reply, but he took two cups from his satchel anyway.  The kid watched the man assemble the small kit over his desk for positioning the kettle.  The man was slow because he knew the kid could see him.  When he had the kettle in place above the small fire he added a few more twigs and sprinkled some hay from the basket above the hearth, then he took the chair from behind the desk, placed it just in front of the cell and sat facing the kid.  The man reached into his satchel and pulled out one of the six cigarettes he had rolled before he left home, as well as the dozen matches he’d haphazardly thrown into one of the smaller pockets.  He’d arrived much later than he’d intended.

    When the man lit the match with his thumb and brought it to the cigarette he’d stuck in his mouth, the kid could finally see his face, its round cheekbones and tired sunken eyes that gave a permanent agitated countenance.  The kid knew he had seen him before, and when the man removed his hat, and waved him over, he complied.  “You recognize me, then?” the man said.  

    The kid nodded.  When he spoke, he whistled his Ss.  “Your brother iss Heinrich Walsh.”

    “My Christian name?”  The kid turned his head back and forth.  Petulant.  “It’s Thomas.”  

    The kid’s face seemed to light up under the leathered scar tissue.  “Robert Trystenst.”

    The man peered down at him.  “I know.”  This is it, he thought to himself.  He wanted to say more, but he couldn’t.  He turned around and saw small wisps of smoke curling from the kettle’s spout, and gestured that he would be quick.  

He had been a prisoner here in the aftermath of the first rising, then about sixteen years ago, and was told alongside the twenty-seven other people who had been taken in after the raid that they would be shot at dawn the day after the king’s silver jubilee.  Most didn’t seem to mind, spending their last week in high spirits, telling each other the old folklore that each child in Kurn was rocked to bed with, sometimes injecting more nationalistic or sexual undertones.  Singing the national anthem that most of them were too young to have sung in school, as the Constables forced to remain on guard sang their’s.  The young man just watched.

When they took the blindfolds off, and after the Chief of the Kurnesh Constabulary read them their royal decree of amnesty, the young man could see that more than half the men had pissed themselves after the single rifle was fired into the air.  When they were being marched out front to be sent on their way, his captain of about the age of fifty collapsed and three of them had to drag him to the inmate’s infirmary.  He and a few dozen other folks were washing themselves in the fire department showers when Ivan came in and told them the captain was dead.  Not stopping what they were doing, most of them sighed, or snickered at the irony, but the young man made no indication that he heard anything at all. 

    Both cups were hot to the touch, so the man detached his cuffs to cover the handles with the excess sleeves.  When he placed them in front of the bars, he remembered that loose cuffs were against protocol, and began to laugh to himself until the kid asked his reason.  When the kid made an inquisitive face, the man could see features of the kid’s mother, and reached his right hand into his satchel and grasped something.  “Nothing important.”

    The man just stared for a while.  The kid’s body was splotched with old scars from the different burns that grew alongside him.  He would have had no memory of the last bombing, the man only internal still-frames.  

    He was crouched on the floor of Mr. Finnegan’s general store, assembling a doghouse when the familiar sputtering sounds began overhead.  A squadron of pre-war crop-dusters stretched thin against the grey sky, modified with little compartments for dropping the candy-corn-shaped canisters that released the opaque red smoke from its base that stung the eyes and skin and tickled the inside of the lungs.  Finnegan was standing at the register trying to pack his pipe through his arthritis and had only managed to get a decent bit of tobacco in before he heard them.  He brought his free fist down on the table and threw the pipe across the room at the display window, “Piss!”

    The young man ceased screwing on the doghouse’s roof and walked outside and peered up.  “Not much, this time.  Only about a dozen of them up there.”

    When he reentered, Finnegan already had his canister mask on.  The young man had forgotten his home, so wore a disposable respirator for painters with a pair of welding goggles.  From the basement, they heard a single poot from one of the cannisters penetrating the ground.  Finnegan muttered something contemptful and the young man just nodded.  They played cards for about two hours before the young man decided to leave.  Finnegan protested, but the young man was adamant his mother would fear the worst if he was not home soon.  When Finnegan was convinced he couldn’t change his mind, he offered him his mask, but the young man said he would be fine.

    All his body, aside from his eyes, twinged as the bright red smoke enveloped him.  At that point, he could only see about thirty feet ahead of him and guided himself by keeping one of his feet against the curb like his C.O. told him to.  After unintentionally hawking into his mask, he removed it and tossed it to the road and walked the rest of the way coughing and hawking freely.  Walking up Mr. Gregor’s front yard, he caught the vague outline of a masked face through the circular sets of wire that used to hold tomatoes, so he ran over to the backyard, lifted the cellar door and began to climb down.  The voice belonging to the man behind the mask shouted up: “Close the fucking door!” to which the young man obliged.  He breathed in the cold stale air of the cellar like it was an elixir, coughing still.  The other young man, slightly older, tossed him a proper half-face respirator from somewhere he had not seen and gestured for him to follow “Nud up, Neddy.  Chop, chop..”  When he realized it was Ivan, he was less excited.  

    Through a series of interconnected rooms, that in days of old never had specific uses, they came to one without furniture where three 40” x 20” triangular holes were dug.  Ivan squatted at the rightmost hole at the end closest to the door and reached down and grabbed one of the handles.  “I’m leading.  Use both hands.”  The young man hopped timorously over to the other end, crouched, and lifted it when Ivan got to three.  Through the backyard, they made their way to a forested path where they met another few dozen folks moving similar cargo.

    They walked the armaments down the reddened path for two hours. Like plague doctors heading to burn the dead, everyone coughing and occasionally removing their masks to rid their mouths of phlegm.  Someone with a high voice was attempting to mouth a Russian symphony through his mask, before somebody shouted at him to cut it out.  Whenever the path seemed straight from his position, the young man would close his eyes to escape the lurid red.  For a while, he pictured the old lush virid path.  When he was pretty sure they were going through an area he recognized, he would turn in the general directions of the trees that had birds nests, and the rivulet where minnows would swim in the warmer months.  When he caught himself, he began to falter before the man behind him knocked into him and told him to “Keep up the fucking pace.”  He began to dread the smoke dissipating, eyeing the sickly discolored leaves and pines that dangled from branches like cadavers in the gallows and the rut littered with pinky-sized skeletons.

It started there.

    There was a truck waiting for them at the foot of the forest.  The kid’s mother was in the truckbed and inspecting each of the crates before signaling for the two men who worked in the factories in Winton to pull them to the back with the rest.  She gave a muffled “Hello there” to the young man when he and Ivan stepped forward.  She had assisted the young man’s schoolmaster for two years before replacing the schoolmaster the year after he left.  Oh, hell, what would she think now?  Aside from an occasional glance during the few times a year he attended Church, he only saw her one last time after that.  The winter Heinrich and his wife caught influenza.  They had sent their daughters to stay with he and Heinrich’s mother, before she caught it herself two nights before they had intended to move the girls back home.  He had intended to cut through the path behind Mr. Greggor’s old house to get them to school.  It was the year the vegetation began to get its life back and they had been jonesing Heinrich for a Christmas tree, but it snowed hard the night before so they had to take the long route.  He carried both of them by their shoulders up the uncleared stairs as the last of the older students were making their way indoors, and they locked eyes when she came round from the small space between the doorway and wall to take out the door stopper.  He had been wearing his overcoat, but the collar of his amber brown uniform was still visible, the little imitation-gold pin of the tasmanian devil standing triumphantly over a killdeer, the ubiquitous symbol of the Constabulary, flags of it waving over every police station, school, church, and business in Kurn.  After placing the girls down and telling them he’d meet them at 3:00PM, he asked how she was, but received no response.  She just stared for a while.  Like a parent a changeling in its child’s crib.  Tears welled in her eyes, but he had no way of knowing if they were out of disgust or pity.  She used her foot to remove the door stopper, keeping her eyes to his, and then shut the door.  It was the last time he saw the girls too, before he asked Heinrich to meet with the kid’s mother.  Asides from that single benevolent greeting, no one spoke when handing over the crates or during the walk back down the path, remaining perfectly single-file and separating further as it became more transparent.  

    “Y’know your mother taught me for a bit in school?”  the man said finally.

    The kid nodded.  He had brought his knees to his chest and put the cup of tea between the thin V between his bare feet to warm them.

    “She’s a smart woman.  I imagine she’s still teaching.”

    “… She is.”  

    The man could feel sweat from his palm begin to dampen the paper so he brought his hand out of his satchel and into his pocket and produced an 8 oz. flask and two baloney and havarti-cheese sandwiches wrapped in newspaper.  He leaned as forward as his satchel on his lap allowed him and held them aloft.  “You can use what’s in this for killing the pain or sanitation.  That amount won’t don’t much in terms of sanitizing.  But it’s your choice.”  

    The kid reached through the bars and took them in his palm.  The nails of his thumb, index, and middle fingers had been pulled some nights before, and he groaned as he brought them to himself.  He opened his mouth wide and  tore open the first sandwich with his few unhurt molars and shoved a quarter of it into his mouth and spent the next minute struggling to swallow the mesh.  The man let him eat.