And her lips met his.
“Oh,” he said, his heart filling with confusion.
He went back up to his bed. She was under his bed. Beneath him. His pet. His favorite girl.
Evening turned to night and night turned to morning.
For the boy, it was a morning that followed a sleepless night — a night of waking dreams.
In the morning he prepared her favorite meal in her favorite bowl and brought it to her, and she played him a sweet tune on the colored flute, a tune that made him feel as sweet as bright pink melting into light blue.
“Does it please you?”
“It pleases me,” he said.
She did not speak of the kiss, he did not speak of the kiss, but he left for school and he thought of it and nothing else all day.
After school he worked his part-time hours at the mill.
When he got home, the authorities were there.
His mother was weeping. His father was angrier than the boy had ever seen him before. The house was turned upside down. Everything was out of place. All of the larger musical instruments were missing. Most of the smaller musical instruments were damaged, and the small singing harp was completely destroyed.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
“Someone burgled us and stole our man,” his father said.
“I know who did it! If we hurry, we can get her back!”
The authorities gathered around as the boy told them about the girl with whom he was in love and her brother who had recently been released from incarceration.
The brother denied it, of course, but they traced the missing instruments of music to the hot shops, and the clerks at several of them identified the brother as the one who had sold to them, earlier that day, this instrument or that.
But the penalty for theft of a man was more severe than the penalty for theft of any other property, so the little brother of the girl the boy loved continued to deny having stolen the female man.
“I’m really sorry about what I did — but I didn’t steal any man from your house. Maybe she snuck out and ran away. I remember leaving the door open. Don’t they run away all the time? Well, that’s what I heard anyway.”
They knew that he was lying, but he refused to admit the crime.
He shrugged. “In a world without thieves, the wealthy become gods,” he said.
They checked all of the local public kennels, and no one would admit to having purchased a red-haired female man from the brother of the girl with whom the boy was in love.
When the boy got permission from the authorities to check the inventory of all the local public kennels, he did so, but his female man was nowhere to be found.
A sympathetic kennel boss took the boy aside. “You have to understand how it is, son. I see that look on your face and I can only imagine the pain you’re feeling right now, but what I’m going to tell you is as true as the day is long. She is in one of two places. She is in the mines or she is with a circus. These days, most missing mans are never recovered. It’s not like before when there were ample mans to go around. A man would run away and someone would find it and bring it home or bring it here. My shop used to be stocked with as many talking mans as dumb ones. But with all of these new laws protecting the natural habitats of the mans and no laws protecting the natural rights of working people to earn a living in the mines, every talking man is worth its weight in silver. Cheap labor is the law of the land. Whoever stole your talking man got rid of her immediately — and a musical man too! Circus or the mines, and I’m betting the mines. Only the wealthy are still using them as pets. People are too hungry these days. I do not have one single talking man in my shop right now. I take in maybe three a week and they are gone within minutes. Your man would have to be pretty dumb and pretty dull to be a pet, but the smart ones — straight to the mines. Thieves know this. Business is good for thieves these days. A curse on all thieves!”
The boy went home with the horrible vision in his head of his sweet, sarcastic little red-haired female man working in the mines. He wept all the way home. He wept all night.
“Oh Red Locks, oh my little Red Locks!” he cried in his room that night.
In the morning he got up and dressed for school and then he left. After school he went to the mill and he worked his part-time hours. After work he and his father got with their mallets and other tools and they tore down the proper kennel in their backyard.
It was a very long time before the boy courted a girl again. It was a very long time before he loved a girl again. And he never again owned a man.
It hurt too much.
5
Red Man, Red Man, Why Do You Weep?
War is king of your philosophies. Your harvest of blood fills your belly while infants and orphans wail.
On the day the red-haired female man arrived at the mines, the boss took the measure of her and liked what he saw.
He would have preferred that she not be so pale. On the other hand, two years in the eastern mines had made her lean, strong, and clever. He put her to work on the load-and-pull and found that she could do it better than any other man, and so he put her to lead it.
They told him she was a vicious fighter, that she had the gift of landing the first blow. The winding scar on her arm, they told him, was proof. He checked the scar and decided he may have been deceived. It may have been got from the lash. She was a talking man, and so he asked her.
“I have been defeated,” she said. “But never by the same man twice.”
Feisty, he thought, and he patted her head, his lips curling upward in delight. “I shall call you Red Man, for you have red hair.”
She winced and he took notice. Fearing a man bite, he withdrew his hand.
The boss was first among poets.
How serious are her eyes, he thought. They are alert and at the same time so weary.
He peered into her emerald eyes and was afforded a hint of what two years of working in the eastern mines could do to a man — two regular years (six man years) of breaking rock and stone with hammer and club, of hauling the overloaded wheeled carts, of hefting granite, coal, slate, and silver, in the dark bowels of the earth.
“But,” he said to himself, feeling a sudden surge of compassion, “here in the western mines, it shall not be so.”
As soon as he said it, he took it back: “On the other hand, there is much silver to be made.” He rationalized, “She is but a man, after all.”
The boss was first among gamblers. He made her his favorite so that in lean times she would not be eaten as others had been. He made her his companion in the planning of strategy against the man who would be sent to meet her in the fight yard behind the food wagon.
He would point to the opponent. “Gold Braid does not weigh so very much, but she is tall with sharp teeth.”
His female man would nod. “I will run against her and knock her to the ground. Then I will pounce quickly and pin her arms. I will twist like so to avoid her teeth, and I will bite with mine. Mine are sharp too, you know?”
“Good plan, my little red top,” he would say, and then he would clap his hands. “See to it then!”
That is the way it went in the western mines.
She lived for the day’s labor.
She lived for the day’s opponent.
He was called Yellow Fellow, for his hair and his flesh were yellow-hued, and he was the champion.