Swanly, after the pills, began admitting to the peach wine as if it were a mortal offense. Bernadette caught his spirit. They adjourned to the house where he could lie comfortably with her Oriental shawl over him.
We don’t have strong drink here. Not much. She looked to Tuck. You don’t have to drink to have a full experience.
Tuck said, No, not drink. Hardly.
No. I’m having fun just talking. Talking to you is fine. Because I haven’t been much of a talker. That’s good medicine. My tongue feels all light.
Talk on, child. She gave Swanly another pill.
Tuck went to relieve himself and through the window he saw the clothesline over the green clover and he speculated that through time simple household things might turn on you in a riot of overwhelming redundancy. He had heard of a man whose long dear companion, a buckskin cat, had walked between his legs one night and tripped and killed him as he went down headfirst onto a commode. Cheered that this was not him he went back to listen to the boy.
But after all you wouldn’t have just anybody look at you all bared. Surely not that awful person, Bernadette was saying. I’d not let him see me for heaven’s sake.
It seems he ought to pay. I feel tortured and all muddy. I can’t forget it.
Just talk it out, that’s best. It seems there’s always a monster about, doesn’t it?
I feel I could talk all afternoon into the night.
We aren’t going anywhere.
We aren’t going anywhere, added Tuck.
I’m feeling all close to you if that’s all right.
Some people are sent to us. We have been waiting all our lives for somebody and don’t even know it.
Older ones are here to teach and guide the young, Tuck said.
Bernadette glanced at Tuck then looked again. He had come back with his hair combed and he had shaved. He was so soft in the face she felt something new for him. In this trinity already a pact was sealed and they could no more be like others. There was a tingling and a higher light around them. A flood of goodwill took her as if they had been hurled upon a foreign shore, all fresh. The boy savior, child, and paramour at once. Swanly spoke on, it hardly mattered what he said. Each word a pleasant weight on her bosom.
Walthall and the rest stared into the fire sighing, three of them having their separate weather, their separate fundament, in peach wine. Pal could swallow no more and heaved out an arc of puke luminous over the fire, crying, Thar she blows, my dear youth. This act was witnessed like a miracle by the others.
God in heaven, this stuff was so good for a while, said Silk.
Fools, said Bean.
Bean don’t drink because he daddy daid, said Walthall. So sad, so sad, so gone, so Beat.
Yeh. It might make him cry, said Pal.
Or act human, said Silk.
Let it alone. Bean had stood unmoved by their inebriation for two hours, caressing his 20-gauge horse gun.
Teenage love, teenage heart. My face broke out the other night but I’m in love wit yewwww! sang Walthall.
What you think Swanly’s doing, asked Pal.
Teenage suckface. Dark night of the suck.
They are carrying him away, far far away, Silk declared.
Or him them.
Having a bit of transversion, them old boy and girl.
You mean travesty. Something stinketh, I tell you.
We know.
The hermit made Swanly all sick. We should put a stop to his mischief, said Bean all sober.
That person saw the peepee full out of ourn good friend ourn little buddy.
This isn’t to laugh about. Swanly’s deep and he’s a hurting man.
Boy, said Pal. He once told me every adult had a helpless urge to smother the young so they could keep company with the dead, which were themselves.
You’d have to love seeing small animals suffer to hurt Swanly. The boy’s damn near an angel. I swear he ain’t even rightly one of us, said Silk. Bean did not care for Silk, who had only joined them lately. But Silk redeemed himself, saying, Christ I’m just murky. Swanly’s deep.
You know what, Walthall spoke, I felt sorry for all three of them when they left here. Yes the woman is aged but fine, but it was like a six-legged crippled thing.
So it was, said Pal. I declare nothing happy is going on wherever they are.
Whosoever you are, be that person with all your might. Time goes by faster than we thought. It is a thief so quiet. You must let yourself be loved and you must love, parts of you that never loved must open and love. You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself.
Tuck going on at dawn. Bernadette was surprised again by him. Another man, fluent, had risen in his place. She was in her pink sleeping gown but the others wore their day clothes and were not sleepy.
Listen, the birds are singing for us out there and it’s a morning, a real morning, Bernadette said. A true morning out of all the rest of the mornings.
By noon they were hoarse and languid and commended themselves into a trance wherein all wore bedsheets and naked underneath they moved about the enormous bed like adepts in a rite. The question was asked of Swanly by Tuck whether he would care to examine their lovely Bernadette since he had never seen a woman and Swanly said yes and Bernadette lay back opening the sheet and then spreading herself so Swanly saw a woman as he had never seen her for a long while and she only a little shy and the boy smiled wearily assenting to her glory and was pulled inward through love and death and constant birth gleefully repeated by the universe. Then husband and wife embraced with the boy between them on the edge of the bed, none of them recalling how they were there but all talk ceased and they were as those ignorant animals amongst the fruit of Eden just hours before the thunder.
Long into the afternoon they awoke with no shame and only the shyness of new dogs in a palace and then an abashed hunger for the whole ritual again set like a graven image in all their dreams. The boy had been told things and he felt very elegant, a crowned orphan now orphan no more. Bernadette, touched in all places, felt dear and coveted. All meanness had been driven from Tuck and he was blank in an ecstasy of separate parts like a creature torn to bits at the edge of a sea. Around them were their scattered clothes, the confetti of delirium. They embraced and were suspended in a bulb of void delicate as a drop of water.
Sunballs came around the store since it was closed and he wore a large knife on his belt in a scabbard with fringe on it and boots in white leather and high to the knee, which he had without quite knowing their use rescued out of a country lane near the bridge, the jetsam of a large majorette seduced in a car he had been watching all night. At the feet he looked blindingly clean as in a lodge ceremony. He walked quickly as if appointed and late. He looked in one window of the blue house, holding the sill, before he came to the second and beheld them all naked gathering and ungathering in languor, unconscious in their innocence. He watched a goodly while, his hands formally at his side, bewitched like a pole-axed angel. Then he commenced rutting on the scabbard of his knife grabbed desperately to his loins but immediately also to call out scolding as somebody who had walked up on murder.