Hot Valley (5 page)

“Please, let's not talk of war at the table!” my mother said.

“Do you think it will come, Johnson?” my father said.

“Of course. As sure as rain and snow.”

“And will we be safe here?”

“We'll be safe nowhere, sir.”

“Oh dear,” my mother said, suddenly busy with a duster. “Let's not frighten the girls! Come on, Margaret, Jane. You can help me in the…er…in the parlor.”

“I'm not frightened,” Margaret said. “If it comes to war, I'm ready to fight for what's right.”

“I believe you would, Miss Edgerton,” Johnson said, “but God forbid we should ever see ladies reduced to the bestial condition of men. Jack, let's take a walk and leave your family in peace.” He stood up, folded his napkin, and led me out of the dining room with a heavy arm around my shoulders.

We walked through the hall, out of the house, and onto the road at a striding pace, not saying a word. It was only when we had reached the stream, some 100 yards from the house, that he slowed down. The arm remained around my shoulders.

“You don't like me very much, do you Jack?”

I was unused to direct questions like that; in our circle, things were expressed in much more roundabout ways.

“Of course I like you.”

“Then why do you torment me?”

“I don't.”

“Let's cut the crap.”

I had never been spoken to like that before, even by my conquests at the White Horse, who were a rough-mannered lot.

“How dare you?”

“Ever since I arrived, you've been buzzing around me like a horsefly. If you weren't my employer's son I'd have swatted you down so hard your ass would have made a hole in the ground. Now tell me, Jack, what's your problem?”

“I don't have a problem. If anyone has a problem, it's you.” I tried to sound authoritarian, but it came out as pompous.

“You're full of shit.”

“Oh!” This was too much, and I was about to say something that I would very much have regretted. Fortunately, Johnson didn't let me get a word in edgewise.

“You're a spoiled little mother's boy, you ain't never done an honest day's work in your life, and, God damn it, I want you to be my friend not my enemy. Why does that make you so damn mad?”

“It doesn't. I just—”

“You do everything you can to get me in wrong with Mr. Windridge. You make your smart little comments and I bite my tongue, every time. You make out that I'm some kind of criminal, or worse. You needle me, Jack, at every turn. What have I done to you? Don't you like this big black face?”

He stuck his face very close to mine and grinned in a parody of the Nigger Minstrels who came to town on fair day.

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“So why can't we just be friends and drop all this bullshit?”

The time had come for me to answer that question, both to Johnson and to myself. I knew the truth, of course; I was angry with him because he hadn't fucked me, and I was acting like a child deprived of a coveted toy. I was angry because I thought of him as my natural subordinate, yet it was clear he was my superior in every respect. I did not like this reversal of what I had always thought of as the natural order. God, what a shameful admission! I could barely acknowledge it even to myself. Instead, I dressed the truth up in fancy costume.

“I want to be your friend, Aaron. I would like nothing more. But you have kept yourself at a distance. You have spurned my offers of companionship. Is it any wonder that I react with wounded pride?”

He looked me in the eye, his face still close enough for me to smell the coffee on his breath, and frowned. “Pride, is it?”

“Yes.” Oh, the shame.

“Not something else?”

“Like what?”

“Wounded vanity, perhaps? Or disappointment? Frustration?”

“I don't know what you mean,” I said, furious that he'd read me so plainly.

He walked to the water's edge and stared into the trees.

“You and I are not so different, Jack.”

I stood beside him, searching the darkness of the opposite bank as if it held the answer to some great riddle. “Are we not?”

“We are both proud.”

“Perhaps.”

“Vain.”

“Perhaps.”

“Pigheaded and stubborn.”

“Granted.”

“I was very much like you at your age.”

“I doubt that,” I said, thinking of the delights of my ample leisure hours.

“But I learned…restraint.”

This reminded me of the sort of lecture Mick would
sometimes give me about “safe conduct in public” and other subjects dear to his heart.

“Damn restraint.”

“Very well. Damn restraint.” He turned and faced me. “Let's do whatever we want to do. Let's forget the consequences. Let's not think about our families, our friends, our future, our safety. It would be so easy, wouldn't it, Jack?”

“What would?” Things were moving too fast; I was not in control.

“To kiss you.”

Silence between us. The light was fading, the birds were no longer singing, even the stream seemed to have slowed its usual rush to a meek trickle. Nature was holding its breath.

“So do it,” I said at length, closing my eyes and parting my lips. “Do it now.”

And he did. With one hand on the back of my head, the other over my heart, he kissed me full on the mouth, his lips pressing into mine, his tongue finding mine, locking together, struggling, slipping, caressing. My knees went weak, and my cock sprang to life. I could feel from the pressure at his hips that his had done the same.

When I opened my eyes, the world was still the same, the stream still flowed, but something inside me had changed. It was like that time in the White Horse when I first discovered cock. What had I discovered now?

“What happens next, Jack?”

“We go somewhere.”

“And we…lie together.”

“Yes.”

“I want to.” For the first time, he sounded uncertain. “I've thought of nothing else since the first day I arrived, when I nearly ran you down with my horse. I've dreamed of you, your naked body, your skin against mine. Of all the things we could do together. I've watched you in the office, your tongue sticking out between your lips as you scratch away at the ledgers. I've seen you daydreaming, wishing I could be there with you in your dreams…”

“You can. We can be together.”

He kissed me again, briefly this time, a mere peck on the lips. “We can never be together, Jack. You know that as well as I do.”

“Why not? I want you more than I've ever wanted anyone.”

“And what you want, you get, huh?”

“Why not? What's to stop me?”

“The world, Jack. The times we live in. God in Heaven himself. I don't know. How could we ever be together?”

“I know a place in the woods…”

“Where we could go now and I could fuck your white ass.”

“Yes. Please.”

He thought for a while, and I could see that the idea was not repulsive to him. “And then, for an encore, I could ride into town, throw a rope over a tree, hang myself, maybe tar and feather myself, maybe cut my cock off. And what would happen to you, do you think? Well, you'd have to leave town, of course. You'd drift around. Maybe you'd end up in Boston or New York, in rented rooms, watching your life run down the drain, wondering if it was worth all that pain and trouble for just one fuck with the black man.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Nobody needs to know.”

He laughed out loud. “Nobody needs to know? You think things like that can happen without people finding out? Wake up, Jack. Wake up and face reality.”

“Nobody knows what I get up to,” I said, thinking myself very fine and clever.

“You mean what you get up to with Mick?”

That took the wind out my sails.

“And the other fellows at the White Horse? You're mighty popular down in that part of town, Jack. I've heard
that there's very little you won't do. And what a fine, generous young man you are.”

“You don't know—”

“I know plenty. People do, Jack. I imagine even your father knows more than he'd like to.”

“But what's that got to do with us? You wouldn't tell. I wouldn't talk.”

“You think we live in a world where every man is his own master, Jack. Where nobody minds anyone else's business, and everyone can live and let live. But I tell you, we've already done more than is safe. If I didn't believe that your family is indoors right now, that the light is failing, and that nobody has trespassed on your grounds, I would never have come within three feet of you. I would never speak to you in this way. I would never have kissed you.”

“But we can be alone together, far from everyone.”

“Like you were with Mick in the woods? Up at the ponds?”

Had Mick talked? “Who told you about that?”

“You were seen, Jack. People have eyes.”

“But who…”

“Nobody's done anything—so far. They hate what you do, they would kill you if you weren't the son of the wealthiest man in town, and Mick would be run out of the state if he weren't under your protection. And he knows how to look after himself. He doesn't tell you about that, does he? About the fights and the abuse and the threats that he gets. You think all those men in the downtown bars are just there for your pleasure, Jack? They'd cut your throat if they thought they could get away with it.”

I was shaking now.

“But that's nothing, nothing at all, compared to the hell that would be let loose if they found out that a black man had been sticking his big nigger dick up your ass. Ooooh, my soul! Dey chase dat boy all de way to de nigger-hangin' tree! Dey burn yo' house down! Dey take yo' sistah and yo' muddah and dey throw dem in de rivah!”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“I've said too much.” Suddenly he was Mr. Aaron Johnson again, formal, distant, polite. “Please forgive me, Jack. I hope I have not alarmed you. Now there are business matters that I must discuss with your father. Good evening.”

He turned on his heel and walked back to the house.

I sat on the riverbank and stared into the gathering darkness, imagining the twinkle of 100 pairs of prying eyes staring right back at me.

SUDDENLY, THE WORLD CHANGED. WHEREVER I WENT, FROM the office to the town square to the bar of the White Horse, the talk was of war. In March, President Lincoln declared that secession was legally void. In April, confederates fired on Federal troops at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The world was on the march, communities were divided, and our lives would never be the same again.

Even in Bishopstown, prosperous New England backwater far from the battle lines to the south, there were rankling divisions springing up in unlikely quarters, splitting our town in two and making the streets unsafe to walk at night. Old resentments flared up like fires long smothered but never extinguished. Mr. Windridge declared himself hot for the rights of slave owners, and started to frequent hotel bars where like-minded anti-abolitionists flaunted their views without fear of attack. In the town square, there were rallies in favor of Mr. Lincoln, in favor of abolition, in favor of joining the army right there and then to go and fight for the Union. I watched them from a distance, listened to the speeches, and feared for my future.

Mick, my longtime lover and mentor, disappeared one day from the bar of the White Horse, without a word of where he was going; I suspect he'd returned to some long-forgotten homestead with the vague impulse to defend the family who had rejected him. Only when he was gone did I truly value him, as the ache in my empty ass, and the hunger in my guts for his vigorous loving, attested. I still had other playmates around town, but as the excitement grew around the war, their tolerance for my high-handed, selfish pleasure-seeking diminished. Soon, even the junior employees, the stable hands and groundskeeper at the spa, were giving me their cocks with barely concealed contempt. More and more money was leaving my pockets and entering theirs. At the age of 21, I was paying for it, like a man twice, three times my age.

My father asked me outright what I intended to do.

“I won't fight, if that's what you mean.”

“Why not?”

“I don't believe in war as a solution to a purely political problem.” I was spouting the kind of talk I'd heard in college; how inadequate it sounded now.

“And if the Rebels move north? If they attack?”

“I hardly think they'll move on Vermont.”

“Why not, Jack?” Aaron Johnson asked, witnessing this conversation one afternoon in the office. “It's a wealthy part of the Union. The South is poor, they feel threatened, they'll fight to preserve what's theirs, and they'll take whatever they need.”

“What then, son? Will you believe in war then? When they're riding through town looting and burning?”

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “We have state troops.”

“So did Fort Sumter,” Johnson said, leaving the room.

My father stayed, pacing up and down the office.

“We live in troubled times, Jack,” he said at last. I always
knew that when my father uttered such platitudes he was building up to some major announcement.

“Yes, sir.”

“Change is coming.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so? You better do more than guess so, Jack.” There was anger in his voice, and for a moment his eye flashed at me. Then he continued his pacing. I pretended to read some papers, and waited.