The Whipping Boy (8 page)

At Mrs. Peltier's boarding house, his thoughts were occupied by the woman who was recovering upstairs. Saying prayers at night, he couldn't keep his thoughts on the subject for daydreaming about her. His Divine Father, whom he never had exactly pictured, kept slipping away in favor of the woman upstairs. As he knelt by the couch, in fact, his Divine Father didn't have much pull at all compared with the woman upstairs. During the little time he actually slept, weird dreams poured through his head. Tom had always had vivid dreams and nightmares, but now they were laced with images of her. She would be lying down, her hair out on the ground, eating an apple, her mouth a thread of scarlet. Or she would be a tower, her eyes as large as green pools, and he would climb up her neck.

He strongly wanted to go to the parlor and see her, and he managed to do so a couple of times by taking water and food to her room. The lump on her temple seemed to be going down, leaving a greenish bruise. She smiled at him the second time he went, and all that night he turned every which way on the couch, feeling strangely hot, thinking about her.

Reverend Schoot had preached about the serpent poisons of the female sex. Women were the offspring of Eve, bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword, to be feared and put out of one's thoughts. The lust that they inspired could destroy the body and eat up the soul. At the very least, the lust for woman threw off the compass of righteousness. To his knowledge, Tom had never had a strong compass of righteousness, but whatever kind he did have was sure gyrating.

Tom could tell that the woman was on Jake's mind, too. Afternoons, they worked past dark and came back for late suppers in the kitchen, and Jake always asked Mrs. Peltier about her, first thing. Had she said her name yet? Was she better? The landlady's tone regarding her patient seemed to grow less sympathetic each day. Tuesday, she answered Jake's inquiry with a look and no more, leaving an embarrassing silence, and by Wednesday she clearly had lost all sympathy for the patient. “Oh, she talks all right.”

“What about?” Jake asked.

Mrs. Peltier glared at him a minute before answering. “She ought to stay in bed, but she wants to get up and wander around all the time. Doesn't pay a whit of attention to me. Treats me like a hired woman! Last night I was putting witch hazel on her and she said she was tired of me bothering her.”

On Thursday, the landlady had become openly unhappy about running a hospital on top of a boarding house, and very tired of the increasing interest her “bachelors” had in the woman. They were all men in late middle or old age—three of them retired—and Tom was amazed at how much time they had just to sit around talking and being curious. Mrs. Peltier insisted that Jake try to send a telegram to Tuskahoma requesting information about her, so that relatives could be found to take charge of her. He tried, but lines into the territory were still dead. Early that evening Mrs. P sent for a doctor, and according to the way it was told by the men at dinner, he had given his patient a poultice and two doses of what he called “brain stimulant,” to be taken the next morning if she wasn't better.

Mr. Potts was fidgety. The oldest of the bachelors, Potts always sat at the head of the table wearing a boiled shirt, wing collar, cravat, and silver tie pin. Tom's impression of Potts was that he was always cheerful, sometimes to an almost alarming degree. But tonight he kept shaking his head and looking worried. Mr. Taylor, a retired pharmacist, leaned down the table and told Jake, “I seen him make up that pill, and it looked like blue mass to me. I guess he figures her brain is in her digestion.”

“That's a doctor for you,” Jake said. “Just selling his powders.”

The flood was receding by Friday, and the whole river end of town smelled like decaying animals. Tom's job that day was to help haul out more than a foot of muck that covered the first floor and to find dead rats and fish in the building. Although some carcasses could be smelled but not found, he cleared out more than a wheelbarrow full. That evening, Jake and Tom again got home in time to eat supper with the others at the boarding house. Tom knew the bachelors' names by then, although he'd said little but good morning or good evening to any of them. They were, besides Jake, Messrs. Haskell, Albert, Ferris, Taylor, and Potts—and it seemed that their mood tonight was awfully quiet and nervous at the table.

“What's everybody so talkative about?” Jake asked. No one answered, and as Jake muttered something about what a friendly bunch of scalawags they were, Tom saw the door fly open and there she stood, wearing nothing but Mrs. P's old dressing robe, askew on her body, the belt loose and doing little to hold it together. Tom fetched up off his chair as fast as if something had bit him in the rear end, crashing against the table, causing dishes to rattle and glasses wobble. There he remained, amazed, frozen in a half-cocked position, trying, out of automatic reticence, not to look below her green eyes, or her mouth—absolutely no lower than the top of her white neck. Yet he found it impossible not to notice regions below that.

“I've been poisoned,” she announced.

The men around the table stopped in mid-chew, all reaching of arms and mastication halted, as they gazed at the extraordinary sight. Mr. Potts began coughing, choking on his sweet potato. Standing by the table with a bowl of green beans, Mrs. Peltier said, “You are not dressed properly for the dining room!”

“I'm dying,” she complained miserably.

Mrs. Peltier set down her green beans with a clatter and rushed toward her as if to push her out of the room.

“Oh, keep away from me!”

“You can't be in here in front of the gentlemen in this condition.”

“All day long I've been in the lavatory. That doctor poisoned me.”

“That wasn't poison. That was your brain stimulant!”

“If that was my brain, it's all gone now.”

Mr. Potts coughed louder.

“Young lady, you are not dressed—”

“Oh, shut up.” She turned on her heel and exited the room, leaving them in stunned silence.

Mrs. Peltier picked up an empty bowl and gathered herself together. After a moment she said portentously, “Mr. Jaycox, may I speak with you?”

Looking grim, Jake followed her into the kitchen. Over Mr. Potts's continued coughing, Tom heard her whispering furiously and Jake mumbling something back, and then her coming back more loudly, “Well, you have to get her out of the boarding house!”

“I told you,” Mr. Taylor said. “That doctor give her a double dose of blue mass. That's enough to set a horse straight.”

“You okay, Potts?” Mr. Haskell asked.

“It's been twenty year since I seen anythin like that, Yankee,” Mr. Potts said in a tight voice, rubbing his throat and finally getting his sweet potato all the way down. He took a drink of water. “Liked to strangled me.”

Tom was still frozen in a half-standing position, and Mr. Haskell, next to him at the table, put a hand on his forearm. “Sit down, Tom. It's passed.”

***

Tom didn't sleep again that night.

He worried that Mrs. Peltier was going to throw the woman out of her boarding house, and perhaps throw him out, too, if things didn't get “back to normal”—a phrase he heard her say several times. He didn't want to leave this place, because he'd begun to feel at home here. There was so much to like about his new life.

He liked the amazing wealth of things at the store, liked the energy of working among men. He liked not having to parse sentences and practice penmanship and memorize history dates and Latin verbs and recite the Twenty-third Psalm and the proverbs, and not having to listen for the umpteenth time to the toiling recitations of other boys. He liked not having to witness the stubby hand of the Reverend during these recitations, tirelessly marking down little strokes in his “book of sins,” in order later to punish each of them with the birch or the belt or the horsewhip according to an exact accounting of their failures. The Reverend always raised his eyebrow and gave a quiet, satisfied grunt when he made marks in the book. Tom had what one of the many teachers who passed through the academy (they always quit or were fired after a brief time) had called a God-given talent for memorizing passages, so the black marks in his account usually had been for other things—impudence, irreverence, blasphemy, backsliding, uncleanness, haughtiness, each of which merited a certain number of lashes or other punishments, like going without food for two days or being locked in the windowless basement, where Tom sometimes thought he could hear the moaning ghosts of soldiers who'd died in the building when it was a hospital during the Civil War. Tom's God-given talent had not helped him evade the Reverend's constant eye.

Except for the teachers who came and went too quickly to have much influence, the boys who lived at the orphanage at Bokchito were about the only ones who knew about its internal workings, and they were the least equipped to understand it. Few of them had much memory of living anywhere else, and those who did remembered little but the gnawing of empty stomachs. Tom didn't remember even that, so his only points of comparison were from passages in books in the library and from his few encounters with the outside—with the washerwoman, or going to Durant on market day.

The academy library was a dusty closet near the Reverend's office with a few shelves of books, and Tom had read all of them more than once—books personally chosen by the Reverend to uplift the Christian reader, though not too far or too high above the solid foundations of Presbyterian thought. It was in fact a dreary collection, but Tom had no way of knowing that, since he'd never read a book outside it. At least he did have books to read. Mostly they were about the Bible and Christian thought and Christian living and Christian habits and Christian martyrs and even Christian hygiene. One book, kept not in the library but in the quarantine room, was called
The Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children
, and he had read it once while sick. The first chapter came to the “inevitable conclusion,” through the “new science of statistical reasoning,” that hell was populated primarily by children. Other chapters described—in imaginative and colorful language—what awaited children who had committed sins, like playing with pets on Sunday or thinking ungodly thoughts. Descriptions of joyful deaths were few and vague, while the descriptions of their sufferings in hell were painted in excellent detail.

Literature in the library included
The Grave
by Robert Blair and
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
by Gray.
The Analects of the Great Romans
caused a stirring in him, especially the brisk narrative of the Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar. There was a biography of John Calvin which spoke of Paris and Geneva and other faraway places. His favorite book was Herodotus's
History of the Persian Wars
. Here and there in nooks and crannies of this otherwise desolate little group of books were moments of triumph, love, or happiness that Tom read about with interest and puzzlement. The Reverend severely discouraged such emotions except when they involved the conversion experience—which Tom and the majority of the other boys never had.

For now, Tom was still too close to the academy even to hate it. Perhaps at some time in the future he'd understand that the place he grew up in was a cold fortress against the outside world, commanded by a man who cared more about the health of his Christian soldiers' souls than their lives, and more about his own need than either. Maybe Tom would be knowledgeable enough in the ways of the world to figure out how it was that Reverend James Schoot got away with running the academy however he pleased, effectively as distant from the Presbyterian Mission's headquarters as the banks of the Yangtze River, and how it was that the otherwise competent Choctaw government never did anything about the Armstrong Academy—never sent an inspector, never complained, never responded to the outrages that were vividly described in letters written by the teachers who quit the place. Perhaps the tribe did nothing about the academy because it did not seem unlike many other mission-run schools. Perhaps they did nothing about it because they were overwhelmed by other concerns—intensifying lawlessness, a flood of white riffraff who were illegally occupying their land in increasing numbers, a major crop that had come to be nearly worthless, and most recently the ominous Dawes Commission, gathering like a black cloud in Muskogee, said to be hiring hundreds of clerks in preparation for the final liquidation of their government and their domain. Amid such concerns, maybe the Choctaw government was satisfied that the efficient-acting Reverend was handling the orphan boys.

What Tom did know at this point was that he was away from the academy, things were different, life was moving on in a more promising way. His feelings were like a cottonwood seed that had burst open and was being blown in every direction by the wind. There were moments when his heart would begin pounding for no apparent reason, as if something big was about to happen—good or bad, he couldn't tell.

Oddly, he and the other two boys didn't talk much at work. They had been friends at the academy, particularly Tom and Hack, but instead of sticking together and talking about their new jobs, they hardly spoke at all. At first he didn't realize how much they were avoiding one another. One day near the end of work Tom was on the fourth floor loading frying pans onto a cart, and he looked up to see Hack across the gloomy, rough-pillared room, staring into a sunset. Hack turned from the window, saw Tom, and without a word quickly disappeared from view, but even in that brief moment, across the big room, Tom felt a mysterious charge of aversion between them. He walked slowly up the long aisle to the window where Hack had been looking southwestward, beyond the courthouse and river, across the low rolling hills of the Choctaw Nation toward Bokchito.

At the end of each day's work, Tom lay awake in the boarding house, tired, excited, listening to the wind outside and to the sounds of the house, wondering if the woman upstairs was awake or asleep, getting up and pacing the room and gazing out at the yellow light coming from a saloon down the street.