When We Were Animals(9)

At the words “permanent friend,” her gaze landed on Polly and me. Polly looked down, submissive. I made my face blank, like cinder block.

“How can you tell the difference?” Adelaide asked.

Rosebush seemed about to attack, but then she shrugged it off, as would a predator that grows bored with easy prey.

“Believe me,” she said, “when you’re nearly kissed by him, you can tell.”

Then she addressed me amicably.

“On a related topic, do you know who I heard was actually interested in you, Lumen?”

“Who?” I asked miserably.

“Roy Ruggle,” said Rosebush.

“Blackhat Roy?”

“He’s only got eight toes,” Polly contributed. It was well known that Blackhat Roy had exploded two toes off his right foot when he was trying to modify a Roman candle with a pair of pliers two years before.

“But he’s dark,” said Rosebush, “like Lumen. And he’s more her height. Also, he never goes to church, and neither does Lumen. You know, I sit right next to Petey in church. He tells me about his grandmother who died. Did he ever tell you about her, Lumen? You can tell by the way he talks about her he knows about pain. To endure suffering—it’s the most romantic thing of all, don’t you think?”

*



To endure suffering. I wonder how much people really endure. They talk about heartbreak, and they turn their faces away. But heartbreak is really the least of it, a splinter in the skin. Hearts mend. Most tragedy is overcome with prideful righteousness. The tear on the cheek, like a pretty little insect, wending its way over your jaw, down your sensitive neck, under your collar.

I wonder how much suffering my husband has endured. Or Janet Peterson, with her dry, overcooked lamb. They are easily horrified, easily disgusted. They turn their heads away from the simplest and most mundane adversity.

On the other hand, to be bound by your own fate, to feel the eager lashes of a grinning world all up and down your nerve endings. To bleed—to make others bleed. To know there is no end of things. To become something that you can never unbecome. There are in the world sufferings that are not stage pieces but rather whole lives.

Rosebush Lincoln. I was shut to her that day.

Yet those words of hers, even now, recall to me the lovely, hungry smell of autumn leaves.

*



Just as Rosebush Lincoln was extolling the virtues of endured suffering, there was a sound in the trees above the quarry, and we all gazed up to find a boy on the verge—as though we had conjured boyness with our witchy voices and manifested a puerile sprite from the morning dew itself.

“It’s Hondy,” said Rosebush. “He must’ve followed me all the way from town.”

Hondy Pilt held the handles of his bicycle and stared down at us in his misty and bloated way. He said nothing. Hondy Pilt rarely spoke, and his eyes never looked at you exactly—instead they looked right over your shoulder, which made you feel that you were just some insufficient forgery of your real self and that your real self was invisible, somewhere behind you.

So Rosebush invited him to join us, and for the next hour she forced him to drink beer and she put wildflowers in his hair and she told him to sit a certain way so that she could use his bulky body to prop up her own and gaze at the clouds above.

I felt bad for Hondy Pilt, but he didn’t seem to mind being used as Rosebush Lincoln’s lounge chair, and I wondered if that was his particular magic—to be still content with the world in all its pretty little injustices.

It wasn’t long before Rosebush got a new idea—which was to send Hondy Pilt adventuring into the abandoned mine. We all looked at the mouth of the mine, weeded and overgrown, a dark void chipped out of the earth, like the hollow well of a giant’s missing tooth. We had heard stories of our older brothers and sisters spelunking the mine with flashlights, discovering networks of underground rooms, rusted mining equipment, bottomless shafts easily stumbled into. Our parents warned us against the mine, because a boy once lost his way in the maze of passages and never came back out—but every time they tried to board up the entrance, the breachers, who did not like to be disinvited from places, would tear it open during the next full moon.

“I don’t know, Rosebush,” said Idabel. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Come on. Hondy wants to do it. Don’t you, Hondy?”

She raised him to his feet and wound her arm in his so that they looked like a bride and groom, and the boy smiled at the sky.

“Ro’bush,” he said in his indistinct way.

So she led him to the mouth of the mine, and we all gathered around, too—because nobody could stop Rosebush from sacrificing Hondy Pilt to the mine.

“Go on, Hondy,” she said. “Go on now.”

He looked into the darkness, then at his own feet, then in the direction of the girl at his side.

She encouraged him with sweeping hand gestures.

“Go on,” she said. “Bring me a treasure. Find me a gold nugget.”

And he went. While we all watched from the mouth of the mine, he moved forward step by step.

“Rosebush,” Idabel admonished.

“Shush,” said Rosebush, her eyes never leaving her knight errant. In fact, the farther he went into the dark, the more intent she became, her fists clenching themselves into tight balls, her breath coming faster, an expression on her face like some excruciating ecstasy. I could hear her breathing.