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By Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo
The boy could not stay put. A round reddish
brown mark sat smack at the middle of his left foot, over the
crisscross of veins. With a confident show of wisdom, the elders who
attended his birth declared only two possibilities. Either the boy
would never stay still or the growth of his spirit would be
arrested, nailed down at some predestined point in time.
His father cared little where his eldest went as
long as he was done working wood at the shop. The boy learned as
fast as boys do and did good enough work for him. The father did not
ask for more from his son. After a morning’s worth of work and
some routine errands to the lumberyard and smithy, the father often
released him before lunch. At home, his mother gave the greater bulk
of the chores to his two younger brothers. She neither expected nor
desired her eldest to stay at home.
A year ago, when the boy was twelve, the family
was on a journey and the parents lost their son. They had to retrace
all their steps because they could not remember where they got
separated. They found him in the temple with the holy men, asking
many questions, answering many more. He was talking shop, their
shop! And when his mother came to claim and punish him, the truant
called the temple his home. Since then, she gave up trying to leash
the boy to the hearth. Whenever he went away, she believed that he
would make his daily rounds of the holy places. He always came home
before his father did anyway, and so there was never any trouble
between them. She never asked her son any questions, never scolded
him. She did not risk keeping him home.
Every night, she sang the song of her House and
prayed that the second part of the prognostication would be false,
even if it meant giving her son up to his afternoons.
Despite his mother’s hopes, the boy had
nothing more of temples. The boy knew that there was nothing more to
learn from the old men, the men of brown and white beards. Nothing
more from the old men of too many sure words! Rather, he went out of
the walls of houses and markets, beyond the pastures of shepherds.
He went to the farther places, well beyond the difficult pass at the
outskirts, that exacting arc called the needle’s eye, the misery
of beasts and caravans. He went to the very places where other boys
feared to tread. Unlike him, they were constantly fed by mothers
with stories of savage robbers hidden in trees and rocks beside the
road, stories of strange reapers whose anointed scythe considered
wandering children no different from weed.
Over the course of weeks, the boy came to favor
the path of a certain goatherd. He was a large man who always
carried a gnarled staff. That or a young black goat with tufts of
brown above its brow. Brown also extended from the corners of this
kid’s mouth, giving the small black face a perpetual smile.
The boy never approached the man. The man wore
rags no different from other masters of flock. His skin was no
lighter or darker than their skin. This goatherd was tall, with the
ramrod back of a conquering soldier rather than the usual loose
bearing of a herdsman. Upon closer inspection, the man must have
been a decade past his prime although his beard was oiled, a defiant
black against the sun, against the knots of the strident green and
crumpled gold of grass. His staff was as knobby and crooked as an
old tree’s rotting root. The boy decided that this could not
possibly support the immense shoulders of the man despite the fact
that his faithful observation of the herder’s movements yielded
the contrary conclusion. It was somehow strong, that strange staff,
topped with a crossbar like an oar’s handle and tied there were
three bells tapered like shy buds or the severed points of pikes.
He never approached the man. The boy fancied
himself a master of stealth, a silent prince of shadows. He took the
best places to hide, to observe without disturbing what he observed.
He could stay deathly still for a whole afternoon if he so willed.
The goatherd went about his business, driving or
guarding his flock. From his perch, the boy counted ninety-nine
goats, including the black kid. He counted them whenever the going
was slow. He marked their differences, their patterns, how they
grazed and played and fought. He memorized their markings. Later, he
gave them the names of the prophets or their fathers. For example,
he named the herder’s brown-browed favorite David, the small, the
great. For a nanny, he gave the name of a patriarch’s wife or
daughter. The boy also gave the herder a name with four letters, a
name he only thought to himself and never whispered the way he
usually whispered the names of the goats.
He never approached the man because two things
struck him as odd, first: the goats were far too tame, as if enrapt
with the very step of their master. Their bleats seemed muted
compared to other goats, their play, too polite, as if obligatory.
They never fought with ferocity, and it was as if they merely had to
go through the motions. Sometimes, the breeze tempered these bleats
so that there arose something that sounded like a disembodied
chanting. The young of the flock had no hop in their run, no wobble
in their walk. The flock had one mind and it seemed to throb within
the heel of the master. They came even before he shook his staff’s
bells. He never uttered a word. The boy never even heard him sigh.
He believed the man was dumb though he seemed too alert to be deaf.
How did the man tame such a flock without as much as a sound, not
one word? That was the first question. Next, why did the blackest
goats come to his ear?
It startled him the first time he saw a black
goat approach the master unbidden. The goat that dared was the one
the boy named Joseph because it had such a black coat and he
believed such a goat longed for color in its dreams. When the billy
took to the man’s ear, it nuzzled there a bit, its nose to his
ear. Then the lips moved, and the boy thought that the billy nibbled
on the man’s ear! But when the boy took a closer look, he saw that
the goat’s lips did not even touch the herder’s ear. It appeared
to whisper something there. When it was done, the man smoothed the
billy’s stout horns and lightly slapped the nose, apparently a
signal of dismissal.
After two weeks, it happened again, this time, a
thin nanny with streaks of brown about its rear came to the master.
The boy called her Ruth because he imagined that the streaks, seen
from an angle, somehow spelled her name.
Those two questions caused the boy to keep his
distance. Those also encouraged him to stay. That is, until the
goatherd’s favorite kid broke the bleating ranks, was lost and
then found.
On that day, the boy joined the shadow of the
flock earlier than usual. He missed lunch. He had a hunch that on
that very day, he would see another goat take the ear of the
goatherd. He planned to claim the closest possible nook, be as still
as possible, hold even his breath, all to see, all to hear.
A week or so before that day, the herder began
carrying his favorite less and less. He pushed it toward the other
kids. David learned the walk, played the games.
But that afternoon, while the goatherd drove the
flock, David lingered by the roots of a tree. The boy observed David
from his perch, the top of tree a dozen paces from the kid’s tree.
The boy stayed with the kid and did not follow the goatherd. He did
not understand why. He seemed compelled to follow its fate. Or its
freedom, for he saw that after a while of stillness, and a dozen or
so tentative steps, there came a wobble in David’s walk. Then it
ran and there was a hop to its run. David ran and walked and ran,
with no directions whatsoever, just steps because steps could be
achieved, just sprints as if it suddenly found the speed coiled deep
in the bones. Also, some happy stumblings! Thus, David sped and
panted in twists and turns and jumps until it came to a rich spot of
grass under the boy’s tree, and the boy thought he saw a new smile
emerge within the brown smile.
It was the boy who heard the bells first. He saw
nothing over the ridge where the flock disappeared. He looked down
at David, remarked how it chewed with gusto, expected the instant it
would hear the bells, and anticipated that it would stop, and when
it heard the bells, it did. David stiffened.
The goatherd appeared from the ridge, shaking
his staff. He was alone therefore fast. When he came to David, he
caressed it like a lost son, checked its body, its every hair. He
dropped his staff and, with both arms, he raised his favorite to the
sky.
The boy saw a smile break on the man’s face.
At this, the boy remembered his father measuring wood, sawing,
straightening out bent nails with his hammer, and pounding the nails
into the wood. While the urge rose in him to run back to the shop,
he felt like his father’s nail lodged in that tree.
Then the herder nestled David to his bosom,
stooped for his staff, and walked back to his flock.
The boy was transfixed. When they were over the
ridge, he tried to remember David’s face. He tried to understand
the value of that brief time of David’s choice to stray and become
something other than a kid in a flock, something other than a
favorite.
Although he had not yet decided where to go, he
willed himself to leave the tree. He was about to climb down when he
heard the bells again. The boy stayed until he saw flock arrive,
driven by the herder with his lips buried in the ear of the kid
against its chest. The kid seemed more treasured than it ever was.
The herder came to the shadow of his tree,
almost below the boy’s branch. He oiled his hair, his beard, his
dagger. He took some rope from his bag and tied David to the tree
upright, its young limbs stretched, as in an impossible attempt to
embrace the entire trunk with the kid’s back. It protested with
bursts of bleats, how many? More than five? Less than a dozen? The
boy was not sure. For the first time in his life, he could not keep
count. Or he did, and did so exactly, recalling even the intensities
and durations, but he forgot, for once David’s bleats were
silenced, so were the boy’s thoughts. Then in one flowing moment,
the goatherd gripped David’s muzzle in his right hand, effacing
the brown smile. Within that same seamless instant, the dagger in
the herder’s left was plunged with such swift weight that it
buried straight into the skull.
A sure blow, as if the herder knew exactly the
rotary speed of his shoulders, the sharpness of his blade, the
softness of the kid’s skull. The blade came out as quickly as it
entered. Blood welled from the wound, black as the face. To the boy
up the tree, it seemed like the kid’s face was melting in the
man’s grip. The goatherd kissed the wound.
Then a sound of sucking. And from this mouth
that never even whispered in the presence of the boy came the most
eloquent suck-suck-suck, definite like a foreign language, then like
the voice of man-sized insects arguing for domination, a dialogue of
man with the fluidity of blood and brains, and at last like a
triumph of the human tongue.
The man sucked David’s skull dry and left.
Only his tapered bells tinkled, the leaves around the boy were
hushed and the flock walked in the man’s wake without a murmur.
Ruth and Joseph flanked the goatherd and all the other goats walked
as they did, in step with man and staff.
When nothing of the flock could be seen or
heard, the boy felt the heat escape his groins, wetting his clothes
from his abdomen to his knees, filling some of the bark’s grooves,
and flowing until it soaked the left leg of the kid, yellow
drenching black.
The boy climbed down the back of the tree, there
where the ropes completed the kid’s embrace. He went round and
looked at the kid’s eyes, then into it. There he saw David’s
final vision, the swirls of the thumb of its master. The boy saw and
could not help seeing that dark thumb controlling its mouth, his
mouth! The thumb clamped down his own nose, and the other rough
fingers gripped to crush his jaw.
The boy struggled to shut his eyes. He fled and
did not look back. He ran until his side hurt, he ran past the eye
of the needle, past the grazing sheep, past the vendors, long past
the holy men. He ran straight to where his mother was, where his
father would be in a short while, where his brothers played or
slept, he did not know which yet but he would, he swore he would!
But when he opened the door, he ran into a newly hung curtain,
tripped into it, and when he clung to it, his fall broke the wooden
bar and tore the cloth into two.
His mother came to him and propped him up from
the swaddle. She put the boy’s head on her lap and caressed him
until he ceased panting. Still asking no questions, she filled
herself only with the hope that whatever it was that happened, it
should not keep her son home tomorrow afternoon. She prayed her
secret prayer. She rocked her eldest to sleep with a chant she
learned from her mother. And her mother from her mother, the hopeful
and exacting song of their House.
For Rio Elise: do scrabble
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