Sacred Country (44 page)

Now he’s slithered away into the blue. He used to work on the river boats and he’s probably on a river somewhere but they’ve no idea which one. They’re sending letters to river boat companies all over the South. There are more rivers in the United States than in any other continent on earth.

Happiness is making Walter fat. He can’t fasten his rhinestone jacket, but he doesn’t care. ‘Swaithey and Sky’ have been signed up by a record company called TMS Records. I’d never heard of it. It’s not exactly Decca. I say to Walter: ‘What does TMS stand for?’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I dunno.’

Sky says: ‘What it stands for doesn’t matter. It’s like WSM 650, the radio station. That got started by an insurance company an’ their slogan was “We Shield Millions” so they decided their call-sign would be WSM. Now, hardly anyone remembers the “We Shield Millions” thing. You see what I’m saying? WSM has become a kind of
word
.’

‘But it stood for something once,’ I say.

Sky thinks I’m a pedantic person, needing everything explained. She says: ‘TMS could be anything. It could be
Tuna Mayonnaise Sandwich. It could be To-Morrow is Sunday. The point is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is they’ve signed us.’

Bentwater has got his hair blowdried. He’s cut down on the whiskey. He’s fumigated his motor home. He says to me: ‘We’re hitting it now, Mart. Success. We’re kickin’ down the door. And all of us gotta stay sharp.’

I tell Audrey and Bill C. what’s going on. They’ve never heard of TMS Records. Bill C. says: ‘Tell Walter to watch his back. Leopards don’t change their spots.’

But Walter pays no attention. The only thing that can make him depressed is thinking about Pete.

Pete told him in a letter that his bus is surrounded by wire fencing on three sides. Beyond the wire are turkeys. There are more than a thousand of them. Pete is hemmed in with their gobble-gabbling noise and their stench. He put: ‘I’m going mad. If the bus could still move, I’d just drive away.’

‘What can I do?’ Walter asks me.

‘I don’t know,’ I reply.

‘I’ve got to do something but I can’t think what. I owe my life to Pete.’

I tell him I’ll think about it. I say: ‘Out where I am now, I do a hell of a lot of thinking.’

Where I am is on Judge Riveaux’s farm.

It’s a farm given over to three things: to hogs, to summer fruit and to birds. The birds are: peacocks, guineafowl, turkeys, pheasants, chickens, geese and doves. They run and flap and fly all over everything, everywhere. The peacocks live on the roof. Sometimes they walk into the kitchen. The thing the late Mrs Riveaux loved most was all these living and wandering birds.

Bentwater Bliss found me my job. I told him I wanted to leave the grocery store and work in the country, picking fruit or beans. He said straight away: ‘I’ll call the Judge. He’s lookin’ for someone. Miz Riveaux, she used to run that place single-handed with just that old Jeremiah Hill to help her. The Judge
thought he could do what she did. He figured,
Hell
, she was a
woman
! I can do whatever she did and in half the time. But he can’t. It’s got him baffled why, but he can’t.’

So Bent drove me out here. The house is white board with a shingled roof. It has four wood-burning stoves to warm it. There’s no garden, just as there was no real garden at Swaithey. The farm starts at the back door. There are barns for the hogs in winter and right by the barns the low brick house where Jeremiah Hill lives with his family. Beyond the bean fields is a creek, with an old canoe tied up. On the other side of the creek is a wood full of beeches, chestnuts, hickories and live oaks. The doves are pinkish-grey. They live in a white dovecot on a pole.

Judge Riveaux speaks so softly you can hardly hear what he says. You wonder how he used to make himself understood in court.

When I arrived with Bent, Jeremiah’s wife, Beulah, had made tea and a pineapple cake. Jeremiah and Beulah are black. They have twins, aged seven, called Lettie and Glorie, short for Violette and Gloria. Jeremiah is fifty-five and Beulah is thirty-one. He had another wife in the past, from whom he slithered away.

We sat down with the tea and cake. The Judge looked at me with quiet brown eyes. He said: ‘You were born on a farm, Martin. That it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In Suffolk, England. It’s stony soil. The first thing I can remember is picking stones.’

‘Most of Tennessee is red clay. Good and rich. You can grow ’most anything in the Tennessee earth. But my wife, she used to have a gift for makin’ things grow and I don’t have that. You either have that or you don’t have it. One or the other.’

‘We used to keep birds,’ I said suddenly.

‘You did?’

‘Yes. Hens. Guineafowl. I had a pet guineafowl I named Marguerite.’

‘Well, now. Mrs Riveaux, she thought birds were just the finest thing, didn’t she, Bent?’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said Bentwater. ‘She did.’

‘Now the peacocks, they screech sometimes. And to my ears that is one purely dreadful sound. But my wife, she didn’t even mind that. You ever heard that, Martin?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well you will, if you come to work here. You strong, though? You don’t look strong. But nor did my wife. And she was. She could hold a hog down.’

‘I’m stronger than I look,’ I said. ‘And I don’t tire.’

The Judge smiled. He was dropping cake crumbs all down his shirt. ‘Bentwater worked for me once, didn’t you Bent?’ he said. ‘He used to tire. He could sleep anywhere. He could lie down on the bare dirt and start dreaming. Right?’

I moved out of 767. It was summer. Outside my window were watermelons and sugar snap peas. The shade made by the shade trees was black.

Bill C. and Audrey cooked me a farewell meal. It was Shrimp Creole. They said: ‘We know Judge Riveaux. He’s a good man. He treats the world right.’

I said goodbye to Les Ches. He said: ‘Goddammit, Martin. You were the long-sufferingest friend I ever had.’

I don’t live in the Judge’s house. I live in what he calls ‘the studio’. The studio was once a barn. The Riveaux converted it into a separate living space for their daughter, Suzanne, when she grew up and wanted to be an artist. Then she moved away. She married a Claims Adjuster from Florida. She lives in Boca Raton with three children. She never paints now and she never comes back to the farm.

Some of her possessions are here. There’s an album full of photographs. There are books on Klimt and Picasso and Edward Hopper. There’s a pile of records and a love letter from a boy called Irwin. There’s a photograph of Mrs Riveaux when she was young. The bed is wide. It has a heavy quilt over it that hangs to the floor.

At night, cockroaches come out from under it and do figure skating in the moonlight.

I get up at six. I put on my overalls and my boots. There is no planning done on this farm. I walk down to Jeremiah’s house and he says: ‘Okay. What we do this mornin’, we hoe the beans,’ or sometimes: ‘What the hell we gonna do today? Mend the post fence? What we do?’

Sometimes, Beulah calls out: ‘Come in, Mister Martin. Have some coffee. Ain’t no hurry this mornin’.’

So I go into their house, which is always dark, winter and summer. Lettie and Glorie sit side by side drinking milk, with their school lunch boxes packed and ready on the table. The colour of their eyes is amber. One morning, I said to them: ‘Do they teach you about the universe at school?’

‘No,’ said Lettie.

‘We don’t know,’ said Glorie.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I used to make up stories about the universe – you know, about the stars? I could tell you one some time if you wanted.’

‘Mamma tells us stories,’ said Lettie.

‘She tells us real stories,’ said Glorie.

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Mine aren’t real.’

While we sit there, drinking Beulah’s coffee, Jeremiah decides what we’re going to do. In winter, he sits there a long time, near the woodstove, deciding.

Then we go out and start our task, whatever it may be: making a ditch, chopping wood, mending a fruit cage, burning bean stalks, mucking out the hogs’ barn. He and Mrs Riveaux used to work together. They did everything side by side except the tractor work. And this is how Jeremiah likes to work with me. He says he can’t concentrate if he isn’t talking. He says: ‘Miz Riveaux, by the time she died, she knew my whole life. I told her it in ’bout one million sections. She knew my life better ’an I know it myself.’

Now, he’s telling it over again, to me. He says: ‘The thing ’bout my life, Mister Martin, is this. What I don’t have, an’ what I never done had, is the gift of contentment.

‘Now Beulah, she says to me: “Look at you’ life, Jeremiah Hill, and then look back at the life of you’ ancestors who were slaves down in Georgia.” She says: “You look at that an’ see if you don’t got a reason to be happy.”

‘An’ she’ right. I got some reasons. One reason I got is her. And Lettie and Glorie. An’ Mrs Riveaux, Miz Judge, she always did every way treat me fair.

‘So I got reasons. I know that. An’ once in a while it can come at me, like a breeze in August, a little sudden breeze of happiness. You know? But it don’t last. I don’t know why. I was always that way, all my life. Little breeze. Feel it right here, on my face. Then it goes.’

We’re cleaning a ditch. We’re not far from the creek. It’s a hot day but we’re down in the deep ditch and it’s cool here.

I say: ‘In the times when you’re not happy, Jeremiah, are you
unhappy
?’

He stops work and considers this. He wipes his face on his overall sleeve.

‘Unhappy?’ he says. ‘No. It ain’t that. It ain’t that. It’s just, I keep on thinkin’ there’s somethin’ more. I keep on and on believing there’s somethin’
more
gonna come an’ then I’ll be happy. After that new thing done come. After that
more
thing done show itself to me. Then I’ll be a happy man.’

Some evenings, I have supper with Judge Riveaux. He can’t cook. Beulah makes all his meals and sends Lettie and Glorie over with them. But he’s fond of carving. He likes it when Beulah roasts a hen or cooks a ham. He takes a very long time sharpening the knife.

He doesn’t talk much. He stares at his food with his kind eyes. He says one evening: ‘I never went to England. My wife and her friend Kathleen, they used to go. To see Shakespeare. You can see Shakespeare in Nashville. I guess you can see Shakespeare in Alaska. But that wasn’t good enough for Mrs Riveaux; she liked a thing to be authentic.’

Then he says: ‘Mrs Riveaux was an anglophile. We got a larder full of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. I tell her in
my prayers that you’re working here and I can feel her smile.’

I say: ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t have met Mrs Riveaux.’

‘Yes,’ says the Judge, ‘yes.’ Then he changes the subject. He says: ‘Tell me about that farm in England. Still there, is it?’

‘It was sold,’ I say. ‘When my father died. The land’s still there. But I left it a long time ago.’

‘Can’t remember it, can’t you?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I can remember it.’

The Judge is sitting very still. He doesn’t want the conversation to go back to the subject of Mrs Riveaux. He wishes he hadn’t mentioned her. And so, to comfort him, I start describing Elm Farm, I take myself on an imaginary walk, out of the back door round the farmyard where Marguerite used to peck, into the barn where I tried to turn mower blades into swords, down the lane to the field where the hen houses used to be, where Timmy threw grain up into the air. I describe the Scots pine and the tyre swing. I walk on down to the river and the watercress beds …

The Judge folds up his napkin. He rests his hands neatly on the folded square.

I say: ‘There were two acres of forest not very far from the house. When I was a child I got lost there. The night fell and I couldn’t see my way out. I held on to a tree and waited. I was found in the end. But I don’t love woods and trees the way most people do. What I love here is the silence and the sky.’

It has started to get dark while I’ve been talking. It’s a summer darkness, mauve and soft.

‘Go on,’ says the Judge.

‘There’s nothing more,’ I say. ‘That’s it.’

Sterns sends me a command. He says: ‘It’s time to come home. It’s time to go on with your life.’

He believes I should have what he calls ‘reconstructive surgery’. He thinks I am one of the few female-to-male transsexuals for whom the creation of a penis is of critical importance.

This penis is real flesh, my flesh, moved and sculpted.

A pedicle or barrel of tissue would be raised on my abdomen. Operation by operation, it is moved downwards till it hangs where it should. The urethra is re-routed into it. A synthetic stiffening rod of the same kind that is inserted into the penises of impotent men is sewn inside it.

With this, I could be a woman’s lover. She would know no difference. Almost none.

Sterns believes that I will never be happy until I am capable of this. He thinks this is what I keep dreaming about.

I don’t dream about this. I don’t dream about anything. Days unfold. Martin lives them. He works through the hot afternoons. He drinks lemonade made by Beulah. He listens to Jeremiah’s life. He strokes the necks of the peacocks. He sleeps soundly in the big bed. I am him and he is me and that’s all. That’s enough.

The woman I wanted was Pearl. I wanted to be Pearl’s universe. For her, I would have re-made myself as often and as completely as she demanded. She could have gone on inventing me until death parted us.

Sterns knows this. Knowing it, you’d think he’d have a better understanding of my everyday dreams. But then he is a long way away from me and sitting in the dark. He has fish as companions. He’s never seen the sun on the creek. He’s never heard Walter Loomis sing.

I tell Sterns in a letter that I have no desire to return to England. I tell him I have reached a plateau, a level place. I say to him: ‘Something or someone would have to
call
me back for me to give up the life that I have. The idea of more surgery doesn’t call me.’

I remind him and I remind myself that I am thirty years old.

And out in the fields I say to Jeremiah: ‘Age isn’t the only thing to creep up on us. Sometimes it’s happiness.’