The Folded Leaf (7 page)

When it was his turn they began by beating him with a
broom to teach him that no one was kidding. They made him shadowbox blindfolded, hitting him occasionally and shoving him so that he scraped his knuckles on the rough plaster wall. They rubbed hard on the short hair at the back of his neck and also pounded incessantly on his collarbone (this produced an immediate and subtle pain) and made him do alternate knee-bends while they counted: 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 2, 10, 6, 14, 19, 9 … When he had reached what they hoped was a state of physical exhaustion, Ray Snyder shouted: “Think of a nine-letter word beginning with S and ending with N or you’ll be in a hell of a SituatioN. We’ll throw you in the SheboygaN River, neophyte. It’s damn cold there and no good SamaritaN can save you from pneumonia. The SuspicioN will be thrown elsewhere, neophyte, so don’t try for revenge”—all the while pounding Frenchie’s biceps and slapping his chest. Frenchie couldn’t think of any nine-letter word beginning with S and ending with N, so they slapped him across the face several times. When he flinched, they slapped him harder until he quit flinching. After they had slapped him as hard as they could, fifteen or twenty times on both sides of his face, Frenchie cried and they were free to go on with the next part of the initiation. The neophytes were lined up once more and subjected to divination to determine whether or not they had been experimenting with sex. All seven of them were found guilty and made to swallow a pill. To test their courage they were pushed one at a time up a tall stepladder from which, at a given signal, they were to throw themselves into space. Their blindfolds were raised for a second only, so that they could look down at the board full of rusty nails that they would land on. Carson’s blindfold was not as tight as it should have been. He saw the rubber mat being substituted at the last moment for the board,
but Lymie flung himself believing in the rusty nails and trusting that Mark Wheeler would be there to catch him. Nobody caught him. He landed on his hands and feet, unhurt, and the voice that cried out in pain was not his voice.

Spud Latham, who was next in line, jerked his blindfold off and saw that he had been fooled. The committee was astonished by this action, and somewhat at a loss to deal with it. They decided that there was no point in making Spud jump off the ladder after he knew what the trick was, so they tied his blindfold on tighter than before, and shoved him out of the way. Catanzano came next, then Ford, who hesitated when the signal was given and tried to back down the ladder. He had stepped on a rusty nail the summer before, at Lake Geneva, and he kept trying to explain about this; in the end they had to push him off.

The earth is wonderfully large and capable of infinite repetition. At no time is it necessary to restrict the eye in search of truth to one particular scene. Torture is to be found in many places besides the Hotel Balmoral, and if it is the rites of puberty that you are interested in, you can watch the same thing (or better) in New Guinea or New South Wales. All you have to do is locate a large rectangular hut in the forest with two enormous eyes painted over the entrance. You will need a certain amount of foolhardy courage to pass through this doorway and you may never come out again, but in any case once you are inside you will learn what it feels like to be in the belly of Thuremlin (or Daramulun, or Twanyirika, or Katajalina—the name varies in different tribes), that Being who swallows young boys and after the period of digestion is completed restores them to life, sometimes with a tooth missing, and always minus their foreskin.

When you have found your place in the circle on the dirt floor, it will not matter to you that Pokenau, the boy on your right, and Talikai, the boy on your left, are darker skinned than Ford and Lynch, and have black kinky hair. In that continual darkness, the texture of your own hair and the color of your skin and eyes will not be noticeable. The odor that you detect will be that which you were aware of in the Hotel Balmoral. The odor of fear is everywhere the same.

In the belly of Thuremlin a comradeship is established which will last Pokenau and Talikai and Dobomugan, and Mudjulamon and Baimal and Ombomb and Yabinigi and Wabe and Nyelahai the rest of their lives. They can never meet one another on any mountain path or in a flotilla of outriggers and not remember how month after month they sat in a crouching position, cross-legged, without moving; how they heard, not with their ears but through their hands, the strange tones which are the voices of spirits; how they learned to make the loud humming noise which so terrifies women; how one by one the mysteries were revealed to them—the sacred masks, the slit gongs, the manikin with the huge head and the gleaming mother-of-pearl eyes.

Along with the singing and eating, the boys are reminded again and again of how, as children, they were never far from their father’s arms, and how their elder brothers hunted for them. Flutes play in the morning and evening, and when the boys are led to the bathing pool, the ghosts of their ancestors bend back the brambles from the path.

In a primitive society the impulses that run contrary to the patterns of civilization, the dark impulses of envy, jealousy, and hate, are tolerated and understood and eventually released through public ritual, through cutting with crocodiles’ teeth, burning, beating, incisions in the boy’s penis. This primitive
ritual of torture is more painful, perhaps, but no more cruel than the humor of high school boys. Each stage of the torture is related to a sacred object, and the novices are convinced that, as a result of running the gantlet and being switched with nettles, they will have muscle and bone, they will grow tall and broad in the shoulders, their spirit will be warlike, and they will have the strength between their legs to beget many children.

Occasionally in New Guinea a boy will get into the wrong stomach of the Being, the stomach that is intended for pigs; and that boy cannot be restored to life with the others. But as a rule when the period of seclusion is over, all of the boys appear once more in the village, splendidly dressed in feathers and shell ornaments. Their eyes are closed. They still have to be led by their guardians and though they feel their mother’s arms around them, they cannot respond. Even after they have been commanded to open their eyes, the most ordinary acts of life remain for a time beyond their understanding. If the support of their guardian is withdrawn, they totter. They do not remember how to sit down, or how to talk, or which door you enter a house by. When a plate of food is given them, they hold it upside down. Gradually they learn all over again what to do and how to take care of themselves, and the use of their new freedom. They can carry iron weapons after the initiation, and they are free to marry. And they neither fear death nor long for it, because death is behind them.

All this requires the presence and active participation of grown men. Boys like Mark Wheeler, Ray Snyder, and Dede Sandstrom aren’t equal to it. In their hands, the rites of puberty are reduced to a hazing; and what survives afterwards is merely the idea of exclusion, or of revenge. The novices are in no way prepared to pass over into the world of maturity and be a companion to their fathers.

The night that Lynch was born, his father, then a young man of twenty-four, stood and stared at his son through the window in the hospital corridor with the tears streaming down his cheeks. Where was he now? Catanzano’s father was dead, but why wasn’t Mr. Ford at the Hotel Balmoral that evening? He could have talked to his son quietly and perhaps coaxed him until Ford jumped from the stepladder of his own free will. Where was Carson’s father? And Frenchie deFresne’s? And what about Mr. Latham? That stupid pursuit of enemies that were sometimes imaginary and sometimes flesh and blood, to which Spud devoted so much of his time—Mr. Latham must have known, even though Spud didn’t, who Spud’s real enemy was, whose death he desired. The rites of puberty allow the father to punish the son, the son to murder his father, without actual harm to either. If Mr. Latham had been present and had taken part in the initiation, he might have been able to release Spud forever from the basis of all his hostilities. And Mr. Peters should have been there certainly. The call he made from the corner cigar store was not important even to him. It could have been made the next night, just as well. Now instead of being freed of his childhood, Lymie will have to go on smearing his face up with taffy-apples of one kind or another and being stopped by every plaster pig that he encounters, for years to come.

M
rs. Latham never stayed in bed after six o’clock. The light wakened her. In winter when it was dark until
seven, habit made her get up anyway and dress and go out to the kitchen and start breakfast. At six-thirty she called Mr. Latham, and when he had finished shaving, he went into Spud’s room and shook him.

The morning after the initiation, while he was still drugged with sleep, Spud discovered that there was something wrong with him. For a second he didn’t believe it. I could be dreaming that I’m awake and standing here in the bathroom, he told himself. But he actually was awake; there was no doubt about it. And when he looked at himself in the mirror over the washstand, those two enemies sickness and fright had him just where they wanted him.

He pulled the lid of the toilet down and sat with his forehead against the washbasin, which was cool, though there was no comfort in it. “Oh …” he said very quietly, over and over, wanting to die. The minutes passed, and finally there was a sharp rap on the door. This was neither the time nor the place for despair.

He sighed and stood up and took his toothbrush out of the rack. Because there was, after all, nothing else to do, he scrubbed his teeth vigorously, avoiding his reflection in the mirror. Then he untied the strings of his pajama drawers, pulled the coat over his head, and reached for the cold water faucet that was connected with the shower. The cold shock on his face and on his spine kept him from thinking, but afterward, when he stepped out of the tub and began to dry himself, his mind took up exactly where it had left off. The last traces of ink and iodine came off on the towel.

Looking at them, Spud remembered, as though it were something that had happened long ago, how the neophytes, when the initiation was over and the blindfolds were jerked off, looked at one another with surprise and then at their own inkstained,
iodine-smeared, sweating, dirty bodies. Ray Snyder gave them the password (Anubis) and showed them the sacred grip, which turned out to be the same as the Boy Scouts’. After what had happened this morning, none of that mattered in the least.

At breakfast Spud sat with his head bent over his oatmeal and his mind off on a desperate search for some time or circumstance when he could have exposed himself. So far as girls were concerned, there weren’t any. In Wisconsin they used to play post-office at parties, and spin-the-bottle, but he hadn’t even kissed a girl since he moved to Chicago. The trouble was, you didn’t always need to get it from contact with a girl. The man who lectured in the assembly room of the high school (to the boys only; there was a woman who lectured to the girls) said you could get it in dozens of different ways; from drinking cups even, and from towels. Probably there was no use trying to figure out where he got it, since there were thousands of ways it could have happened. The only odd thing, the part Spud couldn’t understand, was how people could wake up happy in the morning and dress and eat breakfast and go about their business all day without ever taking any precautions, without even
realizing
the danger that existed everywhere about them.

When Mrs. Latham said, “Do you feel all right?” he opened his mouth to tell her that his oatmeal dish would have to be washed separately, also the spoon he was eating with, and his eggcup; they’d all have to be sterilized, everything except his glass, which he hadn’t touched yet. But he couldn’t talk about such things to his mother. It was a part of life she didn’t know about, and if he told her now what was the matter with him, it would be just the same as if he had spattered her with filth.

She put her hand on his forehead, and though it felt to him
as if it were burning up, she didn’t seem alarmed. “I guess you just aren’t awake yet,” she said, and got up and went out to the kitchen.

The sunlight, shining on the brick wall outside the dining room windows, cast Mr. Latham’s face in shadow and also cast a shadow on the
Herald and Examiner.
He complained about this to Mrs. Latham when she returned with the coffee-pot, and Mrs. Latham suggested that he change places with her but he merely frowned and went on reading. Spud watched him, in the hope that his father would look up suddenly and realize that he ought to put the morning paper down and get up and go into some other room, where they could talk in private.

Helen got up from the table first. “What were you doing so long in the bathroom this morning?” she asked Spud, and without waiting for him to answer, went off to finish dressing. After she left, Mrs. Latham sat with a dreamy expression in her eyes as if, during the night, she had gone and done something quite unbeknownst to all of them. She took a sip of coffee occasionally, and the bottom of her cup grated when she returned it to the saucer. That and the rattle of the newspaper were the only sounds at the breakfast table. At last Mr. Latham stood up and, with the paper clutched in his hand, walked past Spud’s pleading eyes.

Anyone at all familiar with Mr. Latham’s habits could have told, by the sounds which came from the next room, that he had chosen a tie from the rack on the closet door; that he was tying it now, standing in front of the dresser; that now he was using the whisk broom on his coat collar. In a moment he would come out into the hall and open the hall closet and then it would be too late to stop him. With his hat in one hand and in the other his brief case containing samples of insulating material,
Mr. Latham would be quite beyond the reach of his family. Spud pushed his chair back and went and stood in the bedroom door.

His father and mother’s bedroom was a place that he seldom wandered into, and never at this time in the morning. Mr. Latham was in front of the window with one foot on the low sill, polishing his right shoe with a flannel rag. He switched to the other shoe and Spud went in and sat down on the edge of the unmade bed. It occurred to him, as his father passed between him and the light, that in all probability, since the disease took some time to show itself (ten days or two weeks, the man said) his mother and Helen were already contaminated by him.