YAAN-3
“He won’t hurt Lohu, will he?” I asked Rook, as the man of mud progressed towards Lohu’s field.
“Lohu?”
“The next field. You know, he lives there.”
Rook frowned, but asked no further question, instead letting the mystery of the moment reveal itself to him, if it would; then, remembering a past conversation he and I had had, he said, “Oh, yes, the white horse.”
I nodded. “He’s my friend.”
Rook watched the man of mud lumber a few more steps, and then said, “He looks like an herbivore to me.”
Jake nodded at the growing pile of manure upon his flatbed, and Rook, taking the cue, slid from his perch atop the fence, and began rounding the little cowyard towards Jake. I followed, sinking so far into the mud on every step that it was somewhat difficult to make any forward progress at all, though of course Rook had no difficulty.
“I guess it’s true,” Jake said as Rook, and then I, came abreast of him. His voice, because it has something of a growl in it, seems upon first hearing it to be deeper than Rook’s, but if you listen only to the sound of it and not to his tone, it’s a little bit higher, without the velvet resonance of Rook’s; and perhaps because of this, it sort of died that day, flat, in the dead cold air, and seemed vaguely distant, while Rook’s carried a vibrancy even in the cold, and in fact had a sort of warming quality to it—“mittens on the eardrums,” Mom once said.
“Evidently.” That was Rook.
Handing the shovel to Rook, Jake said, “I’m going to go have a look,” and without any more ado than that, began trudging in the direction the man of mud had gone. Others were heading in that direction as well, from various locations around the farm, armed with rakes and shovels and other tools—hooded figures of brown and gray crawling across barren, parceled, and partitioned land, converging behind the slow, hoodless figure of Jake.
With an air of unconcern, Rook commenced to transfer shovelfuls of manure from the huge pile beside the barn to the flatbed beside the pile (as Jake had been doing), to all appearances having forgotten all about the apparition that was causing all the fuss.
I watched him work. I liked watching him work. I often jaunted out from home just to find him working, and when I found him, would sit and watch him. The loops of his exotic entity pattern flowed and danced with mesmerizing beauty; and at the same time, his muscles helped one another, which was a joy to watch as well. He wasn’t as brutely strong as he seemed, or that everyone thought him, that is, his individual muscles weren’t significantly more capable of exerting force than those of any of the other farmhands; but they worked in such smooth concert with one another that the output of his physical exertion exceeded, by far, that of anybody else, even Jake. My eye couldn’t catch the precise nature of how some of his muscles accentuated the efforts of others, yet it was a thing of beauty to behold. I would watch him, mesmerized, contemplating both his body and his entity pattern, enjoying the elegance of both and at the same time attempting to discern any relationship between his pattern and his physical prowess.
Accentuating the enjoyment of watching him was the stillness of his spirit: he didn’t feel as if he had to talk to me, to entertain me, or to keep me company, and therefore my presence wasn’t a burden to him. He would work away in silence as I watched him, sometimes oblivious to my presence, always unbothered by it, and out of this easy silence would come words, true words, not forced ones. He would say interesting things, and tell me, as he worked, stories about his and Jake’s adventures, which I thought, so many were they, and so funny, could fill a book, and that book be quite entertaining.
I watched him, now, scoop up heaps of manure so copious that I thought they must tip over and fall off when he lifted his shovel up to toss his bounty onto the wagon, but, no, his muscles, helping each other, performed the action with smooth flawlessness, and with each toss the perfect mound of manure that Jake had created, its peak now as high as Rook’s head, would grow yet higher.
“Rook?” I said, after watching him execute this procedure several times.
“Lady Yaan?” he replied, without diverting his attention from his labor. “Lady Yaan” was his unique appellation for me. Almost everyone on the four farms with whom I had any dealings had a pet name for me. Farmer Green called me Little Bitty; Tameedah Green called me Yaany, or sometimes Dear Child; Golden Gerbil called me Acorn; Hector Dallidoe called me Chipmunk. Mom and Jake were the only ones to call me, simply, Yaan.
“Do you and Rushlight ever make love?”
There was a momentary hesitation in the elastic strength of his locomotion, and a momentary wandering-ness, or confusion, in a couple of the loops of his entity pattern, before he continued on with his work. Whether this tiny hiccup was caused by the mere mention of Rushlight, or by the revelation that I knew about his relationship with her, I couldn’t tell. I knew by the multiple, and ever-more-multiple strands of interconnectedness between their entity patterns that they had become quite close; but even though they weren’t keeping the fact of their relationship hidden, nobody else had perceived it.
Jake had brought them together. His matchmaking was unknowing and inadvertent, of course, but the results of his actions were obvious, the action of his entity pattern unmistakable. Jake would never bring a man and a woman together of his own volition—I had heard him tell young farmhands that any coupling would be a mistake and that to go so far as marriage would be to reveal yourself a great fool—but he had done it for Rook.
At first glance, Jake looked a lot more like the other fieldhands than Rook did. He was stout, shorter than Rook by half a head at least, with strong hairy arms, thick hands adorned with thick fingers, legs like entryposts, a ruddy sun-deepened complexion, and short brown-gray hair (along with grey-brown face whiskers most of the time, too). On second look, though, he was as different from them as Rook was, if not more so (I’d heard Hector Dallidoe say to his assistant once, “Neither one of those fellas strikes you at all as a farmhand—what is Farmer Green up to?”). Though he seldom smiled outright, he had a mouth that often smiled secretly to itself. That is, something about the formation of the lines about his mouth (and eyes, too), belying the gruffness of his countenance, told the story of many joyful laughs; and often, when he heard something, particularly something Rook said to me or I said to Rook, or saw something such as Tolan having trouble with Estobbias or one of the other farmhands getting aggravated with one of the other animals, his eye would sparkle and a corner of his mouth would twitch once or twice, as if his face were about to break out into one of the expressions of mirth those lines suggested.
Sometimes, he’d be sitting with a number of field hands at lunch, and that twitch would appear, and for example, he’d say to Tolan, without expression, “That wig is unbecoming on you,” fully aware that Tolan didn’t wear a wig. When on that occasion Tolan responded (while everyone else laughed) that he didn’t wear a wig, Jake said, still without expression, as if musing to himself, “No it isn’t, it can’t be, nobody would wear their hair like that.” He then waited to see if anybody would point out the logical flaw in his insult, that if nobody would wear their hair like that, it would have to be real hair because there wouldn’t be any wigs for sale in that style. I pointed out this logical flaw to him later, and he did smile, then, and patting me on the head, said, “Yes, that’s what was funny about the comment, right? That’s not why they were laughing was it, though?”
Another time, when Tameedah was scolding him about coming onto her porch wearing muddy boots, he regarded her with an intractable blankness for a second as if waiting for the twitch and sparkle to come, at which time it did he looked her right in the eye and appearing for all the world as if he’d just noticed something that he was surprised he’d never noticed before, said, “Wow, you’re the ugliest woman I believe I’ve ever seen.”
Farmer Green, a large and somewhat intimidating man, who commanded and demanded respect from his workers, was his favorite target: “Nincompoop” was the tip of the iceberg. “I didn’t realize you were a boxer,” he might say, and in response to Farmer Green’s quizzical look, add, with exaggerated innocence, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” and under his breath say to someone else (but loud enough for Farmer Green to hear), “It was Mrs. Green.” He called him “Lump” as a matter of course, and often said such things as, “Why don’t you make yourself useful, Lump, and go get me some nails,” or “You know, if you were to retire, I think this farm might turn a profit. Just sayin’, you know, just throwin’ things out there.”
As sarcastic, caustic, and just downright rude as he was to just about everybody, he was as gentle as a mother stork with me. He never said a cross word, or directed a single remark at me that could be interpreted as an insult or even as sarcastic. He might say something insulting or sarcastic to me about someone else, but I was never his target. Interacting with me, his smile appeared often, and was warm, as we spoke of books and history and philosophy, of art and science, as well as mundane things such as the best way to make butter cookies—anything two adults might talk about.
He was gentle and patient with the farm’s animals as well; when they didn’t obey him, he just let them be. He never yelled at them, never whipped them, never complained about them, either. When he was driving the plow, he could often be heard talking to the oxen in a conversational tone, as if he and they were old friends, souls that had known each other for many lives, happy to have time to commune alone together in the field.
Nobody truly minded his jibes or insults; after a time, in fact, it became an honor of sorts to be the target of his ridicule. Essentially, at least: at one level, his victims were annoyed by his antics, and if you’d have asked them what they thought of him, they’d have said they thought him a lout; yet at the same time their entity patterns glowed, basked almost, in the aura of his insults.
Rook, though supremely popular with everybody, delighted just as much in the tweaking of noses as Jake did, he just delighted in it in a way that was subtle enough not to draw notice: he was the nice guy to the not in actuality mean, but unrepentantly blunt and insulting Jake, and with the attention focused on Jake, Rook could enjoy the fallout of his friend’s antics, and even add to the entropy they caused, without anybody assigning any blame to him.
When, for example, somebody stepped in a bucket or on a rake, or had trouble with a goat, while Jake laughed with unabashed glee, or cheered for the goat (he loved goats because they never followed orders), Rook would watch the goings-on with impassive curiosity, perhaps a quiet half-smile on his face, enjoying the scene just as much as Jake was, but not attracting attention to himself.
It was not unusual at lunchtime, when many of the farmhands were sitting around, for Jake to tell a story. And he was a good storyteller: He would build a tale methodically, sparing no detail but telling it in such an engaging way, with red herrings, misdirection, suspense, and careful, entertaining characterization, that he could hold your attention even if you thought the tale wasn’t going to go anywhere or you just weren’t in the right mood to listen to a story. Sometimes it would be a short tale, other times he would take the whole of lunch to tell it; and it always ended with some slight of somebody. For instance, he once held everybody spellbound with a story about the Blues, so called because everybody in their town wore blue, the Greens, so called because everybody in their town wore green, and the Stupids, so called because everybody in their town was stupid. There was a treasure that was found on land triangulated between the three towns, so that each had an equal claim on it. The mayors of the three towns went to the divine oracle of the valley to decide who would get this treasure, or how it would be divided. All three made their arguments—and Jake of course provided details of the individuals, and the towns and the oracle and all that, that added spice to the story—and the oracle decided that the Stupids would squander the treasure if it was awarded to them, and that therefore it would be awarded to either the Greens or Blues. The oracle said he would deliberate upon the matter and in six days would provide his decision. In the meantime, the Greens sent a thief into the valley to steal the treasure; but he was apprehended there by some of the oracle’s men. The oracle then decreed that the treasure would be awarded to the Blues (his strategy, all along, in fact, had been to award the treasure to whoever didn’t try to steal it), and as punishment for their attempted treachery, Greens, for nine generations, would only be allowed to marry Stupids. “And that is why,” Jake concluded, “our illustrious Farmer Green” (who was, of course, present), “is so generous. The greed of Greens has been tempered over the generations by their stupidity.”
All through this, and other, stories, Rook would punctuate the narrative with knowing nods and sincere eyebrow raises, saying, “Correct,” when Jake said, “Isn’t that right, Shamodes?” or “Right,” when Jake said, “Correct, Shamodes?” clearly, to my eyes, delighting in his participation in the game, though others thought him just sort of amusing Jake by going along with his charades.
One day when Jake and Furwood Gurr were baling hay, Jake made a huge deal about how ill Furwood looked. He kept making remarks such as, “I can handle this, Furwood, you need to go lie down,” or “Furwood, you’re jaundiced, I think your liver is shutting down, or maybe your kidneys, I don’t know, what am I, a doctor—either way, you better go to bed, I can handle this, I’m serious,” in an overly serious tone, Furwood brushing him off without much ado for awhile, until at last, fed up (after Jake’s tenth comment or so), saying, “I’m fine Exeter, shut up about it.”
Jake held up his hands, almost apologetically, and said, “Okay, okay, suit yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re on your deathbed. I mean it’s probably something that’ll clear up if you rest, but if you overwork yourself, well, I don’t know, I’m just saying don’t try to be too tough, man, nobody will hold it against you, you’re obviously unwell,” this uncharacteristic gesture of conciliation casting the tiniest doubt into Furwood’s mind as to whether something might indeed be wrong with him, just the tiniest doubt, but a doubt nevertheless.
Rook, who had witnessed the exchange between the two men, came along an hour or two later, and asked Furwood, “Need help?” Annoyed, Furwood responded, “Since when do I need help with this?” to which Rook replied, “Just looked like you were tired, that’s all,” and then went on, leaving Furwood beginning to be concerned about his health.
One day, Jake happened to be passing by Farmer Green’s house with some buckets of water, and had stopped to rest on the steps of the porch, when Tameedah and Rushlight Fox, the daughter of a now-deceased childhood friend of Tameedah’s, came out of the house to have some tea in the bright summer air. Rushlight, a frequent guest of Tameedah’s, was considered “well-to-do” by the farmhands, which was their way of saying she was probably a bit uppity, an assumption they made, I believe, not because of how she behaved but because of how she looked: She possessed an undeniable physical attractiveness, or maybe just fineness of feature, accentuated by the bright colors she often wore that emphasized her physical traits, that made her seem to them to be different from them—above them, they thought, in the eyes of the world.
Seeing Jake, Tameedah introduced Rushlight to him with great reluctance. She didn’t want to subject Rushlight, who she was quite fond of, to any of Jake’s droll vituperation; but her sense of etiquette wouldn’t allow her to slight anybody on her property, even Jake. “Rushlight,” she said, “this is one of our helpers, Mr. Exeter; Jakob, this is Miss Rushlight Fox.”
Rushlight said something about how it was nice to meet him, and Jake, rising, started to say something that I thought wasn’t going to be derogatory. He was just going to say, “Hello,” or something of that sort, and then move on with his water, but that moment, that possibility, was lost in the recognizable twitch at the corner of his mouth. His face brightened, and he said, brightly, “Well, congratulations, ma’am.”
Rushlight looked a bit confused, and Tameedah, sensing that something was coming, tried to steer her away from Jake to their chairs on the porch, but Rushlight said, “I am at a loss, sir, as to what you are referring,” to which Jake said, “Your pregnancy. I would have thought you too old for such a thing, but you can’t fool the piper, as they say.”
Well, Rushlight colored a bit, nothing more, but Tameedah got angry, and sputtered, “She’s not pregnant, you, you…” but Jake interrupted her and said, “Are you sure about that?” and turning to Rushlight, added, “Tell her.”
Rushlight had to say, “No, I’m afraid I haven’t yet been honored with a child,” to which Jake shrugged and said, “Well, if you say so,” and went on.
Some while later, Rook came along, and after being introduced to Rushlight as well, said, “I honor thee, and your child.” (He often said, “I honor thee,” upon first meeting someone.) Tameedah, growing agitated again, but not angry (nobody ever actually got angry at Rook), said, “Rook!”
Rook, feigning ignorance, said, “Yes, Madame Tameedah?” to which she gave him a meaningful look and said, “She’s not pregnant!”
Rook said, “Oh,” with a slight doubting raise of an eyebrow, but Rushlight, now clearly onto the game, said, “You guys must get bored on a farm like this, doing all this repetitive drudgery, creative individuals like yourselves.”
“Selves? I am but one, Mademoiselle.”
“Yes, you and your cohort; but don’t worry, I honor thee as well, and him. Won’t you join us for some tea?”
Rook smiled.
And now, at the mention of her name, the pattern of his entity responded.
He gathered a few more piles in thoughtful silence before saying, without another hitch in the fluidity of his work, “What do you mean by make love?”
“You know, you’re together, and you’re naked, and you’re all smushed together, your faces and your bodies; and I think your penis goes into her.”
An eyebrow went up—his left one, though, instead of his right, which indicated possible surprise. “Yeah, I guess we do that on occasion.”
“Can I watch sometime?”
He gathered another pile, then straightened, regarding me. “Why would you want to do that?”
I was stumped, again. I wanted to see how their patterns interacted while they were making love, how and how many of their strands intertwined, and what kind of an overall pattern, formed of their two patterns, emerged during the activity; but, held by Mom’s command not to discuss the patterns of existence with anybody but her, I couldn’t tell him that.
I said, somewhat lamely, “Oh, you know, it’d be interesting.”
He nodded. “Nah, it’s not very interesting, just basic stuff you know. It’s considered a private thing, anyway.”
“I figured that, but I thought…”
“You thought?”
I thought that if I could explain about the patterns of entity, and how the design their coupling would produce would undoubtedly be a thing of exquisite beauty, then their need for privacy might be superseded by a willingness to share such beauty; but again, I was constrained by Mom’s command. Her rules were killing me!
It was then that what appeared to my eye to be a large and rather ungainly dark bird came hurdling across the sky. I say “hurdling,” because the trajectory of its passage wasn’t consistent with the usual flight of a bird, but seemed more like that of a heavy object, a half-full sack of potatoes, perhaps, thrown from a great distance.
With a rowdy swoosh, it passed above us like a catapult shot, a glop of gray-black, stark and somehow beautiful, against the gray-white of the sky, and crashed into a cluster of tornleaf bushes just beyond the fence of the little cowyard (and therefore, in the big cowyard), thirty or forty paces, in a diagonal line across the little cowyard, from Rook and me. I thought I heard the muffled words, “Oh crap!” as it passed above us, and “Geez!” some moments after the crash.
Rook, who had watched all of this with mild surprise, said, “Was that a chicken?”
I shrugged, wide-eyed.
Shrugging himself, and to all appearances immediately forgetting about the bird (as he had immediately forgotten about the man of mud), he said, as with another splosh he tossed another load of manure onto the shit wagon, “Could you wheel that barrow over here?” With a slight nod of his head, he indicated a nearby wheelbarrow that was filled to well above its rim with manure.
I scampered over to it, and grabbing its handles, said, “Here I come!” but I might as well have tried to move a tree.
Smiling, Rook ambled over to the wheelbarrow, and laying his shovel on its arms, he took it by the handles and with evident ease pushed it up next to the flatbed; and as splap, sploop, spluph, he emptied the manure from it onto the flatbed, I heard something: a sibilance—a sound, or a voice, I wasn’t sure which.
“Psst.”
I stopped. It, this sibilance, had come, I thought, from the cluster of tornleaf bushes into which the object, or chicken, that had hurdled over the cowyard had crashed. I examined, or tried to examine, those bushes, but even squinting, I couldn’t see into them with any clarity. The fence blocked my view.
It would have been as easy to round the cowyard as to take the diagonal path across it to the tornleaf bushes—to chop off its head, as Jake might say—but I liked to climb things, so I clambered over the fence, landed, splatoof, in the mud, and began tromping towards the cluster of tornleaf bushes from which the sibilance had seemed to come, looking, as I walked, as deep into them as I could.
No further sound came from them however, and I could discern no further movement within them, so deciding that I had only thought I had heard something coming from them because I had seen the bird or whatever it had been go into them, I abandoned my investigation. With my hands and feet getting numb by this time, and me eager to warm them inside by a fire or stove, I lacked the investigative tenacity I might have had, had I been more comfortable. After one more glance at the tornleaf bush, I turned to trot, or galumph, back to Rook.
But then, the sound, the voice, came again, with increasing urgency. “Psst!”
Peering between the boards of the fence, I caught sight of what appeared to be a tiny black, red, and iron-gray dragon motioning to me with one arm. I approached him, trying to get a better look at him, and as I got to the fence, I beheld an entity pattern more complex than that of any animal entity pattern, indeed than that of any human entity pattern, I’d ever seen, comprised of thousands upon thousands of intertwined and intertwining filigrees of green and red and purple and orange.
“Are you a dragon,” I asked, as, facing him, I sat down cross-legged across the fence-line from him.
He regarded me with liquid obsidian, yet somehow humane and intelligent eyes, and said, in a voice that would have seemed natural coming from an effeminate man, “Fajee, I am Ragahootoo, Eyes of the Son, it is my honor to make your acquaintance; however, we will have to dispense with pleasantries for now. The friends of the Mother are in trouble.”
“I thought dragons were big,” I said, with tact.
“Indeed, they are infinite, Fajee,” he said in a way that suggested grandiloquent pontification, “but in the sense of which I believe you speak, only the Mothers and the Sons inhabit the dimensions you expect of us. The Fathers and the Daughters are…” He seemed on the verge of commencing a long exposition, but, shaking his head as if expelling a foreign substance from his brain, he said, “but that’s not important, right now; friends of the Mother are in trouble!”
“The mother?”
“Over there!” He pointed, pointedly, with a webbed arm, in the direction that earlier the man of mud, and then Jake, had gone. “You need to save them, Fajee!”
By this time, Rook had noticed that I was no longer hovering about in his vicinity, and, having hopped the fence, was striding through the mud of the little cowyard towards me, presumably to see what I was doing. I ran up to him as the little dragon scurried into the shadow of the tornleaf bushes.
“Was that a miniature dragon?”
“Yes, and I’m pretty sure Mom and Jake are in trouble!”
Without a moment of question, Rook scooped me up, and setting me on his shoulders, was skirting the little cowyard at a jog, pinning my legs, flat-handed, against his chest. Arriving at the fence of the big cowyard, he set me atop it, vaulted it, and putting me back on his shoulders, was off to The Corner.