"Jesse and Kenny: A Romance"
by
Timothy Stillman
The soldier, uniform of dusty gray, was with his brother.
He slept by his fellow soldiers and he yearned in his sleep. The windows of sleep and portals and memories of towering clouds of childhood summers. He remembered deeply, as he slept lightly. There was the momentary battle lull. There was the smell of hot perspiring flesh and wool all round. It seeped into the rocky hillock ground. It was attended by a certain glade that held constant in his troop's memories as they too slept lightly, like children on a summer day that had turned into a sudden thunderstorm where there were only tatters of life left them. To these tatters, they clung with intense strength in bodies that were weak with fighting, want of food; their nostrils insulted by the acrid stench of battle, musket and cannon that overpowered the close green onion smell of summer ground and hot still air
The soldier's name was Jesse. He was 16. He was no longer smooth of face. He had a grizzled beard. Eyes red rimmed and no longer shocked. He did not succumb. He would not die. Because if he did, then so would Kenny. And Kenny was his brother and Kenny was his succor, in the endless days before these, when, as a matter of course, he woke always seeing a pistol aimed squarely between his eyes. In his dreams, it was safe. In his dreams, there was the arbor of home and the secret sweet shadowy ground of the attic with the fanlight of red glow and persimmon smell, the attic of memories and a steamer trunk held together with rope. Where the afternoons of the seasons of their brotherhood brought life to them, as they explored giddy and secret places. The places where brothers explore when the world is not burst into war. Where nothing could ever be wrong anywhere ever.
How Kenny loved to giggle into Jesse's bare skinned stomach. How they learned to love the little hillocks of each other there, in the dusty rust colored smell of things in corners, in the attic soft dim lit glades--mother's dolls from childhood, dolls with big button eyes, and frayed wool bodies, Father's stern paintings, visage sharp and shrewd and keen in his art work solely of himself being whatever addition to human houses must have so they will not fall. So his family would be protected. But Kenny and Jesse required an addition that was concealed from the world, unnecessarily in Kenny's eyes. But Jesse always told him, be still, be careful, for there were traps laid.
Jesse's hand now, in sleep, on that hillock of grass bled down deeper than the earth surely had ever been before, reached for his pistol, close by him always, his eyes stirred against the flies and the gnats of summer that fed on human flesh, alive or dead, they all seemed the same. They slept like fetuses of war, these men, and in their halls of minds, they ran down corridors where the day was brighter, where the sunshine seemed still, in spite of everything, to be. The name "Kenny" might have formed on Jesse's lips, unbidden. A boy with a parasol standing in the strawberry light of the attic of a late summer Saturday afternoon. A boy twirling the parasol of linen from their mother's attic storage, the feel of the sanded wood on the boy's bare feet, laughter in his smile, the way ghost berries shown in his cheeks. And his little erection a flag of pride and dexterity and mechanism most human and most warm. And his tiny balls sacs sweet and fine.
As Jesse laughed at him. Jesse, sitting naked save for his breeches, cross legged in front of the boy who parodied the way fancy and fine ladies walked in the Sunday summer breezes on their ways to and from church. Kenny with his buttocks poked out and his stomach drawn inward, thin though he was, as though he were wearing a bustle; his cheeks in time become drawn from the lack of food there had been, the clouds coming on even then, a nation at unrest, needful of splitting in half to find the whole, but the two boys unaware of it. Determinedly so, therefore: Kenny bustling along naked as a jaybird, twirling his parasol in the bright and briny red sea air, and Jesse laughing secretly, and soundlessly applauding his brother who had gotten their mother and the ladies of the church league down so perfectly. And so funny to see that short thin boy pretend at womanhood and to get it right with a child's perfect mimicry that was more of an art than a joke.
How Jesse loved the bony curves of his brother. The boxiness of the waist that depended to hips and groin. The eyes that looked right at Jesse and saw the all of his soul, eyes that were wise and blue as all the most beautiful sun glint seas. The chest that was full of ribs, and the secret between his legs that he loved to show Jesse because it pleased them both. If there was spectral now, in the dreams of this, the memories of this, it was also a glad abandoning of reality, to go in search of what used to be. How wise, Kenny, with the birdcage heart and the sloping shoulders. How pale he was and shy but given to redolent smells of his golden hair long and to his shoulders, and his face that was shaped like that of a fox face. Jesse loved to sit naked on the attic floor, with his brother resting his head on Jesse's crotch and member which he moved against the smaller boy's hair. And Jesse leaning over to trace his hands on Kenny's unclothed abdomen and chest. Jesse loved to look down at his brother's face, upside down. Like a friendly fox's or kitten's. The planes of it and the structure of the button nose. The eyes that closed comfortably with his brother's ministrations, and seemed to make the very world itself rest.
Saturday was a place. The attic was for the country of Saturday. There were no mountains then or shady groves where a boy might stroll. There were no streams where boys might bathe and have their secret hands in shadows of mulberry trees. There was no sky limned with sunset and night winds that would scare up spring or winter and have its birthright in them. There was no world outside the fanlight of the attic. No worlds that had ground to walk on, hard and flinty, or redolent with summer grass or dandelions. No, the real world was the attic and the country of Saturday that was therein. Jesse had been there one day, when the secret world with his brother started, four years ago. He had been pleasuring himself with the idle chatter of girls he had heard in the school house. Filtered as though through a fog horn on a distant shore not to be reached beyond barb and pigtail pulling that the other boys, never Jesse, excelled in.
There had been no noise on the squeaking attic steps. No sign that anyone was to find Jesse there with his pants flap open, but then suddenly as though from a squall of summers, escaped Kenny's laugh, a shy laugh, like the fanlight in its inverted commas had had enough of Jesse's loneliness, always close to tears when he hid himself away in the attic those days. And Jesse had opened his eyelids, fearing to find mother, or far worse, Father, there, to scold him. But only Kenny and his eyes that made everything else go away-- the talks his parents had at the dinner table about the impending war; the nervousness of the tall gruff teacher that reached into the man and his angry voice and turned it fearful, delicate as a May apple, and so tender for his charges who would one day soon fight in this dreadful conflict--the constant buzz in Jesse's head, even when he was committing self-pleasure--all of this espied from his kid brother's eyes, and Jesse felt suddenly remarkably clean and fresh and new.
Kenny came to him, those distant and distinct and so close few feet. Jesse holding onto his member, and Kenny kneeling in front of him, reaching down to Jesse's opened breeches. The shadow of sexuality was allowed. The doing of it to fear was from that day forward discarded. Kenny was nine and he was as old as Jesse because he held the secrets in the loins of a kid brother who knew what the passage of time does and knows sometime a kid brother may be needed to cease time's stately linkage with the future. Which may not be a pleasant one.
He lay his head on Jesse's legs. Jesse who lay sideways on his left hip. Kenny studied his brother as he had studied him, unknown to Jesse, all those nights they slept in the same little trundle bed, even though Jesse's arms and legs and body had grown too long for it. Kenny leaning over. His elbow on the pillow next to his brother. His head leaned sideways on his hand, taking account this boy who was his brother. Wanting so much to lift his night shirt and Jesse's and place their bodies finally, finally together, skin to skin. The red of hair, the freckles on the bridge of the slim nose, the breath of his sleeping blowing sweet as summer crops in a torpid breeze, on Kenny's face. Kenny loved his brother and hung onto every word, every nuance, every shadow that Jesse made. When Kenny was shown by Jesse how to make shadow puppets on the wall, he treasured them, and formed his own hand to equal his brother's shadow shows, to make the dog bark, to make the rabbit's ears turn like swivets in the summer field at the first sign of a ghost hunter.
And now, in the last of this civil war, each dreamed of the other, each became the shadow show for the other. They fought the terrain. They tried to make the mountains smaller. They fought against the barbarity that soldiers find too easy, too safe to make a home in, for the two boys had no need of it, out of all these boys, for ships call to ships, hearts to hearts. That still breathless day, with the sweat rivulets in the closeness and locked box heat going down their sides, from their arm pits, that day Kenny had surprised Jesse at a most delicate moment made them both feel like Dresden dolls, with those glass faces, with those breakable bodies, with such time and distance steaming into the harbor of Saturday landscape kept precise, kept like a delicate snow ball of glass and dreams in the attic world of their childhood. Jesse's hand stopping its stroking. His eyes wide on his brother. His member not shrinking as perhaps it should have on being found out. That first day of Kenny and Jesse.
Jesse was to be awoken in an hour. To be watchman for the rest of the night to come. He blended both worlds, the world of war, the world of deepest love, together. He was not of either of them now. He dreamed he could touch his brother's warm face, seeing it upside down from the v of his own naked legs. They had done so much. They had carved their love, their days, their summers and winters into a moment that was of the attic, of the house, that was so different from the silence of stealth and fear their Father brought with him wherever he went, as though he could tighten the sternness in his face even more so and thus keep the world from spinning off its axis as everyone knew it would one day. The shadow of war lengthened until even Father could not deny it.
Brother to brother. Mouths in secret places. Hands to lengthen the members of their owners'. Kenny's amazement at how large Jesse's penis was. Kenny's delight in making the milky white come charging out. Quiet in the skins of boys. Quiet in the sounds of summer Saturdays--other afternoons as well, but Saturday always, and every day in the attic was summer Saturday, regardless of how cold or hot it was in there then. Still charged with the topography that needn't be tackled. That could be roughhoused a bit. Silently. Still as shadows that have life in them. Shadows that can't be told to anyone for they would not believe. It would not be right. Kenny never believing, but his big brother told him it was so, and thus it was.
And in the hot night, the soldiers stirred with their own dreamy keepsakes. Their hands reached to the ground sometimes to remind themselves the ground was still there. Still of summer grass, still of green fronds that did not yet have the daubs of soaked in blood on them, far grimmer than the visage of Jesse's father's face in itself and in the paintings that stood there like soldiers one behind the other, straight up, not leaning, against the wall of the attic, the painting in the front always turned around, so the boys would not have to be afraid of it when they made their plays with each other, their plays of taking off the other's clothes, of being dressed while the other was naked. Reveling in one another. Of Kenny imitating to perfection the walk of a bustled woman on her way to church.
Dreaming of that, this night, Jesse smiled. It was the smile of a boy, not a man, not a soldier. A boy who didn't know what all of this was about. Only that his time had come. Only that Father had mustered Jesse out of their rambling two story paint peeling house, and had turned him over to Confederate soldiers then in the yard, asking, demanding, swords clattering, for any able bodied men here to fight for the cause and for God's own people. Father shoving Jesse out. Jesse walking like a man. Pretending. As did the soldiers he marched away with, regardless of their age.
Marching rows of soldier toys. Jesse in the back of them, straggling in the dusty devil July inferno heat. Looking over his shoulder at the house he might never see again. Its sagging front porch. Its swing off its chains and laying cantilevered on the side yard. The house once well repaired, now tattered as though its flesh would be a causality even sooner than Jesse who looked up to the fanlights of the attic through which the summer dust motes were slanting even then, and who knew that his brother was looking out of one of those inverted commas and wept at his love's leaving. Then Jesse turned his head back into the heat of battles to come, marched into the dust, and through it, down the country lane with the hot bothered fragrant pregnant leaves of the trees on either side, as Jesse walked further and further away, into memory. And all the songs of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" would not stir their notes for him, no matter how hard he might try to come back alive.
War was guns and cannons exploding and dust and blood and faces that saw things faces should never see. War was fought by the young men, the children, for the old men, the war mongers safely back home and ensconced in their studies, following the patterns of blood letting on their safe yellowing wall maps with the campaigns noted and celebrated, through newspaper articles, and pins stuck in those wall maps. And Jesse cursed them. He cursed such a huge hatred. Such a huge insanity. As did all the boys, men, in the growing up process, grown as much as they ever would in this world.
A hand reached out of the darkness. Jesse jumped. His hand flashed with his pistol at the mid section of the man who had woken him, who wanted Jesse to relieve him on guard duty. Jesse's eyes opened and his brain aware, alert immediately. The hand on his shoulder might have been that of Kenny's. Kenny who kept watch over his brother as they lay in bed in their nightshirts, when Jesse went far away in his mind, before Kenny found him in the attic and kissed him where Jesse had never known it was even conceivable for a boy to be kissed before. Jesse put his pistol firing end down, and the man above him did not smile, did not say I had hoped you would put a cannon ball through me with that dilapidated old musket of yours, but they both knew it. Words were not necessary.
Jesse then, guarding. His pistol at the ready. His sword broken but still in its scabbard and ready to use if necessary. He rubbed his hand over his beard and thought himself a man and hated the whole wide world for making him into one. The night before the soldiers came to the yard of his parents' house, Jesse and Kenny, having heard the battles far too close to home, having seen the smoke and tumultuousness of it take place not that far a distance from their bedroom window, until Jesse pulled down the shade and held onto his brother as tightly as he knew how, that last night they had made love in their bedroom, their door securely locked. Their lips met each others' for the first time. Their bodies strained against each other. Their eyes were like flintlocks cocked at each other. They tried to lose each other and themselves in the intensity of what they were, of what they had shared, in their hammock of summer that surely would have kept them young and tender feeling for each other for the rest of their long lazy days. But the scythe of battle was calling. The scythe that took the latest crop of lives and put them in the war machine and made them nameless and called murder for love, and love of brothers dare not speak it name.
Their bodies, that last night, joined to each other. Their groins rubbing hard against each other. Jesse had put his lips to his brother's outstretched neck, and he had kissed that pale vibrant beating neck's pulse. He had rubbed his hand over his brother's body, as Kenny did over Jesse's, and they were a sea unto themselves, their berry nipples, their cocks, Kenny's small one, and Jesse's larger one, kneeling against their stomachs. Their hands playful no longer, but at each other's buttocks in the small stifling bedroom, the wool of tomorrow already getting in their eyes, as they rolled together on the floor because the bed squeaked too much to make love there. They held each other. They grabbed each other and Jesse lay down then on his back, and put his ankles on his brother's so thin so sloping shoulders, and he guided the little boy's stick into him, and the night was far too short, and Kenny far too eager to crawl into his brother, his lover, and hide there forever more. Thus the goodbye, the going away and the always longing it would leave them with that no one else could ever satisfy. Were there to be anyone else.
Their Father dressed in gray slacks and gray frocked coat, his face sour, full of thunder clouds, the next morning, at breakfast in the cheerless day when even the sun had bowed out of shining because of the sorrows befallen the land. Their Father looking at his wife as she bowed her head over the table, as did the boys, and they prayed, mechanical, hopeless, full of night in the air already betoken with the smell of death and wounds and acrid cannon and gunfire that was closer so much so, that it was under their skins. It had become them. It did not assuage. It did not blame or affirm or deny or explain itself. It simply was, and that was the beginning and the end of it. A monstrous destructive lover come to bear the cannon fodder home wherever home might be.
And Father--knew! He knew what his sons had been doing. It trilled suddenly through Jesse's bones, his bowels, as he suddeenlystopped eating breakfast. Father had not seen them, Jesse believed. But somehow he knew. It came to the boy like another sense. Jesse turned his eyes to the table. Blushing and ashamed. He would be able to blush and feel ashamed only a very little from this point onward. But Father said nothing. There was only the somber ochre of breakfast table talk, during which, oddly enough, Father seemed--kind? Those ponderous hands thick and hairy were put palm out after they had finished breaking fast. He said let us stay together, in the parlor today, let us talk of old times and be together as a family should. And thus both boys and their mother knew this was the day. Not presentment or foretelling by their Father, just the sagacious following of facts laid out like the bones of God at their feet. Facts that said no one escapes this war. No one. No matter how rich or fine or protected. Though the Arthur family, this family here, were no longer rich or fine or protected. Save the gold coinage of their sons gone away, even the one who stayed, gone away.
The clock of time began to tune toward morning. And Jesse was on point. He watched the copse of trees down the hillock. He watched the sky getting bloody as it readied itself for another day of battle and sums and totals of lives lost for cost, life lost because somehow that would make a man out of the wounded and those wounded beyond repair. Jesse's head sunk on his chest suddenly. He was seated on a rock cairn and the gun slipped out of his long wiry fingers, silently to the ground, and he was suddenly asleep, deeply asleep, as though an ague had come upon him. His tall thin body in the Confederate uniform that fit so badly this boy so far slighter than it, that it seemed to engulf him like a mad turtle shell, fell over slowly with bodily decision and giving up and going home. He fell onto the ground as the sky blistered lighter and redder.
His brain felt the words more than thought them--I am now in the attic and in the Saturday of it, where Kenny will play, until his own time of war, if this dreadful carnage is not stopped before then. Jesse felt the summer in him. The summers with his brother. Who had kept watch over him, as smaller boys might for their older brothers when such things of future are known without being known.
There was a rustle. A whisper of wind not made by the wind in the trees or sky. There was an intake of breath. There was a stealthy walking of shadows. There was only the sky as witness. The Confederate soldiers slept on, thinking themselves watched over by their guard. But Jesse was not as good a guard as Kenny was all those years making sure his brother was safe from harm. The Union soldiers, dressed in their wet sweaty blue wool, walked as with deer steppings to the man, the boy, on the ground, curled round a dream.
They withdrew their pistols. They put their other hands on their sword hilts. The day would be a hot one. And when it happened, Kenny at home, in the attic, sleeping on some of his brother's clothing, knew. As the red morning light no longer came through the inverted commas of the fan light. As Kenny felt as cold as the clay and was, himself, no longer a child.
And Kenny began to remember. And was to spend the rest of his life remembering. For that is all love can do sometimes. In a world such as this, that is all it can do.
the end