A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

big peter in his neaf all rumpled with knobs and veins and the mull of its nozzle fat as a table plum with a slanting warp from the thirl of the tuck to the belling out of the rim. It made my mouth dry to watch him thwack it full stretch.

He had less hair than I above his peter. His was ginger. Mine was springy and black. He asked if mine felt good. He slid his foot out and waggled it against mine. We were friends. He said we could make it last or come quick and then come again. I was near enough to my sneeze to say quick. My milky drop jumped out. Tarpy took longer to reach his sneeze and a hot blush spread up my back and slid down again as a chill when I saw the amount of spunk that he spurted. A blob spattered two feet away. Another fell just short of the first. A third ran into his fingers.

We did it again later in the afternoon on the sand bank where the bears fish in winter. He let me feel his peter. He asked me if I could get him a piece of pie. I told him to meet me just before sunset between the knoll and the river. I brought him the drumstick of a hen and a fair slab of gooseberry pie. I had never seen anyone eat so. He cleaned the bone with his teeth and broke it and sucked out the marrow.

He could not read. I told him Robinson Crusoe. He said he knew the ABCs but had the order all crazy when he tried to say them. He made some of the letters backward in the sand where we wrote them out.

We met every day. I would see Tarpy in the sunflowers from my window and put down my Fenimore Cooper or Baron von Humboldt and go out with my beetle bottle and kit. Matilda would cry that I needed a straw hat against sun stroke. I would head for the woods on the bluff over the sea. Tarpy would bob up to my left when we were out of sight of the house. In a glacial scoop ringed with a haw of bushes under a boulder we shed our breeches and fell to. I liked to loll awhile before the delicious business and pry into Tarpy's abandon with curiosity and envy. He would have come several times since we'd jacked off the day before.

He lay back in the grass with one hand under his head and the other on his peter like a big stemmed pink mushroom. It is as I've measured fourteen centimetres long. And there is a mushroom like Tarpy's peter. Phallus impudicus. Mine is twelve but growing. The more you play with it the bigger it gets. Three times and we would go on a ramble for beetles. One more time standing in the wheatfield dangerously near the house before I was expected to be in.

Morning and afternoon we zinged our spunk in the woods along the river and above the sea. I got bolder and sneaked out after dark to meet Tarpy in the barn loft. Sometimes he did me and I him.

We met Old Sollander on the road. He started right in. No good would come of our playing together. He tapped his open hand with his stick. What if he told the squire what we did? Tarpy pulled my shirt so that I would be with him when he ran. I said that I could be friends with who I wanted.

He showed me a long flat rock way back in a part of the woods where I had never been. It had pictures chiselled into it. He showed me how to see the reindeer. We cleared some moss and lichen away and found a dragon boat. The mast. The oars. Vikings in it rowing. And there was a Viking with his peter up.

One day I turned up at the river with a bundle and said he would see when he asked what I had. Breechesless we got snug shoulder to shoulder in a bush and jacked a sweetness into our peters. We took our time. We were learning to make it last for a lovely long time. The sunshine was scattered in the trees and made the river blue in its middle.

The crickets sang as loud as a waterfall. Swarms of midges hung out over the water. He let me feel the knobby stalk of his peter and jack it for awhile. After we shot off I asked him to do me a favor and ask no questions until I was through with what I was going to do. I unwrapped my bundle. First scissors and comb. He sat crosslegged and naked while I cut his hair. I combed out the rat's nests and elf locks. I knew how to get a strand in the comb and clip it even with the scissors. How to keep combing it down until I had it all of a length across the neck and forehead. I trimmed allowances for the ears.

Then the shampoo. We stood in the river up to our butts. There were welts across his back from beatings that must have cut to the ribs. I lathered up his hair and dug around in it with my fingers. He rinsed it with a duck. I lathered it again. We kept it up until no more black clouded into the water when he ducked. Then the soap. I stood him on a rock and had him all suds. I even brought a wash rag. He jibed only at the hard work in the ears. He squealed when I washed his peter and behind as clean as the river itself. His knees and elbows took some doing. I trimmed his nails and reamed the gunk out from under them with a green twig.

His hair was drying a different color by the time we'd lain on the rock and dried good. I showed him the rest of the bundle. He put the clean shirt on and did a prance like a dandy. Then breeches that might split in the crotch before the day was out. We looked like brothers. We threw his rotten clothes in the river. I told him his new name. Sven.

But he wouldn't have a new name.