Blaze

When they got there, Blaze shifted the boards aside. The well was only twenty feet deep, but a pebble dropped into its rock-lined barrel made a mysterious, hollow splash. Timothy grass and wild roses grew luxuriously all around the concrete pad. Half a dozen old oaks stood around, as if on guard. The moon peered through one of them now, casting pale gleams.

“Can I get your water?” Blaze asked. His ears were burning.

“Yeah? Tha’d be nice.”

“Sure,” he said, grinning thoughtlessly. “Sure it would.” He thought of Margie Thurlow, although this girl looked nothing like her.

There was a length of sunbleached rope tied to a ringbolt set in one corner of the cement. Blaze tied the free end of this rope to one of the buckets. He dropped it into the hole. There was a splash. Then they waited for it to fill up.

Anne Bradstay was no expert in the art of seduction. She put her hand on the crotch of Blaze’s jeans and grasped his penis.

“Hey!” he said, surprised.

“I like you,” she said. “Why don’t you screw me? Want to?”

Blaze looked at her, struck dumb with amazement…although, within her hand, part of him was now beginning to speak its piece in the old language. The girl was wearing a long dress, but she had pulled it up to show her thighs. She was scrawny, but the moonlight was kind to her face. The shadows were even kinder.

He kissed her clumsily, wrapping his arms around her.

“Jeez, you got a real woodie, don’tcha?” she asked, gasping for breath (and grasping his cock even harder). “Now take it easy, okay?”

“Sure,” Blaze said, and lifted her in his arms. He set her down in the timothy. He unbuckled his belt. “I don’t know nothin bout this.”

Anne smiled, not without bitterness. “It’s easy,” she said. She pulled her dress over her hips. She wasn’t wearing underpants. He saw a thin triangle of dark hair in the moonlight and thought if he looked at it too long, it would kill him.

She pointed matter-of-factly. “Stick your pecker in here.”

Blaze dropped his pants and climbed on. At a distance of about twenty feet, hunkered in some high pucky, Brian Wick looked at Toe-Jam with wide eyes. He whispered, “Get a load of that tool!”

Toe tapped the side of his head and whispered, “I guess what God took away here he put back down there. Now shut up.”

They turned to watch.

The next day, Toe mentioned that he’d heard Blaze got more than water at the well. Blaze turned almost purple and showed his teeth before walking away. Toe never dared mention it again.

Blaze became Anne’s cavalier. He followed her everywhere, and gave her his second blanket in case she got cold during the night. Anne enjoyed this. In her own way, she fell in love with him. She and he carried water for the girls’ and boys’ cabins for the rest of the picking and no one ever said anything about it. They would not have dared.

On the night before they were to go back to Hetton, Harry Bluenote asked Blaze if he would stay a bit after supper. Blaze said sure, but he began to feel uneasy. His first thought was that Mr. Bluenote had found out what he and Anne were doing down by the well and was mad. This made him feel bad, because he liked Mr. Bluenote.

When everyone else was gone, Bluenote lit a cigar and walked twice around the cleared supper-table. He coughed. He rumpled his already rumpled hair. Then he nearly barked: “Look here, you want to stay on?”

Blaze gaped, unable at first to get across the chasm between what he had believed Mr. Bluenote was going to say and what he had said.

“Well? Would you?”

“Yes,” Blaze managed. “Yes, sure. I…sure.”

“Good,” Bluenote said, looking relieved. “Because Hetton House isn’t for a boy like you. You’re a good boy, but you need taking in hand. You try goddam hard, but —” He pointed at Blaze’s head. “How’d that happen?”

Blaze’s hand went immediately to the bashed-in dent. He blushed. “It’s awful, ain’t it? To look at, I mean. Lordy.”

“Well, it ain’t pretty, but I seen worse.” Bluenote dropped into a chair. “How’d it happen?”

“My dad go an pitch me downstair. He ‘us hungover or somethin. I don’t remember very well. Anyway…” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh? Well, I guess it was enough.” He got up again, went to the cooler in the corner, drew himself a Dixie cup of water. “I went to the doctor’s today — I been puttin it off because sometimes I get these little flutters — and he gave me a clean bill. I was some relieved.” He drank his water, crumpled the cup, and tossed it into the wastebasket. “A man gets older, that’s the thing. You don’t know nothin about that, but you will. He gets older and his whole life starts to seem like a dream he had durin an afternoon nap. You know?”

“Sure,” Blaze said. He hadn’t heard a word of it. Live here with Mr. Bluenote! He was just beginning to grasp what that might mean.