The Oxboy Page 3

  Would the commissioner sort through the maze of names and blood seals and find the ox hidden behind them?

  I glanced at Suseen. Her certificate was rolled up with a piece of yellow yarn, and she was tapping it in a sleepy way against the edge of her desk.

  The teacher clapped her hands, and the police commissioner moved to a chair at the side of the room.

  Then we put on a play for him in which a swarm of blue-faced boys hunted down other children wearing animal heads. “Blue stands for strength,” we recited. “Blue stands for thought. Blue stands for iron bands that encircle the enemy and keep them away from us.”

  I had the part of an honest goatherd trying to keep his flock together in the face of lions who quoted religious texts to my animals and urged them to flee to the forest. As part of my role, I brandished a club at the lions and pretended to strike them great blows, which were loudly cheered by the audience.

  Later, the police commissioner sat at the teacher’s desk and motioned to a boy in the first row to come forward. We all lined up after him to present our papers to the commissioner.

  Even armed with the official silver certificate stamped with wax blood seals, I trembled to think that he would know that I was carrying a false document. At any moment he would pull out his black whistle, and the blue hunters would come and shoot me without a thought. But he merely glanced at my paper in a bored way and handed it back to me.

  Much fuss was made over a flabby girl who ate candy all day long who was announced as the winner of the competition. She traced her human forebears back four hundred seventy-seven years—one hundred twenty-eight years more than anyone else in the class. The commissioner gave her a box of chocolates tied with a big blue ribbon.

  Then we carried her triumphantly around the room in a chair held over our heads. As the strongest boy in the class, I had been selected as one of the carriers and could smell the chocolates that she constantly stuffed in her small pale mouth while we recited the sacred code: “We are human. We are nothing but human … Pure blood of the human race!”

  That night, as I followed Suseen home, she and her friends were in high spirits. They tossed a ball from one side of the street to the other. Suseen threw it wild, and it shattered a window in Old Xerry the carpetmaker’s house.

  “Run!” I cried as he threw open the door.

  I stood on the walk and watched Suseen and her friends disappear.

  Old Xerry complained to my stepfather, and I had to work for him after school every day for a month. I rolled and unrolled carpets, swept, and carried water while Old Xerry worked his loom, muttering about irresponsible youth.

  Once when he was sick, he sent for me on a Saturday. “Can I trust you, boy?” He raised himself up from his bed and pointed to a carpet that lay rolled up on the floor. “Take it to the grand house on the hill.”

  I heaved the carpet onto my shoulders and carried it across town. There an old woman directed me to lay it down in a back hallway. As I stood up to leave, I noticed that the floor was covered with green scales.

  The woman looked sharply at me. “Xerry sent you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She nodded as though reassured and sent me out the door with a handful of coins for the carpetmaker.

  When I got back, Old Xerry snatched the coins I gave him and counted them twice. Then he sank back on his pillow.

  I waited to see if he needed something more from me.

  “Here,” Old Xerry said weakly. He pressed a coin into my hand. It was the first he had ever given me.

  I took my coin and bought a small glass prism to lay on Suseen’s desk the next school day.

  Laceflower

  I was invited to Suseen’s birthday party. Most of our class attended, as well as the teacher and all of Suseen’s cousins. I was not used to parties, and I stood to one side while the others ran, jumped, and threw in games of skill. Suseen played in all the games, her glossy brown curls bouncing on her shoulders. I sat on the sidelines, sipped the too-sweet drink her mother had given me, and watched Suseen.

  Then came the game where everyone took turns with bows and arrows in front of a large target that was covered by a picture of a deer with an evil look in its eye. Its front hoofs were firmly planted on a small dead child. Everyone shot at it until its entire body was pierced by arrows.

  A bow and arrow were thrust at me. I fit the arrow into the bow with trembling hands. A lock of hair fell into my eyes and I awkwardly pushed it away. I pulled back the bow and let the arrow fly, hoping it would fall harmlessly into the grass. But my arrow flew straight to the target and pierced the heart of the deer.

  My classmates cheered and handed me another arrow. As if it too had a will of its own, the second arrow found its way to the deer’s heart. I bowed my head while the others shouted their approval.

  Suseen took my arm. “You are too modest,” she said. “No one else has made two hits in a row.”

  She led me to the table, which was covered with a fine rose-colored cloth, set with silver plates and cups, and crowned by a magnificent frosted cake made by her cousins the bakers.

  The guests came running, the games forgotten.

  As we left the party, Suseen handed each guest a small gift. The girls were given a necklace of blue and green stones. The boys received a wooden knife. When it came my turn to say good-bye, instead of the hard object I expected, Suseen pressed something light and fragile into my hand. I looked down. It was a tiny purple laceflower.

  From then on Suseen no longer joined in the laughter when the teacher made fun of my reading. When Suseen read in my place, she did so slowly and gravely, as though her words had a special power to somehow transform my mental dullness into her own brightness and quickness.

  After she went into her house at the end of the day, Suseen now waved to me from her window.

  The other girls teased her. “Your love,” I heard them say. “Your handsome noble knight.” When this happened, Suseen reddened and would turn away from me. But the next day she would bring me a small frosted cake at lunchtime.

  One day a boy said, “Oh, Suseen leads him around by a ring in his nose!”

  I became enraged and, lowering my head, charged the boy.

  He screamed and fell, and the other boys came crowding around.

  They brandished fists and sticks at me and drove me off. “Animal!” they called after me. “Animal! Animal! Animal!”

  I spotted Suseen and moved toward her, but she shrank back. I saw myself in her eyes: wild-eyed, disheveled, and streaked with blood and dust. “Suseen …” I said.

  For a moment she seemed about to say something, but she turned away.

  From that day on she refused to speak to me or even to look at me. I kept my distance and did not follow her home anymore.

  The Rescue

  After that, I went often to the forest. My stepfather did not like it, and it sometimes made my mother uneasy. But the forest was the only place where I felt at peace. I spent hours roaming among tangled trees, along silent streams, and through windy meadows. It was then that I felt close to my father.

  I knew there was an invisible world that existed alongside my everyday world. I had heard about people fleeing to the forest and often hoped I would meet one of them. A schoolmate’s cousin had disappeared last year, and it was said that he had gone to the forest. There were tales about flocks of birds with long red hair, round breasts, and shrunken, pale arms ending in talons. They were called motherbirds, and it was said that they stole small human children from their families and brought them to the forest to rear.

  In the forest I often fished. My stepfather liked fish, and when I brought some back, he was pleased and said that at least some good came out of my idle wanderings.

  In school we had learned that fish were pure and safe—the only uncontaminated animals—but occasionally I found some that had to be thrown back. One had a dull green eye, just like the eye of the most popular girl in my class. The fish was long and silver
y and much more beautiful than the girl was. Another one that I caught had long, flat beaverlike teeth. Still another had tiny perfect ears. When I saw these fish, I knew I should kill them.

  Instead I put them in a pail and walked slowly up and down the bank of the stream. Then I tripped, knocking over the pail so the fish fell back into the water. I swore loudly and pretended to try and catch them again, in case anyone was watching.

  One cold day my mother sent me to town to buy thread. I was returning home with my pockets full of colored spools when a man darted out a door. At first I thought he was wearing a special kind of suit, as he was clothed in soft brown fur from head to toe. Then I saw the pointed, twitching ears and the long furry neck. Fear radiated from his large eyes and quivering body.

  From around the corner I heard shouts and the sound of heavy boots.

  Running more swiftly and gracefully than anything I had ever seen, the deerman bounded down the street.

  Just then a familiar wagon came into sight. It was piled high with rugs, and Old Xerry was pushing it. He gave a low whistle, and to my astonishment the deerman leaped onto the back of the wagon and crawled under the rugs.

  Old Xerry’s eyes met mine.

  A moment later the blue hunters surged around the corner and surrounded the cart. “We’re looking for something that’s part deer and part man. Did you see it?”

  “I’m just a poor carpetmaker with only a stupid boy to help me—” Old Xerry whined.

  “Spare us, old man. What’s in your cart?”

  “Only carpets!” croaked Old Xerry. “And I have to keep stopping to push them back on the cart because this lazy, clumsy boy stacked them so poorly.”

  He gave me a shove and the blue hunters laughed. One of the hunters reached into the cart and yanked on one of the carpets.

  I thought then that all the carpets would come tumbling out, and they would see the deerman huddled on the bottom of the cart, but the hunter only said, “There! I’ve straightened your pile.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Old Xerry. “I’m very much obliged.”

  “Let us know if you see it.” They turned to leave. “Pure blood of the human race,” they called.

  “Pure blood of the human race,” Old Xerry and I called after them.

  Old Xerry took the handles of his cart, looked at me again, and then wheeled it rapidly away.

  Now when I went to the forest, I thought of the deerman and wondered where Old Xerry had taken him. Was the deerman a friend of his? Or even a relative? I had many questions that I did not dare to ask him.

  One day as I was picking berries at the edge of the forest, I heard shrill cries.

  I dropped my pail and ran to a nearby creek, where an eagle with large human hands was choking a small wriggling animal.

  “Help!” cried the animal. “Help me!”

  I picked up a stick and drove the eagle off. It responded with a piercing shriek that made me drop to the ground and cover my head with my hands.

  “Die!” screamed the eagle. “Human waste!”

  It plucked a stone from the ground and hurled it at me. I ducked behind a tree. The eagle flew above me and grabbed for my head. I swung my stick at it again, and on a sudden inspiration I called out, “I have a gun!”

  With a great flap of wings it soared away above the forest.

  The eagle’s prey lay in the shallows, half-covered with water. The creature was like nothing I had ever seen before. It looked like a cross between an otter and a centipede: short and plump and sleek, with a dozen slithery arms and legs that appeared entirely useless.

  I picked it up. It was shaking with fear and cold. I put it under my shirt to warm it. Its eyes met mine—large, intelligent eyes, luminous almost—and there was an instant flash of communication between us.

  “Thank you.” Its voice sounded like a swift-running creek. “You saved my life.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “My home and family have been destroyed. We lived in a stream not far from here, until the eagle diverted the course of the water and forced us out. I was the only survivor. Since then I have gone from puddle to pond searching for another place to live.”

  “You can come with me,” I said. I picked up my pail of berries and set off through the forest with the otter under my shirt. Gradually his trembling subsided, and he fell asleep next to my chest. As for me, I was happy and content in a way that I hadn’t been in a long time.

  We were almost home when the forest became unnaturally still. The flowers closed up, the mushrooms shriveled, and the leaves on the trees turned silvery white and curled inward.

  The otter awoke and shivered violently. “Hide!” he ordered in a shrill whisper.

  I shoved the pail of berries under a bush and quickly climbed a nearby pine tree.

  “What is it?” I whispered. He did not answer me, but I felt his heart beating and heard the quick intake of his breath.

  Then I saw them, their blue faces, their guns and heavy boots. They were carrying something wrapped in a burlap sack and laughing loudly.

  “This one will get us a fine bounty,” said one of the hunters.

  “Look at those hands,” said another. “That means double.”

  They dropped their sack to the ground, and the eagle fell out. Slapping the earth like a man, he pleaded, “Do not kill me, good men.”

  The men lifted their rifles.

  I held the otter under my shirt as the shots rang out. His smooth warm body trembled violently against mine. I sat hunched on a tree limb, not daring to move or even to breathe.

  They cut off the head and one hand of the eagle and lit a pyre around its remains. Then the hunters stood in a circle and recited, “We are human. We are nothing but human …”

  They left with their bounty in the burlap sack.

  “Yours is not a kind race,” said the otter.

  “I am not one of them.”

  The otter studied me. “You look like a human. How are you not one of them?”

  “I am the son of an ox.” I had never before spoken those words aloud. They sounded strange to my ears and seemed to echo all through the forest.

  The otter said nothing, but I saw compassion in his eyes.

  The shouts and songs of the blue hunters gradually disappeared from the forest. I climbed down slowly from the tree, and we set off for home.

  The Otter’s Tales

  The otter slept with me at night, curled in the curve of my legs. And while I was at school, he stayed under my bed in a basin of cool water.

  Each day I brought fish to him, fresh fish that I caught in the creek at the edge of the forest.

  When my stepfather was home, he always wanted to know what I caught, and where, and how many, and was it easy. Did I see any that should be reported? Under his watchful eye I had to empty my pail outside and gut and clean the fish.

  Then I brought the fish to my mother in the kitchen. “Leave them on the table,” she said. I spread the fish out on a sheet of heavy paper and slipped one or two into my pocket. My mother always seemed to have her back turned, though once I caught her eye in the reflection from the window. Her expression did not change, nor did she say anything.

  One day I tiptoed upstairs to surprise the otter and found my mother singing softly to him. I stopped on the stairs and silently watched them. She cradled the otter in her arms and hummed a tune I knew from long ago. I slipped back down the stairs. The otter never spoke of my mother. Nor did my mother speak of the otter to me.

  Several times I took the otter out to the creek. I put him in a basket and covered him with grass and twigs. We had long happy afternoons splashing in the creek, and when we were ready to come home, I covered him with piles of small wormy apples.

  One night my stepfather was waiting for me on the front steps with his wood and his knife.

  He pointed at the apples with his knife. “What do you need those for?”

  “The worms,” I answered. “We study them in school.” My he
art was beating fast, and I hoped he did not notice how flushed I was.

  “You study vile animals?”

  “Only to demonstrate our superiority,” I answered quickly.

  “Well, go in! What are you standing there for?” he said.

  My stepfather was suspicious. I worried. What if he came home unexpectedly from the glass factory? I told the otter that he must never speak when my stepfather was in the house, even in his sleep. If he was discovered, he must never let on that he understood the speech of humans.

  Of course he knew this far better than I did.

  The otter told me many wonderful tales. He understood the language of stones and stars and moss and roses. Of water dripping in dark caves. Of sand flying in the wind. Of tightly wrapped leaves bursting from buds.

  Like my mother, he too told me of the time when animals and humans began to communicate—when they no longer held each other in fear and contempt.

  “When humans and animals began to marry,” the otter told me in his low, deep, water voice, “some animals became miraculously intelligent. They attacked problems and mysteries with a ferocity, an unswerving concentration, and it seemed as though they could ferret out the secrets of the universe.

  “As for humans, their instincts were enhanced. They became powerful musicians whom no one could resist, magnetic lovers, charismatic leaders, mysterious preachers.

  “Sometimes, however, the animal nature seemed to paralyze the human being with shame. A feathered man hid in his house, ashamed to be seen by either friend or family. A girl with an eagle’s beak and piercing eyes wore a veil over her face and never married. A man whose arms, legs, and chest were covered with shining silver scales went from one doctor to another claiming he had a mysterious disease and demanding a cure, when everyone knew that his mother was a snake.”

  Another time he said, “When human nature was added to the animal, the animals were given the opportunity to express deep, untouched springs in their nature. A following grew up around a dog who was said to have found peace and freedom while contemplating nature by a pure spring. He was a great handsome dog, shaggy and eloquent, with gentle eyes and an air of complete stillness. He made his home in the forest, where many of the new breed of creatures joined him, as well as some pure humans and animals.”