Читать книгу Amen's Boy - William Maltese - Страница 12

CHAPTER EIGHT

ALGIERS

Algiers, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans’s famous French Quarter, a ferry or a bridge ride away from the Crescent City, was home to Father Terry’s family. It was to New Orleans that we drove in the black Chevy from Assisi in Conway, all the way to New Orleans.

Oddly enough, we went through Mississippi part of the way even though Louisiana is directly connected to Arkansas. We took the “scenic route” Father Terry said. He said there were advantages to some of the rural roads in Mississippi, more interesting sites; so, this long detour gave us a luxurious amount of time to chat and be together. It was clear to me Father Terry liked me, and I liked him, very much. I began to talk a lot to him about everything I could think of. I seemed to be waking up from something like a long dream state. He knew something about everything, too. No other adult talked to me like this. He was my friend, for sure, and now I was going to visit with his mother in their home. I was eager to see their family grocery store and “camel back house” where he’d grown up.

I thought Father Terry’s rectory was spooky but not as spooky as his bedroom and home in Algiers turned out to be. It was really “old world,” and I learned what a “camel back house” was only after imagining a house with camel humps on the roof. What it meant was that it had a hump on the back, one story on the front of the house at the street and two story mid-house onward to the rear of the house. Property taxes in the parish in that part of Louisiana were calculated on how many square feet of frontage your house had on the city street. A two story frontage meant twice the property tax so people built shorter fronts, one story, and paid taxes on one story homes, but lived in two story houses back from the street curb. It wasn’t really a hump in the middle of the house, but the back of the house was the humped-up part.

Being a guest in Father Terry’s family home and store was fun. I loved it. However, I was a little confused. I had been visiting Father Terry in his chambers as a solitary, one on one, private, very secret confessional and counseling relationship. Then I learned, on the way to his parent’s home in Algiers, that I could confess my sins to him in ordinary conversational talking. No one had to know it was confession; he didn’t have to put on the purple stole and didn’t have to make the sign of the cross with his hand. He said not everybody was allowed to go to confession like this, but I was advanced in my understanding of the sacrament of confession, and special arrangements could be made. I liked this because I always loved to have special secrets and special secret friendships. I had a few secret friendships with boys I met downtown. Like at the newsstand downtown across from the Fox Theatre there were some older teenagers who would meet up with me and buy me cokes and malts. Older men seemed to like to watch me read comic books and sometimes bought one for me after we hung around in the magazine stand in the back where I could sit on the lower rack. Yet, above all, I enjoyed just talking to Father Terry about sexual urges, and how I dealt with them, all in casual conversation when we were alone.

In Algiers, Father Terry and I went into his mother’s house from a back door entrance. There was an alley which he used to drive his Chevy up behind the house, off the street. When we got there, it was nighttime and I didn’t see much of the neighborhood. It looked sort of dilapidated to me, like a picture of something out of an old 1930s movie.

His mother was very sweet to me, but somehow she seemed far, far away. She was careful not to intrude too much. She gave me the sense she was just an apparition or maybe just a person who came and set out food and then left, not timid or shy. She was spooky, somehow in keeping with her black silk dress with little tiny white dots all over it, appearing from the other side of the room as little stars in the midnight sky. She was sweet to me and asked me what I liked to eat and how I liked my name called.

“Thaddeus is my name, but I am called Tad and sometimes at school I’m called Tadpole!”

“Tadpole! Why, that’s a cute nickname. How did you ever get that?”

“I guess it is because I liked to swim as much as a tadpole or maybe I’m the little frog that becomes the prince?” I began laughing again, and couldn’t stop, and she laughed with me. She talked to me a little while she cooked, and then called her priest son to the kitchen table and pointed to a chair where she wanted me to sit.

The table had a red-checkered table cloth and a wine bottle in a basket woven around it with a red candle burning like in Italian or French movies. There was a big, wonderful, hot, steaming serving bowl full of spaghetti and meatballs, swimming in a red sauce with lots of green onions cut up into it. I couldn’t believe it. Garlic bread, steaming from under the stove, she pulled out on a cookie sheet and shoved into a basket she’d lined with red checkered cloth napkins and covered the bread with the ends of the napkins before she moved to the next thing.

“Milk?”

“Yes, ma’am. I love milk. I think spaghetti and meatballs is my favorite food in the world.”

“Well, Tadpole, you eat all that and then you can have more, but don’t forget you have desert to eat also.”

Father Terry was giggling at me because I was laughing so much, and I kept giggling like a little girl, but it didn’t matter. I ate a lot of food, two plates full, and two big pieces of bread. There was a salad; I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it had marshmallows, the little ones, and cherries, and mixed fruit from a can. It had coconut and whipped cream on it; it was amazingly delicious.

Desert was chocolate cake with chocolate filling, and another glass of milk. Father Terry had his cake with coffee; his mother never sat with us, but waited on us hand and foot.

I didn’t want to say anything about his mother being a widow, but I knew she’d lost her husband. I couldn’t help wonder who she ate with, or when, or if she had company. I was curious because she seemed like a lady who would have thousands of friends and yet she lived alone. In contrast to her happy gregariousness, the house seemed strangely quiet and lonely.

I learned the secret to that later during the following days of my visit. The front of the house was a storefront and she did indeed work all the time, behind a counter that ran around the entire perimeter of the store. People came in and she got things down off the shelf for them. She added the bill up on a big, old, hand-cranked cash register. It registered the amount put into it with metal tabs that popped up. Eventually, I got to learn how to do the cash register, and how to make snow cones and “ring up” the sale. It seemed like a dream. Everything in Father Terry’s home seemed dreamlike. I wondered if we weren’t hypnotized, or in the “Twilight Zone” or the “Outer Limits.”

That first night at bedtime, I began to understand a little more. I knew, from the Blueberry Hill Bayou Camp, that sleeping with Father Terry meant sleeping in the same bed. I didn’t know that men didn’t usually sleep with boys, and it didn’t seem odd to me. What did seem odd was how we always hurried to bed. We had to be real still and quiet, and then cuddle up towards one another. He would put his arm around me, and pull me into his chest and stomach, holding me there in his arms. I felt the curly hair of his chest against my face, and I could feel his pulse, his heart. He breathed on me, and somehow I liked it, but also I wanted him to stop. He smelled like wine and cigarettes sometimes, but at his mother’s house there was no whiskey, only table wine for the evening meal; smoking was allowed only in his room, and out on the back porch. He didn’t smoke much at home. This made me look at him more like a regular person, because now he didn’t have the high status of priest, but was clearly his mommy’s little boy. Oh, she was proud he was a priest, but she treated him like a special little son, almost like he were still a child.

I was not uncooperative when Father Terry wanted us to be cozy and close together in bed. I learned it was okay that we did this secret thing. On those Algiers’s nights, our pressing hard against one another happened every night that we were there. Sometimes he got up and locked the door, which made me think we were not supposed to be seen doing this. I was very young, and knew little about how life outside my parent’s home was, unaware of the rest of the world. However, I didn’t care if it was unusual because it was so kind and tender compared to the beatings from Bubba, and daddy’s constant berating me for all my shortcomings. I learned that it was okay to be aroused, also, during these times we pressed against one another.

Sometimes I felt like he was touching my private parts, but I was in and out of sleep. There were long, serene, dreamlike times of just being with him, close to one another. I felt safe, like the dangers of my own home were far away. I trusted this security, and sought it. He was meticulously gentle with me. As the hours of the night would move slowly by, he touched me secretly. Gradually in the silence activity increased. I lay still and liked pressing his erection into my pubic area and on my legs. He never hurt me. At first he pressed through his white underwear, but deep in the night I’d awaken to him pressing directly against me. He put his hand on mine, and I felt him guide my fingers until I was holding his in my hand, and this lasted for hours. Eventually, a blissful feeling would arise in me and I’d have an orgasm as he held me, and then he would and then get up and get a towel and dry us off. Not a word was spoken. Then we’d sleep until daybreak. Sometimes I’d awaken and he would have his erection beneath my privates pressed in between my hairless thighs, and wet warm ejaculations would follow a period of time during which he’d push in and out between my legs. When he got close to his peak he’d grab me and pull me into his arms forcibly, but not cruelly, just intensely. He’d dry me off in the silence, and I understood that no words ever would be spoken about this.

The week in Algiers seemed to go by quickly, and the next thing I knew I was riding back home in the black Chevy. I was returning to the unhappy world of my parents’ home, and we were leaving a special precious world behind. I knew that the “night sharing” world was disappearing. Father Terry spoke, as he drove, about how I would not be seeing him regularly when I went to Mettray. I was silent for a long time, and then we drove up to the rectory at Assisi. I went in to use the bathroom, and then ran home in the dark under the street lamps. Mother was glad to see me, and my father, he smiled a little, but criticized the way I had my shirt half in and half out, and the scuff marks on the tips of my shoes.

He was critical of me all the time! I tried ignoring him, like mother said, but it didn’t work.