In a hypothetical future where Ferris survives, meets Jacob again in New England, and forgives him, Jacob tells a tale of his god-fearing father.
Jacob turned his back to me, making none of his usual gestures of possession, and shivered despite the day’s heat. I kissed his shoulder, clammy with sweat. “Have I hurt you?”
“Nay.” He gripped my hand as I slipped it over his waist, fitting my body around his as best I could. “You know I had never—“
“I know.”
“Only I think I had.”
He sounded calm, but I felt a tension in him that put me on alert. “I don’t understand.”
“Somehow I’d not thought of it once, all these years. But I remember it well enough now, unlike some other things.”
“Remember what, Jacob?”
“How he punished me.”
“Who?”
“Father.”
The sense of foreboding in me rose from a whisper to a hum. I wet my lips. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to ask. “How did he punish you?”
“The first time,” Jacob said, “I remember it surprisingly well. I wasn’t more than eight or nine years old, but I already boasted a foul temper. Do you know what I did?”
“How would I know?”
He laughed. “There was to be a fair in the village, but I was not to go, on account of some mischief I took part in with a pair of older boys who often got me in trouble. Mother tried to plead with Father, but he was unassailable. I bowed my head, pretending to repent, and promised I’d do better. Yet all the while, rage burned in me. When Father went to the fair with Izzy—Zeb was too little to go, and Mother chose to stay confined with us—I sneaked out of the house, took an ax from the shed, and cut down a small fruit tree Father had planted in the orchard some months before.”
“Poor tree,” I murmured, not knowing what else to say.
“Aye. In truth, Ferris, if my own child were to do a thing like that—I know not if I could stay my hand. But I wouldn’t—I don’t think I could—” His grip on my hand tightened until it almost hurt.
“What did your father do?”
“Same as what he’d always done when I was in need of a beating, at first. He bade me come to his study and lean over his desk—I was just tall enough so I could lay on top of it—when I was smaller, he had me bend over his armchair. He had a special stick. All black and shiny with grease where he gripped it. He said it had been in the family for generations and his father had made a man out of him with it. As a boy I believed it, despite the vicious spring of young wood. It made it easier to take the whipping. I thought, if Father himself had once endured it, surely I could too. And so I did. Unlike Zeb, who squealed every time like a pig at slaughter, I never cried out.”
I wriggled my hand, fearing he’d break it, but when he released it, I wrapped it around his fingers instead.
Jacob laughed again, as if these were fond memories. “The sound it made, Ferris—it was enough to put the fear of God in us. Father never needed shout. If we touched what we weren’t ought to or stole from the kitchen, he’d whip our palms. If we went where we weren’t ought to, or failed to come when called upon, or ran excessively around the house—he’d whip our feet. When we spoke out of turn, he threatened he’d whip our mouths with it, but he had the good sense not to bring the stick to our faces, for it could easily gouge out an eye.”
I nodded, nuzzling his back. Every father had a stick like that, I reckoned. Even Aunt, the gentle soul she’d been, applied the stick from time to time, for I’d been a rascal. But it had always been she who punished me, never Uncle, and now I wondered if a man’s hand would have made me more of a man myself. Less foolish and more violent, like Jacob. Ready to take the stick to my own sons some day. I could not imagine hitting a child, not for speaking out of turn, nor for stealing from the kitchen, nor even for cutting down young fruit trees. I’d do as poorly as a parent as I had done as a founder of a colony. Turning the other cheek might lead to Heaven, but it just gets you slapped twice as much here on Earth.
“For most offenses, it was the back,” Jacob went on. “A child could still do his chores with a back sore from whipping. But for the worst crimes, it was the backside.”
He fell silent, but I felt his shoulders heave with heavy breaths. “Go on,” I whispered.
“I never cried out but that day I left behind a pool of tears on his desk, such was his ire. He bade me spread my legs wider, and wider, till I could barely stand on tiptoes. I bit into my forearm as hard as to leave a black bruise when he took the stick to my—“ Jacob swallowed, and I swallowed too, feeling my own nuts shrink and pull up in sympathy. Was this something all fathers did? Would Uncle have done it? I didn’t think so. Aunt had never, never!
“When I heard him unbuckle his belt,” Jacob said, “I thought he’d whip me with that too. He once whipped Izzy with the belt, and in front of the whole family, for breaking a glass pane on the lozenge window in play.”
Shivering myself now, I hugged him closer, till I could feel his rapid heartbeat.
“But he didn’t strike me. I didn’t know what he was doing, breathing and grunting—it was before I grew into my manhood and I had no notion—and when his seed landed on my backside, raw with welts, I thought he had spit on me. And that burned even worse.”
“Jacob—”
“Hush, I beg thee, and let me speak. If I don’t speak of it now I’ll never find the courage again.”
I almost pleaded with him to stop anyhow, and never speak of it at all. I could see the rest of it well enough already. But then I recalled how confessing my grief to him, and hearing him confess his to me had made the wounds heal. Could wounds this old, this vile, ever close? God only knew. I shut my eyes and nodded.
“After it,” Jacob went on in a strange, unfeeling voice, as if reciting some history from a boring book in class, “I was too ashamed and frightened to be angry. I thought he didn’t love me anymore. Never before or after had I stayed away from mischief so devoutly, hoping to get back in his graces. And he must’ve been ashamed too, though I couldn’t know it then. A long time passed before we were ourselves again with one another. And then… O, I know not what I had done. What any boy does to deserve a whipping. Surely I did deserve it but when he bade me to his study, I trembled like a leaf, Ferris, like never before. I could barely stand. For the first time, I begged him. I wept and sniveled like a girl, groveling at his feet, but God help me, I think it only stoked his fire. It was the same thing all over: bare the backside, bend over the desk, bite the arm to stifle the cries. He didn’t beat me as savagely as before but…”
Tears burst from my eyes and I kissed them off Jacob’s skin. “My heart,” I whimpered. “O, my heart.”
“I should count my blessings,” Jacob went on, still in that flat, dispassionate voice, “for he wasn’t a large man himself. In every other way I grew to be his image, so everyone said.” A haggard laugh rattled from his chest. “And you know best of all. My poor Ferris, playing with fire. Till you were burned.”
I shook my head, though I hardly knew why, for he had spoken true. In his arms I had always been as helpless as a child, and I had invited him into my bed knowing his nature. O aye, I had known it very well.
“After that, his manner changed, and so did mine, I’ve no doubt. He could not bear to look me in the eye but when I caught him watching me in secret, he had the stare of a starved wolf. Constant fear of wrongdoing and punishment made me stupid and clumsy and he took every opportunity to summon me to his study. I remember… one time I begged for pardon, he made me suck. And then he did it every time. First that, then the whipping, then the rest, and all the while he’d recite from the Scripture. Can you imagine?”
I could not. I refused to. My heart drummed and my breaths came in rags and it was all I could do to stop myself from outright sobbing.
“And I… I imagined I wasn’t there. I imagined it wasn’t me. It was some other boy, one both weak and stupid, who could do nothing right and deserved every cruelty. I became another boy. Better, smarter, stronger… unfeeling and unafraid. A grown man might not succeed at this deception but with a child’s imagination… I was able to separate my mind from what happened with my body, and persuade myself I was only an observer. I perfected the fantasy until I could detach myself so completely I would not even remember it. And do you know what that was like?”
I shook my head, my eyes screwed shut.
“It was like that time in the army, when I attacked you with the knife. Do you remember?”
My voice was rough with tears. “Aye.”
“You may not believe it, but I never knew I pulled out the knife. One moment, we were arguing, like friends sometimes do, and the next, someone had hit me on the head and someone else was prying the knife from my hand. It was me, but it also wasn’t. Do you understand?”
I took a deep, shuddery breath. “It was the Bad Angel.”
Jacob was silent. When enough time passed for my eyes to dry, I rose on an elbow and peered over his shoulder. His face was hidden under hair wet from sweat or tears. I pulled it gently aside, strand after strand, until I could see him in profile. He stared ahead, barely blinking.
“I’ll never be rid of him,” he said, sounding at last like himself again. He turned so he could look at me. “You know it, don’t you? He’s burned into me, like the sign of the beast.” I stroked the tears that still ran from the corners of his eyes, but he caught my hand. “You mustn’t be fooled, Ferris. I cry not for what happened to me, or even for what I have done. I cry for what I might still do.”