Amen's Boy. William Maltese
it to a razor edge. I could chop a palmetto stem with one whack and harvest a wonderful parasol, either for shading myself in the open fields, or for deflecting rain in the forest. Always nature spoke to me vividly: everything had magical proportions.
I adopted the habit of playing in the woods as a small boy, no older than seven. I’d been taught to fish, row a boat, build a camp fire, pitch a tent, dig a latrine, and shoot both rifles and shotguns by the time I was nine. I owned my first bayonet secretly, I admit, and kept it buried, wrapped in a waterproof seal container I made from an old torn raincoat. I got my own shotgun when I was ten, but I had to hunt with my elders. However, once I’d learned gun safety and how to never point a gun in the direction of any person, I could be left to hunt in a small stand of trees hiding from the birds and squirrels. I could only shoot when a shell, which my dad said cost about ten cents, was sure to bag at least ten cents worth of blackbirds for a gumbo, or squirrel. Daddy told me not to shoot unless I could get several birds with one shot. I sat totally still beneath the tree where he parked me. I’d wait, then birds would accumulate on the limbs above me, and when there were five or six I’d shoot. I shocked them the day I killed thirty-seven blackbirds. It was a massacre, and from then on I never really shot any animals unless peer pressure forced me to hunt. Mother tried to make us a blackbird gumbo, but the muskiness of the dark bird meat, so tough from flying from the northern to the southern part of the continent twice a year made for something like Firestone Tire Soup with rubber bird-meat. Bleah! We ate the sweet potatoes and the fruit salad and then we somehow forgave ourselves for wasting seven shotgun shells worth of bird. We were grateful we didn’t have to taste that again.
I never brought my gun with me into the woods behind Assisi, however; not unless it was the pellet rifle or gas canister operated pellet pistol, or a B-B-Gun. I had three of those. We were careful not to shoot any animals we didn’t need to eat or protect ourselves from. It never occurred to me to shoot a big water moccasin charging out of the water towards my nine year old feet. I just took the gun and ran like hell!
I had a friend who went to the seminary with me. He was a loyal classmate and friend for three years too; my Science and Mechanics Illustrated friend from grade one, until our junior year in high school. Matty was a blondish, reddish-haired guy who seemed to forever be sweating on his upper lip, excited about something all the time like when he found out that girls and boys didn’t all have “wee-wees.” He came running, story and all. Then he would bring me, if he could, to the next public showing of the little babies in the bathtub at his aunt’s house and we saw for ourselves the “cracks”—I worried how girls kept water from flowing into them through that crack. I really never could figure it out. By the time I was old enough to understand the dynamics, I had already embraced the fact that for me, in the future, there would only be a vow of celibacy.
Matty and I were “Commando Cody” and “Flash Gordon.” Sometimes I’d be the alien in shiny gold lame but really all I had to wear was some silver paint on a cut-up rain coat—we seemed to have a lot of old plastic raincoats. I guess the best costume we ever had was one we made with a staple gun from my dad’s office. We took his chamois skin, car drying-off deerskin, and cut it into tutus for covering our fronts and butts like Indians in the cowboy movies. We had the real thing, deerskin flaps in front and back. I had no notion of how to make a jock or support for our privates, and left the inside of the flap naked intentionally—another of my schemes to see everyone’s “privates.” It worked, too; not only did they have to get naked to put costumes on, they had to let the wind blow on the flaps and I saw everything. The only thing was, I got tired of seeing my best friends at age nine. There were some kids that we couldn’t get rid of, our babysitting chores, and they were uninteresting, like newts.
I caught hell for chopping up the beloved chamois skin. It must have cost plenty money, because my dad never bought a replacement. When I was told to wash the car, no longer did I have the big, golden fleece of a deer skin to wipe the car dry. I had to use rags, towels, torn dresses, or underwear that had holes. I think that was the first time I remember seeing my father cry, in true dejected sadness, at something I did. Maybe his dad had given him that chamois; anyway, his dad wasn’t around anymore. I didn’t know I could cause an adult such devastation. In ignorance, a person can generate a lot of misery.
I do remember that Matty had a foreskin. I had no idea what that thing was, and it was a little noodle to me.
I was always sure everyone loved the woods; it was hard for me to understand why other boys didn’t want to play there. First of all, I have to confess something: I was a “free range kid.” At eight, I was going into the uncharted lands of the forest off Steam Liner Road. It was a wide, dust and gravel rural highway that went from behind the school and church buildings to the forest, across the bayou, and then about thirty miles to the smelly paper mill.
I didn’t walk the road to the forest. That damn gravel and stirred-up dust was horrifying to me. I did as best I could to keep my boots and long pants on, striding across the farm fields that Doctor Guillot’s daddy kept planted in cotton. When they invented something like a bean, a soy bean, in Viet Nam, we were happier. We could run across one of those fields and not get scratched up like the cotton did to us. There were the groves of old pecan trees in a grid pattern, many of them broken and deformed but all producing big pecans.
There were some people who picked the pecans from Dr. Guillot’s daddy’s land. They were usually the older black men and women who probably, I learned from Matty, were picking on “shores” whatever that was. It was a quota system of some kind, but “shore” seemed to be about water. Anyway, we could stop running through the cotton or soy, fall on the cool grass and rest every hundred yards or so when a swatch of pecan trees crossed the land. Otherwise, if there were no pecan trees growing, the land was in full sun, with crops growing.
I loved pecans. I remember the tasty pecans, so good. Of course, one withered, greenish rotten pecan could make you wish you never ate any. Spitting and spitting, we got those out of our mouths, drank some of our canteen water and ran across the next hundred yards of crops. We crossed alternating strips of pecan groves and crop fields, about two miles. In the summer, real summer, that was two miles like the Sahara desert.
Kids didn’t understand the magic of the forest and the wonder of the bayou. There were new canals with giant turtles, green and brown snakes and fish, even wild cows. It was not just bugs, birds and bees. No. The forest was a veritable treasure house of gifts to an imaginative boy’s mind.
However, Matty didn’t like sweating too much even though his upper lip was always wet. He liked to be in the house in front of a fan. When his absent father sent him a Wollensak reel to reel tape recorder, he never came outdoors for about two years.
The tough kids wanted to hang out where the C.Y.O. provided pool tables, card games, basketball, and other civilized and boring crap. They smoked cigarettes, but I couldn’t smoke at the C.Y.O., because my older brother would kill me if he caught me smoking. I did smoke but only after I found a carton of Kent Cigarettes in the park one day. I kept eight packs for myself and gave two packs to Johnny Plazens for two Army Surplus Walkie Talkie Telephones, without any wires, but the generators in them shocked anyone or anything pretty good. We shocked some fish in the lake one day, from the boat side, and a big bass about four pounds jumped into the boat from the other side when he tried to race up the shore.
Getting away from an electrical shock was something I understood. One day I pelted the lead off of the tops of some .22 bullets with a hammer to get the gun powder out. I hit each tiny piece of gun powder with the hammer to make a loud cracking sound. I accidentally hit too deep on the bullet brass casing and it fired. The lead went to my right, the brass to my left and the noise filled my head and heart with fear. Never again did I hit a bullet with a hammer. I had to get the gunpowder burns off of the concrete; to do that I used a hose. Then I really got into washing the house and accidentally or stupidly put the water stream into the electrical socket on the back porch. I felt my bare feet attach to the ground, as current surged through me from my arms, down into my body to my feet. All I could do was remember that when daddy was changing the circuit breakers, he had my older brother stand there with a bat. He told him that if he began to get electrocuted, to hit his arms hard enough to make his hands break off the circuit box. I thought of that while I was being