Sixteen Read online

  “A-meh,” I respond. I never say “Amen” fully because I feel that this is caving into the entire concept of God, and so I make myself a quiet revolutionary and drop the n. I do a similar feat with the Lord’s Prayer—I do not say the last word or significant two words of each line:

  “Our Father who art in, Hallowed be thy, thy kingdom, thy will, on earth as it is, give us this day our daily, and forgive us our, as we forgive those who trespass, and lead us not into, but deliver us.” This renders the meaning of the prayer ridiculous yet very progressive; it is difficult for me not to laugh at my own cleverness when I get away with it in church every week. I have been doing it for five—no, six—years now.

  I lean back in my seat and twist to crack the bones in my back. The crack is deep and extended—a good morning one—involving many bones and seven distinct pops. As I relax into my chair, it feels like something has been released in my back; soothing fluids now soak it, giving me the courage to sit through the meal.

  “Don’t do that,” my father says. He is eating eggs.

  “Do what?”

  “Stress your joints. That’s for old men.”

  “Yes, sir.” There are times when this is prudent.

  “So how does it feel?” Ma asks. She is eating eggs as well. Everyone is eating besides me. I spend too much time thinking to eat as quickly as these people.

  “How does what feel?”

  “Your birthday! Being sixteen! In’nit exciting?”

  “It is important,” I say. “Going from thirteen to fourteen was a big change. I felt I had entered a productive midlife period of youth. Now I am at an even higher plane. Fifteen to sixteen is perhaps larger than thirteen to fourteen. This excites me.”

  “You’re odd,” my sister says. She is eating a biscuit and forking her eggs over to Ma.

  “It excites you?” my father asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you don’t seem excited.”

  “Well, you must be misinterpreting my exuberance,” I say. Sarcasm is a cousin to sullenness.

  “No lip,” he says.

  It is so ridiculous to hear him using these rural expressions as if he can fool me. Every time I hear him, I want to get up and scream across whatever table or desk or pew or bed or piece of furniture happens to be nearby: “You are a clerk! From England! You have no right to talk this way! Your weakness and propensity to please others have led you to adopt the absurd figures of speech that permeate this hole in which we have settled! You are not my father! You brute!”

  But I always think better of this because such outbursts lead to violence. It does not matter what continent we are on. He hit me over there, where all fathers hit their sons, and he does it over here, too, where fathers hit their sons almost as much. Part of me has been waiting for the day when I am big enough to hit back. But due to my diminutive stature, I should just forget about that. So I shut up and stay as good as I can while still maintaining sullenness. And it is through this arrangement that I have avoided being hit for two years.

  “What do you remember most about this year of working?” Ma asks.

  “I wish I were still in school.”

  “There isn’t any more school,” she says. “You need to remember that.”

  “You could send me back to England, where there is an institution called university.”

  Ma sighs. “You’re here now. You need to stop talking like a fool.”

  “You’re a cow,” I say quietly, into my eggs. But not quietly enough.

  “Don’t you dare speak to your mother like that!” My father rises from his seat, and although he is not big, he is big enough. “I am not going to stand for this—”

  He is standing.

  “—and neither is anyone else in this family. I want you to stop eating right now—”

  I’m not eating.

  “—and apologize to your mother. And then I want you to tell us all something that you were thankful for this year. And then that will be the end of it, and you will shut your mouth and be happy and eat until you get your present.”

  One present? I look at my eggs. What is the rule for eggs? Their edibility diminishes at the square of the time they are in front of one’s face. Their coldness progresses at twice the rate of tea—

  “Rutford?” This is my sister, echoing my father, waiting for my statement.

  I suppose I should say that my real name is William, and although there are a lot of Williams in Texas, there are very few William Rutherfords, so when you go to a new school at age eight, it is very easy as a smart, hopeless, realist English boy to get called Rutherford, which then shortens to Rutford as an insult because it sounds like what animals do to reproduce: rutting. Yet I would wage that very few boys who suffer in this manner have their own families to add to the list of assailants.

  “I . . .” I begin. “I apologize to Ma for giving her ‘lip.’ ” I look at her. She nods and keeps eating. “And in this year of eighteen ninety-seven, I was greatly enlightened by my work with Father, who showed me how to calculate accounts for the new station in Lubbock that was recently put into operation by Standard Oil.”

  “And isn’t this the most important and lucrative business to come to this part of Texas ever?” my father asks. “Besides the mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “And aren’t you proud that your father is helping to calculate the accounts for Mr. Gummerin?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you are proud of your father.” He points his fork at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And you are sorry to your mother?”

  “Yes.” I already said this, but as I indicated: compromise.

  “Well, Happy Birthday.” My father gets up and allows me to sit at his seat. My seat. There are few eggs left but the ones here are warmer than what was in front of me because Father was served last. I eat them all.

  My sister receives a stuffed dog for my birthday. This dog used to belong to the Clemenses, who live two houses down from us. When the Clemenses decided to put the dog down, my father asked if he could use it for his first taxidermy project. The result is on the table. The dog has his right eye about an inch too right, but other than that he was sewn up acceptably: no limbs missing or organs left in. My sister loves it instantly and does an admirable job pretending to be surprised by it since Ma told her months ago that it would be her present. (She told me, too. Ma is not discreet.) My sister says that the misplaced eye is lucky and that the dog is Lucky and I am kind enough not to point out that the eye is glass and the dog is dead. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone else that a deceased creature is being passed around the kitchen table while plates caked with drying egg yolk collect its accompanying filth. The dog is medium-size and brown, the way I conjecture all canines would end up by means of evolution if they were allowed to interbreed (rut, Rutford) freely as they are in my town. I am a diligent believer in evolution. This is why my family disconcerts me so; it is clearly heading backward, away from the natural progress.

  “Oh, he’s so lucky—Lucky!—lucky Lucky!” my sister says, hugging the treated fur.

  “Stuffed animals are becoming very popular in the East,” my father says with his fork. “We are ahead of everyone else with them. These are going to be indispensable for children in a few years.” When I hear him say indispensable, it reminds me that he is intelligent, and part of me burns for the set of circumstances that led him to this stifling place and shameful situation.

  My father is a criminal, a common criminal, I have to remind myself when I become enamored of him while he is calculating accounts for Mr. Gummerin with an ease that none can match. What brought him to Texas were dogs, common mutts like the one he just brought to the table, except live ones, which he made extra money handling bets on in England. One day one of his clients, in whose affairs Father was helplessly tied up, ended up owing a man named Ricardo Hump so much money that he thought it would be better— an “opportunity,” even; he called it an opportunity—to leav
e for America, where there were fortunes to be made in the West. Just as soon as my real mother gave birth to my sister, who we at that point did not know would be a sister, and whose birth we did not know would kill my real mother.

  “Now, son, it’s time for your present,” Father says. “Emiline, you have to leave.”

  My sister would under no circumstances leave me to receive a birthday present by myself—it has always been imperative for her to peek into all of my affairs, and presents are of particular interest—except these particular circumstances have afforded her a new toy with which to play. And when Father mentions that there is a rope out in the yard that she can use to tie up Lucky and lead him on a treasure hunt, she is so smitten that she forgets about me and leaves the table, sliding out of her seat as if it were a carriage and dragging Lucky by a front leg, banging into furniture, toward the back door. Ma takes up the dishes.

  “Son.” My father stands up. I point at myself questioningly.

  “No, you stay seated. Son, for your birthday you are going on a special trip.”

  My goodness! A trip! It must be back to England! Ma is cleaning the dishes. Silent, but meant to be there—if Father had wanted her to leave, she would have left. Maybe she has to come, too? And then my sister, too? Drawbacks, but I could not be more thrilled—

  “We are going back to England?” This is a rhetorical question. O happy day!

  “No, you are going to the brothel,” Father says, and lowers his eyelids and twists his chin.

  “The what?” I stand up now, and I see why I was told not to before—this sort of news would make me stand on the table if I were standing already, to make my point, which is forming quickly: “What? Why? You! You! You are sending me to a house of prostitution as a birthday present?! What has overtaken you? Are you . . . are you testing me to see if I am some sort of miscreant? Where are your senses? Why—”

  “Son,” he says, pushing his palm downward. “There is nothing wrong with it. I believe that you deserve to go. You did good work with me this year. You’re a man now and it might help you become normal.”

  Ma speaks up with an “Mmm-hmm” from her washbasin.

  “You agree with this plan?” I turn around “You reprehensible harlot! You surrogate Jezebel! You call me your small boy, and then you want to make sure that I am a big ‘man’—Ack!”

  My father hits me across the face, spoiling two consecutive years of safety. “Apologize to your mother!”

  She’s not my mother, I say, but this is in my own brain. “I am sorry,” I say out loud, but the slap was so stinging, so alive, that it has energized me, and so I reengage my father: “But I am a responsible young man, an intellectual, a hard worker, and I would still be an industrious student if I were afforded the opportunity in this unspeakable . . . pigsty! I do not see any conceivable reason why I should be forced down to this place of ill repute—”

  “Son, do you even know what goes on at a brothel?”

  “I know that it is terrible and morally repugnant.”

  “Yes, but do you know what?”

  “Absolutely. Sex.”

  Ma makes a disapproving sucking noise at the sink.

  “But you don’t know how any of it works,” Father continues.

  “Well, I am not going to explain it here.” I do very much know how it works.

  “You need to know.” Father puts a hand on my shoulder. “You really are a young man now, and you have to learn about these things firsthand, and your mother and I . . . we refer you to the professionals. And you are going to love the entire experience, and when you are done with it, it’s quite possible that you won’t be the exacting little twat”—Ma laughs—“that we’ve all come to expect and tolerate in this household. Maybe you will stop worrying about death, evolution, your education, my profession, your mother’s and my speech patterns—”

  “The economy—”

  “The economy—”

  “Infectious disease—”

  “Right, that, too—”

  “My own entrapment in this prison of idiocy—”

  “Yes, all those things. Maybe you’ll stop, and make an actual friend or two, and end up as something of a functional human being. Yes?”

  “I am already functioning.”

  “Of course you are, son. Of course. So relax. Sit down.”

  I obey. “I hope you both know that I am entirely opposed to this absurd notion that I need female companionship, or indeed, companionship of any kind, to solidify my place in the world and placate the needs of the entirely ordinary and imprudent individuals with which I live and interact. Whom. With whom. Wait . . .”

  Ma continues washing dishes.

  “Put your nice clothes on in the afternoon,” my father says. “We’re going this evening.”

  This is ridiculous and unspeakable. I go to the dictionary in my room (under my bed, next to my honorable bucket) to look up the word brothel . This is one of many words that when I heard it uttered by boys at school—although usually they used much worse words, words I cannot even begin to conjure up—I would turn away so as not to hear what it meant. Now, however, I want to know with scientific precision. I know that a brothel houses prostitutes, but perhaps there is another sort of brothel, a less shameful one, that I can lie about and tell others I have been to. (Or I could not go at all; I could run away, but I do not want to be found and hit again.) Maddeningly, however, brothel is not in this dictionary, which has been sanitized by the Christians. I agree with the Christians’ position that brothels are wicked, but I wish they had allowed me to know what they were.

  As for sex, I know what that is. A woman unfurls her ovarian tubes and inserts them into my belly button until a special fluid leaks from me into her belly button. If I want to simulate the experience, I can use a hole in a fence and a stick of butter, apparently, according to the boys in my class. But in order to clarify, I look for intercourse in the dictionary. Intercourse: the sexual act as performed between a man and a woman. I look up sexual and find pertaining to arousal or intercourse. This is an infuriating loop, and as I ponder it, a certain dread—or rather, a dread certainty—comes to me and I know that other boys, the literate ones at least, must have already encountered this circuitous dictionary sham and I feel left behind.

  I long for my old Oxford English Dictionary, the one that I snuck into my room back in England and Father did not miss. It is becoming the standard and I feel someday it will be legendary. I could not bring it on the trip over because it was so large, so instead I have this smaller, sanitized Harmonious Children’s Dictionary that I purchased in New Orleans from a street vendor over the hearty protests of my father. I lugged it all the way into Texas because I needed some dictionary to make sure I ended up an educated man and not some nameless lout.

  The Oxford English Dictionary was so large.

  It was so exact.

  I loved it and it loved me back; I never stained or mauled it.

  I lie on my bed in the hateful Texas heat and try ever so hard to put myself back in that state of half-sleep where I am my own master and the world cares somewhat what I say and think. But it is eleven o’clock, and it is difficult for nondrunks to sleep at this time, I believe, so I get up and tell my parents that I am going for a perambulation.

  “You’re lucky not to have to work on Saturdays,” Ma says.

  The street is dusty and horrible. All dust. This was a quick town—it is not nearly as old as me—so the dust hasn’t settled yet. And there are ruts in the road, which make me think of my name, which makes me think again of dogs rutting and Lucky the dead dog and the brothel where I will be expected to rut tonight. The houses—even the brick ones—sag under the sun.

  Toward the end of town I turn off into an alleyway to avoid the porch of Murphy &c., where the boys congregate. The boys’ chief preoccupation is hitting me in the side with small rocks; once, last year, the richest one threw an egg at me. The idea of throwing one . . . it was disgusting and wasteful, and yet the b
oy’s egg flew down from the Murphy &c. porch and right into my back with what must have been the most satisfying crunch, for him. My clothing became soaked in gelatinous filth and I was forced to run home to change, weeping. This boy had discovered a missile superior to small rocks.

  Above the road, above the boys, above the defeated and slanted roofs, is the sky. It deserves the songs. It spreads approximately ten degrees farther into the horizon than any other sky I have seen. (Admittedly, I have seen quite a bit of the English sky, which is not really a sky so much as a background for clouds.) It impinges upon the land, but then the land remains huge and open, so it is as if the sky combines with the land, lends it some acreage, a landlord/tenant relationship. I look up at the blue—no clouds today—and waste time on the stupid wish that I could fall into it when I die and have my own constellation up there, one so bright that it shone even during the day.

  “Are you ready?” my father asks.

  I sit on my bed in my church outfit: black shirt, then more black for a vest, then brown for the shoes, impeccably put together with a hat, of course. I always look wonderful at church as I say my truncated Lord’s Prayer. I have been rocking on the bed and comforting myself with the knowledge that I am going to see something new. Ultimately, I may find explanations that I cannot in the Harmonious Children’s Dictionary. The prospect of this knowledge is the only thing that intrigues me. It is night.

  “Come down,” Father says, and I work my way down the stairs and touch the hook for good luck. We leave into the hot, dry, black air; we walk swiftly and there is no speaking for minutes.

  “You are not going to know precisely what to do,” he says finally, triggered by some fatherly duty. “But the madam has assured me you will have fine instruction.”

  I am looking at the sky again. “Yes, Father.”

  He grabs my shoulders and turns me to my right. “This is it.”

  It is a simple, low building, not noticed by me on my walk midday or indeed at any other time during my tenure in this disgusting town. It is not marked.