Deep Heart’s Core
by
Tim Mead
“For peace
comes dropping slow . . . .” He sat on
the porch looking out over ridge after tree-covered ridge. A mountain top does as well as a lake isle.
Old mountains.
Older than the
After the war there was a sense the world was right
again. Even the pop songs seemed to be
upbeat, optimistic, full of the sense that life was good.
About
the ninth grade he figured out something was wrong. He just didn’t get excited looking at the
girls. For him, it was all about
boys. He didn’t even know a word for people
like him. So he supposed if he ever got
a chance to fuck a girl, he’d like it, the way boys were supposed to. Swimming
naked with other boys who lived nearby in the creek that flowed across the farm
had been routine. But as they became
teens, he had to worry about showing his excitement.
He did
his chores, studied, read the books that the grownups got from the book
clubs. He got good grades and played in
the band.
He remembered using the John Deere to plow and disc
fields in the spring or fall, to clip the pastures in the summer. He remembered cutting, baling, and bringing
in hay, helping to load the bales onto the truck or the wagon hauled behind the
tractor, and the lifting and stacking of the bales in the barn. Like many of his friends in high school, he
developed muscles naturally at a time when commercial gyms and fitness clubs
didn’t exist.
When he was a senior, he became aware of Jimmy Brink, the
sophomore who’d become drum major of the band.
Jimmy with the square face, blue
eyes, crew-cut black hair, and perfect teeth.
Jimmy who was six feet tall in tenth grade and grew a couple more inches
afterward. Jimmy whom he fell for.
Oh, it was a schoolboy love affair. But they jacked off together. It was Jimmy who taught him about French
kissing. They talked about cornholing
(the only word they knew for that act), but decided it was too disgusting to
try. However, they did try sucking each
other off. After that they did it every
chance they got.
One day as they lay, sated, the taste of cum in their
mouths, Jimmy said that some day they’d probably be married and still live near
each other. They’d have kids, and their
wives would be friends, and they’d still get together and get nekkid and suck
each other’s dicks. Yes. He shook his head yes. That’s the way their future would have to be,
he thought. Jimmy was right.
In his heart, however, he knew once he’d gone to
college he never wanted to come back to the farm. The world had more to offer than was to be
found in rural
Going off to college was made easier in some ways
because Jimmy had found a girlfriend and they’d drifted apart. They didn’t even write each other after he
left the farm.
‡
He watched as squirrels scampered up and down the tall
pine trees off to his left, the ones that obstructed the view to the east. And he could hear a woodpecker hammering
somewhere behind the cabin.
The campus had buildings over a hundred years old,
with no consistent architectural theme, just designed by whoever the fashionable
architects were when they were built.
The tall elms on the quad were probably even older. He loved the sense of tradition, that young
people had been drawn to this place to learn together since the early part of
the previous century. Constantly he felt the place, the ambiance. But the other students weren’t like his
friends back at the small high school he’d attended. Many of them were easterners, sophisticated,
aggressive, dismissive of those who didn’t come from
But these kids from the good schools were competitive
about grades, and he found he had to work much harder, to sleep less, to goof
off less than he’d ever imagined when he was a high schooler thinking about
what college would be like.
He felt more comfortable as a sophomore, having worked
out his daily schedule so he knew when he could steal some time for a social
life. He had begun dating girls for the
first time as a freshman, and he continued the practice in his second
year. In those days only fast girls put
out, and nice boys didn’t go beyond some mild petting when they returned their
dates to the dorm, being sure to get them back before the mandatory
curfew. To do otherwise, to go further,
would be to show disrespect, and he was brought up never to do that.
That was the year he met Lee. They had both gone out for the fencing team,
neither with any prior experience. He’d
admired Lee in the showers after practice, with his blue eyes, chestnut hair,
nice pecs, and cut cock hanging over big balls.
Having a hairless butt himself, he was fascinated by the light dusting
of reddish brown hair on Lee’s ass.
In the second semester, he and Lee found themselves in
the same introduction to lit class, and he was both startled and secretly
pleased when Lee asked him to go to the snack bar after class for coffee. It turned out that they both lived in Moses
Hall, though he didn’t remember seeing Lee there before. They both had singles, his on the ground
floor, his new friend’s on three.
They began to spend most of their spare time
together. He wasn’t dating that spring,
nor, so far as he knew, was Lee. They
went to movies, had coffee or milkshakes at the Union, listened to music on
their lp players, took bike rides, and
as the weather became warm, sunbathed together.
Mostly, they just talked and talked.
Their bull sessions often went far into the night, and Rich had to wake
up his friend the next morning. Soon he
realized he had special feelings for Lee, emotions he’d never had before, even
for Jimmy.
One evening during finals week they were in Lee’s
room. They were always in Lee’s room, it
seemed. They’d talked about trivial things. Then he told Lee he was dreading the summer
because they’d be apart. Lee had said
he’d miss him, too, and suddenly they were kissing, which led to their being
naked and humping their hard dicks against each other’s belly. He spent the night in Lee’s single bed. They slept, arms and legs wrapped around each
other.
They arranged to share a double room for their junior
year. And though it had two single beds,
they usually slept together. For him,
it was a beautiful time. He loved his
classes, he had lots of friends of both sexes, and he was able to come back to
Lee at the end of the day. They ate at
different dining halls, so they sometimes didn’t see each other until
Their sex was gentle, tender, loving -- and they tried
everything. Well, there’d been no
watersports or raunch, but otherwise, they’d figured out what to do to pleasure
each other. And no one ever suspected
they were homos, to use the prevalent term on that campus in those days. After all, most of the men on campus lived in
double rooms. And neither of them was at
all like the popular conception of a “fairy.”
They shared the same room the following year. Neither of them could imagine wanting a
single – or a different roommate.
In the fall of their senior year, he’d met Susan, and
she was an instant soulmate. They liked
to say they’d started a conversation at her dorm the day before fall classes
started and it went on for 25 years.
They dated. All their friends
thought of them as a couple.
Lee never seemed jealous. In fact, he began to date more often.
When they could find the privacy Sue would let Rick
feel her breasts and she’d sometimes rub his crotch, but that’s as far as
things ever went. Students weren’t
allowed to have cars, and privacy was scarce.
But he and Lee continued to express their love for each other in bed
most nights.
As the year went on and he had to think of what was
going to happen after graduation, he began to worry. He’d been deferred by his draft board as long
as he was in college, but though the “Korean Conflict” had ended, the draft
continued and he knew he would be inducted quickly if he didn’t go on to grad
school. Susan rightfully had expectations. Yet he couldn’t imagine not having Lee to
come home to.
He didn’t want to graduate. He didn’t want this life to end. He’d gladly have stayed around to take
another major, but he knew there was no money for that. Besides, neither Lee nor Sue would be there.
He and Lee had a long talk one Sunday afternoon that
spring. They admitted they loved each
other, that they might in fact be in love with each other. But, as Lee said, there was nothing they
could do about it. In the mid fifties
men who hoped to have a career in anything other than the arts simply couldn’t
be openly homosexual. They had wept
together. Nightly for the remaining
weeks of their last term, they had the most intense sex ever.
Both Rick and Sue and Lee and Joyce had announced
their engagements during Commencement Week.
The college, which had seemed so overwhelming when
he’d arrived nearly four years earlier, was more like a home by the time he
graduated, but he knew he had to move on, to find a life with Susan. Though he loved her, he knew with her he’d
never be precisely content because he wouldn’t be with Lee.
‡
Changed light now.
It was less yellow, more golden, and the hills had more texture as the sun’s
rays struck the trees from a lower angle.
He stretched, and the wood creaked as he resumed his rocking.
He and Sue married just before he was inducted. She lived with her parents that fall and
taught.
For basic he’d been sent to the South, where it was
hotter than he’d ever been, even on the farm. Nothing in his background
prepared him for basic training. He
couldn’t imagine people being so uncivil to others, even if its purpose was to
turn them into “fighting machines.”
Trying to ignore all the hot guys. After all, he was married, and he loved Sue,
never wanting to hurt her.
He spent the rest of his two years at a large Army
post in the
‡
“A cabin will I build there, of clay and wattles made. . . .”
Well, it was more substantial than Yeats’ cabin, but
it had been his refuge. He’d built his
cabin after Sue died.
He’d loved her.
Been faithful to her. No
kids. Both had kept their jobs. Commitment.
Meant something to him, to them. Couldn’t
help being aroused by good-looking men, couldn’t help burning for mansex. But did his best to make Sue happy, as she
did for him. If she ever suspected, she
never let on. So they’d had their circle
of friends, their trips in the summer when she wasn’t teaching and he took his
vacation time. Not the best, but
good. Sweet. Gentle.
He kept his desires under control for her sake. But he remembered Lee.
And then at just short of fifty, he was alone. For the first time in his life, really. He’d soldiered on, working with troubled
kids, immersed in their problems, too tired at night to go out. Not knowing where to go. And knowing he needed what he’d always needed,
a good man.
He didn’t care what they’d think at work, though some
would have claimed that a gay man shouldn’t be working with teen boys. He just didn’t know how to get back into the
dating scene, especially when he wasn’t interested in going out with women. So he did his job and went home to empty
nights.
Often he wondered about Lee. They’d lost touch years ago. After college Lee had written for a while and
then just quit. Sue heard from Joyce
that they were divorcing. After that
there were occasional Christmas cards from Joyce, nothing from Lee, and then
the cards quit coming.
“And evening full of the linnet’s wing. . . .” The sun was almost down now, but two mocking
birds (no linnets here) were swooping around in the trees off on the edge of
the clearing. Apart from the noisy birds
he could hear only the sounds of crickets in the grass.
Just before he was set to retire, it came. The email with its subject line: “A name from the past.” It was from Lee, who’d tracked him down or
looked him up online or some such.
“Live alone in the bee-loud glade . . . .” There were bees around, but he was no longer
alone.
Tantalizing smells from the cook stove. The screen door closing.
Lee kissed him on the top of his head, handed him a
beer and sat in the other rocker. “That’s
a nice crop of pole beans you’ve got this year.
I put some of them in the stew. Supper’ll
be on when the biscuits are done.” He
took a sip of his beer. “You been lost
in your memories again, love?”
He put his hand on Lee’s cheek.
“Never lost while I have you.”
And
a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have
some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go
now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
1892