Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 14.
Beaver's interlude.
Can I offer you a Beaver in these troubling times?
Chapter 14. Beaver’s Interlude.
John Beaver has always been told he has an old soul which makes him uncomfortable because he is a child. Since he was very young, he’s always formed intricate rituals and necessary routines to carry him through the day. He starts each day by stretching his limbs in the light of the rising sun. There’s something in the chill of the morning air that is filled with renewal and life everlasting. To fill his lungs with that cold sweet nectar is the closest John Beaver has ever felt to God.
Beaver was born with a still body and a thrashing in his chest. It took a full minute to untangle his baby-neck from his mother’s umbilical cord and coax life into his lungs. It is a miracle that he survived and that he kept surviving and still his parents looked at this breathing miracle and decided to call him Beaver. Like a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that seemed to coax his two front teeth over the rim of his lips, like they’d wanted this for him. Or otherwise they just wanted to be cruel to the child they’d been so desperate to have. Neither of his parents seemed to believe that they deserved a child and it is true that they did not deserve a child as good as John Beaver.
He irons his own clothes and sets them out for school before he sleeps. He brushes his teeth without having to be told and he can rarely spend more than thirty minutes in front of a television before getting bored. He makes his own boxed lunches and sometimes even does his own grocery shopping with the money he gets from helping Mrs. Paula with her garden. When his parents ask what he wants for Christmas, he says nothing and is satisfied with whatever comes out of the wrapping paper patterned with a dozen white Santas.
Back in Georgia, Beaver spent most of his time outside rolling down the hill out behind the house. The easiest way to remember he has a body is to let it be battered by rocks and sharp branches as his body crashes down the decline. At the bottom, he’d lay there in the dead leaves and stare up through the branches and wonder what it would be like to be dead and to have the forest take his body.
Sometimes he’d lie still and silent for so long that the forest would begin to creep up around him. The trees would whisper, the birds would sing secret songs they only sing when no one is around. The skittish chipmunks would sniff his hand and dig under his flesh for a hidden nut. A group of deer came upon his stillness once and he knew the big one was some sort of old god and he waited a long time for it to ask him something but it just poked him with its antlers after some time and he realized it was answering a question he’d been asking the whole time.
Another time–it was early winter and so Beaver didn’t expect to see much, he was just lying in the brown leaves for the feeling of the earth thrumming against his back–a creature was sniffing around his feet and as always he stayed still so it could explore and maybe offer a hello and they could be good friends. After some time, he heard the creature walk away and he sighed with the disappointment that he would never know what it was. And then it returned and dropped a stick into his hand. He turned to face it and found two beady little black eyes trained on his. It was a beaver, of course. It seemed to be asking him if he knew how to build a dam.
“Boy howdy,” Beaver had told the beaver. “I’ve been building metaphorical dams my whole life.”
The beaver told him that he was an old soul and left him with the gift of a stick.
All this to say, Beaver has adjusted rather well to the communal lifestyle. He’s the first to rise in their cabin each morning and he stretches his limbs by the lake as the pale yellow of the light kisses the water and seeps into his lungs. Sometimes Maya joins him and she says things that are just variations of ‘you have an old soul’ but she also reminds him that his old soul is in a young body and she reminds him to care for that body. He runs a lap around the lake before getting to work.
Beaver has never known a joy quite like tending to animals. And ones that don’t care about whether or not he’s still! In fact, they adore his movement, they require it. It is essential that he uses his body to show his affection and his desire to keep the animals alive.
Marshall built the barn not far from the Big House but it’s set off the path enough that Beaver can usually get through the day without anyone bothering him. There’s one other person that works with him, a woman named Helen, but she likes to keep to herself too. The barn is well built but small. There is room only for a dozen hens, two cows and three goats. Beaver likes the cows best because they’re pretty indifferent to being touched which he totally gets. Still, they are softer than they look and sometimes when he’s been stroking them for a long time he can feel the stirrings of a sort of purr from deep inside.
There’s a small pasture too, teeming with tall grass which is where Beaver spends most of his working day under the penetrating sun making sure the goats don’t hop the makeshift fence and wander off. He’d probably let them though if they tried but they haven’t.
The hard work is his least favorite part–leading the cows when they don’t want to move, hauling gallons of milk and baskets of eggs across the colony. Straining his muscles against a stubborn animal makes him feel big and hard and Beaver likes feeling soft and small. He likes to touch everything with softness. Still, he knows that his work is not just fun but also essential for the survival of the colony. The sweet milk and the big brown eggs that he coaxes out of his barn animals each day will end up on his breakfast plate the next morning and he will know exactly from which animal it came. The feeling is indescribable.
Gina is the biggest of the two cows and produces the sweetest milk. Gary the goat has a midnight black coat and a white goatee and her milk makes incredible cheese. Janet is a boy goat and doesn’t produce any milk but he likes to snuggle and also kick things. He has a lot of depth for a goat.
Beaver is up and about early like he always is. A low haze hangs over the colony and blankets the land in a strange darkness that makes Beaver’s usual path through the maze of corn and squash and beans a bit more trying. The stalks are growing brittle beneath the hands of the changing seasons and the papery leaves crinkle and whisper as he weaves between them, careful to avoid the plump gourds resting at the base of each. His lithe frame moves easily, silently. He feels the movement of the air around him and shifts on sure feet, adamant that he cannot get lost in a place he knows too well.
But he is a bit lost and when he spots a large stone rising from the earth that he does not recognize, he concedes his befuddlement. Beaver clambers over the rock, the light wet on its body picked up by his dress. He carries the morning dew with him. Atop the smooth rock he can just spy the crowns of the trees on the edge of the colony. He ducks back into the thick of it and moves toward the treeline. From there, he can trace it south and he’ll come upon the barn after long.
Beaver’s feet press small ovals into the dirt, kneading the earth before sliding it into the oven. He keeps low for reasons he can’t quite place, perhaps because the morning mist is pressing so low atop everything. The wind cuts through the corn harshly and so he can tell he’s almost reached the edge. A few more quiet steps and he’ll break through the maze and get his bearings once more.
And then–a voice. It’s concentrated into a low whisper no louder than the shifting of the corn. Something about the voice, the hush breaking through the quiet, reminds Beaver of the strained arguments between his parents, the seething spit slipping between curled lips. He ducks down low and cups his helmet against his ear to better capture the sound. He hopes it is nothing more than gossip. He knows from the hiss between gaps in teeth that it is conspiratory.
On his back on his stiff mattress staring at the glow in the dark stars on his ceiling, Beaver can still hear that hissing of his mother’s spittle, the hardness in her throat. He never listened, not really. Had no interest in the words that his parents threw at each other like fine china. His father would hit his mother. She would hit him back. He’d hit her twice as hard. She’d get high and he’d growl over her lapsing body and she’d offer half-hearted refutes to his violence until her mind finally sank beneath the waves. Then it would get quiet. He just had to make it through the hissing, the spittle, the rattling of brains inside of skulls. It was easiest to pretend it was the radiator sputtering to life or rats scratching about in the walls. Of course it was just violence and cruelty and hatred, hard and spewing volcanic lava.
The good part was when his father was gone for long periods of time. Once a month, sometimes more, his father would leave for some sort of police conference or something? Beaver was never interested in how his father carried his cruelty outside the walls of their home. Being absent for a week or more was the best gift that Beaver’s father ever gave him. He could leave his room, stretch his limbs. His mother could sit on the backyard patio with a fresh cup of coffee and maybe be a little bit high but without the tension that kept her rigid like a scarecrow. Beaver would sit with her sometimes in those quiet days where his father was gone, away, when they could breathe in the naive possibility that he might not come back. The bruises could yellow and they could share silence rather than fear its eruption into violence.
Beaver missed those mornings with his mother when they did not speak because they could not bear to know each other’s pain anymore closely. It was what he thought having a mother was supposed to be like. Quiet and sad and sweet. He doesn’t even really know anything about her or her parents or how she got to be like that, if she had a lot of promise as a young girl, if she had passions and desires that were pressed into dust by a leather boot. All he knows is the dust of the woman and still he misses her. He is sad that her life amounted to the drugs snuffing out all that she ever was in the end. She must be so quiet now wherever her body ended up. He hopes it is like the quiet on the patio. He hopes she’s drinking coffee somewhere, a little high with the sun on her pretty black skin and she is not scared of the quiet or the return of a bad man. Beaver is relieved that no more badness awaits his mother.
The first voice is June’s. She has trouble keeping her voice even and quiet in a normal setting but more so in hushed conspiracy. The other voice is too low to identify. They are much more in control of how the words form on their tongue.
“It was a mistake,” June rasps. “We only needed the boy and now the rest of them have integrated into the colony. What will they do after the door is opened? How will they react to watching it burn?”
Beaver leans closer but the second voice is too tame to be heard. He can just see white shifting between the swaying stalks, two dresses identifying nothing more than two members of the colony. He can pick up five words, just a hint of betrayal.
“...the young one cannot see…”
Is he the young one? He is the youngest in the colony by far. There are no children, no babies. There is one sixteen year old woman but even she feels miles older than him. What can he not see?
“So what should we do?” June asks. “I’ll take care of the child, but the other two?”
“...love must be present…”
“I don’t know,” June says. “I worry what Jamie will do.”
More incoherence. Beaver strains.
June sighs. “There really is no other option.”
The second person moves, making as if to leave and for just a moment they come close enough to Beaver that he can hear their final words. “You just make sure the boy does not see what happens. I will handle the rest.”
The conversation ends with a shuffling of fabrics and flashes of white–are they hugging each other? And then the forms merge into one being, elbows locked together as they walk away.
What the heck just happened? Beaver is too scared to move, too deep in his own worrying to think straight. In a few moments he will chastise himself for not shoving his head past the wilting stalks and trying to glimpse the departing forms. In the moment, all he can think is to keep close to the ground and impossibly still like he would in his backyard as he waited for a pack of coyotes to skip past him. Except here he is scared. He can smell his own fear in his adolescent sweat. He secures his helmet atop his head once more along the little grooves in his skin where the pot’s rim has become integral to the shape of his scalp.
Who was June conspiring with? Out this far to discuss plans, surely it is a secret kept between the two of them. And yet it was obvious that they were talking about Beaver and his group. He’s the young one, that much is obvious. But the only name that was uttered was Jamie’s. June is worried about what he will do. Beaver is worried too, that his friend who is like a sort of brother uncle to him is in danger.
But in danger of what? This place is safe. They’ve been here for what must have been months now and the people had been nothing but welcoming. Beaver has felt more at home here than he ever did pinned to his mattress waiting for the drugs to take his mother away from the violence.
The week prior, John Beaver took mushrooms for the first time along with the rest of the colony and though his experience started off poorly–Lana rubbed his back for what must have been twenty minutes while he hid his pallid face in the thick of a fern–once his stomach was emptied onto the earth, the emptiness made room for something much larger: understanding.
That’s the only word he can use to describe it, really. Lana didn’t let him stray very far from her sight after his bout of nausea but he managed to find some solitude for himself at the edge of the lake. Lana warned him to avoid his own reflection but seeing your own face in a pool of water is never as clear as it looks in movies. Especially for dark skin like Beaver’s, so much shape and form is lost in the smooth rippling, the dark silt and clay beneath a better reflection than the water itself. Beaver sat in the sand with his legs splayed on either side of him and when he looked at his face in the nameless lake, he understood what had to be close to everything.
How to describe it. Like the mushrooms and the trees with all their roots coated in mushrooms, Beaver could see the interconnectedness of everything. From the formation of rocks to the first creature that crawled out of the ocean to the last Ice Age to Jesus Christ to cruel men to the erection of false borders to the first book ever written to death to the way a song can move your soul to collapsing buildings to the heavy atmosphere to wildfires to his cop father to himself to his blackness to his old soul. It all came at him like a run on sentence.
He crawled into Shepherd Maya’s lap at some point just to be eased through it all. What a cruel burden to understand everything and to be totally incapable of affecting any of it! But that was part of the understanding, too. Giving up whatever control he might feign having over any of the random but definitive things that make up the world as it is known. It’s a lot for a thirteen year old boy to hold in his still growing chest.
Shepherd Maya massaged it all into his scalp while he slept and made room for the understanding to settle in without killing him. When he woke up sometime later, he was in Marshall’s arms as they walked back to their cabin. He curled himself tight into Marshall’s chest and he cried only because he could see the ways in which he and Marshall were the same. He remembered calling Marshall his brother from Maya’s lap but that wasn’t quite right. They were like brothers but their relation was something entirely different. He saw the two of them as angels of a sort, creatures who came into existence from the same god’s tears as they spilled into fertile soil and they sprouted from the earth all the same and lived very different lives that were also the same. The same side of two different coins. Not black and white but silver and gold. This was all too much to put into words for himself, never mind for Marshall and so he just cried and when Marshall lowered him into his bed in the evening’s tangerine light, he asked Marshall to stay with him and he did.
They slept like lichen-soaked logs and Beaver knew why. Doors were opening. The consistency of the self was changing. Marshall and Jamie had finally found each other and everything seemed to exhale.
Beaver can not escape the overheard conversation much as he would like to. Running a brush through Janet’s coarse, dark hair, he senses danger in the air. From his place curled up in Marshall’s big arms he can still see Jamie hovering nearby and who is watching Jamie? What do they want with such a quiet, focused boy? Do they seek to punish him for his beauty?
Under the cool autumn sun, hauling gallons of milk across the colony in a rickety red wagon, Beaver’s skin is both raised and coated in a thin layer of sweat. He keeps his head down as he always does but his ears are focused like a funnel and every woman he passes he is listening for their voice. If he found the other conspirator, what would he do? If he comes across June, what would he do? Can anyone else carry this with him?
He parks his wagon out the back of the Big House and heaves each steel barrel up the stairs and into the kitchen. Jamie is already hard at work preparing dinner even before lunch has come to mind. The sweet boy is as dedicated to his craft as Beaver is to his animals. He spends the day over the industrial burners experimenting with hand-picked spices, soaking potatoes in a new broth, combining unexpected vegetables in a large pan and seeing what happens. They rarely eat the same thing twice with Jamie at the stove. There is always something simmering on a back burner, always some chili slow cooking on low, always a heavenly cacophony of hot smells and sizzling sounds spilling onto the porch out back.
Beaver cannot bring himself to return Jamie’s grin. He thought maybe he would spill through the doors and proclaim the conspiracy for all to hear. It would come as naturally as ‘hello’ but instead ‘Fire! Hushed whispers! All is not what it seems! Quickly, Jamie, we must flee in the night!’ But something holds the words in his throat.
Beaver drags his milk across the kitchen and when Paula sees him, she jumps to action and takes the milk from his dark hands to carry down to the refrigeration units. Without words. The comfort of routine. The guilt comes crashing in on Beaver with a vengeance. He feels secure in this colony and does not want to disturb it. He is safe for the first time in his troubled life and doesn’t he deserve it? Doesn’t every person deserve the comfort of a routine that expands the soul and allows the mind to explore the self? Beaver has been turning over rocks each morning and finding parts of himself that he didn’t know were hiding. He is a person, he has realized, a fully fledged being on planet earth who is meant to be happy and careful and curious. What happens if this place becomes dangerous? If he must go back to Georgia or flee to another life, what happens to the boy that has opened like a flower?
Beaver finishes unloading the milk inside and Paula totters down the stairs on her thick legs. Jamie brings a spoon to his lips with his eyes closed and holds a broth in his mouth, on his tongue. The room smells of cumin and ginger. Beaver approaches Jamie from behind and hugs him tightly. Jamie holds onto his hands where they clasp at his ribcage. They are quiet, soundtracked only by the sizzle of onion, the bubbling of sauces.
When Beaver releases, Jamie turns to face him. Beaver has been growing steadily since their arrival but still he has to angle his head up to meet Jamie’s eyes.
“Hey,” Jamie says. “You okay?”
Beaver twists his lips all about. It matters to him the words he uses. “I should have told you, too,” he says.
“Told me what?”
“You are my brother, too. Not just Marshall. You are my brother, too.”
Jamie opens and closes his mouth. Paula returns from the basement and he motions for her to take over. “Only two more minutes on the sauce, okay?” She nods. In the kitchen, Jamie’s word has become gospel. No one would dare disobey him only because they respect his ability so deeply.
Jamie leads Beaver to the opposite corner and they curl into the pillows and blankets.
“Is everything okay, Beav?” he asks.
Beaver bites his lip. He knows he must look confused and it’s because he is. He thought he understood everything, that was what it felt like when the world shifted around him and he saw himself in the bottom of the lake. Is there always going to be more to learn and understand? What a daunting prospect.
“Marshall would never let anything bad happen to you,” Beaver says finally.
Jamie tilts his head. “No, he wouldn’t.”
Beaver nods. Of course, Marshall will keep Jamie safe. He exhales his next question. “What would you do if you had to watch a door burn?”
“I…” Jamie trails off. “”Is this about the shrooms? Marshall saw a lot of doors while he was tripping. They scared him a bit.”
Beaver sits up straight. “Really? Were any of the doors on fire?”
Jamie is looking for something in Beaver’s tight lips. “I don’t think so. But there were difficult things behind them. Did you see doors too?”
“No. I thought I saw everything but…”
“You still fear the future is uncertain,” Jamie finishes his sentence.
And Beaver releases the breath he’s been holding since he crouched down between the ears of corn. “The future is uncertain,” he repeats.
Jamie relaxes, the grin teasing the corners of his mouth once more. “You can understand everything, you can be the smartest person in the world but you’ll get nowhere if you don’t accept that most things are out of your control. It can drive you crazy wanting to fix all of the problems in the world or trying to divine the future from tea leaves. Nothing is predictable. All you can control is yourself, John Beaver. And as long as we’ve all got each other, nothing can hurt us, okay?”
Beaver nods. “I didn’t know you could talk that much.”
Jamie laughs. “Well, more people have been listening to what I have to say lately.”
The rest of the day passes like flowing water. Beaver sinks into the reality of Jamie’s words. As long as they all have each other, nothing can hurt them. It’s true, isn’t it? The safety doesn’t come from the colony or the work or the shrooms, it comes from one another. His two brothers and his weird sister. He pictures them all day long, knowing that once his work is done they’ll share dinner together and they’ll play games together and they’ll sleep under the same roof together and they’ll be safe. Things will be okay. June’s words begin to slip to the back of his mind. The second conspirator, faceless and nameless, begins to feel false and harmless by the time he’s herding the cows back to the barn from pasture.
By the time he slips under the covers in the evening next to Marshall and all of the heat that spills from his body, the things he heard that morning became a sort of story, fiction not fact. Beneath this roof with the people that saved him, Beaver is safe. He holds onto one thing, though. What they said about him. That they would not allow him to see the burning of the door and naturally, being told he isn’t allowed something only entices him closer.
When Beaver closes his eyes in the dark all he can see is a bright and burning uncertain future. He accepts it. That something must burn in order to move forward. But Beaver will be there to see it. Whatever plan June has to keep him from the burning door, he will fight it. No one can keep John Beaver from true things any longer. He understands everything. His sweet mind and all of its understanding are no longer confined to a stiff mattress and a helplessness, waiting for the harsh whispers and the abuse to stop.
Beaver will see the fire. Nothing can keep him from it.
stay soften, get eaten / it’s only natural to harden up
Previous chapter. Chapters 15 & 16 arriving next weekend.
Someone please give Beaver a hug. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader.. I leave that decision up to you.