The restoration of our humanity may turn on one honest face
Back then we were tawny streaks, loping almost out of sight. Too young to work fulltime on the farm, left to our own devices, we roamed liminal spaces with our sleek, boyhood bodies, noses in the air, following impulses without intent. We fought, yowled profanity out of earshot from the adults, pilfered things that wouldn’t be missed, playing at danger and disregard. We traveled with pocketknives and pellet guns, gouging at imaginary enemies, shooting at one another and at logging trucks that passed along the highway. We bashed out windows in that empty cabin at the edge of town, swam in drainage ditches in the rain, dysentery be damned. The dark be damned too, we thought, fresh from childhood fears. We “looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate,” like William Golding says, just as likely to turn on one of the group as run together. There were flashes of cruelty too.
And there was the time we wandered in the woods on someone’s farm, scorning the no-trespassing signs. It was cold, I remember, but everything was starting to thaw in the late-afternoon sun. It was early spring, almost planting season, time for new foals, calves, and fawns. We were among the trees next to a gravel road that cut through the property when a truck pulled up and two people got out. They must have been father and son. The man wore work coveralls; the boy stood beside him. When we stepped from the woods like a pack moving in sync, I saw the father’s startled face, his look of alarm.
How strange that an expression could inject self-awareness, revelation, like a mirror held up to our ferality. The father put a hand on his son’s shoulder, said something. Then they returned to the truck and drove away. When I recall this memory now in middle age with a son almost as old as we were then, here’s what I see: The boy smiled when he saw us, like it was a game, like he wanted to be part of the pack. The father didn’t smile. He knew what we were playing at. He knew what we were becoming.
Robert Erle Barham is Associate Professor of English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. He is the deputy editor of Current.