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Show 69 Easy. By killing himself with lust. By giving in to that ancient, easiest way, by having no will power to stop the act which would rot my bones and atrophy my muscles and drive me into gibbering insanity. I was on a greased chute to Hell. And loved it. I had read Anthony Adverse, that boy so human that he tried masturbation once, but so heroic that he never indulged again. Of course he had that housekeeper to screw day and night while I had nobody, chickens and calves never appealed to me, and all I had were large spaces of solitude about the farm, opportunity unlimited behind the haystack or in the barn or lying in a cool empty ditch, privacy unlimited in clumps of willow and dense river bottom trees, in bushy ravines and out in the tall corn. I was like a possessed Johnny Appleseed scattering semen everywhere. Good thing it didn't grow. So it was an Arcadia with hard work and dirt; it was an Eden replete with sloth and pride and gluttony and anger and good old lust; it was an Eden with sweet sweat on my brow and chances everyday to fall. That summer I helped the Falsettis put up first cutting of hay, they small tenant farmers just getting by, and Dom Falsetti was in my class, a good friend. We'd ridden the bus together in our freshman year, had eaten lunch together, had banded together against snotty sophomores, had pulled the required pranks. Once during lunch hour we roamed through the high school and lifted the pins out of the hinges of the doors so that when the teachers returned and unlocked them, and turned the knobs, the doors fell off. So after three years we were old friends and putting up their hay was more fun than putting up our own, not to mention the $2 a day, more than I'd ever earned before. I got up before five to get my chores done by six, ate a dozen hotcakes and three or four eggs with sausage, drank a quart of milk and was ready to go. By the road it was nearly three miles but if I rode down through our place to the lower pasture, then climbed |