Alma Katsu - The Taker

Is it a blessing or a curse to have a boy like Jonathan living in your midst? Pity us girls, I say; consider the effect a boy like Jonathan can have on the girls in a small village, in a town so limited there are few other distractions and it is impossible to avoid all contact with him. He was a constant, inescapable temptation. There was always the chance you might see him, coming out of the provisioner’s shop or as he rode across a field seemingly on some errand but really sent by the devil to weaken our reserve. He didn’t even have to be present to dominate our thoughts: as you sat with your sisters or friends to take up needlework, one of them would whisper about a recent glimpse of Jonathan, and then, he would be all we could talk about. Perhaps we had a part in our own bedevilment, for the girls could not stop obsessing about him, whether on the occasion of a casual meeting (did he speak to you, the girls would want to know; what did he say?), or a mere sighting in town, when even a detail as trifling as the color of his waistcoat was discussed. But what we were really thinking, all of us, was: how he could look you over with an impertinent eye or the way the very corner of his mouth turned up in speculation, and how any of us would die to be in his arms, just once. And it was not just the young girls who felt this way about him; especially as he reached his teenage years, fifteen, sixteen, he already made the other men in the village seem spent, coarse, overfed, or scrawny, and the good wives started to consider Jonathan differently. You could tell by the way they’d stare at him, their feverish looks, flushed cheeks, bitten lips, and the eternal hope in a quick drawing in of breath.

There was the aspect about him of slight danger, too, of wanting to touch him the way a mad voice in your head tells you to touch a hot iron. You know you cannot help but be hurt, but you cannot resist. You must just experience it for yourself. You ignore what you know will come next, the unbearable pain of seared flesh, the sharp bite of the burn all over again every time the wound is touched. The scar you will carry for the rest of your life. The scar that will mark your heart. Inured to love, you will never be quite so foolish in the same way again.

In that respect, I was envied and ridiculed at the same time: envied for all the time I spent in Jonathan’s presence, ridiculed because I had made it plain that there was no romance of any sort between us. This only confirmed in the eyes of the other girls that I lacked the necessary feminine wiles to pique a man’s interest. But I was no different from them. I knew Jonathan had the ability to burn me up with the brilliance of his attention, like a flame to paper. A girl could be destroyed in an instant of divine love. The question was, was it worth it?

You might ask if I loved Jonathan for his beauty, and I would answer: that is a pointless question, for his great, uncommon beauty was an irreducible part of the whole. It gave him his quiet confidence-which some might have called aloof arrogance-and his easy, disarming way with the fairer sex. And if his beauty drew my eye from the first, I’ll not apologize for it, nor will I apologize for my desire to claim Jonathan for my own. To behold such beauty is to wish to possess it; it’s desire that drives every collector. And I was hardly alone. Nearly every person who came to know Jonathan tried to possess him. This was his curse, and the curse of every person who loved him. But it was like being in love with the sun: brilliant and intoxicating to be near, but impossible to keep to oneself. It was hopeless to love him and yet it was hopeless not to.

And so I was afflicted by Jonathan’s curse, caught up in his terrible attraction, and both of us were doomed to suffer for it.

A friendship progressed between us-Jonathan and I-in this way through childhood. We met after services on Sundays and at social events such as weddings and even funerals, whispering together on the fringe of the mourners, or giving up on propriety altogether and wandering off to the woods so we could concentrate all our attention on each other. Heads shook in disapproval, and without a doubt, some tongues gave in to gossip, but our families did nothing to stop our friendship-at least, I was not made aware of it if they had.

It was during this time that I realized that Jonathan was lonelier than I had imagined. The other boys sought his company far less than I’d assumed and, for Jonathan’s part, when a group approached us at a social, he often skirted them. I recall one time, at a spring church gathering, that Jonathan steered me to another path when he saw a group of boys his age heading in our direction. I had no idea what to make of it and, after a few minutes of anxious contemplation, decided to ask.

“Why is it that you choose to walk this way?” I asked. “Is it because you are embarrassed to be seen with me?”

He made a derisive sound. “Don’t be daft, Lanny. I am seen with you now. Anyone can see us walking together.”

That was true enough, and a relief. But I could not give up my inquiry. “Then is it because you don’t like them, those boys?”

“I don’t dislike them,” he said, peevishly.

“Then why-”

He cut me off. “Why are you questioning me? Take my word for it: it’s different for boys, Lanny, and that’s all there is to it.” He began to walk faster, and I had to lift my skirts a bit to keep up with him. He hadn’t explained what the mysterious “it” was that he referred to: what was different for boys? I wondered. Nearly everything, from what I could see. Boys were allowed to go to school, if their families could afford to pay the tutor’s fee, whereas girls got no more schooling than their mothers could impart-the household arts of sewing, cleaning, and cooking, maybe a little reading from the Bible. Boys could tussle with each other for amusement, run and play tag without the encumbrance of long skirts, ride horseback. True, they drew hard chores and had to master all manner of skills-once, Jonathan told me, his father made him repair the foundation of their icehouse, stone and mortar, just so he would know a bit about masonry-but to my way of thinking, a boy’s life was much freer. And here Jonathan was complaining about it.

“I wish I were a boy,” I muttered, nearly out of breath from trying to keep up with him.

“No, you don’t,” he said over his shoulder.

“I don’t see what-”

He whirled on me. “What about your brother, Nevin, then? He doesn’t much like me, does he?” I stopped, dumbstruck. No, Nevin didn’t like Jonathan and hadn’t for as long as I could remember. I remembered the fight with Jonathan, how Nevin had come home spangled with a crust of dried blood on his face, and how Father was quietly proud of him.

“Why do you think your brother hates me?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve never given him reason, but he hates me just the same,” Jonathan said, straining not to betray the hurt in his voice. “It’s that way with all the boys. They hate me. Some of the adults, too. I know it, I can feel it. That’s why I avoid them, Lanny.” His chest heaved, tired from explaining it to me. “There, now you know,” he said and then hurried away, leaving me to stare after him in surprise.

I thought about what he’d said all week. I could have spoken to Nevin about his hatred of Jonathan, but to do so would restart an old argument between us; he couldn’t stand that I’d befriended Jonathan, of course, and I knew the reasons well enough without having to ask. My brother thought Jonathan was proud and arrogant, that he flaunted his wealth, and that he expected, and received, special treatment. I knew Jonathan better than anyone outside his family-perhaps even within his family-so I knew all of this to be untrue, except the latter, but it was hardly Jonathan’s fault if others treated him differently. And, though Nevin wouldn’t admit to it, I saw in his hateful eye the wish to spoil Jonathan’s beauty, to leave his mark on that handsome face and bring down the town’s favorite son. In his own way, Nevin wanted to defy God, to right what he saw as an injustice God had deliberately meted out to him, that he should have to live in Jonathan’s shadow in every regard.