Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“Don't stop because of me,” Callum reassured him, jumping down the last few steps onto the barn floor. Theo wouldn't meet his eyes, and he realized the boy was embarrassed. “You have a wonderful voice.”

Now Theo looked up at him, but he was wary. He was in his pony's stall, shoveling methodically.

“You ever sing in a choir?” Callum asked, when the boy remained silent.

At this he shook his head.

“Well, you should. A church choir, maybe.”

“We don't go to church anymore,” he said evenly. Then he unhooked the stall door and emerged with the cart and his shovel, walking right past Callum as if he were invisible and into the stall for one of the draft horses.

“I rarely sing, but only because I can't,” he confessed to Theo. “I wish I could.”

The child threw him a bone and nodded, but Callum could tell he was only being polite. And so he was about to leave and get on with his other chores, when Theo surprised him. “I like the old songs,” he said. “Not the new ones they make us sing at school or they teach at the Jungvolk meetings. Helmut sings them much better than I do.”

“I doubt that.”

“He does. Werner, too. They have much bigger voices and can really sing the marching songs. I don't…”

“You don't what?”

He shrugged.

“Go ahead, Theo. You can tell me.”

“I don't like the marching songs.”

“I don't blame you. Seems to me they're just drinking songs anyway. You always want to sing them with a stein in your hand.”

“But everyone else likes them.”

“I just told you: I don't.”

The boy looked at him, but said nothing.

“You know, Theo, you don't need to apologize to the world that you're not Helmut or Werner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, realizing that he had just initiated a conversation he hadn't anticipated a moment ago, “that you seem to talk a lot about what you're not. Who you're not.” He leaned over the wooden half-wall of the stall, noticed the pyramidal clumps of manure in the straw.

“So?”

“So? Well, you're a good boy in your own right. Take your singing. Maybe your voice isn't as loud as your brothers'. I have no idea. But there isn't a boys' choir in Scotland that couldn't find a use for a voice like yours. You'd be a soloist.”

Theo sighed and blew on his hands. “I don't seem to like the things everyone else does.”

“I don't either.”

“No?”

“No. And it seems to me, no one thinks they like the right things at your age,” Callum said, though he guessed he was lying. But he also knew that ten-year-old boys always had the potential to bully the odd duck, and that tendency was undoubtedly exacerbated in this corner of the globe. He had a feeling the master race didn't have a lot of patience for a kid like Theo.

“Werner and Helmut were always popular. Somehow, they always knew their duty and did things correctly. People liked them. Students, teachers.”

“Is that what you've been told?”

“It's what I know.”

“I'll bet if you asked them, they'd tell you they never felt like they did everything right. Anyone who thinks he does-and this is one of my favorite words of yours-is a dummkopf. But that really doesn't matter. You're Theo. That's all that counts. And you don't ever have to apologize for who you are.”

The boy seemed to contemplate this. Ran his free hand along the well-muscled shoulder of the enormous horse.

“Besides,” he added. “Think of all the things you do better than anyone.”

“There isn't anything I do better than anyone,” Theo said.

“You are a very fast runner.”

“I guess.”

“And you ride very well.”

“Just ponies.”

“Someday it will be horses.”

“I hope so.”

Outside the barn he heard the wind, and high above them the weather vane swiveled with a shriek. The wind was coming from the north.

“I know so,” he told the boy, though he really knew nothing of the sort. “In the meantime, you sing. And don't worry that you're not Helmut or Werner. You're Theo, and that should be good enough for anyone.”

He felt a twinge of self-satisfaction after he'd spoken. Perhaps he had buoyed the boy's spirits after all. But then, his head down and his small shoulders hunched in his coat, Theo went to the rear of the stall and silently cleaned up the animal's droppings.

SHE CLOSED HER EYES, her mouth against the side of his neck. His skin was warm against her lips, and the collar from his shirt tickled her just beneath her chin if she moved. And so she didn't move. She remained there, perfectly still, aware only of the metronomic rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, and the sound of the logs that were being consumed by the flames in the fireplace. She was afraid to open her eyes, because the moment-the feel of his hand on her waist, his fingers firm against the flesh of her hip because her blouse had come untucked-was exquisite. She had never before felt a man's hands on the skin near her waist, and she could feel her whole body starting to flush. It was as if she had a high fever, except there was no pain. There was only eagerness (though precisely for what, she could admit to no one, not even to herself) and her sense that this was the start of something wondrous and new.

They were standing now in the bay window in the ballroom that overlooked the edges of the hunting park. Mutti and Theo and Basha were shopping in the village, and the two of them had Kaminheim to themselves. Anna had seen Callum carting the furniture from their terrace into the shed beside the house, and beckoned him inside when the sleet and hail had started falling in earnest. There were many chores that had to be completed regardless of the weather, but bringing the outdoor tables and chairs in for the winter wasn't among them in Anna's opinion. Especially with everyone else away for the afternoon.

Finally she felt him pulling her even closer into him, dancing her body so that they were facing each other. She opened her eyes and looked up, her breasts against his chest, and-without even thinking about what she was doing-she moved her legs so that they were surrounding one of his thighs, pressing her groin through her skirt against the hard muscle there. She thought he was about to kiss her, but instead he brought his lips to her ear and whispered simply, “You know, I dream of you.”

She did not know this, but she nodded, savoring the way his breath had given her goose bumps along her arms, and he continued, “I haven't dreamed of Scotland. Not lately. I've dreamed only of you.”

She considered telling him that she dreamed of him, too, but this would be a lie and she didn't want to lie to Callum. But she did think of him all the time-while assisting Basha in the kitchen, while mucking the horse stalls and feeding the animals, while sewing with her mother or reading with Theo in the evening-and so she confessed this to him. She told him how often she imagined being like this in his arms, the two of them alone, and how frequently she recalled their few, brief kisses in the apple orchard.

“Like this?” he asked, and then he kissed her chastely, a tease, barely parting his lips when he brought them to hers.

“No,” she said, emboldened. “Like this.” And she stood on her toes in her pumps and separated his lips with her tongue, burrowing and exploring the moistness and warmth inside his mouth.

There was a part of her that understood this was wrong, all wrong. So wrong that she was shaking. Trembling now in his arms as they kissed. But then she decided that her quivering had nothing to do with the reality that Callum was a prisoner and she was violating her family's trust by inviting him into the house now. By making love to him here in the ballroom. It had nothing to do with the reality that he was the enemy. Her trembling had nothing to do with anything, she concluded, but the fact that she was approaching eighteen and she was in the arms of a handsome and interesting man who was twenty.