Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“Don’t you know how to grip a horse with your legs?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“There’s no getting around learning.”

“People say I’m a slow learner. If that’s true, I never minded it.”

He seemed to realize that he was being standoffish, and that my attempt at ribbing him was simply my trying to be sensitive without giving the impression that he needed sensitivity. We were out by a field of leeks, and their green stalks were reaching up out of the soil like a thousand lizard paws, and looking out over them, he said, “They’re happy to have company tonight.” I didn’t know yet that this was one of his mannerisms, making these odd qualitative statements. Columbia was the most beautiful cow, he said, which agreed with the consensus, and Galahad was the most beautiful horse, which diverged from it. One day he pointed up at the Sierras, at a peak just separate from three others linked in a ridge, and told me it was the saddest mountain. I didn’t know if his strange pronouncements were sincere or an affectation, and I didn’t really want to know. I came to love them. But the first time I heard one, I didn’t know how to respond. I just told him what I knew: we’d be pulling up those leeks soon, and planting turnips.

WESLEY

I saw Hugo pulling up handfuls of early carrots on an afternoon at the end of September, when the ground was still tender and clumpy from the late summer rains and clung in dark walnuts to the pale orange icicles. He stacked them in the basket of his t-shirt, which distended into a lumpy mass. As he shuffled from the garden to the barn like that, a few carrots would sluice out the side of his bundle, and he’d have to stoop down and grope with his hand to retrieve them.

In the barn he walked back and forth between Columbia and Galahad, feeding them each a carrot at a time and rubbing their ears, their faces, so intent, almost in a trance, that he took no notice of me standing in the doorway until I confronted him about what he was doing.

“It’s from the vegetable garden,” he said, “not the crops.”

“So rather than stealing money from the college, you’re stealing food from its students.”

“I could never appreciate this carrot,” he said, holding one aloft next to Galahad, “the way she appreciates it.” He smiled at me. The Bible makes no distinction between a smiling sinner and a sneaking one, but I felt then and I still feel after searching and prayer the conviction that it is a meaningful one.

“You don’t understand—”

“That’s not a very Christian welcome.” Eli spoke from the doorway, where I’d been standing before I’d advanced on Hugo. Eli nodded me out of the barn, and as I went he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.” Remember that at the time I had not learned to distrust him.

The next day Columbia’s milk turned pink, and we called the vet, thinking she had an infection. The vet smelled the milk, and then tasted it, surprising all of us there in the barn who thought it harbored deadly bacteria. He said he’d seen it before, mostly with gentle old timers and farm dowagers. The color was from the carotene and was perfectly harmless. If we stopped feeding her carrots, he said, it would return to normal in a few days. But the milk never went back to white.

ELI

Irrigation amounts to making sure the right dirt is wet, and thus it’s muddy work. But it was even muddier than usual the day in October when we found a dog struggling to swim in the canal out by the nut trees. I kid you not, it was a corgi, scratching with its stub legs at the bank but unable to claw its way out and about dead with exhaustion. I leapt in with my boots on and grabbed the poor thing, which was like a soaked and wriggling roll of carpet, and leaned against the wall of the ditch to hand it off to Hugo and Claude. We rode back to the main campus with me coated in mud all down my front side and with my boots, which had about turned into pitchers of slop, in my saddlebags. Hugo led his horse with one hand and the surprisingly obedient corgi with the other, by a lead rope he’d tied around her belly. Claude jabbered the whole way back about how corgis were supposed to be a smart breed so he didn’t know why one would jump into an irrigation ditch with the body type of a hot dog.

The outdoor shower on the back side of the house was like the stall in a cheap bathroom, with just walls on either side but no door. I’d been in the hot water a long time, getting my fingernails clean, degunking the creases between my toes, the cracks of my thighs, mud just about everywhere it can go, before I looked over my shoulder and saw Hugo standing where he had a line of sight. This was far from the first time I’d caught one of the guys here watching me, but it was the first time the culprit had the nerve to keep watching, to smile openly, after being discovered, rather than tucking his head and hurrying off. So what the hell, I thought. I closed my eyes, tilted my head back, and ran my hands through my hair as I turned around to give him the full show.

WESLEY

You can tell a thing by its absence. The first absence I noticed was Hugo’s during breaks and study hours and our nightly stretches of free time. It was common enough for Eli to be off during these stretches, pounding stakes or killing snakes or fixing up the truck. All the details that didn’t fall within student work routines were his domain. Because Columbia’s milk remained pink, I knew I should be able to catch Hugo pilfering from the garden or in the barn, and yet I could never find him at either. Then I noticed I could never find him at all during those hours. Then I noticed that when I tried to find Eli to express my concern, I could never find Eli either. But the idea did not occur to me then. It remained too impossible for even the imagination.

It was with genuine curiosity, genuine worry, that I too disappeared from our unscheduled hours, searching every corner and level of the barn, searching in and under the pickup, and riding horseback down the alleys between fields and along the perimeter of campus, searching for my missing compatriots, to no avail. I’ll admit that I began to despair, as if it were an important page missing from a book of philosophy I was reading, a page offering definitions that would be referenced again later.

A broken sprinkler head shifted me from one despair to another. I found it flooding the corner of the farmhouse green on one of those dusk rides, and I hopped off and waded into the mud to screw a cap onto it. I went out to clean off at the mud shower, which no one used at that time because it was too cold and work hours were long over, but as I rounded the corner to the back side of the dormitory, I spotted a pair of boots under the wall of the cubby, the feet in them shifting gently from side to side. As I crept around to see in the faint purple light, the scene revealed itself: they were both clothed, but Eli had Hugo lifted and pressed against the back wall of the shower, and Hugo’s legs were wrapped around Eli’s waist, crossed at the ankles, and the two of them were kissing.

“The Devil has brought you together, but I will pry you apart,” I shouted, but it came out as a whisper. The Devil had quieted my voice, I thought, and I confess that I fled. When I came back again on several other evenings, I also found my voice missing and my conviction sapped. I could not even speak on the one when I found them both nude, and Hugo kneeling in front of Eli, working Eli’s lap with his mouth. The greater their indiscretions, the more my power was blocked, such that I found myself paralyzed by the spectacle and unable to look away. Eli’s eyes were closed so he could not see my face, but I could see his, and it was caught in a fire of what at the time I called ecstasy. But the roots of the word ecstasy are the Greek ek , for “out of,” and stasis , for “the place where one stands,” though it was not that he was outside of himself. No, the right word was the one that means to be held by, to be occupied. The look on his face was that of a man possessed.