The Taker-Taker 1 Read online

  And so in desperation I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his. I could tell he was surprised by the way he drew back, slightly, before regaining his wits. And then he did something unexpected: he returned the kiss. He leaned into me, groping for my lips with his mouth, feeding his breath into me. It was a forceful kiss, hungry and clumsy and so much more than I knew to expect. Before I had the chance to be frightened, he backed me against the wall, his mouth still over mine, and pressed into me until I bumped against the spot hidden beneath the front of his breeches and below the folds of his jacket. A moan escaped him, the first time I heard a moan of pleasure come from another person. Without a word, he took my hand and brought it to the front of his breeches and I felt a shudder run through him as he uttered another moan.

  I drew my hand back. It tingled. I could still feel his hardness in my palm.

  He was panting, trying to get himself under control, confused that I’d pulled away from him. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked, studying my face, more than a little worried. “You did kiss me.”

  “I did …” Words tumbled out of me. “I meant to ask … Tene-braes …”

  “Tenebraes?” He stood back, smoothing the front of his waistcoat. “What of Tenebraes? What difference—” He trailed off, perhaps realizing he had been watched in church. He shook his head as though brushing aside the very notion of Tenebraes Poirier. “And what is your name? Which McIlvrae sister are you?”

  I couldn’t blame him for being uncertain: there were three of us. “Lanore,” I answered.

  “Not a very pretty name, is it?” he said, not realizing that every little word can bruise a young girl’s heart. “I will call you Lanny, if you don’t mind. Now, Lanny, you know you are a very wicked girl.” There was a playfulness in his voice to let me know he wasn’t seriously angry with me. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you should not tease a boy so, especially boys you do not know?”

  “But I know you. Everyone knows you,” I said, somewhat alarmed that he would think me frivolous. He was the eldest son of the wealthiest man in town, the owner of the logging business around which the entire settlement revolved—of course everyone knew who he was. “And—and I believe that I love you. I mean to be your wife one day.”

  Jonathan lifted a cynical eyebrow. “To know my name is one thing, but how can you possibly know you love me? How can you set your heart on me? You don’t know me at all, Lanny, and yet you’ve declared yourself mine.” He smoothed his jacket one more time. “We should go back outside before someone comes looking for us. It would be best if we were not seen together, don’t you agree? You should go first.”

  I stood there for a second, shocked. I was confused, still possessed of phantom traces of his desire, his kiss and the memory of his hardness in my hand. In any case, he’d misunderstood me: I hadn’t given myself to him. I had declared that he was mine. “All right,” I said, and the disappointment must have been evident in my voice because Jonathan gave me his handsomest smile.

  “Don’t worry, Lanny. There is next Sunday—we will see each other after service, I promise. Perhaps I can persuade you to give me another kiss.”

  Shall I tell you about Jonathan, my Jonathan, and then you will understand how I could be so sure of my devotion? He was the firstborn of Charles and Ruth St. Andrew and they were so thrilled to have a son that they named him on the spot, had him christened within the month, recklessly exulting in him in an age when most parents would not even name a child until it had lived for some time and proved it had a chance of survival. His father threw a great party while Ruth was still recuperating in her bed; had everyone from the town come in for rum punch and sugared tea, plum cake and molasses cookies; hired an Acadian fiddler, had laughter and music so close after the boy’s birth, it seemed the father was daring the devil—just try to come and take my boy! Just try and see what you will get!

  It was apparent, from the earliest days, that Jonathan was uncommon: he was exceptionally clever, exceptionally strong, exceptionally healthy, and above all, exceptionally beautiful. Women would sit rapt beside the cradle, beg for turns to hold him and pretend that the well-formed bundle of flesh and swirling tendrils of black gossamer was their own. Even men, down to the hardiest axman working for St. Andrew in the logging operation, would get uncharacteristically misty when brought in proximity to the babe.

  By the time Jonathan reached his twelfth birthday, there was no denying that there was something preternatural about him, and it seemed just as obvious to attribute this to his beauty. He was a wonder. He was perfection. That could not be said of many at the time; it was an age in which people were disfigured by any number of causes—smallpox or accident, burned at the hearth, spindly from malnutrition, toothless by thirty, lumpy from a broken bone set improperly, scarified, palsied, scabbed from lack of hygiene, and, in our stretch of the woods, missing parts from frostbite. But there wasn’t a disfiguring mark on Jonathan. He’d grown tall, straight, and broad shouldered, as majestic as the trees on his property. His skin was as flawless as poured cream. He had straight black hair as glossy as a raven’s wing and his eyes were dark and bottomless, like the deepest recess of the Allagash. He was simply beautiful to look upon.

  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—w
hich 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.

  THREE

  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.

  That was why Jonathan had rushed away from me at the church gathering, because he had been forced to share his shame with me, and perhaps he thought that once I knew his secret I would abandon him. How strongly we hold on to our fears in childhood! As if there was any power on earth or in heaven that would stop me from loving Jonathan. If anything, it made me see that he, too, had his enemies and detractors, that he, too, was constantly judged, and that he needed me. I was the one friend with whom he could be free. And it was not one-sided: to speak plainly, Jonathan was the only person who treated me as though I mattered. And to have the attention of the most desired, most important boy in town is no small thing to a girl nearly invisible among her peers. How could that help but make me love him even more?

  And I told Jonathan as much the following Sunday, when I went up to him and slipped my arm under his as he paced about on the far side of the green. “My brother is a fool,” was all I said, and we continued walking together without another word between us.

  The one thing I did not take back from our conversation at the church social was that I’d rather have been born a boy. I still believed that. It had been drummed into my head, by the things my parents did and the very rules by which we lived, that girls were not as valuable as boys and that our lives were destined to be far less consequential. For instance, Nevin would inherit the farm from my father, but if he hadn’t the temperament or inclination to raise cattle, he might be apprenticed to the blacksmith or sent to work as a logger for the St. Andrews—he had choices, albeit limited ones. As a woman, I had fewer options: marry and start my own household, remain at home and assist my parents, or work as a servant in someone else’s home. If Nevin rejected the farm for some reason, conceivably my parents could pass it along to one of their daughters’ husbands, but that, too, would depend on the husband’s preferences. A good husband would take his wife’s wishes into consideration, but not all of them did.

  The other reason—the more important one, in my view—was that if I were a boy, it would be so much easier to be Jonathan’s friend. The things we could do together if I were not a girl! We could ride horseback and go off on adventures without chaperones. We could spend lots of time in each other’s company without anyone raising an eyebrow or finding it a fit topic to remark upon. Our friendship would be so banal and so ordinary that it would merit no scrutiny and would be allowed to proceed on its own.

  Looking back, I understand now that this was a difficult time for me, still caught up in adolescence but stumbling toward maturity. There were things I wanted from Jonathan, but I could not yet put a name to them and had only the clumsy framework of childhood to measure them against. I was close to him but wanted to be closer in a way I didn’t understand. I saw the way he looked at the older girls, and that he behaved differently with them than he did with me, and I thought I might die of jealousy. Partly, this was due to the intensity of Jonathan’s attention, his gre
at charm; when he was with you, he had a way of making you feel that you were the center of his world. His eyes, those bottomless dark eyes, would settle on your face, and it was as though he was there for you and you alone. Perhaps that was an illusion, perhaps it was merely the joy of having Jonathan to oneself. In any case, the result was the same: when Jonathan withdrew his attention, it was as though the sun slipped behind a cloud and a cold, sharp wind blew at your back. All you wanted was for Jonathan to come back, to enjoy his attention again.

  And he was changing with every year. When his guard was down, I saw aspects of him that I hadn’t seen (or noticed) before. He could act crudely, particularly if he thought no woman was observing him. He would display some of the rough behavior of the axmen who worked for his father, speak coarsely of women as though he was already acquainted with the full range of intimacies possible between the sexes. Later I would learn that by age sixteen he had been seduced and gone on to seduce others, a participant (comparatively early in his life) in this secret waltz of illicit lovers going on in St. Andrew, a hidden world if you did not know to look for it. But these were secrets he couldn’t bring himself to share with me.

  All I know is that my hunger for Jonathan grew, and it felt, at times, that it was nearly beyond my control. That there was something about his smoldering eye or half smile, or the way he knowingly caressed a young woman’s silk sleeve when he thought no one was watching, that made me want him to look at and caress me in the same way. Or when I thought of the rough things I’d overheard him say, I wanted him to be rough with me, too. I understand now that I was a lonely and confused young girl who yearned for intimacy and craved physical passion (even though it was a mystery to me) and—I know this now—my ignorance would be the means of my ruin. I was in a mad rush to be loved. I cannot blame Jonathan alone. So often we bring about our own downfall.