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The great oak still stood in the court. It was a watchful, reproachful thing, and so like a prison guard that as Jack gazed at it from his window, he knew he was the prisoner.
It was not all that long ago that this solemn guard was known to him by name, when the crisp December sun limned its branches and the soft light fell on brown curls and freckled face and–
Jack stood abruptly from his chair. His wrists were not manacled, despite his once possessing a shimmer of belief that they would be. The window was not barred, the door was not locked. His uniform in shades of blue was new and pressed. His choir gown and cap, also new, hung clean and neat in the wardrobe.
All was as it used to be. One could almost forget.
*
Garlands of pine and strings of cranberry wound their way over every dining hall surface. The hearth crackled quietly and emitted a gentle warmth. Sweet, cozy scents of gingerbread and cinnamon wafted from the kitchens. The wood tables were adorned with candles, burning low, and were sparsely seated by leftover students. It was eerily calm in comparison to regular days.
Jack found a vacant spot near the flames, hoping the feeling in his cold fingers would return. The dorms never seemed to be warm enough this time of year, and he often slept and studied with a shiver. He fully placed the blame of his frequent illnesses on this fact. Even now, a cough seemed to linger in his chest.
He glanced around at the other stragglers, but did not see whom he sought. Though all of his usual friends had gone home for the Christmas season, there was always a certain boy who was similarly left behind with him. Jack peered down at the slices of plum cake on his plate and poked idly at his piece with his fork. Something about eating alone made him suddenly and nauseously aware of his presence in the hall, and his eyes flickered to the other breakfasters to be sure that their eyes were well on their own repast.
“May I have a seat here?”
The voice, though delicate, was startling in the hushed room, and Jack gave a small jump. The boy he had been looking for stood there before him, his coat dripping and his damp hair plastered to his brow. His cheeks were flushed pink and he shook ever so slightly. His jaw seemed to be set so as not to let his teeth chatter.
“You’re wet,” Jack said, still recovering from the sudden appearance of Simon, who always seemed to be able to sneak up on him.
Simon sat down beside him as if Jack had assented to his previous question, and began taking off his coat. He laid it neatly on the bench between them and turned toward the fire, shivering some more as he reached his arms out and warmed his hands. He did not look at Jack. “I fell in the snow,” he said simply.
“Well,” said Jack, turning back to the plum cakes. It was just the two of them now. He didn’t need to say something to impress the other boys and drive a wedge further between himself and Simon. If that were the case, he would have laughed at Simon now and made a cruel remark about his likely fainting spell. Instead he said, “You’ll dry,” and, pushing a fork towards him, added, “I got a plum cake for you. The kitchen was full of them. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks excellent.”
Simon gave him a brief look that Jack deciphered as uncertainty, but he took up the fork and cut into his piece. Jack winced, hating the callous routine that he forced Simon into, but feeling unable to stop. It was an unspoken ordinance between them that they pretend that Jack was not cruel to Simon most days of the year once they reconvened as friends when the others were away. It angered and disgusted him that Simon just bore it over and over again, but for which of them those emotions were, he was not entirely sure. With the way Simon looked at him sometimes, as if Jack might pull the rug out from under him at any moment, he wondered at Simon’s continual participation in this balancing act of theirs.
“It’s good,” said Simon. The heat of the fire had already worked at drying his hair, and it had curled loosely again in its natural pattern. The dancing flames cast soft shadows on his face and made his wide eyes seem even wider, and deeper. He gave a small smile. “Thank you, Jack.”
Jack coughed and nodded and took a bite of his own cake, suddenly at ease with Simon to eat with. It was good. The delicious cake, the festive decorations, the warmth of the fire, and the boy beside him all folded together into the shape of something whole and right.
He never felt like this with the others. It made him afraid.
*
The dining hall was filled with raucous chatter and a surging sea of boys. The hearth was unlit, but the sight of the tightly packed bodies made Jack feel hot and itchy. He felt numerous eyes on him as he headed toward the most isolated table in the room.
Three boys were scattered about the table, staring at him without contrition. Jack tried to ignore them as he sat and began to mechanically lift the stew to his mouth. As he ate, he counted down desperately: five more spoonfuls… four more… three… two….
One of the boys at the table suddenly shifted in a manner that Jack had grown to recognize, and he stilled as prey stills at the first sign of the hunter. The boy’s hands wrung each other like the neck of a rabbit before being placed firmly in his lap. His eyes rose to the ceiling before falling somewhere around Jack’s shoulder. Jack felt he knew the inquiry before it was spoken. The arrow was nocked and aimed.
“So… Merridew.” The boy cleared his throat. Jack flinched. “What… really happened on that island of yours? Wasn’t Cambourne in choir with you?”
The arrow found its place between his ribs. He had chosen the wrong table.
The three boys seated with him and others nearby had their unblinking gazes fixed on him. Some were whispering to their friends, who whispered to their friends in turn. Jack had endured this five times in as many months, and he was not any more patient with it.
Everyone knew the story. The choristers from Picton were on their way to safety. There was a terrible storm. Lightning. They were stranded on an island. Not every boy made it. Not every Picton boy made it. It was a harrowing ordeal. A tragic tale. The survivors were rescued. The war was over. Jack returned to Picton while the others returned to the families who loved them. The end.
Jack soon learned that not every story could be tied off neatly with a bow. Answers were always being chased and dug after like a rat on the run from a terrier–the fatter and juicier, the better. How many were truly killed? Did they resort to eating their flesh? Why were he and their other classmates covered in paint? What really happened to Cambourne? Why didn’t he do anything to stop it?
Why didn’t he do anything to stop it?
The spoon clattered angrily in the empty bowl.
His voice was hoarse but venomous. “All of you already know what really happened. It was on the radio and in the papers. I shouldn’t have to explain it to you. Learn to listen or learn to read, I don’t care which.”
Jack Merridew, plane crash survivor and not much else now, rose and walked stiffly from the cacophony of the hall.
*
“Where are we going exactly?”
The winter afternoon was chill, but the sun blazed in the cloudless sky. Jack felt its warmth on the back of his head as his boots crunched through the glittering snow. Simon trudged close behind him, matching his stride to Jack’s bootprints.
Jack cast a look over his shoulder and saw him, his eyes glued to the ground for Jack’s next step and his arms held slightly aloft for balance, like a baby bird. Jack snorted in amusement at this observation, causing Simon to glance up at him and frown.
“What?”
Jack turned back around and kept walking as he tried to stem the fondness for Simon that welled in his chest. It would only make everything even more complicated when this holiday was over. “It’s a surprise. But we’re going to draw it on our map.” He held the scroll of paper up to remind Simon of their recent work as cartographers.
“For our Genesis,” said Simon. Jack could hear a smile in his voice.
“That’s right. We are gods, you know.”
The hill was steep, rocky, and riddled with roots and twigs, but Simon managed to keep up with him. Jack continued to look back at him surreptitiously. He was keenly aware of the possibility of Simon fainting out here, where they were not exactly meant to be in the first place, but he appeared fine to Jack, if not a little bitten by the winter air.
At last they reached the stack of stone boulders that Jack had been anticipating. He leapt lithely atop the first one, then held his hand out for Simon. “Here. Can you make it?”
“I’m not as unfit as you seem to think,” Simon grumbled, but he placed his hand in Jack’s anyway, and Jack pulled him up easily beside him.
For a moment, neither boy let go of the other’s hand. Simon’s hand was cold, but a warmth seemed to radiate from where their palms and each of their fingers met, and Jack felt a precipitate reluctance to be parted from it. He could never allow himself this with the other boys–or anyone. It occurred to him sharply that Simon was the only person in the world whose hand he could hold and be warmed by.
He did not completely realize that he had been staring at Simon until Simon smiled guardedly and said, “Are you ill again, Jack?”
Jack blinked. He suspected that Simon did not sincerely believe him to be ill, but was offering him an excuse. He was all too familiar with Jack’s fickle behavior and cognizant of the fact that something gentle like this was, more often than not, followed by incessant derision.
He should not be doing this. But it was just them. It was just Simon, and with Simon the softness was allowed.
“No,” Jack decided, more to himself than to Simon. “I’m perfectly well. Besides the cough sometimes.”
Simon seemed to have slightly lifted spirits, a dog thrown a bone of closeness. “That’s good. Besides the cough, of course.” He squeezed Jack’s hand, but then, to Jack’s disappointment, he let go. “Lead the way, then.”
Jack scrambled up the rest of the boulders, offering his hand to Simon at every opportunity. His mind was whirling with the uncomfortable truth of what he felt for Simon and the falsity of how he must treat him in the presence of others. Because it really was a must. Despite everything, Jack knew that Simon was a risk to all that he had built at Picton. He was a sort of holiday indulgence, to be enjoyed only in moderation lest one become sick.
“Just a bit farther,” Jack said when they had both made it up the final rock and Simon was dusting off the knees of his trousers.
Simon turned his head and looked through the trees at the campus buildings below. He squinted as the blinding sun ricocheted off the white snow. “You’ve been up here before, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have. A few times.” He did not need to say that all of those times included the other boys who aided Jack in Simon’s ridicule. Simon would deduce that. They both stared down at the school, occupied with their own separate thoughts. Jack could not be entirely certain of what Simon ruminated on, but his own line of thought drove him toward the fact that he was sharing with Simon something that had previously been exclusive. He knew that Simon Cambourne was a lonesome creature–he knew it because sometimes when he looked at Simon, it could almost feel as if he were looking at himself. He knew Simon’s starvation and he knew his desperation, but that desperation took the unfortunate form of Jack’s company, while Jack’s took the necessary form of Simon’s ostracization. An experience like this was something that Simon coveted, and Jack was giving it to him after having it dangled above his head.
Jack coughed, and when Simon turned back around, he said with mustered heartiness, “Our Genesis still awaits, Simon.”
They trekked a short path before their destination shone before them. The space etched into the side of the hill was frosted with snow in which the tiny prints of birds and forest mammals could be seen. What was normally a clear pool beneath a trickling waterfall was a glistening sheet of ice and icicles that looked like narwhal tusks of glass. When the sun touched the ice, it gleamed like precious diamond. The pines surrounding them were dusted white, and the air was filled with their clean, resinous fragrance. Birds trilled in the high canopy, and all was peaceful and frozen. A winter scene from a dream.
Jack looked sidelong at Simon and waited for his reaction. He knew that Simon loved trees and nature and appreciated every season of the earth’s slow rotation about the sun. Though this spot did not have the wildflowers and pond fish and lush foliage of the spring months that Jack saw with the others, this snowy display was something only he and Simon would see, and that made it feel sacred in his mind. It was something new and reborn in shimmering ice, to be named and mapped by the both of them.
Simon stood with clasped hands as he absorbed every detail. His countenance was that of tranquility, and to Jack it seemed that he had never seen Simon with such complete calmness before. Even in the quiet hours when they lay beside each other and Simon eventually drifted to sleep, Jack still sensed an undercurrent of apprehension within him. He supposed it was his fault. The sight of Simon restored to unreserved serenity made his heart turn over.
Jack approached a large, flat rock near the iced pool and swept the snow from its surface. His fingers stung and reddened with the contact and he rubbed his hands together quickly before retrieving the scroll and a pair of pencils from his coat pocket. He held the pencils out to Simon, who plucked one, and unfurled the paper, smoothing it out on the rock. He sat on one end and Simon placed himself on the other, all of their world on the map between them.
“We’re about here,” said Jack, tapping a blank space away from their drawing of the school grounds with the great oak of the Tree of Destiny in the center, where it all began. He began to sketch the hill that they had scaled, complete with its piled boulders and evergreens, and of course, the wintry pocket in which they were currently ensconced. Great emphasis was placed on the lustrous ice.
Simon typically left the work of drawing to Jack, who considered himself an especial artist, but he contributed by labelling the points of interest in his neat hand, and he presently worked at setting his own estimation of birds in Jack’s trees. The embellishments of animals on the map–a fox here, a rabbit there–were all his own.
“What shall we call it?” asked Simon.
Jack shaded the final section of his illustration. “I haven’t any idea just now. Perhaps one will come to me. Have any suggestions, Simon?” In truth, he fully intended for Simon to name it, as the place somehow seemed to reflect him.
Simon looked thoughtful. Then, shyly, he proffered, “We could call it the Lake of Providence, within the Forest of Peace.”
The Lake was little more than a pond, and the Forest was only a wood, but both seemed grander and more magnificent to the boys in this moment. Jack pretended to mull the names over before nodding once in agreement. “Yes. Those names are befitting of our creation.” He spoke regally.
Simon penciled the titles in cursive atop Jack’s drawings. He was grinning with delight at Jack’s praise in his choice of names. Jack felt his heart constrict. It was not a small part of him that wanted this Christmas season to last forever. He thought of the return of the rest of the students and choristers with faint aversion. He found himself wishing, not for the first time, that there were some way to remove Simon’s outcast status among the boys. But then perhaps he would not be Simon anymore.
They sat together and spoke effortlessly of all that sprang to mind—more thoughtful conversations than Jack could ever entertain with anyone but Simon—until their idleness brought shivers and red cheeks and they were forced to descend from the Lake of Providence and the Forest of Peace to the school below.
As Jack held Simon’s hand once again down the steep and rocky path, he thought of his assertion that they were gods of this new world. It seemed silly to him now. In this Genesis of theirs, Jack felt less like a divine being than an earthly creation himself, fashioned from Simon’s rib.
*
Jack plodded miserably from the chapel to the dormitory. It was a brisk November morning, with low, swirling fog that left the ground beneath him sodden. His shoes squelched irritatingly in the deposits of mud. The other choristers, none of whom he knew well, were crowded together on their own trek to the building, a murder of black crows. He looked like one excised from the flock, left alone to find his own food and warmth. One boy in front made a remark that caused the others to caw with laughter. He tore his eyes from them with a flash of bitterness.
Choir was not something he derived even a sliver of enjoyment from any longer. It was only monotonous routine now. His voice tended to fail him now. The chapel was stuffed with strangers. There was no one to exchange secret glances with.
The way to the dormitory passed by the familiar trail through the wood of birches and pines that he had taken many times before. At this time of year, the pond at the base of the miniature waterfall would be thawed still from the summer, but perhaps with a thin layer of filmy ice on top that would dissolve as the day wore on and build back up again when night fell. Right now, there would be no crystalline ice or sugary snow that had belonged to himself and Simon.
His heart ached monstrously. He had nothing left anymore. He had sown and he had reaped and the harvest was rotten.
When he rent himself from his miasma of thoughts, he found that he was standing not far from the court that housed the great oak. He could see it, the warden that served as a constant reminder to his sentence. Its leaves were beginning to brown, its skeletal structure was becoming increasingly visible beneath. At one point in time, it had meant renewal and companionship. Now it only signified to him the loss of his own design.
He gazed at it until a cold wind sent a shiver up his spine, and then he made his way to the dormitory, alone.