Every Boy Should Have a Man

12 The Oaf

The boy grew up and was a boy no more.

The boy grew up and became a full-grown oaf, as was his father and his father’s father before him.

He was wed and started a family. And times were hard, so he and his young family were forced to remain with his parents.

For a time, they said.

And one year became two, and two became four, and four became eight, and ten years later, ten regular years, he was still going to bed and waking up in his childhood room, though he had a wife and somewhere scattered around the house were his two children.

He thought often about the mans of his childhood. He thought about them every night, despite all that had happened and how things had changed.

One night in his bed he lay awake thinking about his mans, and there came a persistent tapping on his window. He arose and there was a man looking inside the window at him — a female man with red hair, green eyes, and frecks.

Frecks and wrinkles.

In regular years she would be eighteen. In man years she would be fifty-four.

He rushed out into the backyard and hugged her so tight she begged him to release her, and he did. And then she hugged him back and seemed unwilling to let him go.

She said, “I missed you so.”

The boy who was now an oaf said, “And I missed you.”

In the yard with her were three other mans and an odd-looking little oaf that he had never seen around these parts. She introduced everybody but the oaf, who looked to be a simpleton. She said, “This is my husband Rufus, but everyone calls him Jack. This is my son Bob, and this is my daughter Janet.” And then she told them, “This is my old master, Zloty. He was the best master I ever had.”

He shook all of their little hands and then hugged them all, including Rufus who could also be called Jack.

“Zack?”

“No, I’m Jack,” said Jack. “Adventurer, scholar, and giant-killer at your service.”

Zloty shrugged, for he did not understand. Then he eyed the pinhead oaf again to see if maybe he knew him, and again it was nobody that he knew.

And then he thought, It is dangerous these days for mans to travel through the streets. It is illegal for them to be out and about without a leash or an escort. So many of them have been killed. So many of them have been stolen. In this neighborhood, so many of them have been stolen and made into a meal. If the scientists don’t work fast, all of the free-range mans will be dead. The swamp of the Eternal Grass has already dried up. In the north, the great white beos are gone and the ice caps are melting. So maybe this pinhead with them is someone she met after being stolen from me, and she contacted him first and made him her escort so that they all could pass through the streets without worrying about the authorities.

But the oaf was rather short for an oaf, standing a little less than three hla-cubits, while the oaf Zloty, who was considered slightly below average in height by oaf standards of his day, stood four and a half hla-cubits. The pinhead, Zloty figured, was just a little bit taller than a boy at the start of puberty, which made him a very short adult male oaf. And he had frecks on his face and arms, which was very unusual for an oaf. In ancient days, frecks were believed to be a sign of bad fortune and the infant born with them was strangled by its parents after its first suckle to please the great creator.

Her family moved to the other side of the backyard to give her some time alone with her old master. She explained to him all that had transpired since she had been stolen from him. She explained to him the new world in which they lived.

“It is a long, long journey that can only be made by foot. We are separated from your world by about 70,000 zlazla hla-cubits of stairs, but in many ways our world is much like yours. We have war, poverty, racism, sexism, religious intolerance, crime — we are destroying our natural environment.”

He asked her to explain religious intolerance.

“You will not understand it because in your world you only have one religion.”

“What is religion?”

“As I said, in your world everyone believes in the great creator. In the world of mans, people believe many different things.”

“How can they believe many different things?”

“It is hard to explain.”

Then he asked her to explain racism, which translated poorly into his language as hatred of the difference in the hue of the fruit on a single branch.

She struggled for the words to explain. “Well, as you can see,” she said, “my husband Rufus has dark skin and my skin is pale.”

“Frecked,” he corrected.

“Well, okay, but see, Rufus and I are considered to be from different races, uhm, er, from different family trees, understand? And this causes a problem for some people down there.”

He snorted. “You are pulling my leg, right? I’m no pinhead. You come from the same racing fruit tree, or whatever you call it. You are both mans. A little female man and a little man man.”

They both laughed at that but for different reasons; he at the truth in it, and she for the irony of it.

Then since she had mentioned that in her new world she was wealthy and he had always dreamt of being wealthy, he asked, “So how do you earn your money in your world? What do you do for a living, little wealthy man?”

She said, “Nothing. Rufus comes and steals silver from your world every few years.”

“Aha, silver is money in your world too.” For some reason this pleased him. Perhaps because at last here was a thing he understood. Their worlds had something in common — the love of silver.

“I arrived in that new world with wealth. Silver is worth money there, but so is a substance called gold. Gold, in your world, is used to make rope and thread. It is found in most cloth. The hair cloths I went there with were worth a fortune. My loin pouch also. The tunic of war that I wore was lined with it. And the small singing harp I was given by one of the evil soldiers I told you about who owned me before I left — it too was made of pure gold. Your mother’s singing harp would be worth a fortune in my world. In my world you and your family would be wealthy because of that small singing harp alone, which in your world is regarded as the least significant of instruments.”

They talked about many other things, but eventually she asked him, “What has happened to this world? It used to be so vibrant, so green. It looks like a desert everywhere we’ve been. Was it the war? Who won the war?”

He said, “Which war? It has been ten years of wars. There have been four wars in ten years. I fought in one of these.”

Shaking his head sadly, he pulled up his pant leg to show her the scar, as winding and ugly as the one on her arm.

“Nobody ever wins a war. A new one is starting right now, but it is of no concern to us. A war changes nothing for the poor, except that if you are the right age you fight in it and die. And my friend Auutet, my best friend in the whole wide world and your first master, though he was wealthy, he was also noble and earnest and good; and he did fight on the side of the poor in the war and was killed in battle. My heart still aches for him.”

Auutet. Auutet. Her heart did ache as well, but in silence as the boy of her childhood spoke.

“This desert, as you call it, is because we are going through a worldwide famine. This happens in a cycle every few thousand years — oafenkind has been on earth for 10,000 years. It is nothing to worry about. Things will get better. We will survive.”

“Oh.”

He lowered his voice. “That is what the wealthy say… but our sacred speaker says there are people, scientists, who believe that it signals the end of days.”

“What do you mean?”

“They say we have angered the great creator and he has turned his back on us and left us to perish in a world that we have destroyed. We have poisoned the air with our mining and the waters with our waste, we have scorched the face of the earth with our overharvesting and our wars. We have caused the cold places to become warm. Many animals have died and will never return. The free-range mans are almost all gone. There are almost no more mans in the wild. We have hunted them into near extinction. The only mans alive now are mans that we raise for pets and circuses.”

She frowned. “Pets and circuses.”

“I do not mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I know. You are a good oaf.”

“I remember you told me that your mother said this world was going to die. But I do not think I believe it. The great creator would not give the oaf the power to destroy the world. The oaf is but a part of the world. The oaf is a creature of nature too. If the oaf overhunts an animal and it dies out, then that is a natural death because the oaf is a natural creature too.”

“True, but the great creator gave the oaf understanding,” she argued, “which makes him greater than other natural creatures. The oaf, unlike other creatures, understands that he is destroying the world for a selfish and temporary purpose, and he is able to correct his actions and halt the destruction. If he does not do that, then maybe he is indeed but a dim-witted pinhead and does not deserve to be called the greatest of the great creator’s creations, right?”

She saw from his expression that he lacked understanding. There was a chasm between them that she could not bridge. But he was soooooo big. She had forgotten how big he was. How big and how handsome.

They looked at each other, and there was something that he wanted to tell her and there was something that she wanted to tell him.

It was she who spoke first.

He knelt close and she whispered into his face: “I have learned of a thing that I did not know before. The way I learned it was painful… but now I understand some things about us, you and me. We are not different beings, your people and mine. We come from the same family tree. We are the same people, just different sizes. Man is but a smaller version of the oaf. And there is no such thing as talking mans and mans that cannot talk. Mans that cannot talk are simply mans who speak a different language.”

She saw the look on his face and she knew he was about to ask a question, and she raised a hand for him to be silent.

“You do not know of languages because your people only have one language. So you do not even have a name for the language you speak. You do not even have a word for the word language.” She paused to look at his eyes. Did he have understanding? Was it even worth it to keep trying to explain? “In my world,” she went on, “your language would be called Frisian, which is not too different from the language I speak with my husband and my family, which is called English. My husband, who is learned among the mans of our world, speaks English, Frisian, French, Dutch, and German. These are languages. In my world, mans have many languages…”

She wanted to tell him that in many ways the humans of her world, and even the mans of his world, were more advanced than the oafs, who lived mostly clumped in large, overpopulated groups instead of spreading out and expanding their civilizations into the wildernesses and other continents of their world. The oafs, who possessed an almost religious fear of the unknown, had a belief that wildernesses were for hunters, adventurers, and scientists, but not for building cities in. Most oafs believed that wildernesses, along with forests, deserts, and mountains, were for plundering and bringing stuff back from, but not for living in. As a result of having lived so close together for such a long time, the oafs had never had their language or their blood stretched out and then comingled. They all looked alike and sounded alike, even when they were mortal enemies facing off in their many and devastating wars.

She continued: “Even in your world, mans have many languages, but only those fortunate enough to have grown up with oafs and who therefore speak the language of the oaf are considered to be talking mans. But all mans are talking mans, just as all oafs are talking oafs! Don’t you understand? My mother was a talking man. She simply did not speak your language.”

He nodded his head out of politeness, though he found it unbelievable that all mans were talking mans.

This new world that she had escaped to had filled her head with some very strange notions — this new world where mans could marry and be called husband and wife. Hahaha. Could there be such a place? Would the great creator allow such an impossible, upside-down place to exist? A world where mans wore shoes? He tried to picture it in his head, but it was too much like a story for children.

Hahaha.

There was no understanding in him at all.

She continued: “We are the same beings, you and I, so we can have feelings for each other that are greater than master and pet. Thus… you were my first love.”

At last, there was understanding in his eyes.

“I was jealous when you fell in love with that girl, the one with the wicked brother who burgled me and sold me into the mines. But I am happy to know that I loved you. I used to think that it was a monstrous feeling I had for you, but now I know better.”

He nodded his head, but was unable to speak the words — to say that he had loved her too. They had come of age at around the same time, but she was a lesser creature, a pet, and the ideas that he’d had in his head about her back then — they were monstrous, as she had said, simply monstrous. How he had wished for her to leave his room and go live in her proper kennel that he and his father had built with their own hands, but if she had done that then he would have spent all of his time out there with her because he had indeed loved her.

Yet he did not say this, and there was no need for him to say it because she was his elder and she knew these things through having lived an unsheltered and precarious life. He was bigger, but she was wiser, having traveled widely in both the old world and the new. Thus, she was his master.

But he was big and, oh, magnificently beautiful. She gazed unabashedly.

He joked, uncomfortably, under her gaze, “In your world, I see they make shoes small enough for mans!”

It was enough to break the spell. “You silly pinhead!” she said, shaking her head.

“Hahaha,” he laughed.

“And,” she whispered to him, “that one there, the simpleton.” She pointed to the oaf. “He is Mike. He is my son from that oaf general I told you about who had his way with me.”

He looked at the little pinhead again, and then he understood all things. The frecks, he laughed to himself. The frecks!

“He has frecks like his mother,” he told her. Then he laughed out loud. “He is such a little thing for an oaf. What a shorty! Hahaha. They would tease him in school.”

“But in our world, he is considered quite big. And you are so big, Zloty. I had forgotten just how big you are, and so handsome,” said she to him.

“Oh,” said he to her.

His blush was interrupted as just then his mother, Gretjel, looked through the window as did his father, Uulfnoth, and they recognized their red-haired female man. She had returned to them! They came outside, running with arms outstretched.

His children were there, his boys, Tado and Zloty the younger, and his wife who was named Gretjel, as was his mother, but was called Grietjelaia so there would be no confusion.

They all came out and embraced and exchanged stories.

And all were happy with joy and wonderment.

Just before his female man and her family made their return to their world, they lined up and in perfect harmony sang a beautiful song for the boy of her childhood and his family.

And then they sang more songs, and they too were beautiful, for her family was made up of all singing mans, even the oaf, whose name was Mike, a big simpleton, who had the beard and sexual maturation of a twenty-four-year-old man, but the mind and manner of an eight-year-old oaf, for he was both man and oaf.

Gretjel, the mother, ran inside the house and brought out a new small singing harp, as the first was destroyed during the burgling of their home that originated the adventure, and gave it to their long- lost and now returned female man, and she took it.

She bowed to Gretjel. “Thank you,” she said.

Her husband Rufus had eyes that smiled and hands that rubbed together with glee when he saw the gift of the golden harp, which was priceless in their world. More wealth! There can never be too much wealth, he thought.

But his female man wife nudged him and he reached into his pockets, stuffed to bursting with stolen loot, and withdrew all the silver that he had nabbed earlier that day from a miserable old pinhead who lived in the caves near the hidden entrance to the portal between the higher and lower firmaments.

Rufus bowed graciously and gave the silver coins to Gretjel, the elder.

“Thank you,” she said, bowing in her turn. “But this is too much. We are simple people. We do not need this.”

Her husband Uulfnoth, whose eyes had smiled and whose hands had rubbed together with glee when he saw the silver being placed in his wife’s hands, shook his head with great energy and hurriedly spoke these words: “What my wife is trying to say is that she is grateful for your most kind and most generous and most thoughtful gift, which we are most honored to accept.” And he took the silver from his wife Gretjel’s hands and stashed it with a quickness in his pockets.

Everyone smiled knowingly.

After the tearful goodbyes were spoken, the female man and her family made the long journey back to the lighted hole in the firmament, and they descended the many thousands of stairs on what remained of what once may have been a tower built by mans who wanted to join with the gods, and they returned home to their world and all of its problems.

And they were happy.

And her boy, who had become a full-grown oaf with boys of his own and an oafen wife who shared his mother’s name, went back to his bed in his childhood home.

And he was happy.