26 - The Boy With The Three Gold Rings

Latoya's smile was as wicked as her brother's face was somber. She leaned over to grab a candle.

"It didn't end there, of course. The boy, Hermes. What do you think happened when his mother died? Auntie told me what happened with...

THE BOY WITH THE THREE GOLD RINGS

Hermes Thothson was eighteen when his mother died. His father had saved one bullet for himself, and the boy had to sit with the bodies for eight hours, waiting for the man's heart to catch up with the fact that its brains had been blown out. Auntie had been called. She watched the boy as he unbuttoned his mother's dress. The rings looked bigger than they had on Isis Thothson's, nineteen years ago. Or so auntie thought.

"You don't have to," she croaked. Her dark brown eyes sought the young man's, grey as slate. "Ain't nobody to know."

He turned to her then, and there were tears in his eyes. For as much as Nefertiti Thothson had been colder and harsher since the day she had put those rings on her body, she could see that the young man had loved her.

"I'd know."

She did not hold his hand, when he went to old Adamson's place. Nearly twenty years, and more of his body was blue with ink than when auntie had been there last, and the old sailor had not seemed surprised to see either of them again.

"I done some reading," he said, as he weighed the three heavy gold rings in his hand. "There's those as think such a thing as these is cheating, in a sense."

The two men's eyes met. It was not an angry staring contest, only a measure of wills.

"She was my mother," Hermes Thothson said. "And I would cheat a god for her."

Well, there was nothing to be said to that. Needle and flame, blood and ****. The young man had not reached his full growth, but his shoulders were broad and his muscles well-developed for his age. The heavy, feminine ornaments looked odd on his masculine physique, the weight of the gold tugging particularly painfully at his nipples, but he bore the weight and the pain with courage.

Auntie said nothing. She felt her part in this was to bear witness.

It was not long after the Thothson's were buried—Nefertiti in the pyramid in Eastside, and his father in an unmarked grave in the potter's field—that auntie hired him to carve her own stone. She had her own plot picked out and paid for, and wanted to have it settled before she died, if it be tomorrow or a year or twenty years after. Hermes quoted her a low price, as she was a friend of the family, and maybe would have done it for free if business had permitted. Times were hard just then, and he was alone in the world, save for his aunt who was a schoolteacher. They had dinner every week.

So Auntie would drop in from time to time to inspect the work; she'd been insistent on having an angel to hover over her, and one with features no man would mistake for a white woman, for she insisted God had to have at least one Black angel among all the rest. Other days she would visit with Asa Thothson, and between the two she saw and heard much more than anyone else in Dagon's Hollow.

She saw the young man fill out, though his beard never came in. Broad across the shoulders, but slim and wasp-waisted. Did not hear that strange accent in his voice, did not see that familiar smile she had seen on his mother's face. Yet there was a change to him. A softening of the features. Longer lashes of the eye. A fullness to the lips.

When they sat at tea, some months after, Asa confessed young Hermes had started taking boarders at the house. Young men, often drifting through on the railroad. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for a week. Despite how hard he worked, she worried that maybe the stonecutting business was not paying enough for him.

One afternoon, Auntie came around the house at an unexpected hour. She heard a noise that made her not go to the front door, but to walk quietly around the house to just outside the master bedroom window. She listened for a long time to the savage grunts of two voices, a steady plap-plap-plap, and at last dared a quick look.

Hermes Thothson had his shirt off, his britches down around his thighs. The swollen teats that hung from his muscular chest would have been enough for any woman, and the strong black fingers tugged at those rings, stretching out the swollen nipples obscenely. Behind him, a man grunted. Dark skin beaded with sweat, shaven head glistening in the little light that came through the window. The ring in Hermes' belly button flopped back and forth with each pounding thrust of those powerful hips, and his buttocks pushed back to meet it.

Auntie kept her own counsel. A few weeks later, Hermes installed the angel above her grave, and she noticed that the young man seemed to have gained weight; at least, he looked to be getting a little pot-belly that made his shirt over-snug, the outline of the gold ring there visible if you knew to look for it. She asked Asa whether he was eating right. Asa confirmed her nephew had a terrific appetite these days, but it spoke well for him that he had ceased smoking and never touched a drop of liquor.

He had not ceased to take in boarders. There was some talk in town at that. Auntie didn't like such talk, and said so, but rumors have a life of their own. She judged her time carefully, when Asa said that he was going away for a little while on some business in California, auntie stepped by to make a call.

The stomach was pronounced now, and the broad chest puffy. Bandages, she thought. Her eyes met his...and for the first time, auntie wondered who was staring out from behind those eyes to meet her gaze.

She had packed her bag.

"I was thinkin'," she said slowly. "Of going west for a while. There are them as might need the help of a midwife."

"I'm sure there are," Hermes said, and there was a touch of an accent there, muddled, but auntie could not be sure.

"I had heard from your aunt, that maybe you were headed out that way," auntie said, and her tone conveyed far more than her words. "May be we could travel together for a little while, since we're headed in the same direction."

Hermes smiled. It made auntie feel as if a hole had been opened in her chest. She knew that smile of old.

"I'd be delighted to have you, auntie," he said. "I'll even pay your way."

Hermes Thothson and auntie got on the train. In San Francisco, a young woman, enormous with child, in a new dress, got off, helped along by an old Black midwife. They checked into a hotel. Three months they were away. Letters came back to Dagon's Hollow, and everyone there heard the news. A scandalous affair with a young married woman who had stopped at Dagon's Hollow months before. The sudden **** of her husband. Hermes Thothson hurrying out west to marry her before the child was born.

Her **** in childbirth.

Hermes Thothson was never quite the same when he returned to Dagon's Hollow, with two newborn babies in his arms and auntie at his side. He walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his days; some damage to the hip that never healed quite right; and he never entirely lost the weight he gained, though his stomach was no longer swollen, his chest remained enormous.

Auntie said little of the trip, except when asked directly, and she said honestly that she had helped with the birth. She told me once how, when Hermes was born, he was a perfectly normal boy in every respect. Yet in San Francisco...she hadn't known what to expect. Yet she told me that she had experienced the most profound sense of déjà vu in her life. It had been so very much like seeing Hermes' mother give birth, all over again.

"Now, there are still Thothsons here in Dagon's Hollow. In fact, Leroy and I have a little Thothson blood in us—on our mother's side. But neither of us has inherited anything...yet."

So saying, she blew out the candle.