Project Purple

40 - The Badger

"It's a mulligrubbing carbuncle of a life!"

Alison liked the expression mulligrubbing carbuncle-He used it often to carp about his chores, or to complain of the general filthiness of their environment. He detested the daily meals, also, but he never complained within earshot of the Matron: She intimidated him to no small degree.

"I had a husband," she would say, "Had to put him down."

When she first said this, Alison took it as some droll dig at the expense of the menfolk. But as the months drew out, the quip took on an ominous new meaning; underscoring its gravity was something that everyone had come to know-The Matron didn't joke.

Some times, when in one of her foul moods, she would berate the Bader's ethnicity, "The Jews killed Christ, and I will not hear of any revisionism on that score."

Alison, having no interest in confronting the woman's bigotry, just raised his hands in surrender and walked away-never knowing if she had truly expected atonement for his killing the Son of God, or for his sexual perversion, or for both. He knew the Matron had a big problem reconciling the reality that the man she chose-the Preacher-in front of everyone, to be her confidant (and perhaps even more!), this good and pious man, could possibly be a Godless butt-pirate!

The Matron was, so it seemed to Alison, in a lonely state of denial.

And as for the Preacher, Robert wouldn't even look Alison's way; such was the man's fear of escaping his own suffocating closet, of announcing this natural penchant to the world-even if 'the world' meant this paltry colony of dirty pilgrims.

Alison felt resented by the others for so many things - for being homosexually deviant, and for the temerity of grandstanding it- as if one drunken assignation with the Preacher constituted some contagious virus of depravity.

But he bore it all-this filthy, brutal version of the colonial experience-as long as it ended before the fall semester at university began in early September.

The tribulations, however, didn't end. September crept in like some sadistic serpent, simpering at them from all the branches of all the trees, and as the leaves drifted onto their tatty boots.

Then they killed Woody Pilgrim, and the Governor and Pickleherring had still not returnd. Alison watched docilely as the colony responded to the carnage by turning on itself.

"This is ya all's fight. I want nothing to do with it," the Tallyman said inside the chapel, his incensed eyes never leaving the Buckskinner's-in some kind of intense Mexican face-off.

The Buckskinner kneaded his shaggy beard, "When this is over, why don't we have a workshop, and we can engage in some meaningful dialog concerning the roots of racism..."

The Tallyman considered the suggestion with his mouth open, as if struck by a sudden, bracing breeze.

"And then," the Buckskinner went on, "perhaps, we can establish a deeper regard for its various forms."

The Tallyman gave a sober blink... It was that twinkle in the Buckskinner's eye-They'd all come to know its maddening contradiction...

The Tallyman discharged at him, the two men falling to the dirt floor of the hut, kicking off a table leg, and the table, with its simple adornments, came crashing down onto them as they ensnared one another, and the others screamed for them to stop. They slammed into each other and almost took out the back wall as Alison watched the Buckskinner jab a vicious elbow into the Tallyman's thorax.