Joyous and Moonbeam Read Free Page B

cottage and picking bunches of wild flowers and jumping off the rope at the eastern water hole when it was hot, as it so often was, and finding out who and how we were.
    When you fall in love like that, Joyous, and I really hope that one day you will, it’s like opening a new book, a beautiful book with each page being different and surprising and joyous. Each page something to behold, a gift from God. That’s what Thomas Bowen and I did that summer. Carefully, lovingly unfolded the pages in our book oftogetherness, one by one, slowly, quietly, knowing how strongly it mattered. We were never disappointed. Never at all. So that’s the first part of my story to you. Very important and the best of everything, as you will see.
    Lots of love, Mamma

JOYOUS
    Go back, you say, mister, go back. Joyous can remember going-back-stuff like school days but not to do so much of that because going back there is very hard to be working around a little. Schools were not liking Joyous because they were not so dandiful. Schools were honkingly big places made of concrete and angered eyes and hard pieces. Lots and lots of hard pieces like other boys and lunchtimes and not understanding and too many words for Joyous to be hearing, words like icy rainy bits falling down from the sky.
    Mister, there are lots of many examples, like the timea boy who was being called Matthew Berrings, who had a square red face and big hands like two big tuna-fish, did say, Oi, Mong, come around here, got something for you. So Joyous did go trustingly, which Mamma says try not to do, but I can and I am. And then other boys who said they were his mateys did hold me with arms against the side of the gymnasium and Matthew Berrings unzippered his pants and peed on Joyous’s legs. I do recall it was wet, hot and stinky, and in the sunshine being the brightest yellow I had ever seen but a funny kind of pretty like a curvy rod of gold, and then they all were laughing fit to burst at the seams and Matthew Berrings said, Let’s shit on him, too, which is not a word Joyous wants to use but that is what came out from his square red face so it’s righteous.
    Yes, mister, it was a hard, hard piece of time with the sun be hurting my eyes and wet legs and badness smells like toilets then Mister Jameson was walking around and they all skedaddled and Mister Jameson said, Bowen, isn’t it? What, had an accident, son? Honestly. At your age. And that did make it harder some more because Joyous had to be walking behind Mister Jameson through the playing-yard with wetness and smells and confusion and boys be calling Joyous new names like Pisser and Bog-brain and Stink-bomb and head down like an arrested person. Although it was being good later when Mamma did say, No, Joyous, you were no arrested person but a big filmstar man on the red carpet, which was working it around a little so that’s the plain and simple kookity end of that.
    But yes, mister, yes, Joyous can be going right back to Kinsville and knowing that before the poorly judged whip-around and Sammy-K coming for companioning, Mamma did say that there was just her and me and it was beneficial. Mamma is liking to use the words with the
shl
sound: special, artificial, beneficial, because the
shl
sound is softer and does be soothing before sleeping. When Joyous was a just a slip of a lad and filled up to the brimsome with all that world-wondering, Mamma was calling out, Joyous, My Special! Which I did like because it was being sounded like an official title, like you might say, Grand Pooh-Bah Lord High Everything Else Of Titipu. Which I did see once on a singing movie on our old black-and-white TV that Sammy-K later did smash with a hammer because he was being angered about the burned sausages late home for tea so we did get another one with colours a bit further on when the angry was gone.
    Back then, before Sammy-K, we lived away from the city in a farming house on the land. Joyous doesn’t