Free Jazz Moon by Joe Okonkwo Page A

read that poem. That was how they whiled away their time together. After they’d tired from splashing in Sugarfish Pond and had kissed themselves numb, Ben read to Willful. They started with the Paul Laurence Dunbar—the only book Ben owned—reading the difficult and beautiful poems worn cover to worn cover over the course of weeks, always while trifling in the groves of dogwoods as yellow-head blackbirds and laughing gulls chirped and clucked overhead.
    Willful couldn’t read or write. Ben wanted to teach him, begged to, but Willful always deferred with, “Maybe someday.”
    When they finished the Dunbar, Willful pulled a new book out of his pocket with what seemed like sleight of hand. “For you, Know-nothin’. I don’t know what it is, but it’s so pretty.”
    It was pretty. Leather-bound. Gold gilting the pages’ edges, the title, Poems of John Keats, spelled out in ornate lettering. They started it right away. Ben bumbled and fumbled the verses at first and Willful constantly asked, “What does that mean?” The language was so strange, it might as well have been foreign. They recognized individual words, but the phrases they created were a mystery. The two boys had to train themselves to submit to the language. When they did, they lost themselves in its beauty, although they never got through more than the first few pages.
    It was an open secret between them that Willful had stolen the book from the store in the white part of town. That and all of the gifts he had given him: candies, sweet apples, a pocketknife with a mother-of-pearl handle. After the Keats poems, more contraband books came. So many that they no longer fit in secret compartments under fussy chickens and Ben had to invent creative ways to stash them. Meanwhile, in the grove of sweet-scented dogwoods, Ben and Willful lamented their lack of books by colored writers, but gorged themselves on what they did have.
    Spinning in a whirlpool of I’ll die if don’t see him soon, Ben didn’t comprehend what consumed him. But when Willful got lost in the beauty of words and faraway places—so immersed that a look of peace illuminated him—he wasn’t just the handsomest boy in Dogwood or a thief or a lazy, good-for-nothing son and brother. Willful was the love of Ben’s life. The whirlpool spun and spun. Out of the dizziness he wrote his first poem:

    Underneath the dogwood trees us lie,
Sweet delights get took on borrowed time.
You is sunnier than day.
I got your love, you got mine.

    Their afternoons in the dogwood groves exceeded poems and pilfered gifts. Willful loved to sit against a tree, Ben kneeling in front of him.
    â€œUndo my pants.”
    Ben obeyed, was happy to obey, happy to make Willful happy. Even if Willful didn’t reciprocate. At least not that way. But he would work Ben until the cream spewed down his big, dark-brown hand in white stripes.
    â€œWhen you gone let me inside you?” Willful asked, numerous times, during the year they’d been together. That act could complete the circle of their intimacy, he said, but it was the one desire of Willful’s that Ben wouldn’t obey. Because one day, Willful had played with him, back there, with an intrusive finger. The deeper he prodded, the worse it hurt.
    More gifts: chocolates in boxes wrapped in tissue paper; a razor for shaving; a bottle of Scotch (it made them sick); a set of suspenders, which he couldn’t wear without provoking suspicion. Things he couldn’t possibly use: a lady’s jewelry box; a parasol.
    He loved the books, but the gold heart-shaped locket was his favorite gift.
    â€œI know it’s for a gal,” Willful said, “but it made me think of our favorite poem. A thing of beauty is a joy forever .”
    The thievery benefited Ben, but not Willful’s own impoverished family. Nevertheless, he anticipated each gift, even as he worried about the consequences if