The Bloodpines

By Matt Beers

The walk to the forest of bloodpines was once a meaningful rite-of-passage, instilling confidence and purpose in the boys who undertook the task, but Parlay Burnham, the one-legged son of a widowed schoolteacher, sees it only as another form of oppression. As the other boys in town eagerly prepare for the four-day hike, Par struggles with insecurity, expectations, and the uncertainty of his place in the community.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, James Lester, a brilliant and misunderstood boy with nothing to prove, has no intention of making the walk. He thinks it’s childish and pointless and he scoffs at the boys as they pass, but seeing Par limping along at the rear of the pack changes James’ mind. He knows what boys are like, knows what they’re capable of doing to each other. Even in a group of two-dozen boys, Par will be all alone out there.

On their journey to the bloodpines, Par and James find that the road of self-discovery can be a lot longer than expected. They learn that life is about more than survival. They learn that sometimes you have to fight for what you want. Mostly they learn that you can’t let others tell you who you are.

The Bloodpines is a story of courage, redemption, and hope as two unlikely friends search for meaning in a world that doesn’t want them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Beers
• Release date: Jun 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386385080

Matt Beers

Matt Beers was born and raised, against his will, in northern Indiana. He started life pink and angry, which seems to be a recurring theme. Matt lives in a grumpy house that leans ever so slightly, depending on the wind, with his patient wife and three loud children.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Common Lester stood at the railing on top of the Watchtower and watched as the last few boys disappeared, laughing and cheering, down the path toward home. They wouldn’t go far, though. The sun was setting and there was a designated campsite nearby where they would all spend the night.

The whole thing...the walk, the Watchtower, the non-existent bloodpines...seemed foolish to Common, but much of adulthood seemed foolish to him. This was just one more confusing piece of the puzzle.

He wasn’t in a hurry, but he was growing impatient. Almost done over there? he called. His best friend, Abner Burnham, knelt on the platform at the top of the Watchtower with his hatchet in his hand. It was a tradition to carve your name into the tower once you’d climbed it, one more layer of proof that you’d come and claimed your manhood.

Almost, said Abner. Common walked over to inspect Abner’s handiwork. He had carved both of their names nearly a half-inch deep.

Good Lord, Ab, said Common. Did you need to cut it so deep?

I don’t want it to wear off. Look at the names on here, he gestured around him at the graffito covering the platform. You can barely read some of them. I just want to make sure future generations of disillusioned boys know we were here. Abner had a habit of overdoing things, and he took perverse pride in knowing how obnoxious he was being in moments like this.

Future generations? repeated Common. You think our great-grandsons will still be coming up here?

Abner waved away the question. I’m never having kids.

Common didn’t pursue the comment. The wound behind it was still too fresh. Instead, he looked around at some of the other names carved into the platform. He recognized many of them. For generations boys had been coming up here to fulfill the rite of passage. He’d been excited himself to climb the Watchtower and see where the great forest of bloodpines had once stood, but now that he’d done it he wondered what the point was.

I think I’d like to have kids some day, he said, forgetting that he was avoiding that particular topic.

Fine. Have a hundred kids, said Abner. He put a few finishing touches on the carving and stepped back to examine his work. I hope they’re all girls and you have to find husbands for all of them.

The two boys, both fifteen years old, stood at the railing and watched the sun touch the horizon, another mid-summer day gone.

You ready to go back? asked Common, meaning to the campsite.

I don’t ever want to go back, said Abner, meaning home.

You can’t do this, Ab.

Why go back? asked Abner. So my father can control my every move? Or so I can watch Victoria get married off to the highest bidder?

Did you really think you had a future with her? asked Common for what seemed like the hundredth time.

I asked her to run away. Abner stared at the setting sun without seeing it. Just before the Jubilee. Her father was so preoccupied with preparations...It would have been a week before he noticed she was gone.

Your pa would have noticed, said Common.

Well, it doesn’t matter now, spat Abner. She said, ‘no.’ She said that it was better this way. She said that we’re from two different worlds and she wouldn’t be happy living my life and I wouldn’t be happy living her life. She sounded like her mother.

I think I agree with her, said Common. Abner shot him a dirty look. Can you imagine marrying into that family? Do you really want to be related to Simon Downey? Victoria’s great, don’t get me wrong, but her brother has got to be the most unpleasant person I’ve ever met.

True, agreed Abner. He couldn’t even do the whole walk. Had to get a ride from his father.

And everyone knows it, said Common, but they’ll all cheer like mad when he walks into town a full day ahead of the others.

I can’t go back to that, said Abner. Not yet.

So, what do we do?

Abner looked south toward town and then north away from it. What do you suppose is up that way?

Mountains, eventually, said Common. Why?

A spark flared in the corner of Abner’s eye. What do you suppose we’d find if we walked that way?

Not much, said Common cautiously. Loggers cleared out most of the trees.

But not all. They couldn’t have cleared out everything.

You think there might be bloodpines out there?

Why not? asked Abner.

Nobody’s brought back a bloodpine in nearly a hundred years, said Common. They’re all gone.

Are they? asked Abner. The spark danced from the corner of his eye to the center.

Yes, said Common. He saw the dancing spark, had seen it before, and didn’t like what it meant.

But how can we be sure? We’d better go check. Abner moved toward the stairs.

Ab! You can’t go wandering around the woods for a week. Your father will kill you.

A week? said Abner, pausing at the top of the winding staircase and putting on his most sincere, innocent expression. This could take months.

Chapter One

It was two days before the Jubilee and Parlay Burnham stood in the shade of a large oak tree. The leather straps around his thigh, never very comfortable to begin with, were unbearable in the stifling July heat. He longed to sit down, undo the straps, and remove the heavy wooden leg that dangled beneath his right knee, but that would have been madness. The other children knew about his disability and they made sure to taunt him whenever possible. To remove his leg in public, to flaunt it so brazenly, would have only invited further torment. He didn’t even dare scratch at the straps.

Par preferred to stay indoors where he could be alone with a book, but his mother sent him out here every few days so that he could pay his respects to the man who lay beneath the gravestone standing twenty feet from the large oak tree. Abner Burnham, Par’s father, died in the same accident that took Par’s leg. One wagon-load of logs and one skittish horse was all it took to change the Burnham family forever. That was seven years ago. Par, now fourteen, had suffered in one way or another every day since. He sometimes envied his father, whose suffering was over.

After what he judged to be long enough, Par stepped away from the tree and winced as the leather straps pinched his thigh. He didn’t know how much longer he would be able to wear the false leg. It was far too small for him and the straps barely reached around his thigh as it was. His mother had made such a fuss over the cost of it and bemoaned the day he would outgrow it that he had gone to great lengths to postpone that day for as long as possible. He avoided exercise and ate very little hoping to forestall growth of any kind. Whether due to his efforts or because of his natural build, it was hard to say, but he remained small and skinny and his wooden leg lasted far longer than intended, though it was several inches too short.

Par had adopted a shuffling gait that kept his wooden leg pressed to the ground to prevent it from falling off, but it still happened occasionally. When it did, he was forced to drop his pants to refasten his leg. He suffered this humiliation stoically, but the bitterness always lasted for days after.

His mother never seemed to notice how he suffered. She was too busy relishing her own suffering. It’s not easy, she would say, supporting a son on a school teacher’s wage. And you wouldn’t believe the looks I get from the other women around town, as though I’d like nothing better than to swoop down and snatch up one of their husbands.

Grace Burnham had been a beautiful woman before the rigors of widowhood forced a permanently pinched look on her gray face. Moral Downey, a local boy who seemed to enjoy tormenting Par more than the others did, once said of Mrs. Burnham, She looks like she’s trying to figure out who broke wind, but everyone knows it was her. Par made a big show of being upset by this, but he had to admit, privately, that Moral Downey was absolutely right. Judgment and guilt seemed to be waging a constant war on Grace Burnham’s features.

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Par shuffled across the schoolyard leaving a groove in the dust. He made his way around the back of the building and dropped himself on the step by the back door. He stretched his wooden leg out in front of him and slid his pants down just enough to get at the straps to undo them. The moan that escaped him when he unfastened the buckles was almost indecent. Blood rushed to the stump and a fierce burning set in, but Par welcomed it. He hoisted his pants up over his rump and did up his buttons before reaching down to pull the prosthetic through his pant leg. He placed the fake leg on the step next to him, took the safety pin from where he kept it under his collar, and pinned his empty trouser leg up so it wouldn’t flap like a dog’s ear. Giving his tingling stump a hearty smack to get the blood flowing, he stood on his one good leg and, tucking his fake leg under his arm, he hopped up the remaining step and through the back door of the school where he hoped he would be allowed to read in peace for the remainder of the day.

That hope died at the sight of his mother standing just inside the door glaring at him, soapy sponge in one hand, bucket at her feet. She had a manic look in her eyes and Par tensed, waiting for a whirlwind of complaints, a list of imagined slights his mother had suffered, none of which were his fault, but all of which were his responsibility.

Frozen in the doorway, one hand on the door frame, one hand clutching his wooden leg, Par waited, but the attack never came. Grace Burnham slowly turned her wide eyes back to the blackboard and applied the sponge in what had been her Friday afternoon ritual since before her son was born. Par exhaled quietly, slowly.

He had seen this behavior from his mother before, had seen her lost in her own head. Once he asked her where she went in those dream-moments, but she had no idea what he was talking about and he dropped the subject when she got agitated.

He gripped the wooden leg between his knees and, leaning on the desks and swinging his legs forward, moved quickly through the room until he reached the coat hall. A long bench stretched the length of the coat hall and Par stashed his leg beneath it. There was a small loft above the hall, all that remained of the bell tower that had been the town’s pride and joy. The tower caught fire years ago, but the bell had survived and was mounted on a small raised platform in the town square.

Par’s father boarded up the loft when he repaired the roof after the tower fell, but there was a small door set into the ceiling that provided access to the small space. Abner shared the secret space with his son once upon a time and it was the only place in the entire world where Par now felt safe. There were several hundred townsfolk who would have agreed that it would have been better if Par had died under that log roll seven years ago, but up here, up in the loft, no one winced when they looked at him. No one thought of him as a wooden leg with a boy attached. Up here, he was Parlay Burnham, voracious reader, hopeless dreamer. He was a one-legged teenaged boy, yes, but he was so much more. King. Warrior. Sorcerer. Here he was someone’s beloved, someone’s hero. Out there he was a tragedy, the broken-hearted son of a dead man.

Par nimbly hopped up onto the long bench and his fingers instantly found the nearly-hidden grooves between the wallboards. Years of doing this had made his arms and hands exceptionally strong. He hoisted himself up and climbed, hand over hand, up the wall until he could reach the whitewashed panel, which he pushed up into the ceiling. He gripped the ledge and fell back, swinging out over nothing, pretending for a brief moment that he was in danger, and then, with little effort, he pulled himself into the dark hole, dropping the whitewashed board back in place.

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Parlay Burnham had ceased to exist, which was fine with him.

Chapter Two

The townsfolk loved to talk about the Lester family. They would hypothesize this way and that about the quiet life they led, why they kept mainly to themselves, whether their marriage was a happy one, and, most of all, what was wrong with their giant, stupid son, James. An outsider might hear the whispers and conclude that the Lesters had a shameful past that they couldn’t quite outrun, but the bottom line was that Common Lester hadn’t lived up to everyone’s expectations. A minor sin, but enough to condemn the entire family.

James Lester had always been big for his age, first as an infant, then as a toddler, right up into his teen years. This alone was no cause for alarm, but the fact that the boy never spoke was proof enough for most folks that he was more than a little slow. They saw him trudging around town with his father, most often barefoot with a battered straw hat perched on top of his head, and they would whisper things like, Such a shame, or I can’t imagine if one of mine had turned out like that. They would have been surprised to know that, behind that blank stare, under that ridiculous hat, James Lester was laughing at them.

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It was true that James rarely spoke and that he didn’t attend the school in town, but those things had nothing to do with his intelligence. Grace Burnham, the school teacher, had met with Common and Rebecca when James was in his first year to suggest that public school might not be right for their son.

He worked through the grade one primer in his first week, said the widow Burnham.

He’s eager to please, said Common. He doesn’t mean to show off...

You misunderstand, said Mrs. Burnham. I haven’t even started the grade one children on the reading primer yet. We’ve been reviewing letters and numbers. I try to set a pace manageable for all of the children so none are left behind.

And he took it upon himself to complete the reading primer, you say? suggested Common.

The teacher looked annoyed. That was the first week. In the subsequent three weeks, he has completed all eight of the reading primers we teach here. He’s also been completing the math assignments I’ve been setting the older students. I wasn’t aware he was doing this until I found him outside at lunch one day explaining fractions to some of the older children who were having difficulty grasping the concept.

Common didn’t exactly smile, but there was a proud sparkle in his eye. His wife blushed and covered her mouth, suppressing a laugh.

It’s no laughing matter, Mrs. Lester. By taking it upon himself to teach the other children, James has diluted my authority. He’s making it appear as though a child could do my job. Common refrained from pointing out that a child was, indeed, doing her job. Mrs. Burnham was the type of person to presume that everything was meant as a personal insult to her, a character flaw that had only deepened in the three months since the accident that took her husband.

Has he been disrespectful? asked Rebecca.

Haven’t you been listening? Mrs. Burnham was growing frustrated with the fact that she was the only one who saw the problem with James’s actions. I set age-appropriate assignments and by completing the advanced coursework he is making it clear that he has no respect for my authority or expertise. Furthermore, by teaching them himself, he has demonstrated to the other students that I am an inferior educator.

It sounds to me like he’s just helping his classmates. I don’t know if I’d qualify that as an act of disrespect, said Common.

Mr. Lester, I appreciate all you’ve done for my son and I, but I do not feel that I can continue teaching your son... She paused, collected herself, and said, It isn’t a question of his behavior. He’s beyond me. I have nothing left to teach him. He reads as well as anyone, myself included. He instinctively grasps mathematical concepts more advanced than I have ever taught.

But it’s been a month! He’s only been going to school for a month! cried Rebecca.

Mrs. Lester, said Mrs. Burnham. The other children have already noticed that his intelligence far surpasses their own. Some of them are resentful. There has been some teasing, none of it as vicious as... her voice broke. None of it as vicious as that directed toward my own son, but I fear it won’t be long before it escalates to that level.

Rebecca leaned forward and clasped Mrs. Burnham’s trembling hand in hers, mother to mother. Common said, calmly, James can deal with bullies, that’s no reason to end his education.

Mrs. Burnham looked bitterly at him. You think this is education? There’s nothing left for him to learn. Send the boy off to a private school, get him near a library, give him access to an observatory with a telescope. He’ll be a great man, Mr. Lester, but not if you keep him here.

It was clear to Common that Grace Burnham, though prudish and eager to take offense, also genuinely wanted the best for her students. Her suggestion that James be sent to learn elsewhere had nothing to do with a personal grievance and everything to do with the boy’s potential.

Thank you, Grace. Common stood and tilted his head toward his friend’s widow.

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That was nearly seven years ago. Common had not sent his son off to a private school, but instead ordered crates and crates of books on every subject and watched over the next several years as the boy devoured every word.

Common enjoyed having his son around. It seasoned his days. The two of them spent their days working the farm, repairing fences and roofs, and tending to the animals, and spent their evenings reading, studying, and sharing ideas. Common was amazed by some of the things James said while they sat around the kitchen table. Baffled, but amazed. He understood right away why Grace Burnham had been upset. Folks don’t like being made to feel inferior, and it was impossible to talk to James and not feel a little bit stupid. It never bothered Common, though. His strengths