About Lil's Boy / Everything Good and True

by Sarah Rogers
34 pages / 16000 words
ISBN: 978-1-60370-730-5, 1-60370-730-1
Available file types - html. lit, pdf, prc

Wealthy, lonely Alex Jordan has the time and money in 1915 California to find paid companionship. In a brothel in Salinas, he finds Tom playing the piano, and thinks it might just be love. Through seduction, old family photos that cause problems and war, Alex and Tom live and love through these two intertwined stories. Will their need for each other be enough to survive all of their obstacles?

Sample

Salinas Valley, California--January, 1919
The afternoon train was running late. I paced up and down the platform, yanking my wool scarf over my mouth and nose, turning up my collar. A month ago I would have barely felt the cold. I'd barely felt anything other than my heart aching with loneliness and diminishing hope. A month ago I was nearly a broken man, but now that was fading into dim memory. Tom was coming home.

They called it the Great War, the war to end all wars. It was the end of innocence for my generation. It was the end of an era for most of the world. And for me, it was very nearly the end of everything good and true in my life.

I had been twenty-five years old when I was drafted in the spring of 1918, not long after U.S. declared war against Germany. Tom had barely been twenty-one. He hadn’t even had time to register with the Selective Service when he decided to enlist -- so that neither of us need go off to war alone, he said. We’d lived together as lovers for nearly four years and hadn’t spent a night apart in all that time.

Our life together up to that point had been happy and full. Leaving management of the ranch in capable hands, we spent a year or so traveling the country, spending time in San Francisco, Chicago, and various other places before finally settling in New York. We moved into a brownstone on the Upper West Side and I enrolled at Columbia, while Tom took up his piano studies with a crusty, exacting Russian gentleman who, despite his irascible demeanor, was impressed with Tom’s talent, and thought he had a real chance at a concert career. I was barely two months away from completing my degree when the declaration of war came.

We’d done everything we could to make sure we were both assigned to the same unit, and we were shipped to France together in the first wave of American troops. I remembered my last few moments with Tom before our first battle, at the Marne in mid-July. I wanted so badly to take him in my arms, but all we could do was clasp hands for a few seconds and beg one another to be careful. That was seven months ago.

I remembered the rotten, fetid stench of the trenches, the eardrum-shattering screech of incessant shelling. A searing pain shattered my right arm, and then nothing. I awoke on a pallet in a makeshift medic’s tent, delirious with fever, drifting in and out of consciousness. The next thing I recalled was the clean, antiseptic smell of a proper hospital, and trying to reach for a glass of water on the bedside table with a hand that was no longer there.

They’d amputated my arm halfway between the shoulder and elbow. But that loss was nothing compared to my utter panic at not knowing what had happened to Tom. The Army was no help, since I couldn’t prove that I was immediate family. I asked every man in the hospital if they’d seen him, but no one had. I checked the casualty bulletins for his name, to no avail. By the time the doctors declared me well enough to be shipped home, I was frantic with worry. I protested mightily, but the Army would brook no opposition. I was going home whether I wanted to or not.

I stayed in New York for the next two months, using every contact at my disposal to try and get word about Tom. Then, near the end of September, I had a visit from another man in our unit, who, like myself, had been sent home due to injuries. He told me he’d seen Tom a week before he himself had been shipped home, and that he was alive and well.

I wrote Tom a letter every week, hoping against hope that somehow they’d find their way to him. I never received a single reply. And so, reluctantly, in the first week of October, I left New York and returned to California. Jenkins, my estate manager, had been drafted not long after I was, and the ranch was in sore need of my attention. So I wrote Tom a letter telling him where I’d gone, left it on the dining room table, and caught the train west.

The ranch needed a good deal of work, which kept me busy most of the time, but worrying about Tom was never far from my mind. I rode into town every day to pick up my mail, in the vain hope that I’d find a letter from him. I scanned the newspapers for his name among the lists of dead and wounded, though its absence afforded me little comfort.

The war was over at last come November, but still I received no word. Then, two days before Christmas, a telegram arrived. My hand shook as I opened it, fearing the worst. It was from Tom. He’d arrived in New York a few days before, and was staying at the brownstone until he could get a train to California. With the holidays, not to mention thousands of men trying to get home, every seat was booked for the next few weeks. I sank onto a nearby chair, stunned and relieved. I didn’t care how long it took him to get home. Tom was alive. Nothing else mattered.

I spied the telltale plumes of gray smoke in the distance, and stood there watching as the tiny black speck grew slowly larger, finally puffing and chugging its way into the station. There weren’t very many people disembarking, but I was still taken aback at the pale, exhausted-looking dark-haired young man who caught my eye and started walking toward me, smiling wanly. He wore the dark wool suit I’d bought him last winter, though he’d lost so much weight it now appeared a size too big for him. When he threw his arms around me, I nearly forgot how to breathe.