Every Boy Should Have a Man by Preston L. Allen Page A

every day, for now he had no man of his own to love and his father possessed no discretionary money to purchase another.
    At the wealthy boy’s house, the poor boy was treated with a respectful sadness, even by the wealthy boy’s father, who regretted originating the cruel though legal actions that had led to the unfortunate ending. Each time the poor boy visited, the father sent him home with a gift of food or silver for his parents, which the poor boy always accepted with discomfort and reluctance.
    But the poor boy was not there for the generosity of the wealthy father nor even the friendship of the wealthy son. He was there for the infant baby man of his female man.
    Each day she came to look more and more like her mother, with the red frecks on her face and arms growing rustier, and the red of her hair becoming more like fire.
    The man’s year is three times faster than the regular year, so at the end of the first year the poor boy had watched the baby man go from cradler to toddler and utter her first words. She was a man that talked, as had been her lidless-eyed father before her.
    In the second year, the poor boy watched her grow from toddler into precocious childhood as she began early to display her natural gifts.
    In his grand room, the wealthy boy’s father had many instruments of music, enough for an entire orchestra, and the child man reached for the tinny drums and the colored flute and both the small and large singing harps, each of which she did play, for she was a musical man, as had been her mother before her.
    The music she played was always bright and cheerful.
    In her fourth year, when she was a budding prepubescent of twelve in man years, the child female man did become more melancholy, as did her music, as she went into heat and began to attract the attention of the man mans in the wealthy house.
    The wealthy boy, who was twelve in regular years, did not want her to be fixed as his father had threatened. He told his friend, who was also twelve, “My father wants to have her fixed, but I have a plan. Why don’t you take her? You still have the proper kennel your father built for her mother, don’t you?”
    The poor boy lit up. “That’s a great idea!”
    He exchanged the secret handshake with his friend and embraced him.
     
    * * *
     
    When the poor boy’s father came home, he found his son pounding nails into the roof of the proper kennel in the backyard.
    “I’m fixing it up. I’m getting a new female man,” the boy explained.
    His father’s brows and spirit lifted. “The one with the red frecks? The one who is the daughter of your old female man?”
    The hammering boy nodded.
    He heard the muttered words beneath his father’s breath: “It’s a good idea, I suppose. But how are we going to pay for it?”
    The boy stopped hammering nails. “It’s not that much money—she’s not a baby anymore and she’s housebroken domesticated. It won’t cost much. Anyway, there is the money I earn down at the mill.”
    The father nodded. Down at the mill. The boy worked with him as a loader for a few hours every day after school. The boy was a hard worker, not like some of the other goof-off boys who worked at the mill part-time. The father was proud of his son; every father should have a boy like him.
    He said to him, “Very good, but if you ever run short, come to me. Together we will find a way.”
    The boy went back to pounding nails and the father leaned against the fence and said, “It is not true when your mother tells you that I do not like mans. I like them just fine, but when I was growing up, my mother and I lived on the edge of the wilderness in a dwelling on the farm of a friend of my dead father. Our living was hard because we had very little money. It was not a farm with animals, but with grain. I was a small boy and lonely because there was nothing to do and no one to play with. Yes, the farmer had two dogs, but they were work dogs and not very good for companionship. One