Across the Blue Mountains

By Ian McDuff

An entry in the Never After castle challenge. With, it will no doubt be observed, my characteristically idiosyncratic twist.

Title, and deeply buried theme (not plot), from Across the Blue Mountains, traditional Anglo-Scots-Appalachian folk song (memorably, spine-tinglingly performed by Robin and Linda Williams).

The grounds of Bacon’s Castle – so called, though in fact it was a Jacobean manor house, one of the showplaces of colonial Virginia, and had never been Bacon’s at all, nor castellated, nor yet defensible – had been thrown open on an unprecedented scale for what most of those who were paying for the privilege of attending it persisted in calling a Renaissance Fair.

It wasn’t, of course: the High Renascence had long since shaded into the Elizabethan Age, the infancy of the Modern, when the Old Dominion was first settled, and the old Allen manor itself, a classic sample of the Age of James, gained its fame and name in 1676, when Bacon’s Rebellion swept through Surry County.

And what was happening this day, in the crisp, leaf-blazoned gilt glory of a Virginia autumn, was actually a Colonial Faire, and one of rather curious antecedents. With the imminence of the 400^th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, in 1607, the Commonwealth of Virginia was spending a good five years patting itself on the back, to the not unprecedented and not unnatural annoyance of Maryland, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. That in itself sufficed to explain the Colonial Faire.

It did not quite explain the presence, amidst the players – more politely called ‘the interpreters’ – indeed, listed, officially and a bit pompously, as the ‘Living Historians’ – of ten young men better known for harmonies, dance moves (well, some of them), and a role in what is oxymoronically called ‘pop culture.’ And thereby hangs a tale.

The factitious, manufactured rivalry between ’N Sync and Backstreet had this much truth to it: firstly, that Backstreet (notably Kevin Richardson) had been affronted by the way in which Lou Pearlman and his henchmen had doublecrossed them, and Kevin had in the earliest weeks of his rage blamed his co-victims of ’N Sync as well as the real villains of the piece (which management, for its own purposes, had spread about, to where it was years before Kevin and BSB as a whole could publicly back down), and secondly, that James Lance Bass had spent his life repressing numerous facets of his personality, but had never been able to curb or control what even Chris admitted was a far superior line in sarcasm and insult. And all this despite the fact that, Southerners all, and Dixie being Dixie, Bass was distant kin to Kevin’s and Brian’s mothers, as he was to the Louisiana Chasezes, to the Mississippi-born Britney (even if she had been largely raised across the state line in Louisana’s Tangipahoa Parish), and, most tenuously of all, to the Timberlake-Harless connection that had given the world his bosom rival and most beloved in-group enemy, Justin.

Not that the public Lance and the public Justin squabbled, as the public Kevin and the public Lance long had. And not that there were not deep ties of affection, lain down originally in freezing German hostelries when the elder members of the band were out raising Cain and Justin and James Lance were thrown together into an alliance of circumstances. But the private James, Josh’s James, the James who in private had the private side of the public JC, had his share of Justin Issues (as who does not?) and a fatal, Southern-fried combination of mulish stubbornness and fiery, hair-trigger temper. And Justin possessed the same characteristics (that being, in fact, the primary basis of their temperamental antipathy), and was inclined to give as good as he got. Both were desperately jealous of one another, in fact, and each subconsciously, unconsciously, preyed upon the insecurities that gave rise to those jealousies, such that each argument was comprised of a fair amount of showing off.

Whenever the two locked horns, it was the same. James, the private James, trundled out the same artillery on each occasion: the slight social advantage of birth he had always possessed over the Timberlakes, and his subsequent self-invention as a Southern Aristocrat (artillery that, if fired, would have been of no effect against the sterner, Yankee defenses of Chris or Joe; but this was one of the axes on which Justin, as a Southerner, still, was open to attack, and weakly defended); and the admittedly devastating armament of a much quicker and more incisive mind and cutting rhetoric. For his part, Justin counterattacked, or often enough began an assault upon a James who had not provoked it recently, by marshalling his own most powerful weapons: his superior popularity and consequent stroke with the label, the body that James so envied him, his higher ‘hipness’ quotient, his comparatively greater ability to pass for wholly straight … and his longer, though infinitely less intimate, connection with Josh, the center of James’s universe.

The situation had taken a turn very much for the worse in 2002, when James had been played for a fool by the Russians even as Justin had the world at his feet with his solo CD (the fact that James – and, privately, Josh, for that matter – didn’t think much of it, musically, was but cold comfort in light of the public and ‘critical’ raves, even if the latter came not from serious critics, but from the lapdog press of the music industry). Ever since, Joe, Chris, and especially Josh, who was nowhere near as oblivious and spacey as even his James thought him, were dedicated to forcing the two to interact amiably by putting them in situations in which they had to cooperate – and perhaps even remember that, fundamentally, they loved each other.

So that was one reason the ’N Sync side of the equation had seized the opportunity and accepted a role in the Colonial Faire.

But the reason they had been offered a role at all was unrelated to these squabbles, of which they took care the public knew nothing. As part of his recasting of himself, James had become increasingly involved, as all high-cotton or socially-aspiring Southerners do, in preservation issues and Saving Our Southern Heritage. Politically, of course, unless there happens to be a seam of coal under a battleground hallowed by the death of a single Confederate soldier or a proposed highway might Threaten An Historic Oak, the UDC / SCV / Antiquities crowd, of which James was now a thorough-going member, has little to say to the tree-huggers and Pretty Butterfly people amongst whom Kevin was notoriously numbered. In fact, just that morning, Kevin and James had one of their usual passages of arms on the subject:

‘Y’all people can go chain yourselves to a damn dogwood tree if you think it he’ps. Fact is, B.A.S.S. and Ducks Unlimited –’ James was of course a member in good standing of both, as he was of Trout Unlimited, the Izaak Walton League, and the NRA – ‘done more to preserve the wild than y’all have managed since John Muir was in short-pants.’

Kevin had just given him A Kevin Look. ‘He’s the NRA, folks,’ he observed, ‘and he votes – a straight corporate ticket.’

‘You hand your coat to a beggin’ leper, give away your millions, leave Kris, and start an Order, then you can pose as St Francis of Assisi,’ James snapped. ‘And I don’t right care to hear huntin’ denounced by anyone as still eats meat. It’s hypocritical.’

‘How do you know I’m not a vegetarian these days, cuz?’

‘Your complexion ain’t bad enough and you don’t fart near enough. Right, Justin?’

‘Wha- yo, why ask me?’

‘You’re the one thinks he’s a “purty little fucker,”’ James had said, using it as a conclusive two-for-one exit line as he went into the dressing room.

In fact, though, the potential pool of donors: makers of charitable contributions for the preservation of historic sites and of wilderness alike: is, reasonably enough, limited, and there is more overlap than the Save the Trees crowd and the Damn the Trees, Save Marse Robert’s Battlefields crowd would prefer to admit. It was this overlap, in the end, that had lured both James and Kevin into supporting the Faire, and from that support, drawn them imperceptibly into playing a part in it, and dragging their bandmates along.

This had been encouraged by Josh, by Chris and Joe, by Joe’s Kel, and by Nick-and-Howie, all of whom were once more acutely concerned by James’s latest round of sniping with Justin. It wasn’t as bad as that horrible Thanksgiving of 2002 (when, if truth be told, just about everyone was angry with Justin, what with the marijuana-with-Nelly stories, the crack about Kevin, the ‘bubblegum’ comments, and all). Few things could be as grim as the time that saw Justin’s and Nick’s first solo CDs: when, immediately after announcing he planned to walk on water (James had started a slow burn the minute he heard that one), Justin had broken his foot, James had not only not extended his sympathies, he’d snapped, ‘Well, maybe it’s a judgment, Mr No-Longer-Religious-Spiritual-Dude.’ Things weren’t quite as bad this time around – at least Justin hadn’t recently committed anything James regarded as a public blasphemy, this time – but their mutual friends hoped, yet again, that a shared task, that was still a break from the rote of performing, might help James and Justin remember that, after all was said and done, they loved each other still.

What they had forgotten was that the Age of Elizabeth and the Age of James, especially in the raw New World, was a time when invective and intrigue were in their fullest flowering. And James, characteristically, had thrown himself into research for his role, far more than had the others, even Joe: if for no other reason than that this Colonial Faire was a semi-private event over the two days on which the groups were participating, public access being limited to movers and shakers in Virginia society and commerce, a group James had a positive hard-on for impressing. (‘Hollywood Lance’ was never wholly submerged beneath the surface of any of James’s personæ.)

In addition to interacting with the other Living Historians and the select public, the young men were booked to do two set-pieces, one set in a London inn’s yard when the colony idea was new (there was a set for that, on the grounds), and one set later, in the Old Dominion itself, on the eve of Bacon’s Rebellion (to be played out in the lawns, gardens, and surround of the Castle itself). Worse still, though the characters and plots were roughed out, they were expected to improvise a great deal of dialogue.

Howie had observed it was rather a pity they were limited to those times and places, as, he said, he could ‘just see James and Josh at a real RenFaire. Josh as, say, Benvenuto Cellini, artist – Big Important Ahhhhtist – rogue, and seducer of both sexes –’ everyone had laughed, and Josh had blushed to the point that he actually glowed – ‘and James…. Absolutamente, James, oh yes: gentlemen, I give you … Niccoló Macchiavelli.’ Even James had grinned at that, if a bit tightly, and Joe had roared. ‘I always said my man Lance’d make a good Italian!’

As it was, though, the London scene called for James to be a young lordling, Josh a Huguenot merchant-refugee, Brian a somewhat Puritanical City of London merchant-prince and investor in the Virginia Company, and Howie a sinister Spanish Don, determined to keep the English out of Spain’s New World.

Kevin had been tapped for the role of one of James 1^st-and-6^th’s Scots favorites, even though it was AJ who was, after all, a Maclean of Duart: AJ had politely indicated that there was no fucking way he was fucking wearing a fucking kilt, and had pointed out that after fucking years of the fucking man-skirt, fucking Kevin oughta be fucking comfortable in the fucking thing. (Sarah had made great strides in cleaning up AJ’s language.) So Kevin stalked about grandly in a muted sett of the usually eye-searing kilts of the Clan Ogilvie, of which the Richardsons are a sept: spying obtrusively on Brian’s character and his attempts to get James to invest in a Virginia voyage, and trying not to flinch when he felt a breeze.

AJ, whose primary goal was having a costume that didn’t reveal his anachronistic ink in this scene, played a robed and turbaned Turk with designs on any new spice trade the English infidels might develop. (Justin, whose role allowed him this license, made up rude rhymes – Elizabethan rap, really – about harems, eunuchs, and boys, and egged the crowd on to participate in hissing the Wicked Don and the Dreadful Turk.)

The real comic relief came from Joey, as a Genoese sea captain trying to peddle charts and maps, but whose Catholicism and poor English kept getting him in trouble; Chris as a wild Irishman who was suspected of being a secret Vatican agent, an undercover Jesuit (Justin laughed immoderately at that idea); Justin as a poet-minstrel trying to find a patron (Brian or James) by writing ballads about the New World despite his having no idea of what it was like; and Nick as a player’s boy from the Globe. (Justin’s character kept pestering Nick to take a play script to his manager, while all Nick’s character wanted to do was post a few playbills, gather some bored spectators to swell that night’s gate, and – boy players of the day taking all the female parts, there being no actresses allowed – not have to listen to any more of Lord Bass’s drawling comments about what a tall damned Ophelia / Desdemona / Portia, et cetera, he made. ‘Damn me, the Danish prince was none so mad after all, if this be the Ophelia he didst seek to ’scape from! God’s Ballocks, man, the varlet’s hands like hams, a’n’t they!’)

For the Virginia set piece, in the now-settled colony on the eve of Bacon’s Rebellion, James and Brian – ‘Sir Thomas,’ grandson and namesake of his London character – were rival Council Members, with Kevin as the Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley. Howie was an Irish lawyer on the run, Josh a sea-captain in the tobacco trade, Joe a minor planter, Chris a rabble-rousing tavern-keeper, landlord of the local ‘ordinary,’ Justin an indentured servant, Nick a free laborer, and AJ, all his tattoos now displayed (along with a good deal of the rest of him), the werowance of the remnants of the Powhatan tribe.

This gave James ample scope to call ‘Sir Thomas,’ who was arguing for the smaller folk to be given a greater role in the Colony’s governance (which was Bacon’s great issue, after all), a ‘canting, Precisian rogue, more fitted to sing psalms i’ the nose as do that base sect late infesting New England, than to serve by the commission of the King his Grace.’

The real classic improvisation in this scene, redeemed mostly by its authenticity, was when James, in his character as lordly FFV planter, saw his ‘indentured servant’ step in some horse dung – it was a very authentic Faire – and called attention to Justin’s natural wince: ‘How now, sirrah! Wouldst pretend, eh, you’ve never before smelled shit? Christ’s Thorns, man, it was your childhood plaything, by the looks of you.’ Justin didn’t break character, and deferred to his master, but the brief glare he sent James was frankly murderous.

That night, after a dinner at which all ten were praised to the skies – an elderly historian had gone on for far too long about how perfectly James, ‘Lance,’ had played the part of the heavy, demonstrating in but a single line the large-planter attitude that had sparked the Social Consciousness of the Rebellion (Justin kept a still tongue in his head, but those who knew him could see he was ‘a-fixin’ to cloud up and rain all over them,’ as his mama would have put it) – immediately after dinner, Josh, Nick, and Howie exchanged one glance and effectively kidnapped James and got him the hell out of there.

Once safely across the James and ensconced in their Williamsburg hotel (the two couples had chosen to stay in adjoining suites at the Williamsburg Inn, as they were staying on for a few days just to relax together, while the others, who were to fly out the next day to their wives, girlfriends, families, and Busy Superstar Schedules, were at the Clarion in Norfolk. James had already made a ‘hellloooooo, sailor’ joke at Justin’s expense) – once safely away from everyone else, Josh pushed James up against a wall, kissed him so thoroughly James’s knees buckled, and then tenderly took him by the hand, sat him down where they could snuggle, waved D and Nicky onto the facing settee, and lovingly asked him, ‘What the fuck is your problem, babe?’

James turned red with mingled embarrassment and shame and guilt, and responded heatedly. ‘It’s always my problem, ain’t it? Decade now, damn near, and whenever something comes up, we all bow down t’ the Boy Wonder, Mistah Blingin’ Golden Boy Big-Haid Superstar, do we still? Well, I tell you what, I’m sick and tired of ev’body and their dawg deee-ferrin’ to that no-’count little bastard! Hell’d we get to where he can do no wrong and all the rest of us have to stay a step behind, in his damn shadow, the which wouldn’t be near as big as it is, weren’t for the size of his damn ego! God fuckin’ damn it, you’re twice the singer, three times the writer and dancer and producer and all, that he is, an’ you’re still stuck in that little prima fuckin’ donna’s shadow your own self! And the Goddamn closet thing he has goin’, fuckin’ hypocritical no-balls bastard! He –’

Howie interrupted him, quietly, fraternally, and unanswerably. ‘You miss him so much.’

James opened his mouth to make a rejoinder, and then just started bawling. Josh soothed and gentled him as he cried himself out, and Howie and Nick came to sit flanking them, each running a soothing hand down James’s heaving back as the sobs wracked him.

‘I do,’ James said, when he could speak again, still sniffling. ‘I miss him so much. Real Justin. The one we all loved, the one where I finally got a baby brother like I’d always wanted. God, what’s happened to him? Where has Real Justin gone?’

‘I don’t know,’ Josh said quietly. ‘But I think he’s still there.’

‘Just hiding,’ Nick said. ‘I’ve done that. If it weren’t for Howie … I mighta spent my life still doing hiding, um, things.’

When James spoke, his voice was very small, and miserable. ‘H- hiding … you, you think maybe he’s hiding from me?’

Josh looked uncertain, and tried to hide that, but Howie had no doubts at all. ‘No, no. No. He’s hiding from so much. Even himself, maybe especially himself.’

‘Verdad,’ Nick said, and Howie smiled at him, touched as always whenever his lover remembered even a word of Spanish for him.

‘Perhaps he wouldn’t hide as much if you and he got along better, but you are not the reason he hides, not even one of the many reasons. But, mi amigo, mi pariente, this is a talk you and he need to have. Not with us.’

James hung his head. ‘I. I know y’all try to get us to work together so we can maybe do that. Was … was that why y’all were so high-behind this here get-together?’

Josh shook his head. ‘Not really, baby. Partly, it’s for a good cause, and preservation generally will benefit from it: not just Kev’s trees and your historic sites and Nicky’s oceans, but country and wilderness camps for kids with lupus or heart trouble or who are just down on their luck, now that Chris has his own foundation, and adoptees, and even for music camps in the country.’

‘“One time? At band camp?”’ Nick was irrepressible.

‘And partly,’ Josh went on, ignoring Nick, ‘sure, yes, partly, man, so you two might work in harness instead of butting heads. But mainly…. We thought. The four of us. Castle. You know.’

James honestly didn’t know. Howie took pity on him.

‘Remember, James? You and C were still chaste, though dating: you weren’t eighteen yet. And I was refusing to let myself think of jailbait here, and he still had his adolescent crush on Kevin. We had a chance, though, in Germany – it was the first time the four of us went anywhere together, just us, though we weren’t two couples yet – but we had that chance to try to get along and heal some of the rivalry, remember?’

And suddenly James did remember.

It had been a glorious, bright day at Neuschwanstein. He and Josh were trying to be super-discreet, and not let on to Nick and Howie that they were together, though each was also getting pings galore from the two Backstreeters.

Josh had gotten all gooey over the view, and started rambling about how the Mad King’s Bavarian-ersatz castle felt strangely homelike to him, and, like, it made you wonder, dude, about, like, past lives, because, man, it was, like, déjà vu or something, being here.

And James had turned to him, laughing, and shaken his head, and said, ‘C, I swan, you are about half a bubble off plumb. Place here seems like home to you on account of you’re a damn Mouse. Where did you think Walt Disney gacked the damn castle from?’

And Josh had just gaped at him, and Nick had gasped in utter horror, his voice actually trembling when he’d asked, ‘Disney was a plagiari-, plarigi-, he stole this idea?’

Howie had just looked at the three of them, with an expression of affectionate, amused worry, then smiled and cut to the quick in classic Howie fashion. ‘You two are so cute,’ he’d grinned. ‘How long have you two been together?’

And Josh had stammered and James had wanted the earth to swallow him, and then Nicky had piped up with, ‘Seriously, dudes, it’s so neat. I want that for me, some day, what the two of you got. Have. Whatever.’ And Howie had echoed the sentiment, and Nick had earnestly assured him that he just knew Howie would have that some day, and Howie had said the same back to him, and James and Josh had hesitantly and bashfully come out to the two of them….

How could he have forgotten that, James wondered now.

And Nick patted him on the back, soothingly, and added, ‘Castles, man. Like that time at the end of the Now or Never thing when I went back to Japan to wrap up the way I’d started, Japan and Germany, man, and you guys all three came and surprised me there….’

James certainly remembered that. They’d actually had an audience of the Emperor, quietly (HIM Akihito’s musical tastes are resolutely Classical – he is a cellist of renown – but he has a granddaughter, Princess Mako, who was 11 when Nick’s first solo CD came out, and she was a fan). Josh had been reduced to inarticulate gurgling by the art treasures of the Edo Palace; and it had been in the Palace Gardens that Nick, eyes shining, had taken them aside and barely restrained a patented giddy twirl as he told them that he and Howie had not only worked everything out for good this time, but were now engaged.

‘Castles, huh?’ James smiled, his tears now dry.

‘They’ve seen some important milestones on our road, baby.’

‘All four of us,’ Nick added. ‘I still remember that quip, you fucker, when we were in Japan and Josh said, “Well, you’re certainly big here,” and you said that even Howie the Hobbit was “big” in Japan. Cracked my ass up, right before we had to get serious and met the Emperor, you sneaky bastard.’

James grinned, then turned to Josh. ‘I’ll talk to Justin before he leaves tomorrow. I will. Thank you, all y’all, for helping me here. Now. Joshy. You were saying how romantic castles were?’

Howie stood and pulled Nicky to his feet. ‘That’s our cue. We love you guys. See you at breakfast.’

‘Howwwiiieeeee. I wanted to watch.’

‘Pervert,’ Josh grinned.

‘Come on,’ said Howie. ‘We’ll go to our own nice, big bed … and you can show me you’re still big even when you’re not in Japan.’

Nick’s face lit up, and the two were out the door, Nick half-dragging Howie, even before James’s lips could quite touch Josh’s.

And they did live happily ever after, all four.

END