Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Yet had Margaret’s histories (otherwise free of any news of whales, which she admitted she had never read a word about) foretold the future? For wasn’t that what you learned from reading the history books? His own father said so, and when he got time (which he officially never did, because of his editorial devotions to the family that he had married into without his bride having to "change her name"), he read Ulysses S. Grant: on the subject of winners and losers, however firmly the South, like Mexico after Chapultepec, claimed there was other loss in battle besides the battle itself.

Jim’s father said this to a visitor on the front porch one day, many months before Brad’s Day. Jim lay hidden in the cool earthen space under the porch, latticed by the light that came through the diamond openings of the diagonally cross-hatched lattice slats, himself and the damp-scented cavern. The visitor’s reply stuck for years in Jim’s memory but he did not summon it later, and so perhaps could not, from the shades cast by the light of freedom and loss, while the visitor, whose heavy shoes creaked and tapped their toe tips directly above Jim’s eyes, listened to Jim’s father observe some dull thing about bias and the reading of history and the newspaper business, and replied that his host had always worked hard at toleration: which precipitated a rare guffaw from Jim’s father and thence from the helpless son supine below the battlements a cough really due to the visitor’s convergent (porch-high) fart during his host’s laugh plus the farter’s murmured "Did you hear something?" Which words coincided with Jim’s cough yet accidentally foretold it, though it was less cough than laugh, less laugh than a body’s custody of some surprise held though not quite grasped.

And before the host could think to answer the guest’s casual suspicion, he was adding what, as he said, the guest knew little if anything about, to illustrate the business carried on between bias and impartiality, for whereas the family paper — the Democrat —had come into being well over a century before to put the county if not New Jersey squarely behind Jackson and against the Central Bank and its sovereign favors to the big guns, to property as Hamilton stitched it into our founding chapters (honorable and succinct as a Swiss ledger) and it multiplied into paper you couldn’t pay my taxes with, we have to give to Lincoln in the early 1840s if not total agreement at least space to duel in his own way with James Shields, the Illinois state auditor, who told the tax collectors to take the notes of the tottering Illinois State Bank at only their real value (you know this story?), which was forty-four cents on the dollar, which Lincoln—

— dueled in his own way? came the unexpectedly knowing retort — (and the sub-rosal or sub-cathetral auditor stirred upon the dark earth, smelling through porch boards the noble gas against natural law descending from the afore-related wind, as from treated seaweed, or from a fresh, soundless second, only to hear, then:) you sure you didn’t hear something? as if the tapping of the boot tip on the porch above the boy answered the frequency of his own sound yielded by who can tell what motive beyond accident or, to travel on ahead to a Washington bar in ‘62 and a friend Ted, that key to history known as small talk and so small it might be the space past or yet to come of the tapeworm’s expansible tunnel—

— second wind? says the interrogator turning our trial to his own personal uses — isn’t that what you people call the reserve breath that runners reach only at un certain deeper hollow of fatigue? better be sure it’s not the oxygen-depletion stage of running on fat cells which we know are not the greatest back-up.

— Lincoln’s own way was to choose cavalry swords against James Shields, went on Jim’s father — who was so nearly right above Jim that pomposity closed in on love that was surprised alone, not grasped — the jumbo size, a plank on edge between, and an eight-foot limit behind for each. For Lincoln had much longer arms than Shields (and, we add, arms which were to be one day the longest arms of any American President in history though not matter of profound wonder to their beleaguered owner).

— But — and the visitor rose, transferring his weight — but that was a sure thing, Mel; are you sure you got the facts right? I mean I know you always do, but I thought Lincoln was a fearless—

— That’s why he wanted to avoid the duel though he’d brought it on in

the first place: he wrote these letters to a paper showing Shields at a fair using

state paper to pay off the town’s women who came to his window let down

‘cause he couldn’t marry them all" "so handsome and so interesting"—

Shields was Irish and Lincoln wrote the letter as a certain Aunt Rebecca—

"Well," said the visitor’s creaking porch and shoes, "I’m sure I heard something."

"Shields you know caught a bullet in the lung in the Mexican War but he lived to be outmaneuvered by Stonewall Jackson fifteen years later in the Shenandoah rain while the bossman General McClellan was building bridges like a politician, soon after Grant beat Johnston at Shiloh — and when the Governor of Pennsylvania said Grant had been drunk and lost thirteen thousand men, Lincoln said, ‘He fights.’ "

"Once got drunk and mislaid my toolbox," said the other.

"Lincoln was a fighter if there ever was one. Hardest kind of fighting."

"He didn’t eat good I seem to recall," said the voice, "but wasn’t he married to an impossible lady?"

Jim moved his foot and rang a trowel against the upended teeth of a dark rake, whose earthy rust he now knew was what he had been smelling.

After a second, "I wouldn’t want to say for the record," said his father, and for a moment the men might have looked at each other so that nothing could keep up appearances: but the diversion of the boy’s presence was not the only fact between the two men who were not willing to hate each other, nor (deep down) willing to spend time at the beach with their wives and children though the visitor and his wife — loudly difficult to a point of throwing a muffin tin at him fresh full from the oven — had no children for all that went on between them.

And on Brad’s Day, scarcely a month after a woman whose whereabouts in her New Jersey town had been unknown for several hours was discovered or inferred in certain of her effects (including a large black towel) well above high water at Mantoloking, with incidental vague apologies written to a neighbor, whose gray dory, with those sweeping proud lines that, of all months, in August needed a coat of paint on its bottom, was reported found on a spit in Barnegat Sound with one oar gone and a damply darkened paper bag rolled tight as a toothpaste tube yet with one lengthwise half of a dill pickle inside it wrapped in white store paper not waxed, the discussant men above on that porch were two of the four principal folk to "look in" on young Brad’s bereavement, though at least two others also came during the day.

Brad turned his head up away from the piano, and, his profile toward where his grandmother Margaret knelt with her hand no longer touching him, he knew his brother Jim was still there. Jim respected the little bastard, who still was telling Jim nothing more than the day at the beach when Jim got suddenly stuck above him in the sand towering murderous but hearkening to the threatening call of their mother from her black towel blinded by the sun. And meanwhile Brad on the floor of the music room wasn’t going to school. It’s embarrassing having your mother kill herself. And no more point in Jim telling him than forcing dry cornflakes scratch by scratch down his throat. Yet Jim didn’t go to school all that day himself. There were other people in this life of theirs who could come to the house. And on this day probably for the first time Jim thought about the look of the house. The dark-brown shingles of the porch roof led you up to the roof angles and facing of the second and third stories. The dormers and the other sections of roof spread in what seemed a lot of directions when you weren’t actually looking at the house. He couldn’t draw, he thought, but he drew the house, doodled its thick white pillars from the low, thigh-high wall that ran around the porch to the porch ceiling, the day after Brad’s Day, when he was sitting in History and couldn’t think, and out it came onto his notebook, but the angles of dark shingled roof section varied less than the mountainous watercourses he found he had with some instinct drawn, but he’d never thought of what the house looked like till Brad’s Day.