Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

It was uniquely open to the sky, which seemed slanted because of the shoulder of mountain that hung over one tier of the quarry. Yet by its cliffs and, above them, the steep retreating banks of fir and birch, it was as secluded as the tight-sealed play of our echoing whistles and calls, Al’s and mine. “OH: OH-Oh-oh-oh,” “HEY: HEY-Hey-hey-hey,” then louder and answered one or two echoes longer “SHIT: SHIT-Shit-shi-shi-shi,” eventually succeeded by the lone boldness of “FUCK,” fading all around that beautiful mountain quarry into the mysterious prospect of “FUck-FUck-fuh-fuh-fuh.” Lying out in the cold water and, as if you hung at a great height, imagining the water’s density suddenly gone, you might spot a small hawk coming over or a stone-chip bombed at you so thoughtfully that its arc would end at a point never nearer any part of you than a yard. But nothing else, not a woodpecker tapping or a squirrel’s rustling weight in a bough.

Al dived again and again off one ten-foot-high setback from which you had to stretch and arch to miss a lower ledge. I did some of that too, but I saw myself rather as the submariner of the team. Al wasn’t interested in my kind of dive, but he listened politely when I came up gasping to report (a) how far down I estimated I’d been (: over fifteen feet one day with earplugs, the second of the quarry summers), and (b) what exactly I’d seen (: nothing — except in the deepening blue-brown shade a pale strip in the granite wall).

Dom, we let Gail come with us because she’d found out. I didn’t mean to get onto Gail tonight, I came almost unprepared for her lithe intervention in these pages. But now I think even if we hadn’t let her come she wouldn’t have told on us; and I believe I knew this even then. Who could she have told? Maybe her sister. Not her mother, who she thought was too hard on Al. And not her father, with whom she played dominoes every night after supper. No, not her father.

Why? Well, if love is style, then “not her father” because that wasn’t the kind of thing they said and did together. He’d have felt obliged to beat Al if she had told; on the other hand, this wasn’t why she refrained.

She was beside her father in the pickup once when he came to look at our gas refrigerator, but she wouldn’t come in; I kept an eye on her out our kitchen window as our fathers knelt together. My mother offered Al’s father a bottle of beer before he was ready, and opening it and standing it on the counter she told him she was terribly grateful to him because she had houseguests coming that weekend; he said, “Y’have, have you?” and she said two friends and her cousin-in-law. My father asked how to get to the quarry — though the postmaster had already told him — and was it still active, and Al’s father murmured, “Active?” why no it’d cost too much to get the stone out. “Marketing problems,” my father said pensively — did they plug and feather? was it dimension stone they were after? And Al’s father didn’t say anything for a few seconds, rubbing some part he had pulled out of the back of the refrigerator, then said no he guessed not, guessed they just blew it out in pieces. My father said it wasn’t true, was it, that there were rattlers in the caves? after all you didn’t really get rattlers in New England, did you? and Al’s father fitted on the panel and stood up and looked at my mother and then my father, and quietly said, “There’s rattlers, yuh.” And he wouldn’t take a cent. Gail sat perfectly still in the pickup so far as I could see; and, Dom, I’m not getting any closer to the quarry three summers later. My father, who didn’t join Al’s father in a beer, asked what he thought about the war, and in return Al’s father asked if R oo sevelt would get us into it; to which my father replied by asking, “How can he not?” but his warm, reasonable voice was suddenly so dim he might have been speaking from inside the freezing compartment: for Gail was out of the pickup and was standing on the far side of its bed with the end of the goldenrod field behind her and, if she’d only known, she was looking right at me across our green lawn. “My little girl’s waitin’ on me,” said Al’s father, and wiped his mouth along his index finger; then he nodded, and went. The summer sun combed into Gail’s long sandy hair a sharper, crystalline light. It is ten p.m., Dom, and I’m still a long way from Al’s drenched sneaker, much less Bob’s white-knuckled fist, but I need something other than time tonight. Her mother somewhat inaccurately called her “Goldilocks,” but I bet her dad never did.

Great distances at which forces in a field occultly but exactly work — aren’t they, Dom, like those silences love knows it does not have to fill? For instance, you knew I hope that your son Richard, a creative actuary, loved you even if he did derive his nurture at the breast of Henry James and even if you didn’t receive his monthly letters. And I knew precisely how much my father loved me even when he asked emotionally vague questions like “How many miles was it around Babylon’s walls, probably?”

Tomorrow night panel pundit number five — great head sunk on twin chins, hands between his legs — having subordinated clause to phase, the pressure on you Dom to the talents in you, then having winnowed the four preceding diagnoses and suborned them to his own, is at last called on by the pivoting televizier. Whereupon, raising the heavy head, hauling his idea off the ground like the great Karnak shaft, he spreads himself and, aiming a sightless elbow at his armrest, leans. And apparently misses, for in the pre-shrunk TV picture his head now drops sharply at an angle. But to discuss effectively the generous paranoia of those who pursue themselves, this emergency pandit must keep back down that narrative tube such sure-fire capsules as, unearthed or not, will soon melt away their own clear solvent coatings, Dom. I mean two crescents of aquamarine satin lastex sealing the top of Gail’s barely thirteen-year-old thighs, all but one crooked pale hair; I mean three bikes wheeling back down the path from the quarry with now and then a domestic clink belying the sense of our terrible silence; I mean Al’s drenched sneakers in Gail’s basket behind me; and Al in the lead but not leading us, his sopping dungarees puckered to his legs, and brown needles stuck to his bare heels. What predatory watcher would have guessed the truth?

Even dimmed by close breath or smudged then by wiping fingers, these small slides of being when blown up by a projector have a bright volume. Ten years later a temporarily bearded Bob says, “The mountains are different from the seashore.” But the truth is not always in good taste, and leaving the quarry for a moment I might add that Al’s sneakers were — one of them — soon to be drenched in more than these granite waters.

The summer I was eleven the Number Two puzzle in The Heatsburg Hour began to change. I noticed it all through June and after I got back from camp the end of July. We had already seen one change the summer before: the puzzle’s deviser had stopped numbering his points. But though this looked like a big change, it wasn’t, for the shapes were still so easy (if inevitably curveless) that, except for a line or two of rigging on a frigate or a musket muzzle above the right shoulder of a Colonial militiaman, or, in the square field of its design, one or two of the swastika’s horizontals or verticals, the Number Two remained a cinch. Al’s father’s little errors — like the halyard, the musket muzzle, or the swastika — merely confirmed him in his preference for Two. Eventually he stopped even trying the Number One. It was the word-puzzle, and you had to find a certain number of words at least four letters long in the letters of, say, vestibule, perpetual , or celluloid . He’d fall short of the minimum sometimes by as much as half; he’d ask me and I’d politely (if quickly) think of two more, then say I gave up, and on we’d go to Number Two. Here you drew lines from point to point to make a mystery shape. If Al’s father missed a couple of early connections he’d erase and go back and try to join other sets of points. Once or twice I’d feel Gail watching from the kitchen doorway and look around to find a neutral, close attention in her eyes and (I now realize) her mouth. But the new change in the Number Two was in the shapes themselves, now so much trickier that, at least for Al’s father I could see, the lack of numbers had become an insult to his intelligence, and he’d do a slow burn. He might close the contour correctly but then, his stomach now distantly crashing, he wouldn’t know what to call the shape, and he’d mutter that he’d like to cold-cock the guy. One day outside I told Al I was sure there was a new person making up the puzzle, and Al shrugged and called for me to pitch; without having to move an inch he caught what we called my curve, thrown with a hopeful sidearm sweep, and he said, “Prob’ly a new guy does the puzzle every week.” But aside from my instinctive rejection of this view, I’d already seen something in the changed puzzles that I knew related them. I couldn’t pinpoint it, so I wouldn’t have discussed it with Al, but I said I knew someone who got things printed in the Hour and I could find out if I wanted. “Oh I bet,” said Al.