Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Well, the basketball player, who’d been at the camp the summer before, kept saying day after day he was waiting for the tomatoes, that was where the money was. But he didn’t make it, and neither did I. One gray August morning he and I and two others went in the back of a pickup to weed an acre or two of something green and heavy, I forget what. And the big leaves were so wet the six-five potentially all-state center called the conditions brutal and walked off the job with the two others. When I went on bending my muddy way through the rest of my first row, thinking I knew what was coming, the big shot as I expected started calling to me that I was a gung ho chicken shit afterbirth of a Japanese gang fuck, a coward and a traitor, and the other two told me I better stop work if I didn’t want to get them all in trouble, and the tall one said they were going to notify the authorities the conditions we were made to work in and he said something I couldn’t hear about the tomatoes coming in, but when I said Nobody’s making you work in these conditions, he started in on me again, and then I stood up at the end of my row, my Levis wet from the knee down and told him he was too dumb to do even this job much less pick ripe tomatoes piece-rate, and then he started toward me. He looked even taller there diagonally across the rows because you knew he wouldn’t step on the plants, and I started walking toward him, though indirectly down my row. But there was the farmer in his roomy overalls marching a long pigeon-toed stride down from the house with his little girl bustling beside him. He said if we wouldn’t work, there was plenty fellows would at one-fifty an hour, and anyhow he didn’t want our foul mouths on his property for his little girl to hear, and when I turned to go back to my rows he said, “You too, Charlie,” and that was the end of that, I wasn’t going to explain. It was eight-fifteen, a Thursday. The start of a long morning of a long day, especially since the head of the camp told me I’d have to pack my bag. He said he wouldn’t send a letter home to my parents but for public relation’s sake I had to go. Well, I wasn’t about to explain.

Richard your actuary son didn’t wish to explain either, though in a way he did and in a way he couldn’t. Well, ye gods I couldn’t protect you by monitoring your own outgoing phone calls! But Richard’s most recent missive said enough for me to know: “you shouldn’t have phoned like that”: in your present state “a composed letter is to be preferred to an accusing person-to-person call at midnight. And that is not true about not receiving my letters. I have written you. And you have received them.” Then a quiet, abrupt “Yours ever” (and percentally appraising), “Dick.”

The odds (a local weekly said) against “contracting” polio that August at the farm camp were considerable. But even more considerable that my parents would hear the news. But they didn’t. So they didn’t call me home, but by coincidence I’d been kicked out so I was coming home anyhow. Bob’s father’s message was waiting for Bob that Thursday when he arrived from a ten-dollar day pulling rutabagas; he was to leave at once, train to Easton, then through New York and on up to Providence where he’d be met. He wired his father there was no train that night.

We had a ride the next day with one of the assistants — Doc — who was eighteen and going home to the Cape to be drafted; we’d cross the Delaware well south of Easton and save time. Of course, I phoned my father who was in New York, and he was stunned about the polio and said leave tonight, no don’t travel at night, leave first thing in the morning, he’d call my mother in the country; he added irrelevantly that my uncle was coming from Washington the weekend after this. My father was scared; I didn’t tell him we were driving. Doc said he had a heavy date in Hartsville and in the morning we’d leave as soon as he could get himself up.

He was liverish in the morning and farted during the whole trip. He knew about my getting booted, I didn’t tell him the truth. And Dom, you know that if I chose to forget my timetable for getting the truth out of Annette while Al and the librarian were in the kitchen, I could ramble over to the echoing Quaker gym for that two-hour unrefereed valedictory that night in which on me but more conclusively on the potential all-state big-ass it was proved that basketball is a body-contact sport in spite of what Al’s librarian friend said in ’52.

“Any friend of hisn ’s a friend of myun,” said the librarian’s scruffy friend the goateed bookseller Fred Eagle hauling himself out of his chair and shaking hands with me and bowing to the girls. The stubble on his cheeks was a day or two long, his gray hair looked like a six-or-eight-week-old crew cut. He was somewhere between thirty-nine and fifty, and above little blue pufflets his wild eyes restlessly watched us.

The girls giggled as Al said, “A savant, a great man.”

Fred, as if promptly on cue, said, “I am a miscellaneous person full of self-knowledge,” and Al laughed and said, “It’s better than being a mislaid person,” and Fred said, “You’re merely misled not mislaid,” and they both laughed at that.

When I said I was Al’s subversive friend from New York City, Fred became cordially serious and said he’d heard all about me, and when I said “New friends are best,” Gail took my hand and leaned her wholesome shoulder against me and said, “Oh you”; and smelling in the house an old sweetness of wine mulling — with raisins, I thought — and not even Halloween yet — I asked myself why the hell I’d stood up Tracy in Northampton and come here this weekend to check how much Al knew.

The librarian had been to Scandinavia for three weeks and was making Glögg. He had a neat gray crew cut and a yellow button-down and belt-in-back khakis. Gail held my elbow and gently pulled me with her onto the sofa as Fred said So I was the famous New York friend. The librarian said to have some appetizers — mixed nuts and pale brown goat cheese — and he went out to the kitchen with Al, telling him the priest in question would be glad to help Al with his Latin. Gail’s hand fell off my arm as I made a move for the glass bookcase behind Annette’s chair. Annette asked me for some matches but Fred jumped over with his, and his hand shook a bit as he mashed a couple before he got her Kool lit. His nostril-flares were red but he didn’t have a cold. He was fifty.

“Here’s the Everyman Encyclopedia,” I said. “I forget, what’s Al’s?”

But Fred said, talking very fast, “There’s a better one right beside it, the works of Charles Dickens. All you need to know.”

“His isn’t that one,” said Annette turning around in her chair and looking up over her shoulder.

“What you want’s the Eleventh Edition of the Britannica,” said Fred. “Say, there’s Kingsley’s Hypatia , ever open that book?”

I said no but I knew who she was.

Annette went to the kitchen. I heard the icebox door close. If I keep things apart do I make them equal?

Doc was kidding me about being thrown out of the work camp, but Bob interrupted telling me I’d have time to read Great Expectations now for English in the fall, he’d been telling me to read it, it was great, there was a woman in it who was crazy about cleaning because (Akkie Backus had told Bob) she wasn’t getting enough from her husband.

Eleven-thirty feet to the near lift. If I were typing, they’d hear. All hands to quarters, I go slow, A and B are side by side, who am I between? Doc’s Plymouth turns into a tense room, the librarian’s parlor moves us at devious speeds around the evening.

Downstairs if Ev has made progress in her inquiry I may find on arrival home that I’ve been discovered dead. She’ll leave the guests’ glasses, crumbs, ashes, and scurf till the morning or even later, she always does. I love Ev. It does not take time to love. I loved at first sight Tracy’s succulent legs each one and Perpetua’s plain strong mouth and Gail’s collar-bone and sweet moles, though one Sunday when I happened to pass the Episcopal church as early service was letting out, Tracy’s hips from behind deceived me I admit into thinking they barely interrupted a tall thin girl, when in fact they were alive all by themselves. An only child dwells upon others with a private thoroughness unmatched even by animal want, though perhaps by art.