William Gass - Middle C

You’re on a scholarship?

Um … Same as.

Can you catalog, check out, check in, reshelve?

I can learn. I can count. I know the alphabet. They don’t cover cataloging at Augsburg.

Are you a Lutheran? Religious?

I can be if I have to.

Ms. Bruss laughed like a contralto, though her speaking voice wasn’t notably dark.

What do you want it for — this job?

I can’t live off my mother anymore. She can’t afford me. And I want to go further on in school, but I didn’t feel … well, frankly, I didn’t feel I was learning enough at Augsburg.

Augs. She laughed again. Ugh. She thrust the pencil — point first — into her hair. “Further” is good. Delicate distinction. But you’re too young. You don’t look twenty.

I’m nineteen.

Through Augs by nineteen?

I accelerated.

What do you go by?

Jo — Joseph.

Below her hair, Marjorie Bruss had a rosy round face, quick laugh, and happy wrinkles like lashes about the eyes — beneath her hair, no neck and lost ears. I have to tell you.

Ma’am?

No one wants it.

Don’t you get to read?

For days. Maybe that’s a reason no one wants it. But the pay is poorer than bad cheese. The only applicants I’ve had are eighty. They are trying to earn the price of their plot. They will bore me till I lie in one. I need someone who can carry armloads.

I have two forearms.

You’re quick. But a tabula rasa.

I will ask you lots of questions. What’s a rasa?

You’re a blank page.

I’m a clean sheet.

Okay, Joseph. She gave Joey a piece of paper with a dollar figure on it. Accept this and you’ve got the job.

First, he walked around the town. It was located in a valley that had one obviously open end because you could follow the accelerating water of the creek, as well as the main drag that paralleled it, in order to see now and then at some distance the broad blue Ohio into which the fast stream poured, earning for itself the name Quick Creek, though the natives said Quick Crick, since the stream was often like a line of ink and also because they couldn’t help themselves. The many elms that once shaded most roads were ill, but not all of them had been taken down. Squeezed as it was between hills, Urichstown was only a few streets thick, and cross streets were short, stopping at the crick or giving out like a winded runner some small way up a slope. Apart from a square of judicial buildings that had been set to one side as if by a picky eater, the main points of public meeting were the three brief bridges that spanned the Quick, and kept the two halves of the town together. They were said to be “brief” because they had no great distance to span and because spring floods often rushed roiling water through the town to wash one or more of the crossings away. These floods were consequently measured by the spans they engulfed—“one bridge,” “two bridge,” or “three bridge,” as sometimes proved to be the case. Only when the Ohio was so full it forced itself up its tributaries, and the rapid water from the hills ran into the river like a truck into a train, was the flood actually fierce enough to endanger homes or public buildings.

Joseph sat on a bench at the bus stop whiling away the half hour he had until the posted time of its arrival, and then the fifteen minutes more that would pass before its actual appearance. The weather was perfect. Sun ran over his calves and flooded his feet. There weren’t many people about, and those he could see kept to their missions and paid him no mind. Traffic was subdued. He thought how differently he felt about this change in his circumstances. For many such moves he had been but a burden with a runny nose, a loud sore throat, and a pair of frightened eyes, someone who inconveniently remained the same armload of duties wherever his mother and sister bore him. However, since then he had begun to strike out on his own. After all, hadn’t he half chosen Mr.

Hirk, sought out the High Note, and taken all the ceremonial opportunities that came his way to play “Beautiful Ohio,” even if he did so with a notable lack of enthusiasm? As for Augs — he hadn’t enjoyed it very much. He’d rarely been stirred the way he had been when playing Mr. Hirk a new tune or even receiving the polite applause of mothers or finding a record worth a turn. Instead, he had become confused. Augs was education? However, the tidy little library with its rosy round-faced librarian appeared so welcoming, and the look of the books gave him heart they seemed so available, as did the quiet of the reading rooms with their promise of repose (a purposeful quiet in which one might sit as if in a pause between movements), that Joseph was encouraged to approach his future with a confidence and an enthusiasm he had rarely known. He wasn’t fleeing from, he was running toward, and what he hoped to learn would be free and unassigned, known only to himself; so that, consequently, to the world Joseph would remain undefined — a vague reference.

For the first few miles the only other passenger was a vast woman with spiky hair carrying a teddy bear. Joseph preferred to think that she had boarded the bus at the last minute in order to save him the embarrassment of being the lone ticket, but she chose to sit in the aisle seat next to him and his window because “We’uns the onlies here, might as well chat to spare the hollows.” Joseph wondered whether she hadn’t been inflated like a float toy by someone fearful of the water. The enormous lady was a comfortable talker and as redolent of goodwill as she was of cologne. He stared at his own glass-imprisoned face — wan, transparent, and stuffed with trees, grass, and bushes — while her chat went on, rarely addressed to him, mostly headed for the ear of the bear. We needs the warmth of this weather, she said. I don’t know where you bin, but I bin here, and we needs the warmth of this weather. It’s misery — and I am witness to it — when — even here — at the bottom of April — clothes freeze on the line. Joseph felt obliged to nod. Like they’d of died — that stiff. And Billy Bear’s blankit here — frosted like windy glass. Her hair as stiff as ’cicles, too, Joseph thought. It must be rather wonderful to assume that the world would receive with interest whatever came into your head. As Joseph was considering the distance between himself and this crazy creature, in order to marvel at it, he remembered that it had always been his job to hang the wash, pinning even Debbie’s panties, bras, and blouses to the line that hung behind the house, carefully stretching the sleeves out with clothespins at the cuffs so she wouldn’t complain of wrinkles; and at that moment he shared this overlarge lady’s hatred of hanging damp trousers up with freezing fingers. Billy Bear likes to travel, see sumthin of the whorl, so sumtimes I jus git a tickit and come on for him to injoy the trip. Nice day for it, Joseph offered. Oh gawd yes but not today, today aint for him, we bin to town on bizness an now we’re goin back to LouElla. Lowell was a village the size of an intersection. Joseph was grateful for the information, because Lowell was the next stop; even now from the crest of a hill he could see where the train tracks turned toward its station. So you live in Lowell, he felt himself safe enough to venture. Sum of the time. Sum of the time I live in Whichstown. Sum of the time I live in Gale. Sum of the time it seem I live on dis bus. Her flesh shook, the heavy flesh of her arms shook when she laughed. That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it? to live so many different places — I suppose not all at once — but so near one another. Oh you guessed it, dear — all at once, shure. But Billy Bear live in only LouElla. Hey, we is home, honey. And she heaved herself up from her seat and waddled toward the driver as the bus brakes sighed and they entered Lowell. Bydeebyby, she tossed to him over Billy Bear’s shoulder. He saw that, though the hair on top of her head was drawn up in teepee-shaped points, it fell like a flap over her neck in back. In a moment, Joseph became the sole passenger on the bus again, but now he was cuddling a mystery against his chest the way Miss Spiky-hair carried her bear.