Writer showcase #6
Peter Spain

spainm@bethel.k12.ct.us

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If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write
things worth reading or do things worth writing.            
Franklin

Man is an imitative animal.
Jefferson

Whoever wants to be creative in good and evil must first be an
annihilator and destroyer of values.
Nietzsche


As a vast, solid phalanx the generation comes on, they have the same
features . . . . All wear the same expression, but it is this which they
do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the
philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets,
which dilates in the love of another.  
Thoreau

What has been done, will be done again, . . . Take anything which people
acclaim as being new: it existed in the centuries preceding
us. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10


CHAPTER 1

Sunday Oct. 26,1947 A.M.  
Francis drove with one eye on the road, and the other reading a
notecard he held against the top of the steering wheel.  In the Army, he
had learned to split his sight this way.

There was very little soothing or splashed with green to look at this
morning. As his silver Mercury sped south, the pale chaff fields and the
forkwoods blinked across the gray-scribbled distances. Starlings and
crows, dotted the dawn, rummaging for worms, and any corn peepers left
by the combines’ augers.

Thumbing out the triangular window an inch, Francis closed his eyes,
one two, and flipped the notecard with his left hand. In the cool
whistle of fresh air and the dark calm of shut eyes, his mind flowered
with the scenes he had just been reading: a sandy-haired girl, twenty to
thirty, at night. She is running from a windy shingle-sided ranch to
fetch her bobby socks from a drooping line. Then, a serated knife
flashes clear across her larynx like a moon beam through a winter night.
Its blade barber poles down the cartilage, and destems her trachea.
After her first cry, nothing is heard from her, ‘no, not even a breath .
. .  no suspects across the Mountain States,’ as chapter two closes.
“Bad things happen fast,” Francis thought, relinquishing the gory scene
from his mind, “That is one reliable generality that most bad fiction
puts to good use. That bad things happen fast.”

He opened his eyes, and saw the cambered rise in the blacktop turn down
to a straight away. From here south to St. Louis, he knew, Route 61
hardly needed any steering.

Since the Army Francis had read everything he could find by Penn
Blotch. Read everything by Blotch and written down notes on 3 x 5
notecards. Just yesterday in Iowa a book he’d never read by Penn Blotch
stared out at him from the lower stacks of a library. Cut The Deck
Again. It didn’t take much figuring to tell it was the sequel to Cut The
Deck-- one of Francis’ favorite murder mysteries of all time. The kind
of formula suspense that keeps the balance of surprise and expectation
nodding gently between a few novel nuggets and many predictable crumbs.
Francis had skimmed over Cut the Deck Again-The Skimpole Tragedy , and
scrawled down sentences and plot twists from the story. The next morning
now, at sixty six miles an hour, ached wit, he re-read what he’d
pencilled down on the notecards, considering what he could transplant
into a story he had been developing in his mind for months. Not only the
blood trails, but also the suspense of Skimpole’s murder could enrich
the skeletal plot lines he wanted to start typing on his patina-green
Royale Automatique; as soon as time allowed.

Tugging in the triangle window by its blunt trigger hook, he turned on
the car radio. KMOX-St. Louis washed in with static and news, “The
butchering continues. . . a half million killed in India. . . fighting
since the Subcontinent . . . from Britain two months ago . . .Today’s
weather after this message from Gillette ...”

With the weather fair, and with his deliveries in good order, he’d make
St. Louis by noon, take care of his appointments, then get his mail from
the box. Replies on the book would be piling up by now. He hadn’t been
in St. Louis since late September.

What you’ve written is not  a book until you sell it, said the raspy
voice inside his head.

Francis checked his light-brown eyes in the rearview mirror, and saw
the foxtails and grasses nodding in the pull wake of the car. Francis
turned up the radio. A pipe organ wheezed through a couple weighty
measures, then accelerated into cloud-splitting soprano glissandos that
soon faded into morning choruses. As the music ribboned and fanned into
a coda, a scratching voice broke in over the radio,

“Oggh. Good Sunday morning Christians. Aghh.This is Elder Michaux’s
Eternity Hour.Today’s program begins in Revelation. We’re finding the
way to our aghh righteous ends.”

A fading sod farm appeared off the right side of Route 61. There was a
sign nailed to the farm’s white fence, “Mark Twain’s House 18 miles
Ahead in Historic Hannibal.”

Francis knew his way around most of America. In the past three weeks,
he had driven a far route south from Bismark, holding to the Missouri
River. Along his way, he had delivered over four-hundred 1948 updates,
but sold only fifty one new subscriptions. One of those he had sold to
the orphanage in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. How amazed and frightened he had
felt on the front steps of the big pink Victorian. He knuckled up to the
brass knocker and took two steps back from the door. When the door
opened, the old linseed reek of the front hall whet his memory. And then
out came Ms. Erdel shuffling in suede Hush Puppies, and using a cane.
She wore the black collaret dress and liverwurst-colored stockings in
which he remembered her, awake or in nightmares, coming after him. Her
long ashen hair had gone white, and she was stooped over more than he
remembered her being.

  “What is it now? Is that who I think it is?” she said inflectively as
she looked up at Francis.

Her stringy Norse features had grown plump in the twenty years since he
had escaped the orphanage. Her outline now looked like a sideways pear
balancing on a tripod of toothpicks. The shock of seeing whom he’d
assured himself would be long gone was made worse by the dread that he
would have to stand and be polite while the old lady would begin to
recognize him.

“No, I’m Gerry Manley, m’am. Regional salesman from Lincoln Home
Encyclopedias. New York. New York.”

Through Mrs. Erdel’s eyes this salesman looked shy and inept as he
limply held out his sample case of encyclopedias. She invited him inside
after he had taken off his hat and said again that he was Gerry Manley,
regional salesman. Her curiosity in the name Manley, and where he came
from did not seem to put her in mind of the mute child she had taught
how to add and to subtract, to read and write, and how to boil,
hardboil, peel, pickle, dice, scramble and even separate an egg; Francis
S, the orphan boy she’d known from his third to his tenth year, whom,
when he acted up, she’d swatted in the chops with the back of her hand,
cursing at his little crew-cut head, “Why you no-good-little-Indian
bastard. There’s a reservation up the road for you once I get up the
gumption to send you there.”  In hindsight, the adult Francis thought
Ms. Erdel had only wanted to be proper as she knew it to be. She kept
herself and the twenty to thirty orphans “proper” through rules and
regimens. She took the orphans to church every Sunday. 

Mrs. Erdel sneezed and Francis said ‘bless you.’   “Thank you George,
now let’s get to what you’ve come to do.”

As he followed her inside the orphanage, he remembered how when someone
farted in the orphanage she had made the farter stop where he was and
say, “Excuse me everyone, that was gross, I’ll try to have more control
next time.”  Mrs. Erdel never used the word ‘fart.’ No, she called them
“bombs” or “gaseous explosions.” So you’d fart and she’d stand over you
and say with the look of a billyclub in her eye, “What do we say when we
have a bomb or gaseous explosion ?”  Francis had the misfortune of
eructing an uncontrable and lubricious fart in church one Sunday, right
as the chalky-eyed minister took the podium to begin the Gospel reading.
The boys to either side of Francis giggled and made funny faces. Francis
bit his lip to keep from laughing. There were tears in his eyes as he
looked around at Ms. Erdel in the pew behind him. She was turning red
from embarrassment. She looked away from him in disgrace. So Francis
stood up and said to the Church in the most apologetic tones a five-year
old can deliver, with his hands held out prayerfully, “Excuse me
everyone, that was gross, I’ll try to have more control next time.” As
the church broke out laughing, Ms. Erdel grabbed him by his collar.
Francis protested, “That’s what we say when we have a bomb or gaseous
explosion.”  The more laughter he heard echoing through the church, the
tighter his collar squeezed around his little neck.

The billyclub look in Mrs. Erdel’s eyes had softened over twenty years,
although  Francis tried to avoid looking her directly in the eye as she
led him inside. She said she’d heard that Lincoln Home Encyclopedias
were cheaper and just as good as the more expensive kinds. Francis
agreed as he stared at the floor in the center of the front hall. The
herringbone parquet was dark and grim as ever. The bitterwood curl of
the banister at the bottom of the stairs reminded him of when the world
was sleepy and alive with short, perfectible paths: up the stairs, down
the stairs, out to the fields between the orphanage and church, into the
potato patch or compost pile with a pitchfork.

He turned with Mrs. Erdel into the parlor, and saw the dining-room
chairs arranged around the white-bricked fireplace. Mrs. Erdel exhaled a
low wheeze out her rumpled beak, and unburdened her legs as she sat in
the rocking chair by the smoldering hearth, “Come in.” The chair sighed
as she tipped her toes, and rocked back,

“Come in, Gerry, and show me what you’ve got in your colorful case.”
Mrs. Erdel saw him staring at the chairs as if he was displeased with
the scuffs on them. She said, “Oh any one’ll do, Gerry. Now,  show me.
I’ve been meaning to look into encyclopedias for the children. Oh,
they’re all outside in the churchyard now. Picking the last apples with
The Reverend Beetler. We’re going to make a pie with them.”

Her once sassy smile had become crooked with the spaces between her
teeth. The more that memories of this place floated across his mind, the
more he feared the old lady would recollect some aspect in his
appearance unbreached by growth or gravity’s erosion and down sculpting
of the flesh. His strong epicurean nose, the way it overhung his full
lips, had inched out to a prominent position, as had his dusky eyelids,
softening the bitter look in his eyes, sharp black brow and jutting
cheeks.

He pulled a sample encyclopedia out of his case, smiling as best he
could. His teeth he had had capped in the end month of the war.
“You have children, Gerry ?” Mrs. Erdel asked as she took the sample
from him, with that flair of the nostrils that marks false excitment, or
the ebbing of one’s enthusiasm for an unexpected visitor.
Francis turned in his seat to reach into his wallet for his faux
photos. He would keep the illusion going and be Gerry Manley, family
man. He’d bitten his tongue at the thought of adding Hopkins to the
name.

The faux photos in his wallet were something quite elaborate that the
president of the encyclopedia company, Mr. McKarch, had devised for the
young unmarried salesmen. The photographs were faux  photos because they
were staged. In the final days of sales training in 1945, Mr. McKarch,
led the trainees to the basement of the building for “Pictures,” adding
that, “Accuracy is only as important as what it portrays. We have the
public to thank for that. At the end of this week, all of you are
setting out to sell which means you’re first-impression artists, first
and last. Make a fitting impression of yourself and of Lincoln Home
Encyclopedias.” By the time Mr. McKarch finished saying this, the newly
trained salesmen were standing before the glowing photo stages. It was
easy to see that the three life-size dioramas on the basement floor were
replicated from Norman Rockwell paintings. McKarch had had them done by
fanciful Broadway set designers, and lit up bright as noontime with
stage lights. The first diorama McKarch showed them was the “Freedom
>From Hunger Thanksgiving Feast.”  Set with every detail down to
swan-white tablecloth and napkins, the pewter napkin rings, covered
tureen, and the colonial silver carving knife and fork awaiting the
steaming turkey. Powdery light glowed through the lace-curtain windows
behind the table. The adjacent set opened a little wider, and it was
called the “Christmas” room. A holly-green half of an octagon-shaped
room stood around a Christmas tree with shimmery ornaments and roping,
and decorated with gaudy packages and gold-dusted stockings pinned
behind the tree, on a mantelpiece over an imitation fire. The third and
final stage design, called “Our Summer Cabin,” was a log-pole den of
photogenic trout paintings, fly rods, flies, cedar and rawhide
furniture, a rifle cabinet in a corner, canoe paddles and three mounted
antlers.

  McKarch had hired three models from an agency for the day to pose as
thee wives in the pictures (your choice). And there was a fleet of
youngsters to chose as your children. There were no choices about the
outfits, nor about the settings or the props. You wore the tight khaki
vest pinned with artificial hackled flies and silk-veiled river gnats in
the summer shot, and held a rubber rainbow trout as, with your other
arm, you held your wife’s shoulder. In the Thanksgiving shot, you
flirted dangerously with the steaming turkey while your plastic family
gazed approvingly.  At Christmas, you lovingly looked down at your
children as they handed gifts to each other in front of the Christmas
tree while your wife pretended to be stuffing last minute nick knacks
into the stockings. McKarch was there for every faux pose, saying
“smile, eahn ?” through his big rosy nose. All told, that day in the
basement of the Lincoln Home Building, there were fifty people,
including the new salesmen, the models, the children, a pair of French
Canadian set carpenters, an Italian lighting man, a Czech nurse, two
electricians from Spanish Harlem, three seamstresses from Chinatown, an
Irish nanny from McKarch’s house, and four photographers from Bacharach.
At the last moment, another prop was added to the list the trainees had
no choice about. McKarch’s dog. Clancy, the Irish Setter with a foaming
overbite. Because Clancy could not be restrained (he cantered through
the dressing rooms en route to cornering a brood of baby rats and their
mother under the stages), the dog had to be tranquilized by the Czech
nurse and her large needle. Then Clancy was set in a stiff crescent
before the hearth in the Christmas Tree Room.

“Use these photos well,” McKarch had told Francis, “‘Til you have
better to show for yourselves. ‘Til you become your own men.”
Francis turned thirty the day he sat by the fire with Ms. Erdel in
that parlor in Sleepy Eye. As much as he knew his birthday fell in the
middle of October, the occasion always made him feel certain the year
was over. This year, 1947, that feeling managed to sadden him more than
usual for he was in the orphanage where he’d started, pretending still
about where he came from and who he was. Turning another year older
saddened more than usual also because he had promised himself back in
July that he’d sell his novel by the end of year, or burn it. Why not ?
he thought. Why not ?  The year was almost over. Besides, he’d gotten
back twenty some rejections on the forty copies he’d sent out in July,
and not one positive reaction.

On his birthday in 1946, he had vowed to stop writing the story
altogether if he hadn’t completed it by the end of 1946. However, mostly
disliking himself for it, he had ignored that deadline, choosing to
panic and push himself rather than to abandon all hope. By the summer
of 1947 he’d come to writing the final draft. On a sweltering afternoon
in July in Wichita, Kansas he knocked off the last line to the story on
his Royale typewriter, then typed, ‘The End. By Francis S’ Soaking in a
marinade of his own sweat and tears, he gazed at the final page. He
never thought he’d finish War Widow, but here it was. As he finished
typing his last name, he reminded himself about the pseudonym he’d been
thinking of. He would have to use a false author’s name just in case the
uncreditted sources in his story were ever discovered.  And so, he
rubbed out his name with a Berol White Gum eraser, and typed another
name in its place, “Dirky Whirled.” The next morning, with the Kansas
summer heat still on him like a huge panting dog, he hurried to the
printers on Douglass Avenue, got forty copies made, then mailed them
off, including with each a folded self-addressed-stamped envelope to
Francis S c/o Dirky Whirled, P.O. Box 722, St. Louis, MO.
The strapping heat and excitement of those days in July still frazzled
and framed his intents on October 26,  as he drove south to St. Louis in
the company car, but frazzled and framed him very faintly, for
everything seemed to be slanting away from that nativity at the
typewriter, receding and falling off with the northern light.

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