I Sing the Body Electric (23 page)

“I never had any other name except Bernard Samuel Wyneski,” said Mr. Wyneski, his eyes still fixed to me.

“None?” cried Grandpa, startled.

“None.”

“Have you proof of childhood, then, sir?” asked Grandpa. “Or are you a natural phenomenon, like a ship becalmed at sea?”

“Eh?” said Mr. Wyneski.

Grandpa gave up and handed him his full plate.

“Fall to, Bernard Samuel, fall to.”

Mr. Wyneski let his plate lie. “Dover Coach…?”

“With Mr. Dickens, of course,” supplied Grandpa. “Bernard Samuel, we have a new boarder, a novelist, who is starting a new book and has chosen Pip there, Ralph, to work as his secretary—”

“Worked all afternoon,” I said. “Made a quarter!”

I slapped my hand to my mouth. A swift dark cloud had come over Mr. Wyneski's face.

“A novelist? Named Dickens? Surely you don't believe—”

“I believe what a man tells me until he tells me otherwise, then I believe that. Pass the butter,” said Grandpa.

The butter was passed in silence.

“…hell's fires…” Mr. Wyneski muttered.

I slunk low in my chair.

Grandpa, slicing the chicken, heaping the plates, said, “A man with a good demeanor has entered our house. He says his name is Dickens.
For all I know that is his name. He implies he is writing a book. I pass his door, look in, and, yes, he is indeed writing. Should I run tell him not to? It is obvious he needs to set the book down—”

“
A Tale of Two Cities!
” I said.

“
A Tale!
” cried Mr. Wyneski, outraged, “
of Two—
”

“Hush,” said Grandma.

For down the stairs and now at the door of the dining room there was the man with the long hair and the fine goatee and mustaches, nodding, smiling, peering in at us doubtful and saying, “Friends…?”

“Mr. Dickens,” I said, trying to save the day. “I want you to meet Mr. Wyneski, the greatest barber in the world—”

The two men looked at each other for a long moment.

“Mr. Dickens,” said Grandpa. “Will you lend us your talent, sir, for grace?”

We bowed our heads. Mr. Wyneski did not.

Mr. Dickens looked at him gently.

Muttering, the barber glanced at the floor.

Mr. Dickens prayed:

“O Lord of the bounteous table, O Lord who furnishes forth an infinite harvest for your most respectful servants gathered here in loving humiliation, O Lord who garnishes our feast with the bright radish and the resplendent chicken, who sets before us the wine of the summer season, lemonade, and maketh us humble before simple potato pleasures, the lowborn onion and, in the finale, so my nostrils tell me, the bread of vast experiments and fine success, the highborn strawberry shortcake, most beautifully smothered and amiably drowned in fruit from your own warm garden patch, for these, and this good company, much thanks. Amen.”

“Amen,” said everyone but Mr. Wyneski.

We waited.

“Amen, I guess,” he said.

O what a summer that was!

None like it before in Green Town history.

I never got up so early so happy ever in my life! Out of bed at five minutes to, in Paris by one minute after … six in the morning the English Channel boat from Calais, the White Cliffs, sky a blizzard of seagulls, Dover, then the London Coach and London Bridge by noon! Lunch and lemonade out under the trees with Mr. Dickens, Dog licking our cheeks to cool us, then back to Paris and tea at four and…

“Bring up the cannon, Pip!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Mob the Bastille!”

“Yes,
sir!
”

And the guns were fired and the mobs ran and there I was, Mr. C. Dickens A-l First Class Green Town, Illinois, secretary, my eyes bugging, my ears popping, my chest busting with joy, for I dreamt of being a writer some day, too, and here I was unraveling a tale with the very finest best.

“Madame Defarge, oh how she sat and knitted, knitted, sat—”

I looked up to find Grandma knitting in the window.

“Sidney Carton, what and who was he? A man of sensibility, a reading man of gentle thought and capable action…”

Grandpa strolled by mowing the grass.

Drums sounded beyond the hills with guns; a summer storm cracked and dropped unseen walls…

Mr. Wyneski?

Somehow I neglected his shop, somehow I forgot the mysterious barber pole that came up from nothing and spiraled away to nothing, and the fabulous hair that grew on his white tile floor…

So Mr. Wyneski then had to come home every night to find that writer with all the long hair in need of cutting, standing there at the same table thanking the Lord for this, that, and t'other, and Mr. Wyneski not thankful. For there
I
sat staring at Mr. Dickens like
he
was God until one night:

“Shall we say grace?” said Grandma.

“Mr. Wyneski is out brooding in the yard,” said Grandpa.

“Brooding?” I glanced guiltily from the window.

Grandpa tilted his chair back so he could see.

“Brooding's the word. Saw him kick the rose bush, kick the green ferns by the porch, decide against kicking the apple tree. God made it too firm. There, he just jumped on a dandelion. Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile.”

The door slammed. Mr. Wyneski stood at the head of the table.

“I'll say grace tonight!”

He glared at Mr. Dickens.

“Why, I mean,” said Grandma. “Yes. Please.”

Mr. Wyneski shut his eyes tight and began his prayer of destruction:

“O Lord, who delivered me a fine June and a less fine July, help me to get through August somehow.

“O Lord, deliver me from mobs and riots in the streets of London and Paris which drum through my room night and morn, chief members of said riot being one boy who walks in his sleep, a man with a strange name and a Dog who barks after the ragtag and bobtail.

“Give me strength to resist the cries of Fraud, Thief, Fool, and Bunk Artists which rise in my mouth.

“Help me not to run shouting all the way to the Police Chief to yell that in all probability the man who shares our simple bread has a true name of Red Joe Pyke from Wilkesboro, wanted for counterfeiting life, or Bull Hammer from Hornbill, Arkansas, much desired for mean spitefulness and penny-pilfering in Oskaloosa.

“Lord, deliver the innocent boys of this world from the fell clutch of those who would tomfool their credibility.

“And Lord, help me to say, quietly, and with all deference to the lady present, that if one Charles Dickens is not on the noon train tomorrow bound for Potters Grave, Lands End, or Kankakee, I shall like Delilah, with malice, shear the black lamb and fry his mutton-chop whiskers for twilight dinners and late midnight snacks.

“I ask, Lord, not mercy for the mean, but simple justice for the malignant.

“All those agreed, say ‘Amen.'”

He sat down and stabbed a potato.

There was a long moment with everyone frozen.

And then Mr. Dickens, eyes shut said, moaning:

“Ohhhhhhhhhh…!”

It was a moan, a cry, a despair so long and deep it sounded like the train way off in the country the day this man had arrived.

“Mr. Dickens,” I said.

But I was too late.

He was on his feet, blind, wheeling, touching the furniture, holding to the wall, clutching at the doorframe, blundering into the hall, groping up the stairs.

“Ohhhhh…”

It was the long cry of a man gone over a cliff into Eternity.

It seemed we sat waiting to hear him hit bottom.

Far off in the hills in the upper part of the house, his door banged shut.

My soul turned over and died.

“Charlie.” I said. “Oh, Charlie.”

Late that night, Dog howled.

And the reason he howled was that sound, that similar, muffled cry from up in the tower cupola room.

“Holy Cow,” I said. “Call the plumber. Everything's down the drain.”

Mr. Wyneski strode by on the sidewalk, walking nowhere, off and gone.

“That's his fourth time around the block.” Grandpa struck a match and lit his pipe.

“Mr. Wyneski!” I called.

No answer. The footsteps went away.

“Boy oh boy, I feel like I lost a war,” I said.

“No, Ralph, beg pardon, Pip,” said Grandpa, sitting down on the step with me. “You just changed generals in midstream is all. And now one of the generals is so unhappy he's turned mean.”

“Mr. Wyneski? I—I almost hate him!”

Grandpa puffed gently on his pipe. “I don't think he even knows why he is so unhappy and mean. He has had a tooth pulled during the night by a mysterious dentist and now his tongue is aching around the empty place where the tooth was.”

“We're not in church, Grandpa.”

“Cut the Parables, huh? In simple words, Ralph, you used to sweep the hair off that man's shop floor. And he's a man with no wife, no family, just a job. A man with no family needs someone somewhere in the world, whether he knows it or not.”

“I,” I said. “I'll wash the barbershop windows tomorrow. I-I'll oil the red-and-white striped pole so it spins like crazy.”

“I know you will, son.”

A train went by in the night.

Dog howled.

Mr. Dickens answered in a strange cry from his room.

I went to bed and heard the town clock strike one and then two and at last three.

Then it was I heard the soft crying. I went out in the hall to listen by our boarder's door.

“Mr. Dickens?”

The soft sound stopped.

The door was unlocked. I dared open it.

“Mr. Dickens?”

And there he lay in the moonlight, tears streaming from his eyes, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, motionless.

“Mr. Dickens?”

“Nobody by that name here,” said he. His head moved side to side. “Nobody by that name in this room in this bed in this world.”

“You,” I said. “You're Charlie Dickens.”

“You ought to know better,” was the mourned reply. “Long after midnight, moving on toward morning.”

“All I know is,” I said, “I seen you writing every day. I heard you talking every night.”

“Right, right.”

“And you finish one book and start another, and write a fine calligraphy sort of hand.”

“I do that.” A nod. “Oh yes, by the demon possessions, I do.”

“So!” I circled the bed. “What call you got to feel sorry for yourself, a world-famous author?”

“You know and I know, I'm Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.”

“Hells bells,” I said. I started for the door. I was mad because he wasn't holding up his end. He was ruining a grand summer. “Good night!” I rattled the doorknob.

“Wait!”

It was such a terrible soft cry of need and almost pain, I dropped my hand, but I didn't turn.

“Pip,” said the old man in the bed.

“Yeah?” I said, grouching.

“Let's both be quiet. Sit down.”

I slowly sat on the spindly wooden chair by the night table.

“Talk to me, Pip.”

“Holy Cow, at three—”

“—in the morning, yes. Oh, it's a fierce awful time of night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We have need of friends then.
Friend
, Pip? Ask me things.”

“Like what?”

“I think you know.”

I brooded a moment and sighed. “Okay, okay. Who
are
you?”

He was very quiet for a moment lying there in his bed and then traced the words on the ceiling with a long invisible tip of his nose and said, “I'm a man who could never fit his dream.”

“What?”

“I mean, Pip, I never became what I wanted to be.”

I was quiet now, too. “What'd you
want
to be?”

“A writer.”

“Did you
try?
”

“Try!” he cried, and almost gagged on a strange wild laugh. “Try,” he said, controlling himself. “Why Lord of Mercy, son, you never saw so much spit, ink, and sweat fly. I wrote my way through an ink factory, broke and busted a paper company, ruined and dilapidated six dozen typewriters, devoured and scribbled to the bone ten thousand Ticonderoga Soft Lead pencils.”

“Wow!”

“You may well say Wow.”

“What did you write?”

“What
didn't
I write. The poem. The essay. The play
tragique
. The farce. The short story. The novel. A thousand words a day, boy, every day for thirty years, no day passed I did not scriven and assault the page. Millions of words passed from my fingers onto paper and it was all bad.”

“It couldn't have been!”

“It
was
. Not mediocre, not passing fair. Just plain outright mudbath bad. Friends knew it, editors knew it, teachers knew it, publishers knew it, and one strange fine day about four in the afternoon, when I was fifty,
I
knew it.”

“But you can't write thirty years without—”

“Stumbling upon excellence? Striking a chord? Gaze long, gaze hard, Pip, look upon a man of peculiar talent, outstanding ability, the only man in history who put down five million words without slapping to life one small base of a story that might rear up on its frail legs and cry Eureka! we've done it!”

“You never sold
one
story!?”

“Not a two line joke. Not a throwaway newspaper sonnet. Not a want ad or obit. Not a home-bottled autumn pickle recipe. Isn't that rare? To be so outstandingly dull, so ridiculously inept, that nothing ever brought a chuckle, caused a tear, raised a temper, or discharged a blow. And do you know what I did on the day I discovered I would never be a writer? I killed myself.”

“Killed?!”

“Did away with, destroyed. How? I packed me up and took me away on a long train ride and sat on the back smoking-car platform a long time in the night and then one by one let the confetti of my manuscripts fly like panicked birds away down the tracks. I scattered a novel across Nebraska, my Homeric legends over North, my love sonnets through South Dakota. I abandoned my familiar essays in the men's room at the Harvey House in Clear Springs, Idaho. The late summer wheatfields knew my prose. Grand fertilizer, it probably jumped up bumper crops of corn long after I passed. I rode two trunks of my soul on that long summer's journey, celebrating my badly served self. And one by one, slow at first, and then faster, faster, over I chucked them, story after story, out, out of my arms out of my head, out of my life, and down they went, sunk drowning night rivers of prairie dust, in lost continents of sand and lonely rock. And the train wallowed around a curve in a great wail of darkness and release, and I opened my fingers and let the last stillborn darlings fall....