The Brothers K (37 page)

A
single, formidable exception to the hand-me-down-shirt syndrome was our grim, grammar-dispensing ninth-grade English instructor, Delmar Hergert. Everett’s pet theory was that the man was simply half inorganic—the offspring, possibly, of some horny hiker who’d had a wet dream
while napping atop Beacon Rock. Be that as it mayn’t, Del Hergert looked like a walking talking gray-haired chunk of Columbia River basalt when Everett sauntered into his class in September 1961, and he hadn’t weathered a whit when Bet and Freddy fled the same class in June of ’72.

Not only did Del Hergert refuse to age, he refused to laugh, frown or in any way color his face with emotion, refused to modify his words with humor, anger, affection, irony or even volume, in fact refused to do anything at all except pass or fail, with basaltic unbias, those students who had succeeded or failed to master the basic laws of English grammar by the year’s end, and to have demonstrated that mastery in a lengthy test and even lengthier “original essay.” All my siblings and I had to concoct monstrous essays for Hergert. Irwin’s heroic “History of My Dad from His Birth Up to Kincaids’s” was only the longest. Mine, the following year, garnered the distinction of being the most brownnosingly boring: my strategy had been to tailor my topic to the man it was intended for, so I’d nearly died of ennui writing about—you guessed it—Columbia River basalt formations. Peter’s essay (on the Great Religions of the East), Bet’s (on the Space Program) and Freddy’s (on the Oregon Trail) all made me feel better by being only slightly less anemic than my own. Only Everett had been sufficiently uncowed by Hergert’s basaltic visage and personality to take full advantage of the word “original” in the assignment description, and that’s why he penned the only essay besides Irwin’s that is still tolerable to read.

It was called “Junk Cenius,” and though it was written two years before Irwin’s “History of My Dad,” it picked Papa’s baseball biography up where Irwin had more or less left it—with Papa dramatically saved by the mysterious “Fort Oopawanapoonawahinipopo” Brigadier General from “Goon Squad” and “Mongol trenches,” only to end up broke, bum-winged, and sold by the White Shlocks to that most inept and aptly dubbed of ballclubs, the Washington Senators, who in turn took one peek at Papa and zipped him off—with his three sons, wife and the embryonic edition of me—to a Baseball Erewhon called Kincaid, Oklahoma, and to a Double A team called, believe it or not, the Cornshuckers.

“Junk Genius” earned Everett a number of peculiar honors. The first was a red-inked U (meaning Unacceptable) from Mr. Hergert, due to “extensive use of profanity.” The second, third and fourth honors—all compliments of a now defunct periodical called
Sporting Digest
—were a free year’s subscription, a wall plaque, and (oh joy!) a baseball bat
exactly
like the one Everett’s antihero, Roger Maris, used to club his sixty-first
home run! Having no idea that they were gainsaying a redoubtable old grammarian,
Sporting Digest
selected “Junk Genius” as second runner-up in their “1962 Sports Story Open,” thereby swelling Everett’s already sizable head to the bursting point. Fortunately for those of us who lived with him, they immediately shrank it back down again by publishing a version so drastically condensed and dehydrated (good old-fashioned “#$%&*!”s where the “extensive profanity” should have been, for example) that reading it was rather like trying to consume instant coffee without first adding water. But the last and most peculiar honor the paper received came in the form of a letter of bombast and protestation addressed “to the McLoughlin High School Tinkling Brass” by one G. Q. Durham—the Junk Genius of the title.

Faithfully preserved in Mama’s attic archives, Durham’s letter is too confounding to quote in full. But his closing remarks should serve to demonstrate the inimitable G.Q. style:

… So if the straight poop is still worth a good goddam in this horse-crap Hypocrite’s Hey-Day & Age, young Everett there should have an A
plus
coming for his picture-perfect protrayals [sic] of my private & unique methods of instructing the science of junk pitching, commanding a ballclub & employing the King’s & various lesser types of English. So please convey to the scholarly Mr. Yogurt [sic] that if anybody’s got an F coming it’s The Bull, not the boy, & he can mail it here any time he likes & be overjoyed to know that my mean ol’ mom’ll whale the living tar out of me. But please convey to him also that if he insists on bullyragging helpless youngsters by shelling out Fs to the wrong person, Bull Durham looks forward to dealing in kind with Mr. Yogurt personally the next time my duties carries him out that way. This is no threat. Just a sweet & mild promise. Hugh Chance’s boy has done both yours & my organizations proud & ought to be commendated [sic] in kind.

Yours in baseball,

G. Q. “Bull” Durham,

Ex-Head-Scout Washington Senators,

Ex-Pitcher (5 teams American & National),

Ex-Manager Kincaid Cornshuckers,

Current Free-lance Scout & Junk Authority Extrordinnair [sic]

T
he Bull’s real name was Gale Q. Durham. What the Q. stood for was anybody’s guess, but what the Bull stood for was definitely not the man’s
size, strength or brand of tobacco, but his manner of “employing the King’s & various lesser types of English.” His ominous letter on Everett’s behalf was typical: at the time he penned it, the mighty Bull was a bald-headed, tub-gutted, hypoglycemic stroke victim who stood all of 5′9″ (though antique baseball cards listed him at 6′1″), weighed a doughy 199, grew winded when forced to rise from a chair or box seat, and needed bifocals if not binoculars to read the labels on his beer bottles, let alone to size up any sort of baseball prospect. The Bull sported one kidney, two small but patriotic eyes (red, white and blue), anywhere from two to five chins depending on whether he was watching grounders or pop-ups, and a pair of indelible mouth-corner tobacco stains that made him look like a puppet with its jaws hung on hinges. A baseball uniform—particularly a Washington Senators uniform—didn’t add one iota of grandeur to the overall picture. In other words, what made the Bull the Bull was not what he was, but what he was full of.

The big leagues do have an aura of power, though. And a tobacco-stained threat-letter scrawled on official (if obsolete) Senators stationery by a fellow named Bull could strike more than a little fear in the average pedagogue’s heart. For a grammar-dispensing chunk of Columbia River basalt, however, there was only one way to deal with such mail: Delmar Hergert calmly corrected its grammar and spelling, gave it a bright red F, mailed a copy straight back to Bull, and handed the original—with red-inked corrections—over to Everett, accompanied by a handwritten note that read:

While my stand on profanity remains unaltered, this drivel has inadvertently demonstrated your exceptional memory of and ear for this pitiable bombast’s vernacular. That you apparently cherish both the memories and the dialect is a subjective judgment the wisdom of which I shall not here question. In recognition of your gift, however, I offer this compromise: recopy the entire essay in
legible
longhand, substituting blanks (i.e ______) for obscenities, and I will change your grade from U to B +, thereby enabling us to be permanently rid of one another.

“Yours in baseball,”

D. M. Hergert

Everett did exactly what the basalt chunk suggested, but couldn’t resist adding a note of his own:

While my stand on verisimilitude, and to that end profanity, remains as unaltered as yours, I’ve learned something valuable through all this: G. Q. Durham is a great pitching coach and bull________er, but D. M. Hergert is an equally great grammar teacher.

Yours in English,

Everett M. Chance

W
hile I became a pre-Feminist, Everett a pre-Hippie, Peter a pre-Bhikku, Bet and Freddy Famous Scientists, Grandawma a surprisingly fond memory and Papa one hell of a skilled backyard-mattress basher, Mama had also undergone a major change: she’d become a Fanatic.

Not a raving Fanatic. At least not audibly raving. That might have been healthier, actually, because Mama’s raving went on almost solely in her head, where there was no way to hear it, hence no means of challenging it, hence no means of preventing her from believing every bit of it. Fully believing herself to be at war with Satan, fully believing Irwin’s, Bet’s and Freddy’s salvations to be at stake, her love for the rest of us—even her love for Papa—simply sank out of sight. The submerging of this love immediately began to kill a very large part of her. But it also freed the fanatic to begin conducting a covert holy war against us.

Her first act of war was to try to balance the odds by secretly enlisting the mightiest ally she could think of: Elder Babcock. Her second act of war, at the urging of this ally, was to completely disgrace herself: at Babcock’s suggestion Mama became a kind of religious McCarthyite, Everett, Peter and I became the “witches,” and she became our hunter. That we happened to be her offspring didn’t matter (Matthew 10:36). That she was attempting to chop her family in half like a big chunk of stove wood also didn’t matter (Matthew 10:35, 37 & 38). That she set out to do this “chopping” by surreptitiously plundering our rooms, notebooks, closets, wastebaskets, and any other place she thought might contain evidence of our moral or religious corruption eventually did matter to some of us (Exodus 20:15). But witch-hunters don’t think about niggling little rules like the Ten Commandments. Witch-hunters think they’re right, they think you’re wrong, and they think that as long as they can prove it, how they prove it doesn’t matter.

The exact purpose of Mama’s pilfered evidence, as far as we were ever able to understand, was to show it to Irwin and the twins at a sort of
Inquisition/Surprise Party to be organized and supervised by (who else?) the Elder. The purpose of this gathering, in turn, was to convince our orthodox siblings to give us rebels the same
Agree with me or I’ll damn you forever!
ultimatum that Babcock and Mama had already given us. Like many a Christian before them, Mama and the Elder justified their machinations with Christ’s famous sentence: “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” And like many a Christian before them, they completely forgot that the only sword-shaped weapon Jesus ever actually used was the one He died on.

Still it was an interesting plan. At least it was bold, dramatic and, from Bet’s and Freddy’s perspectives, rather flattering: not every eight-year-old girl on the block got invited to sit in judgment over older brothers charged with heresy, Satanism and the like. Of course the plan was also ridiculous, and doomed to bring nothing but pain, confusion and embarrassment to everyone concerned. But this is the Fanatic’s great disputative advantage over other people: “What’s a little confusion or pain,” they ask, “compared to eternal salvation?” And of course this question can’t be argued: who wouldn’t gladly be robbed of all they own today if they were certain that the thief would “come again” and hand them a billion-dollar compensation payment tomorrow? But this question doesn’t address the real problem. In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ’s power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church
is
that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to
their
astounding effrontery but to
our
sinfulness?

The Austrian writer Robert Musil summed up the Fanatic’s great rhetorical advantage in just ten words: “There is no truth which stupidity can’t make use of.”

Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put it this way:

“Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right—for let them only doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Someone has to do it.”

·  ·  ·  ·

I
’ve often wondered what Mama and Babcock could possibly have found to say to each other the first time they huddled over a heap of her espionage findings. What did they make, for example, of a confiscated poem I wrote called “Why Apple Pie”? The inspiration for this ditty was that Everett had been making remarks about the corresponding sizes of my body and appetite, and Irwin had been finding these remarks so amusing that he’d committed some to memory and taken to trotting them out at night when I was trying to get to sleep. For this reason, when I was given a parody-writing assignment in Honors English, I decided to prove to the two svelte louts that my sense of humor was as big as the rest of me—even when the rest of me was the topic. It went like this:

Among its intended audience the reactions were predictable: Everett (who loved even bad parody and undoubtedly envied my poem) yawned to hide his smile and said it didn’t sound like Carroll at all. Peter (who hated parody and, I’m sure, disliked the poem) smiled politely and said, “Quite the little parody there, Kade.” And Irwin (who loved every silly thing his brothers ever did) spoke not a word: he just made the whole effort utterly worthwhile by falling off his bed laughing, and later insisted on tacking it to his wall—