Long time readers will remember in the autumn I often turn to story telling. Many of my stories are about a semi-fictional little town called Joshaway, which in no way except complete reality mirrors my boyhood in the tiny hamlet of Joshua, Texas. There were less than 1,000 people in Joshua in those days. We were a bit, how shall I say, rural.
When we moved from the old high school to the new high school, a story in itself because the new high school bond package came about when a huge chunk of plaster from the rotting ceiling of our old high school auditorium/cafeteria/practice gym fell on the head of Eleanora Prattwhiler, local demagogue, during her latest impassioned speech to the School Board on the safety of our school facilities and the soundness of our structures, which would all be fine, just fine, if only a few people would bring their paint brushes to the school during the summer and spruce things up a bit, which she would do, if only she could, but her lumbago would not allow it, nor could she find time, what with her leadership of the local Bowling Team, but it sounded like a good job for the teachers to do, since they were off in the summer anyway, but wanted to be paid for the whole year, which set her off on one more brief parenthetical thought, how her great-granny Prattwhiler taught in a one room school house for thirty years and was paid in chickens, them being hard times, one supposed particularly for the chickens, which paid a terrible price for education, and she was about to go off on the price of chickens at the Holmes Store when the plaster fell, striking her in the head and killing her instantly.
Nothing was ever proven about the absence of Mr. Lunk, the High School Principal, at that deciding moment. He always claimed he had gone to the restroom during the screed, but there are those who have always believed he may have had something to do with that plaster fall at that moment. Those of us who ate in the old auditorium/cafeteria/practice gym every day knew to watch out for falling chunks of plaster, which grew larger and larger with the passing years, like the giant icebergs you see on the Discovery Channel, separating from the Antarctic due to global warming, which none of us believe Mr. Lunk did anything to cause, either, but there are those who will tell you he put Enos, the custodian up to the plaster fall that day, and they point to the suspicious X marked on the floor of the auditorium/cafeteria/practice gym in duct tape, duct tape being good for anything, just for that School Board meeting that day.
The Warring Commission, set up by Superintendent Oral Warring, cleared Mr. Lunk and Enos from any culpability in the matter, saying God had acted alone in the Falling Plaster Death of Mizz Prattwhiler. She was gone, long lamented, and the school district sent a nice spray to her funeral, which was held down at the Greater Holiness Church of the Illuminating Spirit (Dispensational, Pre-Millenial, Non-Missionary, King James Only, Closed Fellowship) Church, the one with the big sign that almost blotted out the sun, so you could know what to believe before you ever walked in the door.
Anyway, with Eleanora Prattwhiler gone to her reward (or ours, we could never say aloud, it was kind of like that Twilight Zone episode where the little boy could read your mind and turn you into things you did not want to be and put you in the corn field if you did not kow-tow to him, sort of like Congress) the effective opposition to the School Bond Issue for the new high school ended. We got our new high school by a vote of 675 to 654, which was thought odd, because there were less than 1,000 registered voters in town. Mr. Warring and Mr. Lunk, it was said, held out enough votes in a secret ballot box to overcome any vote the anti-bond forces could muster this time, so it was several weeks before we knew the outcome. During this time Mr. Warring carried a large piece of plaster around with him, so people could remember the great tragedy and perhaps to warn them of more to come.
During the recount of the secret ballot box, Number 13, thought particularly lucky because there were only twelve wards in town, it was discovered Mizz Prattwhiler had actually voted for the bond issue, several days after her death, just going to show a woman can change her mind at any moment.
Well, anyway, like I started to say, when we moved from the old school to the new school, our principal just told us to pick up our desks, put them in the back of our pickup trucks and take them out to the new school. He cautioned us to put our books in the cab of the truck, so as not to damage them in the half mile journey out to Highway 174, the vital link to Cleburne in the South, nine miles away, where our only hospital rose, four majestic stories high, towering over the only Dairy Queen in Johnson County, which made it the only fast food in Johnson County (the Dairy Queeen, not the hospital, though the hospital had a very nice cafeteria and delicious Salisbury Steak), unless you counted the Vienna Sausages (pork snout packed in little round cans of congealed fat) and saltines you could buy fast and eat the same way at Holmes Grocery. Cleburne was nine miles to the south and Burleson, to the north, was also nine miles away, the perfect symmetry to make Joshaway people believe we were the center of all things good and right.
Cleburne and Burleson were sort of our satellite republics, like Mongolia and Outer Mongolia were to the USSR, this being the time of the Cold War. We would descend to Cleburne for food and medical care, then ascend to the North for recreation with the girls of Burleson, they being so starved for male companionship.
So was our epic journey undertaken.
Burleson, not Cleburne, was how I ended up, for a time, as a Pearl Diver at the Local Greasy Spoon.
I put my desk in the trunk of the Dodge Dart I drove illegally, being under age and unsteady with machinery. The last part had nothing to do with the law but everything to do with how I became a Pearl Diver at the Local Greasy Spoon.
I have decided to tell this story over the next day or two. I have not told a story for awhile but it is the time of year when I think of stories that might have happened and tell them just as they might have occurred, if they had happened one way and not the other. Some people come here for profound thinking, that being rare in our day, so rare what I do passes for it. Others come here for outrage, which is less rare, seemingly, because there is such demand. For that there are many, many sites. I could name a few but I think you know them. You will have to go elsewhere for your outrage this week, and that suits you well enough.
I am going to tell a Joshaway story.
Joshaway, Texas, less than a thousand souls, but soooo many characters. We were a little bit of Camelot, with a huge dollop of Mayberry dropped in the pot. L'morte de Arthur meets Andy and Barney, if you will.
Soooo many characters. We had a little constable who raided the kids' beer busts whenever he ran low on beer at the house. He sent the minors home, mostly sober, empty handed, with a stern warning on the evils of Demon Rum. He took their confiscated Lone Star away just to teach them a good lesson.
Then, there was my mother, a character in herself, sweet as the day was long, but flying high in a balloon that never landed; six feet tall, a giant woman in a world of men five inches shorter than her, on average. She married one of them, my little father. Told repeatedly, authoritatively, by confident medical authorities she could never have children, she had my brother and me, instead, and raised us mostly like children, regardless of how we acted.
My dad used to pile us in one of the big Ford cars he favored, a giant monstrosity, made out of real, American steel forged in Bethlehem and powered by light sweet Texas crude oil. He would motor us proudly down to the only Dairy Queen in Johnson County, down in Cleburne, where he would let my mother lie to us.
My brother would not partake of anything vanilla and I would not have chocolate. My mother would buy one malt for us to share. She told us my side was vanilla and my brother's side was chocolate and we must drink the malt quickly, so the two flavors did not run together and use only our straws on only our side. I discovered her mendacity one day, when I caught the waitress, Daisy, (or so it said on her name-plate, though I called all things into question that went on in that Dairy Queen after that day) winking at my mother when the Magic Vanilla/Chocolate Malt was ordered. I watched closely then and proved to myself there was no such thing as a non-mixing, two-flavor malt, causing me to lose all regard for Daisy and all trust in my mother, so that the Santa Claus revelation of three years later was no great shock to me.
My gullible brother cried for days. I comforted him with small bits of chocolate, which I did not want anyway.
Tomorrow: Episode Two-Youth Camp and Romance
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