HEMINGWAY VARIATION No. 21
Couple of things I want to say. The first thing I already writ in that letter in the Trunkline, about Roger Fellway’s can. Actually, the letter were writ by James Gulliver, Esquire. If any of you folk think that you’s the only human being who come up to me and say, “Balthazar, I know you ain’t writ that letter,” you is seriously deluded. I ain’t been shy that I told Jim Gulliver what I wanted it to say and that he’d get ten dollars if it come out in the newspaper.
To add to what that letter say, Mayor Farrell, Moses Knight, Rainy Barton, Jim Jephson and Titus Shelby, if any of you over there raise your hand to give fifty dollar more to Roger Fellway you is being foolish with our money. Not unless Fellway ain’t allowed his can or he’s supposed to tell us how much is in that can every day, which there would be no way of verifying, so that wouldn’t work.
I know Roger say sometime there ain’t nothing in the can. I got no doubt that surely is the case. But have anyone ever heard Roger say how much was in the can when there were something in it? That reporter who come from Shreveport for the anniversary? I expect he put something in the can, and it weren’t peanuts. That’s all I have to say about that.
The second thing is, this town would be better off if we stop making believe there really were some old white elephant. I know plenty of you would like to shoot me right now for saying that, but you can’t because I’m here in plain sight, and once I’ve finished with what I have to say, it too late to come sneaking up on me or anything, since I already done said it.
It were just one of those coincidences that a elephant got loose from a circus in Shreveport and the engineer of the 5:22 from Baton Rouge, whose name was Anthony Pardo and whose pitcher Roger Fellway has up in the museum, say “I done hit a white elephant.” Which ain’t entirely accurate. What he say, this Anthony Pardo, were something like, “I done thought I hit a white elephant.” He might have said “a white cow,” but KWKH had been going on all day about that loose elephant and we was all expecting to see a elephant come at us around some corner. By the time Pardo say what he say, he know what he hit and it weren’t no white elephant.
Another thing. There weren’t ever nothing about that loose elephant in Shreveport being white. Fellway’s got the Shreveport Times from the next day up there on the wall. Have anyone ever put their nose right up to it and read what it say? There ain’t nothing there about that elephant being white. And it would have been. White is out of the ordinary for a elephant. I once even seen mention in the newspaper about a albino groundhog someone see somewhere. Pardo was the one who say “white.” He say “elephant” because that was in everyone’s brain on account of KWKH and he say “white” because white were what Eurythmie Mason, or Eurythmie Bewley as she used to be, were in her birthday suit when she roll down the hill.
Now every man is entitle to make as many mistakes as he want. Mistakes is what make a man what he is. When Lamont Mason come up with the plan to change the name of the town, given that Sheriff Kelsey told the Shreveport Times that it were a white elephant that the 5:22 from Baton Rouge had slammed into because, he say, that’s what someone told him down the telephone, and there ain’t any way we’re going to know that for sure because they both dead, Mason and Kelsey, in the expectation that it would bring the tourists down here, like they go to Murfreesboro to dig for diamonds or Arlington to see the Witness Tree, we know now that were a mistake.
Spent two hundred and fifty dollar going from Commerce City, which admittedly never do us any good, to White Elephant, and two hundred and fifty dollar back in 1928 were a lot more money then, more like a thousand. And that were just for lawyers and such. It don’t include how much it cost to change the signs, even though, truth to tell, the official signs on Route 155 was put up by the state highway department, but the sign right outside this building for one, and then buying new stationary and the like, and they had to send twenty-four dollar up north for two new town seals, that one setting there and the other one in the Clerk’s office.
There’s mistakes but then there’s damn bad luck. There ain’t no way Lamont Moran could have know that Eurythmie Bewley were going to get fat like that. Now, there ain’t nothing wrong with how a woman naturally fill out. If a man appreciate what he got in the first place, he appreciate it twice as much when there’re twice more of it. And Eurythmie Bewley, as she were then, were right comely, that red hair and all. We were all busting to try her out, it just were Moran who she were with when the music stop, if you catch my meaning.
But Eurythmie, when she got so fat. If you been around then, you remember. My particular pitcher of Eurythmie is her having to go into Callingham’s sideways and Earl Callingham having to put more space between those wooden racks he had because whenever Eurythmie came shopping apples and onions would get knocked off and roll around.
Then come the New Year Party, right here, with the chairs all carried out to the roadwork shed and paper ribbons looped across the room from one window catch to another, not straight across, but from the farthest on one side, over there, to the farthest on the other side, over here, then the next farthest to the next farthest, and so on, so they made a kind of cat’s cradle, and Roy Conklin and he called it The Cowboy Stompers back then, not The Dance Kings, and of course the Mayor had to be there and he couldn’t leave his wife home on New Year, and Roger Fellway, who was drunk, saying, “What you got percolating in there, Eurythmie, a elephant?” which, come to think of it, were before the elephant got loose in Shreveport, so you might say that were really the start of the elephant thing around here, and Eurythmie just slumping down on two chairs, since they left some chairs along the wall for folks to set on and one chair weren’t enough for her, and bawling away, “It’s the glands.”
Now I hear one or two folk say Lamont Moran roll Eurythmie down that hill, maybe half-dead, maybe all dead already, but I can’t buy that. Eurythmie roll, she roll alright. You just had to look at that swath she make on her way down. But how Moran going to make it so that heap of human being going to end up crosswise across the railroad tracks? Even if he run down the hill after it, even if he have some help, how two men going to haul three hundred fifty pound a-flopping out of that gully and up twenty feet of gravel and heave it onto the tracks between when the 5:28 from Dallas go by and ain’t seen nothing and the 5:22 from Baton Rouge come around the bend.
Most people know what happened to Eurythmie Moran, even without really knowing, but knowing just from being another human being. What she going to do? How anything going to get better for Eurythmie? She can’t do nothing with those glands and people are just getting less and less polite. Some folk are suspicious because she were in her birthday suit. Maybe she thought she roll better that way and not get caught up in the brush, maybe she just want to say, “Here I is, just as I is.” I ain’t got the answer to that. Then when she hear the 5:22 coming, she just crawl up there and put herself across the tracks.
Now a man can’t have his naked wife hit by a train, no matter how much she weigh. So Moran have to get down there, or maybe he had a friend, or a friend come around with a tractor, and Pardo, the engineer is there, and Sheriff Kelsey maybe, maybe not, doesn’t matter, and the fireman, I don’t know his name, he ain’t there. He run back to the cars where some lady broke her arm.
It’s better for Pardo to have hit a critter, something like a white cow, than a person, so Pardo, he write his report like that. Kelsey, he either see and go along or he just were told the fiction down the telephone, I don’t know. Then Kelsey talk to some reporter, skunk on moonshine probably, who put it in that the elephant that got loose in Shreveport were hit in Commerce City by the 5:22 from Baton Rouge, the part about the elephant being white being left out because it was too hard for the Shreveport Times to swallow, and the next thing we know, we is White Elephant, Texas, museum and all, and Roger Fellway got his can.
Fact is, folk get more consternated over why Moran say he run Eurythmie over hisself in his driveway because he thought she were the boar that been rooting up his beets, than whether Moran roll her down the hill or just drug her back up, or why Eurythmie were naked. Some folk say that the story tells better if Moran make hisself the cause of it, if he take on the blame. Maybe so. Moran could have put her out on Route 155 and say it were a hit and run, but she can’t lay out on Route 155 in her birthday suit any more than on the railroad tracks. So, it has to be the driveway, because a driveway is part of a man’s castle, which is a way of saying his home, and home is the only place your wife can go around naked in without anybody saying anything.
I got another idea about all that, though. I think Moran say he the one who done Eurythmie in, although he make sure it were the form of a unfortunate accident, because he feel like it were true, that he done done her in. He do her in back on that New Year when he just set there soaking up beer with Ryan Bouchard instead of going up and busting Roger Fellway’s jaw.
And I got more to say about that. We all who was there, we all done in Eurythmie a little. There were no need for us to bust Fellway’s jaw, but just say something, something like “Can’t treat no woman like that, and the Mayor’s wife and all.” But nobody say anything. When I think of it now, that New Year, and Fellway, and Eurythmie there, bawling away, I personal think I were a miserable piece of what I can’t say up here since the ungodly Communists ain’t got down this far yet, and I’ll put five dollar down, ten dollar, that plenty other folk feel the same way.
Okay. Now imagine you was the husband. And then she done what she done. Oh, man. How you going to feel? What you going to do? You’s going to take the blame on yourself, you’s going to change the name of the place, you’s going to build a tabernacle, you’s going to install as keeper of the tabernacle a man who feel just as full of blame as you and just as full of repentance, and who maybe help you when you needed help, and will keep silent no matter what. Even now.
So, Mayor Farrell, Councilman Knight, Councilman Barton, Councilman Jephson, Councilman Shelby, I’m putting in front of you a formal motion that somewhere down the line we change the name of this town again. If it weren’t for all the money and trouble it take, the signs and the stationery and the seals and all, I’d say let’s do it tomorrow. But pretty soon, pretty soon this town should be named what it rightly should be, Eurythmie, Texas.
We keep the museum and all, but not a museum about a lie, about some jungle critter that never saw hide nor hair of here, but a museum about the truth, about the truth about a lie, if you catch my meaning, about how we mistreated that poor woman and made up a story because we were ashamed, and then thirty year later about how we see the light, and done repent, and give honor to the innocent human being we just might as well have murdered.
Some train hit a elephant in 1928? What kind of story is that? It’s stale, a stale story. But a story about how a entire town were born again, a entire town take blame onto itself and go to the bother and expense of re-changing the name again to make it up to the poor female citizen it done forsake? That’s not going to go stale, that’s a story for the ages.
They’ll come then for sure, they will for sure, but won’t be called tourists, they be pilgrims, and we can sell tickets and make some money and start getting things done, like fixing Legionnaire Road. And we won’t have to pay Roger Fellway nothing. That can of his will be all he need.
Couple of things I want to say. The first thing I already writ in that letter in the Trunkline, about Roger Fellway’s can. Actually, the letter were writ by James Gulliver, Esquire. If any of you folk think that you’s the only human being who come up to me and say, “Balthazar, I know you ain’t writ that letter,” you is seriously deluded. I ain’t been shy that I told Jim Gulliver what I wanted it to say and that he’d get ten dollars if it come out in the newspaper.
To add to what that letter say, Mayor Farrell, Moses Knight, Rainy Barton, Jim Jephson and Titus Shelby, if any of you over there raise your hand to give fifty dollar more to Roger Fellway you is being foolish with our money. Not unless Fellway ain’t allowed his can or he’s supposed to tell us how much is in that can every day, which there would be no way of verifying, so that wouldn’t work.
I know Roger say sometime there ain’t nothing in the can. I got no doubt that surely is the case. But have anyone ever heard Roger say how much was in the can when there were something in it? That reporter who come from Shreveport for the anniversary? I expect he put something in the can, and it weren’t peanuts. That’s all I have to say about that.
The second thing is, this town would be better off if we stop making believe there really were some old white elephant. I know plenty of you would like to shoot me right now for saying that, but you can’t because I’m here in plain sight, and once I’ve finished with what I have to say, it too late to come sneaking up on me or anything, since I already done said it.
It were just one of those coincidences that a elephant got loose from a circus in Shreveport and the engineer of the 5:22 from Baton Rouge, whose name was Anthony Pardo and whose pitcher Roger Fellway has up in the museum, say “I done hit a white elephant.” Which ain’t entirely accurate. What he say, this Anthony Pardo, were something like, “I done thought I hit a white elephant.” He might have said “a white cow,” but KWKH had been going on all day about that loose elephant and we was all expecting to see a elephant come at us around some corner. By the time Pardo say what he say, he know what he hit and it weren’t no white elephant.
Another thing. There weren’t ever nothing about that loose elephant in Shreveport being white. Fellway’s got the Shreveport Times from the next day up there on the wall. Have anyone ever put their nose right up to it and read what it say? There ain’t nothing there about that elephant being white. And it would have been. White is out of the ordinary for a elephant. I once even seen mention in the newspaper about a albino groundhog someone see somewhere. Pardo was the one who say “white.” He say “elephant” because that was in everyone’s brain on account of KWKH and he say “white” because white were what Eurythmie Mason, or Eurythmie Bewley as she used to be, were in her birthday suit when she roll down the hill.
Now every man is entitle to make as many mistakes as he want. Mistakes is what make a man what he is. When Lamont Mason come up with the plan to change the name of the town, given that Sheriff Kelsey told the Shreveport Times that it were a white elephant that the 5:22 from Baton Rouge had slammed into because, he say, that’s what someone told him down the telephone, and there ain’t any way we’re going to know that for sure because they both dead, Mason and Kelsey, in the expectation that it would bring the tourists down here, like they go to Murfreesboro to dig for diamonds or Arlington to see the Witness Tree, we know now that were a mistake.
Spent two hundred and fifty dollar going from Commerce City, which admittedly never do us any good, to White Elephant, and two hundred and fifty dollar back in 1928 were a lot more money then, more like a thousand. And that were just for lawyers and such. It don’t include how much it cost to change the signs, even though, truth to tell, the official signs on Route 155 was put up by the state highway department, but the sign right outside this building for one, and then buying new stationary and the like, and they had to send twenty-four dollar up north for two new town seals, that one setting there and the other one in the Clerk’s office.
There’s mistakes but then there’s damn bad luck. There ain’t no way Lamont Moran could have know that Eurythmie Bewley were going to get fat like that. Now, there ain’t nothing wrong with how a woman naturally fill out. If a man appreciate what he got in the first place, he appreciate it twice as much when there’re twice more of it. And Eurythmie Bewley, as she were then, were right comely, that red hair and all. We were all busting to try her out, it just were Moran who she were with when the music stop, if you catch my meaning.
But Eurythmie, when she got so fat. If you been around then, you remember. My particular pitcher of Eurythmie is her having to go into Callingham’s sideways and Earl Callingham having to put more space between those wooden racks he had because whenever Eurythmie came shopping apples and onions would get knocked off and roll around.
Then come the New Year Party, right here, with the chairs all carried out to the roadwork shed and paper ribbons looped across the room from one window catch to another, not straight across, but from the farthest on one side, over there, to the farthest on the other side, over here, then the next farthest to the next farthest, and so on, so they made a kind of cat’s cradle, and Roy Conklin and he called it The Cowboy Stompers back then, not The Dance Kings, and of course the Mayor had to be there and he couldn’t leave his wife home on New Year, and Roger Fellway, who was drunk, saying, “What you got percolating in there, Eurythmie, a elephant?” which, come to think of it, were before the elephant got loose in Shreveport, so you might say that were really the start of the elephant thing around here, and Eurythmie just slumping down on two chairs, since they left some chairs along the wall for folks to set on and one chair weren’t enough for her, and bawling away, “It’s the glands.”
Now I hear one or two folk say Lamont Moran roll Eurythmie down that hill, maybe half-dead, maybe all dead already, but I can’t buy that. Eurythmie roll, she roll alright. You just had to look at that swath she make on her way down. But how Moran going to make it so that heap of human being going to end up crosswise across the railroad tracks? Even if he run down the hill after it, even if he have some help, how two men going to haul three hundred fifty pound a-flopping out of that gully and up twenty feet of gravel and heave it onto the tracks between when the 5:28 from Dallas go by and ain’t seen nothing and the 5:22 from Baton Rouge come around the bend.
Most people know what happened to Eurythmie Moran, even without really knowing, but knowing just from being another human being. What she going to do? How anything going to get better for Eurythmie? She can’t do nothing with those glands and people are just getting less and less polite. Some folk are suspicious because she were in her birthday suit. Maybe she thought she roll better that way and not get caught up in the brush, maybe she just want to say, “Here I is, just as I is.” I ain’t got the answer to that. Then when she hear the 5:22 coming, she just crawl up there and put herself across the tracks.
Now a man can’t have his naked wife hit by a train, no matter how much she weigh. So Moran have to get down there, or maybe he had a friend, or a friend come around with a tractor, and Pardo, the engineer is there, and Sheriff Kelsey maybe, maybe not, doesn’t matter, and the fireman, I don’t know his name, he ain’t there. He run back to the cars where some lady broke her arm.
It’s better for Pardo to have hit a critter, something like a white cow, than a person, so Pardo, he write his report like that. Kelsey, he either see and go along or he just were told the fiction down the telephone, I don’t know. Then Kelsey talk to some reporter, skunk on moonshine probably, who put it in that the elephant that got loose in Shreveport were hit in Commerce City by the 5:22 from Baton Rouge, the part about the elephant being white being left out because it was too hard for the Shreveport Times to swallow, and the next thing we know, we is White Elephant, Texas, museum and all, and Roger Fellway got his can.
Fact is, folk get more consternated over why Moran say he run Eurythmie over hisself in his driveway because he thought she were the boar that been rooting up his beets, than whether Moran roll her down the hill or just drug her back up, or why Eurythmie were naked. Some folk say that the story tells better if Moran make hisself the cause of it, if he take on the blame. Maybe so. Moran could have put her out on Route 155 and say it were a hit and run, but she can’t lay out on Route 155 in her birthday suit any more than on the railroad tracks. So, it has to be the driveway, because a driveway is part of a man’s castle, which is a way of saying his home, and home is the only place your wife can go around naked in without anybody saying anything.
I got another idea about all that, though. I think Moran say he the one who done Eurythmie in, although he make sure it were the form of a unfortunate accident, because he feel like it were true, that he done done her in. He do her in back on that New Year when he just set there soaking up beer with Ryan Bouchard instead of going up and busting Roger Fellway’s jaw.
And I got more to say about that. We all who was there, we all done in Eurythmie a little. There were no need for us to bust Fellway’s jaw, but just say something, something like “Can’t treat no woman like that, and the Mayor’s wife and all.” But nobody say anything. When I think of it now, that New Year, and Fellway, and Eurythmie there, bawling away, I personal think I were a miserable piece of what I can’t say up here since the ungodly Communists ain’t got down this far yet, and I’ll put five dollar down, ten dollar, that plenty other folk feel the same way.
Okay. Now imagine you was the husband. And then she done what she done. Oh, man. How you going to feel? What you going to do? You’s going to take the blame on yourself, you’s going to change the name of the place, you’s going to build a tabernacle, you’s going to install as keeper of the tabernacle a man who feel just as full of blame as you and just as full of repentance, and who maybe help you when you needed help, and will keep silent no matter what. Even now.
So, Mayor Farrell, Councilman Knight, Councilman Barton, Councilman Jephson, Councilman Shelby, I’m putting in front of you a formal motion that somewhere down the line we change the name of this town again. If it weren’t for all the money and trouble it take, the signs and the stationery and the seals and all, I’d say let’s do it tomorrow. But pretty soon, pretty soon this town should be named what it rightly should be, Eurythmie, Texas.
We keep the museum and all, but not a museum about a lie, about some jungle critter that never saw hide nor hair of here, but a museum about the truth, about the truth about a lie, if you catch my meaning, about how we mistreated that poor woman and made up a story because we were ashamed, and then thirty year later about how we see the light, and done repent, and give honor to the innocent human being we just might as well have murdered.
Some train hit a elephant in 1928? What kind of story is that? It’s stale, a stale story. But a story about how a entire town were born again, a entire town take blame onto itself and go to the bother and expense of re-changing the name again to make it up to the poor female citizen it done forsake? That’s not going to go stale, that’s a story for the ages.
They’ll come then for sure, they will for sure, but won’t be called tourists, they be pilgrims, and we can sell tickets and make some money and start getting things done, like fixing Legionnaire Road. And we won’t have to pay Roger Fellway nothing. That can of his will be all he need.