Growing up in
It started innocently enough, when Ma forbade me from lurking around the chicken coop, where she interred her prize herd of Buff Orpingtons, all being groomed as fastidiously as fashion models for the Ohio State Fair. These hoity toity birds preened and strutted around the chicken yard with the air of Queen Marie of Rumania or the lost Princess Anastasia, while I, a normal American boy trapped in the body of a normal American boy, had to do crappy chores and generally take boxcar loads of lip from people like Ma or Pa or Uncle Frank, our cross-dressing live-in relative who shared the back garret with me.
Ma repeatedly ruled me away from the ratty old chicken coop where these exotic fouls lived, but I loved to hide out in a little shed stuck on the back, where Grandpa kept the extremely nasty and toxic substances he sprayed and drooled on the acres of prize-winning pansies, pumpkins and coreopsis that he also carted to the State Fair, in vain hope of being awarded something better than 14th Honorary Mention (his best score to date). The little shed to me was a magic kingdom I called “The Catbird Seat,” where I spent hours daydreaming I was a confused man named Walter Mitty who spent hours daydreaming he was Genghis Khan or Moby Dick (was he the man or the whale?) or Wallace Beery. I also worried about catching diseases like oleomargarine, pneumothorax or prestidigitation.
Some days I used a piece of charcoal to draw on the shed’s rough wood walls—seals, lumpy ladies with frowns, strangely misshapen hound dogs, all manner of stuff that soon convinced me I was not going to be the next Charles Dana Gibson. I thought about writing one of my stories on the walls, but it seemed like too much work. I just sat back and inhaled the fumes of deadly chemicals and wondered what miracle it would take to escape from
One night I suddenly developed somnambulism, a disease I had never worried about and was even unprepared to spell. I left my bed, lurched down the outside stairs from the garret, inadvertently waking Uncle Frank, who was as usual sleeping with his beauty mask on, holding down a green mudpack. He lept out of his old army cot, staggered around the garret until he tripped on the skirts of his flouncy pink and puce tulle peignoir and crashed headfirst down the long outside stairs after me.
I staggered on automatic pilot to the shed and my source of dreams, trailed by my uncle, more dazed than usual. There I must have started thrashing around in all the poisons and nostrums and hey! presto, I managed to kindle a fire amongst the assorted combustibles. Luckily my dream-navigation took me away before I was engulfed, and Uncle Frank had passed out safely in the garden, overwhelmed with it all. I heard Grandpa bellowing from inside the house, and then Ma and Pa tumbled headlong out the back door.
A fire bell was clanging somewhere, and then the night watchman blew the steam whistle on the tannery as an auxiliary sound effect. The night lit up like a Roman holiday when the fire smoldering behind the chicken coop reached some lethal combination of fertilizer, bug spray and patented Gro-Rite applicant. The chicken coop disassembled itself and rose upward as an infernal blossom of flaming planks, which then rained down and clattered off rooftops and roadways all over the neighborhood. The sky also filled with Buff Orpingtons, whole and in parts, and feathers blew in a williwaw worthy of the
I don’t think I learned a lesson from all this, but the sleepwalking never returned after that night, and nowadays I sleep as stolidly as a strangely misshapen hound dog. ###
| jptArchive Issue 5 |
| Copyright 2008- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved |
| The Journal of Provincial Thought |
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