Stories

We were in the Spring garden thinning carrots. It was midmorning and the day had not wasted time in getting hot. My baseball cap was cocked at a ridiculous angle to block the sun. The going was slow, so you put your water bottle ten paces ahead as an incentive and as a measure of progress.

Noah and Daniel were talking about how to deal with flea beetles. Matt and I were swapping jokes. He knew some good ones. There was one about a talking dog and another about thermometers. I vowed to myself that I would remember them, even though I knew I would not. I could only remember one joke. I told it, drawing it out as long as possible, trying to make up in duration what I lacked in quantity.

And then he says, “Where’s that old woman with the toothache?!” I had stopped
thinning carrots to deliver the punch line with added flair. This paid dividends. Matt was down the row convulsing.

You know what I’d love to study? I said. Story-telling. What a beautiful, lost art.

You should hear Jim Pfizer tell a story. I think he does it professionally. Got one those Marshal grants recently to maintain local tradition. Fifteen-thousand dollars.

Really? Never heard of Marshal grants. So he spins a good yarn?

“Jack tales”. That’s what they call them around here, I think. Jack tales.

Jack tales. I like that. We were closing in on finishing the second row of carrots.

My grandpa could tell a story, Matt said. That’s one of my favorite memories as a kid. Just sitting in the living room listening to grandpa talk about growing up in the depression in South Dakota and getting into all sorts of mischief. He could tell a story.

When I try to picture someone in their childhood, I just superimpose their grown up head onto a child’s body. The results are cartoonish and frequently comical. Imaginary Little Matt was particularly comical. Grown Up Matt wears a wide straw hat and a long, bushy, reddish-brown beard. In appearance and temperament, one might suspect that he escaped from either Lancaster County or perhaps the 19th Century. He teaches writing and literature at UT Chattanooga and speaks slowly and sonorously with the precision of someone who makes his livelihood with words.

My dad’s uncle Elmer… now he could tell a story, I said. Nick Harris Detectives. That was my favorite—Nick Harris Detectives. He drove out to Los Angeles from this small town in Illinois, kind of a last hurrah before going to study dentistry. And somehow he landed this job with this Hollywood detective agency for about two weeks of misadventure. I must have heard him tell it six or eight times, and it never took less than forty-five minutes. I recorded it before he died. That and his stories about the Philippines during the war.

We kept on in silence for a while and I thought about television and story-telling and that Wendell Berry quote Noah liked. Something about how we should always ask whether a technology increases or decreases the skill level of the person using it. I wondered what sort of stories I might tell my grandkids and against what kinds of games and gadgets I would be competing for their attention.

A cool breeze was coming in from the south. I finished my section and moved on to hoeing a row of Swiss chard. The ground was hard and caked after the prior week’s rains and the recent heat. The hoe did not slice easily through the soil.

Ashley called us in for lunch just after noon. She had made sandwiches with Matt’s sauerkraut, her own mustard, and a massive block of raw-milk cheese she had ordered from Wisconsin. With some of the limes we had inherited from Ann, she made the best tasting limeade I have ever had.

The food disappeared quickly and we sat around the table, satiated. Chocolate almond butter cookies materialized and life certainly could not have gotten any better.

I sold Anabelle this morning, Ashley said. It was funny; I met the lady in the parking lot at Baylor and the security guard kept giving us weird looks.

Well... you were in the process of selling a goat out of the back of a truck… Noah pointed out astutely. Everyone laughed.

You should have just looked incredulous and said, “What? You’ve never seen a goat deal go down before?” This was Matt’s contribution. I nearly lost my meal.

We all washed up and thanked Daniel and Matt for coming out. When would we be seeing them again? Soon, they said. They set off to canoe back to the Baylor dock. Clouds were coming over Elder Mountain from the west. I filled my water and shambled back to the field. As I picked up where I’d left off with the chard, my mind was filled with snippets of the voice and laughter of Uncle Elmer recounting his exploits with the famous Nick Harris Private Detective Agency of Hollywood, California.