Hi, fellow travelers. I don't know why I'm calling this contribution a "rhapsody". I don't really know for sure what a rhapsody is. Wait... I just looked it up. With a stretch it fits, it fits. I found this in my closet, among a sheaf of old writings from when I was a whole lot younger. It's not finished, as the title says...

Anyway, here's what I thought I'd ask you to do, just for fun: Read the piece through. When You're finished, suggest an ending for it on my message board. I'd like to offer to the "best ending" a copy of my book "The Dead Of Winter" which I'm hoping will be out in the fall. Hey! I can't afford any more than that!

Any takers? Here goes:


There's a story there somewhere, a damn fine story I'll bet! I'd like to be the one to tell it, but here's the problem: I'm a country boy, you see. (My wife, Jesse, happened to be walking past my desk just as I put down that last sentence. She stopped, bent over my shoulder, and burst out laughing. She's gone now, thank God! She doesn't know, of course, how tenuous a thread there is between confidence and pen. But if she happens to come this way again, let her read this: "You are right, dear, sweet and severe critic! You are right!")

I'm not a boy. I'm forty-two years old, and it's high time, I guess, I start thinking of myself as a man, maybe even a middle-aged man. But it comes hard, thinking that. It comes real hard.

Being a country... "anything" isn't exactly right either. I can say I was born in the country, but, hell, from seventeen on I was educated in the ways of all that was non-country. My education began the day I left Achindale, South Carolina, you might say. That was the day I joined the Air Force. Then, four years later, and straight from the Air Force I went to N.Y.U. where, I guess, by all standards I got a swell education. And, fresh out of college I got myself a real nice job, real nice, and right here in New York City, where I've lived for eleven years, have married and am helping raise three children, two boys and a girl.

So, anyone would say I'm no country boy, and there's no problem, so I should go ahead and tell the story simply, and from the beginning.

Like most stories there is no precise beginning. The story teller just jumps in anywhere, cranks something up in him, and starts moving until something tells him he should turn off the ignition, or until he runs out of gas or into something.

No, finding a place to start moving is no problem. But finding the end most truly is. It most certainly and truly will be difficult. I'm like a clown in one of those circus cars than goes forward a spell, rears up on its back wheels, does a complete turn and ends up going in the opposite direction. I won't get very far that way. But, on the other hand, I'll cover every square inch in my area of performance. Oh, hell!

There's a story there somewhere, a damn fine story, I'll bet! And this is the reason I can't tell it myself: I'm a country boy, you see. I have to go back to that! And I have to continue to go back to that. I have to hang on to it for all I've got, if this story is going to be told at all.

There's an awful lot I don't know, that I suppose I'll never get to know. But there's one thing I used to know, and it is this: I knew and I understood the growth of things in God's earth. I guess that's why I have a profound and direct belief in the Almighty ~~ a belief that no amount of education... but, anyway, I understood growth and roots. And anyone who understands growth and roots can understand what moves certain people, like Crazy Bains, and they would understand at the same time how terribly difficult it would be to tell her story. So few, so very few people, are close to the earth any more. It is sad.

There was a cornfield way back behind our house. And, up closer, a vegetable garden with okra, peas, radishes, lettuce, sometimes tomatoes, and, clear up to the fence on the east side, some melons. We all helped with the corn. But the garden was my own special project. I'd water it, hoe it, thin it. I was as tender to it as a mother is to her child. After a heavy rain I'd go out and lift the leaves that had sunk down in the mud and been buried, so they wouldn't rot. And, if we had tomatoes that year, I'd drive the stakes that supported them deeper intothe mud until I found solid ground beneath. I suppose I should admit I even talked to the plants. Yes, I even did that.

I'm only saying this to show you I was a country boy. I guess I hope I am still, somewhere inside me. I used to understand better than I understand now the growth and roots of things. I knew them at first hand. I took especial care with the growth of things when I was a child. And that is why I'm having such a terribly difficult time, now, wanting to tell, and not being able to tell the story of Crazy Bains. It would have been so easy at seventeen.

There is a story there. It's there in the tangle of all of our lives. It's her story I want to get at, though. I want to tell it simply, without frills, and as honest and without fakery as the growth of the vegetables in the garden behind our house when I was a boy.

There are no gardens that I know of here in my part of the city. I look out from behind my desk and through my window I see haze; and through the haze I see an unfriendly kinship of metal, glass and concrete.

No gardens anywhere. Some trees. But, those are dying or dead. Potted plants, cheerless and limp on gray windowsills. Or plastic plants.

Yet, someone here in New York City could write the story. That's the irony of it. I'd be naive to think it wouldn't be handled cleverly by one of them. Maybe Norman Mailer, who's several years off his moon now and is, for the time being, not moonstruck with politicking. Anyone here with a whistle of talent could take one episode in her life in our town, or just the name Crazy Bains, and make a story out of it. They could coax out a tear, or a smile, or get a guffaw out of the reader as they wished. But, if I were to read the story, or if mom or dad (when he was alive), or Jimmy, Barbara, Pete, Cousin Jinks or Mrs. Whittlebury, for that matter (who wore her hair in a bun and wasn't credited with having a lick of sense until she married the pan salesman who was really concealing his inheritance in order to find a decent wife, and he made her very rich) had read it, and they would all say, "No that is not her, that is not Crazy Bains."

And it wouldn't be, either, though in all other respects it might be a fine story.

All of our lives were tangled up in the life of Crazy Bains. That's one reason why her life is so hard to get at. I would have to gently unravel our lives from hers like I used to get rid of the weeds that infested my garden. It had to be done with delicate fingers and gentle tugs, as anyone who has worked with weeds knows, so as not to damage the plant. Likewise with her. As long as our lives remained tangled in hers we would be drawing away the nourishment she would need to live in her story. Yet strangely enough ~~ and this seems to turn my theory of weeding on its head ~~ she seemed to derive her energy or nourishment, to a great extent, from us.

Damn!

There is a story there somewhere, and a damn fine story, I'll bet. I know before I begin that I won't bring it out. But, already my circus car is cranked up and begins to inch forward with jerks.

My wife is begind me again. How long she has been there I don't know. How much she has read, I don't know either.

"Who is this Crazy Bains?" she asks me.

"Just a woman."

"Just a woman?"

"A woman who lived in the town I grew up in."

"Come away from your desk, come on, just for a few minutes." Her fingers slip down from my shoulders to my armpits, and now she is gently pulling me up from them. "Come on. Don't frown, come on over there where we can be comfortable, darling. I want you to tell me about this crazy Bains."

Damn! I ask her how much she has read already.

"Everything. But you haven't said anything about Crazy Bains."

I sink into the chair opposite her. It is easy to see that she is enjoying my confusion, but enjoying it with that warm, childlike curiosity I am so familiar with, that shows itself in the eagerness of the eyes and then the mouth that is ready to spread into a grin at any moment. I guess I have always loved in her what I loved in my children when they were growing up and what I hoped they would carry with them into adulthood, or if they outgrew it as most of us do, they would make the discovery soon enough to relearn its magic. I mean that constant amazement and unselfconscious curiosity in life, that knowing that you are always on the edge of mystery in the most commonplace situation.

I light my cigaret and watch it for a while between my fingertips draped over the arm of the chair.

"Was she really crazy?" my wife asks.

"We called her crazy. Yes, I suppose she was crazy."

"Why did you call her crazy?"

"Why? Didn't I answer that?"

"No, you said she was crazy. You didn't say why you called her crazy."

"Ah..."

Her head is cocked in that way that always reminds me of a little bird.

"Why did you call her crazy?"

"You mean, why were we so cruel?"

"No, but if it were cruelty I wanted to ask about I would want to know why you, out of all of them, were so cruel. But, no, that's not what I mean." And she smiles at me.

I begin rubbing my nose furiously; a habit of mine.

"I can't imagine your writing about anyone who's just crazy. There's no story there, it there? Was she just crazy? Or is it more?"

"Oh, much more, dear, much more... I think."

She laughs outright. "You think?"

"Yes, I think. I mean, I haven't really got a handle on her yet. But if you knew that she"





And that's it. That's where I ended ~~ all those years ago. Now, I'm curious how you would end it. In a sentence or a paragraph or a page, give it your best shot.

Contest ends 4/30/03, midnight.

C'mon, humor me.

Until next time...

Always Upwards,

Jay Squires