JONATHAN: Could you not simply forbid your employees to go after me?
JENKINS: Lard men, Mr. Blashette, are hard men.
JONATHAN: Then, I assume this interview is over.
JENKINS: You assume correctly. By the way, would you know of someone with the requisite qualifications who might wish to apply for the position?
Jonathan’s friend Toby “the Monkey Boy” Brancato was hired the very next day.
6. Halley’s hysteria was widespread. Jonathan’s exasperation over the paranoia that gripped Wilkinson County residents in the weeks leading up to the May, 1910, fly-over by Halley’s Comet is evident in this letter which Jonathan wrote to Great Jane on “the eve of the Great Apocalypse, May 17.” (JBP.) I include it here in its entirety. It reflects Jonathan’s growing impatience with “those trammeled by their own timidity” but also indicates Jonathan’s growing bitterness and dissatisfaction with his own life.
May 17, 1910
Hawthorne Way
Pettiville
Dear Great Jane,
The citizens of this jerkwater Mongolian hamlet have decided that the world is about to end. It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. In the face of all reason, they gather to make all right with God, to tearfully kiss their babies and hug their grannies good-bye, to sing their favorite hymns and eat up the best preserves from the fruit cellar, and I can’t get anyone to wait on me at the five and dime because selling a tin of shoe polish means nothing compared to the destruction of this planet by poisonous cometic gases — sufficient reason, it would seem, to try to drink as many ice cream sodas as the human digestive tract can hold while customers in need of shoe polish who don’t happen to believe that God is arriving tomorrow morning on the 6:07 must fend totally for themselves like I don’t have better things to do with my time than walk through a store and claim items for myself without clerical assistance! I would be fired for treating my customers at Izzie and Moe’s the way these apocalypse-obsessed imbecilic sales clerks treated me.
My parents are, thankfully, keeping their wits, although I can detect the occasional anxious thought percolating now and then, understandable when you consider that they are surrounded by men and women totally deficient in intelligence and possessed of not even the notochord of an embryonic mouse.
Yesterday I had the displeasure of talking seven men and women out of nailing themselves to crosses in a cotton field just north of town to wait Christ-like for what they believed would be the Second Coming, due to arrive in a cloud of comet dust. My exchange with these people went something like this:
ME: Hello there! What’s with the crosses?
A LARGE, FURRY AGRICULTURAL SORT WHOM THEY CALL TUB: Where you been, son? The end is near!
ME: Right. But what’s the reason for the crosses?
A TOOTHLESS AGRICULTURAL SORT WHOM THEY CALL LESTER: We will await our Lord and Savior in the manner in which He Himself was spirited to the arms of His Father.
ME: You’re going to nail yourselves to these things?
AN EARNEST APRON-BEDECKED WOMAN WHOM THEY CALL EITHER BESS OR BETH (SEVERAL HAD CONFUSING LISPS): Yes. That is the plan.
ME: What about these little crosses?
TUB: They are for the children.
ME: Where are the children?
TUB: They require a bit more coaxing.
ME: And the tiny cross there?
BESS: I have a cat named Mr. Pink.
ME: So who goes first?
A GRIZZLED OLD MAN WITH A HUMP WHO I LATER LEARN IS NAMED PAPPY: We’ve drawn straws to decide.
TUB: Unfortunately, we can’t tell which is the shortest of these two.
ME: Let me see. That was easy. Here’s your winner.
TUB: Lester, this three-legged gentleman says you got the shortest straw. Pappy, we best get the hammer and commence to crucifyin’.
ME: What happens if the comet comes and goes and Jesus doesn’t show up?
LESTER: If we’re still alive and kickin’, then I reckon we’d need someone to come get us all down. I also reckon the doctor would have to do himself some patchin’ about our hands and feet.
DOC: Yup, I reckon I would.
ME: Here’s a thought: maybe Jesus would prefer to find you all sitting quietly and without physical anguish in your parlors when He arrives.
BESS (nodding her head eagerly): That is a thought. Why, you know what? I could make Him lemonade. I couldn’t make Jesus lemonade if I’m hangin’ on that there cross, Lester.
LESTER: That’s a right good point. Maybe we could study on it a spell.
In the end, even the cat was spared.
Your friend,
Jonathan
7. Lucile Moritz entered Jonathan’s life through the peeled-back tarpaulin flap of a Chautauqua lecture tent. The lecture which brought Jonathan and Lucile together was delivered by a Professor Wilbert Wollensagen on the topic “Agronomy and Animal Husbandry in the Age of Industrial Encroachment” and included “a magic lantern slide show for illustration, and musical interludes provided by Judith Crevecoeur and her dwarf-harp.” So instantly enamored of each other were Lucile and Jonathan that neither recalled much of the event beyond projected images of fruit flies and botflies and a gagging farm child who had apparently put one of the insects into his mouth. Jonathan’s Diary, 4 June 1914.
Traveling tent Chautauquas were popular vehicles in the early 20th century for exposing non-urban communities to culture, intellectual thought, and the more refined performing arts. They also provided — as Jonathan and his new girlfriend Lucile were probably well aware — the opportunity for young men and women in such communities to meet and mingle outside the auspices of church and the socially regimented workplace. Indeed, for many of Jonathan’s generation the word Chautauqua served as acronym for “Clever, handsome and unambiguously tantalizing adults under-canvas quietly uniting anatomies.” John B. Paperwhite, “Courting and Cavorting in Rural America,” Rustic Review 17 (1975): 12–17, 72-79
8. “We spend long hours together working jigsaw puzzles…and doing other things.” Jonathan took an instant liking to the recently invented jigsaw puzzle and shared this interest with the new love of his life. Jigsaws would remain a favorite form of entertainment for him. He even carried a box in his “ol’ kit bag” when he began his tour of duty for Uncle Sam in 1917. On those occasions during which things got quiet on the Western Front, Jonathan would pull out the box and try to scout a flat, clean surface upon which to reinstate the disassembled picture of a smiling Dutch school girl holding a bouquet of colorful tulips. He was rarely rewarded for his efforts; the pieces quickly became soiled and blood-blotted, a trench rat chewed a large hole in the box, and fellow doughboys made fun of him, calling him “Jigsaw Jugglehead.” “It was a stupid idea,” Jonathan later wrote to Lucile from the front, “but I did somehow finish those tulips.” Ibid., 17 June 1914.