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Downtown Writers Network is a resource for independent writers in central
Ohio. |
Father Zorro and the
Statisticians I also decided to become a vegetarian. I'd been reading Dostoyevsky and taped a quote from The Brothers Karamazov to the glass divider of my cubicle. It consisted of a few lines from a sermon given to the monks by the Russian Orthodox mystic, Father Zossima:
Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you -- alas, it is true of almost every one of us! That's how I got the nickname "Father Zorro." One of the statisticians made a joke when he passed a report to my supervisor: "Get Father Zorro to type this." The name stuck. "Pass the ball to Father Zorro," someone would shout during a game. "It's Father Zorro's turn to buy the Cokes," a statistician would remark at the beginning of lunch break. By the beginning of August, nobody called me by my real name anymore. I was Father Zorro -- clerk typist, apprentice writer of crop reports, and friend to barnyard animals everywhere. Montgomery turned incandescent in late August. I'd grown up with southern summers, but this one teemed with more insect life than I was used to. My apartment was full of roaches, especially in the kitchen closet. My cat and I could kill a dozen at a time in there on any given evening after work. We made a game of it. She'd run into the closet when I opened the door and bat them out to me where I waited to smash them, one by one, with a broom. When I told them about killing the roaches, the statisticians asked why Father Zorro's sympathy didn't extend to insects. Someone rewrote the quote from Dostoyevsky and pasted it over the original. "Love the roaches. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. ... Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the roaches; they are without sin...." And so on. The locusts were louder than normal, too. Walking down Sayre Street on the last day of the month, I stopped to marvel that I could scarcely hear the passing cars over the din of the locusts' incessant chirping. If Scott Fitzgerald had stayed in Montgomery, what could he have written about the insects? Instead of the green light on Daisy's dock, he could have made a symbol of the big roaches on her verandah. I sauntered on, not knowing that this was to be my last morning walk down Sayre Street.
A phone call came for me a little before two o'clock that afternoon, from a college back home in Mississippi that needed an English teacher, immediately. A professor had died or retired or been forced to resign -- the details were sketchy. Anyway, four freshman English classes were without a teacher. The department chairman said the job was mine if I could be there, ready to teach, in two days. "Call me back in half an hour with your decision," he told me. Ed helped me out by persuading the office managers to waive my required two-week notice, but I had to have an exit interview with one of them. "Father Zorro, we're sorry to see you go, but we wish you luck in your new parish," the man said to me. It occurred to me after I left the office that nobody had explained the joke to him. He must have thought I was actually some kind of priest. I shook hands with all the statisticians on my way out. Ed walked with me to the elevator. I learned later that he received his promotion and was transferred to Washington a few weeks after I left. I was on the road at dawn the next morning, driving west on of one of those many roads that led away from Montgomery, out through the farmland of Alabama and on to the fields of Mississippi. The growing season was almost over. Harvest had already begun at some of the farms I drove past, along those two hundred miles of country roads. My hands were on the steering wheel, but my fingers started instinctively tapping on an imaginary typewriter. "Wheat," they wrote. "Soybeans, cotton, peanuts, okra. Corn." Douglas Gray is Director of the Downtown Writers Network. His poetry collection Words on the Moon is available from Mid-List Press. |