by Lorraine Ray
A trick of my brother did hide some unwanted papers once, only temporarily. There was a small triangular area of desert growth which we always passed after crossing the street in front of our school, crossing it in 1962. If Jack came out early, my mother and I would not yet be rounding the corner of the street toward this barren stretch of earth and he would pass this triangle of desert growth before she saw us. Several stunted mesquites, a few creosotes and some withered blackened prickly pear cactus clung to life in the corner, which was liberally decorated with newspapers, beer bottles and, for years, an old pink towel. When Jack's undecipherable writing earned him bad marks and angry notes at the top of his papers, he saved them up in his desk and then, by running ahead, he found time to shove the thick stack of papers rolled into a cylinder into a snake hole in this messy desert. A whole thick stack of papers shoved in the hole, rolled together and shoved down there as a sacrifice to a subterranean world. Until Mother saw them.
"What are these!" said Mother when her superior eyesight detected, on the edges of the mangy papers, her son's faint name in her son's screwy scrawl and she walked up and bent down and snatched the cylinder of papers out with a cold, angry intensity that is only seen in the deeply disappointed mother. "What? What in the world are these papers of yours doing jammed in a snake hole! Well, I never. School papers jammed in a hole? Are you going to pretend someone else put them in here? Are you going to say such a ridiculous thing?"
"No," he said resignedly. "I put them there."
"Well Billy-be darned! Whatever were you thinking? As long as I live I'll never understand this! What do you have to say for yourself? What earthly reason could you have for doing such an absurd thing as this! How do you explain this?"
"I didn't want to bring them home," said Jack, offering a child's simple excuse.
"I should say not! Horrible papers. A son of mine doing such inferior work?"
Mother began leafing through the sheets, examining the teacher's comments. Small groups of children walked by on their way home, glancing sympathetically in our direction when they overheard our mother raving over the bad comments on Jack's papers. "Never in my wildest dreams did I dream of anything this wild. Oh, biddle-boddle, biddle-boddle, bo, bo, bo. I'm so mad I could spit. I'm madder than a wet hen. My goodness gracious, your teacher has been writing me frustrated messages. Look at these. Over and over for months. I haven't gotten any of these notes from her. She is 'very tired of your sloppy work and poor penmanship.' And she's right. The work is terrible. Your work 'isn't coming up to standards for a third grader.' I should say so. Your work 'shows little improvement or effort.' What a shame. She wants to know 'am I working with Jack?' Heavens to Betsy. How could you do this? How could you mortify me this way? Now I will have to explain that I never saw these paper from her, because you were hiding them in a hole in the desert. Oh, the embarrassment for me, a librarian from Indiana, to discover that my own son was hiding bad work from his mother, shoving it in a snake hole of all the things in the world. I went to school in a one-room schoolhouse with lots of tough boys from the surrounding farms, and they didn't give a hoot about school, but they never would have been so craven as to hide their bad papers from their own mothers. They took their punishment with courage. They took their lickins and liked them. They didn't hide their shortcomings. Maybe there's more strength in stupidity. All I know is when I had a little boy I expected him to be honest and truthful. That wasn't too much to expect, now was it? Maybe I'll tell your teacher that you were hiding your bad papers in a snake hole, but that is almost too much to be believed and too much for me to bear. I don't think I can take the humiliation. What kind of fools are you trying to make us out to be, huh? The stupid kind of fools who turn in sloppy work and don't give a hoot? The kind who hide their failures and try to avoid honest work and self-improvement? I am so disgusted by this that I can't even look at you. These papers were opportunities. Opportunities to strive. There is no Royal Road to learning, kid. You are looking for the easy way out! I'm here to tell you there is no easy way. You can look all your life, but you won't find it, because it doesn't exist."
Serendipity, that is the force that you must marshal to make art. Serendipity made Mother see her son's papers with her eagle eyes, notice the edge of those papers, and walk over to the hole and reach down and pull Jack's papers out of that hole, and serendipity prompts me to accept with grace the arrival of characters, and to use them when they're given to me and to support myself now with a stern rebuff; go on, it's life you're describing, and life necessitates courage. Step out bravely into the midst of mashers and maniacs with little knives. There is no Royal Road to learning. Don't look for the easy way out of the horror and the work and the mistakes. Make your mistakes, take your knocks, write your lies and work your mash of a mish-mashed life into something vaguely uninteresting.
The papers that I used over the years to write the stories that never succeeded come back to haunt me like ghostly mantles, these sheeted dead squeak and gibber, and stand as pale reminders of my many failures, my many attempts to start something literary. I wonder if nothing will help me dispose of these troublesome papers. Perhaps the papers are more troublesome than the people who stopped me. But I remind myself of something. Be thankful for the times and people who stopped you, because they are the material you use now, if that makes any sense. I am on a mission to tell you about the ways my art was kept from succeeding, and in doing that I hope to have some measure of success.
