by William Tenn
I worked there for about four months, trying to empty one large file drawer where Tony had stashed stories that were just not quite good enough to be published, but still too good to have been rejected. Each story had a special problem: one, for example, by Robert Bloch, “That Hell-Bound Train,” was an absolutely fine piece of work that just didn’t have a usable ending. It was my job, among other things, to come up with such an ending and persuade the writer to write it. I developed a great respect for the editors—chief among them John W. Campbell and Horace L. Gold—I had known and quarreled with a lot, an awful lot.
One of the things Bob Mills asked me to do right off was give him a story by me for the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine. I agreed, and promptly forgot about it as I wrestled with the thick inventory of science fiction written by people I much admired but which always lacked some essential quality or passage.
And then Mills came to my desk at 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday as I was getting ready to leave, and asked me where it was.
I got into my coat and stared at him. Where what was?
“The story for the anniversary issue. It goes to bed tomorrow. Thursday morning. Dead deadline, Phil!”
In an emergency, my mother had taught me, always lie. “Oh, it’s home,” I said. “I’ll bring it in with me tomorrow morning. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.”
“How long is it?” Mills wanted to know. “I hope it’ll fit the book. We can’t use much more than about six thousand words.”
“That’s just about what I have,” I told him. “Six or six five. I haven’t counted it yet.”
And I got out of the place.
All the subway ride home, I plotted feverishly, to absolutely no avail. I couldn’t think of a single good idea, certainly none I wanted to write. But as I got out at my station, a large poster advertisement on the platform caught my eye. It was the latest in a group that advertised a Jewish rye bread, each showing a color photograph of someone of a different, non-Jewish ethnic group proclaiming that he or she simply adored Jewish rye. This one was of an American Indian in full feathered headdress.
I ran up to the ad and, to the astonishment I suspect of everyone on the platform hurrying home that night, blew a couple of kisses at it. That was my story, I knew immediately.
And by the time I reached my house in Sea Gate at the Coney Island tip of Brooklyn, I had worked it out almost completely.
Ever since my boyhood, I had been fascinated by the Indian story—or the many Indian stories, perhaps I should say. When I was a kid and my gang played Cowboys and Indians, I always insisted on being one of the Indians. I did it partly out of a partiality for the exotic, but mostly out of a kind of an apology.
What was I apologizing for? I’m not sure. Possibly for what my people had done to them. (My people? My people came from ghettos in Poland and Lithuania! Oh, well, maybe my people, the Cowboys.)
I swallowed the supper Fruma had prepared for me and rushed to my typewriter. I began typing almost immediately.
I stopped only to go to the bathroom. By the time dawn broke over the end of the boardwalk, the story was done.
It needed very little rewriting, and once I did that, the piece came to sixty-four hundred words almost exactly. For a title, I went back to a book by a writer whose work I had loved since the age of twelve, Charles Kingsley, the vicar of Eversley. And I had a story that was science fiction and also what I liked to write those days—a moral tale. I decided that I too adored Jewish rye.
Bob Mills liked it too, the story, not the bread. And I’ve always been quite fond of what I call my science-fiction western.
Written 1957 / Published 1958
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