Confessions Of A Bookworm(Ron Pruitt) Confessions of a Bookworm

Tuesday was a special day because the bookmobile came to my little town. A converted tan motorcoach lined with shelves of books, it was always parked right on my route home from school. There was a limit of six books. I always checked out the max and they rarely lasted the week. I learned as much from the bookmobile as I learned at school. Mark Twain taught me the broad Mississippi, Jules Verne took me to the moon, under the ocean and to mysterious South Sea islands. I sailed aboard the Bounty, sleuthed with Sherlock, and hacked through the jungle with Indiana Jones. I escaped to worlds I had never known and had experiences that dwarfed my own small existence.

I went through reading crazes, devouring everything available about certain subjects. For months, in six-book installments, I was stuck on the romance of the great American West. I read biographies of all the great Indian chiefs and learned that, though fierce and cunning, they usually had to be killed for murdering innocent, industrious settlers. I read the lives of the gunfighters and found that they too often died violent, sudden deaths. Buffalo were killed by the millions in a frenzy of slaughter. Mormons died for their religion. Cattlemen killed farmers, sheepherders and coyotes. The Army wiped out Indian villages. I concluded that the West was exciting because death was everywhere. Unlike my life, where death was so rare I had never known anyone who had died. The Old West had been alive with death.

I read many juvenile adventure stories where brave, clever young men brilliantly foiled violent crimes. The fictional boys lived lives rife with danger and excitement, a stark contrast to my own. My biggest thrill was climbing aboard that big brown bus full of books. The boys in the books never read books. They were too busy keeping horrible disasters from happening to be bothered with such a low-key pastime. And they never seemed bored or aimless or had time move slowly the way it did in church or during long car trips or on rainy Sunday afternoons.

One common experience seemed to denominate many of my young fictional heroes. It happened to Huck Finn, the Hardy Boys, and most of the others. They all found dead bodies. Just like in the American West, the boys encountered death in their day-to-day activities. It was death that kept me turning pages. Slowly, in my mind, an idea began to form about how I could, in some small way, be like the boys in the books.

There were many places in town that could conceal a dead body. My bicycle gave me the mobility to explore. I poked through Coal Creek Hollow, canvassed the grassy field behind Wooley's gas station, and looked in a couple of abandoned falling-down houses. I surveyed the Frisco tracks from one end of town to the other, in grouchy old Mr. Stamper's orchard, in weedy vacant lots, in the little woods behind my school, in alleys, storm drains, underpasses. I looked through every dark, dismal little corner of our town and what I found was- dumped trash and rusted appliances. No dead bodies.

By the end of the first week, I had eliminated many of the prime spots for dead bodies. But then I reasoned that a dead body could be dropped off at any time, so if I really wanted to be as dutiful as the boys in the books, I had to keep checking. The second week, I revisited the same out of the way places. Again, nothing. But I was undeterred. I just kept going back, knowing that I was playing a waiting game, and somebody had to die sometime.

Miss Gladys Ferguson was the librarian at the bookmobile. She wasn't a warm, friendly person, but I eventually got to know her the same way alcoholics get to know bartenders. She tried to present the severe look that librarians affected, hair pulled back in a bun, no makeup, and no-nonsense black plastic glasses. Actually, she probably was an attractive woman. She was small and thin, with fine, dark features, the high cheekbones of a model and an olive complexion. She wasn't married, which was unusual at her age, somewhere around forty.

I think her life revolved around reading. She always had a book in front of her, even while she crunched an apple or pinned back her hair. She read books by writers with exotic names I'd never heard before, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Camus, Sartre. A bookworm, that's what they called people like her. That's what my dad called his brother-in-law, who lay around on his day off reading murder mysteries.

She didn't warm up very fast. Months went by before she managed a shy smile, and more months before she made a short comment about a book I had read. Still, even without many words between us, I knew Miss Ferguson and I shared a love of books and the wide world they held.

One Tuesday, she had a book stuck back for me, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. It was about a teen-aged boy who went off to fight in the Civil War. As soon as I arrived home, I retired to my room and began reading. I knew the book was going to be a ripping adventure, the brave boy distinguishing himself in the Great War. But it didn't turn out that way at all. When the battle began, the boy turned and ran like a rabbit, deserting his post. He was a coward. I tried to imagine what the Hardy boys would have done if they had been in the Civil War. I'm sure they would have courageously stood their ground in combat and probably would have concocted a bold plan to win the battle. But never mind the Hardy boys. What would I have done? Grimly, I admitted I was a lot more like the boy who ran and hardly like the Hardy boys at all.

Next, she gave me Lord of the Flies by William Golding. It's a horrific story about all these boys who are stranded on an island and how they go wild and murder each other. Actually, the book reminded me a lot of school. There was a small group of cruel toughs who victimized everybody else. In the book, the bullies were allowed to do whatever they wanted, no limits, so they committed heinous acts just for pleasure. I recognized myself in the book as one of the boys, maybe somewhere in the middle of the pecking order. But it came as no surprise to me that the bullies were capable of extreme cruelties. At the end of the book, when sailors arrive to rescue the boys, they are disgusted to find out what has happened, but my reaction was, well, what would you expect?

Animal Farm by George Orwell was next. It's a crazy book about some animals who take over a farm and try to run it themselves. The pigs are the smartest, so they assume the roles that humans had held, living in the farmhouse and even learning to walk on their two back legs. I wasn't quite sure what this book meant. It was subtle, harder to figure, but I thought it might be saying that humans were just pigs walking around on their back legs, or that pigs could as easily run things as humans if they were given a chance. Either way, it was a fairly negative comment on people in general.

Every Tuesday, Miss Ferguson would have a new book waiting for me and I looked forward to that book the way a gourmet looks forward to dinner at a great restaurant. The only problem was that I was staying too long at the bookmobile and coming home too late. When Mom questioned me about my tardiness, I made the mistake of being a little too glowing in my praise of Miss Ferguson.

"Maybe you ought to go live with her," Mom said. After that I begin lying about the time I spent hanging around the bookmobile.

"I stopped in the park to shag flies," I would say, or "I was looking at the magazines in the drug store," or "I was catching crawdads in the creek." The lies brought forth only a mild reprimand to come home promptly after school.

Miss Ferguson kept saving back books for me. She was my tour guide through the wonders of literature and she brought me along slowly through the classics.

Then the police found a dead girl in a field at the edge of town. It was a place I played, flying kites and balsa wood airplanes. The newspaper said the teen-aged girl had probably been lying dead in the field for several days. Murder was suspected. Some townsfolk watched the police haul out the body and the gossip mill was furious with speculation. Who was she, and who killed her, and how did she die? Stories were created to answer these questions when the police didn't. I felt sorry for the girl and glad I hadn't found her and I was spooked, having tempted fate as it were. Walking the dusty, night streets of my hometown that warm simmering spring no longer felt comfortable. Shapes in the darkness suddenly were ominous, noises emanating from the gloom were cause to take flight, and Mom put the hook on the screen door before we went to bed.

The police didn't catch the killer and never even figured out who the poor girl was. Things didn't come to a rousing conclusion. They just hung there unresolved, a situation that never happened in any of the books I read. Sometimes the outcomes were tragic, disastrous, but there always was the satisfaction of having things bound up and settled. Not so that warm spring with a murderer wandering among us.

Some bullies from school caught me walking home alone from the bookmobile one Tuesday. I ended up face down in the dirt, a bloody nose and swollen lip inflicted quickly, furiously, joyously. They took my books and tossed them in Coal Creek. I found them a few days later, swollen up and falling apart, the same way bodies do. I pulled them out anyway, dried them and took them back. Miss Ferguson gave me a time payment plan and I think she felt sorry for me because she compared me to Abe Lincoln, whose biography had been part of my U.S. presidents reading series.

"It happened to him, too," she said.

I had to tell Mom and Dad about the fight, marked as I was, but I changed things around a little, giving as good as I'd got in the version they heard. Mom reprimanded me for fighting, and threatened a whipping if I got into another one, but Dad was pleased, as if there was a side of me he hadn't reckoned on. I healed fast and kept a wary eye out for my assailants. I was scared of the bullies, but it was exciting, too. I felt like I was smuggling books home, slipping through the grasp of the pirates to bring literacy to the rabble. It was a quest to bring the printed word to a world where words were almost always spoken, little was ever said, and our daily exchanges seemed as mundane and transient as the air that carried them.

I joined a book club. The club let me select a bunch of free books to receive at the beginning, and then I was mailed one book a month. The club was enjoyable for a while, but then I went through a slim time financially and missed a couple of month's’payments. A stern letter resulted, but there didn't seem to be much concern, because the books kept arriving like clockwork. The club tacked on hefty shipping and handling charges, something I hadn't figured on when I planned to pay for the books from my small inflow of cash. Once I got behind, it became difficult to catch up.

The letters from the club became more threatening and the books stopped. They began threatening legal action against me and I got a little scared. What if someone showed up at the house with legal papers? What if I had to go to court and explain to a judge why I didn't pay my debts? What if Mom and Dad found out?

The letters got more frequent and downright nasty and then the letters from the collection agency started. The book club letters had been restrained by comparison. The collection agency threatened to ruin my life, expose me as a credit fraud, confiscate my wages, and label me as a deadbeat for life. I became really scared, and tried desperately to get the money together, but cash eluded me.

Finally, the letters from the lawyers came, and I began to pray. God, if you will only get me out of this, I'll stop skipping church every chance I get. I'll be a better person. I'll spend time reading the Bible. I'll rededicate my life to Jesus. And soon after, the miracle happened. The letters stopped coming.

I was astounded to think that God Almighty had intervened on my behalf. I had asked for His help, and God had reached down and taken action. I spent several weeks trying to become a better person, indentured to God for his bounty, and I hated it. I was still indebted, and for life. My reformation lasted maybe a month, and then, despite my good intentions, I began straying from the path I had promised Him . As time went on, I totally breached my deal with God. Never mind what the book club would have done to me, now I was messing with God, and I knew enough Old Testament stories to know He could be wrathful when riled up. I lived my life under a cloud, expecting the thunderbolt anytime.

What I didn't know was that Mom had noticed the lawyer's name on my mail and opened it. The letter scared her too, and she paid the bill.

Mom finally got around to telling me. The information came with a lecture, but I didn't care. Mom had been my savior. I wasn't bound by my promise to God, unless He was acting through Mom, moving in mysterious ways. That unsettling thought occurred to me, but I chose to credit Mom, and again own my own soul.

My spirits lifted and I jumped on my old bike and breezed around town, parting the thick spring air for the sheer joy of it, no destination, in search of nothing, but moving toward something, always over the horizon, just out of sight. I pumped as hard as I could, trying to accelerate into the future.

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