Reporting at Wit's End by St. Clair McKelway

Author:St. Clair McKelway [McKelway, St. Clair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608191239
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2000-03-27T07:00:00+00:00

THIS WAS BEFORE the invention of the talking pictures that were later to come to the movie houses in Washington and elsewhere, but talking pictures were showing in my head just the same. Some of them were entirely from the memory, some were from the imagination, some were from the emotions, and some were from wherever it is that nightmares come from. At times the memory, the imagination, and the emotions became merged with one another into a continuous series of overlapping pictures, with accompanying dialogues. But in the nightmares it was the same scene over and over, and all nightmare. I would find my father after hunting for him in banks of clouds, and I would upbraid him, shaking my finger at him and sometimes screaming at him. I would tell him he ought to be ashamed of himself for going away from us. I would tell him he had to come back to us right then or I would tell my mother. I would tell my mother our secret about the partridges he let me shoot that time on Sunday when just the two of us went on the hunting trip to his birthplace, in Charlotte Court house, Virginia. I tried to stamp my foot to show him how angry I was and to show him I meant every word I said—that I would tell my mother he had lied when he said it was on a Saturday that he let me shoot the partridges—but my foot would only go through the cloud I was standing on, and my stamping made no noise, and my father would just look at me and put on the imitation painful-face he had teased me with the time I pretended to have the stomach ache at our first house in Washington—the house in Georgetown, not the house in Mt. Pleasant, where he had died—when I was just starting grade school. Then he would grin at me and wink at me, and I would wake up. My memory would thereupon quickly show me some talking pictures connected with the nightmare. For example, it would show me the stomach-ache scene—my mother putting me to bed and saying I needn’t go to school that day, and my father coming in before he left for his office and seeing me make my painful-face and then making his imitation painful-face at me, indicating he knew I was malingering. My mother took my side that time and told him he shouldn’t tease the sick child, and he winked at me and went off chuckling, and I was mad at him because he had made fun of me. But I felt conspiratorial with him at the same time, because he had winked at me, indicating he knew I was putting on a show to keep from going to school but that he wouldn’t tell.

Then my memory, as likely as not, would bring out the pictures of Siegfried dying in the back yard of the Mt. Pleasant house right after we moved there from Georgetown.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.