New Myths Of Man And Spider page 2

The Boston Fiction Festival

New Myths of Man and Spider

C.B. Bernard

The spider crawled onto the platen of my No. 5 Underwood typewriter on the eighth page of a story about a tattooed trucker named Clint and an arborist named Amelia. Amelia was pregnant. Clint had been drinking. I swatted at the spider with my Strunk and White.

My chair collapsed beneath me, dropping me with a clatter to the floor at my desk. It’s a folding wooden chair my grandfather stole from the city of Lawrence. The story is that Harry Truman sat in that chair once. It was a time when the country loved its leaders, and yet a time of war. Lawrence was a mill town, cradle of the American Industrial Revolution and a magnet for European immigrants, and my grandfather was one generation removed from the mountains outside Napoli—a product of the American Dream. He worked for the Department of Public Works, and had never laid eyes on a seated president before. He watched Truman closely during introductory remarks by the mayor or the governor, saw that beneath the tailored suit and the pomade the president was just a man, no different from himself or his brother Sully, no different from the Irish or the Italians who came to his father’s shop on Park Street looking to buy food on credit for their growing families. There must be something that sets us apart, he thought. Something that allows one man to become the American president while another sweeps streets. When Truman stood to speak he swiped the chair in case he some day had a grandson who appreciated a good story.

Or was it Eisenhower? I can’t remember...