Much to her embarrassment on this day, Sean Carswell’s mother was a teacher at this backwater, swampland elementary school. All were called before the principal: Miss Sunday, Mrs. Shock, Mrs. Carswell, Sean Carswell, and Dan Shock with his brand new fat lip. Miss Sunday gloated. She and Mrs. Carswell did not get along. Perhaps, Miss Sunday felt a sense of vindication. Mrs. Carswell’s other two, her eldest son and young daughter, were poster children for the school. The male one an exceptional athlete, the female so cute she was a heartbreak waiting to happen. Both were appropriately unmotivated students. Not like young Sean Carswell. Who did he think he was with all his books and his memorized multiplication tables and his obsessive talk of ukuleles? For Miss Sunday, Sean Carswell’s misbehavior was his mother’s comeuppance. Glee emanated from the edges of her words as she described the assault on poor little Dan Shock and his pinkie-headed turkey.
Dan Shock sat in his little chair with his fat lip jutted out in a mixture of pain and humiliation. Mrs. Shock was, well, just shocked by it all. Mrs. Carswell expressed an adequate sense of remorse. Only Sean Carswell refused to play his role. He sat cross-armed and snarling. If this slow parade of stupidity continued, he’d sock ‘em all in the mouth.
This wouldn’t do for Principal Cowling. Suspension, particularly of a teacher’s son, was not a scenario under consideration at this point. He proposed, and it was agreed upon by five of the six parties present, that Sean Carswell should spend his class time taking notes instead of reading library books and punching his classmates.
So note-taking was piled upon the indignity of a rural Florida public school education.
Sean Carswell’s mother gave him a spiral notebook that a fourth grader failed to rescue from lost and found in a timely manner. Sean Carswell began taking notes. He documented all of the activities of the classroom. In the evening, he sat at the kitchen counter while his mother prepared a meal of whatever innards were on sale at Harry’s Meat Market. Let’s say on this one particular Wednesday night, dinner was pan-fried chicken livers with macaroni and cheese and canned green beans. Sean Carswell’s brother and sister sat in front of the television, arguing over whether they’d watch Eight Is Enough or The Life of Grizzly Adams when primetime finally rolled around. This argument could last for hours, so Sean Carswell’s brother and sister began it hours before the actual programming began. His father watched the evening news, somehow unperturbed by the failing picture tube that cast the world according to Walter Cronkite into an alien green pallor.
Sean Carswell read the day’s notes: We are reading about the Jamestown settlement. Caryn Paige thinks it is the “jam is town set, set, set, emmm.” Paul Fulmer falls deeper in love with every word Caryn can’t read. I hope someone else will get to read the next paragraph. I may be old enough to drive before Caryn gets through the word “Pocahontas.”
“How long did she let Caryn read?” Mrs. Carswell asked.
“Three or four hours,” Sean Carswell said.
“No,” Mrs. Carswell said. “You’re not going to get me on that one.”
“It’s true. I read all the way up to the Civil War before she stopped pronouncing the ‘h’ in John Smith.”
Mrs. Carswell smiled and looked at her husband. He was the one who had given the kid this sense of humor.
Sean Carswell skipped ahead to the math notes: Dave Gast has to figure out what 3 × 5 equals. The sum was 15 when Miss Sunday asked him yesterday. Could it be the same today? Is it possible for his brain to hold the equation 3 × 5 = 15 for twenty-four hours? The answer is no. Will he guess every number he can think of until he hits fifteen? Yes. His guesses so far: 35, 2, 17, 99, 26, 57, and 83. I know why Miss Sunday is so interested in the number 15. It’s because…
Sean Carswell stopped before reading the mean statement that followed.
Mrs. Carswell turned the chicken livers in the pan. Sean Carswell’s brother and sister’s argument devolved into name calling. Walter Cronkite and Mr. Carswell worried about inflation together. Outside the Carswell household, the popular kids in Sean Carswell’s second grade class plotted new ways to sabotage their education.
The next day, Miss Sunday insisted upon seeing Sean Carswell’s class notes. She forgave everything until she arrived at the line, “I know why Miss Sunday is so interested in the number 15. It’s because each of Miss Sunday’s butt cheeks are 3 × 5 inches wide.” Another rendezvous was scheduled with Principal Cowling.
This session’s compromise was much more agreeable to Sean Carswell. To Miss Sunday’s chagrin, Principal Cowling suggested that Sean Carswell should be allowed to build ukuleles in the back corner of the classroom once all of his day’s work was finished. This may have been the defining moment for the future carpenter-turned-author.
He convinced his mother that he needed a knife to shape the neck. His mother dug up an old, rusted number she’d found in a garage drawer when she moved into her house. She rubbed the blade against the concrete floor until it was dull enough to be bullied by a butter knife. Sean Carswell took the dull knife back to the garage and massaged it against his father’s sharpening stone until it was equally as sharp as the pocket knives half of the boys in school wore in their back pockets. He carried the knife and an old two-by-four to school the next day.
Take a moment now to picture Sean Carswell in the back corner of his elementary school classroom, sitting at a tiny workbench that his janitor buddy, Earl, constructed for him out of a one-legged card table. A column of obsolete textbooks bound together with duct tape replaces one of the missing legs; the gym teacher’s abandoned disciplinary paddle replaces another. The final corner is propped up by the cubbies where students store their lunches and, on the one cold morning of the year, their windbreakers. The seven-year-old Sean Carswell may look, in your mind’s eye, like the current version of the man. His gray hair would glisten under the school’s fluorescent lights. His classmates would be dazzled by his sweet goatee. His seven-year-old hands would be covered in scars and cracks like the alligator-skin purse a swampland hunter makes for his second-favorite girlfriend. We’ll have to revise this, somewhat. Turn some of that gray (though not all; our best intelligence dates the graying of Sean Carswell’s hair to his kindergarten year) into a blond bowl cut. Shave the goatee and imagine against all better judgment a chin. Shrink him to kid size. Create your own montage of him whittling down the two-by-four into the neck of a soprano ukulele while Dave Gast slaughters mathematics and Caryn Paige builds speed bumps between every written word. This montage should include Sean Carswell running the neck through a pencil box, then gluing the pencil box together to serve as the uke body. The next shot will show Johnny Wilkinson breaking all of his classmates’ pencils when he’s bored with the diamonds Dan Shock cuts out of construction paper while imagining Valentine hearts. Sean Carswell will respond by breaking Johnny Wilkinson’s long pencil in half, sharpening both ends, and turning it into a ukulele bridge. An additional scene will include Miss Sunday becoming Mrs. Matthews and spending an entire school day with a slide show of wedding pictures and stories of a honeymoon spent at the Bithlo stock car races. The last shots chronicle the completion of the ukulele: finish nails absconded from neighborhood construction sites being glued down for frets; eye bolts shoplifted from Ace Hardware being transformed into functional tuners; and, finally, fishing lines being strung on the masterpiece.
Everything changed at recess once the ukulele was built. Sean Carswell took to entertaining the rabble with original songs about the issues of the day: six’s fear of seven, footprints in the butter, Dwayne the Bathtub (who’s dwowning), and the cross between an elephant and a rhinoceros. Mrs. Matthews was far from ecstatic about the evolution of Sean Carswell’s ukulele, but she was happy with the crowd at recess. Some students sat cross-legged in a semicircle around Sean Carswell. Other students twisted and hopped and shook and spun around in movements that seven-year-olds like to call “dancing.” Sean Carswell leaned against the monkey bars, strumming and singing. No one seemed to
need monitoring, which freed up Mrs. Matthews to smoke with her fellow second grade teacher, Miss Shore, and fantasize about the day when Miss Shore, too, would become a Mrs. Something Else.
Only, on this Thursday, long before Sean Carswell’s brother and sister would start their fight over whether to watch What’s Happening!! or CHiPs, Sean Carswell started singing the classroom favorite: “Mother May I? (Spell Cup).” A lull came over the conversation between Mrs. Matthews and Miss Shore. The last refrains of the song were belted out in a call-and-response style. Sean Carswell sang, “Mother May I?” His classmates sang out, “C-U-P.”
Miss Shore asked, “What’s that kid singing?”
Mrs. Matthews listened.
Sean Carswell improvised the ending a bit. This was a schoolyard favorite. Instead of “mother,” he called out the names of his classmates, singing, “Todd Hoagland may I?” while the class sang, “C-U-P.”
“Mark Bishop may I?”
“C-U-P.”
“Wendy Sturman may I?”
“C-U-P.”
“Mary Lynn Honeycutt may I?”
“C-U-P.”
Miss Shore giggled. Mrs. Matthews contemplated putting an end to the song. But she’d just started a cigarette.
Sean Carswell ran through all the names of his classmates except Rodney Butler’s. That name elicited hesitation. Rodney was the only genuinely slow kid in the class. He was always a risk during this song because, one recess period not too long earlier, Judy Flynn asked to see him pee and he obliged. Both were sent to the principal. Neither returned to school for two weeks. With no other names and the refrain coming around so quickly, Sean Carswell acted without full deliberation. He sang, “Rodney Butler may I?”
With Judy Flynn looking straight at Rodney Butler and singing perhaps the loudest, the class belted out, “C-U-P.”
In the wave of excitement, Rodney dropped his shorts to his ankles, lifted his T-shirt over his prodigious belly, and watered the black schoolyard dirt. The class roared. Sean Carswell accompanied their laughter with a few more measures on his homemade ukulele. Miss Shore leaned into Mrs. Matthews’ shoulder and snickered. “Look at Rodney’s little dickey-doo.”
The slightest laugh was rerouted from Mrs. Matthews’ pursed lips but managed to escape through her nostrils. She looked at her half-smoked cigarette and decided that intervention was still not yet necessary. Rodney had finished and shaken and hiked up his shorts once again. Sean Carswell strummed without singing.
What Mrs. Matthews couldn’t know was that, with no more names left to sing, with Rodney’s spectacle outshining his song, Sean Carswell had to take his art to the next level. When the hoi polloi settled, he sang out the last possible line of the refrain: “Mrs. Matthews may I?”
Instead of the usual “C-U-P,” Sean Carswell’s classmates responded with silence. In his mind’s ear, Sean Carswell heard the “C” and the “U,” but before the “P” could slide into the song, Mrs. Matthews wrapped her nicotine-stained fingers around his upper arm and started dragging him principal-ward, with ukulele in tow.
On this final infraction, Mr. Carswell was called into the meeting of Mrs. Matthews and Principal Cowling. Suspension at this point had moved beyond consideration and into implementation. Mrs. Carswell would have to withstand the gossip and barbs of breakroom politics for the rest of the school year. Sean Carswell would spend one day of his institutionally mandated two-week break in his father’s truck, completing the schoolwork he was missing. He would spend the other weekdays working a series of small jobs on his father’s construction site.
At the end of the suspension, Sean Carswell’s ukulele would be returned to him. His father would drive him home from the day’s job site. Mr. Carswell would tousle his son’s slightly graying blond bowl cut and say, “Don’t worry, kid. I always find a way to fuck things up, too.”
Sean Carswell would pluck at the strings of his pencil box ukulele, seeking a way to turn that sentiment into a song.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Pam Houston and Patricia Geary for reading the stories in which I made them each a main character, and for giving me their blessings to publish those stories. They both have also done me the huge favor of writing blurbs for my books. That means the world to me. I borrowed passages, true stories, and stylistic tricks from all the authors in this collection. Thanks to each of them for being a muse and an inspiration. Thanks in advance to the living authors in this collection and the estates of the dead authors for recognizing the difference between homage and plagiarism.
Jim Ruland and Mickey Hess have been reading my manuscripts and giving me feedback for years now. Thanks to both of them for the help on this book. Brad Monsma, Mary Adler, Bob Mayberry, and Sofia Samatar workshopped several of these stories with me in our writing group. Without their encouragement, I might not have tried to publish any of this. Ben Loory blew my mind when the two of us did a reading in San Diego, and he had an Elmore Leonard story that seemed to fit in the spirit of this collection that I had just finished. Thanks to him for endorsing this book. Several editors published these stories before they became a collection. Thanks to all of them. Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson took a chance on this book. I can’t thank them enough for that.
Most importantly, thanks to Felizon Vidad. It takes a very special person to be married to a guy who spends a lot of his time obsessing on ukuleles and other things literary.
The Metaphysical Ukulele Page 13