She looked at him and leaned her head against his shoulder.
“You know, I’m just as good an artist as you are an athlete,” she said. “You should remember that while all these people are ‘kissing your ass,’ as you say. There’s a million people out there just as good as you at what they do. It might give you some humility.”
She paused and said, “You know . . . I really do like you.”
And he knew she didn’t mean like everyone else.
But he said it anyway.
“Right. Everybody likes me. Haven’t you noticed?”
“I know, but I like you. You’re interesting. More complicated than anyone thinks.”
And at that moment, Grudeck liked her so much it might have been love. He liked her so much he didn’t want to move. He just wanted to stay quiet, with her head against his shoulder, and figure out a way to feel like that forever.
That was thirty years ago. And he’d never felt anything like it since.
A few weeks later, the Red Sox called, and the day after graduation, Joey Grudeck was gone.
* * *
SO HERE WAS STACY NOW, trim in her black raincoat, looking less worn and more refined than their old classmates. He waited for her to ask why he never called when he was back in Union, or ever. He had an answer ready—“You were different”—but that answer would skirt the truth. The truth was harder, and Grudeck wasn’t sure if he’d yet figured it out.
But she didn’t ask.
“You look awesome,” Grudeck said. “Better than the rest of us.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Yoga. Stretching—and stressing. It’s the stress that keeps you thin.”
She congratulated him on the Hall and asked, “So, what are you doing now?” He realized she was the first one to ask that night. Maybe the only one, besides his mother. God, how he hated that question.
Grudeck told her he lived at the country club, still “adjusting” to retirement.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” he said. “Seems I’m busy enough just being me. What about you?”
She still lived in town, in her old house. Her parents signed it over after she divorced, and they retired to Ocean County. She said nothing about her marriage, except she had a seventeen-year-old son, Wayne Jr., a senior at Union. She made “decent” money as the art director of a midsized marketing company in Springfield.
“So you’re an executive?”
“Of sorts.”
“You play golf?”
She laughed. “Lord, no.”
“Maybe I should teach you, so you can schmooze with the boys.”
“No, that’s the sales director’s job,” she said.
“And I bet the boys schmooze you anyway.”
“Some do . . . And I always have a conversation piece,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“That I went to high school with Joe Grudeck.”
That was it? Went to high school? Not dated?
“I thought it was a little more than that,” Grudeck said.
“Yeah, a little more,” Stacy said, and let the words hang.
Grudeck shifted on his stiff hip.
“You still have those pictures?” he asked.
“Pictures? . . . Oh, the photographs of you. Yeah, somewhere . . . I used one of them in my portfolio for a while, back when I started,” she said.
“Which one?”
“Oh, hmmm, I forget. No, it was the wrestling one.”
The door of the hall opened, and people came out. Stacy looked over his shoulder toward them.
“How is it in there?” she asked.
“I don’t know . . . kinda weird. In some ways, it’s like I never left. In other ways, it’s like I don’t belong . . .”
“A familiar stranger?”
“Exactly,” Grudeck said. “A stranger in my own town . . . world.”
“You’ve always been like that,” she said. “Strangely lonely. Poor Joseph, nothing’s changed in thirty years.”
He couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or not, and it left him stuck.
“The things I tell you,” Grudeck finally said. “I don’t know, they just come out.”
Grudeck looked back toward the gym, then at her.
“Your public awaits. You’d better go back in,” she said.
“Aren’t you?” he said, gesturing her to walk ahead.
“No. I just came to say ‘hi’ and now I did,” she said.
“Wanna make a run for it?” he asked. “With me?”
She took his jacket lapels and pulled them tight, like a mother bundling up a child.
“No,” she said with a sweet laugh. “I should get going. And you should go back in. People are waiting.”
“Can I see you later? Tonight?” he asked.
“No. You know that.”
“Can I call you?”
“I’m still in the book. Same number after all these years.”
He repeated it, to his surprise. After all these years.
Chapter Thirteen
Horace pulled “American Rubism” from an oak filing cabinet in the Farmers’ Museum archive. It was his last research paper, finished the same month he picked up blacksmith tools. Now here he was again, fifteen-plus years later, brushing up on the Giant for his summer stint as circus-tent docent.
The paper—twenty-four pages, single-spaced—was an academic analysis of the Great American Hoax, a textbook case of what P. T. Barnum called “humbug.”
In the post–Civil War days of seeing-is-believing, the Giant—a gypsum statue deliberately buried on a farm in Cardiff, New York, and unearthed a year later—was passed off as a fossilized biblical goliath to thousands of paying rubes, even after noted scholars in the fledgling sciences of geology and paleontology debunked it. Barnum tried to buy it, the owners refused, so Barnum simply made his own American Goliath. The parties ended up in court, countersuing each other as promulgators of a hoax. That put an end to it, and the authentic Cardiff Giant was sold a couple of times as a novelty, eventually ending up in his final resting place at the Farmers’ Museum.
That was the ten-cent tour—a classic American parable of greed and arrogance with a litigious conclusion.
The ten-dollar tour—Horace’s original academic treatise—wasn’t so simple. Through his freshly master’s-degreed lens of diminishing farm town culture, Horace played with the facts like a kid with a kaleidoscope, looking for patterns and symmetry, and made this case:
In 1869, the shift from agrarian America to industrial America was coming with the relentless march of an assembly line. Northern cities were growing full bore. Farmhands found better work in factories and offices, where big-city anonymity let them enjoy moral loosening they never knew back home. For veterans burdened with shrapnel or night terrors from Gettysburg or Bull Run or Antietam, the big-town vices of alcohol, opiates, and prostitutes lessened the pain.
As cities grew, America itself shrank. The golden spike was hammered at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, marrying rail lines from east to west, a union from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The rail network webbed secondary cities through the east and brought more people to more places than ever before. As Americans became more mobile and exposed to cities, they aired a greater pretense of sophistication.
New transportation meant easier distribution of mass-produced consumer goods. The market explosion of these goods—and newspaper advertising to shill them—rendered handmade things old-fashioned and ordinary. Country folk—and the things they made—became backward in the national view. The roots of rural slurs—hayseed, hick, bumpkin, clodhopper, hillbilly, Okie, yokel, and rube—all trace back to these days.
The Giant, a crude sculpture not nearly as anatomically detailed as a human fossil would have been, gave America’s new city folk reason to chide their unsophisticated country cousins. Decades after the Giant caper, it was still a popular trend, from Lewis’s Elmer Gantry to TV’s Beverly Hillbillies.
It was the
dawn of America’s ongoing thirst for new communication technology as Western Union wired the country coast-to-coast. Fast forward 130 years, Horace thought, and the dots and dashes of Morse code evolved into a new text-message language of abbreviations, and other bombardments of constant gadget-driven news, scores, games, social networks, and on and on. It was the continued exodus from the spiritual to the external. Contemplation, quiet time, and internal reflection were dead, dying in a white-noise wilderness of diversion. Where was the God within? As silenced as the mute stone Giant.
At the same time the first wires were being strung, America’s fascination with natural sciences—including paleontology and anthropology—shook the long-held tenets of Bible-based religion in modern-thinking society. In God, America first trusted, but then science figured it all out. Creation was evolution. Religion was a lie, clung to by ignorant country folk. Horace’s America was founded on the belief that its land and people were in God’s favor. George Washington himself said the colonies were blessed by God’s “Providence”; it was a land of abundant natural gifts, with infinite forests, rich soil, an endless wealth of iron ore and minerals deposited below.
But by 1869, the notion of a nation smiled upon by God had passed. The Civil War was hell on earth for the men who fought it; and the new generation of industrialists believed it was their own genius, not God’s grace and loving hand, that made the nation prosperous.
One of these men was George Hull, a pronounced atheist and capitalist cynic, who hatched the Cardiff Giant plot as a way to embarrass the “biblically blind” of his day. In the Giant archive drawer, Horace found the cracked, leather-bound memoir of Hull’s, which came to the Farmers’ Museum through his great-grandnephew in Genesee, who found five copies of the self-published tale in an attic strongbox. Horace hadn’t looked at it in twenty years, but when he started reading, he remembered how delightfully Hull told the story.
Hull was from Binghamton, New York, and inherited his father’s cigar business; he found himself rich and bored. A family business will do that to a man, and Hull lived to escape by train on tobacco-buying trips to New York City, where he met Carolinians and Cubans who supplied him with leaf samples, dinner and drinks, and willing girls. But the trips to heartland cities such as Akron, Duluth, and Peoria where Hull’s Grade B cigars were sold were not as vice-full, and Hull dreaded them.
On one such trip to Ackley, Iowa, where the cigar maker had set up a sales territory for his “half-wit” brother-in-law, Hull found himself at a formal dinner at his sister’s house with a man he called “Reverend Turk” and several other prominent citizens.
Turk was a corn-belt Fundamentalist, a believer in the Bible as the Word of God. Old or New, it was to be read and consumed literally, as full Testament and Truth—not as a series of parables made up by hapless Jews who blamed an unpleasable God for their misery, and then later, followers of Jesus, who promised heaven to give solace to the earth’s downtrodden.
Hull knew the type, because upstate New York was loaded with them.
Back home, there was a revival movement, started by Charles Grandison Finney, Hull wrote in his memoir. He was tall and bearded in the Lincoln manner; dignified, until he started to preach. Then he transformed into a shaking, vibrating stem, like a tree hit by lightning, his arms whip-snapping like branches in a tornado, his voice a-thunder. He was a burning bush of hellfire and brimstone, a flaming beacon for lost souls! And he massed them together all spring, summer, and fall in any town that had five flat acres to pitch his giant tent. I went often when he came by Binghamton, not as a believer, but to be at once amused and repulsed by his believers. I do admit this perverse attraction; it is no more than the same curiosity that drew men to Barnum’s New York museum or traveling sideshows.
Reverend Turk, himself, had been influenced by Finney, and that night in Iowa, bored with the polite dinner chatter about corn prices and local charities, Hull asked Turk what he thought of T. H. Huxley’s new theories on evolution, which claimed man and primates shared the same biological ancestors.
“I suppose this is all a contrived controversy to bring him scientific fame,” Turk replied. “But it is heresy, and will earn him God’s eternal shame!”
“But I think any book with such a weighty title—Man’s Place in Nature—must be plied to see if it contains any plausible truths,” I countered, swirling my glass of port for emphasis.
“The truth comes from a source far more knowledged than some English biologist , which to me, is a fancy word for leaf-collector,” Turk said, his impatience growing. “How can any man pretend to know more about the natural world than that very world’s Creator?”
“Yes . . . but doesn’t that Creator hint to mysteries in the Bible?” I asked. “Three equal gods in one . . . a virgin conceiving a child . . . (at this, a few of the women coughed demurely) . . . Doesn’t your Bible challenge intelligent men to unearth some of its mysteries?”
“My Bible has no mysteries,” Turk said without pause. “It is the true Word of God, to be taken on faith,” he said, his voice then rising up to preaching levels.
“I have always viewed the Good Book as a series of parables,” I said. “But you’re telling me you believe, for instance, that giants like Goliath actually roamed the earth?”
The Reverend closed his eyes and began to recite: “From Genesis 6:4: ‘There were giants in the earth in those days.’ Numbers 13:33: ‘And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak’ . . . ‘All the region of Argo was called the land of giants,’ Deuteronomy 3:13. And, speaking of apes, sir, this biblical evidence of giants also refutes this fashionable ‘survival of the strongest’ theory, does it not?”
“You’re speaking of Darwin,” I said. “How so?”
“In this theory—I’m only told because I would not subject myself to such heresy—the biggest, strongest gorilla is king of the troop. In humankind, giants were invariably Philistines, and thus were overcome by smaller men who followed God’s word. Hence, David slayed Goliath, as every child knows. And look no further than who rules our world! The Zulu warrior? The Tripoli pirate? Our own redskins? No, the civilized God-fearing man!”
The other guests gave him a polite smattering of applause, and I admit his mulishness left me speechless. All I could manage was, “Well, that’s that,” and he sat, smug and satisfied, having vanquished his own brute . . . me.
That night, as Hull lay restless in the quiet Iowa night, he recounted the episode, as people do after a conflict.
I thought of all the clever retorts I failed to come up with. I thought of ways to embarrass Turk and those like him, to expose their antiquated stupidity. I was fitful the night through. So desperate I was to rest I opened the Webster’s Bible on the night table hoping its pedantic language would lull me to sleep. The book fell open to Deuteronomy, where my eyes fell on this passage.
“And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people from the one end of the earth even to the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the LORD shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind . . .”
I drifted off with thoughts of this vengeful God but awoke with a fresh idea! A god of stone! I would give the Turks and other sanctimonious preachers an Old Testament Philistine! I would take a gigantic statue and bury it, unearth him later, and pass him off as a fossilized human Goliath. His grotesque face would be contorted with the anguish of a death without Salvation, smitten by their angry Lord. Such a thing had never been discovered! I would do it near the roads the Holy Band traveled, and put up a revival tent over my Giant, then pass the hat among the Faithful. Oh, the Union-backs to be made! Here lies the Bible’s Goliath! I would advertise him as such! An American Goliath! And I would take their fool money!
Hull spent weeks reading up on geology, archaeology, and alchemy, and studied sculpture from Mesopot
amia to the Renaissance. He decided a soft, porous stone would best give his Giant an ancient look, but it could not reflect any definitive art period. The Giant was to be unique, like any human.
Ah, the study of rocks yields all the mysteries of the Earth. Once secure in my knowledge, I went back to Iowa to buy a block of gypsum, a hydrous calcium sulfate that contained vein-bluish strata, as if human blood once pumped through it. I told the quarry master the block was for a President Lincoln memorial I planned to donate for the county courthouse back home.
The quarry master told me he had been a corporal with Pennsylvania’s 17th Cavalry and fought at Gettysburg. Michael Foley was his name, and he went west after the war, with his army severance and a half-pound of rebel shrapnel in his thigh. (I noticed the limp and made up the Lincoln story the moment I did.) He wanted to contribute to my cause and dropped the price from $75 to $50. This bit of serendipity got my scheme off to a rousing start.
Hull asked Foley if he could recommend a good sculptor who was looking for work, rather than one in demand. He offered up Edward Burghardt, who had a monument shop in Chicago but had higher artistic aspirations. Hull paid Foley, and arranged to have the block delivered by teamster and train to Burghardt’s shop.
On the train from Iowa to Chicago, I had drawn rough sketches of the giant’s face and his twisted body that came to me. Burghardt took these, and made some anatomical suggestions. I told him I did not want our petrified man confused with ancient art.
The next day I returned to examine his clay model, and it was exactly as I imagined. The body was strife-ridden, the face in muted torment; the silent scream of a man crushed in a catastrophic burial.
“This is art!” I told Burghardt, and gave him a modest down payment and a box of cigars.
When he returned to Chicago six weeks later, Hull saw a giant more convincing than he’d ever dreamed.
Burghardt proved himself a sculptor of artistic merit. My Giant was a masterpiece; a primordial man, like us, but greater in mass and bone. The thickness and breadth of his forehead and jawbone were not quite early man, but not yet modern. And Burghardt added a dimension of reality of which even I hadn’t dreamed: It was the feet. The length and heaviness of those feet, the blunted thickness of the toes, were of a man who walked the earth. These were not the perfectly formed dainty feet of Michelangelo’s David. These were the feet of an authentic Goliath, worn and tired and flattened out from years of supporting such enormous weight, ambling through life protected only by primitive sandals against earth’s harsh elements.
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