Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

The Misplaced Person by Tom Tolnay

Tom Tolnay describes himself as a short-fiction devotee and says he reads more than 200 short stories a year for pleasure. His own short stories have been published in widely different types of magazines, from mystery to literary to mainstream. Most recently, his stories have been featured in The Iconoclast, Hardboiled, and Carpe Articulum. The author also runs a small press that publishes many letterpress poetry books and anthologies of short fiction and essays.

In the old days Bartleby Jargon would’ve been known as an “eccentric”... an odd duck who, though out of step with the rest of the community, was appreciated by most because his weird originality made life a bit more colorful. Nowadays, in a world impatient with the uncommon, a world far less generous, Bartleby was called a “flake.” To the citizens of Gopher that meant he was adrift somewhere between the moon and stars, someone no good to anyone, least of all himself. But to me, Bartleby was just a misplaced person without a past or present.

Bartleby wasn’t born in Gopher, yet no one could say exactly where he came from or how he happened to show up at this speck of pepper on the map. He just was and had been for some time. What made him hard to figure out, I guess, was that he’d never learned how to give a direct answer, and always went round and round with a puzzled look in his eye. Under that gob of hair with the texture of clay was a plain, unmarked face that could’ve passed for thirty-five or sixty-five. Plus, he had oversized ears that tended to wiggle when he spoke, distracting us from thinking about anything beneath the man’s surface.

With his natural attraction to nuts and bolts, no one was surprised to hear he took a job at Cowley’s Hardware over on Main — even flakes, I mean eccentrics, have to pay rent and buy baloney. If eccentrics are different from regular folks it’s because they get things done by way of their own mysterious logic. Like the time his boss, Zack Cowley, was away at a hardware show in Chattanooga, and Bartleby, left behind to mind the store, handed over shovels, hoes, rakes, and God knows what else to a family of migrant farmers passing through. Either the family skipped town without paying, or Bartleby saw fit to give the stuff away. All Zack knew for sure was that a batch of tools was missing from his store, and there wasn’t enough cash in the register to account for the merchandise. But he didn’t sack his assistant, as everyone expected — in some cases hoped would happen, and I figure it was because no one else in town would’ve sorted screws and brads and washers with such enthusiasm and at such cheapskate wages... They say it took Bartleby Jargon ten months to pay back Zack Cowley for those wayward tools.

Because Bartleby never expected anything from anyone, and yet was always willing to extend a helping hand to neighbors or strangers, I found myself doing little things for him. I’d bring him a coupla apples from the twisted tree out back our house, or I’d drop off the sports pages after I’d finished reading the local weekly: Like any red-blooded American, he had a soft spot for baseball. But he usually seemed embarrassed by my friendly gestures, so I had to hold back from time to time before I’d say to my wife, Maggie, “Think I’ll drop over to Jargon’s and see if he can use a little help with his mailbox — snowplow knocked it off the post two months back.” At which Maggie would look up from her knitting, over the wire rims of her glasses, and say: “I could use a little help stopping my kitchen faucet from dripping.” Reactions like that have taught me to do my thinking with my head and not with my mouth.

Bartleby’s behavior reminded me of an old song they used to play on the radio that goes something like this: “I start for the corner, but turn up in Spain.” One day Zack sent him to deliver an imported copper teapot to the Brandon place; it’s that sturdy white Victorian up on the hill, overlooking the village like God in His heaven looking down on us. Only Bartleby never reached Brandon’s mansion — ended up digging poppies out of fresh flower beds in the village square and transplanting them into his teapot. Then he goes and leaves this flower arrangement on the steps of the town jail. “What in God’s name was that flake thinking?” townspeople asked each other. To one of them, Myra Crane, I answered, “Nothing at all — he was just being Bartleby.” What I’d meant was, he was always doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and usually for some reason that made sense to no one but him. That’s why everyone in Gopher seemed to have a favorite Bartleby story. Whenever the men gathered for their Friday night card game at the Grange, or the women met in the basement of the Methodist church to organize a fund-raiser on Saturday afternoon, they seemed to spend more time telling Bartleby yarns than dealing cards or planning a chicken-and-biscuit dinner.

If there’s one chapter in the story of Bartleby Jargon’s life in Gopher that stayed in people’s minds it would surely be the time he was drafted for public office. In my hometown the same half-dozen people keep their elected posts so long we didn’t really need to vote, though we sort of did anyway just to make sure folks in surrounding communities didn’t start calling us “commies.” Fact is, the few times someone else had the gall to put his or her name up against the standing Village Clerk, Village Truant Officer, Village Justice of the Peace, we, the citizens of Gopher, looked upon it as an act of aggression. Far as we’re concerned, Alice Archer is the Clerk and Artie Frome is the Justice of the Peace, and so on — that’s their job, their livelihood, and running against them was like trying to run them off their deeded lands. But several years ago Nickie Bumppo, the Village Collector for the previous twenty-nine campaigns, up and died on us.

You can’t run a town — even one small as Gopher — without a collector. Once a year for a whole month the Village Collector collects the dues to operate the Volunteer Fire Department (housed in a rickety barn on the abandoned MacKenzie place), to run an ambulance (an ancient hearse fitted up with a cot and first-aid kit), to plow the snow (a World War II Jeep with no doors) on roads the county ignores, and other such vital services. We call this money the Village Dues for the good reason that Gopherites find it easier to pay smaller dues for special services in summer than higher overall taxes at year’s end. A member of each household — we got maybe a hundred fifty households in Gopher — would drop off a check or an envelope with cash over to the Bumppo house, have a cup of coffee in Martha’s ballyard-sized kitchen, trade two cents’ worth of gossip, then go about their business. Lately, a few of the town’s better-heeled folks, like the Brandons and the Whitneys, came around waving credit cards like these things were the Lord’s Prayer sealed in plastic. But Nickie never got around to accepting “the devil’s tool” for payments since he believed we’d already let thingamajigs take over too much of our business. Except for figuring out who owed what and then collecting it, don’t ask me what Nickie did as collector the rest of the year. But he did it, I know, because it got done.

When a public official in Gopher passes on to the Great Collector in the Sky — that’s just a bookish way of saying “croaked” — the spouse, or son, or daughter is expected to move into the vacated post without so much as a ripple in the town’s routine. Saves the time and expense of calling a new election. Under this system of handing over the power we’re able to pay our dues at the same house and be assured of getting a decent cup of coffee. (No one around here can abide by surprises, especially in their coffee cups.) In the case of Martha Bumppo, she’d been the Village Collector behind the Village Collector ever since the start of Nickie’s reign. The money was handed over to the man of the house, but the woman of the house kept the records and sent out the overdue notices and typed up the reports. So while all the glory had been going to Mr. Bumppo, all the work had been falling on Mrs. Bumppo, and with four kids to cook for and keep patched up, she already had too much to do. For years she’d been wanting to visit her ma in Missouri. Now, with her husband cooling down in a plot behind the Baptist church, and a little insurance pay dirt coming her way, and with all but one kid out of the house, she was determined to give up the collectorship and climb on a bus heading west. No matter how hard Annabelle and Daisy tried to convince her otherwise, she wouldn’t budge: “I ain’t doing it no more, so stop asking.” Her “stubborn-headedness” upset them plenty, as if they believed sidestepping this civic duty shed a bad light on everyone in Gopher.

Martha’s refusal to move into the vacated post was further complicated by the fact that the rest of us already had jobs at the pharmacy or barbershop or general store or dry goods outlet or repair shop/gas station. As for weekends, we had too many loose drainpipes and wobbly banisters and drafty windows and leaky faucets to repair at home to take on an extra duty. Besides, none of us knew how to be the Village Collector. With not one candidate stepping up to the plate, the phone wires of Gopher — even a few computers equipped to send out mail on the wings of electricity — heated up, and they didn’t cool down until after my boss, Sylvester Masterson, a member of the Village Council, looked up from the pill he was crushing with his pestle and said to me: “Mitty, let’s put Bartleby up for collector.”

“Bartleby!” I yelped, nearly dropping the bottles of aspirin I was setting out on a shelf.

“He’s the perfect man for the job.”

“What makes you say a thing like that?” I asked, glancing over to make sure there wasn’t a “pulling-my-leg” grin on his sunken face.

Sylvester must’ve thought all this out earlier because he came out with three “damn good reasons” without blinking. First, Bartleby liked everyone, and everyone tolerated Bartleby. Second, he could add up prices on a complicated list of plumbing materials without using a calculator. Third, and most important, he didn’t know how to say no.

Following a long night of being coaxed by Sylvester over several hands of poker at the Grange, Rolf Larsen, Gopher’s resident entrepreneur — he owns the general store and laundromat and heads the Village Council — marched into Cowley’s Hardware first thing next morning. With Zack out back taking an inventory of stovepipe, Rolf asked Bartleby point-blank if he could think of any good reason why he shouldn’t become the Village Collector.

Bartleby thought about this awhile, then said, “Can’t say as I can.”

“That settles it,” said Rolf. “You are hereby nominated to become Gopher’s new collector.”

Without a word Bartleby scratched his ass, went out the front door, looked into the slot in the mailbox on the sidewalk, then disappeared down the street. Or so they tell me. That night at the Grange there was a bucketful of grumbling about putting up a “flake” for public office, but the simple fact was that no one else wanted anything to do with that opportunity. As for the few who supported the nomination, I suspect they were just trying to play a joke on the good people of Gopher. Next afternoon, in an emergency meeting of the council staged at the schoolhouse (which is in dire need of a new roof), Bartleby’s “election” was carried by a landside. The only dissenting member of the council was Zack Cowley, who expressed concern that the duties of Village Collector would get in the way of his duties as a hardware clerk.

“Needn’t worry ’bout that, Mr. Cowley,” Bartleby assured him. “I’ll chase down those stray mutts at night after your store shuts down.” This was the first hint we had that Bartleby may have misunderstood the nature of the collections he’d been elected to undertake.

Bartleby’s acceptance speech consisted of a promise to be the “best collector this town’s ever seen,” and true to his word, Bartleby began collecting with the same zeal he brought to sorting concrete nails and wall anchors at Cowley’s. On his way home from work he’d stop unannounced at random residences to collect used clothing for the town rummage sale; on bingo nights he was seen collecting cigarette butts and candy wrappers off the plank floor of the Grange; Saturday evenings he put aside to chase down stray dogs and cats and even a coupla squirrels. On Sundays he could be found handing the collection plate down the pews of the Baptist and Methodist churches. Bartleby would collect anything that struck him as collectible, and the big joke back then was that you’d better keep moving or else Bartleby would come along and collect you too.

On hearing that Bartleby Jargon had taken to collecting every raindrop in Gopher, outsiders might’ve thought he wasn’t a flake so much as flat-out stupid. But if anyone had ever said that about him to my face, he would’ve had a fight on his hands. (I may be skinny, but I’m wiry.) Bartleby was simply a good neighbor and an earnest public servant, a throwback to the days when a man went out of his way to help someone less fortunate, when a man performed his workday job like it was a patriotic duty. Why call him stupid or flaky just because he got left behind in all the changes that’ve taken place? I don’t mean like the new cash register that plays a song in Rolf’s general store or the high-speed teat-tweaker out at Joad’s farm. I’m talking about the changes that have crawled into the minds of the citizens of this land. The way the Almighty Buck is worshipped. The way people look out only for themselves. The way we let the TV tell us how to live.

By the time Bartleby’d been in office through the falling snow and the blooming of daffodils, Rolf visited his cottage, and said: “Time has come for you to figure out who owes what and to start collecting the Village Dues.” Looking more confused than ever, Bartleby began to tremble. “No need to be in a muddle,” the entrepreneur assured him. “All you have to do is think of it as community tithing.” Well, the collector still didn’t get it, but the next day he put on his Sunday best — green checkered pants and striped yellow shirt — greased down his claylike hair with Vaseline, set up a folding table and chair in his front room, sharpened a coupla pencils, laid out a pad of lined paper, and put a pot of coffee on the electric hot plate.

Outside the village proper dues were figured at a dollar an acre and three dollars a kid. If you had no kids at home, it was a flat five bucks, plus acreage. In town, dues went for a dollar a kid, and three dollars per tree. Despite a fair policy aimed at equaling things out, the farmers on the outskirts of Gopher tended to be charged higher dues and tended to take longer to pay. Farmers had more acreage, and with too many long winter nights to occupy, they tended to have more kids; another reason they paid a larger share for public services was that some village residents — without mentioning names — were so cheap they started cutting down their trees for firewood, helping them to save money in two ways.

That first week, no one showed up at Bartleby’s cottage to pay their dues, and the look in his eyes became more puzzled, more worried than usual. That’s why I was the first one to come across that year — didn’t want the Village Collector to get too down on himself. But others didn’t follow my example, as I’d hoped. Could be the constituents thought they might get away without paying dues since he was new on the job, and especially since it was Bartleby. Halfway through the month I found myself stopping at his place more often than usual to prop up his drooping spirits.

In response to one of my pep talks, Bartleby said, “Mitty, looks like no one ’round here wants to set aside money to put out brush fires.”

“Folks in Gopher are just slow in letting go of their cash,” I assured him. “Just you wait and see — they’ll be lining up at your door any day now.”

And they finally did start trickling in, dragging the dust of the street and dirt of the fields with them into his front room. Gratefully he collected the dues of Mr. Dodsworth, and Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, Mr. Lonigan, and old Mrs. Killegrew, calling everyone Mr. and Mrs. throughout the process. But he was disappointed none of them stayed for coffee afterwards, the way they used to do at the Bumppo place. Rather than tell him they might have been put off by his thanking them five or six times during each transaction, I asked him if he could fill my cup with more of that rusty-tasting coffee. (Between all that burnt caffeine, and Martha elbowing me to stop rolling around the mattress all night, I didn’t get much sleep during that period.)

As for the collecting of monies, everything went down as easy as a slice of apple pie until the last day of the month, the dues deadline. The Sawyer boy pushed through the screen door, dragged his lazy sneakers up to Bartleby, and dropped a fingerprint-stained white envelope on the table. Going on fourteen, Chick Sawyer was big for his age and was courting Cassy Pask at the time. Obviously aware of the importance of his mission, Chick stood there bold as a bank teller: “What you gonna do with all that money, Mr. Village Collector?”

“I’m gonna put out fires,” said Bartleby, grinning like a pyromaniac as he shook the greenbacks out of the envelope onto the table.

Young Sawyer snickered. “Don’t you know dollar bills’ll burn in a fire?”

Bartleby didn’t notice Chick’s attempt to make him look dumb. He was too busy counting the crumpled, mostly one-dollar bills. All of a sudden Bartleby ran a thick finger down his list of names on the pad and cried out, “Whoaaa! Your dad’s dues is ninety-three dollars and there’s only seventy-eight here.”

“You better count again, Mr. Collector,” said Chick, his left thumb coming unhooked from the right strap of his overalls.

I looked up from the baseball scores on the back page to see what this was all about, and I watched Bartleby count again — just a formality because he was always dead sure of his math. “No doubt about it,” he said. “Not one bean more, not one bean less than seventy-eight.”

Blood pumped into Chick’s face, and his voice got squeaky as a rusty gate. “You musta done something with the rest of the money ’cause my pa put that dues in this envelope and that’s what I brought you.” Before Bartleby could say anything else, straight out the screen door dashed the Sawyer boy, slamming it behind him. The Village Collector sat there looking sadly at the cash a long while. At last he reached into his back pocket, pulled out a skimpy calfskin billfold, counted out five singles and two fives, and set them with the greenbacks on the table. No wonder they laughed at him in the barbershop, and over to the Grange.

Half an hour later, just as I was standing up on my own two legs to head back to Sylvester’s Pharmacy — I’m retired, but I keep his shelves stocked on a part-time schedule — the boy returned, but this time he wasn’t alone. Father and son banged through the screen door, and strutted up to the table like a pair of fightin’ roosters. They stood with legs apart, arms crossed. Papa Sawyer was a leather-hided dirt farmer with teeth like kernels of corn left to rot on the cob. The boy’s teeth were in better shape, but it wouldn’t be long before he was growing rotten corn in his mouth too. In this corner of America we don’t get too much drama, except that phony baloney on TV, so I dropped onto the arm of the sofa to take a good gander at the second act of this little play.

“My boy here says you lost fifteen dollars on me,” the elder Sawyer’s voice screeching like the circular saw at the mill outside town. “I don’t have no money to be throwing away, so you better find that cash fast or there’s going to be hell to pay!” Like a bull getting ready to charge, the farmer scraped the mud off his boots on the oval scrap of braided rug.

“It’s like this, Mr. Sawyer,” Bartleby started, “I counted the money twice, and there was only seventy-eight, but—”

“You callin’ my son a liar?”

The Sawyer boy uncrossed his arms and backed up a few feet. I started to pipe up that I’d seen Bartleby count out every dollar, but the farmer swiveled his head toward me and snapped, “You keep out of this, Francis Mitty!” I’d learned a long time ago that when someone calls me by my full name, it’s smarter to keep out of it, especially when the name-caller is six feet or more in height. (I may be wiry, but I’m no fool.)

“Look here, Mr. Sawyer,” said Bartleby, “if you’ll simmer down a second I’ll explain.”

“Don’t you be telling me to simmer down, you flake!” Sawyer roared, shoving the table aside — sending pencils flying across the floor and moving up eye-to-eye with Bartleby: The tops of their heads were pretty much even with each other’s, so if it came to that, at least it would be a fair fight.

“Let’s not get our feathers ruffled,” I advised, climbing to my feet again, but they didn’t even know I was in the county, much less in the room.

“You’re worse than a flake,” Sawyer kept on, “you’re a damn thief!”

Though Bartleby was bolted together as solid as a hot-water boiler, he was as easygoing as a carousel. But far as I knew, no one had ever called him a flake to his face before, and certainly not a thief. As I stood there feeling helpless, an amazing change came over the Village Collector: His neck thickened and his jaw extended and his chest puffed up like a grouse getting ready to mate. Catching his breath, he raised his hands slowly in front of his face and stared at them as if he hadn’t seen them in a long time. That was the first time I’d noticed how big and muscular they were, the blue veins popping out like rivers on a map.

The collector and the farmer stood two feet apart for half a minute, neither one of them blinking or budging or burping, the air so thick you could’ve bitten into it like a Granny Smith. At long last Bartleby lowered his hands to his sides and muttered, “I’m jess trying to tell you, Mr. Sawyer, that after your boy left I found the missing money on the floor — must’ve slipped off the table when I wudn’t looking.”

Sawyer’s chest seemed to deflate like a punctured inner tube. “Why the hell didn’t you say so ’fore?” But he couldn’t hide the relief in his voice. And why not? The farmer had stuck his head into the fiery furnace of Bartleby’s anger, and had quickly learned to respect the flake. Besides, fifteen dollars was a lot of money to him: All these farmers around here worked the soil not because they could scrape a decent living out of it, but because they were determined to spend all their days and nights with earth under their fingernails until they were buried in the stuff. Young Sawyer, who had dirt under his nails too, had his back pressed against the screen door.

To this day I can’t say if the farmer was bluffing because he was short on cash, or if his boy had been hard up for a few dollars to take his girlfriend to the movies over in the county seat. (A lad that age’ll do just about anything to impress a girl, one of the few things that hasn’t changed in the world they’ve twisted out of shape.) And it’s just as hard to say if Bartleby was backing down, or if he was just being kind to Sawyer. The lines between such matters, like the markings between properties in this part of the state, are always hard to stake out. All I know is I still haven’t managed to rid myself of that mental picture of Bartleby, intense on the edge of violence, puffy red hands dangling at his sides.

When the Village Collector didn’t show up at his job on Monday morning, Zack Cowley sent the Wesley boy over to Bartleby’s cottage. The boy went up and knocked and, when he got no answer, walked right in: The drawers of the wooden bureau were left open, and his shirts, pants, and socks were gone. Along with everything else he owned, which wasn’t much. It didn’t take long for folks to start repeating what had jumped out of Sawyer’s mouth — that Bartleby was a thief; a few of them seemed pleased with the notion he’d run off with the Village Dues. Nor did it change people’s minds after the dues were found, all counted out and recorded on a sheet of paper, in a cigar box in his refrigerator. More than once I found myself trying to straighten out the facts for my neighbors. But it didn’t do much good. Once a story gets told in a certain way, it keeps on going in that direction until folks get hold of another story they like better.

These days, Bartleby’s name hardly ever comes up at the barbershop, or the general store. But I still think about him now and again. It didn’t make sense to me that he would up and leave such a fine town as Gopher without saying goodbye, and all because a corn-toothed farmer had called him a coupla names. Then one day I remembered how Bartleby had stared at his huge red hands that day, how no one really knew anything about his past, and I suddenly had an inkling of why he went away. Sometimes I wonder where Bartleby is, and what he’s up to. I wonder if he’s being as kind and generous as he used to be in Gopher. Or if he’s just getting angrier with every hardening of life around him, egging him on to repeat whatever it was he’d done with those hands that had made him hide out in Gopher.

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Tolnay