He Who Toils Leaves All To Fools
Two kinds of people drive convertibles, Poncey thought, older men and younger women, and the women always had fathers who paid for it. Jazzy Luray’s father was a dentist, so when she sped through town with her hair in the wind, Poncey was sure she had daddy to thank. He was at his usual stool in the Diner and saw her through the window, squealing and lifting a bottle of some sort, a friend in the passenger side. Such a silly girl shouldn’t drive, he thought, and certainly shouldn’t have such a car, a low-slung roadster of deep purple. He turned back toward the counter as the roaring automobile faded into memory, and his fork poked at his plate aimlessly. She’s a brat who doesn’t know what’s good for her, he thought. He could show her, except she’s just too silly to know.
Poncey thought about another such time he’d seen her, when he spied her years ago pouring some suspect liquid into a pop bottle. Way too clever to be fooled, he was sure she’d gotten her hands on some liquor and was disguising it – quite a feat for someone underage, in a dry county and so silly to boot. Not to be outdone, he determined he’d get some booze for himself, and show her. The trick would be to pull it off and make sure no one knew, particularly not Rev. Fletcher nor anyone else at First Church. With no car himself, he’d jumped on his bicycle and pedaled all the way to the next county, to the package store conveniently located just over the line. Poncey had figured out a plan to keep his age from coming up, even though he was a big kid and could pass for older than his fifteen years. But he was so out of breath as he entered the store, he completely forgot to wink at the clerk – to cast the knowing look that would say he and the clerk had a connection, that he could trust Poncey implicitly. With such a pact, he wouldn’t have to prove he was old enough to buy the liquor, which he couldn’t. If he had remembered to look at the clerk, he’d have noticed his hands in the air and the masked man pointing the gun.
Poncey carefully chose a bottle of something he’d never heard of and turned toward the counter, his heart finally settling down in his chest. Instantly it jumped back into action and into his throat as he finally saw the robbery in progress, and the bottle slipped out of his hand. The percussive crash sounded like a shot itself, and both the gunman and clerk jerked their attention toward Poncey. He stood like a guilty schoolboy for a moment, then whooped and made a break for the next aisle. Running like a doughboy, he kept his head low while he navigated the maze of shelves. A bullet whizzed by, and a giant plate-glass window just beyond Poncey burst into a million shards. He vaulted through the resulting exit and leapt to his bike, pounding away at the pedals as the clerk laid the distracted thief low with a baseball bat.
No, Jazzy had always been nothing but trouble to Poncey.
Skullbone was abuzz the next day about the anonymous hero who had thwarted a desperate hoodlum in the next county. Nobody knew who he was or where he’d gone, but he might well have saved the clerk’s life, they said. Poncey was beside himself at the gushing praise, knowing that never in this world or any other could he admit he’d been buying himself a bottle, hero or not. I swear, that Jazzy, he thought, she is a thorn in my side. If he tried to use this event to enlarge his reputation, he would succeed only in shooting it full of holes. All the talk at the Diner was about the unknown protector of all things good – albeit a liquor store – and all he could do was sit and listen.
“Poncey Muldoon!”
He jumped to attention, and his fork clanked against the plate. “Huh?” he asked.
“Honey, I thought you’d left us,” said Mavis, the waitress, from behind the counter. Some years before she had made the poor calculation of marrying Rafe Davis, so Mavis Blipnil had become Mavis Davis and an ongoing source of cheap jokes in Skullbone. “I was sayin’, that Jazzy sure is a mighty perky sight in that ragtop, ain’t she?”
“She’s got no right to a car like that.”
“Oo, honey lamb, you ain’t a tad jealous, are you?”
“No, I couldn’t care less. She’s just too silly to have a car like that, that’s all.”
“Well, young girls tend to be silly sometimes. Sometimes men just turn ’em silly.”
Poncey looked up, hoping for some sign that she was talking about him, but she wasn’t. Mavis had spent too many years thinking only about herself to change the subject now, he thought. Sometimes she didn’t even make sure she had pie on hand in the afternoon, after how many years now of him coming in for pie, that’s how much she thought of him. Jazzy was even worse. The idea of it turned him yet more disgruntled.
“Some men, that’s all there is to it,” Mavis talked to herself, wiping the counter.
She’d grown up just outside Skullbone, her grandparents being self-made farmers, hardscrabble folk who’d raised themselves from migrant farm work to actual land-owners. Over the years they had traveled the railroad from south to north, all over the region, following the warmth as the season turned toward planting, then back again for the harvest. They’d lived on a string through good times and bad until finally they’d saved enough to buy some foreclosed land there in West Tennessee; one day they jumped off a railroad car and bought the land right there. They had no experience raising cotton, as most farmers did in the Midsouth, but instead became the only farmstead thereabouts to put in field corn. The crop required tender loving care in the thick clay, and after several seasons of plowing under corn stover for mulch, the land began to produce a bounty.
A daughter was born, and the family carried on. She was married, became Mavis’ mother, was orphaned and then widowed when the Viet Cong ambushed Lt. Blipnil’s squad on patrol. Over the years the responsibility of the farm grew and the poor woman’s capacity to oversee it diminished; the careful land management fell to the wayside in spite of a grand hoard of corncobs, and as a result the crops began to suffer. So a perfect storm raged at just the time that Rafe Davis showed up.
Mavis had a pretty smile, and Rafe looked like a huge teddy bear to her. He captured her heart easily, and her mom’s as well, what with his ability to heft a 100-pound bag of seed with each hand. But once the cow was in the barn, so to speak, Rafe showed that he didn’t know how to go about the milking. He displayed no talent with the crops either, and a strong back alone could not save the failing farm. Old Mrs. Blipnil died of a broken heart, Mavis sold off all the land but the patch including the house and barn, and she and Rafe made a new start by buying the town’s little greasy spoon. But Rafe proved to be no more deft in a building than in a field; in fact, his hulking form barely fit into the place at all. Over the next few years he broke enough plates, moods and wind to get himself banished forever, from business and bed; eventually he and Mavis were content to throw in the towel, cash their check and call it a day. Mavis got everything, and Rafe moved to Tunica, where last word was he made a nice living as a professional poker player.
“Tell you the truth, I’d say you’re just a tad jealous,” she told Poncey.
Mavis Blipnil had been a petit slip of a girl, but the Diner had turned Mavis Davis into a dumpling, a round ball of flab. She arose from behind her counter like an ancient stone idol, shrouded in smoke from a nub of cigarette that Poncey could just barely see pinched between her flaccid lips. She’d turned herself into a mess and couldn’t be trusted to have a good opinion. Besides, he wasn’t even sure if she was talking about him anymore.
“I’m not jealous of anyone. It just doesn’t seem fair she’s got that car and I don’t have one at all.”
“Well, that’s just life, ain’t it, honeybun? Some folks got, and some ain’t. It comes easy to some in spite of theirselves.”
Poncey thought back to the precious time and labor, to say nothing of money, he had invested at community college, and how little that had panned out so far. He refused to understand Mavis’ point. Jazzy knew she could never pull off an accomplishment equal to his education, and secretly she’d gladly give up her convertible and anything else to do what he’d done, Poncey was sure. She just used carefree gaiety as a cover-up.
“Findin’ your way in this world is like stumblin’ ’round in the dark, for some folks,” Mavis went on. “Most folks just end up runnin’ into the door. I’m just glad I got somethin’ – at lease I got this here diner.”
“I’ll get more than this, someday. Just makin’ a livin’ isn’t good enough for me.” Poncey ran his finger around the rim of his coffee mug, a soulless hunk of stoneware, heavy and white, sides straight up and down and round.
“Sugar, what you doin’ now? Seems like you’d be happy just to work steady. Ain’t nuttin’ wrong with makin’ a livin’. All those folks who kill theirselves buildin’ somethin’ up, they just lose it in the end. Somethin’ comes up that just ruins it. No, ain’t nuttin’ wrong with just makin’ a livin’.”
Poncey had no time for this prattle – Mavis was a colossal treasure trove of working-class sour grapes. However, he didn’t know how to hijack the conversation. “I’m gettin’ awful tired of gettin’ around on a bicycle,” he said, his voice flat.
“You big show off,” Mavis laughed. “Big talk on a bike. I know where you can get a car right away, honey pot. I can get you a car.”
Poncey thought Mavis had lost her mind right there in front of him. The pressures of running the Diner had finally gotten to her – she looked like she was going to pop. This is what he deserved for hanging out there so much, to see her go crazy right before his eyes.
“You’re tryin’ to trick me. What car?”
“Gramps’ old Model T. Been sittin’ out in my barn since 1940. You’re welcome to it.”
She was trying to trick him, Poncey thought, but such a lame trick made him want to take up her offer, like a dare. Obviously, the car wouldn’t run, but if he could fix it up somehow, it’d show her to fool with him. Zeke Breather, owner of the junkyard, could help with parts and know-how; his father knew a few things about engines as well. Wouldn’t that be a hoot, to drive up to the Diner in Mavis’ own car, tossed at him as a joke? That really would drive her crazy, Poncey thought. Even Jazzy would have to notice that.
“Maybe I’ll go down there and take a look at it,” Poncey said.
“You’re welcome to it, sugar bowl. If you can get it out.”
“Oh, I may just look at it. I didn’t say I wanted it,” Poncey tried to cover his bases, so in any case she couldn’t say she’d suckered him.
“You just go on down there an’ help yourself to anything you find. I’m sure that fine vehicle will knock your eyes out.”
As Poncey pedaled down the time-worn road – once traveled by an unending parade of tourists, before Hwy. 22 drew all traffic away – he wondered what Mavis meant by that last remark. She’s too dumb to triple-cross me, he thought, with visions of a sparkling antique automobile revolving in his mind. Was she betting he wouldn’t go to the barn and discover that she’d hoarded a mint-condition museum piece all these years? So what if it was a Model T, a car like that would set him apart in Skullbone, touring through town in its deep black gloss. Mavis couldn’t be pulling a trick like that, he thought. Could she?
He pulled up to the barn, a grand old structure apparently held up only by air pressure. One side of the roof was large and swept low, extending down to roughly shoulder-height from the ground. That side still proudly displayed, in gigantic faded letters, “See 7 States from Rock City,” the grand work of some sign painter forgotten to history. At the top stood a rusted rooster, preening as it proclaimed a west wind at the moment. Poncey stood and stared for a while, losing his sense of purpose, feeling like he had stepped into the grit of history. These things once meant something to someone, he thought. But not anymore, he thought, and trudged toward the barn door.
A fairy tale wrote itself in Poncey’s mind, as he prepared to be dazzled by a pristine jewel just within the dilapidated door. No, he thought, and tried to uproot the notion from his head, this car is going to be a disaster. But what if Mavis had counted on him thinking that, safe in knowing he’d never believe her offer? Mavis would never in a million years think of that, he thought, this car was going to be a disaster.
He yanked the door open and peered into the darkness, broken only by sharp slices of sunlight sifted by the slats. Among the scattered debris, he finally focused upon his quest.
Disaster – definitely disaster. Worse than he imagined.
The only surface of the Model T not covered by several decades of dirt were the holes rusted-through. The only part of the tires not rotted were the few inches flattened too deep into the ground to see. The only sign that life had once existed at all there was the hood folded up from the side to reveal a gaping wound which once held the engine. Poncey stood silently, too cynical to be disappointed, too snookered to feel vindicated. After a few minutes of filling his eyes, he sat upon the running board to think, and crashed to the earthen floor.
If I could pick up this thing and shake it, he thought, every single piece would fall off. If he ever did get this heap on the road, the wind would blow it apart. If he were to look at it too hard, it would clatter to the ground, he thought. And then he thought of something else: He could strip the car down to the chassis with no effort at all. Then he might have something to work with – the steering wheel was still in place; the rims were still round. He might have something indeed.
Poncey found a crowbar and a mallet concealed within the rubble, and lay into the Tin Lizzie. Sure enough, the thing capitulated into a heap that looked like a pile of leaves. The doors came off in his hand, and the parts that once were rubber crumbled to dust. Brass fittings long ago had been scavenged, and Poncey removed lesser attachments with ease. In only a couple hours he had reduced the American classic to what looked like an odd box spring with wheels. After clearing a path to the door, he tucked a stout timber under the back and levered the vehicle into motion. The axles complained bitterly with squeaking cries, like a giant awakened from an enchantment. Poncey groaned and strained as he inched the frame forward, until at last it broke into the full sunlight.
Hands on hips, Poncey surveyed his work and knew he was onto something big. He stood at the cusp of inventing something new, something that would turn Skullbone upside down. Poncey would roam the streets in a towering sail car, harnessing the mighty rushing wind, combining the old and new to propel his brainchild. After much struggle, he wedged a platform of heavy lumber solidly within the skeletal frame, producing a deck of sorts, sturdy enough to support a mast reaching into the heavens. Poncey would become lord of all the elements, chasing the wind along West Tennessee roads and across open fields, mocking his poor, gasoline-encumbered fellow travelers. The Flivver’s brake handle was bolted securely to the chassis; a simple wooden contraption attached, pressing against the wheel rim, and the car would stop on a dime. Poncey squared his shoulders, proud to finally reveal the greatness of his mental agility, to show the world its future.
“Avast!” he cried to the plodding traffic, gripping the steering wheel and balancing against his own rollicking momentum. He felt a spray of dust in his face as the Bon Homme Poncey pitched and rolled over the landscape. The storm whipped at Poncey’s baseball cap, but could not tear it loose. A siren wailed like a tempest to his stern, giving chase to the fleet vessel. Blue lights flashed through the mist, and slowly the patrol car eased up to Poncey’s port side. “Prepare for boarding!” a cop called through a bullhorn, and Poncey threw back his head in laughter. One hand on the wheel, the other entwined within the line, Poncey pulled the sail fully into the wind, and it filled and billowed like a rolling thunderstorm. The swift craft left its pursuing foes in a wake of dirt and gravel, lifting upon its suspension as it gaily lilted into the horizon and eternal liberty.
Poncey had already bought several cans of WD-40 to loosen the steering when he learned that, in order to move the car even a little, the sail would have to be four stories tall.
Comfortable within a patch of grass, Poncey lay outside the barn trying to imagine a mast twice the height of the roof. He’d suddenly come to appreciate every low-
hanging tree branch and electrical wire in town, angling to take hold of his passing invention. The clouds drifted by as light and fluffy as his plans had proven to be. Mavis caused all this, he said to himself, she thought she’d gotten the better of him, but he’d find a way to show her. His eye again lit upon the rooster-crested weather vane.
“I’ll get somethin’ out of this deal,” he said to himself. “Mavis said I could have anything I found out here, and I’m gonna take that weather vane.”
Poncey did not possess the greatest athletic skill, but he did have good feet. Back in high school, the football coach had let him play defense because he said he had “good feet;” Poncey had realized then that it had always been true. At an early age he’d discovered a talent for picking up items with his toes, when he was too busy to bend down, and once he’d come to grips with the tedium of school, he found his teachers tolerated him drumming his toes in boredom more so than his fingers.
As children always seek some advantage over their mates, in those days Poncey also used his good feet to dominate the playground slide. The preferred slide of all the kids was a giant steel structure, tall and smooth and shining – and hot as blazes in the summer. The slanting surface was particularly wide and featured rails along the sides tall enough to grasp. Decorum called for each child to ride down in turn, then run around to wait for the ladder again; sometimes they would number in the dozens, tightly packed in line, waiting interminably. But Poncey learned that the angle of the slide was no challenge for his feet, and he could run back up the incline, first with the help of the rails and eventually completely freestyle. As soon as his shoes hit the hole worn into the dirt at the bottom, he’d turn and scurry back to the top, each metallic footfall pealing across the playground, time after time.
Poncey’s talent didn’t set well with the other children, of course, particularly whoever had the next turn. A storm of protest arose every time he pulled this trick, but the person most upset – stuck at the top of the ladder, just wanting an opportunity to sit and slide – he was in no position to find the teacher and tattle. Finally the day came when none other than Jazzy was the victim behind him in line. This would be delicious – Poncey sat for a significant amount of time at the top, talking to her over his shoulder.
“I like the view up here,” he told her. “It’s better than the monkey bars.”
“You’re a monkey all right. Hurry up and slide, biscuit boy.”
“I’ll go when I’m ready. I’m thinkin’ ’bout sump’m right now.”
“Hope you’re not thinkin’ ’bout runnin’ back up the slide.”
“Maybe. I’ll let you know.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I was you.”
“Well, you’re not me.”
“Just slide.”
And so it went until finally Poncey did decide to slide, quickly depositing himself upon the ground, ready to climb back in a flash. He spun around just in time to see Jazzy hurtling toward him head first, her fists stretched out before her like Superman in flight. She caught him solidly on both knee caps, and since his knees did not bend in that direction, he spilled backwards with an agonizing bellow. Jazzy stood over Poncey’s wallowing body, as he squawked and held his knees, then signaled the next child to slide on down on top of him. He rolled to safety and swore vengeance.
So Poncey did not have good knees. But he did have good feet, and the low roof of the barn was not so different from the slide. It comprised three distinct sections, the top short and steep, the middle longer and much steeper, and the lower broad and nearly level. He cast off his shoes, heaved his bulk up to the bottom gable and said to himself, this is a piece of cake. For the first time Poncey saw the words “Lookout Mt.,” part of the Rock City sign that couldn’t be seen from the ground.
Poncey became intimately familiar with that sign as he scaled the most vertical surface. He came eye-to-eye with the “Rock City” part as he began his ascent, his hands seeking out the best places to grip within the worn wood as his toes clawed at its grain. His face pressed tightly against the “7 States at” while he took a short breather, his grasp growing increasingly strained and tenuous. He gazed longingly at the “See” part – painted on the roof’s top section – like the tape at the end of a footrace, an objective at the top of his summit. He crept ever higher, his fleshy stomach clinging to the surface.
His foot slipped, and sent a small avalanche skittering below. Sometimes the ice formed so sheer on the surface, it couldn’t be seen. Poncey swore at himself for forgetting his ice axe; but, even without cleated shoes, he had faith his good feet would deliver him to the summit. Even on his undeveloped mustache, he could taste the glacier cream forming. To each side of him he looked down upon lesser ice pinnacles, and he paused to set his jaw again toward his lofty goal. A blast of wind ripped at his protective jacket, and he had to turn his face away; icy fog covered his goggles and frosted the inside of his oxygen mask. Inch by inch he proceeded, even the slightest progress still a major onslaught upon nature and history. Stealthily he felt, tucked inside his shirt, the tiny flag he would plant at the very top of the world.
Fingers clinched anything they could find as Poncey dragged his torso over the edge and onto the more accommodating pitch of the top area. He took a moment to lay there like a wet rag; not just anybody could have climbed that roof, he thought. He wondered how many states he could see from his new perch.
Eventually Poncey remembered why he had made the climb. A glance toward the saucy iron rooster sent him into shock: It was nearly as big as him. Wavering slightly in the breeze, it turned just enough to catch the sun, to look at him sideways, revealing rust and pocks left from decades of battling everything nature could throw at it. The proud sentry gazed flatly over its domain, giving no quarter and asking none. Up on his feet, Poncey leaned expertly into the angle of the gable and eased closer in his pursuit of the vane. He could see a bolt secured it to the base; he cursed himself for not bringing any tools – and he sure wasn’t going back to get any now. If that forty-foot sail hadn’t distracted him, he grumbled, he’d have thought to bring a wrench. The vane’s base itself was screwed into the roof’s bleached, wooden ridge; Poncey bet he could probably pull those screws out by the roots. The wood feels weak, he thought as he set his feet and tested his grip on the rooster, it’ll probably give way.
He was practically kissing the bird as he gave it a mighty heave upward.
Poncey was right about the weak wood. Unfortunately, it didn’t give way underneath the weather vane – it gave way beneath his good feet. A slow cracking sound grew into a disastrous crunch, and like a magic trick Poncey disappeared into a hazy cloud. As he felt the roof splinter under him, he thought for sure this was it, and Mavis and Jazzy and everyone else would be sorry they had treated him so badly, if they ever found him. He expected to come down heavily upon a pitchfork or tiller, or some other antique implement of destruction, impaled like a shish kebab. Instead, he was swallowed up by an incredible pile of dry corn cobs, letting loose a choking blast of dust and debris. As he scrambled to escape, crying and coughing and looking like a poorly made-up Halloween ghost, he considered this an even worse way to die.
Poncey sat planted on the edge of the loft, struggling to breathe, his legs dangling, his eyes muddy. He had survived his pillowy salvation, but only barely. The stored cobs reached almost to the roof, nearly filling the space. Poncey picked up one and studied it, wondering what possible use anyone would have for a million of them. The pockets left by missing kernels reminded him a little of the plastic bricks he had played with as a boy, thousands upon thousands of tiny squares and rectangles kept in a jumble inside a tall, round can. He considered the humble cob and thought about how he’d failed to build his sail car, and failed to get the weather vane, in spite of all his brainpower. In his mind he saw Mavis smirking through her cigarette smoke, and coughed slightly. All his learning was no use at all if it didn’t set him apart from these other idiots. He thought about the cobs, and
the toy bricks, and the barn.
The broken portion of the roof hung in front of his face, exhorting him to ‘See’.
Poncey thought about the sign.
What kind of fool would drive to the other end of the state because of a sign painted on a barn, he wondered. Who cares about seeing other states when there are great things to see right in front of your eyes? Things like a sail car. Poncey looked at the cob in his hand. Or things like a grand building made of nothing but corn cobs, he thought.
Poncey’s next few weeks were filled with industry; he even became scarce at the Diner. A design had immediately formed in his mind, which any architect would have scoffed at but it reminded Poncey of the Taj Mahal. Straight and solid walls made the uniform corn cobs a perfect construction material. Poncey gleefully tossed great mounds of his chosen medium out of the loft with a coal shovel, leaving only a tiny dent in the stockpile. After scraping out a footprint in the land along the highway, Poncey laid a foundation of cobs reinforced by mud. The expanse of the structure would dwarf the barn, much less the farmhouse. Placing layers of cobs alongside each other – alternating between six parallel, then six perpendicular, like cordwood – he expertly fashioned an edifice square and sturdy. A wet mixture of clay held the cobs together securely as Maizeland, as he began to call his creation, slowly rose from the ground.
Someday soon folks from all over will come, just to see the Maizeland mansion, thought Poncey through his glad whistling. He’ll put Rock City to shame.
At first the work hurt his legs and back, as it forced him to crouch low for hours on end. As the walls reached his waist, his back straightened and the fatigue became less, and he designed ways to frame out doors and windows with scrap lumber. Once the structure grew higher than his head, his routine became more complicated: He found a step ladder in the barn, and a shoulder bag to hold cobs, and he used a small board to carry a bit of mud in one hand. Up and down the ladder he went, bending low, reaching high, over and over, then shifting the ladder to begin again, until his muscles cried out for mercy.
Through the nights Poncey lay awake, planning and scheming the next day’s work, his legs and arms groaning. His back cramped in the night’s rest and stiffened at each new labor in the morning. He never considered giving up, though; such was his fervor for the project. Once he was finished, nobody will even think about Rock City again, he told himself.
Next to Mavis’ humble farmstead lay her former fields, still being worked by the wealthy planter who had bought them. Every midday Poncey saw a group of day laborers pass by on the road, heading to lunch, then back again. As Maizeland increased in size, so did the sound of their derision, and the hired help never failed to apply a new insight or insult to Poncey’s work. At first he tried to ignore them, but before long he began to dread noontime; these nincompoops, these field hands, couldn’t appreciate art or the fine satisfaction of real accomplishment, he thought. He bore with their ridicule until at last he could stand no more, and began a contest of wits with their passing commentary. Only the shortness of their lunch break saved him from exploding in utter frustration.
“There’s that boy again,” said a tall one, looking like a corn stalk himself. “He’s still thinkin’ a corn cob is a brick.”
“Hate to see him at supper,” replied another, “Chewin’ on a brick ’stead of a corn cob.”
“Hee heee! Chewin’ on a brick!”
“Shut up! Get outta here an’ get to work – get out there an’ make more cobs for me,” Poncey retorted. “You cornballs go back out to your cornfield!”
“You don’t need no more corn cobs. What you need is at least one lick o’ sense.”
“You’re some kind of corn clown,” said a short, stubby one.
“Hee heee! Corn clown!”
“Knock it off!” Poncey said. “You jerks wouldn’t know a piece of art if you saw one.”
“Pizza fart?”
“Hee heee!”
“You’re all idiots! Idiots!” Poncey screamed, almost letting them get to him.
The walls rose a majestic ten feet now, so Poncey decided to place towers at the corners, beginning at the ground again. He spent days building them to wall height on the exterior, a medieval façade, then added an overhanging lip at the top. He liked the effect so much, he thought battlements would make a nice addition. Maizeland had become a thing of beauty, a dusty brown testament to one man’s vision and perseverance. As Poncey shoveled more cobs from the loft, he planned an interior wall with towers at each end, and for days the work went on, seasoned by constant jousting with the field hands.
“You call this the Corn Clown Castle?”
“Shut up! It’s Maizeland!”
Then one morning when Poncey arrived at his work site, he froze in his tracks. A gaping hole in one wall of Maizeland stared back at him. In horror he studied the breach and the small pile of cobs on the ground directly below, and wondered whom he could blame. A roiling storm arose in his heart as he began the repair and railed silently at whatever brainless vandal had dared attack his masterpiece. Poncey had settled on blaming a raccoon by the time he’d fixed the hole, fuming over the precious hours he’d lost.
But the next morning another hole had appeared, in a different place, and bigger. Poncey cursed the raccoon and angrily patched the area. He tried to devise an animal trap in his mind, but couldn’t think beyond making one out of corn cobs. He settled on hoping the varmint would die of natural causes. Hours later, he finally finished and turned his attention to the inside wall.
Then again the next morning there appeared not just a hole, but an entire section of wall that had collapsed. The dislodged cobs had fallen mostly to the inside, and Poncey swore a mighty oath at the sight of them. This repair would take him all day, he thought. New mud had to be mixed, and more cobs torn out to weave in the patchwork, and Poncey’s slow simmer grew to a violent boil. This foolishness had gone on long enough; now he was determined to do something about it.
Again that night Poncey was unable to sleep, but no longer because of cheery planning. Instead, he lay on the cold ground, camped out in a little wood lining the road, hiding next to his castle, determined to catch the mystery marauder in the act. His teeth chattered through the night in his sleeping bag, with no light nor fire to give away his presence. Poncey blew hard into his cupped hands against the chill coming off the Channel. Brigades of the Saxon fyrd lay scattered across the land, prepared for the onslaught sure to come. William lurked somewhere nearby, preparing his troops for their attack on the barony. Poncey swore his allegiance to Edward, to defend the castle against the barbarous Normans or die trying. He peered at the towers, trying to make out the huscarls, but the starless night was too deep. Nothing to do but settle in for the long vigil, he thought, to dwell and dream upon those whom he loved, those he would likely never see again. A sea breeze gently drove rolling fog across the encampment. The creeping enemy would be upon him before the morning was even fully lit, likely, arriving like burglars and raining a terror of arrows and shafts upon him. Rumors of cavalry, long lances brandished upon strong horses, vexed his sleep and made him dread waking. Poncey jerked alert from his nodding.
He nervously scanned the wall with binoculars, afraid that he’d slept through the action. Every chirping cricket or hooting owl made his attention jump, thinking that he was about to confront his enemy.
Just as dawn broke he heard a sporadic mumbled noise, gradually drawing closer. The sound of roughhousing, the joking and scuffling of rambunctious friends, slowly separated into distinct voices. He lay silently studying the exchange.
“Nice of him to give us such a handy supply.”
“No trouble at all any more.”
They were the voices of the field hands.
“Watch it!” the skinny one laughed.
“Cannonball!” yelled the stocky one.
Poncey could see them now in the dim light, shoving each other playfully, talking trash. He gasped as the skinny one lurched into
one of Maizeland’s towers, sending it slowly leaning, then toppling to the ground. The man rolled in the pile of corn cobs like a bath, lost in hilarity, as the other picked up a few and stuffed them into his pockets.
Holding one up, he gaily proclaimed, “Nature’s toilet paper!”
Sitting among the trees, Poncey saw Maizeland for what it was. The barn smiled at him, and the sign offered him its empty advice.