LITTLE BIG MAN

“I wouldn’t like to see you misled by your own enthusiasm,” said Dr. Teague a few minutes later, seated behind his metal desk, on which was mounted a fluorescent lamp supported by a great derricklike structure. “I remember your Mrs. Burr, who was a member of the janitorial staff rather than a nurse. She was discharged, I believe, for supplying certain patients with intoxicants, foremost among them being Jack Crabb. While an occasional draught of something mildly alcoholic might have a favorable physical effect on the aged, assisting in circulation, a strong drink can be very deleterious to an old heart. Not to mention the psychic effects. And I think that Mr. Crabb’s paranoid tendencies are quite apparent even to a layman.”

“But he could be a hundred eleven years old. Can you grant me that much, Dr. Teague?” asked I.

Teague smiled. “Curious way you put it, sir. Mr. Crabb is so many years old in reality, and it has nothing to do with what I will grant or you will accept. There are certain techniques by which medical science can determine the approximate age of a man, but those means lose precision as the subject grows older. Thus with a baby-”

I got out my handkerchief just in time to catch a sneeze. I had thought as much: an aftereffect of those wretched geraniums. And my prescribed nose drops were a hundred miles away. My straightened right septum ached; the incision had hardly healed. Yet there was a moral lesson in this eventuality. I remembered Mr. Crabb’s story about the unoffending chap who was beaten by the Indians, and belatedly understood it: each of us, no matter how humble, from day to day finds himself in situations in which he has the choice of acting either heroically or craven. A small elite are picked by fate to crouch on that knoll above the Little Bighorn, and they provide examples for the many commonplace individuals whose challenge is only a flat tire on a deserted road, the insult of a bully at the beach, or a sneezing spell in the absence of one’s nostril spray.

I filled my hand with water at Dr. Teague’s stainless-steel washstand and sniffed some up my nasal passages. It was a stopgap remedy and not very efficacious. I sneezed regularly for the next forty-five minutes, and my nose swelled to the size of a yam, my eyes narrowed to Oriental apertures. Yet my will never wavered.

Dr. Teague’s interest proved to lie exclusively in the subject of money, or more properly, Marville’s general and the psychiatric section’s particular shortage of that supreme good of our culture. Medical science could determine a baby’s age for almost nothing; for an old man it took money. Wheelchairs required money. Attendants like the late Mrs. Burr, not to mention genuine nurses, had to be paid. Even those detestable geraniums apparently strained the budget.

I had never before realized that my father was on intimate terms with a number of state legislators. Whatever Dr. Teague’s proficiency at his own trade or science or swindle, he gave evidence of being a gifted student of politics. The upshot of our little session in his office, in which every item but ourselves seemed to be fabricated of metal, was that I agreed to discuss with Father the advisability of increased appropriations for senior-citizens’ centers. On Dr. Teague’s part, he would, pending receipt of sufficient money to schedule certain chemical and X-ray tests to determine the calcium content of Jack Crabb’s ancient bones, tentatively estimate the old scout’s age to be “ninety plus.”

I doubt whether Crabb in his prime, with his Colt’s Peacemaker, could have done better against Teague. I decided that I could discharge my obligation by writing my father a letter. Whether he acted on its suggestions, I do not know. He never mentioned it on my regular appearances. The zeal of Dr. Teague, of course, and that of the director, his instigator, never flagged during the five months of my almost daily interviews with Jack Crabb. I ca

“Encouraging, Doctor.”

I have not been back to Marville since the early summer of 1953, at which date they were still asking.

Now a few words on the composition of these memoirs. In their original form they consisted of fifty-seven rolls of tape recorded in Mr. Crabb’s voice. From February to June, 1953, I sat with him every weekday afternoon, operating the machine, encouraging him when his enthusiasm flagged, now and again putting pertinent questions that aided him in clarifying his account, and generally making myself unobtrusively useful.

It was, after all, his book, and I felt peculiarly honored to have rendered it my small services. The locale of these sessions was his tiny bedroom, a cheerless enclosure furnished in gray metal and looking onto an airshaft up which noxious vapors climbed from the kitchen two floors below. The glass-enclosed balcony on which I had first met him would no doubt have been more comfortable but for my allergy to its flora, not to mention the possibilities it afforded for interruption by the other old people and members of the staff.

Then too, Mr. Crabb was visibly failing during these months. By March he had taken permanently to his bed. By June, on the final tapes, his voice was hardly audible, though his mind continued vigorous. And on the twenty-third day of that month he greeted me with glazed eyes that did not alter their focus as I crossed the room. The old scout had reached the end of his trail.

After checking out of the motel in which I had resided for five months, I attended the subsequent funeral, at which I expected to be sole mourner, since he had no friends; but in actuality most of the other ambulatory inmates were present, wearing, after the fashion of old people at such functions, expressions of smug satisfaction.

The obsequies were held on June 25, 1953, which happened to be the seventy-seventh a

As to the text: it is faithful to Mr. Crabb’s narration as transcribed literally from the tapes. I have subtracted nothing, and added only the necessary marks of punctuation: when the latter sometimes seem sparse, my motive has been to indicate the breathless rush in which these passages emerged from the speaker. I have made no attempt to reproduce the old scout’s peculiar voice or pronunciation, lest the entire book resemble the letter which he wrote me from Marville.

He was a gifted raconteur and had a keen ear: in no other fashion can I account for certain inconsistencies. You will notice that while the direct narration, in propria persona, is ungrammatical, a cultivated character such as General Custer speaks in the formal style. And Indian discourse in translation appears impeccable as to grammar and syntax. Indeed, in his own speech Mr. Crabb is not always uniform, using “brought” and “brung,” say, or “they was” and “they were,” interchangeably. But listen occasionally to individuals of the lower orders among your acquaintance, your garageman or bootblack-he knows the rules of civilized rhetoric; has not, after all, been living on the moon; can, if he wishes, speak well, and sometimes may if only to elicit a gratuity. It is clear his habitual idiom is a product of the self-indulgent will.

You may question Mr. Crabb’s having in his untutored vocabulary such a word as “apprehension.” But it must be remembered that the frontiersman of yore received his rude culture from many sources: for example, Shakespearean troupes traveled to the farthest outposts; as did ministers of the gospel, with the King James Bible in their saddlebags. Then as we shall read, under Mrs. Pendrake’s tutelage young Jack was exposed to Alexander Pope and no doubt other notable poets as well.