Spooner Read Free Page B

remembering it.
    He kept these things to himself and kept himself apart, yet never seemed to stir the kind of resentment and misunderstandings
     that you might expect, this sort of person in this sort of place. And nothing about this ever changed. Sixth in his class
     at Annapolis, first at flight school in Memphis, and right to the end had no enemies below or above.

    If the question occurs to you as to how or why a human being teaches himself to write with his feet, it began, at least in
     this case, with a letter from home. Calmer’s mother wrote all the letters and cards that came out of the house, and he received
     one every week, Wednesday or Thursday, usually six pages long, as it was her habit to compose a page a day, usually after
     the supper dishes were done, and rest on the Sabbath. The letters were full of weather forecasts, crop reports, news of broken
     drive belts, what the coyotes had killed while she and Dad were at church (
My, but the varmint has got Father’s dander up this time! He’s still setting up there in the upstairs bathroom window with
     his 30-30 and a flashlight, wouldn’t even come down for supper…
), stories of broken fences and heartburn, car wrecks, tractor accidents. And newspaper clippings. Sometimes it seemed like
     she’d clipped the whole
Conde Record
. Winners and losers of the turkey shoot down at the Rod and Gun Club, football scores, honor rolls, high school graduations,
     marriages, births, obituaries. The letters were always signed
Love, Father and Mom.
    It was toward the end of one of her letters, after a detailed, strangely nonpartisan account of a monthlong battle of wits
     between Father and a weasel that was raising cain in the henhouse that she dropped in the news about Arlo:
    I suppose you heard by now that Cousin Arlo finally run out of Luck with that polar bear in Minneapolis and had Three Fingers
     de-gloved on his left hand, which I am given to understand means the bear got it all but the Bones, which the docs proceeded
     to Lop off at the hospital anyways. He made all the papers and the UPI news wire, and said he didn’t blame nobody at the Zoo,
     lest of all the bear, who was just doing the job she was hired to do. Just his luck to be left handed! I am certain he’ll
     be looking at those missing fingers for the rest of his Life, and think about what a darn Fool he was to be getting drunk
     with that crowd in the first place. But that’s Arlo for you, the one that’s always got to find out everything for himself.
    And off this news, Calmer taught himself to write with his feet. More out of curiosity than sympathy, wondering what he would
     do if he lost his own fingers. As the fitness reports always said—right up until the day he was ruined—Calmer Ottosson was
     an officer prepared for contingencies.
    But more to the point, teaching himself to write with his feet was the sort of thing he had been up to all his life. Making
     his own fun, as the great writer called it.
    But then, like the great writer, he’d grown up alone.
    An adopted only child on a break-even two-hundred-acre farm fourteen miles southeast of Conde, South Dakota, a tiny spot up
     in the northeast corner of the map near Aberdeen, who at seven years old enjoyed sitting barefoot in a plowed field, balancing
     his father’s helmet from the war on his head and firing his single-shot Remington .22 into the air, correcting for the breeze
     as the little puffs of dust appeared in the spots where the bullets landed, trying to bring one right in on top of his head.
     He was a child who listened to what he was told and never bragged about his good marks at school or his shooting, just as
     years later, at the academy, he never mentioned that he could write with his feet. Not to anyone there, not in any of his
     letters home. Not even the ones to Cousin Arlo, although Arlo would have been tickled to hear of it—Arlo was everybody’s favorite,
     and not just because he led a colorful life and