Harry's Version

A microstory

Cleo and Pancho. We were swimming at Molly’s Pond last week. This has nothing to do with the post. Sigh.

Prefatory Remarks

Then I’m taking the ferry to Carriacou (apparently, one is sure to be seasick) to look at L’Anse la Roche, where the estate ruins can still be found in the woods. Also an estate called Industry, which, I think, is now completely forgotten. These were cotton plantations 200 years ago. Carriacou is tiny, with lots of stone ruins, cisterns, foundations, and such. You can walk everywhere.

This is off season or the tail end of rainy season (or the middle of hurricane season). Looking ahead, it’s going to be over 90F every day, down to 81 at night. Since I am going to out of the way places, none of my lodgings are more than $50 a night, a fact which my parsimonious soul enjoys immensely.

For reading, I am taking along R. P. Devas’s The History of the Island of Grenada and his hiking book Up Hill and Down Dale in Grenada. Devas (1887-1975) was the parish priest on Grenada and Carriacou beginning in 1923. His books are perhaps out of date but strangely charming. Also I have a copy of Kevin McGrath’s lovely essay “Walking to Windward” about his Carriacou peregrinations.

One small and illuminating detail: I am renting an entire house in Moya for about $45 a night. I asked for the address, you know, so I could find the place (so my cab driver could find the place). My landlady wrote back: “Pearls Main Road, the concrete house opposite Ben Jones’s house.”

Okay, but to give you something more meaty, here’s another little story, a piece of whimsy, but, you know, autobiographical up to a point. That song “Home on the Range” was one we sang school when I was a kid. It stuck, a bit of a brain worm, erupting now and then into my head. Then one day the line “where the deer and the cantaloupe play” appeared. I liked it, but it ruined the brain worm for me. I can’t sing the song with the same nostalgic heft any longer. Yet the comedy of the line and the way it illustrates something about the relationship of sound and sign fascinated me. Antelope/cantaloupe. It’s not quite a homophone, and the words (sounds) mean quite different things. But there is poetry in the rhyme. Goofy poetry. And madness when the brain begins to play with the sounds and they slip away from meaning.

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Harry’s Version

That morning Harry broke into song, an old favourite of his. “Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam / Where the deer and the cantaloupe play / Where seldom is heard, a discouragin' word / And the skies are not cloudy all day.” “It's antelope, you ding-dong," said his wife Marjorie, as she went for him with a carving knife. In court, she claimed diminished responsibility due to years of spousal abuse because of that song. It had clouded the days of her marriage, not the least because Harry couldn't hold a tune and would always shake his head and give a snuffling chortle after. "It's antelope, not cantaloupe," he would say under his breath. "You idiot!" It pleased him no end, and since he hadn't stopped in 13 years, she was compelled, she said in court, to turn him off. The case was universally celebrated, a topic for internet badinage and late night talk shows. A popular comedian made a popular recording of Harry’s version. In the street, young men and boys followed her, singing, "Home, home on the range, / Where the deer and the cantaloupe play—" They would stand outside her house at night, serenading her lustily, boozily, thinking they were great wits, as young men will.

At night she dreamed of herds of cantaloupe grazing on the western prairie. They had short stubby legs like clothes pins and no heads nor tails. But antlers like oak twigs. Mountain lions stalked the cantaloupes of her dreams. They had orange blood. To her, they seemed uncanny and terrifying. One day, Penelope Garthwaite, an old family friend, no doubt well-meaning, brought her a fruit platter with slices of cantaloupe layered around the edge. Marjorie slew Penelope Garthwait with the cheese cutter and poured sliced fruit over her body. Then she took the AR-15 she had purchased online and began to shoot singing boys from her upstairs bedroom. In court, she claimed to be suffering from PTSD and viral persecution; she portrayed herself as the victim of a mass outbreak of media-induced hysteria. She could not possibly be held responsible for the 31 dead people outside her window. They all looked like Harry, she said.

In court, someone behind her began to hum the tune. Her mind supplied the words. "—where the deer and the cantaloupe play—" In the midst of a defence motion for dismissal, she began to chortle snuffily. Chortle, chortle, chortle. Somewhere deep in her mind, she heard the words. She heard Harry singing the words, but his voice was distant as if he were singing from the bottom of a deep well. Her public defender, a recent law school graduate named Nellie Bellows, stopped speaking and turned to Marjorie with an interrogative look. The entire courtroom stared at her, interrogatively. Chortle, chortle. While she had everyone's attention, Marjorie thought it might be entertaining to strip. The bailiffs were coming for her. Overweight gentlemen who resembled cantaloupes. Marjorie went for Nellie Bellows, her knobbly fingers around the young woman's ethereal throat. Half-naked now. The right half. Whispering the song lyrics. "Where the deer and the cantaloupe play—" Cantaloupe did sound better than antelope, the concrete consonant like a hammer striking an anvil at the beginning of the word. It scanned just the same, but more definitively.

She was remanded for observation as there was now some doubt, croaked Nellie Bellows (with her throat bandaged), as to whether Marjorie was fit to stand trial. Perhaps she would improve with peace and quiet. But there was no peace and quiet for Marjorie. Harry climbed out of the well. Snuffle, chortle. And began to sing. And someone thought it would be a good idea to serve cantaloupe slices with her eggs every morning. Marjorie began to be very quiet. Listening, with a curious half-smile on her face, to music no one else could hear. Though still considered violently dangerous to anyone who came near (there were rumours of late night visits to the ER), she has lived like this for many years now without hope of recovery.

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