The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (49 page)

The style of architecture we labeled Colonial Gothic, a characterization which the passage of years has brought no need to revise.

Originally the basement floor, now the county free schoolbook depository, had housed the prisoners awaiting trial in the courtrooms overhead. By 1885, however, the county crime rate having exceeded expectations, need was felt for more spacious quarters, and the present four-story jailhouse was erected on its site a block to the west. The ground floor, raised some ten feet off the ground, and reached by broad flights of stone steps on all four sides, each leading to arched double doors eighteen feet in height, was square in plan, buttressed at the corners. The second floor duplicated, on a one-quarter-reduced scale, the first. From the second floor the windowless tower rose one hundred and sixteen feet, exclusive of the weathervane, for an overall height of one hundred and sixty-eight feet. On each of the tower's four sides was a round white clock face three feet in diameter. Above the clock was an open lookout. Above the lookout the tower terminated in a tapered cupola which housed the clock bell.

The clock bell, which on still days could be heard and the strokes counted up to ten miles away, with its bass, even somewhat solemn, but distinctly musical note, tolled every quarter hour beginning at 6
A.M.
and going on until midnight, chiming four times for the quarter past, eight for the half, twelve for the three quarters, sixteen before the hour, and then the hour. This, the
Lariat and Northern Bee
informed its readers, added up to a total 877 chimes per day, 6,139 per week, 26,310 per month—taking thirty days as the average month—and finally, the staggering figure of 320,105 chimes per year!

We omitted in our series to count the number of steps of the stairway inside the tower mounting to the lookout above the clock—and not being as young and spry now as we were then, we must beg to be excused from supplying the omission! But we did remind our readers that the stairway was there, open to the public admission-free, whereupon all of Canaan County, always excepting “California” Stan Reynolds, of course, made the climb, many of them, although native-born, for the first time. From the lookout the view over the flat, bare prairies which surround us is extensive in all directions on a clear day. All who made the ascent and looked to earth from that dizzying height roundly declared that nothing, not even a thousand dollars, could induce them to attempt to scale it with nothing but their own two hands. There were some then who opposed permitting even the Great Grippo to make the trial.

To arrive at the courthouse grounds by the hour they did on that Saturday morning, the fifth of October, some of the country people must have been traveling in their horse-drawn wagons since late the previous afternoon. They had begun to gather there by the light of the moon. By the time the clock sounded its first note of the day the lawn was already thronged. Cars with license tags from four surrounding counties were to be seen. Market Square as well as the public square being by then full, those arriving after six were obliged to take parking space wherever they could find it, some in residential streets as far distant as a mile's walk. In the public square bargain sales were announced in loud paint on the show windows of every store. Needless to say, these would open their doors for business only after Grippo's performance, as until then nobody would be doing any shopping, and the storekeepers and their employees were as eager as everybody else to see the show. By the time the clock struck seven the town, except for the courthouse lawn, was everywhere deserted and still. A thief could have walked off with the whole place unopposed, if he could have resisted the desire to see the human fly himself.

All eyes that day were turned steadily skywards. Indeed, for some time afterwards New Jerusalem and Canaan County, being accustomed in the pursuit of its ordinary daily occupations, such as plowing, cottonpicking, sweeping house, scrubbing clothes, et cetera, to an earthwards-inclined posture, was to suffer cricks in the neck in the proportions of an epidemic.

Shortly before eight o'clock a man wearing an aviator's leather helmet strapped underneath his chin and large dark-tinted goggles so that his face was almost entirely hidden appeared at the edge of the crowd and commenced working his way through it.

“Mister,” one small boy mustered the courage to ask, “are you Grippo, the human fly?”

“The Great Grippo,” replied the man in a husky voice, and to the
ah-hahs
of the one party and the
ughs
of the other three, strode to the east face of our courthouse, which was the first one he came to, and without wasting a second in studying the building but as if he had been born and raised in its shadow, proceeded to climb it. Those who had been waiting for him on the other sides hastened around to the chosen one, and the crowd thereupon became so dense that people standing close to one another had to take turns drawing breath. Small children and many not so small were hoisted to their fathers' and even to their mothers' shoulders.

“No! No!” a woman screamed. “I don't want to see it! Take me home!” A large woman she was, and when she fainted five men were needed to carry her off.

Grippo began by leaping from the ground and grasping a window ledge and hauling himself up to it. From there he stretched across to the next window and the next, going towards the door. He let himself down onto the porch and opened one half of the door back to the porch rail. He climbed the rail and straddled the door and shinnied up its edge like a monkey up a pole to the top of it. From there with the greatest of ease he hoisted himself to the roof.

Pausing only to fetch his breath, Grippo assaulted the second story. This he elected to scale by way of the drainpipe affixed to its southeast corner. It took him just five minutes by the clock overhead, but it seemed to all below much longer. Twice he lost his grasp and slipped downwards. This was no doubt a part of his act, but the crowd let out a gasp and on both occasions another woman passed out and had to be removed. The scariest moment came when, hauling himself over the edge of the roof, he slipped and hung dangling from the gutter in midair, the snap of his chin strap popping open and the flaps hanging loose. Then in a piercing voice a woman screeched, “Get that man down from there! Get him down, I say, before he falls and kills hisself before our very eyes!”

When Grippo had gained the second-story roof he stood up and gave himself a shake and rested for some moments to catch his breath, panting deeply. Among the crowd down on the ground, meanwhile, breathing went suspended. Their gaze now elevated several notches, they studied the lofty tower, all asking themselves how Grippo meant to meet its daunting challenge. Now came the day's real trial. The building he could not climb might not have been built, but how did Grippo mean to scale those nearly one hundred feet of perpendicularity, its blank surface unbroken but for the courses of gargoyles spaced at intervals of some twelve or fifteen feet?

Grippo took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers and began walking up the wall like a fly. A gasp of amazement ran through the crowd.

“It's not true!” a woman shouted. “I don't believe it! I'm going home!”

How? How was Grippo doing it? He was doing it, the realization dawned, relying on those Swiss-cheese-like fossil holes in the stone for finger- and toeholds!

“Yawl can stay and watch if you want to but I'm going home!” the same woman as before shouted.

Grippo did not go straight up. Searching ahead for holes big enough to hook a finger or a toe in, he was often forced to veer from his path to one side or the other, even to descend and strike out on a fresh route, so that he crisscrossed the entire face of the structure—very much the way a fly climbs. Thus he was twenty minutes in gaining the relative safety of the first gargoyle, upon whose neck he sat for a well-earned five-minute rest. Then could be seen the toll his climb was taking. The knees of his trousers were torn open and his knees scraped raw and red. Hanging as he did sometimes by a mere two fingertips in those jagged and sharp-edged holes, the punishment to them could be imagined.

“I can't stand it anymore! I'm going home where I belong!” that same woman yelled.

After his rest Grippo's rate of climb was slower, and by the time he reached his second gargoyle it was almost nine by the clock. His rest at that station was a long one. It was a stone goat upon whose neck he sat this time, and it seemed to be bucking and trying to throw him off, so deep was his breathing. To the watchers on the ground the tower appeared to have grown in height and people were saying now that Grippo would never make it to the top.

At last he rose and faced the wall again and resumed his climb. One foot higher he lost his grip and fell. The crowd's cry died away on a vast sigh of relief as he caught the gargoyle in his descent. The jolt of his fall and its sudden arrest popped his helmet off and with it his goggles and sent them flying through the air. It was then in the general hush, broken only by the hysterical sobs of various women, that Mrs. Ernestine Reynolds, pear-shaped with her third child, cried out, “My Lord it's Stan!”

And my Lord she was right. It was. The Great Grippo was none other than our own “California” Stan Reynolds, in his desperation to escape from the home town he hated trying to climb his way out up the courthouse tower. The plump of two thousand hearts high in hopes sinking in sudden disappointment could almost be heard.

“Grippo my foot! Don't Grippo me!” Ernestine was shouting at her neighbors trying to persuade her and themselves that she must be mistaken. “I reckon I know my own husband when I see him—the crazy fool! Stan! Stanley Reynolds! What do you think you're doing? Come down from there! You hear me, Stan? Get down from there before you fall and break your neck! A fine fix that would leave me in, wouldn't it! Children, hush your crying! Stan! You—Oh! Watch out!” And she went green around the gills.

For in struggling to haul himself onto the gargoyle Stan's hold had slipped and he now hung only by his hands with his feet kicking free in space.

“Run get a rope, somebody!” a man yelled.

“A rope! A rope! Run get a rope!” cried several all at once.

Mr. McKinney, of McKinney's Hardware, waved his store keys above his head, croaking to get himself noticed. The keys were passed to the rear of the crowd and someone set off running for the square. By the time the man got back with the coil of rope Stan had succeeded in pulling himself up and was once again sitting astraddle of the stone goat. Now that he was about to be rescued, having spoiled the day for all, mutters were heard that it would serve Stan right if he fell and broke his neck. A party of five volunteers ran into the courthouse carrying the rope. In the empty, high-ceilinged hallways their heavy footsteps could be heard, then could be heard no more as they started up the tower.

Stan must have heard them on the stairs inside going past the point where he sat perched. Whereupon he stood up and began again more determinedly than ever crawling up the wall. Shouts from the crowd went up of, “Sit still! Stay where you're at! Wait a second! They're coming with a rope!” and from Ernestine the cry, “Oh! Just wait till I get you home!” But Stan had climbed that high and could see above him the attainment of all his dreams. He was determined to go the whole way and claim his prize—which was to spit in the faces of all those below him and then never see them again. When the men of the rescue party appeared in the lookout and dropped their rope, Stan continued on his way, climbing up alongside it.

That was around half past nine. By ten Stan had gained two more gargoyles and was a little less than halfway to the top. It was an exhibition of frantic determination and mad bravery, and throughout it the crowd's mood had changed. At first, its hopes for a good time dashed, disgusted with being duped and boiling with indignation—a mob rather than a crowd—it was bent on having its own out of “California” Stan as soon as he was let back down to earth. But as Stan inched his way upwards, clinging for life by his fingertips, slipping and nearly falling and bringing every heart into every mouth at every moment, it began to dawn upon them that they were in fact seeing what they had come to see: a man scale the courthouse; and that if it was excitement they wanted they were getting not less but more out of watching an amateur, someone like themselves, do it, than they could have gotten out of watching a professional human fly. Nobody cheered: Stan had made himself too unpopular for that, and it could not be overlooked that that stubborn perseverance was the measure of his hatred of them all. Still it had to be admitted that what he was doing took nerve.

By eleven o'clock nerve was all the man was going on, and when finally he struggled to yet another of those stone billygoats it was plain to all that he had gone as high as he was going to go. Still he would not come down. Even after it must have been clear to Stan that he could go no higher but must give up and come down, he clung to his hard-won height, stubbornly ignoring the rope that dangled by his side, his wife who pled with him, threatened him, cursed him, and cried. Goaded by that hard-dying dream of his, or by the prospect of defeat, descent, he tried again, dragged himself up the wall another foot, then clung to it, unable to go up, unwilling to come down.

The rescue party in the lookout could be heard pleading with him. “Aw, come on, Stan, grab the rope. Please, Stan! Grab the rope, won't you, Stan?” Down on the ground women wailed and shrieked while men called up, “We're not mad at you, Stan, hear? Nobody's going to hurt you when you get down. Just grab the rope. Please!”

The clock struck twelve. Sixteen solemn chimes and then the long slow counting of the hour. The final stroke died away. A spasm of despair followed by a shudder of surrender passed over the man clutching at the wall and he beat his head against the stone. Then he turned and let go and reached for the rope. And missed it and fell sixty-six feet to the roof of the second story.