Parallel Persuasions

Parallel Persuasions

A novel by

John Edgar Chapman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by John E. Chapman

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

A Foreword

(The Gambles)

Miriam Langley and Arden Gamble were both country born people. But Miriam, having moved into town at age twelve, was influenced by her mother and father who established prudentially in her mind the idea that success and achievement was connected with staying out of the country and installing oneself as firmly as possible in the city. It was pointed out to the young girl that one should always seek to advance one’s self effectually apropos the benefits of modern society, though William and Dora Langley only dreamed of such advantages.

Still this became Miriam’s own determination and she set-about to do just that. Seemingly unfortunate for her though, she found herself at the age of fourteen deeply in love with Arden Gamble who was a devout country boy. Ironically, because his mental and emotional matrix was so deeply entwined with the rural life, it came as what can only be justly described as total shock when he discovered that his feelings for Miriam were stronger than his determination to stay out on the farm.

A year after his father Byron Gamble shot himself in the head, who at eighty was suffering the inscrutable and agonizing throes of bone cancer, Arden, age nineteen and Miriam age fifteen, were married. And for a while she lived with Arden on the farm he grew up on. This was in 1925. But Miriam soon became sullen and then bitter about her role as chief cook and bottle washer for the three Gamble boys. She also took care of Bess their bed-ridden mother stricken with the old-timers disease at the age of fifty-five.

Miriam did all the washing and ironing and was often relied upon to feed the livestock. Tending the chickens and gathering eggs was also her job. She slopped the hogs and hoed in the garden, and did all the chores the boys normally took care of because after the old man’s illness and tragic end the young men of the family took jobs and worked long hours to make the money necessary for keeping the farm in their family name.

But the responsibility was too much for Miriam and there was no letting up in sight. Everyone but her was satisfied with the arrangement, Content to abide with it through eternity, she said. They commented good-naturedly, but with the accents of teasing, how obvious it was that she was cut out to be a country girl.

These were definitely the wrong words to level against Miriam Langley, teasingly or otherwise. So one night when Arden and his oldest brother Frank were in the woods on an opossum hunt, she packed a bag and began walking the fifteen miles back to town and her parent’s house. Arden returned home a little early and discovered she had left. He saddled up one of the work horses and took out after her, catching up with Miriam ten miles from her destination. She stood her ground and refused to return so he had no choice but to deliver her up on horseback to her mother and father.

To his complete dismay Arden found hisself unable to return to the farm, except to return the horse, after that night, though he did put up a good fight, thinking he might be able to turn the situation around. But at 2:30 in the morning when they were both tired of arguing Miriam lobbed the deciding bomb shell into his lap. She was pregnant with their first child Blythe Elaine. Their struggles from there on, marked by the unexpected pregnancy and Arden’s forced removal from the farm, were long and arduous but they were young and truly in love. Eventually the relationship tightened and they buckled-up to the task of raising a family.

At the beginning of their marriage, to Arden’s humble consternation, Miriam seemed never pleased or satisfied with any attempt to establish a permanent home. Some undesirable attribute associated with the house they were living in, or the neighborhood, would eventually rear its blameworthy head, and the grass became greener elsewhere.

After Blyth Elaine was born Zane Eugene Gamble was born. Miriam and Arden Gamble were on their way down the long winding road of parenthood. It became important that they develop a well-established home. But a permanent residence seemed impossible to secure. By the time their fifth and last child Darvin was born they had lived in twenty two different houses in and about the city limits of Langston, Tennessee.

Owing to the fact of Arden’s fulminating abilities as a sculptor and ensuing good fortune, he was able to keep up with the mounting expenses of placating her quixotic and nomadic predilections, though for a while they would not live much above barely getting by. But his talent for bringing a face to life in clay and bronze caught the eye of an honest agent out of Knoxville who had corporate connections, and after Blyth was born rarely a month would go by before a packet would arrive in the mail stuffed with photos of some aging or deceased CEO or other professional person along with an advance check and a contract to sign. It was a business and Arden sometimes felt like an employee for his agent but the arrangement was fair and paid the bills. His hope was that one day he would get a commission from someone famous and true success would follow.

To the dismay of several nosey people in Langston Arden’s work held relatively steady regardless of the depression. The Gambles had a worse time because of those years but not as bad as most. Jeremiah Puriform, Arden’s agent, with his aggressive ability as a salesman, had wisely broached the vanity spheres of governmental institutions and military adherents, and though there were lean times Arden’s family never went hungry, and not a single bill went delinquent. The family continued to flourish and during each Thanksgiving holiday they realized their blessings and gave humble thanks.

Blyth and Zane were especially thankful at Christmas time because Santa Clause always arrived to plump their stockings and deliver the whirligigs and play-pretties requested in the letters they religiously sent each December addressed to Santa Clause, The North Pole.

The years rocked on and the family enjoyed good times. Blyth and Zane grew up. In 1944 Blythe Elaine and her fiancé Kenneth Porter, a better than fair country singer, were married. Kenneth’s earnings with his band were meager and his parents were dirt poor. And though the newlyweds never asked, they needed financial help from someone. Arden Gamble acknowledged being the only possibility. In a few years Zane Eugene, so far the only boy in the family would be returning home from his debt of honor with the army. And though he too was freshly married college would be on his agenda. The army would pay some of the expenses but they would need more, and Arden desiring greatly to help them felt extremely needed and was willing to sacrifice beyond his limits. But over the years he had been unable to save very much because of the extraneous expenses used to placate Miriam’s impermanence. His patience was approaching a turning point.

Watching a Sunday morning drizzle of rain beading up then break into long runnels on the old type wavy glass window panes, Arden reflected on his weariness and how he had truly grown tired of trying to sink a root in the ground with Miriam continually shifting her notions toward yet another move.

Vivian, the third child, was eleven years old, and Helena the fourth was five, and Arden was ready to start planning also for their education. He was finally and completely exasperated with spending money related to Miriam’s gypsy whims. It was needed for their children and some things had to be curtailed. So when the house with three acres on Railroad Street came available, and the contract for ownership signed and notarized, Arden finally put his foot down. I’m not moving anymore, he said. We will finish raising our children here. This is home from now on and that is my final word on the subject!

Miriam, seven months pregnant, was relieved. She too loved her children and wanted to help, and had belatedly and secretly been considering that her instability might actually be symptomatic of some kind of mental derangement. Instinctively she realized her husband’s overdue ultimatum was a chance for her to heal something that might otherwise range drastically out of control. She made no bones about Alden’s unusually strict assertiveness, and began immediately squelching her roving, emotional exigencies. However, her solution was to transfer them over to another order of capricious behavior which was merely a more stationary mode of transience: that of constantly changing the furniture around, in effect, revolving the rooms of their house on Railroad Street.

But Arden could handle this. He built a large studio and workshop onto the backside of the barn by the railroad, and there he spent his creative hours in an environment that changed only to accommodate the growth of his work or his artistic needs. And he grew accustomed, as did the other Gambles, to coming into the new house periodically after being gone—for sometimes only a few hours—to find that the bedroom was now the living room, and green instead of the color it had been.

And being pregnant did not slow her down one whit. At this point in life she was a professional child bearer, and two days before the birth of Darvin she moved the dining room to the living room and put the living room in its place. Somehow, that was much better.

While Blythe and Zane were busy trying to get their lives going, the other members of the Gamble family still at home continued to live happily on Railroad Street: a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood, except for the trains. Unpaved at the time, the gravel road the house was on was not very long and was the last named street in the neighborhood. During those days there were only two houses on their side of it: theirs and old Mrs. Davenport’s.

Though not paved it was sturdy and often traveled. The unpaved street ran close but not exactly parallel with the railroad where the gargantuan, reptilian monsters of steel and iron belched and roared and hissed, moaning and groaning, rocking and rolling back and forth along the iron railway at varying hours of the day and night. With the fifteenth street crossing only a couple of stone-throws away, the ear piercing steam whistle of a big smoker, usually blown directly behind the Gamble house, was easily heard at the crossing. If it happened to be a big diesel going by, the deafening blast from the air horns could cause an unwary visitor’s heart to sputter.

The old two story frame house built on small, two feet tall brick pilings, often trembled with the passing of a train as it stood on these thin legs only two hundred feet from the tracks. Windows rattled in their sashes. Old floorboards hummed and vibrated against the soles of shoes and bare feet. In 1945 train engines were fast changing over to diesel but many of the old-time choo-choos were still in use, puffing out voluminous clouds of smoke, distributing tons of black soot much of which always managed to settle on Miriam Gamble’s clean wash pinned up to dry on sagging steel wires that spanned the length of the back yard.

Darvin Gamble, the youngest of the five Gamble progeny had no specific memory of any first encounter with trains, or any particular style or model of train. Their storybook sounds and thunderous vibrations, choo-choo and otherwise, were present on the day he was born in his parents bed in March of 1945, and existed for him henceforth as commonly as the sounds of a spring storm.

During those earliest days of his life he became so accustomed to their teratoid rumblings, that instead of monstrous he considered them to be warm, friendly and benevolent. At night a powerful diesel would often stop along the stretch of track behind his house and hold in wait for a man to run ahead and switch tracks, and sometimes talk for suspended lengths of time on the telephone housed in a company phone-box attached to one of the signal light poles not far away. The diesel engines at idle during the interim would chug low and heavy, the puissant rumble pouring into Darvin’s consciousness thickly and dark as molasses. If his mother had been struggling to get the child to sleep, the deep, vibrating murmurs of the engines would take over and complete the task.

Vivian, when she could be torn away from her thespian activities, was a lot of help to her mom. Darvin had come into the world with good lungs, and unfortunately often had colic. Miriam was thirty five when the boy was born and pretty much worn out from the four colicky babies preceding him. The all night bouts of crying sometimes put her down enough that Vivian’s help with the household chores made a big difference. And Helena, only six years of age, was good help too. She was good with the baby. Even then she could sing. With her sweet voice, high in pitch but soft and always in key, she sang to him the same lullabies Miriam had sung to her and the other children. Darvin loved Rock a Bye Baby.

In many ways Darvin was a little spoiled during his first few years. He was the last child, and a boy, which both Arden and Miriam wanted very much to help balance out the standing three to one count. But after suffering a relatively bad accident, when he was only a year old, he received an unordinary amount of attention from his family and usually from everyone he came into contact with who knew about his suffering.

One spring morning while being carried around by his thirteen year old cousin Elizabeth, he leaned away from her reaching to grab a red shirt going through the old-time washing machine ringer. The ringer grabbed his fingers and pulled his hand in between the hard rubber rollers all the way to his shoulder. The rollers didn’t stop rolling and by the time they got the machine turned off, all the skin, clean down to the muscle, had been torn away from his armpit and upper arm.

All the muscle and flesh on his arm was badly mauled or bruised and took months to heal. Most of that time he wore a loose fitted arm cast with a rod attached to a sturdy but soft belt-like ring around his waist. The rod propped his arm out away from his body. This allowed the stitches and grafted areas of his wounds the un-encumbrance they needed to heal.

It was a very bad experience for such a small child but memories of the traumatic incident quickly tucked themselves away in some dark reserve of the child’s mind. Two years later he could barely recognize a shred of it, even when the story was being told to someone by his mother or Arden. It was as if they were talking about someone else. There were scars under his arm that extended part way down his side and as he listened to the story he imagined he remembered the ordeal but his imaginings were mostly inaccurate. He had questions but he didn’t know how to ask them. By the time he could form a complete sentence, all visual imagery, and memories of pain connected with the accident were deep down in the ocean of his mind.

And when he began to complain about having strange dreams, his behavior was not thought to be unordinary. He was told not to worry and soon everything would be alright. He had no choice but to take their advice about it. And the plentitude of attention, including extravagantly bestowed hugs and kisses, along with exceptionally bequeathed favors of extra ice-cream and banana pudding, he accepted in general as being normal behavior.

Life was good. And at day’s end, while enveloped often in the lap and arms of Miriam or Vivian or Helena for hours at a time, the deep-toned, sonorously resonating canzone of a lingering diesel would deliver the final coup de grace and Darvin would set sail for dreamland; though it was not always such a nice place to be.

So Darvin, for a time, was overly protected, fussed over, and usually spared the sharp bite of normal scolding. Spankings were kept to a minimum, and receiving positive attention was at a premium. But all things, good or bad, have their time and move on, diminish. The especial attention he had been garnering waned as Darvin grew older. Soon, with his brother and oldest sister out on their own and Vivian away nearly all the time, and Helena in school during the day, his days were being spent mostly getting in his mother’s way or playing alone somewhere in or around the house.

As the marvel of nature commonly known as self-awareness continued to bloom in Darvin’s spirit, it slowly came to him that there was something unusual about his position in the family. He was the last child, the youngest, and at age five he felt a bit like the only child because Vivian was a senior in high school and gone all the time and definitely on her way out into the world. Helena, being a girl and in the sixth grade, seemed so much older than him, a grownup really. He soon realized he had nothing in common with any of them. Though it was not how he would have preferred it, if he had the choice, he felt lonely. He also was becoming keen to the fact that all his sisters and brother knew what they wanted to be in life. And they had abilities while he had none.

That some people did seem born to this world to be artist, as with Arden, or to be an actor, as Vivian aspired to be, is not always an easy thing to understand. Nor is it always easy for such individuals to find satisfactory success. But it does appear that the puzzling pieces to life’s picture fit more easily together for some than for others. This was true for the Gamble progeny. Zane, fresh out of college, had discovered that he could make money playing golf. He displayed great natural ability, and a promising career as a professional golfer seemed obviously forthcoming. Darvin was in complete awe of his brother’s natural ability.

Blythe Elaine discovered she had the capabilities of a good business person. This included a great nose, great ears, eyes, and brains for it, and a mouth that knew when to remain shut, when to open, when to speak and say the correct things. Everyone talked about her grand astuteness as a business woman. Kenneth Porter would have been a struggling success at best without her, but Blythe was seeing to it that everything he did turned into money and recognition. Darvin thought he was a great singer. Kenneth had several records on the market that radio stations everywhere were playing.

And Helena would probably be a professional singer one day. She had the best girl voice Darvin had ever heard. She knew every song on the radio, and though once shy she now jumped at any opportunity to show out. But Darvin had no such talent. He hadn’t a clue as to what he wanted to be when he grew up.

He became very depressed and hypothesized that he might not grow up. Why should he when there was nothing special waiting for him as with his brother and sisters. But how can a young child know what garners within enfolds of their verging persona? He couldn’t of course. But he knew he felt different and alone.

And recently the bad dreams were worse and plagued his apportioned endowment of peace and contentment. Jelly snakes and chimerical faces taunted him nightly. Worst of all his dreams were almost always black and white, and in the early days were very scary. They were not black and white in the same sense as black and white photographs or television is black and white. They were black and white as in each thing or person in the dream was either black or white; actually somewhat like the negatives of black and white film. He tried to express to his parents and Helena and Vivian what this was like to him, but untenably they paid him little mind. The consensus was that children have bad dreams, and one day soon they will grow out of it. Arden cushioned these assumptions with stories of his own childhood encounters with dreams in black and white. But unbeknownst to him, his were not like his son’s.

Early one morning in nineteen fifty, Darvin walked with his father down to the barn and around it to the railroad out back. He had asked where the property line was and Arden, wanting to take a walk anyway, suggested that he show him. With one of these strange black and white dreams still fresh on his mind, still availing to his inner feelings incipient tremors of dread, he learned from his father that the family’s three acre plot was bordered in the rear by the city/county line. It was marked on a sign along the tracks directly behind the barn. Darvin lived in the city. People on the other side of the line, the railroad, lived in the country. Arden thought back to his and Miriam’s early days and believing he was mostly addressing himself remarked, Country people and city people are as different as night and day.

Young Darvin looked up at his dad and asked: Black and white?

That’s right, Arden said.

The city/county border line was unique to the child for its ethereal presumptiveness and also for sharing alignment with the shiny protracting strands of iron rail called the Southern Railroad, stretching in Darvin’s young imagination from sea to shining sea. So when he stood on the tracks with his father that day his contemplation went mostly toward a pestering bewilderment at discerning opposite sides. He wondered if this line stretched all around the world.

Even after asking his father about it and Arden tried to explain the difference between city and county, a visual image of a world divided planted itself in his mind as clearly as a sunny day at high noon. Certain words he had heard often and not understood took on new meaning: ‘born on the wrong side of the tracks,’ and ‘from the bad side of town,’ also ‘the county hick and the city slicker.’

Darvin had observed on occasion that there was a supposed serious difference in people like him, born to reside but a few feet inside the city limits line, and those pronounced less fortunate for being born barely on the other side. The words ‘born on the wrong side of the tracks’, perked his ears often, and suggested that he came into the world rightly, but he could not feel or understand the opposite of rightly.

Now he was pressed to wonder if this difference was in some way actually real and something he simply had to understand and accept. But his family had a cow and a horse, a barn with hay in it, Arden planted a big garden every year, they raised and slaughtered hogs, they had chickens and guinea fowl. Darvin had been thinking he was a country kid until realizing the line told a different story.

Along with these bewildering thoughts there was another odd thing that happened that morning. He remembered for a short time, and somewhat cryptically, that he had previously dreamed about being with his father on the tracks and the conversation that had transpired. But he didn’t know what it meant. He was experiencing the phenomenon known as déjà vu, but was unable to express his thoughts about it.

And so this happenstance revelation about the property line and Arden’s comment that morning about city and country people being as different as night and day, pronounced themselves as strangely and profoundly meaningful, and would from that time on betoken Darvin Gamble’s view of the entire world he found himself born to, and would abide as the benevolent fire starter requiring his inner most considerations of the dichotomies inherent of human nature.

The supposed differences in people as to right and wrong, good and bad, city and country, black and white, accepted as fact by most and ignored by but a few, was egregiously self-evident and short of mystery to everyone around him. Yet to the five year old child Darvin Gamble there was mystery, and the mystery grew as he grew. His young underling thoughts, naive as a puppy’s under the idle wheels of a car with its motor running, were also enduring thoughts that struggled to understand the deeper truths about the order of such perceived oppugnancies.

At age six and getting ready to start school, much leisure time and the care free experiences of a protected childhood had in its peculiar way, verily strengthened and propounded the divergent canting of his imagination. For instance: he was given to think at times it was possible that instead of being alive, he and everyone in the world were actually dead and only he was aware of it. He thought it was possible that what was called birth may actually be the conveyance of the soul when it dies, a soul cast again into a physical world of pain and the darkness of unknowing, and like a falling star is headed for yet another diminishing unknown.

And one might wonder if his traumatic experience with the washing machine ringer, the memory of which so swiftly and neatly tucked itself away in his subconscious, played a role in the overall matrix of his understanding. Some things simply cannot be known. But the black and white dreams, which began soon after his wounds had healed, were now becoming common place. Slowly he accepted the unusual dreamscapes as being uniquely his own.

At times, people and things in a dream might be presented as glossy black upon a shimmering white background. Or the opposite: glossy white images over black. Sometimes they were white upon white with only thin, shadowy, ethereal lines distinguishing one thing from another; the reverse of that revealed black on black, dark and foreboding. But there was always enough distinguishable detail to support the form-certainty content of his curious dream images and characters. Darvin hated having dreams when dark things moved around, on, or over darker backgrounds. They were the scariest.

With no one in his life to deem his dream behavior strange, and who might understand something about it, or his subsequent yielding acclimation to the extraneous bearing of their content, the inner fires of incongruity burned brightly. But Darvin complained less and less, and his deepening troubles were not detected. He was alone with the uncommon, while roaming aimlessly in the private world of his imagination, poking around indiscriminately in the anthill of his weird dream world.

One sleepy morning at the age of seven, with his head poised over a bowl of cold cereal, he experienced an odd twist of perception within his mind’s eye, and projected it onto the waking scene. The dream he had awakened from that morning involved walking down a white road and across a black field. White trees in the distance lined the edges of the field and were stark-like, white paper cutouts against a black sky.

Sitting there, staring at his cereal and remembering the dream, his eyes felt as if they had crossed and he saw the dark blue bowl as white and the milk black. He dipped a white spoon into the black milk and brought it to his mouth. The black liquid tasted like milk. He didn’t know why but he started to cry. Miriam came to his side and asked what the problem was. But he did not know what to say. The milk was black and it tasted like milk, was all he had for an answer. She felt his head for fever, he begged her to let him stay at home from school that day. He was crying so hard she let him.

Usually Darvin dealt with his problems in a quiet way. He knew that something inside his head might be wrong, and if he complained too much about it his family might decide to take him to him see a doctor. He thought it would be easier to suffer the mental anguishes alone within his mind than to trust and depend on strangers who may discover that he was crazy and send him away somewhere.

He had strange lonely notions about the nature of reality with no one to discuss them with. The problems with understanding the essence of opposites interloped his private thoughts constantly, and the phenomenon of déjà vu was occurring once or twice every day.

So it seemed like a gift that he found a bit of reprieve one day during a childish argument with Helena when he blurted out that being good was no different than being bad. Instantly he found himself in hot water with her. He wasn’t completely sure about his statement but he set his jaw and was determined not to back down. When he felt himself losing the argument he steered the discussion in a slightly different direction. Black and white are equal! he said, and waited for her comeback.

Helena hadn’t a clue as to what he was talking about but she took offence at his statement anyway. She was beating him up on the good verses bad issue and she could do it with black and white. But that would not be the case. She launched her attack on a subject Darvin felt he knew something about. As the argument escalated so did his confidence.

Black is the color of evil and is far beneath white in God’s eyes, Helena asserted.

Black is the color of night and without it the sun would shine all the time and we couldn’t sleep and things would dry up and we would all die. Darvin said.

The angels in heaven are all white, and if black were equal some of them would be black.

You’ve never seen an angel, and black people go to heaven the same as white people, and some of them are angels too!

Black is darkness and the color of death and white is the color of life and it is better to be alive than dead! Helena put her hands on her hips and cocked one out. She assumed that one would do him in. Her left eyebrow arched and she smirked at him.

Black and white are not colors. My teacher said so. They are….. he thought for a moment, absent of color. Black is the same as white it just ..it just soaks up more light. There was more he wanted to add but he couldn’t bring to mind the rest of what his teacher had said about it. He struggled to remember.

Helena eyed him curiously, turned and walked away saying: You’re crazy Darvin. But that was not her true assessment of her little brother. It was simply the only come back she cared to put forth at that time.

Something came alive in Darvin during and after the argument with his sister. He had enjoyed voicing something that was meaningful to him: talking about the sameness of opposites. His experiences with déjà vu decreased and his thoughts became more organized. He began to press similar issues with his friends at school and members of his family, if they were so unfortunate as to fall into his trap. His reasons were simple, and speaking his mind made him feel better. He found new strength inside himself when