“What's up, fellers?” said the hulking faun.
“Ogell-muggell, you have to pass those tests.”
“No dice,” said Ogell-muggell, who spoke the tongue of sportsmen. “I jest ain't got it in me.”
“You're coming with us,” said the leader of the mob. “and we're going to teach you the whole year's course.”
“In two days?”
“In two days!”
They grabbed him, and his strength was not in him. He let himself be led away, the hired girl shouting he was a goddam sportsman … in a pig's eye he was! And Ogell-muggell disappeared from the sight of the town.
Nothing was heard from him for a day; then suddenly down the main street a huge, nude man was found trying to batter his way through a locked door….
Papa and I were passing, on our way to pick out some cigar bands for my collection (poor Papa smoking the shape that was enclosed by the band I picked). We saw this sobbing naked man; he turned to us, the look of a hunted thing in his eyes….
“Help! Help me! I can't do it, I tell you … I just can't!”
“It's Ogell,” said Papa.
“He's lost his track pants,” I said.
“They locked me up, they took me clothes, they fed me coffee … then, then….” He couldn't go on … whatever foul thing they had done, he couldn't go on. He shivered.
“There, there,” said Papa.
“They had bright lights in me eyes all night. They said things, and I hadda say it after 'em. They was fiends … I couldn't get it, I couldn't say it….” The big man began to sob. “So I got out over the shed roof … but no clothes, and….”
Just then the posse caught up with the football player. They piled over him. He fought, but his heart and spirit had been broken by verse and six-times-twelve and the verb as in French. They led him away to texts and sonnets….
No one saw Ogell-muggell the next day. There was a rumor he was dead, strangled by an adverb he couldn't keep down, or that he had gone mad and stabbed himself with an algebra book left carelessly within his reach. But these were only snide remarks by the loafers around the town depot … they did not care about State Champ honors.
Mama was the hardest hit. She sat in darkness in the parlor, and she was pale but her head was high. She looked at Papa as he lit the lamp.
“I must go on, Henry. I believe in something.”
“Sara, you do what you think is right.”
“But they may kill that poor boy.”
Papa shook his head. “I don't think so … his head isn't built to absorb anything. They're not overloading him, because he can't take it.”
“I'm right … what if some fall by the wayside … think, Henry, of all the kids for generations to come who will get free milk in school. And all the broken necks that will not crack.”
“Now, Sara,” said Papa, “you're acting like Ogell. You're excited and you're upset … you go lie down.”
Mama felt better and went to bed….
Friday dawned clean and respectable. The town was hung in banners. The students had collected all the loose wood, fence rails, and tar barrels in that part of the state for the big bonfire that would be a pyre to victory that night. But their hearts were not in it. They overlooked twenty railroad ties right under their noses just outside town.
The tests at the school board hearing were set for three o'clock in the afternoon. Mama dressed with care, as if for a hanging. The streets were silent; people stayed indoors, and anyone caught out on an errand hurried along, looking from left to right with downcast eyes. It was a crisis in the town's life, and it may appear foolish, overvalued, and small-village in outlook; yet the town team's honor, the nearness of State Champ standing, were all enough to drive the weaker citizens to drink. This was before radio “war experts” and bigtime advertising. People took their entertainment in the flesh. The talkies were undreamed of, the gramophone was wound by hand, and no idea of music by the mile or the juke box was around. No, it was either a hanging or a big game that could excite the town. And this matter was bigger than just the town, too. The College was preparing to take on the nation's best teams in the next few years. A railroad president and an oil well digger had died in the same year, and their wills had left millions to the College if its teams won a certain number of games, and if they were admitted to the Eastern Football Conference … and Ogell-muggell was the man to win all this for them….
Pinterest
