New to WW? Start reading "Oddbody"
It began on March 19, 2024. 18 chapters. About a librarian with disability, book banners, and his tenth great grandfather, Clarence Oddbody, model for the angel in "It's a Wonderful Life."
Author’s note: All my writings on Substack are now free.
Many of my stories and fiction were begun as a pre-Internet underground press in the seventies and eighties that never got off the ground. I started a magazine of short stories, scripts, essays, poems, and serialized novel chapters all written by characters I created with an overriding tale of their reactions to revealing stuff about each other which readers could see and be entertained by the editorial introductions and letters in each succeeding issue.
Issues were to be published monthly but no publisher I presented it to would think people would want my restoration of Dickens or Saturday Evening Post serializations. My library career happened and I put it aside until last year when I realized Substack has given me the exact format I desired to present my work.
You will see more of that Bolugi Bay group of actors and writers when I start posting the second novels of my Bolugi Bay Magical Altrurians trilogy, Farlop Finds New Altruria. The older ones are introduced here in Oddbody as well.
Please read. comment, share, and enjoy … Bill as Perry Grandwell
ODDBODY (A novel in serial chapters)
By PERRY GRANDWELL
The annual showing of Frank Capra’s iconic American Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, had reached its climactic scenes while being shown at the community room of the Cayatoga Free Public Library in the coastal town of the same just west of Sonoma County in Northern California.
Jimmie Stewart as George Bailey, in the final throes of despair, is heaped with one horrible outcome after another as he learns how bad everything is in Bedford Falls if he had not lived at all. His loan company has failed and no lifelong friend, nor even his own mother, knows who George Bailey is anymore. The town has turned to seed and is now called Pottersville, His Bailey Park development of reasonably priced homes is now a cemetery.
At his younger brother’s gravesite, George learns he did not prevent the boy from drowning when they were young. Therefore, his brother did not grow up to be a war hero who saved thousands of sailors by stopping an air raid.
But there is still one more dreadful example than all that other misery which will send George to the worst point of despair imaginable.
George pounds the ground in front of his brother’s grave and turns angrily to the quirky four-hundred-year-old angel, Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second Class, played sweetly by Henry Travers.
GEORGE BAILEY - “Clarence, where’s Mary?”
CLARENCE - “Well, uh, uh … I can’t …eh …”
GEORGE BAILEY - “I don’t know how you know these things, but tell me where she is.”
CLARENCE - “I ...”
GEORGE BAILEY - “You know where she is. Tell me where my wife is!”
CLARENCE - “I’m not supposed to tell.”
GEORGE BAILEY - “Please, Clarence, tell me where she is.”
CLARENCE - “You’re not going to like it, George!”
GEORGE BAILEY - “Where is she?”
CLARENCE - “She’s an old maid. She never married.”
GEORGE BAILEY - “Where IS she??!!”
CLARENCE – “She’s just about to close up the LIBRARY!”
The scene changes to the front of the Pottersville Public Library. A suddenly frumpy, frightened Mary, played by otherwise beautiful Donna Reed, closes the door from outside and is immediately accosted by the wildly fervent George Bailey she does not know.
She runs for her life.
At which point, in the back of the Cayatoga Library Community Room, a whispered voice calls out to his co-workers.
“Aargh! The final, worst, most horrible thing that can happen. She becomes a librarian!”
That statement, made with low volume to not disturb the roomful of library patrons who were enraptured by the film, was uttered at every showing in the Cayatoga Free Public Library by the male librarian in charge of the place. He said it to his two co-workers and grimaced with comic scorn.
“Aw, you say that every year,” said Corey Ann Bright, the just turned middle-aged Circulation clerk who had worked with him for many years.
“And, of course, she is an ‘old maid!’” charged the librarian. “That old stereotype …”
“So are you if they applied that term to males,” was the sideways barb Corey Ann launched at her boss.
“I choose not to marry,” he rebuffed. “It’s not the same thing. You’re not married either.”
“But she’s engaged,” whispered the naïve young library aide, Keanno Condo, to join the conversation behind the computer projector from which the film emanated.
“For five years to the same bungling town cop,” laughed the librarian who was then playfully slapped at by Corey Ann.
“Not until he makes Captain,” she defended.
“Who demanded that? Him or you?” the librarian laughed.
“None of your business,” Corey Ann huffed.
“Come on,” the librarian said with a sniff. “The movie is ending. Corey Ann and I have to get to the desk. Keeko, you clear up any stragglers in the room after they file out. Nobody hiding under a table like last month, okay?”
“That was Mr. Bullheart again. He was hiding to get more time on the computers after we closed.”
The librarian turned his tall stiff body to face him with a stern stare. “I will not have a loose patron hanging out in the library after we’ve closed. Okay?”
“Okay. On it. I’ll look for him this time,” replied Keanno who moved toward the projector as the film zoomed in on the Christmas tree to hear a bell ringing in its closing scene.
“Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings,” says celluloid Zuzu in her daddy’s arms. The camera zooms in on the title page of “Tom Sawyer” with Clarence Oddbody’s handwritten note to George, “No man is a failure who has friends.” George Bailey thanks Clarence and winks to the angel in the sky,
The crowd in the library community room cheered and applauded while Corey Ann and the librarian made their way to the large desk in the front library lobby. She walked briskly to the Circulation side, and he to the Reference side in the slower, more cumbersome manner his body and cane would allow.
There, on the long desk were wooden placards in front of each position. On hers the name C.A. Bright below the word Circulation, and on the other side below the word Reference was printed with the librarian’s initials, last name, and his librarian degree, E. F, Oddbody MLIS.
Yes, His name was Oddbody, just like the movie character.
It would be only a minute or two before some patron might come out of the community room after that afternoon December film and ask him if he is related to Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second Class.
It happened nearly every year after that film was shown. His usual answer was a friendly scoff and the words, “Related to a fictional, entirely imaginative character? I think not. And by the way,” he would add, “now he is Angel First Class. He has his wings now.”
Librarian Ellery F. Oddbody’s last name has always been a joke for some but he never changed it. He learned to withstand all the low laughs and meet them back with higher level wit, which was gleaned from his literature-filled boyhood. But as he matured, fate unfortunately caused him to become the very embodiment of that last name.
Ever since he was twenty-three, Ellery Oddbody’s torso had become, indeed, unquestioningly odd.
He still had a leading man face, but his spine had become permanently stiff, a little crouched, and titled to the right. He used a cane after both hips had been replaced when they became immobile. His shoulders were restricted in movement as well, his left leg was shorter than his right, and he could neither turn his head nor look up or down without turning his entire body head-to-toe as if he was a mannequin.
Yet the man with the strange body maneuvered through life with little complaint, with adaptations to allow him to reach what his body could not reach, with forthright creative industry, and mostly good cheer in his endeavors.
He presented to the world that he was different but not disqualified, and, by and large, the world accepted him by virtue of that confidence. Those who knew him liked him without regard or reservation. Those who did not made up their own minds about his character based on whatever misapprehension they came in with.
Oddbody was odd. But, so what?
His mind, however, was fascinating. And he reminded all who reacted to his physical oddity with disdain, fear, or sympathy that odd bodies in this day and age, and in every other, are very normal in nature’s diverse forms of being.
The disfigurement crept up on him slowly in his twenties. In his youthful years of constant activity, he had excelled in two sports, baseball, and basketball; was a lead singer in both the school and church choirs; and had acted the lead or major character in nearly every school and college and later community theatre plays. But his boyhood dream of becoming a tap dancing, singing, first baseman with an offseason television show came to a slow, grinding, and temporarily painful end when the arthritic condition he was born with began to turn his torso into a somewhat petrified man.
He was one of those people whose genetic heritage included a disease called ankylosing spondylitis, a form of sometimes excruciating rheumatoid arthritis that cause the bones of one’s vertebrae to fuse together into a solid, bamboo-like corridor around the nerves within the spinal column.
At some point in any person’s life, after an invading viral agent or trauma attacks the body, the white blood cells eat away at the bad agent. But then with this genetic disorder, the cells do not stop as they would normally do. The blood cells continue to eat away the synovial fluid that connects and buffers the bones of the vertebrae. Hence bone against bone become fused, solid/ The person either has a permanently stiff back from hip to neck, or can even end up bent over with a sunken chest.
In Ellery Oddbody’s case, the damage was not so severe as the worst could have been. To look at him just standing still at the Reference Desk you may not imagine there was anything different about him, but as soon as he moved in either direction, his oddity would be apparent.
While the condition was extremely painful for a time, those aches eventually wore off after a few years and through it all, fortunately, Ellery Oddbody never lost his good humor and friendly charm. He was able to satisfactorily complete college and the two years for his Masters in Librarianship and Information Studies degree. He even continued acting and directing in community theatre in roles in which his disability was not a deterrent.
He had pretty much adapted to every possible encounter in his life. Except for one. He resolved to never again become romantically involved with a woman.
Ellery Oddbody was not, he said over and over, ever going to marry and/or engender children who would carry on this horrific genetic trait to cause any further progeny to suffer this sort of pain and oddity.
He acted as a person who was content in his oddness, because he had to. Though he fully understood that others in the so-called disability community celebrated their differences, he saw no need to carry on the genetic heritage that caused it. He saw his withdrawal from breeding as a kindness to future society.
Much as his libido urged him against such rational thinking, he mostly stopped dating and even eschewed come-ons from female friends. He had access to all the books in the world, he claimed, to allow him to imagine all the other lives and experiences a man could ever want.
Or so he said to himself, often enough.
And though Corey Ann and others would suggest that he could marry without children, or adopt, or marry a woman with children already, he claimed the accidental romance or sexual abandonment that could occur in any such arrangement would not guarantee that ill-fated progeny would not result.
“So, have a freakin’ vasectomy then,” Corey Ann’s slow-moving mate, Sherriff Deputy Beau Lawson, nudged him over a beer at the nearby Slippery Inn a recent night as the long-engaged couple had blindsided him with the latest of the unsuitable women they had foisted upon him.
As he set himself up for business at the Reference Desk after the annual film showing, Ellery mused and recalled that evening with the probably already drunk woman’s hands and face all over him. She claimed, he imagined with Corey Ann’s prompting, that she did not want kids either.
Out of the blue, he just turned to Corey Ann and said “I’m just not ready to do that.”
“What?” she replied. “Ready for what”
Ellery realized where he was and answered, “Never mind. Just a workplace nightmare. Uhm. Daydreaming. I mean daydreaming.”
He absently picked up his name placard and dusted it off. He turned to look at his name.
‘E. F. Oddbody, MLIS.’
His middle name was Furnivall, his mother’s last name, though he rarely used it. He had recently learned that it was the name of one of the original founding editors of the Oxford English Dictionary before the more famous, and more long-lasting editor, James A. H. Murray took over in the 1870s. He had always meant to check Ancesstry.com to see if he was related.
Such a relation suited his bookish fascination with facts. He believed there was good genetic heritage there, if not the disease-filled one.
Ellery had once even considered using Furnivall for his last name to avoid the constant joking about Oddbody. He often questioned his mother about why Oddbody was his last name and not hers. Though she raised him and loved him, she never married either. When he was finally old enough, she at last told him why he was given that unusual name.
She told him his last name was Oddbody because his father, who had just been passing through town, had signed the name, “E. Donegal Oddbody,” to the hotel register at which they spent their one fateful night. She had met him the night before after he performed with his flute and bagpipes at a community park event and was swept away by his Scottish articulation and theatrical charm. Whether either was real, she could not say.
She had imagined she would run away with him to the next town on the Celtic Tour performance schedule, but he disappeared before she awoke the next morning. She traveled to find the touring company at their next two towns, Sacramento, and Grass Valley, but was told he was no longer part of the troupe and had only joined them while they were in Berkeley the month before. They said he had just shown up for two gigs and then left.
Ellery’s mother had returned to Cayatoga and found out she was pregnant in several weeks. She kept to her job as a hotel concierge at the Cayatoga Utopian, and raised her son in a corner room on the first floor while fending off tryst hungry travelers and always unsuitable suitors at her desk. She did try over the years to locate the bagpipe man but nothing came of it. Ellery knew that she would play records and CDs of Celtic music while she scanned cover art to see if that man was ever in the band.
She told Ellery that she would recognize him instantly if she saw him because his head was turned aside in a way that would stand out from others. She said that man, his father, was disabled in some way but she did not know what it was called.
But, as long as she lived, she never caught sight of him again. Her own demise from cancer, though, came quickly, right after Ellery’s second year in Cayatoga Community College right before he transferred to Cal for his Bachelor’s study. There were friends, but no relations at her memorial service and there was no news at all whether his unknown father, E. D. Oddbody, had heard about it. Ellery asked every salesmen who did show up in the seats and offered kisses to the corpse but none claimed to be his father. He felt good, however, that they all seemed to show kindness to her because she had been so kind to them.
While Ellery thought often of his late, brave, single mother who had raised him with love and positive promise, every so often Ellery thought he should finally investigate some Internet sites or even an ancestry database and see if he could find that Oddbody person he thought might still be out there somewhere.
Maybe tonight, when he gets home, he thought.
But then the filmgoers began to stream out of the community room toward the main library counter.
“So, are you related to Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second class?” said the first person to stop at the Reference Desk.
Corey Ann, who heard this, laughed, and winked at Ellery. The librarian came out of his reverie about his mother, and looked at the teenager in front of the desk. He felt different tonight and answered in a way he never had before.
“I don’t know. Maybe?” He looked lost in thought again.
Corey Ann dropped her jaw and stared at him until a young woman came to her at the desk and asked if the book that she had placed on hold was there yet.
“Let me see,” said Corey Ann. She received the patron’s proffered library card and checked the online catalog on her computer. “Not yet,” she reported. “You are next in line, but the person who has it out has not returned it yet. We’ll send you an email when it is available.”
“Okay,” said the young woman. “Do you have Angels in Disguise? I didn’t see it on the shelf.”
Corey typed in the title. “There are two books with that title. Angels in Disguise: an Occult Baseball Club mystery, and Angels in Disguise: trans Samaritans to the rescue.”
“That one,” said the patron.
“Good heavens, that one is overdue by two weeks as well,” revealed Corey Ann. “I’ll put it on hold for you.”
She did so and handed the library card back to the young woman who thanked her and departed.
Corey Ann mumbled but was immediately confronted by another patron asking if his book request had come through.
The title of the nonfiction book was Black Like Us, Blue Like You: how to react to political color codes. It, too, was long overdue.
Corey Ann looked over to Ellery with a widening glare. He did not see her as his face and body was not turned in that direction. His eyes were intent on his computer in front of him. He scanned title after title in the young adult section while a couple of teens waited in front of him.
“Good gawd!” he muttered. “They’re all gone.”
He turned to his side. “Corey Ann, it’s happening here. All the books about gender and race, have been taken out and they have not been returned. Just like in the South and Mid-West. But here, in Cayatoga, California? I didn’t think it would happen here.”
Corey Ann could only smile with a quirky downturn. “All across America. You know that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said to the two teens, one a male, the other perhaps a female, perhaps an Other of some undetermined kind. “Someone does not want you or them, or anybody to be reading these books. Here,” he said as he turned his computer so that they could see it. “This is a website that will give you access to any of these challenged books if you can read them as e-books.”
“Wow, I guess we won’t need libraries, then,” said the boy as his companion typed in the web address to a smart phone.
“Please, don’t say that,” Ellery chuckled. “Libraries and librarians are still forever needed.”
Corey Ann, who had been listening, chimed in with, “For example, at the Crafty Reader. Tomorrow evening at seven.”
“What’s that?” asked the teen who turned to look at her.
Corey Ann and Ellery both turned and pointed to the large framed poster of a painting on the wall behind the main counter at which they stood.
“That is The Lector, painted by Mario Sanchez, a Cuban-American artist from Key West” Ellery explained. “It is a picture of his father whose career was to stand on a raised platform and read a newspaper and books to workers who wrapped tobacco cigars all day. Many people who did repetitive work with their hands were able to learn and enjoy literature just as many people use audio books and music today while their hands do something else. We have a kind of lector session in our Community Room every Thursday evening when the library is open past six, in which a reader …”
“Ellery F. Oddbody himself,” Corey Ann pointed to him.
“In which,” Ellery continued, “I read aloud from a famous novel one night a week over several weeks while people sit at tables around the room doing whatever kind of craft can fit onto the table. I start a new book tomorrow night by Sinclair Lewis. You would be welcome to come. Bring whatever craft you’d like to work on.”
The two teens looked at each other and seemed to agree that such a thing might be fun. They giggled and started through the security gate to leave the building.
Just then a brief ringing alarm buzzer sounded throughout the old Carnegie building.
“Oh, an angel just got their wings,” said the teenage boy to his friend at the door. He laughed as the other one spread out arms to make them look like wings. They danced out.
“Five minutes to six,” noted Corey Ann. “Time for your eloquent limerick about closing.”
“It’s not a limerick, it’s a doggerel,” said Ellery as he turned to face her sarcastic smile. “Never mind. This is the one time each year I shall be brief. All these people still hanging around just saw the movie. So, here goes.”
Ellery turned to the side table behind the Reference Desk and picked up the microphone. In the same tone of the movie’s Clarence Oddbody, he projected into the microphone, “I’m just about to close the LIBRARY!”
His two co-workers and several others near the stacks responded with chuffs and giggles. People rushed to check out books while others streamed to the exit gate.
Behind them all, Keanno pulled and pushed Mr. Bullheart away from the public computer he was on and ushered the recalcitrant oldster through the exit gate for the evening.
Once everyone was gone, Corey Ann locked the front door. She and Keanno both made their daily circuit to check the restrooms, turn off lights from the community room, then the stacks, and finally the main room leaving the LED light bulbs shining from the large Christmas tree at the broad front window.
With only the light from the open office door behind him, Ellery finished up with daily reference and circulation numbers at the desk computer and made a note to himself for the next day to check into the outstanding book holds and the names of patrons who had checked them out to see if any patterns emerge.
Corey Ann and Keanno both went into the office where they collected their coats and they returned to say good night. Ellery waved to them without turning around but his hand brushed aside a book that was next to the computer. It fell to the floor.
Keanno rushed forward to pick it up but he was restrained cautiously by Corey Ann. She pointed to the inside corner of the Reference Desk where Ellery kept his triggered reaching apparatus. They watched while Ellery took hold of it and used it to retrieve the book from the floor as his stiff back made him unable to bend low enough. He brought the book up and let it drop from the mechanical reacher onto the counter.
He went back to the computer. The two co-workers then went out via the back door where they were met by Corey Ann’s standing fiancé, Sargent Beau Lawson.
There in the darkness inside the library but for the sweet colored lights of the Christmas tree, Ellery Oddbody changed the computer to an online searching screen. He typed in a silly question.
“So, Clarence Oddbody, are you my many times great-grandfather?”
Then he laughed raucously as the search engine words responded to say it did not understand the question.
The Reference Librarian closed the screen window abruptly and turned to go to the office where he used another adaptive hook-on-a-stick device to get his coat on and around his body. He shut off the office lights at the back door, then went through it and locked it. He walked with his cane in his lumbering way to his apartment three blocks away as light snow sprinkled over the sleepy Northern California town of Cayatoga.
The comforting rays of the lights of the Christmas tree outside the front window of the old library gave the newly whitened civic lawn in front of it a beautiful shimmering sense of pleasant calm appropriate for the Yule season.
Shortly, a less seasonable bluish light began to shine from within the library. It was at the Reference Desk. The computer screen burst open and the window on the screen was revealed. It showed Ellery’s silly question, “So, Clarence Oddbody, are you my many times great-grandfather?”
Then keys on the keyboard began to move …