Elmer Gigantic

Then the young lady bartender flew over and poured him a drink.

“Let me tell you.  Things have changed since I was young.” He slurred his words slightly, either from a bad old age, or regular drunkenness, or both.

“And I’m not just some old stiff.  I know you’re thinking it.  But I’m the real thing.  I’m the real fucking thing.”

The few men who were at the bar this early in the evening had seen Elmer around a lot.  He’d never really spoken up before then though.  Up until then he’d done nothing but drink and search through long old books, like he was searching for his son.

But today he spoke.  In the direction of the bartender, but he spoke to all of them.  Apparently he hadn’t found what he’d been looking for, and this day was his day to confess.  Or lay blame.

So, they listened.  How could they resist?

“They should have erected a statue to me but instead look at me.  I’m just here.  Just here talking to you people.”

Harsh words from a man with jeans so unwashed that they’d almost turned brown.

“You see, it all started with a book I found…”

Elmer Widgery Gigantic, 29, had just bought a home and was in the attic doing some work on the floorboards.  He was planning on taking up all of the floorboards and replacing them in an effort that he hoped would eventually lead to a complete finishing of the upstairs.  This was an attempt, as was everything those days, for Elmer to increase his net worth.  And since he had recently been let off from a job that he hadn’t liked in the first place, Elmer’s latest attempts had increased two fold.

“If I just get all of the boards on this side done today, and then replace them tomorrow I can get to the other side by midweek,” he said to himself.  His concern over his value was at this point still kind of selfless, directed not at winning himself things that he wanted, or needed, but at preparing a good life for his newly born son, Mailbox.

He pulled up one board, and cut himself, and then began trying to tear up another without getting too much blood on his clothes.  Mailbox, Elmer’s first and only son, was in a crib at the far side of the attic with some mosquito netting over it.  Elmer had put the netting on to keep saw dust or whatever else flew out of the floor from getting into his son’s eyes and lungs.  The second board came up half way, and then split, and Elmer’s attempt to get it free gave him nothing but three splinters, big ones, and a pain in his right shoulder.

Believing that he just didn’t have the right tool, Elmer ran downstairs, leaving the baby laying quietly in the attic, to retrieve a hatchet.  He returned and proceeded to chop the old board into splinters.  He moved to the next board, and having a whole new and different set of problems with this one, left his son laying quietly to find a new tool that he knew he needed.

It was on floorboard four that Elmer discovered a box and ended the project for good.

Some might call what Elmer found a chest, but to Elmer it was a box.  Albeit an old box, with a latch, and some initials.  A box none-the-less.

It was under the floor close to one wall, packed around by old insulation, and it looked like it had been there a long time.  Elmer pulled it up using more than one of the now six tools he’d retrieved from the basement and then sat down to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his eyes.  The box was heavy, like it was filled with bricks, and Elmer, like any of us would, hoped as he looked at it that the bricks inside were gold bricks, and that with a little drive and a little sweat he had just made himself a rich and happy man.

Not wanting to let the box out of his sight Elmer spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out how he could bring both the box and the crib down to the second floor where he could inspect it.  After realizing that this was an impossibility, Elmer took the chest down to his bedroom, figuring that there was more chance of it disappearing in the mythical realm of the attic, where it had been discovered, than in the bedroom, which was anything but mythical.  It might seem crazy, but as far as Elmer was concerned it was crazy that he’d found the old box in the first place.

He went back up to the attic and took Mailbox and the crib, as well as a wood chisel and hammer, down to the bedroom hastily.

The box was on the middle of his bed, the baby was in the crib, still with mosquito netting on it a few feet away, and anticipation was growing by the minute.

“I guess I’m about to find out some history of this house after all,” he said to the baby.  He’d thought about doing some research on the origins of the house when he first bought it, but then his life kind of exploded in an array of sadness and insanity and he’d forgotten that it had been something he’d wanted. Mailbox squirmed in his crib and mewed a contented mew.

Elmer took the chisel and the hammer and knocked the lock clean off the old box, and the whole latch as well.  They came right off, making him think that this box must be as old as the house if not older.  The house was built in 1822, and he’d imagined when he’d bought it that it must have been built by an old sea captain who had done well for himself all those years ago.  It was the oldest house in his neighborhood, which was in the oldest part of Portland, and since there really wasn’t any industry other than shipping and logging back then, his new soon-to-be-benefactor must have made his fortune on the ocean.  A logger would have built further up the coast on Mt. Desert, or even further, where the Rockefellers made their vacation homes.

Elmer licked his lips and rubbed his hands together, and ever so slowly he lifted the lid of the box.  Even Mailbox seemed excited by the anticipation, and let out a little giggle, and a burp.

The lid lifted up, and Elmer peaked under the edge as it rose, hoping that something would glitter at him from below, but nothing glittered or even shined.  Whatever it was just coughed up a puff of ancient dust and the smell of the library, or his father’s room in the old barn growing up.  And that could only mean one thing.  Elmer threw back the lid to reveal a book.

There was no gold at all, just a book, hand bound with yellowing pages decomposing as he watched them, and a few personal items of whoever had left this book for Elmer to find.

“Just my luck,” Elmer said, unconvincingly as his son made an indistinguishable noise.

“A book.”