So that’s my assignment, and I never had a cockeyeder one: Find out why one town, out of this whole nation, has quit the war flat.
Proutyville, June 24.
At least Proutyville’s what it says on the road map, though where I am says just MOTEL and that seems to be about all there is.
I’m the only customer tonight. The motel business isn’t what it used to be. I guess that’s why the garage next door is already converted into a blacksmith’s job.
“People that live around here, they’ve got to get into town now and then,” the old guy that runs it said to me. “So they’re pretty well converted back to horses already.”
“I’ve known guys that were converted to horses,” I said. “But only partially.”
“I mean, converted to the use of horses.” There was a funny sort of precise dignity about this correction. “I am pleased to be back at the old work.”
He looked old enough to have flourished when blacksmithing was big time. I asked, “What did you do in the meanwhile?”
“All kinds of metal trades. Printing mostly.”
And that got us talking about printing and newspapers, which is right up my alley because Pop used to own the paper in Sage Bluffs and I’ve lately been tied up with most of the department’s cases involving seditious publications.
“A paper can do a lot of harm,” I insisted. “Oh, I know it’s been the style to cry down the power of the press ever since the 1936 and 1940 elections. But a paper still has a lot of influence even though it’s hard to separate cause and effect. For instance, do Chicagoans think that way because of the Tribune, or is there a Tribune because Chicagoans are like that?”
From there on we got practically philosophical. He had a lot of strange ideas, that old boy. Mostly about truth. How truth was relative, which there’s nothing new in that idea, though he dressed it up fancy. And something about truth and spheres of influence—how a newspaper, for instance, aimed at printingTheTruth, which there is no such thing as, but actually tried, if it was honest, to print the truth (lower case) for its own sphere of influence. Outside the radius of its circulation, truth might, for another editor, be something quite else again. And then he said, to himself like, “I’d like to hear sometime how that wish came out,” which didn’t mean anything but sort of ended that discussion.
It was then I brought up my own little problem, and that’s the only reason I’ve bothered to write all this down, though there’s no telling what a crackpot blacksmith like that meant.
It’s hard to get a clear picture of him in my mind now while I’m writing this. He’s tall and thin and he has a great beak of a nose. But what I can’t remember is does he have a beard? I’d almost swear he does, and still—
Anyway, I told him about Grover, naming no names, and asked him what he thought of that set-up. He liked to speculate; OK, here was a nice ripe subject.
He thought a little and said, “Is it Grover?” I guess some detail in my description of the plant and stuff tipped it off. I didn’t answer, but he went on: “Think over what I’ve said, my boy. When you get to Grover and see what the situation is, remember what we’ve talked about tonight. Then you’ll have your answer.”
This prating hasn’t any place in my diary. I know that. I feel like a dope writing it down. But there’s a certain curious compulsion about it. Not so much because I feel that this is going to help explain whatever is going on in Grover, but because I’ve got this eerie sensation that that old man is like nothing else I’ve met in all my life.
It’s funny. I keep thinking of my Welsh grandmother and the stories she used to tell me when I was so high. It’s twenty years since I’ve thought of those.
Grover, June 25.
Nothing to record today but long, tiresome driving over deserted highways. I wonder what gas rationing has done to the sales of Burma Shave.
The roads were noticeably more populated as I got nearer Grover, even though it was by then pretty late. Maybe they’ve abolished that rationing, too.
Too late to do any checking now; I’ll get to work tomorrow, with my usual routine of dropping in at the local paper first to gather a picture.
Grover, June 26.
Two of the oddest things in my life with the FBI have happened today. One, the minor one, is that I’ve somehow mislaid my diary, which is why this entry is written on note paper. The other, and what has really got me worried, is that I’ve mislaid my job.
Just that. I haven’t the slightest idea why I am in Grover.
It’s a nice little town. Small and cozy and like a thousand others, only maybe even more pleasant. It’s going great guns now, of course, reveling, like everyplace else, in the boom of postwar prosperity.
There’s a jiggy, catchy chorus in The Chocolate Soldier that goes, “Thank the Lord the war is over, tum-tee-tum tee-tum tee-tover—” Nice, happy little tune; it ought to be the theme song of these times. It seems like only yesterday I was stewing, and all the rest of the department with me, about saboteurs and subversive elements and all the other wartime problems.
Only now I’ve got something else to stew about, which is why I’m here.
I tried to get at it indirectly with John MacVeagh,
