Where Summer Strives
by
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. . . . But then take walking to school in the city, there’s nothing like it. First you get yourself a pocketful of rocks, that’s for the dogs. Now as for dogs, they can be classified as the known biters and the would-be biters, those that will take a rush at you any time, day or night, and the others that just kind of hang around waiting for things to happen. I got no use for either kind, have fired away at both of them when I had the chance, but I feel more respect for the rushers. You may not like that kind of dog, but you have to respect him.
Then of course there’s always the things you can find in the gutters, some good things that you can bring home, some things that would be good except that they are broken, which is probably why they end up in the gutter. Oh, bad things too, there’s the things you wouldn’t want your sister to see, if you had one. You won’t believe what Chalky Murphy found once on the corner of Hoover and 18th, it was a baby, a real human baby. Only it wasn’t all there you see, it wasn’t what you might call intact. Dave said that it hadn’t lived long enough to be called a baby, quite. I tried to piece that out afterwards, but gave it up. I mean, you could tell it for a baby right off, and any fool could see that it was dead. But Dave said that Henry would belt him, probably, if he elongated on it to me. So it was a puzzle. The Bradford girls, who have got a church answer to everything, said it was in the hands of God. Fatty Winslow said he didn’t know about that, but the last time he saw it, it was in the gutter. All in all it was a pretty bad mess, we all just stood around it until the cops came and gave us notice.
Cops. They asked us all kinds of questions about it. Jack took to calling it the corpus derilict, and it did make you feel more comfortable not calling it a baby, but that other. We saw this man in a cloak of inky black put the infant into a jeweled bag, along with some gold pieces, and about to hang it on the convent door of the holy sisters— No, you had to face it, it was just a poor dead baby in the gutter. They scooped him up in a box and took him away. Not every day, of course, but what do you want? In fact, walking to school you’re really in school, sort of. You learn a lot.
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About the Book
Set in a Midwestern factory town during the summer of 1945, Where Summer Strives is the story of drunken literary scholar Harvey Sloane, who finds his way by accident to the town and to the white working-class neighborhood where he will make a series of fatal mistakes about the conduct of his life. It is also the story of eleven-year-old schoolboy Tobe Jackson, whose clear perception of his environment helps him to function within it but doesn’t allow him to avert the disasters that await both Sloane and the family of his young black classmate, Sammy Tucker.
At times shocking, at others hilarious, Where Summer Strives is serious—often brutally so—in its depiction of the lives of America’s working class white poor in the closing days of World War II.
About the Author
Thomas Thornburg was born and educated in Muncie, Indiana, and taught for many years at Ball State University in that city. He has written and published numerous essays, short stories, individual poems, and three books of poetry: Saturday Town, Ancient Letters, and Munseetown. He lives in southwestern Montana with his wife.
Visit Thornburg on the web at www.munseetown.montana.com.