the oracle at delphi

julia taylor | Spring 2021

Somebody told me the other day that I was a character, and if I could read I could’ve been a poet. I can read. I don’t know why she said that part. I do know what she meant by character. She could’ve said I was funny. But when people make me leery that ain’t what I call them. I say, 

“Buddy, you’re a live wire.” 

Have you ever felt a live wire? 

Afterwards you’re stiff and sore a week. That’s because it pulls you tighter than a day-old corpse when it happens. The electricity does that. 

I ran the Downeaster that day and it got me at Ogunquit. While I was waiting a couple of rusticators bought me a coffee. It was a fine thing but they probably thought I was some lunatic, in fact, I know they thought I was some lunatic. Just before they come over to me, the lady said, “You think that fellow in overalls is some sort of lunatic?” 

“He must be bully hot anyway,” says her old man. He was in his shirtsleeves, looking slick-translucent. 

“No, darling, look.” 

I was leant against my elbows under a stairway, with a coat on too, watching seagulls creep about the door to an ice cream parlor. It was hot indeed, and the surf hungover, but in the summer there is always gay colors and noise down there. 

“I don’t think that is a lunatic,” Mister says in a minute. 

They was stopped amongst the early-morning strollers, staring at me. 

“That’s an epileptic. You see how he convulses? Right there.” 

“Oh,” says Miss. “Not an albino?” 

“No, no.” 

I’m not an epileptic that I know of, or even an albino. I’m a fireman on the International of Maine. Besides that I don’t know. I was born of a couple of orphans in a mill town isn’t big nor small. My name is Teddy Whalen. When I first got shown in vaudeville they called it 

!! YANKEE WONDER !! 

Shockhead Ted the Boy Electric Wizard 

but you can call me Shockhead Ted. 

“We should give him a nickel.” 

“What for?” 

“So he can have something to eat, John, why do you think? He isn’t being a nuisance.” “I don’t suppose he is, but you can’t give money to bums each time you see one.”

“He doesn’t look like a drunk,” she says. 

“You can’t tell with an epileptic,” Mister says, but then he thinks a minute. “See here,” he tells her. “Did I tell you about what Tyler told me at the club, about how when a man is hot he wants a cold drink, but in fact if he drinks a hot drink, that will really cool him down much faster?” 

“How?” He never told her how, or I was looking at the gulls again. 

But he comes over to me once his courage is up and says, 

“Hello there, chum,” he says to me. 

“Good morning,” I say. I hadn’t figured yet whether to try and act more epileptic or less. I’m a big numb looking rounder with a fearsome twitch in my eye and in the end I figured they had got enough to go on. 

“My wife and I are here from Boston, and we noticed you standing here.” “Yeah?” 

“Our views are liberal.” He nodded. I nodded. “If you’re amenable we should like to buy you a hot cup of coffee.” 

“Sure,” I said. He smiled like that really made him happy. 

“Are you cold?” the lady asked me very gentle. I smiled back at her which I ain’t mean to do really, what cause had I? but I couldn’t help but be ashamed the way she sounded. “Not a bit,” I said, like it really made me happy. 

What the matter with me really is is when I was eight years old they had a Fourth of July parade. 

They always had a Fourth of July parade. But the time when I was eight years old, I couldn’t see. So I climbed a tree and wound up tangled in a street car wire. Really it wasn’t like that at all. I got someone to start me off, first of all, I couldn’t climb worth very much. And I was sitting in that tree a whole minute before I saw it there. It was heavy gray and coiled like rope, going over my lap like the bar on a fairground ride. It didn’t mean a word to me. So, I don’t know. I guess I put my hands around it. 

But they get me a coffee and bring it to me personal, right in that parlor there now that it was opening. They get some lemonade and drink it while they watch me. I’d have told them my name but he didn’t tell me his. 

“How do you like this weather?” Mister asks me. I say, 

“I like the weather fine, but there isn’t any.” 

“Oh?” 

“Yes sir. This ain’t enough.” 

Because it was eighty-nine degrees, and still as concrete. It was bright but the sky weren’t blue. I like when there’s real weather, any sort of a weather. Rain or snow or wind or whatever. 

“You’re a character,” says Miss, all smiling. “And I bet if you can read you could be poet.” I can read but I’m no poet. Ain’t a witch or wizard and no oracle or nothing, but I have got some of that in my family. And it is true I never felt worse than feeling bad–than feeling something will drop whether or not you like it–on a hot no-weather day.

It was a day like that when I first saw these big painted signs someone nailed up beside the tracks, outside the town where I was born. There must have been a dozen nailed to trees, so it’s like watching a shaky movie when you go by at seventy-mile-an-hour. They said THE END IS NEAR. 

I guess when you read that it’s generally on a painted sign. 

Anyhow I thought they should have said more. You’ve got to work harder than that. But still it made me uneasy. 

It’s called Delphi, the town is. Aside from when the movietheater came all it’s done is rust and grow. It’s ‘Delfy’, not ‘Dell-phi’ since it’s in Maine, not France, like Calais is ‘Kalis’. I imagine that’s not right, that in Rome or whatever they don’t say it like that. Anyway they make mostly shoes and steamer trunks. 

The first thing I knew after it happened was how my ears hurt, but that was from my mother, screaming right next to my head. They handed me to her stiff as a board and she fell to weeping upon the ground. She was holding me and sort of rocking back to forward. It isn’t ever good, is it, when people do that. 

I must have cried. I did. They couldn’t get me off her til I was too thick to hang on, once they’d poured half a bottle of Foley’s down me. Foley’s is Foley’s, magnetohypnotic or whatever, a liniment. It gives a you lead feet, it makes you drool, it soothes the teething child. Soothes anybody. 

It struck my hair white–the electricity. It burnt my brain, and my mother says I was slow forever after. I say I don’t know why she thought I’d amount to so much anyhow. 

The only good thing about when the weather is floating dead is sometimes it goes on to be the calm before the storm. That’s okay. It tickles me from my inside out. And then there is a thunderstorm, and I can get fair drunk off of a thunderstorm, and shake worse than no lady from Boston ever saw. 

Sometimes I worry I’ve been drunk a little ever since I was eight years old. Cause I don’t get cold. And sparks don’t hurt me. I couldn’t hear so good after that. Yeah...it ain’t exactly like I couldn’t hear. It’s just things seemed so far-off I couldn’t feel them on me them like I should, not feel them on my body. Like seeing someone cry a hundred feet away. 

Until I was eleven we lived at the top of this place called The Oracle House, which is only a house, pink, and real jagged in the floor. They called it that because once a long time ago they made a newspaper in it, and they called the newspaper The Oracle. But it mustn’t have been much of an Oracle really, because if it were much of an oracle really it would have been there yet. 

I know what an oracle is. It’s somebody who knows what’s going to happen before it does. My grandmother was an oracle. She said she saw the Civil War coming. “Ain’t everybody seen the Civil War coming?” I asked her once.

She didn’t like that. It’s like I said, I’m not an oracle. I’m a man and men don’t have that. But I think I can tell when other people are. My sister Jemima says she is and I believe her. “I have to speak a prophecy,” she’ll say in the middle of supper. And she’ll stand up on the table and do it, in a funny voice sometimes. Sometimes her eyes roll back in her head and she don’t sound human, but that don’t worry me. What worries me is our grandmother has been nervous all her life, they say, and mad since the time of her youth, and it’s no wonder, is it? She saw the Civil War coming. 

But Jemima also fools herself however she likes. 

So I’m not worried. 

But the other day she stood up on the table, one foot in the butter, and said in a voice like a dead crow, 

“Hark.” 

“Hark,” said me and a couple of my brothers back, because we think we’re funny. Everyone else just watched and chewed. 

“The meek,” she cawed. 

“What about ‘em?” I asked. 

“They are dead in the swamps, and dead on the roads, dead in the sea, dead in garages, dead on the fields, dead in the prisons. It seeps and rumbles and ripples and steams for a thousand years–they talk til you’re upon ‘em then they won’t. They know you want to hear ‘em say it, so they don’t.” 

“Say what?” said my brother Bill. 

“All is well and all will be well,” she croaked. “All manner of thing will be well.” It’s a shame we moved away is all. 

You know all I really had to do in vaudeville was stand there with my hair on end while they fixed it so a line of people came up on stage. One held on to the next and the next to him and the next to her, you know. The way it worked was we’d get them all jazzed up and on their toes, and when we had a long line I’d take one of their hands and see what happened. 

It went all down the line most often. I would get so wound up standing, waiting, that I could feel it build up in my bones, and my eyes would wobble in my head, which will make a child cry. I expect it was the theater lights but in those days I was always shrugging, chattering in the teeth like I had some dread disease; I hadn’t but I think I was far from home, you see. It was the lights but besides I got so damn depressed I’d not care to breath, it was pathetic. I was a big boy, I was eleven, but I wasn’t man enough to take a train to New York City, well, I was, only I was a real poor sport about it. You’d think they were pulling out my fingernails. And all I had to do was stand there. But better than three months in vaudeville I remember how the ride was up back home, when I finally got sick enough, in the pines, in the pines. And you shiver when the cold wind blows. 

“Do you feel better now you’ve had the coffee?” the man asked me. His shirt was getting its color back. I had to go. 

“Oh, sure.” 

“Better how?”

“Much better. Thanks very much.” 

“Are you quite cool?” asked his lady wife–her name was Eve. I said my name was Theodore, and I made it thee-a-dore just for them. 

“Well,” I said. “It’s awful hot. But I feel better.” 

“Are you quite sure? You’re shivering,” she said. 

“Oh, I ain’t cold. It’s just me, I got a, a,” I smiled and my teeth clattered. “A nervous condition. It’s hot as hell.” 

“You are dressed terribly heavy.” 

“Yeah. I’m on my way to work.” 

“You must take off your coat at least.” 

“I gotta dress this way I work in a furnace.” 

Mister don’t believe me I don’t think, since he thinks I’m crazy or something. You can’t tell with an epileptic. But he don’t argue. “Be that as it may, why, you aren’t there yet,” he told me. “It isn’t healthful.” 

And you know, he was right. 

I went down on the beach before I left. There’s a reason people come from Boston and wherever. It’s the salt wind. It’s better than a hot coffee to cool you down. Better than Foley’s Hypnotic if you’ve never had it. Better if you take your coat off, I’ll tell you that. Not as good as getting in the water. 

The part I remember best about the Fourth of July was later. 

I’d been laid out on this loveseat on the back porch, where it was cool and I’d not be in the way. I had a cloth over my eyes and one of my shoes still on. The cloth fell off and I could see blue–that was the roof, really it’s white but it was dark–and black purples–that was the yard–and a ripple over everything so I couldn’t see what was what–that was the porch screen. 

The only one around was my Grammie, my dad’s mother. I didn’t notice she was there at first, but then I barely noticed I was human. I remember thinking I was part of the sofa, that the springs had grown up into me. That sounds pretty bad, but it didn’t move me at the time. 

She was sitting there with her back to me, and I tried to say something to her, but my mouth was too dry and my skull too stuffed with cotton lint, heavy and silent. This terrific boom came up just then. My Grammie jumped, and turned around in her chair to look at me. Those noises kept snapping off one after the other–it was the fireworks. I tried sitting up to see what was happening and Grammie said something like, “Christ, he’s awake,” and leaned over me so she was all I could see, and rubbed my chest and said, “Hush dear, it’ll be over soon. You can go and see your mother in just a few moments longer just, oh, Lord. Be brave.” My mother was having my brother Bernie, it turned out, and she wouldn’t be through with that til midnight–but I wasn’t afraid of the fireworks. I could hear them. It made me want to cry I could hear them so fine, I could feel them in my breastbone like a marching drum. 

I try and think like the little old lady says, all will be well, she’ll tell you. I don’t know if my ears got better or I got used to being deafer, but it doesn’t bother me now. All manner of thing will be well.

“Hark,” she rattled, five o’clock this morning, up in the attic where she sleeps. It was in the gray dawn and I don’t know why anyone would be awake. I could hear my breath so thick I knew I wouldn’t move. Jemima creaked from one foot to the other, I couldn’t hear but I could picture it. And then she said, not like a crow at all– 

“Which horseman do you want first?”