Hearsay - Excerpt

For young Lemuel the day began with the buzzing of a fly.  It woke him from the best sleep--silent, blank, faceless--the kind that adults long but few, if any, recapture.  The boy turned onto his backand squinted at the strip of flypaper hanging from the ceiling light fixture.  The yellow ribbon, which Grandma Groscz had put up because flies breed on dung and spread disease, twisted as if it had a life of its own.

Stinking fly, Lem thought, as bad as the alarm clock whose burr pierced the plaster wall like a dentist's drill.  It took his stepfather forever to extend a paw and slap the stupid alarm into silence.  After that Lem could count on another ten minutes to snooze before his mother came to roust him, tootling her cheery:  "Rise and shine!"  He always pretended to be fast asleep, pretended he hadn't heard.

The fly's buzzing, angry, demanding, was worse than the alarm.  It came out of nowhere.

There it was again!  PPPRRRzzzppRRRZZZ--a volley of R's and P's and Z's, intensifying, fading to a hum, rising to full force.

His attempt to transliterate the buzz of the snared fly to the English alphabet made him think of Sunday school.  Written Hebrew, the teacher had told the class, uses no vowels:  "G_d's shorthand, so to speak.  It saved Moses on the MOunt time and trouble, but caused all kinds for the rest of us.  Scholars have been wrestling with the words ever since, arguing over the accuracy of this or that translation of Holy Scripture."

Lem, an impressionable child, envisioned the mysterious yellowed scroll--an endless string of consonants over which wizened rabbis bent, each chanting a different version of the text.  Magic incantations.  Lem's step-grand-mother mumbling as she circumcised a fresh loaf of rye bread or pulled a loose tooth from his mouth:  "Hocuspocus minimocus.  Abracadabara.  Eins-zwei-drei!"  But the long-bearded elders were afetr forbidden knowledge, seeking to decode the very secrets of nature.

Foxy, Lem's best friend, had not been impressed.  "4 Q"  he whispered.  "That means up yours."  Monday morning at the P.S.  assembly, he passed arounf his "Hebe" transcription of America.  Standing at attention, right hand over hearts, he and his fellow first-graders shrieked:  "MCNTRTSFTH/SWTLNDFLBRT..."