serial fiction

Delroy and the Cheese — Part Three

In which both socks and great literature are discussed

This is the third chapter of an 18 chapter series about life in a Canadian tree-planting camp. Feel free to comment either publicly or privately. If you’re new, you may want to start at the beginning or go to the complete list of Delroy and the Cheese chapters.

After dinner, I stopped by my tent and dug out my copy of Ulysses. Susan’s tent was about a hundred meters away from mine. Her door faced Andrea’s at a ninety-degree angle and they had strung a tarp above both tents to create a sheltered area in front of them. A couple of logs served as rudimentary benches inside the shelter. When I arrived, Andrea was arranging the day’s work socks on one of the logs. They were soaked and muddy and had bits of twig sticking to them. I ducked under the tarp and sat on the opposite log.

“How’s the sock situation?” I asked.

“Three pairs dry but dirty, two pairs soaked through, one pair clean and untouched. I’m hoping to save the clean ones for the day off.”

“Nice.”

I realize there are people out there who fetishize socks, but I think you need to have lived in a bush camp for a season or more to develop the kind of deep-abiding love for socks most tree planters have. I’m not talking about some squalid lust-filled obsession. This is a much purer emotion — like a child might feel for her parents. Or a dog might feel for its owner.

Actually, maybe it’s the other way around. We do love our socks but they frequently disappoint us. They may not flunk out of preschool or pee on a nun, but they never seem to maintain that first soft and bright wonder they have when they are new. I loved my socks when they were fresh and clean and soft and warm. But this far into the season that can’t be said of any of the socks I brought with me. I still love them, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed in them.

If I’d been asked to categorize my socks I would have said, “Two pairs fetid and filthy, three pairs rancid and wretched, one pair (those currently on my feet) slightly damp and scratchy, but not immediately a threat to life and limb.”

Andrea turned around and sat down on the log across from me. Her feet were bare and not quite filthy. And, as feet go, fairly shapely. Maybe I did have a fetish. She pulled on a pair of the aforementioned dry-but-dirty socks and modeled them for me, stretching out her left leg and pointing her toes.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Sexy?”

The sock was cheap wool and looked like it might have originally been colored green, but was now mostly brown. It was a bit big for her foot and crumpled in an oddly angular way; the embedded dirt gave it more structure than a strictly yarn-based sock.

Before I could answer, Susan unzipped her tent and poked her head out.

“Story time!” she said.

Ulysses is not a quick read, particularly if it is being read aloud to a couple of women with a habit of interrupting the reader. That night we managed about a dozen pages. Each page prompted a new topic of discussion, sometimes several.

There was a line of Latin on the very first page. This prompted a discussion about whether anyone still studied Latin in school. Andrea knew someone who had. It wasn’t even an option at my school. Susan wondered if the Pope and his buddies spoke it as kind of a secret language in the Vatican. We talked about how the Pope’s Latin was a very different style of Latin than the Latin of Latin American salsa dancing or Latin American culture in general.

We talked about what level of obesity was meant by the word “plump”, and whether it was a gender-charged term. There was a fierce debate about this. Was plump a more effeminate word than pudgy? Did they mean the same thing? Was plump rounder? And pudgy lumpier? To give you an indication of how slowly the reading went, plump is the second word in Ulysses. My copy of the book is 564 pages long.

As far as I was concerned, this was perfect. I wasn’t really interested in Leopold Bloom and how his day had been. My mission was to win friends and steal cheese. I needed to befriend these women and get them on my side.

The next chapter…

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