Edgar's Sunday Courtship

A dew-damp Sabbath dawns on a Midwestern whistle-stop; Edgar, all cowlick and conviction, trots toward the white-steepled schoolhouse clutching a lesson book like a buckler. Between picket fences he collides with the girl whose eyelashes seem tuned to church-bell resonance, but his moment of wonder is ambushed by the town’s velvet-jacketed tormentor, the boy who already smokes like a grown rake. Scripture hour arrives; the teacher unfurls the saga of David’s sling, and suddenly the rafters quake with Edgar’s daydream—he is the ruddy shepherd, the chalkboard becomes a battlefield, the inkwells swell to Goliath’s shield, and every classmate—beloved, rival, even the stern spinster at the pump-organ—are hostages in a life-sized diorama of peril. When called to recite, Edgar’s answer meanders through Philistine armor and lands in comic heresy; the scandalized congregation sentences him to the dais of shame, a scaffold where every stare brands him ‘delinquent prodigy.’ There, in a hallucination worthy of Doré, he plummets through floorboards into a sulphur-tinged underworld, clutching his spelling primer like a life-vest. Yet the descent is brief; pie—two slabs of molasses-sweet consolation—restores equilibrium, and by twilight Edgar struts home whistling, reconciled to rivals, sweetheart, and the cosmos itself.