Junius Maltby: Divine dirtbag
“He had stopped wearing shoes because he liked the feeling of the warm earth on his feet, and because he had no shoes.”
My kids were asleep in the back seat of the plow truck after I’d finished plowing our driveway in the Front Range of Colorado on a winter day. Choosing not to disturb them, I pulled this book out of the glovebox.
Without knowing it, I finished the Red Pony and began what I thought was just another chapter titled Junius Maltby. I wasn’t sure when this asthmatic accountant was going to meet up with the hardworking folks of the Tiflin Ranch that I’d grown to love in the Red Pony.
Fifteen pages in I realized Junius Maltby was a separate short story by John Steinbeck, not mentioned on the cover, tacked onto the end of The Red Pony. Like a hidden track, which are some of my favorite tracks (Mosquito Song by Queens of the Stone Age). This is now one of them.
Mr. Maltby falls into the possession of a farm after moving from San Francisco inland to drier farm country.
Everyone in the small community hates him for his laziness and some other less true rumors that get spread about him. He doesn’t know to care though, or care to know.
“They never had any new clothes at all, but Junius had discovered the essays of David Grayson. He wore overalls and sat under the sycamores that lined the meadow stream.”
Somehow he raises his son Robbie to school age on goat’s milk and the meager crops that they can find amongst their weeds, and someone tells Mr. Maltby that the boy ought to go to school. Junius reluctantly convinces Robbie to go to school, but doesn’t think to buy him new clothes or shoes or anything. Robbie just goes in his tattered overalls. But despite their intention to do so, the other kids can’t bring themselves to tease Robbie.
“Robbie’s effect on the school was immediate. The older boys let him entirely alone, but the younger ones imitated him in everything, even tearing holes in the knees of their overalls. When they sat in the sun with their backs to the school wall, eating their lunches, Robbie told them about his father and about the sycamore tree. They listened intently and wished their fathers were lazy and gentle, too.”
Robbie leads the schoolboys in elaborate make-believe missions, and the teachers notice that after hanging around Robbie, the other boys’ vocabularies improve a great deal.
I don’t think of Junius as quite a freeloader, because he doesn’t ask anyone for anything. He doesn’t want anything from anyone. Problems arise when they try to help him anyway. The surest way to weaken a stone arch is to support it from below.
I thought of the small town I grew up in, the common pressure to conform, and the other way that a small town or other like-minded group can catch fire with when someone new arrives with the spark of a new and different way of thinking. And how that spark is often smothered in the firestorm that follows. I’m thinking of the most famous long-haired, sandal-wearing dirtbag who died for what he believed in, along with some less famous rock-climber types that made more of an impression on me as a boy, and are also no longer with us.
I wish there were more Maltbys and fewer martyrs.
And I wish I were a little bit lazier and gentler father.