Story #2: Telemachus. Telemachus!

Telemachus. Telemachus!

So they finally came to Telemachus and said, “What should we do now?” You see, Ithaca was a small town, and people never stopped caring, because that’s what happens in a small town. They knew Odysseus was missing, that he should have been home by now. Everyone knew the war was over. Other soldiers from other boats had come home from Troy. From the few rumors they got of his whereabouts they knew it looked grim, but they never stopped hoping and they did all they could.

The first few years Ithaca kept watches so there would always be someone scanning the seas for the rocking prow of his galleon or the dip of a bow light if it was night. Later they had to stop the watches as the hopeful watchmen called out too many false alarms—Ringing the bells and running into the marketplace with huge, happy eyes only to have the boat be some messenger from Menelaus or worse, some trick of the eye in the twilight. The next few years all the denominations got together and held prayer vigils on the anniversaries of Odysseus’ departure for Troy. Priests mixed with pastors and preachers and they all held up white candles, translucent where the flame was, and they all said prayers and hugged each other and the women cried and some felt secretly jealous of all the warm sympathy Penelope was getting.

The High School football team, even wore yellow “O” decals on their helmets for a full season in his hopeful memory. The coach called the team together before the first game. They were dressed already in their pads and milling around the locker room flexing their young muscles. The coach had them all take a knee on the concrete around him in the chlorine smelling space outside the showers and then he told them they would be wearing a patch for Odysseus because, God Damn it, Ithaca was going to stick together and not lose hope. Then he handed them out and each kid sat on the wood bench outside his orange locker and, carefully because the shoulder pads made his arms clumsy, stuck the decal on the back center of the helmet, right where it should be. And none of them said anything when Telemachus stuck his decal right on the front of his helmet above and between the eyes. Wasn’t that his right? They thought. Star QB and Odysseus’ only son? Didn’t he need to not lose hope more than anyone? And the whole town cried, even the fans of the other team, when he went out that night and threw four TD passes and ran for two more in an emotional Ithaca win. The strong men wiped tears from the corners of their eyes at his filial loyalty. All the cheerleaders dreamed of easing his pain with their young bodies. Even the old mothers, wombs long dried and husbands dead, wished against wish that they could be young again just to marry a boy as loyal and as hopeful and as honorable as Telemachus.

In Ithaca, in those times when Odysseus was long overdue from Troy, that whole town coped with it’s sorrow like the passing of a collection plate, hand to hand and everyone puts a little bit in and no one takes any out until Odysseus comes home. Because that’s what happens in a small town. And as long as that plate keeps moving from hand to hand it’s kinda alright. So it’s not that they ran out of caring when they came to Telemachus and asked, “What should we do now?” Ithaca never stopped caring. It’s just that any town eventually needs closure from so constant a tragedy. They would have gone to Penelope and asked but she was so distraught, so caught up in her grief and stuck to her loom that the only one they could reason with was Telemachus. They said kindly:

“Son, it’s time. Let’s all collect our memories of him. The women will sow quilts and the men will record their stories of him. Then we’ll put it all in a coffin and have a symbolic burial. It’s what we should do. Look at your poor mother. We know you’ll never give up hope, and we won’t either, but you have to come to terms that there’s a time to move on, like the Bible says. A time for everything, including, hard as it is to hear it (trust us we know son), a time to move on.”

Telemachus thanked them for their care and went home to sleep on his decision. He tried to talk to his mom about it but she was far-gone in grief and doing all she could to avoid any men, even him. So he went for a drive up the canyon near his suburb and he played his favorite music and he thought about the few memories he had of his father—the scabs and wrinkles on his father’s knees. Once when his father had chased him, growling like a strange beast and how fast he had run with that sound at his back. And strongest of his memories, the farewell call and the pure copper glint of sunlight off of spears as the army had massed at the wharf to leave for Troy. He must have been six years old then.

When he went before the town the next day Telemachus said that he thought all night about what Odysseus would do in his place. He told the town that everything they said made sense but that he couldn’t let go of hope. He said, “My father would go looking for me. He would get a ship and he would go back to Troy. So, with or without your leave, I’m leaving.” And everyone tried to talk him out of it, that he’d never find a willing crew to go back to that hell, that they couldn’t stand to lose him, that it was time to move on. He listened to everything, he nodded respectfully, but said he was still going, even if he went alone. And the bitter old men thought Oh, he’ll go alone alright, nobody’s going to follow that fool-boy into death. And the strong men expressed their willingness to go with him but begged out because of their families (and they were grateful they had families). And the young men, his high school friends, well, they agreed to go with him. Because he was Telemachus. It was in his blood to lead. He was their Quarterback. He’d thrown for four touchdowns with his father’s image right between his eyes. And he’d never let them down before and he wouldn’t now. And everybody in that meetinghouse cried at the boys’ loyalty and their mothers cried doubly and placed huge new sums (all they had) in that small town’s rich collection plate of sorrow.

In a month Telemachus’ last memory of his father was now real and his own and he stood at the wharf with his spear and his friends (and his friends with their spears) all glinting in the sunlight of an early spring. The whole small town was there trying not to cry and then Penelope came sobbing, shuffling down the street with her black mourning clothes trailing in the road dust. She broke her silence and forbade him from leaving, said she would die if he left, or worse, she would be forced to marry one of the out-of-towners clamoring for her hand and wealth. She said his presence was the only thing that protected her and she begged the town to understand and the town understood because it was true. The elders ordered Telemachus from the ship but he refused and this made his mother collapse on the slat wood pier. Then Telemachus left the ship to go to her and then the ship left. He turned and ran back towards it but the town restrained him and his friends covered their boyhood with stoic voices and called to him from the distancing ship, each cry fainter than the last, “It’s what you would do in our place. We go by choice. We will return with your father. We swear an oath. We’ve named the ship in your honor.” The small town had to fight to keep Telemachus back. The fathers and mothers of the boys who were leaving were not among those who held him back.

So Telemachus did his duty to his mother and stayed at home. His mother went back to her loom and he entertained the out-of-towners and like a butler deflected their coarse advances. Imagine him, Telemachus, like a butler. He longed to, but he didn’t have the strength to throw them all out and this mixed with the shame of being left behind and he missed his prom because of the shame and because of it he didn’t walk at graduation. He spent a summer begging off the young women that came calling for him and the colleges that came with their scholarship offers and within a year the bitter old men and even some women in that small town couldn’t pity him any longer and started to whisper that he was secretly enjoying the company of the out-of-towners. That he was getting drunk and eating swine with them. That he had turned his back on the rest of Ithaca. That’s how rumors start in a small town. And when the mothers and fathers of the boys-who-had-left heard the rumors, they spread them.

It became that half the town pitied Telemachus because he was left behind to play butler and forced to atrophy all the best parts of himself, and the other half thought him a squanderer and hated him secretly because he was still with them, whereas their sons were not. But whatever way they thought about Telemachus, they all talked about him—in the marketplace and the bathhouses, over iced tea on the verandas. And if you’ve been in a small town you know that kind of rumor talk is the talk that hangs in the air like chemical smoke, and you can feel it in your lungs with each breath and if you take in too much it gets you get sick, fatally. By the time Odysseus came back that town was rumor sick, and weakening.

When Odysseus did come back, in disguise, and alone, he slaughtered all the out-of-towners, tousled his son’s hair, and went upstairs with Penelope. When he came down he tousled his son’s hair again and commended him on his loyalty, said he had claimed a Trojan spear for him but had lost it with the rest of his spoils. Then he stood in the warm hall, an orgy of out-of-towners dead on the floor, and he called for wine. He sat down in a great wooden chair and asked his son to bring the paper. He had a lot of catching up to do.

When the catching up was done they went hunting, father and son. They built a deer blind in an oak tree at the edge of a clearing and waited for a buck. Telemachus had huge eyes then for his father, and he asked a thousand questions of the war and his father’s adventures and he was in the middle of a question when a 6-point buck breached the clearing and then the buck heard him and bolted. And Odysseus was so mad he sent Telemachus home and two hours later came home himself with that same buck gutted and across his shoulders.

Other times in those first few days they talked, father and son, but Telemachus was all questions and Odysseus was used to giving orders, not answers. And Telemachus couldn’t understand why his father was so God favored, and his shame over his high school friends made him question why he should celebrate the return of one man when so many still missing left with him, or because of him. He even said it once, obliquely, to Odysseus. He showed his father the decaled football helmet and told him the story of that game and the story of those boys-who-had-left and Odysseus looked away out over the sea and paused, then said “Athena protect them, but if it be not so, they were a worthy sacrifice”. Odysseus said it in a way that you had to believe it; there was no option to disbelieve it. But, still, a part of Telemachus began to disbelieve it, and things were never the same after that between Odysseus and his only son.

When word spread among the town that Odysseus was back they all came to see him. He didn’t go to them. They all came to see him and the kind old ladies kidded Telemachus when he opened the door saying “You selfish and handsome young man, keeping your father all to yourself. Don’t you know he belongs to us just as much as you?” And that small town massed at the door to see him. Civilly at first and then jostling, like sick people in line for the fountain of youth. And Odysseus sat in that great wooden chair looking the same age as the day he left and he was so charming and noble and he had so many fascinating stories that he became the hero-salve that healed that sick small town. And a lot of the anger of those mothers whose sons were gone left when they focused on Odysseus’ easy strength. And the rest of the anger went straight to Telemachus because, they thought, look, here was Odysseus, returned on his own (with Athena’s help), our sons didn’t have to leave to suffer who knows what fate, and no matter what way you looked at it, it was Telemachus’ idea to go after Odysseus. He wasn’t content with prayer vigils or night watches or decals. No. He had to go and try to be a hero. As if he could upstage a Goddess with his planning.

All those thoughts became talk and that talk was chemical smoke and it got in Telemachus’ lungs. He had a father, but no father he could talk to, and a mother like a dog in heat and half a town that saw their (perhaps) dead children in the way he moved and the youth of his shoulders. He wasn’t blind to any of it and he felt that when he held out the collection plate of his sorrow no one was there to pass it to, and he was forced to just hold it there in his lap with all that rumor talk burning in his chest. Sometimes that’s what happens in a small town, after many other things happen. After about a year it proved too much for him and he made the great failure of forgetting his oblations to the Gods, which was his duty as the heir and Odysseus’ only son. And after that, the other half of the town lost pity for him and then he lost it for himself and then he slipped away in disguise. He left Ithaca. And the next place he went he told no one who he was.

That’s why they never wrote any grand epics about Telemachus. Maybe even when I first mentioned his name, when I said, “So they came to Telemachus”, maybe even you didn’t recognize his name. Maybe you thought I was talking about a digital phone service, or a city in Mexico. Maybe you turned to your lover (as you read at a desk in the bedroom) and asked, “Love what’s a Te-le-mac-hus?” And your lover, born and raised in a small town, said, “come to bed. It’s a long story and it’s late.” And you said, “no really, who, what or where is Te-le-mac-hus?” And your lover noticed the tone in your voice required an answer so your lover said, “My grandma used to tell me that story. If I tell it, will you come to bed?” And you said, “yes” and your lover said, “promise?” And you said “yes” and your lover said, “it’s the name of the deadbeat son of a hero. But more importantly, it’s the name of a ship lost at sea with all hands. Now come to bed.” And you said, “no fair. That was a statement not a story. And now you’ve ruined it.” And there was real indignation in your voice. But your lover just smiled with white teeth and moved a bit under the covers. And, in that, you forgave the small injustice and came to bed.