Original Love. J.J. Murray

The Elements of Style from the bookstore.”

      “Excuse me,” I whisper to Johnny.

      “Yes?”

      “Did he say ‘creative writing’?”

      “Yes.”

      “This isn’t technical writing?”

      “No.”

      “I’m in the wrong place. I’m supposed to be in technical writing.”

      He smiles. “You want to take technical writing?”

      I’d much rather be creative. “Not really.”

      “Then you are in the right place.”

      Damn, he’s got some fine eyes, but what the hell’s that accent? He has to be from Brooklyn or something. “What should I do?”

      “See la professore after class, and he will make the change.”

      Damn, he has a fine voice with just enough Italian accent to wet my panties. “Just like that?”

      “Just like that.” He leans closer, and I get a whiff of some exotic cologne. That shit definitely isn’t Old Spice. “What is your name?”

      “Ebony.”

      “Ah, a good name for you. You are a precious tree.”

      And then I shiver. I literally shiver there in that heaven of a classroom. Yeah, I say to myself, I am in the wrong place at the right time.

      I push away from the laptop and massage my lower back. I know it’s only a prologue and two chapters, but there are three parts, right? This ought to hold Henry for a while, maybe even get me a real advance.

      Now if I could only hold the real Ebony…

      Drifting off to sleep moments later on the couch, I dream of my precious tree, my E., my Ebony.

      4

      When I wake in the early afternoon, I realize that I’m hungry. I forget to eat when I’m writing, hot tea and soda keeping me going since I quit drinking two years ago, and the rabbit food in Henry’s refrigerator looks stale, wilted, and rubbery.

      I close the refrigerator.

      Stale, wilted, and rubbery.

      I now know how to grind out the history of the Underhills to start my book. But should I use first person or third? I don’t want it to be a memoir. First-person memoirs get stale and whiny in a hurry, and third person will allow me a little poetic license to be selectively cynical and cruel. Third person it is.

      Chapter 1

      Peter Rudolph Underhill was a distant descendant of the Vikings and a recent descendant of the Underhills, a stale, wilted, and rubbery people from England who settled in and settled for Long Island when Long Island was young, Manhattan could be bought for the cost of a pair of bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium, and Native Americans were as yet unconverted by the sword to Christianity.

      “Damn, that’s harsh,” I say to the screen. “True, though.”

      Captain John Underhill, Peter’s most distant relation in so many ways, got kicked out of or left Puritan New England along with John Seaman and came to Hempstead, Long Island, during the seventeenth century to live among the more tolerant Dutch. There Johnny U. met and married a Dutch girl who promptly died, most likely of boredom because Henry Hudson’s landing spot of Coney Island hadn’t been invented yet, leaving him no choice but to marry an English Seaman girl.

      “And the Seamans have been Underhill ever since,” I say, repeating an ancient family joke.

      Captain John is infamous for taking part in the killing of 120 Matinecock Indians, the very same Algonquin tribe who taught the early settlers the whaling trade that would rule Long Island for two centuries. And for this “heroism” that pacified a bunch of crabby English farmers, Captain John earned a monument to himself in Mill Neck—the strangest plaque Peter had ever seen. On one side of the plaque, John is hacking Matinecocks to bits with his sword. On the other side, he is reading the Bible to a smiling group of Matinecocks. John’s philosophy must have been: “If they don’t believe in God, I believe that I’ll cut them to ribbons so they can meet God.”

      He was not the only Underhill to do this—just the first.

      Peter Underhill lived with the other one.

      “Okay, Captain,” I whisper. “Let’s write the history of you according to you.” This will definitely not be another chapter of English history, since the Captain was about as English as the English muffins Henry has turning to dark green mold in his refrigerator.

      If Peter believed all the stories that his father told him about his ancestry, Peter could write the most amazing tales of adventure on the high seas, adventures rivaling Moby Dick and any book in the Horatio Hornblower series.

      Good thing Peter had a public school education and access to a library to keep his family history straight.

      According to David Jonathan “The Captain” Underhill, his ancestors made Long Island what it is today. The Captain’s kin were swashbucklers, legendary whalers, and expert sailors—so he said. In actuality, they were whalers and shipbuilders, barrel makers and carpenters, and rope and sail makers until the whaling industry on Long Island collapsed before the Civil War.

      “Ah, that would be the life,” the Captain often said about whaling. “Nothing between you and forty tons of wild whale but a sharp harpoon and the deep blue sea.”

      Whaling, Peter found out, was a brutal life filled with danger, stench, and little or no pay. Whalers, most of them Native Americans, former slaves, or poor whites with little or no schooling, would leave Long Island for voyages of several years to supply the world with whale-blubber oil, shoehorns, men’s collars, umbrella stays, and hoopskirts.

      Once the whaling industry went belly-up, the Captain’s great-great-grandfather became a bay man in his pound boat, dredging the Great South Bay for bluepoint oysters.

      “Ah, that would be the life,” the Captain often told Peter about dredging. “Just you in an open boat, drifting or rowing through the shallows using your tongs”—heavy, long, iron-toothed rakes—“to harvest the best-tasting oysters in the world.”

      Until the oysters, too, went the way of the whale, Peter’s grandfather dredged with steel-toothed nets and even started using a power dredge before the “Long Island Special”—the great unnamed storm of 1938—gave all those oysters and clams an early grave.

      After Grandpa Underhill went to his own whiskey-induced early grave in 1939, Peter’s father became a farmer for a few days. “Too much bending over, too much time on my knees, too much digging,” he had complained. “Potato farming was like dredging on land.”

      He drifted along Long Island’s south shore until he landed in East Hampton, where he became a fisherman using shore nets to catch menhaden or mossbunker before hiring himself on to a boat to help bring in cod, striped bass, bluefish, bonito, sea bass, and an occasional shark for tourists.

      He also claimed to have saved the country from the Nazis.

      “I was there in forty-two,” he used to say to anyone who would listen. “Good thing, too, or we might have had us the Nazi invasion of Long Island.”

      According to the Captain, he was the one who found metal boxes that several Nazi spies had buried in the sand at Amagansett.

      “I found them, and don’t let anyone tell you different,” he told Peter. “I saw the U-boat, and I found the box, and inside that box was a shovel and a bomb.”

      As a child, Peter believed his father’s every word. “My daddy was a hero during World War Two,” he would tell his friends.

      “Come