Page 76

By Jack Joseph Smith

orchard. Yes I'm useing lanaguage like that now. I learned how when there was no other way of describing some of the crap I have seen. Of course, sometimes I don't talk at all. I just pick up a good rock and heave it through a window, where I see an excape route near. I've been counting them, and I'm almost up to two hundred. I love it when they go through clean so you can hardly hear the even glass drop. And Christ almighty, can I run now. I whistle through those backyards going over fences and hedges. Whe in the night and I see a turning light, I spin to the ground and burry myself beneath the leaves. The dummys could walk over me, and they wouldn't see me. I was talking to Daniel about Whiskey Hollow the other day. It's far away. Probably a couple of mountains beyond Kennedy forest. But if those real estate bastards keep on building houses, we might have to find a new retreat. I've been over there a couple of times with some poor kid I met at Saint Bernards. He and his folks and two brothers live in a shack above the hallow. I really like him and his place could be kind of our home base. It's awfully far away for him to be going to Saint Bernards. He said his mom read about Papa Joe in the newspapers. Papa Joe is the man the Magician talked about so long ago. He was the last magician I ever saw up until now. My fathers business orientation ending around the time I started going to Saint Bernards, so we don't have to entertain those people as much. Yeah, but there's the Country Club. That's okay though, because I get to run around alot. Papa Joe's real name is Father Joseph L. Lawnegan. He told the Bishop to go to Hell, because the Bishop said that nobody could go to school outside of their own parish. In other words he was trying to tell Papa Joe, that anyone that didn't live in Mount Lebanon couldn't go to Saint Bernards. You see, Papa Joe has this football team that hasen't lost a game in the last ten years. The kids

Original Scan

Page 76

AI Interpretation

GPT

The vandal life expands into rock-throwing, window-breaking, fence-running escape, dreams of Whiskey Hollow as a new hideout, and stories about Papa Joe, the rebel priest behind Saint Bernard's football power and parish defiance.

The page widens the boy's map beyond Kennedy forest, linking his private rebellion to poorer terrain, new companions, and a priest whose authority comes from open conflict rather than obedience. Papa Joe feels like another version of the strong man foretold earlier, now arriving through local legend, sports, and institutional refusal.

Claude

The narrator boasts of swearing, of heaving rocks through nearly two hundred windows and hiding under leaves from searchlights, and of scouting Whiskey Hollow with a poor Saint Bernards classmate whose family lives in a shack above 'the hallow'; he then introduces Papa Joe, Father Joseph L. Lawnegan, who told the Bishop 'to go to Hell' over parish rules and whose football team 'hasen't lost a game in the last ten years'.

The voice is cocky and street-hardened, with vandalism described as craft and escape as sport, yet the search for a 'new retreat' keeps the old longing for wild space. Papa Joe enters as the fulfillment of the magician's prophecy, a defiant priest whose authority the boy can respect because it breaks the rules too.