Page 25
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Gibbons grows from his parents' lawn into a sixteen-year-old football player moving among trees, watching his mother and approaching the coaches.
The writer connects throwing a ball with hunting and attention to the landscape. Maternal survival and the coaches' affection surround Gibbons's confidence in his body.
Section I opens with a mother's flat list, '"(Cleveland), Ohio. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That's it."', then follows Gibbons as he walks through the cedar, learns he 'could / run around it, but he could not buck it', and at sixteen comes down to the coaches, who greet him with '"Ya fucken jagg offs,"' and a jibe about combing his hair.
The prose moves in short, blunt sentences, mixing family memory, a boy testing his body among trees, and the rough affection of the coaches. Source spellings such as 'stroled', 'augest' and 'perminent' give the typescript a raw, first-draft texture.