Elenore's Child: Fly Fishing, Exotic Foods, Murder

By Allan Larson

This tale follows a boy from Kansas as he grows from a mumbling, humming toddler into an intense young man. Initially, he is guided by an understanding mother and a particularly peculiar, loving father. Throughout childhood's challenges, he persists with absolute focus on his goals. An old north woods Indian helps him become a gifted fishing guide, and an older gentleman introduces him to a successful career in the exotic food business. He stays grounded in sensibility, thanks to his mother and his wife, until a fateful encounter in the Amazon changes his course. An encounter with members of the drug cartel deep in the jungle provokes an act of violence with lasting repercussions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667881850

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ELENORE’S CHILD

Fly Fishing, Exotic Foods, Murder

© 2022, Allan Larson.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66788-184-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66788-185-0

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Appendix A

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Woodrew Halford DeGraffenried III was an unusual child. He was a hummer, meaning that a monotone hmmm came out of him continuously, until, at about the age of three, he uttered his first intelligible words. He would often sit on the floor for an hour or more watching his father, Luther, who had a red, white, and green Rubik’s Cube that he worked night after night as he watched television. Luther had seen a three-year-old Japanese girl on the internet who solved the Rubik’s puzzle in forty-seven seconds; he knew he could do it too, but he never did.

As a consequence of watching his father’s frustration and failure, the only thing young Woodrew wanted for his fourth birthday was his own Rubik’s Cube. He worked the cube relentlessly, wearing out two of them (perhaps itself a world record) before he was six. Then, suddenly, without any new strategy or approach, the puzzle seemed to solve itself. Each side was a solid red, white, or green. Woodrew had no idea how he had prevailed after thousands of tries, but he accepted success and never touched the cube again. To his academic parents, it was fairly clear that young Woodrew was not particularly gifted, but the child’s implacable pursuit of a goal was, to them, both commendable and not a little disturbing.

If weirdness could be inherited, Woodrew III came by it legitimately. He should, in fact, have been Woodrew H. D. IV, but his father changed his name because he disliked being called Woody. He thought Woody was unbefitting of a college professor and renamed himself Luther Densmore Brockmeyer to celebrate some personal heroes of a long-forgotten social struggle known only to him. Luther had plenty of contemporary social and professional friends, but old acquaintances from before the name change thought that he’d become a bit pompous, a little uppity, and they still liked to call him Woody because they knew the professor hated it.

Luther and Elenore, young Woodrew’s parents, met in graduate school at Franklin University, an endowed liberal arts school, in Ocktun, Kansas. The central Kansas location was a flat, treeless area of cows, wheat, feed lots, and farm implement dealers. Not surprisingly, Franklin University did not attract many locals, much to the dismay of Willard S. Franklin, the school’s founder and primary benefactor, who, with his inherited fortune, hoped to bring culture to the uncultured. The curriculum was as varied as the liberal-leaning faculty wanted to make it. It therefore attracted free-thinking and shallow-thinking, discipline-averse students from all over the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Franklin University did not attract many Orientals.

Luther was finishing his dissertation in the sociology department on Dialects as related to diet and hunting methods among some Athabaskan and Inuit Indian tribes. Elenore was a theater history major wrapping up a master’s thesis on Tom Mix. They first encountered each other at a square dance club meet and greet. Speaking to her in the style of an Athabaskan-speaking Indian, Luther’s first words to her were Why are you here? She looked at the tall, gangly fellow with the Ben Franklin glasses and the wild, black hair as though he were a visitor from another galaxy. Then, for some reason, she remembered The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and thought of how her new friend was the personification of Ichabod Crane. She started to laugh. She had a loud, happy, squawking laugh that was contagious, and soon Luther was laughing too. Then soon the whole club was laughing, and nobody knew why except Elenore, and that made her laugh even harder. Luther really wasn’t much of a laugher, but whenever Elenore laughed, it made him laugh even when he had no idea what they were laughing about.

They were, in many ways, an unlikely couple. He was initially generally serious, subdued, and self-conscious. She was chirpy, happy, and outgoing, with the kind of constant smile that even strangers immediately warmed to. With her, Luther was more light-hearted, occasionally even somewhat witty and self-deprecating. She would not let him take himself too seriously, which he was prone to do.

Chapter 2

They were married in the Franklin University chapel a month before graduation, with only student friends in attendance. Elenore was an orphan, and Luther’s parents stayed away, perhaps as a protest about his name change, but probably more likely because of the lodging and dining options in Ocktun, Kansas. They were of substantial inherited means, and neither chicken-fried steak dinners nor the Holiday Inn Express appealed to them.

Luther assumed that the esoteric thesis that he had written, his facility with Athabaskan languages, and an invitation to speak at the annual Dené Language Conference would earn him a professorship at a major university, but it did not. He simply did not interview well. In the absence of Elenore, he had little self-confidence and was almost entirely humorless. Under questioning on subjects other than Dené language and culture, interviewers generally thought his thinking slow and obtuse at best and incomprehensible at worst. Ultimately, Willard S. Franklin heard of Luther’s plight and prevailed upon the Franklin University Academic Faculty Committee to grant him an interim assistant professorship of indigenous cultural science in a department of one. Willard could not bear to think that a Franklin University doctoral graduate was unemployable.

Chapter 3

Elenore knew full well that a thesis on the old cowboy, Tom Mix, would never land her a meaningful job in her field, even if such a job existed at all. But she did not care a bit; she liked the old movies, the stars, the directors, and the producers, and her opus on Tom Mix was a lot of fun, and she learned a lot of probably unmarketable information. However, in the course of her research, she was fascinated by the old camera equipment and how it evolved into the modern film and digital versions. So, after she and Luther settled into their first house in Ocktun, she began a career as a professional photographer. She did local weddings, funerals, graduation pictures, and birthdays, and every spring, when Ocktun John Deere Farm Supply got its new demo equipment, she would shoot tractors, combines, swathers, and other essential pieces of the green and yellow Farmlife line. In less than two years, she was earning substantially more than the interim assistant professor.

Woodrew III was born eight months to the day after Luther and Elenore had graduated from Franklin University and settled permanently in Ocktun. When Woodrew was about seven, Luther bought him a small, fat tire, two-wheel bike. Immediately, a problem presented itself. The driveway where young Woodrew was to learn to ride was long and gravelly, and the new bike, with its training wheels and fat tires, could not move fast enough for him to learn balance and to really ride. But he persevered; week after week turned into months. Woodrew III was not to be deterred by repeated failure; he ground on toward a goal that seemed more and more unreachable. Then one day, totally by accident, he careened out onto the paved road. Immediately, the bike, training wheels, and Woodrew shot forward faster than the bike had ever moved before, and the concept of balance on the bike was suddenly, at last, apparent to him.

He started listening to music on his little Christmas present transistor radio when he was eleven, and good mother that she was, Elenore decided it was the appropriate time for him to learn to play an instrument. The problem was that Woodrew didn’t really like popular contemporary music, and he really, really did not like classical or country music. So, guitars, pianos, clarinets, and most conventional children’s instruments were out. For reasons lurking deep in his subconscious, he was drawn to piercing bagpipe dirges and even more so to polka music. The choice for Elenore was grim but obvious, and Elenore took six hundred dollars from photographing the newest tractors and manure spreaders and rented young Woodrew a modest-sized accordion for a year.

This turned out to be both a good and a bad decision. The boy loved his accordion and played it incessantly; that was the good part. But they had a small house, and he wasn’t very good, and he did not want a teacher. He thought he could teach himself. The bad got worse as he listened to and watched polka bands on the family’s only television. He liked a barely popular polka band called The Six Fat Dutchmen, but his real favorite was Frankie Yankovic, and he would try to play along to Frankie’s classics, The Beer Barrell Polka and the Too Fat for Me Polka. After a year of unrelenting practice, the best he could do was a scarcely recognizable rendition of the BBP. He simply could not coordinate the long keys and the hundreds of little buttons while pumping the bellows. After the one-year rental period was over, Woodrew reluctantly agreed that the thing had beaten him, and Elenore returned it to Ocktun Pawn and Rental. She and Luther sat on the front porch swing that night and polished off an entire warm bottle of Jim Beam bourbon, smiling the whole time.

Chapter 4

Woodrew H. D. III was entering his freshman year at Ocktun Valley Consolidated High School when Luther was finally tenured at Franklin University. His dogged research into the language and culture of extremely remote indigenous tribes gained him growing respect from the few peers who had any idea of what he was talking about. He also attracted a few aboriginal-aspiring graduate students, both male and female, who wished they had traveled with Lewis and Clark or been born in the late Pleistocene. The fact that Luther was not deterred by long periods of time and spent all seasons in the Great North Woods eating strange, often terrible-sounding food earned him a sort of cult following.

Luther was becoming a pretty good storyteller about the cultural obscurities of some of the tribes he visited. A favorite of his students was his spirited, animated descriptions of some of the far north’s culinary delicacies; take the Kiviaq, for instance. It goes like this: in the summer, coastal natives would kill and skin a seal, leaving as much fat as possible on the skin. The head is cut off at the neck, and the skin is filled with seabirds and shorebirds, which they net by the hundreds. Little auks and guillemots are preferred because they ferment the best. The little carcasses go into the bag intact: feathers, beaks, feet, and innards. The bag is then sealed with fat, which repels flies. It is then stored under stones where the sun heats it, but birds and foxes cannot reach it.

As the fat slowly melts in the summer, the slowly decomposing birds are bathed in seal fat. As many as five hundred birds could go into a large Kiviaq. After it had time—at least two or three months—to decompose and ferment, it became a staple of the family and a treat for guests. Everything except the feathers, beaks, and feet was eaten. Bones were cracked and sucked. Luther reported that it was indeed a pungent smell that emanated from the bag—fetid, like overripe cheese and rotting meat. All agreed that Luther was one unique and uncommon dude.

On the other hand, Elenore thought that Woodrew, now fifteen, seemed to be attaining some level of normalcy as he started ninth grade.