The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935–1978)
BILLY GIBBS was as lively a boy, no doubt, as he could have been made by a strong body, excellent health, an active mind, and an alert sense of humor much like that of his father, Grover Gibbs. Like about all the Port William boys of his time, his life was not as leisurely as he wished it to be. From the time he grew from the intelligence of a coon hound to that of a fairly biddable border collie, his parents, who were often in need of help, found work for him to do. This occasioned his next significant intellectual advance: recognition of the advantages of making himself hard to find. For the next several years, however, his parents, Beulah and Grover, were better at finding him than he was at hiding. From the time of their marriage in 1920 until Beulah inherited her parents’ little farm in 1948, they were tenant farmers, and Billy was always under some pressure to earn his keep. Needing to work, for a boy of sound faculties, naturally increases the attractiveness of not working, and Billy’s mind was perfectly sound.
His life would have been simple if he had been only lazy—or, as he himself might have said if he had thought to say it, only a lover of freedom. But along with the wish to avoid work, his mental development brought him also to the wish to be useful to his parents and to work well, especially if an adult dignity attached to the work. And so he was a two-minded boy.
And so he grew up into usefulness and a growing and lasting pride in being useful, but also into a more or less parallel love of adventure and a talent for shirking. Throughout his youth he remained, with approximate willingness, under the governance of his father, a man famously humorous and much smarter than he allowed his children to know. He managed Billy by demand, by challenge, and by pretending not to know what he knew he could not prevent.
If there were times when Grover kept Billy pretty steadily busy, there were also times when he did not. When Billy was not at work, he would be out of sight and free, as Grover expected and more or less intended. And so Billy got around. He hunted and fished and trapped mostly by himself, and with his friends he roamed about. There were few acres within a walk of his house that Billy had not put his foot on by the time he was twelve years old. His mind was free and alert in those days. He saw many things then that education and ambition would teach him to
