At Noon the Bell Tolls

Scott Stavrou
5 min readAug 3, 2018

Literary lions debate Hemingway’s Undiscovered Short Story: The Fourth-Grade is Very Hard But So is Tetherball

Literary Scholars debate Hemingway’s first short story (Pic by Thought Catalog on Unsplash)

In the spring of that year, Mrs. Pilar’s Social Studies class was still going on. We did not much like to attend it but sometimes Social Studies is like war and attendance is mandatory whether you like it or not.

I was sitting in the back row so that I could see everything and also protect the rear flanks. It is not an easy thing to sit in the back row of a Social Studies class where you can look out the window and see the wind stirring the leaves and the green grass of the playground and the hard gray monkey-bars but still someone has to do it. By then I had learned that seating assignments were not always alphabetical. That’s just how it was in the fourth grade.

Outside I could see the tetherball stirring in the breeze, lightly banging against the pole. Like me, it had nowhere else to go. The tetherball, I thought, was much like myself in Social Studies class. It did not wish to be there but it was attached and could not escape. All of us were tied to something whether we wished for it to be that way or not. There was not much that you could do about it in the long year of the fourth-grade, not that I could see, anyway.

Sometimes when you are young that is the way of things. I imagined that it might also be like that when you are not young but in the fourth grade I did not know yet. There were still quite a few things I did not know then but not too many. I had a B+ in clear red marker at the top of my last pop quiz to prove it to anyone who did not believe. If you are lucky enough to get a B+ when you are young man, that is something that stays with you forever.

Robert Cohn sat in front of me in Social Studies. He had once been the tetherball champion of Oak Park Elementary’s Fourth Grade. Do not think I am much impressed by that as a title but it meant a lot to him.

“Cohn, tetherball challenge at lunch,” I said. He did not answer.

All I could hear was Mrs. Pilar in the front of the class talking about politics. If you sit in a Social Studies class long enough you learn that everything is politics. Whether you like it or not.

It was hard to look out the window at the playground when recess was so very far away so I looked at the bulletin board where there were pictures of zebras and wildebeest that made you think about Africa. The problem was that Africa was like lunchtime and recess. It was very far away and there was not a thing you could do about it no matter how hard you tried.

That’s when I heard a loud grumble that sounded something like I imagined artillery fire would sound. It was my stomach. I had gotten up very early that morning to work on a composition and had had to skip breakfast. It was not a thing I liked to do but English Compositions sometimes demand such sacrifices. I had written it alone in the very early morning of dawn’s first light and thought perhaps the composition would be better for that but you did not know until Mr. Perkins had read it. You just had to have faith that you had written the composition as good and true so that any fourth-grade English Composition teacher might believe it was truer than if it had even happened.

Mrs. Pilar was still talking politics and I hoped that she did not hear the noise of my stomach. Everything else was very quiet, even the pictures of the wildebeest and I could hear the slow ticking of the second hand on the clock behind her.

In just two minutes Social Studies class would be over. Not forever, but for this day, which was a Friday. Then it would be the time for lunch in the clean, well-lighted cafeteria. It was a good place and I liked to go there at lunch to kill the appetite I had worked up. It being Friday reminded me that it was the day for fish sticks and tater tots which was very good because it was something to look forward to and in Social Studies class on other days there was not always much to look forward to.

Young Hemingway Fishing for Sticks

The last minute was very long and seemed like it happened in slow motion like a punch-drunk fighter’s long and clumsy right cross but I spent it thinking about the sticks made out of fish from the lake named Michigan and the tots of taters that were probably made from the very good potatoes of Idaho.

Because it was spring and the Friday of fish I had decided that I would sit at the same round table in the cafeteria where Brett Ashley always ate her lunch.

When the bell tolled noon, I jumped out of my seat in the back row and walked fast out the door much like any hungry fourth-grader on Fish Stick Friday except maybe more so because that day I would sit and eat fish made into sticks and tater tots with Brett and maybe she and I would even share some ketchup and then everything would be fine.

It was very pretty to think so.

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Scott Stavrou
Scott Stavrou

Written by Scott Stavrou

Writer (Losing Venice, a novel) & Writing Coach | American abroad | PEN Hemingway Award | ScottStavrou.com | http://bit.ly/LosingVenice