Many years later, as he faced the press conference, Roy Moore was to remember that distant afternoon when his father first took him to discover bivalves. It was a bright cold day in November, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of computers, it was the age of gropers, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, and it was the end times for the bible thumping fool Roy. "I wish I were an invisible man," he thought. Nonetheless, the spotlight shone, having no alternative, on this nothing new politician. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that crap, but I don't feel like going into it."
"This is the saddest dude I have ever heard," whispered a reporter.
Roy looked down at the plagiarized text and mindlessly read, " I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me."
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, the voters will decide," he read, "Some say I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, and a lover of clams. Not all of this is true. You have the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it's a different story, so not all of it is true."
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a clam, and it showed in his demeanor. His story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Another reporter whispered, "The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."
Roy continued reading, "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since, beware the clams. I heed that advice," he said as he recalled Daddy also saying, "But if you stray, you better not never tell nobody but God." He also thought, "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me."
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he looked straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull wearing a cowboy hat. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," he said. " Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have statutes of limitations."
Another reporter whispered, "Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common, I've come to learn, is clams."
They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army of voters stretched out on the hills, informed and ready.
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