Front Porch Vision

THE ANGEL AND THE SAILOR (217 pp.)-Calvin Kentfield-McGraw-Hill ($3.50).

A short story, like a baseball pitch, either goes over the plate or misses. Most of promising young (32) Author Kentfield's stories go right over the plate. But he is more to be praised for control than change of pace, for most of his tales travel the arc of boy-into-man.

The initiation rites begin in a small Mississippi River town in the '30s, with several of the stories pivoting around two youngsters named Jason and Ira Garrett. In Chip Canary, Jason tangles with the town queer woman, Elizabeth Minerva Stretch. She is a monstrous frump, always trundling a baby carriage full of junk and dubbed--for some shadowy peccadillo of the past--"Chip Canary." In a moment of adolescent bravado Jason yells out this taboo nickname, then breaks and runs. That night, snug in bed, Jason smiles as he hears his father say to his mother: "He's big enough, now, to take care of himself. Whatever he does it's his own fault."

In River Stay 'way from My Door, it is brother Ira's harum-scarum pal "V.R." who puts the town in a tizzy by seeming to drown in the Skunk River. Unlike Mark Twain, who allowed Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to attend their own funeral after a similar drowning escapade, Author Kentfield arranges a highly un-Twainlike denouement. Seems that V.R. had swum the river to scare one of the town tomgirls into granting him her favors. In a third story that brakes compassion just short of tears, Ira himself leaves his mother lonely and heartbroken by bolting for the great world beyond the Skunk and the Mississippi.

A second batch of stories which carry the baptism-by-life theme into young manhood are told by a nameless narrator who is serving as a seaman aboard tramp freighters. These show traces of the fogbound, soul-bedeviled yarns that Eugene O'Neill spun in his early one-acters. But what Iowa-born Author Kentfield brings to his best stories, beyond the knack for telling them well, is a front-porch vision of small-town life, talk, fears and dreams as authentic as the creak of the rocker that serves as the observation post.

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