Mutt Ploughman's 'Suicide Station', Part 1.

As alluded to in previous posts, I now present the first installment of a brand new serialized short story I am debuting on this blog, entitled 'Suicide Station'. I will post a new installment every 4-5 days; there are four sections in all. I hope you enjoy this dark ride, partially inspired by the work of Stephen King, partially inspired by a dream.


SUICIDE STATION
A Dark Tale

1. The Dead Ravine
Most of my dreams are abstract and bizarre, and when I wake they vanish quickly. But when I came awake into this one, the one I am still caught inside even as I write these words, everything was clear and tangible. It felt different from all others. The chill in the air. The sharp teeth of this graveyard wind. The aridity of the hard earth beneath me. The smell of dust and ash and metal. The spectral wake from a pestilential tide that had recently swept over this territory, and the hint of the final destruction soon to follow.

I woke up jolting with painful coughs. A dry, brittle hand seemed to reach inside my throat and scoop out the breath from my lungs. It felt like my ribcage had been battered silly by numerous other fits that had come before, but I didn’t remember them. All I knew is that I found myself hacking away before I was aware of anything else.

The first shock of many was what stood in for my bedclothes. I discovered that I had wrapped myself in a large sheath of mangled cardboard. It must have been an old refrigerator box. Gripped by the coughing that had pulled me out of whatever sleep I had managed, I attempted to sit upright, only to discover the makeshift sleeping bag enclosing me. It failed to cover my lower legs or to keep me warm. I kicked angrily in frustration until it broke apart. Part of the box skittered away in one of the occasional gusts of wind that reached where I lay. For a while the other piece of the stained, torn cardboard lingered nearby. One flap stuck up into the air with the inverted words THIS END UP and an arrow pointing down towards the dead land.

I sat up on the cold ground, still coughing. Panic washed through me. Dream? Where I had been when I fell asleep – in my own bedroom, lying next to my wife, with our two little children sleeping down the hall – was slipping out of my awareness, fading fast as if it had never existed, as though that life, 38 years in duration, had been little more than a prolonged mirage. For I was no longer in a bed, in a bedroom, in a house or in a suburb. Now I was seated on the banks of what must have once been a stream or a river, next to the skeleton of a long-dead tree, with high ground on all sides, as though the water that at one time had flowed through here had carved out a ravine.

There were no buildings visible anywhere, but I was on low ground. There were no other human beings or life forms of any kind. The air was cold and dry and my body was uncomfortably chilled, but not freezing. A gray light in the sky seemed to be brightening slowly. Dawn. I had absolutely no memory of coming to this place.

My lips opened, with the intention of calling out my wife’s name. It was a reflex; but when I started to do so, the name itself flew from my cognizance. I couldn’t remember it. With mounting concern, I determined to picture the house I lived in, or at least the room in which I had gone to sleep. But even as I remembered how these familiarities had appeared only a short time before, the mental images, just like the names, stole away from me. It felt as though I wasn’t actually dreaming at all but had instead been transported somehow, physically and mentally, to this other place. Yet even though I could not remember the images or the names, their absence did occupy a space in my mind, and the awareness of another place (another world?) recently vacated remained.

Hacking again and shuddering now, I surveyed myself from top to bottom and saw that I was wearing strange clothes: a gray, long-sleeved sweatshirt, stained and unwashed, with long drips of what looked like motor oil or blood or some other dark liquid streaking down the front; blue jeans that were worn at the knees and frayed at the ankles; a pair of running shoes, it looked like, that must have once been white with black trim but were now discolored into more of an ashen tone with clumps of mud and God knew what else clinging to the sides. These were not clothes that I recognized, but at least they fit my body.

Then a startling thought occurred to me and, lacking a mirror or any other kind of reflective surface, I began to pat my head with my hands and fingers to determine if I was even the same person physically. But here, at least, was no great shock – I still had the same face, the same goatee beard that now had strokes of gray, the same prematurely bald dome with the remaining hair cropped close to the skull. Evidently the physical injustices that I had been dealt in the other world had not been corrected on my passage into this one.

Although I was insufficiently rested, my limbs ached, and my dry throat rasped with pain, clearly I had to move to assess the full extent of my predicament. I struggled to my feet, beating sand and brittle twigs from my limbs. Because of the steep embankments, rising over the level of my head, I couldn’t see to the horizon in any direction, so my first order of business would be to climb out of this ravine and try to orient myself. Out of habit, I patted at my pockets, which I often do to make sure I have my car keys, wallet, cell phone, and whatever else I need to carry around in order to validate my existence. Or at least my former one. There was no cell phone or set of keys, but to my surprise, the back pocket of the jeans did contain my wallet. I pulled it out and began to rifle through the contents.

Never have I wished before that I was one of those men who carries around pictures of his family! The fact is that I have never done so. When I buy a new wallet I take out the plastic thing that holds photographs. It’s not that I don’t want to have images of my wife and daughters close at hand, but I never end up showing them – nobody asks anymore. And because of all the plastic cards and various forms of identification and ATM receipts that seem obligatory somehow, the wallet always ends up being too thick. Since there exists that unwritten law of the universe that says a man simply will not carry with him what cannot be stuffed in a pocket – the unacceptable alternative being some kind of manpurse – the solution was to reduce the contents of the wallet so it could be carried comfortably. Now, however, I needed some other reassurance that I was still who I thought I was.

I looked into the cash folder portion of my wallet and was startled to find several bills. I am not affluent. It is uncommon for me to carry much cash. But it looked like I had a pretty hefty amount stashed away here, for the bills were not singles. At least I seem to have come prepared in this respect, thought I. Then the oddness continued, causing me to revisit the question of whether I wasn’t simply dreaming all of this. It made sense, given the fact that I had money. But when I took hold of the bills with my fingers, I made the mistake of pulling them completely out of the leather fold to count them. As soon as the bills came clear of the wallet, they immediately turned into what looked like ashes, or at least gray dust – I didn’t get to inspect the remnants for very long, for the slight breeze carried the dust off and scattered it over the brittle ground. So much for preparation.

My next thought was reasonable; at least it would have been in the world I had recently vacated. Lacking cash, I thought, there was always plastic. Perhaps there was an ATM machine somewhere in this place. Even as I had the thought, however, the absurdity of it struck me almost like the slap you might visit upon someone who makes a fantastically inept suggestion in the midst of an extreme crisis. The kind of idea that is so obviously not helpful it actually makes the situation worse. Not here, you idiot, my mind told me. To reinforce the point, when I took out my VISA debit card, it looked just like my own, but the critical information on it, my name and the card number, appeared this way:

†‡•‰ € ­í¿•˛–ƒ
­­­ŁŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁ

Two other credit cards I owned had similar aspects: they looked like the ones I typically carried, but the identifying information was indecipherable. I did notice that the characters replacing the letters of my name varied from card to card, however, and never repeated themselves. Yet the characters replacing what should have been identifiable numerals were all the same, as if numerals didn’t exist any longer; this confirmed what I had always suspected as a student, that eventually numbers would not matter, but words and language always would.

The final stroke was when I removed my work identification/entrance key, a plastic card that was shaped just like every other one in the wallet but featured only a passport-style photograph of myself and the words of my name. Normally this allowed me unwelcome access to one of those office complexes, probably designed by Communist architects, where one chisels away at their own soul each day under the auspices of employment. But now the words were again replaced by cryptic characters, and perhaps the most startling, the photograph was altered. It had the same nondescript background that I recalled from the day I stood for it, and it even seemed to accurately represent my shoulders, neck, and the shape of my head. But where my face should have been was a blank. Not as though that part of the image had been cut away – I mean a blank oval, the color of my own skin.

Only at this point did I begin to feel fear. Perhaps less fear than simple panic. What the hell was going on here? Where was I? Who was I? was the next question, but I didn’t allow myself to even consider it. I was not yet prepared to concede the nullification of my existence. After all, moments ago I had touched my own face and been lucky enough to find it there. Now I did so again, with the same result. That was fortunate, but I was shaken. The accumulating questions were now weighing heavily on the thin suspension bridge formed by my reason and sense of calm. If it gave way there was only the abyss beneath.

Suddenly, I remembered about one last item in my wallet that might provide reassurance. Something that to me suddenly seemed of grave importance. I mentioned before that I did not carry photographs in my wallet, but there is one exception. In the last slot where one normally keeps credit cards, their driver’s license, etc., I had tucked away a single photograph that had been in my possession since I was five years old. I looked in the wallet again, and fortunately, it was there.

It was a neat square, not large, and was old enough to have been developed on film stock that had a thin white border around all four sides with the date printed on each. The date on this image was May 1971. The photo itself was of me, as a baby of 7 months old, sitting up next to a couch, looking at the camera with a befuddled expression on my face, which for an unknown reason was not blanked out in the picture. In my meaty little hands I was clutching a long black block, rectangular in shape, almost like a column. I never found this picture very cute or interesting, but the reason I kept it was not for the image of me. It was for a mere fraction of the person in the background.

To my right side in the picture, the left side for the viewer, was the lower half of a pair of female legs, one crossed over the other in a formal manner. On the feet were brown shoes with a half-inch heel, and over the knee, which was just barely in view, was the hem of a dark green skirt. Those legs belonged to my mother, and they were the only picture I still owned of her, or even a little of her. She was killed two weeks after that photograph was taken, on a business trip, in a wrecked taxicab. This was one of the few items left for me that could evoke even the slightest, most fleeting memory of this woman, whose absence from the rest of my life had always felt to me like a cruel injustice.

Looking at the photograph always gave me an unwelcome jolt to the heart because of what I have just described. I swallowed this back, however, for the photograph had only one purpose in this particular instance, and it was not sentimental. It confirmed for me that I was still myself, which under the circumstances was no small thing. That left only one thing for me to do.

I had to get out of the ravine and examine the world I was trapped inside.

A Towering Feat of the Imagination

Some palaver on reaching the halfway point in Stephen King’s Dark Tower epic.

I wrote a post a few months (see August archives) back about having crossed the halfway point in reading J.K. Rowling’s behemoth ‘Harry Potter’ series after I had completed the fourth book. It seems fitting, now that I have crossed the same threshold in Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga – I am just completing the fourth novel of seven, Wizard & Glass – to reflect on this series also, and perhaps jot down some thoughts on the long way towards an ambition I have to one day write an essay which examines one epic story in light of the other and vice-versa. If it was only about sales, Rowling would win hands down: her series has sold more copies than any other in publishing history. Of course, Stephen King is not exactly unfamiliar with strong book sales. His novels have been flying off the shelves for far longer than Rowling’s have.

When you introduce Stephen King into a discussion about literature, there will always be plenty of detractors who say he should not be a part of the conversation. It’s a well-known story that on the very night he was presented with the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, a controversial decision, the winner of that year’s National Book Award in Fiction, Shirley Hazzard, decried his selection. Critic Harold Bloom described him at the time as being the author of ‘penny dreadfuls’. And so forth. King has had literary critics his entire career. It has never slowed down his ability to write stories people around the world loved to read. And on that night, King commented on all the hoopla with humility: ‘I've tried to improve myself with every book and find the truth inside the lie. Sometimes I have succeeded.’

Literary critics have plenty of legs to stand on when they critique King’s writing. He’s a sloppy, overbearing and sometimes sophomoric prose writer; his stories are riddled with gratuitous gore and sex, even for someone who specializes in the horror genre; his characters are frequently cartoonish and unintentionally ridiculous; and, in addition to all that, he can display an unpalatable poor taste in his stories and in his use of language. All of these things are on typical display in the Dark Tower series and certainly in the fourth novel, Wizard & Glass. How can a writer who relies on these techniques really command the attention of serious literary minds for very long?

It’s tough to say definitively, but one can go a long way towards imagining how that could be when you consider the simple fact – and I think this probably is a fact – that in 100 years, almost every prominent ‘literary’ novelist of our time will be remembered only with difficulty, but we will almost certainly still be reading and talking about Stephen King books. Just think about that for a moment, and maybe we have part of our answer.

While we are contemplating this, let’s turn our eyes towards the Dark Tower, shall we? Here we have an epic fantasy series for which the creator clearly has long-term, perhaps career-defining ambitions. King obviously regards this series as his magnum opus, and why not? It’s certainly no worse than any of his other accomplishments, and in terms of sheer imagination, it rivals his very best work. Is this saying much? Perhaps, perhaps not.

We must remember that a lot of people find it amazing that J.K Rowling came up with the idea for Harry Potter in a train in 1990, and it took until 2007 for her to realize the massive breadth of her intentions. But that’s child’s play, time-wise, compared to King’s achievement with the Dark Tower series. He came up with his idea in 1970, and at the time he was totally unknown and so down on his luck that he didn’t even have the resources to take his own ambitions on. As Wikipedia has it, he shelved the idea, and took a second job pumping gas at $1.25 an hour to make ends meet instead, all the while penning nutty horror stories to try to make a few bucks here an there to pay bills. And it’s not like he didn’t have responsibilities to live up to: he was already married with two little children, and making $6,600 a year as a high school English teacher. It took King not seventeen but thirty-five years to complete his opus. If nothing else that is a testament to the man’s endurance and tenacity of vision. He would not let his story go unwritten, and he also felt a great obligation to his readers, who craved resolution. I find that kind of follow-through admirable.

In the most cursory analysis, however, this series lags behind the Harry Potter epic in many areas, not just sales. Rowling’s story is more elegantly written, more appealing to a larger body of people (wiping out the lines between ‘adult’ and ‘children’s’ literature), and far more carefully plotted. Even though her story is long, the corners fight tightly together, the lines are worn smooth, and the end result is polished and structurally secure – at least, so far. King’s epic is almost the complete opposite. It’s bulky, unruly and sometimes so unencumbered, you wonder if you’re really reading a draft that slipped through the editing cycle. Though it took much more time, it’s far less polished. One can argue that this shouldn’t be the case. King may not be as skilled at plotting a long story as Rowling clearly is, but he at least could have cleaned up the shoddy language and cut back the obviously overgrown thickets during his pruning process. That he didn’t raises questions about his literary judgment, even after all this time on the job, and also about his publishers’ desire for money, for they seem to believe that the public will consume just about anything King writes, and will shirk on editing and revision just to get the product out to consumers. You can’t kill the publishers for that, however – they’re correct about it, for one thing. But you can criticize King for not being more meticulous about his craft. Not that this has ever been his way.

With all that seems to favor Rowling’s series, why is King’s even in contention with it, at least for this reader? The answer to this question is seated upon a questionable foundation: that there is something to be said for tenaciousness and imaginative power even in the face of shaky literary quality. That having the steadfastness to finish a race can stand up to the accomplishment of running a better race. One result may be superior, but which is the more formidable achievement? Do the spoils always go to the victor? (If so, it would be hard to explain the enduring popularity of the film Rocky. It’s not the acting.) It’s a good question.

King’s story is inspired by a 19th century English poem by Robert Browning called ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. The story goes that in 1970 he thought up the first line of the entire series and wrote it down: ‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ The fact that the entire saga springs forth from that image of the tower and that single sentence is to me fairly astounding. But it would be a number of years before the first novel, The Gunslinger, would appear, originally in 1982. That first installment tells the story of the pursuit hinted at in the opening sentence, and introduces Roland Deschain, the saga’s protagonist. He is the last gunslinger, a kind of half-bounty hunter, half-Sergio Leone-style cowboy, and evidently there are no more to follow in a desolate world that is of a parallel existence to our own. (This is only one of a few ideas I fully admit I am more or less stealing for my short story ‘Suicide Station’.) In the opening segment of this first novel, when Roland obliterates an entire town with a pair of guns, we get a sense of both the fantastical, over-the-top aspects that this whole saga shamelessly embraces, and the distant, forlorn nature of the protagonist himself. He can sling his guns all right, and evidently he’s okay doing it whenever he feels it’s needed. We are treated with only a glimpse of his main obsession, which is to find and reach the Dark Tower.

The entire series is a quest epic, and the tower is its center and its object, although the nature of the tower – what it is, what it precisely does – is shrouded in mystery throughout much of the story. King holds these ideas close to the vest, and it’s very hard to determine whether it’s because he intends for the reader to stay in the ‘dark’ for most of the journey, or if it’s more because he himself didn’t know exactly what the tower was. It’s probably something of both. Not knowing what the outcome of a story will be even as one writes it is nothing new, writers do this all the time. Giving the distinct impression that you aren’t aware of the story while you are writing it is something different. King barely straddles this line. I have had the distinct impression throughout the first four books that he was only vaguely aware of where it was all going, and was counting on his story-telling power and sheer verve to bring him through to the right conclusion. Whether this was the case or not, of course, only King would be able to say.

The bad news about writing the story this way is that it can meander and stray all over the place, and in many of the novels this is exactly what it seems to do. Wizard & Glass in particular, in my view, is largely hobbled with this malady. But at the same time there is an upside to letting one’s story-telling instinct take its course and not getting in its way. It unleashes the undiluted power of the imagination, and it can make for some wild twists and turns. If you plot your story too much it can seem well-hewn and gracefully constructed, like Rowling’s great wizarding tale, but it can also seem conventional and constricted by the same old rules. Stephen King, in this story and probably most others, cares nothing for the rules. I think the result, even among some of the shoddiness and the frivolity that sometimes infuses the narrative a little too much, allows for the emergence of some of his most interesting ideas. Ideas like a huge tower holding together all existence and a series of spoke-like beams hidden in the earth, leading to that center. An abandoned city with a monorail train with a mind of it’s own that happens to have gone insane. A mysterious mutant-figure named the Tick-Tock man. A group of glass balls, each a different color and hidden throughout King’s Mid-World (inspired by Tolkien) in various places, each with a soothsaying purpose, called the Wizard’s Rainbow. The concept of ka, a term which vaguely means ‘destiny’, which guides and binds together the inhabitants of Mid-World, much like the idea of The Force in George Lucas’ universe.

Letting his imagination run amok has also allowed King to introduce another interesting element to the saga, one that J.K. Rowling could never have equaled. In the creation of Mid-World and the quest for the tower, initially conceived before he had any readers or name recognition, King realized he had come up with a universe of his own into which he could tie in every last filament of his own forthcoming body of work. He created a patch of ground on which he could tell his stories his way, and he planted his literary flag there. This means that even as he went on to write all the various other novels and the hundreds of stories he would produce, in one sense it was all done in a context of his own creation. The King universe, for better or worse, was also all built around the Dark Tower. What this meant was that as he wrote each installment of the saga between the years of 1970 and 2004 he was able to weave in characters and settings and storylines from his other books. This is why one of King’s greatest villainous creations, Randall Flagg, best known for being the primary face of evil in his novel The Stand, can also be found in the Dark Tower universe. Another mysterious and dangerous creature called The Crimson King, which was featured in the novel Insomnia, is alluded to throughout the first four Dark Tower books. And Father Callahan, who was a pivotal figure in one of King’s best early novels, ‘Salem’s Lot, makes a prominent appearance in later volumes of the series.

I think these things are the qualities which combined make the strongest case for King’s saga. I am by no means declaring the Dark Tower series the winner. I found the novel Wizard & Glass to be a somewhat missed opportunity. It tells a very long back story, a romance, which explains something of how Roland got to be the way he is, but it takes up 80% of this critical fourth novel, and it moves incredibly slowly. The final portions of the novel are explosive, literally, but King’s penchant for too much exposition and hard-headed insistence on telling every last detail of every move of the characters in the flashback derails the pacing considerably, almost fatally. I can see many a reader getting too bogged down in Wizard & Glass to bother continuing. Yet by the time you reach the end you do know a good deal more about Roland and enough clues have been dropped in relation to the exhausting and bloody journey still ahead that the persistent reader will be compelled to venture further, if only to determine what the Dark Tower is, and what it really wants from Roland, or possibly from all of us.

These thoughts to be continued down the road, after I am able to finish reading all seven books of both of these remarkable storytelling accomplishments.

Duke's Quick Hitz

Hey hey, here comes a relative stranger to these pages... all I can say, people, is it ain't for lack of tryin'. I'm constantly thinking of musings or ideas I'd like to share on this blog, but finding the time is a whole other ballgame. At any rate, I'm back to offer some thoughts on subjects various and sundry...

• Mutt's upcoming 'Suicide Station' - This should be an interesting set of posts from Mutt. Serialized fiction has in recent years, of course, gone the way of the dodo, but I've heard more than one author speculate on how the internet and social media applications could provide a way to resurrect the practice. The Secret Thread is proud, then, to lead the way in this effort... and best of all, I can take some credit for that even though I am doing absolutely NONE of the real work!
  
  Seriously though, I hope everyone comes back and checks out Mutt's new story when he starts posting it. He did this (as mentioned in his post) way back in 2005 and I remember that being an interesting tale (go back and read it here)... it's a good way for Mutt to try out some new ideas and flex his fictional muscles, so to speak. Plus, he and I have been musing lately about genre fiction and horror tales in general, so I for one will be looking forward to checking out how these conversations might inform this latest effort of his. I know that doesn't help anyone else who comes here to read it, but hey, it filled up some column inches...
  


• An ancient travelogue - As the left column indicates, I've been making my (very slow) way through Herodotus' Histories over the last several weeks, and I must say it is pretty fascinating stuff. It's like going back in time, finding an old and grizzled traveler who's been all over the ancient world, getting a camp fire going and just letting him regale you with tales of what he's seen. What's really interesting to me is the objective tone he tries to take throughout - he says a lot of "well, this tribe believes in this, and these people think this is the best method for building a temple... but that's not necessarily my opinion." It's like he made a conscious effort at "fair and balanced" reporting from his own experiences... Herodotus is known as "the father of history," but in some ways his work could be regarded as the original investigative journalism piece as well. Anyway, for anyone willing to put in the effort, this is about as close as you can get towards getting an idea of what people actually thought and believed a long, long time ago, centuries before the birth of Christ.
  


• Welcome to the jungle - For some reason the concept of packing up and heading out into the untamed jungle to build a new utopia has been coming up a lot in what I've been reading, listening to and watching lately. I recently checked out a film from the 80's I've been meaning to catch up with for years, Peter Weir's fascinating adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast (featuring a solid, under-appreciated performance by Harrison Ford in the prime of his acting career). Then Mutt shared with me a song from folk artist Kate Campbell about Henry Ford's wacky scheme to build a utopian village in South America where he could grow unlimited rubber trees to produce material for his tires... it didn't work out needless to say, but apparently the ruins of it are still there if anyone wants to go and find them. I've also been watching the first season of the TV show Lost, a rarity for me (I don't usually get into TV), which is obviously about starting over in the jungle, although in this case obviously unplanned. This latter show was more or less forced upon me by my work colleagues, but seeing as I value their opinions I thought I would give it a try... and so far it's been pretty gripping and well-done, especially for a TV show.
  
  It just got me thinking that the "starting over in the jungle" thing has become quite the literary/cinematic sub-genre unto itself... obviously the idea of Utopia has been around since More and was enhanced by Rousseau, but when you think about it there are all kinds of fascinating stories and films that take this idea and run with it... and I realize some of them are among the more interesting that I've read/seen. Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now, Aguirre: The Wrath of God & Fitzcarraldo from the great Werner Herzog, and I know there are many others I can't think of right now. At any rate it seems a lot of people missed or don't remember The Mosquito Coast, which is a shame because it shows a different side of Ford we haven't seen much of before or (certainly) since. You may want to check it out.
  


• "Read in order to live" - That great quote is from Flaubert, but I was reminded of it recently when I went back and listened to an interview that the esteemed young British novelist Zadie Smith did with Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt back in 2007. In it Smith offers some fascinating and insightful comments about the necessity to read "not just for entertainment, but in order to learn how to become human." She impressively took the concept all the way back to Aristotle, who spoke about ingesting art as "a training of the emotions" and described it as a different type of learning, one outside the realm of the logical, i.e. math or science. Her point, which I find profoundly important and relevant for out time, is that not only do se seem to have given up teaching our children the moral and even spiritual importance of reading, but we seem to have completely forgotten the entire point of the thing in the first place. Maybe Robert Jenson was right - maybe the world really has "lost its story."
  
  At any rate, Smith has all kinds of interesting things to say in this wide-ranging interview, including some provacative comments about "the search for identity" in fiction, and how she thinks that conept is just something for critics to talk about and not the concern of a writer who cares about his/her characters. It's a great conversation, and I highly recommend anyone interested in matters literary to check it out.

All for now... maybe I will check in with some more "quick hitz" in another post down the road.

Caution: Dark Turn Ahead

Introducing Mutt Ploughman’s second serialized short story, coming soon

For only the second time, Mutt Ploughman will be presenting a serialized short story exclusively to Secret Thread readers in the coming weeks. This is a return to an experiment I tried once over three years ago, in September 2005, right on this blog, with the serialization of my short story “Start Something”. That tale’s conclusion was a little on the dark side, but overall the story was not intended to be bleak: it was about a man trying to locate his creative voice, and the false limitations we sometimes put on ourselves in attempting to discover our true calling. The problem for the protagonist was that he made his discoveries too late, and became victim of a random act of meaningless violence.

Dark as that seems, that’s nothing compared to the new story, which I can honestly say is my first-ever Gothic tale in nearly 19 years of writing creatively. I have never written a flat-out horror story in my life, and while I’m not sure this one qualifies, it is intended to be a dark tale, as its subtitle will suggest. The story is called “Suicide Station”, and will consist (hopefully, subject to change) of four sections, the first of which, “The Dead Ravine”, will hopefully be posted here in about three or four weeks, give or take. Before the end of the year, anyway.

(Is something going on here with the letter ‘s’?? After all, my second serialized short story, a series that started, appropriately, with “Start Something”, is followed by “Suicide Station”. What in blazes is going on here????)

Anyway, here is a brief teaser:

In “Suicide Station”, a man lays down to sleep next to his wife in his suburban home, but wakes up alone, wrapped in a cardboard box, lying on cracked, brittle ground in a world of unimaginable desolation. Surely he has dreamed up this terrifying place. But what if the place itself has dreamed him – and everything and everyone he has known? What if the ‘real’ world is cataclysmically different from our own, where the destruction we all fear has been in progress for centuries, where synthetic “gods”roam the empty landscape hunting for any remaining human survivors, and where only four “waystations”exist to transport the ones still alive from the reality back into the dream? The man locates one of these survivors – a woman who tried to save her son many years agofrom what was coming – and who needs his help to find him again. Together, they move towards a huge black obelisk across an arid landscape, where their fate awates.

A haiku

To My Brother on His 38th Birthday
a haiku

generous gesture:
when my twin held the door wide
on my way in here.

Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 49

The Mind Wanders

The writing of my fledgling novel has been pretty difficult in recent weeks. Well, actually, by “pretty difficult” what I mean to say is “nonexistent”. I suppose this edition of the ‘Journal’ will amount to an update on why I haven’t made much progress. I’d better turn things around. If for no other reason, it would be a travesty to arrive at the milestone 50th entry of my space-stealing “Journal of a ‘Novel’” and not be writing the thing at the moment when I reach it.

I get pretty streaky sometimes with this long work of fiction, which is not very conducive to getting the thing done, but it has been a consistent problem. At least I can say, and this is usually the case even when I get in ruts in writing this novel, that I continue to write something even when I do get blocked. One thing I stalwartly refuse to do is go long periods without writing anything. Thus, I have been working on a few other side projects. For several weeks now I have been gathering up notes to attempt a nonfiction essay about the work of novelist Paul Auster, and indeed I recently read four of his novels in the same month – unprecedented for me since I started reading seriously around 1988 or so. I have started to write the piece a couple times, but I am having trouble finding the correct ‘angle’ I want to take. That’s pretty normal. Hopefully I will find the right point of entry here soon and head into it. It’s not that I want to keep procrastinating on the fiction, but I have put a lot of thought and reading into the idea of writing about Auster’s work – which I have read for years – and I want to take it seriously if the muse is calling me to write this piece.

Otherwise, I have recently written two essays, one called ‘Problem Child’ (posted below) which was a humorous (hopefully) look at my years in the ‘metal militia’. Part of the inspiration for this piece was reconnecting with an old high school pal with whom I played in a metal band called Mere Illusion (I want it on the record that I was not in the band when that name was selected; even back then I didn’t much like it. ‘Grand’ Illusion would have been better.) more than 20 years ago. We had one on-stage performance, at the Governor Livingston Regional High School ‘Battle of the Bands’ in Spring 1988. After I started working on the piece, this guy actually turned up an audio casette recording somebody had made on the night we performed, and mailed me a copy. There were six songs in all, all metal songs from the 80s, and I was both the bass player and the lead singer of the band. We performed in front of about 300 people. It was honestly one of the most surreal listening experiences I have ever had to listen to myself playing and singing heavy metal over 20 years ago. Like I said, the essay was more or less written before I heard the tape, but the tape certainly helped firmly root me back into that time, and it helped round the thing out. It is weird the way things happen serendipitously sometimes.

Finally, most recently I have written a new essay called ‘The Soldier, the Spirit, and the Bride’ which is nothing at all like the last one I wrote, thankfully! I think I successfully got the metal out of my veins (only for now, it never really leaves, once a junkie you remain on the hook….). This essay was precipitated by a very different motive: my mom had found a clipping for a writing contest being sponsored by Central PA magazine (who knew?) that advertised an annual writing competition, and she sent it to me, suggesting that I should write something for it. Normally, I wouldn’t do that. Most of the time, I can’t write because I want to get something, or because someone invites me to do so. (If someone approaches me from Newsweek tomorrow and asks for an essay, I’d probably change that tune.) The topic and the motivation has to come from a more mysterious place within; you get grabbed by a subject and a sudden burst of energy to write on it, and it usually isn’t clear until later why you wanted to write about that topic in the first place.

On the other hand, though, sometimes you see something like this, and take it as a challenge: what would I write if I had to enter the contest? Could I come up with something? What do I have to say about anything related to central Pennsylvania???? The answer at first was: not too much! I couldn’t think of anything and I sort of dismissed it. But then one day an idea popped into my head, and I realized it was something that had been buried back in there for a while (13 years, to be precise). So I accepted the innate challenge that my mom had made when she first sent me the clipping, and just started writing. And I got an essay out of it that I am pretty pleased about. I will enter it into the contest; whether it wins anything is another story. I am sure the odds are long, but it will be out of my hands. Maybe someone will love it; more than likely, I’ll get a note saying which essays did win. But no matter. It’s not the competition or the prize money (modest); it’s the idea of challenging myself to write under certain limitations. I’m not posting the essay here though; the rules are pretty strict about the essay not appearing in print anywhere first, and who knows who could find it even on a blog. Wouldn’t want to be disqualified on those grounds.

Some day I am also going to write an ambitious piece which sets out to compare Stephen King’s 7-book Dark Tower series (note ‘What We’re Reading’ section on the left) to J.K. Rowling’s 7-book Harry Potter series. I want to compare and contrast these two massive works of the imagination to see which is superior and why. So far I think Rowling’s series leads the race (I am through book IV in her series too), but both efforts have some discernable merits over the other, for vastly different reasons. In general, at least so far, Rowling’s series is far more intricately plotted and elegantly composed than King’s is. It’s kind of like you might expect from a big work from a British imagination versus a big work from an American imagination. It’s like a large, endless castle banquet vs. a Super-Sized Value Meal at McDonald’s. Both are excessive, but one is a bit more refined. That’s not to knock Stephen King too much, however. He plays much more fast and loose with the rules than Rowling does; relies far less on conventional themes and well-known mythological devices; his long suit has always been his fearlessness and his lack of attention to what ‘critics’ think. Rowling is a superb plotter, she does everything meticulously and carefully and is fully in command of her own world of Hogwarts; King shoots from the hip, lets his imagination run totally wild across his barren landscape, sometimes to the point of outright sloppiness, but his compelling voice and assurant hand knows you will keep going. It dares you not to.

So there you have it: this post is about everything but the job at hand, my Indiana novel. It is on the back-burner. But I’ve come far enough to know it will be back. After I get some of these ideas out of me, I will take it on again. I think the day is probably coming pretty quickly though when I am going to have to clamp down. The question will become, are you going to get this story done or not? If you’re not, shelve it now and get on with whatever else you plan to write. But if you think you are, then let’s knuckle down to the job at hand. It is hard to have the impulse to write about many things; both a blessing a curse. I am glad I have ideas, but I think I require more literary discpline if I want to write novels, something I have aspired to do for nearly 20 years (and still no novel). I’m not getting any younger. Time waits for no man.

Duke Altum's POTM #65

I was not familiar with this poet (Jonathan Holden), but this poem about the mystery and awe surrounding a father through the eyes of a son really struck me... the father/son relationship (as I was just discussing with a sibling of mine recently) is nothing if not complex, and I could relate to this poet's not being entirely sure where he stood at times with his old man... the fact that my own old man was a quiet, thoughtful, logical, 'half-German' scientist too (though not really a handyman) probably helps in that regard... anyway, it's a great example of how a poem can be universal, despite the very personal and specific subject matter that informs it. Pretty sobering last two lines!!

*******

The Scientist

Other fathers might cuss out a lawnmower
that wouldn't catch. Or kick the car.
Mine would simply stop. A physicist, he'd stop
and think awhile, his breath wheezing
through his nose-hiss and hiss, mechanical
until, abruptly, a solution clicked.
Then, step by step, arranging parts
in the sequence they'd come loose,
he'd direct at our lawnmower a logic
even that sullen machine could not refute.
Then, just as systematically, refit
each wrench upon its pegboard silhouette,
re-index every drill bit, every nail—
this small, half-German intellectual
who, although he'd own no gun himself,
let me wear twin Lone Ranger cap pistols
on each hip. You couldn't tell
just what he thought of you. Had he hated
us, he wouldn't have shown it. When,
in that reasoning, mildly troubled tone
of his that meant he might
be disappointed in his son, he once explained,
In war, people hurt with tools,
I shuddered. You couldn't imagine what
he might invent. He was a patient man.

Problem Child

A Veteran of the Metal Milita Reflects on his Service
Online exclusive essay by Mutt Ploughman, with tongue firmly in cheek.

I was recrüeted into service in the metal militia at age thirteen. The 1983 album Shout at the Devil by Mötley Crüe was responsible. The idea of screaming back at Satan for all the appalling pain he had inflicted on my heavily burdened existence – living as I was under significant duress in upper-middle class suburban New Jersey – appealed to me in an almost Paleolithic way. When I heard that sinister narration by a voice identified as ‘Allister Fiend’ on ‘In the Beginning’, the album’s biblically-flavored prologue, urge me to ‘be strong, and shout at the Devil’, I considered that an oath of service. I took up my bludgeon and strode willfully onto the warpath.

Of course, none of this sat very well with the outgoing chain of command: my parents. Infatuation with a heavy metal band whose records included such transparent offerings as ‘Too Fast For Love’, ‘Bastard’, and the impossible-to-justify ‘God Bless the Children of the Beast’, and whose drum kits and merchandise were plastered with Satanic-looking pentagrams, wasn’t exactly smiled upon in our Roman Catholic household. It was pointed out to me that I was, technically, still an altar boy at our parish. You see the contradictory impression created by your church activities in combination with your burgeoning musical interests, the Authorities said. I do, I conceded, but let me remind you, as merely one example of the pitfalls associated with jumping to conclusions, that the Mötley Crüe record is called Shout at the Devil? The Devil is bad, correct? No harm done! One preposition was the bedrock of my defense.

I attempted to enlist in the Crüe’s ‘Safety in Numbers’, or ‘S.I.N’, Fan Club, the instructions on how to do so being helpfully provided on the album sleeve. But I could not come up with the dues, and even if I could have, I was unable to subvert the in-house financial system in order to deliver the money. There was simply no way my parents would allow me to forfeit my wages, hard-earned in slave labor on a paper route, to join something called the ‘S.I.N. Club’.

No matter, for by then mentally, ideologically, and perhaps even theologically, I had already joined the militia, and I felt the camaraderie with my brothers in arms. I had discovered the place where I fit in. I stepped into that mystic land where the drums were always pounding, the battle was never over, the blood flowed all the time and the screams were unceasing.

Ok, so there were a few obstacles impeding my advancement through the ranks. I was only thirteen, after all. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t buy my own records, let alone an improved wardrobe full of spandex and studded leather. I didn’t even try to grow my hair long – a major problem, for in metal the correct appearance made up for most lapses in substance and talent. But it was something I could have never gotten away with in my parents’ house.

I didn’t have much of a physical form, either. So I wasn’t breaking any heads, let alone getting any girls, and what I would have attempted to do with those girls if I ever got them is best left to the annals of bad YA novels about under-developed losers. Ironically enough, these were the same kinds of books I was being assigned to read at the time, preposterous tree-defilers like The Chocolate War and Bless the Beasts and Children that I am sure would have proved my point had I read them.

In the beginning, then, I did the best I could. I studied the music and, most importantly, learned the words. I had my friends whose parents were less formidable adversaries than my own make Maxell tape copies of their records, which I would smuggle into our house in book bags. Yes, Mom, lots of homework today, let me just lug this thing upstairs so there is no possibility of my forgetting to set to it.

Occasionally, because of the paper route and other degrading jobs like cutting wealthier people’s grass, I would scrape together a little cash of my own. This would prompt me to embark on patrols, usually on foot, to a record shop to buy an LP or cassette. Then I would try to transport the goods across lines without being captured by the Authorities or compromised by my older brother, who was above heavy metal, but took pleasure in ratting out my twin brother and me. It was all hazardous stuff, and I thrived on the danger. Metal had never been for the weak-hearted, and it wasn’t going to start being that way under my watch.

I remember the day I commanded a ten-speed individual combat transport about eight or ten miles to a Pathmark supermarket, in the intermittent rain, just to purchase an LP copy of Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance. I can still see the $5.99 price tag in my mind’s eye. That record’s title boiled my entire mental state to three words. The fact that singer Rob Halford literally screamed through most of the title song lent much credibility to the enterprise. He sounded the way I felt.

A title like that could not possibly be figurative. If there was anything I was not interested in in those early years of service, it was nuance. The warriors I longed to follow in battle would take the fight straight to the enemy. Judas Priest delivered exactly what I was looking for.

Over the first two or three years of my tour it became harder and harder to beat the security system in the suburban gulag where I was imprisoned. My parents caught on quick and drew in the lines. Meanwhile, simultaneously, the albums themselves took greater pains to offend. Kill ‘Em All. Invasion of Your Privacy. Lick It Up. Orgasmatron. Spreading the Disease. Stay Hard. Innocence Is No Excuse. The Number of the Beast. Ad infinitum. On one album alone, Accept’s Metal Heart, included the following songs, any one of which would have prompted summary execution of my entire record cache: ‘Dogs on Leads’, ‘Too High To Get It Right’, ‘Wrong Is Right’, ‘Bound To Fail’, and ‘Screaming For A Love Bite’.

The pinnacle of my smuggling operation may have been the time I hitched a ride to a mall in Livingston, New Jersey, purchased a record called See You In Hell by Grim Reaper, and managed to get it inside enemy lines and on to our crappy turntable in the basement. If my parents had ever managed to find it, they might have declared with confidence that I would see whoever was responsible for that album there if I did not make a decision to change my ways.

At about age 16, though, I became caught in a rut. Listening to the records, drawing the bands’ logos on my grocery-bag textbook covers, and scrounging the occasional tour t-shirt out of life was not going to cut it anymore. I was being called to a higher level of service. As the reader has no doubt discovered for themselves, your humble scribe was in possession of reserves of talent. Since no one seemed to be summoning me to the front, inexcusably, I had to initiate my own offensive offensive. But in what form, and how would I sustain it?

Then, in a spectacular communications breakdown, the sort on which great conflicts hinge, my mother bought me a used bass guitar for Christmas against my father’s wishes. This was explicit evidence of dissention within the enemy ranks, for I knew my father would never have signed off on the procurement order. I expressed genuine gratitude whilst resolving to make both of them pay dearly for this snafu. In my mind I immediately began drawing up a list of potential band mates. I had never played the bass for one second in my entire life, but no problem, I would learn.

My brother and I had a long history of making up fictional bands and albums on our own, perhaps in anticipation of a greater destiny. In eighth grade we created a fake band called Hooded Lizard (names that failed to make the cut were ‘Blood Monkey’ and ‘Brain Damage’); it was for them that he one day conceived and even drew up cover art for a debut album, Maul. Maul’s first single, ‘The Sun Don’t Shine On Those Who Rock’, would have taken its proper position alongside such hard rock classics as ‘For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)’ and ‘Rock And Roll All Night’, had it merely had the benefit of not being imaginary.

Then I took the whole thing one step further. I began penning my own lyrics to match explosive musical arrangements that were detonating perpetually inside my skull. It was around this time that I produced my signature teenage manifesto, a paean to my own lofty aspirations. The song was called ‘Problem Child’. Before you say it, this was well before that ridiculous C-movie with the guy from ‘Three’s Company’; that didn’t come out until 1990. Anyway, here’s a sample:

Problem child, bad attitude
They say you’re loud and rude
They’re takin’ what you never had
It makes you pretty mad!

Get back, look out
I’m a problem child
Nowhere to run from the grip
Of a problem child

Before long, my twin brother was singing lead vocals, since he didn’t play an instrument, and I was the bassist for our first band, Igniter. We found a guitarist named Andy, who was genuinely talented, and convinced a drummer friend of ours, Dave, to not only join our band, but to strong-arm his parents into letting us use their basement as a rehearsal studio/headquarters. His drum kit was already set up there anyway. The sonic assault must have been unbearable; I don’t know how his folks held out for as long as they did. They must have been dug in pretty well.

Later we changed the name to Outrage. What was the difference? All we knew was that we couldn’t call ourselves Cutthroat, because that was the name of a rival band at our high school.

We began with covers, like any band. I remember playing Priest’s ‘Living After Midnight’ and Metallica’s ‘Seek And Destroy’ over and over again. But all of us knew what we eventually had to do. The first original song we wrote and performed was ‘Problem Child’. After that, we opened every single rehearsal with it. It is impossible for me to ever forget the guitar riff or the bass line. Like all soldiers, we broke the job down into small parts and repeated them until we could play the whole song without the hindrance of cognition. ‘Problem Child’ was our Pledge of Allegiance, our Preamble, and our Bill of Rights. My brother dug deep on that song, for it was required; he belted out the final ‘I’m a problem chiiiiiiiiiild!!!’ in a high note that none of us knew he was capable of hitting. Such is the power of rock.

As frontman, it was obvious that my brother had to write his own song, make his own statement. A leader must be willing to take the point. He responded with nothing short of prophecy, predicting at least three future global events in the apocalyptic ‘Hysteria Forever’:

That one fleeting moment
That one reaction
Is going to become this night’s main attraction
Everyone is jumpin’, not knowin’ what to do
It’s a whirlwind of lunacy
It’s comin’ straight for you

No one knows what to say
No one knows what to do
When the hammer falls
They’ll come to kill us all

Hysteria!
Hysteria forever!
Hysteria!
Hysteria forevermore!

As you can see, he was coming on strong for the cause. With those take-no-prisoners lyrics, the riffin’ possibilities were legion.

The band steadily grew in muscle, proficiency, and facial hair. Our practices extended for hours. My third-hand amplifier, probably busted before it ever got to me, started sending painful electric shocks through the bass strings to my fingers; it was shorting out. All the better. It sounded exactly like an insane 1,000-pound wasp, underwater, stapled to a buzz saw. I remember attempting to squeeze in syncopated bass fills wherever they would fit. The bass mattered in hard rock. If you didn’t have a rock solid foundation down below, your wall of sound crumbled. My job was to drive the rhythm section, but I also had to tear it up.

Andy, lead guitarist, was listening to a lot of Suicidal Tendencies and Stormtroopers of Death at the time; he wanted to try a punk-inspired hard rock tune. He threw down the gauntlet. Bring it on, said we. The result was the rebellious crowdpleaser ‘I Woke Up Late’. Andy’s lyrics played it close to the vest – the song resembled our real lives only slightly more than our other rock sagas did – but we compensated musically with a power-chord stompfest that made everyone who heard it bang their head.

I woke up late and I’m tired right now
School is open and I don’t wanna go
I woke up late and I’m tired right now
School is open and I don’t want to show

School was open all right – for all competing bands. Outrage was on a tear. Other originals soon followed, breaking even more new ground. One song I wrote while in a more somber mood, ‘Origin’, summoned up everything from Beowulf to J.R.R. Tolkien in the mode of a classic quest narrative. The lyric depicted a lone warrior ‘hunting land and sea’ in search of his ‘Origin’ – a nebulous, perilous metaphor for the universal search for meaning in a cruel world. For some reason the metaphor was reinforced musically via a bass solo.

Later, another original composition, music and lyrics both written by Andy, somehow became both the high point of our musical competence and the forewarning of our band’s demise. The song, appropriately titled ‘Shattered Dreams’, was the first we had written that featured a more complex arrangement than your average high school-level construct of ‘verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus chorus chorus’. Thanks to Andy’s development as a musician, the new tune had shifting time signatures and a few extra bridges built into the framework. I was only too motivated to learn my part and suggest enhancements. Andy came up with the idea to play the opening riff with the benefit of a flanger effect pedal he had recently purchased. My brother bellowed the vocal with appropriate vitriol.

Sadly, however, ‘Shattered Dreams’ led to Outrage’s own individual Waterloo. A Battle of the Bands was coming up at our school, and we agreed we were not men if we did not try out for it. It was high time to take to the stage and deliver our message to the masses, who were begging to be stirred up into a frenzy. One must recall that at that time the metal militia was on the cusp of taking over the entire globe. Metal albums were all over the Billboard Top 200. We weren’t satisfied to just sit back and let other people take the fight to the enemy, which by now consisted of all persons in any position of authority. All metalheads by definition lust for a piece of the action, wherever it is. Besides, our name was Outrage. If we had no intention to take our music to the people, we might as well have called ourselves Inrage.

We informed the committee at our high school that Outrage was throwing our hat into the ring. They answered that we had to submit to a live audition in front of said committee. So one afternoon they sent a delegation of the most popular kids from our high school – juniors and seniors who would have not given us the time of day if we had been alone on a desert island and they had been spotted a timepiece. They came over to Andy’s house, where for whatever reason we had relocated our setup into his upper bedroom. This cluster of nitwits that none of us could stand, who listened to stuff like Steely Dan and Madonna, filed in to the room with their clipboards and expensive clothes. We stood in our ripped jeans with instruments slung over our shoulders like battle axes, as if in a Viking troop formation. ‘We’re Outrage,’ my brother informed them bravely. Subtext: we’re gonna rock your asses off.

Unfortunately, when we got to our own complicated original, ‘Shattered Dreams’, we wrecked our vessel on the jagged shores of ambition. We got lost in the middle section of the song that was supposed to be our defining set piece. As we halted in mid-bridge and exchanged flustered glances, the fight flew from our hearts. It was all the committee could do not to laugh out loud. They managed to hold it in as we limped to the end of our audition, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ said the committee. We didn’t make the cut, and never performed live. And that was what might now be called the death of Outrage.


* * * *

About four years later, I was home during the summer from attending college. My life and my tastes had changed considerably. I was an ROTC cadet with short-cropped hair. My grades were far better than I had ever achieved in high school. I was contemplating a career in the real militia, the United States Army. I was starting to listen to the sort of stuff that would have made my former self aghast with disbelief. Bruce Springsteen. Sting. Peter Gabriel. Even folk music. But I was still, for whatever reason, writing my own lyrics, and I had taken up acoustic guitar. I still had the desire to create my own music. So I called up my old friend Andy, formerly of Outrage, and asked him if he wanted to write a song together.

For a couple of weeks we collaborated closely in the same bedroom we had performed our disastrous audition in, writing and rewriting the music to a song I had written called ‘The Threshold of Truth’. Andy by then had his own 4-track mixer, and we used it to record a vocal track (sung by yours truly) and three acoustic guitar parts, which he subsequently mixed. Both of us got to perform guitar solos; it is still the only time I have ever tried to record a solo in any capacity. I can remember how challenging it was; I played my little four-bar solo about a hundred and fifty times before finally getting it right with the reels rolling. At last we produced a single copy of ‘The Threshold of Truth’ that we were both very proud of. I had a renewed appreciation for what went into making music.

I listened to the finished product on the way home in my car one balmy, dark summer night, hearing my own voice articulating a lyric that had come to me from God knew where – some latent, inner hunger for experience and the sort of wisdom that was still a long way off.

Staring at pictures of days gone by
My life’s been short and long at the same time
Now I can’t remember all the faces and names
But hope I’m stronger with the knowledge I’ve gained

We pray someday we’ll break from our youth
‘Til then we’re stuck on the threshold of truth
We pray someday we might find the truth
‘Til then we’re stuck with the questions of youth

All of a sudden, during that slow drive home through our sleepy suburb under a canopy of stars, winking because they were clued in to the larger comedy that eluded me, something dawned in my brain. ‘Staring at pictures’? ‘Knowledge’? ‘We pray’? ‘Truth’? Where was the rock? And what the hell happened to the Problem Child?

The truth treated me like a battering ram. At that moment my metal heart crashed and burned, leaking motor oil and acid and blood in one highly flammable mixture. As I listened to my little folk song, knowing I would never go back again, I had to face a bitter reality. I had reached that place where one convinces himself: Those days are behind me, I am too grown up for that now, I have things to do, places to go, people to meet, I may one day start a family, a steady job is looking like a wise idea.

When I served in the metal militia, long ago, we had a term for that state of mind. It wasn’t screaming for vengeance. It was selling out.

The Twin Towers

Duke decides to join Mutt in a parallel exploration of one of America's "essential" writers

Inspired by Mutt's recent post "Which Writers Are Indispensable?," I've decided to take the challenge/opportunity inadvertently presented by my esteemed co-blogger here and embark on a sort of "parallel journey" to his upcoming (and highly anticipated) Melvillepalooza reading binge.

As Mutt knows, American literature has been a subject of increasing fascination for me in recent years. I'm very interested in exploring the ongoing evolution of a distinctly "American voice" in fiction, and to that end have gone back and explored some of the early and less-known works in the American canon - everything from Washington Irving (maybe the first identifiably "American" storyteller?) to Sarah Orne Jewett, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Booth Tarkington, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, Jack London and Sherwood Anderson. Hell, I've even sought out obscure stuff like Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware and Norris' Epic of the Wheat trilogy - books no even knows about any more, let alone still reads (and I haven't yet either to be honest- full disclosure! Though I have the books and plan to...).

In a post going back a few years now, I proposed my own Top Ten Most Essential American Novels... this was the list I came up with at that time, and I think it holds up pretty well:

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
5. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
6. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
7. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
8. The Violent Bear it Away, Flannery O’Connor
9. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
10. The Sketch Book, Washington Irving (contains American folk tales of enduring popularity such as ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip van Winkle’)

Now, I didn't say then and I can't say now that I've read every single one of these (though I have most of them now), but for my money if you had to choose only 10 to represent the finest of American fiction, this list would more than suffice. Obviously there are personal preferences embedded into it. I've long said that by my rendering, the greatest writers America has produced are Herman Melville, William Faulkner and Mark Twain, in that order. To that list I personally would also include two others: Flannery O'Connor and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A very, very close second tier would include our first Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and finally, the writer of what is probably my favorite underappreciated American work of all time, Sherwood Anderson (of course I refer to his incredibly powerful Winesburg, Ohio).

Another criminally underappreciated writer (these days anyway) who I want to at least mention because I admire his stuff so much is Thorton Wilder.

But back to Mutt's challenge... knowing Mutt the way I do, I know that he likes to embark on these incredibly ambitious, long journeys of reading one author's works in succession, or committing to read one major work from a guy like Charles Dickens per year (his groundbreaking Dickensfest series, well documented on these pages). Normally I don't go along with him on these literary treks because I've got my own reading agenda to follow, but I have always admired and observed them from the sidelines. But this year, in tandem with his Melvillepalooza extravaganza, I have decided to try a "reading festival" of my own to also deepen my knowledge of an essential American writer... only in my case, it won't be Melville. It's going to be William Faulkner.

And in the spirit of the game here, I'm calling it Duke Altum's Faulknerama Festival 2008.

I've read some Faulkner of course, but I have always wanted to dive deeper into his work, and for some reason have not visited his canon in four years. The last book of his I read was the magnificent As I Lay Dying, but that was back in the Fall of 2004, when we were waiting for the arrival of our third son - now three and a half! So I thought, here's a chance to not only follow along with Mutt on a parallel reading series of my own, but it also gives us both a chance to circle back and compare our experiences with both writers (I've read a little more Melville than Mutt; he's read far more Faulkner) and maybe even examine the work of a writer we've compared to both (Cormac McCarthy) to see whether or not he really deserves to be mentioned as in league with America's undisputed Twin Towers.

I happen to be reading McCarthy's Blood Meridian now, and I think I can hear echoes of Faulkner's prose in his own - certainly the scope and scale of the book mirrors those of some of Faulkner's most ambitious novels, though with far more violence. But it will be very interesting to explore further the genius of Faulkner and think about whether they had any common concerns, and whether one modern writer's talents truly do match up to his predecessor's.

To me, Melville is indeed the Greatest of them all. But Faulkner seems to be a close second, and I would like to know whether any kind of line from Herman to William to Cormac can truly be drawn. The rest of 2008 will give me the chance to try and find out.

Oh, and the lineup? Here's what I plan to be reading from ol' Billy soon (in this order) - though I think I may throw in shorter, contemporary works in between, just to make sure my eyes don't glaze over and my brain shrink into a raisin from imbibing too much Faulkner:

Sanctuary

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Absalom, Absalom!

The Reivers

And by the beginning of 2009, if either Mutt or I are still standing and speaking beyond an incoherent babble, we may have the beginnings of a pretty interesting discussion indeeed on what truly defines great American literature... the Swedish Academy, which apparently thinks American writers are "too ignorant" to be considered for the Nobel Prize these days, can kiss our big ol' red white n' blue butts!!!

(Oh and one last word to the Academy that will tie up this post nicely: hey fellas, there wouldn't be no Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a guy you honored if you can think back that far, without one William Faulkner. I'm just sayin'...)

Which Writers Are Indispensible?

I am not even going to pretend that this post will be coherent, but I mean to touch on a subject I have been thinking about recently. You may notice – ‘you’ meaning ‘person reading this blog’, which I think may amount to maybe 3 people at the most – that I have added a slight modification to the “What We’re Reading” section on the left there, where we indicate which books we have ‘on deck’. The ones we are planning to read, for those of you who don’t know baseball. If you have noticed this, you may read through it and ask: what the hell is ‘Melvillepalooza’?!?

(Actually, your first reaction was probably closer to ‘Man, what friggin’ DORKS these guys are!’ But then again, what are you doing reading this blog in the first place if you do not have at least some symptoms of the same disease? If this is you, and you’re still not down with it, go back to your ‘Friends’ list on Facebook and leave the literary discussion to the big dogs.)

The thought occurred to me at some point this year, I can’t say when, that one thing I almost never do is read two books in a row by the same author. It happens sometimes, but it’s rare; it’s not something that I really enjoy for one simple reason: variety. I don’t want to read too much of the same sort of thing in a row. And I find that even if an author’s novels are all very different from one another – someone like Ron Hansen, or Michael Chabon, to cite just two examples – you can still tell it was written by the same guy (or woman), and more often than not some of the same broader themes will emerge in one way or another.

But others sometimes tell me that once they find a writer they like, they go out and find everything by that person and blow through it all in one long shot. My wife does this sometimes, if it’s a writer whose work she really finds compelling. I have never done this, as I said before; I guess it just goes against my impulses as a reader, and there are always so many other books out there I am longing to get to. Yet I had heard it enough times that I finally had the idea to ask myself, ‘If I was going to read several books in a row by the same writer, which writer would I select?’ This is the question that I have been considering off and on for several months now.

If I was ever going to entertain this idea, I thought, I would have to choose a writer that to me was indispensable. I would have to be certain that all of that time reading [SELECTED WRITER]’s books was time well spent. One has to remember that for however long it would take to read a number of one individual writer’s books in a row, that is time you would not spend reading novels by other talented writers. But which writers are indispensable? Everyone has to decide that for themselves. As soon as I started to think about which ones were to me personally, the list was short, and I discovered that I had already read many of those writers’ works. Not all of them of course, but most of them. I had to branch out: I was interested in finding a writer that would probably be considered ‘indispensable’ reading by any ‘objective’ account, that I had not read before, or had not read much of.

So which writers are really indispensible? Meaning you can’t check out of this life without having read them, if you are interested in literature? Although I am always interested in literature from other countries – indeed, world literature is some of the most satisfying reading for me, because it allows me to ‘travel’ when I cannot afford to do it for real! – I wanted to start with the literary tradition of my own country. Which whittled the list down considerably. So then: which American writers are really, genuinely, indispensible reading?

William Faulkner? Without a doubt: but I have read a lot of his books. There are enough more than I haven’t read that I could easily have used him as my guinea pig for this project, but for some reason I wanted this to be more of a journey of discovery, and I know more about Faulkner than I do about many other great American writers. I have read a major biography of him as well. It seemed too safe and too obvious to choose him.

John Steinbeck? Probably, but he is already one of my all-time favorites. I’ve read a great deal of Steinbeck and have thought about his work endlessly. He is clearly not the writer I want for a journey of discovery. I also have read a very big biography of Steinbeck.

Flannery O’Connor? A strong early possibility. But I am also very, very familiar with her work. I have read all of her fiction, but not her letters (yet). She would be a fine prospect for this idea, but again, I feel too familiar with her writing. Not that reading her more and again would not be a good idea. But it was starting to feel to me like I almost wanted to use this as a chance to correct some oversight, to read someone I really should be a lot more familiar with, but am not.

Mark Twain? A very, very good choice. I know very little of his work. Embarrassingly, I have never read Huckleberry Finn OR Tom Sawyer. (Huckleberry Finn is on my shelf, waiting its turn, as are several other Twain books.) In fact, aside from some stories, the only book of his I have read, if I am not mistaken, is his obscure historical work Joan of Arc. This did seem to be that oversight I had been thinking of fixing. Or one of them. And yet…..I didn’t choose Twain. I don’t know if it has to do with the fact that he wrote a lot of satirical and comical stuff that I don’t always gravitate to as much as more dramatic material. But my gut told me to press on with the search.

And that’s about when it hit me. The only possible choice for this experiment of reading several books in a row by the same writer has to be the man who wrote what for me is the most legitimate and best claim to the elusive title of the “great American novel”. That writer, of course, is Herman Melville.

It all seemed to fit. I have read Moby Dick, but only once, and it was several years ago. It is, needless to say, an absolutely astonishing book, and I still tell people that for me, it is the one novel I can think of that grants the reader the greatest payoff for their effort with its electrifying, terrifying, stunning conclusion. The pursuit of the great white whale is probably the single most powerful literary metaphor ever conceived, for my money (as a depiction of man vs. God). The character of Captain Ahab is an immortal creation that has so embedded itself into the culture that anyone knows what we mean if we refer to some one as being obsessed as Ahab, even though many Americans have never read the novel. It is also true that almost everyone is familiar with its world-famous first line: “Call me Ishmael.”

Yet Moby Dick is merely one of numerous Melville novels that illustrate and define Americans, their culture and their beliefs, all written in a time when the country was raw enough to still be in the process of formation and self-definition. And up until this year, it was the only one of Melville’s famous novels that I had read. Earlier this year I returned to the beginning of his work and read his first book, Typee, which is one of two early novels that are set in the distant lands of Polynesia, but concern themselves with the clash of American sailors and those faraway cultures. I have limited familiarity with his other sea-faring novels, or later works that are set in our country itself like The Confidence-Man or the classic short story (which I have read, once) called “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, set on Wall Street in New York City. To me, once I thought of this great writer, this literary behemoth not unlike a white whale for would-be novelists, my search was over. Melville was the guy.

To conclude, I draw your attention to a memory I have from about seven or eight years ago, around the time of the turn of the millennium. This memory didn’t come back to me in the context of this project until later, but when it again returned to my mind, I used it as a kind of strange confirmation that Herman Melville was the only choice for this Fall’s extensive reading experiment. This occurred before I was a father or even married, back when I was just a young single man without a real direction in the world but for the idea that I wanted to some day write my own novels, a dream I am still trying to drag into existence.

I happened to be in lower Manhattan one day, adjacent to Battery Park, sitting on a wooden bench in a suit and tie, writing in a small journal. I was only there because I was scheduled to have a job interview for a financial newspaper called The Bond Buyer, and they were located almost at the very tip of southern Manhattan. As has always been my custom, I was there ridiculously early for the interview, for I am always paranoid of showing up late. To kill time I sat on the bench, and I think I had brought a book to read and the journal. While I was sitting there, I looked up at the building next to the bench, for some unknown reason, and there I saw a tiny metal plate, drilled into the wall.

I cannot remember the exact wording on the plate. Perhaps the journal, which I still have somewhere, records the text verbatim. But the gist of the plaque was this: This is the place where the great writer Herman Melville was born in the year 1819, author of the classic novel Moby Dick. At that time I had not yet read that book, but I still felt a great burst of inspiration then, something I had never forgotten. There I was, trying to get a writing job in some financial periodical as a means to support myself until I could someday write my own books. And right there, too, in that very spot, had been born a man who also worked in the financial markets, long ago, to support himself. A man who would persist and endure, and eventually even triumph. A man who would write one of the greatest novels ever written, in America or anywhere. It was a great coincidence and a happy occasion and I was thankful for it.

Incidentally, I did not get that job. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I was there on that day had nothing to do with getting a job, but had a lot more to do with just sitting in that spot and seeing Herman Melville’s birthplace and knowing that that’s what it was.

I don’t know. It will go down as one of these unanswered questions. But I know that Melville is an indispensible American writer, and he is the writer I will be reading in my forthcoming literary experiment, “Melvillepalooza”. I plan to read two novels, one book of his stories, and a well-received critical study of his work written by Andrew Delbanco called Melville: His World and His Work. I am looking forward to it. I might do it again next year, to read some of his other works.

The question anyone reading this must now ask themselves, of course, is: which writer do you think is indispensible? Whoever that is, go out and reward their labor by reading their books. For those hard-working men and women didn’t write those books for themselves. They wrote them for you.

The Family Plot

The following is an exclusive excerpt from Chapter VI of my novel in progress, Only the Dying.

It had been a family ritual since before their son Jonas Wittenburg was even born, in the fall of 1919. Even when they had performed it the first time, in the spring of that year, on the first anniversary of their loss, Cal and Ella Wittenburg thought of it as a family event. For their daughter was with them, they believed.

The ritual was conducted twice a year, in the spring and in the fall, early in November, and they had never failed to observe it yet. Always on the Sabbath. They would choose the Sunday in April that fell the closest to Liesel’s birthday; not to her death, which had only been five weeks later in that first wondrous and terrible spring.

After coming home from Mass on April 4, 1930, the Wittenburg family convened in the kitchen of their farmhouse, all five of them. Jonas was now a short, rail-thin but energetic boy of ten; his other two siblings, Jane and little brother Micah, were nine and three respectively. All of them knew what to do, even little Micah, who was always very proud to help.

The preparations were conducted in a kind of subconscious ceremonial manner, but they were by no means sorrowful or somber. Cal and Ella made sure of that, and were determined to keep it that way. It was meant to be a celebration, not a second funeral. Thus the children were taught to laugh and talk and joke and ask questions. The Wittenburgs simply refused to let the occasion become an opportunity for self-pity or bitterness. This was not to say that, for either of the parents, it was a day they found easy to navigate through.

Jane Wittenburg, her father’s sun-kissed doll with strawberry blonde hair and red cheeks, helped Ella prepare the wicker picnic basket. She fetched a large blue and white flannel table cloth from the top drawer of the curio in their dining room as Ella removed a bowl of cold fried chicken from the icebox. Ella stacked the pieces of chicken high on one side of the basket, and on the other side she added in thick slices of homemade bread, a jar of apple jam, a small ceramic crock full of potato salad, a cluster of grapes, and a few tin mugs, all piled up on top of five chipped plates. She handed a Thermos filled with black coffee to her husband as he passed by, heading for the back door of the house, having changed into a pair of ‘overhauls’, as he called them. Wittenburg plucked a straw hat from a peg near the door and put it on his head. Jonas trailed behind his father en route to the barn.

Their first job was to gather the cleaning materials. Wittenburg stowed the Thermos in the side cargo pocket of his denim garment and secured two metal buckets from the side wall of the barn. He left one pail with Jonas and took the other to a cast iron storage tank located outside along the eastern wall of the structure. The tank was connected by a pipe about one foot underground that led approximately 150 meters away to the farm’s single windmill, standing at a higher elevation than the barn. The windmill harnessed the gusts to pump water up from below ground into the storage tank. Wittenburg filled his bucket just over halfway, to be used for both drinking and washing.

Inside the barn, Jonas collected a small box of cornstarch, a hand-held trowel, a short-handled sledge with a heavy steel head, a pair of pliers, a scrubbing brush, and a few dirty rags from a jumble of them cut from old shirts. He stowed all of these things in the second bucket, and with his other hand secured his favorite item: a small scythe, hanging from two nails on the barn wall near the horses’ stables. He took these things out to join up with his father in the yard.

Just then the sun began to peek out from behind a large wall of atmospheric debris. It had been overcast most of that morning, with occasional patches of intermittent sunshine. Wittenburg wasn’t expecting rain: he could not smell it on the wind, and the cloud formations didn’t bear the correct signs. Staring up into the sky while waiting on Ella and the other children, he felt his oldest son come to his side. Jonas didn’t speak. Wittenburg knew that Jonas understood that on these occasions, no matter what kind of show of normalcy and strength he made, his father would require some silence. Wittenburg felt conflicted about this. He knew it was best to keep talking, to engage the children, and not dwell too long on the feelings of grief that this day inevitably uncovered. But it was difficult.

The brief shaft of sunlight made him smile. It was already gone almost as soon as it had arrived, which seemed appropriate. Wittenburg would never have been able to articulate the nature of his emotions on these occasions. These were the times when he felt the most confused, the most unsure of himself somehow, the most conscious not only of his failure to keep one of his own children alive, but of all of his multitude of failings as a man, father, husband … and yet, he also felt small bolts of happiness, here and there, every time they went on these special outings, electrical shocks of fleeting but potent joy. He sometimes wondered, in more lucid moments when he was feeling more like himself, if these spontaneous impulses were not simply pride over the constantly-overlooked accomplishment that all parents can claim of having collaborated successfully with God in the creation of a single, everlasting soul. I can take a small amount of credit for her, he would observe to himself only, for she is now one among the heavenly multitude for whom Ella and I are at least partially responsible.

He believed in the innermost chamber of his heart that a day would arrive in which he, Cal Wittenburg, would see his eldest daughter again, and sometimes this thought alone sustained him through periods of extreme darkness and sorrow.

But here now was the remainder of his family, the living, coming out into the yard. Ella had the wicker basket looped over one robust forearm, laden with its appetizing quarry, and was also holding the small hand of Micah Wittenburg, whose ragged one-piece denim outfit and still-paunchy legs made him resemble his father in miniature. Jane followed, blue gingham dress fluttering around her thin white legs, which shocked Wittenburg every time he saw them. Not for their shape or their color, but for the way in which they inexplicably seemed to lengthen almost daily. His second daughter was nine now, but in two or three short, short years she would already begin to blossom like the yellow daffodil that at that moment she was still little girl enough to twirl in her slender fingers. Wittenburg would never be prepared for that when it came.

Ella Wittenburg smiled at her husband, who met her eyes and held them. The two of them had learned long before, from the most merciless of instructors, that the only way to navigate down a path of grief that has no terminus was to do so in synchronicity. You simply could not go it alone. The parents of a dead child must alternately pull one another along. Ella let go of Micah’s hand, reached into a pocket within the folds of her skirt, and took out two small leather packages that resembled coin purses. She handed one of them to Wittenburg and returned the other to the same pocket.

Thus assembled, they all strode together down a series of dirt trails that led through the wheatfield towards the large oak tree near the crick, the location of the Wittenburg family plot.

Wittenburg could not remember who it was in his past who took it upon himself (probably at the request of one of the Wittenburg wives, more likely) to erect the black wrought iron fence around the small gathering of gravestones. It was a detail he wasn’t sure he had ever learned. Most likely it had been his father. The fence, which only reached to mid-thigh on a man of average height, had been surrounding the graves for as long as he could remember, that was for certain. His best guess was that it had been there for about fifty years. It was built to include the large oak tree inside its confines and was rectangular in shape. The long sides of the rectangle faced east and west, and the short ends were on the north and south. The eastern side of the graveyard, facing the farmhouse and the barn, had been outfitted with a small gate that could be secured with a latch, protection against God knew what.

A handful of rooks circled overhead, expressing annoyance at the human invasion, as the Wittenburg family once again passed through the gate. The sun had again ducked behind a flimsy wall of clouds. There was a slender dirt path leading right down the center of the graveyard that followed straight back to the oak tree opposite the iron gate. The five of them proceeded past the two complete rows of graves dating back to 1866, when the grandfather Wittenburg only knew about through family lore was the first to be buried. Eleven other gravestones came after that, including those of his own mother and father, and a number of aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunts and great uncles. Wittenburg was pretty sure there was at least one dog somewhere in there as well, but the canine graves were not marked.

There was a third row, began in the year 1918, which consisted of only one tiny marker so far. The thirteenth gravestone. Its occupant, however, had not been the most recently buried in the small cemetery. That distinction belonged to Susannah Wittenburg, who survived until 1927 before dying very suddenly of heart failure at the age of 62. But her resting place had already been set aside her husband’s in the second row, waiting for the day she would join him. Thus, when her granddaughter was taken away after only five weeks, nine years before her own passing, a new row was initiated in the graveyard, where the tiny remains had been in repose, all alone in death, ever since.

They filed past all the graves without pausing and without commentary. A subdued but not downtrodden silence settled down over them, but the mood was not altogether unpleasant. Everyone was used to it by now. A short time later, once they were eating their picnic lunch and passing chicken and potato salad between one another, the conversation would begin, and before too long they would be telling stories and laughing at silly jokes the way they always did when they ate as a family.

The early moments of the ritual were the closest they got to sadness, at least outwardly. It was hard to enter that tiny graveyard for anyone in the family, including the children, and not be overcome at first by the grief and the ghosts that lingered within the confines of that wrought iron fence. It took some time for Cal or Ella to even be able to look in the direction of the lone grave marker in what they formally called ‘the Third Row’. Each time they made a supreme effort to endure those first few moments, so they had learned that the best way to do so was to go in, file to the back, spread out the cloth under the comforting branches of that large tree, and dig in. Everything seemed to get a little better with a good meal; one supposes that the same principle is in play when people gather for a large meal immediately after a funeral service.

So they all set to the quick preparations, laying out the cloth, unloading the basket, passing around the plates, and soon enough every last Wittenburg, young and not-so-young, was chomping happily, and experiencing the odd comfort born out of solidarity with their ancestors. (Technically, they were not Ella’s ancestors; but her daughter was there, and that was all she needed.) Cal and his eldest son entered into a discussion about the Chicago Cubs, who had gone over two decades now without winning a World Series title. ‘That’s a travesty!’ Brogan declared. When would that unhappy losing streak come to an end?

Ella, meanwhile, had demonstrated to Micah how he might toss, from a short distance, a few grapes to see if he could land them inside the wicker basket. A poor idea, because he now horded the entire cluster and refused to let it go. The boy now sat, legs curled in front of him, entranced by the game; his fingers were smeared with apple jam, which made his handling of the grapes cumbersome. But at least it had him occupied for the moment, which was one of the hardest jobs inherent to the ritual. Jane had eaten a few pieces of bread with jam on it and a small handful of the same grapes, and little else, before standing up and strolling around the inside of the fenced-in yard plucking dandelions from the grass. This was one of her jobs, exclusively, and she got a jump on it in order to make sure no one stole it from her, and, possibly, to get out of eating more lunch, being the pickiest eater in the family by far.

As for Wittenburg and his ten-year-old, they certainly didn’t have that problem, wolfing down fried chicken and potato salad like it was somehow going to vanish at the top of the next hour if they didn’t. They took care of most of the chicken between the two of them alone. Afterwards Wittenburg wiped his fingers with a cloth napkin, kissed Ella and thanked her for preparing the meal, something he tried to do after every single meal his wife made, and moved over to the large oak tree. He called to his family to gather around him. The older two children groaned quietly: they knew what was coming next. No matter what the motive, it was universally difficult to get young children to stay seated and quiet for what they were about to do. Let alone to pay attention and actively participate, which, one has to admit, would be almost impossible to expect out of children who were ten, nine, and almost four. But they knew their father expected them to sit through it anyway, to get into the habit of it, and to show respect not only to who they were doing it for – their deceased sister – but also to the practice itself.

Wittenburg took the small leather pouch out of his trouser pocket and removed a rosary, made out of ebony beads and an old piece of leather cord. He had received it as a gift from his grandmother on his mother’s side over 35 years before for receiving his first Holy Eucharist. He glanced over at his wife, who had seated herself opposite him with legs folded up under her and with Micah on her lap. For the moment Micah complied, for he too knew what to expect; he curled himself onto his mother’s lap and put his thumb in his mouth, a habit he still fell back on when he was growing sleepy. Jonas and Jane sat down Indian-style on either side of their father beneath the tree, and stayed quiet.

Cal Wittenburg removed his hat and laid it face up on the ground. He rubbed his face with his hands, the beads dangling from his knuckles. The rest of the family waited. The 46-year-old father felt moisture seep into his eyes, in the corners, and squinted a few times. This was the moment that always, always socked him in the gut. He looked again at Ella across the small distance between them, over the three children that had lived. Her eyes smiled at him, a measure of encouragement. Her eyes were not glossy. She was a tougher soul than he was at the core.

Few people knew about Cal Wittenburg that he was far softer emotionally than she. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel the same grief. The years did not deaden the pain, and by now they had given up expecting them to. But Ella Wittenburg had a greater capacity to buck up her strength under duress than her husband did. There was no use pretending that this was not so. They had been through plenty of difficult times in the years since Liesel’s death, some of them so despairing that Wittenburg was ready to give up on everything and admit his catastrophic failure. But it was Ella who refused to break. She wouldn’t allow him to give up. And she definitely would not allow their child’s life and death to be an occasion for wallowing in that despair. To do so would be to dishonor God, Who had given them the child in the first place, and had seen fit to take her away again. Worse than that, it would dishonor Liesel herself. And as long as Ella Wittenburg was alive, she would allow no one – especially not Cal Wittenburg – to do that.

Wittenburg recovered himself. ‘All right then,’ he said. Then, because it was a Sunday in Lent, not because of the fact that Liesel was dead, he added: ‘Just the one decade, the Sorrowful Mysteries. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.

‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth …’

As they prayed the rosary together, or ‘just the one decade’ of it – the whole thing would take too long, the children would never make it through, plus there was the small matter of the cleaning duties still ahead of them – Wittenburg found himself thinking not about what he could remember of the pale-faced little baby, Liesel, but about his old paternal grandfather, Jeremiah, uttering the same prayers in the tongue of the Fatherland. Wittenburg’s father used to tell him stories about Jeremiah droning through the rosary on a regular basis, praying in German. He pointed out to his father a long time before that he couldn’t have been more than five and a half years old when he picked up that memory; could he be certain of it? Cal Wittenburg Senior replied that our religious practices, or maybe the lack thereof, were often the things that made the deepest and the earliest impressions on our own children. When Wittenburg glanced at the healthy faces of his own three that had survived, the smallest of them near sleep, the older two with features drooping in boredom, but too cognizant of the sensitive nature of this tradition to complain, he earnestly hoped that his father’s observation had been correct.

They didn’t dawdle on the prayers. They didn’t dawdle period, as a matter of general family practice. Wittenburg finished up by invoking the name of Saint Nicholas, protector of children, and everyone answered, ‘Pray for us’, except Micah, who by now was asleep. Ella Wittenburg stood up and laid the little boy carefully on his side on the blanket, where he did not even stir. She took her husband’s hand, he picked up the metal pail with the supplies, and they walked together up the trails to the ‘Third Row’, stopping in front of the stone. Wittenburg found he could never get accustomed to the markings, which shocked him anew every time he saw them.

LIESEL MARIE WITTENBURG
b. 1918 d. 1918
CARRIED BY AN ANGEL TO HER ETERNAL REST

Although they had never had occasion to consider the matter before 1918, and God willing would not need to again before they died themselves, Cal and Ella both remembered when they had chosen unequivocally to foot the additional expense – money they scarcely had – for the extra words on her gravestone. The loss was really far beyond any measure of words or human language, but there was still a perception between them that more was needed to mark the passing of a baby girl who had literally had no chance of becoming. All they could think of was the sweetest, most loving means of transportation from the land of the living to the Dominion of Heaven, something even more beautiful and profound than the spectacle of a ladder to Heaven, or a fiery chariot. So the two of them had settled on the image of an angel carrying Liesel to the foot of God’s throne in its arms the way one would cradle a baby. And somehow this insufficient gesture did provide them with a small measure of consolation.

Having stood before their daughter’s grave and shared a few moments of unspeakable silence, they set to work. Wittenburg gave Jonas the scrub brush and the box of cornstarch. His primary duty now was to use the cornstarch to clean the gravestones, an old method. He started with his sister’s, sprinkling the cornstarch on his brush and scrubbing the stone down, front and back, without water. Ella followed behind him with a rag, wiping the stones clean behind him, for they did not stop with just Liesel’s grave; they merely began there.

Jane continued the task she had started before. She skipped from stone to stone, pulling out dandelions and other weeds, making small piles in front of each grave that she would come back to collect. They would gather up the clippings and later toss them, dry, into the woodstove back at home. If there was any piece of the overall job at hand that Jane Wittenburg was born to do, this was it.

That left Cal Wittenburg, standing alone at the headstone of his baby girl, his daughter, a child he barely remembered. Only a few times did he ever hear her laugh, and he never heard her speak a word except in the unintelligible language of innocence. He stared again at the words carved into the limestone. What did her very name even mean? What did any words mean? Certainly, there was nothing he could, or would want to, express aloud just then. He both hated and dearly loved this time of year. The crows languished in the tree branches, chattering noisily.

A little while later, he would straighten the errant poles of iron with the sledge, repair any damaged hinges with the pliers and some wire, whisk away any dust and debris, and generally police the graveyard. But for this moment, right now, he had one function, which was to reap.

He picked up the short scythe, tainted here and there with small patches of rust, and thereupon commenced swinging the blade hither and yon through the obstructive grass, individual leaves flying everywhere, henceforth to be collected and cast into the flames.