Job 4:18

A Fiction

PART ONE

Banished. The Lord God sent me hurtling through the firmament. I felt nothing as I breached the outer layers of gas and bits of rock and other debris, but then as I fell further a bracing wind assaulted me. I plunged through a glittering bowl of crystalline moonlight. Finally my curved back sliced a decaying woodshingled roof over something, like a scimitar flung through a thatched hut. I slammed into a rusted metal vat and fell forward onto a dirty floor littered with leaves and broken glass.

The air was freezing, the darkness absolute. Although it is something we are conscious of and must also negotiate, physical pain such as human beings endure is not experienced by my kind in the same way, so I was able to climb to my knees, then stand. We don’t bleed. But that does not mean we are not susceptible to damage.

In terms of motor capabilities, however, all was well – except for my wings. A few cautious attempts to spread them revealed that they were shattered, irrevocably impaired, and would be of no more use to me, I thought, unless there were some way to regain access to the Throne and prostrate myself before his Divine Mercy. They hung inert from my back. Obviously this was part of the penance; my lot was to accept it. The dead weight of the wings would take on the role of cross for the remainder of my predicament here.

Once I stood up I heard noises outside of the structure. Rustling; the approach of something. I held ground. It was not a man; we can smell them coming. This was different. A moment later a decrepit door hanging askew from one hinge close by was nudged open a few inches, and a long snout pushed through, followed by a pair of great dark eyes. It was a large doe. I reached out and slowly pulled the door all the way open and beckoned the animal forward. When she came to me I rubbed under her chin and neck with my hands and leaned towards her. She moved closer and I spoke softly into her ear. The doe lay down beside me and I used her body to shield my own until dawn. There was no possibility of me freezing, but a living body can always draw warmth and comfort from another.


Good morning, I’m Karen Reynolds and this is IHS Cable News. If you’re just joining us, we’re following a developing story via our affiliate, WFSH, which has been unfolding over the last couple of hours in the quiet rural village of Goshen, Massachusetts. That’s in the western portion of the state, a densely wooded region, populated by farming communities and nature preserves, among other things. It’s a strange situation, keep in mind, and we’ll be bringing you additional details as they are revealed to us.

Here’s what we can tell you so far. What you’re looking at there now is a live image captured by our NewsChopper of a place called Light of Truth Evangelical Congregation, which, it appears to be a small church, and as you can see it is surrounded by a bevy of police vehicles, and now it looks like a couple of military vehicles perhaps from a nearby National Guard unit.
Apparently there is an unidentified man who has closed himself inside that church with a group of nursery school children …. three- and four-year-olds … without anyone else. Somehow he seems to have displaced or gotten rid of the teacher that was with the children at the time he came in. It’s unclear exactly what happened but we do know that the teacher herself is evidently unharmed and at this moment is with the authorities outside the church. Now how she got there, and why she would be out there when all the little children in her charge are inside the building with this, with this man, is not known to us but it’s probably something a lot of people are wondering. Obviously it’s tough to tell from these overhead images exactly what is taking place on the ground. But we do know that there is an unidentified man in that building with, we’ve just confirmed, a nursery school class of nine small children.

Not a lot of activity right now as you can see, just that the authorities have the structure completely surrounded, we don’t know if any attempt has been made yet to communicate with the man. We’re getting one report from the dispatcher that the FBI has been contacted and that a hostage negotiator is en route, but that is unconfirmed. And as you can see there are other vehicles pulling up, I can pick out a few minivans down there, one would have to assume there are some very agitated parents.

At this moment, ladies and gentlemen, all we can tell you about the individual in that building is that he is male, and that he appears to be unarmed, yes, that’s unarmed. So that might make you wonder exactly what is the reason for this very cautious, even tense, stand-off. Well folks, that’s where this story gets hazy – there are wildly conflicting reports about who this man might be – to our knowledge only a handful of people so far have actually seen the man, but according to our reporter on the ground, from the affiliate, whom we’ll hear from shortly, and who apparently spoke recently to one eyewitness, the man is very large, unusually large, and possibly an albino!? We’re hearing that he is white, or very fair-skinned. A witness also said that the man may have some other kind of physical deformity, like a curved spine or a hunchback ….

We know how strange this sounds, but as we’ve been promising all morning, we will bring you fresh information just as soon as we get it ourselves on this harrowing story. We’ll take a quick pause. Keep it here.


The day began to break. I sent the doe forth with my blessing and she gave me hers. I had the strong impression that I would need one from somewhere. She needed food and I needed to move, although to where was unclear. At least to orient myself. As the light grew I took gradual stock of my surroundings.

I was in a run-down wooden shack of some kind, clearly no longer in use, but where some type of specialized craft had been practiced in earlier times. There were two large, squat metal vats, presumably empty, taking up one side of the small structure. Each had thick metal pipes leading from the top and through the roof to exhale some vapor or byproduct of whatever industrialized process had taken place in here.

Normally I am sensitive to things being shot forth into the sky by human beings with little concern for their effects. But this place did not give me a feeling of wastefulness. Here was a trade that had been formerly plied by people who cared about what they were doing and took it as a matter of pride to do it correctly. You could tell by standing in the shack that what had been done in here was once of value to others. Now it all lay in shambles, another example of one of the more noble practices of the human species having been laid to rest and probably replaced by a far less honorable procedure.

The rest of the space was filled with dirt; a few leaves; a scattered carpet of pine needles; a stack of old metal buckets; a workbench with some saws and a few steel spikes on it; a pair of stained work gloves; a series of spigots, of various sizes, intended to regulate the flow of liquid. I took a moment and breathed in slowly through my nostrils, inhaling, probing for information. We have many human features, but a far greater sensual capacity. One needs to draw from bottomless wells of feeling to do our job properly; heightened sensitivity helps to collect what is needed for these reserves. I smelled earth, dust, water, manufactured lubricants, and there, underneath it all, a rich smell, a kind of lifeblood: tree sap. They made syrup in here once upon a time.

I smiled; then heard the sound of a motor being ignited not far away, and the next moment a set of tires was crunching through gravel. I moved to the cracked doorway and peered out. A box-like automobile, fairly large, was slowly making its way down a curved driveway, almost a street of its own, towards the shack. The car, red, rumbled past. A burly, bearded man sat behind the wheel, wearing a baseball cap, chugging from a vessel filled with coffee, most likely, obliviously rolling by the shack with no inkling of my presence.

After the car passed I leaned out just far enough to look up the gravel path it had come down, which climbed an upgrade further into the woods to a large, white, two-story house. It looked fairly new, with three dormers across the front, a large porch with a swing on it and an assortment of brightly colored toys. Even from where I stood I could see various forms hustling around inside the house. I couldn’t see any other houses nearby because of the thick trees. At least these people had managed to avoid one of those overcrowded suburban enclaves that this country – for it was obvious now into which I’d fallen, and wouldn’t you know it – was belittled for in other places.

I tucked my head back into the shack. What would I do? The truth was, it hardly mattered. My only outlet now was to observe. If I was lucky, if the Lord was willing to be merciful, He might ask me to perform some kind of intercession. But it could be years before this opportunity ever came. Millennia.

For the moment, I had to plan my movements, unless I just wanted to sit in the shack until someone came and discovered me there. But I could not just step out and casually stroll up the driveway to the house. I’d surely be seen and the usual human hysteria would ensue.
I looked out the doorway again and saw this time that there were two other vehicles sitting at the top of the gravel path. One was a green, partially rusted contraption that had space to sit towards the front and an open, flat bed on the back half used to transport things, one would assume. It said FORD on the back door of the bed and it looked as though it had been around for a while. The other vehicle was large, also box-like, dark blue, and seemed to be in better condition. It was obvious that you didn’t use this vehicle to transport materials; rather, you used it to carry other people.

I decided to wait a bit longer. I had a feeling. The air was freezing cold but the atmospheric conditions didn’t bother me. I’ve been in all of them before. You want it to be cold before you want it to be hot. After some more time had gone by, which didn’t seem like very much but may have been by the local standard, I heard children hooting and hollering, tiny feet on small stones, a self-assured female voice directing the action, another motor starting, tires on gravel once again. The dark blue vehicle rolled past, on to the road, and away.
This was the time to move.


… you’re looking at live images of an apparent hostage situation. The small white building there is called the Light of Truth Evangelical Congregation, a fundamentalist Christian church, where an unknown, unidentified man has been holed up with a group of nine nursery school-aged children for the last hour or so.

We’re told that the authorities don’t know who the suspect is or where he came from. This is where the story gets a little outlandish, ladies and gentlemen. We’re doing our best to gather as much accurate information as possible with regard to the suspect, but the information we have so far seems unreliable. We’re waiting on video of an interview our affiliate’s reporter conducted with a local resident, an eyewitness to some of this man’s activities before he single-handedly apprehended the church … do we have that video yet? … okay ….

Folks, we’re still waiting for it, we’ll have it for you shortly.

From the information we have so far, witnesses report that the suspect is an unusually large white male, unarmed by all accounts. He is evidently extremely tall, some are saying over six feet, some are saying seven feet or more. Also some witnesses have said he is fair skinned, but others are saying he is not just white as in Caucasian, but white, like an albino. We’ve also heard reports that he has some kind of physical deformity, but we don’t yet know exactly what that means. One witness has said he has a pronounced hunchback.

There you can see on the scene there appears to be some sort of hostage negotiator, a man in civilian dress with a bullhorn, who looks as though he is trying to establish communication with the suspect. There are no indications that the suspect has made any attempt to reciprocate.

What? …. okay …. we have that video now, taken about thirty minutes ago by our affiliate, WFSH. This is an interview with an eyewitness who alleges that the suspect actually invaded his home earlier today. Keep in mind, we just received this video, it has not been edited or reviewed by us in any capacity. This is the first time I am seeing it. The witness, I’m told, is 81-year-old Silas Gray, a Goshen resident. Take a look.

—Mr. Gray, you say you actually saw the suspect earlier this morning?

—Yes, ma’am. He was in my house. He stole my pickup truck.

—Can you describe the man for us?

—This wasn’t a man, dear. He was huge, and he had wings. That’s not a man.

—Excuse me. Did you say he had wings?

—Yes ma’am, I did. A massive pair of white wings. He was about—

—Mr. Gray, how old did you say you were?

—Eighty-one. Does that help you picture what this fellow looked like?

—No … it’s just …..

—Because I’m telling you what I saw.

—Go ahead, sir.

—He was at least six and a half feet tall. He had white skin, alabaster skin. He had no hair. He had wings. He didn’t say a word. I think I tried to speak to him. He subdued me, took my rifle away, tied me up. Then he stole my pickup truck and left.

—You had a rifle on him?

—It was a shotgun actually. I heard someone break into the house. So I got my shotgun and went to investigate.

—Did you try to get off a shot?

—No ma’am, not once I had seen him. I thought he was there on different business.

—What does that mean?

—I thought he was there for me.

—I see. Mr. Gray, do you … are you in good health?

—Listen to me, miss. I’ve been healthy and strong all my life. I’ve lived here in Goshen the entire time. I know what it sounds like. You can ask my daughter, son-in-law, or anyone around here if I’m okay in the head, all right? You asked me what I saw, I’m telling you. I’m a Christian believer. That wasn’t a man. The thing that stole my truck is not one of us.


My thought was that I could find a way to help someone, in some small way, being trapped here. Not in any salvific endeavor, of course, but perhaps in the areas of hope or of faith or simply in easing the general burden of living here. This did not seem unreasonable, and was unlikely to incur a wrathful response, or at least no sentence that would be worse than the one already carried out. We are given certain capabilities, gifts one might call them; it feels like a form of sin not to put them into use.

From the shack I scurried forward, doubled over, up the curved path. I kept my ruined wings folded closely at my flanks. Their tips brushed the small sharp stones. It seemed that the trees would shield me from observation by passing vehicles or neighbors. I was counting on the idea that no one else remained in the house. I’d seen the man leave first, then his wife and children. The third vehicle was still nearby, but it didn’t seem to get much use. It sat rusting almost visibly in the early morning cold. But let’s hope it runs, I thought.

I wasn’t sure if I could fold myself into that cramped space. The designers hadn’t had me in mind. But I had to get away from where I was, under concealment. Flight was out of the question. The idea was to isolate myself in some removed place to regroup. An alien cannot extemporize their way around the country they’ve landed in; everyone there is inherently against them. So one has to think things through.

When I got to the house I hopped the porch rail and sided to the door near the end of the path. It seemed to open into the back of the structure. I wrapped my hand around the chilled metal knob and twisted once. The lock inside the wood fell apart and the door jerked open. A wave of stale warmth blew over me and I became temporarily woozy. My senses were assaulted by a battalion of odors. Food; dust; refuse; ash from a cold grate; an animal, possibly more. I steadied myself, then went in.

We’ve had ample time to observe how these creatures live, so I knew what was needed. God was with me, even though I wasn’t with Him. I located the keys quickly. I thought it would be a longer search, but a ring of them hung suspended from pegs on the wall. I plucked them off. They chimed against one another, which sounded in its own way like a tiny chorus. But which was the correct one? I needed the one that was marked with the inscription ford.

It was then that I heard a pair of human feet shuffling nearby on the wood floor. As though lifting them was an effort. The sun was attempting to force its way into the house through the doorway where I stood, like an accomplice. I turned slowly, rising to my full height, blocking off the flood of light. A wrinkled human came into view. A man, wearing striped clothing and pointing a gun.

The man had white hair standing straight up on end, and small white whiskers on his sunken cheeks. He stood about a foot and a half shorter than I. His whole form was swallowed by my shadow. He lifted his eyes towards my silhouetted face, then lowered the barrel.

Bless the nations, the man said.

I sprung on him. I didn’t want to frighten him but it was too late. He lost consciousness and crumpled in my arms. In the room on my right there was a table and chairs where they obviously broke bread. I pressed his frail form into a chair and looked around some more. There was a second row of wooden pegs in a small chamber nearby with laundry machines. I found several long scarves, various colors and lengths, and used them to secure the old man to the chair. The fabric was soft enough not to cut him, but given his weakened state and the number of scarves I used, he might have been stuck there for some time. His forgiveness would have helped, but there was no opportunity to ask for it.

Before I left, the man stirred. I turned back and lowered my face in front of his, offering him my full-on gaze. The man’s eyes fluttered but he did not wake. My own eyes are awash in jade and azure tones. They resemble this planet when seen from a great height. For a moment I thought the man might open his eyes and look into them, but when I saw that he would not I gradually unfurled both wings, powerless though they were, curved them around the back of the chair, and enclosed his entire body. I held him in that space for a moment, touched my forehead briefly to his, and felt his body quiver.

Moments later I was squeezing myself into the vehicle, wings agonizingly crushed into the small space, my back curved unnaturally, head lowered so as to see out the window. I inserted the key and turned it.


… there was initially a single schoolteacher with the children, of course, conducting normal pre-school activities. We have confirmed that the teacher is 27-year-old Amanda Byers, who is from Northampton and lives in Goshen now. Ms. Byers was with the children but for whatever reason either chose to leave the building or was in some way coerced ... either way we know that she exited the church early in the standoff and was later taken in by the authorities. We have a reporter there trying to find out exactly what happened with Ms. Byers.

Now, meanwhile, we are starting to put together some of the pieces about how the man got to the church and where he at least began the day … you saw earlier our affiliate reporter Janet Batchelder’s interview with 81-year-old Silas Gray, who was accosted by the suspect, and whose vehicle was stolen. If you saw that interview you know that Mr. Gray made some unusual observations about the man that did this to him. Janet Batchelder has made her way to the scene, and joins us now.

—Janet, I understand that you have also spoken to Mr. Gray’s daughter, is that correct?

—I did speak to Mr. Gray’s daughter, Christina, moments ago, she did not want to appear on camera. But I want to show our viewers, if Bob can capture this behind me, I’m standing at the bottom of the driveway of the O’Leary residence, that’s Christina O’Leary and her family, this is their home. Mr. Gray is Ms. O’Leary’s father and resides here with them. But as you can see the house itself is farther up the hill. Here behind me is what was once known as a ‘sugar shack’, a separate building where Mr. Gray, a lifelong maple syrup manufacturer, used to produce his own maple syrup to sell locally. As you can see, Karen, the building is abandoned, but I would direct viewers to the roof of the structure … Bob, if you can zoom in on it … you see a substantial hole has been punched through. Now, according to Ms. O’Leary, that hole never existed before last night. You can see very clearly that either a portion of the roof collapsed or that somehow a breach was made in the structure ... we’re bringing this up because Ms. O’Leary said she was out of the house for several hours this morning and when she returned home about 45 minutes ago, she noticed the breach. Then she found her father, bound to a dining room chair inside the house. Now of course, Karen, there could be many explanations for the roof of the shack, but when you combine it with Mr. Gray’s somewhat bizarre observations about the man that stole his vehicle this morning … well, we have the beginnings of a strange story here.

—Yeah, I’ll say, Janet.

—Furthermore, according to Ms. O’Leary, it looks as though someone or something spent time inside the sugar shack during the night. She said she’s never seen that before in her lifetime, that it’s always been abandoned, but she told us that after unbinding and speaking with her father, she came down here to look inside. And that she saw evidence that someone had been in here.

—A very unusual scenario, Janet.

—Indeed.

—What was Ms. O’Leary’s characterization of her father’s state of mind? Did she have anything to say about what he told you earlier?

—We asked her that, Karen, she did not want to comment specifically on whether or not she believed her father’s account. But she did say to us pointedly that she believed he is, and I quote, ‘the sanest, most grounded person I have ever known.’ Back to you.


I guided the vehicle around some curves and over a few inclines until I reached what looked to be the middle of their small town. The cold white sun was harsh and clear, and I knew I was tempting something just by being there. I made an effort to keep the vehicle in constant motion, past the swiveling head of the occasional resident, walking a dog or pedaling a bicycle. I wanted no one to be able to get a on fix me, but inevitably someone probably did.

My only desire was to be of service, to locate someone or something that would be receptive. It collides with our nature to remain silent and inert. He knows this, of course, and figures it into the punishment. My plans, however, were not too grandiose, I thought, and there is a breadth to His Mercy that is often underestimated. In other words, at the time, I felt that there was a kind of safety net below me, as they say here. One might say I was counting on that. Whether this was wise or not, it allowed me to proceed as boldly as I had been.

I did not know my destination just then. I figured I would know it when I got close.

A short time later I arrived at a crossroads in the middle of the village, but it was such a sleepy town that no one was around. I sat in the vehicle for a moment with the machine chugging inside of it like some artificial heart, slapped together by amateurs. Then I heard other sounds, lilting on a fine webstring of air through the glass. Something flickered within me. I turned a crank to lower the window and listened closer. And there it was, a voice. Then several voices. A chorus!
Across the way from where I idled in the vehicle there was a white church. It was not new, because it had been built in such a way as to be recognizable. I know about the churches now that resemble massive hangars of human commerce, soul shopping malls. This was not one of those places.

Slowly I moved the vehicle forward into the parking lot. I followed it around the back of the building, a traditionally-shaped structure with a spire, painted white but with large scales peeling off, clearly in need of basic repairs. There was a large sign out in front of the double doors that had the name of the congregation – Light of Truth – and below this an open space where one could arrange plastic letters to deliver a message. It read:

ITS S NDAY
WHATS MISSING?
U!

Evidently this was intended to jolt readers into changing whatever plans they might have had for the Sabbath and attending services instead. How successful this campaign was seemed open to question.

Behind the church in the small parking lot strewn with blackened patches of unmelted snow there were a few other vehicles and a back door. I assumed that this led into a basement or to some all-purpose rooms that were used for church functions other than the ceremonial. With my window still partially rolled down I glided up near to this door, cocked my head and listened.

I could still hear them, the voices. They were beautiful, all of them, scrambling up over a rather tentative, plinking piano rendering a reasonable approximation of ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children’. Their untainted sentiments lilted up into the air and out of this place, seeking the ear of the Lord of Hosts, who has said, Let the little children come to me.

Here was my charge. They needed me. My heart gorging, I abandoned the vehicle and went inside.


… the stand-off, ladies and gentlemen, is now upwards of two hours hold and continuing on. At this stage most of the parents or family members associated with the children are gathered outside of the building, they are the civilians you see huddled together there on the lawn behind the barricades of police vehicles and military HUMVEEs.

Now, here are some of the other facts that we know or think we know as of this moment. We know that the man in the church is operating alone. We know that he arrived there in a pickup truck that he stole earlier this morning from a Goshen resident named Silas Gray. That vehicle has since been re-acquired by police and returned to Mr. Gray undamaged. We believe that the man in the church is unarmed; this according to the schoolteacher, Amanda Byers, who was with the children when the man arrived but was compelled into leaving the church entirely.

All morning we have been trying to get some answers to the most obvious questions raised by this situation, such as Why did Ms. Byers agree to leave the children were alone with this man, and Why have the authorities not attempted to enter the church if they believe the man is unarmed, et cetera. Folks, I can tell you that there are a lot of reports and rumors and stories floating around … but we now … are we ready? Great. We now hope to get some legitimate information because agreeing generously to speak to us for a moment in the middle of this crisis is the Deputy Sherriff of Hampshire County, William Cosgrave.

—Deputy Cosgrave, Karen Reynolds of IHS Cable News. Can you hear me all right, sir?

—Yes ma’am, I can.

—Thank you very much for speaking with us this morning. I know the situation is tense.

—You’re welcome.

—What can you tell us about what is happening right now?

—Well … basically we have a suspect in the building alone with nine young children who is not cooperating with us at the present time.

—What does that mean, he is not cooperating?

—It means that the suspect is not responding to any of our attempts to make contact with him in order to negotiate or identify his intentions.

—Has he harmed any of the children, Deputy?

—Not that we are aware of. We’re not in there, that’s the thing. But we believe he has not harmed or attempted to harm anyone at the present time.

—Do you know for certain that the man is unarmed?

—We are reasonably sure, ma’am, that the suspect is not armed, according to the statements of Ms. Byers and Mr. Gray from earlier this morning.

—Ms. Byers being the schoolteacher … Deputy, are those the only two eye-witnesses?

—No ma’am, there is another, a gentleman who happened to be walking his dog in the woodline up there behind me, who saw the suspect go in to the church and saw Ms. Byers come out. He’s the one who contacted the police.

—Who is that gentlemen and where is he now?

—He is still talking to us, he’s on the scene, but he asked not to be identified.

—All right. So, Deputy Cosgrave, I think what most people are probably wondering is, if the man is not armed, why has no one attempted to go into the building? Can you explain that to our viewers? What’s the holdup!?

[Pause]

—Well … Karen, I think that the best way to answer that is to say that we’re being extremely cautious because we don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with.

—Could you …. It is possible for you to elaborate on that, Deputy?

—Well, we don’t …. I’m not interested in alarming people any further, okay? Let’s just say we’ve had some conflicting accounts of what the man looks like and who people think he might be.

—Are you referring to Mr. Gray’s statements earlier today that he believes the man inside the church is not a man at all?

—Karen, it’s best if I do not comment on—

—Have you heard any other witnesses say that the suspect has a pair of—

—Ma’am, the front door of the church is opening. We’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you very much.

[To be concluded with Part Two soon]

Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 53

On Writing Short Stories: A Second Meditation

I got to thinking about writing short stories not too long ago on this blog, as a means of keeping my creative juices flowing when the novel I am writing was sputtering, as it is now again. It seems I have run into some kind of trouble keeping things on course in each of the last 3-4 chapters. Somehow I have managed to work out of the jam in each case so far, which is positive, but the delays this way of writing the novel causes are more or less unacceptable if I ever truly want to see this novel through and get it done.

Other writers, like T.C. Boyle, seem to take a run at a story or several in between novels they have written; in my case, it looks like I have some kind of weird propensity to taking a swing at one inbetween chapters of a novel……which is not very good for the novel’s momentum, of course. And it doesn’t ever seem to advance my prospects in the short story market, because as I’ve said here ad nauseam, after almost 15 years of sending out stories I’m still searching for my first publishing success in fiction. (I have two stories I’m still peddling out there now, waiting to hear their fate, one of which has already been rejected three times, the other once so far. But just to show you that I haven’t given up.)

In any event, here I am working on Chapter VII of the novel and I have hit yet another creative snag. I am struggling on one scene in particular, and sometimes when that happens the whole thing grinds to a halt. It’s hard when you hit these creative dryspells. You learn only through long experience, even if you’re not a household name, that the only way through is straight ahead. You have to kind of power your way through like the pointman of an infantry patrol who has to stay on azimuth but finds himself pushing through thick brambles. We’ve all been there, right?

For me that method doesn’t always mean sticking to the particular scene or story I am writing, but it does mean continuing to write, nearly at all costs. Sometimes you have to shelve something for a small period of time and return to it. It really hurts you on the timing front, more delays to completing your masterpiece, but then again, you never know where your tangents can sometimes lead. My last two short stories are among my best writing in my own opinion, and both of them were written while I was logjammed on the novel.

So I am beginning another short story. The tentative title is ‘Angel Accelerating’. I don’t really know how or why it got started. I had this image pop into my head that had to do with an angel that crashed to earth – operative word ‘crashed’, no soft flight, as if he’d been expelled – and stole a car. Why’d he steal a car? I wondered. Doesn’t an angel have wings? What was he doing down there? Where could he go? This story started as an attempt to answer those questions. Although at this early point it feels like it’s oriented towards a weirder vein than mos t of my other short stories so I am not sure if any, or all, of these answers are going to be provided. We’ll see. It may become more about, well, other things.

This is the second story in a row, if you count my previous short story ‘Suicide Station’, that started with a fragmentary image, and a strange/surreal one at that, and grew out of an attempt to determine what the story behind the image was. The only difference is that the prompt for ‘Suicide Station’ came from my subconscious in a dream, literally, whereas the image of the fallen angel jacking someone else’s car – as opposed to singing God’s praises or rolling stones away or delivering messages or what have you – came to me smack in the middle of the day for reasons that are entirely obscure to the writer. Call it living in a fantasy world to a frightening degree; call it a by-product of my crazy reading tastes; call it what you want, but that’s how the ideas seem to be coming these days. In pieces, and at odd times.

By the way this story is also revealing an even more baffling trend towards two-word story titles on the part of yours truly, if you consider one of my more recent stories was 2005’s ‘Start Something’, and my last two were ‘Auto-Response’ (still two words!) and ‘Suicide Station’. Now here comes ‘Angel Accelerating’. What the heck this reveals is minimal to the point of irrelevance, but it’s still kind of weird.

I feel increasingly like I go into writing short stories in particular with almost no real idea of what I am trying to accomplish. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It may represent me learning some lessons about fiction writing which would have stood me well if I had only learned them like 15 years ago instead of now. But no matter. I’m a late bloomer, I always have been, and that still can give me some hope. My brain these days feels better equipped to dig into nebulous material and find the story there, as opposed to beginning with some kind of concept or plot idea and attempting to construct the story around that.

This story I am beginning now seeems to be informed in an off-handed way by a few things. The first was the image popping into my head as I said before. But following that, there have been other prompts to persuade me to give the story a try. For a while I was listening to an audio version of the New Testament in my car, read by actors, the most notable being Jim Caviezel, best known for playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. I was listening to the first two gospels, Matthew and Mark, and I kept getting struck by the almost casual mention of angels here and there in the narratives. They would just pop in to Jesus’ words from time to time, or into the narrative itself, but never with much explanation. Like how Jesus, early in the accounts of his adult life, spends 40 days fasting in the desert, the Scriptures say ‘angels came, and administered to him’. What? Who? In what way? Does that mean they brought him food? How many helped him out? But it just kind of breezes past you. Ditto when Jesus is being arrested in Gesthemane, and he tells his disciples, ‘Do you think I could not ask my father right now, and he would send legions of angels? …… but it must be thus, that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.’ He would? How many angels? To do what? Trash the Roman soldiers?? It just got me thinking about the mysterious idea of angels at all. Not human, not God…….

Also I think I am being subconciously influenced by some writers I have read recently. The young but rising writer Chris Adrian’s novels and stories have an abundance of angels in them, and last year I read his collection A Better Angel. In an anthology I just finished I came across a story I had read once before, A.S. Byatt’s ‘The Thing in the Forest’, which is a magnificently written, strange, and sinister tale which recounts a single incident shared by two girls who meet during the evacuation from London during World War II. They are sent to a large country estate, and there they wander, unsupervised, into the woods where they encounter, quite literally, a thing in the forest. The remarkable thing about this story is that even though the entire conceit of meeting a monster in the woods has no basis in reality, the ‘thing’ is described so vividly and the reader experiences it so viscerally that you accept it anyway as the truth of the story. It happened. Reading this the second time around I was not only impressed so much by the writing, but I also realized, again, you can do anything. Just because something can’t happen in real life doesn’t mean it cannot in your story. You just have to find a way to express it in a manner that makes it real. It’s not easy to do, but the idea of attempting to do it is liberating. Finally, I have been reading some of the work of the inimitable Denis Johnson over the last year, and in the same anthology I happened across his remarkable novella called ‘Train Dreams’. This story ends with a kind of wolf-creature howling on a stage in front of a rapt crowd. The notion sounds preposterous. But in the context of this startling and powerul novella it comes across not only as a guttural, harrowing experience, but it seems to reach far beyond that, to signal that an entire era of human history has come to some kind of wounded close, and some new and darker reality is stepping in to plug the gap. Now THAT is powerful stuff. And yet it all comes out of a scene that in my description sounds ludicrous and hokey.

Does this mean my new story will be anything BUT ludicrous and hokey? Probably not….but I know what is possible. And I can dream as hard as I can towards it. Maybe this way I’ll write a good story, maybe someone will want to publish it. Maybe it will simply succeed in breaking the logjam and getting me going on the novel again.

Either way, pressing on with my story is a good move.

See You In The Next Life

In Memoriam, Melissa A. Cino, 1972-2009


Now in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring.
Thomas Merton


I WAS– AND I STILL AM – a fraud.

I don’t mean as a human being. I mean as a Pittsburgh Steeler fan. I’m not from Pittsburgh. Never even set foot there. In fact, I am such a facsimile of a true fan that I wasn’t even aware of the term ‘Stillers’, and did not know what it meant, until I learned of it from the wife of Peter Cino, my good friend for more than 30 years.

Melissa ‘Missy’ Cino, who died of cancer on April 2, was the real thing.

Pete employed the term in December 2004, as his wife and I were making plans to attend a football game between the Steelers and his favorite team, the New York Giants. In an email message he made reference to how Missy and I would enjoy watching the ‘Stillers’ play. I ‘corrected’ him in a reply, saying that no one called them that. He informed me as diplomatically as possible that his wife, having been born and raised in Murrysville, Pennsylvania – 20 miles east of Pittsburgh – had enlightened him long before that this is precisely what true-bred fans did call the team.

Whoops! Point taken.

I choose to begin this inadequate reflection on my 18-year friendship with Missy Cino with this ‘teaching point’ for two reasons. One, it was the lead-in to the second-to-last direct experience I ever had with Missy, a time I will always treasure; and two, it illuminates one of the small but meaningful ways in which Pete Cino showed his great love for his wife. For the fact is that when I came into possession of two tickets to the Giants-Steelers contest that year at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, my first thought was to call my old friend and invite him to come with me. As I have pointed out, Pete loves the Giants, so I was sure he would leap at the opportunity. ‘It will be my first time ever seeing the Steelers play in person,’ I cried gleefully.

Pete thanked me for the thought, and then told me without hesitation that he wouldn’t be going. ‘Why the hell not?’ I asked him. ‘I really want to,’ said Pete, ‘but Missy has never seen the Steelers play in person either, believe it or not. She’s going with you to that game.’

And so it was. Pete even sent me my own ‘Terrible Towel’ to wave. Missy and I did attend the game together, which happened to be the first ever match-up between then-rookie quarterbacks Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning, both of whom ended up being Super Bowl champions later. We watched the ‘Stillers’ go ahead early, then blow a good lead; the game turned into a cold-weather thriller as the winter evening descended on our chilled knuckles and wind-burned cheeks.

I remember Missy and me howling in unison and exchanging the obligatory high-fives as Jerome Bettis rumbled across the goal line for a short-yardage touchdown to secure a road victory for Pittsburgh. Throughout the game, we huddled closely to beat the stinging gusts streaking in from the swamps of Jersey, shared stories about our small children (I had one daughter at the time; she had two young boys), and hurled screams of support (and derision) down onto the frozen turf. It was great fun and I’ll remember it always.

One of my other favorite shared experiences with Missy was not one occasion at all, but stretched out over almost all the time I knew her, almost two decades. It was like one long-running joke. It’s not something that a lot of people would understand, but it sure gave me, my twin brother John, Pete, and a few others friends a lot to laugh about.

In 1988, when Pete, John and I were high school seniors (Missy was two years younger), an action-comedy film called Midnight Run arrived in theaters, with Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin. In the annals of celluloid history, this film was fated to be obscured by another action-comedy that opened around the same time, called Die Hard. But I digress. Midnight Run is about a bounty hunter (de Niro) who was hired to track down a seemingly weak-willed accountant (Grodin) who embezzled money from a mob boss, and transport him from New York to Los Angeles. If he did so successfully and in time, a sleazy bail-bondsman would pay him $100,000. The action-comedy aspects came into play in the form of a dizzying array of obstacles, accidents, misunderstandings, and hang-ups that all conspired to prevent the bounty hunter from completing the job and collecting the money.

The script, written by George Gallo, was filled with hilarious expletive-filled banter between not only de Niro and Grodin’s characters, but also between, behind and beyond just about everybody else who appears on the screen. The Internet Movie Database informs me that what we affectionately call the ‘F-word’ these days is used 119 times in the film.

For reasons no one will ever understand, this film became an obsession among my friends and I, and we would watch it over and over, together and apart, over the next 15 years. It didn’t take long for us to start quoting the script to each other, for it did have numerous very funny lines, and some of them seemed to be applicable to multiple situations, such as: ‘You know, you’re in this mess because you’re in this mess; I didn’t put you in this mess’. Somewhere along the way this developed into an untitled contest – a game – where the ongoing challenge was to determine who could find the most appropriate, or the wittiest, means of inserting a quote from Midnight Run into everyday life.

The game was, and still is, sophomoric. But in the same manner in which old school mates will tell the exact same stories over and over again whenever they reunite – stories that were absurd even the first time they were told – this practice of finding ways to work a quote from the film into a conversation became a part of the ritual whenever our old crew came together. Nobody understood the game except us, which made it funnier. You could only imagine the reaction of our girlfriends first, then our wives, and then even our children, as time ambled on and Pete, John, myself, and others continued to play this game unabated. Eyes rolled; heads shook; probably a lot of thoughts flew around the question of how boys who had ostensibly turned into men could still act exactly like boys.

Most people reacted this way to the game. But not Missy Cino. She not only seemed to accept the game – she embraced it, she joined it. And before very long, she was better at it than any of us. She reached the point where you could be having conversations about totally divergent subject matter, and out of nowhere she could insert a quote from the film that fit so well, we all would stop dead in our tracks, think for a moment about what had just been said, and then burst into laughter. There were times when she did this even during discussions of potentially difficult subjects, and it would always ease the tension.

I don’t know if she ever quoted the film in an attempt to make light of her own strenuous, and final, battle against the disease which claimed her life. But if I were a betting man I’d put a wager on it.

Since her struggle with cancer began, and even more so since her untimely death at the shocking age of 36, I have tried to make sense of why her role in what seems like such a silly ritual – this game around a goofy movie that not many people remember – means something to me. And I can only conclude that it has to do with the way Missy seemed to accept us – meaning Pete’s old buddies from the grammar school years, and Pete himself when he was with us – for exactly who and what we were. She never made fun of us for acting like a bunch of overgrown idiots, which we made a science of. She just rolled with it. She joined right in, and it never seemed unnatural.

There’s always that special woman who can be at the same time so totally female, in the best possible sense, and yet, when the situation calls, can also stand in effortlessly as another one of the ‘guys’. I think what this boils down to is the woman stooping to enter the sub-strata of male rituals of friendship and communication, and joining in with it instead of casting judgment. Missy was this kind of woman.

I remember Missy as being equally adept in talking about the Yankee starting rotation (the Cinos are big Yankee fans), or the latest Rush record, or the Steelers of course, as she would be in discussing motherhood or her community involvement. In my times with Missy over 18 years it was not unusual to have her in a room with five or six other men who all had known each other for decades, telling old and increasingly ridiculous stories. She knew them all and would share in the telling. In her later years she would talk proudly about her sons’ baseball exploits or other boyish triumphs as both a mom and an ardent fan. Missy always struck me as a wonderful mother to sons – down to earth, engaged, with a pair of dirty hands and scuffed-up knees – and her eyes gleamed with her love for them and her pride in their accomplishments. One got the feeling that if Peter or Daniel ever wound up on a team that won the World Series, Missy would be the mother storming the field rather than waiting until afterwards to offer a demure hug.

If I can only speak about Missy through the filter of my essential boyishness, it may be because I did not know her nearly as well as others. I know next to nothing about her childhood, nor do I know about any of her female relationships; tributes to Missy Cino strictly as a woman would have to come from other sources. In other words, I knew a lot less about her than she did about me. One of my painful regrets is that I was never able to observe Missy interacting with her youngest child, her daughter, which was all the more difficult when I finally looked upon this beautiful little girl at her mother’s viewing and saw Missy’s own face there.

Yet the fact that I knew Missy almost as ‘one of the guys’ I think leads directly to my ultimate understanding of her, which is that she loved all of us fellas through her unselfish love for Pete Cino. Because she loved Pete so much, so too did she love us, and she always, always let the boys be boys. In some ways, this woman who was junior to us in years was a kind of mother to us all: she was lovely enough to inspire our pride; generous enough to indulge our immaturity; fun enough to join us in it; decent enough not to criticize it.

Missy had a wonderful, throaty laugh. It was the kind of laugh that made a man long to have a beer in his hand so he could hoist it in the direction the laugh came from. I remember it perfectly, and can hear it even as I write these words. I hope somewhere, somehow I can drag it up from the depth of Missy’s healthy, pain-free gut one last time when I offer this last remembrance:

Missy, your courageous struggle will mark my heart forever, and your death came far too soon. After it came, and all of us men had gathered in one more smack session after saying goodbye to you, I felt later on that I had been set anew on a long, twisting, and possibly arduous road representing the rest of my time on earth without you. And facing that road, I can only think of one thing to say.

Looks like I’m walkin’.[i]


[i] ‘Looks like I’m walkin’’ is the final line from the film Midnight Run. ‘See you in the next life’ is also a line from the film.

Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 52

Exclusive Excerpt
The following is an early excerpt from Chapter VII of my novel-in-progress, Only the Dying. The chapter is tentatively titled 'Desperate Measures, Obeisance to Mammon'.


Career Change

Walter Brogan was freezing. If there was anything he was sure of, early on the morning of March 3, 1931, this was it. Everything else he found himself involved in on that particular morning was unsure ground. But he was doing everything he could not to make it appear that way.

A late winter freeze had had the township of Bentonville in its grip for the better part of a week, and it was quickly getting tiresome, Brogan thought. The temperature on the new thermometer he had nailed to the front porch of his home on 2nd and Evergreen had been a teeth-chattering 15 degrees; he’d made sure that he checked it on the way out the door earlier that morning. The unpleasant reading of the mercury had bothered him for two reasons: one, that he was going to have stand around ‘working’ in it all day, although working outside on cold days was something he’d done plenty of in his previous job. Two, he was now saddled with the concern that his wife would be too cold all day, because he knew she wouldn’t turn up the heat.

Normally, Greta Brogan’s frugality and self-sacrifice was something he wouldn’t take issue with. He couldn’t budge her anyway on such matters: he’d certainly learned that. Utility prices were murderous; just the cost of heating his house alone was drawing their already-strained budget close to the limits of its flexibility. But he hoped Greta would remember – well, certainly she remembered – or take into consideration the reality of her situation. For as of the first week of March, Greta Brogan was into the ninth week of her second pregnancy.

So far it had all gone down much differently than their first experience with pregnancy. Much less fanfare, both between Walter and Greta themselves, and in terms of their announcement of the news to the rest of their families. Greta had told Brogan around the middle of January that she had a suspicion she could be pregnant again, over dinner one night; the next week she visited the doctor, and received a phone call a few days later with a confirmation. She told Walter that evening when he arrived home from work. Brogan couldn’t feign great surprise or explode with nervous enthusiasm the way he might have done the first time around. And it wasn’t exactly a private moment between them, for their son Luke was literally tugging at his trouser leg for some attention when Greta delivered the information. Brogan, exhausted from his day’s work and trying to decompress from the struggles and inanities of same, managed to give his wife an embrace and a brief smile. He held her for a moment, before they moved into the kitchen where she had a beef stew and cornbread meal waiting for them.

But this was not to say that Walter Brogan was not happy with the prospect of having a second child. On the contrary. Brogan had always liked children. One thing that he and Greta had seen eye to eye on – since the first moment in their relationship when it seemed appropriate to even broach the topic – was the prospect of having a family together, with more than one child, if God’s will allowed for it. Brogan had wanted a son, and they’d been blessed with one the first time out, but he didn’t want the boy to have no sibling. Secretly, he began to hope right from the moment he learned Greta was expecting a second child that Luke would have a brother, for the simple fact that he never had one himself. At the same time, however, part of him was also intrigued by the prospect of having a daughter, and wondered about what having a baby girl would mean to him.

Nonetheless, it was difficult to react in quite the same way he had the first time – as much as his wife seemed to expect that he would. Their situation had been quite different when they’d learned about Luke’s existence, and so were the conditions around them. Winter 1927 seemed a thousand miles away from the place they found themselves in in March 1931, despite the relatively brief span of three years and a handful of months. The entire nation had been in a very different situation before from the pickle it was embroiled in now, and the mood of the people – their concerns, their hopes, their dreams, and their nightmares – had shifted dramatically. Brogan had already been inclined to worry, to internalize his personal questions and insecurities about his ability to provide a good home and a good life for the people who bore his last name – even before the bad reports that seemed to keep streaming in hand over first since this decade of the 1930s has begun. There was also the matter of the dead father who populated his thoughts and dreams - to whom he’d expressly promised, after his death, that he would secure those things for those who came after him.

But with every passing day in 1931, this calling, this responsibility, seemed to grow more and more difficult.

For Brogan, it would all be won or lost with his performance in this new role. This arena, that of his career, was the one in which he was obligated to excel. This was where his struggles would play out – right here, on the Hoosier ground where he now stood, where at that very moment a crew of workers was hacking away at the frozen soil in order to lay a new foundation.

He’d been hired by Standard Oil Corporation of Indiana two weeks before Christmas of the previous year. It had been a remarkable turn of events, at least from the Brogans’ perspective. For seven weeks following his face-to-face ‘walkthrough’ interview back in September with Standard’s Tom Spenlow and Bill Doyle – the latter of whom was supervising construction in the grass field – Brogan had heard precisely nothing about his prospects for obtaining the position. The closest he’d had to any feedback on how well he’d jockeyed for the job was Spenlow’s observation that day that it had been ‘very good’ to hear his condensed pitch for hiring him. The two men had walked him around for a while longer, dropped him back off at the Auto-Stop, and disappeared. By the beginning of December Brogan had more or less concluded that he hadn’t made the cut for one reason or another.

But then came the letter, from one Ralph ‘Whitey’ Pickering, the General Manager of Standard of Indiana’s North Gary Refinery, just over two hours away by car between Gary proper and East Chicago. It was a brief message, inviting Brogan to tour the facility and to ‘have lunch’ with Pickering and ‘some of my associates’ on Friday, December 17, 1930. That was the moment when Brogan first began to understand in his gut that the job would be his, and his life, or at the very least his career, was about to change.

He’d said this much to his wife on the evening the letter came. He remembered that she had been standing in their kitchen at the time, wearing an apron and cutting up chicken livers for a meal. She smiled warmly and said she felt that way too, and that she was positive that he would go up there and show those oil men who was the right man for the job. Brogan felt his confidence begin to swell – until Greta made one more observation.

‘Pretty soon though, honey, you’ll have to explain all this to my father.’

Brogan felt like someone had snuffed his best set-shot on the basketball court. But Greta was right. He’d thought of the matter before, but not recently, and not at all since he’d opened up that official letter of invitation that evening.

He’d asked her: ‘What do you think is the best way to go about doing that?’

To which Greta responded, after pausing for a half-beat to think about it, a large kitchen knife extended in front of her, parallel to the wood cutting block: ‘The sooner the better.’

‘Be direct about it. No pussy-footing,’ he’d said.

‘Don’t you think so?’

He did. After their dinner on that very evening. Brogan found himself strolling down the sidewalk in the pale, chilled moonlight towards his father-in-law’s house, where he lived with Gertie only. He carried the letter with him. He felt nervous as he still sometimes did when approaching a discussion with P.G. Heinricks, who had not softened one bit over the years they’d been related when it came to matters of business. Heinricks was a hard man with a keen intellect and a foreboding sense of loyalty.

All of this came rushing into Brogan’s mind anew when the front door of the familiar house abruptly opened. P.G. Heinricks stood rigidly before him, still dressed in his signature shirtsleeves and black tie, a lit pipe exhaling smoke into the night air. He stared at his son-in-law through the doorframe.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the old man growled.

‘Mr. Heinricks. Sorry to bother you. There’s something I need to discuss with you. It’s important. Do you have a minute?’

P.G. Heinricks stared some more. Brogan held his ground, looking straight back into Heinricks’ eyes, from his somewhat elevated angle, the way he had once done at the tail end of a church aisle on a day many years before, with a woman dressed in white by his side. ‘Come on in, then,’ Heinricks said, and stood to one side to allow Brogan through.

A Four-Course Meal of Faulkner

Occasionally I will embark on a self-regimented “reading series” in order to read more deeply into a certain area of literary interest. A few years back I did this with 19th-century British literature, finally getting around to works of such giants as Eliot, Hardy and Lawrence. I’ve got plans one of these years to do one focused on the African experience in America (possibly in 2009), and one exploring modern literature from India. I even have a more ambitious project in mind (and I know I’m not the first to do this!) to “read around the world,” taking on books from six continents and “raiding into dark corners” (to steal from Benedict Kiely) I have yet to explore. Whether that happens any time soon, given my hectic home and work life, is anyone’s guess needless to say… but it never hurts to aim high.

Recently I decided to take on another of these series’, this time attacking the work of William Faulkner. As someone with a fascination and taste for American literature, I felt I needed to know more of his work… and even though I had read such standards as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, I knew there was whole huge chunks of the Faulkner corpus that would reveal far more to me about this complex and intriguing writer. I decided to take on four other works from the Southern master: Sanctuary; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; Absalom, Absalom! and finally his last novel The Reivers.

What it was like, plowing through four Faulkner works almost back-to-back? What did I learn from it? Well, it would be hard to sum up in a short post… but I would like to share some impressions of each book and take an amateurish stab at how they might fit into the greater Faulknerian body of work. I’ll take them in the order that I read them…

Sanctuary – This strange foray into the world of noir crime fiction (sort of) is definitely one of the stranger, and in my opinion less successful, Faulkner works. It’s interesting though because we know Faulkner worked for a time in the Hollywood system writing screenplays (most famously, I think, for his script for Chandler’s The Big Sleep), and I wonder if his time doing that sort of nudged him in this direction with his fiction, or whether it was the reverse somehow. Anyway, mixing Southern gothic and noir fictional themes together makes for a dark, murky, strange brew… which would be interesting if more happened in the story. Still, the climactic crime and courtroom scenes that revolve around it still hold some shock value even today… and in Popeye, Faulkner created one of the more menacing heavies in all of American fiction. Fans of Cormac McCarthy might pick up echoes of Faulkner’s descriptions of the Memphis underworld in Suttree’s Knoxville. This is definitely not the place to start with ol’ Billy though.

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem – Probably one of the most experimental of Faulkner’s novels (along with perhaps A Fable), this tells the seemingly-unrelated stories, in alternating chapters, of a love affair between a man and a married woman and three convicts trying to escape prison across fields flooded by the Mississippi River. Literary types (like myself) will find interest in thinking about what possessed Faulkner to take these two disparate tales, which he was working on separately, and intertwine them together into a larger work… not to mention the utter mystery of taking that phrase from the Old Testament as his title (though this is something Faulkner liked to do, obviously, with his novels – see Absalom, Absalom!). By the way, based on imagery I noticed in this novel (the flooding river engulfing cotton fields and farms, livestock on top of henhouses, not to mention the fact that this is all set in Mississippi), I'm convinced that this book is one of the sources the Coen Brothers were drawing from - whether consciously or not, we'll never know - as they were conceiving and filming their underappreciated O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Absalom, Absalom! – Speaking of… not only was this the most powerful and accomplished of the four novels I read in this series, I think it’s also right up there with As I Lay Dying as my favorite of all Faulkner works. For years schools and literature courses have been using The Sound and The Fury as a way to introduce Faulkner to readers, but in my opinion this is the one novel that best represents his work in terms of setting, themes, characters and concerns. It chronicles the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen and the estate he built up in the Old South – the slaves he kept, the affairs he had, the children he neglected and his dogged ambition to build up some kind of ‘legacy’ in his adopted home state of Mississippi. Rich, complex and deeply evocative of a Southern culture that was quickly fading (although not the racist attitudes that grew up out of it, unfortunately), this is considered by many to be William Faulkner’s masterpiece… and I would have a hard time arguing against that. I think I enjoyed reading Dying more, but this novel amazed me nonetheless with its poetic language and seething passion, rising from every page like Southern humidity.

The Reivers – Faulkner’s last published novel is considerably different in tone and style from all of those previously mentioned… it read to me like the work of a more mellow, older and perhaps wiser writer who’s reflecting on the life he’s led. Hence its (important?) subtitle, A Reminiscence, and its warm and elegiac tone. I’m not sure if this is based on real memories of his or not, but it was interesting to read him writing in the voice of an 11-year-old boy this late into his career, and the upbeat ending came to me as something of a surprise given the somber and menacing tones the other books had struck. It may be a classic case of an artist “mellowing with age” and perhaps losing a bit of his former bite… still, there are interesting aspects to this comic novel, especially in its depiction of the newly-emerging phenomenon of the automobile. His descriptions of driving and maintaining an early Ford and what it was like to traverse long distances through state lands without highways were both humorous and fascinating.

In lieu of "Valentine's Day"...

I know many readers are waiting in rapt expectation for the annual Secret Thread Valentine's Day Celebration... what's that you say? You don't remember any in the past??

All right, I'll be honest here - I think Valentine's Day as we know it today is ridiculous, a total sham. I think this guy is absolutely right on the money when he says, essentially, that not only is it a bad idea all around, but it only exists to make retailers richer and actually weakens the concept of "true love" in people's minds.

I know that makes me sound like a crank and a curmudgeon... and yes, it also makes me unpopular at home around this time of year... but something about the idea of the Hallmark Corporation telling me that I MUST express my love for my wife on THIS day, in THIS way, just rubs me the wrong way.

Fortunately, I've come across two items that serve as great reminders/instructors of what real true love is all about... i.e. self-sacrifice, giving without counting the cost, and taking great personal risks to make yourself vulnerable to someone else.

These are the kinds of ideas you're not going to find expressed in pithy statements inside of those Hallmark cards...

A phrase that dawned on me when I first became a parent and has stayed with me ever since is this (and I don't claim it to be in any way original!): the greater the love, the greater the risk. Once I had a child and started the long and wondrous journey of watching and helping him grow (and subsequent other "hims" and one "her" since :) ), I began to realize what a 'great and terrible' thing is it to wholly invest yourself in someone else. Of course I had a sense of that once I met and fell in love with my wife, but with a child somehow it is even more apparent - the instant they are born you feel yourself "fully invested." It felt to me exactly like climbing a very high ladder, putting some powder on my hands and reaching out for that swinging trapeze - even though I had never swung on one before, and there was also that terrifying realization that there is no net underneath!!

Because there isn't. When you give yourself away in love to someone else, you are fully aware of the fact that you could lose them at any moment... and that realization intensifies your love for them like nothing else. Oh, I'm not saying for one second that I always treat my loved ones as I should because of that love... far from it, unfortunately, for I am a deeply flawed man like any other. But when I stop to think about how much I love them, or how much I love their mother... really think about it, and the implications of that... well, I think there is a healthy bit of fear mixed into the warmth of the love I feel. It's scary to deeply love someone, because of how vulnerable you become. Every parent has felt this.

Here are two items that caught my eye because they are expressions of this... in very different ways.

The first is a blog entry from a writer for The New York Times who is suffering from cancer. In this piece he offers a heart-felt tribute to his wife who has hung in there with him through a very physically and (importantly) emotionally/psychologically debilitating experience. It's so devoid of sentimentality that it actually describes things you'd never want to really know about (the man has prostate cancer, so you can imagine)... but that honesty is essential, because it serves to hammer home his point all the more. Which is nicely summed up when he writes:

Yes — lust is essential. But right now, sex seems quaint, old-fashioned. Oddly enough, it can’t compete with the depth and gravity of a light touch, a sly glance. I’m in the mood for the Beatles and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” not Grace Jones growling, “Pull up to my bumper, baby." Don’t get me wrong. I really, really like sex. But given a choice between the mere biology of lust and the deep soul of love, I’ll take love.

A wise man. Me too. Sex is important, sure, even vital - but it's not the be all end all, even though our culture tries to tell us it is. God bless Mr. Jennings in his fight to beat the cancer, and may he enjoy many more years of love - true love - with his wife.

Then there's this concise, poetic and heart-shaking from Donald Hall (especially when you realize the writer lost his beloved wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, several years back) description of the risk of love... which, if you truly mean it when you say those words "in sickness and in health," you're signing up for on the day the ship sets sail.

Love Poem

When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.

You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

May God give me, and all spouses everywhere, the strength and courage to see the journey through to its end... no matter how rough the waters become, no matter if the very ship itself goes down in the effort.

Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 51

It’s gratifying to report that I have completed the draft of Chapter VI of my novel, as of this morning.

‘But wait!’ interrupts the discerning reader of this blog. ‘You started writing it back in July! How is this progress?? I’ll look forward to reading the book in about twenty years, thanks.’

My answer: ‘Chill out, bro. This is in fact progress, as I am about to explain. It is true that I first laid pencil to paper on July 28, 2008 to begin drafting Chapter VI and that today is February 9, 2009. For those who don’t do math, this constituted a period of roughly 6½ months. However, back in ’08, I only got through one “scene” and part of another one before careening into a brick wall and skittering off wildly towards a few essays and some weird short story about a woman who commits suicide by jumping off a tower in a parallel universe. As you can see, I lost my head for a little while. Fortunately, I buckled down sometime around Jan. 2 of 2009, and have written all of the rest of the chapter since then, which is only about five weeks. It’s a good size chapter, close to 40 pages. When you consider the documented fact that most of the first five chapters of the novel have taken me anywhere from 3 to 6 months to write, I’d say that Chapter VI was composed relatively quickly, and it bodes well for getting this book done in the less-than-two-more-years I have allowed myself.’

Discerning Reader (DR): ‘Ok, ok, so you are working well now. Will it continue?’

Mutt Ploughman (MP): ‘I hope so. I am going to make every effort to cruise right into writing Chapter VII without so much as a tap on the brakes.’

DR: ‘But don’t you have to put in some time on editing and rewriting Chapter VI first?’

MP: ‘Next question.’

DR: [clears throat] ‘What’s Chapter VI called? Being Discerning Reader, I of course saw that already in the historic Entry #50, but maybe the legions of other readers here will want to know.’

MP: ‘Good point. It’s called “The Right Man, Tapping a Gusher”.’

DR: ‘What’s “tapping a gusher” even mean?’

MP: ‘Read the book.’

DR: ‘I’d love to, but I don’t have 20 years to wait.’

MP: ‘Ha ha ha. Well, it has to do with the discovery of oil under the ground.’

DR: ‘Where else might one discover it?’

MP: ‘Do I need to end this interview?’

DR: ‘Sorry. So what does happen in Chapter VI?’

MP: ‘I can’t really say that.’

DR: ‘Nah, I guess you can’t. Can you relate the characters the chapter is most concerned with?’

MP: ‘Sure. There’s Walter Brogan, my protagonist, of course. Cal Wittenburg, the wheat and hog farmer, at least at the outset. He’ll also have a key role in Chapter VII. Peter Heinricks, Brogan’s wayward brother-in-law, experiences some major changes, but off-camera, as it were, since he’s in Texas. And finally Myron Devreaux, the attorney who wants to run for public office, returns in this chapter from being absent in Chapter V.’

DR: ‘Where time-wise does Chapter VI lead us up to?’

MP: ‘November 1, 1930, to be precise.’

DR: ‘Interesting! So why did Chapter VI take so long to write?’

MP: ‘It’s a good question. The answer is I wish I knew. As I remember, when I completed Chapter V over last summer, I was feeling about as confident as I have at any time that I could keep going with the novel. I liked how the writing was going. My goal was, like it is now, to hop right into Chapter VI – and I did! But as I said above, I got about two scenes in and just hit the wall. It wasn’t really “writer’s block”, per se. I mean, I had an idea generally of where I want to go. When I start a chapter, I write a very loose outline, like six or seven lines. I don’t really want to plan the book very much, planning is overrated. But I do have some ideas of where I want a chapter to go when I start on it – you have to have something in mind – so I jot a few of them down in about one sentence each. So I had done this for Chapter VI, it’s still sitting there on my desk. But I got into the second scene and something just wasn’t working well. And it’s a confidence thing, I believe. You start to second-guess. That’s why momentum is important. I wasn’t feeling it, and I started to skip days, and before I knew it the thing had gone way cold and I couldn’t breathe any life into it anymore. Is that frustrating? Exceedingly. But there’s a positive thing which comes out of this kind of experience too. Whenever this happens to me, and it has happened a number of times in writing this story, I always find that my writing instincts do not give way. I can’t get the chapter moving again, but luckily – and I do consider this extremely fortunate – I am still dying to write something. Anything! So I might scribble a few entries in here, for example, or, a lot of times, I think about trying an essay or a story. So that’s what I did from August to January 1, ’09. I wrote a book review, at least two essays, and the short story I mentioned before. The story in particular I think really helped me on a confidence level. I had a weird idea and decided to try it. Just before then, I had had a different weird idea for a story that had to do with Bono [singer from U2] and Africa, and I tried it, and I failed right out of the gate. But this time I had a fantastical idea and I demanded of myself that I would write it. I felt that I was the only one who could. And so I did. It was a great exercise, and it gave me back my confidence.’

DR: ‘What happened to that story? I know you’ve always tried to get stories published, but without much success.’

MP: ‘True. I entered it into a contest. I’m still waiting for the results.’

DR: ‘Good luck.’

MP: ‘Thanks. It’s a real long shot, but I don’t mind the odds, and I’ve certainly gotten used to rejections.’

DR: ‘Any other potential publishing accomplishments in the docket?’

MP: ‘I have one other short story submitted to a literary magazine and an essay also entered into a contest. Still waiting on all three.’

DR: ‘What do you predict will happen?’

MP: ‘Next question.’

DR: ‘So what happened after you finished the story?’

MP: ‘In a word, the holidays. Then after the new year I resolved to work doubly hard on my novel. I picked up Chapter VI and after one day it was as though I never stopped.’

DR: ‘Let’s change course. How do you think the novel is coming along overall?’

MP: ‘Really, considering that I have never written one or even came close – the closest was my graduate school thesis, a modern-day military novel that logged about 300 pages but never really got anywhere – I think it’s going pretty well. I have worked on it at least half the year every year since 2006. I had been thinking about it in some capacity since at least 2000, if not earlier. I just needed to develop more skills and discipline to get started on it and perhaps a little bit of publishing experience to gain enough confidence. Unfortunately, none of my published work has been fiction, but that hasn’t been for lack of effort. I’ve written about 40 stories, so that’s something. My experience over the last three years has revealed to me a truth I suspected but didn’t really have enough information to confirm, namely, that anyone writing a first novel is going to school – they are involved in the ultimate OJT. No one really knows how to write a novel. No one can really teach you how to write one. I would even imagine, and I am going to have to find this out later, that even after you’ve written one you still don’t know “how” to do it. You have to just read a lot of them and decide you’re going to try to write one. And from there it’s a commitment. I figure if I am capable of making a marriage work, then I can write a novel too, if it really matters to me to write one.’

DR: ‘Are you fully satisfied with the speed with which you’re writing the book?’

MP: ‘Not even a little. But I can’t increase it too much more. I might be able to jam in more writing here and there in my day, but there isn’t a whole lot of room, and I probably would pay for it in other areas even more than I do now. The commitment to write a book that I spoke of a minute ago comes with a price tag. You have to be able to afford what it costs you. If I’d been able to write one from the ages of say, 22-30, that would have been the best time for me to do it, but I’ve always been a late bloomer, and I just couldn’t get one going. Now I’m 38 with a wife, a full-time job, sometimes a second job, and three young children. I don’t get much time to write. I have to do it a little bit at a time. There’s nothing for it.’

DR: ‘Do you think your novel is publishable?’

MP: ‘It’s up to me to make it so. I can try as hard as I can to make it so. The good thing about that is that at least some of that is in my own control.’

DR: ‘But do you believe it will be published?’

MP: ‘Honestly, I don’t know. Like they say in sports, I don’t have a crystal ball. I hope so.’

DR: ‘But surely you think about it?’

MP: ‘Sure I do. Often. But when I am writing, I have to make a very conscious effort not to. What matters is not what happens to the story, when you are writing a story. What matters is the story. And that’s all that matters. Take this analogy: I remember when Bruce Springsteen was doing his solo acoustic tour in support of the record The Ghost of Tom Joad, he would tell the audience at the beginning of his shows that he wanted to have silence – that he needed to have silence from them so that he could, as he put it “give my best to you”. That’s kind of how I feel about those thoughts. I can’t be thinking them if I want to give my best to the story itself. And as a consequence, one hopes, give my best effort to the reader, should the story ever find one.’

DR: ‘But I take it you have to imagine, at the very least, that the readers exist in order to write.’

MP: ‘Of course. Otherwise, why do it? You don’t write just to see your own words on a page yourself. You want to communicate what you have to say or tell to others.’

DR: ‘What’s the next chapter called?’

MP: ‘I’m not sure yet. In keeping with my idea of having each chapter title be one phrase, comma, another phrase – i.e., Sweet Music, Pretty Flowers (Chapter I) – I think I know what I want the second phrase to be: “Obeisance to Mammon”. That is from Scripture, and it was also quoted by FDR in a famous speech in 1932. Which, if you’re paying attention, gives you a clue of some of the timing of the next chapter.’

DR: ‘What’s my name?? Of course, I caught that. Have you started writing it yet?’

MP: ‘No, I am typing up Chapter VI and have to do some rewriting and editing first. I hope to start it by the end of February though.’

DR: ‘Best of luck. Hey, one last question. Isn’t it really egotistical to sit down and ask yourself a bunch of interview questions that you can answer, like you’re some kind of real writer?’

MP: ‘It’s really just pure fantasy, is what it is. But the way I see it, what’s the difference? Ego or fantasy? Both are essential for a novelist, it seems to me. In the words of Popeye, I yam what I yam.’

On what ought to be a resounding wake-up call to American Catholics (and Christians of all stripes)

Despite all that lip service (read: BS) about “reducing abortions” and “women’s health,” current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it blatantly clear yesterday in a nationally-televised interview why the pro-abortion lobby is so important to her party… it’s the economy, stupid!!

From ABC NEWS’ THIS WEEK:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

“Fix the economy by increasing the amount of pregnancies we terminate”… that’s a great idea. That’s forward-thinking. That’s “change we can believe in.” Did you know that $65-70 million of the President’s proposed “stimulus package” would go straight into Planned Parenthood’s coffers? What a surprise, huh? (Obama is, and always had been, PP’s “dream” candidate. I think nowhere near enough people have really thought about that. One wonders what PP’’s founder, a white woman and an infamous racist, would’ve made of that one…)

Don’t tell me it ain’t about convenience and money… don’t talk to me about “only in cases where the life of the mother is at risk”… after all, we've got an economy to jump-start here! It’s an industry we’re talking about here, it’s big business… might as well make money off of it!! Why not pass out coupons in public schools, Nancy?? (Actually, they probably already do that… or close to it.)

Anyone ever read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World??

Does anyone else see something troubling in this logic, or am I just a hopelessly right-wing fanatic??

Not condemning any person here… I know I’m in no position to… just the mindset.

Look, there’s no doubt this is a very complex issue. I acknowledge that. But even putting all spiritual/theological discussions aside: to actually encourage this as a money-making operation, as an industry – to me that is incredibly problematic. Where are the sweet-smelling Clintonian reassurances along the lines of “safe, legal and rare”? Doesn’t such a promise run contra to the instincts of the entrepreneur, or the businessman/woman?

Just as the government wants to help the Big Three make and sell cars, they also apparently want to help Planned Parenthood succeed as well… oh, for the greater good, of course (whose, is open to question). But you know what? - we could save a LOT of money and funnel it back into the economy by getting rid of all our elderly on life support, too… hmm… somebody call up Peter Singer at Princeton! (Don’t laugh - they actually do this stuff in the Netherlands!!)

Remember the whole “Quietus”** concept in Children of Men? This ain’t very far from that, when you think about it… encouraging the elimination of the inconvenient, so that the rest of us lucky enough to have been born already (and good thing we weren’t born during a similar economic crisis, under an administration like this one! *whew!!*) can thrive again, upgrade our house and buy a Wii for the kids! Whoo-hoo!!

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I don’t want some of that stuff, for my own family… I'm not putting myself on some holier-than-thou pedestal here... but at this cost?? NO THANKS.

** from the Wikipedia plot summary of P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men: “Older/infirm citizens have become a burden… they can either (a) die helpless and unassisted in their homes; (b) commit suicide or (c) take part in a so-called Quietus (government-sanctioned mass drownings).”

Oil Men

Below is a brief excerpt from Chapter VI of my novel in progress, Only the Dying. In this segment, two men from the Standard Oil Company of Indiana have shown up in Bentonville, Indiana, unannounced, looking for Walter Brogan, my protagonist. When they find him, they invite him along on a walking tour of a possible building site for a new bulk plant facility for the storage of fuel oil. The site is alongside the B&O rail line on the outskirts of town where a decrepit ruin of an old factory now stands. Brogan understands that the invitation amounts to a job interview. The time is early September, 1930.


‘Al McCready is dead,’ the older man said when Brogan had stopped talking.

This was not what Brogan had been expecting to hear, of all intelligence that the men from Standard Oil of Indiana might have been there to impart. He was dumbstruck, and slowed his progress through the grass to nearly a stagger. Al McCready, dead? He had never known the man to seem robust, but passage from this world was not something that had struck him as being imminent. Although it was true that Brogan hadn’t exactly counted McCready among his close friends, he had been an associate, and for a few years running was his sole connection to the possible change in profession that the three men now seemed to be on the way to discussing. In short, the news came as a shock.

‘Had he been ill?’ Brogan asked.

Spenlow looked at his red-haired colleague, who exchanged a silent glance with him.

‘We were thinking you might be able to tell us,’ said Spenlow.

‘Me?’ asked Brogan. ‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t know the man well enough to know that. Sure, we spoke a lot, but we never got into that kind of thing. McCready is – or, was – he was a bit rough around the edges. Smoked a lot. But if he was sick or not, I never knew.’

‘In that case, I’m sorry to have to tell you. It was a surprise to us too, as you can imagine.’

‘Any news about what happened?’ Brogan wanted to know. By the time they had reached the old building and were standing adjacent to its flaking southern end.

‘He was found in his home, in the bathroom. Looks like an accidental death. That’s all I really know, and couldn’t tell you much more than that in any case, on account of the inquest that is just underway,’ Spenlow related.

‘Sorry state of affairs,’ commented Doyle abruptly, and Brogan was about to agree, but then saw that the other man wasn’t even talking about McCready. He was peering into a shattered window close to where they stood, into the darkened interior of the old factory. ‘We’d need to come in here and level all of this right quick.’ This last comment was directed to Spenlow, almost as if the preceding conversation had never taken place.

Insensitive son of a gun, thought Brogan. McCready put in over a quarter century of service to this crackerjack’s outfit. But he said nothing.

‘You said he was found in his bathroom?’ Brogan asked. His thoughts had immediately flown to Ilse Heinricks and her tragic death two years before.

‘That’s right. Damned tragic,’ replied Spenlow. He shook his head. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to mention that while you were eating with your whole family. But it was one of those things that got us out here now. McCready’s untimely death accelerates the process. We’ve got Fred Means in there temporarily, but he won’t be delivering to this area. We need a new facility.’

With that, he began looking over the decrepit building. He walked around the corner to the west side. The breeze tousled the grass. A wasp buzzed near Brogan’s head. He waved at it impatiently, not knowing quite what to say next. He was still a bit flummoxed by the news about McCready, but didn’t want to ask more questions on the matter. Something made him feel that Spenlow, representing Standard, knew more than what he had indicated about the death, but there was no legitimate basis for this feeling. Only the inclination of his own gut.

Spenlow had opened a small distance between himself and Brogan. He gestured to Doyle to join him, and for a few moments the two of them spoke in inaudible tones. Doyle made broad sweeping motions with his arms, and pointed in particular directions. Brogan, standing off to one side, realized the younger man was describing a potential layout of the site. Spenlow nodded here and there. It began to occur to Brogan that Spenlow was doing more of the talking because he was the officer type, a man who made decisions. Doyle was the foot soldier, as it were; the man with the trade knowledge. Although he seemed rather young to have expertise, he clearly was directing the thought process.

Brogan stood off to one side and remained quiet. He didn’t want to seem impatient. But the truth was he had left Benson on his own at the station, and, more to the point, he still didn’t know what the precise purpose was for these men to bring him out here with them. He had an idea, of course, that they were interested in recruiting him, but they had yet to make mention of this. They must have picked up something in Brogan’s demeanor, however, for Spenlow broke away from Doyle again and wandered across the grass towards him once again.

‘Sorry, Brogan. We were thinking things over.’

‘What are you thinking about?’ Brogan asked. He thought it wasn’t out of line to ask, since they had brought him out this way after all.

Spenlow pulled a white handkerchief out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He removed his barbershop hat with one hand and mopped his brow with the other.

‘Well, if we’re going to put a bulk facility in here, we’ll need a man to run it. You know that. The fact is, we’ve got a job to fill. McCready recommended you to us. In fact, he brought your name up some time ago. That doesn’t surprise you, I take it.’

‘No sir. We spoke about it. He told me months ago he would mention my name. I’ll be up front about that.’

‘Hopefully you’ll be up front about everything, Brogan. That’s the sort of man we’re looking for.’ Spenlow now regarded him with great scrutiny and a stone face. Doyle had his back to them, still looking back and forth over the land.

‘Of course, Mr. Spenlow. I didn’t mean otherwise,’ said Brogan, rubbing his hands together.

‘I’m sure you didn’t, sir. And while we’re talking straight, I’ll tell you this. We’re here because of McCready’s, let’s say, “enthusiasm” about you as a good candidate. But we’ve got questions, too. A couple concerns. I don’t mind telling you about them. I’d like to know what your answers would be to those concerns.’

‘Then go ahead, Mr. Spenlow.’

The older man smiled. ‘Brogan, I consider myself a reasonably good judge of a man’s character. I think that’s part of what got me to where I am right now. And you strike me as a decent fellow. You’ve got some backbone. And you seem to work pretty hard. Standard of Indiana can appreciate those qualities.’

‘I suppose I have some pretty good reasons to work hard,’ Brogan said, shrugging. ‘More reasons every day, I’d say, if you read the papers.’

‘I assure you, sir, that I do. Good jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by nowadays. Which is why we feel we need to select our man wisely. To tell you the truth, Mr. Doyle here is of the opinion that you might not have the experience required to do this job. We know you haven’t been in the business for long. What would you say that?’

Brogan eyed the redheaded man. He still didn’t turn towards the two of them, even though he was certainly within earshot. This Brogan found irritating.

‘I’d say if he has questions about what I can or can’t do, maybe he ought to ask me about them himself.’

Now the younger man did turn around. Quickly. His eyes blazed, but he did not advance towards Brogan.

‘Now listen here—’ Doyle began.

Spenlow held up one hand. His eyes remained on Brogan. He waited a moment before speaking. Brogan stood his ground and looked at Doyle straight on.

‘Look, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘This isn’t personal. I appreciate that you have self-confidence. But the fact is that Doyle’s correct. You do lack experience. You’d have to hit the ground and learn the distribution aspects of this business in short order. Pumping fuel is one thing, sir; handling it on a regular basis is quite another. I need not tell you that aside from all business issues, there are also safety concerns that we would need to have assurance that you would be able to understand and address.’

Brogan took his eyes away from Doyle and paid Spenlow his direct attention. He still didn’t like, or much respect, what he could ascertain of the younger man’s character. But he knew that Spenlow’s points were valid, and he could sense that his opportunity was on the line. There would not be a whole lot of other chances to land a more suitable position, he thought.

He realized that Spenlow was giving him the chance to speak. So he decided to make his own thoughts clear.

‘Mr. Spenlow, I understand that you’re concerned about my experience. It makes sense that you would be. But if you don’t mind my pointing this out, it doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem, or your employer probably wouldn’t have sent you out here to find me. I’m sure you men, and Standard Oil, aren’t interested in wasting time.’

‘You got that right, Brogan,’ said Doyle, still looking him over.

Brogan ignored the interjection. He continued: ‘I’ll tell you this much. I think I can handle the job. I’m strong, I work hard, and I’m local. And I’m looking for a more promising situation in order to better protect my family. There’s no shame in saying that. Now, I don’t know if you folks teach your employees or if I need to go out and spend some time up in Gary or Calumet talking to other men that handle fuel or what. I do know I spent a lot of time talking about the way it works with Mr. McCready.

‘I’ll learn the job. You can bet on that. If you’re looking for a man that’s serious, who will make you feel right about your choices, Mr. Spenlow, I am that man.’

At that moment, as Brogan finished speaking, what might have been a lingering moment of silence suspended between the three men in the grass was splintered by the long, low rumble of a freight train’s whistle. The approach of a trainful of supplies seemed to Brogan to lend the whole situation a good feeling, a kind of unspoken confirmation that the location was appropriate, and the need to find the right man for the job was, for all practical purposes, the last piece of the puzzle.

‘That’s good to hear, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘Very good. Now, let’s take a few more minutes before we get you back to the station to talk about what a bulk plant down here might look like. Come with me.’

He walked around the edge of the building, clapping Doyle once on the shoulder as he did so. Brogan followed after them.

Mutt Ploughman’s Annual Non-Scholarly Charles Dickens Essay

*The Posting of Which Officially Concludes Dickensfest VII*

My business here is to offer some thoughts on this year’s Dickensfest selection, which happens to be the 1850 novel David Copperfield.

Even among the multitude of famous novels written by Dickens, David Copperfield stands apart for a number of reasons. First, it represents the midway point in Dickens’ career as a novelist – there were seven major novels that came before it, and seven more followed. Second, it is the first of his novels that Dickens wrote exlusively in the first person, losing himself in the voice of the young Copperfield of Blunderstone Rookery. Thirdly, it has the following distinction, which I will articulate using Dickens’ own words from his preface to the ‘Charles Dickens Edition’, published in 1867: ‘Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’

When you read Dickens, you’re taking on a lot, and commiting a hefty block of your own time. As well you should. There aren’t many other writers whose novels take such a commitment with every outing, which is why their legends don’t endure. Unlike most writers’ work, when you decide to read Charles Dickens, you’re not just experiencing a story – you’re entering a whole world. It’s like traveling to 19th century England for an extended stay every time you open one of his books. You’re going to get the sights, the smells, the noises, and above all else, you’ll get an entire peanut gallery of personalities – not just one or two characters. You’ll enter Victorian chambers for tea with the very rich, gossiping amongst themselves about this scandal or that; but you’ll also take to the cold streets, and experience the poverty and peril of the underworld.

One of the reasons Dickens was so adept at portraying many different aspects of British life was his own experience early on as a court stenographer, where he was exposed to a wide variety of real-life characters ensnarled in an unmitigated maelstrom of legal and moral predicaments. In fact, one aspect of the character of David Copperfield’s life that parallels Dickens’ own is revealed when, late in the novel, Copperfield also becomes a court stenographer, allowing Dickens to deliver this revealing observation: ‘Brittania, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl, skewered through-and-through with office pens, and bound hand-and-foot with red tape.’

However Dickens’ talents may have come about, it is because of his astonishing range of vision – his close attention to all levels of human society, not just the elevated ones – and the author’s singular gift of imagining and giving voice to so many different characters that his works have become immortal in the annals of world literature. Almost no iteration of the modern novel can be imagined were it not for the influence of his stories.

Hallmarks of that influence can still be seen clearly in much of today’s literature and film; it is something I perceive acutely every time I take on one of these annual adventures. Just as I have been reading David Copperfield, I saw two films that bear his influence: Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story (itself a genre which Dickens has also greatly influenced) which depicts disadvantaged, orphaned children banding together to avenge the murder of one of their own; and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which features a long, complicated plot filled with coincidental collisions that are as unpredictable as they are improbable, and also pays particular attention to the sights, colors and sounds of the world of the poor. Mr. del Toro, the Mexican director who is responsible for such visionary works as Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth, frequently acknowledges Dickens’ influence on his films and screenplays; in Pan’s Labyrinth, for example, the young female protagonist’s offering of her left hand in introducing herself to a man who will become her abusive stepfather is unabashedly lifted from Chapter II of David Copperfield, where David does the same thing to a figure who will play a similar role in his existence.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire phenomenon of Harry Potter would be utterly nonexistent without the long reach of Charles Dickens. J.K. Rowling’s complex plots betray an indisputable debt to the Dickens canon, and her very memorable wizarding world includes dozens of characters of all shapes, sizes and colors (not to mention species). The bumbling elf-like character of Dobby, for example, who is introduced in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is so comically Dickensian in his mannerisms and frequent lamentations that it feels like he was lifted right out of one of his novels, except for the fact that he is not human! Not to mention the central notion of the boy hero who rises from humble circumstances, which can be traced straight back to Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the first major novel in the English language to feature a child as its protagonist.

In David Copperfield there is little question that we encounter Dickens the novelist at the zenith of his considerable powers. But rather than to try to describe in hyper-literary terms exactly why that is the case, I think what I will do instead, for the duration of this commentary, is attempt to describe some of the things that I have most enjoyed about this particular Dickens novel, and let whatever conclusions or observations that are scattered in the process sprout where they have fallen.

Within our own family, Duke and I are somewhat reputed for our tendency towards hyperbole – and few among us, if I may be so bold, can do it like we can. But NOBODY exaggerates like Dickens does, and when he chooses to lay something on thickly, he doesn’t just cover the subject, he smothers it. His descriptions of David Copperfield falling immediately in love with the childish Dora Spenlow are so over the top, I found myself howling. Probably a lot of critics throughout the different eras since his books appeared have crushed him for this, and there’s no doubt that he can overdo it on certain subjects just like he can overdo it in general (note the size of his novels!). But that’s the nature of the beast when it comes to Dickens, and I suppose if you’re going to wax at length about any particular subject, you can do worse than extolling the virtues and sublime qualities of the person you love.

Dickens’ portrayals of the lives and struggles of the underclass and the poor are always interesting to read, and his sympathy towards their plight resonates profoundly, which can be comforting if one is reading during tough economic times themselves, and is all the more laudable given that shortly after his first novel appeared on the scene, Dickens himself had absolutely zero financial worries of his own. He was the J.K. Rowling of his own time. But his memory was long and sharp, and he never strayed too far away in his own mind from his father’s humiliation by being thrown into debtor’s prison (which is where I probably would find msyelf right now if I lived in those times) or his own personal baptism into the life of the working class via a stint in a blacking factory as a young boy. In this novel, as in most, there are a number of characters who are involved in a mighty struggle to stave off insolvency, David Copperfield himself being not the least among these; but the spirit with which he carries himself in this struggle is laudable and worthy of the reader’s appreciation. He won’t give in. He makes something of himself against all odds. I can relate to that idea.

I also find it interesting to note, which may not be much of a surprise, that David Copperfield himself becomes a writer, and begins to publish stories and such in various magazines. Later, he publishes a novel. It was with a wry turn of the lip, I admit, that I discovered that David Copperfield’s transition from aspiring writer to ‘authorship’, to use his own word, occurs over the course of exactly one brief retrospective sentence in the novel, whereas my journey towards being a published fiction writer began somewhere around 1994, and has yet to find its way to a legitimate conclusion. However, my lack of success is no fault of the fictional Copperfield. Furthermore, I can always reiterate the words that close the previous paragraph here with regard to my own situation: he won’t give in. He makes something of himself against all odds.

Lastly, it’s also interesting that although Copperfield touches on his literary success in the book, he reflects upon it with humility. Dickens doesn’t have him fixate on his own stories or novels: ‘I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and triumphs of my art,’ he writes, in Copperfield’s voice. ‘That I devoted myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed upon it every energy of my soul, I have already said. If the books I have written be of any worth, they will supply the rest.’

One of the funniest characters in the book to me was a man called Wilkins Micawber, a side character with whom David works for a period early in his career. Micawber is one of those Dickens characters that is comically dramatic, waxing at length about the plight of his existence and the various challenges he faces. In this case, Micawber is constantly fighting to overcome debt, a struggle for more than one character as I alluded to earlier. He even spends some time in debtor’s prison. This character is based on Charles Dickens’ father, John. Micawber’s circumstances are difficult throughout most of the story, although he eventually finds a way to deal with his problems, thanks to the help of many generous friends. But what makes him funny to me is the numerous letters he writes in the book and the off-the-cuff speeches he gives regularly about his struggles to defeat his creditors. These are filled with flourishes of highly exaggerated language that amply demonstrate both Dickens’ unique flair for drama and his exuberant prose style.

To conclude I would remark that the key to appreciating Dickens’ work, to me, is to simply allow yourself to enter fully into his stories and become swallowed up in them. I believe that this is the way Dickens meant his fiction to be experienced. His efforts seemed to lean towards creating a panoramic reflection of human experience, an invitation to readers from all walks of life to come inside and be entertained and perhaps to learn or re-learn some of the things about ourselves that are worth remembering. For you can say what you want about how his novels are filled with melodrama or unrealistic twists and turns or just too many words, but the fact is that very few novelists across the centuries, in all the history of English literature, had compassion, generosity, and warm-hearted enthusiasm for their fellow man on the same scale as Charles Dickens.

If you, in a dark moment, seek to cut yourself off from mankind and cower in the mirthless, painful corners of our existence – and I admit, sometimes I do myself – then you might do better to curl up with some Hemingway or Nietschze. But if you pine for some instruction from literature on how to be alive and to accept and even embrace your brother, while being simultaneously and copiously entertained, Charles Dickens is still your man. David Copperfield stands forever as one of the greatest examples of what he accomplished.

Journal of a 'Novel'-MILESTONE 50th ENTRY!

Mark it: November 7, 2010

I know many of you have been anxiously awaiting the miletone 50th entry to my Journal of a ‘Novel’ series of posts. If you are in this large group, you have been waiting for a whopping eight weeks, but your wait is over. This one is for you!! (????)

And in the spirit of this post and of my literary work for the year ahead, let’s get to work. The date above is my 40th birthday. It also represents a new goal for me with regard to my fledgling, but slowly coming awake again, novel-in-progress, with the working title of Only the Dying. Actually, this goal is not really new. When I first started writing on this story, way back in March 2006 (the research began in 2005), I always thought, and I even told the few people that knew I was starting on this, that my loose goal was to have the novel completed by my 40th birthday. That never meant published, for who knows if this novel will ever be published. It faces monumental odds. Rather, it meant that I would have finished writing the book by the time I turned 40 years old.

At the time I was 35, and that seemed like giving myself a reasonable space to get the book finished. Five years seems like a long time, but I was trying to be realistic. It was to be an ambitious project, and I had (have) never written a novel before. I also had two children at the time I started it, and have since added a third; I am the sole bread-winner for my family, etc. There’s not much time in an existence like that to work on a novel, especially if you have financial pressures of the sort I (and many others) face every day.

But the truth is, I never really held myself mentally to that, and always thought of it as a “loose” goal. It didn’t matter to me so much if I finished it by then, as long as I got it done “someday”. With this 50th journal post (the fact that there are 50 posts and I’m not even halfway done with the novel tells you there’s a disciplinary problem here), however, I announce the change: now, my 40th birthday IS the official goal, and I pledge to do everything I can to meet it. The problem is, I am a lot closer to being 40 than I was when the goal was originally floated! It’s less than 2 years away now. But no matter: I understand now that I have lacked the discipline so far that is required to see this novel through. And setting a tighter deadline will hopefully help me develop the discplinary fortitude to get the book done.

But this is no self-flagellation. I now take the time to appreciate, hopefully without aggrandizement, what I have accomplished so far. For while I have not done a great job over three years’ time setting myself to hard work on the book, I have done a reasonable job. I have hand-written over 270 manuscript pages, and have drafts of a Prologue and five full chapters completed. I researched for three and half months about the Great Depression, the Roaring 20s, and the oil industry in late 2005 and early 2006, and learned a lot there. I have continued to research such topics as Indiana history, the oil boom in Texas in the early 1930s, early pro football teams, Prohibition, township governance and by-laws in the state of Indiana, New Deal politics, and, most recently, the smuggling of contraband or “hot” oil across state lines that led to the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935, all while continuing to write the novel. I think these are all legitimate accomplishments, and worth being proud of, but all the same, the novel is still not making very rapid progress, and unfortunately it hit a LONG snag towards the end of 2008 for at least a couple of months. I might have had a sixth chapter completed by now had I not hit a rut, but lamenting that reality is not a very good use of time either.

And at the very least I can be happy that I used that time to write two or three nonfiction pieces and one short story, all of which I am pleased to have written, even if none of them have yet to find a home in print. But those pieces have been written about elsewhere on this blog and are not my focus here.

The simple fact is that for all I have done so far, more effort is required if the dream of writing a novel is ever to be realized. The question for me is how to work in the effort that it will obviously require. My life is no less busy with three children than it was with two, when I started the book, as one can easily imagine. My time only grows shorter as life moves ever-forward. It may seem bleak but it’s true. How long does one allow oneself to take an honest shot at one’s life dream? When is it too late? How long can one justify taking the time to write a novel when I could use the time for an infinite variety of other pressing needs and matters, and in light of the chances of success a novel might have to be published, let alone read? Why does one even attempt to labor against such odds in the first place? If I, at 38 years old, can still walk around saying that I feel like I was ‘called’ or ‘born’ to write novels, when most people who are called to do so have certainly produced something worth mentioning well before my age, at what point does that become kind of a sad joke, or worse, a form of self-delusion?

Needless to say these questions haunt me all the time and I do not have, or I do not want to have, their answers. But I know that my time is not unlimited. And I have strong suspicions that so far I have not lived up to my full potential on this earth. I don’t know if I am kidding myself or not at this stage. What I do know is that I have a very powerful urge to write, and I want to use that urge to produce writing I can be proud of. And I also know that a long time ago, many years ago, I set a goal for myself that I would someday write a novel. As early as 1999, the subject for my novel began to take shape in my mind. And to this day that novel remains unwritten. It’s in progress, but it’s still unwritten. I am the only one who can write it. So I am giving myself a deadline to finish the book. The deadline is November 7, 2010.

What does that mean? It means I have to write a lot more than I have in a smaller amount of time. If I have been writing the book for almost three years, and have produced what I believe is a bit less than half of the story, what it means is that I have to write over one half of the novel in less than two years. So it’s obvious that the output will have to be more prodigious with less time. How can I expect to achieve this? The only answer is to cut other things out. For example, I almost always devote some time in the early morning to reading. Much of that is going to have to be temporarily suspended, as much as it pains me. Reading for pleasure is going to have be fit in only when more pressing matters have already been addressed in a given day.

Furthermore, I am going to have to write more, and more often. For me to achieve this new goal, it seems reasonable to expect that I will need to write once a day at least for 5-6 days per week. And it may require even more than that. I remember when I was trying to get Chapter 1 of the novel off the ground, back in 2006, I was trying to fit in what I called at the time “two-a-days”, where I would write as much as I could fit in in the mornings, and then take the manuscript with me to work, drive to a library on my lunch hour, and try to put in some more time on it at lunch. I may have to adapt a similar strategy now. How else can I expect to make the progress I need to? It will take a lot of persistence and effort when there will be many, many days where I don’t want to do it. But it’s becoming clear that it won’t get done otherwise, and who knows, I may run out of time in one capacity or another.

Can I do it? I think I can. I can recall another time in my life when I set a milestone birthday as a goal to achieve something, and I manged to achieve it. When I was serving in the Army in my 20s, I told myself that I would obtain an advanced degree before I was 30 years old. At the time this goal involved taking the GRE test to even be qualified for graduate school, researching and applying to schools, then entering a program and completing the course work for a Master’s degree AND a thesis. It’s true that I was single then and had no family and nowhere near the same financial constraints that I have now, but that’s no excuse for not achieving other goals later in life. If I did it before, I can do the same thing now. Getting a Master’s degree required a lot of work, and I accomplished that, so I can move on to the next goal and get that done too. If I am fixated on the idea that the day will arrive when it’s too late, then I suppose I have no business trying to get something done in the first place.

Today I went down into my basement work area, where I have not written a word in several months. In some places there were literally cobwebs to be brushed away. I cleared off my writing desk, a dark wood piece of furniture that my wife gave me when we got married, because she believes in my writing abilities. Then I set to work, climbing back up the side of the mountain, scratching out only a few new paragraphs to a draft I have had going of Chapter VI of the novel, that had been laying stagnant for many months. I am working on a scene in which Walter and Greta Brogan, married characters from the novel, are in a restaurant discussing the downturn in the economy. The year in the novel is 1930, but I hardly need point out the parallels to the present day. ‘The question is,’ Walter Brogan says, ‘how bad are things going to get.’ As we all know, things from that point in history only got far worse before they got better. But they eventually did get better.

What I want the character in my novel to do is press through, and he will – he will keep working as hard as he can to provide for his family, come what may. He may not emerge victorious, but his spirit will live on, just as his real-life inspiration, my grandfather, has lived on and is living on in spirit as I write this book which is partly based on his life story.

Reader, your humble(d) scribe has no choice but to do the same thing. He has a job before him. Times are tough. He is under strain. There are many things demanding his attention. He has not achieved everything he has set out to do. He must have faith, stay strong, get serious and stay serious. His family is counting on him to become what he believes he can become. The work awaits: it must be seen as his job: it is his job. Time for him to set to it.

"Take up and read" - again

It will come to know surprise to anyone familiar with me that C. S. Lewis is one of the guiding lights – “patron saints,” if you will – of this blog. The very name of the blog itself is a direct reference to something the world famous Oxford (and Cambridge) don wrote in his essential book The Problem of Pain.

Anyway, this post also takes its inspiration from something Lewis once wrote, which is (paraphrasing a little here) that no one can say they “know” a book having only read it once. I heartily agree – the first reading of a great book is something like your first introduction to a memorable person. Or any person, for that matter… who would say they truly know a person after just one meeting? Chances are, you've only just begun to scratch the surface.

In the spirit of this wise dictum, then, I present a short list of books that I am aiming to re-read in the year 2009. I’ll say right off the bat that it’s unlikely I will get to all of these, especially since there are so many new books I want to get to… but these are some of the books I consider to be truly great and worth investing a lot more time into. There are depths to these books I have only barely begun to plumb, and I look forward to discovering what a second trip through these pages may have to teach me.

In 2008 I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus Blood Meridian and got a lot more out of it than I did the first time (which is not to say I understand the book now!). Who’s to say the same won’t be true for some of these classics?

Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
I resolved a while ago to re-read at least one part of the short but essential O’Connor canon every year.

Silence, Shusaku Endo

The Creators, Daniel Boorstin

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson

Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) and Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering), Pope John Paul II