CHAPTER THREE: YOUR OUTER STORY: Scene-Making
Long patience and application saturated with our heart’s blood —you will either write or you will not —and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.
JIM TULLY, WRITER’S DIGEST
I HOPE THAT after the last chapter, you’ve made a mess. A proper mess with charts and photos and time lines running everywhere. Maybe even a few (friendly?) ghosts have come to call. For all you neatniks out there, I’m even hoping you’re a bit twitchy with all this chaos and mess. If so, you’re probably like my husband, who nearly every morning noisily rearranges and organizes the pans in the cupboard because somebody has not stacked them correctly. (That would be me, cleaning up the night before, who threw the pans in any old whichway, as long as the door stays shut. Or at least mostly shut. An inch ajar is fine.) I hear him clanging and banging in the kitchen and I feel sorry for him, possessed with such need for order. But he feels sorry for me, too, though he strangely never quite blames me for the mess. I think I’ve convinced him that there’s a fairy of entropy who comes out to play every night.
We have to make friends with that fairy, who I think probably lives in your house too. We all have a natural need for some kind of order. This is what motivates many of us to write in the first place —to clean up some of the detritus, to wrangle random events into some kind of sense and chronology. But right now, entropy and chaos are your friends. Invite them to stay for at least a little while.
We’ve opened a lot of doors, windows, and cupboards. Some of them may hold the usual pans and pots you keep restacking, and some, I hope, open onto an entirely new set of cutlery and pots. Where to now? How do we turn these memories and moments into stories —stories that shake and move us, stories that open the world wider to ourselves and anyone who reads them? We start with the three building blocks of storytelling: scene, summary, and reflection. And we’re going to spend most of this chapter on the most neglected of the three: scene.
You already know something about scenes. Remember how in the grocery store you and your sister were having a decent, civilized discussion that may have involved a little shoving, maybe a little hair-pulling and voices at theater-worthy levels, and then your mother bombed between you, hissing under her breath, “Stop making a scene,” wildly looking around for special forces with stun guns? That meaning of scene is definition five in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A public display of emotion or anger.”[15] Most of us have created this kind of scene at some point in our lives —but we’re after another kind.
The Writing Cooperative defines scene as
a section of your novel where a character or characters engage in action or dialogue. You can think of a scene as a story with a beginning, middle, and an end.[16]
In creative nonfiction, which is the genre we’re writing in if we’re writing directly from our lives, a scene functions basically the same as in a novel. (Fiction writers, take note!) And it functions pretty much like you and your sister hair-pulling in the aisles of Safeway: Something is happening. There’s a specific setting. There’s action. There’s usually dialogue. The key word is action.
But it’s not enough to have things happening. They have to happen in such a way that the reader is brought beside you. As if she’s experiencing it along with you, even when it means a hair-yanking.
You know this! You’ve known this from childhood, when you were swept away into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, watching with both horror and relief as Violet Beauregarde inflated into a giant blueberry, stilling those gum-chewing jaws. We all know how it feels to be ferried off into a novel, dropped from chronos time into kairos time, and there we are chasing Moby Dick with a harpoon in our hand. As a girl, I’m sure I slept in the bed next to Jane Eyre at Lowood. Isn’t this the very reason we read? We read to live beyond our own single life in our own tiny cottage, to live a thousand, ten thousand lives in huts, hovels, and faraway palaces. Never forget that people are reading your life to discover and enlarge their own. They’ve come to live with you awhile.
That expands our definition of scene, doesn’t it?
Scene takes the reader directly into the action. A scene always includes the following:
- Setting: time and place of the story
- A beginning, middle, and end (a mini-story)
- Dialogue: people (if present) are talking
- Vivid description: concrete and specific details that evoke the reader’s senses
Kate reminds me of all of this on my next phone call with her, many months later. (I’m embarrassed to tell you exactly how many. Because it’s a big number. It took a very long time to turn those essays into first-person stories. All those harassing voices and the fear, you know?)
“Okay, Leslie, so I got your manuscript of the memoir. I like it. You’re getting it. You’re getting the voice. The arc. You’ve definitely got movement here from beginning to end. But there’s a piece missing.”
“Only one piece?” I ask with relief. This is like getting an A-. I expected a B- or a C+.
“No, well, there’s more.”
Of course. I knew it was a C+.
“Here’s the piece I want to talk about today. So —you get to Alaska, you give us some of that backstory, and then the first thing I know, we’re out in the skiff and you’re working those nets like a pro. You didn’t start out that way, right?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Well, we need to see you when you first go out. We need to really be there with you. Take us into that boat your first time fishing. Help us feel the wind, the water. Get us wet. This is a big deal in your life and your journey, and you just skipped right over it. Take us there.”
“Oh yeah, I see. Sorry I missed that. Okay, I know what to do.”
And I did. She was telling me two things: that I needed backstory for context, which I would provide partly through summary. And second, that I needed scenes.
Sometimes it’s hard to write about something we know well. We all have pieces of our lives that are so familiar to us, we don’t even know what we know. And then we assume our readers know what we don’t know we know. We skip some of the pieces they need to see, hear, taste, touch to be there with us. And our knowledge and experience are not always verbal. It may be a body knowledge. It might be a vocabulary of muscle and tendons. So it was for me. I had to stop, engage my body in the composition of those pages. How did I stand in the skiff? How did I first step into those hip-high rubber boots? How did I lean over to catch the net?
So I started. I started writing scenes of my first time actually working with my husband in the skiff. I was writing fifteen years later from that first day, but I had journals, and those early memories were sharp. I remembered the process of getting dressed, with layer upon layer of sweatshirts, hip boots, rain pants, finally layered so thick and heavy, I could hardly walk. Kind of a backwards Pygmalion story, the real person submerged under inches of fishing gear.
Then I thought of my first snack and bathroom break on the water, on an eighteen-foot open boat. There’s no latrine, of course, on a boat that size. We worked all morning until it was nearly lunchtime. Duncan and his father, DeWitt, brought out the snacks from under the seat —candy bars and pop. For their bathroom break in the skiff, they asked me to turn around. For mine, I was dropped off on a rocky ledge. But it wasn’t quite that simple.
But you don’t care about any of that, right? I don’t either. I just gave you information. I told you what you needed to know, but you weren’t with me. I just gave you words about a time and a place far from wherever you live. So let me try again, this time as a scene:
It’s almost noon now. We’ve been fishing for four hours. I sit wearily on the wooden seat, looking at the fish on the floor of the skiff. There must be five hundred of them, all fat and shiny. The waves slap and slosh our skiff from side to side. I’m hungry. And I need a bathroom break, but how does this happen in an eighteen-foot boat? There is no cabin on our little wooden peapod. It’s just a glorified rowboat afloat on a great Alaska sea.
DeWitt sits heavily in the bow, his black-green raincoat mirroring the dark water below. “Well, I guess I’ve gotta shake the dew off my lily,” DeWitt intones in a gravelly voice. I can hear his Oklahoma accent, though he left forty years before, during the dust bowl. He grew up poor, picking cotton and working the land. Now he works the seas, but he moves awkwardly in the boats and never seems at home on moving water. Except now.
I smile at Duncan and DeWitt and turn around. When they’re done, it’s my turn.
“Let me off on that rock over there, Duncan.” I point to a cove with a shelf of rock jutting out. In a moment we are there, the skiff rising and plunging in the waters swirling around the rocks. I’m nervously perched in the bow, ready to spring overboard at just the right second. My hands twitch as they grip the rail. I’m motionless but breathing hard.
“Jump!” Duncan yells as the nose of the skiff rises in the foaming surge.
“You’re not close enough!” I shoot behind me. I see DeWitt sitting calmly beside Duncan as if we’ve done this a hundred times.
“I can’t get any closer! Jump!” he shouts as the boat gurgles and sinks now in the trough.
I can’t leap that distance in all this fishing gear. And if I miss? How did a simple bathroom break become a life-and-death endeavor?
Do you feel closer to the action? I hope you feel as though you’re perched right there beside me in the skiff, waiting to vault overboard.
You may have noticed something else going on in this scene: summary. Scenes often include summary, a condensed form of whatever information the reader needs to make sense of the scene. We write summary with a light hand, not wanting to slow the action down. We’re just sketching in the most essential information for the reader to fully inhabit the scene. This scene in the skiff includes a summary about DeWitt’s background.
A question that always comes up in scene-making: What about dialogue? How can we remember exactly what people said, especially if the story happened fifty years ago? Often, we can’t. (Unless it’s your father-in-law, who used memorable language and the same phrases again and again.) You may not remember precisely what your sister said before she ran away, or the exact words between you and your mother when you returned to your house after the fire. We may not be able to reconstruct the exact words, but memories lodge for a reason. We often remember the tone, the sense, and the import of those words. That’s all we have, any of us, unless we happened to pull out an audio recorder or a video camera during the fight, after the fire, during any of those times when the hardest, the best, and the most banal words passed between us and another. Render dialogue as closely and as fairly as you can. It will be enough.
But if your memories of a particular exchange are thin and uncertain, there’s another solution: Don’t use dialogue. There are many other ways to convey the scene: “I don’t remember my grandmother’s voice or even her words that night, but after supper, when everyone left the table, she talked to me about going to college. She believed in me more than anyone else in my family.”
Writers have been rendering scene and summary for a long time. More than half of the Gospels in the Bible are scenes. Much of the Old Testament is made of scenes. How did those ancient authors (who didn’t read a book on writing) know this, that we needed not some dusty account of who did what, when, where, and how, but full immersion, full attachment to those events, no matter how distant?
Consider this fantastical scene, written by Ezekiel 2,500 years ago:
The LORD took hold of me, and I was carried away by the Spirit of the LORD to a valley filled with bones. He led me all around among the bones that covered the valley floor. They were scattered everywhere across the ground and were completely dried out. Then he asked me, “Son of man, can these bones become living people again?”
“O Sovereign LORD,” I replied, “you alone know the answer to that.”
Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, listen to the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Look! I am going to put breath into you and make you live again! I will put flesh and muscles on you and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’”
So I spoke this message, just as he told me. Suddenly as I spoke, there was a rattling noise all across the valley. The bones of each body came together and attached themselves as complete skeletons. Then as I watched, muscles and flesh formed over the bones. Then skin formed to cover their bodies, but they still had no breath in them.
Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to the winds, son of man. Speak a prophetic message and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so they may live again.’”
So I spoke the message as he commanded me, and breath came into their bodies. They all came to life and stood up on their feet —a great army.
EZEKIEL 37:1-10, NLT
It’s not clear whether this is a vision or in-the-flesh reality, but one thing I know for sure: This is a scene! It’s not only a marvelous example of scene (characters! dialogue! setting! action!), but I’m going to use it another way too: as an analogy. Isn’t this an image of what we’re doing when we write stories from our lives?
There we are, standing in the middle of a valley, looking out over the bones of our past. We might be excited or despairing or quizzical or joyous or all of these things. But how will we bring them to life? How do we attach tendon to bone? How do we conjure up muscle and ligaments, pull fresh skin over the new flesh? How do we resurrect the people and moments of our past? We do it, like Ezekiel, through language. Our words can call forth and join piece by piece by tendon by joint by muscle by skin. By which I mean, we write scenes. And we include whatever summary is needed to make sense of those scenes.
There’s a reason scenes are so powerful and so necessary to our stories. It might be enough to simply say we’re flesh-and-blood creatures, so we need words that awaken the past through our bodies, our senses. That sounds like reason enough. But I am greedy and curious. Surely there is more to this need for earthy, in-the-flesh words. If you’re a God-searching person, there is indeed more here. (If you’re God-shy or even God-averse, feel free to skip this part, but you’ll miss something if you do.)
Who is this God who speaks to bones? He’s not just a word-speaking God, a storytelling God. Even if you believe that God’s words in his book are Holy Spirit alive, not even all this was enough for us. We needed more. God was telling and writing his story already through his people, the Hebrews, calling out a people for himself, but those words were not enough for them. Clearly. Because if you remember your Old Testament at all, you remember this: Things were not going well for anyone. (Idolatry. Rebellion. Defiance. Judgment. Drought. Famine. Fire. Enslavement. Short-term repentance, then rebellion; rinse and repeat the cycle.)
We human beings needed more. We needed more than the words of the law, perfect though they were. God knew it. He knew we needed bones and flesh and drama! So in the next story, the New Testament, God told a better, fuller story. This time his word birthed human flesh, with arteries and veins, a pumping heart, highways of nerves, with toes, fingernails, forearms, and hairy legs. The logos, the Living Word, now laughed, reclined on grassed hillsides, ate roasted fish on the beach, gulped wine at weddings, smeared dirt on a blind man’s eyes, plodded through mud.
We plod through mud too. No matter how lofty our ideas or how spiritual we think we are, faith calls us to the things of this world. If our words don’t conjure up the mud, the fish in the skiff, or the look in our mother’s eyes, the bones of our past will lie on the floor of the valley, scattered, lifeless.
These specific details of our existence matter, and not simply as material that we dress up and animate to act out a more Christian story. We’ve done that already. The Christian literary tradition is lined with allegory, some of which I love. But this planet, bursting with 8.7 million species of creatures, is not just a shadow box for a future higher realm.[17] It matters now. Heaven’s coming down to earth. So be careful not to sermonize (which I acknowledge I’m doing here!). Give us a story. Give us the earthy details. Describe the salmon’s scalloped scales, the way each fish was suited in its own silver mail. How slick the mud was, like clay with tiny pebbles in it. And did you see how his mother’s green eyes faded when he left and how she threw her crumpled napkin into the fireplace? The enfleshing of the words of God is not done. The Word became flesh so that now, our flesh can become word. God is writing his story through the details of our lives as well.
In a recent class, after reading this passage in Ezekiel, I asked my students to write something about bones. I asked them to “tell” a story about a time they broke a bone or experienced something related to their bones. Zandree was at the finish line of a successful battle with bone cancer. She wrote this:
Bone marrow cancer. It was a diagnosis I expected, maybe even hoped for at the beginning because it meant the beginning of the end —no matter what that looked like. An end to the pain, an end to the suffering, an end to the depression. An end that maybe, just maybe, also contained a new beginning. A beginning that was going to mean new life, one way or the other.
That’s exactly what I asked for. I gave them a few minutes to “tell” their story. When they were done, I asked them to return to that event, to those dry bones, and to “show” the story. To render it as scene. Zandree wrote this:
The sterile-white paper gown crinkled underneath my breasts, stomach, and hips, as my body pressed hard into the cold steel of the surgical table. The drill bore the full weight of the doctor’s heavy male body as my bone splintered and cracked beneath the undulating bit. Pain shot through my body’s network of nerves like lightning to the top of my skull and very tips of my toes in milliseconds. A single tear welled out of my right tear duct and slid slowly down the arc of my nose.
The drugs, the thought-words sludged through the mud of my mind. They aren’t working.
I lay there, salty tears now pooling beneath my left cheek, unable to move for the power tool buried deep in my pelvis. Words exploded from the mouth of the doctor living just another Wednesday —the shot heard ’round my world.
“I can’t get through her bone . . .”
Are we not there with her in those painful moments on that table? The “telling” words didn’t take us there. Only the “showing” words. Listen: Scenes aren’t just for your reader. They’re for you, too, the writer. The one who lived through that moment, the one who survived and has now returned to tell about it, to make something of it, to send it on.
How smart do you have to be to do this? How many degrees do you need? I’ve had some brilliant students, people much smarter than me. People with encyclopedic minds and maybe even photographic memories. But over the decades, I’ve discovered that compelling storytelling isn’t about intellect or education. It’s about courage. It’s about persistence. It’s about daring to dig through vague words to get at the real, concrete world. It is through writing scenes that we discover again and again our love for this world, the goodness of this muddy material existence.
I know Kate is not thinking of any of this when she tells me I need more scenes in my memoir. I know she is not thinking of this as an exercise in metaphysics and incarnational theology. But this is precisely what it is.
As I remembered and wrote about my first day in fishing, as I wrestled verbs and adjectives to capture the sound of the water against the wooden skiff, the feel of the salmon between my fingers, the plunge of the skiff by the rock, I remembered more. I remembered something about my father-in-law, which has since become one of my favorite recollections of him.
We’ve missed lunch. We’ve declared a snack break, retrieving the candy bars from under the wooden seat of the skiff. DeWitt sits now, his head down, his hat askew on his head, munching his Snickers. I’m eating the same, both of us rocking in the slap of the waves against the skiff. He appears to be studying the salmon lying askew at our feet. Then he looks up at me and says, straight into my eyes, “Those are beautiful fish, aren’t they?” I nod in surprise. He leans over, grunting, and picks one up with both gloved hands, holding the silver body out lengthwise in front of him. With the wonder of a boy, he shakes his head: “Beautiful fish.”
I look at him, trying to hide my amazement. DeWitt has seen and smelled and handled these fish for twenty years. He came to fishing in his forties and now he’s in his sixties, when most people are beginning to fade. When most people begin to grow old. How is it that after twenty years of seeing and smelling and handling these creatures, he can still see them? Why hadn’t they turned into faceless objects, or pieces of money? I hoped then that in twenty years, I could do the same.
As you stand in the valley, don’t leave the bones on the ground, bleached, blank, silent. Speak to the bones, like Ezekiel. Remember the wind in your ears as your family drove to your camp, how cold the river was when you fell in, the sound of your mother laughing, what your brother said, and how you burned the trout at dinner and your father ate it all before launching you, hollering, into the river one last time. Live it again. Write it. Take your readers with you into this world of glorious bodies. Tell them a real Story.
Your Turn!
- 1. At the end of this chapter are two life stories that are rich in scene (“Sometimes a Fox” by Todd Johnson and “A Time to Leave” by George Linn). Before you start writing, spend some minutes with these pieces. Read them through first for pleasure. (Always the most important reason for reading!) Then read them through as a writer, identifying each paragraph as scene, summary, or reflection. (We’ll dive more into reflection in chapter 5, but for now, label what you think seems more interior than scene or summary.)
- 2. Look back at the story or stories you wrote from chapter 1: an early encounter with God. Does it “tell” the story more than “show” the story? Try rewriting key moments with vivid scenes, using setting, sense-appealing details, and dialogue (if it fits). Bring your reader with you into those moments.
- 3. Return to your maps, time lines, your Artwalk, whatever means you used in the previous chapter to map the scope of your life. Do you feel a particular pull toward an event? Follow it, writing vivid scenes to capture that moment. Follow your passion. Follow your curiosity. Take your time and write as many scenes as you can. Help your reader see, hear, feel the setting and the events that happened, using vivid sensory details. It’s okay to “overwrite.” You can always trim later. As you do this, you’re putting muscle on those bones. You’ll soon see them walking around!
SOMETIMES A FOX
by Todd Johnson
In second grade our class at Southwest Christian Academy went on a field trip to Iroquois Park. On the drive, I imagined myself and my classmates as Iroquois Indians in fierce war paint, sporting bristled mohawks and twirling bloody tomahawks into the air. This is how boys think, so when we piled out of the maize-colored bus in a frenzy, our hands formed wah-wah pedals for our screams. We descended on the natural wildness of the park armed with our cloistered wildness —sixty shooting arrows of pent-up hyperactivity. Green trees waved welcome, beckoning us back to our primal home, but we ignored our heritage for the white man’s trinkets —a playground with seesaws, swing sets, and slides.
Inside the metal play fort, a spark of danger bloomed inside me —a spirit animal was born —a wily fox, uncharacteristic and cunning. Back then, I could only describe the sensation as hunger, but not physical; no hankering in my belly for chicken or Twinkies. This hunger was spiritual —a need for new experience and freedom. It was odd because I was a child of temperance and conformity. A quiet A-student, I was not one to grasp for forbidden things or give in to impulses. So this strange fox within, with quick eyes and glistening teeth, aroused both curiosity and nervous excitement.
“Hurry up, Spencer!” Brandon yelled to the mousy boy at the top of the slide.
“I am; hold on.” Spencer scanned the horizon for witnesses —potential jurors.
I stood behind Brandon, four kids back down the ladder. The fox sensed risky behavior, and it brought me to the foot of the slide. Each kid had ascended the ten rungs of the ladder, stared down the expanse of bent mercury, and then paused, as if mesmerized. Watching for teachers, they’d move their legs out over empty space, but not to the top of the slide. No. These pale savages stretched their legs around the outer pole —to the beam supporting the slide at a seventy-degree angle.
Like firemen, each hugged the pole with both arms and legs, then swoosh, they’d zip to the ground. I watched the descent, viewing them in a new light: daredevils, protesters, and shameless rule-breakers. I coveted their subversive creativity. The fox smelled blood.
“Spen-cer Gard-i-ner!” The sound of Miss Gunther’s Kentucky drawl swept away all fantasies. “What are you do-eeng up thay-er?”
Spencer was midcling on the pole, ready to cherry drop.
Miss Gunther squinted up at Spencer the way I imagined Jesus eyed Zacchaeus up in his tree. Spencer, now looking as guilty as the corrupt tax collector, put his foot back on the ladder. Miss Gunther canopied her eyes with one hand and said, “You cai-n’t go dow-un that wa-ay. You come dow-un the rye-ite wa-hay. No-ow!”
“Oh-kaaay,” Spencer whined as the other sliders groaned in unison. In seconds, and in obedience to God’s law, Spencer’s butt slid down the mirrored surface.
The fox remained wary and attentive as I climbed up the slide to take my turn. I was relieved to see Miss Gunther saunter off to patrol the reservation, but I had no plan.
Then I was at the top —the pinnacle of the world. Slides feel this way when you are young, as the expanse and altitude flattens out the neighborhood. There may have been a lift in the air that decided things, dreams of tawny ancestors moving through wooded forests, or an inhalation of migratory birds heading north above ken-tah-ten (Kentucky), which in Iroquois may mean “land of tomorrow.”[18] Whatever it was, my body sensed the oak and elm trees leaning up on their roots, rattling branches, and goading me to action. Without words, the fox within called me in seductive growls: down the pole, down the pole, down the pole, you boy called fox.
I paused, maybe. Hadn’t Jesus been tempted by the devil —Throw yourself down, angels will catch you. But he wussed out. I remember my embarrassment for Jesus because he fought the devil with words —even worse to an eight-year-old boy, Bible verses! I wanted Jesus to jump, to fly like Superman. Here was my opportunity. I didn’t understand it then, but maybe this was my defiant response to the devil’s challenge, or maybe only a subconscious protest to my own timidity —a way to purge myself of do-gooder cowardice.
Heart thumping, I swung my legs around the pole. The fox howled. I let go —
Time and space collapsed in a fugue rush of wind, fire, and greenery. The hunger sated in an instant —my lips cottoned in the smack of freedom and the bent parabola of rebellion. The ecstasy created a pit below me. I was falling, past the outstretched arms of angels, really falling, out of control, no pole now, yellow eyes, a leaf spinning a hundred revolutions a second from the temple, earth and —snap!
blazing pain —bite of teeth on bone
My wrist took the entire brunt of the Fall —like a dry twig trod cleanly in two, my arm fractured under the heft of gravity’s heel; my hand cast into fire.
Decimated. Sitting in the grass in horror, I couldn’t fathom the abomination of flesh, all angles and swelling. I don’t remember tears; there was intense pain. The familiar hand I had known my short life —the buttoner of shirts, the holder of toothbrushes, the wielder of pencils —obliterated by my own stupidity.
Jesus said if your hand offends you, cut it off, for it is better to lose that than to sacrifice your whole body to the fires of hell. But I didn’t want to lose my hand. My hand wasn’t the culprit. It was the sly fox who’d done it, the beast now conspicuously silent, cowering in some corner of my conscience.
All I could do: hold my throbbing wrist upright and pray the sinner’s hopeless prayer of undoing. I called out for Miss Gunther.
When I woke in the hospital, it was hard to focus. The dots on the ceiling pulsed; I was still groggy from anesthetics. The doctors decided it was easier to put me under to reset my fractured wrist. Now conscious, I felt the weight of what I’d done in a white battering ram, a hunk of hardened plaster grafted to my arm with three portholes for bicep, thumb, and fingers.
But my parents never mentioned the incident afterwards; Miss Gunther never spoke a word of it; and I must have buried the need for absolution below my friends’ swirly signatures and the itchy confines of my cast. My parents chalked up this incident to an accident —they didn’t know about my fox or my sin. Maybe they should have known. My name, after all, means fox,[19] and although I do my best to keep my name at bay, he comes and goes, howling at the moon or whimpering at shadows. Sometimes, in thoughts, he may lead me back to that place where I was born —not the land of tomorrow, but a place called Kentucky, or as some translations put it, the “dark and bloody earth.” It’s there where foxes meet and where the bones of the past are broken and mended.
A TIME TO LEAVE
By George Linn
The day I left home for the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes was the first time my father didn’t stand behind me. He laid no hand on my shoulder. No hand mussed my hair. I sensed no pride welling up the way it had when we’d go uptown on Saturdays and run into one of his railroad buddies hanging on to a parking meter.
“Is that the boy, Slim?” they’d ask, my father standing behind me, his hands squeezing my shoulders.
His cronies had given him a nickname obviously connected to his stature. Each time it took me by surprise. They were track men for the B&O,[20] often reeking of creosote, lifting rail and driving spikes for a living. My father, on a good day, couldn’t have been more than five-feet-ten-inches tall or weighed any more than a hundred and forty pounds.
At the airport he’d turned his back, busied himself gazing up at a travel poster, only pausing long enough to run a pocket comb through his slicked-back hair. I sat at the gate alongside my mother, my twin sisters, and my three-year-old brother, who was fighting imaginary figures and making temporary landings onto my mother’s lap.
“I don’t know, you guys,” I said.
“Too late,” she said. “Go say something to your father?”
“Too late,” I said. “He made it clear he doesn’t want me coming back home.”
“He’s just afraid . . .”
“That I’ll get out of here?”
“No, that you’ll end up over where they’re fighting.”
The night before, we’d watched more news coming out of Vietnam.
Weary soldiers mired in an endless war carried their wounded by their arms and legs, their dead zipped tight in the darkness of military-issued body bags.
“If they ever wanted me again, they’d have to chase me,” my father said, referring to his stint in the army. The tightened muscles in his neck became quite visible. Through clenched teeth, he said, “I wouldn’t blame them all for heading to Canada.”
My mother held a bowl of cream cheese and wedged a bag of corn chips between us on the couch. “Why would they want you again?” she asked. “Besides, he’ll get to see the world.” She shrugged her shoulders, nonchalantly dipping a corn chip into the cream cheese, quite pleased with her own commentary.
“I bet they told them that, too,” he said, pointing to the television. My father’s voice, usually found somewhere between nonexistent and soft-spoken, became unusually strong, then cracked, as if he might break into tears. “My second week over there, they had me throwing arms and legs into the back of a truck. You tell me, how they know who’s in them bags?”
It was the first time I’d heard him say anything about Korea other than that he’d slept under an ammunition truck. Then there was my mother’s well-rehearsed story of how he’d sent all his money home so that they could get married. How the night he found out his parents had spent it all, he’d walked over five miles in the pouring rain to her house.
I defended myself. “I’m leaving here with a guaranteed duty station.”
“You can’t even swim.”
“They’ll teach him,” my mother said, defending me.
“You just don’t want me to get out of here,” and before he could say it, I said it for him: “I know; if West Virginia doesn’t have it, then I don’t need it.”
On the ride to the airport, my father, driving, said, “You’ve hurt your mother.”
My mother, looking out the window, abruptly asked, “Is this the way we used to come to the Green Stamp store?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, working a disc of butterscotch candy around his mouth.
My mother turned and asked, “Remember Elsie, the Borden cow? How she’d turn her head and wink at you?”
“I think so,” I said.
“I wonder what happened to that sign?”
“They tore it down,” my father said. “Too many fools stopping to look at it.”
“I guess we were fools.”
Looking back in the rearview, he said, “Your mother doesn’t want you to go.”
They’d gotten good at speaking for each other.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Just write me lots of letters.”
“Look at him,” she said, “thin as a rail, and not a hair out of place. At home I can barely pry a word out of him. Go say something to him.” Her voice was nearly a whisper in my ear.
“I don’t want to.”
“George Jr.”
I hesitated but went at her insistence. He was talking to an old man who had been wandering around the airport. As I approached, I heard him say, “He’s going into the Navy.”
“Anchors aweigh,” the old man said, and just as quickly he was off, striking up another conversation.
“He might be a little touched,” my father said.
I finally said, “I just want my freedom.”
“You won’t get it there.”
“How come you never talk about Korea?”
“Nobody ever asked,” he said, as my flight number was called.
Pushing through the turnstile and stepping onto the tarmac, I turned to see my mother. My father, barely visible, stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders. I couldn’t take my eyes off my mother. She stood just inside the gate, her dark brown hair curled and slightly unkempt, wearing the torn, gray peacoat she swore was more comfortable than anything she’d ever owned. She was holding my baby brother, a twin clutching a handful of her skirt by each hip. She didn’t wave but offered me a parting look I’ve come to believe only a mother could offer: a look telling me I was forgiven of any hurt I was about to cause or would ever cause her again.
My father and I had said good-bye, but we never touched.
The topic of Korea didn’t come up again until after my mother’s death in 2012 when, on a final visit, my father felt the urge to give me the Zippo lighter he’d carried during the war.
We sat on the back porch, drinking coffee. He finally opened up, telling me a story of a freezing prisoner who had asked him for a cigarette. As he told it, he rubbed his thumb over the insignia on the face of the lighter.
He said, “So I lit up a Chesterfield and handed it through the fence to him.”
“That same lighter?” I asked.
He nodded.
“The next thing I knew, a South Korean soldier was beating him with a club made out of strands of barbed wire. I aimed my rifle at him and said, ‘You stop that s***. We don’t even treat our animals that way back in West Virginia.’ Then the lieutenant stopped me. ‘You let them handle their own,’ he told me.”
He handed me the lighter. I rubbed the Wolfhound with my thumb.
“All that man wanted was a cigarette. I knew right then, if they ever wanted me again, they’d have to chase me. I said no boy of mine was ever going to have to go through that kind of thing. And Vietnam was that kind of thing.”
When I left home that day, during the Vietnam War, my father was only forty-four years old and was still hurting from a war that happened before I was born. I wanted his blessing; he didn’t give it. He got angry instead, and before I left, he said, “You’ve hurt your mother, so don’t come back.”
I wonder now, if he had given me the lighter sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have enlisted.