Until Black Hole XTK Yields Its Light

Even before I came down off Roniger Hill that early morning many months ago with an image of a topographical grid in my head, the materials of this book had been moving about and arranging themselves like iron filings: I, a magnet, moved and they shifted but kept various patterns. After a few months I began to see what would fill these seventy-six chapters, although usually not how I would do it. There was only one exception, a renegade chapter that kept jibing about, slipping from quadrangle to quadrangle and, at times, even leaving the county altogether; but I wrote steadily along, slowly removing the places where it could veer off until, finally, I pinned it in this distant corner of the county, this far reach of the book.

Whenever I found a topic to give to it, to fill it with, the chapter would appear to hold that subject steady for a day but then, the next morning, the material would vanish as I realized it wasn’t really what I was after. It seemed as if some trade rat of the soul would creep in at night and quietly carry off the shining subject and not leave in exchange even so much as a pinecone or deer turd.

Editors and fellow writers said forget it, go with seventy-five chapters—after all, who would miss one? The answer, of course, is that I would, and, now that I’ve raised the issue, you would too. Whenever I’m writing and fail or foil my instincts, I end up in regret. I began calling the chapter The Black Hole: a thing with a mystic gravitational field so intense its light can’t escape to reach me. I can’t see the damn thing, but I know it’s there.

What I’m setting down now, then, is not the subject of this chapter, unless you want to consider topiclessness as a topic. I could, of course, pick up any number of subjects to fill out the grid, things in the county I haven’t addressed: chiggers, bankers, school athletics (the Bulldogs came within a game of winning, for the first time, the boys’ 3-A state championship in both football and basketball this season), the county attorney, a mammoth bone recently washed out of a creek bank, alcoholism (as in most rural places, a considerable problem), the big salamander that crawled from a courthouse wall and startled hell out of me, the Presbyterian woman preacher, dugouts, hopper-dozers (Model A’s with a big catcher and trough of oil below, once used to “bulldoze” grasshoppers off crops), a night ride with a deputy sheriff, the farmer who refuses electricity. I’ve talked with more than ten percent of the countians, although no more than ten percent of even those three hundred appear in this book, yet all three thousand residents know at least one good tale or detail. Sometimes whom to include was easy: Whitt Laughridge introduced me to an elderly man in the Wagon Wheel one noon and told him I was writing about Chase, and the first thing the old fellow said was, Don’t go putting me in no damn book. And the reverse, He hasn’t talked to me yet, or the pretty woman who leaves notes on my windshield, inviting me to drop by.

These people and things are absent not simply because a book can’t include everything (it’s three times the length I set out to write) but rather because my explorations quite early began forming into a gestalt that seems to control what I am capable of writing about. My common sense may advise including, say, the rodeo at Strong City—after all, many people believe it to be the essence of Chase County (I find it show biz and hokum, but then those are important topics too); it’s even revealing that Strong City may now pretend to be a cowboy town when in fact it began as a railroad stop (there used to be a big roundhouse and, still today, the brick depot is one of the distinctive buildings in the county). No, this gestalt permits only what it wants. It determines. You see, then, I’m not entirely in charge of this work, an occurrence writers commonly discover when they’re on the right track.

So, this chapter doesn’t exist: I’ve been thinking about doing what Laurence Sterne did in Tristram Shandy and printing an entirely black page. I like the idea because then the topic would be here, and all I—or you—would have to do sometime is remove the portion of ink that isn’t the topic to let the chapter stand revealed, the way a stone sculptor chips away only what isn’t his sculpture.

I keep having various ideas about what this black hole might mean: maybe it’s an emblem of all the Chase material I haven’t found or that hasn’t found me. Or maybe it’s a darkness waiting for a future light, material to come later, the kind of thing that will make me say, why didn’t I hear that one five years ago? (If this is so, and if I and the book are still alive some years down the road, maybe I can fill the hole not as a follow-up but as a hope fulfilled.) Or maybe this chapter will one day be the spot to answer questions surely to arise: What did this book do to Chase County? What did Chase County do to the book? (Recently people here have talked to me about having an autographing party to raise money for 4-H and the historical society, perhaps in the courthouse, the one building where virtually every countian who’s ever lived has been, and I like the idea, what with all the ghosts there: Sam Wood, Harry Brandley, White Thunder God, Indians, Knute Rockne’s inquestors, the lynched prisoner, a future vice president, governors, and common thieves. I’ve said I’ll do it, but citizens are wondering whether to hold off until they read the book.) At other times, I’ve considered the chapter a place to insert a kind of internal and preplanned afterword I might complete, say, a decade from now, when the new millennium begins, a tenth-anniversary celebration where I’ll tell you the outcome of the loomings here and the fates of some of the countians you’ve met. On other days, I see it as nothing more than a small exit, a dark at the top—or bottom—of the stairs, or, perhaps, the kind of opening a Native American weaver leaves in a blanket for the spirit in the design to find release and travel on beyond.

When I’m writing and come across something I don’t know the answer to, I pencil in XTK: Unknown To Come (XTC makes ignorance sound like ecstasy). This chapter is a big XTK. But, so that I don’t cheat you of the outcome, or at least of its raw material, I include as best I can now a Tristramian answer on the next page. Have a go at it yourself. Perhaps, I having failed, you are to be its author: