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Overview
Franklyn Shivs is a Wisconsin farm boy with a mind too vigorous, too full of desire, for a life on the farm. Leaving home as a young man, he heads south to turn-of-the-century Chicago, a city untamed and turbulent enough to challenge each of his dreams and talents. There he becomes a newspaper reporter, rising through the masthead and learning the back alleys, the tavern manners, the corruption and conflict that underlie the city's grandeur. Dispatched to Northern Michigan to cover the bloody copper mine strike of 1913, he falls in love with the strike's most militant leader, the estranged wife of one of the miners. Their affair forces him to choose between principle and passion, a decision likely to affect the outcome of the strike and the future of the labor movement. With careening, virtuosic prose, Bruce Olds brings to full-blooded life a watershed moment in American history through the experience of a distinctly American protagonist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312426774 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2008 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.07(d) |
About the Author
BRUCE OLDS is the author of two novels: Bucking the Tiger, an ALA Notable Book adapted for the stage as The Confessions of Doc Holliday; and Raising Holy Hell, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominee that was also named Novel of the Year by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association and winner of the QPB New Voices Award for Fiction. His nonfiction work has appeared in Granta and American Heritage, among other publications, and has been anthologized by the Modern Library and MIT Press. He lives in Chicago.
Read an Excerpt
The Moments Lost
A Midwest Pilgrim's ProgressBy Olds, Bruce
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2007 Olds, BruceAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374118211
Tamarack On the tenth day of the eleventh month, 1880, at precisely nine past noon, Franklyn Tyree Lattimore Shivs was born to Augustus I. and Narcissa Shivs-née-Wills in the second-floor bedroom of their whitewashed clapboard, shiplapped, cedar-shaken mainhouse in the affluent farming community of New Menomonee, Wisconsin, some dozen miles northwest of Milwaukee. No doctor stood in attendance, no certificate of birth was applied for or secured, no announcement was placed in the local newspaper, and, because none then was extant, no relative was notified. History failed to acknowledge its most recent arrival, as it did the disconcertingly curious fact that he had been born with one eye, his left, the one gray as gun grease, cocked obliquely open, and, so his parents shortly would conclude, sentiently seeing. Odd. Decidedly so. Odd-got and odd-born. Odd child. If not so odd that his mother, middling conversant in such and the selfsame, was upon first infant sight of her son not rendered too disencumbered or fractured of wit to quote, as she never failed to call him, the Old Top Bard Himself: “’Tis the error of our eye—that armed vision—directs our mind.’”
SWAMP CREATUREHe endured his childhood, he would insist everafter, altogether alone—save for his dogs, of course—if, incidentally, in the company of hismother and father, on a dairy farm abutting a swamp, the Tamarack, where, on select summer nights, the swamp gases phosphoresced steady as beacons, or, rather, flicketted in stroboscopic fits, their shimmy, flare, flameout and flit playing tag and tagalong, self-immolating before rekindling in firedrakes and fantails, in licks called ignes fatui (“foolish fire”), will-o’-the-wisp, foxfire, friar’s lantern, corpse’s candle, noctilucae terrestia. Ensorcelled by them from the first, the swamplights—those about which his mother once had read from their encyclopedia, “Occurring most often on windless nights well after sunset, when approached, they appear to recede, often reappearing in another direction, behavior leading to the folk notion that they are the work of a mischievous spirit intentionally leading seekers and pilgrims astray”—he had throughout his childhood been repeatedly admonished by his father to “stay clear of the Tam,” those unfarmable acres the paterfamilias was in the habit of referring to as “the cess,” the “drossy wet neck” of which he likewise was in the habit of loudly vowing to someday “wring bone-dry.” But that night, in the schorl-dark of his bedroom, ears forfeit to the swamp’s jatter and chirr as he stood at the window absently clasping and unclasping the twin blades of his parents’ birthday gift, the Buck jackknife inlaid with oolite and staghorn, he decided—in his own mind, quite momentously—that being all of eleven now, he was old enough deliberately to end-run, if not cavalierly to disregard, his father’s wishes. Stealing down-grece, striding over the snoring Tick, his terrier, clumped at the base of the stair, he slipped out the front door undetected and tiptoed across the porch, making straight for the barn. Feeling for the lantern along the wall, he found it, struck a long Lucifer match, unlooped the handle from its nail, then settled it on the ground as he fetched to a knee, flipping open its glass panel before wristing the vent-cock and inserting the flame. The lantern caught easy, its fourteen-candlepower light oiling up the barn walls to magnify the stall rows where the cows lay mute and uncaring, chackling cud, swishing tail. Lowering the flame to a steadier, less light-blinding burn, he headed out of the barn and across a gap of ground that was rock strewn but reasonably flat, then a stretch of tallish grass that gradually dipped toward a pitchy brake of stiffer rushes and stalkier reeds. The sky, he noticed—impossible not to—was pressed immodestly near, nearly naked, its moon nigh full, the stars as cloves of ice. Toting the lantern shoulder high and steady, its light-loft torchlit the tress of the trees dead ahead and beckoning, not far. Reining up, he looked back, his sight line cutting the house in half. The roof and some of the second floor were all that he could see—his bedroom window, the moon on its pane a chrome eye. “Moon paint,” he thought. “Puck.” The piped peeps of the peepers surged and receded, singing crescendo/diminuendo waves in oscillating accord with his plotching farther in, quieting as he approached, upswelling as he passed, a diapason. And then he was fully into it, among treespread onto floor sponge burlapped and nappy through the soles of his shoes, the fluxion, flex, sway and giveway, springy as a cushion of mattress. The deeper in he went, the less tentative he felt, less apt to step through bottom. He felt his feet getting wet, squishy in their socks, a pair of “soakers.” He was going to catch hell when got back, a bawling-out, but found he cared less. Like walking in chews across heels of bread. The moon had melted the mud. He hadn’t expected it to smell like rotted eggs. Phew! Fancied, then, that he could feel the wind of the planets as they wheeled in their rounds, sounds of passage, musical spheres. The moon has a way, perhaps, of massaging a pulse from the ground. Extinguishing the lantern, he stood there a moment, self-blackened, before lowering himself to a knee, Indian scout, immediately feeling better, less exposed for the crouch. Something unthinkable rustled his hair, migrated its surface, crisscrossed his scalp, inched down his neck. Procession of spider? Scrutiny of grub? Leech? He felt it hook in, sink a footing, probe, then drill, root ’neath his skin. He swatted. Deadfall inside his shirt. Yeesh! Which is when, roughly, he saw them. They weren’t there, and then, roughly, what had not been, was. Twenty, twenty-five yards ahead, a glade of lucent mist, and on the mist and of it, and of the mist and through it, glosses of pink sheen, wafers of red, lobes of bluish green, pleats of membranous yellow merging with flounces of purple that wobbled, roopled, minnowed and weeviled. And, then . . . fled. The lights skated plasmas and muscosas of air as if skimming a sentient surface, one he slogged over and through as if reeled onward, into the dark, amidst the marl of everything he could not see, not thinking, bereft of thought and right cogency, until, expecting each to be his next, squelching further on far from sure-footed, keeping his eyes fixed fast on the lights, the closer he came, it suddenly dawned upon him, the farther they moved off, backpedaled, waltzed in reverse, tattered apart, trailed off and away, draining in situ until they had petered to nothingness. His three feet forward, their six feet back. His eight, their twenty. Pulse step by pulse—of panther’s paw?—he pounced, raced headlong, unheeding on the hurtle, only to have the dunes of ectoplasmic light distill to dissolve before his eyes, an in-essence more porous than powder; tachistoscopic. He fell. So—though he would arrive at its meaning only later—that was the first lesson: what is bequeathed you, however beautiful, when pulled even with at last, falls apart, goes to pieces, evanesces, in the dark, over and over again. The moment, present, always, past. Impermanent as the vapor of angels.
FATHERBefore it was half over, his mother had fallen into the habit of calling it “the Summer of the Fledermaus.” Bats were a seasonal fact around the farm, but that summer—he must have been twelve, thirteen maybe—the local population seemed inexplicably to have soared by magnitudes of infestation. Indeed, so conspicuous had become their amassed flocking that his father, the very night before what happened happened, had remarked over evening stew that they were so plentiful now, they had become “nuisance enough to spook the cows.” Twenty-four hours later, Franklyn, having been called down to wash up for supper, was standing at the kitchen sink hard at the hand pump when his gaze was drawn through the windowglass to the image of an object at no little remove from the house, out across a stretch of yonder pasture. Size, shape, angle, contour, color—he could delineate nothing with any salience. Even when the figure appeared to move, a fluttering of black flaps in relief against a white field—crows feeding on a carcass of summertime snow, he would remember thinking later—even then, he hadn’t a clue. Until he heard the sound. Or rather, his father did. His father heard it first. “Damn!” He was on his feet at the kitchen table. “Stay here.” Franklyn stood, mindlessly pumping, feet stapled to the floor, as his father charged out the kitchen door, past the privy, through the barnyard, blew past the barn, the dovecots, his shed, sped along the pond, past the silo, the millrace, through the pasture gate, into the pasture and across it, full tilt, not stumbling. Willing himself, belly full of bees, Franklyn released his hold on the pump handle and crossed over to the door, staring through its screen. It would occur to him later that he never had seen his father, who customarily typified what his mother always called a “plodder,” move so swiftly or sure. Beeline. Something about his father’s purposefulness, quality of voice. Franklyn suspected he might have use of his help. He was out the door and halfway there when his father turned and yelled, “Kerosene!” Altering his course without breaking stride, Franklyn sheared for the barn, located the tankard, not frantic, raced back through the pasture, hands full and encumbered. He could see his father bent over the spot, back to him, kicking at something in what appeared to him as all of an infernal fit. By the time he reined up even with him, he was clean out of breath, the stitch in his side a tug like a suture that was playing his ribs for a cinch. It was a cow, one of theirs, and she no was longer standing but supporting herself propped by her rear legs alone, down on her knees, V’d, bipod, having been brought down, felled and foundering, her rump hoisted in the air as if slung there. Franklyn was drawn at once to her eyes, eyes open wider and redder than he ever had seen any cow’s before and which bulged with what could only be fear and panic even as they rolled wild’d in bewilderment. From her mouth, open as the baa of a shearling lamb’s, resonated a baritone of mucosal bleating around and past a lax slab of pink tongue that lolled out and over her massive lower jaw like an unspooled band of wet rubber, even as her nostrils dilated and contracted in rapid bursts, blown strings, pomellated knots. The pools of piss and piles of shit lay everywhere; she floundered among them, the strew of them there. Snatching up the cannister of kerosene from his son, the father unscrewed its lid, turned it bottoms up, and began shaking it, dumping its contents, flinging it in long flumes over her head, back, shanks, flanks, the liquid landing in splashes that splotched the black-and-white Holstein hide enough to dislodge some of the bats, the ones that loosed their holds here and there, rose up, flapped off, but not all of them, not most, not nearly enough. They appeared to be hundreds—or at least enough to bring down a heifer—and they clung to her like a last meal, bunched at her neck, corsaging her nose, clumped to her backside, under and along the basket of her belly and groin, bouqueted at her udder and teats, a school of winged sharks lost to the frenzy of its feeding. He could see—she was chum. Her back legs gave way then, and, as she collapsed, overcome and unsocketed, her mass met the ground with a humpff, full brunt, before rolling onto its side, her lungs heaving hugely against the slats of its ribs. They were about to lose her. Perhaps she had been lost all along. His father retreated, took three steps back—Franklyn counted—stood staring as his son stared along. “Go home,” he said, not looking at him. “Go home, boy.” “Yes, sir,” said Franklyn, making no move to obey. His eyes were fixed on his father’s, whose own appeared to have lost track of their presence, the tense of this present, so monocularly trained were they on what they beheld. “Can’t I stay?” he said at last. “I’d rather stay.” Summoning one last mighty effort, expending what she could afford to ill spend, the cow endeavored to jolt her way to her feet, craning crazily at the neck, cords taut, muscled herself partway up, bucked herself to her haunches, performed a sort of demivolt, then sank back, slack, before beginning to thrash, legs and hooves feebly bicycling. She wasn’t bellowing anymore. Her bellowing had ceased, if not the gurgling that was not immediately apparent to Franklyn as that of a cow’s. Though it was only when they went for her eyes that his father reached into the breast pocket of his bib overalls and fished out the safe of matches, sliding it open like a desk drawer. Extracting a match from the box, he struck it, then flicked it at the heap. When it failed to catch, he struck a second, then a third, another, then another still, struck every match in the tray, tossing each in rapid succession . . . fluuuf! The flames engaged, vectored, spread, rolled horizontally across the carcass until, describing the veer of a vertical leap, they hurled upward, a collusion of boas. The smell of charred cow coursed up Franklyn’s nose, chafed at the roof of his mouth, scalded the back of his throat. He sensed the lining of his lungs sear, stung acrid as outcry, raw as regret. And then it was night and they gunned thistling up out of the flames, black burrs finning, shrapnel aflame. Combing the crown of his balding head with a calico kerchief, his father clumsied his arm about the startled shoulder of his unwitting son and insinuated an assuasive, rough tender-meant tug. A hug? “Let’s home,” he said. “She’ll keep ’til morning.” Through the dark, its moment at their backs, they humped their horror home.
How speak the substance of a shadow or endow a vapor with its valency? How give his bedeviled dust its due? Like that Fourth of July when Augustus Shivs, flare-blind and smoldering, staggered through the backdoor blistered, blasted, tattered to effigy, having blown himself nigh sky-high. Though for all his grinning through the raccoon mask of black powder you might have thought, as did his son, that he just had returned from a leisurely day at the races. Had to hand him that, his moment of special grace. “Can’t see jack,” he had joshed, barking a shin on the stove while ripping the still-smoking shirt from his back. “Somebody, woncha pleeze, hand me the crook of a cane.” Then the hours at the kitchen table, refectory, trestle, swabbing his eyes, rinsing them with saline back to some semblance of sight, Mother extracting each of the black grains of unburned powder embedded beneath his flesh like kernels of pepper, squeezing them out, tweezing them out with tweezers or, the deeper ones, a sewing needle, placing them, seeds in a saucer, hundreds, like lice, daubing at his wounds with rubbing alcohol. And Father the while, good soldier, nary a word in complaint save the occasional sharp in/uptake of breath and good-natured, “Oooo. Now that’s a beaut, that one was.” “Watch this,” he had instructed wife and son later that evening, forfeit to high spirits, almost antic, playful as Franklyn ever would see him as he arranged what shreds remained of the shirt in a heap in the front yard before flicking several matches in its direction. The flag of cloth sizzed, sneezed, effervesced froth-white with spark, and when wife and son had started some, he had japed, “Lucifer’s blouse!” The Fourth was his father’s holiday, the only one he took more personally than his own birthday, and when Franklyn—vague recollection—once had dared ask him why this was so, he had consented, that once, to explain: “Noise, heat, smoke, motion, light, brilliance, color, form, flight—it’s all there, Latty, a feast for more than the eyes.” An amateur pyrotechnician just amateur enough to pose a danger, at least to himself, the one pocket of his life not laundered of risk was that in which reposed his fireworks. Which was what his workshop was about, his “powder lab,” the “fire lathe,” the off-limits, twelve-by-twenty-foot tarpaper-roof shed located out back, hard by the barn where he made and kept his “pyros.” Atelier, refuge, it was where he repaired to perform, as his son conceived of it, his miracles of fire, the wonderwork of pyromancy, and, as that son would apprehend only much later, seek right respite from the ways of his wife. Franklyn remembered that quite clearly, his father not saying much, if the little he did with a rude, blunt-nosed eloquence. No lessons imparted, philosophies shared, no attitude encouraged or endorsed about how properly to repose in the world, no bootstrap or cracker-barrel advice, a reticence so organic he typically exercised the option only under duress, the while counting upon the need not arising, as if he were hoarding them—words for a rainy day that he knew never was coming?—saving them back in case he should have need of them later, in heaven, perhaps, or elsewhere. Did his father know the world, what was going on in and across it? Or if he knew, care? Certainly he never communicated the sense to his son, but then, he wasn’t the sort to share his counsel or strut it, commend consolation, ignite debate or stoke it, proffer congratulation, talk sex, politics, business, or religion, cajole or gladhand, trade barbs or bon mots, josh around, or call his one and only affectionate nicknames—horsefly, pissant, buzz cut, bullethead, bucko, bucky, buckaroo, spike, spud, sluggo or stretch, slim or stubby, satchmo or socks or sprat or sprout—and so remained for him, the son, much the insular cipher, a man defined by the uneasy space of his silence, a silence so transparent that when he entered a room he did so without being seen, yet whose greatest pleasure in life was to punch open the sky in parasols of flame in order to scrawl there his signature in every fiery color of the palette. The Shivses kept cows, milch cows as his mother called them, black and whites, Holsteins, half a hundred head. Still, it would not have mattered to Augie Shivs had the Holsteins been Herefords, the cows bantam roosters, and their acreage sown with barley and beets. What mattered more, as his mother was prone grandly to repeat in her moments of more regal self-regard—the farm had been bequeathed to them upon their betrothal by her parents—was that they were “landed.” Augustus Shivs may have embodied the stoicism one associates with the stereotypical Midwestern farmer, but he was singularly unsuited to managing a farm, save precisely where he succeeded in doing so, incrementally into the ground. It wasn’t neglect. Augie Shivs was no piker. It was sheer ineptitude, temperamental incompetence. At last, he was a dairy farmer who almost tragicomically despised dairy cows. They were docile, and he disliked docility. They were stupid, and he disliked stupidity. They were ugly, and he disliked ugliness. They were dependent, and he disliked dependency. They were slow, ungainly, bereft of personality, and he disliked all of those—because the qualities were so pronounced in himself? And they were bovine, and bovinity he could not abide. Nor was he overly fond of rolling out at 4:00 a.m. to milk them, as he was the less so of turning in at eight in order to roll out again at four to milk them again. And again. And again. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, year after year for the rest of his natural-born life. “I am so dang tired of teats, boy,” Franklyn recalled him remarking near the end. “Tired of puttering around the arse-end of cows. Flat-out, udderly beat. Cows is cows. Awesome dumb. And bad smelling. Dumb as the dung they dump where they do.” Most dairy farmers pet-name their cows—Maysie, Daisy, Elsie, Sal. Not Augie Shivs. He called each one the same thing—Fucking Dumb. It was the sort of existence that cornered a man, set him to chewing off his leg before blowing out his spirit, until in time, as his own father had done before him, he went out for a fag and disappeared—poof!—a man literally up in smoke, this abiding archetype, the father who abandons, then vanishes. That final morning, the one over which Franklyn later would reproach himself for failing to intuit what it portended, Augie Shivs addressed his son at more length than he had, it seemed to Franklyn, the previous thirteen years sum. The date—helpful, perhaps, to nail these things down—was the year of “the Crisis of ’93,” the one history shortly would immortalize as that of the “Wisconsin Death Trip,” the year the banks failed, loans were recalled and farm foreclosures soared, black diphtheria ran rampant, killing children by the score—whole families wiped out, and the “Wisconsin Window Smasher,” the berserker Mary Sweeney, went on her rampage in the northern part of the state, near Ashland, breaking more than one hundred panes of glass before being arrested. The year, too, that a spate of inexplicable arsons swept downtown Milwaukee, as did a rash of barnburnings near Madison, and more inmates escaped from the madhouse at Mendota State than in any similar period before or since. That morning, then, milking the cows as they always did, teat stripping in silence perched side by side upon their stools amid the feculent amalgam of hay, sawdust, mud, and cow pie strewn about the floor, the splish of warm milk chi-tinging its plangent tin-rain rhythm against the curved sides of the pails—had they kept cats, as cats, by farmers, typically were kept, they would have been on the prowl about then, plaintively mewling for their share—without missing a beat or even looking his way, he of a sudden began. “Frankie”—he never called him that, always Franklyn or Frank or, occasionally, Latty; should have known right there—“every man worth a jackleg has a dream, but hardly a one has a passion, and those who do, well, recognizing it ain’t so easy. And in time? Before it’s too late? Passed too far on by? Shoot, that’s just damned difficult.” Franklyn looked up and over, not a little startled. His father appeared to be speaking to the cow, addressing the bulge of its udder. “So, now, you do yourself a favor and don’t let that happen to you, hear? Quit your listening to what any man may tell you and find the one row that’s for you and hoe it on down and for all that it’s worth. And then no excuses, none. You keep to your way of it, come what may. No quit. None of this running out on yourself way a hermit crab sheds its own shell. You keep ’til what’s done is well done.” Augie Shivs paused then, quit milking, looked at his son. “’Cause life’ll be a damned misery if you don’t, ’til you reckon your own way of it and no kind word from another living soul. No, you make your purpose your passion, and you make ’em both yours, alone.” Augie Shivs appeared to be deciding something then—which words to use, perhaps, or whether to use any at all. “The mind’s one crafty bastard, Frank, and it’ll try to talk you into thinking you can go it alone. Don’t listen; it lies. ’Cause it’s not enough, nor meant to be. Gotta listen to your heart, see? Gut, too. And eye. See it all, all through, all around. And when you trip into trouble—and you will, someday, happens to us all—no place left to go, nowhere to turn, nothing to hold to, then you listen to your soul. Could be carnal, too, you know, in part. Often thought it so, the soul.” And then he did the unthinkable: hitched up off his stool, strode over, stood behind his son, bent over, and kissed him on the top of his head, through his hair, whispering in his ear, “Swear it, Frank, your oath honor bright, that you’ll not let it cut you down to size, your life.” And so he had sworn, however confounded. Carnal souls? It would be years before it roosted home with him—it was the only counsel with which his father ever had favored him, as the only real advice. This man, anonym, whatever, whoever he was, or once had been.Excerpted from The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress by Bruce Olds. Copyright © 2007 by Bruce Olds. Published in April 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
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