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Overview
Ancestors and Others collects selected stories from the legendary southern writer, Fred Chappell
In this collection, Fred Chappell shows his mastery across a range of genres. Featuring folk fables in the Twain tradition, realistic stories of growing up in remote Appalachia, stories of family, kin, and community, and tales of the fantastic and spooky, this book will delight fans and surprise new readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429985642 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 401 KB |
About the Author
FRED CHAPPELL is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and fiction. He has received many major prizes, including the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University and the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife, Susan in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Fred Chappell is the award-winning author of more than twenty books of poetry and fiction, including I Am One of You Forever, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, and Look Back All the Green Valley. He has received many major prizes, including the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University and the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife, Susan in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Read an Excerpt
Ancestors And Others
By Fred Chappell
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2009 Fred ChappellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8564-2
CHAPTER 1
THE OVERSPILL
Then there was one brief time when we didn't live in the big brick house with my grandmother, but in a neat two-story green-roofed white house in the hollow below. It was two stories if you stood at the front door; on the other side it was three stories, the ground floor a tall basement garage.
The house was surrounded by hills to the north and east and south. Directly above us lay the family farm and my grandmother's house. Two miles behind the south hill was the town of Tipton, where the Challenger Paper and Fiber Corporation smoked eternally, smudging the Carolina mountain landscape for miles. A small creek ran through our side yard, out of the eastern hills. The volume of the creek flow was controlled by Challenger; they had placed a reservoir up there, and the creek water was regulated by means of a spillway.
At this time my mother was visiting her brother in California. Uncle Luden was in trouble again, with a whole different woman this time. Maybe my mother could help; it was only five thousand miles round-trip by train.
So my father and I had to fumble along as best we could.
Despite the extra chores, I found it exciting. Our friendship took a new and stronger turn, became something of a mild conspiracy. New sets of signals evolved between us. We met now on freshly neutral ground somewhere between my boyhood and his boyishness, and for me it was a heady rise in status. We were clumsy housekeepers, there were lots of minor mishaps, and the tag line we formulated soonest was "Let's just not tell Mama about this one." I adored that thought.
He was always dreaming up new projects to please her and, during her absence, came up with one of masterly ambition.
Across the little creek, with its rows of tall willows, was a half acre of fallow ground considered unusable because of marshiness and the impenetrable clot of blackberry vines in the south corner. My father now planned it as a garden, already planted before she returned.
We struggled heroically. I remember pleasantly the destruction of the vines and the cutting of the drainage ditch neat and straight into the field. The ground was so soft that we could slice down with our spades and bring up squares of dark blue mud and lay them along side by side. They gleamed like tile. Three long afternoons completed the ditch, and then my father brought out the big awkward shoulder scythe and whetted the blade until I could hear it sing on his thumb ball when he tested it. And then he waded into the thicket of thorny vine and began slashing. For a long time nothing happened, but finally the vines began to fall back, rolling up in tangles like barbarous handwriting. With a pitchfork, I worried these tangles into a heap. Best of all was the firing, the clear yellow flame and the sizzle and snap of the vine ribs and thorns, and the thin black smoke rising above the new-green willows. The delicious smell of it.
After this, we prepared the ground in the usual way and planted. Then we stood at the edge of our garden, admiring with a full, tired pride the clean furrows and mounded rows of earth.
But this was only a part of the project. It was merely a vegetable garden, however arduously achieved, and we planted a garden every year. My father wanted something else, decorative, elegant in design, something guaranteed to please a lady.
The weather held good and we started next day, hauling two loads of scrap lumber from one of the barns. He measured and we sawed and planed. He hummed and whistled as he worked and I mostly stared at him when not scurrying to and fro, fetching and carrying. He wouldn't, of course, tell me what we were building.
On the second day it became clear. We were constructing a bridge. We were building a small but elaborate bridge across the little creek that divided the yard and the garden, a stream that even I could step over without lengthening my stride. It was ambitious: an arched bridge with handrails and a latticework arch on the garden side enclosing a little picket gate.
He must have been a handy carpenter. To me, the completed bridge appeared marvelous. We had dug deep on both sides to sink the locust piers, and the arch above the stream, though not high, was unmistakably a rainbow. When I walked back and forth across the bridge, I heard and felt a satisfactory drumming. The gate latch made a solid cluck and the gate arch, pinned together of old plaster lathe, made me feel that in crossing the bridge I was entering a different world, not simply going into the garden.
He had further plans for the latticework. "Right here," he said, "and over here. I'll plant some roses to climb up the trellis. Then you'll see."
We whitewashed it three times. The raw lumber sparkled. We walked upstream to the road above the yard and looked at it, then walked downstream to the edge of the garden and looked at it. We saw nothing we weren't prideful about.
He went off in our old Pontiac and returned in a half hour. He parked in the driveway and got out. "Come here," he said. We sat in the grass on the shoulder of the culvert at the edge of the road. "I've been to the store," he said. He pulled a brown paper sack from his pocket. I found ten thimble-shaped chocolate mints inside, my favorite. From another pocket he pulled a rolled band of bright red silk.
"Thank you," I said. "What's that?"
"We want her to know it's a present, don't we? So we've got to tie a ribbon on it. We'll put it right there in the middle of the handrail." He spooled off two yards of ribbon and cut it with his pocketknife. "Have to make a big one so she can see it from the road."
I chewed a mint and observed his thick, horny fingers with the red silk.
It was not to be. Though I was convinced that my father could design and build whatever he wanted — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Taj Mahal — he could not tie a bow in this broad ribbon. The silk crinkled and knotted and slipped loose; it simply would not behave. He growled in low tones, like a bear trying to dislodge a groundhog from its hole. "I don't know what's the matter with this stuff," he said.
Over the low mumble of his words I heard a different rumble, a gurgle as of pebbles pouring into a broad, still pool. "What's that?" I asked.
"What's what?"
"What's that noise?"
He stopped ruining the ribbon and sat still as the sound grew louder. Then his face darkened and veins stood out in his neck and forehead. His voice was quiet and level now. "Those bastards."
"Who?"
"The Challenger Paper guys. They've opened the floodgates."
We scrambled up the shoulder into the road.
As the sound got louder, it discomposed into many sounds: lappings, bubblings, rippings, undersucks, and splashovers. Almost as soon as we saw the gray-brown thrust of water emerge from beneath the overhanging plum tree, we felt the tremor as it slammed against the culvert, leaping up the shoulder and rolling back. On the yard side it shot out of the culvert as out of a hose. In a few seconds it had overflowed the low creek banks and streamed gray-green along the edge of the yard, furling white around the willow trunks. Debris — black sticks and leaves and grasses — spun on top of the water, and the gullet of the culvert rattled with rolling pebbles.
Our sparkling white bridge was soiled with mud and slimy grasses. The water driving into it reached a gray arm high into the air and slapped down. My father and I watched the hateful battering of our work, our hands in our pockets. He still held the red ribbon, and it trickled out of his pocket down his trouser leg. The little bridge trembled and began to shake. There was one moment when it sat quite still, as if it had gathered resolve and was fighting back.
And then on the yard side it wrenched away from the log piers, and when that side headed downstream, the other side tore away, too, and we had a brief glimpse of the bridge parallel in the stream like a strange boat and saw the farthest advance of the flood framed in the quaint lattice arch. The bridge twirled about and the corners caught against both banks and it went over on its side, throwing up the naked underside of the planks like a barn door blown shut. Water piled up behind this damming and finally poured over and around it, eating at the borders of the garden and lawn.
My father kept saying over and over, "Bastards bastards bastards. It's against the law for them to do that."
Then he fell silent.
I don't know how long we stared downstream before we were aware that my mother had arrived. When we first saw her, she had already gotten out of the taxi, which sat idling in the road. She looked odd to me, wearing a dress I had never seen, and a strange expression — half amused, half vexed — crossed her face. She looked at us as if she'd caught us doing something naughty.
My father turned to her and tried to speak. Bastards was the only word he got out. He choked and his face and neck went dark again. He gestured toward the swamped bridge, and the red ribbon fluttered in his fingers.
She looked where he pointed and, as I watched, understanding came into her face, little by little. When she turned again to face us, she looked as if she were in pain. A single tear glistened on her cheek, silver in the cheerful light of midafternoon.
My father dropped his hand and the ribbon fluttered and trailed in the mud.
The tear on my mother's face got larger and larger. It detached from her face and became a shiny globe, widening outward like an inflating balloon. At first the tear floated in the air between them, but as it expanded, it took my mother and father into itself. I saw them suspended, separate but beginning to drift slowly toward each other. Then my mother looked past my father's shoulder, looked through the bright skin of the tear, at me. The tear enlarged until at last it took me in, too. It was warm and salty. As soon as I got used to the strange light inside the tear, I began to swim clumsily toward my parents.
CHAPTER 2BROKEN BLOSSOMS
At first, brightly colored stones and oddly shaped leaves and bird nests and cicada husks, and perhaps it ought to end there, when one is seven or eight years old, attracted to the gathering of things by the eye's joy and by a reverence for something which the natural world — so shadowy mysterious — has seemed to cast aside. Whatever it later turns into will be mere pleasure in collecting for the sake of collecting, in pigeonholing, in aligning things in rows, in piecing out categories.
In my own case, this dark latter urge struck me hard when I was eleven and was manifested as stamp collecting. The stamp album from that time has long been lost, or maybe I traded it away as a teenager. I should like to see it now, though I would blush shamefully if I had to display it before a true philatelist. I recall the color, a matte chocolate-maroon, and the gold lettering across the front, STAMPS OF MANY COUNTRIES, and my name, too, in gold letters in the lower right-hand corner. The situation in which I most vividly recall it is lying cater-cornered on the beat-up coffee table which served me as a desk (I sat cross-legged on the floor) under the bronze-painted table lamp with its dusty yellow shade. When the big square book lay there unopened, it spoke my name to me again and again.
Inside, what a mess! The stamps were supposed to be attached to the album pages with little gummed paper hinges, and this required a minimal amount of dexterity, which I never acquired. The stamps were to be stuck to the smaller flap of the hinge, while the large flap was pressed against the page. Often as not I got the flaps reversed. And spit was disallowed by the experts as a dampening agent. A saucer of lukewarm water was advised, temperature tested with the back of the wrist. I eschewed all such frivolity and laid stamp and hinge on my tongue and mashed the gluey bit of paper onto the page with the heel of my hand. A typical finished page would look like a crazy quilt, each scrap of color at any angle to another, each stuck there forever or clinging tenuously as a butterfly to a leaf.
Yet I regarded such a filled page with a proud tenderness. I had collected the stamps; I had affixed them; I had already in my life accomplished something. Sometimes I would open the album to one such page and stare at it until I was overwhelmed, and then I would spring to my feet and twirl about in a circle, overcome with happiness, with the feeling that a bright and shining future lay in store and here gave a foretaste of itself. Or I would stare at it long and pensively, in melancholy reverie dreaming a blurred, half-imagined history of the universe.
But the true and fatal attraction in hoarding stamps was the lure of instant wealth and global fame. It seemed improbable that I should not discover a rare stamp equal in worth to the fabled British Guiana or one with a magnificent printing error like the twenty-five-cent airmail with the upside-down biplane. I did not deceive myself that the odds were against me, but I was sure I would beat the odds. For, look here, I had already filled in five pages of this huge book, cheating only a little by sticking seven or eight stamps in or near spaces where they did not belong.
So that even if I had been able to afford the expensive sets of stamps I saw advertised in Boys' Life — mint sets of new Nicaraguan issues, or Swiss first-day covers — it is doubtful I would have been deeply interested. For me, the great excitement was in those big envelopes given away as introductory enticements, thick wads of ordinary canceled stamps, rose two-pence British, French and Italian airmail, and even three-cent Jeffersons. When one of these envelopes arrived, my father handing it over with a half-amused smile, I would tear it open and pour under the bronze table lamp this useless clutter of paper and claw through it feverishly. There would be nothing I had not seen and rejected scores of times before, but that was merely the preliminary examination. After I stirred about in this heap till my initial fervor wore off, I would go downstairs to the bathroom medicine chest and borrow my mother's tweezers, take up each stamp, look at it on both sides, holding it against the light. Not that I knew what to look for. Watermarks I had read about and had seen sketches of, but I never glimpsed one in a stamp. There were ribbed lines running horizontally, but I knew they were not watermarks, because they were not exciting. I thought that if I could just once sight a watermark of any kind, I would be well on my way to making my famous, inevitable discovery, because I would be able to recognize one of the components of rarity. ... But at the end I would have to look down sadly upon them and drift them by handfuls into the wastebasket.
Of how my parents regarded this outlandish enthusiasm, I can form but a vague notion. My father, though educated, was a farmer and a practical man. I think he may have been mildly concerned about my interest, for he would occasionally bring me toys of a different sort, miniature farms with barns and silos and brightly painted tractors. My mother, fastidious and vocal as always, would complain about disorder and the absence of her tweezers. But their objections could not be taken seriously, I reasoned, for they had given me the album and the first bulky envelope of stamps for my birthday. Anyway, once I had made my discovery, once my picture appeared in all the newspapers, once the renowned dealers began to telephone with their unheard-of offers, I would be vindicated a hundredfold. And it wasn't only the money and the worldwide recognition — I would have proved that my imagination was healthy and brilliantly practical and would make its way in the world. Then my activities, which were not limited to stamps but also included chemistry experiments and poetry writing, would have to be reckoned with seriously.
After my father, chief among my continual teasers was Harmon Cody. Mr. Cody was a spare, sandy-haired man with unyielding green eyes who lived down the narrow dirt road about a mile from our farmhouse. The arrangement by which he worked on our farm is obscure, for he worked neither entirely for shares nor for wages, but for some intermediate combination. He took other jobs, too, part-time farmwork or repairs. The vagueness showed in the way he and my father treated each other. He rose to suggestions with such ready deference and spoke in such respectful tones that most people must have supposed his position was that of a sharecropper. But he was independent, and my father never talked to him in any manner suggesting his dependence, and any hint of inequality came from his side.
Mr. Cody's attitude toward me was another matter. It was clear to him that I was a new kind of animal upon this earth and he would gaze at me in unabashed wonder as I drifted empty-eyed from one chore to another, so abstracted at times as actually to stumble over an object in my path. He would ply me with bland jokes. "What's the weather where you are?" "Don't forget your head is on the top and your tailbone on the bottom." And when I smiled back dreamily, his mouth would quiver in amazement. He kept joking and after awhile became more pointed, though his motive was never malice, but a kind of bemused experimentation. What will this creature ever react to? he must have wondered. And I, half-conscious of what went on in his mind, was pleased with any attention he gave me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ancestors And Others by Fred Chappell. Copyright © 2009 Fred Chappell. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
The Overspill,Broken Blossoms,
The Three Boxes,
Ember,
Alma,
Judas,
Linnaeus Forgets,
Ladies from Lapland,
Moments of Light,
The Somewhere Doors,
Gift of Roses,
Christmas Gift!,
Crèche,
Tradition,
Duet,
Children of Strikers,
Bon Ton,
The Lodger,
Mankind Journeys Through Forests of Symbols,
Ancestors,
January,