This story dates back to the year 1991. Around this time I had declared my aspirations to “become a writer” and my college roommate bought me a leather bound copy of the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. After his touching vote of confidence, I read many of those stories, which I think is evident here. I remember laboring over this story, scouring the dictionary and thesaurus, giving lots of attention to diction as if intuitively a language poet. Clearly, though, I had intention, and I believed, meaning to convey. I know this because I took notes on my own drafts. One reads: “an attempt to create the false self-confidence and defensive pride of a young man fresh against the world. Humility in self-satire.” In my own interpretation of the story I was both the narrator and the dead old man who faced the wrong direction — because at the time my family wanted me to go to law school, and they were not subtle about it either. When I look back at this writing now, I see even early on in my career, a love of prose language, particularly decadent, gothic 19th century prose. I see the influence (at the time unwitting) of Surrealism. I see a filmic road story that ends in the middle of the road, perhaps in the shadow of Kelly Reichardt or Roberto Bolaño. But, I also see a lack of understanding about form, plot and story-telling. I see a writer at the beginning of his career wrestling with difference between narrative and story, who has written into a dream landscape as a way of avoiding this problem. Still when I look back I am surprised to see how much of my aesthetic is present here at the outset. It makes me wonder how much one can change as an artist despite all the education. Even now a common thread for my short story characters is to wander in surreal landscapes, to be lost, and to struggle to respond to losses of all kinds: personal (as in the umbrella) or metaphysical (as in direction) or cultural (as in the communication troubles with the cathedral workers). I also frequently write about artists and artisans. Since this story I have written dancers, classical musicians, painters, and writers, not unlike the stone cutters figured here. Like Barthelme I find beginnings, middles and endings to be the hardest part of writing. Depending on my mood, my reliance on road motifs and oneric landscape is either the abominable crutch of poor story-teller or the triumph of imagination over mundane reality. I suspect at least that much will remain unchanged.
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I had been walking a suspiciously long time. Then it occurred to me that I must have detoured somehow onto an unfamiliar path. Fortunately, not far off through the branches of bare trees, I saw the ongoing reconstruction of the cathedral’s bell tower. An intricate, weatherstained scaffolding crept about the scarred tower as a web for slow crawling artisans. But something was definitely wrong; I knew I should have been approaching from the other side, not by this back path. With heightening vexation my eyes narrowly held the cathedral, and I continued on (up hill, no less) fuming at the possibility of an irksome delay.
Moments later the path arrived among the tiny elfin work huts supporting the cathedral restorations. Shed entrails spread out from the open doors onto mudstained grass lawns. Mortars, mixes, troths, wheelbarrows, stereotomers’ tools, and devilish grotesques lay about unattended. It was as though I had stumbled upon a Pompeii whose incomplete citizens incased in stone had frozen in tragic poses of quietus.
Abandoning any hope that my way might perchance find itself, I stood full of despair in the midst of these work sheds looking about for assistance (or a convenient route). As luck would leave me, there was not a living soul in sight from whom to inquire the way around to the front of the cathedral. I paused to sweep my hair from my face in exasperation of disbelief.
To complicate matters, my gravel track proceeded up to a green sward and dead-ended at the foot of a high stone wall. With no one around, I thought for a moment about leaping the wall with the aid of an intricate lattice set against it. I was forced to give up this idea, however, as the trellis overflowed with an impenetrable bramble of blooming flowers. Honeysuckle, roses. Morning glory, forsythia hung sanctimoniously entwined. Woven thick through the lattice, the flowers were a magnificent human creation prepared as though for a splendid event — a wedding shower perhaps. The arrangements extended the entire length of the lawn. Beyond them the wall continued out of sight. On the far side of the wall, thick pines trees lent a dark backdrop to the kaleidoscopic beauty of the arrangement. I remained for some moments struck by the prodigal effect of the trees and flowers. Meanwhile no person appeared.
Surveying the situation, my usual sense of brash economy prevailed, and I resolutely decided that (barring any advice to the contrary — and none appeared forthcoming) I might skirt the botanical colossus most easily to the right by making my way into the fields behind the huts. Prizing an opening between the little shacks I hurried along the narrow path. Like row houses for lemmings, I thought. Unfortunately, turning in, I saw the alley was completely blocked by the burnt out carcass of a farm vehicle. I stood helplessly glowering back down the path, annoyed by everything even the quietness.
Then, to my relief and salvation, an old man emerged from the last shed in the row. I scuttled over to him and quickly explained that I was lost and wished to know the nearest way to the front of the cathedral. His slow thoughtful steps and his sturdy wool sailor’s hat revealed his competence. They gave him the look of a wisened sea captain. Surely, he would solve my predicament. But no — taken aback, I could barely comprehend his gibberish and wild expression. He underscored murky syllables with emphatically demonstrative pantomime, sawing the air between the wall and the fields with one hand and rubbing his snow white grizzle with the other.
“Fr-giv me anguish [English?]. I’ve cancer [can answer?] … not … .. …. …,” was all I could discern.
Evidently aware of my uncertainty, he repeated each phrase two or three times and even nodded my understanding for me. He drew closer and closer to my face until I smelled his licorice breath. And I noticed many missing teeth, like a carved pumpkin. Making what I could from his play, I surmised that the directions were too complicated for him to articulate, and thus he would head me. He was even prepared to stop his work and take me posthaste which I greatly appreciated.
As in applause of my intuition, we passed through one of the open work sheds to into the fields to the right of the wall. I paid no attention to our path, thinking at first that it would be but a matter of moments before I flanked the cathedral. So as we whisked over the first stiles I followed the scenery. The neat fields were folded in hills and stitched with hedgerows. At a high point I chanced to see, to my surprise, that the wall extended beyond my vision in both directions. A bit alarmed I tried to ease my anxiety by recalling our turns, but I found that we had already progressed beyond my memory. The old man continued in silence, and the walled bobbed in and out of sight from various angles. I grew more concerned that my guide had misunderstood me somehow, but still I pressed our pace urgently. The hills seemed to shift like sand dunes while the dead ground beneath them played tricks with a lake in the distance.
We followed the scarecrows who stood out in every field a population unto themselves, clad in faded clothes and pointing the way from crossed wooden frames. Near us one wore thin black robes and was leaking patches of straw from a hole in it’s side. (Was that a rib cage!?)
I trusted the old man implicitly. He led me across open hills, grey fields, and a quarry, through bunkers of sand, mortar pits and among tall hedge rows. As soon as each successive hill wiped out my vision, I was lost. I existed as one crossing over different frames of a photo album. We moved quickly, two shadows accelerating, keeping low to the ground, seldom speaking. I wondered how I could have gone so disastrously wrong. All the while the cathedral’s various spires darted behind the hills. I certainly must have been a fool to conclude that I had approached the cathedral from the rear. How could I have been so hasty, not even considered anything else? Had I ever had any accurate sense of my true direction? Confronting these questions, I fell into abstraction.
All at once we drew up along a fallow plot which skirted a darker, deeper woods. We knelt at the top of a knoll as the old man examined the terrain below. I could not imagine at what he was looking; the cathedral was not in view.
In the distance people huddled in a small group, playing a game it seemed. They were specs like geese by a smooth lake of smoked glass. But the old man was not concerned with them. He pointed across to a path which began on the other side of the field where the trees were thin and the wall low. He smiled in satisfaction, and I saw tunnels into the toothless regions of his mouth. There upon my guide scratched at his cap and launched into his charade and reprise.
By this stage in the journey, I had grown more adept at ciphering his gabber and orchestration. Apparently, I was to follow the path until I reached some conspicuous landmark [a giant something], turn left, and voilà, the main road. Simple. Of course I was filled with relief and thanked him, perhaps too profusely, for his expense and effort in locating my way.
“Can I possible do anything in return for your sacrifice?”
Nodding hopefully, he explained that his son recently had lost an umbrella on the very path ahead. As a man of modest means, he wished to recover it if at all possible. Yet he plainly had not the time for searching. Then he produced from his overalls an Indian head nickel, his lucky charm, which would help me find the umbrella. Shaking hands we parted. Naturally eager to help the old man, I zig-zagged along with my eyes fixed to the ground, and I was very proud when, after only a few steps, I glimpsed something buried in the long grass. The missing umbrella. Only having walked for a short time, and with my way so apparent in front of me, I thought to return it quickly to my guide.
Turning, however, I no longer saw him. Apparently he had just disappeared behind the hill. I hurried back in the direction of the lake, and thinking I could see him moving rapidly away by the nine-tails, I dashed back over the hill after him. I was calling out to him somewhat awkwardly, for I never learned his name. Waving the umbrella I was even attracting the attention of the game on the far side of the field, of every one except the old man.
With the hedges rising on the hills in front of me, I kept losing sight of him. When I finally arrived by the lake, having gone much farther than I anticipated, I discovered the figure was not the old man at all, but rather a young woman. She wore a simple floral dress, and carried an empty meat satchel. Breathless, I coughed out a fragmented description of the grizzled old man — the hat, the missing teeth.
“Stone cutter?” she said, “He in’t here in the fields; he’ll be working ‘top the cathedral t’day.” I tried to argue with more details, showing her the nickel, but then decided debate was futile.
“Can you tell me his name,” I asked, “So I can mail his boy’s lost umbrella to him at the cathedral?” I felt a little anxious she might offer to take it to him, and that was not what I wanted.
“Flaragen O’Melverney,” or something close.
But that was not it. By this point, I was so determined to right my way, I forgot the name she said even as I thanked her. I turned back to confront my direction, but I was unsure. I was angry for not being able to think clearly, and my eyes narrowed and and my teeth clenched distracting me all the more.
“Can you point me in the direction of the main road?” I turned back to her.
Now the group of men had arrived and was standing behind her. Silently, they examined me with stern looks, their pasty arms folded. They were an emaciated and hollow looking collection of artisans dressed in what I grimly surmised was their Sunday best. Ill-fitting suits hung off their limbs like wet clothes from a line. Huddled in a bouquet behind the taller butcher-woman, the looked as though they expected me to snap their photo.
“No,” the only bearded one said.
“You m’st come back with us t’the settlement ‘fore it gets dark an’ the gargoyles get t’roamin’,” the woman said. Shifting her satchel, I could see it had been freshly emptied. The pork blood still ran in streams on the inside. As I was considering all the variables in the offer, the group turned and swept me up in its undertow.
The woman led us back to a windowless cottage on the fringe of the hut settlement. The evening was darkly upon the houses. I did not even expect electricity. I could see the drafty cracks in the walls were stopped with straw. Inside there were dirt floors and just two rooms: a kitchen with a twisted iron stove and a sitting area filled by a long table. Several chairs had been removed from around the table leaving gaps between the remaining seats.
In the kitchen a simmering broth gave out a voluble aroma. A powerful woman stood scraping freshly diced carrots into a stew from a metal vegetable scuttle. The woman did not look up as we entered. Instead she went on to prepare fish, her huge hands like red oven mitts. Her redundant flesh danced under her arms as she worked. Finally, looking up she filleted each man with sharp malicious eyes. Shuffling past the kitchen, the pack seated themselves around the barren dining table while our young woman put her satchel by the stove and commenced to help in the kitchen with the food. Leaving my umbrella conspicuously by the door, I turned and found I was left standing alone; so I removed myself to the table — not so close to the men as to intrude on their conversation, but not so far as to seem aloof or unfriendly. I sought to give the appearance of unobtrusive pleasantness, and I watched the family machinations. The men spoke in low tones which I could not understand. Soon their furtive glances died away, and they did not appear to notice or discuss me further. None of them removed their dark jackets.
Before long the two women emerged from the kitchen. The table was set and the stew served. I was given a generous portion of broth brimming with long, sinewy fingers of meat. No sooner than the bowls hit the table, the men attacked the gruel with zest. Indeed such a clamor of grunts and slurps and all manner of trothful sounds that I was thoroughly affronted. But regardless of the surrounding vulgarity, I found my meat very sweet. I deftly spit the bone slivers into a napkin without anyone noticing and managed to comment to the effect that I didn’t believe I had ever had a meal so well cooked. The women grinned crookedly beside their plates of steaming fish.
After the supper, I would hear nothing of anyone else moving a muscle to clear the table, and I bustled into the kitchen with an armful of dishes. Dropping them in the sink, I was shocked at the waste — and from men already perilously thin! Despite a raucous like swine, they had eaten hardly two bites from their bowls.
Emerging from the kitchen, I said to everybody, “Tomorrow I shall be off first thing…. It’s been most kind of you all to let me stay….”
“Yes,” they said, “Kant b’leve y’strayed s’far.”
The evening’s topic for conversation among the artisans was not surprisingly, the cathedral. In particular they jabbered on about a certain cornice which might be finished ‘ere the month. While the men talked, the women cleared away the dining room table and the extra chairs, replacing them with three straw cots. I tried to join in where I could, but I was very tired and stiffening from my exertions. After so many expressions of polite incredulity, I felt myself beginning to doze. But my nap was restless as the drafts from the poorly stopped wall cracks made the room very uncomfortable. Again my mind became possessed with urgency.
I woke up chilled to the bone, having absolutely no idea how long I had been asleep. I had been carried to a cot and placed under a very itchy wool blanket which I had subsequently tossed off in my sleep. I was naked; or no… my clothes were my covers, the blanket. Rubbing my eyes, I noticed there was another person on the narrow cot with me. It was a turned around man. His gnarled feet were at my head as he lay sleeping in the opposite direction. Indeed, it was one of the stick thin men, the bearded one with the very bushy eyebrows I now noticed. The draft was strong enough to push back the hair from his brow, and his grey eyebrows moved back and forth like new butterfly wings. He seemed very old, annoyance had carved a home on his face. But there was something definitely wrong about the direction he was facing. Alas! He was stone dead!
Oh, where was I?