"He Went Through the Floor"
Bob Kopfensteiner
The old wood creaked in the dark. Jeremiah rested on the cold bottom step, listening to the trickle of hidden water somewhere above him. A candle burned at the top of the stairs and in the dim light dust floated, twinkling like snow in the night. The house was quiet, and it was he, the brother youngest by two seconds, who walked while the rest slumbered. Putting his hand to the knotless wall of swirling white wood, he felt for the spot that was most comfortable. Then he scooped up his bare foot for scratching, cradling it like a baby in his fair-haired forearm. Getting up, he made his way under the high, exposed lintels of the first floor, walking for the western rooms, his lanky frame moving over the network of yielding boards in a practiced and ghostly manner. The richly tanned eastern pine that met his toes as he walked from room to room had been cured in an ancient fat from the prancing fawn, a recipe turned secret for all but the dead. What was taken was a barrier, he was told, of and for the wild that often seeped in through undiscovered cracks. And yet, as he returned, passing under the heavy slanting ceiling of the stairway once more, placing his foot upon the aged and feathered wood, a single and unexpected drop found its way through the dark onto Jeremiah’s unwrinkled brow. He wiped this away, gazing for a moment at the sheen on his hand before heading towards the candlelight at the top of the stairs.
“Jacob?” he whispered. “Brother?”
His voice hovered in the circle of light on the landing around him. He pushed the candle bowl with his big toe until the edge of the jamb in front of him came into its light. It came as a steady patter now, a stream from the snow that melted under the moon, and it called to him from behind, so he left the candle by his brother's room. He walked blind until he measured out twenty-two paces to put himself on the last step down below, but the splashing was gone, and he waited. The water must have snuck in, must have ran itself across the roof until it found a place that had not been blessed by the mixture his eldest granddad had learned from the native man, who had learned watching the great forest trade life for life as it had always done. He had been taught that to keep the woods alive, a piece of the kill was to be buried at the site. His brother and father had done the woods a service over the years, and Jeremiah had been chosen to dig. Jeremiah gave up waiting, and now felt his way through the dark along the wall until he touched the splintered doorframe of his parents’ room. He could feel the maroon flaking away in his hand as it had done often enough before. This was the only paint in the house. His father had gone into town only once in his life, walked two days through and when he returned he carried this paint in the large, waxed cloth-sack he used for hunting, and with his hands he painted the door for his new wife now with child. She had told Jeremiah that his father managed a smile that day as she watched him from the bed, his hands covered in the softest red. The gentle draft of sleep reached Jeremiah’s ears from within, and he quietly pulled away from the door.
He was called to sleep now, and made his way across the upper floor into his room and shut the large hand carved door bearing his name, which had left his father’s hands bloody and worn due to the cold winter night. To his left he pressed his knowing hands upon a smooth track along the wall, following the rippled wood past a corner and stopping when his hands pried upon the shape of another door. His father had refashioned the doors of the house to his liking, and had cut this door especially thin, so the two brothers could whisper to one another as children in their beds. He pressed his ear to it and listened. A rumble of tousling air greeted him, the sound of his brother. Jeremiah had always imagined the sound was that of a great match indeed, as the air wrestled above Jacob every night in a private show for those who had the eyes to see it. He let his hand fall through the dark until he hit the oily knob, and silently pushed inwards. The surface of the door floated away from him and he could only imagine the edge of a bedpost in the center of the room. The dark was much the same under the old tree by the valley's river. In the north, during the hunt, Pa, Jacob, and Jeremiah had crept along the river by night, to keep the secret of the old hunting grounds alive. They walked four days under the moon, hiding in the roots of the great trees by day, for Pa had often enough expected men from town to follow him. In the early morning, before the sun broke, they would hunt by the valley, colored in browns and shades of red, and then stop to rest beneath the old stepped tree. Pa’s descendents had driven planks to tough bark, pinned criss-cross up the side into the branches, for hunting, but mostly waiting. Even then, the tree was said to bless those who slept beneath it with dreams of their ancestors. Jeremiah had not experienced this, but the grounds were ever plentiful, and so they were sacred. The owner of the nearby town, a McGuffrey, had once asked to join Pa's hunting party, a request Pa declined, as a good huntsmen never needs a dog. Jeremiah made a step onto the only floorboard he could see, toward where his brother snored in the adjoining room, but as he inched closer he heard the water again, trickling down across the roof beams and rafters somewhere in all that dark, and he stopped. He looked for the outline of his brother and then gave up, and turned away. As he shut the door he struggled to set it, pushing hard against the soft groaning wood, and with a last successful heave was splashed again. His sleep was shaken from him again.
He groped for the handmade quilt atop his bed. His father had put the quilt together after a showdown with the Brothers, Jim the Toe and One-Hip Moris. The land his father owned was in dispute, he having no record of payment for the family plot that seemed to stretch beyond time, and the fiends who ran the closest town wanted it. The ruthless man known only to Jeremiah as McGuffrey was not there to settle the squabble of his townsfolk though, and the ensuing fight left his father broke, bedridden, but worthy. As Jeremiah folded the quilt, he heard another moan, coming through the floor somewhere below. He reached out with the blanket bobbing in one hand when suddenly the bed was against his leg. A dull screech of grinding wood began, and he scrambled over the blanket covered top as the bed slammed against the wall. A great splintering crack shot through the dark, and he began to slide again across the uneven floor. A beam came whipping down from above and slammed Jeremiah from his perch. He fell backward into his room, and saw that the ceiling was splitting right above him, rending itself a new window into the night. He clutched his shoulder and staggered towards the door to Jacob’s room, but the door was bending itself in front of him, sinking into the floor. Bits of his home rained down across it, and he turned and dove toward the other door, toward the sliver of light, and he caught the edge of the frame with one hand before the door itself swung wildly off its hinges. Pulling himself through the entryway, he crouched to see his parents at the stairs. His Pa was tearing at the growing pile of wooden beams, the arms of his long underwear tied around his waist as he ripped and pulled with the thin iron arms that had made him famous amongst the woodsmen. There was a snarl on his face, and the last thing Jeremiah saw of them were those white teeth and the pale face of his mother floating close by. He started to shout that the wood was stuck, but the roar of the ripping pine could not be matched. Swinging his fist he began to pound on the rippling wood, hammering away until a sudden shift sent him lurching through space, suspended in a room unrecognizably his as he fell through the roof into the black sky.
“Son?”
Jeremiah shook in the icy grass. His father’s hands pressed his shoulders together, squeezed him back into the world. His father did not let go, and his hands remained even as his mother filled the space between them.
“Where is Jacob?” she whispered into Jeremiah’s chest. She began to sob, and Jeremiah let his head roll to the soft earth to look where his Pa was staring. They were sitting on a ledge of grass, which spilled like a waterfall back into the earth.
*
The small penny was creased with dirt. This was half of a pair of coins received in younger years, and in the rut of the man's long nose and up around his golden crown of feathers was earth, pressed then scraped away by clumsy fingers. Jeremiah held the coin in his palm before sliding it into his pocket. Pa was standing over him, unmoving, eyes locked on the small stage as the people of the town condensed around them.
“Welcome all, WELL-COME!”
A square-shaped man in a coat the color of moss stood above the sea of men and women, waving one arm violently to signal order. He strode across the three feet of wooden boards erected on the main dirt road for the occasion, turning suddenly when he reached the edge in a furious display of discipline. Whenever he did so, the hanging empty sleeve of his lesser arm swung across his chest and fell limply at his side.
“WELL-COME, welcome you!” he said, pointing with a grey hand. The crowd had settled to a quiet chattering, and through the thick of people the doctor was visible clinging to his wife near center stage. Dr. Hartley twisted over Mrs. Hartley’s shoulder in his brownish suit and spied Pa. Upon finding himself in the line of Pa's gaze, he offered a smile that turned nervously to a sneer before spinning around again. Turning, Jeremiah looked on as a thin pale hand reached through the crowd and found its place between the sweat-touched shoulders of Pa's white shirt. Ma stood beside him now, her entry hushed and solemn, as he continued to stare at the man on the stage.
As the crowd grew, a curious man in a shining blue suit and pointy shoes sidled up against the ruddy wood of the stage. Paying little attention to those around him, he leaned over the platform with an elbow to prop up his contentedly dull face with an obscenely cerulean triangle, all the while ignoring his jutting hind end to the dismay of the crowd. The man on stage was forced to skirt around the intruding elbow, and shaken from his habit, the man turned to face the waiting crowd.
“It is my duty to the folk,” he said, holding his arm out as if to embrace the crowd, “as of the lineage of the McGuffrey line, to announce such things when they occur. That is why those of us who remember the significance of coming days gather, now and then, to remember such things. I thank you for coming, for traveling out, to share in the importance of this moment with me. Now I ask for a moment more of you all, that you lower your heads, lower your caps, and think on the weight of things as I have done in the passing month. We remember those we lost in failing to gain, the lost stag who escaped the hands of the folk, and that is all.” With that he bowed his head and the crowd followed suit, and then above the crowd stood out only the blue hat of the man and Pa.
With a sudden clack that startled the front row, McGuffrey leapt from his reverie. “The hunt is now!” he shouted, his wrinkled face red with zeal. Behind him a horn was blasted, sending the birds out from the big oak behind the stage. Jeremiah turned to see Ma searching Pa's face, which had only darkened. McGuffrey stamped his feet to a soundless tune on stage as the others watched, until he finally settled himself on a stool passed across the top of the crowd. Suddenly grim, he stared dead eyed into the front row.
“The scouting was slim, it was not a fair report if I had to tell it to you now. The brothers Moris, myself, and Jim–the Jim s'who carried the bear head on his back, the one up at the shop– have spent the past month in the southern woods and have seen no tracks. As a matter to tell you all, a disruption of the natural world has occurred and the bounty has scattered for the northern lands, though I cannot rightly say what may have done so. I do know that this will not impact our survival, nor the continuation of the lives we have carved from the scalp of creation.”
Here McGuffrey stood and pointed so that the crowd shifted and looked on at Jeremiah. Startled, he stepped back and bumped into Pa, who anchored Jeremiah to the spot with a hand on his shoulder.
“Those folk there,” said McGuffrey, “have blessed us with the northern lands, forbidden to us for so many a year, wrongfully so, and I have acquired them for you. In turn they will be fed and sheltered by one of you.” With that he sat down and began to roll a cigarette. Uncertain, the crowd remained standing, but with no further announcements from their leader quickly began to fray, until those at the edges made up their minds to leave. Jeremiah watched as the townsfolk drifted back to their homes down the road, and through the mingling stragglers, he could see the blue-suited man passing out paper. Dr. Hartley, having been caught crossing towards them, read from the single sheet with his wife in arm. Puzzled, he stopped short of Jeremiah before tossing the paper to the ground.
“We just wanted to thank you for contributing,” Dr. Hartley said, offering his gloved hand. Pa stared at McGuffrey, and when the Doctor placed a hand on his shoulder, Pa reared back and knocked the man off his feet.
As Dr. Hartley lay sprawled across the dirt road, as still as the air around them, Jeremiah picked up the paper. It read:
HALT THE HUNT
REDEEM THE SLAYER AND THE SUFFERER
GIVE ONLY LIFE
*
The thin paper crinkled easily between the fingers that held it aloft, an ashy and uncertain shape clinging to its surface. Jeremiah flicked through the sheaf of large plain paper he strained to reach, sitting on the edge of a too-short rocker in an unfamiliar room with the oaken easel Pa had made him. A touch of the coal was left on a few of the pages, and he did his best to rub it away. Returning to the top page, he switched the stick of charcoal from his right hand to his left and rolled his shoulder. He began to sketch, poorly, with his weak hand, drawing wobbly circles on top of one another. The hard clack of footsteps ran above his head on the upper floor as he drew arches.
Jeremiah stopped and looked at the page for a moment, then his fingers. They were covered in soot, and he rubbed them together until the black had spread to his knuckles. He tore off the top sheet that hung from the stand and let it fall. He started again; first with the roundness, one line, curved, just so, then the other, a lesser line, shallow. He smoothed the outer edges with his fingers, stroking the shape. Then he drew a hook, but pointier, a small black dot beside. He shaded this too, and drew two ovals next. He paused, holding his stick above one of the empty circles. He looked to the trash, where a dozen other stained papers had been crumpled in a heap. A bald, blind thing looked back at him from the page without seeing, and he tore it to pieces.
Jeremiah flipped through the remaining white sheets that hung on the stand. Doing so left a small dirty dot on the lower corner of each one. There were seventy three pages left, but he went through them again, and each time faster, so that it seemed there were fewer pages than before, and in pressing them together between thumb and forefinger the amount of pages became smaller still. Looking at the bin, at the wasted pages upon the floor, it appeared the paper wasted and the paper remaining measured equally, the creation of one thing and its selfsame destruction, though neither were endless. He stood and walked through the door, left ajar, to the hall with carpet, which led him to another half-shuttered room. He did not enter, but crept close to its unpainted frame, crouched low.
“Don't you leave this place.”
This was Mother's voice. Heavy footsteps started, stopped, then started again.
“Dr. Hartley got us in here because of that man. If you go, we'll have to follow you out. There's no staying here once he finds what you've done.”
The sound of rattling chains and weighty metal. These were traps.
“We've already lost the one; I'm not losing the other to the wild. Have you seen what our son’s been carrying on with, what he's been doing? He thinks the grounds are special because of you. And that land is killing us now.”
The walking stopped. The clunk of metal alone stirred the air.
“It's got nothing to do with you,” he said.
Then the door opened, and Jeremiah was pushed back as Pa strode past him. He turned in stride to look back, but continued on, and in his hands were snares, over his shoulder was coiled a rope, and across his back was strung his gun. Stuffed in the back pocket of his fading figure was a jar, in which sloshed the game urine he used to protect his supply trail from scavengers. But Pa was not wearing his grey hunting cloak, nor did he have on the looped belt to hang small game.
Before he could rise, Ma stepped out into the hall and pressed her face to Jeremiah’s.
“You need to let him go, or they will catch you in their land,” she said. Jeremiah pulled away, turned to watch Pa.
From his hands and knees he looked on as the front door was flung open before Pa could take its handle. Standing just outside the entryway was the curious man, dressed in a new blue suit. He wore a creaseless, wide brimmed hat with a perfect round hill in the middle, and he carried a brown suitcase with yellow straps. The man was smiling, and with a delicate touch tipped his hat while Pa stood, his face flat.
“Sir, I believe you forgot one of these,” he said through his smile. He pulled a single sheaf from under his coat, and held the paper out to Pa. Hands full, Pa looked on, drawing up one side of his stubbly face in impatience. Unconcerned the man pressed him further.
“Sir, I am Willie, sir, Willie Rowne, of the southern peninsula Rownes, though I have been as far north as Marquette to teach the boys and girls in philosophic thinking. Say, I saw you and your family the other day, oh and there's your boy there on the floor, he's a fine lad, but the other day I saw you there, and I knew. I knew you were the man I needed to see, one of whom I could relate.” Willie eyed the hunting equipment arranged about Pa, who stood straight despite the weight of the three thick iron bear traps dangling over his shoulder.
“Those who defy the hunt must stick close, friend,” Willie said, taking a step closer. “I have traveled many a town to get here, and on each path I take you may trace back the enlightenment of a people who disrespected life itself, though they may not do so now. Take this here, for your own salvation,” he said, shaking the paper that had remained in his outstretched hand. His small teeth fit together like carved wood painted over. Without a word, Pa took his foot and scraped whatever mud remained from his usual morning walk onto the thin pant leg of Willie's knee. As the strange man stepped back, Pa rattled past him headed north into the swirling wind.
*
A large group of children ran along the dirt road across town, together falling into small pools of water with squeals of joy. Jeremiah walked along the walls of sparsely clumped wooden houses, damp and sweet smelling from the rain. Across the way, three men were huddled close, arms folded. Beneath the flat caps that covered their eyes, they spoke amongst themselves, lips moving in sharp whispers. As Jeremiah passed they all turned to face him. One of the men started forward but was caught at the elbow by his companion.
Jeremiah continued walking, and stuck his hand in his pocket. He retrieved a small carving, a wooden relief of a tree crudely etched with three yawning branches. He turned it, and on the back was his brother's name.
Then the sound of whistling struck the air, which even now blew softly the hair atop Jeremiah's head. The man in the blue suit was dunking his papers in a pail and slapping them wet against the old red brick on the broad face of the corner store wall. They hung tattered and soggy, and had already begun to peel when he noticed Jeremiah. Willie immediately made his way over.
“You must stop the blood,” he said, bending down slightly so that he was eye to eye. “You can end the suffering before it begins. I can't advise the weak lest they fill themselves with the presence of another which does not exist in itself, yet I can warn you to stave off the suffering of others by not acting upon them.”
The man put his hand in Jeremiah's and shook it. “M'names Willie,” he said, "Willie Rowne.” He handed a few of his papers to him and led him along the street past the shop front. As they went by the door, Jeremiah noticed a small boy with a large paper roll around his arm standing at attention.
“One slip, one loaf, one cut. One cut, not two, not for twice the pay. One cut, one loaf, one ticket per family. Stealin' is keelin', one ticket per!” the boy shouted, and people began to leave their homes to line up outside the door. Willie pushed Jeremiah past them.
“Your father is a cruel man. I understand your predicament, I sympathize, and I oblige that you listen. The sufferer shall not suffer in vain, nor shall you suffer the position of the slayer. I've traveled a great mile to talk to those who suffer out of suffering, for suffering is evil. An abomination.” He spit then on the ground, moving Jeremiah out of his aim.
“I see you have suffered, and I can end it,” Willie said, adjusting his waistband.
Jeremiah looked up at the pale blue eyes beneath the wide brim of the hat. “You know about my brother?”
Willie blinked his soft eyes. “Of course, of course my child. You have lost your brother to that infernal pit we shall call despair. And I shall guide you from it.” Here he set his bucket down, and began plastering the wall of someone's home with rows of paper. He looked over his shoulder as he did so, keeping his eyes on Jeremiah.
“Your father and I must collaborate. I know he don't like that one-handed bandit, and we need to talk about that. And then I'll show you the absolute truth of absolute justice in this world.”
*
Jeremiah looked over the edge of the forest that was now in new hands as evening set. Behind him, the southern grounds lay depleted. He walked along the side of the road, and the breeze followed, picking up what leaves it could carry in the wet air as thunderclouds seethed in the distant sky. An orange snap of lightning flashed in the distance, its golden hue obscured by the rolling murk. Up ahead, the boundary of the forest would curve off away from the town. It would meander back north, and meet the sloping grasslands, whose green blades stood unfolded and tall without humankind. Only the crux of the furthest valley, by river's foot, had been explored and claimed, the hidden place of the hunt.
The road ended suddenly, and Jeremiah stood in the presence of McGuffrey. The man hefted a massive post, his arm curled around the tree trunk's girth and his shoulder quivering from the dense wood. Finding his place, he slammed it with precision into the ground and in it sank. Satisfied, he reached for his back pocket, pulled a loaf of bread from it, and began to eat.
“Come out, boy,” he called, still looking for his next bite. “No running from me.”
Closer, the man was covered in sap and bark. The brown straps of his suspenders cut into the egg-colored shirt, and no shoes covered his well worn feet. He continued to lean on the post, eating, but did not offer to share.
“You know why I do this?” he asked, finding Jeremiah's eye. “I like to return to the roots my grandaddy gave me, but that's not why I am here today. I'm here because of the roots your grandaddy gave your pa.” With that he finished the loaf of bread, and immediately produced another. “On behalf of the folk, where I belong and you do not, I'm building a fence. I will not forbid, because the trust has been broken, but I will gate these lands, and these lands will stay open to mine and only mine, so that the folk may thrive under creation.”
Somewhere a branch snapped and McGuffrey jumped to attention, staring into the woods and hearing only the gust against the trees after. He settled back against the fence post, and resumed his meal.
“I cannot talk about what is fair, nor right, but only what man says is fair and right. What your daddy did ain't neither. He already poisoned what we got from him, and he is persistent, but I will try again in the making of this fence, in the making of a reserve for the town. Truly, this will help man eke out his scraps from nature's firm table. I have spent much money to do so, and the town is surely starving.” With that McGuffrey walked off, straight into the forest he had begun to fence, and Jeremiah was left standing in the shadow of the looming log.
*
An empty shoe sat alone in the dirt. It was angular, black, and shiny. Jeremiah looked up to the sounds of shouting, and Willie was running toward him with his hand covering his hat. In his other arm a bundle of papers were flying loose, and his shoes were gone. He stopped short of Jeremiah, out of breath. In the distance, the shouts of men and women cried out his name.
“Good, you've found one,” he said. Willie's legs gave way and he fell to his knees. He looked up, his eyes pleading.
“I tried to find your father, they caught me at the fence, stop the hunt, help you,” he wheezed.
Jeremiah stepped behind him before he collapsed, and looped his arms under Willie's pits, dragging him off the road into the space between a small church and someone's house. Running back to the road, he grabbed the paper pile, and instead of returning, continued running, his bare feet slapping the dusty earth as he threw papers behind him. When he reached the end of the road, he dropped the stack in a mud puddle and sprinted into the forest. There he waited until the shouting died down and the day grew late. Then he returned for Willie, who looked up from his hiding place between a large rock and a garbage pile, in which he had found his other shoe. Rising to his feet, suit dusty, he straightened his hat.
“Let's find your daddy.”
*
In the deep of the woods, a snapping twig in the dark caused Jeremiah to freeze. Behind him, Willie made a motion with his hand, and they began walking once again. Jeremiah felt the trees as he passed each one, winding his way through birch and oak and white spruce. He was not the tracker, but he walked the trails Pa would use when they hunted. The fine white light that fell through the trees spread across the damp forest floor, and the starry leaves upon the black backdrop of the earth illumed the great wood, every rivet and every crease in every turn of labyrinthine bark holding pools of light, each light a dewy moon. Jeremiah stopped to rest on an upturned stump, its roots wrestling in the clear air, when Willie trod by, following in the path turned valley over years of traveling.
“Do you think a dog who loses his bone turns to himself and thinks of justice? I'd say, rather, hope, that–“
He was cut off as Jeremiah sprang from his seat and caught the dazzlingly bright suit tails between his fingertips. He pointed, and Willie followed his gaze. Beneath the glistening leaves the sickly glow of dull iron teeth lay hidden, and hanging above it was Willie's foot.
Turning, Willie offered his hand in thanks when a man's scream echoed off the trees, wailing in the dark somewhere nearby. The cries continued, and other men began to shout in the distance, then a rifle shot, some pistol fire, then silence. The man was still whimpering when another rifle shot cracked, closer now, over the next slope, and then another volley of shots erupted from the group. The crackle of leaves and yielding brush signaled an approach, and atop the hill above them a figure froze, rifle raised. Willie's arms shot up, and Jeremiah stepped in front of him.
“Father,” he said. The figure on the hill lowered the weapon, and started off in a dog trot along the ridge into the dark.
*
A stack of tattered papers lay bundled on the floor, waiting to be restocked. Across the top read “YOUNG MAN FEARED DEAD IN SINKHOLE HORROR.”
Jeremiah moved deeper into the shop. At the end of the aisle, two men were waving their arms at one another amidst empty shelves. The taller of the two, with his pants rolled up to his knees and ill-fitting boots, waved a hand holding a ticket as well his only two fingers could manage. As the squat one turned away, he moved his round body in perfect lurching circles, a near-done top about to fall. He shot Jeremiah a squint-eyed look, and Jeremiah moved an aisle over.
There was also a man here, sitting on a shelf and its loaves of bread without seeming to notice, reading the paper. Folding it lower, McGuffrey immediately caught Jeremiah’s eye, gesturing with his hand to come over. His creases had deepened since their last meeting, and his stubble had turned to cloud, the soft, whispery white hair framing his face. He seemed then a man whose daily labor under the sun had taken more than it had given. He raised his eyes and the thousand folds surrounding them seemed to grow deeper as he did so, until those orbs looked out from a newly darkened place.
“You’re that boy,” he said, sticking a wooden finger into Jeremiah’s chest and then rustling the paper.
“Yessir,” he replied.
“That hole made the fencing easier.” McGuffrey paused. Then he grabbed Jeremiah’s chin with the arch between thumb and index, holding him still to get a better look.
“How is the Missus?” he asked.
“Fine sir.”
“Your father shot a man last night. How does that rest with you?" he asked, letting go of Jeremiah's face.
Jeremiah remained silent.
“He bear trapped poor Jim, though I cannot say it wasn't a mite ironic, considering,” he said, gesturing to the trophy above him. “We did not get a good look, but we know, the town knows. They know who's been starving them. And they want justice. You know what that means, eh? They want your daddy dead on a rope in the dirt square yonder, even though we don't do things like that anymore. But that is the justice of man.” He paused, and turned the page of the paper.
“You been talking to that Mr. Rowne, though,” he continued.
“Yessir.”
“Folks don't like him much either, though, he also don't do too much. Told me he was a writer and thinking man, but he just does some preaching it seems.” McGuffrey tilted his head so that it almost rested on his shoulder. His mossy jacket was stained and over large, and Jeremiah stared at his empty sleeve.
“You been going up there then?” McGuffrey asked.
“Sir?”
“Ah, oh well. You don’t dwell too much on that. You got some ways to go, though. Your feet are muddy.” He pointed.
Jeremiah looked at his shoes. “Sir?”
The man stabbed with his finger insistently. “There, there, you’ve got some mud. Up to your ankles now, mind not too much, but you’re in the quick and you’ll keep sinking there, moving like you are.” He kept stabbing.
Jeremiah tapped his feet against boards.
The man shot his arms out wide and focused instead on his floppy cuff with bright eyes.
“The trick, the trick is, to know. That you sink in mud by the feet. Right?” he asked, turning to Jeremiah.
“Sir,” he replied.
“But,” McGuffrey said, imitating a crawl with his arms, “you gain inches. Inches!”
McGuffrey started laughing. “You tell it to your pa, and tell it to him unless he'd like to swing, that wherever he may be he best tell me where to go. Or tell him we will drive you out. That sweet doctor, despite what you may have offered him, has made it known to me how generous he has been with your kind. And I noticed you don't come here often for the meal ticket,” he said, poking Jeremiah's stomach, “so your pa must be sitting on the kill somewhere, eh boy? I suppose that explains Hartley's absence from the lines as well.” Then a haze seemed to come over him, and he shifted his position amidst the bread and flipped the paper back up to read, leaving Jeremiah alone in the empty aisle.
*
In the dark, whispers clung to the door. The smell of aging meat pressed through the walls, and Jeremiah heard shoes on the hard floor. Dr. Hartley was shouting, the lights came on, and Ma was crying.
*
Night was falling as the fence came into view. Jeremiah followed it, the ticket from the shop still clutched in his fist. Then he stopped. The forest before him spilled into it, the hole massive, its mouth wide, and on the edge of it all stood the large kitchen and fragments of his room above. Tentatively, Jeremiah approached the open back door, the green wood swinging askew on its hinges. The mesh screen curled from its frame in greeting, and the sound of dripping water announced his return.
The great oaken boards of the home remained and Jeremiah walked to the center of the room. The splintered ends of each piece hung over the edge a few feet away, and the shattered wood had turned, as water dripped into pools of green slime. The water had run ceaselessly over the old floor, and the rivulets had devoured it piecemeal. He knelt down then, placing his hands firmly against the leaky boards, and started to push.
The wood groaned but he pushed, warping the boards below. His knees began to wobble, then sink into the collapsing floor as the boards tilted, and he pushed harder, until the wood could take no more. The floor collapsed, and he fell into the hole he had made and bounced off a rubbery beam that hung below. He hit dirt, and rolled deeper into the earth, flung head over heels down the slope, further away into a spinning dark.
*
A thin pool of water soaked his clothes and submerged his fingers as he moved his hand over the rock in the dark. He rolled over, and the shimmer of light from the slope caught the uncovered water beneath him and jumped across the cavern. Great heaps of violet shimmered across the walls, clusters of stone shining in the melt, trapped since winter's thaw. They stretched across the ceiling and trailed down beneath his feet under the water. Each facet of every crystal twisted into smaller nodes, spiraling away forever into patterns and shapes that could never be created again. He climbed to his feet, and followed the running streams to the ledge of stone, looking into the massive pit as it continued downward into the dark. But the walls were glowing, twisting, turning, down in color as far as he could see. He pressed his hand to the damp rock and felt the earth.
“Brother,” he called. The word carried itself down, and in the deep passed over the surface of the waters, echoing in caverns with the gurgles of small streams in answer.
“Brother.”
*
When he emerged, morning had come. He wiped the sweat from his face before removing his shoes. There he buried them, then began walking back through the woods. As he stumbled over the thin branches of a dead pine, the brush ahead began to rustle. Creeping closer, Jeremiah pulled the branches apart.
Mumbling to himself, his blue suit in shambles, was Willie. He was rubbing vigorously at the bark of a tree with two leafy branches, but when he saw Jeremiah he dropped them and smiled.
“I knew I'd find you out here,” he said, drawing closer. “After you saved my life I couldn't let you die alone in the awful forest. Everyone is looking for you; your mother is broken, and even your father has surrendered, though he has been imprisoned. I tried to stop them, but this place has a funny sort of people. Well, after I was further persecuted by the crowds, I came looking for you, the sufferer.” He put his arm around Jeremiah and they began to walk along the fence towards the town.
When they reached the road, Jeremiah stopped. Willie stepped ahead of him, his arms swinging cheerfully.
“Is my brother still with me?” Jeremiah stood in the leaves and the mud and looked at Willie, who turned and smiled gently. His eyes were soft and blue like his suit.
“I can end your suffering,” he said, placing his hands on Jeremiah's shoulders, “I can show you the truth, and you won't have to suffer these thoughts.” Willie leaned in closer. “Your brother isn't with you, nor can he be, nor can he come back, because there's nothing to come back from, child. There's nothin' out there but the dark in those woods, and it is your suffering that collaborates with it. There's nothin' but the dark.”
That said, Willie stood and continued his march, crushing a fireweed along his way. The wind had shifted, sign of a coming whirlwind, and as Jeremiah stood watching Willie go, it caught in his shirt and pulled him along after.
As Jeremiah and Willie approached the first clump of homes the chanting grew louder. In the same dirt square the same platform had been erected, and on this stood McGuffrey. Below him, a large circle had formed around Pa, who stood in leg bindings, arraigned in hunting gear not of his own. His rifle was in the hands of the man beside him, the wide-bellied One-Hip Moris, whose brother was missing.
Pa's face was unrecognizable. If not for the crowd, the shackled man, leaning heavily on Moris, would not have passed as the figure running along the forest's slopes in the night. The crowd screamed at him, with many of their shirt sleeves stained to match the color of Pa's. Willie placed his hand on Jeremiah's shoulder.
Atop the planking, McGuffrey pointed. “Look on! See your son!”
The crowd turned first, and only after Moris shifted did Pa face Jeremiah. His eyes were dark.
“It is said the sins of the father shall be passed on to the son, so that he remembers for his father's sake what has happened,” McGuffrey said, “but that is not the way of the folk, and the mother and boy shall be fed. Now, let the hunt begin!”
A horn blasted, and the trees shifted in the wind. The crowd roared, their gaunt faces eager and splitting. A few men staggered into the circle to stand beside Moris, rifles strapped across their thin chests, licking their lips in anticipation. The sky screeched, the fiery lightning cracking over the crowd, driving them further into frenzy. The howling wind swirled around the group, tearing the papers from their homes and brick walls, launching them into a wicked funnel in the sky. McGuffrey's loose sleeve whipped in the wind, and platform beneath him began to rock. The sky darkened, thick and writhing, and the small hunting party started forward with uncertain steps. Jeremiah jumped then, into the crowd, pushing his way through the wormy group, Willie shouting behind. McGuffrey pointed as Jeremiah dove against Moris, who stumbled despite his girth into the dust. Pa fell to his knees.
The lighting cracked again, shattered glass flecking the wind as the crowd screamed now out of fear. Instead of scattering, they huddled closer, around Pa. Behind the stage, the large tree was spinning, roots ripped from the earth. McGuffrey pointed.
“Beware, it falls!”
The tree tumbled from the black sky, its mighty roots destroyed. From within the babbling circle, Jeremiah could see Willie standing where he had left him, and he could see the oak swinging down.
Everyone cowered but his father, who watched from his knees until Jeremiah pulled him away. Stepping over the men and women of the town, he dragged his father to the great oak. Jeremiah could see Willie's face, as blue as his suit, his arms flopped limply at the bark. Jeremiah struggled to lift the tree, and certainly could not do it alone, and so looked to his father, who lay draped upon it.
On Writing “He Went Through the Floor”
For a writer, the literature of others is often a brimming well, deep and restorative. Those weary and without guidance may draw upon this well for refreshment, guidance, and even instruction. A writer reads to enjoy the creations of others so that in turn, his own sense of creation may be kindled. A writer also reads studiously, examining the thoughts and reflections of other writers so he may contribute to the depths of his own. But a writer is also a thief, who treads quietly across the sands to steal a drink, and moreover takes the design of the well itself in the hopes of building something similar to, if not surpassing, the original work. In my own writing I have read to plunder, and I have read to resolve the issues of that have sprung up across the revision process of my story, “He Went Through the Floor”: plotting, characterization, and the alignment of the reader behind a strong, effective point of view that have sprung up across the revision process of my story, “He Went Through The Floor.” I started with a desire to tell a story about a young man who loses his brother after a massive sinkhole devours his home, but I continued to write to explore my narrator’s powers after reading Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” I was also enthralled by Flannery O’Connor’s characters in the stories “The Life You Save May Be You Own” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and the way in which she effectively utilized a point of view similar to my own to enrich each moment with an uneasy suspicion. Ultimately, I turned to Chekhov’s novella “The Duel,” seeking an efficient and tension-filled plot structure to deliver every scene in a more satisfying way. These five works have had the most influence on the mechanics of my story, though other stories I read while revising certainly contributed to the writing process.
“A River Runs Through It” is a story told by an unnamed man reflecting on his last summer fishing on the Blackfoot river with his brother Paul. This unnamed figure caught my curiosity, as Maclean’s first person narrator is very much a storyteller, albeit one with a unique position. Many first person narrators report on the current state of things; the reader follows them in real-time and they may think, speak, and act while the reader watches. A first person narrator often “disappears into one of the characters,” and some critics have stated that in its most basic use, the first person point of view “offers no opportunity... for direct interpretation by the author” out of fear that the narrator might “transcend his sensitivity, his knowledge, or his powers of language in telling the story” (Arp 305). Maclean’s narrator functions differently, however, and delivers interpretations of the story from an authorial perspective by making use of a separation in time. In “Point of View” of Keep It Real, Lee Gutkind notes the separation found in a first person narrator in nonfiction, reminding the reader that “when we speak from a child’s point of view in the present tense, it is obviously not the child writing the prose” but the writer “pretending to be a wiser adult” (121). The same is true in fiction, and the “persona” of that wise adult in non-fiction becomes Maclean’s storytelling narrator (Gutkind 121). In “A River Runs Through It,” this unnamed entity is both narrator of his tale and a primary character within it, which splits, yet intrinsically binds, the characters across time.
The position of the storytelling narrator, one who looks across time to describe the events of his past, is at first invisible in Maclean’s story. In lines like “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” the narrator could simply be giving present tense information that has been true up to this point in the character’s life (Maclean 1). The narrator does eventually reveal his future self, however, in statements like “So he made the arrangements for what turned out to be our last fishing trip together” (Maclean 78). This line reflects a level of hindsight not possible for the narrator-as-character in the story, and thus exposes a definite narrator-as-storyteller that exists at some later point in time. Once the reader is aware of this fact, every comment by the first person narrator seems suspect, and the reader is faced with the challenge of trying to decide which version of the narrator is speaking. Regardless of the reader’s interpretation, the constant reminder of the split narrator creates an intrusive effect. This effect is also present in the dialogue, which is typically written with the dialogue tags behind the dialogue like “‘I should understand that too,’ I said” (77). Others tags are positioned in the front, yet refer to a speaker other than the narrator, like “As I covered her, she said, ‘He should have...” ( 27). This is not always the case, however, and some dialogue tags are placed in the front of the narrator-as-character’s speech. By switching the position of the tags in these cases, the reader must first pay attention to the speaker before he speaks: “I said, ‘I should understand’,” or “I told him again, ‘I’ve told you before...”, and even “I said to my brother, ‘Go easy on him’” (Maclean 76, 57,9). In these cases, the reader must first imagine the act of speaking before seeing what is said. Then, combined with the constant struggle of identifying the narrator, the added emphasis on the speaker challenges the reader to place the dialogue tags within the right context. The narrator-as-character is still voiceless after only reading “I said to my brother” , and there is a temptation to turn to the narrator-as-storyteller to fill the silent space (9). This is because the narrator-as-storyteller is a figure who remains capable of speaking at all times throughout the story, and who can share in the authority of the “I” of the dialogue tags because he is technically the same character . If such a decision is made, the reader will experience an unusual fluctuation at work throughout the story, at times pulling the two versions of the narrator apart before melding back into one voice. This fluctuation was interesting to me as an effect because it emphasizes a strong bond between the character and narrator across time and space. I wanted to create a similar connection between my narrator and my protagonist Jeremiah, though, given the first person nature of Maclean’s story, it was hard for me to envision its implementation in my own third person story.
When I reviewed Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” a similar, yet inverted version of Maclean’s narrator seemed present. In the story about a young boy, Colonel Sartoris Snopes, who struggles to remain loyal to the family despite his father’s abusive and destructive acts of vandalism, Faulkner utilizes a device to relate narrator to character, despite telling the story from a third person perspective. The following passage from Faulkner is a good example of a narrator who clings to a particular character: "The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish–this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood." The narrator seems restricted to Colonel Sartoris, and according to Lynna Williams, this style of restricted narration is considered the “third-person unified” point of view (117). This means that through the narrator, the reader has access to the chosen character’s senses and “brings us closer to the character in this type of third person than in any other” (117). Like Maclean’s first person narrator, the information the reader receives is “filtered through the point-of-view character’s consciousness” and thus not an entirely objective telling of events (117). This is why the reader knows that Sartoris “knew he smelled cheese, and more” and why the entire room in the opening scene cannot be depicted, because “he could not see the table where the justice sat” (Faulkner 3). Third person unified enhances the senses of the character by diminishing the range and power of the narrator’s ability to perceive the fictional world without him.
More importantly, in the close connection between narrator and character, there is a blurring between the two present here, similar to the one arising from Maclean’s split first person narrator, though not as frequently rendered. Just as thoughts and dialogue tags conjure the storytelling narrator into the story being told in Maclean’s work, the use of parenthetical comments breaks up the flow of the story with a seemingly familiar voice. As he watches the dealings between his father and the judge, Sartoris notes that “his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood” (Faulkner 3). As the first parenthetical the reader encounters, Faulkner makes it clear through both the thought tag “he thought” and the direct thought “He’s my father!” that the parenthetical comments and italicized direct thought belong to Sartoris. Yet this thought, also arising from the present moment of the story “in that despair,” seems to differ from the next parenthetical, which simply states “He (the father) always did” (Faulkner 7). While it is not surprising to see the parenthetical used for a variety of purposes, the insertion here serves to correct, and therefore sheds new light on the narrator. Later corrections, like “(who had not stopped)” and “(or transmit)” also follow this path, and their growing use throughout the story seems to create a new distance between the narrator and Sartoris, who seems an unlikely editor as a young boy(10,11). The reader never returns to the closeness of “he thought” in the opening sequence, and later it is “the boy” who stands out in the parentheticals: in “(they had once owned a saddle; the boy could remember it though not when or where)” and “(the boy could tell that even in the darkness)” (15). The odd close-to-distant shifts between Sartoris and the narrator continue outside of the parentheticals as well. It seems likely that the narrator is aligned with a future Sartoris given the pieces of future knowledge that are included in lines like, “Later, twenty years later, [Sartoris] was to tell himself” (Faulkner 8). This idea also shows in the italicized direct thoughts, where “Hit’s big as a courthouse” turns into “People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch” (10). These two thoughts are broken up by a judgment of the narrator, who deems Sartoris “too young” for deeper reflection (10). Though, in reading “it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause [the father’s] descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion,” it seems as if the narrator is either referring to himself in the third person or speaking of his children (6). The narrator also refers to events that Sartoris currently does not know of, but doesn’t specify whether or not he will later come to know them when he mentions “[Sartoris] cried suddenly...not knowing his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense” (24-25). It may be assumed that he comes to know these details because the narrator is speaking of them, but this uncertainty creates an unusual distance between the narrator and Sartoris. This ephemeral relationship between narrator and character has been something I have explored in my own writing, and it seems Faulkner is exploring the connections between narrator and character in the third person without simply taking these bonds for granted.
I will attempt now to explain my conception of the narrator of “He Went Through The Floor” in light of Maclean and Faulkner though it should be noted that my design may evolve over time. I hope to create a story similar to Maclean’s and Faulkner’s, in which the inherent connections between character and narrator are explored through the content of the story itself, linking craft to theme. In Maclean’s work, the bond between narrator and character comes from his first person point of view, yet it is made tangible by having the narrator not only tell a story about himself, but by inserting himself in the story as the storyteller. This effectively doubles his voice, as if the narrator-as-character is merely repeating what the narrator-as-storyteller is saying, creating an interesting echo effect. The third person point of view must work harder still in Faulkner’s work, because now a connection between the narrator and character is much more elusive if the writer desires to make it tangible within the story’s content. Faulkner also refuses to use the simplest setup for doing so; by referring to a future Sartoris in the third person, he cannot set up the same storytelling narrator Maclean uses. Repeated references to “the old fierce pull of blood,” however, leads me to believe that blood is the connective tissue between narrator and character (Faulkner 3). It is even stated, quite clearly, that “the fluid world, rushed beneath [Sartoris] again, the voices coming to him again through...the old grief of blood” and that “the old blood....which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust)” (5, 21). In these lines Faulkner plays with the idea of perceiving through blood, and that the ancestral blood itself is a force capable of traveling across great, unknown distances. Sartoris’ father even warns him, saying “You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood stick to you,” and given how the story ends upon Sartoris fleeing his family for good, it seems likely that Faulkner has connected the powers of his third person unified narrator to the content of his story (8). This connection gives credence to the narrator’s ability to look across both the past and future of the family line without needing Sartoris to be the narrator of his own tale as Maclean did.
I admired this commitment to craft and the desire to characterize the narrator by looking to its powers for inspiration. It was my desire to explore the powers of my restricted, yet effaced, narrator and connect them with the happenings of my story. According to McKenzie in her book The Process of Fiction, the effaced narrator is one that lacks access to the consciousness of characters and does not call attention to himself within the story, only relating details as they appear and relying on dialogue and action to tell much of the story (McKenzie 10-11). My desire to remain solely with my protagonist Jeremiah and my decision to rely on his abilities of perception to deliver the details of the story often gives my point of view a resemblance to the third person unified. Because my narrator continues to access information Jeremiah would have throughout the story, I decided that it would not shock the reader if I used the third person unified point of view at the beginning of my story and then shifted into an effaced narrator who occasionally seems to access Jeremiah’s thoughts after the devastation of his home (my cautious approach is still evident in a careful balancing of Jeremiah in scene and Jeremiah in thought). The new narrator would still follow only Jeremiah, but it would retreat from his thoughts and remark only on the visible happenings of the story. Though I could have continued telling the story in a unified third person like Faulkner does, I wanted the loss of Jeremiah’s brother to have an immediate effect on the reader, and so I wrote the town meeting section as if Jeremiah were no longer capable of leading the narrator through the telling of the story as he had been in the opening sequence. The transition that follows is focused on the old penny, and the previous formula is overturned as the long stories of the past are restricted: “This was half of a pair of coins received in younger years” (Kopfensteiner 5). These bits of information slip out from the narrator’s consciousness, a near reemergence of the narrator from before, but they are just as quickly wiped away by waves of sensory details.
In light of Faulkner’s mysterious narrator, who hints at knowing much more than he lets on, I did take steps towards reworking the narrator to reflect a more complete point of view shift, from one associated with Jeremiah to one signifying the haunting presence of his brother Jacob. I tried to show a shift in knowledge by creating a difference in what Jeremiah should know and what the narrator does know, as in the details given about the “unfamiliar room” of the Hartley’s in which only the “oaken easel Pa had made” is recognized by the narrator (Kopfensteiner 8). So far these hints seem too slight to affect the reader’s perception of the narrator, but I did not want to create an intrusive narrator like Maclean’s; though the same echo he creates could be said to exist between the slightly altered narration styles of the two brothers. In the meantime, I will continue to explore my options in building my ghostly narrator.
Ultimately, my decision to write from my chosen point of view was cemented after reading the work of Flannery O’Connor. In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” the restricted or unified third person point of view used by O’Connor seems similar to my own. In both stories, two sets of characters are immediately pitted against one another. While Lucynell Crater and Tom Shiftlet, in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” manipulate one another to get by in a hostile landscape, Julian, in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” seeks to undermine his mother’s influence on him by devising her downfall during a city bus trip. Lucynell Crater in “The Life You Save” is “ravenous for a son-in-law,” and the reader is given this information quite easily as the restricted third person point of view seems to cling to her as the reader is seated firmly with “[Lucynell] and her daughter...on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time” (O’Connor 150). The narrator seems restricted to her perspective until a small space break almost halfway through the story, which reveals a change in focus as paragraphs increasingly emphasize the activity and feelings of Mr. Shiftlet; “The next morning he,” “Mr. Shiftlet slept,” “He had raised the hood,” and other introductory sentences show a narrator focused on the activity of Mr. Shiftlet (O’Connor 149-150). The point of view here is deceptive, as it seems likely that the reader will be aligned with Lucynell after sitting with her and watching Mr. Shiftlet approach in the story’s opening scene. Here the reader is left to wait with her as “the old woman didn’t change her position until he was almost into her yard” (O’Connor 145). Yet, if the position from which the reader views the characters in the story is ignored, and the lines where each character’s interior is accessed are given more consideration, then the point of view seems closer to an omniscient point of view in that the story equally jumps between the minds of both characters. It is only the depictions of one character viewing the other, as in “the old woman watched from a distance, secretly pleased,” that are used to give the reader the exact perspective from which to view the previous scenic details, and create the illusion of a more restricted narrator (150). This strategy seemed useful for my own story, as I could show a change in the narrators by offering a perspective that would be impossible for Jeremiah to assume. In an earlier draft of my story, the opening sequence included scenes where Jeremiah was not present, though these were removed from my current draft because they did not accurately reflect my design at the time. I am considering a return to scenes like those for future drafts.
While the reader remains with Jeremiah throughout my story, I hoped to remind the reader of his gaze to keep an anchor on the narrator. O’Connor keeps the reader aware of the character’s line of sight too, after the narrator engages in the “long stare.” The passage begins “Mr. Shiftlet’s pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard,” and if it were to end there, the reader may, since the narration has up to this point been restricted to her perspective, take this as an observation made by Lucynell (O’Connor 146). This would effectively keep the reader positioned behind her as a point of view character, as a new perspective has not yet been established. The passage continues, however, to describe the objects in view; “the pump near the corner of the house and the big fig tree that three or four chickens were preparing to roost in–and had moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile” (O’Connor 146). The longer the description carries on, the closer the reader is to Mr. Shiftlet, as the reader is placed in his shoes and sees what he sees. It is made clear that no one else is looking at these objects, especially when the reader experiences the exact moment Mr. Shiftlet sees the car. The reason for reminding the reader of the point of view character’s gaze is linked to what Jerome Stern refers to as mise-en-scene. This is a term that speaks to “all that the viewer sees in a single shot” or scene and was originally borrowed from drama (Stern 154). While it is often good to let the reader slip into the story, it seems just as well to remind the reader of every piece contributing to the power of the scene, even if that means calling attention to the point of view character. So in my story, when “the crowd shifted and looked on at Jeremiah,” the moment becomes much more powerful if the reader already feels next to Jeremiah, having “looked on”“ from his spot in the crowd in previous moments (Kopfensteiner 7, 5). Since the effaced narrator is about emphasizing scenic details above other sources of tension, utilizing the gaze gives even the point of view character a dramatic role to play as the entire scene is put on display.
While I can utilize the “long stare” and through it render the point of view character in scene, reminding the readers of the physical distance between the characters also creates tension; which, according to Stern, is “the mother of fiction” (237). This is apparent in the first scene of “The Life You Save,” where Shiftlet is described first as a “gaunt figure” in “a black town suit” with “half an arm” (O’Connor 145). The odd details are given and then the reader is left to sit through Lucynell’s reaction, all the while waiting for more information on this mysterious figure as he approaches. Relying on Lucynell’s limited line of sight draws the moment out, and causes the reader to anticipate further details or action. In my story I tried to create a similar effect in describing Willie Rowne, a newcomer to the town who arrives “in a shining blue suit and pointy shoes” and whose disruptive entrance sets him apart from the dismayed crowd (Kopfensteiner 6). After offering this glimpse, the reader must wait until the crowd disperses to see how the unusual man will crop up again. Tension is also created through distance in “Everything Rises,” when Julian turns “to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming towards him” (O’Connor 406). Even though Julian is familiar with his invader–his mother– the creation of physical distance lends itself to examination and judgment; all the while the gap is closing, and an unwelcome encounter draws nearer. While I have not created the same sense of anxiety through distance, I have tried to create a sense of loss in the description of Pa leaving Jeremiah. The reader starts close but is pushed aside with Jeremiah while Pa “turn[s] in stride to look back, but continue[s] on” (Kopfensteiner 10). What follows is an examination of Pa’s tools, but by the time the reader finishes reading Pa is already at the door. I hope this sudden distance makes the reader acutely aware of the new space between Jeremiah and Pa, which seems impossible to bridge then as “Jeremiah watch[es] from his hands and knees” (10). When a writer must heavily rely on how scenes are arranged to create tension when using an effaced narrator, the physical distance created or removed from between characters seems crucial in effectively setting the scene to deliver the desired drama.
One of my other interests across the project was creating a large cast of characters that would drive the plot after the destruction of Jeremiah’s home forces his family into contact with a nearby town. Chekhov, like O’Connor–and countless other writers– uses the desires of his characters to drive the plot of his novella “The Duel”. Unlike O’Connor though, Chekhov’s story contains a bevy of characters that will come to complicate the plot. His story swirls around Laevsky’s difficulties in love; an adulterer that has grown bored with his lover Nadyezhda and seeks to send her away. What results from Laevsky’s plan is an interesting spiral, which spins from Laevsky to nearly every other character he encounters in a constantly shifting third person omniscient narrator. Looking at the characters as plot intensifiers, an author who creates more characters has more opportunities for extending the plotline, elongating the story, and providing more turning points. Shortly after the opening of the first chapter, the main problem of the story is discussed between Laevsky and his friend, the local doctor, Samoylenko: how to deal appropriately with a woman Laevsky no longer loves. In the following chapter, the narrator is attached to Laevsky, who introduces the reader to Nadyezhda. The third chapter, though, marks a shift: the point of view jumps away from Laevsky and Samoylenko. Both the third and fourth chapters involve Samoylenko’s dinner party, where two new characters–Von Koren and the deacon–are introduced and entangled in Laevsky’s business. In the fifth chapter the point of view jumps again, onto Laevsky’s lover Nadyezhda, who also involves her own set of peripheral characters in her interpretation of Laevsky’s recent hostilities. In total, the revolving door of characters and complications, introduced in a timely fashion, seems both an efficient and effective way to create tension, by forming smaller groups of characters with their own impressions of the problem. By Chapter six, the reader is set up with a picnic gathering, which involves most of the named characters who have been made aware of Laevsky’s dilemma and which could boil over through any of the now thoroughly entwined minor plotlines. From this point on, Chekhov can simply toss any number of characters together to create a situation rife with tension. Each character has been empowered to modify the major plot– Samoylenko influencing Laevsky, Von Koren hoping to expose Laevsky as a coward, Nadeyezhda fleeing from potential affairs, and Laevsky sitting vulnerable at the center of them all.
In trying to implement Chekhov’s design, I quickly ran through the recommended page length for my story. Chekhov’s work was simply much more expansive, and so I searched for a way to make his technique fit my work. This often brought me close to declaring my own work a novella, and indeed I attempted to push my work towards this goal throughout the writing process. What I often attempted to understand while working towards this goal of novella sized-ness was what made a novella so different from a short story. In my studies, it seems Chekhov’s structure perfectly embodies the thoughts of Howard Nemerov, who argues in his essay “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel,” for the power of novellas by citing the effect of “rhythmic intensification”: "What are short novels? For the writer who is by habit of mind a novelist they must represent not simply a compression but a corresponding rhythmic intensification, a more refined criterion of relevance than the one he usually enjoys, an austerity and economy perhaps somewhat compulsive in the intention and itself. For the writer who habitually thinks in short stories–a bad habit, by the way–the challenge is probably greater: he will have to think about a fairly large space which must be filled, not with everything but with something definite which must be made to yield in a quite explicit way its most reserved and recondite ranges of feeling; he will have to think, for once, of design and not merely plot." I felt very much like the short story writer considered above, and my understanding of the novella’s rhythmic intensification lead me to believe that I could not reach my goal. I saw in my work a much larger story, that followed Jeremiah as he encountered odd individuals and who would add their own layer of understanding to Jeremiah’s search for his deceased brother. To create not just an intensification, but a rhythmic intensification, a balanced ebb and flow to the story’s layering of information, I would need a longer story; a short story could only manage so many of my strange characters before they started to jockey for attention. Looking to another interpretation of Nemerov, Debra Sparks offers an elaboration in her essay “Aspects of the Short Novel” when she says it’s “the necessity not just for compression, relevance, and economy...but for design” (93). Chekhov has designed a spiraling system of character introduction that expands with every point of view shift and every new character, yet focuses this powerful rotation of characters along the same plot thread. As Leibowitz notes in Narrative Purpose in the Novella, the form exhibits “an intensive presentation of a specific situation,” which seems at hand in Chekhov’s cyclonic design (78). This design fuels the plot and keeps the story going for as long as the writer allows the cycle to continue, or until Laevsky breaks under the strain of such a story.
Still desiring to utilize Chekhov’s work, I looked across to O’Connor so that I might find some middle ground between them. In both stories, I was struck by the importance of efficiently introducing multiple characters who will come to complicate the rising action of the story. Given the limits of a short story, I needed, like O’Connor, to introduce my characters quickly, but the number of characters in “He Went Through the Floor” is much larger than either of her stories. It seemed more appropriate, then, to introduce my characters early on, yet cycle through them in a manner similar to Chekhov. Through the stories that emerge from Jeremiah’s consciousness, background information can be gleaned about the town and his family’s estrangement from it; characters like McGuffrey, the Morris Brothers, Jacob, and even Jeremiah’s parents are introduced and given back story (Kopfensteiner 1-4). I also create a town meeting sequence, where Willie, Dr. Hartley, McGuffrey, and Jeremiah’s parents are given motivations that will create the main tension of the story (5-8). Creating this “double opening” allowed me to efficiently set up the rising action of my story and provide details about the character’s pasts while avoiding droll exposition or compromising on my chosen point of view. While Chekhov’s rotating character system may actually be applicable to any story form, the pacing of the character introductions themselves rely entirely on the length of the work in question, and so my short story required that I focus mainly on three characters, McGuffrey, Willie, and Pa, for complications that Chekhov spreads across twice as many figures.
By analyzing and studying the works of Maclean, Faulkner, O’Connor, and Chekhov, I’ve experimented with an eclectic list of techniques and effects in an attempt to create the story I envisioned. The narrative echo of Maclean; the transcendent blood of Faulkner; the sharp attention to physical details and fictional space of O’Connor; the immense funnel of character and plot Chekhov unleashed: each is beautiful and wonderful in its design, and all enviable features to possess. In dealing with my own issues of design, characterization, and point of view, I have come to a new understanding of craft with the help of these strong storytellers. As I continue revising my story, I hope to improve upon what I have already learned in the pursuit of a well crafted tale.
Work Cited
Arp, Thomas R., and Laurence Perrine. “Point of View.” Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College, 1998. 302-07. Print.
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. “The Duel.” Comp. James Rusk. The Duel and Other Stories. New York: Modern Library, 2003. N. pag. The Gutenberg Project. Web. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13505/pg13505.html>.
Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning” Logan, IA: Perfection Form, 1979.
Gutkind, Lee, and Hattie Fletcher. Buck. Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 119-125 Print.
Kopfensteiner, Bob. “He Went Through the Floor.”
Leibowitz, Judith. Narrative Purpose in the Novella. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Print.
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1989. Print.
McKenzie, Barbara. “The Process of Fiction.” The Process of Fiction: Contemporary Stories and Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. 8-22. Print.
Nemerov, Howard. “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel.” A Howard Nemerov Reader. Columbia: U of Missouri, 1991. 183-200. Web.
O’Connor, Flannery. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 145-156,
405-420. Print.
Spark, Debra. “Aspects of the Short Novel.” Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2005. 89-104. Print.
Stern, Jerome. Making Shapely Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 154-55. Print.
Williams, Lynna. “And Eyes to See: The Art of Third Person.” Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of Associated Writing Programs. Cincinnati, OH: Story, 1999. 115-24. Print.
“Jacob?” he whispered. “Brother?”
His voice hovered in the circle of light on the landing around him. He pushed the candle bowl with his big toe until the edge of the jamb in front of him came into its light. It came as a steady patter now, a stream from the snow that melted under the moon, and it called to him from behind, so he left the candle by his brother's room. He walked blind until he measured out twenty-two paces to put himself on the last step down below, but the splashing was gone, and he waited. The water must have snuck in, must have ran itself across the roof until it found a place that had not been blessed by the mixture his eldest granddad had learned from the native man, who had learned watching the great forest trade life for life as it had always done. He had been taught that to keep the woods alive, a piece of the kill was to be buried at the site. His brother and father had done the woods a service over the years, and Jeremiah had been chosen to dig. Jeremiah gave up waiting, and now felt his way through the dark along the wall until he touched the splintered doorframe of his parents’ room. He could feel the maroon flaking away in his hand as it had done often enough before. This was the only paint in the house. His father had gone into town only once in his life, walked two days through and when he returned he carried this paint in the large, waxed cloth-sack he used for hunting, and with his hands he painted the door for his new wife now with child. She had told Jeremiah that his father managed a smile that day as she watched him from the bed, his hands covered in the softest red. The gentle draft of sleep reached Jeremiah’s ears from within, and he quietly pulled away from the door.
He was called to sleep now, and made his way across the upper floor into his room and shut the large hand carved door bearing his name, which had left his father’s hands bloody and worn due to the cold winter night. To his left he pressed his knowing hands upon a smooth track along the wall, following the rippled wood past a corner and stopping when his hands pried upon the shape of another door. His father had refashioned the doors of the house to his liking, and had cut this door especially thin, so the two brothers could whisper to one another as children in their beds. He pressed his ear to it and listened. A rumble of tousling air greeted him, the sound of his brother. Jeremiah had always imagined the sound was that of a great match indeed, as the air wrestled above Jacob every night in a private show for those who had the eyes to see it. He let his hand fall through the dark until he hit the oily knob, and silently pushed inwards. The surface of the door floated away from him and he could only imagine the edge of a bedpost in the center of the room. The dark was much the same under the old tree by the valley's river. In the north, during the hunt, Pa, Jacob, and Jeremiah had crept along the river by night, to keep the secret of the old hunting grounds alive. They walked four days under the moon, hiding in the roots of the great trees by day, for Pa had often enough expected men from town to follow him. In the early morning, before the sun broke, they would hunt by the valley, colored in browns and shades of red, and then stop to rest beneath the old stepped tree. Pa’s descendents had driven planks to tough bark, pinned criss-cross up the side into the branches, for hunting, but mostly waiting. Even then, the tree was said to bless those who slept beneath it with dreams of their ancestors. Jeremiah had not experienced this, but the grounds were ever plentiful, and so they were sacred. The owner of the nearby town, a McGuffrey, had once asked to join Pa's hunting party, a request Pa declined, as a good huntsmen never needs a dog. Jeremiah made a step onto the only floorboard he could see, toward where his brother snored in the adjoining room, but as he inched closer he heard the water again, trickling down across the roof beams and rafters somewhere in all that dark, and he stopped. He looked for the outline of his brother and then gave up, and turned away. As he shut the door he struggled to set it, pushing hard against the soft groaning wood, and with a last successful heave was splashed again. His sleep was shaken from him again.
He groped for the handmade quilt atop his bed. His father had put the quilt together after a showdown with the Brothers, Jim the Toe and One-Hip Moris. The land his father owned was in dispute, he having no record of payment for the family plot that seemed to stretch beyond time, and the fiends who ran the closest town wanted it. The ruthless man known only to Jeremiah as McGuffrey was not there to settle the squabble of his townsfolk though, and the ensuing fight left his father broke, bedridden, but worthy. As Jeremiah folded the quilt, he heard another moan, coming through the floor somewhere below. He reached out with the blanket bobbing in one hand when suddenly the bed was against his leg. A dull screech of grinding wood began, and he scrambled over the blanket covered top as the bed slammed against the wall. A great splintering crack shot through the dark, and he began to slide again across the uneven floor. A beam came whipping down from above and slammed Jeremiah from his perch. He fell backward into his room, and saw that the ceiling was splitting right above him, rending itself a new window into the night. He clutched his shoulder and staggered towards the door to Jacob’s room, but the door was bending itself in front of him, sinking into the floor. Bits of his home rained down across it, and he turned and dove toward the other door, toward the sliver of light, and he caught the edge of the frame with one hand before the door itself swung wildly off its hinges. Pulling himself through the entryway, he crouched to see his parents at the stairs. His Pa was tearing at the growing pile of wooden beams, the arms of his long underwear tied around his waist as he ripped and pulled with the thin iron arms that had made him famous amongst the woodsmen. There was a snarl on his face, and the last thing Jeremiah saw of them were those white teeth and the pale face of his mother floating close by. He started to shout that the wood was stuck, but the roar of the ripping pine could not be matched. Swinging his fist he began to pound on the rippling wood, hammering away until a sudden shift sent him lurching through space, suspended in a room unrecognizably his as he fell through the roof into the black sky.
“Son?”
Jeremiah shook in the icy grass. His father’s hands pressed his shoulders together, squeezed him back into the world. His father did not let go, and his hands remained even as his mother filled the space between them.
“Where is Jacob?” she whispered into Jeremiah’s chest. She began to sob, and Jeremiah let his head roll to the soft earth to look where his Pa was staring. They were sitting on a ledge of grass, which spilled like a waterfall back into the earth.
*
The small penny was creased with dirt. This was half of a pair of coins received in younger years, and in the rut of the man's long nose and up around his golden crown of feathers was earth, pressed then scraped away by clumsy fingers. Jeremiah held the coin in his palm before sliding it into his pocket. Pa was standing over him, unmoving, eyes locked on the small stage as the people of the town condensed around them.
“Welcome all, WELL-COME!”
A square-shaped man in a coat the color of moss stood above the sea of men and women, waving one arm violently to signal order. He strode across the three feet of wooden boards erected on the main dirt road for the occasion, turning suddenly when he reached the edge in a furious display of discipline. Whenever he did so, the hanging empty sleeve of his lesser arm swung across his chest and fell limply at his side.
“WELL-COME, welcome you!” he said, pointing with a grey hand. The crowd had settled to a quiet chattering, and through the thick of people the doctor was visible clinging to his wife near center stage. Dr. Hartley twisted over Mrs. Hartley’s shoulder in his brownish suit and spied Pa. Upon finding himself in the line of Pa's gaze, he offered a smile that turned nervously to a sneer before spinning around again. Turning, Jeremiah looked on as a thin pale hand reached through the crowd and found its place between the sweat-touched shoulders of Pa's white shirt. Ma stood beside him now, her entry hushed and solemn, as he continued to stare at the man on the stage.
As the crowd grew, a curious man in a shining blue suit and pointy shoes sidled up against the ruddy wood of the stage. Paying little attention to those around him, he leaned over the platform with an elbow to prop up his contentedly dull face with an obscenely cerulean triangle, all the while ignoring his jutting hind end to the dismay of the crowd. The man on stage was forced to skirt around the intruding elbow, and shaken from his habit, the man turned to face the waiting crowd.
“It is my duty to the folk,” he said, holding his arm out as if to embrace the crowd, “as of the lineage of the McGuffrey line, to announce such things when they occur. That is why those of us who remember the significance of coming days gather, now and then, to remember such things. I thank you for coming, for traveling out, to share in the importance of this moment with me. Now I ask for a moment more of you all, that you lower your heads, lower your caps, and think on the weight of things as I have done in the passing month. We remember those we lost in failing to gain, the lost stag who escaped the hands of the folk, and that is all.” With that he bowed his head and the crowd followed suit, and then above the crowd stood out only the blue hat of the man and Pa.
With a sudden clack that startled the front row, McGuffrey leapt from his reverie. “The hunt is now!” he shouted, his wrinkled face red with zeal. Behind him a horn was blasted, sending the birds out from the big oak behind the stage. Jeremiah turned to see Ma searching Pa's face, which had only darkened. McGuffrey stamped his feet to a soundless tune on stage as the others watched, until he finally settled himself on a stool passed across the top of the crowd. Suddenly grim, he stared dead eyed into the front row.
“The scouting was slim, it was not a fair report if I had to tell it to you now. The brothers Moris, myself, and Jim–the Jim s'who carried the bear head on his back, the one up at the shop– have spent the past month in the southern woods and have seen no tracks. As a matter to tell you all, a disruption of the natural world has occurred and the bounty has scattered for the northern lands, though I cannot rightly say what may have done so. I do know that this will not impact our survival, nor the continuation of the lives we have carved from the scalp of creation.”
Here McGuffrey stood and pointed so that the crowd shifted and looked on at Jeremiah. Startled, he stepped back and bumped into Pa, who anchored Jeremiah to the spot with a hand on his shoulder.
“Those folk there,” said McGuffrey, “have blessed us with the northern lands, forbidden to us for so many a year, wrongfully so, and I have acquired them for you. In turn they will be fed and sheltered by one of you.” With that he sat down and began to roll a cigarette. Uncertain, the crowd remained standing, but with no further announcements from their leader quickly began to fray, until those at the edges made up their minds to leave. Jeremiah watched as the townsfolk drifted back to their homes down the road, and through the mingling stragglers, he could see the blue-suited man passing out paper. Dr. Hartley, having been caught crossing towards them, read from the single sheet with his wife in arm. Puzzled, he stopped short of Jeremiah before tossing the paper to the ground.
“We just wanted to thank you for contributing,” Dr. Hartley said, offering his gloved hand. Pa stared at McGuffrey, and when the Doctor placed a hand on his shoulder, Pa reared back and knocked the man off his feet.
As Dr. Hartley lay sprawled across the dirt road, as still as the air around them, Jeremiah picked up the paper. It read:
HALT THE HUNT
REDEEM THE SLAYER AND THE SUFFERER
GIVE ONLY LIFE
*
The thin paper crinkled easily between the fingers that held it aloft, an ashy and uncertain shape clinging to its surface. Jeremiah flicked through the sheaf of large plain paper he strained to reach, sitting on the edge of a too-short rocker in an unfamiliar room with the oaken easel Pa had made him. A touch of the coal was left on a few of the pages, and he did his best to rub it away. Returning to the top page, he switched the stick of charcoal from his right hand to his left and rolled his shoulder. He began to sketch, poorly, with his weak hand, drawing wobbly circles on top of one another. The hard clack of footsteps ran above his head on the upper floor as he drew arches.
Jeremiah stopped and looked at the page for a moment, then his fingers. They were covered in soot, and he rubbed them together until the black had spread to his knuckles. He tore off the top sheet that hung from the stand and let it fall. He started again; first with the roundness, one line, curved, just so, then the other, a lesser line, shallow. He smoothed the outer edges with his fingers, stroking the shape. Then he drew a hook, but pointier, a small black dot beside. He shaded this too, and drew two ovals next. He paused, holding his stick above one of the empty circles. He looked to the trash, where a dozen other stained papers had been crumpled in a heap. A bald, blind thing looked back at him from the page without seeing, and he tore it to pieces.
Jeremiah flipped through the remaining white sheets that hung on the stand. Doing so left a small dirty dot on the lower corner of each one. There were seventy three pages left, but he went through them again, and each time faster, so that it seemed there were fewer pages than before, and in pressing them together between thumb and forefinger the amount of pages became smaller still. Looking at the bin, at the wasted pages upon the floor, it appeared the paper wasted and the paper remaining measured equally, the creation of one thing and its selfsame destruction, though neither were endless. He stood and walked through the door, left ajar, to the hall with carpet, which led him to another half-shuttered room. He did not enter, but crept close to its unpainted frame, crouched low.
“Don't you leave this place.”
This was Mother's voice. Heavy footsteps started, stopped, then started again.
“Dr. Hartley got us in here because of that man. If you go, we'll have to follow you out. There's no staying here once he finds what you've done.”
The sound of rattling chains and weighty metal. These were traps.
“We've already lost the one; I'm not losing the other to the wild. Have you seen what our son’s been carrying on with, what he's been doing? He thinks the grounds are special because of you. And that land is killing us now.”
The walking stopped. The clunk of metal alone stirred the air.
“It's got nothing to do with you,” he said.
Then the door opened, and Jeremiah was pushed back as Pa strode past him. He turned in stride to look back, but continued on, and in his hands were snares, over his shoulder was coiled a rope, and across his back was strung his gun. Stuffed in the back pocket of his fading figure was a jar, in which sloshed the game urine he used to protect his supply trail from scavengers. But Pa was not wearing his grey hunting cloak, nor did he have on the looped belt to hang small game.
Before he could rise, Ma stepped out into the hall and pressed her face to Jeremiah’s.
“You need to let him go, or they will catch you in their land,” she said. Jeremiah pulled away, turned to watch Pa.
From his hands and knees he looked on as the front door was flung open before Pa could take its handle. Standing just outside the entryway was the curious man, dressed in a new blue suit. He wore a creaseless, wide brimmed hat with a perfect round hill in the middle, and he carried a brown suitcase with yellow straps. The man was smiling, and with a delicate touch tipped his hat while Pa stood, his face flat.
“Sir, I believe you forgot one of these,” he said through his smile. He pulled a single sheaf from under his coat, and held the paper out to Pa. Hands full, Pa looked on, drawing up one side of his stubbly face in impatience. Unconcerned the man pressed him further.
“Sir, I am Willie, sir, Willie Rowne, of the southern peninsula Rownes, though I have been as far north as Marquette to teach the boys and girls in philosophic thinking. Say, I saw you and your family the other day, oh and there's your boy there on the floor, he's a fine lad, but the other day I saw you there, and I knew. I knew you were the man I needed to see, one of whom I could relate.” Willie eyed the hunting equipment arranged about Pa, who stood straight despite the weight of the three thick iron bear traps dangling over his shoulder.
“Those who defy the hunt must stick close, friend,” Willie said, taking a step closer. “I have traveled many a town to get here, and on each path I take you may trace back the enlightenment of a people who disrespected life itself, though they may not do so now. Take this here, for your own salvation,” he said, shaking the paper that had remained in his outstretched hand. His small teeth fit together like carved wood painted over. Without a word, Pa took his foot and scraped whatever mud remained from his usual morning walk onto the thin pant leg of Willie's knee. As the strange man stepped back, Pa rattled past him headed north into the swirling wind.
*
A large group of children ran along the dirt road across town, together falling into small pools of water with squeals of joy. Jeremiah walked along the walls of sparsely clumped wooden houses, damp and sweet smelling from the rain. Across the way, three men were huddled close, arms folded. Beneath the flat caps that covered their eyes, they spoke amongst themselves, lips moving in sharp whispers. As Jeremiah passed they all turned to face him. One of the men started forward but was caught at the elbow by his companion.
Jeremiah continued walking, and stuck his hand in his pocket. He retrieved a small carving, a wooden relief of a tree crudely etched with three yawning branches. He turned it, and on the back was his brother's name.
Then the sound of whistling struck the air, which even now blew softly the hair atop Jeremiah's head. The man in the blue suit was dunking his papers in a pail and slapping them wet against the old red brick on the broad face of the corner store wall. They hung tattered and soggy, and had already begun to peel when he noticed Jeremiah. Willie immediately made his way over.
“You must stop the blood,” he said, bending down slightly so that he was eye to eye. “You can end the suffering before it begins. I can't advise the weak lest they fill themselves with the presence of another which does not exist in itself, yet I can warn you to stave off the suffering of others by not acting upon them.”
The man put his hand in Jeremiah's and shook it. “M'names Willie,” he said, "Willie Rowne.” He handed a few of his papers to him and led him along the street past the shop front. As they went by the door, Jeremiah noticed a small boy with a large paper roll around his arm standing at attention.
“One slip, one loaf, one cut. One cut, not two, not for twice the pay. One cut, one loaf, one ticket per family. Stealin' is keelin', one ticket per!” the boy shouted, and people began to leave their homes to line up outside the door. Willie pushed Jeremiah past them.
“Your father is a cruel man. I understand your predicament, I sympathize, and I oblige that you listen. The sufferer shall not suffer in vain, nor shall you suffer the position of the slayer. I've traveled a great mile to talk to those who suffer out of suffering, for suffering is evil. An abomination.” He spit then on the ground, moving Jeremiah out of his aim.
“I see you have suffered, and I can end it,” Willie said, adjusting his waistband.
Jeremiah looked up at the pale blue eyes beneath the wide brim of the hat. “You know about my brother?”
Willie blinked his soft eyes. “Of course, of course my child. You have lost your brother to that infernal pit we shall call despair. And I shall guide you from it.” Here he set his bucket down, and began plastering the wall of someone's home with rows of paper. He looked over his shoulder as he did so, keeping his eyes on Jeremiah.
“Your father and I must collaborate. I know he don't like that one-handed bandit, and we need to talk about that. And then I'll show you the absolute truth of absolute justice in this world.”
*
Jeremiah looked over the edge of the forest that was now in new hands as evening set. Behind him, the southern grounds lay depleted. He walked along the side of the road, and the breeze followed, picking up what leaves it could carry in the wet air as thunderclouds seethed in the distant sky. An orange snap of lightning flashed in the distance, its golden hue obscured by the rolling murk. Up ahead, the boundary of the forest would curve off away from the town. It would meander back north, and meet the sloping grasslands, whose green blades stood unfolded and tall without humankind. Only the crux of the furthest valley, by river's foot, had been explored and claimed, the hidden place of the hunt.
The road ended suddenly, and Jeremiah stood in the presence of McGuffrey. The man hefted a massive post, his arm curled around the tree trunk's girth and his shoulder quivering from the dense wood. Finding his place, he slammed it with precision into the ground and in it sank. Satisfied, he reached for his back pocket, pulled a loaf of bread from it, and began to eat.
“Come out, boy,” he called, still looking for his next bite. “No running from me.”
Closer, the man was covered in sap and bark. The brown straps of his suspenders cut into the egg-colored shirt, and no shoes covered his well worn feet. He continued to lean on the post, eating, but did not offer to share.
“You know why I do this?” he asked, finding Jeremiah's eye. “I like to return to the roots my grandaddy gave me, but that's not why I am here today. I'm here because of the roots your grandaddy gave your pa.” With that he finished the loaf of bread, and immediately produced another. “On behalf of the folk, where I belong and you do not, I'm building a fence. I will not forbid, because the trust has been broken, but I will gate these lands, and these lands will stay open to mine and only mine, so that the folk may thrive under creation.”
Somewhere a branch snapped and McGuffrey jumped to attention, staring into the woods and hearing only the gust against the trees after. He settled back against the fence post, and resumed his meal.
“I cannot talk about what is fair, nor right, but only what man says is fair and right. What your daddy did ain't neither. He already poisoned what we got from him, and he is persistent, but I will try again in the making of this fence, in the making of a reserve for the town. Truly, this will help man eke out his scraps from nature's firm table. I have spent much money to do so, and the town is surely starving.” With that McGuffrey walked off, straight into the forest he had begun to fence, and Jeremiah was left standing in the shadow of the looming log.
*
An empty shoe sat alone in the dirt. It was angular, black, and shiny. Jeremiah looked up to the sounds of shouting, and Willie was running toward him with his hand covering his hat. In his other arm a bundle of papers were flying loose, and his shoes were gone. He stopped short of Jeremiah, out of breath. In the distance, the shouts of men and women cried out his name.
“Good, you've found one,” he said. Willie's legs gave way and he fell to his knees. He looked up, his eyes pleading.
“I tried to find your father, they caught me at the fence, stop the hunt, help you,” he wheezed.
Jeremiah stepped behind him before he collapsed, and looped his arms under Willie's pits, dragging him off the road into the space between a small church and someone's house. Running back to the road, he grabbed the paper pile, and instead of returning, continued running, his bare feet slapping the dusty earth as he threw papers behind him. When he reached the end of the road, he dropped the stack in a mud puddle and sprinted into the forest. There he waited until the shouting died down and the day grew late. Then he returned for Willie, who looked up from his hiding place between a large rock and a garbage pile, in which he had found his other shoe. Rising to his feet, suit dusty, he straightened his hat.
“Let's find your daddy.”
*
In the deep of the woods, a snapping twig in the dark caused Jeremiah to freeze. Behind him, Willie made a motion with his hand, and they began walking once again. Jeremiah felt the trees as he passed each one, winding his way through birch and oak and white spruce. He was not the tracker, but he walked the trails Pa would use when they hunted. The fine white light that fell through the trees spread across the damp forest floor, and the starry leaves upon the black backdrop of the earth illumed the great wood, every rivet and every crease in every turn of labyrinthine bark holding pools of light, each light a dewy moon. Jeremiah stopped to rest on an upturned stump, its roots wrestling in the clear air, when Willie trod by, following in the path turned valley over years of traveling.
“Do you think a dog who loses his bone turns to himself and thinks of justice? I'd say, rather, hope, that–“
He was cut off as Jeremiah sprang from his seat and caught the dazzlingly bright suit tails between his fingertips. He pointed, and Willie followed his gaze. Beneath the glistening leaves the sickly glow of dull iron teeth lay hidden, and hanging above it was Willie's foot.
Turning, Willie offered his hand in thanks when a man's scream echoed off the trees, wailing in the dark somewhere nearby. The cries continued, and other men began to shout in the distance, then a rifle shot, some pistol fire, then silence. The man was still whimpering when another rifle shot cracked, closer now, over the next slope, and then another volley of shots erupted from the group. The crackle of leaves and yielding brush signaled an approach, and atop the hill above them a figure froze, rifle raised. Willie's arms shot up, and Jeremiah stepped in front of him.
“Father,” he said. The figure on the hill lowered the weapon, and started off in a dog trot along the ridge into the dark.
*
A stack of tattered papers lay bundled on the floor, waiting to be restocked. Across the top read “YOUNG MAN FEARED DEAD IN SINKHOLE HORROR.”
Jeremiah moved deeper into the shop. At the end of the aisle, two men were waving their arms at one another amidst empty shelves. The taller of the two, with his pants rolled up to his knees and ill-fitting boots, waved a hand holding a ticket as well his only two fingers could manage. As the squat one turned away, he moved his round body in perfect lurching circles, a near-done top about to fall. He shot Jeremiah a squint-eyed look, and Jeremiah moved an aisle over.
There was also a man here, sitting on a shelf and its loaves of bread without seeming to notice, reading the paper. Folding it lower, McGuffrey immediately caught Jeremiah’s eye, gesturing with his hand to come over. His creases had deepened since their last meeting, and his stubble had turned to cloud, the soft, whispery white hair framing his face. He seemed then a man whose daily labor under the sun had taken more than it had given. He raised his eyes and the thousand folds surrounding them seemed to grow deeper as he did so, until those orbs looked out from a newly darkened place.
“You’re that boy,” he said, sticking a wooden finger into Jeremiah’s chest and then rustling the paper.
“Yessir,” he replied.
“That hole made the fencing easier.” McGuffrey paused. Then he grabbed Jeremiah’s chin with the arch between thumb and index, holding him still to get a better look.
“How is the Missus?” he asked.
“Fine sir.”
“Your father shot a man last night. How does that rest with you?" he asked, letting go of Jeremiah's face.
Jeremiah remained silent.
“He bear trapped poor Jim, though I cannot say it wasn't a mite ironic, considering,” he said, gesturing to the trophy above him. “We did not get a good look, but we know, the town knows. They know who's been starving them. And they want justice. You know what that means, eh? They want your daddy dead on a rope in the dirt square yonder, even though we don't do things like that anymore. But that is the justice of man.” He paused, and turned the page of the paper.
“You been talking to that Mr. Rowne, though,” he continued.
“Yessir.”
“Folks don't like him much either, though, he also don't do too much. Told me he was a writer and thinking man, but he just does some preaching it seems.” McGuffrey tilted his head so that it almost rested on his shoulder. His mossy jacket was stained and over large, and Jeremiah stared at his empty sleeve.
“You been going up there then?” McGuffrey asked.
“Sir?”
“Ah, oh well. You don’t dwell too much on that. You got some ways to go, though. Your feet are muddy.” He pointed.
Jeremiah looked at his shoes. “Sir?”
The man stabbed with his finger insistently. “There, there, you’ve got some mud. Up to your ankles now, mind not too much, but you’re in the quick and you’ll keep sinking there, moving like you are.” He kept stabbing.
Jeremiah tapped his feet against boards.
The man shot his arms out wide and focused instead on his floppy cuff with bright eyes.
“The trick, the trick is, to know. That you sink in mud by the feet. Right?” he asked, turning to Jeremiah.
“Sir,” he replied.
“But,” McGuffrey said, imitating a crawl with his arms, “you gain inches. Inches!”
McGuffrey started laughing. “You tell it to your pa, and tell it to him unless he'd like to swing, that wherever he may be he best tell me where to go. Or tell him we will drive you out. That sweet doctor, despite what you may have offered him, has made it known to me how generous he has been with your kind. And I noticed you don't come here often for the meal ticket,” he said, poking Jeremiah's stomach, “so your pa must be sitting on the kill somewhere, eh boy? I suppose that explains Hartley's absence from the lines as well.” Then a haze seemed to come over him, and he shifted his position amidst the bread and flipped the paper back up to read, leaving Jeremiah alone in the empty aisle.
*
In the dark, whispers clung to the door. The smell of aging meat pressed through the walls, and Jeremiah heard shoes on the hard floor. Dr. Hartley was shouting, the lights came on, and Ma was crying.
*
Night was falling as the fence came into view. Jeremiah followed it, the ticket from the shop still clutched in his fist. Then he stopped. The forest before him spilled into it, the hole massive, its mouth wide, and on the edge of it all stood the large kitchen and fragments of his room above. Tentatively, Jeremiah approached the open back door, the green wood swinging askew on its hinges. The mesh screen curled from its frame in greeting, and the sound of dripping water announced his return.
The great oaken boards of the home remained and Jeremiah walked to the center of the room. The splintered ends of each piece hung over the edge a few feet away, and the shattered wood had turned, as water dripped into pools of green slime. The water had run ceaselessly over the old floor, and the rivulets had devoured it piecemeal. He knelt down then, placing his hands firmly against the leaky boards, and started to push.
The wood groaned but he pushed, warping the boards below. His knees began to wobble, then sink into the collapsing floor as the boards tilted, and he pushed harder, until the wood could take no more. The floor collapsed, and he fell into the hole he had made and bounced off a rubbery beam that hung below. He hit dirt, and rolled deeper into the earth, flung head over heels down the slope, further away into a spinning dark.
*
A thin pool of water soaked his clothes and submerged his fingers as he moved his hand over the rock in the dark. He rolled over, and the shimmer of light from the slope caught the uncovered water beneath him and jumped across the cavern. Great heaps of violet shimmered across the walls, clusters of stone shining in the melt, trapped since winter's thaw. They stretched across the ceiling and trailed down beneath his feet under the water. Each facet of every crystal twisted into smaller nodes, spiraling away forever into patterns and shapes that could never be created again. He climbed to his feet, and followed the running streams to the ledge of stone, looking into the massive pit as it continued downward into the dark. But the walls were glowing, twisting, turning, down in color as far as he could see. He pressed his hand to the damp rock and felt the earth.
“Brother,” he called. The word carried itself down, and in the deep passed over the surface of the waters, echoing in caverns with the gurgles of small streams in answer.
“Brother.”
*
When he emerged, morning had come. He wiped the sweat from his face before removing his shoes. There he buried them, then began walking back through the woods. As he stumbled over the thin branches of a dead pine, the brush ahead began to rustle. Creeping closer, Jeremiah pulled the branches apart.
Mumbling to himself, his blue suit in shambles, was Willie. He was rubbing vigorously at the bark of a tree with two leafy branches, but when he saw Jeremiah he dropped them and smiled.
“I knew I'd find you out here,” he said, drawing closer. “After you saved my life I couldn't let you die alone in the awful forest. Everyone is looking for you; your mother is broken, and even your father has surrendered, though he has been imprisoned. I tried to stop them, but this place has a funny sort of people. Well, after I was further persecuted by the crowds, I came looking for you, the sufferer.” He put his arm around Jeremiah and they began to walk along the fence towards the town.
When they reached the road, Jeremiah stopped. Willie stepped ahead of him, his arms swinging cheerfully.
“Is my brother still with me?” Jeremiah stood in the leaves and the mud and looked at Willie, who turned and smiled gently. His eyes were soft and blue like his suit.
“I can end your suffering,” he said, placing his hands on Jeremiah's shoulders, “I can show you the truth, and you won't have to suffer these thoughts.” Willie leaned in closer. “Your brother isn't with you, nor can he be, nor can he come back, because there's nothing to come back from, child. There's nothin' out there but the dark in those woods, and it is your suffering that collaborates with it. There's nothin' but the dark.”
That said, Willie stood and continued his march, crushing a fireweed along his way. The wind had shifted, sign of a coming whirlwind, and as Jeremiah stood watching Willie go, it caught in his shirt and pulled him along after.
As Jeremiah and Willie approached the first clump of homes the chanting grew louder. In the same dirt square the same platform had been erected, and on this stood McGuffrey. Below him, a large circle had formed around Pa, who stood in leg bindings, arraigned in hunting gear not of his own. His rifle was in the hands of the man beside him, the wide-bellied One-Hip Moris, whose brother was missing.
Pa's face was unrecognizable. If not for the crowd, the shackled man, leaning heavily on Moris, would not have passed as the figure running along the forest's slopes in the night. The crowd screamed at him, with many of their shirt sleeves stained to match the color of Pa's. Willie placed his hand on Jeremiah's shoulder.
Atop the planking, McGuffrey pointed. “Look on! See your son!”
The crowd turned first, and only after Moris shifted did Pa face Jeremiah. His eyes were dark.
“It is said the sins of the father shall be passed on to the son, so that he remembers for his father's sake what has happened,” McGuffrey said, “but that is not the way of the folk, and the mother and boy shall be fed. Now, let the hunt begin!”
A horn blasted, and the trees shifted in the wind. The crowd roared, their gaunt faces eager and splitting. A few men staggered into the circle to stand beside Moris, rifles strapped across their thin chests, licking their lips in anticipation. The sky screeched, the fiery lightning cracking over the crowd, driving them further into frenzy. The howling wind swirled around the group, tearing the papers from their homes and brick walls, launching them into a wicked funnel in the sky. McGuffrey's loose sleeve whipped in the wind, and platform beneath him began to rock. The sky darkened, thick and writhing, and the small hunting party started forward with uncertain steps. Jeremiah jumped then, into the crowd, pushing his way through the wormy group, Willie shouting behind. McGuffrey pointed as Jeremiah dove against Moris, who stumbled despite his girth into the dust. Pa fell to his knees.
The lighting cracked again, shattered glass flecking the wind as the crowd screamed now out of fear. Instead of scattering, they huddled closer, around Pa. Behind the stage, the large tree was spinning, roots ripped from the earth. McGuffrey pointed.
“Beware, it falls!”
The tree tumbled from the black sky, its mighty roots destroyed. From within the babbling circle, Jeremiah could see Willie standing where he had left him, and he could see the oak swinging down.
Everyone cowered but his father, who watched from his knees until Jeremiah pulled him away. Stepping over the men and women of the town, he dragged his father to the great oak. Jeremiah could see Willie's face, as blue as his suit, his arms flopped limply at the bark. Jeremiah struggled to lift the tree, and certainly could not do it alone, and so looked to his father, who lay draped upon it.
On Writing “He Went Through the Floor”
For a writer, the literature of others is often a brimming well, deep and restorative. Those weary and without guidance may draw upon this well for refreshment, guidance, and even instruction. A writer reads to enjoy the creations of others so that in turn, his own sense of creation may be kindled. A writer also reads studiously, examining the thoughts and reflections of other writers so he may contribute to the depths of his own. But a writer is also a thief, who treads quietly across the sands to steal a drink, and moreover takes the design of the well itself in the hopes of building something similar to, if not surpassing, the original work. In my own writing I have read to plunder, and I have read to resolve the issues of that have sprung up across the revision process of my story, “He Went Through the Floor”: plotting, characterization, and the alignment of the reader behind a strong, effective point of view that have sprung up across the revision process of my story, “He Went Through The Floor.” I started with a desire to tell a story about a young man who loses his brother after a massive sinkhole devours his home, but I continued to write to explore my narrator’s powers after reading Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” I was also enthralled by Flannery O’Connor’s characters in the stories “The Life You Save May Be You Own” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and the way in which she effectively utilized a point of view similar to my own to enrich each moment with an uneasy suspicion. Ultimately, I turned to Chekhov’s novella “The Duel,” seeking an efficient and tension-filled plot structure to deliver every scene in a more satisfying way. These five works have had the most influence on the mechanics of my story, though other stories I read while revising certainly contributed to the writing process.
“A River Runs Through It” is a story told by an unnamed man reflecting on his last summer fishing on the Blackfoot river with his brother Paul. This unnamed figure caught my curiosity, as Maclean’s first person narrator is very much a storyteller, albeit one with a unique position. Many first person narrators report on the current state of things; the reader follows them in real-time and they may think, speak, and act while the reader watches. A first person narrator often “disappears into one of the characters,” and some critics have stated that in its most basic use, the first person point of view “offers no opportunity... for direct interpretation by the author” out of fear that the narrator might “transcend his sensitivity, his knowledge, or his powers of language in telling the story” (Arp 305). Maclean’s narrator functions differently, however, and delivers interpretations of the story from an authorial perspective by making use of a separation in time. In “Point of View” of Keep It Real, Lee Gutkind notes the separation found in a first person narrator in nonfiction, reminding the reader that “when we speak from a child’s point of view in the present tense, it is obviously not the child writing the prose” but the writer “pretending to be a wiser adult” (121). The same is true in fiction, and the “persona” of that wise adult in non-fiction becomes Maclean’s storytelling narrator (Gutkind 121). In “A River Runs Through It,” this unnamed entity is both narrator of his tale and a primary character within it, which splits, yet intrinsically binds, the characters across time.
The position of the storytelling narrator, one who looks across time to describe the events of his past, is at first invisible in Maclean’s story. In lines like “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” the narrator could simply be giving present tense information that has been true up to this point in the character’s life (Maclean 1). The narrator does eventually reveal his future self, however, in statements like “So he made the arrangements for what turned out to be our last fishing trip together” (Maclean 78). This line reflects a level of hindsight not possible for the narrator-as-character in the story, and thus exposes a definite narrator-as-storyteller that exists at some later point in time. Once the reader is aware of this fact, every comment by the first person narrator seems suspect, and the reader is faced with the challenge of trying to decide which version of the narrator is speaking. Regardless of the reader’s interpretation, the constant reminder of the split narrator creates an intrusive effect. This effect is also present in the dialogue, which is typically written with the dialogue tags behind the dialogue like “‘I should understand that too,’ I said” (77). Others tags are positioned in the front, yet refer to a speaker other than the narrator, like “As I covered her, she said, ‘He should have...” ( 27). This is not always the case, however, and some dialogue tags are placed in the front of the narrator-as-character’s speech. By switching the position of the tags in these cases, the reader must first pay attention to the speaker before he speaks: “I said, ‘I should understand’,” or “I told him again, ‘I’ve told you before...”, and even “I said to my brother, ‘Go easy on him’” (Maclean 76, 57,9). In these cases, the reader must first imagine the act of speaking before seeing what is said. Then, combined with the constant struggle of identifying the narrator, the added emphasis on the speaker challenges the reader to place the dialogue tags within the right context. The narrator-as-character is still voiceless after only reading “I said to my brother” , and there is a temptation to turn to the narrator-as-storyteller to fill the silent space (9). This is because the narrator-as-storyteller is a figure who remains capable of speaking at all times throughout the story, and who can share in the authority of the “I” of the dialogue tags because he is technically the same character . If such a decision is made, the reader will experience an unusual fluctuation at work throughout the story, at times pulling the two versions of the narrator apart before melding back into one voice. This fluctuation was interesting to me as an effect because it emphasizes a strong bond between the character and narrator across time and space. I wanted to create a similar connection between my narrator and my protagonist Jeremiah, though, given the first person nature of Maclean’s story, it was hard for me to envision its implementation in my own third person story.
When I reviewed Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” a similar, yet inverted version of Maclean’s narrator seemed present. In the story about a young boy, Colonel Sartoris Snopes, who struggles to remain loyal to the family despite his father’s abusive and destructive acts of vandalism, Faulkner utilizes a device to relate narrator to character, despite telling the story from a third person perspective. The following passage from Faulkner is a good example of a narrator who clings to a particular character: "The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish–this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood." The narrator seems restricted to Colonel Sartoris, and according to Lynna Williams, this style of restricted narration is considered the “third-person unified” point of view (117). This means that through the narrator, the reader has access to the chosen character’s senses and “brings us closer to the character in this type of third person than in any other” (117). Like Maclean’s first person narrator, the information the reader receives is “filtered through the point-of-view character’s consciousness” and thus not an entirely objective telling of events (117). This is why the reader knows that Sartoris “knew he smelled cheese, and more” and why the entire room in the opening scene cannot be depicted, because “he could not see the table where the justice sat” (Faulkner 3). Third person unified enhances the senses of the character by diminishing the range and power of the narrator’s ability to perceive the fictional world without him.
More importantly, in the close connection between narrator and character, there is a blurring between the two present here, similar to the one arising from Maclean’s split first person narrator, though not as frequently rendered. Just as thoughts and dialogue tags conjure the storytelling narrator into the story being told in Maclean’s work, the use of parenthetical comments breaks up the flow of the story with a seemingly familiar voice. As he watches the dealings between his father and the judge, Sartoris notes that “his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood” (Faulkner 3). As the first parenthetical the reader encounters, Faulkner makes it clear through both the thought tag “he thought” and the direct thought “He’s my father!” that the parenthetical comments and italicized direct thought belong to Sartoris. Yet this thought, also arising from the present moment of the story “in that despair,” seems to differ from the next parenthetical, which simply states “He (the father) always did” (Faulkner 7). While it is not surprising to see the parenthetical used for a variety of purposes, the insertion here serves to correct, and therefore sheds new light on the narrator. Later corrections, like “(who had not stopped)” and “(or transmit)” also follow this path, and their growing use throughout the story seems to create a new distance between the narrator and Sartoris, who seems an unlikely editor as a young boy(10,11). The reader never returns to the closeness of “he thought” in the opening sequence, and later it is “the boy” who stands out in the parentheticals: in “(they had once owned a saddle; the boy could remember it though not when or where)” and “(the boy could tell that even in the darkness)” (15). The odd close-to-distant shifts between Sartoris and the narrator continue outside of the parentheticals as well. It seems likely that the narrator is aligned with a future Sartoris given the pieces of future knowledge that are included in lines like, “Later, twenty years later, [Sartoris] was to tell himself” (Faulkner 8). This idea also shows in the italicized direct thoughts, where “Hit’s big as a courthouse” turns into “People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch” (10). These two thoughts are broken up by a judgment of the narrator, who deems Sartoris “too young” for deeper reflection (10). Though, in reading “it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause [the father’s] descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion,” it seems as if the narrator is either referring to himself in the third person or speaking of his children (6). The narrator also refers to events that Sartoris currently does not know of, but doesn’t specify whether or not he will later come to know them when he mentions “[Sartoris] cried suddenly...not knowing his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense” (24-25). It may be assumed that he comes to know these details because the narrator is speaking of them, but this uncertainty creates an unusual distance between the narrator and Sartoris. This ephemeral relationship between narrator and character has been something I have explored in my own writing, and it seems Faulkner is exploring the connections between narrator and character in the third person without simply taking these bonds for granted.
I will attempt now to explain my conception of the narrator of “He Went Through The Floor” in light of Maclean and Faulkner though it should be noted that my design may evolve over time. I hope to create a story similar to Maclean’s and Faulkner’s, in which the inherent connections between character and narrator are explored through the content of the story itself, linking craft to theme. In Maclean’s work, the bond between narrator and character comes from his first person point of view, yet it is made tangible by having the narrator not only tell a story about himself, but by inserting himself in the story as the storyteller. This effectively doubles his voice, as if the narrator-as-character is merely repeating what the narrator-as-storyteller is saying, creating an interesting echo effect. The third person point of view must work harder still in Faulkner’s work, because now a connection between the narrator and character is much more elusive if the writer desires to make it tangible within the story’s content. Faulkner also refuses to use the simplest setup for doing so; by referring to a future Sartoris in the third person, he cannot set up the same storytelling narrator Maclean uses. Repeated references to “the old fierce pull of blood,” however, leads me to believe that blood is the connective tissue between narrator and character (Faulkner 3). It is even stated, quite clearly, that “the fluid world, rushed beneath [Sartoris] again, the voices coming to him again through...the old grief of blood” and that “the old blood....which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust)” (5, 21). In these lines Faulkner plays with the idea of perceiving through blood, and that the ancestral blood itself is a force capable of traveling across great, unknown distances. Sartoris’ father even warns him, saying “You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood stick to you,” and given how the story ends upon Sartoris fleeing his family for good, it seems likely that Faulkner has connected the powers of his third person unified narrator to the content of his story (8). This connection gives credence to the narrator’s ability to look across both the past and future of the family line without needing Sartoris to be the narrator of his own tale as Maclean did.
I admired this commitment to craft and the desire to characterize the narrator by looking to its powers for inspiration. It was my desire to explore the powers of my restricted, yet effaced, narrator and connect them with the happenings of my story. According to McKenzie in her book The Process of Fiction, the effaced narrator is one that lacks access to the consciousness of characters and does not call attention to himself within the story, only relating details as they appear and relying on dialogue and action to tell much of the story (McKenzie 10-11). My desire to remain solely with my protagonist Jeremiah and my decision to rely on his abilities of perception to deliver the details of the story often gives my point of view a resemblance to the third person unified. Because my narrator continues to access information Jeremiah would have throughout the story, I decided that it would not shock the reader if I used the third person unified point of view at the beginning of my story and then shifted into an effaced narrator who occasionally seems to access Jeremiah’s thoughts after the devastation of his home (my cautious approach is still evident in a careful balancing of Jeremiah in scene and Jeremiah in thought). The new narrator would still follow only Jeremiah, but it would retreat from his thoughts and remark only on the visible happenings of the story. Though I could have continued telling the story in a unified third person like Faulkner does, I wanted the loss of Jeremiah’s brother to have an immediate effect on the reader, and so I wrote the town meeting section as if Jeremiah were no longer capable of leading the narrator through the telling of the story as he had been in the opening sequence. The transition that follows is focused on the old penny, and the previous formula is overturned as the long stories of the past are restricted: “This was half of a pair of coins received in younger years” (Kopfensteiner 5). These bits of information slip out from the narrator’s consciousness, a near reemergence of the narrator from before, but they are just as quickly wiped away by waves of sensory details.
In light of Faulkner’s mysterious narrator, who hints at knowing much more than he lets on, I did take steps towards reworking the narrator to reflect a more complete point of view shift, from one associated with Jeremiah to one signifying the haunting presence of his brother Jacob. I tried to show a shift in knowledge by creating a difference in what Jeremiah should know and what the narrator does know, as in the details given about the “unfamiliar room” of the Hartley’s in which only the “oaken easel Pa had made” is recognized by the narrator (Kopfensteiner 8). So far these hints seem too slight to affect the reader’s perception of the narrator, but I did not want to create an intrusive narrator like Maclean’s; though the same echo he creates could be said to exist between the slightly altered narration styles of the two brothers. In the meantime, I will continue to explore my options in building my ghostly narrator.
Ultimately, my decision to write from my chosen point of view was cemented after reading the work of Flannery O’Connor. In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” the restricted or unified third person point of view used by O’Connor seems similar to my own. In both stories, two sets of characters are immediately pitted against one another. While Lucynell Crater and Tom Shiftlet, in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” manipulate one another to get by in a hostile landscape, Julian, in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” seeks to undermine his mother’s influence on him by devising her downfall during a city bus trip. Lucynell Crater in “The Life You Save” is “ravenous for a son-in-law,” and the reader is given this information quite easily as the restricted third person point of view seems to cling to her as the reader is seated firmly with “[Lucynell] and her daughter...on their porch when Mr. Shiftlet came up their road for the first time” (O’Connor 150). The narrator seems restricted to her perspective until a small space break almost halfway through the story, which reveals a change in focus as paragraphs increasingly emphasize the activity and feelings of Mr. Shiftlet; “The next morning he,” “Mr. Shiftlet slept,” “He had raised the hood,” and other introductory sentences show a narrator focused on the activity of Mr. Shiftlet (O’Connor 149-150). The point of view here is deceptive, as it seems likely that the reader will be aligned with Lucynell after sitting with her and watching Mr. Shiftlet approach in the story’s opening scene. Here the reader is left to wait with her as “the old woman didn’t change her position until he was almost into her yard” (O’Connor 145). Yet, if the position from which the reader views the characters in the story is ignored, and the lines where each character’s interior is accessed are given more consideration, then the point of view seems closer to an omniscient point of view in that the story equally jumps between the minds of both characters. It is only the depictions of one character viewing the other, as in “the old woman watched from a distance, secretly pleased,” that are used to give the reader the exact perspective from which to view the previous scenic details, and create the illusion of a more restricted narrator (150). This strategy seemed useful for my own story, as I could show a change in the narrators by offering a perspective that would be impossible for Jeremiah to assume. In an earlier draft of my story, the opening sequence included scenes where Jeremiah was not present, though these were removed from my current draft because they did not accurately reflect my design at the time. I am considering a return to scenes like those for future drafts.
While the reader remains with Jeremiah throughout my story, I hoped to remind the reader of his gaze to keep an anchor on the narrator. O’Connor keeps the reader aware of the character’s line of sight too, after the narrator engages in the “long stare.” The passage begins “Mr. Shiftlet’s pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard,” and if it were to end there, the reader may, since the narration has up to this point been restricted to her perspective, take this as an observation made by Lucynell (O’Connor 146). This would effectively keep the reader positioned behind her as a point of view character, as a new perspective has not yet been established. The passage continues, however, to describe the objects in view; “the pump near the corner of the house and the big fig tree that three or four chickens were preparing to roost in–and had moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile” (O’Connor 146). The longer the description carries on, the closer the reader is to Mr. Shiftlet, as the reader is placed in his shoes and sees what he sees. It is made clear that no one else is looking at these objects, especially when the reader experiences the exact moment Mr. Shiftlet sees the car. The reason for reminding the reader of the point of view character’s gaze is linked to what Jerome Stern refers to as mise-en-scene. This is a term that speaks to “all that the viewer sees in a single shot” or scene and was originally borrowed from drama (Stern 154). While it is often good to let the reader slip into the story, it seems just as well to remind the reader of every piece contributing to the power of the scene, even if that means calling attention to the point of view character. So in my story, when “the crowd shifted and looked on at Jeremiah,” the moment becomes much more powerful if the reader already feels next to Jeremiah, having “looked on”“ from his spot in the crowd in previous moments (Kopfensteiner 7, 5). Since the effaced narrator is about emphasizing scenic details above other sources of tension, utilizing the gaze gives even the point of view character a dramatic role to play as the entire scene is put on display.
While I can utilize the “long stare” and through it render the point of view character in scene, reminding the readers of the physical distance between the characters also creates tension; which, according to Stern, is “the mother of fiction” (237). This is apparent in the first scene of “The Life You Save,” where Shiftlet is described first as a “gaunt figure” in “a black town suit” with “half an arm” (O’Connor 145). The odd details are given and then the reader is left to sit through Lucynell’s reaction, all the while waiting for more information on this mysterious figure as he approaches. Relying on Lucynell’s limited line of sight draws the moment out, and causes the reader to anticipate further details or action. In my story I tried to create a similar effect in describing Willie Rowne, a newcomer to the town who arrives “in a shining blue suit and pointy shoes” and whose disruptive entrance sets him apart from the dismayed crowd (Kopfensteiner 6). After offering this glimpse, the reader must wait until the crowd disperses to see how the unusual man will crop up again. Tension is also created through distance in “Everything Rises,” when Julian turns “to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by the atrocious hat, coming towards him” (O’Connor 406). Even though Julian is familiar with his invader–his mother– the creation of physical distance lends itself to examination and judgment; all the while the gap is closing, and an unwelcome encounter draws nearer. While I have not created the same sense of anxiety through distance, I have tried to create a sense of loss in the description of Pa leaving Jeremiah. The reader starts close but is pushed aside with Jeremiah while Pa “turn[s] in stride to look back, but continue[s] on” (Kopfensteiner 10). What follows is an examination of Pa’s tools, but by the time the reader finishes reading Pa is already at the door. I hope this sudden distance makes the reader acutely aware of the new space between Jeremiah and Pa, which seems impossible to bridge then as “Jeremiah watch[es] from his hands and knees” (10). When a writer must heavily rely on how scenes are arranged to create tension when using an effaced narrator, the physical distance created or removed from between characters seems crucial in effectively setting the scene to deliver the desired drama.
One of my other interests across the project was creating a large cast of characters that would drive the plot after the destruction of Jeremiah’s home forces his family into contact with a nearby town. Chekhov, like O’Connor–and countless other writers– uses the desires of his characters to drive the plot of his novella “The Duel”. Unlike O’Connor though, Chekhov’s story contains a bevy of characters that will come to complicate the plot. His story swirls around Laevsky’s difficulties in love; an adulterer that has grown bored with his lover Nadyezhda and seeks to send her away. What results from Laevsky’s plan is an interesting spiral, which spins from Laevsky to nearly every other character he encounters in a constantly shifting third person omniscient narrator. Looking at the characters as plot intensifiers, an author who creates more characters has more opportunities for extending the plotline, elongating the story, and providing more turning points. Shortly after the opening of the first chapter, the main problem of the story is discussed between Laevsky and his friend, the local doctor, Samoylenko: how to deal appropriately with a woman Laevsky no longer loves. In the following chapter, the narrator is attached to Laevsky, who introduces the reader to Nadyezhda. The third chapter, though, marks a shift: the point of view jumps away from Laevsky and Samoylenko. Both the third and fourth chapters involve Samoylenko’s dinner party, where two new characters–Von Koren and the deacon–are introduced and entangled in Laevsky’s business. In the fifth chapter the point of view jumps again, onto Laevsky’s lover Nadyezhda, who also involves her own set of peripheral characters in her interpretation of Laevsky’s recent hostilities. In total, the revolving door of characters and complications, introduced in a timely fashion, seems both an efficient and effective way to create tension, by forming smaller groups of characters with their own impressions of the problem. By Chapter six, the reader is set up with a picnic gathering, which involves most of the named characters who have been made aware of Laevsky’s dilemma and which could boil over through any of the now thoroughly entwined minor plotlines. From this point on, Chekhov can simply toss any number of characters together to create a situation rife with tension. Each character has been empowered to modify the major plot– Samoylenko influencing Laevsky, Von Koren hoping to expose Laevsky as a coward, Nadeyezhda fleeing from potential affairs, and Laevsky sitting vulnerable at the center of them all.
In trying to implement Chekhov’s design, I quickly ran through the recommended page length for my story. Chekhov’s work was simply much more expansive, and so I searched for a way to make his technique fit my work. This often brought me close to declaring my own work a novella, and indeed I attempted to push my work towards this goal throughout the writing process. What I often attempted to understand while working towards this goal of novella sized-ness was what made a novella so different from a short story. In my studies, it seems Chekhov’s structure perfectly embodies the thoughts of Howard Nemerov, who argues in his essay “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel,” for the power of novellas by citing the effect of “rhythmic intensification”: "What are short novels? For the writer who is by habit of mind a novelist they must represent not simply a compression but a corresponding rhythmic intensification, a more refined criterion of relevance than the one he usually enjoys, an austerity and economy perhaps somewhat compulsive in the intention and itself. For the writer who habitually thinks in short stories–a bad habit, by the way–the challenge is probably greater: he will have to think about a fairly large space which must be filled, not with everything but with something definite which must be made to yield in a quite explicit way its most reserved and recondite ranges of feeling; he will have to think, for once, of design and not merely plot." I felt very much like the short story writer considered above, and my understanding of the novella’s rhythmic intensification lead me to believe that I could not reach my goal. I saw in my work a much larger story, that followed Jeremiah as he encountered odd individuals and who would add their own layer of understanding to Jeremiah’s search for his deceased brother. To create not just an intensification, but a rhythmic intensification, a balanced ebb and flow to the story’s layering of information, I would need a longer story; a short story could only manage so many of my strange characters before they started to jockey for attention. Looking to another interpretation of Nemerov, Debra Sparks offers an elaboration in her essay “Aspects of the Short Novel” when she says it’s “the necessity not just for compression, relevance, and economy...but for design” (93). Chekhov has designed a spiraling system of character introduction that expands with every point of view shift and every new character, yet focuses this powerful rotation of characters along the same plot thread. As Leibowitz notes in Narrative Purpose in the Novella, the form exhibits “an intensive presentation of a specific situation,” which seems at hand in Chekhov’s cyclonic design (78). This design fuels the plot and keeps the story going for as long as the writer allows the cycle to continue, or until Laevsky breaks under the strain of such a story.
Still desiring to utilize Chekhov’s work, I looked across to O’Connor so that I might find some middle ground between them. In both stories, I was struck by the importance of efficiently introducing multiple characters who will come to complicate the rising action of the story. Given the limits of a short story, I needed, like O’Connor, to introduce my characters quickly, but the number of characters in “He Went Through the Floor” is much larger than either of her stories. It seemed more appropriate, then, to introduce my characters early on, yet cycle through them in a manner similar to Chekhov. Through the stories that emerge from Jeremiah’s consciousness, background information can be gleaned about the town and his family’s estrangement from it; characters like McGuffrey, the Morris Brothers, Jacob, and even Jeremiah’s parents are introduced and given back story (Kopfensteiner 1-4). I also create a town meeting sequence, where Willie, Dr. Hartley, McGuffrey, and Jeremiah’s parents are given motivations that will create the main tension of the story (5-8). Creating this “double opening” allowed me to efficiently set up the rising action of my story and provide details about the character’s pasts while avoiding droll exposition or compromising on my chosen point of view. While Chekhov’s rotating character system may actually be applicable to any story form, the pacing of the character introductions themselves rely entirely on the length of the work in question, and so my short story required that I focus mainly on three characters, McGuffrey, Willie, and Pa, for complications that Chekhov spreads across twice as many figures.
By analyzing and studying the works of Maclean, Faulkner, O’Connor, and Chekhov, I’ve experimented with an eclectic list of techniques and effects in an attempt to create the story I envisioned. The narrative echo of Maclean; the transcendent blood of Faulkner; the sharp attention to physical details and fictional space of O’Connor; the immense funnel of character and plot Chekhov unleashed: each is beautiful and wonderful in its design, and all enviable features to possess. In dealing with my own issues of design, characterization, and point of view, I have come to a new understanding of craft with the help of these strong storytellers. As I continue revising my story, I hope to improve upon what I have already learned in the pursuit of a well crafted tale.
Work Cited
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Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. “The Duel.” Comp. James Rusk. The Duel and Other Stories. New York: Modern Library, 2003. N. pag. The Gutenberg Project. Web. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13505/pg13505.html>.
Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning” Logan, IA: Perfection Form, 1979.
Gutkind, Lee, and Hattie Fletcher. Buck. Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 119-125 Print.
Kopfensteiner, Bob. “He Went Through the Floor.”
Leibowitz, Judith. Narrative Purpose in the Novella. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Print.
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1989. Print.
McKenzie, Barbara. “The Process of Fiction.” The Process of Fiction: Contemporary Stories and Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. 8-22. Print.
Nemerov, Howard. “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel.” A Howard Nemerov Reader. Columbia: U of Missouri, 1991. 183-200. Web.
O’Connor, Flannery. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. 145-156,
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Spark, Debra. “Aspects of the Short Novel.” Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2005. 89-104. Print.
Stern, Jerome. Making Shapely Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 154-55. Print.
Williams, Lynna. “And Eyes to See: The Art of Third Person.” Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of Associated Writing Programs. Cincinnati, OH: Story, 1999. 115-24. Print.