I’m about 11,000 words into my novel THE ROCKY ORCHARD, so have not exactly perfected the elevator speech. Here’s a stab at a synopsis, following by a new snippet:
A woman retreats to her old family farm and encounters an older woman. The two form a friendship over daily gin rummy games. As the younger woman reflects and remembers her past times at the farm, it becomes increasingly unclear exactly what is happening.
Mazie and Lula cut the cards to determine who would deal the first hand. Mazie drew the ten of spades. Lula drew the nine of clubs, and Mazie began to shuffle. “You know I promised myself I wouldn’t talk you to death again today, but, do you know what? These cards were here when we bought this farm. The Bishops – the people who owned this place before my family did – just walked out one day, and we walked in. They left everything. Everything! Like a neutron bomb had gone off. Every sign of human life had vanished; every remnant and relic stayed behind. The kitchen cabinets were filled with their dishes. The drawers held their silverware, their cooking utensils, their pot holders. Towels hung on the towel racks. Freshly washed sheets lay carefully folded in the upstairs bureaus. Extra ones, because all five of the beds had sheets and blankets and pillows already on them, carefully arranged. They left their board games, and their decks of cards, even their jigsaw puzzles with a piece or two missing, in an old oak table. I used to go around each room of the farmhouse, opening every single drawer and looking at the things inside. It was as if my family had walked right into someone else’s life. I mean, look at these cards! At some point in history, somebody went into a store somewhere and looked through all of the decks of playing cards, and they picked these – the ones with the Grecian urns overflowing with fake grapes. One deck with a watery purple background, the other deck a muted peach. Someone thought these extremely odd cards were the perfect thing. And here we are, two people who were complete strangers just a few days ago, who met by chance, now playing a game of gin rummy with those very cards, so many years later.”
“Two people who at some point may play gin rummy,” Lula said. “Or may not.”
“Point taken. Your turn,” Mazie said.
Top photo: Harry Lapow
Bottom photos of Jessica Tandy, the image I have of Lula.
I hope you enjoy this snippet from my novel-in-progress, “The Rocky Orchard.” And if you’re in the same general vicinity of the U.S. that I am (Chicago), I hope this snapshot of a glorious summer day provides a bit of comfort against the brutal cold!
There was not a cloud in the sky the next morning, the sun dazzling the first second it burst over the horizon. The morning dew, heavy on each individual blade of grass, lit up into a sea of sparkle as millions of dew drops reflected the sun’s rays. Mazie opened the porch’s screen door and let it slam its completely-familiar slam behind her. She needed to feel the carpet of wet grass outside on her bare feet. She kicked a foot hard into the grass, sending a fountain of droplets into the air. She watched their arcs of ascent and fall. The power of the early sun combined with the chill of the dew on Mazie’s feet sent a thrill through her entire body. The eerie silence of yesterday’s fog had been displaced; the forest erupted into raucousness, birds seeming to have increased their volume in jubilant recognition of the day’s beauty. An industrious spider had spun an intricate web that ran from the screen door to the nearest bush, and each of the delicate strands glistened with dewdrops.
Mazie kicked once again into the grass, and when she looked up to watch the droplets spray into the air, there was the old woman, walking stick in hand, standing at the near end of the orchard, no more than twenty feet away.
“Oh, hey! Hey there. Hello. Sorry, I don’t know your name,” Mazie said.
“Lula, dear. My name is Lula,” the woman said.
“Holy Cow,” Mazie said. “My mother had an Aunt Lula – my great aunt!”
“Well, it was actually a rather common name way back. Sometimes short for Luella and sometimes for Lucretia, even Louise or Talullah.” Lula tapped her walking stick against the bottoms of her shoes to knock off the clumps of dirt, and she adjusted her hat. “Funny thing is: my name isn’t any of those. It’s Eulalia.”
“Eulalia!” Mazie said. “That’s beautiful! I’ve never known anyone named Eulalia.”
“Oh, I’m glad you like it, dear. Can’t say that I was ever nearly as excited as you seem to be. Not that I ever heard anyone call me that. I was Lula as long as I can remember.”
“I’m not sure that I can call you Lula,” Mazie said. “Sometimes we just can’t stray too far from the ways that we were raised, I guess.” Mazie smiled. “My parents would faint if I called an older person – a person who was older than me; I hope I’m not offending you – my parents would die if I called you ‘Lula.’”
“Are they here, dear?” Lula pretended to crane her neck and did a quick, exaggerated scan of the area. “I hadn’t seen them.”
“No,” Mazie laughed. “All alone here. Just me.”
“Then I think you should call me Lula, and I should call you…?
“Mazie. My name is Mazie. Not short for anything.”
Please enjoy this continuation of what I expect to be my fourth novel.
Mazie stood behind the chair that had always been her mother’s place at the porch’s outdoor dining table. She ran her hands along the welted seam of the – what was it called…Naugahyde? – chair, the miracle synthetic material that supposedly lasted forever. Mazie smiled down at the gray, marble-patterned Formica table. Her parents would be astonished to know that the chairs and table they had carefully chosen with their eternal vigilance to thrift would one day be precious collector’s items for scores of retro-crazed home decorators. Neither the word “chic,” nor the value it represented would ever had entered her parents’ lexicon. They insisted that their furnishings and possessions be practical and durable enough to weather children, animals, friends and the vicissitudes of life in general with a minimum of worry or bother.
Mazie ran her hand along the Formica, and once again along the welting at the top of the chair before lifting her gaze back to the orchard. She thought she saw a flicker of movement between two of the old apple trees on the far slope, and she unconsciously rose up on her toes to get a better look.
It was mid-morning, not a time of day that one would expect to see a deer. It was also unlikely that a deer would decide to amble through a relatively open orchard well before the time of year when any apples could have ripened enough to fall. Mazie saw a flash of red, high enough above the ground that she reckoned it could only be a person, one who seemed to be plodding in slow motion through Mazie’s orchard.
Mazie stood and watched fixedly, shock, wonder and suspicion whirling within her, as an elderly, snow white-haired woman came into focus. The woman wore a cotton print dress, much as Mazie’s grandmothers and their various sisters had worn most days, with ankle socks and well-worn walking shoes. Around her neck she wore a red bandana, the flash of red that Mazie had seen from afar. The woman carried a cane in one hand, or perhaps it was a walking stick, which she leaned on heavily. She watched her feet intently, making her way among the multitude of rocks in the thoroughly uneven, hazardous orchard. The woman had gotten all the way to the near end of the orchard before she chanced a glance upward, at which point, she immediately saw Mazie standing behind the chair at the outdoor table on the porch.
The woman raised her cane in the air, a kind of salute. “Oh! Hello, dear!”
Mazie was not sure what else to say besides, “Hello!”
“I’m not used to seeing anyone!” the woman said. “You gave me rather a start.”
“It’s my place,” Mazie said, “my family’s place.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is, dear, seeing as you’re standing there on the porch. But I walk through here every day, through your orchard there. So, you’re what’s different for me. Never saw anyone before.”
“I was just thinking about the orchard,” Mazie said. “Wondering why anyone would choose such rocky, uneven ground for an orchard in the first place.”
“Well, I can’t answer that one,” the woman said.
“What I’m wondering is, why you would walk through such an… inhospitable orchard, when the road is right there.” Mazie pointed.
“The road gets a little boring after a while, lovely as it is. I do walk on it. This is my little foray off the beaten path, as it were. Just through your orchard and back on up to the road.”
“You know, when we first bought this place, my parents were intent on trying to mow it, you know, tame it into a nice, grassy meadow kind of an orchard.” Mazie laughed. “You can’t imagine the sound when a ride-on lawnmower hits a rock. The lawnmower engine stops dead, and this…enormous…noise reverberates through the woods in every direction. Oh my gosh, I can still hear it clear as day.” Mazie laughed. “Except that one time, the whole lawnmower rolled right over, right on top of my father. That wasn’t so funny.”
Mazie observed herself, talking to a total stranger, who was technically trespassing on her old family farm.
The woman smiled. Mazie regarded her.
“Oh. Perhaps you’d rather that I don’t walk through it,” the woman said.
Mazie considered. “Well, I’m not sure that makes any sense,” Mazie responded. “Seems kind of mean-spirited and arbitrary, out here in the middle of all this land. No, you go right on walking through the crazy, rocky orchard any time you like.”
“Very kind of you, dear. I suppose if you’re up and about, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Where are you headed, anyway?” Mazie asked.
“That way.” The woman pointed up the road, the opposite direction from the one she had come, and began walking without another word.
Bottom photo is of Emma Rowena Gatewood, better known as Grandma Gatewood (October 25, 1887–June 4, 1973), an extreme hiker and ultra-light hiking pioneer who was the first woman to hike the 2,168-mile (3,489 km) Appalachian Trail from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine solo, and in one season.
Much has been thought, and written, and even researched about the nature of what we call “inspiration.” My Oxford online dictionary defines it as “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.” The second definition listed is: “the drawing in of breath; inhalation.” What a magnificent concept.
Most writers have various little rituals and incantations we perform in order awaken the Muse. Most of us also find that, however we may try, that crazy thing that we call inspiration, that deep inhalation of fresh, creative air, finds us at the most unexpected times. Never did I imagine that, recovering from a total hip replacement surgery, an image would pop into my head, and I would know that it was the foundation of my next novel.
Here, then, is the beginning of what I have tentatively entitled “The Rocky Orchard:”
“What a strange place to put an orchard,” Mazie thought to herself.” Mazie stood at the exact spot on the wrap-around porch — the one that covered two full sides of the old farm house – where she could see the farthest in three different directions. “I never could figure out why there.”
There was not all that much to see to her left, as the stone path leading from the porch door was steep enough that you had to stoop down just a tad to see the old dirt road at the path’s end. To her right sat the old shed, and the small, spring-fed lake her parents had dredged, and the wide expanse of field that abruptly ended at the edge of the thick woods. In the spring, if you listened very carefully, you could hear the little creek that lay just beyond the farthest edge of the field, at the very beginning of the trail into the woods. Full and ripe with the winter’s runoff, the freezing water tumbled over the rocks in rushing abandon. You could hear it, even from such a distance, before it began its languishing journey from bursting its muddy banks, to flowing in a steady and patient stream, to trickling in ever-shifting paths between the mossy stones, to its eventual disappearance in the flush of summer.
Where Mazie came from, it was a point of contention whether the proper way to say the word was “creek” or “crick.” Feelings ran strong about this. Weekend people, people who did not live there full-time – like Mazie’s family – generally said “creek;” locals said “crick.” But if you tried to say it like they did, to be nice when you were talking to them, they assumed you were making fun and immediately got quiet or mean. It made Mazie tired to think about.
I cannot predict the future, but I do know what will happen.
This morning, when I set out for my morning dog walk, my calendar told me that the date was November 10, 2018. The sunlight that shone through my window was vast. The air that hit me in the face when I opened my back door was not the bracing, invigorating air of late fall, the chill that brings a healthy rose to your cheeks and energizes your step. It was the unwanted, unwarranted, unexpected, entirely RUDE slap in the face of mid-winter. 21 degrees. I could sense the sun laughing at me. Hahaha, fooled you.
Here is what will happen.
One hundred nineteen hours from now (seven thousand one hundred forty minutes, four hundred twenty-eight thousand four hundred seconds), a man will hold a brutally sharp knife just above my skin. He will have marked the spot. Possibly with a Sharpie. He will slice my skin on a precisely drawn line, and he will watch as six or more inches of my skin separates into parts. Copious amounts of blood will spread from the split. People, ones who are not holding the knife, will have prepared for this. They will mop up the streams and rivulets with highly absorbent sponges.
The fall has lingered this year. It has taken its time, languorous and slothful in showing its colors, the trees refusing to let go of their flaming displays. But after a blustery rainstorm, many trees gave up all at once, raining a thick carpet onto the ground. When it dropped well below freezing last night — for the first time — another miracle. Trees and leaves can no longer cling to one another. Emblazoned leaves let go, one at a time, in a slow motion and silent shower. They spin, twirl, dawdle in their descent, and they come to rest among the thick carpet of their brethren.
Once the myriad tissues have been cut through or pulled to the side, the man will put down the knife. He will remove my femur from my acetabulum, or in simpler terms, he will dislocate my thigh bone from my hip socket. He will then take a bone saw and cut off the top portion of my femur – the largest bone in the human body. He will cut it entirely off.
Perhaps I can predict the future.
On the morning of November 10, 2018, I watch the leaves drift one at a time to their resting place on the newly-frozen ground. Their crunch underneath my feet, even as I walk along with my cane, is one of the glorious sounds on earth. My dog sniffs for the perfect place to plop down and roll back and forth in the leafy carpet.
When I walk among the leaves a year from now, I will not need a cane.
PUSHING THE RIVER releases one week from today! Here are some teaser quotes from the novel to whet your appetite.
“I have lived in the company of ghosts. I have known this for a long time – that I rattled around among specters and spirits and wraiths. But I also knew that they were, indeed, my company.”
“He shook her toe a few more times and then went over and sat down on his own side of the bed. It occurred to him that maybe if he got back under the covers and shut his eyes and then opened them up again, it might all be different.”
“When Jeff first left — fourteen years ago today – I could read without glasses, even the smallest print on the train boxes. When my hands reached up to dust those boxes, the craggy blue veins did not stand out starkly against my sallow hands. The skin did not pucker into fascinating, horrifying patterns.”
“She had a nearly overwhelming desire to lie down in the grass right then, halfway along the trail, right there, in the middle of the sculpture garden, and resolve to stay there, not move, not continue, until something changed.”
“I was a Natural Woman. I told my mother she had given me her last Toni home permanent, thank you very much, and gathered up my bras for a ritual burning.”
“There was something just a little goofy about him, the stoop of his shoulders, the enormity of his feet in the ultra-white gym shoes she later learned he had bought that day at Costco. A mortal after all.”
“Something old and very deep within Madeline felt a profound shame. She tamped down the instinct to apologize over and over, to do anything, to do everything, that might possibly make Dan feel better, want to stay, want to hold her, want her.”
“Alongside the shame and the blind anger, the most profound feeling of all was a wish that something, just one thing, could be simple. Clear. Easy. Known.”
“Even the wildly striped hair did nothing to dilute the impact of seeing a child – a very small, very young, very sad, and very scared child – standing there. A child who happened to be seven months pregnant.”
The one from the basement started it. He crawled up from his underground lair, from the smell of epoxy that he uses for projects, from the array of fluorescent vests that he wears to work. He took up residence on the stairs. Early in the morning, he was on the stairs. Late into the night, still on the stairs.
Others began to gather. I never knew where they came from. There would just be another voice, a conversation, coming from the stairs. Or I would come home, and have to step around and between others, bodies leaning this way and that as I made my way through their habitat.
I didn’t want to hear them, tried to not hear them; but they were on the stairs. There was really no escape.
Sometimes I would take a long walk go for coffee invent an errand visit a friend drive to the lakefront, all with the hope that when I returned, the stairs would be a dazzling open space — no residents. No clutter and detritus of citizens who had created their own fiefdom, on my stairs.
In the evenings, the sound of the citizenry would swell like a great ocean storm. Still, occasional single voices would ring out like a carillon bell, random snippets that made no sense and created ripples of unsettledness: “ …had to escape my marriage in the cover of darkness…” “…heard you can’t ever get rid of that smell, no matter what you do…” “No, no, that wasn’t the time I got shot; that was a…”
The voices stop, a crashing silence. A million eyes turn to me.
PUSHING THE RIVER — my third novel, set for release this October by Amika Press — currently lay in the trusty and capable hands of their graphic designer/production person Sarah Koz. If you are a writer yourself, and you are reading this, you know exactly what this means – that I am wandering around the various circles of Marketing Hell in a bleary daze, waffling between dutiful determination and dejected drudgery (and stooping to the lower depths of ill-advised alliteration).
How to bring the FUN back into writing – that has been the challenge I have posed to myself. And as I cast around with the beginning of the beginning stages of Writing a New Novel, I have been “trying out” various characters, almost in the same way a director might audition actors. Here follows a character who, out of the blue, inhabited me and began to tell his story:
First time I was over at Bert’s place, he yelled at me right through the screen door. “YO!” He yells, “come on IN.” Didn’t get up or nothing, just hollered. I was a little shook by that, to tell you the truth, cause all I could see was nothing – just like total blackness on the other side of the door, that’s how dark it was inside. I sort of followed the sounds, the music and rustling and all, down this hall til I could make out Bert like some dim faraway spirit.
Bert was sitting in the nicest chair, meaning the one whose stuffing was sprouting out of big gashes in both arms, and had seat cushion that didn’t even fit in the frame any more – that’s how caddywhompus and old and tore up it was; still, it was a damn sight better than any other place to sit in the room. Bert’s own dad, in fact, was sitting on the arm of what must have once been a couch. I figured it was his dad, because I knew Bert lived with him and because the guy on the arm of the chair was a lot older than anybody we hung around with. Anyway, Bert was sitting in the quote nicer chair, which I also thought was a little weird, because I mean, come on, it was his dad.
Once my eyes started to adjust to the near-darkness, I could make out that Bert was rolling a joint on his lap, using a greasy old magazine to hold his paraphernalia. I looked at his dad, and back at Bert, and Bert looked up for the first time and seemed to register that I was there, also for the first time, in the middle of this living room, I guess it was, while he was rolling a joint and shooting the shit with his dad.
“Oh, hey,” Bert said.
Man, I have never before felt like a stick-up-my-ass, stick-in-the-mud conventional, conservative prick, but I’m suddenly feeling all disapproving. Jesus, the one time my dad wanted to prove that he was as open-minded as the next guy, and to demonstrate it he was going to go get a marijuana cigarette that he’d been given by a friend ages before, and that he’d been keeping all of this time, and wouldn’t it be fun to get it right now, at Thanksgiving, and pass it around the table before dessert and coffee. I thought I was going to seriously lose my shit, partly because, needless to say, I was already high due to spending Thanksgiving with the fam in the first place. And when my aunt said, “Do we have to share the same one? I really think I’d like my own,” then, really, that’s just a Twilight Zone-type situation you can only hope comes to a swift and relatively painless end.
So, yeah, I’m feeling kinda judgy of Bert for taking the best chair in the room and for rolling a doob right in front of his old man and not thinking a thing of it, and also feeling pissed at myself for feeling judgy in the first place, and like of jeez, who knew, turns out I’m just a regular old middle-class honky white boy right along with the rest of them. So I’m kinda testy when I say to Bert, “I thought we were having a party here, man.”
“What do you think I’m doing here?” Bert says, holding up the doob, which is just about the size of one those small little cigars. “I’m getting ready!” He says this with some element of triumph. “Already mixed up the punch.” He gestures towards the fridge, which is, in fact, not very far behind him in this same room. “Grain alcohol and grape juice.” And he adds, with a giant ass smile, “Ohhhh, yeahhhhhh!”
