Roundhouse Stories:

I

In the town where I grew up, it seemed to rain all the time, It didn't, of course. Not really. there were days and days of bright sun, blue sky and fresh green. But the rain was important, if not exactly constant, and it seemed that it was this that bathed and brightened the sun, the sky and the green, green land. The town, my town, nestled in the "v" where two rivers met and backed up against the coastal mountains. At the height of the rainy season, the rivers would rise and flood. They covered the island pastures and the River Park, made islands of low hills and submerged the long gravel bar where we would fish. As a child, and then a young man, this transformation of the land awed and frightened me. Old Pat Gordon once told me that, in the thirties or forties, there had been such a flood that all the piers and bridges in town had washed away and Steadfast, the town across the bid river, had vanished overnight. Even when the waters subsided, it had taken weeks for things to dry out. "Soggytown," the children had called it then, and the name stuck. That's the way I thought of it, too. My town--Soggytown.

That's probably because of Pat. Pat Gordon was that magical character that nearly all small towns seem to possess--yarnspinner, historian, grandfather to everyone, guardian of the past. To my generation, it seemed he'd been in town forever. His youth, the years working the lunch counter at Finley's, his rise as a writer of children's books, his descent back into obscurity--these were the central elements of the local mythology. His books--adventures of the Rider Girls, the Be-Ready Boys, Red Harker & Major, and so many others--these were proudly displayed at the public library, on those rare occasions when they were not all in the hands of avid young readers. My favorites were the adventures of the Soggytown Gang--four boys constantly embroiled in unlikely adventure in a town so like my own.

That was Pat's place in my town, my childhood. He was a sure thing, like the rivers and the rain. And he loved us children as if we were all his own. In return, we gathered around him, listening to his stories of the past, of other times and other children. Hearing him speak was one of the greatest joys of my childhood. His voice was deep and soft, full of age and love and the wonder of creation. Pat was full of life, and overflowing with the past. Children would listen, but children grow. . .

I grew, and I left Soggytown, following family, college and finally a career to other towns. I found that there were other rivers and other places where the rain fell gently on green fields. I found other old men, full of history and love, but I never found another Soggytown, or another Pat. Then, after fifteen years of wandering in search of fortune, fortune called me back to where I had started. I took a new job in my old town. I came home.

Pat had aged--his hair was whiter, thinner, and his gait slower--but not nearly as much as I had feared. How old was he then? Nobody knows. His origins remain a mystery beyond a certain point. He outlived nearly all of his contemporaries, so there was no one alive at the time of his death who could say for sure just which year it was that he had ridden into town, a young hobo on a dead-end freight. But he must have been at least ninety when I returned to Soggytown, and I suspect that he was older. He died three years after my return, but not before we had rekindled our old friendship and affection. I was the oldest of his "children," the only one of my generation to stay in, or come back to, Soggytown. So it fell to me to look after him in his last year. In fact, it was a privilege I might have fought for. Most evenings, when my work at the University was done, I would walk the half mile to his little house--across the old footbridge laden with groceries and news of town. I'd spend the early evening there and he'd cook for us and tell me once again about the Firemen's Plot or how he had found the baby in the arms of the Hanging Tree--the only survivor of Steadfast. When an hour or two had passed, I'd take my leave and walk the long way--up the old mill spur and across the SP bridge--back home. Old Pat would work away at the past. "I've got a few more stories in me yet," he'd say, and he painfully tapped them out on a tired old Smith Corona. "If I don't write them down then nobody'll remember them. I figure maybe nobody else knows." This worried him more and more at the end, when it became clear that even he couldn't live forever. It was, increasingly, the thing we talked about--not the past itself, but how it seemed to be fading away. It was, I think, the only thing that had ever really scared Pat, this idea that his beloved Soggytown, and his beloved children, might be something other than immortal. The fear grew as his strength began to wane, and finally it all came to a head...

It was one of those late summer days--the last days of that last summer. Old Pat Gordon and I were sitting on the dock at Slaughter's, chewing on Red Man and the news of the world. The afternoon was fading into evening, but the moist, smoky air grew no cooler. Fitful breezes brushed languidly through the trees, curled up into dust devils in the lot, then collapsed, as if from overexertion, and were gone. We sat facing the setting sun, and talking, and spitting, slowly and deliberately. We might have been a pair or rustic ancients, not an aging writer and a university instructor young enough to have been his grandson. I had fallen completely into his rhythm, and he moved now only with the slow inevitability of the wind and the river. So we sat and thought, spoke and spat, always towards the setting sun. And as the sun sank lower we spent more and more time in thought. Silences grew and blossomed in the air between us, full but heavy, drooping.

Pat's voice struggled up. "I been thinking."

Just that. And then the evening's peculiar gravity seemed to drag him down again. I turned to face him, but he was still gazing at the setting sun. I watched him watching it and could see, over his shoulder, the last of the orange ball slip behind the black silhouette of the Peak. It became suddenly, noticeably darker and then the clouds lit up for one last encore in purple and red. A lame breeze dance haltingly, stop-start, around the dock, ruffling Pat's long, white hair as he finally turned to face me.

"I been wondering about all this." He waved vaguely in an arc that could have meant Slaughter's lot, or most of town this side of the river, or really almost anything.

I waited for more.

"Do you know what I mean?" He didn't wait for an answer. "This town. This land here. I've been here, seems like forever. But something..."

Darkness had come in the space of a long pause. On the corner of the building a light switched on, flickered and burned out. We laughed, sighed, rode the moment uncertainly. Out by the highway a streetlight began to glow pinkly.

"I'm getting old," Pat said. "Yeah. I'm getting old. But that's not all of it. Is it? You know what this town was like when you were a kid? Now hold on a minute!" No time even to respond. "I know things got to change, however little I may sometime like it. But listen to me. I don't hardly know this town anymore. There's something gone out of it."

He looked at me. "You know what I'm talking about." It was a question this time. "They're gonna lose all that, you know. Everything we had. It's just gonna get lost, replaced, bulldozed so they can widen a road. You're a teacher, aren't you? A writer? Can't you do something about that? I've written and written it, over and over again, but I'm afraid it's just gonna get lost. I'm afraid. Do you understand that?"

"Yes." It was all I could think to say. I'm not sure I did understand then, of course.

"Good." He looked at me. "I knew it. You'll remember. You'll pass it on. Right..?"

A silence, and then a flood. Was it something in my face that set his fear free? Suddenly it was loose, pouring from him, and he could only repeat, "You'll remember? Right? Promise me."

It didn't seem like much at the time. I promised.