Roundhouse Stories:

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II

In the years since Pat's death, I've thought often of his words. "You've got to tell the real story. You've got to keep it alive. Pass it on." I've tried to do it for him. For him and for myself. I write and hours pass and pages fill and I stop to see what I have wrought. I turn the pages, searching for the energy that's been drained out of me, but it's nowhere to be found. Gone. The characters, events are familiar, but only that. This is not it. This is just a story.

In the years since Pat's death, the pages have accumulated. Stacked up. I have boxes of them. Boxes of pages full of something, not Soggytown. Stories. Just stories. Dead words masquerade as the past. I wonder how to bring them to life. Bring life back into the past. That's what I promised. To keep it alive. Soggytown. Pass it on.

It's been ten years since Pat died. For ten years I've been writing. Trying to keep a promise. I wonder if I'm not a little crazy, writing and writing to keep a promise. a promise to a dead man. Writing to keep my word. I've written so much. So many lifeless words. I hate to see those boxes full of paper. I've put most of them up in the rafters, out in the garage.

What's missing? What's wrong with all the pages? I wrote it all down, just the way it was. The way it is inside. But writing's a kind of killing, I suppose. A stick-the-insect-with- the-pin kind of limiting of possibility. Inside me there's a Soggytown that's alive. Not really the way it was. Not really. But alive. How do I put life on the page? Not with these dead letters, squashed-ant specks and squiggles. Then how?

I promised. It ought to mean something when you give your word.

Ten years. I gather it all together. There are five boxes in the closet. Eight more in the garage. In the dining room, I open them up. Spread them out. Ten years of remembering in little piles on the floor. On the dining table. On chairs.

It's all here. Boys' Life: A Story of the Soggytown Gang. Twenty pages from a history of the Willamette Timber Railroad. A notebook full of memories. Thirty-two lines of the Roundhouse burning in iambic pentameter and the same conflagration in sixteen sonnets. A stack of historical vignettes, loosely grouped as "Roundhouse Stories." "The Widening"--nearly three hundred pages, set in the Parklands. "The Heroes' Picnic." And there is so much more. So many more approaches to the past. To the promise.

I leaf through the pages. read the words, some for the first time since they were written. Now and then there is a spark. I discover something I had forgotten. I move piles and pages, putting them together as they seem to fit. Floor to table. Chair to floor. The B-Movie Boys vs. HUAC with the railroad trestle haiku. Like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. "The Firemen's Plot: A Tragedy in Four Acts" with "Stormcrows: Animal Totemism in the Works of Patrick Adam Gordon." I arrange the piles. This stack goes here. This single sheet right here.

There are pieces missing. I head for the attic. Find four more boxes and a footlocker. Their contents swell this outpouring beyond the capacity of the dining room. Soggytown and the past spill into the kitchen.

A bag of marbles. A wooden slingshot. Photographs of boys and girls, with autographs. "Love, Polly." "Keep dreaming, Imp." "From all the B-Movie Boys. All the best." "Thanks for everything, Dick." A compass, with the Be-Ready logo imprinted on the back. And books, dozens of them. Rider Girls at the Races. The Railroad Drifters. Red Harker's Atom Train. To the Island Faraway. Be-Ready Rally. More Roundhouse Stories. There are so many books. So many words. Pat's words and Pat's world. How many children read these stories when they were alive? Alive..? That's the way it seems to me. Soggytown is dead, or dying. Forgotten. I told him I'd make them remember. Keep that world alive. I gave my word.

I put them into the picture. The books and other things. Mix them. move them. Rearrange. A Young Nurse at Sea with this pile here. "Fall Games" and Noddy over there. On that stool. Take that yo-yo, the wooden one. Put it in the kitchen, by the sink. Next to that stack of prose poems. Find the patterns. Mix and match.

From a clear spot on the floor, I survey my work. Books, paper, memories stretch as far as the eye can see. Farther. Around the corner, into the kitchen. So many words, memories, stories. My words, and Pat's. They surround me, an interconnected mass. I am in the midst of it. Of them. And I can't read them. I can't make sense of them all. A man's words ought to mean something.

Do you understand? Can you see the big picture? I know you're out there, looking in. And it's all laid out for you. What do you see from your vantage point? Pull the roof off my little house. Peer down from above, like a giant or a god. Reach down and take a page, a pile, a piece. A story. Take this story. Here. Take these memories. I promised. I gave my word. I give my words.

Go ahead. Take it. It's yours. Yours now. I'm passing it on.

Yours.

Your story.

It goes something like this. . .