A little flurry of concern flared up in the comments section yesterday over whether my story (or essay or whatever it is) Silver (q.v.) was autobiographical.
I suppose I started it myself, because after Yorkshire Pudding said, “How cruel of your father to get rid of Silver out of spite when you loved that horse so much and how wonderful you remember your mother’s laughter so vividly,” a sort of twinkle came into my eye and I replied, “[D]o you always assume that my writing is autobiographical? This piece is, of course, except for names that have been changed, but still I wonder, do you always assume it?” which caused no little consternation over at Hilltophomesteader’s house. She wrote, “I assumed you were talking about your own childhood. You will tell us if you’re making something up...won’t you?”
Let me put all fears to rest. Silver was autobiographical, but I did change some people’s names. Furthermore, I also hasten to assure Lord Pudding that I am real, Ellie is real, Jethro was real, and Canton, Georgia -- God help us all -- is real.
I do like what Thomas Wolfe said at the beginning of Look Homeward, Angel (which you can read in full online over at Project Gutenberg Australia):
TO THE READER
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical--that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than “Gulliver’s Travels”cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives--all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.
(end of excerpt from Look Homeward, Angel)
I trust that all hearts and minds are now clear and that we can continue as if nothing had happened.
Showing posts with label Silver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silver. Show all posts
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Friday, June 14, 2013
Silver
In the spring of my fourteenth year, my parents decided to give me a horse for my birthday, and after some searching my father eventually brought home a gentle fourteen-year-old mare that I named Silver after the Lone Ranger’s big white stallion even though she looked nothing like her famous namesake. She was a Pinto, a painted pony with big splotches of brown and white, and we kept her in a dilapidated structure that might have been red once, a multipurpose building that was part garage, part barn, part pigpen, and part henhouse. She shared it with a small, similarly splotched flock of chickens that included White Leghorns, Buff Orphingtons, Rhode Island Reds, and Black Dominicks; and she also shared it with Lady Henrietta, the pig I was raising to meet the personal project requirement in Mr. Ben Barber’s ninth grade vocational agriculture class and who later provided us with a delicious supply of ham, sausage, bacon, and pork chops, Lady Henrietta I mean, not Mr. Ben Barber.
All summer long I rode Silver around our pasture bareback, using only a bridle because my parents couldn’t afford to buy a saddle and stirrups, and I loved that horse more than any dog or cat that ever lived. She had about two acres in which to roam and graze; a third acre held a vegetable garden and all sorts of trees that old Mrs. Mason, the former owner, had planted: apple trees, pear trees, peach trees, cherry trees, plum trees, persimmon trees, mulberry trees, and there were also fig bushes, blackberry bushes, a grape arbor, two big oaks, two big elms, and another dilapidated and unpainted structure that housed Mama, Daddy, and me in its four small rooms. Between the house and the barn-garage-pigpen-henhouse sat an old Dodge pickup that had seen better days, rusting, with grass and weeds growing up all around it and, thanks to holes in the floorboard, into it as well. We didn’t have indoor plumbing; whenever Nature called, we had to walk down a well-worn path about fifty yards to an outhouse. Every drop of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing was obtained by lowering a bucket on a rope over a pulley into a well next to the back door and drawing it out by hand, every drop except what we gathered in pots and pans and jars and basins whenever an occasional rainstorm pounded on our corrugated tin roof and demanded to be let through. On the kitchen counter sat a bucket we drank out of using a long-handled ladle. There was no sink. On the counter next to the bucket sat two basins, a round metal one, white with a red rim, where Mama put soapy water for washing dishes, and a square one made of red plastic where she put clear water for rinsing. When the dishwashing was finished, we simply opened the screen door and threw the water into the back yard. We bathed in a number three tin tub that my father would set in the middle of the kitchen, spreading newspapers around on the floor to absorb any water that might slosh over the edge of the tub onto the ancient, cracked, nondescript linoleum. The water for the tub and also for the dishwashing had to be heated on an equally ancient wood-burning stove. We had a wooden icebox instead of an electric refrigerator like everybody else, and supplying it with blocks of ice every week and emptying the drain pan every day were a regular part of our routine. Even allowing for it being Texas in the nineteen fifties, it was a pretty primitive existence; I was the only kid I knew who lived this way.
Eventually we acquired a real refrigerator and an electric stove from the local Western Auto store, but Daddy never did put in plumbing. The shallow well went not dry but bad when a film of oil developed on the water, so it became my job two or three times each week to go through Silver’s pasture carrying a five-gallon bucket in each hand or sometimes pulling my old Red Flyer wagon with a large metal garbage can balanced on top, to a neighbor’s house about a quarter of a mile away, where my parents had been given permission by Florabelle Oxley, Jimmy Wayne’s mother, to get our water supply from a hose hooked to an outdoor spigot on the side of their house. Sometimes I would call to Silver, “Hey, girl,” whereupon she would stop grazing, look up, and neigh softly as if to say she understood completely the humiliation I felt, having to depend on others and living in substandard housing herself. Today, all these years later, when I turn on the sprinklers to water my azaleas I still think about pulling that red wagon across Silver’s pasture to the Oxleys’ house to get water; it’s hard to forget that Florabelle Oxley’s Poland China hogs lived better than we did.
In late autumn, when the “blue norther” cold fronts for which Texas is famous came roaring down the plains from the Panhandle and the weather turned wintry, Silver stayed in the barn most of the time eating hay. By the time spring arrived, when Mrs. Mason’s jonquils and violets and irises and God’s bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes splattered our yard with their colors, my father thought Silver might be a bit skittish since she hadn’t been ridden all winter. “I’m going to ride the damn horse first,” he said. Mama didn’t think it was a good idea, but Daddy was adamant, and since he wore the pants in the family, the decision was made. Whether it was Silver’s skittishness or the fact that my father was twice my weight I’ll never know, but as he swung himself up onto her back she bolted out of the barn door and began galloping across the pasture with my father holding on for dear life. At the far fence line she made a turn and headed back straight toward the plum tree where Mama and I were standing and staring in disbelief. Daddy was yelling “Whoa! Whoa!” and doing his best to get the horse to stop, but Silver, who apparently wore the pants in her family, kept running toward us. When she reached her destination, she deftly scraped my father off her back under a low-hanging branch of the plum tree, then stopped and began grazing calmly as though nothing had happened. Daddy lay on the ground, conscious but stunned, trying to comprehend what had just occurred. By this time Mama was laughing hysterically. “What the hell are you laughing at?” Daddy demanded, but Mama just kept on laughing. Picking himself up off the ground, Daddy dusted himself off, said, “You damn fool,” and slowly made his way back to the house. The doctor said Daddy had three cracked ribs and taped his chest up for a month, Daddy’s chest I mean, not the doctor’s. Before the tape came off, Silver had been sold, and even though I cried buckets the day they took her away, my father never bought another horse.
[Editor’s note. This post first appeared online as a reader-contributed short story at Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” website in 2006. In 2009 it became Chapter 3
of my online book and other blog, “Billy Ray Barnwell Here.”
The voice and writing style are Billy Ray Barnwell’s. --RWP]
All summer long I rode Silver around our pasture bareback, using only a bridle because my parents couldn’t afford to buy a saddle and stirrups, and I loved that horse more than any dog or cat that ever lived. She had about two acres in which to roam and graze; a third acre held a vegetable garden and all sorts of trees that old Mrs. Mason, the former owner, had planted: apple trees, pear trees, peach trees, cherry trees, plum trees, persimmon trees, mulberry trees, and there were also fig bushes, blackberry bushes, a grape arbor, two big oaks, two big elms, and another dilapidated and unpainted structure that housed Mama, Daddy, and me in its four small rooms. Between the house and the barn-garage-pigpen-henhouse sat an old Dodge pickup that had seen better days, rusting, with grass and weeds growing up all around it and, thanks to holes in the floorboard, into it as well. We didn’t have indoor plumbing; whenever Nature called, we had to walk down a well-worn path about fifty yards to an outhouse. Every drop of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing was obtained by lowering a bucket on a rope over a pulley into a well next to the back door and drawing it out by hand, every drop except what we gathered in pots and pans and jars and basins whenever an occasional rainstorm pounded on our corrugated tin roof and demanded to be let through. On the kitchen counter sat a bucket we drank out of using a long-handled ladle. There was no sink. On the counter next to the bucket sat two basins, a round metal one, white with a red rim, where Mama put soapy water for washing dishes, and a square one made of red plastic where she put clear water for rinsing. When the dishwashing was finished, we simply opened the screen door and threw the water into the back yard. We bathed in a number three tin tub that my father would set in the middle of the kitchen, spreading newspapers around on the floor to absorb any water that might slosh over the edge of the tub onto the ancient, cracked, nondescript linoleum. The water for the tub and also for the dishwashing had to be heated on an equally ancient wood-burning stove. We had a wooden icebox instead of an electric refrigerator like everybody else, and supplying it with blocks of ice every week and emptying the drain pan every day were a regular part of our routine. Even allowing for it being Texas in the nineteen fifties, it was a pretty primitive existence; I was the only kid I knew who lived this way.
Eventually we acquired a real refrigerator and an electric stove from the local Western Auto store, but Daddy never did put in plumbing. The shallow well went not dry but bad when a film of oil developed on the water, so it became my job two or three times each week to go through Silver’s pasture carrying a five-gallon bucket in each hand or sometimes pulling my old Red Flyer wagon with a large metal garbage can balanced on top, to a neighbor’s house about a quarter of a mile away, where my parents had been given permission by Florabelle Oxley, Jimmy Wayne’s mother, to get our water supply from a hose hooked to an outdoor spigot on the side of their house. Sometimes I would call to Silver, “Hey, girl,” whereupon she would stop grazing, look up, and neigh softly as if to say she understood completely the humiliation I felt, having to depend on others and living in substandard housing herself. Today, all these years later, when I turn on the sprinklers to water my azaleas I still think about pulling that red wagon across Silver’s pasture to the Oxleys’ house to get water; it’s hard to forget that Florabelle Oxley’s Poland China hogs lived better than we did.
In late autumn, when the “blue norther” cold fronts for which Texas is famous came roaring down the plains from the Panhandle and the weather turned wintry, Silver stayed in the barn most of the time eating hay. By the time spring arrived, when Mrs. Mason’s jonquils and violets and irises and God’s bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes splattered our yard with their colors, my father thought Silver might be a bit skittish since she hadn’t been ridden all winter. “I’m going to ride the damn horse first,” he said. Mama didn’t think it was a good idea, but Daddy was adamant, and since he wore the pants in the family, the decision was made. Whether it was Silver’s skittishness or the fact that my father was twice my weight I’ll never know, but as he swung himself up onto her back she bolted out of the barn door and began galloping across the pasture with my father holding on for dear life. At the far fence line she made a turn and headed back straight toward the plum tree where Mama and I were standing and staring in disbelief. Daddy was yelling “Whoa! Whoa!” and doing his best to get the horse to stop, but Silver, who apparently wore the pants in her family, kept running toward us. When she reached her destination, she deftly scraped my father off her back under a low-hanging branch of the plum tree, then stopped and began grazing calmly as though nothing had happened. Daddy lay on the ground, conscious but stunned, trying to comprehend what had just occurred. By this time Mama was laughing hysterically. “What the hell are you laughing at?” Daddy demanded, but Mama just kept on laughing. Picking himself up off the ground, Daddy dusted himself off, said, “You damn fool,” and slowly made his way back to the house. The doctor said Daddy had three cracked ribs and taped his chest up for a month, Daddy’s chest I mean, not the doctor’s. Before the tape came off, Silver had been sold, and even though I cried buckets the day they took her away, my father never bought another horse.
[Editor’s note. This post first appeared online as a reader-contributed short story at Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” website in 2006. In 2009 it became Chapter 3
of my online book and other blog, “Billy Ray Barnwell Here.”
The voice and writing style are Billy Ray Barnwell’s. --RWP]
Thursday, October 4, 2007
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again...
When I tried in yesterday's post to point you to two of my stories online, I must have done something wrong because all you get is "The page cannot be displayed." Undaunted, I shall now provide an alternate method for those among you who cannot imagine living another second without having read my stories. Simply (ha!) follow these steps:
1. Go to the website of A Prairie Home Companion; that is, type http://prairiehome.publicradio.org into the address line and click on Go.
2. Scroll down the APHC home page until you see "First Person: Share Your Stories From Home" on the right side of the page. Scroll past the titles of the currently offered story and poem until you see "Share your stories" and "Browse the ever-growing collection." Click the latter. (Warning: Clicking the former instead of the latter opens a window in which you can share your own story, so if you aren't prepared to do that, proceed with caution.)
3. When you browse the ever-growing collection, the currently offered story and poem are on the left side of the page and an archive list is on the right side of the page. My stories are in the archives. "Silver" (about a horse I used to have named Silver) is available by clicking September 2006. My story "Florabelle Oxley" (about a neighbor I used to have named something else altogether) is available by clicking June 2007. (Helpful hint: Depending on the size of your screen, clicking the archive reference may seem to bring up the same page you were on. If that happens, don't be confused; just scroll down until you see the entries for the month you picked listed by date.)
Maybe by the next time I want to put a link in a post, someone will have shown me how to do it correctly.
A thousand pardons. And again, happy reading.
1. Go to the website of A Prairie Home Companion; that is, type http://prairiehome.publicradio.org into the address line and click on Go.
2. Scroll down the APHC home page until you see "First Person: Share Your Stories From Home" on the right side of the page. Scroll past the titles of the currently offered story and poem until you see "Share your stories" and "Browse the ever-growing collection." Click the latter. (Warning: Clicking the former instead of the latter opens a window in which you can share your own story, so if you aren't prepared to do that, proceed with caution.)
3. When you browse the ever-growing collection, the currently offered story and poem are on the left side of the page and an archive list is on the right side of the page. My stories are in the archives. "Silver" (about a horse I used to have named Silver) is available by clicking September 2006. My story "Florabelle Oxley" (about a neighbor I used to have named something else altogether) is available by clicking June 2007. (Helpful hint: Depending on the size of your screen, clicking the archive reference may seem to bring up the same page you were on. If that happens, don't be confused; just scroll down until you see the entries for the month you picked listed by date.)
Maybe by the next time I want to put a link in a post, someone will have shown me how to do it correctly.
A thousand pardons. And again, happy reading.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Thanks, Big Dru, whoever you are
My blog has now been up for six days and I have received a total of three comments, all after my first post. Since that inital flurry, the silence has been deafening. One comment was from a friend, one was from a relative, and one was from someone called Big Dru. Since I don't know anyone called Big Dru, I googled the name and found 2,890 Big Drus in all. So his/her secret is still safe. It was a kind comment, so I'll quote it here: "Impressive! If your musings are as good as your stories published in the "Prairie Home Companion" website, we are in for a treat."
Thank you, dear sir or madam, for the kind words. So now I am forced (forced, I tell you) to be a tooter of my own horn and make the multitudinous readers of this blog (from my mouth to God's ear) aware of two stories of mine that were accepted by the kind folks in St. Paul, perhaps by the great Garrison Keillor himself. The first is Silver and the second is Florabelle Oxley.
Happy reading.
Thank you, dear sir or madam, for the kind words. So now I am forced (forced, I tell you) to be a tooter of my own horn and make the multitudinous readers of this blog (from my mouth to God's ear) aware of two stories of mine that were accepted by the kind folks in St. Paul, perhaps by the great Garrison Keillor himself. The first is Silver and the second is Florabelle Oxley.
Happy reading.
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