At one time I had decided to leave those photographs to be found, to let them tell the story of the woman who had carried them with her for much of her life. Then I spent days with Raphael remembering his friends, and evenings with Tom Hardin in his woodshop, and I came to understand that I might leave behind something better than photographs. I came to understand that I, Miss Camilla Perkins of the plain countenance and unlived life, had a story worth telling, embellishing, debating, distorting, denying, leaving behind. “The Old Maid’s Version of What Happened to Her Randy Old Man’s Pictures”—I should like to hear it told, ten years after I am dead, layered over the multiple stories surrounding those photographed lives. “I never knew a fact that couldn’t be improved with a little exaggeration”—I hear Tom Hardin speaking across time.
So I have destroyed all the pictures but this one. In destroying them I began, so late, to forgive my mother and father. I began to forgive myself. In place of photographs I am leaving behind my story of learning too late to forgive Tom Hardin, the world, myself.
Remember me, remember me—this is my story, that I am writing down for you. “Life is the little that is left over from dying”—is it Mr. Whitman who writes this? In my writing it he lives anew, and in my teaching it to my children, for that is how I think of all those students over all those years.
I taught this to all the Hardin children: Joe Ray, Barbara, Leslie, Robert, Clark, Bette C., Raphael. They may, perhaps, remember what I taught from love. Through love—the way that has been given to me—I will have entered the chain of being.
I taught these words, and though I have taken too long and known too much death before I learned them, I have learned them, learned this much. I write as someone who for too many years has lived very carefully indeed; I know whereof I speak. Given that it is impossible to live a life carefully enough, surely the best course is not to live it carefully at all.
Writing here amid the dead, I am struck by the memory of some remembered fairy tale, in which a parade of barbers saw the emperor’s goat’s ears and spoke aloud their curious questions and promptly lost their heads. Then a barber arrived, more clever than his unfortunate predecessors. He saw the emperor’s hairy ears as clearly as anyone but held his tongue. He cut the emperor’s hair, received his fee, and was invited to cut the emperor’s hair another day and another. He was established in the capital in luxury.
After some years the burden of knowing became too great, and the barber went to the country, where he dug a hole, spoke his secret aloud to the earth, and relieved his conscience. Freed from his burden, he returned to the city to cut the emperor’s hair again, to drink more wine, make love to more women (or maybe men—I think of Raphael here).
The following spring a reed grew from the hole the barber had dug. A shepherd cut the reed and shaped it into a pipe, which when played spoke aloud to the town the secret that all had known but no one had dared acknowledge—“The emperor has goat’s ears!” With the secret spoken aloud, the town rose up, deposed the tyrannical emperor, and replaced him with the benevolent barber.
You are the dark and fertile earth, into whom I have whispered these stories.
Afterword
Scissors deepens and amplifies my engagement, begun in my first novel, Crossing the River, with the nature of families—the families we are given by fate and the families we choose. Dennis, the responsible parent, says to childless Andrew, “You might like your friends, but you don’t have kids you’re taking care of.” In response to this observation Raphael Hardin, the gay HIV-positive son, snaps, “Instead I’m taking care of friends who are dying. A lot of them a thousand miles from parents or brothers or sisters who could care less.” Which family is of greater consequence: the blood relations or the affinities of the heart?
In the mid-1980s, midway through writing Scissors, Paper, Rock, I realized that no gay character living in San Francisco in the 1980s could occupy the page without engaging the catastrophe of AIDS. I thought then—and I think now—that the greatest separation between persons arises not from race, gender, sexual identity, or even economic class but from the gulf that separates the healthy and the sick. I agonized as to whether I, an HIV-negative man, could conscionably write from the point of view of a character—Raphael Hardin—who knew in the most intimate way what it was to live with foreknowledge of an especially prolonged and brutal death, as the immune system deteriorated one T-cell at a time until the body became a petri dish for opportunistic infections. In the end I gave the manuscript to my partner, already ill, and asked for his frank opinion: Had I successfully imagined his life, his world? With his endorsement, I published the book you hold. It was the last book he read in its entirety. Four months later he was dead.
Astute readers have noted that the family tombstone includes the names of children whose stories are not told. Those stories live in my heart but are still, decades later, too intimate to see print. Those same readers have asked for the story of Nick, the tobacco farmer who appears at the family gathering and with whom Raphael makes love in the ancient apple orchard. Nick is the central character of a published story titled “Bad Habits,” but in Scissors I wanted to focus on the immediate members of the Hardin family and Miss Camilla, their next-door neighbor. No matter where I placed Nick’s story it felt like a digression—an outsider’s intrusion into the family—and I did not want him to be a digression. The interested reader can find the published version of “Bad Habits” on my web page.
Scissors broke ground in subtle but notable ways. To my knowledge it is the first work of literary consequence to portray the intrusion of AIDS into a rural landscape. I have the remarkable Sisters of Loretto to thank for this inspiration. In the mid-1980s, when people spoke of AIDS in hushed voices, the Sisters constructed an AIDS memorial on the grounds of their motherhouse in rural Kentucky, honoring local men who had died of the disease. If they can do it, I can do it, I thought, and resolved to follow their courageous footsteps.
Published in 1993, Scissors was also among the first books in a late-twentieth-century revival of a tradition as ancient as the Gospels or Boccaccio and as American as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, even if at the time it was seen as carving new territory: a novel composed of interconnected and interdependent stories, unified not by a dominant narrative line but by tones and themes. The form has never entirely disappeared, but Louise Erdrich’s superb Love Medicine (1983) paved the way for its revitalization and served as my inspiration.
I light a candle of homage at the altar of the early James Joyce. I make no claims to be other than a devotee, but for anyone seeking to teach herself or himself how to write, I note that in writing the long central chapter of Scissors, I taught myself the intricate choreography of crowd scenes by propping open Joyce’s Dubliners to its greatest story, “The Dead,” and studying sentence by sentence how Joyce accomplished in fiction what choreographer George Balanchine accomplished on stage: the art of keeping attention focused on central characters and actions while secondary characters/dancers swirl about them and occasionally sweep them up.
The Hardin family picnic’s setting is divided—as our mythologies divide the afterlife, as Joyce divides “The Dead”—into three distinct worlds: upper, middle, and lower. Joyce sets his primary action in the middle world, with the other worlds suggested mostly through sound—by the noise of dancing (upstairs) or the clink of cutlery (from the kitchen below). In Scissors, the music emanates from the outer reaches of the yard, the cooking noises from the kitchen inside the house. Joyce’s Irish holiday spread is more lavish than the summer fare of the Hardins—Joyce grew up in a culture that better appreciated food—but his description is, well, mouth-watering and worthy of imitation. And in writing as in life, we learn through imitation, the sincerest form of flattery.
Scissors taught me—is this not why we write, why we read?—that the writing is wiser than I. My characters, and at times my narrative voice, made observations that had never occurred to me before their writing. In t
he opening chapter, “High Bridge,” Tom Hardin chooses to remain holed up in his woodworking shop rather than apologize to his wife for leaving her alone and pregnant while he goes hunting. After he returns, Miss Camilla violates his sanctuary to tell him, “One way to know evil is that those who do it hide from what they have done. You are hiding, here, from what you have done.” Across the years I have perceived the truth of her observation over and over (consider American foreign policy!), though when I wrote those lines of dialogue I was only searching, as every fiction writer searches, for the right words at the right time from the right character’s mouth. When Joe Ray identifies memory as “the third agony” and says that the “best thing about memory is that it forgets,” he gives voice to a profound truth that I have quoted many times since; though it is important to note that I am quoting not Fenton Johnson but Joe Ray Hardin, who like all children are of their parents even as they have lives and minds and memories of their own.
I have imagined that, for family and friends, reading Scissors is like entering a fun house of mirrors—they see something or someone they think they recognize, only noticing the broken shards and distortions on closer inspection. But from the first, Miss Camilla insisted on speaking in the first person. I tried squeezing her round peg into the square hole of third person, since every other chapter was in third person and that seemed consistent and appropriate, but she was having none of it. Finally I let her have her moment at center stage, as she had so richly earned: the spinster, the outsider, the watcher next door. She is the book’s only genuinely autobiographical character: always and everywhere I have been the outsider, watching from the corner of the room or from next door.
As I write this afterword, more than two decades after the book’s first publication, I am seized with an uneasy sense of déjà vu—an epidemic virus that causes cancer, spread through means that include but may not be limited to sex? I might have written that sentence in 1984 about what later came to be called HIV—human immunodeficiency virus—except that this is 2015 and the acronym has changed its central letter—it’s now HPV, and the angel who passed over my door in the 1980s has chosen to knock.
I write with a picc (“peripherally inserted central catheter”) line in my right arm, used for delivering chemotherapy and saline fluids during the course of treatment for cancer caused by HPV, human papilloma virus, now understood to be the cause of most cancers of the body’s openings—mouth, throat, cervix, anus. The treatments have been brutal, their outcome uncertain—success in 50, 66, or 80 percent of cases, depending on which doctor I listen to. I find myself not exactly in the position of Raphael, the HIV-positive son: at the time of the writing of Scissors, a diagnosis of AIDS was a death sentence, whereas I have odds to play. All the same, I am living with doctor visits, infusions, painful and debilitating side effects, violations of the body to uncertain ends, and the moment-by-moment understanding of mortality.
In the 1980s we had a cohort of vocal, angry activists who demanded the nation’s attention and got results. Far from condemning those who shouted down Health and Human Services secretary Louis Sullivan when he spoke at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, or those who blocked the Golden Gate Bridge, or who interrupted mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, we should be issuing commemorative stamps and assembling those leaders still alive to receive Congressional Medals of Honor. They drew attention to a worldwide plague that was well established even as it was assiduously ignored by mainstream institutions. AIDS would inarguably have claimed millions more lives worldwide—straight and gay, women, men, and children of all races and creeds and nationalities—had those brave souls not acted up, had they not fought back.
I did not sit with those activists at the Moscone Convention Center. I did not help block the Golden Gate Bridge, though I was living in San Francisco at the time and could have joined either action. Instead I was at home, writing about the dying and the dead, about community and how we build it, about the families that we are given and the families we choose; instead I was writing Scissors, Paper, Rock. I leave to you the assessment of that choice.
We are all mortal on this fierce and fearsome Earth. How merciful are the ways and means of life, including most especially death! The writing of Scissors, and the suffering and deaths of many friends and family, taught me that death is the mother of beauty, to invoke Wallace Stevens’s most memorable line, and that if we open our hearts to its lessons, suffering will teach us how to love.
I thank the members of my family who have so patiently accepted my occasional cadging of details from their lives and borne readers’ assumptions, however mistaken, that I modeled the Hardin brothers and sisters on them, when in fact each is a fictionalized version of me. I thank the University Press of Kentucky for bringing this novel and its predecessor back into print. Like all my books, it represents an effort to teach myself how to love and, through writing, to convey what I have learned to others; for teaching and learning are the most erotic of acts.
Fenton Johnson
Acknowledgments
I wrote these stories and chapters with the generous support of the following fellowships and awards:
A Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction from the Stanford University Program in Creative Writing; a fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, given to a California writer by the San Francisco Foundation; the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Prize, given by the Henfield Foundation; and a Nelson Algren Fiction Competition award, given by the Chicago Tribune.
For providing me quiet time in which to work, I thank the MacDowell Colony and its astoundingly wonderful staff, as well as Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts.
I thank Professor John L’Heureux for his invaluable guidance on earlier drafts of several of these stories and for his years of support and encouragement. Heartfelt thanks for their advice and patient listening to Larry Rose, Haney Armstrong, Bill Bradley, Melanie Beene, and Doug Foster; for their love and generosity, my patrons and friends Fred and Kathy Rose; for their hard work and suggestions, my agent Malaga Baldi and my editor Jane Rosenman; and for his long-standing hospitality Dr. J. Michael O’Neal.
No book is written in a vacuum, and it would be impossible to name the writers and people, past and present, whose intelligence has informed what is good in this work. But I take pleasure in acknowledging my debts to Wendell Berry, Anton Chekhov, Paul Gauguin, and James Joyce.
KENTUCKY VOICES
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New Covenant Bound
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Next Door to the Dead: Poems
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Driving with the Dead: Poems
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Upheaval: Stories
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Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
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Crossing the River: A Novel
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The Man Who Loved Birds: A Novel
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Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel
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Many-Storied House: Poems
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With a Hammer for My Heart: A Novel
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Famous People I Have Known
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The Land We Dreamed: Poems
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At The Breakers: A Novel
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Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel
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Nothing Like an Ocean: Stories
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Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York
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When Winter Come: The Ascension of York
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The Cave
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