Backland Graces; Four Short Novels

by Hal Zina Bennett

  Backland Graces: Four Short Novels

  Other Books by Hal Zina Bennett

  Spirit Circle (novel)

  Write From the Heart

  The Lens of Perception

  Spirit Animals & the Wheel of Life

  White Mountain Blues (novel)

  Spirit Guides

  Zuni Fetishes

  BACKLAND GRACES

  Hal Zina Bennett

  Tenacity Press

  The characters in these stories are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental. Whatever stories, characters, or situations remind readers of real situations in their own lives is simply the result of the author’s efforts to articulate universal meaning about the human condition. As noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden for all else and unmistakably meant for his ear…”

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without the expressed permission of the author. You may, however, use short quotations for reviews or scholarly works.

  Request information 800-738-6721.

  Copyright © 2012 by Hal Zina Bennett

  Kindle Edition

  TENACITY PRESS

  For Nathan

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Story 1. Swimming Lessons

  Story 2. Throwaways

  Story 3. The Rapture

  Story 4. Congratulations on

  Your Recent Death

  About the Author

  Life veils the greatest truths

  Of our lives. Through our stories

  We can rediscover them.

  Introduction

  Washington Irving once said of his own works, “I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.” For me writing fiction is like that because life is like that. We never know exactly how much to believe of our own stories. We create self-mythologies, tales that at least in our own minds explain what our lives are about. It is not so much that we fully believe these stories, or even that our lives are really shaped by the events we describe in them. But we cling to these mythologies of ourselves to provide meaning and purpose or to give form to those parts of our lives that bewilder us.

  While each of these stories stands alone, it was my intent that the reader would easily imagine the characters’ lives intermingling, all members of the same community. I like to think that the characters in real life might recognize each other on the street, might even know each other on a first name basis. And like most people living in hardscrabble communities, they do what they must to scrape out a living. Because the opportunities are limited—everything from tending bar to woodcutting and teaching school—most know what it is to live on the edge.

  My characters live in a place I call Deer Lake. It is a fictional community though inspired by places where I’ve lived. There’s the lake, after which the village is named, surrounded by a ring of mountain wilderness including thousands of acres of flat delta lands to the east, where a half-dozen family farms grow grains, nuts, and fruits. The lake itself is small but three private campgrounds bring in fishing enthusiasts and sunbathers three months out of the year. This pretty much describes the narrow limits of the economic base of the community and plays a major role in shaping the mythologies of those who live here.

  Sometimes the mythologies of the characters are obvious, as in the protagonist’s story of surviving a drowning, described in “Swimming Lessons.” Sometimes the self-mythologies are more obscure, as in Sarah’s fantasies of her father—or the lack of them—in “Throwaways.” And sometimes the entire story itself is the intended mythology, as in “The Rapture,” an exploration of religion gone bad in the lives of three people. In “Congratulations on Your Recent Death” two young men immerse themselves in the mystery of death and society’s efforts to regulate and sanitize how we honor the passing of our ancestors.

  The characters in this book are a raw lot. They live close to the bone, with few aspirations or illusions to coax them through hard times. They appeal to me because hidden in their roughness is their immutable humanness, rising to the surface in unexpected moments, as if this very humanness had a life of its own, separate from the body and personality hosting it.

  Like the stories we all tell about own lives, my characters’ stories are filled with contradictions. I read them, think about the real people in the world from which they were drawn, and I do not know quite what to trust. Like Washington Irving, I am at a loss to know how much to believe in their stories, how much to trust what I have invented in the telling. And how much to believe of my stories about myself.

  A friend suggested that maybe we have to learn to trust all of it, that we are both our mythologies and the real events of our lives. I’m certainly not the first to observe that truth is best revealed in fiction when we are willing to suspend our sense of disbelief. Only then can we accept the veiled realities of the personal mythologies that give our lives form and meaning. Truth and beauty are always right there underfoot, like Brer Rabbit’s briar patch, promising thorny safety and reprieve from self-doubt if only we can find the courage to jump. ~ HZB 2012

  Swimming Lessons

  The gray, weather-beaten cabin slouched at the edge of the cliff, thirty feet above the lake. Each time Rocko passed it in his truck it reminded him of a drunken beggar that he once saw in the city, a man standing at the foot of some wide stairs screaming at a priest who stood placidly in the doorway several steps above him. Rocko had been young, passing quickly on a bus, so the impression that stuck in his memory was not that the beggar was assaulting the priest but that he was praying to some dark and angry god. The priest did not know because his gods were different. There was no way to know the truth.

  But Rocko had grown to hate this crude, decaying cabin which clung precariously to the side of the cliff, its broken windows stuffed with crumpled newspaper and the roof covered with a blue tarp that the sun had shredded, leaving frayed tendrils fluttering in the wind. No larger than a single-car garage, the cabin stood on spindly stilts cut more than sixty years before from tall pines that once lined the shore.

  Sitting in his dark green Department of Fish and Game truck, parked on the road twenty feet above the cabin, Rocko looked down the steep hillside, watching a trickle of raw sewage oozing from the black PVC pipe a recent dirt slide had uncovered. Truth was, he’d suspected the pipe was there for months, having spotted algae blooming on Cutter’s beach while patrolling in his boat.

  Pressing the soft rubber eyepieces of his binoculars to his face, he trained them on the edge of the shore where even as he watched a stream of frothy effluent erupted from the pipe. The brackish bilge increased in volume, continuing to pour out for ten minutes or more before it stopped. The water around the pipe was thick and murky, clouded with greasy-looking algae, unlike the rest of the lake, which was always deep blue and clear.

  Deer Lake was spring-fed and because of its relatively independent natural source, its waters stayed pure, unaffected by the increasingly polluted waterways and lakes in the surrounding area. When Rocko was a boy, his grandparents had owned the Deer Lake Lodge which back then was the only commercial property within twenty-three miles. Grandfather had always pumped water from the lake for bathing and washing dishes. Drinking water came from a spring halfway up the side of the mountain, held in a large redwood pressure tank. He gauged the number of guests he’d take in by what the water would support. Back then, there were only two rooms for rent in the lodge and six spacious tent sites chopped from the landscape, with privacy walls of blackbe
rry vines and scrub oak.

  The La Mortacinos, who purchased the lodge sixteen years later, had a very different approach. They took in twelve year-round tenants, big fifth wheel trailers and shiny aluminum Airstreams with air conditioners and satellite dishes on their roofs. Rocko tried to avoid looking at what the lodge had become, knowing it was probably necessitated by what the new owners had paid his grandparents for the place--seven-hundred and fifty thousand dollars, most of it borrowed from the bank. It had to be a strain to meet a mortgage like that, though unarguably it was a happy retirement bundle for Rocko’s grandparents. They had a new life now in Winnemucca, Nevada where the old man bought into a motorcycle repair shop.

  Rocko had gone to live with his grandparents at the lodge when he was seven, after his father disappeared and his mother took up with a Canadian truck driver who talked her into going north, but not with the kid. Looking back on it twenty years later, Rocko realized that his parents’ abandonment of him had been the first of several hidden blessings in his life, for it opened new doors for him at the lake. Even so, he still sometimes grappled with the barbed mysteries of his parents’ disappearance. His wife Angelina said it scrambled his best judgment when he got to thinking about it too much, causing his wild days. When he went off to work like that, she worried he might commit some kind of violent act that would lose him his job and maybe even get him jailed. Surprisingly, he never turned his rage against her and had the presence of mind to channel it in ways that so far had passed as serving the law. On his best days, when Rocko thought about his parents, he felt grateful for their indifference to him. Whatever their other shortcomings might have been, they’d had the good sense to recognize they were unfit to raise a child.

  Rocko had one great passion in life--the lake. He loved it above all else, even above his own life and his love for his wife Angelina. The lake had, after all, provided comfort and solace at a sad and conflicted time in his boyhood. It had been his mother, not in the way the local Indians spoke of the ground under their feet as Mother Earth but in a way that he believed was much more real and unsentimentalized. As a boy he would sneak from his room late at night, particularly during the bright evenings when the sky was clear and the moon and stars glazed the limbs of the pine trees outside his window. He’d go down and squat on the beach, gazing out over the waves which, like the facets of diamonds, caught the light from the night sky and shot it back at him. He imagined the lake spoke to him through the lights that danced on the waves. The waves carried a secret code that he longed to understand. He knew the lake acknowledged his presence and that he could trust her in ways he could never trust people.

  As much as he loved the lake, loved it in the way he’d never loved or even cared for the mother who’d abandoned him, he never forgot that it had once almost claimed his life. He was ten or so at the time and hadn’t yet learned to swim. He’d been alone, wading in the shallows just a hundred yards from the lodge, catching minnows to use as bait, which he held captive in a mayonnaise jar. He’d done this dozens of times before without incident.

  He never quite understood what happened except that his feet were knocked out from under him by a great force whose power literally stunned him. Then something slimy and muscular wrapped around his wrist and he was pulled out toward the center of the lake at a dizzying speed. He screamed, kicking and thrashing to escape whatever it was that was dragging him, but he could not strike a blow or get the thing to release him.

  Just as suddenly as he’d been struck, he was free, no longer held by the thing, but he was by no means out of harm’s way. He beat the water, flailing his arms, gulping for air, as he sank, then rose and sank again, swallowing water, feeling it filling his lungs. As he remembered it, total darkness enveloped him and he stopped struggling. He felt safe and warm, without fear, without concern of any kind. He dreamed he was a giant sea turtle. He’d seen pictures of them in National Geographic at the one-room school he attended. He watched the bottom of the lake rising up to meet him and heard a popping sound, then a buzzing. These weren’t unpleasant sounds at all. Perhaps they were words in the secret language of sea turtles, maybe even songs they sang to each other under water.

  The next he knew he was in his bed at home, in the tiny knotty pine paneled room his grandparents had provided for him. He lay on the bed naked, as rigid as a log and shivering from the cold. When he tried to turn, he couldn’t move. He felt sick to his stomach, tried to call out but when he did a great rush of water spouted from his mouth and nose. It came silently and fast, maybe gallons of water erupting from every orifice, soaking the bed. He was frightened, not so much of the water coming out of him as what his grandmother might say when she found the bed soaked like that.

  After all the water went out of him, he heard voices in the next room. He opened the door a crack and looked out into the living room where two strangers and his grandparents sat talking. One of the strangers, a thin, athletic man, was barefoot and without a shirt. He wore jeans which were soaking wet. The other fishermen, the one with dry clothes, was telling Rocko’s grandparents how they’d seen the boy way out in the center of the lake, flailing about. At first they thought he was just horsing around, like kids will. But as they watched, it became clear that wasn’t the case at all. The kid was drowning.

  They’d rowed hard but by the time they got to him he’d gone down for the fifth or sixth time and didn’t come up. The wet fisherman told how he’d stripped down, diving into the freezing cold water. Apparently they were right over a spring. The man swam back to the surface several times to gain some breath and dive again. Then at last he’d seen the boy’s lifeless body resting on the bottom of the lake, buck naked and curled up like he was taking a nap. The rescuer had grabbed one arm and pulled the boy’s lifeless form to the surface.

  At first Rocko didn’t understand they were talking about him. He felt sad for the drowned boy. His grandfather told the fisherman, “Don’t blame yourselves. You done what you could. Nobody could have done nothin’ more. God’s will.”

  “God’s will,” his grandmother echoed, and this was echoed by the fishermen in turn.

  The fishermen mumbled something Rocko couldn’t understand and then his grandfather walked with them to the door, thanking them for their efforts and telling them again and again how they’d done what they could and shouldn’t blame themselves.

  Until that moment, Rocko had not paid much attention to his grandmother. Now he saw that she had her face in her hands and was sobbing. He felt terrible. What had he done? He had never seen her or anybody else sob as she was sobbing and it set something off in him. The next he knew he was crying, too, running out to her, flinging his arms around her, hugging her, telling her not to cry.

  The rest was confusing. Even thirty-four years later he could not put together his memories in a way that made any sense. His grandmother was pushing him away, screaming, and then his grandfather was yelling at both of them to stop and then whipping off his leather belt and dragging Rocko back into the bedroom. The leather belt came down on his naked backsides again and again, until he wished he could be a sea turtle forever, resting on the bottom of the lake and immune to any kind of punishment. When his grandfather finally stopped, the old man was gasping for air.

  “Praise God,” Grandpa said. “I don’t know what miracle and blessing brought you back to us but you are a very foolish and very lucky boy.” He then lectured Rocko about all the warnings he’d been given about swimming without supervision, and how this should stand as a lesson for his entire life, to always heed what adults told him.

  Rocko never dared tell his grandfather about what really happened, about the slimy, muscular thing that had taken him out into the deep water. He did not tell him about how blissful it was to stop struggling and become a sea turtle, content to drift down and down, gently settling at the bottom of the lake. He did not tell him about the darkness, the nothingness after that and how he was certain, even at nine years of age, that he would never be afraid again.


  When he learned more about drowning during his training for Fish and Game, he questioned if any of this could have happened. Could a boy survive such an experience? Maybe in freezing water, the instructor explained, because a person’s metabolism slowed way down. But it was unlikely. The science of it didn’t matter to Rocko. He needed to trust his memory of what happened that day. It was right enough. He wouldn’t change his truth.

  From Cutter’s cabin came the sound of a toilet flushing. Rocko pressed the binoculars to his eyes just in time to watch several good-sized turds spill from the PVC pipe down at the water’s edge. That was it. That was all the evidence he required. With the stub of a pencil Rocko jotted down notes in a small spiral notebook, stuck the pencil inside the coil and tucked it back into his shirt pocket. He heard a door slam and then watched Cutter trudging up the path through the woods toward the road and Rocko’s waiting truck. Halfway to the top, Cutter spotted him, looked up and grinned, then waved casually to Rocko. They were not, after all, strangers, living less than a mile and a half apart, maybe half a mile as the crow flies.

  As Cutter came up to the edge of the road and approached the truck, Rocko leaned over and swung open the passenger’s door.

  “What’s up, Cap’n,” Cutter said, greeting him with a cheerful tone, as he always did, with an edge of mock respect that never quite hid his contempt for anyone who even pretended to possess some authority.

  “Get in,” Rocko barked, making no effort to hide his irritation.

  Cutter squinted, making two narrow slits through which Rocko would have to judge his intent. Cutter started to ask something, managed only a grunt, then climbed into the truck, hanging one leg out the door, signaling Rocko to expect some resistance.