I glanced at the mirror once before I fell asleep, just to check. The glass only reflected the trailer around me. Zeffirelli’s trailer. Mine, for the night.
A few hours later, barely awake, I stumbled into the passenger seat of Zeffirelli’s truck, closed the door behind me. We pulled out first, before I even had my seatbelt fastened, and moved at a crawl up the road, letting the other trucks and trailers fall in behind us. Zeffirelli kept checking his rearview mirror, and only when he was sure everyone was in place did he put his foot on the gas.
The engine roared loudly.
I watch the outskirts of the little town spool by, waiting. Everything looked different from inside the truck. Smaller, somehow. Grey, like it might start to rain at any moment.
And then we were passing open fields, rows of corn, hay as high as a boy’s thighs, all blowing in a slight breeze.
To my right, there was a small cream house, set back from the road by a vegetable garden, a motorcycle in the driveway. And just past that, more fields, hay again, but pasture this time, a dozen cows ambling toward the barn, herded by a young boy with messy brown hair and dirty jeans, shooing them along with a switch.
The boy looked up at the caravan as we passed, and I raised my hand to him through the glass, but I don’t think he saw.
And then we were past, and he was gone.
Some Notes on Stories, Short and Otherwise
The stories in this collection span about three decades, which, truth be told, is something of an alarming thought. The oldest were written about twenty-five years ago (an odd thing, that, considering, in my head, I’ve just turned twenty-five myself), while the most recent was finished about a month ago.
Because I consider myself primarily a novelist, I was surprised to find, when I started pulling this book together, that I actually had quite a stack of stories to decide between for inclusion. This, however, isn’t an exhaustive collection, and that’s my fault. And all because of a poem.
The title for the book, and its form (however rough), comes from the old English counting rhyme. People have been counting crows (or magpies) for hundreds of years now, and there are a number of variations, but all of the rhymes follow a general structure. The version that has guided me is:
One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
Four for a birth
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret
Never to be told
The idea of secrets, never to be told, stuck with me. Crows. Secrets. Stories.
Seven Crow Stories.
With that in mind, and as a guiding principle, I knew what the collection would look like: seven stories.
As a result, there are a number of stories that aren’t here. And it’s not just a matter of space. I sought, through the selection process, to avoid undue repetition of themes (hence no “Fiddler’s Green,” no “The Ones He Used to Know”), and there are stories that just didn’t fit, for one reason or another (“Coming To Land”). And there are stories that started out as stories and ended up as . . . something else.
I am not, by nature, a short-story writer. I approach a story in exactly the same way I approach a novel, which is a path fraught with peril. “Peril” in this case referring to the fact that, fairly often, pieces which I thought would be short stories turn into novels, as happened with The Fallow Heart, which started out as a novella a couple of decades ago and is currently a sprawling manuscript, more than novel length, spread out etherized on my revision table. Similarly, a couple of years ago I started writing a novella which has, somehow, turned into a trilogy, in progress. So it goes.
Most of the time, I can tell, even in its germinal state, whether an idea is going to turn into a story or a novel. It’s pretty straightforward: stories don’t stay. Like most novelists (I think), I can carry a notion for a novel with me for weeks, years if need be, niggling at the back of my head, accruing weight, until it becomes an irresistible force.
Ideas for stories aren’t like that. Generally, if I have an idea for a story, I need to leap on it right away, or it disappears. I need to write it within about seventy-two hours, or it dissipates, back into the vapours. Jotting down the concept isn’t enough; if I don’t get to it right away, it’s gone, and any notes I might have made are inert, lacking the primal force that drives the pen. I don’t know why it works like that, but it does. And I’m glad. That’s how I knew there was more to “Winter’s Tale” than the long short story I wrote: it kept haunting me, pulling at me, until I gave it another look. And lo, Black Feathers was born.
At any rate, I went through the stack of stories, and came up with a rough selection for this book. And then I had to fight against every natural writerly instinct I have, and step back.
With a time span of twenty five years, there’s a lot of stylistic variation here, and I wanted to smooth it out. I had to resist that urge.
Because stories don’t stay, and because each story is written in a gush, every story is, to me, something of a peculiar marker, a glimpse of where I was as I was writing, who I was at that particular moment. I wouldn’t write, say, “Blessing” the same way today, nor should I. The story exists the way it is because of the way I was at the time I was inspired, at the time I was writing.
The revision process was, therefore, at times, counter-intuitive, more akin to archeology than to my usual process. My goal wasn’t to make these stories conform to where I am now, as a writer, but to gingerly dust them off, clean them up, and present them into the light. There were a couple of exceptions. “Coming to Land” isn’t here because there are parts of it that made me wince, and wonder about the kid who wrote it (and also because there’s more to that story. That one has stuck with me, which leads me to believe . . . well, you know.) And “The Last Circus”? Well, we’ll come to that.
So. Seven secrets. Seven stories.
Almost.
“Grateful” isn’t formally part of Seven Crow Stories, but I knew, from the start, that it had to be here, an introduction of sorts. For the longest time, I referred to “Grateful” as “The Storyteller’s Story,” which I think says it all (but that’s not going to stop me from writing a bit more).
“Grateful” is one of the oldest stories in this book, written in the early 1990s, almost immediately after I decided I wouldn’t go to grad school, choosing to focus on my writing instead. In a way, it’s the most autobiographical story in the book, despite not being autobiographical in the slightest. I don’t drive, I’ve never met a ghost (much to my chagrin), I never trained to be a teacher. . . . And yet . . . Like Murray in the story, “Grateful” was where I burned my boats.
The story comes from a folktale motif referred to as “the grateful dead,” in which a traveler assists a stranger, who turns out to be the spirit of one recently departed, and receives a boon for their assistance. That motif, obviously, was the inspiration for the band’s name; the story was actually inspired by the title and the opening line of the Dead’s “I Will Take You Home”—“Little girl lost, in a forest of dreams.”
Two other things: if you think Murray seems familiar, it may be because you’ve met him, in the pages of Black Feathers. And you’ll see him again, I promise.
And finally: “Grateful” was first published in a textbook anthology for high school students, which, given its subject matter, is perfect, and, given my fraught relationship with my own high school experience, is more than a little delightful.
“Tom Chesnutt’s Midnight Blues” was written, I believe, in 2008, after I had made the acquaintance of one Marla Good, who is a font of often deeply disturbing story inspirations and elements. I try to get together with Marla when I’m in Toronto, and I always bring a notebook with me.
Beyond the basics, I often don’t know where the elements of a story come from, but with Tom C., I have
a few signposts. His experiences in Spokane, Washington are drawn from a day I spent there on the US tour for Before I Wake, while the bar he plays in Victoria is the late, lamented Harpo’s.
And if you think Collette seems familiar, it’s likely because she too appears in the pages of Black Feathers (the party, where Cassie talks to Murray, is held in Collette’s apartment, upstairs from Ali’s basement suite). You will find, as we go on, that these sorts of connections are the rule, rather than the exception, and definitely by design.
In keeping with the music/music industry setting and themes, I have always viewed “Crossroads Blues” as the B-side to “Tom Chesnutt” (to the point that I’ve actually thought of printing them as a chapbook, front to back, so you have to flip the “record” over to read the other story).
The inspiration here, I think, is obvious: “Crossroads Blues” is one of the most famous of the tracks bluesman Robert Johnson recorded after (allegedly) selling his soul to the devil, a legend which Charlie Webber is perhaps too familiar with. And the devil, well, he clearly has a sense of humour. Or irony, at least.
I’m not normally a night writer—I prefer the pre-dawn for fiction—but in mid-2011 I was at my desk at about ten at night, finishing the typing of the first draft of “The Crying in the Walls,” when the line “I sold my soul to the devil in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven” popped unbidden into my head. I finished the typing and wrote “Crossroads Blues” in one sitting, knowing nothing more about the story, its structure, its characters, than that single line, and that voice. . . . Oh, that voice.
“Blessing” is one of the oldest stories in this collection, written around the same time as “Grateful.” I recall, at the time, experimenting with what I thought of as a “storyteller’s voice,” trying to create a “once upon a time” story without the “once upon a time.” It’s significant, I think, that out of that experiment came the first story set in Henderson; it was, from the very beginning, a place out of fable, out of fairy tale.
In this story we meet, for the first time, John and Claire Joseph, and other residents of the town, people we’ll come to know, and love, and mourn, in stories to come. You’ve been warned.
“The Crying in the Walls” is my one and only (so far) Toronto story. In part, it’s the architecture: we don’t have semi-detached houses out here in the wild west (we have duplexes, which aren’t the same), and I needed to have that adjoining wall. Mostly, though, it’s due to spending afternoons with James Grainger, walking around his old neighbourhood, looking at buildings and talking about horror.
“Three Days Gone” occupies a strange space in my head. It’s a finished short story; it does exactly what I want it to do, it moves, it breathes . . . It might also be the first chapter of a trilogy of novels. I like to think it’s done, but only time will tell. . . .
I’m not sure if this was written before or after The World More Full of Weeping (I suspect before), but there are certainly elements in common: lost children, other worlds, the lives of those left behind. These are some of the things I keep coming back to, and I’m not sure why. I’m not sure I want to find out.
I wrote a bit about “The Small Rain Down” when it was published in the limited edition of The World More Full of Weeping, so I may just quote myself: “In late October 2006 I sat down with the deliberate intention of writing an ‘October’ story, something suffused with death, and loss, and dreams; the story equivalent of the smell of leaves burning in the distance and the slow, autumnal dwindling of days. To that end, I pulled out a Moleskine notebook (with that earthy cream paper) and a Lamy Al-Star loaded with Noodler’s Walnut ink (a deep, earthy brown) and set to work. The story was written in virtually a single sitting, over the course of a rainy weekend, with the house to myself, a leaking roof, and Nick Drake’s Way to Blue on repeat on the CD player. It might just be me, but I think you can hear the rain, and the slow, sad music, in the spaces between the words.”
Which almost says it all, save this: looking at it now, as part of this selection of my work, “The Small Rain Down” seems, in part, to be an answer to a question that “Grateful” almost asks, but doesn’t quite. Or that might just be me.
Tracking down the dates for some of these stories has been a bit tricky; not so with “The Last Circus”; I finished writing this story in early August, 2016, after several months of stop-and-start writing. Though that’s not the whole truth. . . .
This version of “The Last Circus” is actually a second version of the same inspiration, my memories of the day the circus came to town, when I was about twelve years old. In a way, this is an autobiographical story, but then, it would be, whether you lived it or not. There’s a mirror for us all.
All writers carry their influences with them, sometimes in their hearts, sometimes on their sleeves. I wrote this, very consciously, with Ray Bradbury in mind, the way he could make a circus wonderful and terrifying at the same time.
I knew, though, without even looking at the earlier version of the story, that I hadn’t quite said what I wanted to say with the story, so I decided to revisit the material. As near as I can figure, the first version of the story was written in the mid ’90s, so this version is twenty years down the road. The same story, but utterly different.
The same, I suppose, can be said about me, twenty years on: the same story, but utterly different. I don’t know when I crossed over into the mirror world, or how many times, but that’s the secret, I suppose. Never to be told.
Publication History
“The Small Rain Down”—limited edition hardcover of The World More Full of Weeping, ChiZine Publications, 2009
“Grateful”—Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2011
“Tom Chesnutt’s Midnight Blues”—Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd Did I Live, EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011
“Crossroads Blues”—Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I, EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2013
“The Last Circus”—Found Press, 2016
“Blessing,” “The Crying in the Walls,” and “Three Days Gone” are original to this collection.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the venues in which some of these stories first appeared, and thankful for the skills and attention of their editors, including Jared Bland, Michael Kelly, Bryan Jay Ibeas, and, of course, Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi at ChiZine, for that and for this.
Thanks to Samantha Beiko, who oversaw this book with diligence and care. And, it should be said, infinite patience. I swear, it’s almost finished.
I am grateful to everyone at the McDermid Agency, in a world of ways, but special thanks to Chris Bucci and, as always, Anne McDermid.
With stories spanning more than twenty years, it’s inevitable I’ll miss someone, but I am grateful to Marla Good, Clare Hitchens, James Grainger, Colin Holt, the members of the now-gone Yahoo group, and so many others, for early reads, inspiration, pep talks, drunken commiserating, walking tours and the like.
Special thanks to Cori Dusmann, of course.
Love and gratitude to August, who keeps me simultaneously grounded and on my toes, as only a seventeen-year-old can.
And finally, my deepest thanks to Athena McKenzie. No dress rehearsal, only second acts.
About the Author
ROBERT J. WIERSEMA is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and a reviewer who contributes regularly to several national newspapers. He is the best-selling author of three novels: Before I Wake, Bedtime Story, and Black Feathers, as well as the mix-tape memoir Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen. He teaches creative writing at Vancouver Island University, and lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
From.Net
Seven Crow Stories Page 22