THE AMERICAN STORYBAG

by Gerald Hausman

  They make music, a stream of changeless poetry that flows out of the throat of a nightingale. It’s a symphony, not meant to be read, but to be heard, and I hear it well, and am lifted aloft by it.

  I wake, still dreaming. My eyes open. It is only later—fully awake—that I realize Roger has just taught me something about writing; that it is not a conversation between two people, the author and the reader, but it is a symphonic outpouring, a silver rain of divine mind.

  Once, in, let us call it “real life”, Roger and I rained words on a page together. We stormed and spat forth forks of lightning. But there was a bardo-like time of waiting, of meditation before we worked together. It happened like this.

  One day I told Roger the tale of two mountain men, John Colter and Hugh Glass. Colter was chased by Blackfeet Indians for 150 miles in the area in and around what was later named Yellowstone National Park. Hugh Glass, eviscerated by a bear, was buried alive by friends who thought he was dead. Glass dug himself out of the dirt and crawled one hundred miles on his belly over the Grand Valley to the Missouri River.

  Roger liked the idea of the story—the runner and the crawler. But he told me we had to wait a year before he had time to tackle it. That year lengthened into two. And thus I learned the most important lesson there is: waiting with grace. Or, if not grace, at least not angst. Roger told me, “To wait is also to write. We’ll get to it. Sooner or later.”

  It was what I most feared. The later.

  Roger knew it, too. He let me live with it.

  When it did come time to do ColterGlass (as we called it then—later it became Wilderness) Roger was eager to begin, not that he had the time to do so, but his willingness surprised me.

  At that time, he was writing two other novels, plus a variety of short stories and essays, all in good style and, of course, good humor. I wondered how he could accomplish so many things seemingly at the same time.

  Roger, the juggler. The wondrous mage who never dropped anything on the ground. Keeping it all in the air, the days and nights floated over him, and he played, he danced, he joyed over the words he wrote, or rather the words that came joyously out of him. If it was work of the bodily kind, sitting and typing for long hours, he never complained of it. He seemed at ease with everything he wrote, and it was all as real and as spontaneous as his speech.

  Our shared novel, Wilderness, was a lesson in how to write without pressure. How to let the characters be who they are, not who you want them to be.

  Colter, the runner.

  Glass, the crawler.

  “At some point,” Roger said, “the roles may change. The two men reversing their positions in life.”

  “Historically, though, they didn’t change,” I told him.

  Roger smiled. “Shall the runner slow down, and crawl? And the crawler, one day, will he get up and run?”

  “What will that do to the story?”

  “If it happens, and I’m not saying it will, but if it does it will make an unreal tale seem more real.”

  A little later on, when our collaboration was almost at an end, I told Roger that I couldn’t conclude a certain chapter—didn’t know how to stop the pell-mell action.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  The following day Roger gave me an envelope.

  My ending was the same. He hadn’t done a thing to it.

  But the next chapter was his. It was three words long: “The hawk soared.”

  I told Roger, “Well, that takes care of Colter. Now what about Glass?”

  A couple of days later, he showed me the Glass chapter, which was ten words long: “And growling, the bear raised himself onto his hind legs.”

  “I guess that solves it, “ I said.

  “Don’t be afraid to let the unexpected pop up,” he said.

  To this day, those are my two favorite chapters in the novel.

  There are many things Roger taught me. But, towards the end of his life, we shared, not writing, but being. I was going to Jamaica a lot in those days and Roger said that he was really intrigued with the Blue Mountains that rise from sea level to seven thousand feet, and where, in the tropics you can sometimes have a flurry of snow at the summit.

  Roger asked, “What is it like up there?”

  Having just returned from a Blue Mountain trip, I spoke rhapsodically, “The coffee trees spread out in the lower elevations, the cheese berries litter the paths above the Jacob’s Ladder, which is cut in clay straight up to the plateau that straightens into a primeval forest of ancient cycads, and this plateau is followed by air plants and orchids galore, and then come the stunted trees near the top and the tall windswept grass at the very summit from which you can see all the way down to Kingston. I was afraid I’d get blown off the mountain.”

  “Take me there sometime,” he suggested.

  I promised I would do that.

  It has been many years since I made that promise, and only last night did I try to fulfill it.

  In the dream, I am waiting for him on top of Blue Mountain Peak.

  Roger comes along, flying.

  “A new chapter,” he says, opening himself on the wind and blowing right past me.

  Pirate Breath

  As luck would have it, I wrote a small short story collection one year while we were living in Jamaica. The collection is called Duppy Talk. Duppies are Jamaican ghosts and my experience with them is in the book but also in the History Channel program Haunted Caribbean. We recreated the essence of Pirate Breath for them and I acted out my own part with my wife, Lorry. We had fun filming this, but it didn't end there, as you shall see in this story.

  I breathed pirate breath, once.

  I was in Jamaica staying in the old estate of Noel Coward on the north coast. One night I fell asleep listening to the cheep and chime of the tree frogs and when I awoke there was a pirate sitting on my chest.

  He wore a piratical red felt greatcoat with gold filigree. His shirt was loose and open, and soiled. He stank to high heaven. There was every smell you might imagine on this stinking man. He carried a fragrance of forlorn sweat, fetid animals, swilled rum, tobacco flakes (his beard full of them) bad teeth, oaken casks, sour smoke and other less nasty odors like cloves, which he apparently was chewing to sweeten the smell of his dead gray teeth and to ease the sting of his mouth sores.

  I bore the man’s weight on my chest until I could stand his smell no more. In point of fact, he weighed nothing, nothing at all. And when I kicked him off me, he went like a featherweight into the air, landing hard on his brass-buckled shoes.

  The pirate drew his sword and I prepared myself for his next attack. But as he raised the curved blade over my head, he, or rather his image, dissolved before me.

  All that was left of him was his piratical smell. I awakened my wife Lorry, and said – “Bloody pirate’s been sitting on my chest!”

  Half-asleep, she mumbled, “I smell him. Where is he?” She was sitting up, peering. There was the sound of the sea shuffling around the coral heads. The tropical night was clear, tree frogs piping, croaker lizards critching.

  “Where is the pirate?” Lorry asked with a yawn.

  “He left.”

  “Out the door?”

  “He disappeared.”

  Lorry smiled, murmured, "Ghosts."

  Not me. I stayed awake all night.

  Just before dawn, I heard the ring of a pickaxe, the chink of a shovel. Then silence. The last croaker lizard barked and then the pocket parrots owned the jeweled, Jamaican morning.

  My pirate visit seemed to vaporize in the Saint Mary sunlight. Fishermen sang on the reef as they dropped their fish traps into the turquoise bay. It was a beautiful, friendly day and came to a quiet and peaceful end with another lovely evening, slow and somnolent and seeping darkness from Firefly Mountain that loomed over the old estate. Going to bed, I remembered the pirate had tried to cut off my head with his sword. The old sword was red with rust rather than blood. And, as the man faded before my eyes, his clo
thes, his sword, his face all turned to rags and ruin, sinew and bone. After this uncanny exposure, he vanished.

  Let me point out, I am not afraid of ghosts.

  In fact, I like them.

  Even the sword-raising kind.

  Yet this unknown, ancient man meant to murder me – why?

  The color and sound of the day had drowned out all else, but now, as I slipped into bed, I wondered what the pirate was after, and why me.

  I swung out of bed, put on my shorts, went downstairs and spoke to my friend Roy.

  Roy was meditating under the guava tree by the bamboo fence. He smiled when I told him about the pirate. "I think him look fe something dat once belong to him. Where your bed is, Ger, dat where him bury, dat where him dig.”

  “Did he see me then?”

  “Him dream you.”

  “His dream being his dead life?”

  Roy chuckled. “Him no dead. Him trod de world just as before.”

  That fact, if fact it was, made me feel much better – about the pirate. At least he had something to do. A job of work.

  But it didn't explain why he wanted to chop me with his cutlass.

  Roy explained that by saying, "You inna his way. Inna him dream."

  Six months later, when I returned to Jamaica, I was with a camera crew and a producer and director from the History Channel.

  They liked my Jamaican ghost story collection, Duppy Talk, and had asked me to be an advisor on the shoot.

  One story, which I'd discussed with them, was the midnight encounter with the pirate.

  The first morning of the shoot, the director, Jim, said, “You know, I like to do these stories of hauntings, and their relationship to human history, but I don’t feel them in my bones the way you do as a writer, or participant.”

  I laughed and said, “In Jamaica, they say 'who feels it knows it.'”

  “Isn’t that a Bob Marley lyric?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I suppose I don’t feel it,” Jim told me with an amiable shrug.

  The producer, Alyce, made fun of Jim. “I’m a bit more open than you are," she admitted. "I’ve never actually seen the stuff we re-create for History Channel, not like you have, Gerry. But tell me, off the record, did you really, truly see that pirate? Or were you dreaming about him?"

  I wanted to explain how they dream us, not the other way around, but instead I said, “I saw him and I smelled him. My eyes were wide open.”

  "What did he smell like?"

  "Black tobacco, golden rum, shit and gravy."

  “Ah-ha,” Alyce said, "That's rich."

  Jim just stared at me.

  We finished the rough footage of the film in five days and on the fifth night Alyce excused herself right after dinner, saying she had to pack and get some rest because the crew was heading out in the morning to do some more ghost stories in Puerto Rico.

  At breakfast the following morning, Alyce came downstairs from the upper veranda of Villa Grande. She did not look well. Despite having a bit of a tan, her face was pale. Her hands were shaky at the table. I asked, “How are you doing, Alyce?”

  “Not so good,” she confided.

  "What was the matter?”

  “I thought it was a joke, at first. That big sleigh bed upstairs -- it started bumping up and down. I thought it was Jim, playing a trick on me. Then –- she shook her head – “Whatever it was, demon or joker, it actually kicked me out of bed. I landed hard on the cedar floor – Bam. It was all over after that. I stayed awake the rest of the night, like you did after you saw the pirate. The whole time, my mind's turning it over. Still haven’t got hold of it yet. My first real ghost encounter. Feels pretty weird . . . and goofy, at the same time.”

  “They dream you," I said softly, but I didn't go into it, and Alyce didn't ask.

  “I don’t ever want to get slammed on the deck like that again.” Alyce got up and said she had some more packing to do, and that was the last I saw of her. Jim thought it was all very amusing. Said it might've been an earthquake. You get them here, don't you?"

  “We get them, but there wasn’t one last night. We would’ve felt it. The whole little coastline quivers and shakes. Things fall off the walls.”

  “Yeah, things like Alyce,” Jim joked. “She’ll be all right, though, don’t worry about her.”

  I didn’t. But I knew what she was going through. When I looked into the graveyard eyes of my pirate, and saw that he was alive, it was a moment I'll always remember. His smell hung in the air like . . . well, like the grave.

  In coming days Jim edited the film so it would appear the following fall on History Channel, and I helped edit the script that went with it, and we exchanged emails for a while. He was back in Los Angeles and I was in Florida. Then one day, I got one of the strangest emails ever.

  Dear Gerry,

  I don’t want to make this more awkward than it is. You know how skeptical I am about this supernatural stuff. I’ve heard all of the writers talk about hauntings, and I’ve managed to stay objective about it. Makes my job as director and editor a lot easier. Well, this is what happened the other night. After I put the film to bed with some last minute cuts and edits, I put myself to bed. My son sleeps in the next room and both of us went out like a light. Middle of the night, the bed starts shaking. I was sure it was an earthquake, we get a lot them in L.A. But the house is still and silent and no objects are moving. Just the bed. Finally, whatever it is kicks me off the bed onto the floor, and then in my son’s room, I hear the same thing at the same time -- a crash – and my son yells, “Hey, Dad what’s happening?” Do you think Henry Morgan could’ve followed us back to Hollywood? What does he want -- his own film? He better get a ghost writer. In all seriousness, this crazy thing really happened just like it did with Alyce. I’m wondering about a lot of things lately.

  Best,

  Tim

  Moments Of Truth

  Snail

  This story happened before the turn of the last century in the Canyon Creek country of Montana. I first learned of the mountain man Liver-Eating Johnston from Dr. Raymond Bunker when I was living in New Mexico in the 1960s. Bunker was a legitimate story link to the character of Johnston whom he had written about and also to the story of Plenty Coups, the wise Crow chief who, if he did not change history directly, offered another version of it in this story. This originally appeared in the book Horses of Myth by my wife Lorry and me.

  One hundred years ago there was a horse named Snail, a sleepy, sulky, and generally lazy mustang. Not that there was anything wrong with that, really, but in the little corner of big Montana where Snail lived, horses were prized for their ability to look nice and to race well.

  All that was lost on poor Snail.

  Oh, he had the noble Barb and the blooded Arabian in his ancestry, but so well hidden. Somehow, the sloping rump and convex head, the pretty, wide-set eyes, small muzzle and pointed ears were buried in hard-caked dirt, which was just one of the reasons he got the name Snail.

  You see, he liked to roll when it rained; and he liked to dust himself when it didn’t. It didn’t matter how often he was curried, for he had a longing for the creek bottom and its sticky, slicky Montana mud.

  Snail was mostly mustang, as far as pedigree goes, but, at a distance, all muddy and spattered and gone-to-seed, he seemed nothing more than a leaf brown horse with a few, true Appaloosa spots on his hind quarters.

  There was nothing that stood out about Snail except that he lived up to his name—he didn’t move a muscle except to munch prairie grass or take a roll in the creek bottom.

  Well, he did have one peculiarity. Snail, like his namesake, enjoyed a bit of cabbage now and again. Snail’s owner, Uncle Bill Wooten, who was a pioneer in the area, discovered this one day when he was carrying a ball of cabbage under his arm. He’d just come from his garden and was passing Snail when the darn fool horse took off after him.

  Snail was thirty yards off when Uncle Bill noticed that he was about to get ru
n over. Not knowing what else to do, Uncle Bill threw the cabbage head in the air and headed straight for his cabin alongside Sourdough Creek. When he looked back a moment later, Snail was happily crunching down the cabbage.

  “Well, well,” said Uncle Bill, amused. “Snail found something in this topsy-turvy world worth running for—and, if I do say so myself, what a run!”

  The next thing Bill did was call some of his friends. He asked Doc Allen, Jeremiah Johnson (the famous mountain man), and Tom McGirl to have a look at his silly, little mustang, the one everyone thought was a useless pony. They came over the very next day.

  Snail, for his part, paid no attention to the men gathered around him. Ignoring everyone, he went on with his munching and crunching.

  “Well, what’s so special about this not-so-special horse of yours,” queried Doc Allen. The others nodded. They had seen all they wanted to see of Snail.

  Uncle Bill explained, “Remember how you fellows wanted to find a racehorse that could beat Plenty Coups’ famous buckskin mare?”

  Jeremiah Johnson guffawed so loudly a raven coughed in a nearby tree.

  “You’re not gonna tell me that this here hoss of yours can run, are you, Bill?”

  Uncle Bill looked slyly at his friends.

  Jeremiah picked up a little clod of earth. Uncle Bill undid Snail’s tether and held his halter for a moment, while Jeremiah sent the clod of dirt flying like a bee. It nipped Snail in the flank, and old Snail—or young Snail—shivered and wiggled his hind end ever so slightly, and went back to grazing buffalo grass. The incident had passed without his knowing it.

  “All right,” said Tom McGirl, pushing back his Stetson “What kind of a trick you think you’re pulling, Uncle Bill?”

  “Yeah,” said Jeremiah. “What’d you get us over here for?”

  “Time to ‘fess up, Wooten,” added Doc Allen.

  Uncle Bill grinned like a fox. Then he dipped his hand into his feed bag and produced a big, round, green head of cabbage.