Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  When news of the tragedy reached my hometown, the loss was palpable everywhere. The husband of the second-grade teacher at my elementary school was one of the Guardsmen who came home alive. My older sister’s best friend wasn’t as lucky. More than one new bride lost her young groom on that hillside near Phu Bai. The husband of another friend survived, but his brother did not. Not everyone in our rural community had lost a relative or close friend, but no one seemed immune to the sense of communal grief. Over the coming years, the war brought more tragedy. A celebrated POW would come home, more changed and damaged than anyone could know. He would later shoot dead a neighbor in a dispute over tractor parts. Some of the boys I had known would serve their time and come home belligerent and addicted or smoldering and withdrawn. My older brother, a paratrooper of the 101st, would be discharged from the Army and wander for a time on the streets of some California city. We’d had photographs from him: of a sky raining young men hanging from parachutes; of the side of his head bloodied by the debris of an exploded grenade; of him with an Asian wife we never met, a tiny, beautiful girl who died from a ruptured appendix, just outside the doors of an Army hospital. I put notes in my father’s letters to him, begging him to come home.

  People who write novels are often asked whether a particular work is autobiographical. With varying degrees of equivocation, we generally respond, No. But many of the events that have occurred during my lifetime—both to me and to people close to me, and even far off events—have stuck with me. They go into the making of who I am and sometimes provide the germ of an idea for a story. Beyond the obvious parallels between the historical 1969 war tragedy that occurred for the very real people of Nelson County and the fictional tragedies that affect the fictional families of the fictional town in this book, all direct relationship to real places, people, and events comes to an end. This maker of stories asks that readers please keep in mind the nature of fiction, an enterprise of imaginative exploration into what it is to be human.

  * * *

  * Detailed information about the June 1969 battle at Fire Support Base Tomahawk can be found in John M. Towbridge’s book Kentucky Thunder (2010); in Jim Wilson’s The Sons of Bardstown: 25 Years of Vietnam in an American Town (Crown Publishing, 1994); and in the After-Action Report—Attack on FB TOMAHAWK, dated 7 July 1969, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 138th Artillery.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First recognition for what lies at the heart of this novel goes to those who have lost loved ones to fighting everywhere. Men and women for centuries have marched away from home, either under force of draft or to defend what they believed was right. I honor them. I also honor the people they left behind, people like the families who live in the pages between these covers.

  This book would not have been written without the generous support of the Artcroft Foundation, Aspen Writers Foundation, the Bedell Foundation, Key West Literary Seminars, the Meyerson Family Foundation, Ox-Bow Artist Residence, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. I am especially indebted to Maureen and Robert Barker whose noble hearts sustained me during long visits at Artcroft, their magical farm and artist residence in the Appalachian foothills.

  Thanks to fellow writers who have read for me, listened to my blather, or simply were there to tell me to keep going. Among them: Lisa Birman, Mary Cantrell, Jane Hill, Patricia Grace King, Aryn Kyle, Dylan Landis, Anna Leahy, Michael Poore, Max Regan, Christopher Rosales, Claudia Manz Savage, Christine Sneed, Evelyn Spence, Cheryl Strayed, and Rachel Weaver. Grateful acknowledgment goes to writers who have encouraged me in countless ways, and whose work has taught me to see with new eyes, among them: Richard Bausch, Robert Bausch, Mark Childress, Marcia Douglas, Brian Evenson, the late James D. Houston, Pam Houston, Laird Hunt, Stephen Graham Jones, Tim O’Brien, Christine Schutt, Elisabeth Sheffield, Lee Smith, and Mark Winokur. Joshua Kendall, thank you for telling me at just the right moment not to stop.

  My agent Michelle Brower was willing to sink her teeth into this thing and push me and prod me to make it the best it could be. The brilliant guidance of my editor Dan Smetanka turned the hard labor of revision into an adventure. The fine staff at Counterpoint Press has showered this book with attentive care: Megan Fishmann, Kelly Winton, Ryan Quinn, thank you. Michael Kellner is responsible for the beautiful cover.

  My children, Rachel Lambert, Lesley Lambert, and Graham Kirsh, have given me the kind of support about which most parents can only fantasize. You three, I adore you.

  The dear man with whom I have the blessed fortune to share this life deserves much more than my skimpy words can muster. David Kirsh is my light, my partner, my knight, my love. May this book be worthy of the unfailing support and belief he has put into me and my work. There is no woman luckier in love.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Paulette Livers is a Kentucky transplant to Chicago via Atlanta and Boulder, where she completed the MFA at the University of Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Dos Passos Review, Southwest Review, Spring Gun Press, and elsewhere, and can be heard at the audio-journal Bound Off. Selections from Cementville were awarded the Meyerson Prize for Fiction, Honorable Mention for the Red Hen Press Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Cementville is her first novel. Visit her website at www.PauletteLivers.com.