I’ve always wondered why certain moments in stories take hold in my mind while so many others—most in fact—don’t. We retain so little, and too many books leave nothing behind.
Still, there are the rare ones I don’t even need to open, the spines themselves are enough for me to conjure fleeting moments, scraps of detail. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Eudora’s The Golden Apples. Sebald’s The Emigrants. Lily Briscoe painting her forever imperfect picture. Reverend John Ames and his father walking from Iowa to Kansas in search of a grave. The night-blooming cereus and Virgie leaving home for good after her mother’s funeral. Paul, the teacher, his unfathomable sorrows.
My eye catches another spine, a thin one, tucked between two fatter but less essential books. John Edgar Wideman’s All Stories Are True. An entire scene comes to mind. It’s from the last story, “Welcome,” a complex, multi-voiced piece of work about a writer’s return to his hometown, Pittsburgh, at Christmastime. The writer has his own troubles. He has a son in prison. But it’s the last scene of this last story I’m thinking of right now. The narrator is driving past a bus stop on his way to pick up some barbeque. At the bus stop, in the wind and the cold, stand a father and a son. They look like they’ve been waiting there forever. It’s a holiday. Who knows? Maybe this bus will never come. The writer thinks about these two, this young father (not much older than his own boy) and this young son, and he invents a sad story about why they happen to be out there at this bus stop in the cold. Just then—this is my memory talking, the book is still on the shelf—the young dad picks up the kid in his cheap K-Mart snowsuit and pulls him close, and the writer thinks, all right, all right, it’s rough right now, it’s windy, it’s cold, this fucking bus might never come, and yet—these two, maybe they’ll make it over the long haul because there’s a little love. I’ve written about this story before, in a book I published a few years ago, and I’m sure I failed then, and I’m sure I’m failing again, to convey how moving this final scene is. I may have even gotten the facts wrong.
Maybe the dad never does pick the kid up. Maybe they just remain standing side by side as the writer drives on past.
Let me be wrong. Let this be inexact. I don’t need the paragraph itself to conjure that father, that son. I carry them around. The only thing I’m certain of is that there’s something in the way they are waiting, in the way they are bundled in the cold, that makes the writer think they’ll overcome the sad story he’s just invented about their lives together. And that’s it, the story’s over. The bus still hasn’t come.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well as chair of the English and Creative Writing department at Dartmouth. His most recent book, Still No Word from You, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.