THE AMERICAN STORYBAG Read online

  THE AMERICAN STORYBAG

  A Collection of Tales

  By

  Gerald Hausman

  On

  The American Storybag:

  "Not since Mark Twain has a writer presented classic American storytelling so honestly. Hausman is at his best with this collection, truly entertaining."

  - Hilary Hemingway, author of Hemingway in Cuba

  On

  Tunkashila:

  "...it is like the wind one hears on the plains, steady, running, full of music."

  - N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize-winning

  author of House Made of Dawn

  * * *

  "...an eloquent tribute to the first great storytellers of America."

  - The New York Times Book Review

  STAY THIRSTY PRESS

  An Imprint of Stay Thirsty Publishing

  A Division of

  STAY THIRSTY MEDIA, INC.

  staythirsty.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Gerald Hausman

  All Rights Reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected]

  Atten: Permissions.

  Cover Design: Jason Mathews

  ALSO BY GERALD HAUSMAN

  (Partial List)

  Gerald Hausman Folklore Collection

  (Speaking-Volumes Audio)

  The Kebra Nagast: The Lost Bible of Rastafarian Wisdom and Faith from Ethiopia and Jamaica

  Three Little Birds

  (with Cedella Marley)

  The Boy From Nine Miles

  (with Cedella Marley)

  How Chipmunk Got Tiny Feet: Native American Origin Tales

  The Story of Blue Elk

  The Image Taker: The Selected Stories and Photographs of Edward S. Curtis

  Gerald Hausman

  THE AMERICAN STORYBAG

  A Collection of Tales

  ". . . hobo, first class, no class -- it's the boarding of the train that counts. . ."

  - Bob Arnold, American Train Letters

  "And we know: this is only a truce, a swift feast of peace, a perching on earth, a brief huddle."

  - Elisavietta Ritchie, Flying Time

  Table of Contents

  Storytelling in America

  Hero's Way

  A Real Life Goliath

  The Horse of the Navajo

  Listener

  Ishbish

  The Story of Terence Trueblood

  Bimini Blue

  On the Road

  Along Came Bob Washington

  The Billboard at the End of the World

  In and Around Onawa, Iowa

  From Esther with Love and Directions

  The Railroad Oil Field Cotton Boll Blues

  Lady Bug Blues

  Just for Fun

  Big Fat Harry Toe

  Time to Call the Dog

  A Tree Frog Named Houdini

  One Bright Night

  The Parrot's Scribe

  Reflections

  Three Guys from Atlantic City

  Just Like Geronimo

  My Mother and My Father

  Open Water Swimming

  The Ancient Itch

  Out of This World

  A Visit to Cross Creek

  Dead to the World

  Man Taken Aboard UFO

  Talking Adobe

  Let's Not Tell Anyone About This

  To the Blue Mountains of Jamaica

  Pirate Breath

  Moments of Truth

  Snail

  Curandero

  The Greatest Novelist to Come Out of Cuba

  Tyger, Tyger

  A Rose for Charley

  Old Ben, Pam Snow, and the Blood of Summer

  Yarns and Tales

  Rattlesnake Pete, Goiter Healer

  Sam

  The Biggest Barracuda

  The Seventh Bridle

  Of Lions and Men

  Discussion Questions

  Author Interview

  About The Author

  Storytelling in America

  Stories have always ridden the high winds of America and taken us to the heavens and hells of earth -- but we've loved the medium for what it is -- a change of heart, a momentary break from the mundane, a heartbeat from a different drummer.

  An old friend said the other day that people don't die, they just change batteries. That is also the history of the short story in America and it explains what stories, in general, do for the American psyche.

  Whatever the story is, it's indicative of change. The last great resurgence of energy in this medium occurred during the 1930s and it has actually been said that certain short stories were like the National Recovery Act. Hearing what others were going through during the last Great Depression was healing for many, and shared stories were part of that healing process.

  Today the short story in America is going through yet another experimental evolution. In less than 80 years, we've changed from a more or less regional agronomic-industrial nation to a cybertech, global nation. As we have morphed, so have our stories. They've come right along with us, helter-skelter, and growing shorter and shorter as our attention span for detail lessens on a massive cultural scale. Presently we read short-shorts (like many of the ones in this collection), sudden stories, exploded narratives, blogs and others experimental types of brief fiction.

  As we've become a somewhat hyper nation of humans, our quickie-fix stories have come along with us, offering both consolation and damnation, by turns. And while most of the stories in this book were gathered in the old way -- hand-gathered, as it were, by listening to them myself, by attending storytellings, and by just "being there" as we used to say in the sixties, I believe this effort comes from a much older ceremony, one going back to the American craft guilds of the previous century. You have to imagine this -- the saddlemaker, at rest, telling a tale in between stitches, amusing some friends who've stopped by to get their saddles repaired -- or so we might imagine.

  Stories "in the olden days" as Joe Medicine Crow says, often came from people who worked with their hands. Joseph Bruchac, the Abenaki storyteller and author, has said that some of his stories came directly from his grandfather. While the elder was working, chopping wood, for instance, he told a story. Maybe something about a chip off the old block. Maybe an aphorism as old as an axe and a chunk of wood. So the story grew out of a work experience, an act of artful labor. And the significant thing here is that someone was watching and listening. Culturally speaking, this does not happen much anymore. People are talking, texting, running. But they are not watching and listening like they used to.

  My Navajo friend Jay DeGroat once said that stories, in his time, as well as his father's and grandfather's, were told to inform the young people. He remembered his grandfather singing a certain horse song while they were horseback riding together (on the same horse), and he said that, just the other day, he sang that same song, for the first time after fifty years, to his own grandchild.

  The question is raised -- are we losing this sense of connectedness? We don't live together, communally, as we once did during our apprenticeship to this great land; we live, if anything, apart. On the move. Heading out. But is this really any different from our foreparents' covered wagon days? Or Johnny Appleseed's spreading his goodwill? Or Jay's grandfather's story of the Navajo Long Walk?

  We are a nation on the move, we used to say a couple generations ago.

  Not one of us, all of us -- whether by force of circumstance or by choice.

  We are nothing if not fluid beings inhabited by a space of mind as well as one of geography. Our compass has always been the human heart; and that, again, is what stories are -- compass reading
s of the American journey.

  Who am I? Where am I going?

  These are the focal points of the storyteller-traveler.

  Storyteller Larry Littlebird once said "We are all carriers of water in the desert."

  And so, you might ask, are the stories in the water? Or are they, metaphorically speaking, the jar itself? How about both?

  There is a northwestern coastal tale about Raven who changes himself into a particle of dirt and drops down a smoke-hole and lands in a large water jar. The world changes as a result of this black-feathered trickster. It gains light, and wisdom.

  Water is a good medium for the story because as we know water is always changing. And it has the power to, literally, move mountains.

  Meanwhile -- to return to the story as story, we have jokes circulating around the internet, mini-videos celebrating mundane daily events. The story, whether words or pictures or both goes on and on. "It only goes out so it can come back in," Armenian-American poet David Kherdian once said to me in conversation.

  For 40 years, I have gathered stories as if my life depended on it. I guess, in the end, it really did.

  I became "the listener," listening when people said things they themselves didn't know they were saying. I was the listener hearing words rolling off tongues and ticking off typewriters. I was the listener who saw things as they happened, and scribbled them down as they were happening. I am still jotting down notes, picking up vibrations, putting it up so it can come back down, watching it go out so it can come back in.

  You have it before your eye.

  Eye-and-eye, I-and-I, aye and aye.

  All of us with an eye, look up and listen.

  Look down, eye the page.

  Someone's talking to you.

  - Gerald Hausman

  Hero's Way

  A Real Life Goliath

  As a veteran diver in the Caribbean, I was always having deep water misadventures -- like the octopus that attached itself to my wrist in about five feet of water. As I raised it to the surface to see it better out of water, the desperate animal applied its remaining seven arms to a nearby piece of coral. My snorkel was less than an inch from the surface but the octopus had me ransomed. Life existed one inch above my head, but I couldn't get to it. It was only when I was out of air and stopped struggling that the octopus let me go, and oozed away into the reef. That is background to the story I tell here and one that my Florida neighbor, a spear fisherman, also shared with me. What struck me about his story was the idea that bravery is often foolerly. Genuine bravery occurs when you least expect it, and when, in fact, you're quite oblivious of it. Sometimes heroism happens when you press on; other times when you let go. Once in a while, it happens when you do a little dance all your own.

  My dad and I are diving the wreck of the Marie Roget, a sunken tanker just a little ways off the island of Andros in the Bahamas. The Marie’s down about forty feet and to get to her, you snorkel over the coral-heads called bommies, until you hit the deeper water where the bottom falls away. Our pale legs, flashing back and forth, must look like bait to whatever’s down there, watching. Or so it always seems to me.

  The big blue makes me a bit nervous. But why lie? I should say, a lot nervous! My dad streaks through the sea, a black neoprene shadow. He cuts through pillars of sunlight that go down into the darkness. I just try to keep up with him. Which is not easy since he’s a retired Navy SEAL.

  Anyway, pretty soon the water changes color again—to a sort of misty lilac—and the milk-riffled sand spreads out forever, with nothing there—except the hulk of the Marie Roget.

  A glittering escort of angelfish hovers around the phantom shape of the Marie. Close to the broken hull, there are popped-out portholes and all kinds of stuff from the ship. Marie’s guts are strewn everywhere. One time I found a seaman’s vest, hanging off a rusted piece of railing.

  Most of the Marie Roget broke up in the storm that sunk her back in the mid 30s. But there’s still fifteen yards of prow intact, with some of the fo'c'sle, ancient and ochre-colored, and frosted with barnacles. You get a queer feeling in your belly, seeing what’s left of the Marie as she dreams on in the twilit world of the reef.

  Above, near Dad and me, a school of blue tang shivers like sequins. In the flick of an eye, they turn clockwise, counter-clockwise. All in unison, like a ballet of birds amid the busted masts and cobweb cables of the Marie.

  As I say, you get a strange feeling watching all this. A feeling of doom. Of desperation. Of lives lost. One hundred and twenty, to be exact. Dad checked it in his mariner’s survey of the region. The Marie went down in the hurricane of 1935 that devastated the Florida Keys. No one was saved. If you listen, amidst the crackles and pops of the ocean, you might hear some long distant echoes. Time-warp reminders of the night the Marie lost her bearings and got heeled over against the reef.

  On the surface, my dad snaps me out of my reverie with—“I see some grouper down there. Think I’ll spear one for supper. Stay up top and keep watch, will you?”

  I nod as he cocks his spear gun, and goes down.

  This is all ho-hum, just another day in the brine, for him. Wish I could be that cool, but I can’t seem to. The other day I dived down to look at a fish trap and it had a moray eel in it. I got down there level with the chicken wire trap-enclosure and that eel, grinning like a wildcat, tried to bite me through the wire. It almost got its head through, too. My face was good and close to the trap, and I swam like hell all the way to shore. I was scared the eel was going to break free and come get me.

  Dad was sitting on the dock when I came out, gasping. “What’s that about?” he asked, "You racing something?"

  Shame-faced, I told him.

  “What are you going to do when you come face-to-face with something that isn’t held back by chicken wire?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And I still don’t.

  But I wish I did.

  My worst fear is that I’ll never get over being a "fraidy-cat." Dad's a born diver. I don’t know what I’m born to do, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with water. But who knows? If I could shake the jitters, maybe.

  But, now, I'm watching Dad dive down to the Marie where there’s a bunch of grouper hanging out. Silver chains of bubbles and fins flicking as he descends. I don’t really see anything except some parrotfish.

  A moment later, Dad’s back with a good-sized gag grouper on the metal stringer clipped to his weight belt. The freshly killed fish is leaking blood. “I’m going to get another,” he tells me.

  “There’s bound to be sharks with that blood you’re trailing.”

  “Have you seen any?” he asks.

  “None, so far.”

  He adjusts his mask; blows it clear.

  “Forget the sharks," he advises. "Keep an eye out for one of those silver subs, will ya?"

  Silver sub's what we call barracuda. Dad claims he doesn’t worry about sharks much, but silver subs are another story. They’re really unpredictable. Mind their own business one second--in your face the next. And when a barracuda’s in range, it can close distance faster than a shark. Do worse damage in less time, Dad says. One time he had his mask ripped off by a barracuda that was drawn to the shine of the glass.

  So I’m treading water, watching for silver subs, and Dad heads back down. The outgoing current's pulling me over the purplish wreck of the Marie.

  Then, as I’m looking down at Dad, I see something come over him.

  The thing's like a shroud, a huge dark tent.

  Stingray? Shark?

  I don’t think either.

  I clean my fogged-up mask, snort the water out.

  Whatever it is, the thing’s six feet long and some six hundred pounds, for a guess.

  My heart jumps up into my throat. I’m treading against the current, seeing a horror film that's real!

  I've no idea what to do.

  The thing starts nosing Dad, pushing him around on the forward deck of the Marie. />
  Then it knocks the spear gun out of Dad’s hand. I watch the gun drop lazily to the sandy bottom.

  Then it comes to me what the creature is. It’s just that I’ve never seen one so large. Maybe no one has.

  Goliath grouper. One of the largest fishes in the sea. Normally friendly. Curious. Unaggressive.

  What’s with this guy?

  All at once, I’m diving down — not knowing what I’m going to do. My heart’s galloping, my eyes burning.

  That monster's dragging Dad all about the deck. First one way, then another.

  I kick harder. I’m there -- now what?

  It’s hard to see with all the stirred-up gunk, but there’s plenty of noise. Lots of clinking and binking—Dad’s weight belt banging against the railing of the Marie.

  Out of the boiling rust and silt, the flash of a hand.

  I grab it hard.

  Then an underwater roller coaster ride.

  Goliath’s gotten rid of Dad, and taken me.

  It’s got my whole foot, flipper and all, in its huge mouth.

  I need air.

  Round me, whirling, red starbursts of filament. This, and the great blue lips of the ghastly grouper. I close my eyes and see sparklers-- that's the outer limit, brain-gauge telling me -- get up-and-out, or else --