“BEGIN AGAIN”: A Little Western Town
The little white church with a steeple that represents the American Protestant movement was only a shell in the Western town built to be a movie set. What to name the town? For the owner of the land where the town was constructed? For the sources of money or the movie-making corporation that often used it — at least in the old days? For some mythic terms like “Sundown” or “Boomtown” or “Hopeville”? How about “Begin Again”?
This is developing into a meta-narrative about several points of view overlapping and drawing on each other. One person might read it as a straight story like what they already know. Another might do a lot of free association and deconstruction according to people with French names.
it wasn’t possible to go up in the steeple, but the pews were sturdy and the pulpit was dead center on a stage. So both the arrow pointing to heaven and the community that forms a proto-institutional body were missing. But what does it mean to have a woman sleeping in the vestry and a boy occupying a back pew while he works on his laptop? Are these future potentials of female ministers and the young with their worldwide contacts? Is this church truly a sanctuary or just a kind of symbol,
When she woke and realized there was someone in the sanctuary, she pulled on the old coat she was using for a housecoat and went cautiously out to see. The boy with long hair who was absorbed in his laptop, put up a finger to ask for a few minutes.
“Just a second. I’m watching the burning of Notre Dame in Paris! It’s so amazing!”
“What?” She tried to shake some sense into her head. “Who are you?”
“Notre Dame Cathedral — a symbol of what is permanent and transcendent. No one expected such a catastrophe. They think the stained glass windows might be saved.”
The little pretend church had no stained glass windows. It was plain and simple rather than severe or ascetic, because it had lots of windows, a high ceiling, so there was light. Stan Lynde, the cartoonist, used to depict his
“Rick O’Shay” cartoon cowboys as sitting horseback under the open windows, listening but not part of the congregation. “Hipshot”, the gunslinger, was just as likely to be out on a mountain ridge, speaking directly to God.
One of my abiding interests. because of working on a memoir aside from this story, is the relationship of the knight and his squire. This is sometimes a vehicle for gay relationships between old and young, but in my case it’s okay because in my life it was heterosexual. That’s alright, isn’t it? So long as it’s legal? Which is pretty snarled up because of mixing different ideas about owning females, biological readiness, historical tropes, and socioeconomics determined by ecologies.
For a decade I WAS a 14-year-old “boy” in close relationship with a 47-year-old sculptor. When it ended I was a 21 year old female, a little incomplete, and he was a 57 year old man with a nearly ungovernable career that attracted parasites. His health was damaged. This is not directly relevant to the little town of “Beginagain”, but some of it is useful. As for what 14 year old boys are like, I had taught school on the rez where boys are not necessarily domestic, as well as briefly in a small white town where boys are exploited, mostly for sports. These things simmer in my unconscious.
What’s important to note is the fact that when one writes fiction, quite a bit more than writing “fact,” experience is key. This is particularly true in terms of the senses, including those of feeling one’s own internal body. In this case the boy would be becoming a man with all the growing powers and mysterious forces, but also shortfalls. The woman would be my man growing old, collapsing and losing skills. So I’m doing a certain amount of gender-swapping. This may be an advantage in our times.
In terms of Montana literature about the past, moms really like the ones about female pioneers managing in spite of all odds. Of course, the ones who didn’t manage just died. In fact, the toll of fertility was a high percentage of deaths in childbirth, including my great-grandmother. There is a quietly shut-out set of books about the abuse of children, not as sexual objects but as owned labor — herders or weeders or gatherers. Small labors that in cities children are often made to do, like factory work or going down mines — equally as destructive and deadly. Authors, usually female, write books in rage at injustice but they don’t appeal to readers and are shelved as depressing history, flat-fronted girls in old men’s suit jackets over rags, dirt and bruises. Readers like homemakers and prostitutes, with the constant hint of sex. What to do with that? Maybe I should also leave out those types.
Overlapping layers of socio-economics exist in every time and the interplay in moving among them is as compelling as the trickier movement among different times and places, so that we see the century of reality when the American frontier was dictating the stories against the screenwriter conventions of television Westerns in the 1950’s. My premise is that those “classic” shows were about “standing down” from martial life in the difficult transition to jobs at home. In those days Clint Eastwood was an impetuous young man who made a lot of trouble and had to be rescued by the older and wiser “Mr. Favor.” Alas, that actor, Eric Fleming, along with the archetype of the peace-loving male mentor, died and was eaten by piranhas in a canoe accident on the Amazon River. But Fleming in reality never had a “Mr. Favor” life.
“Born with a club foot, he needed crutches to get around and was often severely beaten by his father. At the age of eight, he attempted to kill his father with a gun, which jammed. He left home shortly after, first to Los Angeles, and then to Chicago, where he lived roughly and associated with gangsters, doing odd jobs for them to make money. At the age of 11, after being wounded in a gunfight between some gangsters and hospitalized, he was returned home to his mother, who had recently divorced. During the Depression, he dropped out of school and worked at various jobs until he joined the Merchant Marine, before joining the United States Navy in 1942 for World War II. He served as a Seabee in a naval construction battalion.” (Wikipedia)
In contrast, Eastwood, a California boy, made his next generation reputation as the violent, callous side of cowboy outlaws, gunslingers, in “Spaghetti Westerns”. The dark side attracts people, but not usually not usually children and women if they are either victims or perps. Not if they’re about the ambiguity of teen boys or single women on their own and how far they’ll go to survive.
“Fifties Westerns sought to teach the good values of honesty and integrity, of hard work, of racial tolerance, of determination to succeed, and of justice for all. They were, in a sense, modern morality plays where heroes, strong, reliable, clear-headed and decent, fought their adversaries in the name of justice.Dec 1, 2012” (Google?)
Small town values, right? Even if the town is a construct, a fantasy. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/77727-the-history-and-future-of-the-western-in-10-books.html
