After a week off for the Fourth of July, where I hid in the basement playing video games and spent a lovely evening by a campfire eating low country boil with friends, I am back, and ready to tackle Point of View. LeGuin describes it as “the narrative problem I have met most often in workshop stories (and often in published work)” It is the current plague stymying the manuscript a shaped briefly, and I already see how it will challenge the manuscript currently open on my laptop. In fact, If you look at what’s emerging in “Old Ghosts”, you can see point of view issues tugging at the shape of the story.
- The first draft was written in first person, but seemed too omniscient.
- The third person limited components are better, but again result in omniscience problems.
- I did not attempt any version of an outside, detached narrator.
- I have been leaning toward third person omniscient.
LeGuin’s exercise has four parts, asking writers to rewrite the narrative from multiple perspectives. No dialogue is involved, but it should involve three or more characters in some action. For my purposes, I am going to work with a new idea. Clayton is be the stream, and suddenly he sees, and can be seen by all the other people from across the many time periods. This is quickly emerging as a fulcrum point for the story, and it’s something that I haven’t written out or captured yet in any kind of satisfactory way.
After my attempts, I will paste in the existing draft of “Old Ghosts” with a capitalized note where the paragraph should appear, so you can try it with the different paragraphs in that slot.
*****
Part 1.1: Protagonist I
I was surrounded. No other way to describe it. I raised my hand in a slow wave. The father and son, sitting on the log I used so many times, mimicked me. The woman on the opposite bank, bronze skin and hide dress, she waved as well, the bowl of water abandoned at her feet. The boy on the bent tree, suspended over the river, gun temporarily forgotten, he waved as well. And the soldiers, they waved too, as did the helmeted shape, impossibly tall. I hadn’t noticed him there. We all waved, and I was alone.
Part 1.2: Alternate I
I hadn’t seen the old guy there. He looked puzzled; he waved; I thought he might be surrendering. I could tell him a thing or two about surrender. But something in his features—the stumpy nose, the baggy eyes—I thought about my grandad. I missed him. And with everything else happening at school, at home… well. I became aware of the pistol, its heft, the way it dragged me down. If Mom found out I had it, she would beat my ass. Nothing new there. Just she and me and an ass beating. But I know the truth. I read the letter her boyfriend left. I know that when I go bock, no one will be there. It’ll just be me. She’s already escaped. But then I noticed he seemed to be looking around, gape-mouthed. I followed his stare. There was some kind of tin man on the opposite bank. tall. Inhuman tall. Effigy on the high school bonfire tall. And that’s when I saw them. I had an audience for my last act. A fat guy and his kid. A couple of women playing dress-up black hair in braids, all Pocahontas-style. Some refugees from a Civil war reenactment. Something wasn’t right. Well, what did it matter, the world was just following the way of my life—a sure sign to depart.
Part 2: “Fly on the Wall” Narrator
They converged at that place. The old man with the straw hat. He waved slowly, gaped at the sight. The rotund fisherman and his waifish son. The water women from among the reeds. One on the bank, her bowl at her feet. The other behind a tree. The soldiers [paused in their truck, skipping stones like the boys they were back a summer before. The figure in silver. The boy in black, his grip on that pistol loosening. Each of them waves, makes a sign of recognition. A tip of the hat from a soldier. A raised palm from the woman. The moment passes and they all disappear—all but the old man in the straw hat, who reaches back to scratch his ear, confused.
Part 3: Observer-Narrator
Everyone saw the exact moment their timelines crossed. Each became aware of the other. The women gestured a greeting specific to the pre-colonial Lenape. The boy waved to the hermit—Clayton—who had lived by the stream in the late twentieth century. The young fisherman and his father waved. So much was similar between the end of the-prior century and the first part of the next. The soldiers, little more than boys in dirty blue uniforms, waved as well; one tipped his cap. The Gliesian, drawn to this moment by data foreign to any earthly science, found zem caught in it. Zey waved, a m mimicry far from their own methods of greeting; what more could zey do? Then the moment passed and the Gliesian drifted back to his craft, already examining the data from instruments not only on the ship, but embedded in zem’s suit.
Part 4: Involved/Omniscient Author
The moments arrived. Clayton waved to the Baxters. Father and son waved back, the pail between them knocked back and forgotten. A woodpecker hammered at a poplar, causing the woman to look up. Clayton, pale and grizzled, was a foreign sight to her. She raised her palm in greeting, unsure of the response. The boy with the gun saw the exchange. The Baxters waved to him; he waved back and contemplated whether or not he wanted an audience for his final act. The soldiers, worn from the march, acknowledged the odd assortment, unsure if there was a confederate spy among them. The Gliesian with his instruments whirred and ticked beneath the shell armor. Six timelines converged and held just long enough for the woodpecker’s assault to end, then they slipped apart.
The Baxters would scramble away, distressed by the moment, abandoning the pail of worms. The women would return to their camp, and before nightfall, the men would return. armed and wary. They would retrieve the pail, and the development of their technologies and belief system would change.
The gun slipped from the boy’s hand. cursing, he would abandon it, just as his mother had abounded him. Local police would never find the body in the stream. Instead, the boy would seek help from his father’s family. The Gliesian would recover the gun and revise Zeir calculation for invasion back by three hundred Earth years. The gun would make invasion simpler, as those most likely to resist would have been wiped out beforehand. Those most likely to bear guns were also the least likely to think through their actions, making a simple delay practical. Hundreds of Gliesians would be spared a painful death.
The union soldiers would not speak of the moment again. One prayed with all his might, but still died in the hospital at Gettysburg. The other stopped believing in God and died in the wilderness. Belief seemed to make no difference at all.
As for Clayton, he puzzled over what he had seen all the way back to his cottage. That evening, he placed a call to New York.
*****
Old Ghosts
Clay thought his life ecclesiastical. He woke to the rooster’s crow. Fed the hens first, goats second—while he had them. In their absence, he made breakfast. Well, Clara was gone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t make his meals. Dwight, his nephew, managed the fields. Smarter than his father. He’d inherit the whole patch. Just as well. Clay had lost Clara, but he’d thrown Junior away. Junior lived in New York; they never talked. The pill tasted bitter, but Clay swallowed it every day. Afternoons belonged to the garden. He planted less each spring. Less planted, less to harvest. Less to can. Clara liked canning; he liked eating. Sometimes, after chores, he fished. The stream in the hollow beckoned. Light played on the water. Herons dropped in for trout. Well, so did he. Yes, everything had a season, and work was sacred, he still believed.
Clay stepped into the afternoon heat and surveyed his land from the back stoop. The orchard in full bloom gave him hope for a bumper harvest. He had put signs up: Pick your own apples. And that had brought out a a few townsfolk. Junior scampered among them, carrying bushel baskets to cars while he and Clara chatted with customers and took their cash. But without Clara and Junior, he couldn’t keep track of it all. He solved it with a farmstead at the top of the drive. Did Dwight’s wife or kids like to can fruit? Maybe he would just hire migrants to harvest them all, and sell to young families with a lot of mouths to feed. Families used to be bigger.
Something disappeared into the tall grass at the end of the row. The grass shushed as it slipped away. He often saw deer, foxes—they all loved the orchard, though not usually in spring. He shrugged it off. His fishing gear awaited on the bench in the shed.
He meandered that afternoon, pole over his shoulder, tackle box in hand. Daffodils lifted their faces to the sun; wind-blown blossoms speckled the stream in pink and white. Same every year, the colors of Clara’s flowerbeds. Mums, begonias, pansies, snapdragons—he’d neglected them in the three years since. The beds had grown patchy: wild in some places, barren in others. Yes, he would have to tend them better. She would have long already chastised him for neglect. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of black. A darting form. He turned. Nothing.
“You are indeed losin’ it,” he announced. “Too much nostalgia. Not enough work.” He hoped it wasn’t a bear. His rifle sat secure and useless in the den, locked in the cabinet Clara insisted he buy.
The stream burbled and played. He listened to it through the trees long before he saw it. Then a glimpse, another through a break in the mountain laurel, and the trail followed the water’s edge. Snowmelt strengthened the headwaters, submerging the banks until summer. Clay would stay until the peepers chirped away the sun. So much of life was hiding. Bullfrogs croaked. Furry things scuttled beyond the rushes. Snakes slithered over logs and wound across the water. Shad and trout darted beneath the ripples. Life lived just out of view.
A brown shape passed behind the dogwoods on the other side. Clay blinked. Deer? Maybe people? It better not be people. This was his land, bought and paid for with hard cash and forty-some years of blood and tears and sweat.
When he arrived at his fishing spot, Clay found it already occupied. A father and son from the look. The waterlogged overalls and dirty face suggested the boy’s natural lack of grace. Clay pictured him tumbling off a slippery bit of trail, or sliding sideways off a rock on the upstream crossing. He was fawnish, leggy and stumbling against the world, a lot like Junior used to be. He held a bamboo rod—an antique. They had gone out of style when Clay was a boy.
His portly father sat on a log, baiting his hook. Sweat beads dripped down his face, despite his straw hat. He wiped his hand on a pantleg. They shadowed each other. The boy had his father’s round nose and basset hound eyes. The elder was a worn and overfed version of the younger.
“Like this,” he said, and cast his line. The boy watched, then pulled his line in and recast.
“Better,” his father said.
Clay waved.
“You there!” He called. “How’s the fishin’?”
In the old days—Clay mourned the old days—he and Junior skipped stones. He taught the boy to select flat stones. To flick his wrist just so when throwing—spin and angle equalled skip. Skipping was an art. A skipper graduated from the bowl-sounding plop to the whispering taps—six or seven? ten?—before the stone slipped under for good. He chose one. Skipped it. A five-hopper. Not bad. Perhaps he had only shown the boy once or twice. It felt like more.
They nodded. The man doffed his hat.
“I said, ‘how’s the fishin’?'”
They ignored him. The wind shook the leaves. The stream burbled. A woodpecker rat-a-tatted a poplar. Clay called out.
“You’re on private property, you know.”
He had hunted the woods and cleaned the carcasses in the shed behind the cottage. Fished the stream and scaled and cooked fish on coals from dying trees. Those trees warmed the cottage in winter. He cleared the dead wood, picked wild raspberries, planted the garden. Drove the stakes tied with white cloth to mark the corners. He worked it; it was his.
“It’s disrespectful of you—”
The boy got a bite. A little tug, a stronger tug, and a trout popped out of the stream. It flailed in the air. The man punched his son’s shoulder.
“Now, look here,” Clay called. “I don’t mind you–“
The lad released his catch into their bucket, and the pair sat down on the log again.
Clay thought himself patient. When Clara had come up with the cancer and the doctors hemmed and hawed more than he cared for, he had been patient with them, though Clara’s bony hand on his had done much ’til it couldn’t anymore; and he had been patient with Junior, who hated farmin’ from the start alright, but loved the theatre so much that Clay and Clara had given up whole evenings to watch four years’ worth of school productions, which hadn’t gotten them anything but a visit from Markley come up over the hill, bitchin’ that his boy and Junior were makin’ hog sounds in the loft and threatenin’ to sue over Lord knows what, that had required patience; even when the boy came into the hospital in mascara and lipstick like a red light hussy he had’t yelled or nothin’ just told him to go home and clean up ‘fore his dyin’ mama saw it, and that was that forevermore; but now here this bulbous man and his ragamuffin ilk sat on his log on his stream on his property casting lines and takin’ his trout without the slimmest bit o decency to say “hello, how do you do?” or even recognize that Clay had worked that land for damn near fifty years and who were they to come replacin’ him since he wa’n’t dead yet nor read his name in the obituaries like he ‘spected to one day.
I picked up a stone and skipped it across the water toward them.
“–I don’t mind you–“
“Hey,” Straw Hat called out. “Who are you?” He stood up and pointed at me with a sausage finger.
“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “Since you’re on my property.”
“Excuse me?” he said. “This is my property.” He motioned to his fishin’ buddy. “Get me the rifle, son,” he said. the younger one dropped his makeshift pole and ran up the path.
“You’re gonna get violent?” I asked.
“When you try to steal my land from me, damn right I will,” he said.
“But it’s not your land,” I insisted.
“Like hell,” he said.
I reached down into the water and pulled up a skipping stone. I played a bit of shortstop in high school. I thought I could peg him in the thigh. He was a big target anyway.
Several seconds of glaring silence passed. His boy reappeared with the gun.
“Mister,” I called out. “You touch that gun and I’ll break your hand with this stone.” I palmed it like a baseball.
He grabbed the gun. I chucked the ball at his hand. It hit him square. Then it passed through his hand, his gun, and his son on the other side.
Well, shit.
He raised it and fired. Then he stared. His boy turned white.
“Son–“
“Right through him, Pop, I swear to God.”
The shotgun crack sent a flock of geese honking skyward. Silence slipped behind them. Suddenly I saw two Lenape women on the opposite bank: one bore a basket of plants, the other filled a clay bowl with water. A column of revolutionaries drank before marching on, muskets perched on their slumping shoulders. A weary-faced grandfather joined the man and boy. A teenager draped in a saggy black clothes sat on a log, a pistol in his hand.
A stone skipped toward the woman, its whispering hits ending in a plop. She froze. Keen eyes scanned the banks. Across the stream, a demon—a crow-colored man—brooded on fallen log suspended over the water. He hadn’t noticed her, but he hadn’t thrown the rock.
Two boys in blue skipped stones upstream.
“Four,” the taller one said glumly. He chewed a bit of honeysuckle as the other boy skipped his stone.
“Five! Ha!”
“Best of five?”
Behind them the colonel coughed. “You boys don’t want to give away our position I hope?” The men snapped to attention.
“I didn’t think so.” He scanned the water. A father and son fished on the other side, but neither paid them any mind. “You might be lucky today, but luck runs out. Don’t waste it on this.” The men—barely men, the colonel knew—scurried back to camp.
NEW WORK MIGHT FIT HERE
Everything converged. The women retreated into the wild. The soldiers marched onward. Grandfather, son, and grandson cast their lines as one. The boy blew his head off.
I dropped to my knees. Clutched my chest. Sweat tickled my nose. I hoisted myself up with my walking stick. They were gone—all of them. The stream dribbled along without a burble. The wind had calmed. No birdcalls. No rustling leaves. Scared, I swore to write down my experience. Just had to get home. I staggered. Shock—I’m sure it was. Yes. It was shock.
They turned and ran. I chased after them, but they disappeared up the path. Somewhere beyond the trees I heard an engine turn over. I dropped into the big guy’s seat on the log. The wood had been worn; it was well used. I looked into the pail. It was empty. Rusted through.
So Clay stood on the bank, skipping stones like he did when he was a boy, like he did when he taught his son, waiting for the guy and his kid to come back. He considered going home, but opted to wait. It was his property, after all. He skipped a mother stone.
“Six hopper.” The sun warmed his face. The stream burbled along.
Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula K.. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (p. 70). HMH Books. Kindle Edition.
Nicanor Abbott 