FSF, May 2008 Read online

  So I'll qualify that intro by saying The Shadow Year is superb, heartbreaking, and masterfully written; in its way, as perfect an evocation of the mystery and hilarity and terror that is American childhood as Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, or Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, with flickers here and there of David Sedaris's black humor and the frightening fever-dream of Charles Laughton's great movie adaptation of Davis Grubb's Night of the Hunter.

  An expansion of Ford's novella “Botch Town,” which won the 2007 World Fantasy Award, The Shadow Year begins and ends with the last days of summer, the bittersweet halcyon season that marks the true beginning of a child's year, far more than the random, grownup assignation of January 1. In this I detect a nod to Fellini's Amarcord, the filmmaker's funny, melancholy reverie of his own childhood. The Shadow Year has much in common with Amarcord. The movie's title translates as “I remember,” and Fellini completed it when he was just past fifty, the same age as Ford is now. Like Amarcord, The Shadow Year conflates the everyday and the supernatural; overheard adult conversations that take on a gilded patina of legend and the profane, no-bullshit exchanges of kids when they know grownups aren't listening.

  The narrator of Ford's tale is the middle of three siblings, suffering through sixth grade in a small Long Island town in the early 1960s. As in “Botch Town,” he is never given a name, but it's difficult not to identify him with the author—two of the book's three dedicatees bear the same names as the narrator's siblings—which makes the novel's balancing act of memory and magic all the more impressive. The plot is simple and, by now, familiar to any reader of late-twentieth-century popular fiction: a small town is threatened by a serial killer who preys on both children and adults. The killer, dubbed Mr. White by the protagonist and his older brother, Jim, possesses near-supernatural attributes we've seen before, usually in Stephen King novels—distinctive car (older model, shiny white, tail-finned), distinctive clothing (long white trench coat and hat), unsettling ability to detect the presence of hidden children while seeming to remain invisible to adults. Mr. White is real, though—he attempts to abduct one kid and murders another, and also kills an adult neighbor. But is he the same person as the mysterious Peeping Tom who is glimpsed by various folks throughout the novel?

  Mr. White's depredations are eerily foreshadowed in Botch Town, a makeshift basement model of the children's hometown, built of discarded toys, Matchbox cars, and other junk by older brother Jim, and inhabited by toy figures the three siblings name after their real-life counterparts. Mary, the youngest child, is able to predict where Mr. White will strike next, and this concession to the mechanics of supernatural fiction gives The Shadow Year a passing similarity to works like King's Hearts in Atlantis, the stories in Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, and in particular Glen Hirshberg's spooky, underrated The Snowman's Children.

  Yet The Shadow Year is better than all of these, because it is a more nuanced, far more delicate novel. “Delicate” seems an odd word to describe a book wherein Sherlock Holmes appears as a leitmotif, described thus: “The great detective came across to me like a snob, the type my father once described as ‘believing that the sun rose and set from his asshole;'” or where the narrator has this encounter with his grandparents—

  On the TV, Hercules was lifting a giant boulder. Pop was awake now, reading a magazine. He saw I was also awake and said, “You shouldn't watch this junk,” nodding toward the television. “You should read a magazine. It's educational. See?” he said, and turned the magazine in his hands so I could see the page he was on. There was no writing, just a picture of a naked woman sitting on the lap of a guy in a gorilla suit. I could feel my face flush. Nan looked over and laughed. “Put that away,” she said.

  The characterization of the narrator's family is so dead-on it almost hurts to read, caught between heartbreak and laughing out loud—Jim's severe, don't-argue-with-me pronouncements on topics such as school projects and the hierarchy of Halloween candy (Milky Ways at the top, home-baked goods at the bottom); the unsparing, deeply loving depiction of their mother's alcoholism; Mary's odd powers and imaginary friends, evidence of an acute imagination that seems as though it might veer into a more frightening adult psychological disorder; the narrator's casual yet deeply felt discovery that he likes to write in a notebook—all take on the buoyant gravitas of a modern classic being born, right there on the page.

  Because what Ford does in The Shadow Year is capture childhood the way it really is, starlight that reaches us a million miles away, in adulthood, all the more fragile and breathtaking because we know we're seeing something that is gone forever. G. K. Chesterton, another laureate of the magical mundane, wrote “What is loved becomes immediately what can be lost"; and The Shadow Year is both celebration of and memento mori for a kind of American childhood that doesn't exist anymore, except in fiction.

  It did once, though. I can attest to that, having grown up in a time and place not far removed from the setting of The Shadow Year. But Ford's book isn't an exercise in Baby Boomer nostalgia. It's far too hard-headed for that, far too blackly funny; far too real, even as Ford plainly stakes his claim to a homegrown surrealism as distinctive as David Lynch's, as when their mother takes the three children to see a grimy circus, complete with sideshow, camped outside town—

  Even I wanted to see the Blood-Sweating Hippo, but we turned and walked away. My mother bought us cotton candy—plumes of blue wrapped in a paper cone. The first bite was like eating hair, until it suddenly melted into straight sugar....

  We made our way to a circular enclosure and peered over the walls. There was a lightbulb above the ring that lit the slick hide of the hippo. The creature lay there, in straw sodden with its own piss, huge and unmoving. All it did was breathe. We stared at it as long as we could. Then Jim picked Mary up and held her so she could see. She pointed to the edge of the enclosure at something I hadn't noticed before. There was a track that went around the rim of the circle, and on it was a turtle. A few seconds later, she pointed to another spot, and there was a rabbit.

  "The tortoise and the hare,” said my mother.

  "What does that have to do with a hippo?” I asked.

  "Ask the midget,” she said.

  * * * *

  The Shadow Year plays out across a year in realtime, kid-time. The big events include murders, that attempted abduction, and a haunting, but they're played out against the things that really matter when you're eleven years old: Halloween, Christmas, beating up the kid who beat you up first, a long, unplanned afternoon with your father, listening to grownups talk when they think you're asleep. Ford's narrative isn't leisurely so much as oneiric. I finished this book as though waking from a long dream, like Alice returned from Looking-Glass World; trying to puzzle out which parts were real, which invented; what had actually happened to me forty years ago and what I had only just read about. It's proof of Jeffrey Ford's narrative power that, ultimately, the distinction doesn't much matter. His made-up world trumps ours all hollow.

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  Rebecca's Locket by S. L. Gilbow

  S. L. Gilbow is making a reputation for himself as a storyteller with a sharp eye for social commentary—several critics marked him as a writer to watch after reading his stories “Who Brought Tulips to the Moon?” (Dec. 2007) and “Red Card” (Feb. 2007). His new story is lighter in tone, but just as keenly observant of how technology tends to change human lives.

  On a November Friday morning, Jerry Morgan attended his funeral at the Cotton Springs Methodist Church. It wasn't a bad funeral. His daughter, Jill, flew her Cessna in from Saint Louis, and his son, Buddy, drove up from El Paso six hours away. The townspeople of Cotton Springs turned out in good numbers too, solemnly filing into the old, brick church, filling all the pews except for a few closest to the front. Cotton Springs was a small, close-knit community where funerals tended to draw good crowds.

  The service proceeded much as Jerry had planned. Jennifer Garland,
the church organist for twenty-one years, started out with “How Great Thou Art.” She bobbed her head in rhythm to the music, striking each key with precision, artfully working the pedals with her feet. Jennifer hit her final B-flat with the left heel of her patent leather Mary Janes and held it as Jill and Buddy somberly marched to the front of the church, stood behind the coffin, and began to sing: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium."

  This surprised Jerry. He had planned for Jill and Buddy to sing “I'll Fly Away.” But here they were, bold and passionate, making their way through “Ode to Joy,” Jerry's favorite song. Jerry had learned to sing it in German while in the Army, and belted it out around the house whenever he was in a good mood.

  "Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum,” whispered Jerry. Jill sang with a passable German accent she learned at Texas Tech, but Buddy butchered his vowels with a thick west-Texas drawl. But the song was beautiful. It was always beautiful.

  After Jill and Buddy finished singing and stepped away from the coffin, Reverend Hackam ambled to the podium and began to talk about what a wonderful person Jerry had been for the past sixty-eight years, about how well he had treated his neighbors, about what fine contributions Jerry and his small store, Grocery Delite, had made to this humble community. Jerry agreed with almost everything the reverend said but disliked the dry, monotonous way he said it.

  "Jerry was a fine man,” droned Reverend Hackam, “a good person to have known.” Jerry had hoped for a little more enthusiasm.

  The spray of roses on top of Jerry's coffin bothered him too. Jerry and Rebecca had talked about the funeral in great detail two weeks before Jerry died. She had come to his hospital room late one night, knowing Jerry didn't have much time left. Rebecca didn't want to talk about death or dying, but Jerry brought up the subject. He usually avoided serious topics, but this was one thing he wanted to discuss. He told her how he pictured the funeral. He talked about songs and singers. He selected his casket from a newspaper ad for Hank Jenson's Funeral Home down on Austin Street, picking out the deluxe oak coffin with thin silver bands that ran around it like racing stripes. Finally, Jerry asked for red flowers. He loved his ruby-red Ford pick-up truck and hoped red roses might remind everybody of it.

  But the flowers on top of Jerry's coffin weren't red. They were yellow—as yellow as canaries.

  "Why the yellow flowers?” asked Jerry, gazing at his oak coffin.

  "They were out of red roses,” whispered Rebecca. “Now be quiet."

  "I would have settled for carnations."

  "Shhh!"

  "You're the only one who can hear me,” said Jerry. Rebecca had been short with Jerry all morning, and he was growing tired of it.

  "We're in a church,” said Rebecca. “We're in the middle of a funeral.” She was having trouble getting used to Jerry being in two places at once—in the casket and around her neck.

  "I guess the yellow flowers are okay,” said Jerry.

  "They're fine,” said Rebecca, trying to be patient. She had been listening to Jerry through an earpiece that ran from her right ear to a gold locket hanging over the center of her chest. And that's where Jerry was—in the locket. Well, not exactly in the locket—Jerry was the locket.

  * * * *

  Things came slowly to Cotton Springs. When Martha Jenson brought the first washing machine to town in 1926, Frank Hapsen acted as if the whole world might come to an end. “Ain't got no use for that kind of thing around here,” he would say whenever anyone would listen to him. But the world didn't come to an end, and Frank's wife, Mary, washed his shirts by hand until he died in 1937. Then she bought a washing machine.

  And so over the past one hundred years technology crept into Cotton Springs. Always slowly. Usually grudgingly. But it always came. Washing machines, telephones, cameras, radios, televisions, hot air popcorn poppers, microwave ovens, computers, and cell phones all worked their way out of Fort Worth, down Interstate 20 to the west, and over the state highway into Cotton Springs.

  It was no surprise when the Eternilocket finally came to town as well. By the time it got to Cotton Springs, the rest of the country had already played around with it for five years and was beginning to grow bored.

  When Infinite Electronics came out with the Eternilocket, people were fascinated with the idea of downloading a person's personality and memories into a locket. The locket could be brought out to help the next of kin get through the grieving process. It was also pretty handy when you couldn't find the will.

  However, many people complained that the lockets just didn't capture the beloved's true personality. Others pointed out that they never seemed to get the voice quite right. A few just grew tired of arguing with jewelry. By the time the Eternilocket came to Cotton Springs, by the time Jerry Morgan had one programmed at his hospital bed less than a week away from dying, almost all the rest of the country was done with it.

  "And, of course, Jerry was more concerned with the mule's hoof than his own head,” said Reverend Hackam. Laughter rose from the crowd, that quiet respectful kind of laughter you occasionally hear at weddings, funerals, and fancy restaurants.

  "That's not really how it happened,” said Jerry. The mule story had been going around for about ten years now, and it seemed to change a little every time someone told it.

  "Hush,” said Rebecca.

  "I got kicked in the shoulder,” said Jerry. “It was nowhere near my head."

  "It doesn't matter,” said Rebecca.

  "And Jerry was a passionate man,” continued the reverend.

  Passionate? thought Jerry. That wasn't really how he would have described himself.

  "We all know how much Jerry loved his wife, Rebecca.” Jerry could sense himself dip as Rebecca bowed her head. “And of course we all know that Jerry loved Jacks,” said the reverend.

  Jerry brightened at the mention of Jacks. He had even wanted Rebecca to bring Jacks to the funeral, but Rebecca had refused, saying it would be silly to let a dog into a church.

  "You really should have let me bring him,” said Jerry.

  Rebecca grasped the locket and dug the small red jewel, Jerry's eyes in a sense, into the palm of her hand, squeezing hard.

  "I can't see!” shouted Jerry.

  "You going to be quiet?” asked Rebecca.

  "All right,” said Jerry.

  "Not a word,” whispered Rebecca, releasing Jerry from her grasp. He dropped to his place between her breasts.

  "All right,” said Jerry. He paused. He didn't intend to say another word, but he couldn't resist. “I know Jacks would have been good."

  "That's it!” shouted Rebecca as Jerry sank into darkness.

  When Jerry came to, he heard barking, low and muffled, coming from another room. He thought Rebecca had brought him home but, looking straight up at the ceiling, couldn't be certain. After a few seconds, he recognized a gaping crack in the corner molding, a crack Rebecca had begged him to fix many times, and knew Rebecca had laid him on the dresser in their bedroom.

  "Rebecca!” shouted Jerry. He no longer spoke through the earpiece, and his voice, strong and metallic, almost like shouting into a frying pan, startled him. “Rebecca,” he said softer.

  "Yes?"

  She was close. Of course, she had to be close. Jerry couldn't have switched himself back on.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Jerry, this isn't going to work,” said Rebecca.

  "Of course it is,” said Jerry, still disoriented, still gazing up at the ceiling. “Just put me on again. We can talk."

  Jerry hadn't been much of a talker when he was alive. He could do small talk, but he usually avoided serious conversation. Serious talking was one of those things he occasionally endured to keep his marriage going. But now, since he no longer had legs or arms—or even a torso or head for that matter—his choice of activities was extremely limited.

  "Please,” he pleaded. “Just put me on for a little while and then we can talk."

  Jerry's view sp
un around wildly as Rebecca lifted him off the dresser and fastened the locket's thin chain around her neck. When Jerry stopped spinning, he found himself looking in a mirror, looking at Rebecca, looking at a gold locket engraved with tiny flowers. In the center of the locket sat a glassy red jewel. I'm actually a little gaudy, he thought.

  Jacks scratched at the bedroom door, barking loudly. He was a large golden retriever, usually calm and quiet. Jerry had owned dogs for almost his entire life, but favored Jacks over all the rest.

  "Can I see Jacks?” asked Jerry.

  "He won't recognize you,” said Rebecca. “And he's kind of excited today."

  "We can at least try."

  Rebecca opened the door. Jacks dashed in, arced around her and emitted a low guttural sound, not quite a growl. Jerry thought Jacks was a beautiful dog. Not perfect. Certainly not a show dog. His shoulders stood too high and his head was too broad. He had a pink nose and a thick, dark coat. Rebecca backed away slowly as Jacks, tail wagging, body shifting from side to side, jumped closer.

  "I told you,” she said. She turned to look out the open bedroom window thinking that if she ignored Jacks he might settle down. Jerry looked out the window too but could still see Jacks at the edge of his vision.

  "Jacks!” said Jerry. That usually quieted him.

  Jacks dipped his head for a second, regained his courage and barked again.

  "Get back,” said Jerry. Jacks took one step back and sank obediently to the floor.

  "We need to talk, Jerry,” said Rebecca.

  As Jerry looked out the bedroom window, he could see the neighbor's cat skulking about next to the large cottonwood tree at the end of the alley. She was a large gray beast Jerry and Jacks had grown to dislike. She always seemed to be sneaking onto the Morgans’ property to prowl through the garbage cans at the back of the house.