A History of the World

By W. A. Smith

A History of the World is a haunting exploration of the mystery of human connection. A novella with the fullness of dimension and scope of a much bigger book, the story is set in a fictional rural American town in the early 1980’s and is told by six narrators, including two ghosts. W.A. Smith's language is luminous, provocative and profound—by turns lyrical and magical—and the tale is rich with deeply drawn characters and personal histories. Guilt and fear drive Epley away from his true love, and after a journey of self-discovery, the desire for life and love leads him home. A History of the World captures families at their breaking and breakthrough points, revealing the power of love, fear, desire and redemption as they are expressed and sometimes hidden in the gestures of daily living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. A. Smith
• Release date: Apr 3, 2013

W. A. Smith

William Atmar Smith was born in Charleston, South Carolina, attended schools in Charleston, and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He received his M.A. from San Francisco State University. His stories have appeared in a variety of literary venues including Aura, Berkeley Fiction Review, Cimarron Review, Crucible, Five Fingers Review, New England Review, and Algonquin Books’ New Stories From the South, The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their four children.

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A History of the World

W. A. Smith

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2007-2013 W.A. Smith

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TRIPTYCH

Driving Lessons

Skunk Time

Birdsong

About the Author

Author Photo: Suzy S. Smith

William Atmar Smith was born in Charleston, South Carolina, attended schools in Charleston, and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He received his M.A. from San Francisco State University. His stories have appeared in a variety of literary venues including Aura, Berkeley Fiction Review, Cimarron Review, Crucible, Five Fingers Review, New England Review, and Algonquin Books’ New Stories From the South, The Year’s Best. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their four children.

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With admiration, gratitude and love to

Charles Capers Smith and William Atmar Smith,

fathers, fishermen, healers, storytellers, brothers, sons:

I linger in your shadows and long for your voices

and to my mother, Anne,

whose love I never doubted, whose faith increased my own

and to Suzy, Connor, Céili, Tess, and Jenna,

precious as breath, gifts from the living God

and to

Capers Wilson,

Dale Lynch and his adopted daddy Bill,

Ruthie Ellison Robbins,

Jack Warren,

Danny and Joe Shea,

gone on ahead, held in our hearts.

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I am an old woman

named after my mother

my old man is another

child who’s grown old

If dreams were lightning

and thunder was desire

this old house would’ve burned down

a long time ago

- John Prine

Angel From Montgomery

DRIVING LESSONS

JOSEPHINE

Look! he said, whispering to me from the side of the house, or the edge of our wedding bed, in a lovely sober voice, changed - lonely, I was thinking - but clear and strong as the first day we met, and of course I did look, laying my head back against that old tree, spreading my arms to receive him, as natural as you please, my eyes rounded with a wild expectation searching in the dark tangled mystery of oak limbs where the light was lost above me, expecting another instruction, or a kiss, a very long kiss, breathing deep as the air goes blue, discovering the white sky, never missing my heartbeat, not knowing when it stops. Lewis, don’t be playing games - I’m not as young as I used to be. But I love him and ache with my longing for him, and I will play any game he can dream up. If you’re hiding, Lew, I’ll count to ten and come find you ... and while my finger taps the slow numbers out against the hard silence of the tree, about the time I come to eight or nine, I’m in the kitchen looking through the screen door into the yard at Josephine, what’s left of me, leaning respectfully against the oak waiting for my instructions in the faded yellow dress turning blue with the new air, rippling like a wave against my legs ... looking for my Lewis’ mouth to kiss and keep kissing. My eyes fill with the end: an old dead woman I never really knew.

So my going was easy and the strange familiarity of it unexpected ... and there was no pain because Lewis somehow knew and chose the time, calling to me, a final protective distraction as my heart ruptured and gave up. He always could catch my attention and hold it.

Through the screen I saw a red bird among the branches above me, my dress fluttering, a constant trembling, the bird beginning to sing, almost casually, and it seemed as though my dead eyes, out there, heard it too. Long familiar notes rose like secrets grown out of a dark, merciful remembrance of light, revealing themselves one by one, drops of rain on a new leaf, and my heart’s song was cast like a net in the blue air.

Lewis, are you listening? How do we speak to one another? Where are you? But there was only the tree and the dress and the deep, changed air, beginning now to pulse with voices, some I know - Mommy and her mother, who was gone before I was born, whispering to one another as they brush each other’s hair, my grandmother praying for a good crop and a decent cow - just the crop would be fine, she says - and I wonder why she’s praying for these things now - why is she praying at all? She says to Mommy, For efficient prayer mostly you need your voice, your heart, good memory and enough grace to fill a thimble. And I think, What about faith? But what I say is, Why isn’t there Lewis’ voice? At least his voice. Why do I only get silence from him?

Epley was crying and I looked again out through the screen and saw him in the yard finding me ended up against the oak. I’m figuring Time is not the same as it once was. Without moving his lips Epley begged me to wake up - he was praying, after a fashion, desperately - more in his head than his heart - and I hear him. He was sorry, so sorry about it all, wondering if someone had done this to me, please wake up, and I tell him I’m all right here in the kitchen. But your father is incognito, I tell him. Where are you, Lewis - why don’t you talk to me? He got me through the worst of it and now he’s nowhere to be found. I wonder, What is this feeling? This death is soft around me, soft, like a dry beautiful water - what could be softer than this? I know I have moved permanently into it, and I am heavily certain that living will not be the same from now on.

I could see the oak and my boy crying there, his own song curling out of him like a kind of smoke ... but now I am concerned more with living on this side. My interests have changed. Of course I wanted Epley to know I’m doing fine, it’s good where I am - he and Trudy must get on with their own glory and questioning and suffering. And sorrow. There will soon be a baby with black hair and eyes deeper than the hole they’ve laid my body in, but I have no fear and worry now, only questions. Fear is in the clear air - I’m not going back there, ever - my thoughts returning to Lewis ... and Mommy, and Bertha Travis and Jake Hawley who I never got to say good-bye to. And I hear Daddy and GrandJack plowing somewhere together, an eternal furrow in deep, wet earth, and their hands are full of seeds as they whistle the funny old father-and-son duets they make up as they go along. Melodies constructed like good fences or furniture. I’m certain I’ll see them before too long - the distance between us seems shorter than the rest. My father and grandfather sound like two streams of the same steady green river as they plow, promises flowing this way.

Lewis? Will you come soon? Can’t we be here together?

I remember his dying. It was so long in coming ... and I held him and smoothed my hand across his cool forehead, watching the pain run like swollen veins through his face.... You gave me the joy of your voice as I died, but I didn’t do that for you. I was lost from you, Lewis, without help or peace ... but when I saw that freedom finally in your face I was glad for your release, sure you’re happier than you’d been. Lord, I thought you had to be.

Our son was gone that night. I covered your face and called the funeral home, and I went out looking. It didn’t take long. I found him drunk in the movie house with his friends, Jolly, Willis, Tiptoe Jefferson, watching the show over and over, drinking bourbon from a plastic cup. The light traveling across his face. I touched his shoulder in the dark and felt his cold eyes turning on me. Is he dead? he asked. Yes, I said, and you should show some respect. The dark theater was vibrating with projected light. Ep closed his eyes. This is the best I got, he said.

Come here to our house, Lew. Can’t we rest here now? Do you hear any of this?

With this death comes a knowing that is more certain in an instant than all I learned on Earth. Nothing stops, everything is illuminated. But I still have all my questions. If they were drops of water, there would be an ocean in this house.

I always thought there would be one complete answer, one word maybe or a single reason like a crystal the light runs through, the same for everyone, everyone understanding the one thing and knowing it together, a family growing as the dead are added to the circle. I expected much less complication. But it’s a million little answers coming one by one, and it’s not a circle exactly - there’s no face across from me to study and love, no hand beckoning.

Epley and Trudy came into the house like it was church, tiptoeing. Trudy asked Ep where did he think they should start cleaning and rearranging furniture. But my boy couldn’t say anything back to her. He didn’t know what to do with his grief. Talk to that girl, that beautiful girl - you two make a home here.

The child moved inside Trudy. She put Epley’s hand there so he could feel it. The child rolled its soft head, soft as this, against Ep’s hand and waited for the sound of his voice. Ep was frightened by everything so he tried for a moment to act brave and certain, like Lewis might. Epley thought about smiling and saying something to the baby, or telling Trudy how Girleen was going to look just like her ... but he didn’t make an attempt. He took his hand off her stomach and looked around the kitchen as if he could feel me there with them. And he told her they should start upstairs and work their way down.

He helped move all the furniture from the other house, and after my funeral they worked together fixing the upstairs the way they wanted it, but after that he didn’t do much inside. He worked on his truck out in the yard, bending over the engine for hours at a time, or he made up jobs, meaningless things to keep himself occupied, and separate. He left for work early and got home late. I could see his heart clenched inside him like a fist. The look on his face was like Lewis in bed waiting for the end. Trudy saw all this too, but she was hoping everything was going to run its natural course, figuring when the baby came and his grief over me wore out the world would change back to something full of possibilities and Epley would change back with it. Trudy thought of her grandmother and closed her eyes while she’s washing the kitchen windows, giving some attention to the proposition that time heals all wounds. Gertrude always said it did. Gertrude and time were thick as thieves. Trudy dipped her hand in the bucket of water, squeezing that new blue sponge with a wrist-snapping authority designed to make it into an old sponge before its time. She surprised me, filled me with her clear whisper, opening her eyes, thinking, Help me, Josephine. I see something coming - I don’t know what it is.

Another dimple in the circle, I say. Has to be. I almost tell her, Try to enjoy it, but I know that advice doesn’t have anything true in it. Imagine: trying to enjoy. And circles don’t have curves, or even dimples. Not here in the kitchen. I know, too, that there was plenty I didn’t enjoy. I thought of the difference between happiness and joy, and which one is worth pursuing. I thought of the last time I washed those windows. It was evening and the cows were up, Lewis was in the side yard digging for some worms for fishing, every so often pointing out to me where I’d missed a spot on the window. Up and to the right, he says. Look up, Josie!

But soon after that, Lewis’ stomach started to give him pain. He didn’t do any more digging ... and I didn’t wash any more windows. His pain tired him out, worked him to the bone, even if he was just sitting in a chair or standing in the doorway looking out. It was a tiredness without sleep to cure it. Life was just a word.

I got tired right along with him, feeling him drift away from me like a boat that’s come untied. Never calling for help….

And when Epley and Trudy carried in their little two-seater sofa, Daddy and GrandJack were sitting on it, blue-faced and peaceful, happy to have the ride. GrandJack’s hands are red where he’d been plowing without his gloves, and Epley said, Let’s set it in front of the fireplace for now and go get the bedside tables for upstairs.

Wherever you put it, it’s going to be there a while, says GrandJack. Daddy looks at me as if I just turned seventeen: There’s that beautiful girl I lost back there. It’s been years, hasn’t it, Josephine?

Yes, it has. Pleased to have the company.

Daddy remembers me standing at the fence.

That’s what they call ‘em, GrandJack says looking through the sparkling windows. Yearrrrrs.

This is a fine place, says Daddy, surveying the kitchen from his position on the sofa.

A nice warm shade of blue, adds GrandJack. Reminds me of the funeral parlor they laid us out in. You were on the left, I was on the right - old Packer, the one-armed mortician, was standing in the middle smiling like we was some kind of hunting trophies.

I remember like it was yesterday, says Daddy, winking at me.

Yesterday or the day after, says GrandJack, wrinkling the air with his laughter, the surface of a lake just after the rock drops in. The only thing I regretted, he says, is I didn’t finish that field the same day I started. All I had was one more row.

GrandJack’s smelling the turned-up dirt now, reaching down into it. Honor comes to his lips and he holds it there, completely still in his mouth, like a bee wings-down in the strawberry jam. Resisting the struggle.

I shouldn’t have come with the water, Daddy says.

Don’t be starting up again with that, says GrandJack. He softens his voice, touches Daddy on his cheek. You came with the water ‘cause you knew I’d be thirsty.

Thirsty beats dead, Daddy says. They look at each other and I see the field in their clear dark eyes, opened wide by the lightning.

I don’t know about that, says GrandJack, a little ornery. I don’t think I’d want to be thirsty this long. Dead-Alive is better.

I had seen it all from the fence line, twenty yards away. It was raining hard that night, but everyone was pleased about it because we hadn’t seen any rain to speak of in months. I had followed Daddy out to the field GrandJack was plowing. GrandJack had been doing strange things for a while - reading books upside down, mumbling to himself in third-person, going to church on Monday, calling Mommy Bessie when he’d never called her anything but Bess for as long as they’d known each other. Also, he’d started plowing at night, just him and the mule and the plow - even though Daddy had recently bought a tractor - and the strangest thing was that the rows were as straight as ever, and I knew he couldn’t possibly see what he was doing. Those straight furrows made GrandJack holy to me somehow, and I watched him like a hawk. Well, Daddy just let him go on and do what he wanted, and a lot of the time he would join GrandJack at the plowing so he could keep an eye on him. On this particular night - which I remember was a Monday because GrandJack had walked to church that morning - Daddy filled the long-handled cup with water and went out in the rain to give GrandJack a drink - just as an excuse to see how the old man was doing ... and I followed him out because GrandJack’s strangeness was the most interesting thing happening in my life at the time. I was seventeen and starved for something, and since our house was surrounded by flat brown fields as far as the eye could see and my best friend Bertha Travis lived in town nineteen miles away, I spent a lot of time by myself or listening to the grownups.

It was coming down hard. It was difficult for me to hear what they were saying because of the rain, and seeing was next to impossible except when a crooked finger of electrified light rearranged the sky for a moment. The mule, Chunk, probably thought plowing in the rain was one of the poorest ideas GrandJack had ever entertained, but he and the old man were so well acquainted and used to one another that Chunk would have grudgingly done anything GrandJack asked him to.

When Daddy offered him the water, GrandJack laughed and said Daddy didn’t have to bring water, there’s plenty of it coming down on their heads. Daddy laughed too and they left Chunk with the plow and went under the maple tree to rest for a minute and have a drink. I thought it was great that Daddy just went along with it and didn’t ask GrandJack to go inside. Daddy’s love was something you could see. GrandJack was still laughing a little bit, leaning against the tree. He tried to light a cigarette, but the rain was dripping through the branches above him and he couldn’t keep it lit. Every time he would light a match, I’d see his dripping face with his cupped hands out in front of it. Hell with it, I heard him say as the last match went out. Of course I was soaked by this time, even though I had on a raincoat, because the water was coming off my hair and going down my neck, so I was thinking about getting back inside where it was dry. I looked over at the two forms huddled under the maple and whispered good night to them, and I saw Daddy’s shadow-hand reach out to GrandJack with the silver drinking cup in it, and GrandJack’s shadow-hand grasped the cup and just then a crack of lightning crashed into the tree and a fireball jumped out of the black limbs at Daddy. The whole field lit up in an instant - Chunk took off running, pulling the bouncing plow behind him, night-colored dirt flying up as the old mule crossed the field with the heavy clinking of his harness buckles joining the crackling hiss of Daddy’s hair catching fire, electricity humming down his outstretched arm as if it were a fuse, the drinking cup a white-hot coal, GrandJack’s arm glowing too, his hair on fire sticking out of his head like a porcupine’s angry quills. And next the sound of me opening my mouth, a dislodged peep dropping out, but very soon a scream - and the two charred halves of the split tree fell down beside Daddy and GrandJack and I screamed and screamed and screamed - the light went out of them, misty smoke rose from their heads like two chimneys side by side, drifting from their fingertips, and I thought Daddy waved to me. His hand drooped at the end of his arm, their four rubbery legs wobbled and sat down slowly where the tree used to be, like puppets lowered down, one of