Kansas Stories

By Randy Attwood

Eight stories from my heartland:

The Saltness of Time

One More Victim

Blue Kansas Sky

The Notebook

Downswing

Hospita Days

Innocent Passage

Bless Me, Father, for I am Sinning

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randy Attwood
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386664659

Randy Attwood

I grew up on the grounds of a Kansas insane asylum where my father was a dentist. I attended the University of Kansas during the troubled 1960s getting a degree in art history. After stints writing and teaching in Italy and Japan I had a 16-year career in newspapers as reporter, editor and column writer winning major awards in all categories. I turned to health care public relations serving as director of University Relations at KU Medical Center. I finished my career as media relations officer of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Now retired, I am marketing the fiction I've written over all those years. And creating more.

Book preview

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The Saltness of Time

One More Victim

Blue Kansas Sky

The Notebook

Downswing

Hospital Days

Innocent Passage

Bless Me, Father, for I am Sinning

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

My hope is that the reader will find these fiction offerings good stories well told. My further hope is that the reader will find herself or himself engaged with these words. They certainly engaged me. The stories span my mostly unsuccessful years of trying to get them published. Admitting failure in a preface to a publication seems poor self-promotion, but honesty is critical for the writing process—if not to the publishing process. I sense myself whining. The writing will capture you or it will not. This preface and others will not get in the way. Well, maybe a little.

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In which order to present these eight stories? I let the reader decide. Or rather those who have left reviews of these stories that can be found on Amazon. The Saltness of Time has the most reviews.

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THE  SALTNESS  OF  TIME

I like these kinds of snows. They cancel things out.

The voice that broke the silence in the cold room had the gravel-grumble tone that smokers get and keep – even after they stop smoking. The nervous plucking of his hands at his worn, brown sweater said he still missed his cigarettes. His lined, but healthy, blood-perfused face meant he had smoked heavily most of his life before something had made him stop. Bypass surgery, I diagnosed.

There were five of us that night: myself and my fiancée, Stephanie; her sister, Kristin; and her boyfriend, Ted. And him. He was in his late forties or early fifties. Once thin, but now with a small, cannonball pot – the result of not smoking and not changing his eating habits while his body's nutritional needs had changed its. And not exercising. Nutrition and exercise were the new panaceas we were being taught in medical school.

On our way to spend Thanksgiving with my fiancée’s parents in western Kansas, we had stopped in Lawrence to pick up Kristin and Ted, both undergraduates: she majoring in theater, he in fine arts – painting. A snow storm had muscled us off the Kansas highway into a small town where we had found an old hotel: miraculously open. He, too, had found this prairie port, and now we all sat in the lobby around a fire. Because the electricity was out, a kerosene lamp added its natural circle of light to the fireplace glow in the dingy room.

This night reminds me of that other night, the strange man continued. Long ago, but not that many miles from where we are now. Odd blizzard then, too, had canceled things out; started new things in motion. You're all Kansans, aren't you? he asked in a way that said he already knew the answer. We nodded our heads in affirmation.

I thought so. Weather determines our life, doesn't it? We have so much of it. Endure so much of its extremes. Learn from it. Not just farmers and crops. More. I've lived in Florida. Disgusting weather. Two seasons: couple months of nice, the rest heat and humidity. Lived in Ohio. Despised it: all gray for six months. Lived in Seattle. Talk about depressing: rain, rain, rain. Weather in Kansas surprises. Never boring. I like that. Wakes you up.

He was a little spooky. But I figured he was harmless. And there were myself and Ted to protect the girls, snuggling against us as we sat on the divan. We both had our arms around our respective women, sharing the commingled warmth of our young bodies in front of the fire, the only source of heat in the hotel. Sleeping arrangements had yet to be worked out. We had taken two rooms and, by looking at Ted, I could tell he was sharing the same hope I had: that we would take our girlfriends to our own beds, as we each certainly had done in the past, but neither of us knowing if the sisters would acknowledge that fact to each other through the act of allowing it to occur again in the presence of the other. The alternative was unappealing: sharing the narrow, double bed with Ted.

The stranger sat in an overstuffed chair near the fire, getting up as needed to feed it new logs.

I haven't told many people this story. Perhaps you'd rather not hear it. I know how hard it is for young people to listen about what rocked the hearts and flamed the passions of old people when they were young. It seems so long ago it's hard to believe lives back then were blood and bone real. And what happened to me that night reached back into the last century. I mean, Gabrielle was born in the 1880s. No, wait, might as well get it right. She was eighty-nine when we ran across her and that was in 1963, so she would have been born in... He stopped briefly to calculate in his head and Stephie, the little math whiz, spoke up with the answer, 1874.

Eighteen seventy-four. Amazing that I can pass on, personally, now more than one hundred years after her birth, some of the reality of Gabrielle. If you'd care to hear about it, he said, and it was more a plea than a question. Something there that needed telling.

The two artsy types were hooked. Their sets of eyes didn't waver from the stranger's face. The way Stephie leaned her head against my chest told me she didn't want to move. None of us objected. He took it as our assent.

Usually the killer blizzards come in February when the ground is so hard from the cold you'd swear it would fracture the wheat seed planted there in fall and crush the seedlings. But, like this year and this blizzard, winter chose November to crack her knuckles over Kansas.

Her? Is winter feminine? Ted interrupted him before Kristin could.

Oh, yes. If you've ever loved a woman and had her leave you, and find your heart has been turned into a lump of ice in your chest, then you know winter is feminine. Just like summer is masculine, he responded.

And spring and fall? Kristin wanted to know.

"Spring is feminine: hopeful, fresh, innocent – like a young woman's face. Fall is masculine: the brooding, empty gaze of a defeated middle-aged man. Anyway, winter cracked her knuckles over Kansas that year in November. An arctic-air monster had sneaked across the Rockies, caught in its grip the lingering moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and Pawnee County staggered under a two-foot load of snow that stopped everything, except two boys on skis.

"We were just sophomores. Fred was my best friend. We did everything together. Sat in class beside each other, roamed the prairie together, learned to play snooker together. Took up the guitar and pretended to be folk singers. Weekends found one of us staying at the house of the other. Fred lived in Larned. His dad was the sheriff. I lived on the grounds of Larned State Hospital west of town where my dad was the dentist for that loony bin.

"Fred stayed at my place the Friday night that storm hit us. It shut down the roads, downed the phone lines, and only because the hospital had its own power station did we still have electricity.

"We woke up to a wondrous world of white. You just had to get out into it. I remembered that our neighbors – a couple from Germany – skied. Fred and I had never skied, but we went next door and the good Herr Doktor showed us how to get into the skis, and off we went to cross the country. It seemed easy. No major hills nearby to try, but a few banks gave us a hint of the thrill a real hill would have provided. You know what I miss most about youth? It's the discovery of new things. Amazing how quickly in life – about your age I suppose – you stop trying new things: get stuck in the ruts of the familiar. I miss Fred, too. The older men get, the harder it is for them to make new friends. Anyway, skiing made us famished, and we went back to the house for lunch.

"After lunch we went down to my room in the basement and worked on a few songs – something by Peter, Paul and Mary – I can't remember what, when we heard the doorbell ring, and in a few seconds, my dad was calling to Fred to come upstairs. There we found the hospital's security chief, who had come by to tell Fred the sheriff's department had radioed out that his dad had been taken to the hospital with a heart attack. 'How is he?' Fred asked. 'Don't know, son, but they got the doctor to him so I'm sure they're doing all they can. I'm sorry you can't get in to him, but the snow plows won't get to us until tomorrow,' the officer told him.

"'I could ski in. It's only three miles,' Fred said after the security chief left. Dad argued against it, but soon gave in, hoping, I think, that were the situations reversed, his own son would have demanded the same. I added to the weight of Fred's decision by saying I would go with him. So Mom filled a thermos of hot tea, and Dad spiked it with a gurgle of whiskey. We set off on a route we didn't use often by car because it was longer, but we reasoned that it was flatter. The usual, shorter route would have presented a fairly good-sized hill for us to climb. So we headed across the small bridge spanning Pawnee Creek, leading to a road that paralleled the Arkansas River and followed it to town.

"I don't know about you, but I love the prairie. The expanse and openness of it. I'm in big cities too long and I just have to get out, get back to where I can see miles out. The prairie opens us up to the vastness inside of us. Life can constrict you: make you feel tiny and worthless. You have to know there is a vastness inside of you that you can never fully explore, never fully should explore. Socrates admonished, 'know thyself.' I don't think we should know ourselves too well. I think within us there are mysteries, mysteries about ourselves that are, and should remain, mysteries to ourselves.

"Skiing across the prairie was easy. At first. And then the wind came up. A crosswind from the north that kicked up snow and obscured our vision. We must have been halfway to town when I fell, twisted my ankle. When I tried to get back up, I knew it was no simple sprain I could walk off. I couldn't bear any weight on it. We took the laces out of my boots and tied the skis together to make a kind of sled I could sit on. I took my scarf from around my neck and Fred used it as a rope to pull me. He was winded after a hundred yards and had to stop to rest. We knew we were in trouble. Night was not that far off.

"In the distance, towards the river, we saw a large stand of trees and concluded it must contain a farm house. Fred pulled and puffed his way on. A mailbox by the highway told us it was the home of Gabrielle Wentworth Asbury. Neither Fred nor I had heard of the name. The driveway must have been a quarter of a mile long, and I remember how suddenly I felt closed in by the sudden forest that lined the narrow road. Fluffy blue spruces were smothered in snow. Cottonwood trunks were columns of white where the blizzard's fury had slapped on snow and left it like a numbing sting. All the trees seemed to be waiting for a strong wind to shake their heads and free them from the anesthetic, white stuff. Through the trees we could see acres of fruit trees, untended. Old apple trees twisted and gnarled like dead, withered hands stretched up out of the snow. Maybe the trees were dead. But you never know in winter what is dead or has buried its life deep within itself waiting for spring. Tall elm trees that had survived the Dutch Elm plague presented themselves. I was hoping there would be a house, because not moving meant my body wasn't generating as much heat, and I could feel the cold seeping through my winter coat. I wasn't disappointed. What a house we found!

"It was a house made for another era, another place, a set of dreams beyond my understanding. In the failing light, and in the shadows of the trees, the air around the white, three-story mansion had a bluish tinge, the color of my own cold lips. The house needed painting. And what a job that would be! Wide eaves above the attic windows that were above that third floor. Fancy-cut posts, gables, and columns. The entire front porch of the house was screened in. It had the look of a plantation mansion, and I wondered if the porch might not contain a misplaced southern gentleman in a white suit and Panama hat, frozen in mid-stride while smoking his after-dinner cigar.

"I guess we didn't feel proper enough to attempt entry to such a house by its front door. We headed around the side to find the service entrance. And there we saw an old woman shoveling a path through the snow. Fred, too, was stunned by the scene, and for a few seconds we just stared at her. She wore a scarf over her white, scraggly hair. As she pushed the small shovel into the snow, her movements were so brittle it seemed as if her limbs might snap off at any moment from the force of her work. Yet the length of the narrow path from the house headed in the direction of the barn bespoke her strength.

"'Hello,' Fred called. His voice cracked like a gunshot over ice. She startled. Fred pulled me with him as he approached her. Her face was pallid and her lips were blue.

"'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, thank God you've come.' Her frozen lips had trouble moving to shape the sounds. Her body shivered, making her voice quaver. Fred stepped out of his skis and led her back to her house.

'My heat is off. Trying to get to the woodpile, I heard her tell him as they walked away. He led her as you would a wisp of smoke. I stood up and found I could still put no weight on the ankle. I used one of the skis as a crutch under my armpit and hobbled towards the back door.

"I made my way through the kitchen to the sound of Fred's voice. He was explaining about his father's heart attack and my ankle. He was wrapping her in blankets. She sat in an overstuffed chair. Her feet were on a footrest. Fred was creating a cocoon of woolen blankets around her.

"'So we stopped here hoping for help,' Fred said.

"'It will be you who will have to help me. Can you get a fire going? I'm so cold. I don't think I've ever felt this cold.'

"'Yes, Ma'am, right away.'

"It was growing darker in the room, a sitting room just off the kitchen, but in the dim light I could see just how crammed and cluttered it was with stuff. She must have concentrated her life from the immense house into this one room. Shelves were loaded with books, and in front of the books sat gilt-framed pictures, small wooden boxes that must contain other mementos, stacks of letters tied together with ribbons. Small ceramic figurines freckled the room. Stacks of National Geographic magazines were under end tables. Fred lit two candles before he went to fetch wood from the barn, and the flames seemed like frozen wax lights as they illuminated the flower-print wallpaper.

"'What's your religion,' she suddenly asked me.

"'What?' I asked.

"'Your religion, what is it?'

"'Catholic,' I told her.

"'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been...' She started to tell me her confession, but I stopped her.

"'I can't hear your confession, Ma'am, I'm not a priest,' I told her, but then the cold seemed to take physical possession of her, shaking her with jerks that seemed to rip away at her life and finally tear open the door to her very soul, from which a blast of emotion, long pent up, erupted.

"'No, not yet. Not yet! Wait!' she screamed.

"I thought she was dying. I wanted to go to her, to touch her, touch her in that manner any of us will want to touch a person we are with who is near death. But that natural instinct, I have to tell you, was wiped away by a palpable fear, a fear that if I went near her at that moment, the blast from her open soul would sear my own.

"She expelled a long breath that made the candle flame flicker and set the patterned wallpaper aquiver. The house itself seemed to look over my shoulder in expectation of the great event of her