The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (2 page)

“The Honeyed Knot” cuts right to the heart of that pursuit. It begins with a cascade of tales, story after story tumbling down the page, related by a protagonist who is Ford himself, teaching a writing course that is for his students more a means of self-discovery than a road to publication. One tale steps forward to achieve centrality, but its uncertainties and revelations do not trace a straightforward arc of revelation. The discoveries made by Ford, searching for the truth behind the tales, fold in upon themselves and reconnect in unexpected ways. The machineries of night are at work here, and if their mechanisms cannot be laid bare, their effects can at least be held up for examination.

Ford says that “The Honeyed Knot” is highly autobiographical. He held that job. The students were all real, as were the stories they wrote. One of them did indeed murder a little girl. He wrote this story as a kind of exorcism of his sense of disappointment in himself for not being able to foresee and prevent that death. “One of the things I think the story gets at is how a sense of responsibility can exceed its bounds and turns into a kind of destructive vanity or self-righteousness,” he told me. “Maybe that's what I was going for there. Believing I should be able to do things I had no way of doing.”

So there is serious stuff going on here. But I invite you to examine “The Honeyed Knot” on a more superficial level. In it, Ford's universe is revealed to be literally made up of stories. And the revelation at the end, the explication of the “honeyed knot” that is the story's central metaphor, leads us again both outward and inward, to life and to words.

If you were to require me to explain Ford's fiction with his own words, however, that's not where I would have you look. Rather, I would refer you to the last story in this volume.

“Bright Morning,” original to this collection, is an audacious work that is on the surface an exercise in self-reference. The narrator might as well be Jeffrey Ford's
doppelgänger
. He gets the kind of blurbs and reviews that Jeffrey Ford gets. He has a publishing history not at all unlike that of Jeffrey Ford. But I wouldn't put too much weight on that, if I were you. Ford is a trickster, and not likely to be caught out as easily as that.

Right in the middle of “Bright Morning” comes a moment that touches upon the revelatory. “My sentences,” writes Ford, who never seeks to obscure when it's possible to make manifest, “sometimes have the quality of Arabic penmanship, looping and knotting, like some kind of Sufi script meant to describe one of the names given to God in order to avoid using his real name.”

Exactly. There is an inexplicable strangeness at the heart of this story, as there is in all of Ford's work. It is not, however, an alienating, but a comprehending strangeness, a means of coming to grips with something that can almost but not quite be put into words. Time after time, his protagonists come face to face with that instant of insight that might, even if only for that instant, reveal the hidden workings and secret connections of the universe.

But don't take
my
word for it. To understand the essential strangeness of Jeffrey Ford's world, you have only to dip into the stories contained herein. Experience the man's voice firsthand. Let him work his magic on you. Read. Marvel. Enjoy.

Comprehend.

Michael Swanwick

September 2001

Creation

I learned about creation from Mrs. Grimm, in the basement of her house down the street from ours. The room was dimly lit by a stained-glass lamp positioned above the pool table. There was also a bar in the corner, behind which hung an electric sign that read RHEINGOLD and held a can that endlessly poured golden beer into a pilsner glass that never seemed to overflow. That brew was liquid light, bright bubbles never ceasing to rise.

“Who made you?” she would ask, consulting that little book with the pastel-colored depictions of agony in Hell and the angel-strewn clouds of Heaven. Mrs. Grimm had the nose of a witch, one continuous eyebrow and teacup-shiny skin—even the wrinkles seemed capable of cracking. Her smile was merely the absence of a frown, but she made candy apples for us at Halloween and marsh-mallow bricks in the shapes of wise men at Christmas. I often wondered how she had come to know so much about God, and pictured saints with halos and cassocks playing pool and drinking beer in her basement at night.

We kids would page through our own copies of the catechism book to find the appropriate response, but before anyone else could answer, Amy Lash would already be saying, “God made me.”

Then Richard Antonelli would get up and begin to jump around, making fart noises through his mouth, and Mrs. Grimm would shake her head and tell him God was watching. I never jumped around, never spoke out of turn, for two reasons, neither of which had to do with God. One was what my father called his “size ten,” referring to his shoe, and the other was that I was too busy watching that sign over the bar, waiting to see the beer finally spill.

The only time I was ever distracted from my vigilance was when she told us about the creation of Adam and Eve. After God had made the world, he made them too, because he had so much love and not enough places to put it. He made Adam out of clay and blew life into him, and, once he came to life, God made him sleep and then stole a rib and made the woman. After the illustration of a naked couple consumed in flame, being bitten by black snakes and poked by the fork of a pink demon with horns and bat wings, the picture for the story of the creation of Adam was my favorite. A bearded God in flowing robes leaned over a clay man, breathing blue-gray life into him.

That breath of life was like a great autumn wind blowing through my imagination, carrying with it all sorts of questions like pastel leaves that momentarily obscured my view of the beautiful flow of beer. Was dirt the first thing Adam tasted? Was God's beard brushing against his chin the first thing Adam felt? When he slept, did he dream of God stealing his rib and did it crack when it came away from him? What did he make of Eve and the fact that she was the only woman for him to marry? Was he thankful it wasn't Amy Lash?

Later on, I asked my father what he thought about the creation of Adam, and he gave me his usual response to any questions concerning religion. “Look,” he said, “it's a nice story, but when you die you're food for the worms.” One time my mother made him take me to church when she was sick, and he sat in the front row, directly in front of the priest. While everyone else was genuflecting and standing and singing, he just sat there staring, his arms folded and one leg crossed over the other. When they rang the little bell and everyone beat their chest, he laughed out loud.

No matter what I had learned in catechism about God and Hell and the Ten Commandments, my father was hard to ignore. He worked two jobs, his muscles were huge, and once, when the neighbors' Doberman, big as a pony, went crazy and attacked a girl walking her poodle down our street, I saw him run outside with a baseball bat, grab the girl in one arm and then beat the dog to death as it tried to go for his throat. Throughout all of this he never lost the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and only put it out in order to hug the girl and quiet her crying.

Food for the worms
, I thought, and took that thought along with a brown paper bag of equipment through the hole in the chain-link fence, into the woods that lay behind the schoolyard. Those woods were deep, and you could travel through them for miles and miles, never coming out from under the trees or seeing a backyard. Richard Antonelli hunted squirrels with a BB gun in them, and Bobby Lenon and his gang went there at night, lit a little fire and drank beer. Once, while exploring, I discovered a rain-sogged
Playboy;
once, a dead fox. Kids said there was gold in the creek that wound among the trees and that there was a far-flung acre that sunk down into a deep valley where the deer went to die. For many years it was rumored that a monkey, escaped from a traveling carnival over in Brightwaters, lived in the treetops.

It was midsummer and the dragonflies buzzed, the squirrels leaped from branch to branch, frightened sparrows darted away. The sun beamed in through gaps in the green above, leaving, here and there, shifting puddles of light on the pine-needle floor. Within one of those patches of light, I practiced creation. There was no clay, so I used an old log for the body. The arms were long, five-fingered branches that I positioned jutting out from the torso. The legs were two large birch saplings with plenty of spring for running and jumping. These I laid angled to the base of the log.

A large hunk of bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes, curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seedpod for a nose. The mouth was merely a hole I punched through the bark with my penknife. Before affixing the fern hair to the top of the head, I slid beneath the curve of the sheet of bark those things I thought might help to confer life—a dandelion gone to ghostly seed, a cardinal's wing feather, a see-through quartz pebble, a twenty-five-cent compass. The ferns made a striking hairdo, the weeds, with their burrlike ends, formed a venerable beard. I gave him a weapon to hunt with: a long, pointed stick that was my exact height.

When I finished putting my man together, I stood and looked down upon him. He looked good. He looked ready to come to life. I went to the brown paper bag and took out my catechism book. Then kneeling near his right ear, I whispered to him all of the questions Mrs. Grimm would ever ask. When I got to the one, “What is Hell?” his left eye rolled off his face, and I had to put it back. I followed up the last question with a quick promise never to steal a rib.

Putting the book back into the bag, I then retrieved a capped, cleaned-out baby-food jar. It had once held vanilla pudding, my little sister's favorite, but now it was filled with breath. I had asked my father to blow into it. Without asking any questions, he never looked away from the racing form, but took a drag from his cigarette and blew a long, blue-gray stream of air into the jar. I capped it quickly and thanked him. “Don't say I never gave you anything,” he mumbled as I ran to my room to look at it beneath a bare light bulb. The spirit swirled within and then slowly became invisible.

I held the jar down to the mouth of my man, and when I couldn't get it any closer, I unscrewed the lid and carefully poured out every atom of breath.

There was nothing to see, so I held it there a long time and let him drink it in. As I pulled the jar away, I heard a breeze blowing through the leaves; felt it on the back of my neck. I stood up quickly and turned around with a keen sense that someone was watching me. I got scared. When the breeze came again, it chilled me, for wrapped in it was the quietest whisper ever. I dropped the jar and ran all the way home.

That night as I lay in bed, the lights out, my mother sitting next to me, stroking my crewcut and softly singing, “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” I remembered that I had left my catechism book in the brown bag next to the body of the man. I immediately made believe I was asleep so that my mother would leave. Had she stayed, she would have eventually felt my guilt through the top of my head. When the bedroom door was closed, I began to toss and turn, thinking of my man lying out there in the dark woods by himself. I promised God that I would go out there in the morning, get my book and take my creation apart. With the first bird song in the dark of the new day, I fell asleep and dreamed I was in Mrs. Grimm's basement with the saints. A beautiful woman saint with a big rose bush thorn sticking right in the middle of her forehead told me, “Your man's name is Cavanaugh.”

“Hey, that's the name of the guy who owns the deli in town,” I told her.

“Great head cheese at that place,” said a saint with a baby lamb under his arm.

Another big bearded saint used the end of a pool cue to cock back his halo. He leaned over me and asked, “Why did God make you?”

I reached for my book but realized I had left it in the woods.

“Come on,” he said, “that's one of the easiest ones.”

I looked away at the bar, stalling for time while I tried to remember the answer, and just then the glass on the sign overflowed and spilled beer onto the floor.

The next day, my man, Cavanaugh, was gone. Not a scrap of him left behind. No sign of the red feather or the clear pebble. This wasn't a case of someone having come along and maliciously scattered him. I searched the entire area. It was a certainty that he had risen up, taken his spear and the brown paper bag containing my religious instruction book and walked off into the heart of the woods.

Standing in the spot where I had given him life, my mind spiraled with visions of him loping along on his birch legs, branch fingers pushing aside sticker bushes and low-hanging leaves, his fern hair slicked back by the wind. Through those red mushroom eyes, he was seeing his first day. I wondered if he was as frightened to be alive as I was to have made him, or had the breath of my father imbued him with a grim food-for-the-worms courage? Either way, there was no dismantling him now—
Thou shalt not kill
. I felt a grave responsibility and went in search of him.

I followed the creek, thinking he would do the same, and traveled deeper and deeper into the woods. What was I going to say to him, I wondered, when I finally found him and his simple hole of a mouth formed a question? It wasn't clear to me why I had made him, but it had something to do with my father's idea of death—a slow rotting underground; a cold dreamless sleep longer than the universe. I passed the place where I had discovered the dead fox and there picked up Cavanaugh's trail—holes poked in the damp ground by the stride of his birch legs. Stopping, I looked all around through the jumbled stickers and bushes, past the trees, and detected no movement but for a single leaf silently falling.

I journeyed beyond the Antonelli brothers' lean-to temple where they hung their squirrel skins to dry and brewed sassafras tea. I even circled the pond, passed the tree whose bark had been stripped in a spiral by lightening and entered territory I had never seen before. Cavanaugh seemed to stay always just ahead of me, out of sight. His snake-hole foot prints, bent and broken branches, and that barely audible and constant whisper on the breeze that trailed in his wake drew me on into the late afternoon until the woods began to slowly fill with night. Then I had a thought of home: my mother cooking dinner and my sister playing on a blanket on the kitchen floor; the Victrola turning out the Ink Spots. I ran back along my path, and somewhere in my flight I heard a loud cry, not bird or animal or human, but like a thick limb splintering free from an ancient oak.