Happy Wednesday, Story366!
What do think of when I mention rubber bands? When I was a toddler, they were always around our house because my older brothers shared a paper route. There was always a box sitting somewhere, not to mention the strays under the table, behind couches, in drawers. The best place to look was on a door knob, where my mother would put them when she found them. Eventually, if we didn’t use them, the rubber bands would get funky, stick together, and eventually dissintegrate—I’m pretty sure that when we moved out of that house, every doorknob was left covered in stick blobs of rubber that my dad had no idea how to remove.
My brothers taught me how to shoot rubber bands, how to become a sharpshooter. We’d set up chess and Stratego pieces on a dresser and have contests to see who could knock down the most pieces from across the room. Sometimes we’d shoot so many rubber bands, the elbow pit on my left arm would chafe red. I was Annie Oakley with a rubber band. Still am.
In Webelos, I made a rubber band gun by using a jigsaw on a piece of pine, cutting out the stencil of a pistol. We then glued clothespins on the top, the kind you squeezed open with a hinge, and made a notch at the tip of the barrel. When you stretched a rubber band from that notch and into the clothespin grip, and then opened the clothespin, the rubber band would shoot. I painted my rubber band gun purple and black with a gold barrel. I called it “Lightning” and painted its name in orange across its sides.
Years after Scouts was over, I kept memorabilia from my childhood on my dresser, starting in college, running through adulthood. I moved that menagerie onto the window ledge in my office in Bowling Green, then to my window ledge here in Springfield. It sits there now. There you’ll find a laundry list of memories: A Batgirl and a Robin jelly glass from Burger King, circa the late seventies. A University of Illinois cheerleader Barbie doll. A Smithers action figure (he was hard to find). Mini-baseball bats from every minor league park I’ve visited. A baseball signed by one of my Little League teams. A cube I made from Elsie Sticks. Every ID from Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park I’ve collected since 1989. A statue of a baseball player my dad won for me at a raffle. Last but not least: Lightning.
It was in Bowling Green, maybe twenty years ago, a bunch of people commiserating in my office—the Karen, Abby Cloud, Dustin Parsons, Karen Babine, some others—that I pulled Lightning off the windowsill. I’m sure I had a rubber band and used it to shoot at someone, probably Parsons. Probably everybody. I passed it around to give everyone a gander. “Good old, Lightning,” I said. A jagged lightning bolt adorns each side of its barrel, painted with tempura paints when I was 10.
“You mean ‘Lighting’?” someone asked.
“No, Lighntning,” I said.
“This says Lighting,” someone else said.
Lightning, as it turned out, was actually Lighting.
Ever since then, when I spy that gun out of the corner of my eye, I’ll say to myself, “Good old Lighting.” Often when there’s lightning in the air, I’ll look to Karen and say, “Good old lighting.” When we’re in a hardware store,m in the Lighting aisle, I’ll whisper, “Lightning.”
The words have become each other’s private jokes.
Today’s feature story, “The Lightning Tree,” made me think about all this, though I’m sure that’s not what Erin Pringle hoped for when she wrote that story and put it in The Whole World at Once, her 2017 collection from Vandalia Press. In any case, I’ve read a story or two by Pringle before and was happy to see an entire collection out, to find its way into my queue.
I don’t know Erin Pringle, but if I know one thing, it’s that she hates names. All the stories I read in her collection feature generic descriptors in the place of names, like in “The Boy Who Walks.” In this story, we get the main character, known as “the boy,” along with his mom, “the woman,” and his dad, “the man.” There’s also “the girl” and “the girl’s mother.” This effect, carried throughout The Whole World at Once, makes the stories universal—like each character is a blank canvas, of sorts, but also sets a tone, maybe an ominous, overly minimal one, as it’s hard to get differentiate one character named “the boy” from another character, in another story, also named “the boy.” All in all, I like that effect, that choice, almost a numbing, as it made me break down these characters to their base parts, made me see them for the actions more clearly. Perhaps names are just a distraction? What think you, reader?
In any case, the boy in “The Boy Who Walks” decides, one morning, to go out and take a walk before his parents wake up. He’s too young for this, and eventually finds himself in a jam, almost dying when he falls into a retention pond, through thick snow, and nearly freezes to death. The incident has a long-term effect on the boy, as well as those around him.
The story after is “The Boy in the Red Shirt.” I don’t think this is the same boy, but then again, I can’t say for certain. Anyway, this story’s told from the perspective of the girl, the girl who works in a diner with her mother and becomes obsessed with a boy, a boy in red who is found dead, drowned, on a beach.
“The Lightning Tree,” further into the book, is about a woman who is dying. She’s been sick for a while, in and out of the hospital, but at the point where the story opens, she’s accepted her time is nearly up. She spends a good hunk of the story noting this, preparing herself for what’s next, and more so, prepping her husband for her departure. Not a very happy story, as you might suspect, but a very good one.
The woman and her husband live in her husband’s family cabin, where he spent a lot of his childhood. This is where he played, fished, and lost a dog and also a brother. The brother died—how we don’t know—when they were boys. The husband’s family history is in the cabin. Because it’s only one story tall and easily maneuverable and has everything they need to survive, they decide to spend the woman’s last days there.
There is also the lightning tree, a tree struck by lightning more times than the husband can remember. A black-and-white picture of the lightning tree hangs in the house, before it had ever been struck by lightning, a dead hog hanging from it branches. It’s an important tree, something spiritual, at the very least, and the woman finds a kinship with it, as her husband and his family had before her.
The husband, in fact, believes the tree is magic. After his brother died, he was convinced he could bring him back to life, if only he could perform a ceremony under the tree involving his brother’s pajamas. It doesn’t work—it’s not that kind of story—as the boys’ father has a ritual of his own in mind, one not involving the raising of the dead, but instead, letting him pass on.
It’s impied, but never stated, that the woman and her husband stay at the cabin to be close to the lightning tree, that the tree is helping to keep her alive. Maybe it is—okay, it might be that kind of story—but the woman’s already accepted her fate. While the husband dawdles around, fixing every little thing in the cabin from squeaky doors to wobbly chairs—some things, he can exert control over—the woman continues to make plans for her departure. She’s obsessed with her death, though not exactly with dying or being dead—more what she’ll leave behind, her husband, this place.
My time with Erin Pringle’s stories in The Whole World at Once was well spent. Pringle writes haunting, stark narratives that send her characters out to investigate what they can’t understand, be it a snowy ravine, the death of another, or the imminent death of the self. Curiosity is a solid trigger for any story, and Pringle handles her sleuths with an adept hand, getting close enough to look over their shoulder, though not close enough that we know their names. Mortality, and their existential relationship with it, makes for some tremendous pondering.
Story366 