The Sandhill Chronicles: An Author’s Apology
My small Texas hometown was fairly typical of hundreds of other small towns in Texas during the “boom years” following World War II, probably fairly typical of tens of thousands of small towns across America in those days of “I Like Ike” and television sitcoms’ idyllic visions of family life and community spirit. In most ways, I was an ordinary small-town kid of the baby-boom generation. I wore dungarees, ugly striped tee-shirts, and a flattop held up with Butch Wax, and had a passionate longing for a V-8 engine and a girl who looked like Annette Funicello or, later, Ann-Margret. My father was a blue-collar working stiff, a combat veteran of World War II who came home after trouncing Hitler and his minions to settle down and grow prosperous. He settled down, but never did grow prosperous, not in the way he planned. He always wanted to raise horses, as his father and grandfather had done. He wound up working for the railroad until they farmed him out with bad eyes and a bad heart, at least some of which was probably the result of trouncing Hitler and his minions when he should have been home raising horses. My mother was a typical small-town girl who married a guy with a good job so she could have children and grandchildren and grow old and beam proudly whenever her progeny were paraded in public. She got most of that—the progeny, anyway—but my father died fairly young, and her children moved away to hold their parades in other places where no one knew her, or them. It probably is one of the great bewilderments of her life that her elder son, always somewhat of an oddity and outcast, became a writer.
It was her fault, though. She read all these books to me as a child and then encouraged me to spend afternoons visiting the library instead of watching television. Mothers rarely understand the damage they do in the name of what’s right until it’s manifested in oddities later on.
I think, though, that I began the process of writing about where I was from and what I was doing early in my life long before I left home. Because I refused to play football (a heresy in small-town Texas when you’re as large a person as I am), I made myself an oddity and an outcast from the start. I preferred music and books to other teenage pursuits that were, I think, as boring to most of my friends as they seemed to me, only most of them wouldn’t admit it. Many of them just couldn’t quite think beyond our hometown and the surrounding county. Neither could many of my teachers or any of my preachers. For me, and for my friends, the world ended at the city-limit sign, or later, at the county line. We knew there was something else out there, but we were afraid of it. Only a few of us would ever go there, and almost none of those who did would come back. I think we knew that would happen, and I think, for most, that’s what the big fear really was.
I believed, though, that if there was pleasure in books—and what I knew or could learn of music, art, and theater—in my remote corner of Texas, there would be more of it elsewhere, “out there.” So off I went, seeking beauty and truth and the meaning of life in the big city—well, in San Antonio and Austin at least, with an occasional sojourn to Houston or Dallas. Those cities were, after all, big enough and exotic enough to intimidate any small-town boy who wandered agog in their concrete environs and studied the temptations and blandishments of their darker haunts.
In that precomputer, pre-color-television era, “out there” was something of a challenge, and we suspected that it held secrets. We weren’t really ignorant, backward, or poorly informed. We had AM radio beamed all night at us from KOMA, Oklahoma City, after all; through those static-filled airways, we heard of far-off places such as Kansas City and Omaha, Chicago and St. Louis. We marveled over the wonders of a “hemi under glass” and “double overhead cams” as they were detailed in the rapid-fire commercials for stock car races—“Saturday Night! Saturday Night! Saturday Night!”—interspersed with the croonings of Gene Pitney, Buddy Holly, Elvis and Patsy Cline. Cousins visiting from Fort Worth and Dallas, from Atlanta and San Francisco and New Jersey, enabled us to participate, however vicariously, in an emerging world of juvenile delinquents, beatniks, surfboards, then flower children and heavy-duty rock and roll. Our vocabularies expanded with cool, boss, and far out, and we learned about sex and drugs and even met some kids who had seen The Beatles live, been to a Cowboys’ game, or flown on an airliner. We heard there were places with rivers you couldn’t walk across and trees so abundant you couldn’t see the forest for them. We didn’t believe it. We also heard that people were orbiting the Earth, but I don’t think we believed that, either. For us, West Texas, empty, vast, and hostile as it seemed, was vacuum enough. Who would blast off on a rocket merely to discover more?
Through these outsiders, though, “out there” forced itself into our consciousness. We imitated them and tried to make our place like theirs, and while we watched such programs as The Andy Griffith Show and desperately prayed that such hick-infested burgs as Mayberry weren’t a reflection of our own rural reality, we knew all the while that they probably were.
But we tried. None of us was a cowboy—or cowgirl. We wore the latest fashions, as observed on American Bandstand and the Sears Catalogue, combed our hair in the style of our idols on record album and magazine covers, and talked with authority of the doings of faraway people and places most of us couldn’t even imagine. We sensed that somewhere out beyond the buttes and prairies that blocked our view of “out there” there were places where people acted the way movie people acted, the way people in books acted, and we wanted to know them, to be like them, to know what they knew. Or some of us did.
I left when I was seventeen, and I was bitter: angry over slights, real and imagined, that I’d endured all my conscious life. I wanted to “show them”—although I wasn’t sure, exactly, who “they” were—and I was insensitive to the fact that “they” couldn’t have cared less, that less than a decade later most of them wouldn’t recognize me on the street or have very much to say to me if they did. I didn’t understand, then, that each individual has to find his own life, his own stories to tell, and that geography doesn’t really have much to do with it.
What I eventually learned, though, was that for a writer, it’s necessary to leave a place—not merely physically, but spiritually—in order to come back to it, to understand it, and to write about it. But there are many ways of leaving, and it’s not until you turn around and look that you can appreciate how far you’ve come. For a writer, it’s often not very far.
It wasn’t until I had been away a decade that I found myself drawn back home in a spiritual sense. At first, it was a kind of pedagogical thing. I wanted what I believed to be the uniqueness of my youth to be understood by those who had never experienced the isolation of a West Texas small town. I found myself wanting to write stories about where I was from, about the people I knew. Over the next several years, those stories coalesced into an idea, ultimately into a place that I eventually named Sandhill County. The name was not an accident, but it was important, and almost instantly, it became as real to me as the actual county in which I grew up. I had taken the first step: understanding that fiction is truer than memory, and in the long run, more important than fact.
A writer setting a story in cities as large as New York or Los Angeles—London or Tokyo, Dallas or Houston—has considerable license to manipulate geography and even people. But a writer who sets his story in a world no larger than that of my youth must imagine the whole of it. He must make that imagining fit the story he tells. And so I came home to Sandhill County.
The name was appropriate because the county I was writing about was bordered on the north by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, one of the sandiest and most treacherous waterways in the Southwest, and on the east and south by the Pease River, which was smaller and less treacherous but no less sandy. Both flooded frequently, washing out bridges and fields. Lining both riverbeds were endless mounds of sandy diluvium hills covered with light vegetation at their crowns. These descended into labyrinthine loblollies and swamps filled with dark and dank plants, thickets of thorns, and dens of bobcats and snakes. Among the few more naturally appealing fauna that farmers and ranchers hadn’t hunted into extinction or killed out of pure meanness was the sandhill crane. These huge, graceless birds made an annual pilgrimage from points north each winter, camping out on their storklike legs on the river-beds, enticing the bloodsportsmen among us to—what else?—try to kill them.
As a youngster, I tried to hunt sandhills along with quail, dove, and rabbits, but the birds were skittish and elusive. Their preference was for the vast, sandy emptiness of the Red’s or Pease’s bottoms, which, when they weren’t flooded, were truly just huge sandbars occasionally cut by shallow rivulets of briny water. To reach the browsing flock, I often crawled through a frozen swamp—a quarter mile of mud, mesquite, and plum thickets—and endured thick red goo, horsefly and mosquito bites, sharp thorns and stings from a variety of nasty, ugly plants no one in his right mind would even touch. Finally, my stealthy companions and I would emerge onto the riverbed, wipe off the slime and ignore the pain, then trudge our way around quicksand bogs that would suck our shoes right off. When at last we were nearly in shotgun range of the tall, gray birds, we would stand there helplessly in our frigid, wet misery and watch them rush in an awkward gait down an icy sandbar, spread their huge wings, and take off, slapping and honking into the cloud-mottled blue of the West Texas winter sky.
I recall our trying to bag a sandhill crane maybe twenty or thirty times. Old-timers, who said they knew, assured us the cranes tasted just like turkey, but we never found out. The closest we ever came to them was still too far away to identify their coloring with the naked eye, and we never forgave them for waiting until we had labored so hard to come near them before taking off and beating, tantalizingly close, over our heads toward a safer haven, while we faced the discouraging return trip through the swamp.
So I named my county after those rivers and those obnoxious birds, and after the hundreds of fields of dry-land cotton that were plowed and churned out of the loamy soil of the bottoms, farms that were mostly abandoned to the Dust Bowl and Great Depression before I was born. Those fields—reclaimed by modern wells—provided my chief motivation to leave that gritty, biting, and stinging hell.
I remember one summer, hired at the exploitative rate of seventy-five cents an hour, I trudged row after row of cotton plants, technically charged to chop out the weeds that threatened the young cotton plants. In point of fact, we cut few weeds with hoes. The weed of cotton-field choice in that loosely packed soil was the careless weed, a tube-rooted, fuzzy-shafted vegetable demon that thrust its sticky leaves upward toward the sun from the shadows of the tender cotton plants. A careless weed could not be hoed out. If you chopped it off, it would merely grow back—overnight, it seemed. It had to be pulled, and in that field—which was irrigated—the roots ran deep. This meant stooping, grasping, and tugging until the tip of the root came reluctantly from the dusty sand, where it could then be unceremoniously dropped, exposed to the harsh sun and utter aridity of the West Texas summer that would, in a day’s time, shrivel it to virtually nothing.
In an hour of this labor, my hands stung from the sap of the plant and its pointy, stickery leaves, and my back ached from the effort of tugging them from the soil. It was July, which meant it was yellow-grass hot (I never knew green grass was even possible in summer until I was sixteen and went with my parents to visit an aunt in Corpus Christi. I thought all grass turned yellow on the Fourth of July, just as the mesquite leaves fell in winter.) At the end of each row, I turned and went back up the next. But alongside the field at one end was a huge billboard designed to be seen from the highway some two miles away. Across the enormous blank white field of the sign swept a muscular arm and fist, and clenched in the fist was a frothy stein of FALSTAFF BEER, or such was the red-lettered claim. The foamy head of the brew swept out behind it in an icy contrail that splashed the hairy disembodied forearm that moved it as, I imagined, a bartender might sweep the beverage across a mahogany bar to sit in front of a thirsty customer.
In the history of the world, no one has ever been thirstier than a kid chopping cotton in a sandy river bottom in West Texas.
For half the time I trudged through the grasping, ankle-deep sand of those cotton furrows—bending and straining to jerk the tenacious careless weeds from their taproot hold on the soil that would, we knew, rise and blow taller than a building with the first norther next fall, turning the sky black and any standing water to instant mud—for half that time, I was confronted with that promise of permanently slaked thirst and icy, frothy wonder of pure refreshment. Although at that tender age of twelve or thirteen, I had never tasted beer—never even smelled it or been in the room where anyone had done so—I knew that people “out there” could taste it at will. They could walk into any saloon or bar—dens of sin, from my mother’s point of view—plunk down a few coins, and for that minuscule amount be presented with this ambrosiac, golden liquid that I was sure had a bouquet and aroma that not even a Baptist god could resist.
From that agonizing week of summer on, I vowed I would never again live in a dry county where such liquid balm could not be had, even by a preteenager whose only barrier against grainy, sandy thirst was warm tin-cooler gyp water and a well-worn stick of Juicy Fruit.
Sand and West Texas, skin-scorching heat and bone-aching cold, then, had been inscribed on my experience from my youth. Some years later, when I worked on a farm and ranch near the Pease River bottoms, I discovered that cotton chopping wasn’t the only mean and unforgiving labor that resulted from sandy-land farming, even without a torturous, taunting billboard. One incredibly hot afternoon, I cut the wheels the wrong way and buried to the axles a John Deere 4020 and the harrow it pulled in a fallow sand terrace. While I trudged in 110° heat through devil’s-claws and Russian thistle—keeping a wary eye out for rattlers—to face the anger of my rustic employer, I felt the bitter disappointment of one who’d begun to realize that his entire life might be rooted in loose and shifting soil. And I vowed again to leave, never to return, but never to forget the clutching, choking sand of West Texas.
Thus, my relationship with the county of my imagination was initially one of antipathy for its ephemeral but somehow always painful and torturous nature, metaphorically represented in the baking dunes and blowing fields of sand and the icy misery of its swampy riverbeds. It had existed in reality, briefly, when I was a child in my own reality. But very quickly, it became a memory, and as a memory, it carried with it the trappings of both horror and humor. At first, of course, the humor somehow escaped me. Like most youngsters in their callow twenties, I was far more interested in outrage than in irony. But eventually I came to understand that both those elements were a part of who I was and who everyone who had ever lived there was. If I was going to tell stories about it, about them, then that had to be my subject, and the subject had to reflect, however indirectly, the gritty verity of a place called Sandhill County.
The name of the county came second, though, after the name of the town in which I determined to set my stories. I needed a name that seemed to say West Texas; Agatite did that, and more. It was, once upon a time, a real town in West Texas. Only a few people remembered it, and no one was sure exactly where it was.
When I was a child of no more than seven or eight, my grandfather, Joe Reynolds, who was the gyp mill’s mule wrangler and postman and who lived in Acme, Texas, took me and another boy for a long walk out into a pasture. I don’t remember who the other boy was, but he may have been an older cousin visiting from California. We tramped out there in the milkweed and salt cedar, mesquite and switch grass for a while, when my grandfather shouted for us to be careful. He told us there were old foundations and wells around, and we might fall into one, or possibly “run up on” a nest of rattlers or “mama bobcat.” He then assured us that we were in the “smack dab middle” of where a town once stood. The town was called Agatite. It was nowhere visible.
Agatite was an interesting place in its brief history for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it was the terminus of the shortest independent railroad in the world, the Acme Tap Line, which ran from the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific junction in Acme, Texas—my father’s birthplace—more or less north, for a mile and a half. The function of this one-track railroad was to haul gypsum ore and, I guess, the wallboard and plaster products manufactured from it, down to Acme, where it would then either be put to use at the Acme mill or shipped far away to build houses in cities in places I’d only heard of. It also carried mail and passengers, I suppose, in those days early in the twentieth century when trains were as reliable as UPS and Toyota pickups have become today.
Agatite was, from all I’ve been able to learn, a mill town, owned part and parcel by some company or other (possibly, the Wabash Plaster and Wallboard Company of Chicago, Illinois), and it didn’t last for very long before fading away into the indefatigable and largely useless but nevertheless discomforting groundcover of West Texas. Acme was a much more important place, until it, too, was eclipsed by Quanah, some five miles to the east, which in turn would be eclipsed by Wichita Falls, which would be eclipsed by Fort Worth, etc., etc. The source of Agatite’s name is a mystery. There is a street named that in Chicago (near the Wabash company’s headquarters, by the way), but no one seems to know the word’s etymology. I invented one in a later novel called Franklin’s Crossing, which truly is the start of these stories.
Agatite was interesting to me, however, more because it was a place that might have been than because it was a place that ever was. The name sounded hard and harsh, flint-edged, and granite ugly. It sounded like the result of something, rather than the cause of something, and it seemed to suggest a difficulty that was as metaphoric as its definition or meaning was shrouded in the past. In many ways, that suggested West Texas to me. It was a place where people came more out of desperation than out of adventure, where they stayed more out of necessity than because they had grand hopes and dreams for anything like progress.
As a place, West Texas was hard to come to, hard to stay in, hard to be from. And it was hard to leave. Most of the people I met out there knew it only as a vast, empty nothingness they had to cross to get to the snowy slopes of northern New Mexico or Colorado. According to legend, the Comanche weren’t very much interested in it. They visited from time to time, of course, for it was “theirs,” and it was reputed to have places with medicinal properties. But it seems they spent more time scurrying across it than hanging around counting rattlesnakes, scorpions, and red ants. They were no more in favor of careless weeds than I was. They understood that virtually everything that grew naturally there stung, bit, clawed, or itched, and there wasn’t much potable water around, either. They had better sense than to stay there long enough to be caught and trapped by the sandy soil.
So the names of the town and the county were born out of a real place and real experiences, and they connect to the whole. But towns and counties are really only spots on maps and lines in almanacs without the people in them, and it was in those people, or in my imperfect memory of them, that I sought my stories.
The people of my past and my imagination are vague things. They too often haunt that rare fog of the past. In my fiction, they take shape for me, become real. But they really are manufactured from the whole cloth of my own wonderings. In my first novel, The Vigil, I was initially interested in using this town and county only as a backdrop for one woman’s ordeal. And I never thought anyone would read it, so I wrote it with unfettered honesty.
The incident that inspired the story didn’t happen in my hometown, not even in Texas. I’d read about it in a newspaper, and my memory was vague, but I was still intrigued enough to want to tell the story. I set it in Agatite, Sandhill County, because it was the place I had been writing stories about for so long, although I had never published any or thought I ever would. Because I did set the story there, though, it became something more than the story of the character’s horrible experience and what she learned from it. Maybe by using the town and the county as I had fixed them in my imagination and brought them to form in my words, it became the story of a place and the people who made it.
The Vigil tells a story about a woman, Imogene McBride, who loses something that defines her, her daughter. There may be all sorts of “subtexts” (oh, how I hate that word!) and literary layering involved in the question of whether or not a mother should define herself in her child, but I wasn’t concerned with that. Truly. I was only concerned about what the impact of that kind of loss would be on an individual who experienced it. Originally, I didn’t plan for it to be a novel. I planned for it to be a short chapter, part of something else; but it tended to grow a bit more than I thought it would, and by the time I was finished with it, it had become a whole story.
Fundamentally, I think, The Vigil is about the discovery of self. In that sense, it’s no different from any work of fiction we have, dating back to Homer or Moses, in what we are arrogant enough to call Western Literature. When Cora, Imma’s daughter, disappears, leaving her mother alone and distraught, Imma must confront herself. She is alone, utterly, and she has nowhere to turn, nowhere to go. At first, she does what anyone else would do: she looks to institutional authority, to tradition, to the values she has been taught will save her from her fate. In the novel, Ezra, the sheriff of Sandhill County, represents these. But Ezra cannot help her, because the limits of his practical authority hold him back from the metaphysical. Even if Ezra could find Cora, could return her to her mother, he couldn’t help Imma find herself. No one but Imma can help Imma. That’s sort of the point of the book, I think.
Along the way, though, I discovered that Ezra is also in search of self. He is a man whose life has largely been unremarkable. He has a history of honor, which he thinks is phony, and he has the respect of the town, which he thinks is undeserved. He has actually reached the zenith of his ambitions in life, but what he found when he arrived was no more satisfying or meaningful than what he had when he started out. The things that mattered to him—his wife, his child—have been somehow lost along the way. So, in some ways, Ezra is as lost as Imma. And like Imma, he must finally confront himself. He looks into the darkness of the abyss only to find nothing staring back: nothing that will help him, nothing that will harm him; nothing. He, too, seeks help in the common value structure—he seeks love, companionship, understanding. He, too, must face the reality that the only person who can help Ezra is Ezra. But the discovery that gives Imma the strength and courage to go on almost destroys Ezra.
And so The Vigil became the story of two people, trapped in the wilderness of West Texas where there is no hope, no reason really to be there other than it’s where they are and there’s nowhere else to go. They have a choice: to die or to endure. And while they look for help in one another, they discover, ultimately, that even that most fundamental of human yearnings is inadequate to answer.
Now, in that sense and to that point, I suppose The Vigil could take place anywhere. It could be in the middle of the Midwest or somewhere in the Canadian Rockies, or, for that matter, it could be in Central Park on Manhattan Island. But it’s not. It’s in West Texas, and specifically, it’s in Sandhill County and in Agatite. And it is here that I think I inadvertently discovered something important in my writing. I discovered that there was a relationship between the town and the people who live there, or those who merely come there and stay. As the story developed, I realized that there was a symbiotic relationship developing between these two individuals, lost and helpless as they were in the cosmos, and this small, isolated town, lost and helpless as it was in the geography of West Texas. Like the two main characters, the town itself was staring off into the abyss, trying to discover something that would define it, but nothing was there. Instead, it was forced, like Imma and Ezra, to turn its vision inward, to seek within itself what it could not discover from without, not even in its history or in its collective faith.
Slowly, the town and its inhabitants swirl around the two bewildered characters at its center, trying to deny that Imma’s and Ezra’s crises are reflections of the meaninglessness of their own existences. In short, the town wants them to go away, to stop reminding them that the placidity and complacency of their lives are a façade, and that beneath the mask may be something dark and ugly and extremely frightening, even though it never quite comes into view.
The Vigil never quite reveals it, either. Rather, the town finds itself defeated by the determination of a single woman’s search for self, by her insistence that she will defy convention and order and even reason; she will prevail by asserting her identity and forcing an awareness of her presence on all of them, a constant reminder of their truer selves, a constant temptation for them to face, and possibly to surrender to, their more genuine natures. Imma and the town of Agatite, then, come to represent opposing visions of one another, opposing interpretations of truth that undermine logic and common sense, perhaps, but that appeal to that universal something within every human being that responds to notions of faith, love, and above all, understanding—that impulse that finally apprehends that whatever evil we perceive in the world is truly within ourselves, as is the good, and it’s the process of separating these that we call life.
When The Vigil was initially accepted for publication in 1986, I had no idea that I had embarked on the mapping of this place, this Sandhill County chronicle, or that I would become inexorably tied to it. I had merely made use of a fictionalization of memory, a falsification of factual matter that permitted me to manipulate and direct the background in a way that, I hoped, complemented the story I wanted out front.
In Agatite, however, I began to see the town and the surrounding county in a far different way. Again, I believe, the underlying theme is the same—a quest for self, a coming to terms with the face behind the mask, the admission of the truth of the nature of good and evil only when it refuses to be denied any longer (and before anyone says it, yeah, I’m aware this is hardly an original set of ideas for a theme). Yet Agatite differs from The Vigil in that the motivation for revelation is less public (even though its revelation is much more public) and in a sense, the result of a deeper self-deception and self-denial.
For a while, after Agatite, I tried to leave Sandhill County again, this time for good. But I was instantly drawn back to it, as a prodigal, I suppose, because I realized that in the course of working on the first two books, I had discovered a wealth of ignorance in myself about the very place I thought I knew so well. I had grown up surrounded by its history, by its past of which I was less than dimly aware—that elusive fog, again. In Franklin’s Crossing, I tried to tell about part of that past, and about the founding of the county, but what I wound up doing was writing a kind of prequel to the county’s history, a sort of prehistoric account of what had happened to give the place an identity, a chance to discover itself. I realized, somehow, that in the fabrications of my first two novels, I hadn’t really accounted for the place’s right to exist, and I needed a novel such as Franklin’s Crossing to do that. It became a birth bathed in blood, one in which evil takes on a corporeal reality. But as any good Baptist knows, without being washed in blood, nothing can be saved.
My next attempt to break away was in Players, but even then I maintained a connection to Sandhill County that is so obscure no one I know has pointed it out. It was a far more subtle connection than exists between The Vigil and Agatite, more on a par with the connection between Franklin’s Crossing and the first two books—and, not incidentally, a number of short stories that do not mention the name of the town but which, nevertheless, I will quickly admit are directly connected to or set therein.
After that, I rather gave up on escaping. Monuments represented a complete return to the town. Its connection to the first books, which I am now shamelessly calling a chronicle, is direct. It is Agatite, again, and it is Sandhill County, again. But this time, the story is far less about the people than about the physical town itself. I thought it was about time I brought the main character out front, gave it a spotlight, and allowed it to play all by itself, allowed its own search for self to be realized through the eyes of a boy.
Monuments, I knew from the outset, would be called a coming-of-age story. The central character, Hugh Rudd, is a youngster, a typical small town boy, and his foil and friend, Jonas Wilson, is an old man, a last vestige, perhaps, of the enduring spirit of the town, of the county surrounding it. The analogues to classical literature are not difficult to trace. But I think it is a mistake to read that novel as a simple story of one teenager’s confrontation with adulthood. I think the true protagonist is a dying town in the middle of the vast, cruel nothing that is West Texas. In that sense, Monuments is about hope unfulfilled, promises unredeemed, and values and ambitions unrevealed. That sounds negative, but I don’t think it is. I think it is real and about as positive as things ever get in West Texas.
I also think that, as with the first two novels, the point is to separate the perception from the reality of self through a process of confrontation—which is not unlike the process of trying to separate good and evil from within. Virtually every experience Hugh has that summer reinforces the notion that, ultimately, we are alone in the universe, and we must become self-reliant. I don’t mean this in the Emersonian sense—not entirely—or even in the existential sense—not entirely—but rather in the sense that informs The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin’s Crossing and, to a lesser extent, Players and a yet-to-be-told story, “Threading the Needle.” By self-reliance I mean that humans often come to a point when they realize that all they can rely on is what they know, what they have learned, what they have experienced. And ultimately, this is all there is. This is the foundation of whatever hope and love and compassion we can find within ourselves. This is the stuff of life.
Monuments, then, represents a full return to Agatite, to Sandhill County, and I hope that it will not be the last. I want to tell other stories about it. I want to discuss the ramifications of teenagers’ hopes and dreams, informed as they are by those outsiders—cousins or otherwise—who brought to the town the false prophecies, the “dirty words” and “nasty habits” of elsewhere, and sent them shivering through the innocent small-town souls of the West Texas young on the staticky strains of rock and roll. I want to recapture a time when the narcotics of choice were cheap beer, sweet liquor, sweaty backseat sex, and two eight-cylinder-driven automobiles shrieking demonlike through the night. Those stories and others continue these chronicles.
I think this is important work. That may be self-flattery, but I hope not. I hope that it has a broader context. Some more forward-looking writers and critics have averred that the “myths” of the past, the drama of the small town, are dead letters; that there is nothing left there of interest. I don’t agree. I think that in the greater scheme of things the dramatic moments of these lives, caught in microcosm, as it were, fretted by the significance of exposure—exposure such as only a small town can provide—provide a closer and more cogent look at the truth of the human experience, of the human heart. And the human heart, after all, is the only genuine subject worthy of a fiction writer’s attention.
What makes sense to me is to create characters, put them into situations that cause them to react in some human way, and contain the whole thing in a crucible of time and place. My time and place is Agatite, Sandhill County, and my characters come from the people who I imagine live there, either now or in the past. The situation in each of these novels is unique to the characters I created and has nothing but the most coincidental relationship to any other situation or characters, real or imagined. After the initial reaction, I think, the characters are on their own, just as the people of West Texas are on their own. As the writer, I can nudge them here and there, can throw more obstacles, opportunities, and circumstances in their paths; but how they find their way to some kind of resolution—some sense of self—is up to them. It’s not up to me to conclude their stories. The characters must do that. And apart from reversing them if they make a wrong turn, an author really shouldn’t—in my case can’t—interfere with how things develop. To me, my characters are as real as my county and my town; in many, many ways, they’re more real than the actual county and town and the people who inhabit it and its cemetery, who drift shadowlike in the gritty fog of the sandy past.
I probably will tell as many stories about Sandhill County as publishers are pleased to put into print. It took me a long time to realize it, but in truth, I suppose that everything I write will, in one way or another, be a part of the Sandhill Chronicles. I hasten to say, though, that I don’t do this out of pure ego—although on at least one level, all writing is merely an exercise of one individual ego—but because this is ultimately what I know. It’s the place I came from, came out of, and ran away from. It is the place I know. And it is the place I am somehow always drawn back to, at least in my fiction; for it is there that I can discover, to the extent that it’s discoverable, the meaning of West Texas and, more importantly, my own definition of self.
Clay Reynolds
Denton, Texas 2001