Write and Wrong
Oh, the joys of editing... and journeying across the Pacific Ocean during a world war...
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
― Blaise Pascal
“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
― H.G. Wells
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann
Joel Bowman, brandishing his red pen in Buenos Aires, Argentina...
No matter how many times one writes the wrong thing, it never seems to come out right. Such is the feeling a writer has when editing his own manuscript for the umpteenth time.
On careful inspection, we discover that, from one page to the next, our crafty characters have changed the spelling of their surnames... or their birthplace... or even, in one particularly brazen example, their marital status. (Just where did Miss Anderson find the time, in her busy, wholly invented life, to carry out her covert nuptials anyway? And right under our nose!)
We’re beginning to think the figments of our imagination cannot be trusted at all!
And yet, there they remain, flawed and capricious, scattered across three-hundred or so loose leaf pages... streaked in red and blue pen, shot through with brackets, arrows and scribbled marginalia... notes to rework this, reword that and to cut other sections altogether.
It’s a good thing we have you, dear reader... that is, specifically, the dozen or so of you who kindly wrote in and volunteered your eagle eyes to help copy edit our latest manuscript. We’re attacking the thing head on, armed with a quiver of your helpful insights and suggestions. Still, the Goliath looms large...
So while we return to the assignment at hand, we thought we’d draw back the curtain a bit for the general reader, allowing an advanced preview of the project under review. Whether this section makes the final cut or not, we cannot yet say. But it will serve for today’s missive. Please enjoy...and share!
Chapter III - A Journey Begins
By Joel Bowman
Hilda Nilsen was not yet twenty-one years old when she stood on the platform of the Grand Forks train station in North Dakota one gusty September morning and wished her father a tearful goodbye. She had never before seen the man cry, not even when her mother passed away almost three years earlier. The tears seemed strangely out of place on his weathered skin, like raindrops on an ancient clay creek bed, long forgotten by the heavens. He was a tall, handsome man who had borne a lot of life’s hardships. It didn’t seem right to her that he should suffer so.
“You must keep well so you are living when I come back,” said Hilda, with a solemnity that hung in the swirling air between them.
The father held his daughter’s face in strong, familiar hands and drew her into his deep embrace. She listened to his breathing beneath his woolen coat, feeling the constrained sob welling up from deep inside his chest. He kissed the top of her golden blonde head and, without meeting her eye again, dug his hands deep into his jacket pockets and marched off along the platform. She watched him until he disappeared into the crowd and prayed to God that He might spare this gentle man until her return, seven years away.
Hilda’s train sat idle on the tracks, but already the journey ahead rose up before her like a cresting tidal wave. To the west lay thousands of miles of unknown continent and an ocean so vast it seemed that, to reach the far edge of it would be to come to the end of the world itself. But even that distant, unimaginable point, flung clear over the receding horizon, would only signify the beginning of Hilda’s passage. Beyond those foreign shores were hidden people and places of which she could form no firm perception in her mind. There were faces with strange names and expressions, with stories so peculiar, so distinct from her own, that she wondered, standing on the station platform in America’s Great Midwest, whether she would ever come to understand the nature of her mission, much less fulfill it.
Closing her eyes, Hilda felt the fall breeze at her back as it gusted over the cooling prairies, with their time-smoothed hills and rolling pastures, their familiar townships and Main Streets and tight knit Sunday congregations. They sang the same hymns, these people, and Hilda knew them all by name. They were her people and her songs, too. From all over Scandinavia they came to settle the northern reaches of the New World, to build a life and to raise their families. They were disposed to the severe climes, against which they labored through season and sickness. They bore children with straw-colored hair and pale complexions and glacier blue eyes, built hearty for the howling winters. They saw their children thrive and, when they did not, which was sometimes just as often, they wrapped their tiny bodies in blankets and lowered them into the cold, unforgiving earth. Then they sang different songs, prayers that stitched communities together in grief and sorrow and that marked the years as they passed them by, like so many empty nights.
There were other people, too, who came with messages of their own from strange and distant lands. Hilda remembered the missionaries who had boarded with her family over the years, even when there did not seem to be food nor space enough to feed and house her own brothers and sisters. Sometimes they came for a few days or weeks. Often, they would stay on for many months at a time. One year, a group of young women arrived from Lebanon. They brought with them aromas of clove and cinnamon and strong coffee and they carried little sacks of dried dates and yogurt-covered cherries, which they would share with the children after meals. Their laughter, which came often and easily, filled the house like birdsong. Another year, on a rainy afternoon in late February, three Persian men came for a week and stayed through the whole of spring. They wore long, flowing garments of the most brilliant colors Hilda had ever seen, and their beards were dark and wooly like the fleece of a sheep’s belly. On weekends they sometimes cooked dinner for the family. Their gurgling Farsi language swirled around the kitchen and mixed with puffs of steam and exotic spices in the warm, evening air.
Once, back in the earliest light of Hilda’s memory, a man came to visit who had traveled all the way from a place called Madagascar. He sat, long-legged in the visitor’s chair by the wood fireplace, speaking with her father. Hilda stopped still in the sunny doorway, her own shadow short on the long wooden boards. She had never seen a person with such dark skin before. He was blacker even than Mr. Samson, the man with the scar where his eye was supposed to be, who had helped her father to paint the church for the Easter service. Hilda felt small and shy, but when the man from Madagascar noticed her, he smiled such a great, gentle smile that it seemed to take up his whole face. Later that night, after her usual bedtime story, Hilda’s father showed her the Big Book of the World, which he kept on the shelf by mother’s piano. It contained all the places known to man, he once told her, and some more that were as yet unknown.
“Here, Hilda. Look,” father drew his forefinger, yellowed by till and tobacco, over the dust-covered page, “our friend has come a long way to stay with us. All the way across the ocean, from down near the very bottom of the world.”
“Will he stay with us a long time?” Hilda asked, her little voice heavy with sleep. Her father’s casual shrug replied that he did not yet know. “I like his smile,” she confessed. “It’s like a gigantic, enormous piano.”
“I like his smile, too,” father agreed, brushing his hand through her curly blonde hair. “He will stay with us as long as he needs to.”
“And then?”
“And then he will go along his journey, to wherever the Lord calls him.”
Hilda thought for a moment. “Why does the Lord call people on journeys?” She looked at her father in earnest. He closed his eyes for a full breath, the way he sometimes did when he was thinking. “He calls them to teach,” he replied at last, “but also to listen and to learn. Remember, Hilda, whenever we go out to meet the world, the world also comes out to meet us. There is a lot for us to learn in this life.”
Standing on the Grand Forks platform, the wind rushing through her hair, Hilda remembered the Lebanese women’s easy gaiety and the Persian men’s scruffy beards and their spicy dinners. She remembered the man from Madagascar, too, with his shiny, blue-black skin and his kind eyes and his gigantic, enormous piano smile. She thought of her father and his slow, lonely ride back to the farm in Wisconsin. And she thought of all the men in the Old World, young men of all colors and creeds, who were at that very moment busy fighting each other in a war that was supposed to “end all wars.” Hilda wondered whether, after all these years, people really had learned much of anything.
In the distance, she heard the rush of steam as her train groaned to life. The stationmaster took to his whistle with gusto and the crowd began to shuffle alongside the great engine. Turning her pale young face to the west, her father’s words in her ear, Hilda Nilsen prepared for her calling, to go out and meet the world...
Wait! Before you go…
Here’s the part of our humble missive where, if we were organized, we would invite you to “pre-order a copy of our upcoming novel from such-and-such a website and get such-and-such a discount, blah, blah, blah…”
Alas, that stage is still a few weeks off yet…
BUT, FEAR NOT!
For those of you just itching to do anything you can to support the starving artist community, here’s something you can do… and it’ll cost you nothing!
If you’re enjoying these pages (these, ahem… FREE pages), please share them with the readers, writers and incurable peripatetics in your life. The larger our audience, the more of a resounding splash our next novel will make, when we do eventually get our act together… and it will all be thanks to honest literature lovers, just like you. Pretty sweet, huh?
Our eternal gratitude is but a click away…
Beautifully said!!!