Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

For me to publish "Weary Kingdom" in this collection requires either a little courage or a lot of sentimentality, or both. On many levels the story seems amateurish to me, and there is ample evidence of writing habits that I now deplore -- lengthy passages in the present tense, which both begin and end the story; clumsy and inconsistent punctuation; overlong paragraphs, which were intended to convey the claustrophobic quality of Minna's mind but which mainly convey to me ... uh, well, an intense feeling of overall claustrophobia. Furthermore, that Celeste complains about the "pee-like" condition of the water at Revere Beach is embarrassing. Molly Cabot might think of water as "pee-like"; for a woman like Celeste, the correct word is "piss." But what makes me wince most about "Weary Kingdom" is that Minna Barrett is only 55-- she sounds and thinks like someone who is at least 115! Of course I was only 25 when I wrote this story -- I was still a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop -- and, at the time, I thought 55 was old. (Now that I'm only a couple of years away from my 55th birthday, 55 strikes me as entirely too youthful an age for such a dullness of body and mind as Minna's.)

I spent a year revising the story; at the same time I was finishing my first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1969). "Weary Kingdom" was published before the novel -- in The Boston Review (Spring-Summer 1968) -- and what endears it to me today, despite the many indications of its amateurism, is that it was from this story that I gained a little confidence concerning how to create a minor character in the third-person voice, which is an absolutely necessary ability for a writer of any novel of substance and length. Even in a first-person novel, there must be minor characters introduced by the narrator; essentially, these are also characters created in a third-person voice.

And minor characters are all the more essential to any story that entails plot; they are the often-hapless figures who move the story in unexpected ways -- often because they are blind to the course of action the main character is following. Minna Barrett is simply a precursor to the lineup of supporting characters in The World According to Garp; to the lesser members of the Berry family (or the rapist, Chipper Dove) in The Hotel New Hampshire; to Wally Worthington (or the superstitious Stationmaster at St. Cloud's) in The Cider House Rules; to Hester (or Major Rawls or the Reverend Lewis Merrill) in A Prayer for Owen Meany; to Martin Mills (or Inspector Dhar or Nancy) in A Son of the Circus. They are major-minor characters, all, and to get inside their points of view is fundamental to storytelling.

With Minna Barrett, I can see that I was just learning how, albeit clumsily.

ALMOST IN IOWA

The driver relied on travel as a form of reflection, but the Volvo had never been out of Vermont. Usually, the driver was a sensible traveler; he kept his oil up and his windshield clean and he carried his own tire gauge in his left breast pocket next to a ballpoint pen. The pen was for making entries in the Grand Trip List, such things as gas mileage, toll fees and riding time.

The Volvo appreciated this carefulness of the driver; Route 9 across Vermont, Brattleboro to Bennington, was a trip without fear. When the first signs for the New York state line appeared, the driver said, "It's all right." The Volvo believed him.

It was a dusty tomato-red two-door sedan, 1969, with all-black Semperit radial tires, standard four-speed transmission, four cylinders, two carburetors and 45,238 miles of experience without a radio. It was the driver's feeling that a radio would be distracting to them both.

They had started out at midnight from Vermont. "Dawn in Pennsylvania!" the driver told the worried Volvo.

In Troy, New York, the driver used steady downshifting and a caressing voice to reassure the Volvo that all this would soon pass. "Not much more of this," he said. The Volvo took him at his word. Sometimes it is necessary to indulge illusions.

At the nearly abandoned entrance to the New York State Thruway, West, an innocent Volkswagen exhibited indecision concerning which lane to use. The driver eased up close behind the Volkswagen and allowed the Volvo's horn to blare; the Volkswagen, near panic, swerved right; the Volvo opened up on the left, passed, cut in with aggression, flashed taillights.

The Volvo felt better.

The New York State Thruway is hours and hours long; the driver knew that monotony is a dangerous thing. He therefore left the Thruway at Syracuse and made an extended detour to Ithaca, driving a loop around Lake Cayuga and meeting up with the Thruway again near Rochester. The countryside bore a comforting resemblance to Vermont. The smell of apples was in the air; maple leaves were falling in front of the headlights. Only once was there an encounter with a shocking, night-lit sign which seemed to undermine the Volvo's confidence, LIVE BAIT! the sign said. The driver had troublesome visions with that one himself, but he knew it could be infectious to express his imagination too vividly. "Just little worms and things," he said to the Volvo, who purred along. But there lurked in the driver's mind the possibility of other kinds of "live bait" -- a kind of reverse-working bait, which rather than luring the fish to nibble would scare them out of the water. Throw in some of this special bait and retrieve the terrified, gasping fish from where they'd land on shore. Or perhaps LIVE BAIT! was the name of a nightclub.

It was actually with relief that the driver returned to the Thruway. Not every excursion from the main road leads one back. But the driver just patted the dashboard and said, "Pretty soon we'll be in Buffalo."

A kind of light was in the sky -- a phase seen only by duck hunters and marathon lovers. The driver had seen little of that light.

Lake Erie lay as still and gray as a dead ocean; the cars on the Pennsylvania Interstate were just those few early risers who commute to Ohio. "Don't let Cleveland get you down," the driver warned.

The Volvo looked superbly fit -- tires cool, gas mileage at 22.3 per gallon, oil full up, battery water ample and undisturbed. The only indication that the whole fearsome night had been journeyed was the weird wingmash and blur of bug stains which blotched the windshield and webbed the grille.

The gas-station attendant had to work his squeegee very hard. "Going a long way?" he asked the driver, but the driver just shrugged. I'm going all the way! he longed to shout, but the Volvo was right there.

You have to watch who you hurt with what you say. For example, the driver hadn't told anyone he was leaving.

They skirted the truck traffic around Cleveland before Cleveland could get them in its foul grasp; they left behind them the feeling that the morning rush hour was angry it just missed them. COLUMBUS, SOUTH, said a sign, but the driver snorted with scorn and sailed up the west ramp of the Ohio Turnpike.

"Crabs in ice water to you, Columbus," he said.

When you've come through a night of well-controlled tension and you're underway in the morning with that feeling of a headstart advantage on the rest of the world, even Ohio seems possible -- even Toledo appears to be just a short sprint away.

"Lunch in Toledo!" the driver announced, with daring. The Volvo gave a slight shudder at 75, skipped to 80 and found that fabled "second wind"; the sun was behind them and they both relished the Volvo's squat shadow fleeing in front of them. They felt they could follow that vision to Indiana.

Early-morning goals are among the illusions we must indulge if we're going to get anywhere at all.

There is more to Ohio than you think; there are more exits to Sandusky than seem reasonable. At one of the many and anonymous rest pavilions off the turnpike, the Volvo had a severe fit of pre-ignition and the driver had to choke off the car's lunging coughs by executing a sharp stallout with the clutch. This irritated them both. And when he made the mileage calculations on the new full tank, the driver was hasty and thoughtless enough to blurt out the disappointing performance. "Fourteen and six tenths miles a gallon!" Then he quickly tried to make the Volvo know that this wasn't offered as criticism. "It was that last gas," he said. "They gave you some bad gas."

But the Volvo was slow and wheezing to start; it idled low and stalled pulling away from the pumps, and the driver thought it was best to say, "Oil's full up, not burning a drop." This was a lie; the Volvo was down half a quart -- not enough to add, but below the mark. For a sickening moment, past one more countless exit for Sandusky, the driver wondered if the Volvo knew. For distance, trust is essential. Can a car feel its oil level falling?

"Lunch in Toledo" hulked in the driver's mind like a taunt; lapsed hunger informed him that lunchtime could have been dawdled away at any of 14 exits which pretended to lead to Sandusky. God, what was Sandusky?

The Volvo, though quenched and wiped, had gone without a proper rest since breakfast in Buffalo. The driver decided to let his own lunch pass. "I'm not hungry," he said cheerfully, but he felt the weight of his second lie. The driver knew that some sacrifices are tokens. If you're in a thing together, a fair share of the suffering must be a top priority. The area referred to as "Toledo" was silently passed in the afternoon like an unmentionable anticlimax. And as for the matter of a falling oil level, the driver knew he was down half a quart of his own. Oh, Ohio.

Fort Wayne, Elkhart, Gary, and Michigan City -- ah, Indiana! A different state, not planted with cement. "Green as Vermont," the driver whispered. Vermont! A magic word. "Of course, flatter," he added, then feared he might have said too much.

A drenching, cleansing thunderstorm broke over the Volvo in Lagrange; gas mileage at Goshen read 20.2, a figure the driver chanted to the Volvo like a litany -- past Ligonier, past Nappanee. Boring their way into the heartland, the driver sensed the coming on of an unprecedented "third wind."