A Cautionary Telling

A CAUTIONARY TELUNG/Naton Leslie MY FATHER IS A storyteller. He doesn't even know he is telling stories; he is simply talking, and what he has to say has a beginning , middle and end. It suits his temperament because he likes to be the center of attention. He often repeats the same stories—you could say he has a repertoire. Heisnever overlytheatricalwhentellinghis storiesbecauseheisgood at it. He knows aU the right cues and markers, when to include dialogue and when to summarize, when to paint a scene or salt a detaU. He seems to teU the story the same way each time, but if I could compare the latest telling with an earUer one, I am sure I would uncover refinements. I can see him at work, watching like a filmmaker at a screening for audience reactions to a rhythmic link or narrative aside. Part of his skiU resides in his eyes. My father has a way of looking at you that is subtly coercive. It is actuaUy a marriage of a look and a nod that says, "You know what I mean, of course. You know what I mean because you feel or think the same way and understand this part of the story because of its basic, undeniable truth." It is a tribal inclusion, and you find yourseUnodding back, even if you aren't sure what pact you are signing with those eyes. This gives him the consent to continue the story—though an incomplete narrative is so compelling, so fetching, you'd agree with the devil to hear it out. "Go on," you are saying. "Finish the story. Tm with you." I owe him a great debt of stories. StiU, I can't reteU them in conversation as he does because I don't have his authority of time and place. He once lived in the Utile mountain town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, where most of his stories are set; he grew up in Depression-era Appalachia, a time that forced people to make hard choices and bear the enormous weights ofdesperation and need. Whatthe stories mean remains the only real collateral I can gather, but it is like trying to preserve soap bubbles. My father is not didactic and rarely reduces a story to a moral or a lesson ; if pressed, I doubt he could say what a story is supposed to convey beyond its seamless events or its projection of character. They are only yarns. My father explains his need to teU stories this way: "There are three stages in a man's Ufe: planning to do it; doing it; and talking about getting it done." Here's a story he tells. Giles Philps grew up poor, what mountain folk call "growing up hard," down in Sligo, Pennsylvania, a borough The Missouri Review · 33 to the south of Clarion, a place settled by Irish coal miners. They were what my father would call a rough breed, people who didn't think about much other than drinking, work and church and didn't make much of a distinction among the three. Such poverty has earned many metaphors to describe it, and in telling this story my father may employ one of them, saying Giles "didn't have two dimes to rub together" or, if he considers his poverty partially the result of shiftlessness or laziness, that he "didn't have a pot to piss in." Either way, such an upbringing marked Giles as prone to tragedy. "Well," my father says, "Uncle Sam thought coal miners made good soldiers, so one day Giles got the letter saying, 'Your friends and neighbors have selected you to serve. . . .'" My father considers the euphemistic opening of a draft letter cynical—the one thing your friends and neighbors wouldn't do if they could help it is draft you headlong into a shooting war. But Giles went, with the sons of his friends and neighbors , into World War II, serving in Europe. Before he left he married "one of those pretty Utile Cramby girls from over in Oil City." That's when my father shakes his head the way someone does when faced with something impossible to understand. This marriage was a...