No Wasted Word: Hill William by Scott McClanahan
No Wasted Word is a bi-monthly column where Caitlin Reade Keenan discusses and reviews books by contemporary writers published by independent presses.
Written by Caitlin Reade Keenan
Scott wrote me a story called Hill William (Tyrant Books). It was a story made up from a whole bunch of different stories. They were stories from when he was growing up in Rainelle, West Virginia. He doesn’t live in Rainelle anymore, but he still lives in West Virginia with a woman named Sarah. He talked about that some too, and it was clear that the growing up stories haunt him now. The whole time he was telling me his stories about life in rural Appalachia, and how he came to be the way that he is, I kept thinking about this thing that Joan Didion wrote, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it the hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”
He told me about the disappointment of seeing Batman at the Park Center Shopping Complex, shattering his arm while playing quarterback, his mom’s medicine bottles, being molested by another kid, seeing Gay Walter get jumped by the Redneck’s son, getting a skid mark on a towel after being baptized at the Springdale Church of Christ, and riding bikes. He also talked a lot about those West Virginian mountains, and watching them get mined for coal and logged for timber. Thinking about what they mean, what they are, he told me,
“And I asked myself a question I’ve been asking ever since, but haven’t been able to answer. I asked myself whether the mountains were just graves full of dead skeletons or whether they were pregnant bellies popping full of life. And sometimes, I think to myself that the mountains look like graves, and then at other times I say, no, pregnant bellies, full of babies, waiting to be born.
Who the fuck knows.”
Sometimes he made me laugh at how he described childhood so well, like when he said, “I was wearing Velcro tennis shoes that I bought at Shoe World. It might not seem like it now, but you weren’t anything in the mountains back then if you didn’t wear Velcro tennis shoes.”
Parts of the stories were tragic, and parts were hopeful, just like most of life. Though he made sure I knew that none of it was easy: “It was every bit as hard being six years old as it is being thirty-six years old.”
Then, he finished his story and that was that. Except that wasn’t that. I walked around for days with those stories sinking and swimming in my head and I couldn’t shake them. I wanted other people to hear Scott tell his stories too. But, most of all, I wanted to talk back to Scott. I wanted to tell him:
I know the narrator Scott is not the author Scott, but maybe he is, or maybe he’s both, or maybe he’s parts, and I’m glad Sarah calls you Bubbie, and she showed great restraint not getting mad at you for breaking the chair, and I still hurt for no-tooth Derrick, even though he’s repeatedly done the worst thing imaginable, and I hope your mom found the right pills, and you were right about the therapist in turquoise jewelry, and tell me again what it was like to see the stars that night in Fat Patty’s pop bottle lenses, and do you think that Gay Walter still wears his flip-flops all the time, and have you decided yet whether they’re pregnant bellies or graves, or are they both, and I’m sorriest for some reason about Sissy and her baby, and Scott, maybe she can still feel your hand brushing her tears away even now, all these years later.
Also, I want to thank you for letting me become you, and I wanted to tell you that you became me, and I just wanted to whisper something back to you:
I LOVE YOU TOO.
