Listen, p.1
Listen, page 1
Reminiscent of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, Sheldon Russell’s Listen paints a picture of the resilience of people during the Great Depression. Listen is full of deep characterizations and action to keep you guessing. Five stars.
—Peggy Chambers, author of Blooming Greed
A very interesting novel that I will recommend to all of my literary friends!
—Dave Kirkbride, former Executive Director, Kansas National Education Association
As in his other work, Russell gives voice to the beauty and mystery behind northwestern Oklahoma’s harsh landscape and resilient residents.
—Matthew Lambert, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Foreign Language, and Humanities, Northwestern Oklahoma State University
also by sheldon russell
A Forgotten Evil
2020 Spur Award Winner
A Particular Madness
2022 Spur Award Finalist
Published by Cennan Books
an imprint of Cynren Press
5 Great Valley Parkway, Suite 322
Malvern, PA 19355 USA
http://www.cynren.com/
Copyright 2023 by Sheldon Russell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
First published 2023
ISBN-13: 978-1-947976-37-5 (hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-947976-50-4 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-947976-38-2 (ebk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940269
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Kevin Kane
to xiwu and ping, friends from afar
contents
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
chapter 32
chapter 33
chapter 34
chapter 35
chapter 36
chapter 37
chapter 38
epilogue
acknowledgments
about the author
chapter 1
Liam Walker stepped off the train and set his suitcase at his feet. A hot wind, laden with dust and mesquite, swept in from the southwest. He dabbed the sweat from his forehead and rubbed the sting from his eyes. A dirt road lifted gradually from the Salt Fork Valley floor to the horizon. At its end, perhaps a mile away, rose an immense and unlikely structure. Its Gothic tower, implausible in the bucolic setting, lifted skyward into the blue. Even at this distance, he could make out its pillars, turrets, and arched windows.
His arrival in this particular world had not been by choice, nor by want of adventure, but by direction of the Federal Writers’ Project, an afterthought of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was Roosevelt, or perhaps some underling, who had conceded to the possibility that writers, too, had to eat.
It was a stretch to think of himself as a writer—certainly not in any literary sense. But he was literate and educated and so fit the Project’s requirements. They needed him, and he needed the money, and so here he was, looking at a castle in the middle of the prairie.
It would be his job to interview an array of local citizens and write up their stories, no matter how mundane or predictable. In exchange, the Federal Writers’ Project would pay him a small salary equivalent to the average window cleaner’s.
It wasn’t that the world cared about the common man’s struggles to eke out a living in an inhospitable land. As far as he could surmise, it was the Project that mattered, the process itself, a pretense to redefine welfare as gainful employment. At first he’d resisted the whole notion. After all, he was well educated and should have easily stepped into a position with an enviable wage.
But reality has a way of getting one’s attention. Upon graduation with a master’s in advertising from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, he had been unable to find work of any kind, at any salary, and so, in the end, had set aside his pride. When his name came up on the unemployment rolls, along with other hapless graduates, he’d joined the Federal Writers’ Project.
In any case, the Project was temporary, the end goal being a pointless collection of life histories, inconsequential to anyone but the interviewees and their closest relatives. The essays would soon enough disappear into the bowels of the Library of Congress, never to be seen again.
So here he was in Atlas, Oklahoma. He would do the best he could, take his money, and move on at the first opportunity. What he understood most was that America was built on money and that he had prepared himself to take full advantage of that reality. He would find his way back. In the meantime, he would take his government check and wait for better times.
The train engine released her brakes and blew her horn as she pulled from the station. Liam picked up his suitcase and made for the depot, a one-room shack that had been sectioned off into thirds: one for the operator, one for the passengers, and another for three restrooms, men’s, women’s, and coloreds’.
He approached the operator, a balding man who wore his glasses on the end of his nose.
“Excuse me,” Liam said.
The man looked up. “What you need?”
“I was wondering about that building up there on the hill.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the Castle on the Hill.”
“What is it exactly?”
“It’s the new college, or nearly so,” he said. “It was a normal school before, you know, where high school kids could go to school, and teachers could be trained. But now she’s a full- blown college just like they have in the big city.”
Liam took another look. It was difficult to see how such an ostentatious building could be justified in the bleakness of the plain.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m new in town, looking for a place to stay, a hotel or boardinghouse maybe. Have any recommendations?”
“There’s the Bell,” he said. “It’s fancy enough even for city boys, providing they got the money.”
“I’m working for the government,” Liam said. “Maybe something a little more affordable.”
“Well, there’s the county jail. Lots of government folks in there. If that don’t suit you, there’s the Pribble Hotel. It has fewer criminals, for the most part, and more permanent folks, those staying over for a spell and living on the cheap. If you don’t mind making your own bed, the prices are reasonable. The food’s edible, they say.”
“Thanks,” Liam said, pausing. “About that castle, that’s the only building on campus?”
“Yessir, that’s it. The whole dang thing right there in that building on that hill. She was built for kings, not for the likes of common folks.”
Liam looked out the window. “You’d think less flourish would have served the town better,” he said. “Maybe a little could have been more, you know. But it’s all there, the whole thing?”
He nodded his head. “Including the library. It’s a fine waste of money, if you ask me.”
Liam headed across town in the general direction the operator had pointed. A county courthouse sat in the middle of the town square, a two-story red brick building with white shutters over the windows and an American flag flapping in the wind. There were bars over the basement windows and a sign at the parking space next to the entrance that read “County Sheriff.”
Liam looked back at the depot and thought about the people he’d left behind at home. His father, a lawyer, had had a clear vision of the world his whole life, logical, intelligent, independent. The accumulation of money, the bottom line, had defined who he was. And when the Depression hit, he’d suffered a lethal blow to that very identity. It took everything he knew to be true and real. It was a man’s job to earn a good living, emphasis on the good. Liam had heard it his whole life. Competition, drive, and success were ingrained in the Walker psyche. All else was but excuse and failure. Faced with that, his father had resolved the failing in the wee hours the day before the bankruptcy was finalized.
Liam’s mother, a woman dependent, and defined by her husband’s success, was suddenly helpless in his absence. She had called for help and was sitting on the front porch swing when the ambulance arrived.
She never recovered, showing no inclination to care for h
Finally, Liam had taken her to a nursing home, where she sat, hands in her lap, staring out the window. She died alone in that room one year to the week of his father’s death. In her lap was a postcard and a ballpoint pen with the law firm logo on it. Nothing was written on the card.
Liam buried her next to his father, and on that desolate day, his own interests and ambitions dimmed. His future was suddenly out of reach, obscured by loss and hopelessness. Like his father before him, the world he thought secure had suddenly and irrevocably vanished. And now here he was, at the end of the world, in a place he neither understood nor sought.
At the far corner of the street sat the Pribble, a three-story framed structure with verandas on the lower two floors. A sign at the entrance read “stop at the pribble hotel: Only Modern Hotel in the City. Electric Lights, Steam Heat, Hot & Cold Water.” He wondered vaguely at the possibility of hot water without available cold water, but so said the sign.
And so this was where it was to begin, a narrow place of rules and deadlines and contrived reports, a place removed and distant from his plans. He stood there on the lower veranda, in the torrid heat and bleakness. It was a far reach from what he’d envisioned his life to be. This was not what he’d intended. It was what he’d been given.
chapter 2
The clerk, strangely out of place with his farmer’s suntan and scalped haircut, looked up when Liam came in. A thermos cup was at hand, and he was reading the local weekly.
He folded his paper. “Help you?” he asked.
“Name’s Liam Walker. I understand you rent rooms by the week?”
“Anyway you want it, mister,” he said. He paused, gathering up his notion. “The longer you stay, the cheaper it gets. At some point we pay you for the privilege of your company. You landing for a while?”
Liam set down his suitcase and glanced at the stairwell. “A while,” he said. “It’s not clear how long at this point.”
“Special rate for a week, two dollars and breakfast in the kitchen. Staying over a month it’s a dollar and a quarter. No room service either way. You want someone to make your bed, better check the Bell down the street.”
“I can make a bed,” Liam said. “Sign me up for a month.”
“And no women,” he said. “While I find it interesting myself, the owner don’t like it.”
“Agreed,” Liam said.
The clerk turned the register around for Liam to sign and said, “Welcome to the Pribble. My name is Willie, Willie Stone. I’m on most nights. You a salesman or something?”
Liam put his pen back into his pocket. “Something,” he said. “I’m working as a writer with the Federal Writers’ Project, for now at least.”
“The hell you say?” Willie said. “What kind of writer would the government be wanting, I wonder?”
“The unemployed kind. I’ll be doing interviews with the local citizenry to find out how they live and what they believe. The project is part of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.”
Willie turned the register back around. “You ain’t a commie, are you?”
Liam smiled. “Not yet. I have a degree in business, advertising mostly. Roosevelt figures I’m just the guy to write this stuff up for posterity. I’ll do the digging and the writing.”
Willie scratched at the edges of his haircut. “Hell,” he said, “you don’t need an interview to figure how these folks think. Step back and take a look. They hang on by their nails like feral cats, persuaded by nothing but blowing dirt and starvation, that some day soon things will get better. Funny what a man will believe when all evidence points to the contrary.
“Anyways, what would I know? I ain’t educated in advertising, or anything else for that matter. It’s a rare bird around here who is, though we do have a new college starting on that hill up there. ’Course, there ain’t much yet, save for the castle.”
“A rare sight in these parts, isn’t it?” Liam said.
“Beats a sod house or a dugout,” he said. “That castle has everything royalty could want, ’cept a moat and a drawbridge. The governor brought in an architect from Germany, or some foreign place, and that’s what he built, a goddang castle. You got to wonder what a bunch of dirt farmers going to do with a castle on the hill in the middle of the prairie.
“They built her of sandstone, trucked all the way from Kansas. That building even has a turret, just like them castles in Europe. Know what a turret is? It ain’t nothing, just sits up there on top doing nothing.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Sure I do. I helped put her together. Mixed enough mortar to pave a road to California, with plenty left over to dam up the Grand Canyon. I helped set the cornerstone and said a prayer over it, an amen mostly. Oh, it was a big ceremony, what with the governor coming in, everyone buzzing around like it mattered. It was the governor’s first visit, and his last, I’m thinking.”
Liam pinched his lower lip into a pucker as he studied Willie. “And now here you are clerking at the Pribble? Must be quite a letdown for a man with your experience.”
Willie folded his arms over his chest. “Oh, hell no. Around here, a man, one inclined to eat at least, is likely to work anywhere and everywhere sooner or later, even for Roosevelt.”
“Point taken,” Liam said. “You know lots of folks in these parts, then, Willie?”
“Oh, sure I do. Everyone what didn’t just get off the train.”
“You exert some influence in the community, too, I figure?”
He nodded. “Got dirt on most of ’em. Worked for most at one thing or another. The harder the job, the more I liked it, that is, until my joints started giving way. When a man gets old, everything gets stiff, ’cept what should. Joints squeak like dry door hinges. The pain didn’t bother me so much, but the squeaking was downright nerve-racking. That’s when I took up this desk job.”
“Any good eating places in town, Willie?”
“No,” he said.
“None?”
“There ain’t a cook worth boiling an egg in this entire town, save for a hamburger joint. But that ain’t in town, strictly speaking. Eat oatmeal, I say. You can’t ruin it, and you ain’t likely to overeat.”
“How about a room number, Willie?”
“Never ate one of those,” he said.
Liam rolled his eyes. “What room will I be in?”
“Six,” he said. “Third floor. There’s a bird’s-eye view of the Castle on the Hill from there, assuming you can get the window blind up.”
Liam picked up his suitcase. “Thanks,” he said. “Key?”
“Door’s open,” he said.
“I’ll need the key to lock up,” Liam said.
Willie opened the desk drawer and searched through a ring of keys, handing one to Liam. “Most folks ain’t that scart of the dark around here. Want me to carry your luggage so’s you don’t get robbed on the way up?”
“I’ll manage,” Liam said, turning for the staircase.
“What you going to write with?” Willie asked.
Liam paused. “Excuse me?”
“Writers have to write with something, don’t they?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so. I hadn’t given it that much thought. Maybe I’ll get a typewriter.”
“I used to work at the hardware store out on the highway. They had an old typewriter in the back. Fred’s a pretty good guy. Maybe he’ll let loose of it.”
“That would be great. Thanks, Willie.”
“I’ll check it out,” he said, turning back to his newspaper. “What’s a writer without a typewriter?”
Liam’s room was small and with all the amenities of a jail cell. Willie was right about the view, as well as the window blind, which released in a dust-filled flap. From the window, the Castle on the Hill looked like a Renaissance painting. Built of red sandstone, the main tower rose majestically against the horizon, complete with arrow loops, battlements, and arched windows. Pillars bordered the front entrance, a portcullis of old, at once pretentious and compelling. Mounted above it hung an enormous disk. The structure proper was imbued in every detail with imagination and romance.
