Hidden Treasure
When my grandfather passed away it was great day of sadness for me. Not only had I lost my “Papa”, my hero, but I lost the one man I wanted to impress with my writing. Not just because he was a great lover of books, but because Papa was also a writer. Back in his day he didn’t have the luxuries we take for granted such as computers and spell check. Each page was painstakingly typed on his manual typewriter, a treasure I still own to this day. What makes the feat even more impressive was that Papa only had one functioning hand, compliments of a couple of dozen machine gun bullets from WWII.
Some of you may recall from a previous post that I inherited all his unpublished manuscripts and as I was going through the boxes of handwritten stories and unpublished manuscripts, I found a short story written by my late grandmother.
With great pride, and an equal amount of trepidation, I took her untitled coal-mining story and reworked it, hoping to keep true to her style of writing and the language of the time. The end result became “Stephen’s Song.” The audio version was wonderfully narrated by my friend – author and voice-over extraordinaire, Renee “R.E.” Chambliss.
With work and life finally slowing down enough for me to catch my breath, I pulled those boxes out of storage again and started looking for another buried treasure. It did not take me long. I found a story originally titled “Town of Conflict” that he scratched out in pencil and re-titled: “As The King Lay Dying.”
Like my grandmother’s short story, his was also about life in a Cape Breton coal mining town. Where her’s was a short story about one family’s loss in a mining accident, his was a well developed story, rich in the imagery of what life was like for a poor mining family. At 445 pages and approx. 100,000 words, I knew it would take some time to finish reading it. I turned the last page the next day.
Stopping only to work and catch a few hours sleep, all my time was devoted to reading his manuscript. Not from some sense of obligation or duty – it was because I simply could not put it down. I ate with one hand and held the time-faded pages with the other. I walked around my apartment, manuscript in hand, as the sun fell asleep and woke the next day. All the while I read, often aloud, until the very last minute when I had to rush off to work lest I be late. I skipped the usual after-work coffee session and headed straight home, anxious to read more. I carefully set that last page down and stared at the title page; my mind still reliving his story until something on that page, a detail I previously overlooked, caught my eye… his address.
He listed his address as living in Lachine, Quebec. My mind raced through a lifetime of stories trying to piece the puzzle together. I knew he lived and worked for a quite a few years in Lachine as a Draughtsman and Mechanical Engineer, but when was that? I called my dad and he informed me that he was just a kid when they left Lachine to move back to Cape Breton Island. That was 1951.
I stared at the manuscript in my hands, stained yellow with time as my brain did the math. That was sixty years ago! It would be another three years before Elvis Presley walked into Sun Records to record for the very first time. It was a dozen years before JFK was assassinated in Dallas, and eighteen years before Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon!
What is even more amazing is that it had to be around 1950 or earlier when the copy I held in my hands was typed because they were back in Cape Breton in ‘51. How long did it take him to write it? The war that nearly took his life ended in 1945. I knew he read a lot and wrote on notepads with his one good hand during his long recovery, was this the story he was writing? How old is this story?
I will never know the answers to these questions, but one thing I do know: I have to share his story with the world. Now begins the long process of scanning the pages into my computer; of editing and correcting the typos, of reading his hand written notes and getting it ready for publication.
Why would I bother to publish his story when I still have so many of my own to write? It saddens me that Papa will never be able to read my stories, but it’s heartbreaking to think I might be the only living person to have read his. This I cannot allow to happen.
About Town of Conflict/As the King Lay Dying…
During the backdrop of Prohibition, it is the coming-of-age story of a young boxer’s fight to escape the call of the deep. A journey of hope, bootlegging, union strikes, love, murder, and one man’s fight to survive, both inside the ring and out, from a life ruled by the iron fist of the heartless mine owner.
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© 2011, Kenn Crawford. All rights reserved. Audio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
