SCHILLING A Novel by Terrell Guillory
Published by Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press
"Dating from WW1 to his painful
demise in the late 1940s, this book chronicles the life of rural Louisianan
Dr. Schilling in elegant, mesmerizing prose. More than just another
good read, this poignant, poetic novel is recommended for all libraries." - Library Journal
"A brilliant work with the scent
of Gulf salt air in its pages -- innovative, imaginative, eclectic,
poetic, unpredictable, sometimes reminiscent of Faulkner, sometimes
of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Richard Ford, James Lee Burke,
but always in Guillory's freshly unique voice. This may be the new
face of fiction." - Jack Olsen, Edgar Award-winning author of I: The Creation of a Serial
Killer
"Guillory's style and narrative
strategies, rich in imagery, cascading in detail and resorting at times
to stream-of-consciousness passages, recall the work of William Faulkner
and James Joyce. Like them, but in his own way, Guillory poses the
timeless speculations of thinking and feeling human beings in a mysterious
universe." - Sy M. Kahn, author of Between Tedium and Terror
"Terrell Guillory's Schilling is
suffused with the lushness of both its Faulknerian language -- what
a pleasure to see that great American literary tradition of narrative
reinvigorated! -- and its humid Gulf coast settings where we watch
in intimate detail the brief flourishing and slow decay of some lives,
the fernlike unfurling of another." - Alvin Greenberg, author of Time Lapse
"Terrell Guillory's instinctive
command of Southern cadence and language bring to life a deeper way
of knowing the world through the life of one good doctor. It recalls
Faulkner, and even Joyce." - Scott Wilson, Publisher, Port Townsend Leader
"In the finest tradition of Western
letters, Dr. Schilling joins Achilles, Aneas, Percival, Hamlet and
Joyce's Leopold Bloom in the futile struggle with the paradoxes of
human existence." - Wes Cecil
The excerpt, below, is from the new book, SCHILLING,
a novel by Terrell Guillory. Library Journal gushed about this book,
calling it "elegant, mesmerizing prose" and suggesting "this poignant, poetic
novel is recommended for all libraries." Several reviewers have compared
Guillory's writing favorably with James Joyce and William Faulkner. The
author is a retired English professor who taught at the universities
of Washington, Idaho, and Purdue.
SCHILLING is a challenging piece of prose. Guillory's
writing has the flavor of dark chocolate -- potent, complex, with a bitter
aftertaste. It is best sampled in small doses -- break off a bit and
let it melt in your mouth -- you will soon find yourself craving more.
The novel is set in Louisiana and
Texas in the 1940s. The excerpt, "Quero's
Lament," is a moving meditation on loss in one long paragraph. Mrs. Schilling,
old and abandoned, watches her farm house, like her family, fall apart
around her. "[I]n the back of her mind there was still, as always, the
dream of rebuilding."
More information about the book, SCHILLING, and author
Terrell Guillory, follows the excerpt. Enjoy!
Quero's Lament
by Terrell Guillory
That hedge needs cutting, the car rolling into the
garage silently, its bumper striking the back wall. Carrying the bag
of groceries from the garage, locking it against the wind, pausing to
admire the Hollyhock hidden behind the unfolded garage door. Tom was
away, going she sensed into his adult agentry whatever that meant: to
the war, whatever that meant; from whence whatever. She had seen him
leaving, going... and she was lost. Help me: wilt thou be there in my
dying? Will no man be there? Must I molt alone? In my grave beside nothing?
No one standing above me looking down at least in loss? Worded and by
its complexity lost, started and by dreams burned out, doomed and by
duress ascending because ascent was the name of man under duress ascending.
Dream of time passed, fatalities met, horrors, moments, shams discovered.
A branch had been broken by the door; she twisted it off and carried
it toward the house. Lilacs were at the peak of their bloom, and the
calla lilies were sappy above the ground. Irises were in full bloom,
violet, ivory and yellow flowers she had chosen her first year here with
a friend who, in ten years, would lay such a purple quintessence across
her coffin. (The friend was the last memorable one who thought she understood
Quero perhaps because in Quero there was something honestly bitter. The
woman had seen this immediately and, bitter herself, instantly invited
Quero into her garden where she chose one each of the colors that propagated.
Quero had a profound capacity for gratitude and her loyalty to a friend
capable of such a gesture could not be unbound, however she might treat
a friend; this particular friend knew that, and the gesture of the violet
iris laid across her breast followed the separation of a year during
which they never spoke. But neither forgot the moment of the first irises
when Quero honestly needed and was befriended, a stranger in town after
so much failure.) The winter over, she passed the wood pile without pause.
Though gas had been piped into the house she still kept a wood stove
in the kitchen. She yearned for a fireplace; there had been none since
she had moved to Kemp for the two dark years she could never forget.
A wood fire consoled her, reminded her of Papa and home from which she
had never grown apart except by the extenuation of fortune and marriage.
This afternoon she felt winded halfway between the garage and the house
and sat on a white lawn seat under a hackberry tree. The tree above her
was like an umbrella, yet when she had cut the seventeen hackberry trees
in 1938, they had all said the trees will die. Before Webber had died,
and he had said, They'll live, Mother, and he had died before they had
come out fully the next spring. She had heard something of the war news
in the grocery store. She hoped Tom would be able to finish college.
But the war would surely continue for years and he would have to go.
There was nothing else but him, now that Webber was gone. She was winded.
Her legs, scarred from the disease of the thirties, were slim and bowed,
their scars shining in the sunlight still on this side of the house,
a silver-blue shiny flesh, spread along the shins; not even wartime hose
could hide that shine. The rest of her was heavy, but not excessively
for one of fifty-three. She had simply lost her shape; yet her face was
still beautiful, without wrinkles, a grosser shape of face than youth
had suggested; dignified and comely and human without airs. She felt
her burdens too much for airs to suffice as a way through life; airs
couldn't bear the burdens or reflect the joke, and most of it was a joke.
This life, this betrayal. She saw verbenas, clumps of leaves, and thought
of those growing around her son's grave which she had not visited for
a month. She had had the stone cut and placed, engraved for all of them,
and verbenas planted, the cedars at each corner of the lot, the grass
mowed, the beds chipped of stray grass, the graves weeded; the roses
she had pruned herself. As she had had this lawn of four lots plowed,
harrowed, leveled, sown; the shrubbery pruned; the beds weeded; all done
to its present state which, to her, was only a beginning. There was much
yet to do. Since she had quit painting, landscape had taken the place
of art. The woodpile had been her fancy; she had thought of painting
it, but she had never solved the problem of composition. Now it lay depleted,
its sticks awry, grass grown along its edges; nests of grass. Beneath
the trees thirty feet from the back porch two wood lawn seats, once white
and now rotting, bore the tubs where she did her washing; galvanized
tubs upturned, the color of lead; the copper ribs of the scrub board
torn, old and lackluster, leaned against a tree. The washlines were hung
beyond, sagging between poles of scrap lumber that raised them when a
washing was hung. The garage had been painted the year before, and three
years before the house had been painted; both were white and fresh. Some
lumber was left where the barn had been town down, red planks split and
stacked against, bent tin roofing damaged in the demolishment, slabs
of galvanized roofing she hadn't been able to sell; she had thought of
donating it to the scrap drive, but in back of her mind there was still,
as always, the dream of rebuilding. Perhaps a garden house. For years
at the house in the country she had set dimes aside and stored near-empty
bags of concrete with only dregs in their boots. At every chance when
she had a dollar she would pick up wire, and talk scrap men out of reinforcing
rods. She got her sand by swapping a nursery owner four river cedars
she had found along a creek in no-man's land. Then before beginning to
build her arch, she consulted books in the library in Waco and sketched
it to her taste dozens of times, sitting in the back bedroom of the only
house she ever loved, soaking her legs in a solution of Epsom salts.
Finally she had everything gathered and with Lucy's oldest boys to pour
the forms and build the frame, she began her arch. She had it raised
at one corner of the orchard where there was no driveway. Standing in
the winds of March on her crutches she caught cold but ordered the work
to go on until the rains began. Then the Negroes went to early picking
and laying aside one crutch the first day, the other three days later,
she troweled the cement onto the wire mesh, and with a ladder from mid-July,
working two or three hours a day, she finished the arch in August. She
had already decided how she could manage ten yards of gravel for the
first of her driveway through her orchard but the arch cracked in September.
She never looked at it again. Perhaps a garden house... The brooder house
had gone first, then the well house, the well rimmed-up with concrete
fragments sledged from the brooder house floor. The barn should have
gone first; no stock had been in it for three years before she had had
Negro Ernest attack it with a crowbar, sledgehammer and puzzlement; neither
of them had known where to begin. Finally he had borrowed a mule at her
suggestion and tied ropes to six posts on one side of the aisle where
cattle had walked to stalls for thirty years. Two mules were required
for the other six posts, four-by- fours set by the weight of the loft
onto concrete blocks. Yet it hadn't fallen. Finally Ernest drew a rope
from its south door through its north and with a fourth mule and himself
tripped it over, the barn lying noisily on its side like a great elephant
dying with a whoosh of wind and disturbed pollen of fertilizer, an enormous
cloud of time and crap and life. The crowbar, the pinchbar, the hammer
and Ernest salvaged the barn plank by plank, the red paint coloring his
hands, its dust flying into his face until at the end of the day he looked
like a tired clown and she felt sorry for him and drove him home, the
red on her car seats for more than a year. The well house was simpler,
yet she didn't watch it. She had nothing to do with it. A part of it
fell against the back porch and she didn't look up from her reading in
the living room. She knew it would lead to giving up the well, and no
matter how strongly she wanted to make this place into a habitable style,
to make it a relevant home in which no one would ever live as though
it were home, the well was the last of the past she forwent; those thousands
of stoppings at wells in all light for water, for thought, for talk,
as strong in her past as thirst itself. The lawn was too big to mow.
Tom had done that before he began to drift. Yet it must be mowed. She
thought of her money for the week, how much she had spent, how much remained;
how she would find enough for the lawn, to have the back screen fixed,
the garage door straightened; the rain had caused it to settle and scrape.
Now the rain was over, so let the garage go for now. There was more to
do. Termites had attacked a rent house; a refrigerator had gone on the
blink; a closet was scraping a hardwood floor. Sparrows were returning
to the trees for the night. The leaves were again attacked by worms encased
in beads growing wart-like along the leaf surfaces; a wind- injured limb
from the spring equinox was dying and carrying with it a young limb.
The winds terrified her. Not the northers that swept along the eaves
of the house from October till March, as she lay in her bed alone, lulled
to sleep by primal incessant howling; but the winds of September, colossal
and rabid, tearing and ripping gales, gusts, cyclonic demons from the
west, beyond compare; dying by morning, her terror white until the dawn,
lightning still in the pulse of her eye. The essence of loneliness is
found in a wind, gusting and dying like the respiration of horror itself.
Malign. Horror. The gutters around the house were never the same after
the wind of '40, and there had been no one to help her when two windows
had blown out last winter; Tom was gone and his father was sick and helpless.
She had used suitcases, jagged and worn from travels from nowhere to
nowhere, holding them in the broken windows to keep the rain off the
beds and floor and clothes, screaming until she caught herself and knew
that no one would come. She swore against the fates as she ever had,
cursing, screaming revenge against life, man, fate, wind, nothing coming
out of her mouth open to the rain, her face and naked eyes wet in prickling
rain. The cat crossed the lawn, Tom's cat, its fur marbled shadows. She
called the cat and the cat came and sat beside her, pawing her thigh
as though nursing; she petted its head. At this time the milking would
be done at Papa's, a wind in the pines, supper in the air. Someone would
draw the last daylight water out of the well, and there would be no reflection
until morning. How old I am. How old am I. I am how old. I am old. God,
no. Death before age; yet she wanted to live forever, and she was afraid,
of life, of death, of living, of tomorrow, of punctilio, of perfection,
of failure, of duty, of the next moment, of dreams, of all and dust.
The ties with money, the contests, the chicanery, the puppeteering of
lives by spectral masters, a depression, a bad year; the chestnutting
cat, the fool in the well: all are too much, and the four sisters failed.
She rose and sicced the cat off her lap and started in. She wondered
how different she might hope it could have been. She stopped to take
linen off the line under the porch, holding the bag of groceries in one
arm. Letting the cloth fall to her shoulder, she stepped to the well
and looked down a hundred feet, the water dark with a faint reflection.
She had studied wells all of her life, the deep eye holding a reflection
of herself, like looking into time and unlived years around corners into
promises. Her teeth were tight behind thinned lips; she looked with a
cold eye. She stepped back and retrieved an apron she had dropped, reached
for the screen door and went in. She now dreaded entering the kitchen
since servants were impossible, not only because there was no money,
but they were embroiled in the war. The kitchen was the last original
part of the house. Elsewhere she had built new rooms, porches, decorated
the old. The sink was littered with dishes. Above the table on shelves
the china she had bought in 1920 bore oily dust; she had not used it
since Webber died. On the table a silver vase bore two irises, the vase
from her mother, the irises placed there to compensate for the duty she
had neglected to perform. The crystal punchbowl bought in 1922 sat at
one end of the drainboard holding boxes of keys, folded napkins, a padlock
and hinge with nails protruding, a half dozen dead candles. A hammer
and level rested in the dust atop a water heater. She sighed and passed
into the dining room which for three years had been her bedroom, the
dining set sold, buffet, china closet, chairs and table, after rain in
the storeroom had warped the veneer. Only one of her paintings remained
in this room, a sketch for a railroad vanishing. She removed the pin
from her hat before the dresser and went immediately through the French
doors, crossing the hall to his open door, the room darkening, the doctor
lying still in the rapidly closing light.
Terrell Guillory was born and reared beside the 98th meridian
running through Texas, the dividing line between the South and the West,
according to rainfall, farming to the east, ranching to the west -- two
cultures. He was exposed to other cultures as well: The Anglo-Celt and
the German, the Mexican-American and the African-American of Central
Texas. His parents' roots were in Louisiana, his mother from Winn Parish,
his father from Evangeline, marinating him in two other cultures -- Anglo-Saxon
southern and Cajun French.
He was educated at the University of Texas in Austin and at the University
of Washington, and he's taught English at the universities of Washington,
Idaho, and Purdue. He currently writes a column for the Port Townsend
Leader in the northwest corner of Washington state.
For many years he has divided his time between the Pacific Northwest
and the Gulf Southwest. Most of his writings come from notes taken from
glimpses through the window of a train which arrives too soon.
