Telling True Stories

Daniel Williams
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read

A friend told me a scary story.

She stepped off the school bus one afternoon and saw a group of people gathered at the little country store up the road. The police were there, and something covered in a white sheet.

Lots of blood on the sheet too.

My friend leaned in and said in a low voice, “He had his head cut off.”

Here’s what happened.

Two men got in a fight in front of that little store. The store sold things like candy, maps, gasoline, cigarettes, and axes.

Man-One popped inside and grabbed an ax. (I forgot to ask if he paid for it.) He came out and chopped off Man-Two’s head.

I can imagine it: “Hold that thought for a second, Frank, I gotta run in and get something.”

I asked, “What were they fighting about?”
“Oh,” she said, “just something stupid, you know.”

We both laughed.

Her story prompted me to tell about the time my grandfather, when he was a boy, went nosing around the railroad tracks where people were working, and one guy said, “Hey kid, take a look at this,” and pointed to a cloth-covered basket.

The man uncovered the basket. My grandfather took a look.

There was a human head inside.

The end.

“Wow,” my friend said.
I said, “I know.”
“Where’d they get it?” she asked. “The head.”
I had to tell her, “I don’t know.”

This left me feeling like I often do at the end of telling a true story: like I messed it up.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“Sorry.”
“What’d your grandfather do?”
“I never found out.”
“So what’d you tell me for?”
“I don’t know. Forgive me.”

These events float in my mind like bits of a shipwreck. They point to some big, overarching thing that happened, the sinking of a ship, but it’s done, and the ship’s lost.

I don’t know where it was going. I have no idea what killed it.

What am I supposed to do with these scraps?

Every time I tell the story of the day my brother and me blew up a dead porcupine with a homemade grenade, I get to the end and I’m stuck.

The story has no end.

It builds and builds.

  1. We acquire the porcupine from the side of the highway.
  2. We build the bomb.
  3. We cut a hole in the porcupine.
  4. We slide the bomb in.
  5. We light the bomb.
  6. It blows up…

…and I see the same old thing on my listeners’ faces, the look that says, “Then what happened? Did you get caught? Did you get hurt? It just blew up and that’s it?”

Yup. That’s it. I’m so sorry.

The heroes wanted to do something: explode a porcupine. And we did. No opposition. No conflict. No character change.

No story.

The event sits in a low position, humbly at the feet of story.

It’s an occurrence. It’s like a dream. Strange things happened, but in a shapeless sort of way. It lacks punch. The ending is just as bad as “Then I woke up.”

There’s a conversation I love from the movie Heat. Robert De Niro is a bad guy and Al Pacino is a good guy trying to bust him. They meet at a restaurant and Pacino says,

“I have this recurring dream. I’m sitting at this big banquet table and all the victims of all the murders I ever worked are there…and they’re staring at me with these black eyeballs because they got eight-ball hemorrhages from the head wounds. And there they are, these big balloon people because I found them two weeks after they’d been under the bed. The neighbors reported the smell and there they are, all just sitting there.”
De Niro says, “What do they say?”
“Nothing.”
“No talk?”
“They have nothing to say. We just look at each other. They look at me and that’s it. That’s the dream.”

I feel like the real things that have happened to me and people I know are just sitting there, looking at me, waiting.

They’re in dream-form. They have no endings. They have nothing to say.

But their eyes speak: “Do something,” and also, “Tell the truth.”

So I’m on a hunt. I’m seeking help.

I started reading a book entitled Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.

Master nonfiction writer William Zinsser explains that “Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.”

So I’m hunting order.

It’s the only escape for my silent, waiting people. It’s a way of making sense of the shipwreck. Maybe if I collect enough pieces and order them right, I’ll discover the ship’s intended destination, and maybe I’ll know enough to tell the story of its dramatic ending.

Daniel Williams
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