Read Online The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert J. Wiersema
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as a boy or that morning after Brian
disappeared.
The search for the missing boy went on for weeks.
Newspapers as far away as Toronto wrote about the
disappearance, and TV crews from the city parked their
vans in the field beside the house. Diane answered most
of their questions. When they had Jeff on-camera, he was
barely able to articulate his loss. He seemed to have given
up, long before the searchers did.
Some days, after the search, after the headlines, Jeff
would find himself in the woods with no awareness of how
he had got there. He would find the quiet of a clearing near
the forestâs edge, or tuck himself into the lightning-struck
cave at the base of a giant cedar tree, and just sit. He would
sit for hours without moving, listening to the wind in the
leaves, the sound of birds around him.
He would sit for hours, waiting, hoping to hear, just
once, the echo of distant laughter.
And at night, he would stand in the dew-wet grass of
the back lawn as the dusk settled around him, looking out
at the darkening swath of trees, the black hill behind them.
He would stand there until full dark, looking for small,
luminous figures in the distance, waiting to hear his son
call to him, Brianâs reedy voice calling to invite him to come
away with them.
He would have gone.
But the call never came.
And once the full dark came on, he would turn away, walk back into the house. He would close the door behind
him, but not lock it.
He never locked the door again.
And he always left a light burning.
Notes
I wrote this novella over the course of a month or so in the
summer of 2006, using a Lamy 2000 fountain pen loaded
with Noodlers Black in a standard issue, middle-grade
composition notebook.
While I was writing, I was listening, exclusively, to the first
two albums by The Band: Music From Big Pink and The Band .
Something about those songs, utterly contemporary (even
now, some forty years after their release), yet utterly timeless,
put me in the perfect mindset for this story, set as it is on the
rubicon between contemporary and traditional storytelling,
between domestic reality and mythic fantasy. At one point,
I decided to change the music â a month is a long time to
spend several hours every morning listening to the same
two records, over and over â and almost immediately, the
writing stopped. So, after a day or two of frustration, I put
the albums back on. It seemed to do the trick.
This story was finished sitting in the woods a short distance
away from the shores of Cowichan Lake, smoking a cigar and
listening to my son in the distance, playing in the water with
his aunt and uncle, his mother and grandmother. It was one
of those perfect moments.
The title of this novella is lifted shamelessly from âThe Stolen
Childâ by W.B. Yeats. The poem was an inspiration, but itâs
not an answer, should you be inclined to look for one.
Mom, this oneâs for you. And for anyone reading in
Agassiz, BC (âThe Corn Capital of British Columbiaâ).
And for anyone else who might be wondering.
Some truths are slow to sink in; there are things that you know, implicitly, without necessarily
grasping their full implications. Over the last year, for
example, it has been brought vividly to my awareness that,
despite the best of intentions, writers often donât know just
what theyâre writing, even as theyâre writing it.
I should have known, though. That fact was certainly
brought home to me a few years ago, when my first novel, Before I Wake , hit the shelves and people started asking me
questions that simply hadnât occurred to me. I realized then,
from their questions, that there were whole aspects of that
book that I had no real awareness of having explored.
If you were to ask, I would tell you that â consciously â
Iâm a narrative-focused writer. To my mind, story is the
main thing. Give me a good plot, and some good characters
to see it through, and thatâs
disappeared.
The search for the missing boy went on for weeks.
Newspapers as far away as Toronto wrote about the
disappearance, and TV crews from the city parked their
vans in the field beside the house. Diane answered most
of their questions. When they had Jeff on-camera, he was
barely able to articulate his loss. He seemed to have given
up, long before the searchers did.
Some days, after the search, after the headlines, Jeff
would find himself in the woods with no awareness of how
he had got there. He would find the quiet of a clearing near
the forestâs edge, or tuck himself into the lightning-struck
cave at the base of a giant cedar tree, and just sit. He would
sit for hours without moving, listening to the wind in the
leaves, the sound of birds around him.
He would sit for hours, waiting, hoping to hear, just
once, the echo of distant laughter.
And at night, he would stand in the dew-wet grass of
the back lawn as the dusk settled around him, looking out
at the darkening swath of trees, the black hill behind them.
He would stand there until full dark, looking for small,
luminous figures in the distance, waiting to hear his son
call to him, Brianâs reedy voice calling to invite him to come
away with them.
He would have gone.
But the call never came.
And once the full dark came on, he would turn away, walk back into the house. He would close the door behind
him, but not lock it.
He never locked the door again.
And he always left a light burning.
Notes
I wrote this novella over the course of a month or so in the
summer of 2006, using a Lamy 2000 fountain pen loaded
with Noodlers Black in a standard issue, middle-grade
composition notebook.
While I was writing, I was listening, exclusively, to the first
two albums by The Band: Music From Big Pink and The Band .
Something about those songs, utterly contemporary (even
now, some forty years after their release), yet utterly timeless,
put me in the perfect mindset for this story, set as it is on the
rubicon between contemporary and traditional storytelling,
between domestic reality and mythic fantasy. At one point,
I decided to change the music â a month is a long time to
spend several hours every morning listening to the same
two records, over and over â and almost immediately, the
writing stopped. So, after a day or two of frustration, I put
the albums back on. It seemed to do the trick.
This story was finished sitting in the woods a short distance
away from the shores of Cowichan Lake, smoking a cigar and
listening to my son in the distance, playing in the water with
his aunt and uncle, his mother and grandmother. It was one
of those perfect moments.
The title of this novella is lifted shamelessly from âThe Stolen
Childâ by W.B. Yeats. The poem was an inspiration, but itâs
not an answer, should you be inclined to look for one.
Mom, this oneâs for you. And for anyone reading in
Agassiz, BC (âThe Corn Capital of British Columbiaâ).
And for anyone else who might be wondering.
Some truths are slow to sink in; there are things that you know, implicitly, without necessarily
grasping their full implications. Over the last year, for
example, it has been brought vividly to my awareness that,
despite the best of intentions, writers often donât know just
what theyâre writing, even as theyâre writing it.
I should have known, though. That fact was certainly
brought home to me a few years ago, when my first novel, Before I Wake , hit the shelves and people started asking me
questions that simply hadnât occurred to me. I realized then,
from their questions, that there were whole aspects of that
book that I had no real awareness of having explored.
If you were to ask, I would tell you that â consciously â
Iâm a narrative-focused writer. To my mind, story is the
main thing. Give me a good plot, and some good characters
to see it through, and thatâs
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