The year: 1727. A moonless night in the dark, dark forest of Sababurg in central Germany. A cabin in a clearing. In the cabin, a woodcutter and his family huddle around a fire, pretending that the cabin affords security from the wolves, from the sprites and witches and familiars of the gods — even though in his bedtime story, the woodcutter is doing his entertaining best to convince them that no such security is possible.
The woodcutter’s name is Jurgen Landes.
Just as he reaches a climax in the story’s action, a sudden whooshing sound comes from outside, and a loud thump.
Jurgen stops speaking and looks at his wife, Magda. I’ll go check, he tells her. You stay inside with the little ones. He picks up his small hand-ax, recently sharpened, and his lantern, and leaves the cabin.
Outside, night crowds around the cabin. All is silent for a long moment, during which Jurgen does not move from before the door.
Then a nightjar trills, gets a lengthy answer from the other side of the clearing. Frogs begin to chirp, blat, and gronk. Crickets resume their chorus. Jurgen steps away from the cabin and examines the roof.
Whatever thumped, it had not thumped into the roof as far as he can tell from the ground. He will have to get up to the housetop for a closer inspection. With no ladder available, he must climb a nearby tree and perhaps jump the short distance from a limb to the roof—
He does not get that far. He puts the lantern at the foot of the closest tree and hangs the hand-ax from a sling at his waist. He gets ten feet off the ground, his arms and legs wrapped around the tree trunk, when suddenly beneath one hand he feels a sharp pain, a burn. He shimmies sideways around the trunk.
Almost buried in the wood is a bright-green source of light and heat. He looks closer at it, uses the hand-ax to chop a little into the surface of the tree around it. Smoke wisps curl from around the shallow hole which the stone has punched into the trunk. The woodcutter grasps the ax up close to the head, chops away a little more wood; finally he can pry the blade under the stone, popping it easily free of the wood. It drops to the forest floor, followed at once — Oof! — by Jurgen himself.
The stone is still warm, and Jurgen tosses it lightly from one hand to the other while inspecting it.
It is nearly round, less than half a hand’s breadth across. The bright green glow has faded a bit, but not entirely, and seems to have settled into a steady pale phosphorescence.
He carries the rock into the house…
Jurgen Landes will live to one hundred fourteen years of age. His eldest son, Jakob, will live to one hundred twelve. Jakob’s son Max will live to only eighty-four — dying in a fall from a beech — but Max’s sister Gretchen will emigrate from Germany and move to the United States of America, where her name will be recorded as Gretchen Landis, and where she will live to the ripe old age of one hundred sixteen, surviving her husband Gerald Drinkwater by nearly half a century. To her only child Sanford, hideously disfigured as he is surely among the least likely ever to father a child of his own, she will bequeath a small amount of money and an odd… well a doorstop, perhaps: a weatherbeaten old log, carried across centuries, a continent, an ocean. Her last words, whispered into Sandy’s left ear as he bent over her bedside, were Teilen Sie es:
Share it.
marta says
This must be a good opening because I have lots of why questions–things I want to know more about. Where did the stone come from, why does Jurgen get to keep it, what is the price of such a stone–if the stone is indeed giving everyone long life–what will happen to the disfigured Sanford, is the doorstop the stone like I think it is?
Interesting your post about magical realism. I’ve got tons of issues around that!
When you read my work you write me these amazing notes. I’m not sure I’m able or if you want me to return the favor. I thought Jurgen was going to die. Then I wanted to know what stupid thing Sanford was going to do with the stone.
I got a little confused when he is up in the tree–but that may be the wine I’ve been drinking.
Keep writing.
John says
marta: Such a great comment. Must have been excellent wine!
I think — hope — that most of your questions are answered by all the text in the book which precedes this excerpt (which is actually pretty far into the book). And some of them aren’t terribly important to the book, so have no really important answer. (This section is meant to answer questions set earlier, not really to open up new subplots and such.) But for the record, let’s see…
“Where did the stone come from?” From the sky, like a meteorite.
“Why does Jurgen get to keep it?” I guess the answer here is that he just happens to be the one who found it in the tree outside his cabin.
The price of a stone like this: oooh, good question. But it’s actually backwards — the gift of long life is the reward which certain character(s) will receive in exchange for having endured certain, um, travail(s).
The disfigured Sanford is Sandy Landis-Drinkwater, who is the one who designed and crafted the flagon and who recounts this story of his German ancestors. (And the book’s reader will already know what happens to him: he dies in a fire shortly after completing the flagon project.)
The doorstop: no, it’s not the stone — it’s the log (later turned into a solid wooden “box”) in which the stone is kept and handed down, before Sandy starts to chip away little pieces and stow them inside his metalworked creations. (So, not to worry — Sandy may be a crank, but he doesn’t do something stupid with the stone. He parcels it out, with the biggest — and final — chunk going into the flagon itself.)
Does that help?
Froog says
I guessed fairly easily that this was going to tie in to your flagon-maker and provide the mechanism for the vessel’s ‘magical’ properties (even before I’d read the whole of your introductory post). However, I think there may be some difficulty with the tone/POV here – surely, in order to embed this within the wider story, it has to be told in Sandy’s voice, an oft-repeated slice of family history? This feels more like a footnote from a detached, omniscient narrator. It’s a slightly clunky way of introducing the back-story to your readers, and it doesn’t introduce it to your characters – which I guess you need to do. I can’t see how you’d introduce the story in this form into the novel…. but perhaps you have that all worked out?
And a technical quibble: I think frogs and lizards make a din only in the tropics. In more northern climes they might occasionally make their noises too, but they’re far fewer and far quieter, so we never get that sense of the night being filled with their clamour. Similarly with crickets and grasshoppers – in northern Europe, it’s seldom warm enough for them to be very active at night, even in the middle of summer.
John says
Froog: Appreciate the feedback, very much.
Technical quibble first: thank you! I looked, well, I can’t say I looked EVERYWHERE online and in the library, but I did look around a lot for information about nocturnal bird/animal/insect calls in European forests… ideally referencing the 18th century. I pretty much came up empty-handed. Nightjars I knew about, and found a fairly common sort of toad called the natterjack — but (this is silly I know) I didn’t like that “nightjar” and “natterjack” sounded so much alike.
The crickets thing hadn’t even occurred to me. In my mind’s eye, I always think of northern Europe as being at roughly the same latitude as (say) New Jersey — which isn’t true. So that was a taking-for-granted mistake.
The fact that this takes place in a forest in pre-industrial 18th century I had sorta-kinda hoped would provide some cover for my guesswork (maybe those night sounds really used to be more common then?). I found one recent article about the long-term effects on animal sounds of human civilization — highway and airport noise, for instance — but, while very readable, it was too general and didn’t really give me a leg to stand on.
So I don’t know.
On the POV thing, again, I don’t have a definitive answer. The chapter in question is a tricky one. Its main POV belongs to a character named Larry, who goes to visit an old guy — nicknamed Wolfie — who is the quasi-retired caretaker for a corporate warehouse. Wolfie was born and grew up in Germany, emigrating over here post-WW2, and still speaks English in a sort of syntactically complicated way.
It’s Wolfie who tells the story of Sandy and the flagon, in an extended omniscient-POV flashback — too long a passage to do entirely in his voice without its being a distraction. That flashback ends with Sandy having shown Wolfie the flagon and the “box” in which the stone was kept. When we return to the main story’s present day, in a very brief scene Larry asks, essentially, So what was the stone, anyhow? Wolfie says, “I tell you about the stone.” Then there’s a section break, and the section above.
So as I said, it’s complicated. But I need ultimately to be confident that I haven’t done too much of that footwork — and raised all the same questions which you have in the mind of a reader of the whole chapter!
Again, thanks so much for the comment. Will fold it all together with other feedback I get and… then we’ll see, won’t we? :)
Jules says
The very, very ending gave me chills.
Have you ever heard of British author David Almond? In the realm of children’s lit, he does magical realism and does it well.
John says
Jules: I’m counting on chills being a good thing, right? :)
Had never heard of Almond until you mentioned him. Will correct the gap in my knowledge at once: it’s inconceivable (“Inconthievable!”) that you’d steer me wrongly!
jules says
Oh yes, my friend, good chills.
Almond’s biggest title is Skellig.
Jules, trying to catch up on blog-reading on a Sunday morning. Have coffee. Can catch up.