Second Cut--intro

 

THIS PIECE OF FICTION THAT WILL APPEAR HERE FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS HAS A PROTOTYPE, but that story’s setting is nowhere near the lakeshore where I was born and reared. Two boys from Rock Valley, Iowa, went swimming in the Rock River and drowned—on the Sabbath, decades ago. The kind of spiritual hand-ringing that occurs in this story would be far more typical of my father’s—or his father’s—generation than my own. I’m guessing the actual story occurred sometime during or just after the Second World War.

On sunny Sunday afternoons, I grew up having to let dry a heavy coat of sweat from playground basketball before I dared walk into our house. I knew something of the righteousness strict Sabbath observances offered kids who stayed on the paths of Sunday righteousness. I preferred basketball.

At the heart of the action here is a tragedy that occurs on Sunday and involves activities most specifically abhorred by the strictest of the Calvinists. It is, for that reason, a story of and for the Dutch Reformed, especially of my generation. My own children would have problems related in any way to the action at the heart of things.

I have only the vaguest of memories of my grandfather’s blacksmith shop, but I used what I could here. That little shop stood behind the filling station he and his son slowly developed when local farmers stopped using horses altogether, when there were no shoes to shape or shares to sharpen.

My grandpa is here in the story—or an image of him anyway—in the smoky darkness of the shop. He’s a man I saw—right or wrong—as a tribal elder, someone to whom people came for more than plowshares and horseshoes. As you will see, the blacksmith understands the persecution of the old ways and understands, although vaguely, that the community’s new life in a new world calls on strengths they needed to develop. The blacksmith’s son does too, the boy I gifted with my great uncle’s name—Edgar Hartman, the character who plays me in the story.

I’ve never written much of anything that wasn’t a simple variation on this very first story’s primary theme—most specifically, the choices we’re forced to make between a gospel of love and the gospel of judgement, or to put it another way, the difficulty of knowing the difference between being in the world or of it.

I wrote “Second Cut” the summer before we left Arizona for Iowa a half century ago, the only story dreamed up, created, and finished while outside the Dutch strongholds where I lived my life in the rural Midwest. .

“Second Cut” has borne hundreds of offspring through the years. It is, in all likelihood, the only story I will ever write. It owns me, I suppose I should say. It has long ago taken up residence in my heart and in my soul. Shake my soul though I may or might, it has never left, nor will it.

In 1983 or so, I read it at a small literary conference at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Through the years, that conference blossomed into an event that drew thousands of guests, as well as some of this country’s finest writers. At the beginning, the attendees were almost all blessed with Dutch names.

After the reading, people said nice things—I was very pleased. I don’t know that I’d ever read a story in front of a literary audience before, and I knew that somehow I’d done well.