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Jon Hassler’s first collection of stories arrives late in his career and, like his novels, it does not disappoint. By turns touching, funny, and evocative, these seven stories reveal Hassler’s native Minnesota from numerous angles and in various lights. With its large, two-color format and fitting wood engravings by Gaylord Schanilec, the book is itself a keepsake. The collection begins, aptly, with “Chase,” which offers a brief but full picture of a group of teenaged friends whose game of choice, a form of hide-and-seek, is marked by the players’ desire to be found, but to be found last. The narrator is the exception he hides for the sake of hiding, and ultimately becomes a man who hides in the “unsearchable refuge of fiction.” “Christopher, Moony, and the Birds” is narrated by a fiftyish college professor whose life is thoroughly out of sorts but for the birds in his backyard and neighborhood. Surrounded by remarkably idiosyncratic neighbors, abandoned by his wife, with one son dead and the other embarked on a life clearly destined for disaster, he finds solace in the birds and takes lessons from them on living with grace. When human community fails, the community of nature steps in to fill at least some of the gap. An elderly Catholic priest, Father Fogarty, is the central figure in two stories, including “Keepsakes.” Fogarty, the longtime pastor of a rural parish, is being put out to pasture by the bishop. Never particularly popular with his flock Fogarty is a “strong old man with a hard mouth,” and his short-term memory has been diminished by age – the altar boys have been assigned the task of helping Father pack to leave. “Well, pitch in and do your best,” one boy, Roger, is told by a townsman. “The sooner Father Fogarty is on the road, the better.” Fogarty chooses the opportunity to divest himself of much that he has gathered in his life, as he tells Roger. “All my life I’ve been keeping things,” said the priest. “Notes and papers and gifts and letters.” He continued to watch the burning newspaper curl into itself and sink to ashes. “I’ve been stashing my past away in trunks and closets, down in the cellar and up in the attic. I’ve kept diaries and snapshots and roadmaps and I have a filing cabinet in my office packed with personal papers.” He turned to look at Roger. “All that stuff is what I’m letting go of today. With your help.” It is Roger who leaves the encounter with keepsakes a piece of sheet music, a Douay New Testament, and a poem Fogarty had written decades before. In just a few words, Hassler manages to demonstrate that Roger has come to feel connected to the old priest, and the weeks that follow Fogarty’s departure culminate, for the boy, in a letter to the man he once thought he hated. In “Resident Priest” Father Fogarty arrives at his new assignment, a small convent on an island in the Mississippi River. His arrival is highly anticipated by the sisters, who have been without a priest for several years. But it is Ernie Booker, the caretaker, who provides the heart and soul of the convent. It is Booker who accompanies Fogarty on what will prove to be the last steps of his human journey. Hassler shows himself to be adept at another tone of the Minnesota landscape with “Yesterday’s Garbage,” a darkly comic story of murder, trash, and machinery in Minneapolis. Hassler’s main characters bumble so innocently into the truth behind a two-year-old murder that their own perfect crime seems a natural outcome. Wonderful lines like “There’s a certain brick house in Hillcrest where the garbage has always been worth a close look” and “You can see by the way Bud drives [his front-end loader] that he enjoys his work” punctuate a tale that calls to mind the film work of the Coen brothers, but with a lighter touch. The final story pits a cynical veteran journalist against an idealistic young reporter in a wager about finding a story of Christmas good news in the small town of Culver Bend. The young reporter’s rose-colored glasses emerge seriously smudged, but again, gentle humor marks his trail as he impersonates a young woman’s fiancé in a nearly selfless attempt to help her out in an awkward moment. That he imagines a resolution to the story that would make it an exemplary Christmas tale is evidence that his idealism is not devoid of naivete but he will be less naïve by tale’s end. Throughout, Hassler draws inviting characters who provoke responses from compassion to laughter. We wonder if Father Fogarty’s life has had, for himself, satisfying meaning, and by the end of “Resident Priest” we hope, despite his parishioners’ opinions of him, that it did. We hope, too, that Fitzharris, the rookie journalist, can find a way to keep the stars in his eyes a while longer and fend off the temptation to follow the lead of his seasoned colleague. The circumstances of the unnamed professor in “Christopher, Moony, and the Birds” encourage us to examine closely our own priorities, and to accept grace in whatever form it might become apparent. With characters and situations that inspire such responses, and prose that moves like a smooth ride along the current of a surprising river, Keepsakes and Other Stories is a book of lasting impressions. Readers who have enjoyed Jon Hassler’s novels will surely not want to miss it; others will find it to be a solid introduction. When Afton Historical Society Press published Keepsakes and Other Stories in 1999, they promised that a companion volume of stories by Jon Hassler would appear in 2000. Rufus at the Door and Other Stories fulfills that promise. With characters familiar from his novels as well as several new ones, Hassler once again displays that he is a master story maker. Hassler stays, for the most part, on his familiar Minnesota terrain. “The Life and Death of Delano Klein,” however, takes place in New England; its title character is a mysterious man who seems caught somewhere between indifference and evil. On the one hand ingenious, on the other hand seemingly motiveless, Delano Klein moves through life with outward success but with an inner emptiness that he ultimately must fill by way of subtle theft. The story is odd and curious, but once read it returns to mind again and again. In two stories, Hassler explores the nature of long-term relationships. “Anniversary” is a mildly surreal look at the way life can pass us by if we fail to be careful and attentive. In “Winning Sarah Spooner,” the widowed Sarah courts Emmett Heed by involving him in the books she reads. “The folks in this book don’t talk like folks I know,” Emmett tells Sarah, speaking of a Hardy novel. But the power of story is strong enough to cement their companionship and help put to rest some of the losses of the past. Hassler fans will especially enjoy “Agatha McGee and the St. Isidore Seven,” in which the inimitable Miss McGee attempts to circumvent a teachers’ strike in Staggerford. Agatha McGee may well be the definition of the place righteousness and practicality meet, and her efforts to right the wrongs of a corrupt school board will elicit cheers in small communities everywhere. Jon Hassler never fails to engage the mysteries of the human spirit, and these stories provide readers with much material over which to mull and muse. But he is foremost a storyteller and, like Emmett Heed, we need little prodding to fall under the spell of the tale. |
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