This outstanding collection marks Tim Gautreaux as one of the best short story writers anywhere. He is probably the only writer in the world who restores old locomotives for relaxation. He can tune pianos, understands sawmills, river-barge engines, vehicles, dancing, fights, washing dishes, feeding hens, tractors, welding and human hearts. His interest in machinery and physical work, his skill in describing the darker mysteries of mechanics and messy lives, greatly enrich these stories.
Reviewers tag Gautreaux as a regional southern writer, but his stories cannot be contained in this box; they connect with people everywhere because they are built on Gautreaux’s deep knowledge of human nature and relationships, and mankind’s old comrades, beauty and grief. The stories celebrate blood, the love of family and the tight-knit community feelings that characterize South African kraals, rural counties, small Ohio towns, coastal Greenland settlements, Albuquerque vecinos, urban blocks and residents of Appalachian hollows. The family of man is Gautreaux’s natural reader.
Generations interlock, as when Merlin LeBlanc, a 52-year-old widower, is left to care for Susie, his dead daughter’s baby. Merlin’s 75-year-old father visits and tells him to look for a young wife. Etienne, Merlin’s 92-year-old grandfather — sarcastic and wise — comes from the nursing home for the day. The four generations sit on the porch, the baby in fierce old Etienne’s lap. “You gonna keep her here and raise her even if you don’t find no wife,” he says, and we know it will be that way.
In another story, an elderly man, suffering intermittent memory loss, is enslaved by a bully, himself terrified of his abusive wife. The old man’s memory suddenly returns, he smacks the abusive wife with a shovel, steals her truck and makes it back to the shopping center from which he was abducted. There, parked next to his ancient Oldsmobile, he sees his sleeping grandson, his familiar features the embodiment of family, happiness and safety. And in Floyd’s Girl, loving father Floyd, whose daughter has been stolen by her mother’s Texan boyfriend, gets her back after a bizarre chase.
Gautreaux’s dialogue seems so comfortable and familiar that the reader feels he or she has lived in Louisiana in some dream-time. He turns small events into large examinations of the nature of human behavior, whether kindness done, tragic loss or repairing wretched meanness, and often takes the reader to a place where a character can say “we couldn’t do nothing for him but we did it anyway.”
Many of the stories have a scalding streak of off-kilter humor. The Pine Oil Writers’ Conference skewers writing workshops; Good for the Soul manipulates kindly Father Ledet into hearing a deathbed confession that leads him down a crooked path of drinking and car-stealing which had this reader laughing for 10 minutes. Navigators of Thought features failed academics as the crew of a greasy tugboat. Easy Pickings highlights a knife-wielding, heavily tattooed hold-up man, self-named “Big Blade,” who tries to rob and then kidnap 85-year-old Mrs Landreneaux. Seeing his tattoos she cries, “Baby, who wrote all over you?” She is rescued by four elderly bourre fiends next door who are waging a hot battle while wondering about the strange car (“a Freon”) in Mrs Landreneaux’s drive. As the police haul Big Blade off to jail, the winner of the bourre game invites him to bring plenty of money and play cards with them when he gets out.
Several of Gautreaux’s best stories are included in this collection. Welding With Children is the story of Bruton, who has four unmarried daughters, each with a child. The daughters dump their children at Bruton’s house and go off. The children are foul-mouthed, disobedient, demanding and awful, and when Bruton tries to do a little welding they switch on his big grinder and fool with the electric welding rod holder until he decides he can’t weld with children around. He gives in to their whining and drives them downtown for “icees.” As he pulls up he hears a mean comment from Fordlyson, one of the old men sitting in front of the store — “here comes Bruton and his bastardmobile.” But later Fordlyson becomes his not unkind guide to a kind of redemption.
The Piano Tuner, about a talented but lonely woman pianist, seems as though it is also a story about mending a broken life, but sometimes long solitude so damages a recluse that healing is not possible. Rodeo Parole is the uncharacteristically bitter story of four inmates who take part in a prison rodeo for a chance of a shorter sentence. Their event is the curious “card game” in which a team of four sits in folding chairs in the arena, hands flat on a card table. The team that keeps its hands on the table the longest wins. A maddened bull is turned loose. He attacks the men. In the end a guard tells one of the convicts the self-evident truth: “We can only have one winner.”
In Waiting for the Evening News the reader is the winner — it is magnificently enjoyable reading.
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