THE BOOK: Andermatt County: Two Parables.
PUBLISHED IN: 2018
THE AUTHOR: Pam Jones.
THE EDITOR: Aaron Joel Lain, Ericka Arcadia, and Lance Umenhofer.
THE PUBLISHER: The April Gloaming. From the website: “April Gloaming Publishing is a Nashville-based independent press that aims to capture and better understand the Southern soul, Southern writing, and the Southern holler. In the words of William Faulkner, to be Southern is to, “Tell about the South. What do they do there. How do they live there. Why do they live at all.” April Gloaming seeks to arrive at the conclusions to these questions through amplifying the voices of the unbridled holler.”
![Andermatt County: Two Parables by [Jones, Pam]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51NsCgSIpVL.jpg)
SUMMARY: Welcome to Andermatt County. Hill country. South-central Texas. The residents walk the terrain and feel the air as if in a haze of their own self-interest. The children live in a mystical void of wonder mixed with downtrodden hopes of their lives to come. In YE SHALL BE AS GODS, meet Emmett Anhalt, a young, curious boy who lives with all women, none of them giving him the time of day, so he embarks on a walk through the brush and woods where he is introduced to the alluring ways of Rex Henry Burr–a serial killer. Emmett and Rex’s journeys together are chronicled in this story, along with the lives and hopes and dreams of their victims and other residents of Andermatt County, each with his or her own personal quirks and downfalls. In HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR BITSY, we are introduced to the proverbial paradise of living in Andermatt County’s social circles. Esther Fielding, or Bitsy, is turning six years old, and her mother only wishes for her to replace her love for dead squirrels and rodents with a love for dolls and teatimes. But is she doing this solely for herself? Or is Esther already limpidly trudging down the right road?
THE BACK STORY: The book began as two separate short stories that grew and grew and then merged. Since the late-2000s, my family has lived in a small town in the Texas Hills, where they think nothing of erecting crosses on hilltops and where you often forget what season you’re in because everything retains some measure of fecundity year-round. You have live oaks and cedar, lots of tall, green grass and cactus, bluebonnets in spring, sunflowers in the summer and fall. And underneath all that, you’ll find bones picked clean by vultures. It’s an atmosphere with a lot of layers and a lot of stories, and I wanted write about what can happen in a place that’s so visceral.
WHY THIS TITLE?: I chose to name the setting Andermatt County after a story I came across about a bridge in the Andermatt region of Switzerland, cutting through the Alps. It is known as the Teufelsbrucke, or the Devil’s Bridge. There is a legend in which the people of that area called upon the devil to build the bridge. When the project was finished, the devil wanted a soul for his payment. The people, thinking that the devil could be tricked, sent a dog across the bridge instead, which the devil then tore apart.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? If you like morality stories that are visceral, very dark but a little light, you might like it. My inspirations are people like Flannery O’Connor, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Shirley Jackson. If you’ve read everything by them and want to see what else in a similar vein is out there, you can put this on your list.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“The comparisons to Faulkner’s Yoknapawtawpha County are obvious, but justified. A dark, at turns quirky, and very real microcosm is contained within this volume, spanning two novella-sized narratives. Jones’ more fitting fellow travelers, of theme and prose, are Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, and not because of their gender, but because of their shared brilliance, economy, and sensitivity to the place of outsiders, believers, and misfits.” — Jordan A. Rothacker, author of Gristle: Weird Tales
“A perfect gothic pairing written with precise and spectacular beauty. Cruel and delicate, these parables are fearless explorations of the mysterious nature of loneliness, grace and human connection. Jones has a style and grit that is all her own.” — Kelly Luce, author of Pull Me Under
“Jones has a gift for drawing beauty out from brutality, even when it’s of a lopsided and unexpected sort. Her descriptions trade between being winsome and petrifying, and the situations imagined in the course of these two tales will haunt their audiences.” — Michelle Anne Schingler of Foreword Reviews.
AUTHOR PROFILE: I’m an East Coast native, born in New Jersey, raised in Connecticut, and now transplanted to Austin, Texas with my husband. I’ve been writing more or less steadily since I was about 9 or 10, and studied creative writing at Hampshire College.
SAMPLE CHAPTER:
Ninth grade was as far as Emmett had gone in school, and that was enough for him.
One day, he just did not go.
There was Emmett, not so much playing hooky as following a smoky train of thought, going the opposite side of the street than the one he usually went to school, going along the road that ran beside the Canadian River until he got to its sandy edge. And he thought he knew what called him there.
The Standing Rock, which rose like the twist of a great tree trunk from the middle of the water, was going to disappear. In a few days, some mysterious collection of workers, all big talk and concrete, were coming to dam the river. Eufaula Lake, they would call it, after the town. His
mother had read it aloud from the paper that morning. At the time Emmett had thought she’d said they were going to damn the river. Fire, brimstone, all that.
But after thinking about it, he knew that didn’t make sense.
Still, he realized that it would be something to see something before it was gone.
At the river’s shore he got comfortable. He slipped out of his shoes, knotted his socks and balled them in his hip pocket. His mother was not there to shout at him, and so he removed his school corduroys, his shirt. As it grew warmer, his hair paled from mousy brown to white. He was long, lean, his skin crosshatched with tiny scars. Clothes were a burden, one more layer of skin than he felt he needed. He was never cold, and he often paired colors incorrectly, green with blue or brown with black. What little scrapes he got in his nudity he took without flinching. He spent his time out of doors this way.
He piled his clothes on a bench, anchored them with his schoolbooks. Then he dug a pit into the sand and defecated, and watched, with eyes that caught the world around him in quick, sharp edges, for anyone who might be coming.
Emmett spent the day at the lake, and thus far he’d not seen a soul. He slept when he needed it. When hungry, he swiped crappies from the water and ate them with his hands. On the shore he draped the shirt, warm flannel, over his shoulders like a cape and read one of the books that weighed the rest of his clothes. What Maisie Knew.
“Poor kiddo,” he said aloud of the title’s heroine. These were the first words he’d spoken in hours. When he wasn’t out of doors, he was reading. He learned things about people from books that he could not in face to face circumstances. People never came out and exposed themselves. He didn’t know what he would do without books; very likely, he would feel nothing at all for his fellow man. Very likely, he would not see himself, and they would not see him. And even if he got to a point at which he had read every novel, every history, every diary in every library, he would never shake the notion of the schism between what people felt and what he was supposed to feel for them. They hurt, but he did not. They wept, but he could not.
That must have been roughly the time the older man appeared. He looked to be taking pictures of the land around them, for he stood behind what seemed to be an old-timey camera, boxy atop a tripod. He was too far away to tell.
When the lens of this device veered Emmett’s way, Emmett himself could think of nothing better to do than to sit and to stare.
And now there was a camera on him.
He hadn’t tried to cover himself. He had said, “Don’t take my picture.”
The older man coughed and told him that he was not taking pictures. “I’m a land surveyor. This is a theodolite.”
“What do you do with it?”
“You measure angles. Oughtn’t you to be at school?”
“I didn’t go.”
“I see that.” At first, because of his complexion, Emmett had thought the older man to be one of the Creek Nation people, here to protest the dam. But he could have been anything; he might have been the first fellow that Emmett could not pigeonhole as simply white, black, or Indian. He looked to be fifty, maybe sixty, and a cigarette perked from the corner of his lip. Emmett’s mother had told him to look at his Aunt Jennie: “She smokes like a chimney. Guess how old she is. Well, she’s forty. And it’s because she smokes like a chimney she looks eighty.” If this was true, the man could have been Emmett’s own age, and not a man just yet. He wore men’s clothes, sure enough, hard boots and a khaki windbreaker, a flat-topped cap of the sort you might wear on a golf course.
The man asked Emmett’s name.
Emmett told him. He thought of giving him a throwaway name, Barabbas or Hercules, but nothing leapt to mind.
“That a family name?” the man asked, shifting the cap on his head. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth to ash it.
“No. I don’t know anyone by that name in my family. I’m the only fellow.”
The man craned his head back, nonplussed. “The only one?”
“Me, my mother. Aunts, too, but neither of them married.”
Aunt Jewel had what she called “beaux”. Sometimes she lived with them, sometimes she came storming back to Emmett’s mother’s house and told him to “Keep out of my damn way. Have you nothing else to do but look at me and make my skin crawl?” She read auras and claimed Emmett brought bad mojo: “Anyone who looks at someone and has nothing to say to them—it’s unnatural.” His Aunt Jennie was a suicide, but she wasn’t dead. She’d jumped off the roof of her apartment house last April and landed in the street: fractured backbone, shattered right femur, kidney trauma, and sourness in her gut. Emmett’s mother made up the TV room for her, and she lay on the couch, ashing cigarettes into her water glass and watching What’s My Line? She had difficulty moving her right side and liked Emmett to be the one who dressed and bathed her. “No man’s going to touch me again,” she would tell him. “But you’ll do.”
The older man asked, “Don’t you get lonesome? Being the only fellow?”
“I don’t know.” Emmett had long ago reasoned that there was the world and there was him, and thus all would remain divided. It wasn’t something he thought he ought to feel one way or the other about.
“What say you come along with me?”
Here was Emmett with color in his face. “Come along to where?”
“Home,” the older man said. “With me.”
“You live around here?”
“No.”
“Then, where do you live?” Emmett had been as far as Tahlequah, where the traffic signs were written in English and in scrolling Cherokee letters.
“Andermatt.” The older man flicked his cigarette into the grit and smeared it with the toe of his boot. “County seat of Andermatt County.”
“Where’s that?”
“Texas, in the hill country. Real pretty down there. Bluebonnet season now.”
Emmett wanted to ask how it came to be that the man was surveying land up here and not down there, but he kept quiet. He reasoned that if he were to go with this man to Andermatt County, he would never have to go to school again. Perhaps he would never have to dress again, either, as the man did not appear unnerved by Emmett’s nudity. Fleetingly, he reasoned that his mother might wonder at where he was, or one of his aunts. (Maybe Aunt Jennie would miss him, but he felt that, to her, he was really a means to an end.) He did not see any reason as to why they ought not to be relieved at his vanishing; it was a small house. These two years past, he’d been made to give up his bedroom for one of the aunts, and bunk with his mother.
He would never have to smell her again.
He could smell this man from here, the bitterness of the cigarettes layered upon the man’s person, his clothes. Emmett had always loved the smell of cigarettes.
“Ought I to get dressed?” Emmett asked. Grit had collected between his legs.
The man nodded, slow. “Yes, you ought to.” The man knelt and collapsed the tripod on which the theodolite stood. “For now. It’s an eight-hour or so drive back to the hill country. When we get there, you can let loose.”
“May I bring my books?” Emmett’s schoolbooks, his required reading for this semester’s English, jittered with a passing breeze.
“If you want. I have quite a library at my place. Homer, Shakespeare, all that. The scriptures being my favorite.”
“You’re faithful?”
“No, not as such. But it helps to keep in practice.”
Emmett dressed and followed him.
Behind him, through the rear window of a ’49 Chevrolet pickup the color of a raw heart, he watched the Standing Rock shrink, smaller and smaller, until it became a crumb on the flat horizon. In another hour, the sun would set, and in that hour they would cross the state line.
In that hour, his mother would begin paring fat from pork chops. Aunt Jewel, peeling carrots, would peer between the curtains at the gloaming. “Well,” she would say, “it’s finally happened.”
“What’s that?” his mother would ask.
“He’s flown the coop. Your boy.”
“How do you know that?”
“Trust me. He’s gone. I feel lighter between my shoulder blades. It means he’s not looking at me.”
“What?”
“Just trust me, hon. He’s gone.”
His mother would never admit to herself that the following sigh was one of relief. The beagle sat, fat and pitiful, at her feet and emitted piggy grunts. The old thing drooled and stank, but you could always guess what she wanted when she looked at you. “Give me those scrapings when you’re through,” Emmett’s mother said to Aunt Jewel, and added them to the plate of pork trimmings.
The beagle, delighted, bent and ate, and she hardly chewed to get it all down.
Time passed, and the land’s curves flattened and remained that way for so long that Emmett wondered if the rest of the country was going to be like this. Plano, Dallas, Killeen, Johnson City. But, little by little, the road met some resistance as they reached the hills. There were trees, too, shrubby ones and spindly ones with branches like witches’ paws, twisting out of the craterous ground. The older man mentioned that this part of the country had once been at the bottom of an ocean.
A sign, carved from cedar and painted in the bright, fancy Dutch style, read, “Wilkommen!” And beneath that, in larger letters, “Welcome to Andermatt County!” And beneath that, a list of all its incorporated villages: “Home to Andermatt, El Velo, Elam, Himmel Creek.”
Emmett did not volunteer much about himself, and nor did the older man, save to inform Emmett that his name was Rex Henry. “Rex Henry Burr,” the older man said, his hands firmly gripping the wheel at ten and two. “My family wanted nobility in it, but I doubt there was any.”
Emmett eyed the constant beyond the window, the long, thin line that separated the highway from the grass and the mud. Every now and then, the sameness was interrupted by a bunch of flowers, a pile of rag dolls, pairs of shoes arrayed along the edge of the road, a cross hewn out of wood and painted purple. When Rex Henry slowed according to the speed limit, Emmett could see a wavering procession moving up the edge of the road. At first, all he could make out were sparks, shards of light that were there and then not, moving up the road as though on an assembly line. When they drove up a bit further, faces emerged in the glow of these sparks, which were the flames from small candles. Emmett turned in his seat; one by one each of these marchers approached the roadside trinkets, the dolls, the shoes, the cross, to lay their candles, to bow their heads.
“What’re they doing?” Emmett asked.
“Girl gone missing.” Rex Henry shifted in the captain’s seat and plucked the knob for the radio. Chet Baker, who sang, “I fall in love too easily…”
“Is she dead?”
“I don’t think so. Just missing.”
“All that, and she isn’t deceased?” Emmett liked to use the better words from his vocabulary when the moment warranted.
Rex Henry pursed his lips. “I believe they’ve given up. That’s why the parade.”
This was good. Emmett made a note to himself that this was the first conversation he had conducted between himself and another. He didn’t count the talks he’d had at home with the beagle, who looked at him from the corner of her eye, as if to say, I don’t have many years left. Please let me alone. His mother and his aunts barked, and he could never quite make out what they said.
Outside, up the highway, the marchers began a hymn. Their voices, caught in the air, gathered and wafted, like smoke, in all directions.
“Art thou weary, art thou languid
Art thou sore distressed?”
Rex Henry let his eyes drift away from the procession, its participants reduced in the dark to the flickering of their candles. When he drove, his posture became gnomish, his head retreating between his shoulders so that he peered over the top of the steering wheel. “We ought to be near Andermatt by eight or so.”
“Okay.”
“You like movies?”
Emmett thought. “I don’t know. I suppose so.”
“Well, we’ll go see the stars,” Rex Henry said. “My treat.”
“Okay.”
The line of sparks continued, at least a mile more down the highway. Through some method not unlike Pass It On, or perhaps by catching the spectral hints of the melody on the wind, the marchers farther on echoed the first lines of “Art Thou Weary?” Not a one of them had a trained voice, and the hymn was better for its roughness. It made Emmett shiver; he bit his forefinger to contain it.
“How long is she gone for?” he murmured, like someone in church.
Rex Henry swallowed. And he smiled. “Only a few weeks.”
“Seems like they gave up on her quick enough.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone must’ve liked her a lot.”
Rex Henry reached to snuff the radio, inviting the ghost of the hymn to slip between the window cracks and through the radiator. There was no escape, nor did the two men want to. Finally, Rex Henry said, “I don’t know about that.”
Emmett nodded, a bit fuzzily. He’d been rooting in the wastebasket bolted to the passenger-side door. With reverence and a steady hand, as though he were handling artifacts at a museum, Emmett lifted each item to his eye and put it back without a sound. A pencil. A hydrangea blossom, blue and made of something like silk. A Canadian penny. A note on lined paper, folded and tucked into a square; it read: “Would you rather A) Lose your virginity to the man of your dreams, but in front of an audience? B) Have the best first time, but never Do It again? C) Be hot and bothered 24/7, but only for Mr. Powell?” A finger ring set with a dot of amethyst, a birthstone.
And the last token.
Emmett held it between thumb and forefinger, a pearl.
A tooth.
“It’s pretty,” he whispered.
It was sharp and milky blue, spotless, incorruptible. It would survive the elements, the years. Emmett put it into his shirt pocket.
Rex Henry nodded, for although no permission had been asked, it had been accepted. Of course, Emmett could keep it.
They reveled in it, the way you do when you have found, at last, your Other. That instant when you know, for sure, that there is not only one of you, and that another will, one day, make the recognition. The feeling was golden. A life could be made, for Emmett and Rex Henry.
Miles passed, three or four, and the line of mourners and their candles dwindled and disappeared. The echo of the hymn drifted into the air, a single note rising and wafting away, then becoming swallowed by highway babble. The last line stuck with them, “…Saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs/Answer, Yes!” They let it burrow and make them its host for the miles that came, so much so that Emmett switched off the radio to let the silence make the words clearer. He fingered the tooth in his breast pocket, not believing it now belonged to him. He felt that a great bit of something like luck or a blessing had been given him; something in him had shifted.
Rex Henry waited until they reached the city limits of El Velo to ask if Emmett was hungry.
Emmett nodded. He’d been going through the wastebasket a second time. An eraser. A hair ribbon. A piece of chewing gum, still mint-flavored, Emmett found when he put it in his mouth.
Rex Henry said, “I don’t know if she was liked, but she was a good girl. Of that I am certain. No one would have known it, otherwise. Isn’t that sad?”
Emmett agreed, it was sad.
“Think what might have happened if this had never come to her. She might have just vanished.”
Emmett chewed and nodded.
“She’s got friends now, as you saw back there. Lots of them.”
Emmett turned to look, though they were a long way now from the procession. He half-expected, even this far away, to see the tail end of the mourners’ parade, one more flickering candle. He dug out the note again, opened it. A title was scrawled across the top, “PERSONALITY TEST…FOR YOUR EYES ONLY!!!” He scanned it. Mr. Powell must be a fusty old teacher. The test itself was unmarked.
Emmett was familiar with these things, made out for, it seemed, the low bird on the pecking order, the one in class who sat, did not talk, did not laugh or cry. The rock you may squeeze blood from, if only you knew how to crack it. Emmett was never given any of these tests himself; no one could crack him, and no one dared try. He had always been one of the hands that passed the note, back, back, back, to the rear of the class where the good girls always sat. Was it the same all the world over? Did good girls everywhere sit in the back? At any rate, he’d gotten a peek at one or two questionnaires. One had read, “How Stacked Are Yoo-Hoo?”, the Os in Yoo-Hoo dotted in the middle to make breasts. The girl who got them (a prim little thing with a virtue name, like Anne Faith or Anne Truth) let her eye flick over the words, and then, po-faced, she would put it away.
Was it meant to be funny?
He recounted the story for Rex Henry, whom he felt ought to know a thing or two.
Rex Henry said, “I’ll bet you they don’t know the half of what they’re talking about. To them, it’s the forbidden fruit. They don’t know what it’s all about, what it tastes like, so they’ll slime it up to make it into something they can understand.”
“What about the good girl? Does she know what it’s all about?”
Rex Henry paused, slowed according to the speed limit, for they were entering the center of town. Lights, pink and green, advertising hamburgers and ice cream. Then he intoned, “I think so. I think she does. Or at least, she can imagine it. She can—she can sympathize. That’s what makes her blush. To her, it’s a serious affair.”
“Is that good?”
“I would say so.”
“Like me getting unclothed wherever?”
“Yes. Just like that. Now, The Carnelian Café and Rock Shop. The Rock Shop’s closed, but we can still get a bite in the café part. How’s that sound?”
Emmett nodded.
He wanted to know what made the difference between a thing that was quiet and a thing that was ordinary.
WHERE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & Noble.
PRICE: $19.99.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Instagram, Twitter: @panimaljone
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 