The Remnants Read online

  Advance Praise for The Remnants

  “Reading The Remnants reminded me of Pound’s conviction ‘that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.’ Robert Hill bridges this gulf even more directly, writing sentences that not only sing but dance, full of whisks and sways and sprightly little sidesteps of language. How would they look, I began to wonder, if you diagrammed them? Like pinwheels, I imagine. Like fireworks. Try to fasten them down and they’d still keep moving.”

  – Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination

  “Bold, brilliant, and touching, The Remnants is a eulogy for a world in which humanity is treasured—a celebration of life in all its imperfect glory.”

  – Rene Denfeld, author of The Enchanted

  “Nobody wants to be compared to James Joyce. Especially, I’d imagine, Robert Hill. So I won’t. But in Hill’s novel, The Remnants, like Leopold Bloom, Kennesaw Belvedere wakes up one fine morning and goes forth into his beloved city. Along his way, worlds open up into worlds, stories beget stories beget stories, and characters live and breathe and die of just about every ailment in the almanac. Really you wonder how you can go on with all the living and the breathing and the dying, but Hill’s language is such a thing of rare beauty that you love every moment. And when Hunko finds Kennesaw, and Molly and Leopold are yes, of all the brilliant moments in the novel, there’s one final brilliant moment, one perfectly still moment, when all is well in a decaying world. If you love language and if you love narrative and if you love stories, don’t pass up The Remnants.”

  – Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

  “Hill’s characters are so precisely written, they feel as real as you and me, despite the generations of inbreeding, which have left them somewhere off the ‘normal’ scale. Yet, these folks love and hope and yearn like the rest of us, and their stories are magical. Hill has the silver tongue of a master wordsmith. His gorgeous prose rambles from hilarious to sly to clever, and then doubles back so it can dive right off into beautiful, heartsick, and poignant. A standout story with unbelievably effective prose, The Remnants is one of my favorite 2016 titles.”

  – Dianah Hughley, bookseller, Powell’s City of Books

  “What a lyric and wild romp of language, life, love. Reading The Remnants reminded me why I love to read, why I love to write.”

  – Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight and The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

  “As to the meaning of this novel, with its sentences coiling around themselves like a celtic knot, I think it comes down to this: it’s a book about that most primal of urges, the urge to have sex, to procreate. In The Remnants that urge runs amuck. It defies the boundaries humans have placed upon it in order that the species might not turn in upon itself. That urge carries with it the desire for connection, for a bond with another human, the two urges inextricably wound around each other, and in New Eden the possibilities are so limited that the distinctions between one family and the next have all but disappeared. The genetic results are of course calamitous, and the emotional consequences are littered across the novel’s landscape. To turn too far inward, the novel tells us, is to invite disaster.”

  – Stevan Allred, author of A Simplified Map of the Real World

  “Wholly unexpected and unique, Hill fills his bewitching telling of the last days of a small town and its few remaining genetically compromised residents with wordplay that belies the power of connection, memory, and community.”

  – Elisa Saphier, lead bookseller and owner, Another Read Through

  “Such extravagant, rambunctious delicious language! And a sad and wonderful story of the end of the town of New Eden and its inbred and lyrical inhabitants. I have never read a book like this before. It defies genre.”

  – Cindy Heidemann, field sales, Legato Publishers Group

  Praise for Robert Hill’s When All Is Said and Done (Graywolf Press, 2006)

  “Every aspect of this agile, intoxicating, hilarious, and poignant novel is compelling, but what elevates it is the exuberant language. Hill writes with velocity, rhythm, and wit, conveying a world of subtle emotions and social nuance in brilliantly syncopated inner monologues and staccato dialogue, creating a bravura and resounding performance.”

  – Donna Seaman, Booklist

  “With evocative, freewheeling prose (‘the run-on sentences that were her married life’), Hill … nimbly salvages one family’s striving from an era of grasping and consumerism.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Truly the most enjoyable, evocative prose I’ve come across in new fiction in quite a while.”

  – City Pages

  “When All Is Said and Done is a fresh, high-velocity cry from the heart, showing that love is the rose and the thorn at once, and that Mr. Robert Hill has taken a running start into what they used to call the literary scene.”

  – Ron Carlson, author of A Kind of Flying

  “This is a witty, generous, heartbreaking book which seeks … ‘the common green in our beings’––and finds it.”

  – Barbara McMichael, The Olympian

  “In flitting seamlessly from the mundane details of daily life to broader questions of love, family, priorities, and death, the author has created a startlingly realistic depiction of the way the mind functions.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  “Hill’s novel is strong for all that it does say, and all that it leaves to the reader’s imagination. There’s something poetic in the best of ways about the way that the lines and language unfold. This book reminds me of Cheever and Yates and a young Rick Moody.”

  – A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven

  “Lively and quirky and effervescent with beautiful, unpredictable language and fresh details. A novel of an incredible vitality, original and vibrating, of a superb unforeseeable and detailed writing to the extreme.”

  – Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

  “Not many writers will risk burying a gem like ‘memory is such a sloppy librarian’ in the middle of a paragraph. Not so Robert Hill. In his lovely first book … there’s hardly a neutral sentence in sight.”

  – Nell Beram, Harvard Review

  “From the first glorious sentence to the last astounding word, Robert Hill’s When All Is Said and Done is a treasure. The sophisticated wit and luxurious language of this brilliant novel weave a story of one family’s complex heart and history and their journey through 1950s/60s suburban Connecticut and all its prejudices. Read this American saga and weep.”

  – Tom Spanbauer, author of I Loved You More

  “Out of nowhere comes Robert Hill’s When All Is Said and Done, a swift, moving novel of the 1950s from a man who has been writing advertising copy in Portland, Oregon, for twenty years. Its form resembles the alternate first-person accounts of a troubled relationship in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over; in its historical shimmer, it recalls Richard Yates’s increasingly beloved Revolutionary Road. … Reading Mr. Hill’s debut novel reminds us how usual most novels are; his is unusual, but not unsettling or obviously weird. Perhaps it is simply the work of an individual who has been minding his own business in Portland.”

  – Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun

  “His is the sort of book which you find yourself wanting to write down passages of particular grace––only to realize that alone, they appear unremarkable. It’s in context of this affecting book that each scene is so striking. … Above all, it’s a love story, one complicated with careers and children and growth and stagnancy: completely mundane and completely extraordinary.”

  – Molly Templeton, Eugene Weekly

  “A snappy, palatable iteration o
f modernism, too earnest and heartfelt to be called postanything.”

  – Patrick Somerville, Bookshop Bibliosurf

  “Exuberant as a rhythmic song, the first novel by Robert Hill is not only smart, it is brilliant, stylish, and offers not a novel but a dramatic existential novel.”

  – Jean Soublin, Le Monde

  “Simultaneously prosaic and breathtaking, All’s Well That Ends (French translation) is the first novel of a great writer in the tradition of Raymond Carver.”

  – Payot & Rivages

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance these characters have to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  © 2016 by Robert Hill

  All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with the exception of reviewers quoting short passages, without the written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-942436-17-1

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Distributed by Legato Publishers Group

  Printed in the United States of America

  by Forest Avenue Press LLC

  Portland, Oregon

  Cover design: Gigi Little

  Moss image courtesy of Roberto Verzo

  Interior design: Laura Stanfill

  Publicist: Mary Bisbee-Beek

  Forest Avenue Press LLC

  6327 SW Capitol Highway, Suite C

  PMB 218

  Portland, OR 97239

  forestavenuepress.com

  Contents

  1. True

  2. Kennesaw

  3. Hunko

  4. Jubilee

  5. Hunko

  6. Kennesaw

  7. Mawz

  8. Jubilee

  9. Frainey

  10. Kennesaw

  11. True

  12. Carnival

  13. Frainey

  14. Mawz

  15. Rutherford, Rufus, Roo, and Ruff

  16. Kennesaw

  17. Ruff

  18. Petie and Loma

  19. Kennesaw

  20. Luddy

  21. True

  22. Knotsy

  23. Kennesaw

  24. Hunko, True, Kennesaw, Carnival, Jubilee, Luddy, Mawz, Zebeliah, Petie, Loma, Frainey, Chippewa, Knotsy, Cozy, Bull, Russet, Circe, Dweller, Spear-Wielder, Lak'isha, and Kip

  Author Bio

  Acknowledgments

  Readers’ Guide

  1. True

  As True Bliss lay in her bed on the morning of the eve of her one hundredth birthday, the thought that circled her mind, in the applesauce eddy of her mind, the first chunk in the applesauce eddy that her mind could sink its teeth into was please don’t let this day be my last day on earth. She had not slept well in the night, nor had she slept well on the one before this, and worse was her sleep on the one before that. It had been too long since she could remember nights of sleeping well, or sleeping some or sleeping at all, and last night’s not sleeping well was a subject she couldn’t put to rest, and it lay in her ample bed with her and took up space along with her hopes of another day. It was the last clear thought she was to entertain.

  She drowsed in that bed that was more bed than she’d needed for years, the bed that grew larger over the years as her already small self lost its roundness and tautness and collapsed into a pool of slack skin that had no will of its own. She had long ago gotten used to the affront of nature taking back from her the size it had only loaned, but to lie in a bed that seemed to grow in its mockery of her predicament as she withered and diminished was downright small-minded. Petty for petty, she wished this waking nightmare on only those most like her. She spit up a little apple seed of a laugh at the thought, for ever since she could remember she had once or twice a week wished it on all three of the Lope triplets, those diminutive demon spawns born in the winter of the year of no summer, whose lungs could suck a day of its life and whose nocturnal screams from infancy on up had deprived the whole town of truly deep sleep since they were pushed up from hell all those years ago. Even long after the passings of Onesie Lope and Twosie Lope in their sixty-seventh and seventy-ninth years respectively, True harbored feelings of ill will and worse sleep on their surviving sibling, Threesie, True’s favorite if she had to choose, for it was Threesie’s screams most searing of all that pierced eardrums and shattered canning jars throughout the valley and on some nights could make a full moon run for cover. Even though the earth swallowed Threesie’s lone screams some years ago, to True their echo is a living thing strong enough to make a night of it still. She stared from the coddled milk pools of her eyes at the fading night sky above her bed that so reminded her of the paint-flecked ceiling of her bedroom, and if she could only have ten pure minutes, minutes free of Threesie’s screams, ten minutes of uninterrupted, mindless, wakeless night, she’d let her heart wander through a century of days and run it to pasture like so many sheep.

  Lore has it that back when New Eden was to apples as its namesake was to hanky-panky, every family for sixty-nine square miles was as cross-pollinated as the town’s prized Granny-Macs. True Bliss’s mother, her name was Cozy, and her father, his name was Remedial, the last of the Remedials, were second cousins from two withering branches of the Bliss family tree; kin whose brief, and to all accounts, indifferent acquaintance prior to marriage never really warmed above freezing. Family and town lore has it, it took six long winters and one slow-to-start spring before Cozy and Remedial Bliss did what married cousins do in private. Everyone in New Eden was good about keeping their hush up when it came to the indifferent relations in the Bliss house, the big white house with the twelve prized apple trees all in a row, True’s house. But come spring in its entirety, when the first of the blossoms on the apple trees beyond the barn began to show and Cozy did, too, there wasn’t a set of eleven fingers in town that couldn’t count to six and a half years without pointing and laughing.

  Neighbor ladies clucked as neighbor ladies will, sitting on the front porch with Cozy as she swelled through the summer and into the high corn. Down river a drop, out on the bank back of the New Eden Grangery, chuckles and snorts breezed with the blackflies as the menfolk blinked daylight over a passing jug of hard cider, nattering their own buzz about Remedial and his best friend Bull Engersol. Nothing that Remedial ever started was ever finished without Bull’s help, and there were sniggers galore that that went as much for husbanding as hoeing. Between generous swigs and hearty knee-slaps, their neck fat quivering like virgins, they’d say, Sumpin’ got remedial with Cozy, but it wudn’t Remedial. You ask me, Bull rode that cow to calf.

  August stretched as far as the eye can see and then some, the apples on the trees beyond the barn grew fat and arrogant, and lore will out that it was ten days into September, a Sabbath date, that Remedial Bliss took his jug and some foolishness out to Grunts Pond and likely drowned there. Cozy’s confinement began to near its end on that very same afternoon and with the moon fully dunked in all that heavenly blackness she gave birth the following dawn to the cousins’ only child, grafted like their prized trees to standard rootstock and grown true, the daughter she named without spit from her husband. Grafting and widowhood agreed with Cozy. She wanted her daughter’s name to reflect that. So she named her True. True Bliss.

  In her lifetime True had skipped to her Lou with sparklers in a sulfur haze and danced a maypole with boots laced high. She tended fevers and blisters and wounds and welts, she drank her applejack neat and ate her chervil raw, and as a girl with no concern for womanhood beyond her youth, saw relations of any amorous kind as nothing more than pennies and pins in a drawer full of nonsense. In dust heaps and scrap piles and corncribs, she trembled for mankind and her own kind over the terrible natures that the unkind unleash. She knew her multiplication tables before she learned the difference between boys and girls and what it could add up to. She could spin a cartwheel like no one’s business. She could fart a skunk. With her eyes closed she could hoe a row straight to an eighth of an inch, she could clean a gun, she could bone
a fish, she could thread cornsilk through a bent needle’s eye. For as many years as she has been mistress of her own home, which is more than even she can remember, she has kept the Good Book in her front parlor; it makes a righteous doorstop. True hated her absent father, but in time forgave him his trespasses. In time she came to hate her mother more, and begrudged her her trespasses for all eternity for sending away the only boy True might have loved. Only nature earns True’s glory, and to her the only thing worthy of psalms is the sound September makes when autumn breezes the trees.

  Two things known in this world are two rounds of ammunition you don’t want aimed at her for fear of retribution: one is jack-in-the-pulpits and the other is pink velvet ribbons.

  True was the firstborn of the last of us all, and at last, the eldest elder we had; she was the elder every younger has always looked to for guidance. She slowed a bit in her sixties as the world sped upward, and ached in her seventies as it moved onward and away, she rusted in her eighties as it moved past her and beyond, and although she never could curse worth a darn, she bitched and pained and moaned and mourned through the seeming endlessness of her nineties till now, and here she is on the cusp of a suddenly-too-soon-century wanting to mark the occasion with the dawn of one more day. Beyond this, she’ll stop herself from thinking. She has one more night ahead in which to not sleep well, and all of eternity to catch up. Well she knows that for all its length and furor, life is as brief as a breath when compared to forever.