Wyatt Earp in Yamanashi and Other Outlaws

Now Available at Amazon but for the time being I'll leave up this Introduction.

Table of Contents

1 The Color of the Killer's Eyes
2 Wyatt Earp in Yamanashi
3 Dog Fight in Wolfe County
4 George Walker Pound, Sheriff of Tobucksy County, Choctaw Nation
5 Doc Fenton and the Fatal Shot
6 Giving Girls Away
7 Frost in the Swamp
8 Sketches from an Unwritten Life
9 Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma
10 Memories of a Childhood Churchgoer

Introduction

Stories are secrets. The writer knows that if he talks about them before they are finished, their inner life withers and they don’t grow. However, that warning no longer applies when the writing is done. Then the author may be permitted a preface, written later of course, when he has finished working his stories and has leisure to reflect on them.

I do not think of myself as a short-story writer, though over the years, in some desultory fashion, I have written several. (It may be that I’m not a writer at all, only an editor, a factotum to some writer unknown to me.) Putting ten of them together in this collection, I notice that they are all American stories, though most of them were written in Japan, and that they all take place between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II. That, and a sympathy for outlaws, defines the matter. 

The first two stories have western subjects and are joined at the hip in some way that I can’t separate, and the next two also have motifs drawn from that genre. These are followed by two more that are set Lincoln County Oklahoma, which is still “west” but only in the most general sense of being west of the Mississippi River, and they involve outlawry of a different color. Outlawry doesn’t accurately describe “Giving Girls Away,” but the protagonist makes a decision there that is offensive to the conscience of many, including that of the man himself--not to mention his offspring. To this day, the descendants of his two youngest children do not want to hear his name.

The next story, “Frost in the Swamp” is surely an eastern and thus unconcerned with outlaws as such, though the protagonist’s driving urge borders on outlawry and takes him to outlaw haunts. The Pearl Harbor story concerns a man who was a quarter-blood Cherokee and may be forgiven if he is not scrupulous bound by the laws of white society, and yet no illegal act casts a shadow on him. The last story, the childhood churchgoer’s confession, accounts for the author’s sympathy for the outlaw.

The story I have yet to mention, “Sketches from an Unwritten Life” is one whose events will be familiar to half of my kinfolk. As a prefatory statement, I would insist that the primary narrator loved his family, and he told his tales with affection and nostalgia. This is true even of the conflict with his older brother --a fraternal antagonism of Biblical resonance and as old as human history--and I have allowed the brother’s wife space to provide his version of matters. 

Whatever rancor may have existed in the original fraternal rivalry, by the time the years had passed and I heard the story told, the dominant tone was a mixture of ruefulness--a regret, tinged with humor, that things had to be the way they were--and affection. 

I admit that in all the stories I have allowed myself touches of irony. Those touches are the author’s way of putting a measure of distance between himself and his subject, something he feels obligated to do if only as a way of circumventing his own sentimentality. I hope the note of affection can be heard in all of the stories.

As a writer, I do not personally endorse the truth of any individual tale; I only aver that this is the way the story came to me, often because it was the way the central characters told it. It is not my job to know anything except what my sources give me. I tell the stories with an effort to be conscientious, though sometimes I cannot help yielding to the literary temptation to heighten effects or insert the occasional detail. If I had to state my own position, it would be that of one of the great story-tellers of the twentieth century, William Faulkner, who says: 

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact. 

Looking around me, I see a world ruled by outlaws, but these are not known as such; rather they are politicians and businessmen who have accumulated such fabulous wealth that they become laws unto themselves. My outlaws, at least, can plead in one case a need to avenge slain brothers, and in the others poverty and desperation.