The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      October 2000
      (This piece is for On Display. The suggestion this month is "Midnight.")

      October 20, 2000
      Friday


       


      I knew this would be a glorious weather day -- clear air, temperatures in the mid-seventies -- and I worked all week toward having no obligations. I wanted to go to Berks County (the setting of my novel and beloved to me for a number of reasons) and look at leaves and light. I did some free writing in the early morning and by 10:00 I was on the road.

      Although I had no obligations, I did have an agenda: conceive and write a piece for the On Display collaborative and get it posted before the very last day of the month. I took Cesar Franck's Symphony in D Minor to accompany the ride down -- I thought perhaps its somber overtones might help me think about darkness.

      By 11:30 I was set up at the edge of Hain's Cemetery. I had a clear view of a grove of trees that displayed every fall color imaginable, including the deep gold and bright crimson that are my favorites. I had my notebook, my pen, and my folding table set solidly on level ground. I breathed and waited for inspiration.

      One of my favorite parts of any contemporary literary magazine or story collection, such as Glimmertrain and the annual Best American Short Stories, is the "contributors' notes" at the back, where the writers give a short statement about how the story emerged and what process was entailed in taking it from idea to the final form on the page. There are times when I take as much learning from those brief paragraphs as I take enjoyment from the stories themselves.

      So I sat on the hill up at Hain's letting the light, the air, and the natural sounds swirl around and through me. I'd brought an apple dumpling left from our church apple festival that my pastor had insisted the members of yesterday's study group take along. As I ate it I could hear birds, acorns falling or being tossed by squirrels. I tried to think about midnight, myself at midnight, but gradually all I could see were my characters, Ellen, William, their children, their farm, Ellen at the broad work table chopping apples, rolling pastry dough, the big stove, the bake house, apple dumplings in crocks made of the redware produced from native clay. A train went by on the tracks behind Route 422 a half mile down the hill, its whistle a long mournful howl that made a dark sound in the brilliant autumn light, and suddenly I had it. I had a new scene.

      Within an hour I'd written three pages. Ellen, newly installed as a hired girl in the Fenster household in the fall of 1860, is awakened from a sound sleep by the shriek of a train hurtling past her window. She jumps out of bed and tries to get her bearings. She hears the clock below sound a single strike -- she has seldom been up and about at so late an hour. Through the heating grate in the floor she sees a light in the kitchen. Thinking it's a lamp that has been left unattended, she makes her way downstairs in her nightgown and bare feet and comes face to face with William, the son of the master of the house, who is sitting in the servants' kitchen reading by lamplight and eating an apple dumpling from a redware crock. Less concerned about class distinctions than others in his family, William invites her to share this late night repast. He serves her -- she has never been served by a man before, not even her father -- and talks to her, an uneducated farm girl, about the political situation developing in the south, explaining things to her without condescending to her.

      Some questions remain, to be answered through research -- were there midnight trains in 1860, and if not, can I invent them? Ellen uses several German phrases -- my German is remembered textbook High German. Would it be different in the Pennsylvania German she speaks? Can I set this scene around Christmas -- would young William be home from college for the holidays? South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20 -- absent CNN broadcasts, would people like William know about this yet?

      Those answers will come. For now, I have another scene in draft, 1000 more words, 6000 in all, about 2% of the total I envision. I'm getting there. I feel good about  my progress, and I shall sleep well though this night.


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      Margaret DeAngelis.

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