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I had heard Freeman Frank read his piece, “Anonymous,” and was liberated from my hopes of finding the special touch that I heard from him. Something about him said Maine: sharp, to the point, undressed prose that lived, like the directions you get from a side road walker Downeast. Freeman had come straight at me as if he were saying, Listen to me, son, this is the way it’s done.
We had been at Out Loud Open Mike’s meeting at Beebe Estates and went into slick wind’s patches of ice and snow. Travel, over such a short distance to my car, was treacherous to the man with an aluminum walker. I did not know what he was tolerating, measuring, or casting aside to be out on such a night to hear poets and writers read, to allow his own voice to brighten the walls, pause, brighten a few hearts, knock me on my butt.
I reveled in the drive to his home, wondering what I’d do if the car failed on such a night, listening to his speech the way it spun out with likely pauses, the way punctuation’s known. He could highlight a stressed point with the most deliberate pause, as if the 40-year old debating coach techniques of high school teaching were being employed. Freeman could make you sit up and wait for his next pronouncement; it was like a silent clarion call, that caesura of his, that singular pause, that finger pointed right at your eyes, saying, Heed me. Truth is here. When you go your way, make sure you bring some of me.
You’re damned right, Freeman.
I helped him from the car, his arms strong from the body lifting he was now used to. A man of short words, plain words, for sure. “Anonymous” kept coming back to me, bare boards in the wind, as clear as a Downeast lake in a winter wind, sheer as ice, how it later lit up the pages of the Wolf Moon Press Journal (Nov/Dec 2006).
I dared to ask him to write reviews or critiques of two of my books.
“I will,” he said, in short order. He did.
On the way home, after meeting his wife, Sally, after his setting himself down in his chair, Sally and him alone again with Time and Pain and utter Truth, I tried again to measure things. I realized I am no mathematician, no chronometer, and know only, for real, those pains that I have personally known. But Freeman must have had his own wheelbarrow to lug along what bothered him. He was an ox, mule, dray horse, daily pulling what was inside him, carried behind him, for the sake of all others. Such thoughts, the day after he has left us, pound on me. I will not forget him, or the things he said.
Nor will I forget what he said about the books traded for review:
Tom Sheehan writes stories for us and about us. Epic Cures spans six decades, from Pearl Harbor to the dawn of our new century. It is comic, lyric, democratic; most of all it is insightful. Its pages brim with names, faces, nationalities of both genders and all ages: fisher-folk, carpenters, teachers, servicemen, truck drivers, card sharks, icemen, dairymen, plainclothesmen, cops on the beat, bankers, an undertaker, a child molester, a coalman, a blind man, and more.
Or his emails, echoes reaching:
You all help me to keep my mind on who I am, rather than who I am not; what I can do, rather than what I cannot do. The big fear is of what Churchill called “the black dog,” despondency. Not the steel or the walker. And, thanks to this whole field in which you people (of the Out Loud Open Mike) are keeping me immersed, 24 hours is just about the happy length of any day for my “am” and my “can do.” Sincerely, I can’t complain.
I’ll be at your “Hodd’s Mountain” story tomorrow with a mind fresher than it is right now.
Cutting to chase, until I met you, those were the nearest to “authors” this Swamp Yankee ever met. So, it is not “wonderful” that you are influencing me more than perhaps you care to. Not that I’m “borrowing” your style–that would be impossible–but increasingly my reading of you is followed by inspiration to get back into my own writing. There, dear Mr. Sheehan, is the real reason for my first critique of your work taking the months of June and July to write; and it explains the delay with your beautiful A Collection of Friends. You’ve gotten me to spend much of my spare time trying to achieve some modest victories for myself, before the final curtain… deadline.
I’m in my second reading of A Collection. Do I exaggerate when I say that your second story in, “The Great God Shove,” (elements of Hermann Hesse and James Joyce) is among the best short stories I’ve ever read? I’ll have the book reviewed “pretty damned soon”–Maine-speak for “Lay-tah!”
“Last Call for a Loner” –am in 3rd read-through of all of ’em–This one, for whatever reason, touches me most. So far. It’s two good ol’ boys in the “delicate April,” on the much-used porch, with their CIB’s (Combat Infantryman’s Badge), GIQ’s (Giant Imperial Quarts), and shared memory of Billy Pigg (P for poignant–I’m serious, so were you), like all of your work, leaves me with a story, ideas, feeling…feeling.
Every guy in our generation, and our dads before us, (and, gawdamnit, the kids’ after us) has at least one “Billy Pig,” keeping in a piece our huge circle. Mine is Callahan, buried in a VFW grave in Mobile.
“And they are not here, and they won’t be here, and they won’t come back again.”
Someone (a Frenchman?) wrote, “All language is banging iron kettles for bears to dance to. While all the time we yearn to move the stars to pity.” John Fredericks Nims is my future project (after I recited for him Nims’ “Shot Down at Night” … the only poem I’ve ever memorized on my own other than my “John Maciag.”)
From Freeman Frank about Nims’ poem, “Tom, The English language does not get better than this. It can’t.”
From Freeman Frank on 5/27/06
Tom,
I only had to start one of the stories in Epic Cure to realize you are so good that I’m not going to rush it. The short story’s my favorite form and, as with a good meal, I want to be at a place and time when I can really enjoy–savor two books, which I know all ready are written in a style I love.
Reading is the happy side of the deal I made with you; the daunting downside will be trying to critique writing which I believe is so much better than my own. “But I shall do it! I shall do it in the end. I shall do it sure.” (Who said that?)
“Far cry from Hackett’s Mills though.” Some time I’d like to boot it over to you–but am sure your plate is pretty full. And the good guys are too easily imposed on.
Not a bit, Freeman. Not a bit. Nevermore.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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