Going to Bend (39 page)

“Look!” Ryan cried from the backseat. Fierce beams of sunlight had shot through a hole in the clouds and lit up the sea like a spotlight. “Someone must have done something nice,” he said.

“What made you say that?” said Rose.

“My mom says that’s why angels turn on sunshine.”

“Have we done anything nice?” Rose asked.

“Not yet,” Petie said. “But we’re about to. Can you pull over? Just into the park. This’ll only take a minute.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

Rose pulled into a tiny state park that looked out over the ocean. Theirs was the only car.

“I need something in the trunk,” Petie said. “Can I have your keys?”

Rose pulled the keys from the ignition and handed them to Petie, baffled. Petie jumped out of the car, leaving her door open, and circled to the trunk. When she slammed it shut again, she was holding the bag with Paula’s ashes.

“You look so weird. What’s going on?” Rose said.

“I found these up at Camp Twelve, stuck under the floor of my grandfather’s cabin.”

“Dust? Why would he have hidden dust?”

“It’s not dust. They’re Paula’s ashes.”

“Oh, Petie. How awful.”

“She deserves better.” Petie walked to the rocks overlooking the ocean, away from Rose and the three children. At the edge, high above the water, she released a handful of the gritty ashes into the wind.

“What’s she doing?” Carissa whispered to Rose.

“Those are her mother’s ashes. She found them this morning. People scatter the ashes of loved ones out of respect.”

“Could we help?”

Rose shuddered but called to Petie, “Can the kids help? They’d like to.”

To her surprise, Petie said yes, if she could talk to them first. When they’d all gathered, she set the bag of ashes at her feet. “Did Rose tell you what these are?”

The children all nodded solemnly. “Then you should know a little about her if you’re going to help. Ryan and Loose, you, too, since she died way before you were even born. Her name was Paula, and she had dark hair like mine and she didn’t smile very much because there were a lot of things she was afraid of. Her favorite meal was banana slices in milk with so much sugar you just about keeled over after you ate them. I don’t ever remember her laughing.”

The children watched her with sober church faces.

“So here’s the thing,” Petie said. “If you want to help me scatter her ashes, I want you to do it with a light heart, because that’s what she missed out on the most and I think she’d like it. Ryan, you want to go first?”

Ryan approached, and took a fistful of ashes. “Go ahead and throw them up in the air.” Petie helped him toss the ashes over his head, into the wind, where some of the heavier particles came down and the rest disappeared in a puff.

“My turn!” said Loose, and flung a handful of ashes in the wrong direction, so that most of them blew back on him and stuck. Appalled, he slapped at his sweatshirt and waited for punishment. Instead, Petie started snorting helplessly. “Oh God, Loosey,” she said, and dissolved into laughter. Rose started laughing, too, and then Carissa and Ryan joined in and the only one scowling was Loose. When Petie regained herself she wiped her eyes, put her arm around his shoulders and said, “This time throw the other way.”

Loose let go of his next handful and watched it fly away on the wind. Petie whooped and flung more ashes in a high arc. Carissa and then Ryan took a turn and pretty soon everyone was dipping into the bag at once and the air was filled with Paula’s ashes, soaring and raining down like confetti.

“Eula used to call those Jesus beams,” Petie said to Rose, watching the last shafts of sunlight disappear over the water when they were done. “She used to say if you watched carefully you would see God Himself descending. Do you see anything?”

“No,” Rose said doubtfully. “Do you?”

“No.” Petie grinned. “Not a damned thing.”

They linked arms and walked back to the car without a backwards glance. With luck and light traffic, they’d be in Bend by nightfall, tucking into fresh beds in an unspoiled place. “You know, if God
was
up there watching us,” Rose said to Petie as she pulled out onto the highway, “what do you think He’d say?”

Petie knew exactly: they were the same words Eula Coolbaugh had spoken every morning for four years.

It’s a brand-new day, honey. Time to rise and shine
.

D
URING THE
decade in which I wrote it,
Going to Bend
became not just a book but a lifestyle that I shared with—and in some cases inflicted upon—many. I extend my deepest thanks to Pat Peach, my keen and generous guide into the ways of small towns and the people who live in them? to Bernice Barnett for her excellent legal insights and unwavering encouragement during all those Tuesday lunches; and to Darrell Ward for his love of the craft of writing and his unshakable belief that there is always room in the world for one more good book. My special gratitude also goes to Julie Blake for loving Petie and Rose from the very start; to Beth Basham and Carolyn Hernandez for surviving those ten-pound ring binders; and to my family for plowing through early drafts of
Going to Bend
on their computer monitors—surely one of the greatest known acts of love.

It is with special awe and gratitude that I thank Jennifer Rudolph Walsh for believing in me through all these years; my editor, Deb Futter, for making possible the only thing I’ve ever really wanted for Christmas; and both of them for their patience, their guidance, and their professional surefootedness.

Lastly, my deepest thanks to my husband, Nolan, for getting it in every way, and to my daughter, Kerry, for sharing this incredible ride with me.

G
OING TO
B
END

A Reader’s Guide

DIANE HAMMOND

Q:
Going to Bend
is your first novel. Is there a story behind your writing it?

A:
I think of the first half of this book as my graduate school thesis. I wrote it in 1994 and 1995, agonizing over its technical aspects and devices as well as its characters and story line. Craft issues have always loomed large for me. Are the character voices clear enough, consistent enough, revealing enough? How much of the story should I stage, and how much can I just allude to in internal monologues? Is it moving along smoothly? Experienced writers make hundreds of critical decisions by instinct, but most less-experienced writers don’t have that luxury. It can be exhausting. In fact, by the exact midway point in the book, I was so worn out from the technical choices and decisions I was making that I was losing my way in the story. This, plus the fact that I had a young child, multiple sclerosis, and a demanding day job, convinced me to put the manuscript down. In fact, I didn’t look at it again until 2001, when I was uninspired by whatever work was at hand and instead hauled out the manuscript. By then, thanks to my appallingly bad memory, I had forgotten more about the book than I remembered. This afforded me the luxury of reading the manuscript straight through with relative objectivity, and by the time I was done, I knew exactly where the remaining story was headed, and how to get there. And the craft issues never waylaid me again—I’d graduated. I completed the second half of the book in just six months.

Q:
A lot of readers assume that you’re from a small Oregon town yourself, because Hubbard is so vividly evoked and its characters are so deeply defined by its limitations. But you were born and raised in suburban New York. What’s the deal with that?

A:
It’s true that my background, up until my late twenties, was largely urban. I grew up in Upper Nyack, a suburb of New York City, and later lived in Honolulu and Washington, D.G. But in 1984 I moved to Newport, Oregon, then a coastal town of just under 9,000, and everything changed.

My first job interview—for a secretarial position with the electrical utility serving the central Oregon coast—ended with a stern lecture about the fact that big-city, East Coast ways would not be tolerated here. It was clear that I had two choices: I could maintain my urban identity and spend a lot of time alone and misunderstood, or I could pipe down, listen hard, and learn about a way of life that was completely new to me. It’s probably no surprise that my survival instincts led me to choose the latter. On those terms, I was befriended by some extraordinary teachers, skilled storytellers, and sure-footed guides to the insular culture of coastal Oregon. I became an avid solicitor of stories of all kinds, and developed a great respect for the strenuous business of living in a town that offers low paying jobs, limited educational opportunities, significant isolation, and a whole lot of bad weather.

Q:
Yes, the weather on the Oregon coast takes on the aspect of a character in the book. Why?

A:
I think that until you’ve spent nine months in nearly relentless wind and rain, you can’t fully appreciate the effect that such weather has on everything you feel and do. And it’s
dynamic
weather, where the rain takes many shapes—teeming, drizzling, blowing, pelting, and pouring straight down, to name a few—and storm fronts come through like conquering armies. On any given day, damned near everyone I knew could tell you what flags the U.S. Coast Guard was flying over Yaquina Bay to
announce the incoming weather. Here’s the thing: You lived in all of this, you worked in it, drove in it, carried your groceries inside through it, ferried small children and babies through it, and your moods reflected it even when you thought they didn’t. You and the weather become one. So when I began writing
Going to Bend
, it was only natural to cast the weather in a major role.

Q:
Let’s talk about your characters for a minute. Do you have a favorite?

A:
Petie is certainly the character to whom my heart goes out first. She is a woman who’s been dealt a bad hand and she refuses to pity herself for it. From that innate pride of self springs everything else about her—her tough exterior, her faith in her own ability to get by, her fierce sense of right and wrong. And yet, her ability to love unconditionally has come through intact. Given her life circumstances, that’s a small miracle.

In many ways,
Going to Bend
is a love story. It’s about the healing powers of unconditional love. For Petie, finding unconditional love has come at a huge price: Paula’s love, though absolute, is insufficient to keep Petie from harm; Rose’s love gives her a staunch ally, but also one who offers limited protection. It is only Eula’s love that brings with it healing powers, though for far too little time. Even so, these pockets of unconditional love have given her sufficient strength to endure exceptionally difficult circumstances.

Other characters for whom I have a tender spot include Marge and Larry Hopkins, who also have a gift for loving not only each other, but those around them; and Schiff, who is a much better man than he’s ever given credit for, either by himself or by those around him.

I’d have to say that Old Man Tyler was the character who presented me with the greatest writing challenge. I’d never created a thoroughly bad character before, someone capable of doing loathsome things. We tend to protect our characters as we do our children, wanting them to be liked and successful. Old Man was neither. And yet, I don’t believe he was evil—just incredibly, deeply, cruelly flawed.

Q:
How do you approach building a novel? Do you work out a lot of your story ahead of time?

A:
I have always envied those writers who can build a story ahead of time, who can pull together a comprehensive road map, the who, what, when, where, how, and why, all very lucidly and methodically set out in advance. It probably says something about the scattershot way in which I create that I am absolutely unable to do this. I really only succeeded in doing it once, and the resulting work was so lifeless that I buried it in a desk drawer.

No, for better or worse I am an impulsive, instinctive, intuitive writer, which means that when I begin writing a book, I know a couple of my key characters, though not well; I have a sense of the feel of the story, though not its specific events; I have a rough timeframe in mind over which the story will take place; and I have a hazy idea of where the main characters will end up. Other than that, I don’t know a thing. I invent it, discover it, reveal it—not only to my readers but to myself—in the writing itself. This can be both exhilarating and terrifying; it’s a very high-risk creative proposition, in that I’m staking a year or more of my writing life on the bet that I can bring the story—which I don’t yet know—home successfully in the end. So far, it’s worked, but there isn’t a day when I take that outcome for granted. That’s why, for me, the process of writing is fraught with danger, a nearly incomprehensible act of the greatest faith in my creative outcomes. I wouldn’t wish this writing style on anyone, though on a good day when my characters’ voices are flowing and I’m hurrying to get it all down, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.