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  Praise for Scissors, Paper, Rock

  “I finished Scissors, Paper, Rock in an unstoppable burst of enthralled reading last night. It is a wonderful book.”

  —Richard Howard, poet and professor of creative writing, Columbia University

  “A wise and compassionate novel. . . . Johnson movingly conveys the senselessness of death, the inevitability of loss and the failure of families to shield us from either.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fenton Johnson has made Kentucky and the family the theme of what is perhaps the first novel to bring AIDS to the heartland. . . . Like all great storytellers, Johnson worries repeatedly a handful of narrative threads, confident of the old wisdom that no two tellings are alike, that each rendering brings a story along, uncovers its further essence. . . . Graceful . . . UNIQUE.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “I am amazed by the strength of these characters (so many!), by how sharply and unforgivingly they are drawn, and by the way the reader is compelled to love and forgive them. Raphael, the gay son, is a hero for our time or any time. I wish everybody who has a family or ever had one (chosen or inherited) would read this.”

  —Shirley Abbot, author of Womenfolk

  “A deeply affecting novel about families and loss.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Scissors, Paper, Rock is a book about family, a book about memory, a book about depicting love and family and community as a continuum. . . . Scissors, Paper, Rock may be the best novel to date encompassing the themes of homosexuality and AIDS. It is beautifully written.”

  —Lexington Herald-Leader

  “Fenton Johnson’s novel is a journey into America; destination Kentucky, the family, the human heart. Scissors, Paper, Rock is an eloquent discourse on the wilderness of the human heart, and a profound meditation on what it is to endure.”

  —Tom Spanbauer, author of I Loved You More

  “A tender, haunting account of a rural Southern family’s demise . . . Scissors, Paper, Rock manages to be both intimate and panoramic. . . . The book is especially strong in its exploration of the varieties of grief that accompany death and losses.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Scissors, Paper, Rock teems with stubborn life. . . . Writing of endurance, memory, and of love, Johnson has created a traditional story about a new kind of death, where the young die in the arms of the old.”

  —Montreal Gazette

  “Strong and self-assured. . . . Scissors, Paper, Rock evoke[s] all the complexities of family and community both past and present. With its treatment of homosexuality and AIDS at its core, it could possibly be found to be indispensable.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  Scissors, Paper, Rock

  Scissors,

  Paper,

  Rock

  A Novel

  FENTON JOHNSON

  Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic

  reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear

  as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged

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  Copyright © 2016 by Fenton Johnson

  “High Bridge” was published in a different form in the Chicago Tribune’s 1986 Nelson Algren Fiction Competition. It was later revised and republished in the San Francisco Sentinel and in the Winter 1988–89 issue of Turnstile and is included in Henfield Prize Winning Stories (Warner Books, 1992). “Back Where She Came From” was published in a different form in the Sewanee Review, Vol. 97, No. 4, Fall 1989. “Little Deaths” was published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine’s annual fiction issue, June 28, 1992. “Cowboys” was first published in a different form in the Greensboro Review, No. 43, Winter 1987–88, and later included in Best of the West, Vol. 2: New Short Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri (Peregrine Smith Books, 1989).

  A verse from the song “Fox on the Run” (lyrics by Tony Hazzard) is used by kind permission of Tony Hazzard and Mann Music Publishers Ltd.

  Published by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Johnson, Fenton.

  Scissors, paper, rock / Fenton Johnson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-671-79542-2

  I. Title

  PS3560.03766S35 1993

  813’.52—dc20

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6656-8 (pbk : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6657-5 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6658-2 (epub)

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  for

  Lawrence Thomas Rose

  and

  Margaret Melanie Beene

  Contents

  Foreword by Pam Houston

  High Bridge

  Back Where She Came From

  Little Deaths

  All Fall Down

  The Way Things Will Always Be

  Cowboys

  Guilt

  Scissors, Paper, Rock

  Some Kind of Family

  Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going?

  Miss Camilla Speaks

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Fenton Johnson and I met in 1992 at the Bay Area Book Awards ceremony. We were both nominated for awards, and neither of us won. Adrienne Rich was there (surely she won something), and Fenton and I were giddy with the opportunity to pay our respects—two young writers invited to kneel (and we did kneel, literally) at the feet of a master.

  Fenton and I recognized each other instantly and thoroughly, creating the kind of jolt to the system that gets a person believing in reincarnation, destiny, and soul mates—all those things the cynical side of one’s heart tries to keep at bay. We were part of several of the same tribes, some of them obvious, some of them not so. The first words he said to me were “Cowboys are my weakness too.” I had read Scissors, Paper, Rock before we met; read it again, starting when I got home that night; and a few more times over the last twenty-three years, when I taught it to various groups of creative writing students; and again, after perhaps a decade of not having read it, in preparation for writing this introduction.

  To say that I had forgotten how good the novel is would be disingenuous. Living, loving, and dying as they do, in the deep ravines of Strang Knob, Kentucky, the Hardin family is, in my opinion, one of the most memorable families in all of literature, evoking shades of Faulkner’s Compsons, Welty’s Fairchilds, and Harper Lee’s Finches. Tom Hardin, the family’s patriarch, is every bit as enigmatic, as complex, as multiple as Jane Smiley’s Larry Cook in A Thousand Acres or Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes in Wise Blood.

  In 1992 many reviewers called Scissors, Paper, Rock the best novel to date encompassing the AIDS crisis, and I believe it remains worthy of that assessment. A
nd there is no denying the novel’s power to evoke, through the chapters narrated by the baby of the family, Raphael, the experience of a young gay man as he leaves his home in rural Kentucky in the late ’70s, bound for San Francisco, and subsequently lives through the epidemic of the early ’80s, only to return home to Kentucky in the midst of succumbing to the disease himself.

  Also unforgettable is the elegant and efficient form Fenton has chosen for the novel: chapters that work like standalone short stories, narrated by various members of the Hardin clan—some who have stayed in Strang Knob, some who have fled. Chapter by chapter we witness each character’s most dangerous hopes and problematic desires, their daily predicaments as well as the events that caused them life-shattering grief. We learn of Tom’s stubborn pride, Bette’s hidden shame, Raphael’s silent rage, and Rose Ella’s impossible reserves of strength that always show up at the unlikeliest times and places.

  It’s hard to forget that the time line of the book is not organized chronologically, or even according to any simplified version of narrative logic; instead, chapters are placed in sequence according to how they will ignite associative sparks among them, on the level of metaphor as well as on the level of plot. The book comes together less like a traditional novel and more like a quilt, handmade in an attic sewing room and thrown over a four-poster bed. Family secrets are often revealed later rather than sooner, and always at the exact moment they will pack the most punch.

  Nor had I forgotten that Scissors, Paper, Rock is written with Fenton’s rare blend of fearlessness and sensitivity, that it defies easy classification (novel versus collection, family saga versus gay coming-of-age story), and that it is deeply honest, well crafted, and full of generosity and heart.

  But what I had forgotten since my last reading—perhaps because I was not quite old enough a decade ago to fully recognize it—was the wisdom, compassion, and grace with which Fenton renders this extended family (the Hardins, their cousins and neighbors, the brothers at the local Trappist monastery, and especially Miss Camilla, the spinster who lives next door), these locations (San Francisco and rural Kentucky), and this very particular period in time (1942–1992).

  During my most recent reading, I was amazed (noting the youthful author photo) at how comprehensively Fenton understood, even then, that we carry our families—their love and their burden—with us wherever we go and that their disapproval lives inside us like an autoimmune disease forever, making us susceptible to specific kinds of trouble for the rest of our lives. But Fenton also knew that a piece of good ground—if we inhabit it fully and with an open heart—can live inside us too and can even, in the hardest times, rescue us from ourselves, can show us—if we sit still there long enough—how to turn what we thought of as weakness into a way to rise.

  In perhaps the novel’s most powerful scene, in a chapter called “All Fall Down,” Tom and Rose Ella Hardin, whose marriage is fraught in the best of times (“they bound themselves to each other,” Miss Camilla says of them, “and it was a hurtful binding”), try to reckon with the death of their eldest son, Clark, in Vietnam and wind up attacking each other physically, raising bruises and drawing blood. After the fight and the sex that follows, after Rose Ella understands that Tom is “daunted by the largeness of her heart—by the completeness and certainty of its demands,” after she reflects that “I am the one who forgives . . . this is the source of my pain and power,” she thinks: “Grief is like any wound—some terrible pleasure resides in it. Better to knead that pain, that terrible pleasure than to have nothing at all. If love fulfills itself in companionship, grief fulfills itself in solitude, for we grieve finally and necessarily less for the dead than for our living selves, our aloneness in our survival, our inescapable invitation to the dance” (76).

  In Miss Camilla, the novel finds not only an axis around which the Hardin family spins, not only a receptacle for all the Hardin family secrets, but also a way to speak in its own voice. In the book’s final chapter, Miss Camilla confesses, and gossips and philosophizes—one is inclined to say testifies—about Scissors, Paper, Rock’s ultimate subject: “What is love but the intersection of memory and desire, past and future? . . . In love something miraculous happens. In loving someone we give them an ideal against which to measure themselves. Living in the presence of that ideal, the beloved strives to fulfill the lover’s expectations. In this way love makes of us the bravest and best persons that we are capable of being” (228).

  Since that night long ago at the Bay Area Book Awards, I have come to know Fenton Johnson as a gifted teacher, a brave and exacting writer, a deeply thoughtful philosopher, a loyal friend, an entirely reliable colleague, an accomplished two-stepper, and one of the last of the great Southern gentlemen around. When I think of our time together, I think of long investigative conversations about art and literature, faith and hope, love and God and death, in a car driving over Colorado passes, at a four-hour breakfast in the East Village, around a chrome and Formica kitchen table in a rented house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, or on a hiking trail surrounded by the Martian green of the spring palo verde in the Superstition Mountains.

  In an introduction to the collected works of the Canadian short story writer Clark Blaise, Fenton writes, “Across a lifetime a writer’s words, diligently and honestly compiled, allow his essential character to emerge, and as it emerges to shape what comes behind, a symbiosis between art and nature in which the writer shapes the clay that shapes himself.” And in Keeping Faith, the book that followed Scissors, Paper, Rock, Fenton wrote, “The greatest philosophers so completely and seamlessly inhabited their lives that death was of no consequence, since to betray one’s principles would be to betray oneself—a living suicide worse than any that might come from the poisoned cup or on the cross.”

  These two quotes, taken together, have always seemed to me to comprise Fenton’s life project: to compile words diligently and honestly, so that he might feel that he is completely and seamlessly inhabiting his life, to the extent that it is possible for anyone to do so. Scissors, Paper, Rock is a book that is “all in” on this project in every regard, and for that reason it is a net that catches all of us—male, female, gay, straight, urban, rural, devout, atheist—all of us engaged in the process of loving, of being loved in this difficult world. I’m excited for you, if this is the first time you are coming to it. I predict it will not be the last.

  Pam Houston

  Author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

  and Contents May Have Shifted

  Founder and Director, Writing by Writers

  High Bridge

  [1990]

  On his workshop bench Tom Hardin lines up the woods he has chosen, his favorites: chocolate-brown walnut; ruddy cedar he has cut and cured himself; bleached white cypress, salvaged from mash tubs at the old distillery and smelling faintly of young whiskey. To these he adds newcomers: gingko, buttery smooth and yellow; wild cherry, pale rose, from a tree he’d planted himself, forty years before.

  Rose Ella, his wife, is dead. Before him—who would have thought it? A year and a half ago she’d helped shovel him into an ambulance, to take him to a Louisville hospital where they’d removed most of his cancerous gut. He’d recovered, to stand half-hollowed out and hear the doctor give him a year to live. Across the next months he and Rose Ella talked very little and thought a great deal about what was to come of her after his death.

  Now she has been dead for almost six months, while he stands among the antique tools and stacked woods and power saws of his woodshop, assembling wood for a lamp for Miss Camilla Perkins, his next-door neighbor and in forty-seven years of marriage the only woman he has kissed besides his wife. “Forty-seven years and one other woman,” he says to himself. “And that just a kiss.” He is astonished by his loyalty. If on his wedding day someone had predicted this, he would have laughed out loud.

  When he turns his back to the woodshop window he hears his children’s voices, chanting the naming poem they’d made up themselves—what R
ose Ella called the litany of the stars:

  JOE Ray, BARbara, LES and CLARK,

  GET ready, GET set, ON YOUR MARK,

  BET-te, ROBert, then there’s RAFE,

  WHICH one OF us GETS—HOME—SAFE!

  The first time Tom Hardin heard these voices he turned around, expecting to see the hot, bright green of the yard filled with the menagerie of neighborhood children his children always attracted, especially after he built them a swing set from scrap iron. But when he turned around, it was midwinter gray, the swing set long since dismantled and given to one of his sets of grandchildren. Nothing filled the yard but ghosts.

  It was the cancer, he decided, or more likely the chemo they gave him for it, that was making him crazy, or (worse yet) sentimental. Today when he hears the voices he turns on his shortwave weather radio and hunches more closely over his work.

  Since Rose Ella’s death he has kept all but one of his children at bay. In various ways they have asked to come; through muleheaded stubbornness he has kept them to weekend visits. Not by words—he avoids talking of his illness—but by his plain refusal to be cared for. They have their own lives and he is careful to remind them of this: jobs, families, community responsibilities.

  Only Raphael, his youngest, has come back. At thirty-six, he is not married, has never had so much as a girlfriend. Instead he brings home men from San Francisco, where he lives—a different man every summer. With those visitors, Rose Ella was civil, even flirtatious. Tom Hardin stayed in the shop.

  This time Raphael has come home alone. Out of the blue he showed up one day, looking thin and anxious—he’d quit his job, a decision of which Tom Hardin disapproves. Whatever the job, to his way of thinking a man didn’t up and quit without good reasons, and if Raphael has good reasons he has yet to set them forth.