HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: Randy Rohn

HOW I CAME TO WRITE “THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE STUMP OF A TREE” WHICH WAS ONE OF THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2009.

By Randy Rohn

Many people don’t understand small towns. I mean, really small towns. Not suburbs, not bedroom communities, but stand-alones. Towns of 6,000 people or less. Ten or twenty miles away from anything. Ten or twenty years past their prime. Several years behind the times. Towns with no highways going through them. Towns surrounded by farms or wooded areas or land that seems to have no purpose.

Towns that Rand McNally might ignore and chains avoid.

People assume these towns are filled with salt-of-the-earth, solid, commonsense folks. However, along with the core of the solid, commonsense type, is a fair share of fringe-dwellers. Extreme eccentrics. Dotty, wacky, madcap, characters. A doctor who always dresses in an expensive suit and a rumpled, flannel pajama top. A lawyer who appears normal in every way, except he saves used tissues, tissues people have wiped their noses on. He stores these in glass mason jars in cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of his detached garage. Not to study. Not to fondle. Just to collect. Then there’s a farmer who is a violinist and violin maker. He boils the bones and gristle of road kill to make the glues and varnishes for his handmade violins. He swears the best sound comes from opossums. Who am I to argue? By the way, these are real people. I’ve met them.

For the most part, the solid, commonsense type accepts the weird ones with a live and let live attitude. There’s even a bit of affection. A wink and a smile. “Old so and so did his crazy thing again” and then a slight shrug and its time to change the subject. “What do you think of this weather we’ve been having?” Life goes on.

I’ve also discovered the combination of commonsense and nonsense in most small towns, gives the town its flavor. It’s texture. It’s soul. Different for every town. An identity which is definitive, distinct, and piquant.

I grew up in a small country town and have lived in several others. Because of my background I have an intense affection for the people, the culture and the atmosphere of small-town America. Besides growing up in a small town, many times when traveling I will pull off the main highway, drive down some dusty gravel road until I run into a clump of buildings. I’ll park the car and spend the day talking to people, hanging out at the local diner and visiting whatever shops and stores aren’t boarded up. Most of them, these days, are consignment shops, dollar stores and antique (junk) stores. There seem to be many more storefront religions with offbeat names. And, of course, a funeral home or two.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to bring to life the colorful characters and places in most small towns. It just didn’t seem like an interesting story. It seemed more like a laundry list: “and east of town is the weird turkey farmer who…”

And then I read a newspaper article about a convicted child molester who returned to his hometown, a small town in Ohio. He lived in a run-down old house next to a tiny, seldom-used park and would sit on one of the park benches all say long. The police didn’t arrest him because he wasn’t doing anything wrong except creeping people out by his very presence. Until one night, he got drunk and started digging a hole near his favorite park bench. The police hauled him in and found a tiny girl’s bracelet in his jacket pocket. Later, after digging deeper into the hole the man had started, they found the remains of three children. For some reason, the molester was drawn to the place where he had buried his victims. And, of course, he revealed himself as not just a one-time child molester but a serial murderer.

Hmmmm.

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Stump of a Tree is about small town characters and what happens to them as the economy sours, jobs are shipped overseas and agri-business takes over the family farm. How do they cope when their town begins to fade away? How does it affect the feel, the atmosphere, the soul of the town?

On top of all this, a stranger has moved into town. A very strange stranger.

Some of the characters in my story are based on people I knew growing up and some of them are based on people I’ve met in other small towns. A few, of course, are totally the product of my imagination but certainly could have been part of small town life.

When someone new moves into a small town, it changes the texture of everyday life---sometimes radically. Sometimes in bad ways. Perhaps even in malevolent ways. This story is about a small, fading town and the mystery of whether a newcomer is really a newcomer or some evil finding its way back.

Randy Rohn’s short stories have appeared in many anthologies including The Best American Mystery Stories 2009, The Baddest of the Bad: The Worst of Out of the Gutter Magazine and Ransom. His stories have also appeared in many print and online mystery and noir pubs. His first novel Hang on Sloopy will be coming out the end of July.