I
take an unusual interest in the dedications at the beginnings of novels.
I don’t skip that page like most people probably do; in fact, I
spend time ruminating on the circumstances that led to the dedication.
Wives, children, parents—usually pretty obvious. Sometimes the author
will supply an explanation, but often a cryptic “for Jane”
will be all the reader has for clues. Months later I’ll be reading
an interview with the author and something he says will make a connection
back to that dedication. I try to guess, often with scant clues, why the
author chose his/her particular dedicatee. A mystery even before the story
begins. Prolific authors get to pick a lot more dedicatees, so eventually
they get around to editors, agents, random acquaintances, pets. Debut
authors like me, though, we have a tougher job of it. We’ve no way
of knowing if our pens will dry up, our minds go dark, if we’ll
ever write another book. Our first dedication has to count.
Still, I never had a doubt about my debut dedication. Later this year
I’ll get to share in the collective thrill of debut authors whose
first books are being released, but I don’t think I’ll ever
again feel that particular sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished
the last draft of the book, wrote the dedication—“for my grandfather,
William Henry Pepin, Jr.”—and printed out a copy to send him
in the mail. It was September 2006, two weeks after his eightieth birthday.
I was a bit ashamed because I’d meant to finish my final edits and
mail him the book for his birthday—but of course I took longer than
I expected. I was doubly bummed because I hadn’t been able to fly
up to New Hampshire for his party, not in the middle of my first semester
of a PhD program. It was a surprise party with family members from all
over the country, and I couldn’t make it. I did call him that day,
asked him if he was surprised at the turnout. He said he was having a
good time. It’s a good excuse to have a beer, he said, one of his
usual droll understatements.
Despite my regrets, he got the book in the mail. He militantly guarded
the manuscript so that no other members of the family could get a hold
of it. My cousin Chris, in particular, would drill him for details whenever
they got together to watch the Patriots and drink beers and eat popcorn.
But Papa—that’s what I call him, what all us grandkids call
him—he wouldn’t budge. Not a word. See, Chris didn’t
always want to read the book. When we were kids I traumatized him with
ghost stories, so he’d already had enough of my fiction. But then
for research I borrowed some of his motorcycle books while he was serving
in Iraq (that’s right, my “scardey-cat” cousin went
to Iraq, something I could never do). Once Chris knew there’d be
motorcycles in the book, he was sold. But still Papa wouldn’t divulge
anything of what he was reading, except to say that indeed there were
some motorcycles in the book.
Nor would Papa tell my grandmother much about the book—not because
he wanted her to wait for the published version, but because we’d
all sort of agreed that she probably shouldn’t read it at all. Ever.
She can be proud of me by looking at the spine of the novel as it sits
on her shelf, but she probably shouldn’t actually open it. “Your
grandfather says somebody gets decapitated in the first chapter,”
she told me on the phone two months ago. “Not decapitated,”
I told her. “Just shot in the face.” “I don’t
think I’ll be reading that any time soon,” she said.
But my grandfather was just as eager to read it as I was to let him read
it. He took a couple weeks finishing it. For him, the window between opening
a book and falling asleep is pretty narrow, so two weeks is pretty good.
Recently, I listened to an interview with James Patterson in which he
explained why he wrote such short chapters with very little detail. Patterson
said he did it for the “working person” who only had five
minutes to knock off a chapter or two before bedtime. Although my grandfather
didn’t really start reading until after he retired, he was still
exactly that working man that Patterson was aiming for. Papa loved Patterson
and other no-nonsense suspense and mystery writers bent on snagging the
average guy or gal as a reader: Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell.
My grandfather retired about fifteen years ago, so his awakening to reading
coincided with my getting serious as a writer. I loved that he had become
a reader, even if we didn’t really share a taste for the same authors.
I had literary ambitions because I was in college learning how to Write
with a capital W, and he was just looking for entertainment. Still, we’ve
talked about fiction a lot over this past decade, and we’ve never
been closer as a grandfather and grandson. That’s saying a lot—because
my father wasn’t around much when I was a kid, and Papa often filled
in for that absence.
Papa would read my short stories as they got published, and often he was
baffled. He didn’t like the kind of “open,” character-based
endings that are frequent in “literary” fiction. He’d
praise the writing but shrug at my endings. But even when I was a pretentious
youth scoffing at the crime genre, he and I still shared an interest in
the macabre, the violent and the mysterious in fiction. Yet over the years,
I’ve kept leaning closer and closer to his way of thinking. I gave
James Ellory a shot and saw a genius who could write with the same depth
and originality as any capital-W Writer. I gave Michael Connelly a shot
and loved it, even though it fit snugly inside of genre conventions. Soon
Papa and I were trading books, mostly Connelly and Elmore Leonard. He
grew to love Connelly and like Leonard (who sometimes indulges in those
open endings Papa didn’t like). He gave up on James Ellroy right
quick, as I assumed he would.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about writing his novels toward
an ideal reader, which in King’s case is his wife Tabitha. Once
I realized Pyres was going to be a crime novel, I also realized that my
grandfather was going to be the closest I’d get to an ideal reader.
I still wanted to do some tricks with theme and character that Papa wouldn’t
have much patience for, but I vowed to keep the story lean and tense,
keep him interested with plenty of suspense and violence. I wanted to
see if I could hold back his nap for another few minutes. I also wanted
to show him that I could dedicate myself to a project this big and get
it done—because he was always instrumental in my learning the value
of hard work.
When Papa was a working man, he was a dental technician. He made dentures.
I grew up around his dental lab, visiting often to see him in a white
apron and a white face mask, with wet plaster on his hands and rows of
dentures on his shelves. I saw him stooped over a Bunsen burner, melting
pink wax into the shape of human gums. I’d sit and eat his root
beer barrel candies or his potato sticks and I’d watch him at his
delicate, exacting work, shaping a tooth with a metal pick.
He was a perfectionist at his job, and he impressed on me his Protestant
work ethic. That ethic has gotten me through a lot of school, thousands
of pages of practice writing, a couple practice novels, and several drafts
of Pyres. Even when my grandfather retired, he never quite retired. His
hand-made dentures were in demand, since they were considered better quality
than the machine-made dentures that had become the norm. He worked part
time in the summers when he and my grandmother weren’t down in Florida
with their snowbird friends and season passes to Busch Gardens.
One afternoon several weeks after I sent the book, I called his house
expecting my grandmother to answer, as she always did. But it was Papa
on the phone, half-groggy from a nap, answering because my grandmother
had gone out on some errands. He was getting over a bout of pneumonia
and he was coughing up a storm, but he did manage to talk enough to tell
me how nice I’d been to dedicate the book to him, how glad he was
to read it. He didn’t elaborate or get excited or weepy. He wasn’t
like that. He just thanked me. We talked a few times after that, but that’s
the conversation I’ll remember best, even as he coughed his way
through it.
My grandfather passed away on the evening of January 21, 2007. A Sunday
night, the Patriots were playing, but he didn’t get to watch that
last game. He died unconscious in a hospice house surrounded by his family,
and not unexpectedly. He’d been quite sick for weeks, and it became
clear that his coughing had more to do with a degenerative lung disease
than pneumonia. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette since the 1950s, but
he’d inhaled years and years of dust from the plaster of the dentures
he made to perfection. His hard work had been his fate, and I think he
probably took a kind of pride in that.
It’s been just a little over a week now, and I still can’t
believe he’s gone. I doubt I’ll ever quite get over losing
him—my Papa, ideal reader. Everyone in the family keeps telling
me how glad they are that he got a chance to read my book and see my dedication
before he died. I’m glad too, but I wish he could’ve been
around to read the second and the third, and—well, God willing I’ll
have a chance to write those, to finish that work I have to do. Is it
sick of me to hope that some day, decades from now, I’ll die hard
at work on a novel, never to be finished? The one straight-out mystery
that Dickens ever wrote was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Dickens died—partly
from exhaustion caused by his reading tours—before he could let
his faithful readers know who killed Edwin. Readers have been speculating
for a hundred and thirty-odd years. I like that.
After the funeral, my grandmother gave me back the manuscript I had sent
to Papa. It’s here beside me now with the dedication, with my little
handwritten note to him saying, “I hope you enjoy it.” The
book will certainly change a bit here and there before it goes to publication,
but it’ll essentially be the same book he read, with one glaring
exception—one change I dread having to make, but I know I will.
I’m going to have to rewrite that dedication. I’m going to
have to say “In memory of my grandfather, William Henry Pepin, Jr.”
And now there is no more mystery about why.
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