Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards

Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards

Robert Olen Butler

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 0802142044

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


For many years Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler has collected picture postcards from the early twentieth century-not so much for the pictures on the fronts but for the messages written on the backs, little bits of the captured souls of people long since passed away. Using these brief messages of real people from another age, Butler creates fully imagined stories that speak to the universal human condition. In "Up by Heart," a Tennessee miner is called upon to become a preacher, and then asked to complete an altogether more sinister task. In "The Ironworkers' Hayride," a young man named Milton embarks on a romantic adventure with a girl with a wooden leg. From the deeply moving "Carl and I," where a young wife writes a postcard in reply to a card from her husband who is dying of tuberculosis, to the eerily familiar "The One in White," where a newspaper reporter covers an incident of American military adventurism in a foreign land, these are intimate and fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in an extraordinary age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

nor tycoon can usurp our importance.” He paused to let that sink in for a moment and I duly stood there looking up at him, agape. Then he winked at me and said, “I am a foreman, however.” And that was how we met, Carl Peterson and I. And we kissed under a maple tree up along a creek where we lingered, sitting on a log, and we talked, and there were daisies all around and then we kissed under the big tree, and this was on Decora-tion Day, 1904, the Pet Milk factory picnic, and all the workingmen

burn. I was behind several of the men and we were in our Sunday clothes, we had left our churches this morning and had come to see the exhibition of this wonderful thing, and now we were stripping off our coats and winding them around our hands and arms to allow us to reach into the flames, to bring Earl Sandt out. Two men were ahead of me, already bending to the tangle of canvas and wood and metal and smoke. I felt myself slow and stop. I did not know this man. I had seen him only from afar,

gone on.” Mama said, “The boy?” “Yep,” Papa said. “He wants to make time to Montana. He’s got grit, the boy. The sky west looks bad.” I crossed the parlor, past the oak table and Papa, something furious going on in my chest. “I was his age once,” Papa said. Then I took up my coat and I was out the door. It was first light. Papa was correct. To the west, the sky was thickening up pretty bad. A sky like this in Kentucky might not say the same thing to a man. Even thinking this way, I knew

“I was just passing through,” I said. “You may sit for a while,” he said. “You may think peaceful thoughts.” Still I hesitated. I felt him trying to read me. “I am going,” he said. “You will stay alone.” It was a respectful offer. I credited him with that. And it prompted a similar feeling in me. Either way now, I would offend the man. If I were myself to go on or if I were to encourage him to go, he would surely think I was being critical of his presence. I knew from long practice how to

Tompkins Square and I have forgotten to go down on a knee, which I scramble to do, and she puts her hand on my shoulder. No, she says. Just sit beside me. At the top of the page of my Times. My arm is hurting. A sharp pain is running down my left arm. At the top of the page: AVIATION MEET AT ASBURY PARK. World-famous aeronauts. Including five professionals flying for the Wright Brothers. Brookins and Coffin and La Chappie and Johnstone and Hoxsey.I am panting with the pain inside me. I will take

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