One of the minor masterpieces in American literature is a false biography of two early residents of Chase County, Kansas — he and she.
The short piece is not exactly fact or fiction. William Least Heat-Moon assembled it.
Least Heat-Moon was working on what he called a deep map of a county in the middle of the country and found an old marker in Elk Cemetery. He couldn’t make out the name or names. The lack, if that’s what it was, bothered him and eventually disturbed his dreams.
Least Heat-Moon finally got out the four-volume oral history of the county and began to assemble a story — an anecdote here, a detail there — making the two pioneers. He and she settled when the Kansas or Kaw Indians still passed through. The gaps between the logs of the pioneers’ cabin were wide enough to throw a cat through.
sometimes the Kaw passed by and stopped to look through the gaps and once to make friends she held a mirror up to a gap and scared tarnation out of a painted brave and then there was a laughter like you wouldn’t believe and they took turns gaping into it and admired and chortled and thereafter when passing always stopping to use the mirror …
sometimes the whole night she’d hear the Kaws up on the hill where their dead lay buried wailing and moaning and that was the worst sound on the prairie and one spring she realized she hadn’t heard them that year and she never did again …
I love the diction. The gap wide enough to throw a cat through will be recognized as a standard measure by people who grew up among country folks.
I also love the way the story handles the most important news of the era — the disappearance of an entire people from their homeland. It seems to me that most of the important stories are recognized in reflection, rather than in the breathless accounts of the day.
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