Homerville
2005 · Editorial guidance from Bob Crowe
Homerville is a book of linked short stories — part fiction, part remembered fact — set in a small central Illinois town that is really every town Ken Bradbury grew up in and around. Through a gallery of unforgettable characters — Darby Sitton, the miserly richest man in town who relieved himself nightly from a twelve-foot throne; Ferd and Rob, the near-blind barber brothers; Ma Runkel, who went on fixing breakfast for a son seventeen years dead; Harold Bright, the bookseller who escaped Christmas dinner into the pages of Henry James — Ken built a portrait of a place and a people that were already passing into memory. The stories shift between first and third person, between tall tale and tender elegy, all bound together by the town itself.
The manuscript was developed around 2005 with editorial correspondence from his friend Bob Crowe, who urged Ken to frame the collection as "a book about revisiting the town where you grew up," its stories "spawned by reflections upon such things as an empty lot where a house once stood, a forlorn grave, and an old piano." Crowe's note captures what Ken was after: "today, many of these people would be locked-up or sedated. These are people from a time gone by … small towns gone into history."
The book opens by setting the town in deep time, in Ken's own words:
The first glacier gave birth to Homerville 150,000 years ago as a continent of ice swallowed up everything southward to St. Louis. When the ice beat its melting retreat northward, it coughed up Homerville and left the town's present topography … a clump of rich, black dirt.
Homerville…. Nine streets north and south, three and a piece east and west, with a few trees older than the western states. The town was a history of Western Illinois in miniature. Once a thriving little settlement of commerce and trade, it was now the final home of retired men who still wore "real work pants" instead of bluejeans, women who got their hair done once a week, and just enough younger families to make a grade school worthwhile.
The major exports of Homerville were long-told stories, way too many tomatoes, and a few decent basketball players.
And Ken's gift for the small-town character is on full display in the opening of "Darby's Throne":
Darby Sitton lived just east of us on the west edge of town. His rambling two-story frame house was a jumble of repairs, patches, and just plain poor fixing. Everything in Darby's life was done on the cheap. If a door fell off, he nailed it shut and used another. His broken windows all said, "SEARS" as packing crates were duct-taped across the cracks. Darby Sitton was the richest man in town and he had earned his money one cheap fix after another.
The town, Ken wrote, "seems to be waiting but for nothing in particular. It's a good place to wait and will continue to do so until the next glacier comes along."