Moscow Author’s Short Stories Draw On Desert Country Roots
When you read a story by Brady Udall, you’re immediately transported to the bone-dry and lonely high desert country of eastern Arizona.
To Udall, it is a land populated by outcasts and reluctant rebels, the kind of characters who won’t stay, can’t leave and as a result end up punishing themselves - and those around them - with a feeling of anguish that’s as deep as it is undefined.
This anguish may be just an accident of geography.
After all, Udall - a 27-year-old husband and father who now lives on a 40-acre, tree-lined spread near Moscow - was born in St. Johns, Ariz., a tiny community that serves as the basis of Udall’s fictional worldview.
His lineage includes several generations of Mormons and at least two nationally prominent figures (former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Congressman Morris Udall), all of whom have roots that trace back to Salt Lake City and to the man - David King Udall - who was St. Johns’ founder.
“He was the one that Brigham Young sent down there,” Brady Udall said during a recent phone interview. David King Udall “was the guy in charge, and a lot of the family came with him,” Udall said of his great-great grandfather. “Now there are a lot of Udalls there. I’m related to about everybody in town.”
In conversation, Udall describes St. Johns, which lies some 10 miles west of the New Mexico border and 53 miles south of old Route 66, as “out in the boondocks” and “not close to anything.”
He has written, however, about the town’s “extraordinary geography.” Of how “it sits, completely isolated, on a wind-scrubbed plateau 6,000 feet above sea level and is surrounded by Indians on all sides; Hopi to the northwest, Navajo to the north, Apache to the south and southwest.
It is a town that could influence a child as much as the fictional town of Vernon does three young men in Udall’s story “Vernon” (which is included in his just-published short-story collection “Letting Loose the Hounds”):
“The twelve streetlights that line Main Street suddenly come on at the same time, surprising us. Nighthawks dive and chitter over the quiet houses. All around, on every horizon, are mountains, sharp and black in the distance, holding us in like walls.”
In such an atmosphere, at once insular and intimidating, Udall in real life played the good Mormon boy. He grew up worshipping in “a four-story cathedral-like church my great-grandfather built.” He attended Brigham Young University and later went on a mission to Brazil.
But through it all, something just didn’t feel right.
“Even though I am a Mormon, and all my family is Mormon, I’m not a conventional Mormon in any sense of the word,” Udall said. “I have empathy for people who don’t fit in because I never really thought that I did in such a strict and rigid place like St. Johns and in a family where everybody was doing great stuff. It was difficult.”
This feeling of displacement resonates throughout the 11 stories comprise Udall’s book, most of which were originally printed in such literary journals as The Paris Review and Story and in such magazines as GQ and Playboy.
In “Midnight Raid,” for example, Udall affects the voice of a 6-foot-3 Apache man who, in a drunken haze, breaks into the house of his ex-wife to give their son the promised gift of a pet goat. Yet after he does, having punched out his wife’s new husband in the process, he says, “I feel more lonely and lost than I ever have in my life; it’s as if I’ve been completely scraped out from the inside.”
The protagonist of “Buckeye the Elder” is a 25-year-old man struggling to live up to the demands of his newly adopted Mormon beliefs. When he suffers the inevitable fall, he explains it this way: “What can I say? I thought I was getting along fine and the next thing I know I’m face down in the dirt, right back were I started from.”
And “Snake” is the coming together of two distinct communities, white and Native American, over the shared anguish of a common pain.
“We sit there for a long time, me, Bud and my boy Cornelius,” says the elderly Native American narrator. “The dark is moving in from the hills, and I think about Opal, my own wife, who died having Cornelius. She put him into the world and was gone just like that, before I knew there was something wrong. And here we are now, three men sitting on a porch, three men with three dead wives.”
Udall follows common themes, among them drunkenness, basketball, lost love and the push-pull of home. His approach to each hardly seems typical of a strict Mormon.
“Yeah,” Udall agreed with a laugh, “they’re not very Mormon stories.”
Yet, in one sense, the stories are a continuation of the minor kinds of acting out that Udall did during his childhood.
“I didn’t have any huge rebellions where I went on drinking binges or anything like that,” he said. “My rebellion was always sort of an ideological rebellion about spiritual matters, about who we should try to be, that kind of thing.”
Minor as it’s been, though, Udall’s rebellions haven’t set well with all members of his family.
“There’s been quite a bit of embarrassment,” he said. “They’re embarrassed and proud at the same time. They don’t know what to think.”
Not all of them, at any rate.
“I had a story published in Playboy, and that caused a little controversy,” Udall said of “Buckeye the Elder.” “But somebody sent my grandmother that Playboy, and she cut out the pictures and put it on her coffee table.”
Perhaps she saw clearly what her grandson wants us all to see: that his stories are neither exploitative nor mere acts of rage against an isolated place and a strict religion.
As Udall said, “A lot of reviewers have mentioned all the stuff about being dark and full of outcasts and all that stuff, but the one they don’t usually mention - and I hope it’s there - is that people do find joy in one way or another in these stories. There’s happiness, and some people do find redemption.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: READING DATE Brady Udall will read from his collection of short stories, “Letting Loose the Hounds,” at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington in Spokane.