Thursday's Columns
January 1, 2026
Our
Story
by
Lawrence Abby Gauthier
ace reporter
The Westphalia Periodic News
I’ve started to work on my novel again. I think I’ve decided to call it “The Biggest Story in the World.”
That’s what I was working on before I decided to create a publishing company going on four years ago now. I called the company Westphalia Publishing, Ltd., incorporated in the State of Colorado. I named it Westphalia in honor of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended Europe’s 30 Years War.
The business quickly consumed all my creative time and I had to put the novel down. But now that the business is running more smoothly, I’ve started looking at the novel again.
Pages of the novel were pouring out during Covid. I was just banging it out, up over 80,000 words and rising. I was obsessed. I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop searching for an end. But then I had to put it down to start a business editing and publishing other people’s work. I continued writing, but it was for a weekly column, not the novel. They're different.
After deciding to take a look at the novel again and then spending days searching for the old documents in old files in my old computer, I quickly realized that the problem was not the illusive end, but the beginning. The beginning has to contain the end. Like a morphogenic idea, the original idea. Like original sin can get you heading off in the wrong direction with predictable consequences, the opposite should be true too.
Originally, I thought the novel would lead me to a scene at the end where the protagonist wins the biggest prize.
I can see now that that needs to be the beginning. What we do
after
winning the biggest prize... That’s the story.
The Biggest Story in the Word
Chapter One:
The Prize
One morning Benny found a bullet hole in his car as a warning. Earlier, he’d been roughed up by some East St. Louis toughs who worked for the country treasurer who was defrauding the county and Benny was slowly, methodically, revealing the truth in a series of stories in the local newspaper where he was an up-and-coming young hot shot reporter.
The treasurer was destroyed and his little gang of toughs on the county payroll had to find real jobs.
The Inland Daily Press Association, an association of mid-sized newspapers in the Midwest, awarded him first place in the prestigious category of investigative reporting.
It was 1976, and because it was the nation’s Bicentennial, the association decided to hold its annual awards banquet in a special place – on the replica of a 19th century Mississippi riverboat/casino docked along the St. Louis riverfront, in the river to avoid state gambling laws.
After everybody was good and liquored up the time came to hand out the awards. A booming mechanical voice pierced through the noise of a Dixieland band and the shrieks and hubbub coming from the casino area.
From where he was leaning up against the boat’s ornate railings, Benny looked out at the St. Louis skyline, the Gateway Arch, where a people began their journey into an unknown frontier.
Looking down, the waters of the continent’s land between the mountains silently washed around and past the boat as if it had never existed.
Benny wondered: “What exists.”
He was high on the free booze brought to him by a cocktail waitress in a short dress. “All this is for me,” he said to her. “Sure, mister,” she said.
“The awards ceremony is about to begin,” the voice over the loudspeaker announced again. “Everybody please proceed to the main banquet hall. Drinks will be served at your tables.”
The winners of the top prizes were being seated at the head table on a raised platform looking out and over the noisy banquet hall.
O’Rourke was up there as editor of the newsroom that had produced the first-place entry in the prestigious category of investigative reporting. Elmer White was up there, too. He was receiving a special recognition award for “twenty years of dedicated service to the newspaper industry” as the long-time president of the Michigan Press Association.
O’Rourke and Elmer White had been Benny’s first mentors.
O’Rourke, a tough Irishman, had been his first city editor. White had gotten him his first job. They were seated on either side of Benny’s chair, but as the master of ceremonies asked everybody to settle down so the awards ceremony could begin, there was one empty seat at the head table. People started looking around and asking: “Where’s Profante?”
Somebody said they’d seen him leaning over the railing not twenty minutes before. Nobody said it, but some thought that maybe he’d gone overboard and was in the river struggling against a mighty current to get to shore.
But then some others said they’d seen him staggering down the gangplank like a drunken sailor.
The Greyhound depot was a 15 minute walk from the riverfront. It took him hours to get there, stopping by jazz clubs along the way where sometimes he’d join in on jam sessions, improvising on his silver flute. So he knew people there and somebody slipped him a pill and wished him well.
At the cavernous Greyhound bus depot, he bought a one-way ticket to Rollo, Missouri, just because it was the name of his favorite candy bar.
He’d never been to Rollo before. It was halfway across Missouri on I-64, the original path of Route 66 of American road lore.
He wanted to put St. Louis behind him quickly before he changed his mind.
He had no idea what he was going to do after he got to Rollo.
All he had with him were the clothes he was wearing — a new sport coat and slacks he’d bought at J.C. Penny’s to look professional for the big event; a used pair of wing tips on loan from O’Rourke; and a white shirt and a blue tie and matching socks. He also had his wallet and his notebook and a pen. The first thing Elmer White had told him about being a newspaper reporter was to never go anywhere without a notebook and something to write with.
The bus wouldn’t be leaving for three hours, maybe four.
By 2 a.m. the downtown St. Louis bus depot was mostly empty, with just a scattering of sleep deprived people milling about like twigs caught in a trout stream eddy.
Benny had a good spot on a bench and watched what was going on around him.
He tried not to think.
But just watch.
And smell.
The pill was taking effect.
When suddenly out of nowhere he had a bean vision and he could see it… It, all of it, from beginning to end all at once in an instant.
It was a big story, maybe the biggest in the world, and he was a newspaper reporter, higher than a kite, and maybe someday he’d win a Pulitzer Prize and wouldn’t his folks back in the old home town be proud and want to tell everybody about it. Maybe he’d get on the Johnny Carson show.
He got out his pen and notebook and wrote down the biggest story in the world:
Greyhound Depot
St. Louis, 2 AM
desolation angels
scattered flock
pretty Chinese girl
the smell of lilac!
He read and reread what he’d written several times.
It looked like a poem.
He thought it looked pretty good.
He tore the page out of the notebook, folded it and put it in his wallet. Maybe someday he would have it framed… his first poem. It was a start. Maybe someday he’d become what he’d set out to become in the first place — not a newspaper reporter or a poet, but a writer, whatever that meant.
