This is a story Tom, my barber, told as I sat in his chair. I wrote it down soon after I left his shop, so I could get his words as true as possible.

Mike and Johnny Phelan were brothers. Their father Francie was an attorney in Fort Madison. He had a cabin on the hill above Montrose, up where my brother lives, but on the other end of the loop that goes around up there. That little gray place on the end. When they got to college, Mike and Johnny would bring girls back there for the weekend.

Johnny wound up getting stabbed to death in Bonaparte one night. Francie swore he’d get to the bottom of his son’s death, and when he did, it wasn’t pretty. Johnny was always taking it outside with guys. He was always saying something to get a guy mad, and him and the guy would end up taking it outside. One night, outside, the guy stabbed him. Maybe Johnny had got the best of him before, but this time the guy stabbed him with a knife. Stabbed him till he was dead. Over in Bonaparte.

Mike wasn’t like that. He was bigger than Johnny, but he never fought. Only trouble he ever got in, one night he let a pig loose in The Palms, that supper club on the west side of Fort Madison. He got in back somehow. It must have been late at night, after they were closed, after ten. Mike wasn’t the kind of guy to let a pig loose in there at 6 PM when the supper crowd was there, so it had to have been in the middle of the night. He got the backdoor open and set the pig loose in the kitchen, then closed the door. The guy who came to work early next morning found the pig and had to clean it all up.

This story breaks rules. Tom skipped every opportunity to give specifics. How did Francie “get to the bottom of his son’s murder?” and what happened to the murderer. How’s a guy get a nickname like Francie? No explanation of why Mike let a pig into the Palms, or what happened to him because of it.

There are three kinds of plot. Dramatic plot is action-focused. Thematic plot is focused on Big Questions the story deals with. Emotional development plot is character-focused. Tom’s story was all and only about the two brothers and the contrast between them. He adhered strictly to that purpose, not allowing the specifics of action, conflict, and their resolution to interfere. I didn’t mind not knowing the details — although next I get a hair cut, I might ask — out of respect to the storyteller because they weren’t important to him in the telling.