Breeding

Jim Matheson is a fixture in Denton.

If you’ve spent a day on the downtown Square — or just an hour — you’ve seen him.

Matheson is tall, slim and usually appears in well-worn denim and a long sleeve shirt. He almost always wears a hat, often one he’s made himself out of leather. He’s got a slightly mussed beard and bright blue eyes.

The retired salesman spends his days between Jupiter House, a comfy, smoke-free cafe, and the Downtown Mini-Mall. He’s got a booth at the Mini-Mall, where he sells his books and the leather knickknacks he makes. He sweeps trash off the Square’s wide sidewalks. He moves with a purpose.

Matheson is a longtime writer — without a big publisher. He’s settled for the small press, and Tattersall Publish­ing, a Denton press, has just put out his collection of Lil’ Bit stories in a collection titled Lil’ Bit of Jim Matheson.

Dallas Morning-News file photo/Nathan Hunsinger

Writer Jim Matheson sits in one of his regular spots, in front of the Downtown Mini-Mall II, last February. Matheson sells his handmade leather hats in the shop on the Square.

As a member of the Denton Writers League and the Den­ton Poets Assembly, Matheson isn’t surprised that he has words inside of him. He’s surprised that he got them into a book that spans 411 pages.

“I don’t know that I’d have done this if I wasn’t with the writers league or the poets assembly,” Matheson said. “You take an English flunky and turn him into a writer. That says something about the writers league.”

Looking at his collected writing, the fresh-faced Lil’ Bit is the root of his work. Lil’ Bit, an orphan and protagonist of the short story “Lil’ Bit’s Heart of Christmas,” is a plucky and jaded youth named Joey. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s an older child in a place where older siblings are overlooked in favor of their infant siblings, a double-whammy of rejection and separation.

His life changes when he meets a vagabond named Old Joe, who lost his voice and an ear to the war, and finds family in more ways than one.

The Christmas story is published with seven other stories. Three of them are about Lil’ Bit and his family, and then there’s “The Valentine Card,” a story about a farmer and an Indian woman. “She Rode Dinosaurs” is a science-fiction story, and “The Pasternak Letters” is a work of historical fiction. The collection ends with Mathe­son’s poetry, and this is where things get really good.

It’s where you learn that Matheson almost got to show some song lyrics to the Moody Blues when he was living in California, and that he was able to show his verses to Jerome Kern himself.

It’s also where we meet Joey the orphan for the first time. Matheson recalls sitting in a coffee shop, wearing an old pair of leather pants, a crumpled green leather hat and writes “my beard was fully grown, thick and red. My mustache was waxed into longhorns.”

He’s sketching a cartoon of a character he called Lil’ Bit when he sees the boy.

“The child looked like someone had loaded a cannon full of freckles and speckled him through the screen door of his doctor’s delivery room,” Matheson writes. “I mean, this kiddo must have tripped in a puddle of freckles on the way to his birthday. He turned toward his mama, after both of them has cast a sideways glance at me. ‘Freckles’ said rudely, in the common L.A. child’s manners of irascibility, ‘Take me back to the doctor and get all these freckles off.’ He had de­manded without a ‘please’ or any measure of respect due courtesy toward his mother.”

At this point in his book, Matheson smothers his irritation at the boy he calls a brat. Instead, he questions him.

“What? What about the friendly freckle fiends?”

He created the poem “Friendly Freckle Fiends” on the spot, then wrote it out for the boy’s mother. The fiends ended up in “Lil’ Bit’s Heart of Christmas,” as did the boy with the freckles — he be­came Lil’ Bit.

Ultimately, Matheson wrote the Christmas story for spiritual reasons.

“The reason we have Christ­mas in the world, well, it’s still about widows and orphans. It doesn’t matter where they are or what religion they are. They are there, and Christmas is for them,” he said.

For Matheson, the seed of his collection, the heart of Lil’ Bit, is that hope belongs to everyone. Everyone, after all, will lose parents and lovers.

Even if big presses haven’t come calling, Sara Hickman did several years ago. The singer-songwriter read Mathe­son’s lullaby in “Lil’ Bit’s Heart of Christ­mas” and recorded it on one of her albums.

As for the other stories in the collection, home and family are constant themes. They run on as steady as the horizon.

“There is something about home,” Matheson said. “Kids will do just about anything — including, sometimes, committing suicide — to get away from home. Then, when they’re older, they do just about anything to get back home. I think we’re all interested in our roots, our genealogy. Even widows and orphans want to know their family history or get close to it.

“It’s that question: ‘What’s your story?’”