My Southern Journey (25 page)

“A dead mule was such a big thing my mind couldn’t really gather it in,” wrote Barry Hannah in
Geronimo Rex.
“I had to think about him in pieces...”

They have been worked to death, bludgeoned, asphyxiated (by accident and on purpose), run over, shot (by accident and on purpose), bitten by rabid dogs, stabbed, starved, frozen, herded into the barren plain to perish of thirst, driven mad by erroneously administered castor oil (the less said about this the better), led out to be murdered on the blind curve of a train track, and, in Capote’s
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
hung from a chandelier.

They have been killed by Larry McMurtry, Richard Wright, Reynolds Price, Larry Brown, Robert Morgan, Jack Farris, Kaye Gibbons, Clyde Edgerton... everybody who is anybody. The most inventive is Cormac McCarthy, who had one beheaded by an unbalanced opera singer.

In modern-day literature, whippersnappers who wouldn’t know a mule from a hole in the ground are killing mules by the caravan. Faulkner, at least, knew mules. “A mule,” he wrote famously, “will labor 10 years willingly and patiently, for the privilege of kicking you once.” A painting of one still sits on the mantel of his study at Rowan Oak, overlooking his portable Underwood, like an angel.

I grew up on stories of noble mules. The mule meant survival for my grandparents in the 1930s. I hate to see the hardworking beasts herded off cliffs and broiled in wildfires. Then again, I can cast no stones. In my first mule story, my Uncle Jimbo won a bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on one.

But that mule was dead when we found him.

WORDS ON PAPER

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: January 2012

H
ere, between the shelves, I escape everything worrisome, petty, mundane. In late afternoon, as the weak winter sun begins its slide, pale yellow light washes through the west-side window of my office in Fairhope, Alabama, and something like magic floods the room. I sit in a big, soft chair, and the words that are bound here come loose all around me.

French cavalrymen on white horses charge through shifting shadows on the wall above my desk, as Lord Nelson, Fletcher Christian, and Captain Horatio Hornblower set sail across the floor. In one corner, Bedouins glide on camels across a void of Sheetrock, while, in another, Sherlock Holmes grapples to the death with Professor Moriarty on the lip of a high shelf. Here, Willie Stark sits with Atticus Finch, Ishmael leans against Ignatius Reilly, and the Snopeses rub elbows with Shakespeare. It lasts only a little while, this glow, until the sun descends toward the dark trees somewhere across the Mississippi line, but not before Woodrow Call keeps his promise to Augustus McCrae, George Smiley sends one more spy into the cold, and Elmer Gantry does a hook slide for Jesus in the last, fading light of the day.

I know that the world of reading has forever changed, that, in this cold winter, many people who love a good book will embrace one that runs on batteries. I know that many of you woke up
Christmas morning to find that Santa graced your house with an iPad, or a Kindle, or a Nook, or some other plastic thing that will hold a whole library on a doodad the size of a guitar pick. Some of you may be reading one of my books or stories on one today, which is, of course, perfectly all right, and even a sign of high intelligence. Someday, I may have to read
The Grapes of Wrath
on the side of a toaster myself. I am hopeful when young people say, “I read you on the Kindle,” because it means they are at least reading, and reading me, which means my writing life is somehow welcome in whatever frightening future awaits.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent
Harry Potter.
I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

Here, not far from the shores of Mobile Bay and the white sands of the Gulf, is a limitless world of
Gallipoli, Sanctuary, Tennyson’s Poetry, The Comedians, Riders of the Purple Sage, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Of Mice and Men, The Last of the Mohicans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Christmas Carol,
Brave Men, An Outside Chance, Cold Mountain, Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, Blood Meridian, The Prince of Tides, Goodbye, Mr. Chips,
and a slightly molded flea market copy of
Dixie City Jam
.

It is not just the stories, but the physical book, the way I feel when I see the spines, when I read the titles, the very feel of the paper under my fingers as I turn the pages. I see the words
Lonesome
Dove
and I see the beauty and great cost of true friendship, played out in a wild, wild West. Every book comes alive in my mind. I like to be in that company.

Cicero said a room without books is like a body without a soul, but I don’t know about that. I just know I like to have them close, when the sun goes down.

WOOD, PAINT, NAILS, AND SOUL

GQ
, June 2002

I
t has doves under the eaves of the back porch. I hear them, hear that lonesome, gentle sound, when I wake up in the morning and stagger to the kitchen over the 100-year-old pine planks and nail heads so old they have turned black as pitch.

I stand there and just watch them, sometimes, at the French doors leading out to the plain brick courtyard that is my entire backyard, watch them dance around the barbs of the bougainvillea, the same bush that the winters always kill down to a stob in January but magically swirls out from that dead nub like a purple fountain by mid-May. Winter isn’t much in New Orleans, true, but cold is cold and dead is dead, and yet that plant rises like Lazarus without any help from me and does its duty, which is to be as pretty a thing as there is on this earth.

It has ornate, curving spandrels—I call them buttresses but I am ignorant of the finer points of architecture—that support the front porch, and that, along with the wooden, slatted shutters, adds character to this shotgun double that was built for working people 100 years ago. From a distance, and with a bit of imagination, those carvings—what some people call steamboat carvings—make the front of the house look like a ship pushing its way up the black river of Annunciation Street. It is painted yellow, but not a pale, sissy, dollhouse kind of yellow. It is a dark, golden yellow, trimmed
in olive and some traces of red, and it looks a little bit Caribbean and a little bit Southern, but mostly it just looks like Uptown, New Orleans.

It has a back porch that runs the length of the whole house, sheltered by a lean-to roof, and I would sit out there a lot more if it wasn’t for the mosquitoes that seem to thrive in every season except ice storms, and we haven’t had one of them since I’ve been here. But I ignore them sometimes and sit outside with my friends and tell lies and stories while they sip on Abitas and I nurse a glass of watery iced tea, which has been about the strongest thing I’ve had to drink in a long time. I don’t want to be a drunk writer in New Orleans. I would miss too much. The porch shelters some old, sun-blasted banana leaf chairs that I bought in Miami a long time ago, a cast-iron barbecue grill in the shape of a pig, and a punching bag that I beat the mortal hell out of when I am mad at life and editors and my own damn self. It does not have any wind chimes, hanging plants, garden trolls, welcome mats that say my name (because if anybody ever comes in my house through the back door I had better by God have invited them), ship’s bells, cat scratching posts, and hummingbird feeders. I love hummingbirds, but my eyes are getting weak and they are hard to enjoy without squinting. It’s like having to bend over to pet a short dog.

It has six fireplaces. It has ceilings so high you have to have a serious ladder to change a lightbulb. It has ceiling fans that spin half-heartedly through the summer heat doing no good at all, and an air-conditioning unit strong enough to chill the world squatting on the roof of the porch like a big Buddha, which does do some good—some heat-spanking good. It would be more picturesque to sweat like a hog in a parking lot, I guess, dripping sweat onto the keys of my Underwood and into the tepid brown lake of my bourbon glass, but as long as I can pay the robber barons at the power company my monthly ransom, I think I’ll chill.

It has termites, and though I know it is silly I lie in bed sometimes at night and listen to munching sounds. I only hope that, if they ever do eat the support beams out from under me, I kill a few of them as I fall through the floor. It has, once a month, a palmetto bug the size of a small kitten that darts from under the refrigerator and makes a crazed dash across the kitchen. I chase. I slip. I stub my toe. As far as I know it’s the same damn bug making the same damn dash for… for what? All the little @#%!#*% ever does is run out into the middle of the floor until he is certain that I see
him, then heads back in the same direction. He may just be messing with me.

It has the pictures of my people, the books I love, the music I hear. I guess it is really just a wooden box to hold a life in, for days or decades, until someone else takes it over. But in my little house at the corner of Joseph and Annunciation Street I have found something good, something solid, even if it does sit 7 feet below sea level in a termite-haunted city that every meteorological expert in America swears is doomed as soon as the next big hurricane comes barreling at us up from the Gulf of Mexico.

It is the same feeling I get when I walk in my mama’s kitchen in Alabama, or when I knock on my Aunt Juanita’s door and hear her Feist dogs growl, or climb the steps to my Aunt Jo’s porch with an armload of Christmas presents on December 24.

I guess it just feels like home.

It is not a rich guy’s house. It was built around the turn of the century—that other one—by real craftsmen who did not have nail guns or snarling power saws or prefabricated anything.

Every nail in it was driven with the force of a strong man’s hand, and I don’t really know why that matters to me but it does. Every piece of wood was handled and measured and cut with that same strength, and that matters, too.

It may be foolish to think it, but I think maybe it is a better house, a tighter house, because of that. I wish I knew who built it. I would like to shake their hand, as if I could divine the artistry there in the calluses and the thick, blackened nails that every good carpenter has.

They built it on the pudding-like ground of the gentle slope of the levee in a time when sweating men still unloaded the massive freighters with pure muscle, built it on piers of red brick sunk deep into the shifting earth that is dry as salt in droughts and gummy, even mushy, when the rain comes down too hard and too much. They did not get fancy, just dropped a frame of good wood on those piers, and over the century the ground shifted under and around it the way the ground does here, but the house stayed mostly level—which makes it a damn good and lucky house.