Oral History (9781101565612) (39 page)
Read Oral History (9781101565612) Online
Authors: Lee Smith
“Go on,” Jennifer whispers. Each word bites into the dark. “Tell me. I want to know.”
But Al throws back his head and laughs and laughs. “Well, it
might
have been pneumonia.” He is talking real loud now. “Hell, maybe it
was
pneumonia. Or maybe it was complications. There's people die of complications all the time. Anyway, you can't take all that too serious-like. You take that tape recorder on back now and I hope you get a hundred on it. You come back sometime and see us again. And drive careful now, you hear?”
might
have been pneumonia.” He is talking real loud now. “Hell, maybe it
was
pneumonia. Or maybe it was complications. There's people die of complications all the time. Anyway, you can't take all that too serious-like. You take that tape recorder on back now and I hope you get a hundred on it. You come back sometime and see us again. And drive careful now, you hear?”
This makes Jennifer feel a whole lot better. But when he opens the door of the Toyota for her, just before she can get in, her uncle Al grabs her right up off her feet and kisses her so hard that stars smash in front of her eyes. Al sticks his tongue inside her mouth. Then before Jennifer can even think what is happening to her, Al lets go of her and she drops back against the open door. “Drive careful,” he says. He walks across the yard and helps his daddy inside, and then they all are gone. Jennifer backs up so fast she slams into the bumper of Al's van. Then she's gone too, off down the holler like a streak, crying and crying and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
But by the time she gets back to the college, Jennifer has stopped crying and gotten a hold on herself. She has changed it all around in her head. Al is nothing but a big old bully, a joker, after all. They still live so close to the land, all of them. Some things may seem modern, like the van, but they're not, not really. They are really very primitive people, resembling nothing so much as some sort of early tribe. Crude jokes and animal instinctsâit's the other side of the pastoral coin.
Jennifer's tape, when she plays it, will have enough banging and crashing and wild laughter on it to satisfy even the most hardened cynic in the class. Jennifer will make an A for the course. Jennifer will marry Dr. Bernie Ripman the summer after she graduates from college, and her stepmother will give a dramatic reading from the works of Kahlil Gibran at the ceremony. Jennifer will not send a wedding invitation to any of her real mother's family in Hoot Owl Holler: not to Ora Mae, or Al, or Debra, or even to Little Luther. And even though in later years her husband will urge her to go back there and take him, and even though in a way she intends to, Jennifer will never get around to going back over there, and then when she and Dr. Bernie Ripman move to Chicago, it becomes clear that she never will. Jennifer will never see any of them again.
Eventually, Debra will have a hysterectomy. Roscoe will win a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina; Troy will start a rock group; Sally and Roy will buy a retirement house at Claytor Lake where they will continue to live out their long and happy lives; Suzy Q will marry young; old Richard Burlage will write his memoirs and they will be published, to universal if somewhat limited acclaim, by LSU Press; Little Luther and Ora Mae will get sick one by one and then die. Donnie Osborne, institutionalized for years, will grow older and older fashioning the dowels he especially loves to make in the prison workshop, the smoothly rounded, tapering, perfectly symmetrical beautiful wood. Al will be elected president of the Junior Toastmasters Club. Then he will make a killing in AmWay and retire from it young, sinking his money in land. He will be a major investor in the ski run which will be built, eventually, on the side of Black Rock Mountain. The success of this enterprise will inspire him to embark on his grandest plan yet: Ghostland, the wildly successful theme park and recreation area (campground, motel, Olympic-size pool, waterslide and gift shop) in Hoot Owl Holler. Ghostland, designed by a Nashville architect, will be the prettiest theme park east of Opryland itself, its rides and amusements terraced up and down the steep holler, its skylift zooming up and down from the burial ground where the cafeteria is. And the old homeplace still stands, smack in the middle of Ghostland, untouched. Vines grow up through the porch where the rocking chair sits, and the south wall of the house has fallen in. It's surrounded by a chain link fence, fronted by the observation deck with redwood benches which fill up every summer night at sunset with those who have paid the extra $4.50 to be here, to sit in this cool misty hush while the shadows lengthen from the three mountainsâHoot Owl, Snowman, and Hurricaneâwhile the night settles in, to be here when dark comes and the wind and the laughter start, to see it with their own eyes when that rocking chair starts rocking and rocks like crazy the whole night long.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Smith is the author of fifteen works of fiction, including
Oral History
,
Fair and Tender Ladies
, and her recent
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel
The Last Girls
was a
New York Times
bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in North Carolina.
Oral History
,
Fair and Tender Ladies
, and her recent
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel
The Last Girls
was a
New York Times
bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in North Carolina.
Berkley titles by Lee Smith
Â
THE DEVIL'S DREAM
FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
ORAL HISTORY
FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
ORAL HISTORY
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