Could it be as simple as that my uncle saw, in his nervous rage and unnatural mood, that girl calling me down the road to sin, and he exploded? That he saw my fate coming to me in my teens, as his had, when he killed the man? Or was he needing a drink so badly that none of this mattered? I don’t know. After that bender he didn’t much follow up on any great concern for me. Maybe he gave up on himself.
It took seven years more. My father came and got me at my apartment in the college town and told me about his death, in a hospital over in that county. My father had white hair by then, and I remember watching his head bowed over, his arm over the shoulders of his own, their mother, my grandmother, with her own white-haired head bowed in grief no mother should bear. My grandmother repeated over and over the true fact that Peter was always “doing things, always his projects, always moving places.” His hands were busy, his feet were swift, his wife was bountifully well off, forever.
A man back in the twenties came to town and started a poker game. Men gathered and drank. Peter lost his money and started a fight. The man took a chair and repeatedly ground it into his face while Peter was on the floor. Peter went out into the town, found a pistol, came back, and shot the man. The brothers went about influencing the jury, noting that the victim was trash, an out-of-towner. The judge agreed. The victim was sentenced to remain dead. Peter was let go.
I’ve talked to my nephew about this. For years now I have dreamed I killed somebody. The body has been hidden, but certain people know I am guilty, and they show up and I know, deep within, what they are wanting, what this is all about. My nephew was nodding the whole while I was telling him this. He has dreamed this very thing, for years.
2000S: Long, Last Happy: New Stories
Fire Water
THE WOMEN FISHED FROM A RENTED ALUMINUM BOAT WITH THEIR own big electric trolling motor, handled well by Dr. Haxton, a white woman of eighty years, the same as Betty Dew. They both fished with stout cane poles and goldfish minnows bought at the gun and tackle store ten miles north in Holly Springs, where Betty Dew had one of the mansions Grant spared in his first defeated assay on Vicksburg. The old women fished studiously and in a mild ecstasy in the black-green waters of Wall Doxey Lake here in twilight with a foggy gloom already set. Early October. They were catching large saddle-blanket white crappie and had four bass over three pounds. They wore straw hats as in their youth, and they could not give up this fortunate day yet. They violated the curfew of the state park the same as in their youth. No sound but loud bullfrogs and tree frogs and thick crickets. Such a day will not come the same to them again, ever. They knew this and wore the darkening end of this Thursday like the gown of a happy ghost.
But something was very different suddenly.
A fire seemed to be leaping around the entirety of this lake on every verge but the sand beach and riprap around the boat ramp.
Neither woman spoke. At first the fire seemed a dream ignited by their last conversation, two moving mouths alone on the lake, the boat tied to a lesser of the hundreds of dead cypress trunks when no fish bit for a half hour.
Both were literary women. Betty Dew had an expensive education and was an MD with a residency in pediatrics before she found she was terrified by children and parents and became an emeritus overnight. She rode a bicycle everywhere in this hill country of north Mississippi. She wrote poems, had received second place or honorable mention in half a hundred contests. She read with the young at the late-night open-mike poetry slams in the bars of Oxford.
Dr. Jo Haxton had been a neurosurgeon forty years. She was seventh in a family of nine geniuses in Greenville. She wrote quiet novels about villages of no ascertainable geography, real but hard-edged, too. Her theme was fairly constant. Small acts of kindness and charity countervened by such horror wherein nothing availed except violence by gentle persons. Perhaps inspired by the Civil War, but whose, ever? Her books were acclaimed by highbrow and middle. They sold well.
The fire caught up in all points of the compass, running, almost speaking in snaps of twigs mad orange all suddenly. But now they saw a darker high fire in and around an edifice two hundred yards south of them. It was a church here in the sticks that neither knew existed. A steeple, meager as blacks or poor whites could afford, covered by asbestos siding, which bore up for a few minutes. It was the last to fall into a heart of black and purple as the whole structure went down, wracking, gnashing what teeth were left. And briefly a crackling Japanese kind of song. Perhaps the piano was perishing. Loud spangs, then back to silence. It’s when the women thought and connected in great fright. The church, temple, and mosque burnings in the north half of this state and up through Memphis. One church exploded right by one of the grand casinos in Tunica, poorest county in the USA.
These healthy and astute women, pioneers long before feminism sucked its first tit and screamed, wanted off the lake and out of the dusk very badly. Dr. Haxton untied the stern rope and turned the throttle to full 5. They looked shoreward for a tall ranger with a pistol, but the park was dead, cabins and resident warden house dark, while the ring of fire dulled, then jumped in places where it got hold of straw grass and dead willows. But the church was the main nightmare, orange now, then green and yakking with a sound like burned souls would make.
Their last conversation haunted them.
They talked about a private fire, a grand bomb of organ music, about the fire in the bottle neither of them had a taste for, not the volume that white-heated his brain and forced silence into a hill march of county citizens puny and eloquent as God on the page. Compared, they were only mild grannies with a patient lightbulb inside. Some lucky flashes somedays, Betty Dew whispered to Jo in the throes of another poem. Jo spoke back low, limpid, and kind, remembering him alive. The little man of the manor on Old Taylor Road. He seemed weary of his daily resurrection. Both of them had worked in the shadow of this statue. Faulkner. Damn the organ tones, the way he wrote like an octopus with pencils. Sullen fire ran through all his books, the organ in his head brought forth by firewater so intense he couldn’t allow victrola music in the house, even when he was sealed behind his workroom door, where he lived with the falls and rises of geography beset by two-legged fires.
Or could you think all this while in this panic of curiosity, of hard-on terror? Jo wondered. When they were ten feet from the beach the two old ladies climbed as one mind out of the johnboat and walked in a foot of cold October water — to hell with the boat, the gear, the fish — to where fire wasn’t. On dry land in wet sneakers they heard something huge thrash in the water behind them. Impossible. A fat beaver dropped from thirty feet couldn’t make that noise. Maybe a gator, but they’d never seen one in the lake of Wall Doxey. This was not literary at all. Two women of eighty wracked by emphysemic gasping and deep chill.
Out close to the loosened boat in ten feet of lake, then coming toward them slowly in only a fathom, was the head and shoulders of a giant male who could have come from nowhere but the bottom of this black spring-fed pond with dying fires around it, the church beyond still showering sparks into the purple. Almost, I’m almost dead, Betty Dew whispered. The man was seeking them. He began the moan and the tale.
Jimmy Canarsis, seven-foot savant, was known to exist by very few. Because Jimmy, devout Christian, played the piano in the church, all day, every day, alone except Sundays and Wednesday nights, when others of the tiny flock gathered around him. He was always already there then they came. The church had caught fire and swiftly. He was surrounded by it on the bench in front of the keyboard before the flames got his attention and thus was badly burned walking out of it. Exploding cheap stained glass from the windows raked his face before he made his own door getting out the back of the church. He sensed a vacuum of the steeple high behind him taking the air from his lungs and scorching the meat that remained of them. So he walked up the beaver-sieved dam and then walked through the lake on its bottom since he could not swim. He had no fear of the water, he just could not swim it. Water is good, he thought, the way the cold springs soothed his burns and cuts. The shadowed ocher not on fire was his reckoning. Head at last out of the water he saw the two human figures, their boat floating near him. He reckoned these creatures were the arsonists so he would beat them as much as the Holy Lord would allow. It seemed like in the Old Testament you could beat on a multitude of folks but in the New, Jesus was not like your football coach screaming for you to kill somebody. Because Jimmy Canarsis had played some ball for Holly Springs in his last grade of school, either the tenth or the fourth. “But ball now, they said play it but wasn’t nobody hardly playing but flatout cracking faces or attempting to chop a fellow’s knees off, and the rest of them were running away. Say you were playing Byhalia and four of them was eviling on me, testicles or eyes or I’ve had an old farm boy with them hard hands like a Chickasaw spearhead rammed clear through past my aner. I’m going to crack these’s heads until the police can come get them, but wait, these is two old women and I’m burnt to agony out of that water. Or you’d have Olive Branch or Coma, their teams weren’t nothing but so they was just out to prove something it didn’t matter, offense or defense, all eleven of them would run straight at me and lay me out every play of the game and the coaches screaming at me to be tough Jimmy, these boys ain’t even up to your tits, kill one and the others would just quit, and we’d be like ninety to two over them, they only wanted to tell their sons or grandchildren they once laid out a seven-foot man, so that’s our family story and I’m’on go ahead and die now, tell them that’s the way it was, and one that played church piano. One game the only play we had was hand off to me up the middle, over and over. The little boy quarterback never learned that one play right, he kept getting in my route down the center’s back. I’m not fast or he’d of been in the hospital more than the four times he was, flattened over like a scarecrow man fell off his stick.”