When Effie saw Cosby Puckett out of the corner of her sight she saw a woman with a want. Not some innocent school girl who sat studying a bunch of books on her momma’s porch. Letting on, like she always did, that she was too shy to smile at a man and too innocent to notice one smiling at her. And Lord didn’t they! All of them. Even Effie’s husband. Especially, Effie’s husband. But Calvin was only flesh and that was the way of the world. Effie nor nobody else could help that none. Ever since Eve came along with all her nakedness some woman had been trying to temp some other woman’s man into doing something he would never have done without her. Effie’s mother had taught her this when she was no more than a girl herself, and she had been able to see such things with half an eye ever since.

Someone died and I was sitting on a set of concrete steps that belonged to a neighbour thinking “I’ve been ostracized and I don’t even care.” My head hurt from the weight of itself and when I tried to turn it, to unstick the glue that made it stuck, I saw the neighbour whose steps I sat upon and it was Nick Clooney.

I thought ‘this is childhood’ because he was always in mine. Smiling. Sitting on a stool and talking up silver screens and things. Making me feel a little better about the varnished walls and green shag carpet that made me feel so bad.

Nick Clooney.

He sat down beside me and said “just breathe” and I said “they call it putting on airs if you don’t have a criminal record.” It was true and we both knew it and I tried to breathe like he told me to do. Because breathing is a true thing too.

Henry sits down and looks out the window and tries to think, for just a moment, about what he doesn’t want to think about. About the thing he knows is there, but can’t quite work out.

“Down the drain. Down the stairs. Out the door. Hit the floor!”

It’s like counting sheep for the…

“Wide awake and ruminate!”

Sometimes he wishes his brain would stop. Would freeze. Right there. Right now. Right where it is. But this invariably leads him to thinking about how horrible something like not thinking would be.

“I’d be a vegetable! And vegetables are dull. Dull as beetroot. Boring as cabbage soup. Potato head! Not really a term of endearment, is it? No one likes vegetables. No one wants to be like a vegetable.”

He thinks all this in one long solid thought. And it makes him tired.

But still, he thinks. And he keeps on thinking and wishing he couldn’t and knowing, all the same, he wouldn’t have it any other way. Because Henry keeps company with misery just like his neighbours keep company with each other and the hands of a clock keep company with the time.

Because misery – and this is the thing that’s seen and unseen and something he no longer tries to dissuade himself of – misery is the only thing he has in common with every other human being on the planet; and “…aint that just a bitch.”

Today’s Writing

“Sheep is the gentlest things. And they can walk a fence better than any goat.”

(photo via sharon montrose prints)

“It is much better to write small things than big ones: they are unpretentious and successful.” – Chekhov

Anton tells me to keep it simple. And I feel stupid every time I read his letter to Moscow literary critique Madame M.V. Kiselyov. In it he says he has written a play (Swan Song) in one hour and five minutes – it will take fifteen to twenty minutes to act.

Today’s Writing

The only thing people noticed that summer was the beauty of the creature. The way she held her head when she spoke. Or parted her lips when she smiled. The way her eyes seemed to shine with see-through innocence, and the soft purr her voice made when she laughed. She was everything a woman ought to have been, thought the town’s pastor, once, twice, more times than he would ever let his mouth or soul admit.

A shining example. That’s what they said. More than one person called her an angel. And it made sense, because that’s what she was.

It was two in the morning when the devil came to Cunning County. Wearing a white dress and blond hair and an unholy glory that made everyone who met her want to share in that sense of something that made her who she was.

“You should take something ordinary, something from ordinary life, without a plot or an ending.” – Chekhov

I began with this photo by Anna Moller. Reminds me of the green behind the house The Euro grew up in. Ordinary enough. But I didn’t follow Anton’s directions very well, because I somehow ended up with a woman walking through the mist. I somehow ended up with a story that began like this post began…

His wife sat next to him on the porch. Out of the corner of her sight she watched him breathe like a man in the middle of a heavy labour. She’d see him stand up and look down the road and say ‘Alright boys, time to go.’ every time he heard an engine, or what might have been an engine, gearing in the distance. She’d sit silent when he realised no one was coming and shook his head in frustration. She’d have time to think ‘What can I do?’ just before she fell back into the muddled fadedness that was taking up more and more of her days.

She’d start remembering her mother and her mother’s children – eleven in all, and she the oldest – and how her mother would fry up big chunks of pork fat to pour over greens and onto bread. Then she’d be there, in the kitchen, fourteen years old and holding a cast iron skillet, tilting and turning it, with the heat from the stove so real and hot she could feel the burn on her face. She’d turn around to talk to her mother who was saying something about the baby in the other room, and she’d think, just for a second, ‘How good momma looks for a dead woman.’ And as soon as she thought it, ‘dead’, she’d think ‘That’s right. Twenty five years now’ and that was always enough to bring her back. To the sun on the porch and to her to husband. His white hair and impatient stance. Looking, watching, waiting…

“You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a Piggly Wiggly. And that’s all I have to say about that!”

——-

On the night Cosby Puckett was murdered most of the town – and all of the Bean Boarding House – were bunched up in a brush arbor down by the river waiting for Brother Ernst Muncey to preach from the book of Isaiah. Like the prophet, Brother Muncey had seen Christ’s glory and had come to tell about it. As the miners and their families listened to the missionary from Mercer beat on about Kingdom Come and Glory, the only daughter of Octavia nee Bean and John Paul Puckett was on her way to discover the hereafter for her very self.

Last night I had a dream about a man.

He told me about his life. How he was born in his momma’s bed, and raised in the cornfields. His daddy was a farmer. From way back.

“One day daddy’s gonna die in that corn.” He looked at me and winked. “But not until I die first.”

He talked about his brothers. How he watched them being pulled under by the river. How he wondered what it would be like. To be gone. Just like that. In a flash and in a flood. Boys. Buried in a watermelon patch.

He carried a camera. Wanted to teach. To write. He took my hand. In long slim lines, we drew his name in the dirt. I asked if he knew my name. He said one day, part of him would. But not yet.

He liked fancy suits. Vests and friends and bowler hats. Red ties.

“They’ll show up better. After I’m dead.”

He hands me the camera. I take his picture. He looks like my brother. He looks like this…

He said he had a wife. She liked to laugh. She worried. He knew why.

He sang about how hard things were. Constant sorrow. Hell on Earth. Whiskey in a bottle.

“Sometimes people need to believe. That it cant get any worse. Even if it means somewhere, somehow, it gets better.” He just wanted to run. “I didn’t know.” He looked at me and cried. “No one ever told me.”

I said it didn’t matter. Because someone knew. Even if he didn’t. Everything would be okay.

He said he liked blue. The color of his baby’s eyes.

“It’ll show up good in pictures. Even after he’s gone.”

His eyes, grey and wet like the belly of a fish, rolled back and forth in their place with every other breath he took. Once in a while he’d shake his head and let out a ‘wheeeeww’. A long kind of exhausted sigh that seemed to say this is the awfullest sort of work I’ve ever had to do in my life.

Ezra believed in God. He just didn’t believe in Brother Eugene Ledbedder. And it was Preacher Ledbedder who showed up every single Sunday morning to stomp and sweat around an old wood pulpit. Who threw open-palmed hands up into the air and pointed fingers at his congregation whenever he said words like eternal and damnation and adultery.