daughters of shiloh

Laura Jean Puckett was fourteen years old when Angus Mullins walked up to her and asked “Where’s your shoes?” She was playing a child’s game on a child’s bench outside her parent’s boarding house. And it was the first time she had ever met the short man in the newsboy cap who smelled like he’d just been delivered from the side of a still.

“I ain’t got none,” is what she said.

“Well,” said Angus, “I’m gonna buy you some. Then I’m gonna marry you.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

He said he had already asked her father, which was all a man needed to do in a holler in West Virginia in 1922. So right then and there, when 24 year old Angus met 14 year old Laura, he took her by her arm and he took her away and she never thought a thing about it for sixty years.

brush arbor

It happened on a Sunday. Will would remember this when other details had been lost to other days. When he could no longer remember the color of her eyes, or the way her mother squalled into the air and gnawed her knuckles until they bled. He would remember the missionaries.

For most of the year the town divided itself amongst the various free will establishments cluttering the coal fields. To hem and haw. To point fingers and pass judgment. But in August, because that month was more miserable than the rest, they’d flock together down by the river under a temporary shelter of skinny trees for a holy ghost revival.

If Will had known then, what he would know not much later, he would have taken his shame some other way.

lost

I had this dream. I was being proposed to. In my high school gymnasium. It was all a bit unsettling. Like dreams sometimes are. Before you realize they’re dreams. And my suitor, my suitor says “Buffy, will you marry me?”

Before I can say ‘what’, before I can say ‘huh?’, this really hard-knocks, city centre priest shows up on the court. He speaks to my suitor. And I am shook.

“Good Grief,” he says. “Are you crazy, boy? Why does everyone insist on playing house these days? Why does everyone insist on getting married? Don’t do that.”

That’s what he says. This crazy priest. I’ve seen him before. I trust him implicitly. Father knows best.

“You’re right,” is all he says. Is all my suitor says. And then he leaves, just like that, and I am lost. Curled up in some big ball of separateness and floating in space. I feel like a star. Burnt out and collapsing in on itself.

Someone leads me away. I’m not part of the world I’m in. The world is a cafeteria now. Now, someone is feeding me chips.

My phone. It’s my life line. And when it rings, I think it’s him. And even though I have nothing to say, I listen anyway.

It’s Steph. My darling Steph. She is love. And she is comfort.

“Did he tell you what he did to me?” I think it. And don’t know if I say it.

“Yes. It’s so sad. He sounded so different.”

And that was it. I woke up. It probably wasn’t immediately. It probably was six hours later. But it felt like immediately. Immediately. And I still felt lost.

what i’m writing…2010

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.

i had this dream…about nick clooney

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.

the sons of man

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.”

keep it simple. stupid.

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.

whenever possible, avoid the trite.

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

a wistful woman

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…

what i’m writing…

“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.