My Southern Journey (2 page)

I’ve lived other places, colder places, where the first snow does not send the population screaming out the door to empty all the bread aisles. I waded knee-deep in running slush in Boston, cursing, and saw whole cars vanish under walls of hard-packed snow. But even in the thaw I never felt at home anywhere but here. I got a $400 parking ticket in Los Angeles my first ten minutes in town, and tried to learn to surf, which was really just buying a really small boat and practicing to drown. I ate a $35 chicken salad sandwich in New York City, with a $4 pickle, and while it was a fine pickle it still left me feeling like I had been thoroughly had. I have, along the way, seen some lovely things. I got to see the elephants before they are all in fences, and a Cape buffalo under a lightning-blasted tree. I have seen vast deserts and deep chasms and rolling seas and camel trains on a horizon a world away, and sometimes I told stories about those places and sometimes I even made a little sense. But I think sometimes I told them the way a tourist would, because I knew, as I left, I might never see those places again.

I am home now. If it snows, more than an inch, I will scrape it from the windshield into a mixing bowl, stir in some sugar and Pet milk, and make ice cream, not because it tastes all that good but because my grandmother did it that way. If I get a parking ticket, I will still have to pay it but pay it by mail, because I am always unsure about the statute of limitations on things I did in 1973, and people know me at the courthouse. It won’t be more than $20 anyway. If I want a $35 chicken salad sandwich, I can get one in the Atlanta airport.

I am home.

I am an imperfect citizen of an imperfect, odd, beautiful, dysfunctional, delicious place.

But at least we ain’t dull.

I hope you enjoy these stories, but more than that I hope you see value in the people whose lives are pressed between these pages. I have been told, a thousand times or more by kind people, that it can be like looking in a mirror, looking at people, places, and things that are more than familiar, and at feelings that seem lifted from their own hope chests, sock drawers, recipe books, and family secrets. Maybe that is what writers mean, when they talk about a sense of place.

PART 1

HOME

THE ROSES OF FAIRHOPE

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: March 2011

I
made the trip with three old women, in a good time for roses. We had threatened to do it for years. We would pack a car with cold chicken and flip-flops and drive south like we used to, till the Alabama foothills faded into souvenir shops, shrimp shacks, and that first ragged palm. They had taken me there, when men still whistled at them and WALLACE stickers papered the bumpers of cars. How could I not take them now?

But we never got out of the driveway, somehow. My Aunt Edna’s heart was failing, Aunt Juanita had to care for my homebound uncle, and my mother, Margaret, did not leave home unless blown from it by tornadoes or TNT. So I was stunned, two years ago, when my 72-year-old mother told me to come get them. I found the three oldest sisters in the yard, suitcases in their hands. Aunt Jo, the youngest sister, stayed home to watch the livestock.

Edna barbecued 250 some-odd chicken thighs and made two gallons of potato salad, for the two-day trip. They packed pork and beans, raw onions, cornbread, a jar of iced tea, a hard-frozen Clorox jug of water, and not one cell phone.

As we drove they talked of childhood, dirt roads where the dark closed in like a lid on a box, and a daddy who chased the bad things away the second he walked in. By the time we hit Montgomery, they had ridden a horse named Bob, poked a
dead chicken named Mrs. Rearden, and fished beside a little man named Jessie Clines. They were remembering their mama, and a groundhog who lived under the floorboards, as we drove across Mobile Bay.

I wanted them to see the sunset from the Fairhope pier, and as we rolled down the bluff, I heard them go quiet. But the sunset was just a light to see by. It was the roses. They were blooming in a circle the size of a baseball infield, more than 2,000 of them, with names like Derby horses or unrealized dreams—Mr. Lincoln, Strike It Rich, Touch of Class, Crimson Glory, Lasting Love. My mother, who never even liked roses much, said, “Oh, Lord.” Juanita, tough and tiny, made of whalebone and hell, looked about to cry.

Their big sister stepped from the car as if in a trance. I had not known how sick Edna was. Her steps were unsure, halting, as she moved into the garden. The sisters moved close, in case she fell.

Aunt Edna had sewed soldiers’ clothes at the Army base, raised five girls, buried a husband, worked a red-clay garden, pieced a thousand quilts, loved on great-grandchildren, and caught more crappie than any man I have ever known. I believed she was eternal, like the red-clay bank where she built her solid, redbrick house.

“So purty,” she said, again and again. She lingered in the rose garden a long time, till the sun vanished over the western shore. She saw the Fairhope roses six times on this trip. The last time, because she was tired, we sat in the car.

A year later, I spoke at her funeral. I surprised myself, blubbered like an old fool. For the first time in a long time it mattered what came out of my head, but the words crashed together inside my skull and I lost the fine things I wanted to say, and stood stupidly in front of people who loved her.

Her daughters just hugged me, one by one, and thanked me for the roses.

MAMA ALWAYS SAID…CHOOSE YOUR WORDS CAREFULLY

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: May 2012

W
hen I cut my own hair, as a child, she did not castigate me, though I looked like I had done it with a Weedwhacker and my bangs made it seem like one of my eyes had dropped 2 inches down my face. “Maybe,” she told me, “you shouldn’t be pointing sharp things at your eyes,” allowing caution, not criticism, to stick in my mind. When I cut it again, as a grown man, she told me it looked nice and neat, when in fact it looked like I was on a chain gang in the Depression. I went to get it fixed, and the stylist said, “Oh, Lord,” then combed some hair over the gapped places, charged me $20, and sent me home. My point is, that stylist did not love me like my mother does, and so did not even try to spare me from myself.

When I write a book, my mother reads it first. Your first critic should be one in your pocket.

“That,” she always says, “is a fine book.”

She points out the typos—she is good at that—and nonsensical things with a gentle, “Now, hon’, you need to look at this...”

I guess I should not be surprised. Mothers, as a group, tend to know the thing to say. They know, when you come home from seventh grade with a red C- on your science project, it is only because ol’ Mrs. So-and-So is a good friend of Mrs. So-and-So,
so little Elrod got an A because he has better connections in the high-stakes world of Alabama public education.

It is why, when I have done good in my life, I have given her the trophies. They sit in dust on her shelves. From time to time I fail, and she says the right thing then, too.

“Son,” she says, “I don’t need a plaque to know what kind of man you are.”

And that is why I love her.

MY BROTHER’S GARDEN

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: May 2012

M
y little brother’s beard has turned gray, and his clothes hang on him like a scarecrow’s hang on crossed broom handles. From a distance, there in the rising dust of the garden, he looks like he stepped out of an old family photograph, like my uncles, like my grandfather, men who knew the secrets of the dirt. He reaches down and pinches a false bloom off a squash. I do not know how he knows it is false. When I ask him these things, he just looks at me, puzzled, and says, “I’ve always knowed.” Today, every day, his rows are straight as a needle, immaculate. You could roll a marble across his ground. I watch him stoop to pull a single, solitary weed, and then I ease away, thinking: If you know, how come I don’t?

The South, like chiggers and divinity candy, is everlasting. It will always be, though it will not always be as we remember. The South of our childhoods rusts, peels, and goes away. Brush arbors have left no trace on it. Preachers who thrust ragged Bibles at bare rafters now shout politics from the pulpit. Civility, toward even those with whom we do not agree, is an heirloom. Quilts, the kind made for warmth instead of cash, are a thing of antiquity, their patterns a mystery slowly fading in an old woman’s eyes. Young men can play 5,000 video games but cannot sharpen a pocket knife; lost are the men who tested their truck’s electrical system by
holding to a coil wire. I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away.

I can still see my maternal grandmother, Ava, go at a copperhead with a hoe held together with black electrical tape; it never had a chance. My paternal grandfather, Bobby, worked 12 hours milling cotton, six more with his hands in red dirt. My uncle John wore out 15 straw hats and worked three tractors to death. Now it is Mark’s turn, to curse the drought, and the late frost, and the rocks in the earth.

Five years ago, he hacked and burned clean an acre of hedge- and weed-infested land, mixed the ashes with a prodigious amount of manure, and created an oasis in a rock-strewn mountain pasture. Now, season after season, he walks down the hill with an old, white German shepherd by his side—he named her Pretty Girl—and does battle with the things that would take it all away: a blight that appears overnight like a bad dream; and hungry insects, some he cannot even name. The old dog watches from a cool place in the dirt, and when thunder sounds in the distance she steps in front of my brother’s tractor and will not move, to tell him it is time to go in before the lightning gets there. A good dog will do that.

Because, you see, there is more than science at work here. He knows the science, the nature of the soil, how to plant—how far apart, how deep—and the hybrids and histories of seeds. But there is also magic—what some folks call folklore—that must be considered, like the singing of frogs, the stages of the moon. Most, I will never understand. For some reason, he named his tractors after family. The one called Ricky is slow to start, has a bad running gear, and its seat has no padding.