My Southern Journey (23 page)

I
remember a quiet so complete a lone cricket was a cacophony, a single drop of water boomed like a stick hammering a bass drum. I remember space, vast and long, remember cotton that stretched to the end of everything, interrupted only by ribbons of blacktop that led to exotic places like Leesburg, Piedmont, and Rome. I remember a darkness complete, not only the absence of light but a thing that could swallow light altogether, the way a mud puddle does a match tossed from a passing car.

It was the early 1960s, in a place called Spring Garden, Alabama, where I would lie in my bed in a big, ragged house and wonder if the whole world had stopped spinning outside my window. I would have asked my big brother, Sam, about it, but he would have just told me I was a chucklehead, and gone back to sleep. I have never slept much; I think I was afraid I would miss something passing in all that quiet dark.

Then, sometime around midnight, I would hear it. The whistle came first, a warning, followed by a distant roar, and then a bump, bump, bumping, as a hundred boxcars lurched past some distant crossing. They were probably just hauling pig iron, but in my mind they were taking people to places I wanted to be. A braver boy would have run it down and flung himself aboard.

And then it was gone, without warning, and I would go to sleep,
grudging, and dream about oceans, and elephants, and trains.

I miss the stillness. It is an antique in this shrill, intruding life, an all-but-forgotten thing of no real value, like inkwells. It is as if we have tried to fill up what stillness there is with all the mindless claptrap we can conjure, as if a little quiet or a patch of peaceful dark is a bug that has to be stomped before it gets away.

In restaurants, I am forced to eat my meatloaf with the television tuned to two mental giants ranting about a topic they manufactured that morning, apparently from mud and straw. In a doctor’s waiting room, a televangelist told me I was going to hell, then Rachael Ray made me a tuna melt.

At any given moment, on a plane, in a lobby, anywhere, I hear the TV at war with a dozen personal electronic devices. I am certain that, if I were sitting on a rug woven from palm fronds and dead army ants in the middle of the Amazon, I could hear the ubiquitous song of an iPhone.

I miss the wind in the cedars. I miss that sifting sound. Sometimes in summer, we sit on the porch of our old house in Fairhope to watch the dark fall, but sometimes the neighbors get to hollering about, well, living, and how do you go over and say, “Excuse me, but you are messing up my dark”?

It is enough to wish for a lightning storm. There’s that moment when the lightning flashes and thunder shakes the house. The power flickers and dies, and a dark stillness falls. And you’re swallowed up by a pure, old-fashioned silence, free of the hum of the refrigerator or the air conditioner, free from all the man-made background noise that makes you feel less human.

I do not sleep any better now. I live most of the year with sirens and squealing tires. But someone, somewhere, is looking after me, and sent me another train. I hear it bump through the city of Tuscaloosa in the small hours of the morning, and I dream and wonder, again, though I know exactly where it goes.

PART 4

CRAFT

WHY I WRITE ABOUT HOME

Long Leaf Style
, Summer 2008

I
write about home so I can be certain that someone will. It is not much more complicated than that.

Home for me has always been as much a matter of class as location. My home is not the comfortable South, not the big churches, or the country clubs, or the giant waterfront houses on the lakes or the columned mansions on the main drags.

Home for me is not a skybox at Alabama or Auburn, or good seats at Turner Field in Atlanta. It is not even the Kiwanis Club, or the Rotarians.

Home is not a thing of position, or standing. My home is where the working people are, where you still see a Torino every now and then, and people still use motor oil to kill the mange.

It is where the men live who know how to fix their own damn water pump, where the women watch their soap operas on the VCR because they will be at work at mid-day.

It is where the churches are small, and the houses, too. It is where people cheer for a college they have never seen, where propane tanks shine silver outside mobile homes with redwood decks, where buttercups burst up out of mounds of red mud, encircled by an old tire.

These are not the people of influence who have their names carved into the concrete of banks and schools and Baptist churches,
whose faces stare back from the society page. As I’ve said, maybe too many times, these are the descendants of people who could only get their name in the newspaper or the history books if they knocked some rich guy off his horse.

I do not, greatly, give a damn about writing about people who, by birthright, history will handle with great care anyway.

I will write about a one-armed man who used to sling a slingblade out by the county jail, and a pulpwood truck driver who could swing a pine pole around like a baseball bat.

I will write about dead police chiefs who treated even the most raggedy old boy with a little respect, and old men who sip beer beside the pool tables in Brother’s Bar, and then go take some money off the college boys.

I will write about the wrongdoers, because sometimes doing right is just too damn hard, and the sorry drunks, and the women who love them anyway. I will write about mamas, not somebody’s Big Daddy. I will write about snuff, not caviar.

I will write and write as long as somebody, anybody, wants me to, till we remind one more heartbroken ol’ boy of his grandfather, or educate one more pampered Yankee on the people of the pines.

I will put on my necktie and do my best to fit in the more comfortable places, and it may be that I have come to like that too much. But it will never last for me, there, and I will always go back to what I understand and admire, and love.

And it may be that there will come a time when no one wants to know, when no amount of skill will make them want to know, or care. And then I will quit, and I will do something else, or just die, because all this jaw jutting will wear out a man.

But the stories will last whether I do or not, count whether I do or not, and the rich folks will just have to get used to the idea that their stories are only part of the story, and not the only part worthy of the clay, and the pines, and the years.

THE FINE ART OF PIDDLING

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: February 2012

T
he obituary made me smile.
Ellis Ray of Moundville passed away Saturday...he was a loving husband, father, and grandfather, who loved to fish and piddle. He will be greatly missed.

I mean no disrespect. Quite the contrary, I smiled because Ellis, whom I never met, is my brother, bound to me not by blood but by a shared habit. We are piddlers.

Or we were. Now I am left here, an earthbound piddler, to piddle alone. What is a piddler? It is hard to explain to begin with, because piddling is neither one thing nor another, but something in between. It is not rest, not something that can be done with your feet on an ottoman or as you recline in a Posturepedic. But then neither is it work, something that one toils at, sweats at, something one needs a break from, for lunch, coffee. It is certainly not something for which one should ever be paid, and absolutely not something that one does while watching a clock.

The whole idea of piddling is to kill time, but without any great effort at all, or even really meaning to. If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice. One does not march off to piddle. One meanders. And even when one heads off to do it, one may not go to piddling right away, because one might have to loafer a little first. But loafering is another story.

A piddler does not fix a leaky washing machine, or a slipping transmission, or a hole in a roof. Such work is necessary, and the more necessary a labor is, the farther from piddling it becomes. A piddler may use tools, but only small, light ones, and only on things that are not needed right then. Changing out a car battery in the dead of winter is not piddling, because it is a necessity. But tinkering with a lawn mower in the middle of February is, especially if the grass is deader than Great-aunt Minnie’s house cat and buried under a foot of snow. Doing a load of laundry is, of course, not piddling. Organizing one’s sock drawer by color and fiber is.

Fishing is not piddling. That is why Ellis Ray’s survivors made that distinction in his obit. But sharpening hooks and respooling line is, especially if the bass boat is covered in sheet ice. Going to a baseball game is not piddling. Retying the laces on your cleats is, but only if the only way you will ever again go fast down the first-base line is if someone shoots you out of a cannon.

Some people have to retire to piddle. Dr. David Sloan, a venerated college professor who worked across the hall from me, seemed one of the least piddling men I ever knew. But he said he fully intended to spend at least some of his retirement piddling. I am not so disciplined. I rearrange books, sharpen knives—the ones I am certain not to use—and change knobs on dressers and cabinets, but only if the ones I am replacing were perfectly fine. I rearrange pictures on the wall, and re-rearrange them because my wife makes me. I spackle holes left from the first rearranging, but only the holes that are hidden by the paintings and do not really have to be spackled at all. To spackle a hole in plain sight would be necessary and therefore illegal under piddling guidelines.

My wife does not piddle. She reads, gardens (successfully), and uses her time wisely. When I try to interest her in my own piddling she looks at me with disdain and says she does not have time to waste.

Ellis Ray of Moundville was 68 when he died. I bet he never wasted a second.

THE COLOR OF WORDS

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: February 2014

T
he winter is bleak and gray down here, or at least it can seem that way. The sky turns the color of dirty cotton and it rains two weeks straight, then sleets. Wet leaves blow like old newspaper and stick to anything that stands still, like windshields and old, slow-moving dogs. The red mud turns slick, then freezes. The ice storms turn out the lights, and people raid the bread aisle as though this were the end of time.