My Southern Journey (26 page)

They hung cypress strips—some people would call them shingles—on the outer walls, and put on a slate roof that someone replaced with Seal-Tab a long, long time ago, and built a gently sloping porch on the front that lets the rain roll off into the bushes. It was a smart man who built it, a man—I’m guessing it was a man—who
built it to last in a place where the rain falls down in sheets and the earth crawls.

Now, most likely, he lies under this same shifting earth—the wealthy and middle class lie above ground in crypts here, but a simple workman may have been interred in the soil itself, and I wonder if he, too, is nudged gently back and forth by that movement. This may be the one place on earth in which the dead do not ever really, completely, lie still.

I had another house, once, a Florida bungalow with a tile roof and terrazzo floors and leaky sliding glass door that I used a dump truck full of caulking trying to seal up right. It was my pride and my joy and I bought it with a future in mind, as all people do. It was a lovely white house covered in ivy, a house on a street lined with oaks and flowering shrubs. It was in Coral Gables, a rock’s throw from the Miami city limits, and the backyard crawled with lizards and hummed with insects and was home to a mangy black cat that I ultimately named “Come Here You Fuzzy @#%!#*%.” I named him other things, but that was the one that stuck. He never let me pet him and I didn’t much care. But he lived in my backyard and decimated the lizard population, living on fried chicken and spare ribs and McNuggets—and lizards I suppose. He was fat as a volleyball some days and other days looked half-starved, had a broken tail and chewed-up ears and didn’t take stuff from nobody. Sometimes when I sat in the backyard he would come and sit just out of reach and was content to just be there, close, unless I tried to pet him or made any sudden moves. Cats are funny, that way.

It was a mighty fine house, too. But the future I had in mind when I first planned on moving to Miami just didn’t ever firm up—one that had once included a beautiful Cajun woman from Morgan City, Louisiana, a woman with eyes like chips of frozen sea, who was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen when she smiled. But that future just wore out over time, from circumstance and neglect and bad damn luck that was every bit my fault, and I sold the house and left there for New Orleans, which is where a lot of people go when they need a new future.

New Orleans is forgiving, and lets a man pick a future—sometimes even a new identity. I hated the day I sold that house in Florida, I guess for all the feelings of loss that it entailed.

I also hated it because, just as I was getting ready to move to New Orleans, the 2000 election somehow failed to elect a President and Florida was the reason, so I lived in hotels for months as the
democratic process worked itself out in a dignified and orderly process that involved a whole lot of “spokespeople” and finally it was done and I was free and headed to the Easy and the future and a mustard-colored house on a street just steps from the dock.

It was everything the Florida house wasn’t. It was not built of brick and stone and concrete, and was almost flimsy in comparison, and looking at it I wondered if it would hold up through a hurricane or even a good washing.

My real estate agent, Linda Roussel, just nodded sagely and pronounced: “That house has stood the test of time.”

I signed the papers and left for a few days and, when I returned, discovered it was also the neighborhood dumping-off place for the buggies from the Winn-Dixie.

Ain’t no place perfect.

But in the days that followed, I found in this house an antidote for imperfect futures. There was a warmth in it, in the wood, in the high air of those tall ceilings, in the very feel of the floors that glowed yellow when you turned on a lamp.

Of course, that might have been because the air conditioner soon died, but even after $6,000 and change, the air was cooled but the house still had that warmth.

I painted, I sanded, I tacked down floorboards that popped up with a twang when the earth moved, but mostly I lived in it.

I sit on my front porch and watch, over my left shoulder, the endless trains that run between the levee and Tchoupitoulas, watch the conning towers of the massive freighters as they glide by. I watch the cars that slow to a crawl, when the children are too engrossed in their cross-over dribble to hear them coming. Some people pass by and wave and I wave back, which is an Alabama thing to do, really, but it’s nice to see, nice to do. Almost nobody gives me the finger, and the garbage men only drag my garbage can a half-block down the street before leaving it there, which is not bad for New Orleans, I am told.

I sit for a long time, sometimes, just living.

It leaks a bit. When the winter rains pound for three days at a time, stripping the cypress tree of its dead leaves—more like needles, really—and clogging the gutters, a little water will slip
down the wall and drip over my stove or inside my cabinets, and I curse the house and the weather and cypress trees in general, and then feel guilty, as if I had verbally abused some great-aunt or a well-meaning Bible salesman.

That is when I know I love this house. I do not talk to it, yet, but I may, maybe when the first hurricane trembles its foundation, or when I am so damn old that all I have left to talk to is the walls.

GRANDPA WAS A CARPENTER

T
he place is immaculate, the cleanest building I have ever seen that smells of grease and oil and rust. My brother Sam pretty much lives in his workshop, the place he goes when he gets off work from the job he is paid to do, or, as Mark Twain writes, obliged to do. Here, in his shop, he works to unwind from work, and finds peace in that. Work is the true value of a man, in his mind, and a man cannot work without tools. He is surrounded by them here, floor to ceiling, and I believe their proximity makes him feel the way that stacks of books comfort me. The difference, in his mind, is that it is hard to plane a door with a first edition of
The Great Santini,
or drive a nail with
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
To him, a man without tools is a pitiful thing. He had to bring me a lug wrench and a jack one time when I had a flat tire on my ’69 Mustang on Alabama 204, and he has had little respect for me since. That was 1974.

In his workshop, sheltered by the big pines behind his house, is everything a working man needs or thinks he might someday need; you never know when you will need a horseshoe nail, or a fender clip from a … well, I don’t know what it’s from. Here, there are a hundred well-oiled and freshly cleaned power saws, drills, mowers, other machines, and an untold number of carefully cleaned and sorted handtools, not one out of place, not one put
away wet, or begrimed. I think if he knew a three-sixteenth socket was left out of its designated slot in his big red toolbox, he would be unable to live with himself.

The most precious tools he has there, the most valuable, are rarely used, though they have hung on one wall of his crowded workshop for as long as I can remember and will hang there long after we are gone. No one with our blood would dare take them down from their altar here. They were already black and pitted with age in ’29, when rich men leapt from the windows on Wall Street. I have never understood those men, never understood how a broken dream could send you flying, your necktie and coattails aflutter in the wind. The men who used the tools on my brother’s wall were different, and in some ways the tools made them that way. Their lives were hard in the beginning, hard in the Depression and the recessions to come, and hard in the end, but as long as their muscles held out and could power their tools, drive them, then they could beat out a life, a noble life. I get that.

They were poured from hot steel in American mills and stamped out, smoothed and sharpened by men with little white scars on their arms from the whorl of sparks they worked within, a thing I know only because my kin worked in steel mills back when the blast furnace fires still lit up the skylines of Birmingham, Bessemer, Gadsden, other places. My grandfather and men like him rolled steel in the Gadsden plant, and when that work vanished in ’29 they picked up their hammers and handsaws and buckets of tar and built many of the houses you see along the thin ribbons of asphalt that run through the hills of my home, here in the highlands of the northern third of the state.

There are wrenches, hammers, saws, roofing hatchets, chisels … all stained with a hundred years of grease and soot and, finally, after a century or more, coated with an unavoidable rust, but still good, still waiting for men—or women—with the muscle and know-how to take up and, by God, make something. They are what is left of my grandfather’s tool kit. They might as well be smelted from silver and gold.

I never saw his face, his living face. But Sam did. It is, I believe, why he can make anything, do anything, and I am the worst carpenter, the worst mechanic, in my family line. I am also the worst fisherman, but I can only deal with one great shame at a time.

The story of them, the old man and the baby boy, is one of my
favorites, one I know only because I overheard a conversation between my mother and a young woman who was writing a story about her. The young woman, a much better journalist than I will ever be, asked my mother to tell her about the best day of her life. I tried to appear modest as I waited for my mother to tell the young woman of the day I showed her the first copy of a book with her face on the cover, or the day I won some big prize.

“I believe,” my mother said, thoughtfully, “it was the birth of my first son.”

I slunk away, but not so far I could not hear.

My mother told the story of giving birth to the boy they named David Samuel, and how, since the man who would be my father was nowhere around and almost certainly drunk, my mother had no place to take the baby but home to her mother and father’s house, to Ava, and Charlie.

The baby did not cry. I do not believe he ever has cried. He was a man all his life, serious and capable. My little brother, Mark, likes to joke that when Sam was born he “dusted himself off and walked home.”

The morning after the boy’s birth, my grandfather pretended to chastise my mother, saying that while the baby had slept soundly, she had not, and stayed up all night. “Margaret, you kept us up all night,” my grandfather told her, “a’talkin’ to that blame boy.”