BookishThoughts.com

LIBER DELECTATIO ANIMAE
[Books, the Delight of the Soul]

One morning (the first Sunday of late Spring Break, to be exact), as rain fell past her City window, blurring the gray obscurity of eternal buildings into a cloudy smear, the radio spoke to Jeanette Williams, and pulled her heart out from where it hid from the Northern cold. A thickly-accented voice clumsily answered some rather condescending pre-prepared questions from a polished interviewer, and suddenly Jeanette began to shiver. Her chic “artist’s pad” clutched at her with its expensive fingers, but that stupid Southern voice that flowed out of small woofers and tweeters surrounded her and burned a vision of green and heat and old wood farm houses into her head, that cut the rain (now flurrying flakes of snow) outside her window even deeper into her bones. And then quite suddenly, the voices on the radio melded into a warm tone that spoke with a rich, brown voice to her and whispered, “Why not go home today, Jeanette? You can always leave tomorrow.”

“I need to visit,” she thought. The spontaneity of the concept surprised her and even delighted her a little. She was into spontaneity, just doing something even if it was dumb, just because the mood was there. “I’m going back to visit the rednecks,” she announced, and began packing.

Her roommates, Jaimy and Chris, watched her throw some clothes, toiletries, a copy of The Tropic of Capricorn, and a bag of weed (maybe, they didn’t really get a good look) into her tattered carpeted bag. She said that she’d be gone a week or two, to take care of her calls and mail, unless it was from T, then to just forget it, she was out of that crappy relationship, and that she wasn’t trying to scam out on them for rent, she was leaving her stereo and TV behind, no big deal, just a short visit to Alabama, no, not Georgia, Alabama, first time since graduating from college four years ago. And in that flurry of clothes and explanations, she disappeared into the rain and snow, and the last that the lovers, Chris and Jaimy, ever saw of her was as she stood soaked in the rain, and hailed a taxi that would take her to a bus that would crawl across the eastern coast over valleys and through mountains and skirt rivers and streams and great cities and small communities, stopping only to inhale fresh passengers and exhale wearied travelers.

Jeanette stared out the window the whole cold, gray way to Kentucky and then watched the gradual transformation of the land from skeletal browns to a verdant spring green, that struck her as somehow miraculous, even though it was April. She shed her jacket at the Kentucky border. Halfway through Tennessee, she took off her sweater. By Birmingham, she was in a T-shirt and carefully torn jeans. And dressed like this, she stepped off of the now empty bus, at the Miller County Bus Station in downtown Calapoosa, Alabama, on the exact day of the semi-annual (which sometimes meant monthly, and sometimes not) pot-luck supper held at the Lord’s Good Love Pentecostal Church.

The Lord’s Good Love was the largest building in the town, as a matter of both function and local zoning laws; the good people of Calapoosa were determined not to let God be outdone by Mammon. Of course, this wasn’t to say that the town was limited by the church; rather, the church grew according to the town, and so when the folks at Piggly Wiggly (“Fresh Food, Good People”) decided to expand the store to accommodate an all-new produce section, the church expanded, too. In fact, Brother Jim Routley, the fervent minister of Lord’s Good Love, welcomed any new growth in town, because it meant all-new additions to his church house. Once, during an anticipated growth spurt that never did quite work out, he developed such a fit of inspiration that for three weeks straight he proclaimed a revelation of whitewashed wood walls stretching as far as the eye could see. For three Sundays in a row, he hollered scripture from Exodus to Isaiah to Revelation (once nearly ripping his Bible in two in a furious race from Leviticus to Hebrews), all unfathomably related to the vision of a church larger than the “big mall in Montgomery,” and his face grew redder and redder moment by fervid moment till Gladys White, who perniciously sat in the first row, declared, “I swear that blood was gushin’ out of Jim Routley’s eyes.” Her children, whose keen insight surpassed that of even Gladys herself, told the tale daily at school until the poor minister’s eyeballs exploded out of their sockets, and brains dripped out of his ears, only to suck back in like a film played backwards, as Brother Routley healed himself.

Jim Routley, oddly enough, never preached this small miracle in church, keeping it to himself as a private witness of the power of God. He preferred to draw miracles out of the congregation as a whole, from the ecstasy of speaking in tongues, to the marvel of the collection plate, to the truly awe-inspiring presence of Ralph Jones in the back pew. Ralph Jones, at over 1000 pounds, was the largest human being in the world and the source of weekly amazement, as he lowered his tremendous girth into the special steel-reinforced bench, reserved for him alone. Once, a visiting family (relatives of the Carvers), took that bench, and Ralph was forced to seek a mundane pew in the front row. He thundered down the aisle and sat down to a choir of creaking wood, held together by the silent prayers of the congregation, and the occasionally voiced pleas of the superintendent, Joe Davis. Brother Routley took that occasion to change his sermon, to an exegesis on the scripture in Galatians where Paul wrote, “Bear ye one another’s burdens.” For that one Sunday, at least, the entire church bore the burden of Ralph Jones’ one-thousand-pound cross, and the bench made it through the entire service, requiring only minor repairs afterwards. Ralph, himself, whose faith was at least as large as his body, was completely calm through the entire ordeal; he had no doubts that the pew would be strong beneath his body. In fact Ralph, in general, ignored his weight, or at least bore it with stolid, and even cheerful, stoicism. The most amazing miracle involving Ralph Jones, though, was his weekly one-mile walk to Sunday services, in spite of strong medical and physiological evidence that it was impossible. Too large for even Mayor Grady’s Cadillac LeSabre, he relied on the great twin pillars of his legs, and the gargantuan power and energy of his heart to move him from his retrofitted double-wide to the preaching of the Word. Brother Routley considered this a miracle on the scale of Peter healing the lame man at the temple gates, and at the semi-annual South Alabama Pentecostal Conference, he testified, first, of the largeness of his church, and, secondly, of the largeness of Ralph Jones. Years later, when Ralph died at the age of 97 and the astonishing weight of 1563 pounds, doctors at Southern Alabama Christian would be surprised to discover that his heart was structurally that of an elephant. Lucille, his wife, upon hearing the news, would then say, “Well, he never complained about it much.”

Lucille was a cousin of Jeanette Williams, and had always felt that Jeanette was making a terrible mistake by heading north. She felt that it was a dangerous move, and wrote Jeanette daily letters telling her so. These epistles were masterpieces of Southern apologetics and philosophy. Unfortunately, Lucille suffered from a rare nervous disorder that rendered her helplessly afraid of anything related to the US Postal Service. It seems that her mailman father, like so many other postal workers, had committed suicide, depressed by the huge quantity of important and interesting mail that was addressed to everyone in the world but him. From that day forward, Lucille felt a terrible and overwhelming sense of oppression from her dead father’s former employer, and went so far as to buy fifteen vicious dachshunds to patrol and protect her yard and useless mailbox against any of her father’s former colleagues. The postal officials, of course, quickly recognized a problem in the making, and with typical bureaucratic quickness sent her several complaints and then court summons – all by mail. In any case, Lucille, who saw nothing wrong with such a classical and biblical pastime as letter writing, never sent any of her epistles to Jeanette. Instead, her carefully crafted arguments and theories, which displayed the genius of Heidegger, or even Kant, were left in tremendous reams of paper that piled to the ceiling of the double-wide trailer. Her husband Ralph was of no help at all; his faith did not extend to such secular activities as walking to the post office.

In the end, it was Bobby Jo Tyson, who, in an act of great charity, conscripted her eight sons to the task of mailing Lucille’s eight years of masterful epistles. They spent an entire day stuffing and licking over 2000 envelopes, until their tongues were as dry as dead wood. Since it was Memorial Day, and all the post offices were closed, they spent the remaining hours of the day emptying their truckloads of philosophy into various drop-boxes in Calapoosa and in surrounding small towns with small-town names like Bodiford’s Corner or Hope Hull. They returned home at precisely midnight, and after emptying the rain barrel on their collective swollen tongues, went straight to bed, never realizing that they had been expected to stamp and address the envelopes as well. As a result, postal employees throughout Miller County spent the remainder of the week frantically trying to discover both the source and desired destination of the letters, neither of which Lucille had bothered to write, figuring that she knew to whom she was writing, and that Jeanette would certainly know by whom she had been written. Ironically , it was Bobby Joe’s husband, the county postal chief, Clyde Tyson, who determined the fate of Lucille’s remarkable text, which contained within it the answers for world peace, universal love, the total abolition of misery, and the ultimate meaning of existence. Clyde Tyson was the world’s last surviving logical-positivist and felt that while the grand propositions of these essentially anonymous letters were truly magnificent, they relied far too much on Heideggerian metaphysics, and thus had them all discarded. For days after, he was heard muttering to himself, “It’s that ‘the nothing nothings’ bullcrap all over again.”

Bobby Jo and Clyde’s eight sons all had names that began with the letter “T”: Troy, Trent, Terrence, Tyrone, Toby, Todd, Tom, and Timothy. They were widely regarded to be as dumb as dirt, and it was considered a total farce that seven of the eight sons had graduated from Calapoosa High. The eighth and youngest son, Timothy, was still in the sixth grade. He had been in the sixth grade for the last ten years, because he kept turning twelve years old, and until he turned thirteen, they wouldn’t let him move on to seventh grade. Mrs. Carver, the principal of Calapoosa Primary School, would always say, “It just won’t do to move Timothy on. He might develop an inferiority complex, on account of always being the youngest in the class, and go off and shoot someone like that awful Charles Manson. I will not allow a potential sociopath to graduate from my school.” And so Timothy stayed in sixth grade for nearly thirty years, until one birthday morning he woke up forty-two years old. Miss Beasely, his sixth grade teacher for all three decades, immediately retired, and he promptly took her place, his command of the sixth grade material being the finest in the world. He would teach Jeanette Williams’ youngest daughter, Lily, that year and magnanimously declare her “the finest pupil I have ever had.”

Timothy was playing hooky when Jeanette stepped off of the bus at the old train station. His thought was “So that’s a ‘lebsian’,” his only concept of the legendary same-sex-oriented woman being that she must have short hair. He ran immediately to school, interrupting what would have been his tenth Alabama History class on the native American tribes of the state, and excitedly proclaimed that he had seen a “lebsian” right there in Calapoosa. Miss Beasely was noted to turn a bright red, and remain oddly quiet for the rest of the class, answering the flood of curious queries about the “lebsian” with an enigmatic “I’m sorry.”

In any case, lesbian or not, Jeanette Williams was back in Calapoosa for the first time in four years. The last time she had been in town was for less than an hour en route to a celebration party at a Florida beach, bachelor’s degree in hand, with an acceptance letter to a grad program in the City. She looked around her, all the landmarks precisely in place, and the immutability of the town shook her for a moment. Yet, despite the sameness of Calapoosa, she felt a strange sense of disorientation. It had become a world almost alien to her. She looked around the town center, amazed at the simplicity of the architecture, and the extraordinary space that surrounded each building. The unknowable web of concrete shafts and mirrored towers that was the City she lived in was impossible here – a myth, a dream, a horror tale of lemming-like existences, coated by a sheen of glitter than only shone for airline passengers and advertisement executives. And here, these familiar earthy piles, solidly grounded like aged trees to the lawns around them – the courthouse, the library, the post office. And there, the park, with the cockroach statue in its center. She felt herself being drawn back into this small universe, and laughed a little. The freaking cockroach statue, she thought with a mental chuckle.

The cockroach statue was the result of the famous boll weevil miracle of ‘05, when local farmers, plagued by a particularly fierce strain of boll weevil, faced the imminent destruction of their precious cotton crop. Unable to effectively deal with the insect menace, they made a radical step, and changed from cotton to the high-risk and relatively unheard-of peanut. Within ten years their fortunes were made, as a peanut craze swept America, and so as a tribute to their unknowing ally, some of the now wealthy peanut growers commissioned a statue of the boll weevil, to be placed in the park at the town center. The sculptor, who was a noted porcelain cherubim artist, spent an entire year on the project.

And so the citizens of the town of Calapoosa gathered in Miller Park in the open space between the gazebo and the fountain and eagerly awaited the unveiling of their newest civic treasure. Speeches were made. A band played patriotic songs. And at last the mayor, William Stoates, with great ceremony, removed the veil, to the delight of the gathered townspeople. There were exclamations of wonder at the beautiful form of the goddess Ceres, in whose up-stretched hands the glorified beetle squatted majestically. It was a moment before anyone realized that something was amiss. It was little Lewis Pickett who suddenly yelled, “That ain’t no weevil – that there’s a roach!” The truth was as horrible as Lewis Pickett’s cry: the sculptor, who knew the difference between cherubim, seraphim, and cupids, could not fathom such difference in the insect family; and somewhere in the translation of town hopes into sculptural reality, the boll weevil had been transformed into a generic beetle that looked like a cockroach. Not long after, the Great Depression struck, and as there was no money for a replacement, the cockroach statue stayed on, a proud emblem of its cousin’s role in putting Calapoosa, if only briefly, on the peanut map of the world.

Jeanette walked into the little park and up to the statue and reached out, as everyone did at least once, and stroked the pitifully proud metal feelers and laughed again. What a stupid statue! But how perfect, how Calapoosa, and she began to notice the other hidden corners of nostalgia around her. And with giddy recognition, she recommenced her journey, now on foot, carpetbag in hand, with hair “a sight shorter than is decent in these parts,” as the local newspaper owner, Franklin Shriver, would be heard to say.

Franklin had never cared much for Jeanette or her family. In his younger years he had had a terrific crush upon Jeanette’s mother, Francis, and had tried to win her hand by bringing her the best kills of his weekly hunting expeditions. Francis would leave for high school in the mornings, and Franklin would be waiting for her with a dead rabbit, or turkey, or even the occasional deer. To Franklin, who found in hunting a sort of peace and communion with nature, these were the finest gifts he could give. To Francis, though, it was reminiscent of her cat who dropped squirrels it had killed on the back porch, as if to seek approval. Francis would take the Franklin’s trophies graciously and solemnly, but inside she would be giggling hysterically, imagining him with the body of a cat.

In the end it was George Williams, though, who won her heart. Shy, quiet George was the town dunce, because he could never seem to get the hang of such simple concepts as hunting, or even football. Many of his teachers suggested that he be kept back a grade or two, but his strong math skills and superior reading ability allowed him to graduate on time. One spring evening, while Franklin was away hunting, Francis went out for a walk along the winding dirt rode that went all the way from Here to There. In the evening cool, she spread her wings and skimmed across the soft tops of the pines, carefully avoiding any hunting areas. Franklin had almost shot her once, mistaking her for a swan. Afterwards, he had apologized, saying that he had never shot a swan before, and that he could barely pass up what seemed to be the chance of a lifetime. In any case, she now took extra precautions, and tried to wear bright clothing. This particular evening she was wearing a lovely pink spring dress, with a shimmering shawl that shifted colors in the glistening starlight.

To George, who in a clearing below was trying to capture lightning in some Mason jars for study, she was the most beautiful thing in the world, like the last butterfly of fall, that flits from fading flower to falling leaves with the heartache of the summer lost and the approaching dead winter. He called to her in his quiet voice that seemed to falter and cling in the in the tangle of pine branches. A single “Oh!” flew straight and true into the evening sky, and expanded like a blossoming firecracker, a perfect sphere of surprise and wonder. Francis flew right into that exclamation, and in the turbulence of such awe, fell softly to the ground. She, who had so calmly and skillfully dodged Franklin’s excited buckshot, was now brought down by George’s sincere admiration and marvel. George, meanwhile, was in a state of shock. He had never expected his impotent speech to be so effective, and, suddenly presented with the immediate presence of the object of his wonder, he found that he had nothing to say. Francis, on the other hand, coolly brushed herself of pine needles, and asked, “Who are you?” George, who still could not come to grips with the sudden power of his tongue, could only stammer, and then in a fit of inspiration, handed her the one jar of his evening’s efforts. Francis was taken aback by the brilliant dance of crackling light that boiled chaotically in the confines of the mason jar. She watched as its frenetic brilliance skipped around the dark clearing, finally landing on George’s quiet face. It was like seeing the moon for the first time. She clutched the jar tightly, the light revealing the delicate bones and veins in her hands, tracing them in soft reds and delicious tingling. Ten months later they were married, and two years after that, Jeanette was born.

Franklin never forgave Francis or Jeanette, and his paper published a weekly gossip column on them alone, that no one but Franklin ever seriously read. When he saw Jeanette walking from the bus station, with her short hair, he immediately went to his type-writer, and began composing. The following article appeared the next day in the Calapoosa Commercial-Appeal:

Well folks, guess who traipsed into town today, just as pretty as you please. None other than Miss Jeanette Williams, back from her fancy-pants Yankee college. And guess what? Her hair is short as a boy. It is the opinion of this writer that it all comes from poor raising. It seems that her parents just haven’t brought her up right. So now she’s all uppity, with out any sense of decency or moral impropriety. So she doesn’t think college here is good enough for her. I would like to let Miss Williams know that this writer was able to abstain a fine education at Chikisaw State, and now is a successful newspaper man. What’s more, his daughters do not cut their hair more than what’s appropriate and right.

Franklin never signed his gossip articles, feeling that the anonymity kept him from any backlash from his some of his more vitriolic statements. He was completely oblivious to the true opinions of the readers about his writing, and felt that everything he pontificated on was taken with the utmost seriousness. In reality, most of the people of Calapoosa (including Franklin’s wife and daughters) placed Franklin’s articles on the “Bathroom Reading” level, also to be used in the place of toilet paper in a pinch. Pete and Louise Hudson regularly sent xerox copies of his terrible writing to friends throughout Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Some of their friends, also in the newspaper business, began publishing Franklin’s rantings in their own papers (usually below “Peanuts” or L’il Abner”), until Franklin became an accidental legend in his time. Franklin, though, would never discover this. His stubborn refusal to read anything but his own paper kept him sufficiently (and thankfully, as his wife June would say) secluded from his burgeoning fame throughout the Southeast. As it was, Franklin, as chief reporter, editor, and publisher of the Commercial-Appeal, relied solely on the radio broadcasts of Paul Harvey on Country Favorites 96 WLAL (“Your truck is our jukebox!”) out of Dothan for the news outside of Calapoosa, and on hearsay for local news. The result was a paper that was one long editorial after the other, and contained not one ounce of solid fact. Most Calapoosans thought that it was just as fine as Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, and a sight better than the “lib’ral propaganda” on NPR.

Franklin was not the lone member of the Commercial-Appeal staff, however. Many of his hunting buddies, who were otherwise destined to a life of hound-raising and small-scale farming, found at least part-time employment under Franklin. There was Forrest McKee, who did weather, and Dick Parnes, who did sports, and Gladys Carver (the finest bowhunter in South Alabama), who was in charge of public relations and advertisements, as well as various acquaintances who would contribute a motley assortment of articles when they needed beer money, or when alimony was due.

Of all these, Forrest was the most dedicated and least successful. He had an actual degree in Meteorology from Auburn University; and yet, somehow, the weather eluded his prognosticatory attempts with tantalizing ease. Forrest diligently researched each weekly forecast, referencing the Farmer’s Almanac, satellite photos, maps, atmospheric readings from airports, and the University of South Alabama Meteorology Center. He watched the Weather Channel. He tried folk wisdom from the Foxfire books. He developed an award-winning mechanism that gave precise and nearly instantaneous humidity readings. And yet, each week, the heavens dodged Forrest’s attempts. “It’s like tryin’ to bring down a twelve-point with one of those Junior Indian bow sets. You maybe the best in the world with one of them plastic arrows, but you ain’t never gonna get you any deer meat,” Franklin told him, with his typical tact and sympathy. Only once did Forrest’s weather column accurately predict the weather. At the end of another week of frustrating and painstaking research, he suddenly let out a tremendous shriek and raced home in a whirlwind of atmosphere charts. He stormed into his house, and fell prostrate before his wife who calmly told him to get out the pile of dust she had been sweeping. She then told him there would be rain on Saturday, sun on Sunday, rain again on Monday, Tuesday, and half of Wednesday, and that Thursday would be sunny in the morning but turn into a spectacular thunderstorm, and that Friday would be a day of tornadoes and hail, and that he should get his sorry self back to work. Deeply chagrined, Forrest returned to the newspaper office and meekly wrote down the predictions of his high school dropout wife. And indeed, the weather obediently followed the newspaper, for the first time in the history of the Commercial-Appeal. Years later, with the advent of the first black man on the staff of a revamped paper, the weather report would become more reliable even than the Weather Channel, but that would only be because he was on a first-name basis, like so many others of his family, with the wind. In any case, the rains fell and the sun shined, exactly as Forrest’s wife had said it would, and on Friday, with the mournful wailing that broke in waves like the ocean, tornado sirens sounded their alarm, sending schoolchildren scrambling under desks, to whisper tales of people picked up and taken to China by the roiling vengeful spouts of black cloud and debris. One brave and foolish child scampered to the windows, cracked open as a charm against depressurization, and stared with eyes wide as three twisters crashed down simultaneously and tore ragged paths through the woods behind the playground. In a sudden motion, he hopped outside and raced after their train siren call, never to be heard from again, until he suddenly showed up at the doorsteps of his parent’s home speaking a strange language that no one could understand. He ended up being the only real casualty of that terrific tornado and hail strike, which damaged every roof in town except one.

It was a great white antebellum plantation home, long since fallen into such a state of disrepair that no one could really tell if any damage had occurred to it or not.. No one knew the story of this forgotten mansion, or its sole inhabitant, who was merely known as “that poor old lady.” There had been several futile attempts to approach her, but no amount of knocking could ever draw her out of the crumbling shell that was her home. In the hour just before dusk that is reserved for the mating calls of fireflies, she could be seen standing at the ancient windows, her image a distorted wave in the glass. She would stare toward the West with a look of such longing that even the impetuous children who played on her lawn would stop their ball-throwing and, with a respectful bow of the head, walk away, careful to latch the gate behind them. There was a variety of theories around town about this lone woman. Some claimed she was just another crazed casualty of Southern aristocratic inbreeding, while others, in wiser, whispered tones, spoke of ghosts. She had always been there, she was never known to venture forth for company, she attended no known church -- she just made her appearances at the window, as if to close the day, until the fading light blackened her windows, and she was gone, and not even the moon or fireflies could bring her out again. It was a miracle of sorts that none of her windows had suffered the cruelty of teenage years, unlike so many other similar abandoned homes in the Southeast. Each year, the old mansion would be the subject of a high school dare, but always the laughing, drunken adventurers would return, sobered and silent, their goal untouched and untarnished by all but that most evil of tricksters, Time. There was a mood to that place, a solemnity that was almost sacred. It was a penitent house, drooping underneath the weight of some nearly forgotten wrong, surrounded by oaks that hung Spanish moss in shame from their twisted shoulders. And in the window, always the woman, with that sad face, staring through the constellation of flickering fireflies that wheeled slowly across the dense lawn.

She was not the only ghost in the town. There was also the dead black man, who wandered through town with a hurt look on his face, which reminded people of the full moon. No one new who he was. The lynching had occurred years before in their parent’s era, and he probably hadn’t had a name then, either. It was vaguely remembered that the lynching had involved a rape or a child’s death, and it was widely known that the true perpetrator of the crime was the sheriff’s son, who left town not long after the event. But he never bore the price of that sin, and so this forgotten black man become an unwilling sacrificial lamb, and had been slain and hung on a tree, and somewhere, a family cried for the loss of a son, but no one ever heard those lamentations. A week later, a service was held in the invisible African Methodist church, but that too went unnoticed. From that day forward, the man walked through Calapoosa, peering intently into the face of each person, and then looking away with an expression that spoke of wounds that went far beyond the weal of the rope on his neck. No one knew what he searched for in his examination of the people of Calapoosa, but the guess was that when he found it, he would be put to rest.

There were many other ghosts in Calapoosa, but they were of the more familiar variety – household sprites and ancestral spirits that made a home a home. No one really noticed them much, but every house had at least one or two, to lend comfort to the quieter corners, to speak for the house itself in wooden creaks and sighs, and to warm the rocking chairs and porch swings. The sad lady and the black man were apart from these. They made folks uneasy, and left the feeling of something forgotten or missed, like a dusty floor unswept or a broken promise. In general, though, most people, considered them to be just another part of life in Calapoosa, and largely ignored them.

Paul Hunt alone had severe difficulties with the spectral population of Calapoosa, which arose from a matter of doctrine rather than fear. As a child, he had been rigorously trained by his parents for ecclesiastical service. Until the age of seventeen, he considered it a mere matter of course that he would enter some Bible college and prepare for the ministry. However, at seventeen he accidentally switched on the television during a Sixty Minutes expose of a preacher he had always idolized. After watching Mike Wallace confront the man with damning evidence of faked healings, misuse of charity funds, and three sex scandals with minors, his faith was badly shaken. The final straw came when the soon-to-be-former preacher, in tears, revealed that the game booths at his annual Christian Carnival were fixed. Paul, who dearly loved the “Shoot the Devil” rifle contest, had never in all his years of effort won the “I shot the Devil Right between the Horns!” tee shirt, in spite of having spent well over 50 dollars on it one summer, and now he knew why. At that moment, he instantly became an atheist. He embraced his new religion with a wholehearted devotion that he had been saving for the Ray Buckman Bible College of Mississippi. He joined a rationalist society and became a card-carrying nihilist. And yet he attended the Lord’s Good Love weekly, and gave generous offerings to the collection plate – always, though, with a note attached with his name and the Biblical contradiction of the week. Once a month he would have Brother Routley over for supper and pose the following problem to him: “Given that God is all-powerful, he should be able to create anything. He must therefore, be able to create an individual who will not obey him, no matter what. Therefore, God cannot make this person follow Him, and would thus cease to be an all-powerful God. If He were to make this free spirit obey Him then He will have undermined His own creation, revealing that He does not have the capacities to create a being that will not follow God no matter what, and thus He ceases to be an all-powerful God.” Brother Routley, whose faith was much stronger than his intellect, never really understood the inherent contradiction, and would just smile and say, “That’s all right, Brother Hunt. God loves us just the same – even that fellow who won’t do as He says.” Paul would laugh smugly and say, “Jim, you’re just avoiding the issue, but that’s okay. Someday you’ll see the light like I have, and then you will stop this deceptive nonsense.” Brother Routley always left these meetings with an unsettled feeling, while Paul would sit back confident in one more month of successful atheism. The one thing, though, that would send him scurrying for back issues of Doubt faster than anything was an encounter with the lynched black man. He would start to break out in a deep sweat, and then he would become minutely aware of the beating of his heart. His thoughts would start to dodge in wild directions in an effort to find a place for this ghost within the realm of his unbelief. Words and phrases like “manifestation of a collective unconscious guilt” or “temporal loopholes” or “mass hallucination” would jumble together, and he would stutter desperately. Finally he learned that the only true solution was to chant Hemingway’s prayer from “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” over and over again, until the specter went on its way. For the rest of the day he would run over in his mind “Our nada which art in nada, hallowed be thy nada . . .”

Jeanette Williams, walking home from the bus station, passed Paul, as he was chanting his litany against the soul. She said hi as he stumbled blindly by, but he desperately ignored her, figuring that she, too, was just another nonexistent spirit, sent to try his atheism and toss it spiraling into the soft purgatory of agnosticism. He was another happy jolt to Jeanette’s lost memories of Calapoosa, just like the Piggly Wiggly, the barber shop, and hardware store.

She walked in a daze of sun and dust and quiet Alabama streets, unaware of the stares and gawks of the Calapoosans, and yet somehow aware of everything, because it all fit into gaps in her heart. She paused at the Brewer’s Hair Designs and almost peeked in, but decided that her hair, or the lack thereof, would cause Shirley Brewer, the owner and “hair sculptress” (as she preferred to be known), to have minor heart failure. Shirley was a powerful woman who personally felt that the beehive was a pinnacle of hair design and an expression of the finest taste. It also happened to be the only style she could really knew, and as a result, half the women in town had enormous, towering pyramids and ziggurats of hair, all lovingly shaped by Shirley into unique patterns and styles. It all ultimately depended on the background music, of course. Jeanette could hear the delicate waltzing violins of Strauss’s “Blue Danube” pouring from the salon; someone would get a graceful, flowing beehive from that. She, herself, had once been in the chair for The Planets, and its wondrous mixture of moods had shaped her hair into a fantastic play, from the martial severity and chaos of Mars to the sensual serenity of Venus. Shirley finished in the middle of Mercury, and so the final product had laughing, light curls bursting out from the top for a stunning total effect. The next day her mother would be unfortunate enough to sit through “The Rites of Spring,” with its twisting, chaotic movements and staggered rhythms. She came home with a wild, sprawling beehive that turned suicidally at the end to correspond with the final ritual sacrifice of Stravinsky’s piece. The finest beehives, though, were rumored to come from Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major or Handel’s “Alla Hornpipe.” The end results were, like the music, itself, stately baroque and gracefully elegant, and people would look at the proud owner of the finest hairdo in the world and recall Bernini’s exquisite Four Rivers Fountain in the Piazza Novano. Jeanette rubbed the scruff at the back of her neck, and for a moment, thought wistfully of her old hairdo, but quickly dismissed the nostalgia. It just wouldn’t do in The City, which is where she had to remind herself that she lived. She considered the painful moment of that announcement of Plans and Options, none of which included Calapoosa or even Alabama. Naturally, her parents had expressed concern; there had been tears, and hasty words passed around like bitter wine. The decision though, had been unshakably final.

There had been many Reasons, and Reasons were the key. There was intolerance, to begin with. The local African Methodist Church was still invisible, after years of integration, and in spite of the fact that its choir regularly drew angels. She had often peeked in through the doors, to see a rich dark people dressed in beautiful red and white robes, singing with caramel voices, and in the back pews, angels, in rapt attention, trying to keep their wings out of the reach of the mischievous brown children crawling under the pews. She had walked out feeling that, in spite of its tremendous size, the Lord’s Good Love’s services were, by comparison, rather small and insignificant.

As she turned this memory over in her mind, she passed the empty green lawn, small but very neat, with a bed of azaleas that bordered the invisible building itself. Rehearsal was underway, and a small group of angels were already lined up in an orderly fashion, waiting their turn to be awed. As Jeanette continued on she heard one of the seraphim start strumming “Go Down, Moses” on his harp, and by the time she was past the Seed & Feed, a heavenly chorus was wafting across the town, in honor of the most beautiful and least well-known choir in the world. One day a member of that choir would leave Calapoosa and head West to California and start the most influential recording studio in the world, and one of the first CDs she would produce would be a collection of old recordings from her choir days.

Jeanette had only a hint of this as she walked home and rethought her arguments for never living in Alabama again. Dust from the dirt road that led to her family’s ancestral home clouded up around her legs with each step, and fine Alabama clay attached itself to her ankles. The heat, which she had considered to be so oppressive four years before, baked her toasty warm, and thawed the chill that had collected in her marrow during eight total winters in the Northeast. She was starting to struggle with her bag a little, but she didn’t have far to go. A cloud of gnats arose out of the cornfield and wove its way towards her. It amazed her how these tiny flies could sense sweat and billow towards it without such speed. Jeanette had traveled her without telling anyone; she had wanted no special greetings from anyone, least of all these gnats, and so she picked up her pace, proceeding beyond the cornfield and into the cool pecan groves that announced, in broad green leaves and a scattering of nuts, Hank Bodiford’s Pecan Plantation, and then on past the powerful bovine smell of the Hall Brothers’ Dairy, and at the very end of the earthen lane, her home.

She walked past the two great holly bushes and the rope swing attached the old oak tree, up to the front steps, and suddenly hesitated. She had come into town confident, and now she felt suddenly unsure. It was the first time in four years that she had been home, and it scared her. Almost timidly, she climbed the steps to the porch, and it was if her eight years of being grown up and on her own sloughed off. She turned and looked behind her and was somewhat surprised not to see a shed skin behind her, like one of the scales her mother would leave behind when her wings molted. I feel like a three year old, Jeanette thought with amazement, and stared down at her hands grown suddenly short and stubby with vestiges of baby fat. Her carpetbag lay at her feet, heavier than she could bear. She strained upwards to reach the screen door handle, and grasping it firmly in her newly tiny hands, slowly pulled it open and stepped inside.

“Mommy,” she called, “I’m home.”

* * * * *

Five hours later, and back to her normal size, Jeanette stepped out of the back of George Williams’ old Buick and onto the lawn of the Lord’s Good Love Church. She was afraid of turning into a child again, in front of all these people, so she stayed back from the bustle and watched as tables were thrown in neat rows, complete with chairs that seemed to materialize in orderly groups of fours, and tablecloths that would suddenly billow out of the sky and drift down like clouds of ugly red- and white-checkered perfection. Another row of tables sprouted up near the doors of the church, and then the women began to cover them with the trays, and crocks, and pans, and tins, and Tupperware bowls, filled with all varieties of fine Southern fair-fried chicken, honeyed ham, pit barbecued pork, fried catfish, venison steaks (from Franklin), Southern fried steak, chitterlings, fried okra, squash casserole, crowder peas, sweet potato pie with a gooey marshmallow top, deviled eggs, collard greens, turnip greens, irish potatoes (pronounced “ar’sh potatoes”), egg salad, potato salad, black-eyed peas, fried eggplant, butterbeans, giblet gravy, boiled peanuts, cornbread (five different kinds), and then, at the end, desserts: pecan pie, apple pie, peach cobbler, blackberry cobbler, blueberry cobbler, three ice cream makers (for after supper), five long red-meat watermelons, and five round orange-meat ones (courtesy of Jim and Mary Sikes, owners of the Farmer’s Market), red velvet cake, pecan sandies, lemon squares, rice crispy treats, peanut butter-filled Ritz cracker sandwiches dipped in chocolate, and Thelma Browne’s famous chocolate chip cookie bars. And Earl Wallace, owner of the local Piggly Wiggly, unloaded bottle after bottle of Chek Cola and Chek Orange Soda, at the end of the table, next to the two orange coolers of lemonade and iced tea, prepared by Jim Routley himself.

And there he was, weaving in and out of groups of folks, with a tremendous smile and a handshake or pat on the back, and there, under the elm trees, another table set up for checkers and Chinese checkers and dominoes, and on the south side of the building Joe Davis was putting up a volleyball net right near where Earl Shugs and Bill Presley were engaged in another legendary horseshoe competition. Jeanette watched as they flipped the horseshoes with grace and accuracy, to ring the post with happy clanks, while the children dared each other to cross the fence around the “gator” pond behind the church. She, too, remembered the delicious fear of sliding beneath the barbed wire to disturb the muddy surface of the pond with sticks and rocks (but never with a bare hand – the gator would sniff that in a second and yank you all the way down to the bottom and eat all of you, even the brains). And back among the tables she watched the slow flow of people, pausing to ask how Lurleen was, and whether Charles was really entering the service, and isn’t this grand weather for a supper; there was Hubert Jones, the math teacher, and Bobby Joe Carver, and Lucille, and Debby , and Thomas, who had been shot by his daddy, but had recovered, and the Hefflin Siamese twins, who were connected at the soul, and not the body, and felt the pain and pleasure of the other just as sure as if it were himself, and Fern Hartwell who had been born with a halo that floated a mere two inches above her beehive hairdo, and other faces and forms that coaxed out names like Fran and Sam and David and Jen. Jeanette knew all these people, and yet in the City she had lumped them all together as one nebulous foolish entity: the redneck.

Jim Routley raised his hand and said, “Let’s say a word of grace, before we all die of hunger!” Heads bowed, and Jim stated, “Dear Lord, we thank you for this day and for the feast we have before us, knowing that the real feast is in your Word, and we thank you, Lord, for the safe return of Jeanette Williams . . .”

Jeanette did not hear the rest of the prayer. She was surprised to have heard her name, surprised to realize that Brother Routley knew she was back and remembered her name. She belonged to a small health club in the City, and no one knew her name there, not even the door guard, who never recognized her as a member, and always asked for her ID. There were professors in her small department at school who didn’t even know who she was. There were times, of course, when the anonymity was nice, but now she felt an equal and perhaps even greater desire to be known, to be recognized, and to feel needed or appreciated, beyond her cool stereo and TV. This thought stayed with her, as she walked to the line that surrounded the food-laden tables. And years later, when she helped organize the first semi-annual (which sometimes meant monthly, and sometimes, not) pot-luck supper with the African Methodist Church, which would no longer be invisible, she would recall this feeling and laugh, because being known had its bad side, too. But for now, she felt that need so strongly it almost hurt.

That evening, Jeanette Williams ate and talked until she nearly threw up, and she went to sleep on a creaky wooden bed that sunk deeply in the middle. Outside the window, crickets and cicadas harmonized with the moon and stars, and Jeanette thought the sound to be infinitely nicer than gunshots and police sirens. She felt wrapped up in the sinking mattress, held tight and warm, for although the day had been almost hot, the night was cool, and the breeze through the open window nipped playfully at her. Her mother had hung a newly-made, homely cross-stitch on the wall. It read:

You are always Home Today — You can always leave Tomorrow (Matthew 6:34)

Jeanette pondered the statement drowsily. As she began to drift off, she thought that she was back in her City room, and wondered what such an ugly thing was doing on her wall, and what had happened to her Janis Joplin poster. And then she wondered how her City room had gotten to Alabama, and how she was going to get it back to the City, where it almost certainly belonged. And finally, as she was drawn inexorably into the hold of her lotus-bed, and still unaware of the conversion that she had just experienced in the shade of the church, Jeanette thought sleepily, as she often would for the next few days that turned to weeks to months to years to a life, Yeah, I’ll probably leave tomorrow.