woke up in a housebound rage, my friend V. Changed diapers. Played poker. Drank bourbon. Played duplicate bridge. Made casseroles, grape salad, macaroni and cheese. Played cards with the priest. Made an argument for school uniforms, but the parents were concerned the children would be indistinguishable. She was thinking: affordable, uniforms. You can distinguish them, she argued, by their shoes. It was a mind on fire, a body confined.
And on the other side of Division, a whole other population in year-round lockdown.
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live[d] to bear children to a dunce.
[Yeats she knew well enough to wield as a weapon. It would pop out when she was put out. Over the ironing board. Over cards. Some years the Big Tree Catholic foursome would all be pregnant at once, playing bridge, their cards propped up on distended stomachs. Laughing their bourbon-logged heads off.]
She had a brain like the Reading Room in the old British Museum. She could have donned fingerless gloves and written Das Kapital while hexagons of snowflakes tumbled by the windowpanes. She could have made it up whole cloth. She could have sewn the cotton out of her own life. While the Thames froze over.
She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.
Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.
+ + +
AMONG HER EFFECTS, a bourboned-up letter:
Dear Callie,
This grandmother of yours is an intoxicant and you are not. It makes me proud that you study calculus.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Anyway, there is one thing that happened that I want you to know about. One Arkansas summer, the summer of 1967? The boys came running in the house and said they saw an accident and we all ran down the road and there was this old man walking around in a daze and I asked if I could help him. There was a car in the ditch and Rudy and Will, I think, said no one was in it. The man said his name, which I forget, and asked me to call Mrs. Hand [an aristocrat with an elevator in her house] and ask her to send help.
I did. She took the message, thanked me and hung up.
About a month later, her son, a prominent town attorney, called me up and asked me to be a witness, and I told him that I hadn’t seen anything. And he said, Come to court anyway. So I went.
The prosecutor, the D.A., was a man named Hunter Crumb. So I’m sitting in the witness chair, telling what happened and I referred to the dazed man, and I quote myself:
And that gentleman, I’m sorry, I have forgotten his name, came up to me and asked me to call Mrs. Hand.
Okay, I do not exaggerate, the D.A. got red in the face and said, “Did you call that [N-word] a gentleman?” and went on at length yelling at me. Face on fire, yelling. I looked at the judge. I looked at Mr. Hand, but they would not look at me. Finally I was allowed to step down. I was shocked.
The second thing I want you to know is that in mid-June of 1969, Sweet Willie Wine [aka, the Man Imported from Memphis or the Prime Minister or the Invader] and Mrs. Oliver called on Hunter Crumb, to present the proper permits for the boycott and ten minutes after they left that man’s office Hunter Crumb dropped dead of a heart attack. I don’t have the news accounts of that, but it happened, and it was like electricity in Big Tree.
After that, I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell.
+ + +
It gradually turns from clear to coffee;
the river receives another river near its mouth
and joins the mighty river to the south of Helena.
Yoncopin are the lilies in the ditches [pretty bloom
for a filthy drainage ditch isn’t it now]. An Arkansas arc
is not a rainbow but an old iron bridge over troubled
brown waters. The cornea’s collection of the earliest
rays ordering an entirely different distribution
of light and shade, I could imagine my friend V:
being blind and seeing everything, marrying a dozen
men and living alone, having seven children and
being barren, toting an M16 that looked
like a hoe, whistling down a taxi in a cold
capital; I could see the faded and ragged fields
replaced by blue shadows on hills of snow or
turning from a stag at the edge of the interstate
into a freshwater pearl before more sediment
entered the river than flowed from its mouth.
[Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a rat snake.]
+ + +
Correction Facility Area
No Stopping
Stay Away
Stay Away
Remain Calm
You Watch
How You
Carry Yourself
I Told My Babies
My Beauties
And Don’t You Go
Getting In That Line
Don’t You Dare Go
Getting In That Line
Festina Lente
My Darlings,
Never Waver,
My Dears.
No more than blood:
There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy dark, burning to cross over.
