It didn’t occur to me yesterday, Monday, April 14, that it was the first day of Holy Week, leading up to Easter next Sunday. I had my head down all day measuring and cutting boards, knocking together the stage I’ve been working on for a few days. Today, in fact, is day six in the construction schedule.

I’m working directly beside the main trunk of an old live oak tree, one of the treasured oaks here at Waterhole Branch. The site is on top of the spot where another stage had held literary and musical court in the goodtime past. But that one was cut down with chain saws and hauled away on a flatbed truck, as I hear. I wasn’t around when it happened. But I’ve heard the stories.

This place, this land where I’m rebuilding the stage belongs to authors Suzanne Hudson and Joe Formichella. The former stage belonged to them. This stage belongs to them, and in a slantwise manner, I suppose, to all the good people who made donations and helped raise money to rebuild it.

Suzanne calls it the Resurrection Stage. So, a time or two or three, these last few days as I was up and down my ladder, bending over to hoist another two-by-six onto the saw horses, visualizing what would come next since I’ve been working without plans, I have thought about Easter coming up. That resurrection story.

 

Also brown-studied a bit on new birth, on eggs not for boiling, dying and eating, but for hatching-out. Because the stage is also in the staked-out territory of a pair of Red-shouldered hawks who are new parents. Their nestlings pecked their way out into this world three days ago.

If I tilt back my cap and look straight up the main trunk, about forty feet high up in the tree it splits into two heavy branches. Like arms raised, palms up, in praise of rain at the end of a long dry spell. Or a preacher man asking his congregation to please rise. There at that juncture of the tree, in that crotch is where Mr. and Mrs. W. B. (Waterhole Branch) Hawk laced together sticks and branches into a three-foot circle. The Audubon site says they likely lined it with bark, moss, and sprigs of green vegetation. Made it nice and strong, ‘cause they’ll reuse it.

It occurred to me, it being Easter season and all, that when I get the Resurrection Stage finished, why not have a priest to come and anoint the stage. Bless it with nice words of joy and hope, talk about community and sharing. Say something about the writers and singer-songwriters, talk some about their words and music that, from this new stage, would raise the spirits of an audience as sure and as well as a Sunday service.

As I walked down the hill this morning, looking at the almost finished stage, hoping to get it wrapped up today, I thought it’s about time to call the priest. I stepped up onto the new boards and immediately noticed that somebody had splattered them with white paint. What? Who? I looked around.

Wait a minute, stupid!

What was that other thing I read online about baby hawks?

It said that within the first five days of life, the hatchlings learn on their own to poop over the side of the nest. No need for diapers. No fouling the nest. But watch out below!

I was delighted. A most perfect anointing of the Resurrection Stage. Saint Francis would love it! And I also love this holy sacrament, this wholly innocent bestowing of, if not divine grace, then the certain promise of a great good place in the out-of-doors for celebrating books and music, in the gliding shadow of hawks in the sky.

Six years after the death of Tennessee writer William Gay, comes The Lost Country, a new novel by him from a manuscript that was found in the attic of his ex-wife’s house. Lots of people knew this book was out there someplace, William himself had read pieces of it aloud at literary events. But nobody had found it. At least not all of it.

Soon after William’s death, I was given by his children some 250-odd manuscript pages to read. Definitely pages from The Lost Country. They were written longhand. William handwrote all his first drafts, then typed and revised them. I was editor-in-chief then for MacAdam-Cage Publishing in San Francisco, and the book was under contract there. I would read the manuscript and report to the publisher, David Poindexter. It would be a great pleasure for me, mixed with some work squinting at his tiny script, and turning the pages this way and that for what was written in the margins.

I borrowed a beach house in Gulf Shores, and went there to see what my dear friend William had written. When I came across the paragraph that included the phrase that was the title of the work, I couldn’t read another line for a day. Here’s that small piece of the genius talent from this man who never went to college, never took a writing class, and worked as a sheetrock hanger while writing these lines. I cannot fathom the brilliance of literary style William acquired all on his own only from reading the books of other great Southern writers.

“After she’d gone in he sat for a time just listening, the croaking of the frogs diminished by the enormous silence of the night. A pale sliver of moon had risen, the bottom edge poised to cup water, a dry barren moon. By its meager light the fields of cotton looked silver, a vast expanse faintly luminous, like St. Elmo’s fire at sea. Earlier there were lights from other shanties but they had gone down to darkness now, and he could see the moment it happened, the face leaned to the lampglobe and the harsh expulsion of breath and the sudden darkness that smells of kerosene and the slow creak of the bedsprings, and the murmurs, the whispers, all over the sleeping land, demurred, passions spent and passions spurned in the temporary dark while the earth tilts inexorably toward the waiting sun. As if he’d be clarified in the crucible of crazed austerity, made whole by the innocence of love, or at least cauterized where the bleeding was coming from. The nights were never long enough, the night would not replace what the day had stolen. In all their beds in all their shotgun shacks they lay burled against the quilts in agonized crucifixion, their troubled dreams biased by the enormous tug of gravity from the invisible and lost country they are come from.”

I hated to report the awful disappointing news to the publisher that the manuscript was incomplete. I told David there were likely twice as many pages missing. And he died not seeing this completed novel come to print, his publishing company closed down after his passing.

The editor of the publishing house, Dzanc Books, that will release the novel on July 10th also worked for David, and she was, in fact, copy editor on my fourth novel, The Widow and the Tree. So when Michelle Dotter asked me would I support the book in William’s absence, I said yes, of course. I wrote the foreword, and I will tour around the South with the novel this summer and fall.

This month, I will be in Birmingham at Alabama Booksmith, Friday, July 7, at 5 pm; in Jackson, Mississippi at Lemuria Books on July 10; and Page & Palette in Fairhope on Tuesday, July 17, at 6 pm. I’ll report the rest of the tour in those months I’m on the road. Please come out and become acquainted with this beautiful book.

I wrote this story when the Eastern Shore Art Center paired authors and artists for a show where either the author or the artist took inspiration from the other’s work to complete his own contribution. Frankly, I cannot remember whether I looked at John Cleverdon’s woodblock print to write my story, or he read my story and created his artwork. It doesn’t matter. We worked together in some kind of arrangement.

This is the only piece of short fiction of mine published in an anthology I had nothing to do with, Climbing Mount Cheaha, edited by Don Noble. I co-edited a college literary magazine, the Southern Bard, and both I and the other editor unashamedly included our own work in the two annual issues we produced. 

 

 

HE WAS ON A NORTHBOUND TRAIN 135 KILOMETERS OUT OF CADIZ, SPAIN WHEN HIS DADDY DIED and a week passed before he got word. Somebody finally thought to send him an email.

When he caught the southbound, he took a window seat and slung his backpack on the floor and put his feet on it. He rested his forehead against the frosted glass, feeling all over the buzz of the steel wheels rolling hard on the rails.

By the time he got home the old man was in the ground. His house had been cleaned out. Everybody got what they wanted, and it was mostly empty.

Figuring the prodigal son was good for a few more years traveling light, he had been left out of the settlement of his father’s things. When his name had come up at the funeral, somebody said it would be a long time before that boy grows up.

He went to the house, he did not go to the grave site, and he found the front door unlocked and a FOR SALE sign already in the yard. He looked at the key on the ring snap-shackled to his belt loop and wondered should he leave it on the kitchen counter for the new owners. He decided to keep it.

 

Without the furniture and the curtains, his hollow footfalls down the hallway echoed back at him like the clocking of time toward his own mortgaged future. Sitting on the bed was the last place he’d seen the old man, fumbling to untie the frazzled shoelaces in his Walmart house-brand sneakers. He had spent some time looking at those sneakers the night he left, not wanting to get into it with the old man’s eyes. They could look a hole in you and let all your planning and resolve leak out and puddle up around you.

“So you spend four damn years in Tuscaloosa, sitting in those boring-ass classes to get your ticket punched on graduation day so you can be a hobo? I told you studying English was about as useful as tits on a boar hog. Son, I don’t know what the hell to make of you anymore.”

He had nodded slow, noticing the glue was breaking loose on the toe of the left sneaker. His dad gave a soft, sighing groan while bent over tugging off the shoe. He’d let his eyes drift up and the old man’s head was down and his thinning hair drooped like an injured bird’s wing. He watched his father’s head tilt back and his face was blood red, his eyes rising like a gray dawn. Then, enough heard, he had walked out without saying another word into the emptiness. Hit the road.

One year ago tomorrow since he left, he opened the door to his father’s bedroom, stripped bare of the bed and dresser and pictures on the wall. Full to ringing, however, with memories of cautious approaches to the old man. “Come in here, boy!”

Then he saw them. The door to the closet was ajar and he could see the sneakers at right angles, toe-to-toe, one turned on its side, looking soft like they’d been lived in. After a good deal of walking. The old man always said hell’s a stylish shoe, heels all jacked up and toes squeezed in. “The devil’s own invention,” his father said.

Now you are dead and gone, and your shoes are here, he said, and his words strummed the silent walls that seemed to wait for a ballad or a hymn, if only one could be found. He looked around at the emptiness.

And the stowaway sneakers. He stared at them, as if they might beckon him, as if he might say something. He thought it odd that he didn’t know what size shoe his father wore. The he kicked off his Birkenstocks and stood barefoot on the floor. He stepped over to the closet and put his right foot into one of the sneakers and his toes caterpillared in for a perfect fit. He used his left foot to right the other sneaker and slipped into it. He stood there looking at his feet, the sneakers, his sandals. The prodigal son come home, his prize collected now.

He would leave his sandals on the kitchen counter.

Someone might later say, see what I told you about that kid, and he would be right.