Untold Tales

On the darkened porch, memories float wraithlike in the humid evening air, an old metal chair waiting in silence for an old man now almost twenty years dead. It seems reminiscent of him as he once sat long ago, lost in quiet thought or gesturing with long bony fingers as he shared oft told tales of early manhood, the promise of youth hanging heavily in the still and haunted air.

As a young man he inhabited two worlds: in one he worked from dawn to dusk in the breathless Mississippi heat and in the other he lived a rough, careless freedom, his long, easy swagger and the ruined company he kept so detached from the poor farm boy he truly was that he seemed in those times to be another man altogether.

And yet he was ever both men, gossamer remnants of the former floating in the tranquil night arm in arm with the hopeful visions that once lured him away from the farm where he was raised, restless wanderlust visiting itself on his sons just as it was visited irrevocably upon him. But for a poor, uneducated farm boy, drinking mean whisky and sharing the company of shiftless men was somehow easier than the terrifying challenge of chasing an elusive, shapeless dream.

It seems strange that those were the only years memorialized by his favorite stories, as if the freedom they represented was the last thread connecting him to the unspoken promise of his childhood fantasies. Like a dark cloud hanging cruelly above him, the stories he did not tell overshadowed the years and memories of his children, their unspoken absence giving the disappointments of his youth unanticipated power.

The shame of his unfinished education was a painful reminder of what he might have become if not for the demands of his parent’s farm, cultivation of the soil forever contaminated by Adam’s curse. In addition to robbing him of his youth, it ruined his chances of a decent education as well, forever denying him his dreams.

He knew how to read and to calculate his numbers, which was enough to meet his parent’s expectations and to prepare him for life as a farmer. But it was not enough for him. He knew he had a restless and curious mind; it tormented him that the opportunity to fully develop it was forever denied.

The secret dreams of his youth never quite died away – finding renewed life to a sometimes greater and sometimes lesser degree in his own children before passing like fairy castles in the sky to his children’s children and eventually to the great grandchildren he did not live to meet.

In consequence, the middle, shiftless years between his unspoken childhood and responsible manhood were infused with a kind of hobo romanticism, the humorous image of his old friend Alonzo Gollihard’s serious, cross eyed stare and pigeon toed walk a sparkling patina disguising the truth that his friend was a joy to remember because he was a good natured and lumbering drunk. The stories he told of Alonzo were funny, but where did they lead? And what became of him? Those were tales never told.

His children and grandchildren glowed with joy as he told them in any event, never tiring of the boyish sparkle in his eyes as he wheezed with helpless laughter at the thought of the good-natured Alonzo straddling an old log in a drunken attempt to cross a stream, or sassing a judge when asked if he knew anyone making moonshine or white lightning. 'Your honor,' he would rasp in imitation of Alonzo’s nasal voice, 'I didn’t know you could make one or the nother.'

But it was his laughter that made the stories really funny, making the retelling of them truly impossible once the old man died. Now they are little more than a distant memory in the minds of those still living who had often heard them, his infectious laughter the only thing they really remember and long to hear once more.

Even the old woman who had more reason to resent him than most often remembers the times when his spirits were buoyant and his manner filled with childlike joy, his strong and lanky arms sometimes popping her off the floor into his tall embrace as he whispered what a pretty li’l thing she was. She always answered “Oh you” … as if he really didn’t mean it, the reddening pleasure in her features giving lie to her words.

He was an entertaining and funny man when he wanted to be and this more than almost any other trait endeared him to his wife to the very end of their life together. In this respect laughter was a virtue almost as prized as love in their home, this sense of camaraderie characterizing the close and lifelong relationships of the children they raised.

But now that Lassie boy’s voice passed forever into the stillness of the night, the emotion of his death somehow is linked with the memory of the old man’s laughter, the two now bound together by death and the sound and fury of a long distant storm.

How many years into the future will the ripples of their ancient clash travel, how many others will know the burning in their bellies of the dreams that so profoundly shaped the lives of their former bearers? Does a man ever really die if his dreams find renewed life in another, even when his stories become a distant rattling in the thoughts and imagination of his heirs? Isn’t it enough that a real and intrinsic part of his life and character, for both good and ill, live on in generations that never even knew him?

There is a strange magic at work here, resisting easy explanation, the sleepy furniture on the porch searching for answers in the starlit night sky, the lonely streetlight glowing sadly in the twilight darkness as moths flutter in erratic loops and darts within its soft halo.

But the answer does not reside in the sky, without the tall twin pines at the end of the walk blocking most of the light’s waning illumination it would be invisible anyway, the mystery hidden by shadow or buried in the rusty soil beneath the old home.

Or perhaps it is not here at all, restlessly wandering many miles away amongst the old cedars and moss covered stones within the Sardis cemetery where so many of their kin sleep beneath hard clay. In some sense the Sardis Baptist church is where it all began when the porch’s master first saw and began to court his future bride at an ice cream social a seeming lifetime ago.

The experience of growing to adulthood on a farm filled him with frustration and contempt for the toil of his youth while wedding his wife forever to the same, as if the two of them were as unsuited for a life together as any two people might prove to be. She loved the magic of the green shoots wriggling impossibly from the rusty clay even as he was ambivalent to it, her devotion and care to her garden providing their household with the fresh bounty her hands wrought from early summer till late fall, canning and freezing maintaining vegetables on her table the remainder of the year.

After they left the farm forever behind, the garden plot behind the house was almost solely her responsibility and love, he would break up the sticky wet clay in the early spring with a tiller and she would do the rest, but even that reminded him too easily of the loss of his youth and promise to a cruel and unforgiving land.

When the old man was still young he had dreamed of trying his hand at vaudeville. He was good at impressions and quick-witted and had suggested the idea to his friend Alonzo on any number of occasions. But Alonzo wasn’t funny because he tried to be – his dour, deadpan face was not an act at all – he never laughed because he couldn’t see the humor that was so painfully obvious to everyone else. After all, people did not laugh with Alonzo – they laughed at him. The old man understood that would make him the perfect foil – like Gracie to George or Curly to Moe, but because Alonzo didn’t understand that he was the joke he could not understand why anyone would pay good money to see and hear him.

Instead of the vaudeville of his youthful dreams, the old man held court on his porch telling stories of local eccentrics and drunks when he was feeling funny. When the shadows of the times seemed too great for laughter, he would turn serious and speak in somber tones about the criminal underbelly of the south – moonshiners, gambling and prostitution.

‘To be boring,’ Oscar Wilde reputedly said, ‘is the only unpardonable sin.’ But perhaps it is possible to be too interesting. Local Southern eccentrics made for enjoyable entertainment and gossip in the evening on the old man’s porch. Michael Shaara once wrote that ‘Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.’ But the people who passed for crazy in Corinth only attracted loud guffaws when the old man recounted their antics on his porch.

Men like Walter Bobo who wore a cockeyed turkey feather hanging from his long, pulled back hair, an old buckskin jacket, and preached the gospel every Saturday from an old wagon stuffed with assorted doo-dads and nostrums to anyone bored or crazy enough to stop to listen were perfect examples of the type. “I am … an Indian Princess,” he would announce in resonant tones, as if the natural authority in his voice was evidence of his royal pedigree.

The old man never tired of telling stories about Lee Roland – another member of self-anointed Corinthian royalty – who opened a greasy spoon restaurant and took to calling himself the hamburger King of Corinth even though no one else ever did without covering their mouths in laughter. A favorite story was of the day Lee’s car was struck by a slow-moving freight train at the Linden Street railroad crossing after he absentmindedly passed the red flashing warning lights.

After arriving on the scene, Art Murphy, a member of the local constabulary, stared in open-mouthed horror at the car pinned to the side of the train as Lee paced nearby waving his arms in comic exasperation. But once Lee spied the approaching officer he indignantly exclaimed, “Now Art, don’t you look at me that-a-way, you can clearly see I had the right of way!”

Men like Walter and Lee were frequently discussed on the old man’s porch because their antics were entertaining or an object lesson on the dangers of mental or moral unfitness. It was easier to wink at southern eccentricity than to acknowledge or combat the true scourge of the Deep South – the underbelly of corruption and crime born of Mississippi’s prohibition laws.

Wags like the old man who did talk about it cynically described the state’s anti-liquor lobby as a coalition of preachers and bootleggers. The war on sin was a long one in Mississippi – its legal and black market consequences felt from 1909 to 1966 and the old man witnessed and frequently commented on it from its birth to its grave.

The old South was in consequence an ongoing contradiction of gentility and lawlessness, a story of a privileged and insulated aristocracy against the backdrop of poor white folk and destitute black folk. The privation of hard work and empty purses could not help but have their own unintended consequences. The further down the societal ladder that one descended, the cruder and earthier the resultant behavior became.

The old man was raised in consequence to fend for himself, the suffering his mother experienced as a girl when her father abandoned his wife and fourteen children ironically creating the resolve to teach her own offspring to seek their own happiness above any others. But even he knew he was poorly raised. He told his wife many a time – “I want you to raise our kids the way you were raised.”

He knew from first-hand experience that no matter how respectable the town or how many white churches lined its prim avenues that you did not have to walk far outside the county’s boundaries to find the roadhouses. Many of the paper and hosier mill workers – their pockets flush with their weekly earnings – would crowd into them on Friday and Saturday to gamble, drink, and whore – only leaving again when they were flat broke. Regardless of how much he had romanticized his wastrel youth in his stories, the roadhouses were the last places on earth he had wanted to see their children.

But in spite of his inclination to selfishness he was a strong man, not especially prone to worry but confident in his ability to find a way to provide the necessities for his family. When the worst years of the depression came his family was no hungrier or poorer than they had been before. Finding work was tougher, but there were always jobs for men accustomed to hard living and the difficult choices that accompanied them.

The soft, educated man would rather stand in the soup lines than stoop in the fields or handle rough sawed timber in the mills. The old man hated to work as much as any man hard or soft, but he wasn’t too proud to sweat for his bread, just too proud to beg for it.

Ironically, the longest spell he ever experienced without work did not come until the prosperity that followed in the wake of World War II and he and the old woman had a brand-new mortgage to pay on the little brick house at the corner of Wick and Young.

His eldest boy was working in Washington D.C. doing clerical work for the FBI and paid to furnish the new home, the old man and woman scrimping and saving almost seventeen years to pay him back, the words catching in old man’s throat when he finally pressed the money owed into his son’s hands.

It was one of those moments of silence when each of them resisted the tears forming in their eyes, waiting to wipe them with the back of their hands until they each had turned in embarrassment away. His son knew how proud his daddy was but could not find the appropriate words in response to the emotion he saw in his Daddy’s face, nodding only briefly in thanks at what he knew was a terrible sacrifice.

Their final exchange of money was in some odd sense the last remaining connection to the unchanging tradition where the old man’s ghost now forever abides. The past had reached out its hand in peace to the future, his father making the tacit and unspoken acknowledgement that it was still possible to honor obligations with dignity and grace long after the son’s accomplishments had outstripped his own.

But life had passed the old man and woman by in the interim between the lending and repaying, their children and grandchildren leaving them and a once familiar past behind for a world that measures time in seconds and minutes rather than hours and days.

They worked in careers rather than jobs, their families sometimes moving across the country rather than simply from one sleepy little town to another as the old man and old woman had done sixty odd years before. They were corporate executives and private business owners, professionals in the medical field, professors, counselors, architects, soldiers, engineers.

The traditions undergirding the family raised at the home on the corner of Wick and Young was born of almost unimaginable privation by ancestors living mostly off the land. Living like this took a grievous toll, women dying in childbirth and children of infectious diseases that rarely kill any more in the western world, people lying sleepless in the night on bug-ridden straw mattresses with bellies that often as not were gnawed by hunger.

The black and white photos of their kin seem like a window into a dying and forgotten world, the old man’s aunt Nan severe and unsmiling features in the few existing snaps of her consistent with her reputation for courage in the face of true adversity. When she discovered that her father’s foot was rotting away from gangrene her siblings held the old man down as she stoically sawed off the infected leg before cauterizing it with hot tar, her Daddy hollerin’ from the excruciating pain.

Some family stories were never told, the underlying mysteries undergirding them either accidental or blotted from oral history, like the disappearance of his maternal grandfather. His abandonment of wife and family was one of those half-told stories – his crime never forgiven or forgotten. The Deep South was like that in the old days, people slipping away for adventures in faraway lands or drowning in some backwoods stream when they were all liquored up.

Perhaps he was not the bad man that his heirs wish to remember, but an innocent one murdered for a few pennies by a drifter or for a remembered slight by another, prouder man, his body buried and then forgotten in some isolated patch of piney woods. Or perhaps he did run away and traveled far northward to find his fortune in gold and instead froze to death one lonely night on the Alaskan tundra for want of a dry match.

The sense of adventure the old man inherited from his forbearers was at the heart of his love for the woodland, lake, and stream. The raw and simple freedom of the wild murmured to him in deep and incomprehensible tones much as it whispered years later to Lassie Boy, the son who bore the greatest weight of his unspoken dreams.

Lying still on his back in bed in the humid night air the old man often imagined a fly rod in his hand, the green popper jumping with a flick of his wrist atop the water in imitation of a frog lazily swimming on the surface. It was hard in those sleepless, quiet moments not to envision an old cunning bass waiting in the dark and still water beneath the shade of an ancient, twisted willow as the quiet water rippled away from the lure floating in mocking innocence above. But imagination wasn’t really necessary; he knew the thrill and shock of the sudden, terrifying leap of the great fish just as he knew the strength of his sinewy arms when he jerked the rod back firmly to set the hook.

He felt a profound and mysterious affinity for the uncultivated earth, but he found it difficult to share these feelings with friends or family. When the emotion of it sometimes overwhelmed him he would grow silent, the ash on his cigar growing cold with neglect, the idea that he might find words to express the experience of it as utterly incompatible to his sensibilities as the sacred is incomprehensible to the profane.

If he had been a religious man he might have thought in such moments be still and know that I am God, and consecrate the moment with a prayer, but even an irreligious man sometimes recognizes when awe should lead to stillness and contemplation, even if it is done without a bending of the knees and bowing of the head.

It was enough to sit quietly watching and listening to the untamed earth disclose its mysteries or to describe on occasion a butcher bird attacking a mocker on the wing with a quick flick of his long hand or to demonstrate the length of a wasp or hornet using a joint or two of his fore finger.

For him fishing was as much an art as writing or painting, not so much in the mastering of the trifles, but in the expression and connection with the wild required to master it. The trifles were important, but the intuitive knowledge and temperament to meet its intrinsic challenges were more important still. For all his faults – and they were many – this was something he had understood to the very marrow.