Death and Taxes

Death and taxes were on my mind today. Of taxes, the less said the better. And I hesitated about writing this -- so close on the heels of writing about Grace's funeral. But death, like taxes, can't be ignored and the passing of Bob Frisby, whose standing-room-only funeral I attended this morning, has left a hollow in the heart of the community.
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Bob (who was the inspiration for taciturn Jim Hinkley in Elizabeth's world) ran the local Gulf (later BP) station for forty-four years. And it took four preachers, a piano player, and a gospel trio today to attempt to do justice to the life of this good man.

Almost everyone in the community has a story about Bob's kindness and patience and quiet wit. This was a man who would close his station (for many years a one man operation) to come to the rescue of a customer broken down on the highway. This was a man who, at the end of a long work day, would hike up a steep mountain road carrying heavy tire chains for a stranded woman's car. This was a man who worked early and late, knowing that folks whose jobs depended on their vehicles were counting on his being there. This was a man loved and honored by all who knew him. This was a man.

And a patient man. Bob probably never had fifteen uninterrupted minutes to work on a car repair, but he would climb out of the grease pit, nod at you with that quiet smile, and pump gas and talk about the weather as if he had all the time in the world. Maybe that's the secret to a life well-lived.

When he retired last year, Bob's friends were happy to think that now he'd have leisure for the things he loved: especially his family (how he loved those grandchildren!) and his fishing. (I think the first time that I really felt I'd been accepted into the local community was when Bob began to show me pictures of the fish he'd caught.)

"It breaks my heart," one of the preachers said, speaking of that well-earned retirement so suddenly cut short .

It breaks mine too.

My Father's Indian Pony

My father was a quiet man who never talked much until my mother died. She always pretty much used up all the air in a room and he didn’t seem to mind. Maybe he didn’t have anything to say because after she was gone, he continued to be sparing with words -- at least around his children.

In many ways, my father was terra ingognita to me, unknown and unknowable. By the time my mother died, I had moved from Tampa to North Carolina, returning to visit only a few times a year. And still he wasn’t inclined to talk about the past.

I knew he’d grown up part of a pioneer Florida family, working -- grudgingly, according to my mother -- at their dairy in Tampa. Though most of his (our) kin lived nearby, he was not close to any of them and seemed to have no fond memories of growing up in the late twenties and early thirties. And that was all I knew. I was ready to snatch at any crumb of his past.

On one of my visits to Florida, my father, my boys, and I were driving along Tampa’s elegant Bayshore Boulevard with its six and a half mile sidewalk, and Daddy mentioned how, till the mid-thirties, there had been no fancy balustraded sidewalk and seawall– only mudflats.

“I had a little Indian pony,” he said, “and used to ride down here all the time.”



That was it; the moment passed. Probably one of the boys asked a question that changed the subject. But a few years later, after my father’s death, I remembered that simple statement and, from it, constructed for him a more interesting and happier youth.

He probably kept the pony at the dairy, I decided, and when he was done with the morning milking, he’d saddle up his horse – it had grown to a small spotted horse in my mind now – spotted, to account for his calling it an Indian pony. I pictured him riding along the glistening mudflats of Tampa Bay, trailed by neat crescent hoof prints, his blue eyes sparkling like the sun-kissed water. A happy, even romantic boyhood, only slightly marred by cows. I felt as if by discovering this story about my father and his long-ago pony, I had found some key to who he really was.

Recently my brother came to visit. I told him about Daddy's Indian pony and the long rides by the bay back when Tampa was still unspoiled, feeling slightly misty-eyed as I did so.

My brother looked at me in some amusement, " I don't think you've got it right. What Daddy had was one of the smaller motorcycles made by the Indian Company. It was called a Pony."

How many so-called memories, I wonder, do I carry around, never realizing they’re imagined – only figments constructed on a foundation of what might have been? Hard to know -- I'll think about it another time but just now I'm busy reconstructing Daddy's teenage years as a prototypical Marlon Brando -- a la "The Wild One."

The Grass Is Always Greener

Cows are drawn to weak fences by an uncanny and unerring force. And yes, in what passes for the bovine mind, the grass is always greener on the other side. So she'll munch and lean into the fence, ignoring those puny barbs (a cow's skin is very, very thick) till, if someone doesn't shoo her away and fix that wire that's down, she'll make a bigger gap and then there'll be a serious outbreak of cattle.

When we first moved to the farm and started a herd, our fences were what is technically known as a joke. Rusted, sagging barbed wire, rotting, leaning locust posts -- and that was the good part. We patched and mended, unable to afford the total replacement that was really called for. And we learned how to herd cattle when they've escaped and gone off on an adventure.

During those early years we got to know a lot about the other side of our mountain, tracking the cows through the scrub and overgrown pastures there. We learned how to avoid looking at a suspicious cow as you slip around her to turn her back the way she came. We found that there seemed to be an unwritten law among cows and calves that if the whole herd is nicely bunched and moving back through the hole in the fence to their home pasture, one, or possibly two, will invariably decline to follow the gang and take off in a frenzy, running along the wrong side of the fence looking for a better way in. We learned that a little sweet feed in a bucket is the best way to get cattle to follow you and that you can get poison ivy, even in winter.

I could go on about cows on the loose but just now I think I'd better see what those girls are up to.

From the Ridge Top

Hit was in the spring of last year – eighteen and fifty nine -- and the day was one of them bright clear ones with all the world looking like hit had been washed clean. Old Baldy’s the highest peak on Bear Tree and with the sky so close hit seemed to me like hit wouldn’t be no trouble atall to reach out and maybe grab God’s shirttail.
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Off in the far distance I could see the mountain humps a-stretchin out in blue rows till they kindly melted into the sky. And then it come to me as how I’d like to travel beyond them mountains some day, maybe see the great ocean that my kin had crossed, back when they first come to this land. I stared off into that blue far-away and, like I had heard the preacher say one time, my spirit took wing. (From the upcoming In a Dark Season )

Today wasn't perfectly clear, but when the young folks decided to climb to the ridge, I sent my camera along. I'm busy writing, having just learned an interesting tidbit about Miss Birdie -- besides, a recent bout with a weird knee tells me I'd better not try that steep hike. No spirit taking wing for me. but I'll join you all in traveling vicariously.

By the way, people often ask about the parallel ridges you see in the grass in the picture above. No, they're not from plowing -- far too steep -- but from years of cattle tacking their slow back-and-forth way up and down the slopes.

This is our holler. Far down below, to the left of the center of the picture , you can see the roof of the blue house (aka Julio's) and beyond it the pond. You can see poplar trees greening up and red new growth on the maples and, in the upper right hand corner, the road curving around the mountain, just above the place where Dessie and then The Three lived in that alternate world.

Which I now have to get back to because Miss Birdie is telling me more and more about her life before she was a cute little octogenarian.

Thanks to Claui for taking the pictures!

SIBA

The SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Book Award was created to recognize great books of southern origin. Booksellers nominate and vote on their favorite "handsell" books of the year -- the "southern" books they have most enjoyed selling to customers --in several categories, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cooking and children's.

Last year's winner for fiction was Charles Fraser's Thirteen Moons; Lee Smith's On Agate Hill was short listed. It's a very prestigious award.

This year there are twenty-four nominees in the Fiction category -- and can you imagine my surprise and delight when I came in from planting potatoes to find that Old Wounds is one of the twenty-four! Ah vow, Ah may swoon! !!! (fanning face gracefully). Many, many thanks to City Lights Books in Sylva for nominating me!

I doubt I'll make it to the short list -- but what an honor to be among those on the long. (Old Wounds is the only mass market paperback original in the group -- a tad declasse -but it promises to mind its manners and not talk loud.) For the complete list -- and it'll point you to some excellent reading -- go to http://www.authorsroundthesouth.com/AWARDS/

An Old Familiar Ritual

A hundred pound bag of seed potatoes has been waiting in the barn for more than a week: waiting for the ground to dry out, waiting for the right combination of people to be available for the task at hand, waiting and sprouting there inside the dark bag, eager to get on with the task of reproduction. My husband had plowed and tilled the potato patch ground some time ago but this morning my younger son tilled it once more, fluffing the rich dark earth to make it easier to hoe. While the tractor clanked in the distance, I sat on the porch, listening to a recording of Patrick O'Brian's One Hundred Days and cutting the potatoes into chunks ( two or more 'eyes' or sprouts per chunk) for planting. The familiar earthy-starchy smell of the potatoes mingled with the spicy-sweet fragrance of the viburnum blooming in the front yard.

We learned to plant potatoes from Clifford and Louise who were here before us. We asked if they planted by the moon or followed the signs and Clifford allowed as how he planted when he could. "I don't live on the moon," was what he said. Like Clifford, we plant when there's a window of opportunity. And with rain, possibly even snow, predicted for the rest of the week, the window is about to close. So after lunch, it was down to the new-tilled field for the commencement of an old familiar ritual.

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Dan kept me company as I filled an old dog food bag with cut potatoes. Justin hoed out shallow trenches; I dropped the cut potatoes in at eight inch (give or take) intervals and Claui covered them with dirt. Next came the step Clifford called "strewing the fertilize," followed by more dirt to cover the fertilizer, preventing the nitrogen from dissipating into the air.

And the rain will come and the potatoes will send up green leaves. Two or three more times, we'll go to the potato patch to hoe down weeds and mound up dirt around the plant, protecting the growing potatoes from the sun which turns them green and, reputedly, poisonous.

If all goes well, come fall there'll be a glorious Potato Hunt as the plow breaks open the mounded dirt and we see what our labors have produced.

As Clifford said, 'Taters is easy made."

Into the Light

Not being religious, I have no firm conviction as to the nature or even the existence of an afterlife. I do agree with Mark Twain who felt that an eternity spent playing harps and singing praises would be tedious. And I reject the notion that any loving deity would condemn anyone to eternal torment. Beyond that -- well, I've been willing to be surprised.

I've never spent much time thinking about the hereafter -- except, as the joke goes, when I'm standing in front of the open refrigerator and wondering what I'm here after. But recently . . .

Every morning I descend into the dark basement, deal with the laundry, then fill a can with sunflower seeds for the bird feeder outside. I pick up a walking stick (the grass is usually slick with dew) and open the door. The brilliance of the just-risen sun dazzles my eyes. I bow my head and set off into the bright light of a spring morning.

If I could choose my afterlife, this is how it would begin.

Sun Up

For a shining moment
It seems to pause --
A copper penny,
Poised on edge and
Ready to roll
Straight and true
Down the narrow blue ridges
Of the waking world.

At Gudger's Stand

Gudger's Stand in Elizabeth's Marshall County is a little collection of derelict buildings clustered by the bridge. Here, in Little Sylvie's time, would have been a depot (the train tracks lie just to the left) and this red brick building would have housed a general store. This building, by the way, is the origin of the name Gudger's Stand -- on that light colored plaque above the middle window is the name of the builder -- a Mr. Gudger.

In the upcoming In a Dark Season, this building is the home to the mysterious Thomas Walter Blake the Fifth -- aka The Troll. (In our world, the building is uninhabited and its back wall half gone. )

"... but the Troll was nowhere to be seen. Elizabeth studied the dilapidated brick building that was presumably his home. Or his lair. Once a prosperous mercantile concern, the business had closed long before she and her family had moved to the county. Birdie said she used to shop there in the forties but it closed when the passenger trains quit running. And that old guy has been hanging out there -- I guess living there -- as long as I can remember.

"She cast a dubious eye at the rusting cars and trucks resting on blocks in front of the old building. The sight of an enormous tabby cat perched on the hood of a battered old pickup should have been reassuring but instead seemed somehow ominous. As if it's lying in wait for someone.

The building's ground floor windows were covered with plywood, but a curl of smoke from a stovepipe protruding from the flat roof hinted at warmth within. At one of the upper windows, a movement caught her eye, a figure moving past the glass."

A Sunday Walk

Come for a walk with me! Follow this link for a Sunday stroll in the woods and here and there.

http://picasaweb.google.com/vickilanemysteries/ASundayWalkApril62008

Shouts of Forsythia

Shawled in morning fog,
The distant mountain sleeps -- no
Shout disturbs its peace.



The shoots of the forsythia, thick with yellow flowers, are like fireworks exploding, spiralling outwards in joyous abandon. I think that the sight of all that golden glory should rightfully be accompanied by glad shouts -- something like the verse from Job --"The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

I wasn't exactly shouting for joy this morning when I had to leave the house early to get to Isothermal Community College in Spindale, NC for a writers' workshop, but I was rewarded with the sight of the fog lying in a thick layer across the mountain immediately to our east, muted in monochrome grays and punctuated with the bright spires of forsythia in the foreground.

The rest of the day held more rewards --getting to attend a terrific workshop by the novelist Ashley Warlick, having a group of enthusiastic and talented participants in the workshop I taught, spending time at lunch with more folks who've been bitten by the writing bug, and then hearing the other presenters read from their works: Ashley, from a recent novel; Joseph Bathanti, from a collection of his short stories, and Cathy Smith Bowers, from several of her books of poetry. All wonderful -- all inspiring.

What a lovely way to spend a rainy day!

Ooh, La La!

Elizabeth is going to France!

No, this isn't a late April Fool's prank. I just received word from my editor that I have my first foreign publishing license! Editions J'ai Lu in France have just come on board for both ART'S BLOOD and SIGNS IN THE BLOOD. Sacre bleu! likewise Zut alors!

Both books will be translated and published -- in French, in France -- sometime in the next two years. I can't wait to see how they deal with the dialect. Of course, it would be nice if I had more than the vaguest knowledge of French, but still . . .!

Maybe someone out there will suggest how to translate "Aye, law, honey, come on in and git you a chair." Please!

I really want to imagine Miss Birdie speaking French. Will it change her? Will she become thin and dress stylishly and smoke Gitanes? Will she replace her cornbread and biscuits with baguettes and brioche ?

The mind boggles!


(Picture courtesy http://www.freefoto.com/ Isn't the internet amazing?)

Another Piece of the Puzzle

"Hand in hand, Elizabeth and Phillip strolled down the leaf-strewn driveway, toward the little pond just beyond the herb field. . . . Down the rock steps and across the wooden footbridge that spanned the shallow branch. The pond lay bounded on one side by the herb field and on the other by a pasture. A rustic pavilion, almost hidden by the coils of a rampant wisteria, jutted out over the still water, and two dark-stained Adirondack chairs awaited them there." (Old Wounds, p. 203)

Here's another bit of the real farm that also shows up in Elizabeth's world. (And yet another blue bench!) Alas, in our world Elizabeth's fragrant field of herbs is a cow pasture -- fragrant in a different way.