Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

Plus I’m still a handsome dude, hung like a small bear. I am faithful to my wife in our separation and she is faithful to me. Time is all, a hard matter, time and its exasperations like minutes stretched to no horizon.

Now in Oxford, drawn by the church, mosque, and tabernacle burnings from northwest Mississippi to St. Louis along the river through Memphis, I admit again I am a worm. I am organizing walking tours from blackened ruin to blackened ruin. Some of the churches were not just burned. They were bombed expertly as well. They exploded as only the hand of a specialist could bring about.

This does not harken back to the Klan burnings of the sixties, which were done by imbecilic cowards cheered on by silence from miserable governors. This is new history. You think Iraq. Vets of Iraq. I know six of them but have not a clue if the crimes are connected to any, none, or all of them.

I forgot to say, because I am a worm, that there is a fee for enrollment in these tours. I have written some articles regarding medicine in literature and have an instructorship at the university, hired on by the kind chairman of English, Joe Urgo, now at Hamilton College. My ship was continued by the next chairman, Patrick Quinn, the important Graves scholar with the hair of Mick Jagger. Dan the junkyard preacher dropped out of the sad motorcycle gang that remained behind in his cabin mourning when he went to Texas Christian for advanced knowledge of the Bible. I understand his studies were thorough and he came out completely insane though functional like most seminary students. Then there is the Choctaw Indian, Pearl Room, from Philadelphia, Ms. and the Indian casino down there, who, well, lectures on the spirituality of the Indian culture, among Choctaws and Chickasaws, the two tribes of the state.

The fee for the walking tour is 5 K.

I came to gawk, just like the rest, and am now the most experienced gawker. In my case, as leader and an invalid I ride the motorcycle and wait around the ruins preparing my lecture for the pilgrims. We have enrolled twenty pilgrims so far, mainly wealthy retirees from the Great Lakes cities who need the exercise and are crazy for Southern Culture, outside of catfish, the leading export of these precincts. Half of them are Jewish, the rest Irish and Swedes. The Swedes, you recall, gave Faulkner the Great Prize, so we start at his home Rowan Oak under the cedars in the long driveway, because cedars were the Indian funeral trees, as Pearl Room explains.

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

My own church down on the bayou north of Vicksburg exploded.

On a hunch I told the pilgrims that from thirty-thousand feet above you see the black dots that connected into the face of Jesus of Nazareth. Then I found out this was true, with only a little push from the imagination.

It was a great shame my church exploded before the IRS could auction it.

But here’s the worst news: my nephew Wilkes Bell is one of the arsonists. My sister, his mother, Ellen, knows nothing about this. My love for them prevents me turning him in to the law. That is a bit of a lie. I’m dazzled and exhilarated and proud of him until my best self comes back.

All the way through art school at the university he painted indifferently but the subject was always fire. The art school was totally ignored by the university, lucky for him. His teachers were alarmed by nothing since it was shit anyway, his paintings. Not even coded fire. Just fire, what fire does to whatever — beginning, middle, and end.

It is true I was licensed by this nation and the navy to burn and explode structures and the humankind near them, this aloof and with impunity. Just as whatever blew me out of my plane was licensed. Burning a church is one sorry damned thing. What hopes, prayers, and dreams, humble houses of worship that civilize and make gentle the hearts clustered to them. When you see flames eating up what kind, thoughtful hands have prepared for their deity, it is the least mirthful matter on the table. Nowhere in my soul is there even pity for such arson, not at my worst. Only the insanely religious or the pathological can bring it off. Or the other crime of long passion: revenge.

My nephew lives in the townhouse apartment in the very room the famous Eli Manning had during his college days at Ole Miss. I’ve chatted with this lad. Both he and his dad, Archie, remind me of Huckleberry Finn at quarterback. Loosey-goosey, they can flat fling the football, and then an Aw shucks, wasn’t that good , toe in the sand. Grand boys, as are also the other two sons, Peyton and Cooper Manning. A national treasure under the miracle tree. God, I love the Harvard crimson and Yale blue of the Ole Miss Rebels. This fall under Houston Nutt we might get back to our 7–4 or even 8–3 seasons in the roughest toughest conference there is. At thirty my nephew Wilkes Bell is not a grand boy. He doesn’t want to be a trust-fund baby, but he most certainly is.

I go by his apartment in the second story of a storied brick hotel now given over to overpriced clothing for swanky hunters and smooth tan daughters just a little younger than their mothers who are also smooth and tan and with sandals and legs. At the north end of the block is the famous Off Square Books. I must get the New Testament on CD to work with the young mid-age mothers in my home church, a white shingled two-story farmer’s mansion with giant magnolias and thin wooden columns, a balcony from which I might one afternoon play the CD over loudspeakers with the women under me in lawn chairs and poolside wicker love seats. I can imitate the Pope. Whichever king of piety the Catholics have now. Yes, go again to Africa and preach in favor of exponential births where the sand and flies fight it out for misery. Has a pope ever held a bloated starving, dying infant in his arms speaking the last rites to it? But I rant. From the balcony I could simply raise my arms and look down. Because I hate to preach and congregations spook me. You must understand I’m no phony. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount on CD and I could look at the tan cleavage, sweating in summer heat much like the Holy Lands.

And I am faithful to Brazile. I look at the cleavages and enjoy them as the women would have me do. But I’m thinking of my lovely Brazile, finally. She’s a woman of mutating beauty. A fearsome beauty in wrath, a quiet madonna at peace, in joy. I have a hard time remembering her face, frankly. And lord I have other troubles.

There’s my nephew Wilkes on his balcony, drunk, hanging over the rail in his suit like a black flag and pumping his arm in a thumb-up victory wave, then a salute. He adores me. Once said he would follow me to hell. I’m afraid my influence on him has been vicious, even if I’m straight and sober now ten years.

Suddenly on my right is the French mockery of a restaurant, 208, yes named for its address on South Lamar, where another vet of the 2003 Iraq war rises and falls as bartender and kitchen man. He’s still a kid although bulked up from the army. They say he’s not doing well, and you know they say is truer than the Bible. Went over to help schools and hospitals. Then received fire. Returned it. The poor boy is pouring out of the mold that formed him.

By Mississippi standards, Oxford is a city. Pop 30,000 counting the university of 14 K. You can get lost merely changing your haircut, your car, your bar.

Could it be that I’m losing my very heart, Brazile. Didn’t I fight for her before we met in that feast for flyboys over Iraq? No. Christ the lamb, Christ the sword. Couldn’t He decide? Am I worshipping at the feet of nothing but a difficult poem? But most days I have Him. All pieced out into the meek and least of us. My ruin is insufferable but god, look at the alternative: the pampered zombies of most America.