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

“Because Canarsis is so beautifully different from such sorry jackasses as us. Wouldn’t you like to have lived in complete innocence and made as much of your gift as he has, nearly burned to death?”

“You the man who burned the church?”

“Well, I did not finish. You seem to want something remaining in it, too. You came back to the charcoal. What would that be? Your pilgrimage?”

“It had a good true spirit to it, that giant boy on a piano that seemed like a kid’s toy measured to him. He brought God down from heaven with his music.”

“You killed my father, holy man. What was your favorite hymn? A man like you.”

They walked around the dam in silence. No creature stirred, all cabins were empty, the house ranger dulled like a sloth as he watched the evening news, settling in to his Pepsi and Orville Redenbacher’s sublime pour-over cheddar popcorn. The perfection of winter muteness, happily dead in the mind, his contented good woman close to hand. James imagined them in an alternate universe. The gun was in his right hip pocket, forgotten, the flamethrower easy on its wheels. They walked to the end of the pier in dogged duty. A beaver fell from a dead cypress with a loud percussive entrance to the water.

“‘Just as I Am’ would be the one. We all are worms with guilty secrets. He forgives all even though we are without one plea .”

“You don’t have one plea right now?”

“You notice I’m not screaming for help, like I could. I stand absolved.”

“I stand as your delayed executioner.”

“But I’ve got a feeling you’ve killed before. You stand guilty and unforgiven.”

“Can you do something for me then? Can you make up a hymn about why it was necessary to kill my father?”

“He was one those outside agitators helping bring on niggers adulterating our way of life. I only say this about the shooting. If the state thought I was guilty of anything but delaying these niggers I’d of been brought up on charges a long time ago. After what happened you didn’t find no French meddlers and liars in these parts.”

The flames were already reaching him then, and they kept reaching him as the napalm stuck. James was amazed the man could stand so long without taking to the water. He used a boat paddle to push the surviving stump of Gale into the lake. But the end of the pier was still on fire and he left in moderate haste to his car.

I watched him afterward. He was a kind of friend, always at Smitty’s talking over the good country vegetables, fried okra, collards, world-class cornbread. He had fantastic eyes, jarred awake like a man whose head had just been severed. He was the saddest man I’ve ever known.

I can’t know what you’ve heard of these parts, but there is law. More of the sheriffs voted, not appointed, into office, are college educated in criminology. Whatever that vague science is worth.

But no man showed at his door, no man raised a hand against him. Three men he knew, I was one of them, voiced the wish very sincerely that he would vanish from these parts, as he had from Montana. But no sheriff told him this. When James had swallowed it all he was dead for a while. He was in the tomb although the stone had been rolled aside for his free walk around the water or to the Arctic. This state with only a million whites is one backyard, and it is solid mouth to ear. Faster than you could trace it on the Internet, certainly faster than the sheriff’s office women could find it on those grandmother computers, the worst is known, the gossip is dead-on to the comma. The lynching of blacks by vigilantes is gone forever, hope to God. We have a new aristocracy and they are black men. Morgan Freeman, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, the ghost of Robert Johnson making his deal with the Devil at a crossroads on Highway 61. But we are a state that still loves the vigilante. The climate is ripe for vengeance.

Franklin James became friends with a black emeritus professor out of Rust College in Holly Springs. Amos Pettigrew. They shared some subject, it was unclear what it was for a while. Pettigrew seemed to hold sway over whether James stayed, fled with or without Goodie, destroyed himself, or lived abundantly, propelled like a bird from the opened tomb into wild freedom. Pettigrew was a calm force for both James and Goodie. She did not know she might be deserted for a while or for good. I saw Pettigrew’s old Buick in their drive many times. James told the man his whole story. Goodie was much afraid. The terror was all over her. She began a series of very expensive shopping trips. James, the killer, said nothing about this mania. He just stared at the bags. She acted as if the purchase of some choice item might be her soul and she could catch it and hold it in a shopping bag. Some of the bags she never touched, although they were full of goods, jewelry, God’s own amount of purses.

Dr. Pettigrew had degrees from Dartmouth and Yale. He had worn himself thin striving against the darkness in young blacks. He had left his heart in the college. Now he was a hoarse and skinny man, going to frail. He knew every living fact about the struggle for civil rights in this area, every night attack, bombing, miscarriage of justice, even every fistfight. I don’t know what afternoon exactly he told James he had burned up the wrong man. The right man was dead of natural causes. He had killed a man who emulated the dead one, dressed like him, had the same tattoos, the same voice, and was even fiercer and louder about his lay preaching and deaconry church to church with the biblical evidence for white supremacy. Two churches had obtained restraining orders against him, a first within anybody’s memory.

When I noticed the yellow motorcycle was gone for several days, I crept up to their bedroom window, yes, like a common Peeping Tom and at my sadder age. I had to peep and eavesdrop. What I saw I call pornography, or some order of necrophilia. She was lying on the bed in a black nightgown revealing an amazingly fit nudity beneath. She did not move for an hour, as if commanded to lie still by a man out of sight. But James was long gone. I could not believe that frozen specter was all about grief. That’s why I said pornography, some militant sexual exercise. I was guilty I saw her. My hands felt heavy when I crept back to the highway. They were bloodier and bloodier.

Rangoon Green

Trophy Holder, Third Place in the National Storytellers Tell-Off

Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 2011

YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF MY BEHAVIOR AT MURFREESBORO LAST YEAR when they announced the winner, runner-up, and next, third, that would be me. Of course I made a noise. The winner, a long-haired creature with a lute who read barefoot, slept with one of the judges, and I know it truly because I saw her disappear into his trailer at ten thirty the previous night. Second was the old bushy man who lived in Murfreesboro. He circulated a fancy brochure about his wins not only here but out west and up north. His wife made cheese sticks, the pepperish kind, and got a tin of them to each judge. If that ain’t cheating take me out to the pasture and shoot me. I’m still not over it. I don’t get over robbery quick. If ever.

After the second propane fire here in Oxford the marshalls came to my door at the liquor store near the airport, right next to Supreme Used Auto, which I also own as well as the bail bondsman office straight across the street. Yes, women do sleep in the cars of Used Auto, but that doesn’t make it an operation, a brothel. Men do come to them in the cars, but that is trespassing. If they have the keys to the autos, my right knows not what my left is doing. I cannot control sleepy women, poor gals down on their luck without the price of a motel, you can’t say a thing. How could I organize sleepy women off the highway, as a lawyer said for me once?