Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

At the funeral, lies are told in the name of comfort. Speculations. Maybe it’s possible Danny did not mean to kill himself but tripped and discharged the shotgun by accident. The preacher lives by traditions and says we have gathered to celebrate a life and that he’s seen some long faces in need of lightening up. He uses biscuits and the ingredients for making them as a visual aid to let us know that a tasty life is made from bitter parts. He gives an old-fashioned call to salvation and not a hand is raised. The reconstructed face in the casket is not recognizable as anything except poorly cast wax. Later his mother says he would have hated the eyeliner and mascara they’d applied to him.

The lies obscure truths we would like to quiet. Danny heard voices under the ground and daily walked outside with his Glock to find and silence them. Some of the hill people say the mountain is riddled with caves and that the older people knew how to get to them but that the old knowledge is dying away as development encroaches upon the old ways. They say that soon there will be no water witchers with divining rods to approach by foot and point out the best places for well-drilling. Danny spent three months in Arizona with some exorcists who claimed demons were whispering in his ears. I believe in the doctors whose antipsychotic medicines Danny regularly neglected. The mind is sufficiently vast for myriad voices to find a place to hide.

Church and cemetery are separated by the greater part of Lexington. Police cars stop traffic for the funeral procession, which is fifty cars deep and slow, in observance of custom. The endless winding from road to road, left turns through red lights and then rights again until an essentially straight path feels circular, leaves me in mind of a hearse-driver perhaps lost with unrelated sadness and leading without benefit of directions or map. The rain starts with droplets at the church steps and turns quickly to downpour in near-opaque sheets. We navigate by taillight.

We wait in our vehicles at the graveside but the rain does not subside. Matt leaves his van and steps into the deluge and beckons the other mourners to follow. Slowly they emerge with umbrellas and ponchos and newspapers held above their heads. Some young people wade unprotected into the falling water and let it soak their clothing to the skin as if their grief required washing or as penance for sins of omission. Maybe they wonder as I do what time spent or what intervention might have changed the course of things.

The rain does not relent as the body is lowered into the grave, nor does it cease during the ninety-minute retreat into the high places. The storm has battered our mountain, and the road to the farmhouses is blocked by fallen timber (the road is in fact named Fallen Timber Branch Road) and many of the concrete and wooden bridges near the base of the mountain have been swept away by mudslides or washed away by the rising creekwaters.

Nearer the top of the mountain, our cars and trucks dig deep trenches in the open fields. A hundred-year-old cherry tree has toppled and her strong roots point skyward, the ground beneath sucked away by flash flood and gravity. The propane tank has loosed its steel moorings and settled dangerously close to the larger farmhouse. The well is inoperable, its pumps dashed to pieces. The porches are filled with debris spit outward from the rapids. Tall grasses now bend hunched as old men, and the southern field is strewn with loose gravel that once filled a driveway hundreds of yards away. My wife says the mountain itself is grieving. Steve’s dam has broken and the waters rush onward toward the valley.

All the breeding dogs have been sold or given away or run off. In a season of speculation, emus were raised from eggs alongside adolescent shelties and golden retrievers in five electrified pens. A spry golden retriever named Mandy mothered nearly half the puppies who grew here. She was the family pet allowed to run free. One evening last autumn she came home with one crippled leg. She’s grown white in the face but still runs with her limp after treats of dried beef. Dan is watching her run and I can see it in his eyes: Dogs should not outlive children.

Conversation has ceased and my wife and her brothers have resumed their chores. Last month a local hunter and my father-in-law agreed on a price for the rental of the lower level of his farmhouse to the hunter’s daughter and her two college friends. Now the hunter has returned to help clean debris from the common area between the farmhouses and regravel the driveways. All of them strike the ground with their shovels, using more force than their task requires. Mandy cowers beneath an aging car. In the distant woods my father-in-law is alone and talking.

The day Danny was born, Dan saw that the boy had no fingers on his right hand. Dan cursed God and drove away into a storm. He says a bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole and an arc of blue electricity briefly danced upon the hood of his car before dissipating into the ground. Tonight it is dark on our mountain, and we are far enough from the city lights to see the milky plenitude. To be sure, we are hoping for a sign. The distances between stars are now calculable but what passes for mourning is harder to measure. We have photographs and folklore. We have words and hands. We can sell the cherry tree. We can fix the water pump. We can build a new dam. We can dredge a new path for the creek and make it a canal. We can shout out into the quiet of the hollow and hear our own voices echoing: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . The words come back plaintive, longing.

The following stories originally appeared in these publications:

“The Question of Where We Begin,” Gulf Coast

“You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace,” Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006)

“The Truth and All Its Ugly,” Fifty-Two Stories (HarperPerennial Digital, 2010), Surreal South (Press 53, 2007), in a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Bandit Press, 2010), and as an Amazon standalone e-book (2011)

“Glossolalia,” Forty Stories (HarperPerennial Digital, 2012) and Cream City Review

“Seven Stories About Sebastian of Koulèv-Ville” (as “Seven Stories About Kenel of Koulèv-Ville”), The Iowa Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 (Houghton Mifflin)

“The Sweet Life,” Alimentum

“First, the Teeth,” Redivider

“In a Distant Country,” Ninth Letter

“Suspended,” Brevity

“Lay Me Down in the Blue Grass,” Mid-American Review

“Seven Stories About Sebastian of Koulèv-Ville” (as “Seven Stories About Kenel of Koulèv-Ville”) won the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction

The section titles are taken from the Andrew Hudgins poems “Praying Drunk” and “Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought,” both collected in The Never-Ending (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), which all readers should immediately seek out, buy, read, and treasure. The story “Seven Stories About Sebastian of Koulèv-Ville” also quotes from and paraphrases a portion of “Praying Drunk.”

Thank you to Lee K. Abbott, Erin McGraw, Ethan Canin, Sam Chang, and Andy Greer — mentors and friends. I am grateful for the ongoing support of Deborah Jayne and Ian and Dylan Minor. I am indebted to Douglas Watson, my first reader and closest editor, and to other friends and editors who helped in some way with these stories: Bart Skarzynski, Joe Oestreich, Okla Elliott, Pinckney and Laura Benedict, Kathleen Rooney, Ian Stansel, Nick Bruno, Jamie Renda, Matt Kellogg, Jillian Quint, Jodee Stanley, Dinty Moore, Philip Graham, Peter Selgin, Cal Morgan, Sophie Chabon, Michelle Herman, Lee Martin, Ron Currie, Aaron Gwyn, Karen Babine, and Mike Czyzniejewski. For crucial help on the publishing side: Katherine Fausset, Steve Gillis, Dan Wickett, Ben Percy, Laura van den Berg, Matt Bell, Kristen Radtke, Meg Bowden, Kirby Gann, and Sarah Gorham. For other varieties of help: Melissa Chadburn, Joyelle McSweeney, Stephen Elliott, Isaac Fitzgerald, Kera Bolonik, Dave Daley, Matt Sullivan, Jen Percy, Phil and Lonnie Murphy, Francky and Tania Desir, Meredith Blankinship, Sarah Smith, Jane Bradley, Ed Falco, Deb Olin Unferth, Daniel Handler, George Singleton, Jan Zenisek, Deb West, Wells Tower, Kevin Brockmeier, Dini Parayitam, Nana Nkweti, Jonathan Gharraie, Colin Kostelecky, Devika Rege, Matt Nelson, Josh Rhome, Hannah Kim, Letitia Trent, Luke Renner, Maureen Traverse, Michelle Burke, Ben Stroud, Karen Kovacik, Robert Rebein, Mitchell Douglas, Terry Kirts, Tom Quach, and Connie Brothers. Thank you.