Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

I rise from the chair and set out for the hotel. The night rises and falls before me, trees shimmering in the lamped dark. Hot blots of light where moths and gnats and winged anonymous others stick and burn, their wings like flaming shrouds. I can hear their panic. If I am attentive, if I incline my ear, these woods will tell me great secrets.

“In mythical geography, sacred space is essentially real space , for … in the archaic world the myth alone is real. It tells of manifestations of the only indubitable reality — the sacred.”

My oldest cousin and I catch a flight to Memphis, rent a car at the airport, and find a cheap motel just outside of Fulton owned and operated by Indians from India. We sit in silence, he on his bed and I on mine, staring down at the dark lake of floor between us, hoping to draw up memories from forgotten deeps. The next day we help lower our aunt’s coffin into a freshly dug grave, fist by fist. I feel the rope tug and pull, the red dirt shift under my feet, feel myself being yanked forward, snatched down into the open box of earth.

“Wasn’t that in Jackson?” The receiver tight against my ear, wedged between my shoulder and cheek.

“No,” my mother says. “Tupelo.”

“Tupelo?”

“Yes.”

I am watching a watercolored landscape, broad pastures and fields rimmed by a cheap metal frame.

“The Klan headquarters was right there downtown. I think it still is. The only place in the world where I’ve ever seen one.”

“That’s what I was wondering.” I unfold a map of Mississippi and spread it across the bed. “Because somebody at the party said that Jackson is south of here. And all this time I thought we took the bus from Memphis through Jackson to Tupelo.”

“No way.”

“Now I know.”

All this time, these many years, I’ve had the geography wrong. I’ve told people that my family comes from the delta. But the delta is a five- or six-hour drive south of here. I’m starting to learn that Mississippi is larger than I had imagined. Its boundaries have slowly grown since I was a child. The state busting its seams, moving out into space, ragged at its edges like an ink blot on paper.

“What do they have scheduled for tomorrow?”

“Nothing important. In fact, I don’t plan to attend any of the morning events.”

“Won’t they be expecting you?”

“They might be. I plan on having a look at the F. estate. It’s supposed to be a short walk from here.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t believe they’ll—”

“I wouldn’t do too much walking around down there, if I were you.”

In one corner of the cemetery, the F. family plot is surrounded by a low concrete wall with the family name chiseled on limestone carved in the form of a columned Greek arch, three to four feet in height. F. and his wife are buried inside parallel tombs, their place of final resting memorialized by two marble plates, each six feet in length and four in width, surfaces almost metallic in the sun. Trees cast a black mass of shadow over the graves, a jutting peninsula in the shape of a black branch, jagged leaves like toothy-edged archipelagos. I’d heard that the cemetery keeps a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey at the plot for visitors so that they can take a sip in F.’s honor, as a libation of sorts. I see the remnants of a bottle, a handful of knuckle-sized chunks of glass and square fragments with weather-faded labels. F.’s dog has earned burial rights in a parallel plot:

E.T.

AN OLD

FAMILY

FRIEND

WHO CAME

HOME

TO REST

WITH US

I set the camera’s self-timer and kneel beside the Greek arch.

I had hoped to visit the Heritage Museum, which has a collection of more than fifty battle flags, but then I learn that the flags are too fragile to be displayed. I turn down an invitation to attend church and on aimless feet head out of town on one of the main roads. A cat lies sprawled in a ditch, its pink tongue curling stiffly to the ground, stretched like bubble gum. Just a ways up, a priest stands on the wide cement walk outside his church — a modern structure with a sleek frame, airy doors and windows, a roof boldly tinted like the blood of Sacrament, and a cross carved with an artist’s keen and distinctive touch — and fellowships with wafer-skinned members of his parish. Smiling, talking, laughing, shaking hands, patting backs, kissing babies, and pinching cheeks. His skin is a shade or two lighter than his black cloak. (Black absorbs everything, even cast-off sin.) He seems much older than his parishioners, well-groomed go-getters in their twenties and thirties who sport designer clothes and drive luxury cars. (The parking lot jammed full.) He is balding, the last of his hair putting up a good fight, a tight black band clinging to the back and sides of his head, a bat with wings clamped. His jaw is lined and twisted, head screwed into his white collar. (White repels. May starched collar keep the devil away from soft throat.) And the expression on his face is by turns sympathetic, pensive, and joyful. In ear distance, I can just make out the words “We can kneel down together or alone anytime, anywhere, and ask for God’s help.”

I want to say something to knock the wind out of him. Does he whiff toe jam at the foot of the cross? Does Lazarus have nightmares about the shunned grave? I bite my tongue. Men are made from the earth and shall return to it. No match for Holy Ghost power.

I concentrate on my footwork, leather rhythm. (During the Civil War, popular consciousness developed a theory to explain the tremendous endurance of men in battle. Called the theory of the conversion of force, it postulated that every shock was absorbed into the body and stored in the form of energy.) Clean-framed homes with aluminum siding give way to weeded lots spotted with rusty metal milk cans like hollowed-out bombshells, hitching posts covered in ghostly mold, shriveled-up sheds sinking into the earth. Long-abandoned antebellum dwellings decaying there, wood indented with the tooth marks of storms. Lumber exploding out at wild angles. Rooms sheared away. Porch and plank constricted in snakelike brambles. Unhinged trellises curling away from structure like suspended high-wire acrobats. Architectural achievements reduced to antiquated puzzles of oak and timber.

Sun straggles — yellow, then red — across the sky. Trees hold their formation, kudzu laced through trunks and leaves. At one point I must appear lost, a dark fugitive, because a white man pulls his car over to the graveled shoulder, steps out of it, and asks if I need assistance. No, I tell him. He offers me a ride. I like to walk, I tell him.

Well, you have a good day, now.

The same to you.

A mile or two later, an old black man comes rolling down the road on a golf cart, shouting pronouncements through a bullhorn. I later discover that he is the only black mayor in the county. He quiets down for a moment to greet me. Rolls on. A welcome introduction to geographical extremes, communities dotting the forest like dice flung and let be. Mississippi still the poorest state in the Union, although black people have owned land in this part of the state since the days immediately following the war’s end. No shotgun shacks here. Native sons and daughters live in six-bedroom trailer homes with working fireplaces and bubbling Jacuzzis.

Nothing like my aunt’s home in Fulton — Mississippi continually spoils my recollection of things — a range house with one door opening into her living room and out onto the front lawn, and a second door, a side exit-entrance, taking you through the kitchen to a cement overhang and cement patio paved all the way down to the noisy gravel driveway. She would dress in men’s overalls and rubber boots and go hunt for heavy watermelons — yellow meat inside — that grew wild behind her house in the wooded decline that everyone called “the snake pit.”