Billy Ray's Farm Read online

  ALSO BY LARRY BROWN

  FACING THE MUSIC

  stories

  DIRTY WORK

  a novel

  BIG BAD LOVE

  stories

  JOE

  a novel

  ON FIRE

  essays

  FATHER AND SON

  a novel

  FAY

  a novel

  A MIRACLE OF CATFISH

  a novel

  LARRY BROWN

  BILLY RAY’S FARM

  ESSAYS

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  This book, naturally, is for Billy Ray.

  GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT is made for the original publication of the following essays, some of which appear here with a few changes: “By the Pond,” Glamour; “Thicker than Blood,” Outside; “Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend,” The Southern Quarterly; “Chattanooga Nights,” The Chattahoochee Review; “Billy Ray’s Farm,” The Oxford American; “Fishing with Charlie,” The Oxford American; “So Much Fish, So Close to Home: An Improv,” The Chattahoochee Review; “The Whore in Me,” AOL, The Book Report; and “Goatsongs,” Men’s Journal.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  By the Pond

  Thicker than Blood

  Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend

  Chattanooga Nights

  Billy Ray’s Farm

  Fishing with Charlie

  So Much Fish, So Close to Home: An Improv

  The Whore in Me

  Goatsongs

  Shack

  Special Preview of Larry Brown’s Joe

  PROLOGUE

  A LONG TIME AGO when I was a boy, there was one slab of concrete that stretched from Oxford to Toccopola, a distance of about sixteen miles, and that was the road everybody used to get to town. It was kind of like half of a road, with one side concrete, the other side dirt and gravel. If you were heading to town, you could stay on the concrete all the way and never have to get off on the gravel side. And if you were coming from town, you could get on the concrete part and drive on the wrong side of the road until you met somebody, and then you had to jump back onto the gravel.

  That road has been gone for a long time, but I still remember the swaying of the car as my father went from one side of the road to the other. Everybody did it and nobody ever thought anything about it.

  A trip to town on Saturday was a big event. The Square in Oxford has changed some, true, but by and large it still retains the image I have of it from thirty years ago. It is still lined with stores and parked cars, and the big oaks still stand on the courthouse lawn, and the Confederate soldier is still standing there high above everything so that you can see him first when you come up the long drive of South Lamar. What has changed is the nature of the town. A long time ago you could find people selling vegetables from the backs of their trucks, and you could go in Winter’s Cafe and get a hamburger and a short-bottled Coke for sixty-five cents. You can’t even buy an Egg McMuffin on University Avenue for that.

  Faulkner would probably be flabbergasted to know that there are several bars on the Square now, and that blues music can often be heard wailing out of the open doors on hot summer nights, floating around the air on the Square, lifting up to the balconies of the apartments that line the south side, where people are having drinks and conversing. It’s not like it was when he was around. Life was hard for some. Blacks were oppressed. The drinking fountains on the Square were labeled Colored and White. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

  What does exist is the memory of it, a faded remnant of the way things were. Write about what you know, yes, even if it doesn’t exist anymore.

  When I wrote my novel Father and Son, people wondered why I set it back in the sixties. The answer to that is very simple. When I wrote the first scene, where Glen Davis and his brother Puppy are driving back into town, I didn’t see the Square I see now, with Square Books on the left side of South Lamar and Proud Larrys’ on the right. I saw that old Oxford, the one where Grace Crockett’s shoe store stood in the place now occupied by a restaurant and bar called City Grocery, and I saw the old trucks with wooden roofs built over the back ends to shield the watermelons and roasting ears and purple hull peas from the heat of the sun, and I saw a battered old dusty car that my two characters were riding in, and I knew that it had a shift on the column, and an AM radio with push buttons, and musty upholstery that had once been velvet. I saw all that and I knew that they had driven in one hot Saturday afternoon back during my childhood, and I remember the way things were.

  What is it about Oxford that produces writers? I get asked that question a lot, and so does Barry Hannah, and so does John Grisham, and I have to confess that I’m just as bewildered by that question as the people who continue to ask it. Maybe even more so. They always want to ask about Faulkner and what it all means, being a writer in Oxford, and where all the stories come from, and why that environment seems to nurture writers. No matter where I go, I always get hit with that question or a variation of it.

  I don’t know what the answer is for anybody else, and I don’t know what caused Faulkner to write. Most times, for any writer, I think it springs from some sort of yearning in the breast to let things out, to say something about the human condition, maybe just to simply tell a story. When pressed really hard, I say something generic like, “Well, for me the land sort of creates the characters, you know? I mean I look at the people around me and wonder what their stories are, or I think of some character and put him in a situation and then follow him around for a while, see what happens next.”

  It’s hard sometimes while being pressed into a corner of the wallpaper to come up with a satisfying answer about your own land and the influences it has on you. Most of this stuff is private. You could say that you like the way the sky looks just before a big thunderstorm moves across a river bottom, or that you like to see the thousands of tiny frogs that emerge on the roads on a balmy spring night just after a good shower. You could ruminate expansively about the beauty of a hard-wood forest on a cold morning, or the way the distant trees stand shimmering against the horizon on a blistering summer day. But none of that would satisfy the question. What is it they really want to know? Probably nothing more than that old and tired favorite: Where do you get your ideas?

  I believe that writers have to write what they know about. I don’t think there’s much choice in that. The world Faulkner wrote about was vastly different from the one that exists now. If Faulkner were alive today, he would see that. The mansion down the street has been replaced by a BP gas station now, and the hardwood forest the dogs once yammered through has been clear-cut and turned into a pine plantation. Black folks don’t say “yassuh” any more, and at this moment I would have no idea where in all of Lafayette County I could find a good mule. I think the past influenced Faulkner a lot. It must have, since so many of his stories and novels are about segments of history that had already passed when he wrote of them. All he was doing was what every other writer does, and that is drawing upon the well of memory and experience and imagination that every writer pulls his or her material from. The things you know, the things you have seen or heard of, the things you can imagine. A writer rolls all that stuff together kind of like a taco and comes up with fiction. And I think whatever you write about, you have to know it. Concretely. Absolutely. Realistically.

  Oxford produces writers for the same reason that New York does, or Knoxville, or Milledgeville, or Bangor. You can’t pick where you’re born or raised. You take what you’re given, whether it’s the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It’s all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.

  By the Pond

  THE BOAT DOCK ju
st out over a little cove that’s sheltered by a leaning cedar tree, one of the few that survived the ice storm last February, and if I could have picked one tree to save, it would have been that one. It shades the dock and sheds its needles onto the planks, and the bullfrogs I released this spring pick that spot to sit, where it’s cool.

  I bought the place five or six years ago, but I fished in the pond when I was a boy. There’s a pasture in front and a small barn on the hill. The tin on the barn’s roof is rusted to a nice even brown, and it’s pretty old, but it still keeps the rain out.

  The back side of the pond is mostly woods, really big pines and a few oaks that form a deep and compelling sanctuary for the birds and the rabbits and one lone armadillo. When the water is still, the trees surrounding the pond are reflected on the surface in a perfect reverse image of willow and gum and poplar. Some of the smaller pines got snapped off in the storm, but the big ones are okay.

  The place is only eight acres, and it looked bad when I got it. It was overgrown with what I called briar bushes, black-tipped thorn vines that cut my skin like a razor and stung like fire. I spent the first summer clearing it, cutting the matted tangles and piling them to burn later. I would work until my clothes were dripping with sweat, until my eyes were nearly blinded with it and I was too tired to keep on, then I’d drive home with that good feeling of having done a day’s work and come back and do it again the next morning. It was hard labor, but I didn’t mind. It made me sleep well at night.

  The pond was worse. It was old, too, and at one time it was full of bass, but a pond will decline over the years. It needed cleaning out and restocking. There were downed trees in it, and I had to wade in there with my chain saw and cut them up, slinging water and mud, then back my little truck down to the edge of the water and pull them out with a log chain. I piled up the trees and waited for them to dry, and on cold fall days I burned them in great leaping fires that lasted into the night.

  I wanted a boat dock, so three summers ago I pumped the water down far enough to dry out the cove, and I hired some boys who owned a bulldozer. I worked in the bottom of the pond for eleven straight days, digging holes and setting the posts in concrete, stringing timbers and nailing the frame together, trying to keep it all level while the others dozed dirt and carved away at the old banks, making the pond longer, wider, deeper. When I nailed on the planks for the walkway and the deck, the pond was ready for some rain, and then finally, some fish.

  One cold November afternoon in Oxford, Mary Annie and Shane stood with me in a stiff wind beside a hatchery truck from Oklahoma and waited while a tall cowboy dipped out tiny black crappie, channel catfish, and a hundred Florida bass into plastic bags full of ice-cold water. We made a fast run out to the pond, knelt on the boat dock and lowered them into the water, and watched as the little fish swam out into the dark depths, vanishing into their world. It felt good to do that, to see new life heading out to explore and grow.

  My friends from town come out in warm weather to fish or camp out and they bring their children, Tom with Julian and Glennray with Zack. I like to see little boys fishing, learning this sport of patience and discovering the beauty of nature’s gifts. Sometimes Randy or Charlie or Rick will come out and fish with me, drifting in the boat and lazing away an afternoon, and it’s one of those rare things that’s peaceful and good for your soul.

  I lived almost ten years of my early life beside a railroad track in Memphis, and I never stopped longing to live in Mississippi, where I was born, and to be in the country, a place like this. Maybe it was the big engines that rolled the length of the Southern Avenue rails day and night, always going somewhere with their sad and thunderous air horns and their endless lines of freight cars, that gave me the feeling of being trapped somehow within the city. Maybe it was all the little houses stacked tightly side by side behind their tiny yards, or just the simple desire a boy has for a dog, a place to fish, a place to roam. Whatever it was, I knew I’d never be happy there. It’s one thing to have a life in a place, and to be happy in it is quite another.

  Now, in fall once again, the water along the shallow edges is the color of tea, and schools of small fish dart out from the timbers when I step onto the boat dock, and the sweet gums are turning red and orange and dropping their leaves onto the glassy surface. The frogs and snakes are deep in their mud by now, and their blood will stay chilled until spring comes again and the warm winds blow. I sit and watch the water, and look at the ice-shattered pines, and think of all the work I still have to do, with chain saw and sweat, in July’s burning air. But for now I can just rest in the ragged lawn chair and see the occasional splash of a feeding yearling bass. No matter what else is going wrong, I can feel better by just sitting for a while, as the leaves keep wafting down, as the wind rustles the grass and moves the water. I may not ever own much else in my life, but this is enough. Or almost enough. One of these days when I get through cleaning up from the storm, I’m going to start building a little cabin right over there above the pond, up in the deep part of that shade.

  Thicker than Blood

  TWO YEARS BEFORE my father died, when I was fourteen, my great-uncle Dave Hallman gave me a 12-gauge single-barrel shotgun that was rusted to a smooth brown, the stock patched together and full of dents and scratches. The yellow veins of glue still show where it rests in my gun cabinet today. It would blow open with the shot because the breech lock was so worn, but it was what I had and I used it gladly. To be able to take that ancient piece that had already been in so many other hands and go out into the fall woods and sit against a hickory tree and kill two or three squirrels of an evening after school and take them home just past dark and skin them for my mother’s black-iron skillet was a fine thing for a boy to be able to do.

  Daddy didn’t hunt, didn’t even own a gun, although he took me fishing plenty of times. Hunting was just something he didn’t do, and I suspect that four years of fighting in World War II might have had something to do with it, all the killing of men with guns he’d seen. It was left to other people to take me to the Mississippi woods and show me the ways of them.

  There was Uncle Ont, who had chickens in the yard of his big old house, and herds of cows and goats and dogs. The dogs were hounds, and they were all sizes, all breeds, Bluetick or Redbone mixed in with Black and Tan or Treeing Walker to sometimes produce enormous coondogs with specks or spots and bugle throats and big feet and long ears. He gave them names like Lisa and Nimrod and Naman. We drove to the river bottoms and cornfields in open pickups filled with baying hounds. Sometimes we hunted almost all night, and Mother never failed to roll me out for school the next morning.

  Robert Fulton Jones was named for the man who invented the steamboat but everybody we knew called him Sam. He showed me secret, primo squirrel woods and we drove to them in a 1958 Impala, two-tone blue, guns on the backseat, tobacco juice out the window. We combed the edges of creek-bottom fields with his lemon pointer and flushed coveys of birds while the shotguns spoke on cold January afternoons. I took thirty days’ leave from the marines in the fall of 1971 and hunted squirrels every day I was home. Sam was still alive then and he lived to see my own sons as little boys with fishing poles in their hands. Mr. Sam, they called him, just like I did.

  I was lucky to spend my teenage years in a little community called Tula. There were only about a hundred and fifty people there. We had a store, two churches. There had been a college there many years ago and there was still a high school there until 1963. Most of the roads were gravel and back in those days, with the energy and strength of a young man’s legs, I could walk to plenty of places to hunt.

  My brother Knox had a beautiful hound named Sheila. She had a great yodel voice that quavered when she was trailing and all I had to do was get her on the leash and find my flashlight and boots and walk out of the front yard into the black woods and down to the Yocona River bottom, the big wild one with leaf-strewn sloughs and fresh beaver dams. The tall cypresses with their knees in standing water were ho
llow coon castles, the bark worn smooth on one side only from the steady traffic of coons scrambling up in the morning and down at night, regular as dairymen.

  One day my newly married friend, Harold Keel, and I were poking around down there and climbed a hollow snag to look quietly into a den and see masked babies mewling and sucking at the fat gray nipples of their sleeping mother, a small nest of intense life in the drowsing summer woods, safe from us on that day. Those times seem like dreams now. But I was just a boy.

  I don’t think the older men who let me hunt with them ever put their heads together after my father died suddenly in 1968 and came up with a plan to educate me in the fine points of guns and dogs. They knew my parents because they had all grown up together, and it just happened naturally in that little place, me going with them.

  They’re all dead and gone, have been for years. I can walk in the cemetery in Tula and see their headstones, stand and read their names now chiseled in granite, marble. I think often of the great gift they gave me— this common act of sharing their hounds and their car-bide lanterns and their secret places to hunt—which in its many forms boiled down to just one thing: their time. Maybe in some unspoken way they took care of me because of us losing Daddy so early. Probably I would have hunted with them even if he’d lived. But in the reserves of good memories we all hold, those times are special and seem magical to me, those nights in the woods and those days in the fields, those lessons in the wild.

  My boys’ guns are beside mine in the cabinet now, next to the old one Uncle Dave gave me. They bring in ducks and squirrels and deer and doves, and I cook for them as my mother did for me, and they tell me their hunting stories, and I listen to catch their words.