Billy Ray's Farm Read online

  From the church we drove in a long procession of cars through Delta fields where tractors were moving over the flat land that stretched for miles and miles. We all ended up strung out on a long dirt road that curved away into the distance and where willows grew beside the road, and most of it was flat except for that mound where the tent had been set up and people had already started to gather. It took a long time for everybody to get out of their cars and walk up that dirt road, but they waited until everybody was assembled and then the preacher said his last words. After that, and after the flowers had been taken from the lapels of the pallbearers and placed on the casket, Duff and some of his friends gathered in a small group at one end of the tent and stood on the plastic grass and they played. They played soft and sweet and low, and everybody knew it was their last gig with Charlie. There were no amplifiers or electric cords, just the gentle sounds of acoustic guitar and banjo, drifting out over the warm April afternoon, where the tractors still rolled through the fields. They played four numbers and then they stopped. And then we all began to go back to our cars, to break apart into our little groups.

  Sometime later that night we found ourselves at Duff’s house, where a bunch of players and pickers were sitting on milk crates or kitchen chairs, and that was as far as I made it into the house for quite a while. The paintings that Duff had started doing were hanging on the walls all around them, and they were drinking beer still, as were we, and I just sat there for a few hours and listened. I knew that I was witnessing something profound and beautiful, and that the music these men were playing was the means for them to deal with their grief. So I listened reverently, quietly, and just before it broke up I went into the house for a while to speak to Duff. He was subdued and somber, giving one of his kids his spelling lesson. We talked some, and then it was time for us to go.

  The night sky was full of stars and wind was moving slowly through the trees outside Duff’s house. The players were packing their instruments away and lingering in the driveway for last words, last handshakes, and we stood around with them for a bit, just making small talk, trying to express to them how much difference their music had made for all of us on this special day. The players were out of beer and I had a few half-cool ones still left in a sack in Tom’s floorboard, and I handed them out and they thanked me for them. We got into the Toyota and rode back through the black Delta night, past the little towns and the lumbering trucks, the cotton fields and all the land that was spread out before us on both sides.

  A few days later Tom gave me a big print of the picture that he had taken of Charlie and me on my boat dock that day. It’s in black and white, very clear focus, and he’s standing above me saying something and I have my face turned up, listening to him. I don’t remember what it was that he was saying. I wish I could. But I’ve got the picture up beside my desk, and I remember the music, and the hot Mississippi nights when he stood pouring sweat on the stage and let it rip, playing his heart out because the people were screaming for it and because he loved it so much. I’m grateful for having known him, and happy that he thought enough of my work to call me his friend, or to go fishing with me. I’m glad we had the quiet times as well as the loud ones, and I hope he’s finally at peace out on that Indian mound, overlooking his beloved Delta, the land of his blues.

  So Much Fish, So Close to Home

  AN IMPROV

  IT STARTED OUT simply enough as nothing bigger than an enjoyable evening of listening pleasure: Oxford’s Kudzu Kings jamming at Proud Larrys’, six-buck cover although the doorboys kindly don’t charge me. It’s a bennie, might look tiny to some people, but over a year’s time it adds up. Like cow feed.

  Things out at the farm were relatively cool but not as cool as they might have been. My bad bull was in my neighbor’s pasture, running herd over his herd, having laid some serious whipass on his bull and run him off into a remote and unpopulated corner of his own kingdom, where he probably had to stand under a tree and watch the great-horned Omar mount in rapid succession the mottled members of his former harem. You get a bull firing in seven seconds but with a stud horse you might have to stand around and watch it for twenty minutes. If you can stand to. Don’t get reincarnated as a mare.

  RIFF: I’d just spent three hours of the

  previous Saturday morning, just as the

  Rebels were getting ready to play the

  Memphis Tigers at Vaught-Hemingway,

  chasing on foot and tractor my neighbor’s

  peek-a-boo cow back into her own pasture

  through the same thirty-foot section of

  rotten and downed posts and rusty wire

  from which Omar had made his escape.

  Bobby Ray had helped me fix that hole or

  I’d helped Bobby Ray fix that hole and I just

  hadn’t figured out yet how to get him back

  on Mamaw’s place, being he is large to the

  tune of a little over a ton with the

  aforementioned wicked sweep of armature

  and a way of throwing his old head up high

  when you approach that makes you think

  twice about getting up close to him

  without something between you and him

  to climb up on or get behind like a tree or a

  fence or a barn. It’s the kind of thing that

  worries your sleep, your animal which you

  after all are responsible for, being on

  somebody else’s place, because you might

  be subject to damage charges or maybe have

  to listen to some legalese if something

  happened like say he went through another

  fence and got on somebody else’s place and

  either tore up a turnip patch good or gored

  some hapless goob.

  It was fairly dark inside Larrys’ as usual and fairly crowded as well. My perch away from the undergrad gabfest taking place on the floor was one step down from the top of the steps at the back where people kept not seeing me and bumping me with their legs. I was just glad to be there. I’m a big Kings fan. Some college girl, a redhead in black twirlies, didn’t see me and kept her little behind right in front of my nose for three or four minutes, but nobody thumped any cigarette ashes on my head. Cervantes was at his usual post in the corner with his cane, behind the hole in the bar where the beerboys carry in their suds, and he got me a Coke with lots of ice, nice heavy glass, made me feel like a millionaire.

  Soon enough the Kings took the stage to shouts of approval and claps but I couldn’t see very well from where I was. About that time Mustapha-who’s-moved-to-Chicago-now came up and said why didn’t we move down to the empty pizza kitchen and then K-Martwanda came up and said the same thing, so, wham, we moved.

  In there it was a pretty good advantage point. It was true that you couldn’t order drinks from in there because you would’ve had to scream your head off and that doesn’t work with a bartender and they don’t appreciate it I know, but there were empty tables to sit on and we were right across from the band guys who were having about as much fun gigwise as any band guys I’d seen in a while while ripping out some legwettin’ riffs. They played one song about how we still don’t have cold beer in the stores in Oxford, which always reminds me of the story about Faulkner getting all broke down like a big she-elephant at all the old tightassed graybeards who used to run Oxford and voted beer out during World War II and telling them, I’m sure with much disgust and righteous indignation, “Only reason you son of a bitches got to vote beer out is because every able-bodied man who could have voted to keep it in is over in Europe fighting your war for you,” or words to that effect. He might have said more, I don’t know, he might have mentioned pity and honor and sacrifice and compassion and all the old verities and truths, but more likely he was just pissed that he was too old to fight himself and couldn’t get a cold beer in a café anymore.

  And sure, I’d gotten up about high noon that day, I don’t deny it. That was usual,
too. Like Robert Earl Keen I like to sleep late and stay up late, like he tells an audience on one of his records. No telling what Robert does when he stays up late. Aw, he probably writes songs and plays his Martin. I like to do that, too, and read and drink coffee, smoke a few Marlboros, eat some ice cream, maybe catch a documentary about something like Benobo chimps over in the Philippines or wherever they live who, when they get nervous or frightened, have sex with their mothers or aunts or cousins or sisters only for some strange reason not known to man they never have babies from that, like something in their reproductive organs has a primitive brain and knows this doesn’t count, is that too far a stretch? no? well, more and more people kept coming in but of course it didn’t affect us in our protected section. You could see over that wall pretty good if you stood on your tiptoes. But even if you didn’t you could see Bukowski’s and Tolstoy’s heads and Groover’s and Dos Passos’s heads. You could hear Guitar Bojangles back there playing his lap steel even if you couldn’t see him. It was way cool and we listened to every song they played. They played a bunch of them and then some other they turned the lights on and suddenly, like always, it was past time to say, Hey brother can you shag me another cup of mead?

  Then the barboys are clearing it out:

  “Let’s go, people.”

  “Bar’s clooosed, everybody, let’s gooo.”

  The things you see at closing time. Some pretty Ole Miss coed’s flopped over a table and she’s puked on the floor some puddinglike stuff a strange color like psychedelic purple and if you’re not watching then you step in it, only then realize what it is and see her, harsh lights shining on her, her nice diamond bracelet, her purse hooked onto her arm, it’s hanging down, where’re her friends? People kicking beer bottles along the floor amid the cigarette butts. If you walk by the front door at three A.M. it’s open and all the stools are upside down on top of the bar and silent black men are mopping and sweeping while the streets are deserted and the cops are all parked somewhere now that there’s nobody left to nab.

  Somehow there was still some billiard action going on down the street at Murff’s. Mustapha went to the bar and I sat down at a tall table and started talking to Lorna and she started telling me about the big fish deal that was going to be happening down at the spillway on Enid Reservoir in the morning. She said it only happened once every five years. She said they were going to shut the spillway down, close that concrete hole tight, and pump the water out of it to check for cracks, and that there were going to be hundreds, possibly thousands of fish suddenly stranded, and that the General Public would be down there waiting behind a fence, and that at nine o’clock they were going to let everybody in the bottom of the spillway to grab all the fish they could for free. I went Wow, man. I got pretty excited and started envisioning things.

  Paddy Chayovsky came by and shook hands. Rimbaud from Ajax came by and shook hands. But it got time to be out of there, too. I talked to a few of my ex-students and some of us walked outside and stood around waiting for everybody to come out since we were all going over to Grover’s house to see what happened. Grover is a superstar.

  I wanted to know lots more about the fish deal and Lorna filled me in with plenty of details in my car driving the long way around to Grover’s house with Paddy in the back. I had a cut of “Sin City” with Dwight and k.d. and we drove by Mr. Billy Faulkner’s spread. Nothing down there had changed. They hadn’t totally screwed up Oxford. Not yet. But pretty soon they would. People were coming out of the woodwork from all over America to move here because of all the culture in town. They were being encouraged to. They were being lured. And the streets were getting filled with more cars and more people and condos were going up all over everywhere, even in places you wouldn’t think a condo could go. I was born here. I remember how it was when I was a kid. Maybe that’s just waxing nostalgia. Things are better in some ways and worse in others. There are just too many people trying to live in this little place, hence your high-dollar town houses and the awful gnashing of treehuggers’ teeth. There is probably nothing that anybody can do about what is coming.

  Lorna said the last time they’d done it, shut the spillway down like that, that it was kind of like a gold rush, and that there’d been fishblood and fistfights in the midst of a fishgrabbing frenzy. I could imagine stinking heaps of bream and carp, maybe bulletheaded behemoths in torn T-shirts standing in them, bloodied, with fishbillies in their hands, the weeps and near-orgasmical moans of a grandmaw in a cotton housedress, a big buffalo lodged and wiggling dumbly between her thighs, others wading forward to help, clubs raised. I could smell the blood and death of it, could see how the sun would be shining down on the carnage at nine o’clock in the morning. Would the soaring September temperatures rise and would tempers rise within them and incite them to fall upon each other, excited by the orgy of death? Would they be clubbing each other’s toes in the bloody water? Lorna said you could get little ones for your pond. I said I wanted big ones for my skillet. She said reckon I wanted to go? I said, Aw shit my damn bull’s out, I got to go home and see about him.

  RIFF: During the course of the evening I’d

  been recalling the gist of a conversation

  relayed to me by my spouse, Marlana

  Antonia, one she’d had with our neighbor

  just that day. She knew about me spending

  that hot morning running nimbly through

  Mamaw’s pasture without benefit of water

  or coffee, trying to chase the cow out, and

  later, in the neighbor’s pasture, trying to

  chase the bull back in. We ran over hill and

  dale. They scooted easily from shade pocket

  to shade pocket, waiting for me to catch up

  with them, but like the mouse with the cat

  batting him around I soon grew tired of the

  game. My neighbor had come over and told

  Marlana Antonia that he had the bull up,

  that all his cows had come down close to

  his loading pen and that he got them all in

  there some way, maybe tolled them in with

  a bucket of feed or something, and that he’d

  managed to let the cows out and keep the

  bull in, so I was already thinking that if I

  stayed up late that night and went to sleep

  and didn’t get up until late the next day, my

  bull might have to stand in that pen in the

  sun without maybe any water until I got

  my dead ass up and went up there to check

  on him. If he hadn’t broken out of the catch

  pen I was going to take him to the sale at

  Pontotoc and sell him. I was going to sell

  the few other bovines I had, too, because I’d

  paid a lot of money for them, and because

  they weren’t making any money for me,

  and because I needed money, and because

  I’d gotten pretty sick of having to feed them

  on cold muddy bitter rainy days in

  February. So I knew I couldn’t go to sleep.

  But we were going over to Grover’s, and I

  knew they’d all probably stay up all night.

  It didn’t look like a problem. The only

  problem I could see was the possibility of

  maybe Omar hurting me in some way,

  stepping on my head or crushing me up

  against a fence or a tree or poking a horn

  into some of my internal organs. It happens

  to bullfighters all the time, rodeo clowns, et

  cetera. Some people have actually gotten a

  horn up their butt, you could look it up but

  I don’t know where.

  Grover’s “pad” or “crib” is down on a small street kind of on the northern portion of town, a quiet neighborhood except for whatever racket Grover makes on his stereo. I don’t think he has police problems yet. His kitchen is about as big as a k
itchen table but three or four people can glom in there and manage to get ice from the freezer and freshen drinks and let folks in and out of the bathroom. You see books in Grover’s house and he’s got a piano in there that he plays in savage bursts of intensity. The night I was there he had recently broken his guitar and I noticed that by picking up a splintered part of it that still had two tuning pegs attached, and you could still read “Silverto” at the top.

  I think Grover likes this place because it’s kind of secluded and easy to miss and it’s fairly dark down there. There are lots of places like that still in Oxford, a place where one can be hard to find at night.

  We went in and people started drinking and Paddy Chayovsky sat down on the bed and started playing a guitar. There were seats to sit on and Grover showed me an old American banjo that his parents had bought him in Zanzibar or somewhere, and we figured out finally that it had probably come from some sailor on a ship in World War II. Grover screamed for his bottle and somebody passed it to him. I was nondrinking at the time, working on getting some of the wrinkles out of my face, and I did not begrudge the great joy it gave my friends, whoa no, was only glad to be among their cheerful fellowship and their shouts of laughter.

  Salinger and Melville and Frederico and Hester came in and we all kept talking. Some of us moved to the front porch for a while and I spent some time sitting on a beer cooler with Lucinda, who was bummed out because Grover wasn’t talking to her very much. We discussed her dog and her newsletter. We moved around and took turns on the couch and at some point somebody went for some more beer. It got pretty loud and rocking, what with Grover’s stereo and the instruments in the house, including the piano, which Grover would sometimes beat on, resulting in a kind of primal music, but only when he got frustrated, and I wondered about him breaking the guitar. I decided that he had to be either crazy or very talented, so I decided to loan him my little Fender Squier Bullet, black and white, in the case with a strap and some picks, knew he wouldn’t hurt mine but needed a simple axe to play.