Willie Morris had reserved a long table for our group of about two dozen, which included Judge Neal Biggers, baseball coach Jake Gibbs and his wife, Tricia, and Faulkner family friend Billy Ross Brown and his wife, Lynn. Shelby, a man who knew his trivia, sat by Jake, a former catcher for the New York Yankees, and began talking baseball.
After dinner the wine flowed and we sang “Happy Birthday” to Pappy, then someone started a WWI song and we launched a songfest that would do an Irish pub proud. When “Bye, Bye Blackbird” gave way to “Let the Rest of the World Go By” we sang romantic songs from World War II, honoring Pappy in a spontaneous, schmaltzy way. Shelby and I knew all the words. The Sizzler resounded with our finale, “Good Night, Sweetheart,” as unseen diners sitting in other rooms joined in.
It’s a shame that Bill Styron was not among the guest speakers at the centennial celebration. His voice would have added dignity and grace to the proceedings, and he and his beautiful wife, Rose, would have enjoyed our songfest. He had been a longtime admirer of Pappy’s work, but they never met. When Lie Down in Darkness was published in 1951, Styron’s work was compared to that of Faulkner. When Pappy died, Styron was the ideal choice to cover the funeral for Life. His article, “As He Lay Dead: A Bitter Grief,” published on July 20, 1962, was the finest of all the tributes to Pappy, a haunting evocation of the grinding July heat, the town’s outpouring of grief, and finally his own sense of loss, hard and unexpected, as the funeral cortege circled the courthouse and sweat-soaked policemen stood at attention with hats over their hearts. Oxford was a “stiller town” that afternoon. The courthouse and Confederate statue had loomed over so much of Faulkner’s work, Styron wrote, “and now, for the first time this day, I am stricken by the realization that Faulkner is really gone. And I am deep in memory, as if summoned there by a trumpet blast.”
I STILL MISS Pappy. The bond between us that began with the accident of my birth remains strong and unbroken. He and the gods still smile on me. I know that in the grand scheme of things his words will live forever. In writing this book I am sending him one last postcard.
Thank you, sir.
With love,
Dean
THE OLD FAULKNER CEMETERY PLOT AT ST. PETER’S IS FULL now: J.W.T. and Sallie Murry; the three tiny graves of the infant sons of Judge John and Aunt Sue; Pappy and Aunt Estelle’s baby girl Alabama; Murry and Maud; Dean; Jack; my mother, Wese; and most recently, Dorothy “Dot” Falkner Dodson.
The early Oxford settlers buried their dead on the high ground at St. Peter’s around a circle of cedars planted nearly two centuries ago. My family’s twelve-grave plot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence lies close to the cemetery entrance next to one of the narrow lanes that wind past carefully marked family grave sites. Four marble steps set in a grassy incline lead down to a rusted gate. At the center of the plot a thirty-foot Italian marble obelisk bears the images of J.W.T. and Sallie in bas-relief on the north and south sides, marked “Father” and “Mother.” “FALKNER” is engraved at the base of the pedestal.
The graves have identical twelve-by-twelve-inch headstones with names and dates. Only Dean’s has an inscription. Instead of slabs, a five-inch-thick marble oblong covers each grave, joined at the bottom by footstones bearing the individual’s initials. Formal, elegant, and meant to last. A row of dogwood trees stretches along the western boundary of the cemetery.
WHEN I CAME back to Oxford in 1970, divorced and ready to start a new life, I moved into Nannie’s house and enrolled in graduate school. The next year, Vicki’s husband, Jim Black, died. They had lived in his native Caracas for several years, and Vicki had a daughter, Gillian, whom I had never seen. Wese and I met them at the Memphis airport, with Larry Wells, who would soon be my second husband. They were bringing Jim Black’s body to be buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery not far from Pappy’s grave. Vicki and Cho Cho moved into Rowan Oak. At that time the house was overseen by the university and open to the public, but family members were allowed to stay there for short visits. It was October, my favorite month, when zinnias were still in bloom but it was chilly enough for the first fire of the season. Larry scavenged for wood; we had drinks in the library in front of the fire and Cho Cho’s favorite meal—chicken livers on toast and fried bananas—in the dining room, the first dinner we’d had there in a very long time. We were all at home again. My children—Diane, twelve, Paige, ten, and Jon, six—were taken with their new little “cousin,” Gillian. The sounds of their voices and laughter brought the old house back to life, upstairs and down, inside and out, from the stables and Mammy’s cabin to Judith’s magnolia out front. For a brief moment Rowan Oak was again a house of children.
I don’t go to Rowan Oak very often anymore. For me, it is no longer a familiar and private place for Faulkners but a well-kept museum. Once I overheard a tourist, upon seeing Pappy’s little portable Underwood, observe, “Think what he could have written if he had a computer!”
The university has taken great care to maintain the house, but the last time I walked into the library I glanced at the waist-high top shelf of the bookcase on the north wall and remembered that once upon a time there were three black-and-white photographs all in a row, unframed, each in a studio holder. The first was of Vicki taken at Pine Manor; the second was Jill’s engagement photo; the third was mine. They’ve not been there in a great while. I wonder where we are.
Vicki and Jill died within four months of each other. In the fall of 2006, Jill suffered a massive stroke. She was incapacitated for seventeen months. She died on April 21, 2008. A self-contained woman of impeccable good manners and indomitable courage, she was Pappy’s child.
Vicki’s death on December 10, 2007, was the result of inoperable lung cancer. The loss of these two, the last surviving relatives of my generation, nearly wrecked me. Vicki was buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery. Her grave is within several yards of Pappy’s and Aunt Estelle’s.
My mother, Wese, survived Dean’s death, an abusive marriage, a car wreck in which she was thrown through the windshield, cancer, more broken bones than she could count (ankles and clavicles, ribs and back, arms, wrists, and legs, some more than once), and many surgeries. I spent many hours with her in the hospital. I never saw her afraid.
William and Jack adored her—as did I, in spite of my difficulties in understanding, or accepting, her tormented relationship with Jimmy Meadow. Whenever she dined at Rowan Oak, Pappy seated her on his right, the place of honor. She maintained close ties with both the Faulkners and Jimmy, without explanation or apology to anyone, literally until death did them part. She had an endless capacity for giving of herself, spending hours as a volunteer in the children’s cancer ward of a local hospital and taking many a “wounded bird” under her wing when she worked with foreign students at Ole Miss.
Wese fought a four-year battle with Alzheimer’s. She died of pneumonia at home.
At her graveside service, I was surprised at the number of people who came to honor her. She had been sick for such a long time; but the people who loved her, and they were many, did not forget. In the eulogy, her Presbyterian minister recalled how often she spoke of her life with Dean, of their flying days, as if it had all happened but a short while ago, as if their marriage, the happiest days of her life, had lasted a very long time. At the close of the brief ceremony, a small single-engine pale blue Cessna flew low over the cemetery in its landing approach to the Oxford airport. To me it was a blessed assurance that Wese would spend eternity with her beloved Dean.
They are all there now, in St. Peter’s Cemetery, but some of them come back to us at 510 South Lamar, Nannie’s home. On beautiful rare occasions, when we enter the house, I will stop and remark to Larry, “Pappy’s been here.” The smell of him—pipe smoke, cedars, tweed, leather, horses—permeates the hallway. I know I’m not making it up because Larry can smell it, too. Other days, in the back of the house, close to Nannie’s room, a presence of lilac sachet along with the scent of dried paper, as if she had just opened one of h
er fans, or perhaps a book, tells me that she is with me.
I always know Wese is back when I smell fresh air in the dead of winter when doors and windows are closed tight against the cold.
I don’t know the scent of Dean. The closest I ever came to him was the first time I held his pilot’s license, something that he had touched, that had been warmed by his hands. From the cockpit of the Waco, across time, he reached out to me.
Not long ago, Larry, my son, Jon, and I drove out to the hamlet of Thaxton, twenty miles east of Oxford, to see the field where Dean’s plane went down. The crash site is on the Graham farm. The present owners told us that every spring when they plow the field they turn up pieces of Dean’s plane. The old barnstormers believe that when a pilot’s luck runs out there is a place on earth waiting for him, that in the split second before he crashes, he will recognize it as his own. This field was Dean’s place.
Then we drove to Sand Springs Cemetery, where the three young men who died with Dean are buried. Only a mile or so from the Graham farm, the rural church cemetery lies west of Hurricane, Mississippi. The Graham markers were easy to find. Each stands about four feet tall with embossed black-and-white photographs of the deceased. They look happy and very young. We could not find Bud Warren’s grave. We will try again.
FIRST, I APOLOGIZE to those who are not pleased that they are included in these pages as well as to those who aren’t but feel they should have been.
When I went beyond personal experience and sought biographical facts and general background about William Faulkner’s life and work, I relied on Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner and historian Joel Williamson, whose scholarship I gratefully acknowledge. I appreciate also the close reading and suggestions of Jay Watson, president of the William Faulkner Society.
Thanks also to Bill Griffith, curator of Rowan Oak, and to Robert Hamblin, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.
My sincere thanks to those who knew my family and shared their memories and offered encouragement: Carolyn Butler Cherry, John Cherry, Sandra Baker Moore, Billy Ross Brown, Clair Smith Gurley, Gerre Hopkins, and Mil’Murray Hopkins.
For information regarding my great-grandfather Charles E. Butler and Laura and Lou Poindexter, I would like to thank Tom Freeland, the Fort Smith Public Library, and the Fort Smith National Historical Site.
I am especially grateful for the encouragement and support of my friends and fellow writers Cathie Pelletier, Neil White, and Lee Durkee, and of my editor at Crown Publishing, John Glusman, and my agent, Jeff Kleinman.
Finally, I would like to thank my children—Diane, Paige, and Jon—who heard this story and lived with it all their lives before I began to write it and who believed that their mama could write the book, and my husband, Larry, without whom the book would never have been written.
DEAN FAULKNER WELLS lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband, Larry, and two good dogs, Shakespeare and Lizzie.
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