by Robert Inman
“Perhaps.”
“Go kick up a fuss, Guv’nah. Like yo’ mama here.”
Fitz turned to Bright, stared at her for a moment. “Are you all right?”
“Perfectly. Go on, now.”
Fitz shook his head. There was a trace of a smile there. “You always did just what you wanted to do,” he said. “Come hell or high water.”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I did. Even when it hurt.”
He shrugged. “We’ll have to talk about that, too.”
“Yes, we will.” Then she turned to Homer Sipsey. “I’m ready to go, Homer. My father used to say the farther a monkey goes up a flagpole, the more of its rear end you can see. And I’m just about as far up the flagpole as I want to go.”
26
The most magic of moments are those just before dawn—moments when things can be as you wish them, unencumbered by light and shadow. You know the vague outline of a familiar place, but you can shape it to the whim of your imagination, people it only with those you wish to have near. Call them ghosts if you wish, or memory. Is there any difference? You can summon them whole and fresh, unravaged by time and the wasting of flesh. You can say to them all the things you always wished you had said, would have said in a more perfect time. That is magic.
It helps if you are older, because then there is more to draw upon. The great burden of old age is that there is so much history to deal with; the great blessing is the gift of forgetfulness, so that you can fashion your own particular history as a carver would work at a piece of wood, smoothing out the rough edges. That is part of the magic.
Thus it is that Bright Birdsong sits this early morning on the sandbar beside her river, conjuring thoughts of magic while she waits for the sky to pale above the treetops. It is quiet except for the soft sound the water makes as it slides against itself and the occasional stirring of a small animal or a bird, anticipating day.
She is alone now. Her ghosts have come and gone: Dorsey Bascombe, tall and lean in his big brown boots that smell of worn leather and neat’s-foot oil and pine tar, his arms strong and his voice confident; Elise, her pale skin luminescent, reflecting firelight, her smile shy and her voice musical; Hosanna, her eyes sparkling with some morsel of wisdom so close to the earth that it smells like a freshly turned field in springtime; and Fitzhugh, the color high in his cheeks from the brisk midday of a Washington winter, his face attentive as if she were the only person in the world worth talking to at that particular moment. Bright Birdsong has not made peace with them, because peace depends on things being certain and settled, and here in these moments before dawn, nothing is certain. It is simply here for the instant—a thing of fancy, not reality. Instead, she has imagined them for a brief time as she wished them, as she wished herself with them. In doing so, she has taken some comfort from them, from the parts of their mutual history that she chooses to remember just now. And that too is part of the magic.
But now the magic time is fading into morning, objects taking their own unalterable shape, ghosts receding, imagination giving way to reality. And reality is something else altogether.
Bright sighs, stretches her stiff limbs, wriggles about a bit in the soft sand underneath. She looks up at the sky. There were stars when she came an hour ago, clearheaded from a night of deep and dreamless sleep in the soft camp house bed. But the bright pinpoints have given way now to a general lightness. It will start as a clear day, a blue sky wiped clean. Perhaps a shower in the afternoon, the first big round droplets speckling the greenish-brown surface of the river and then a sudden downpour emptying the hot mugginess of a June day.
June. Most of a summer yet to come. And what of this summer? A week ago, she expected a still, quiet summer, a time and place where the mind drifts like the river along a familiar and comfortable route, seeking places where it can go unimpeded—Gladys asleep under the house; traffic moving slowly on Claxton Avenue, pausing near the River Bridge as the light winks red-green-yellow-red; quiet notes floating from the old Story and Clark upright piano in the parlor; and somewhere beyond them, the faint echo of a golden trombone. Träumerei. And the sound of God breathing.
But all is changed. Now, there is something quick and lively and unsettled in the air, like the moment just before the summer storm rushes in to rattle the bones of old dogs and children alike, shaking loose ancient dust and cobwebs. A small boy in the spare bedroom, an alligator under the house, fifty thousand dollars in a briefcase. That alone is enough to unsettle, not to mention all the other. A public unraveling, messy with human commerce. Good Lord!
So Bright sits here on her riverbank pondering how all these extraneous things have come tumbling in on her life, altering the course of her summer. But she is an honest woman above all else, in the way her father taught her to be. Too honest, perhaps, for her own good. So she arrives eventually at a truth: that alligators and little boys and stacks of money have little to do with all this unsettling. They are only the instruments by which she has been forced to come out of hiding. And confront. Oh, God, this business of confronting! What she has confronted won’t go away like all the ghosts who came stealing across the sandbar in the predawn hour. There is this business of consequence—of the Dorsey who left his mark so indelibly on her, then surrendered to the battle with his demons; the Elise who fled in perplexed defeat; the Hosanna who, despite her great native wisdom, was no match for dark abidings. And most recently, Fitzhugh. In death, he had worn a perplexity the undertaker had not been able to smooth away. Ah, Fitzhugh. It may have all been a very grave error. And now, unrectifiable. Finally, there were those who remained—Roseann and Fitz, chiefly. They must be dealt with, and no matter the outcome, there would always be a deep ache there, a certain sense of failure.
But dealing with all that, that was the thing. And that was the difference a week had made. Confronting, and then dealing. Dust shaken loose, objects tumbling from locked attic closets. Sixty-eight years old, and she couldn’t be quiet and still. Not anymore, she couldn’t. There was first a small boy, the possibilities he represented. She had barely scratched the surface there. There was the money, or what was left of it, demanding to be dealt with. She had thought about it now and then as she sat in the cramped jail cell waiting for the town council to give way, as it finally had, wanting no more of the tackiness she had created. But she had reached no conclusions. It remained a bother. And of course there was Flavo Richardson. Let her close her eyes in peace and he would surely show up on her front porch, arthritic and irascible, demanding something else. Friend enough to drive an old woman to distraction, now that she had loosed the old furies again. It made her weary to think about it. All of it.
And finally, Buster Putnam. He wouldn’t go away, either.
Sitting with him on her back steps late yesterday afternoon, she had succumbed to a brief moment of confession, had opened her devil’s box of regrets and uncertainties and hauntings.
Errors of the heart, Buster Putnam had said. But that hadn’t been enough. Errors they were, nonetheless.
“Well, then,” he said, “maybe not even errors, Bright. I’m not so sure of right and wrong, outside a few narrow boundaries. Maybe the only sane measure for most of it is how it turns out. And we don’t find that out until it’s woefully too late.”
“You know so much?” she asked.
“Some.”
“Korea?” Then regretted it.
There was a little flicker of pain there in his face. It gave him character, she thought. And when she looked more closely she could see the fine lines that pain had etched over his warrior’s lifetime. They were different from wrinkles, more subtle yet more profound.
“Yes,” he said after a moment.
“What of it?”
“None of your business,” he said, but there was no malice in it. He looked at his hands for a moment, flicked a wood shaving off the cuff of his flannel shirt. He smelled of sawdust and varnish.
“Of course not,” she said. “But just answer me this. Would you do it any d
ifferently, Buster?”
He shook his head firmly. “Hell, no. Goddammit to hell, no, I wouldn’t. Would you?”
“Perhaps. But I can’t.”
“No. So what’s the use?”
She let the evening soften things a bit and then she said, “You always did like to be a little foul-mouth, as I remember. When you were five years old, living next door, I remember you standing at my back steps and saying … well, I won’t say what you were saying.”
Buster smiled. “Back there when I was five, I used to think you were a little prissy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, a little too full of yourself.”
“Maybe I was,” she said. “My father always told me I was the smartest and best-looking girl in town.”
He nodded. “I suppose he was right.”
“And how about now? Am I still prissy?”
He thought about it a moment. “You’ve mellowed some, I reckon. You still need to loosen up a little, though. You ought to go out carousing with me some night, get sloppy drunk and sing along with Waylon Jennings on the jukebox at the Dew Drop Inn.”
She thought to be prissy about that, but then she started thinking about being sloppy drunk at the Dew Drop and she smiled in spite of herself. “Well, who knows,” she said.
And she thought to herself, I don’t need any scandal here. Not with all the other. Well, not much, anyhow.
She is suddenly aware of the morning. The first dazzling burst of sun on the thick branches of a maple across the way, flooding the sandbar with soft gold, the shards of light chasing the last vestiges of the magic hour like a mirror shattering. A new sun, full of life and energy. Hosanna, she thought. She may have been the wisest, sanest one of us all.
Bright Birdsong stands and turns, feeling the new sun warm and full on her face. Then she lifts her nightgown over her head and drops it in the sand at her feet and lifts her arms to welcome the sun, feeling it flood the deep, secret places of her body. Perhaps, she thinks, there is a bit of magic here too.
Too soon, it is over. Then sun pops full and robust into the sky above the camp house and soft gold becomes a clean white heat and Bright feels tiny beads of perspiration on her upper lip. She turns back, looks longingly at the river, then laughs. Sinner, baptize thyself. She wades in, feeling its coolness salve her thighs, her belly, her breasts. At midstream she stops, then thinks how utterly foolish she must look just now, a wrinkled old woman skinny-dipping in the river. She looks downriver then, sees the heron on a low overhanging branch, sees him take sudden flight, straight toward her this time, the ungainly body launching from the branch and becoming a graceful thing, all wing and long neck. He passes perhaps ten feet overhead and Bright turns in the water, watching until the heron rounds the bend and disappears.
Bright thinks suddenly of her father, goes back to the very beginning. “I will take care of everything,” he had said. He had been wrong in that, wrong to try. But he had said something else too. He had said, “Something will always come along.”
She understood now what he meant.
ACCLAIM FOR THE NOVELS OF ROBERT INMAN
HOME FIRES BURNING
“Stands head and shoulders above the crowd…. The best small-town Southern novel since To Kill a Mockingbird”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A wonderful novel, filled with characters who live and breathe and hurt and cry and who come to seem like friends.”
—Morganton (N.C.) News Herald
“A beautiful work, tough and bittersweet, funny and frightening, just terrific.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
OLD DOGS AND CHILDREN
“A remarkable saga of the South … a magnificent storyteller.”
—Chattanooga News–Free Press
“A parade of vivid characters and immediate, gripping scenes.”
—Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer
“Storytelling at its best…. Through the eyes of a spirited lady, Robert Inman celebrates the beauty and battles of a family and a region.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DAIRY QUEEN DAYS
“A remarkable and profound novel. … A joyous addition to our Southern literature.”
—Nashville Banner
“Inman deserves a place on any list of the best contemporary Southern writers. Make that a high place, even on a short list.”
—Winston-Salem Journal
“Inman captures perfectly the nuances of small-town life.”
—Chattanooga Times
CAPTAIN SATURDAY
“Captain Saturday captures the changing culture and economy of the South beautifully, but its real region is the human heart.”
--- Christian Science Monitor
“Captain Saturday shows how one poor, benighted TV weatherman turns the worst kind of adversity into a transformational, if not transcendent, learning experience.”
--- Orlando Sentinel
“A novel ringing with authenticity, both poignant and funny, that leaves readers questioning their own understanding of what is truly valuable.”
---Southern Living Magazine