“Hey, y’all,” I say, smiling myself. I shake Parker’s hand. He grips me firmly. I give Parker a pat on the back and extend my free hand to Austin. He brushes it away and pulls me in, slowly, for a deep hug. There is a moment when he’s resting his head on my chest. He then begins to nuzzle his nose against my sternum, ever so softly, before pulling back and looking into my eyes.
“How are you, brother?” he asks.
“Good,” I say. “You?”
“I’m excellent. Really, really, excellent. Unclouded. Clear. The haze has lifted, brother. My horizons have expanded beyond the horizon. ”
“That’s really good to hear.”
“Hey, Hollis,” a voice says from behind me. I don’t even have to turn around. I could pick it out of a crowd of thousands. Shannon Hawthorne. She’s the only one who calls me Hollis. I’ve known her since I was ten. And it was about that time that she decided to call me by a diminutive of my middle name, Hollister. Sometimes she’ll even call me “Holly.” I don’t mind.
I turn around and there she is, doing the lip bite smile standing at the back of the kitchen. She’s wearing a blue tank top over white capris and she’s barefoot. She’s never looked better. Funny thing, though: my knees don’t go weak. I’m not overpowered. It’s nothing like my worst Shannon moment. That was when she visited Boise one summer. I was either twenty-two or twenty-three; she eighteen or nineteen.
We had taken a trip to our family’s cabin, an hour north of Boise in a small hamlet called Smith’s Ferry, right off of Highway 55. You always know when to turn because after miles of winding road between thick forest on the right and the North Fork of the Payette River on your left, there appears this one solitary building on the side of the highway: Cougar Mountain Lodge. You turn past it and take a dilapidated bridge over the river, cross a long unused set of train tracks and drive deep into the woods on dirt and gravel for ten miles that feels like thirty until you reach the secluded Cabin. There is not a soul nor structure in site as far as the eye can see, only water and trees and sky.
The Cabin is rustic. It is Idaho living in its most romantic and stereotypical. No plumbing. No heat or air conditioning. No TV. No internet. There is a microwave and a stove, along with plates, cups, and utensils. You bring up your own food and the coffee’s made in old style stainless steel percolator pots. The kind that smell like rust and feel like lava if you touch the wrong part but earn their keep by really making the best coffee you’ve ever tasted. You bathe in the river, with just a towel and a bar of soap and the cold water. For fun, there are plenty of board games and beer. At night, we sit around a fire making s’mores and drinking beer. Another cousin of mine once suggested going to the Cabin without beer. His brother shot him in the groin with a BB gun, the whole affair was settled, and it was kind of like, why don’t diplomats try this method? Can we, America, try this? If “no,” why not? I’m just saying I’ve seen the results first hand.
I have two younger brothers. Theodore, who everyone calls by his middle name, Konrad, and Anson, who sometimes goes by A.C.—Anson Colin. Konrad is 27 years old, lives in Washington D.C, and works as financial consultant. A.C. is 24, lives in Bozeman, Montana, and works as a materials engineer. In the winter he is a part-time ski instructor. Konrad and A.C. are both really good athletes. Konrad played water polo in college and does triathlons now. A.C. was a nationally ranked college distance runner. Each time we go to the Cabin together the three of us race up the hill. I, like any good big brother, destroy them every time.
The Cabin is cool enough to have legend attached to it. There’s a small enclave under the deck that is nicknamed “Uwe’s corner.” That’s where Uncle Uwe once drank thirty beers in one night. There’s no way he drank thirty beers. I don’t think it’s possible to drink thirty bottles of water in one night. But my father, who is without question the most honorable and honest man I know, swears that it’s true. I still don’t know.
The Cabin is a Lawson family treasure. My dad, Stephen, remembers working on it when he was a little boy. He told me that from about the time he was eleven years old it has looked as it does today: wood, brown with a white roof, two-stories, a big main room with a few couches and chairs leading into a kitchen flanked by two sleeping lofts. There is a deck from which you can look down over some one hundred yards of sloping hill that runs into the abandoned train tracks bordering the river. The river is always cold. Even in July or August, when the air temperature approaches one hundred degrees, the water stings you when you get in.
My worst Shannon moment happened here. We had decided to head down to the river for a swim. Shannon, who had been sitting next to me on the couch, got up and walked into the kitchen. It was only a fifteen-foot walk taking five, six seconds? I watched every step in 4x slow motion. So intently that when she finally made it to her destination my whole body felt exhausted, even sore. Inexplicably, my eyes misted over. I got the chills from head to toe. I started crying.
My mother noticed and asked me what was wrong. I forget what I said but it was a close call. I almost never cry. I can remember less than a handful of times that I have cried in my life and, this time excepting, never in public. To this day I still have no idea what happened.
There is none of that stuff this time; here, at Shelby’s. It is a great relief because I had been preparing for the worst.
“Hey, Shannon,” I say, walking over to her and giving her a hug. I’m still okay. Good.
Southern women might could make the world’s best food. Shelby has gone all out for this rare occasion when even a small contingent of the extended family is gathered together. The meal begins with an appetizer of fried okra and a bunch of other small things not worth mentioning in comparison. For the main course, she brings out this massive chicken. It’s covered in who knows what and tastes like no comment. No comment because you can’t talk when guzzling down chicken like it’s water. Dessert is a three-item affair: sweet potato pie, raspberry cobbler and muscadine ice cream.
Shelby has been talking virtually non-stop throughout the entire dinner. The current topic is a proposed bike lane in downtown Starkville.
“I, juss,” Shelby says. “I juss think we need that. Y’know? The students, bringin’ new students to the school and bein’ able to show’um y’doan need be only on campus, only at a football game or somethin’, tubby havin’ fun. There’s this connectivity ‘tween the campus and the city and y’all goanbe involved in everything when’ya come here. What you think, Uwe?”
Uwe looks up from a mélange of all the dessert options. A matching coterie of three beers rings his plate.
“Uh,” he mutters.
“No, really,” Shelby says, “What-ya think?”
“Mm.”
“Dang, son. I’m not kiddin. Y’know much Marcus was involved with the city plann’an all that. They’re gon vote on this next month. What-ya think?”
Marcus is Uwe and Shelby’s son. He is an architect. He took a job in Austria a few years ago and has made it his home. Uwe shrugs and takes a massive pull on a Stella Artois, draining it to the dregs. Shelby shakes her head.
“You know, Miss Shelby,” Parker chimes in. “I think this bike lane is exactly what’s wrong with the liberals controlling the campus and the city.”
Shannon rolls her eyes and continues popping her bubble gum.
“You see,” he continues, “the people don’t want this. If the Founding Fathers were here, right now, they’d tell you the same. But the powers that be, those white collared liberal neo-Marxists in the city council and in the school administration, they want to force all these progressive measures on the Southern people.”
“How is a bike lane some type of liberal conspiracy?” I ask him.
“Well,” Parker says. “It’s a bike lane today. What is it tomorrow? See, they’re trying to remake the South in the North’s image. We’ve got enough of these hipster coffeeshops in town that I sometimes have nightmares I’m in Portland. First one bike lane, then more bike lanes, and b
efore you know it there will be signs all around town about saving the earth and being green, reducing carbon emissions. Then you wake up one morning and everyone’s pledging oaths of allegiance to Double Zero and his goose-stepping comrades.”
Shelby laughs, shaking her head. “Boy, you done lost ya’mind. And where you get off talkin’bout my sweet Barack like that?” Shelby always refers to President Obama as “my sweet Barack.” Or, sometimes, “Cool Canary Barry.”
“You don’t, you,” Austin says, tentatively, “you don’t think that saving the earth is a bad thing, do you, brother?”
“Yeah,” Parker replies, sharply. “Because it’s really all about worshipping gaia, one world government and pumping the myth of global warming into every sector of society. So, yeah, I do think it’s a bad thing.”
“But you don’t think that Global Warming, I mean Climate Change, is a myth, do you, brother?”
“Yes. I do. And, Austin, son of a bitch! Stop it with that ‘brother’ bullshit, that Buddha-Yoda Tibetan sage bullshit.”
“I woan have that language ah-ma table,” Shelby says sternly.
Parker nods. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”
“C’mon, Parker,” I say. “You’re busting Austin, but how much of what you’re saying is for real? Refusing to say Obama’s name? Doesn’t the president deserve that basic respect? If I played back what you just said word for word, there’s probably at least five or six crackpot ideas right there, just in those two minutes.”
“Rhett,” he says, shaking his head side to side. “You’ll see. You keep the wool over your eyes and then Double Zero is gonna make his liberal dystopia right in front of you. Just watch. It’s already happening. And if you can’t see it now then by the time you do it’ll already be too late.”
Shannon gets up from the table and leaves. She’s bored. In between popping her bubble gum she’s been twirling her hair and staring off into the distance. Shannon is what some people would call an airhead. It’s really not true. She had a 4.0 at MUW and while she works in a bridal shop now, she has a degree in organic chemistry.
Shannon plays the slow on the uptake, spacy and sweet come rescue me my brave knight southern belle so well. I can’t stand these women. But as with everything in my paradoxical relationship with my second cousin, Shannon’s southern belle persona, whether real or constructed, is irresistible. I’ve fantasized many times about having to rescue this damsel in distress and when she demands that I kiss her, and I initially withhold reminding her that we’re related, she says to me, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Then we kiss. For a long time. For hours.
My favorite thing about Shannon is that she is 100% effective against torpor. If ever there was a widespread torpor epidemic all the CDC would have to do is find a way to exponentially multiply the woman, bottle her, and set up the queues. I’ve felt many things around Shannon but torpor isn’t one of them.
Parker is onto a new topic. Both he and Shelby are practicing Catholics, but of different stripes. Shelby is a thoroughly post-Vatican II Catholic. She loves bongos at Mass, off-key choirs, and saccharine and vapid homilies that avoid doctrine and traffic in jokes funny only to hard of hearing octogenarians and toddlers that’ll laugh at literally anything. Parker is so conservative a Catholic that when I once accused him of being SSPX he didn’t seem to mind. The SSPX, the Sedevacantists too, those suit and tie required, dress required, reactionary modern day Catholic Protestants more Catholic than the “pope.”
Parker is not SSPX or a Sedevacantist. He is a die-hard traditionalist. He accepts Vatican II only in obedience to the Church. Otherwise, he is completely opposed to anything that has emerged from the Council; if not directly from the Council, from its myriad “interpretations:” Eucharistic ministers, girl altar servers, the very music Shelby cherishes, the priest facing the people (“with his back to God” as Parker puts it, adding, “how would you feel if your bus driver decided to drive facing you, just to make you feel all warm and included and fuzzy, you know, with his back to the road, not looking where he’s going?”)
“You know,” Parker says, purposely louder than normal. “I was watching Michael Voris this morning and you won’t believe what he said ab—
“Don’t you mention that man’s name in my house,” Shelby says from the kitchen. I can hear her intensify the force of her scrubbing on a pan. Parker and I are the only ones at the table now. Austin has left. Uwe is passed out in a recliner.
Michael Voris is a polarizing figure, perhaps the most polarizing, if not most hated, man in Catholicism. I know all about him thanks to Parker. I know way more than I want to know, thanks to Parker. Voris once worked for some major news affiliate and won four Emmy awards. He started an apostolate called Saint Michael’s media that, over time, spawned ChurchMilitant.com. Voris puts out a plethora of Catholic programming; Church history, apologetics, a daily news brief. I have watched maybe three episodes total, out of everything combined, but have been irreparably exposed to Parker’s second hand viewership smoke.
Church Militant was originally called RealCatholicTV. The Archdiocese of Detroit made him stop using the name “Catholic” because they either didn’t like what he said or, more accurately, the way he says it, his “tone.” It’s a safe bet that almost all in Shelby’s camp, the “liberal Catholics” whom Voris derides as the “Church of Nice,” feel as strongly about him as she does. Moderate Catholics don’t like him because they see him as a fanatic. Super-traditional Catholics don’t like that he attacks the SSPX and other such breakaway groups in whom they see the best practice of authentic Catholicism, the restoration’s avant-garde, they believe, when and if they re-enter into full communion with Rome.
Voris does have passionate supporters. So passionate that one gets the impression from reading the comments on his website that they await his command to do anything and everything he would ask. Parker talks about “Double Zero and his goose-stepping comrades,” but get him all lathered up on Voris and, step aside. To some, Voris is a demagogical extremist. To others, he is nothing less than a modern day prophet, a voice crying out in the wilderness. One needs only to watch Voris’ daily “Vortex,” a five to ten minute monologue on various topics, to see him at his most Voris. This is where Parker goes next.
“Yeah,” Parker says. “Miss Shelby you should have seen it, really made me think.”
“Think?” Shelby asks. “Howdja have time’a think when Voris was beatin’-ya over the head with his’cessant hollerin’ and babblin’?”
“It was about clapping in church. I never knew it was forbidden.”
“Fah-biddin? No. There’s always people gon try and take ya’joy. Thass’athuh problem with Voris. Can’t find nothin’ real to have a problem with so he goes ana picks’on anythin’-an-airathin’ he can find. Thass the real problem: he creates problems, fake problems, and then makes’im self thuh solution.”
“It was pretty convincing.”
“Thass cuzya young, child. Ya’see things one way. Wait ta’ya get to my age. You’ll see.” Shelby puts a pan away. “Y’wanna know the best thing Voris’err did? Hire that girl does the news. Christine Niles. Now she-good, I like her.”
Parker finds some way to bring Reagan into the discussion. This is my cue to leave. I open the screen door and head out to the backyard. It’s a nice night; muggy and hot and still close to ninety degrees but nice nonetheless. The backyard is bright green, the grass well manicured and sufficiently watered. A small stream demarcates the back of the property. At the stream’s bank is an old magnolia tree under which a small bench and a few lawn chairs provide relief and something of a view. I head towards the bench. Someone is already there.
It’s Shannon. I sit down next to her. She seems down.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. I hear the dejection in her voice. “What do you think I should do, Holly?”
“About what?”
“Mark.”
“Who’s Mark?”
�
��My boyfriend.”
“What’s the problem?”
Shannon lets down her foot and traces her big toe through the dirt. “I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.”
“Well, do you want to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know.”
Shannon has had a revolving door of boyfriends in her life. I guess it’s like me with women. I’m not exactly her confidant so I don’t know if any of those relationships have been serious. I’m inclined to think the answer is no. A few years ago while she was at MUW Shannon pulled off a rare trifecta, perhaps never before accomplished, of dating three SEC starting quarterbacks in the same year: Alabama, Ole Miss, and Mississippi State. Quite an interesting post-game handshake, no?
MSU QB: Good game, man.
Alabama QB: You too. Hey man, say hi to Shannon for me, okay?
MSU QB: We’re not dating anymore.
Alabama QB: What? She broke up with me to date you.
MSU QB: (smirking and pleased with himself) Yeah, I know. But we broke up.
Alabama QB: Really?
MSU QB: Yeah.
Alabama QB: Oh.
MSU QB: Now she’s dating that clown in Oxford.
Alabama QB: (smiling, pleased with Shannon). Wow.
MSU QB: Yeah. Women, right?
Alabama QB: Yeah. Women. (Smiling, but not like “women, they’re crazy,” more like “women, oh women, what would life be without them?”) Well, good game, bro.
I don’t know how she pulled it off, logistically. But then Columbus is basically in between Starkville and Tuscaloosa and it’s not like QB-boy # 3 was playing in the Pac-10 or something like that. That would have been impressive. These relationships with the quarterbacks, like almost all of her relationships, to me at least, meaning what I have heard second-hand grapevined from Shelby, seem to have a humorous indifference at the root. It’s a game to her. Boys are fun, nothing more. The moment anything might get remotely serious Shannon is ready to move on. Maybe this is her experience of something like torpor.
The Holdout Page 3