Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  Dad could hardly bear to even drive us past All Saints Episcopal, 1824, slate-roofed, ivy-wrapped, Tudored with half-timbering. He knew the Black Forest town where its organ had been made, given in honor of Colonel Paxton’s kinsman, killed in the Spanish-American war. Jan and I once caught Red sitting in his car nearby on a summer Friday night when their organist always practiced. Passing the place, he’d sometimes whisper, “Inside, too, it must look just-like just-like being in England.”

  I’ve never known anyone with less education and grander fantasies. It made you marvel at his potential. It made me forgive his granting me this lifetime-break called Riverside. Your ticket to the middle class is, once punched, irrevocable. If you can truly taste the difference between a four-dollar supermarket Chablis and a true reserve Malbec, then you have tasted of the apple, or the grape. No return trips. Heaven and Hell do not accept each other’s currency.

  Times, I wonder what sort of country Buster Keaton I’d have been, if simply left out yonder hoe-in-hand.

  Times, I still feel like some well-fed wild creature mistaken for a domestic pet.

  13

  SOMEBODY SUBSCRIBED TO the top collector-carver magazines, then passed these along our riverside road mailbox to mailbox. We soon learned those Hemphills were called “gunning decoys,” meaning the kind once built to really float. But such game-trapping had worked too well. By 1912, all that got outlawed for commercial use. Decoys had become so good at teasing migrations down into killing range, whole species were going extinct.

  Only then did the craft of outdoor trickery become the art of mantel-worthy carving. Our dear America itself, such an excellent invention, first ran Westerly and wild. Then all that reversed too-soon; it galloped on back and right into the Chicago stockyards.

  America, how soon you pulled shut barn-doors behind you!

  Even before WWI, we’d changed over—from being a nation of hunters to growers, from outdoor do-ers to collectors of the former do-ers’ nifty gear. How weirdly soon we came indoors!

  One side effect of being told since childhood that your heart’s diseased, you pay steady attention to breathing, to any available banister. Over much direct sun can seem a threat; you get to imagine your own death scene. It’s a privilege—mapping-practice for your final voyage. (Red Mabry would get just the communal public death he wanted. Other loving men stood by in sweet attendance.) —Would mine, my death, occur on some ab-improving machine of Broken Heart’s weight room? In my car after activating the turn signal then pulling over, ready?

  It can be an advantage, knowing. You must prepare, admit. But in most directions it’s a hideous deal, getting your death sentence so rottenly-early. Age six. And yet when—not if—it comes, I’ll grab whatever poetry that last free throw can give.

  ROPER NEVER SEEMED to age. It wasn’t only I that thought so. He’d been years ahead of me at Falls High. But our class still bobbed in his choppy wake. His dad was known to be the handsome sulker, nursing a drink at bar’s end, always a silk hanky in his blazer pocket, forever the pack of new playing cards ready at hand. He proved as addicted to contract bridge as he was awful at practical finance. But, however dapper a business failure, Roper Senior had not bought prestige for his son. Unlike so many of these D+ jerks in presidential power lately, Doc simply made up his own credentials. He won scholarships that were, as they say now, “need-based.” Everyone in Falls inherited a little something. But all Doc got from his parents was their poise, their length, their pianist’s and cardsharp’s tapering blond hands.

  In a town so small, we rarely speak straight-out of “love.” We go with “think the world of him.” But didn’t we share one river city’s circulatory system? Small pond, one truly big duck. Big Doc.

  Something in his approach felt both eager-beaver Boy-Scout-like and yet still “cool.” “Doc always goes all-out,” our conservative crowd said, with admiration and worry. We fretted how his too-public enthusiasms left the man exposed. (Not that he bothered noticing.) Unlike most of the Fallen—company-men with cousinly ties to R. J. Reynolds—he lived with no sponsoring endorsement. Doc didn’t teach at a university hospital, too long a commute. As our general practitioner, he just generally practice, practice, practiced.

  Everywhere you went in driving-distance you somehow heard of a new oddball syndrome that Doc alone had diagnosed. Once at a country store outside Castalia, the clerk asked where I was from, then told me how a man named Roper, visiting this same spot for fishing bait, had found the clerk’s young niece going into a convulsion never seen before. The scared clerk guessed it must be sudden epilepsy till Doc discovered, wadded in the girl’s locked fist, a wrapper from a candy bar with peanuts. “Here’s our problem. Bring me—let’s see here—your Dristan powders and all your pills for poison ivy.”

  Protective, we felt scared for Doc, or so we told ourselves. Thing was, he still expected far too much. Might not Roper pay, and big time, up ahead? Or must we?

  When he bought his first white Volvo wagon, the Falls Car Dealers’ Association held an emergency breakfast meeting. The GM boys admitted to the peddlers of new-here Swedish and German and Japanese imports, this was one mighty dark day for all things U.S.-made. “What’s bad for GM is bad, man.”

  And sure enough, within a year, twelve other admired young Riverside couples defected to Scandinavia, then even switched over to our two recent enemies at world war.

  The Cadillac dealer afterward admitted, “We should’ve kept the Ropers supplied, free. Course, he’s way too proud to just accept a fully-loaded El Dorado, boys. We might shoulda rolled one into his garage, gassed, waxed and ready! —Our decoy, get it?”

  NO FALLS COLLECTOR could yet spring for a real Josiah Hemphill. But seven homes already claimed their signature “Marions.” Oddly enough, he’d dropped his lifetime “Doc.” Man went back to that aunt-ish ferny ole first name. He incised that moniker alone beneath the tail of every creation. That followed by a needless ©. —His nom de plume(!) contained no hint he’d ever been a Yale MD. —Now, you delete a fact like that from your CV? means that, for America and Falls, you really are already sailing in your own Phase II.

  TRIAL-DRUG TESTS, early transplant lists, Doc pulled all the strings he held to keep his promise to me current. Roper hoped to get gangly me and this weak-fish heart over the fence into my Phase II. He always blamed himself for not reaching my own dad in time to save him. No one could have. My own final office visit with Roper, he had taken a prescription pad and jotted three names plus their switchboard phone-numbers. “Who’s all this?” I asked.

  “Best cardiologists at Duke and UNC. The Sultan of Brunei? he had his triple-bypass done at Duke. They say he rented the university hotel’s top three stories. For his wives, kids, security and rugs. Travels with his rugs. They’re his capital. He’d obviously pick the best heart guy alive. —So, Bill, what with me being at this age, I guess today means the torch is passed.”

  “Making me the torch, huh? Go out pretty easy, torches. —But thanks. You more than tried.” And into my shirt pocket I double-folded strangers. Seemed kind of “cold” of him, but what had I expected? He couldn’t stay on-duty for the sake of one. Not even for his next-door neighbor, truest pal and leading advocate-observer.

  Though I was a serious case, Doc never charged me one cent more per office visit than he did certain hypochondriac ladies. They had highly seasonal complaints. Friends said with a laugh, “With spring coming on, he’ll soon be seeing Julia, I bet. Julia usually gets all her ‘lumps’ in April. And so, poor Doc takes his.”

  (And yet he never shamed her.) “Well, Julia Abernethy, you still look great, and I think you’re a perfect saint to bear all you do, dear gal!”)

  Looking back, how had he abided us these forty years?

  14

  ONLY ON ARRIVING in Falls did Red understand he was exactly as short and yam-colored as folks had always said. A “Sweet Potato Mabry” after all, he drove downtown to buy his inaugural seersucker suit. He learned at once
Falls’ best “good” store. All the Broken Heart golfers wore this store’s seersucker, striped brown or blue, the one suit suitable for your summer church or lawn party needs. But Rosenblooms’ veteran salesmen always made you face three mirrors. You could see the whole back of your head and it felt almost sickening, a dizzying double-cross. Poor Red came home shaken, acting seasick, went straight to bed. Now he knew he’d forever live eighteen holes away from clubhouse handsome.

  At supper, hair uncombed past caring, Dad said, “Praise the Lord, you don’t favor me, son. Good you got your daddy’s fixtures but your momma’s features.”

  Mom was basically pretty. But her pale rounded looks never seemed to give her either pride or pleasure. “Everybody’s got to look like something.” Baptist-again, she turned aside our every compliment.

  Tonight Red kept at it. “Boy, if God had to go give you my bad heart inside, thank God ole God at least let you be pretty as your momma in the face.”

  I blindly accepted Dad’s belief in my looks. Though, like Mom, I never trusted that I appeared like much past occupant.

  Once at the club shower room, hiding on the shy side of my opened locker door, I had to overhear some guy say, “Yeah, wife got us there so early, only people around were the caterers and Bill Mabry. Oh she apologized then!”

  I OWN A coveted Evinrude outboard, mine since youth and therefore now antique. Its green metal sheathing had all gone to crumbly rust. And yet the thing turns over every time, humming stupidly forward. Doc once joked about buying it from me. “Won’t quit. Like a certain nearby rusty aorta. Your ole inboard, right, pal?” It relaxed a person, having as a heart one barnacled if stubborn combustion engine.

  Maybe half of healing means passing another week’s false confidence to the gimp? If so, bring me even more. And I can say I loved the man for giving my own slowing life at least this image.

  SOMETIMES I WANTED Falls to change and then it would, but rarely quite the way I’d hoped. When Jan and I longed aloud for “new blood” it came, but bringing traffic, people that did not know us, or even Doc!

  If big money once flowed from farm shacks to riverside town houses, the circulatory system reversed. Former fields, having given up tobacco, now sprouted malls that leached residents and cash from downtown. Jan asked if I’d drive her to our one good dry cleaner on Main. Though we’d last been here a month before, everything somehow looked unpainted and old-fashioned.

  Along Old Town’s Summit Avenue, our founders’ mansions seemed swollen, stairways dangerous for families with kids. The best such, home realtors had gussied up as new insurance firms or B&Bs. A historic marker before one rambling house explained our last Confederate soldier had died here in 1940 (attended by his funny overworked nurse-wife). The place now served as a law office. Its big front yard sign declared NO FAULT DIVORCES, CHEAP. IN AND OUT.

  I remembered riding into Falls with Mom and Red for window-shopping. The sidewalks were both washed and swept. We would step solemn from store window to window. The lights were brilliant. The clothing dummies looked to be New Yorkers. And we stared in as if hoping to join their church, too!

  That same downtown lately looked smudged. It looked unloved and therefore unfamiliar.

  MY HEART ITSELF I hoped might just maintain. I saw no high-jump meets in my future. But my inboard’s chugging did let me perk along and notice our deck’s river view. I focused more on my wife’s recent sighs around three p.m. I fretted over our kids’ uneven early career advancements. I concentrated on keeping our house painted, always harder so near water. And on our beloved neighbors, the Ropers especially.

  He told me at our mailboxes how one wooden fowl might take him one month to three to craft. That meant Doc was not the speed demon he’d always seemed. Such carving was exacting but his painting, he admitted, took far longer. My Janet marveled at his “color-sense” she called it. “Most men can’t pick out more than basic red or white or blue. But these feathers he does, they’re more an olive-green shading toward the weak yellow from our cockatiels’ backs. I read somewhere, color-blindness mostly happens to men. Who knew he had this in him?” But we looked at each other and knew we’d known. He could’ve run the Mayo Clinic blindfolded. Compared to that, what was an excellent custom duck-coating? I heard he owned a couple brushes inset with just three camel hairs.

  After his second exhibit, even our least arty guys in the younger set began to talk up decoys. What were these except hunks of wood with flashing cuff-link eyeballs? During drink-hour, people passed around their original heirloom Marion—hand to hand, some weird scrimmage. This pintail’s surface felt sanded into soapstone, jade. To the touch, it seemed less plant matter, more some cool mineral. You almost needed a magnifying glass to appreciate the many quills he’d scratched in there; no single feather assumed. His eye on the sparrow. Each quill built, as by some architect, atop the one beneath it. “Good as new, pal,” Roper used to tell our son, after suturing his eyebrow shut again.

  And, where did lucky owners keep their Marions? Not in safe-deposit vaults but out atop their coffee table’s magazines. Our continent’s wildlife had been tamed to hold down a job now, mere paperweight. Had all our native wildness shrunk to a decorator accent securing our now-married daughters’ back-issue Vanity Fairs? I finally admitted it to myself. I wanted one. I wanted one he’d made.

  TWO NEIGHBORS NOW hunted decoys on eBay. Fellows were soon ordering any thirty-dollar hunk of speckled cork and beak. They would bag no Hemphill, no Marion that way. All of us on The River Road now knew just enough about aquatic-bird-carving to make us dangerous, snobby. (Since Doc had never let me pay him his true worth for necessary Monday office visits, I imagined I might finally off-load major cash, buying one main “art duck” dead-ahead.)

  I don’t want to make like the Fallens’ only news came via fake birds, Jack Daniel’s, and our kids’ early publications. We had the usual vigorous adultery and dicey legacy-mental-health. Money woes, plentiful heart disease, overmuch ovarian and breast and prostate cancer. Usual. Locals dependent on tobacco money were sometimes driven—out of defensive product loyalty—to smoke. They’d prove the act harmless. So tobacconists and their young kids publicly stuck with it, always good for a free pack, jaunty with the cigs as FDR in profile. They stuck with it till cultivating group lung-cancers they could’ve surely lived without.

  And one night Les Wilkins’s dad’s bankrupt tobacco warehouses downtown caught fire. (Luckily spared, the old auction floor where Les stashed his priceless car collection.) From our decks in Riverside, the whole downtown looked outlined in flame. Silhouetted church steeples made this seem a godly retribution.

  Farm-communities were glad to feel needed by the Fallen and rushed us their every truck. The whole night yowled sirens. It felt like London’s Blitz, great cascades of upward sparks hung red against stars’ cold blue. But what came drifting upriver across Baby Africa then into Riverside? This smell so fine it seemed almost an idea! Tobacco-dust, all of it that’d ever sifted into floorboards or rafters since Sherman’s worst, lit up the night like one fine trick cigar.

  If tobacco tasted as good as it sometimes smells many more would be dead. And this seemed history’s long final exhale. Jan and I soon shifted our deck chairs to face such hellish fireworks; we waved over at the Ropers, ditto out on theirs. Studying orange sky, we breathed a luxury that can only come from the very last of something. Even our superb vintage poison!

  Clowning, Doc leaned at a deck-rail, himself pretending to smoke, blowing great sophisticated rings of nothing. Then, seeming to remember, he pointed over at me, tapped his wristwatch, signaled toward our house.

  Just as my Janet here had first mimed news of my raw zipper, Roper stood showing—in a gesture coded for me—I should stay out, enjoy this exquisite smoke briefly, but soon head indoors, okay? Too much of it would not be good for me. Eye to eye with him, I nodded. And all this understood between semaphoring buddies sixty feet apart!

  Things had a way of circling back around
among us, like our shared S-shaped river. Two couples who’d noisily divorced married opposites—“change partners,” as in square-dance geometry. That and the humiliating arrest of a longtime Riverside klepto were good for about two years’ talk. We’d lately dodged four hurricanes. One friend’s grandson, 8, died in five weeks, of unlikely Rocky Mountain spotted fever. (People said Doc, unlike Gita, would have recognized it right away.) Two pals got hit by lightning on the Broken Heart course standing under the biggest maple just as they tell you not to. And one local scandal had state police staking out a nearby nature-park men’s room. It’d become the “meeting place” for a certain type of highly-sexed lumberjack.

  It shocked us when the culprits’ familiar names got listed unfiltered in our Falls Herald-Traveler. The shop teacher with a cleft palate, our own bank-trust-officer, one beloved black choir director father of six. Firings resulted, yellow moving vans arrived and departed. A town less colorful.

  The cops had used their youngest blondest cadet to be bait. His name went unnoted. A competition sprang up to learn if he lived among us. Shocking to hear a deaf old pal at our club say too loud, “I’ll give fifty bucks to any man can tell me the name of their Decoy Dick.”

  BEING MYSELF THE largely self-taught son of an eighth-grade dropout, I can now let myself feel briefly smug: about our three curly grandchildren with IQs bound to produce cute stories. “Bettern money in the bank,” I know my dad would enthuse.

  One five-year-old grandson (William Mabry IV) recently explained to me by phone, “Kindergarten? Boring, Grandpa Bill. Always the same. Milk, cookies, cookies, milk. But, know what? I’m breaking up my day more, see. Time goes faster when I try and teach the others fractions.”

  As a kid, you start off feeling different from everybody else. But as time keeps washing you along, you grow half-proud of how animal-alike we are. Whoever escapes that? Who’d want to?