My hands were on the wheel but no one would have called it driving that morning
Rube Lacey took me for a ride
on his tractor. “The boy won’t forget this,” I heard my father say as he boosted me
up to the seat, and the shuddering
and racket of the old Case-International began to cut a furrow into my memory as
sharp as dates in a headstone.
We were there to visit the ruins, the shabby places my father had lived during the
Depression. I would one day be taught
to call it vernacular architecture, devoid of detail and never intended to survive, a
two-room sharecroppers’ shack tilting
eastward, its sawmill siding paint-shorn and gapped. I wasn’t surprised by my
father’s love for Rube Lacey. At six years old
I had no theory for anything. It was the last time: every shred of light would soon
enough become a premise to be argued. At the end
of the field where the rows of corn stubble dwindled into broom sage and scrub
cedar, the abandoned shack
still squatted in the weeds, a spindly pin oak volunteer twisting upward through the
gray boards of the porch, all of it as salted with story
as one of those Walker Evans photographs, but with a soundtrack of wind cry and
diesel grind. To me it was just a day
not far from ordinary, the two men going over their silvery memories of my father’s
family tenanting and deeply in debt
on the Lacey farm. The old landlord still owned the place the way he always had,
the way our nostalgia owns us and will be paid
its share of the truth. Now what surprises me is how something as piecemeal as a
pile of drawled out words
can be whipped together into an airy apology to render any bitter fact palatable
and just. That must have been the reason
he brought me that day, to gild the past with a shine like the sweet glaze on a fruit
pie fresh from the fryer grease.
It would be a decade yet before our wars got going in earnest, before I began to
stand up and challenge his model
of the past with sullen remarks like “I bet Rube Lacey don’t bore his kids with any
stories of going to bed hungry.”
If we have to, we’ll burn a swath across Georgia to be the one who writes the
history. As he backed the car down the gravel drive,
the wind was prying at a section of the shack’s tin roof. I would be a long time
learning to paper my thin meanings
onto every porous wall, seams tight and pattern unbroken. My father didn’t glance
over, but I couldn’t help taking one last look
at the pin oak, dormant like everything else that time of year, grown up through
the floorboards only a little bit bent.