The plan for finishing up the project is to meet in Mississippi for the Conference of the Book, held in Oxford each spring. Initially, all of the mentees, including Molly and Skip, were to be down there, but in the end only Cristina can make it. She and I will cook for some of the Mississippians who were there for me at the very beginning, nearly thirty-five years ago now: Richard and Lisa Howorth, the founders and owners of Square Books; Lyn Roberts, the longtime store manager; and Lyn’s husband, Doug. Along with Square Books, the other bookstore that taught me how to write was Lemuria, down in Jackson, and I will visit the gang there as well.
Lowry and a writer friend of hers, Katy, the one for whom I suspected Lowry of pilfering Sedaris’s linen napkin, will join us. Katy, who’s finishing up at Barnard and has already had a story published, does a good job of hiding her wicked and sometimes slightly dark if tender wit behind her serious demeanor. She’s quiet, always listening and watching, and is the best thing a young writer can be: hungry.
My hope was also to make a meal for Elizabeth, who is living down in Mississippi now, and to honor her contribution to my writing journey. That part is not to be, as Elizabeth’s brother, who hasn’t seen Lowry since she was little, lives in Birmingham, and the weekend of the conference will be the only time for Lowry to see her uncle. But she and Katy and Elizabeth will join Cristina and me for evenings in Oxford and Jackson on either side of the weekend, with a visit to Birmingham sandwiched in between. Meanwhile I’ll be staying at Doug and Lyn’s lovely rambling farmhouse in Taylor, just outside Oxford. Afterward Lowry and Katy will continue south to New Orleans, then west toward Texas, on their own literary journey, which will eventually lead them back to Montana.
Mississippi is thick with ghosts, of writers especially. Faulkner and Welty and Richard Wright, Shelby Foote and Lewis Nordan, Willie Morris and Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. It has crossed my mind that given the state’s propensity as a ghost-making factory, a writer who finds him- or herself in Mississippi might do well not to linger. It may be wiser to absorb the swamp ether of melancholia, passion, and occasional insanity that rises from the soil and the bayous and the furrowed delta, but then leave before being claimed oneself.
Grief is a ghost too. The divorce wasn’t what I wanted. It’s taken me a long time to shoulder my share of the blame. I tried my hardest to save the marriage and it wasn’t enough. They say not to use the word failure in these instances. They say to get on with your life. Perhaps we are all ghosts, even in the waking. It can sometimes seem that even in the broad light of high noon we are all merely hurrying through the fumes.
It’s hard being back here—I recall my first date with Elizabeth, lunch at a park in Jackson in the springtime. Winter-dried leaves skittered past and the cold blue sky above was like the mother lode of hope and ambition. So what if she was the most beautiful girl in Mississippi? She was already dying to get out, she just hadn’t quite realized it yet. I was twenty-two, she was twenty-one.
I worked in the office with her mother, Janie. Elizabeth was a free spirit, doing part-time drafting work. Elizabeth’s brother was fifteen years younger, and Janie a single parent. I took her little brother camping and fishing. I had my pilot’s license and took him flying too. Janie was a bit of a free spirit herself, letting her youngest go up in a plane with me all over the green state of Mississippi. Once, flying low, near the Alabama line, we passed over some feral chickens roaming a field next to a little gravel airstrip. We landed, put one of the stragglers in a cardboard box, got back in the plane, and took off with a white chicken in the cockpit. Chicken at five thousand feet, then ten thousand. We flew all day, thinking we’d take it home to keep as a pet, but decided against it and in the end returned it to its flock. “The years went by,” wrote John Prine, “like sweet little days, with babies crying pork chops and Beaujolais.”
Elizabeth said she liked BLTs. I told her I did too, that I ate them all the time. A fib. I brought my microwave to the park with us, with an extension cord. She said she liked tennis, and I said I did too, the truth this time. We played a few games in that silly wind, with our whole lives before us, and then I plugged the microwave into an outlet at the base of a light pole and cooked the bacon. I cut up the tomato, spread the mayo, added the lettuce, and we ate hot, fresh sandwiches in the sun, with the tips of our fingers glistening and those crisp leaves blowing past.
Her approval did not come easily and I wanted to please her. I still do, I realize, and always will. I have this fantasy where we become friends again. I remember how Russell, the painter, said his ex-wife was his best friend now, that he called her every day. Not the stuff of fairy-tale romance, but sweet and, toward the end of a life, who cares for style points? I try to operate as if each day is all there is.
Before my event at the conference, Cristina and I meet up with Lowry and Katy at William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, which I’ve never visited despite the years in Mississippi in my youth. I haven’t seen Lowry since Christmas, and I haven’t ever seen her as an adult in the South. It’s strange and new, glimpsing her there among all the old oaks and the trellises of Spanish moss. It takes me back thirty-five years, for in certain moments she looks just like her mother. Sometimes it can feel as if time is nothing more than a fabrication of man.
It’s midafternoon, hot and bright on the lawn, shady and cool beneath the canopy of oaks. The house embodies the word relic. There is a palpable sense of the despair, the alcoholism, the depression that once existed here, and walking along the warped red-brick walkway, you do not have a hard time imagining that it was this force, radiating upward, that knocked those bricks asunder. Lowry says it’s easy to picture him sitting under any of the great old trees, drinking the day, and—unavoidably—his life away.
Then she mentions to me that her mom is going to join us at Rowan Oak.
“Oh good,” I say, and I mean it. I haven’t seen Elizabeth since the last meeting—the cleaving, the apportionment—six weeks ago. The day the papers were finally signed was, fittingly, a cold and windy one. I examine that scar briefly, then refocus.
We go inside. The house is as I imagined—it reminds me of my grandmother Robson’s home; it’s even painted, it seems, from the same bucket of cool blue-gray paint. More ghosts. I remember the girls running through that old house. What must Grandmother Robson have thought? Our older daughter, Mary Katherine, is the namesake of her daughter, my mother, who did not live to see her granddaughters, and Lowry is my grandmother’s namesake. I remember the girls crawling like puppies into the lap of their great-grandmother, a woman born in 1898, one year after Faulkner himself.
The inside of Rowan Oak—empty and static, ghost-gutted by all the visitations, lacking the bouncing vitality of lives in disrepair, in love, in hope and ambition—is only mildly interesting. Absent the keen attention to the sentences, the keen attention to his daughter, the keen attention to the bottle, there is little to see. Faulkner used to ride south to Taylor, eight or so miles away, and water his horse at the fountain. That is what I’d like to see. If he was still alive for us to cook for him, I think we’d grill him a whole pig. “Every time I see a pig, I tip my hat,” Grandfather Bass used to say.
When the four of us exit, it feels good to be back outside. Redbirds call and swoop, streaks of bloodshot song through the trees. Lowry and Katy are wondering where Elizabeth is—we have to be at the courthouse for my talk soon—and I see her before they do, a long way off, walking through the trees. Those old neural pathways will never go away. More than thirty years of keen attention to another’s movements leave their mark.
She makes her way toward us. My old synapses are sending and receiving signals—Greet her, be observant, what might she need or desire?—and then I remember that she no longer requires my attention. There can be something even more sorrowful than ghosts, which is the separation of the living.
We all look around at Rowan Oak, chat briefly—and then, in a moment that saddens me disproportionately, we go our awkward ways in three separate cars: Elizabeth in one, Lowry and Katy in another, and Cristina and me in the third. What was once a family unit, with the ever-present pleasure of duty and watchfulness, is now a roving pack. Not strangers, but every bit as separate. And I do what I have been doing for four years now, and what I suppose I will keep on doing, as one must do with any grave injury, which is simply to push forward.
We park near the square and walk the rest of the way, through the same country we walked when we were young. The same sunlight, the same sidewalks—every footstep the same as it was when we were in love. No ghostliness now, nothing bittersweet, just pain. We walk past things that recall our old lives—black-and-tan hounds in that spring sunlight, preposterously young couples with children in strollers—and past the bookstore where I became the writer I am, and up the steps to the courthouse with minutes to spare before it is time for me to speak.
We slide into the pews as if arriving at a friend’s wedding. Richard Howorth, not only the owner of Square Books but also the former mayor, gives a lovely introduction, and then I go up and talk about how I came to writing. How the two bookstores told me what to read, hand-selling me my curriculum over the years. I talk about Mississippi’s ghosts, not just Faulkner and Miss Welty, but the new ones—Barry Hannah and my dear friend Larry Brown, a longtime firefighter before he was a writer, who died much too young, a heart attack at age fifty-three that shocked and devastated us all. I talk about how my daughters supported my writing. I speak of Elizabeth’s helpful critical standards—never shy about saying something sucked when it did, which was often—and, of course, about Richard and his huge heart. How he survived the crash of the publishing industry and, after that, the Great Recession: hard times through which the community kept him and Lisa going. I give a few writing tips, then say my thank-yous and am finished, and the conference is over for another year.
For old times’ sake we walk over to City Grocery, one of the best bars in America. Up the steep rickety steps, past the friendly bouncer, and into the great shoulder-to-shoulder friendliness of the place, music and conversation, shouting into one another’s ears. When I step to the bar to order cold beers, there’s a picture of Larry Brown on the mirror behind the taps, and I tell the bartender we were friends. The man standing in line behind me, a blue-collar guy still in his work clothes, taps me on the shoulder and says that Larry was a dear friend of his and he’s glad to hear me say Larry’s name.
When we finish our drinks, the five of us head to Taylor Grocery, the catfish place where Elizabeth and I used to go with Larry and his wife, Mary Annie, and sometimes with Barry and his wife, Susan, after readings or signings. A crowded place out in the country with the best fried catfish in Mississippi. Ghosts chest-high, and all a traveler can do is lean in. I’m glad for Lowry and Katy and Cristina to be seeing the past, and particularly glad for Lowry, since this is where she came from before she was here.
At the cash register, there’s another picture of Larry, and when I ask the waitress if she knew him, she tells me she’s really good friends with his family. I’d forgotten how social he was. He’d carouse till midnight or later, go home, play his guitar, write letters, then settle into work, writing until just before dawn. Sometimes there was work that needed doing—a field to plant, a tree to saw up. An airport to get to, a place to give a reading. Leaning forward. But writing was the best thing. The sole purpose of all the other work was just to buy time to be still for a moment and write.
We walk out into the night. Elizabeth, knowing my hearing is declining, asks if I can hear the frogs. I can. Again, there’s that walking-on-broken-glass feeling—three different cars in the parking lot. Doug and Lyn’s house is just across the road from the restaurant. Elizabeth, Lowry, and Katy go over there while I shuttle Cristina back to her hotel in Oxford, then head back to Doug and Lyn’s, where everyone is still up, chatting. Too many years have passed. We don’t keep them up long, but it’s a great comfort to be back in their beautiful old house.
Then Elizabeth leaves to drive back to her house and Lowry and Katy go into Doug and Lyn’s big front bedroom. Meanwhile, in the guest cabin, which doubles as the library, the room of ten thousand books, all the way to the top of the twelve-foot ceiling, with sliding librarian’s ladders, I roll out my sleeping bag and sink into the depths, with tens of millions of words latticing the sky above me, encircling me. These are the new days.
With all the close shaves and command-performance meals, it’s great to have a whole day to shop for food, and to cook for friends with no pressure. It’s like floating on your back in the middle of a mountain lake on a summer afternoon. I meet Cristina in town, and we saunter over to the bookstore, where I sign some stock—hundreds of books—as I’ve done often in the past. The first time I expressed dismay at Richard’s habitual big buy—“What if you can’t sell them all?” I asked—he said not to worry, he’d sell them, even if it took twenty or thirty years. And it’s true; he did, and always has.
Cristina buys a bag full of books, including Larry’s great novel Joe. The gas station where we stop has farm-fresh eggs, and next to the cans of Starbucks espressos and Yoohoo, the Gatorade and Red Bull, are bottles of milk from Billy Ray Brown’s dairy, just down the road. I buy a paper bag of peanuts and we make our way north of town, to the farmers market, where Cristina’s astounded and delighted to find meats she can’t find even in Philadelphia. “There’s got to be an Italian around here somewhere,” she says. A run to Albertson’s for the cheaper stuff, then to the liquor store and back to Taylor, where Doug is waiting for us.
Doug, an attentive sous-chef, stirs the filling for the coconut cream pie, careful not to scald it, while I work on the dough. The developing scents of Cristina’s family-recipe pasta suffuse the room—garlic sautéing on one burner, tomatoes on another, spices being added. What a marvelous afternoon, what a marvelous kitchen. There are two big gas ranges side by side, and Doug jokes that this should be required, that it’s a marriage saver. I smile and tell myself to ignore the hurt. It’s too great a day.
When Lyn gets home from work and walks in to the homey smell of steaming pasta and just-made red sauce, the veal and beef and pork patties Cristina has made, her face radiates. It’s a hearty meal, suitable for ditchdiggers—and with plenty of bread to make sure not a drop of sauce is wasted. Then Doug and Lyn’s daughter, Cecile, wanders in, followed by their neighbor Elizabeth Dollarhide, and then Richard and Lisa, looking spry and festive despite this being about their tenth night in a row of socializing.
We carry our plates out through the screen porch into the guest cottage, into the Great Room of books where I slept the night before, and sit at the long table with tall candles and old family silverware. Lisa, never one to beat around the bush, looks over at me, and at the beautiful food, and says, “I wish Elizabeth was here.”
“Me too,” I say. “I really do.”
It feels good to have said it—to have gotten it out, clean and honest—so that now we can proceed without its lurking under the surface. We dig in, pass plates. Cristina appears happy, having successfully fed a boatload of her elders. Her new Mississippi tribe. Lisa, particularly, is delighted to welcome her in. It turns out they both have relatives back in some little village in Italy. The food reminds Lisa exactly of her way-back.
After a while, we exhaust ourselves, unable to eat any more, but with plenty of capacity for the stories that keep spooling out. No small number of them involve the most recent triumvirate of Oxford’s hard-drinking writers—Larry, Barry, and Willie Morris, a Mississippian who returned home after a stint of many years in New York, including as the youngest ever editor of Harper’s magazine, where he published Norman Mailer and William Styron, among others. Barry in particular loved the Howorths and their children. The three young Howorths were fascinated by his electric bent of mind and followed him everywhere like ducklings. One day, Lisa got a call from a neighbor who didn’t know this, saying, “Lisa, I think I just saw Barry Hannah going into the woods with your children.” Another time Richard and Lisa received a call from Barry when he was out carousing with Willie, saying he was too drunk to drive but that someone needed to get Willie and take him to the hospital right away because his eyes were yellow.
As for Larry, he often ended up staying at the Howorths’ after a night on the town. He would wander over and crash in the guest bedroom. Or not sleep, but just stay up. One gray morning, the Howorths’ youngest, Bebe, came to Lisa very concerned and said, “Momma, Larry Brown’s out by the woodshed, and he’s just staring at the wall.”
I love how they tell these stories—not just in the buttery rich Southern accent of my youth, but with the graceful tag-team elegance of the long-married: Richard and Lisa, Doug and Lyn. Willie died years ago, and after that Barry stopped drinking, though he too is gone now, from a heart attack, like Larry. After decades of turbulence, a calm has settled over the land, pooling like silver fog.
We’ve been offered indefinite lodging, but guests, like fish, are good for only two days. I’m up early the next morning, working, and then it’s daylight, time for pie and coffee, hugs, then the road. Cristina has to fly back to Philadelphia, while I will push on farther south, into the truer heart of my own ghosts: Jackson, where I’ll meet up again with Lowry, Katy, and Elizabeth. Because we have some time and it’s Cristina’s first trip south, we decide to drive toward the Mississippi, into the Delta—the heart of what was once the black-soiled center of the economic engine that made the United States a financial powerhouse. Where each spring the great river that cleaves the country into east and west flooded and deposited a great bounty of nutrients, resettling a garden of Eden, and where almost anything could grow, cotton especially. Later on there would be a great cost, but beneath that broad plain of suffering and injustice, music and literature arose. Of course Cristina should see that landscape. As a writer, as an American.
It always surprises me how close Oxford is to the Delta. After just a few miles, we’re descending; the hills are less rumpled, and then they’re gone. We’re tracking due west, through forests and fields, and the world is increasingly made up of Big Agriculture—a civilization of giants, with sprayers and tillers and seeders towering far above the little tractors and plows of my youth.
Clarksdale. Highway 61. We drive north toward Memphis, past all the casinos, past the tract-home subdivisions that have sprung up in satellite clusters, and into the airport. I drop Cristina off and she goes on her way, back to her life and her writing, and I feel a little as I did when I’d drop my daughters off at school.
Afterward I travel on, wandering back downriver through the Delta, little towns with all their used-car lots, still fraught with poverty, now as then.
The following day in Jackson, at Lemuria, Johnny Evans, the owner, is as happy to see me as if I’ve come back from the dead. There’s a pack of young store clerks well practiced in the process of handing me books to sign, opening them to the flyleaf, taking them from me, then putting them back in their boxes. We blow through a few hundred books in a matter of minutes.
John tells me that over at the Eudora Welty house, where my reading is to be held, they’re hoping to be able to give me a private tour. I have to laugh. Thirty-plus years, aiming to get into her house, even her backyard; I’ve definitely taken the long way around.
Lowry and Katy meet me at the bookstore, John gifts us with T-shirts and bandannas, and Lowry hands me my birthday present, a beautiful watercolor of the two of us climbing a mountain in the Yaak at sunrise or sunset. I’d forgotten it was my birthday today—I’m fifty-eight, born in ’58. Then I’ve got to dash to catch the tour, and will see Low and Katy and Elizabeth at the reading.
I park out front of Miss Welty’s old house and walk right on up the walkway as if she’s been expecting me, has invited me in for tea. One of the docents, Bridget, takes me into the house. I’ve got only ten or fifteen minutes.
For some reason, Miss Welty seems more present here than Faulkner does at Rowan Oak. Maybe the house hasn’t been as over-visited; maybe the spines of her books, and the molecules of scent in her cabinets, have not yet been burnished into nothing. You can tell she’s gone, but it doesn’t feel like she’s been gone long. And in truth she has been dead only fifteen years, compared with Faulkner’s more than half-a-century absence. There’s something of Miss Welty still here, some spirit or essence.
I wander from room to room with Bridget’s guidance. I try to remember everything I see. The Persian carpet, the books left on her coffee-table as they were when she was living. Her record player in its fine mahogany case—how she loved music! (I think of her classic story “Powerhouse,” about a virtuoso musician.) The stairwell, going straight up, which she writes about in One Writer’s Beginnings. The portrait of her father. Her sunlit kitchen, so identical to Grandmother Robson’s. The porcelain corrugations of the countertop’s built-in drying rack: an unspoken ethos from those days, perhaps, when cooking was less artistic expression and more family sustenance. You cooked and you cleaned up; you did not leave the dishes for later. You finished what you started.
How I want to run my hands over things. I want to open the kitchen cabinets, where I feel certain I’ll find the same comforting robin’s-egg blue Fiestaware of my youth. Earlier, I spied a literary journal I’d had a story in thirty years ago—did she read it?—but museum rules prevent me from picking it up and thumbing to it. I can only try to drink it in, all at once, and then hold it for as long as possible.
Minutes are melting away. Bridget shows me the hole in the kitchen wall where there used to be the chimney pipe for a wood-burning stove. Miss Welty once grew exasperated over the rejection of a manuscript and started a chimney fire when she burned the manuscript. The house was almost lost. A couple of weeks later, a letter arrived from an editor asking for the manuscript. She had to write it again.
There’s not time to go into the backyard, but at the back of a long downhill slope Bridget points out a little shed resembling a clubhouse. “She called that Passion Parlor,” Bridget says, with a hint of pride at Miss Welty’s impishness. We tend to think of her as a spinster, forgetting that she too was young.
Upstairs, quickly, her bedroom, pristine, as if the life it belongs to has yet to be lived, and then her writing room, the sunroom, facing out over Pinehurst Street and Belhaven College. “She always wrote with her back to the window,” Bridget says. This gives me a pause of sadness, a momentary judgment—what would it have hurt, in the long run, to face the window? This from a woman who said that all serious daring starts from within. And yet McGuane too writes with his back to the river. And John Berger’s son, Yves, paints with his back to Mont Blanc.
I’m two minutes late. I leave the house with some hesitation—though it’s not hard to imagine Miss Welty being grateful to have it returned to her after closing hours. I hurry across the lawn to the museum, where people are still heading inside, dressed nicely, in that way I forgot young Southern professionals will still do, so different from the Missoula informality I’m used to. Esteem for Miss Welty, for entering her space—an acknowledgment that even though she’s gone, she’s still here.
The museum is an intimate reading space, an elegant old house with folding chairs. Every seat is taken, and people are standing too, spilling into other rooms where I cannot see them, nor can they see me. This fills me with an extra sense of responsibility, speaking to people I cannot see, almost as if I’m speaking into the future. They love their stories in Mississippi, and I love them for that.
Inside are people I haven’t seen in thirty years, my old Sierra Club friends, river-paddling buddies who kept me sane in those first years when, having just gained the West for the first time in my young life by attending college in Utah, I had to give it back up for a while, returning to the South after school for seven long, wonderful years. My writing apprenticeship. And alongside these do-gooder, wilderness-loving anarchists, my old-school oil-field wildcatters, staunch conservatives. How strange to have the two elements of my Mississippi days in one house, all here together. They were never officially at war, but in their individual lives each side possessed a sensibility that wasn’t compatible with the other, despite their living under the same sky, in the same town, shopping in the same stores, breathing the same air. I would like to believe a story, and time, can facilitate the unification of such friction and resistance.
I finish reading my story—I never tire of that ancient act, the oral tradition—and then I answer questions for a long time. It feels good to be able to acknowledge Elizabeth’s emotional support for the stories, despite our differences that widened rather than narrowed over time. A lot of the audience’s questions are about writing, some are about reading, and some, as they should be, are about Miss Welty. These folks knew her well; their stories still possess the beautiful dust of the living.
Afterward, walking down the steps away from the now-darkened old house and into the spring night, I remember that when I used to do triathlons and marathons, I trained in this neighborhood, ran all up and down these bulging hills. The red Yazoo clay, named for the nearby river, which feeds into the Mississippi, is stretched drum-tight across the dome of an old volcano. People tend to forget that in these parts there is a fault line to rival the San Andreas: the New Madrid Fault, which as recently as a century ago shifted in such a fashion as to reverse the flow of the Mississippi itself, sending its current south to north, from the Delta up toward its source, as if time itself, for a few days at least, had decided to run backward.
As opposed to Oxford, we will consolidate to one car to go out to dinner. First, however, Elizabeth needs to get something from her car—a tiny brownie cupcake, baked by our friend Corrine, with a single candle in it, which, once all four of us are in my car, she lights. They sing “Happy Birthday,” and I start the car. The evening edition of National Public Radio is airing an interview with me about my story collection, and we listen to it with some horror and fascination.
“Did you have a cold?” Elizabeth asks. “That doesn’t even sound like your voice.”
It feels good to laugh. “No,” I say, “it’s just me.” Several years older now than when we were last truly together.
Meanwhile, it’s the eve of the Republican primary in Mississippi. Donald Trump, a name I have never before typed, is in town, agitating the citizenry, and Lowry, fascinated by the bizarro quality of this cultural shipwreck, wants to check out the rally, notebook in hand. Elizabeth, however, is hungry, ready to go eat at the Mayflower, one of our haunts. It’s a tricky piece of business, mediating between two strong-willed women. Elizabeth and I decide to place a time limit on the rally exploration—we’ll just buzz out there and gawk. For some unclear reason of irony, Lowry wants a poster. Then we’ll blast back out.
But by the time we get there, it’s already over. The legions are walking out in a dejected overflow—the candidate arrived, spoke for a few minutes, then dashed away—and now we are caught in the mother of all traffic jams. As the subdued pilgrims head back to their vehicles, Lowry and Katy get out of the car and walk past them, searching for discarded signs and posters.
This is nothing more than a fever, I think, as the people pass by. Look, it is already fading.
Downtown Jackson is eerie, empty. We pose for pictures beneath the swirling loops of red and green and blue neon outside the Mayflower, then step inside. We order our favorite, soft-shell crab—fried and broiled both, since we can’t decide. The waitress is chatty and exuberant despite its being the end of a long day. She can tell we’re happy about something, maybe celebrating, and offers to take our picture. We’re sitting against a wall mirror, so the waitress with the camera is in the picture, as is a lesser, second representation of us. It’s a great picture, like something taken fifty or sixty years ago, a happy family of four, nuclear as hell.
And what is the difference, really, between what the camera shows, and what is? This evening, right now, we are happy, no less so for its being a complicated happiness. If things both are and are not as they seem, isn’t that almost always the case? We are hard-wired to develop plans and to chart paths; yet whether it’s a recipe or a life, surely some of the greatest pleasures come from veering away from how we thought a thing should be and into the freedom of that which was previously unimagined but is here now. The only thing you can do, at the beginning of each day, is work with what you have.
We finish our meal but keep talking until at last we realize it’s closing time, a fact from which we’ve been shielded by the kindness of our waitress, who has left us untroubled and is folding napkins and tablecloths at another booth. We thank her, pay, and step out of the restaurant into the night. Already the kitchen workers are sitting in their aprons on a bench, smoking. We walk to our car, and I can feel the edges of something eroding, as when surf foam stretches in, reaching. I will need to drive everyone back to their cars, but first we tour the vacant streets, the skyscrapers rising up into the mist. We show Lowry and Katy the Federal Building, with its worn steps. I remember going into the post office every day on my lunch break to mail out one terrible manuscript after another. We show them the old capitol, where I would go to write on those lunch breaks, and then, just a few blocks away, the old house where I lived, 826 North Street, and, just behind that, Elizabeth’s, on Jefferson—or rather where that grand old house used to be. It has been torn down—a long time ago, from the look of things.
We describe for Lowry and Katy the time the circus passed through town after midnight, with all the animals walking down State Street on their way from the Coliseum to their train, illegal as hell. We heard them from my house—the elephants trumpeting—and went out and followed them for a while, in the wake of their shadows as they sought the darkest streets, headed to the train yard.
We drive on, back to Miss Welty’s house. It is not yet extraordinarily late, but it feels that way. Everyone is sleeping. It staggers me to realize that I used to live in a city. There’s Kiefer’s, where we used to get the best gyros, and there are the tennis courts in the park where I once made those BLTs for Elizabeth.
I stop to let them out at their cars, and when we trade hugs, it takes all my powers of denial and self-deception—all my talents for make-believe and imagination—to live in the feeling that we are not drifters, unraveled. That we still hold, and forever will, some larger unity.
In the morning, breakfast at Janie’s, just as we used to do, sitting on her back porch listening to redbirds. The same breakfast as a thousand others taken here: Community coffee, oven-baked bacon gleaming, small mounds of grits with butter and black pepper, two poached eggs with black pepper, and half an English muffin. We chat amiably about the Trump weirdness, about springtime, as if our lives have not been blown apart; as if, having never done this before, we are not at a loss as to how to revise them. Where, if they exist, are the points for reattachment?
My flight back to Montana doesn’t depart until midafternoon. There are still more than a few ghosts left unexhausted, and in typical fashion I want it all. We’ll drive out on the Natchez Trace, again rolling in three vehicles, then leave two at a roadside pullout. Prior to meeting them at Janie’s, I stopped by the grocery store to get some picnic treats, including a cold Coke in a bottle, to which Elizabeth and I were once addicted—and crackers, smoked cheeses, apples, hummus. We won’t have time to visit the farmhouse where I lived and wrote, twenty or so miles south of Jackson, but we can make it out to the farm where Elizabeth lived—Mrs. Ferris’s farm—south of Vicksburg. The Big Black River. The old general store with the “F. L. or W. B. Yates” signage. Two brothers co-owned it, and clearly neither wanted top billing. On past sharecropper William Appleton’s farm.
It occurs to me that to do this right—to stir up all the ghosts—you would almost have to go back and live your whole life. There’s no time for that. There’s barely time for the remembering.
But it’s a glorious spring day, sunny with a chill breeze out of the north, and the meadows are ripe green from all the rain. We drive slow through dappled sun, the windows rolled down: back in time. Back beneath the long drooping trellises of Spanish moss, and the slick black-tar road of the Natchez Trace, on which Elizabeth and I rode our bikes many evenings.
Down the steep hill leading to Mrs. Ferris’s sprawling farm—across the bridge and into the dazzling light. Past the old empty house where I found the two black-and-tan hounds, abandoned, not even weaned yet. I carried them to Elizabeth’s house, where we fed them, raised them. Homer and Ann, we named them. They traveled with us to Montana, became Montana hounds. Mary Katherine and then Lowry were born, and these hounds licked both girls, who played with them and came to love them too.
There’s time to show the girls Mrs. Ferris’s big house on the hill, where she had tea and a big lunch every day, usually alone, at a long elegant table that looked out over the rolling hills. She was vibrant into her nineties. Still, everything is finite, and we’re dealing now with minutes rather than hours. We do not have time to show Lowry and Katy the lake down in the woods where we swam on hot summer days. The Lake of Peace, I called it—a lake not unlike the one in which Anne Stanton and Jack Burden swam in All the King’s Men. Nor is there time to show them the waterfall, strange for this country—a twelve-foot drop, like something in Hawaii. There’s no time to do anything but go past Vicksburg National Military Park, with its steep hills, where so much blood was shed, now a forest of spooky, ancient oaks with small clearings in which the battles must have raged fiercest. In shadow and sun, with the glint of the river far below, it’s a landscape that looks, strangely, like peace.
I think Lowry knows how much in love her parents were.
There is time—twenty minutes, by my calculation—to do what we set out to do: picnic. We leave the river-bottom country—Elizabeth has her hand out the window, is looking at the green fields—and cross the river. After a while, I pass a weedy gravel road, the turnoff to which is covered with pine straw, suggesting it has not been traveled in a long time. There’s definitely a “Good Man Is Hard to Find” vibe to the lane, and we joke about that. We pull in and drive far enough not to be visible from the road, then get out and walk farther, through a narrowing lane of greenbrier tangles.
We emerge into a meadow, a rolling valley of green in which a tractor rests, and settle at its edge, in the bright sun, and I begin spreading crackers with different cheeses, and hummus, and handing them out. It feels exactly as it did when we were starting out—countless such picnics with our daughters, deep in the forest, and the great simple pleasure of providing.
We share the Coke, and then the four of us split a couple of Larry Brown ales, a gift from Richard and Lisa. I have a bar of fancy chocolate and pass out little squares, which we savor with the beer. Then we spread our jackets behind us and stretch out, falling away from one another like flower petals from the stem. We close our eyes and do not quite nap, but float for a short while in sun-soaked bliss, and I try to be both aware and unaware of the minutes.
I hear a car on the gravel. I hear it drive up and park behind our shiny little rental with its Illinois license plates. A door opens and closes, then a man comes walking down the lane. We sit up, one by one. He’s maybe a few years older than I am, blinking a little. He looks more stupefied by our presence than displeased.
He asks our names—never a good sign, skipping the how-are-yous and nice-weather-we’re-havings. I give him our first names, as if making introductions, and ask after his.
Jack, he says.
“I guess this is your field, isn’t it?” Elizabeth says, and I’m happy to let her do the talking. She tells Jack about Mrs. Ferris, who of course he knows, and he does the math: anyone who was a friend of that grand old lady is not a drug-running cartel of hoodlums or mob leaders down from Chicago.
He seems more puzzled by the anachronistic quality of our repose than by the act of our trespassing, as if he’s gazing half a century into the past, and he continues to study us, knowing he should be cross, yet also somehow wanting to approve. “I guess y’all can finish your picnic,” he says finally.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “We won’t be long.”
As we sit at the edge of the field I do not know that in less than three weeks, the one who started it all for me, Jim Harrison, will die from a heart attack on a Saturday night, seated at his desk, working on a poem. A poet’s death. A journey that began with a death, Peter’s, will end with one; and this is of course precisely the reason I have carried these young people with me, to visit these living ghosts, and to tear open the bread, and soak it in the gravy. “Death steals everything except our stories,” Jim once wrote.
I will not resort to the hoary pronouncement that in every death there is a beginning. While this is as true as the sun’s rising, it is just as true that some things go away and do not come back. We are not much practiced at sitting with, and holding, loss. Would I have even been a writer, a fiction writer, had I not read Jim—had I not read that first page of “Legends,” so long ago now? I don’t know. I know only that I have never been through such a season of ghosts.
We drive back up the Trace to where the other cars are parked, and again we scatter like quail: Elizabeth back to her winter home in north Mississippi, Lowry and Katy down to New Orleans. I in turn hurry east to Jackson, and the airport, where afternoon thunderstorms and spring tornadoes will shut down air travel for half a day. I’ll end up taking a late-night flight to Houston, skirting beneath the belly of the torrents, and then a red-eye back to Montana, floating the whole way through black storm clouds ripped open every several seconds by beautiful spiderwebs of lightning.
Back to work. Back to Montana in springtime, a Montana little different than it was three years ago, when I began this long journey. Work, as it always has, awaits. I took a three-year leave of absence—to some extent, pursued the writing degree I never had. I fed my ghosts, helped nurture them a while longer, as I in turn slumbered, as if within a chrysalis. Not neglecting my writing, but waiting. Meditating, I think, on hunger.
And when I finally awakened—when the last bite was eaten, and the last of the dishes cleared and washed, and the candles snuffed out—what I awakened to was not so much a different world with different sensibilities, but instead the same old world in a different season. Autumn, you’d have to say, even though here in Montana it is the edge of spring, as all that is old waits to start anew.
Alone, my first day back home, I will make a fried-oyster po’boy. Thinking about Jim, I will eat a honey-chicken biscuit for breakfast with thick warm rosemary-and-black-pepper cream gravy clotted with slow-roasted dark chicken meat, the biscuits dense yet delicate. I’ll top it with clover honey and—hell yes—a fried egg so rich its yolk is the color of a tangerine. A slice of French toast on the side, some maple bacon, and brandy-butter syrup, macadamia nuts, and mascarpone spread on top. For lunch, a lamb potpie, and a bowl of potato-leek cream soup.
Then I will go up into the steep blue mountains and hike for hours, with the view of my valley below—in which hardly anyone lives, and now one fewer, my wife—climbing so high that the valley looks as it must from an airplane. I possess no ailments yet, other than of the heart. I’m still as strong and durable as I ever was, able to pour food into the furnace of my body and ramble all day, uphill and under a load. At what day and hour I’ll cross the boundary into old age, I don’t know. But I’m not yet old. Others, all around me, are falling off the map, but not me.
When you have been away for a long time from a thing you love, it feels good to get back to it. It feels good to sink into it, invisible, as if down into a cloak of darkness, where time stops, and there is only the beat of your heart, and the next word, and the next.