The Two Questions

I took the day off today, just because. Just to spend it with my wife. Just to enjoy the cool, rainy weather and the green slopes and the big breakfast and the French pressed coffee and the hum of the tractor under my bones and the barn swallows slicing through the spring air and the red dog dreaming on the wood floor after gorging on corned beef hash and the useful bargains we found at the Dollar Tree and the thought of what the seed ‘taters will produce and the hens pecking at strawberry tops and the kale that we need to pick TONIGHT and the revivifying breeze sifting through the screen door. And I did enjoy all these things and thoughts and I kept thinking of things that make me wince and laugh. Things like the island off the coast of Thailand of which I recently read, an island called Phuket. I want to head up their tourism campaign. “Had a lousy month at work? Need to get away? Just call your travel agent and say ‘Phuket,’ and we’ll take care of the rest!” Things like the fact that Daniel Huttlestone, the little Cockney lad who plays Gavroche in the recent film version of “Les Miserables” looks just like a miniature Ronnie James Dio. I laughed at these thoughts, and then I read of another son of England, a young soldier named Lee Rigby, who was beheaded in public by two gloating nigger muslims.

And my smiles and my laughter ebbed, disappeared.

Who are we? We as a people, I mean. Who are we? To focus more sharply, why are we so passive and so silent and so weak in the face of open hatred for who we are, what we represent, and what our destiny is?

Let’s individualize the question. Who am I?

Who are you?

Perhaps you’re The Respectable Christian. You go to the services, you serve on the boards and committees. You teach. Your wife organizes fellowship meals. You tithe. You do outreach. You own – and actually read – the right books, the impressive books, the books your religious peers dissect in their soporific nasal NPR monotones during the men’s breakfasts. You think you have some kind of diaphanous obligation to share something (the gospel? your wealth?) with the have-not heathens of the filthy world, but you haven’t done a lot with this belief so far. You don’t want your daughter marrying someone who doesn’t look like your parents, but you also don’t want to go so far as to say that those people aren’t (or perhaps can’t be) true Christians. You have witnessed incident after incident, as plain as the hair on your head, demonstrating the fact that your congregation or your denomination or your group is about as unbiblical, as un-New-Testamentish as it’s possible to be. But you remain. You piss away your irreplaceable hours every week, doing the churchy busywork, determined that orthodox-with-a-small-”o”-Christianity is the answer to our peoples’ genocidal plight, even though the church is obviously doing nothing for your people and is in fact working actively to harm your people. You are content to adopt a baptized “long march through the institutions” mindset, and you watch your children grow into young adulthood and essentially apostasize from your family altar and they embrace all things you told them to shun during those long drives and those biblical worldview conferences and those hours poring over the wholesome catalogs like Fishin’ For ‘Em or SeeBeDeeBee’s, put out by some crypto-Jew like, well, you know. You pray, but you don’t expect an answer because, well, Christ doesn’t operate like that anymore. You ignore what Christ says to your heart at 3:00 am because, well, the heart is desperately wicked and your heart was the one part of you that wasn’t redeemed and wasn’t resurrected with Him, so you can’t trust it, right? Your girlfriend or your wife is frightened by your viewpoints, and you’re afraid to talk too much about your beliefs around her or any of your family or friends, so you read the blogs and you start your own blog and you daydream about all this stuff while you fix the garage door. And you fear that you’re doing nothing and that you might be on the wrong side, because all the world is telling you that you’re wrong. Perhaps that’s you.

Or perhaps you’re the Angry Talk-Radio listening, Headline reading, News-watching Mumbler. Your family members gave their lives or limbs in Dub Dub Two or Korea or Vietnam, and Old Glory still makes your pulse pick up, but you’re damn-hell sick of all this shit, and someone’s gotta do something, and so you write letters to the editor until someone figures out where you live and puts a live raccoon in your mailbox or throws balloons of piss onto your front porch or calls you in the middle of the night to scream “Fascist!” in your stunned, sleepy ear. You vote Republican, even though the GOP is outdoing itself in the Let’s See How Much We Can Make The Darklings Like Us game. You dominate the conversation at the weekly poker game, and all your friends think you’re too angry. Your children avoid you. No one seeks your counsel, and you’ve noticed this, but you comfort yourself in the knowledge that the truth you hold is so potent, it can’t be handled by the yokels who are less angry than you. You’ve toyed with the idea of running for local office so you can “change things from within,” but that idea has never really taken off. Your nephew has tried many times to talk to you about your ultimate purpose in this life, but you’re uninterested. After all, you walked the aisle when you were thirteen. You’ve been washed in the blood. You bought the fire insurance policy; you need nothing else. You know your people are under attack, but it can’t be the Jews who are responsible, because they’re God’s Chosen People. They’re untouchable. You might get in trouble just thinking about the fact that they have a 100% flawlessly evil track record. You might get in trouble just reading certain words, or visiting certain websites, or entertaining certain questions. You’re angry and you’re righteously right, but you don’t want any trouble.

Perhaps you’re the Wistful-But-Occasionally-Tentatively-Aggressive Southron. You dream and talk and blog about the South seceding again, and this time, it’ll work. You expend your emotional calories in the pursuit of the fantasy that somehow, for the first time in the history of the world, time will run in reverse, and the antebellum South will rise again, and you’ll get to wear a frock coat and shave with a badger brush and your wife will wear hoop skirts and your daughters will sip camomile tea and banter with the benevolent darkies under the shade of the magnolias while Topsy fixes you a mint julep and old Rastus cleaves that ripe watermelon in half for your epicurean, I-do-declare pleasure. You blind yourself to the fact that no one is attacking Southern culture and that everyone is attacking White culture. You ignore the fact that if the South were to secede today, she would be a majority nonWhite, and that you and yours would quickly be Mau-Maued in some Haiti-on-Sewannee massacre. You quote Dabney while ignoring the warlike Christ. You’re willing to die for the ancient abstract notion of Dixie (if only it were 1862 again!) but you’re not willing to kill the enemy in order to protect your sons and your wife. You want a world that no longer exists, but you won’t work for a world that could exist. Your wife never misses an episode of Dr. Phil because, hey, he’s a Southerner, and he gives good advice, and he really Tells It Like It Is, even though he’s a complete coward when a dark-skinned degenerate is sitting in the tall barstools on the set of his insipid show. You belong to a megachurch that televises its Sunday morning services, and you feel good that a smiling Negro is chairman of the deacon’s board, even though you know his simian son has been rubbing up against your wife during the official fellowship time after evening worship. All we need is the Confederate flag and some respect for Brooks & Dunn and a few more airings of “To Kill A Mockingbird” and this race shit will go away and we can get back to rebuilding the South.

Maybe you’re just The Average Addicted (to tv, sports, alcohol, Rx drugs) White man. Get up with a hangover, shower with effing designer body wash, slurp down some Slim Fast and a microwave meal. Drive to work in a car for which you can’t even change the oil because it’s too complex in these new models, your ears poisoned with the morning drive-time antics of a couple of lowbrow ex-high school jocks, whose show probably features the word “zoo” in its title. Get to work, do the minimum, kiss your boss’s ass and chat up your coworkers with the latest reality tv show gossip, then vivisect one or two of your coworkers via some real-life gossip. Do this for several hours with a lunch break to bisect the fun. Then drive home while listening to two overgrown adolescents crack vulgar jokes and swap arcane sports trivia, maybe stopping off for an order of fries and a twelve pack and a lottery ticket on the way. Oh, and be sure to swing by the drive-thru pharmacy to pick up your wife’s Prozac and your Ambien and your (and your wife’s) Cialis. If the sign shows green, get some hot Krispy Kremes while you’ve still got your ATM card on the console. Yell at the kids, mumble at your wife, hit the recliner and watch another Seinfeld rerun while waiting for the pizzas and breadsticks and 2-liter Pepsis. Your wife is texting or updating her Facebook page, so you watch a little soft porn on Cinemax and then listen to some awesome classic rock on your cellphone while you read a comic book and fret about being constipated yet again. Time for bed. Rinse and repeat. Then the weekend’s here and we’ll drink a lot of beer, halleleujah. The playoffs are on. Maybe the lawn gets mowed. Maybe a golf game. Maybe you get browbeaten into taking Them to the mall, or to the amusement park (you bought the season tickets, after all, diddinyou?) Maybe you go to the sports bar on Saturday afternoon for some man-cave time. Watch a little. Drink a little. Flirt with the waitress who unbeknownst to you was a classmate of your daughter’s, and she uses your name as the punchline for every pervert joke she’ll tell for the next four years. Sunday is for sleeping in, but your wife rouses you with requests and demands, and you call her “bitch” under your breath, and she calls you “bastard” to all her friends, all of who know how much you drink, how much you spend, how weak you are, how mean you are, what a shitty father you are, and did you say that Michael Vick will be at the opening ceremony for the new Jiffy Lube later today? Put on your baggy shorts and your t-shirt and get on down there, with your illiterate, sullen son. Waste the rest of the day watching Daniel Craig mince through a James Bond DVD, and then get ready for tomorrow, because it’s Monday, and racism is the biggest problem in this country, this country, this country where black athletes are role models, dammit, and don’t you bad-mouth him just because he got arrested for rape when he was young and dumb. You want to be left alone so you can perch in the bleachers or squat on the sofa. If drool were gold, you’d be as rich as any Jew, if there were such a thing as a Jew, which there really isn’t, because race doesn’t exist. The Super Bowl exists. KFC exists. Sports Illustrated exists. And those aren’t constructs. They’re life. Sweet, sweet life.

But perhaps none of this applies to you. Perhaps you’re The Capable Agrarian. None of this will touch you, because you can make the most potent compost this side of the Mesozoic era. Jews might be running the world, and niggers might be taunting your son in the Walmart, but you can grow them frikkin’ carrots, yeah, baby. You grow gourds and build banjos out of ‘em. You butcher your own barn cats so you can harvest their intestines and make strings for your handcrafted fiddles. You build your own ram pumps. You castrate your own velociraptors, which you incubated and raised from Day One. You have tons o’ guns, most of them slathered in cosmoline and buried in secret bunkers on your property, and you occasionally do some attention-getting target-shooting, but you’d never really fire one at a human being, at least not with any intent to take a life. You’ve got catnip growing in the window boxes and echinacea growing in the circular plots outside the immaculate outhouse. You’ve got binoculars at every window. You scoff at air conditioning. You cut your wood with a crosscut saw, and if your neighbor doesn’t want to help, well, hell, that’s just one more asshole who won’t be getting any Vienna sausages from your 40 X 40 X 8 larder when the balloon goes up, and you pray yet once again that it goes up. You’re so self-sufficient, and you’re so off the grid, but you somehow can’t bring yourself to acknowledge that the self-sufficient, off-the-grid routine didn’t work out so well for Randy Weaver or David Koresh, can you? You’re convinced that B. Hussein Obama’s government is going to leave you alone, let you withdraw, let you be independent. ‘Cos you’re capable. And you only eat free-range bullshit.

Oh, wait, no, you’re the Christ-mocking tattooed pagan Odinist skinhead, aren’t you? Got your head all razored down like every nigger on every basketball court in St.Louis, unaware that no White men in history ever shaved their heads in such a fashion or for such reasons, but you’re a badass, ain’t you? You like to curse at the Christians for worshiping a “dead Jew on a stick,” but you’re wearing your Thor’s hammer, right? Got the skin your Creator gave you all marked up like graffiti under a piss-stinking bridge in Baltimore, but you’re a proud pagan, aren’t you? You want to create a new religion, a religion for soft-handed, bloated-bellied little shits like yourself, don’t you? You spend your money on new boots or new CD’s or new bumper stickers, but you won’t give a dime to the little semi-senile widow who lives in the decrepit bungalow on your street, will you? You spend your money on Milwaukee’s Best and puke it up every third night, and then you watch Mexican soap operas on Univision and get your little earthworm all hard from the sight of those hot Latina bitches, and then you think you might marry one because they’re so family-oriented. You get into a lot of fights, but only if it’s you and six of your buddies against one Phillipino transvestite, and you worry for days that the cops are going to come for you since you hit him/her just a little too hard, and your sister is dating a nigger but you won’t say boo to him or her because he’s got two inches and forty pounds on your hammer-wearing ass, doesn’t he? But get a new tattoo – make sure it’s a Viking rune, because, hey, the Vikings were hardcore, right? – and go to a concert and yell ’til you lose your voice, because you’re the savior of your people with the new religion that rejects the sheep-savior, ain’t that about right, Wotan?

Could be you’re the doe-eyed mystic escapist. You haunt the Barnes & Noble in your suburb, wearing your British trenchcoat, with your retro briefcase strapped backwards across your doughy torso, a coffee thermos clipped to the D-ring. You get your friends to take photos of your brooding face,and you post the photos on your Facebook page, and you write sarcastic, relevant essays about the Oh-I-Just-Don’t-Have-Words-To-Express-It experiences you have with your boyfriend Jeezus on a daily basis. You don’t care that your uncle was sliced from nave to chops by a nigger with a razor. You just want to feel your way into the otherness of God as He parades past your special ass. You don’t care that your niece is scared to death to leave the house because the Pakistani scum from one street over have been telling her for weeks, in great detail, what they’re going to do to her. You’re too busy centering yourself to observe the inner light, and as soon as you get a chance, you’re going to tell the Hmong down the street how great JC is. But don’t bother you right now because you’re in His presence, aren’t you?

Or could you be…just could you be the racially-aware keyboard kommando? The careful Caucasian, watching and listening, but ultimately above it all because he’s got a profession and picturesque kids? The one who’ll make the big decisions after the economy tanks and the election is overturned and the riots start in Detroit? The one who’ll be the Big Leader when his intelligent (but not equally intelligent!) friends turn to him for advice and counsel when anarchy rules and zombies crawl the curbs and Congress dissolves and Starbucks folds and big cigars are no longer available? Maybe that’s you. You’ll just sit and watch,and when the smoke clears and the dust settles and the gulls stop squawking and the howler monkeys are back in their trees, you’ll finally do something. Or say something. Or make a decision. Or take a risk. It’ll all work out the way you predicted it will, because life is predictable, and you’re the star of your own movie called The Tale of Me.

No, really. Who are you?

If you know who you are, you have to answer the second question:

What are you going to do?

These are important questions. And your responses to them are equally important. If you don’t know the truth of this, why are you here? I don’t mean “Why are you reading this little blog?” I mean, “Why are you here in this life?” If you won’t face the important questions, you may as well make the trek to Notre Dame with your little pistol. Or tell your daughter that she has your blessing to marry Mfweme.

Who are you? What are you going to do?

It’s tighten-up time, friends.

~ Wheeler

Concrete Drawer

When the men came into the bar, Payton smelled them before he saw them. They were as silent as the smoke that reeked off their black clothes, and they took their seats along the rail, three on one side of Payton, three on the other. The one at Payton’s right elbow ordered beers all around in a voice that buzzed in all the empty glasses in their racks.

After the beers came, the six strangers drank in silence. Came from a funeral, I bet, thought Payton. He finished his beer and thought about leaving. He decided to send one more down his throat before turning toward home. A lifted finger and lifted eyebrows and another hundred calories of cool yeastmaltwater appeared. Payton took a short sip and studied the men in the mirror.

He looked at each man in turn, noting the similarity of features, the sameness of the sorrow etched on the faces. Yeah. Brothers. As he looked at the reflection of the last man on his left, Payton became aware of a visual oddity. He wasn’t sure if his perception was true, so he looked at each man in turn again and waited to see if the same thing happened. It did.

Each mourner was looking down into his beer or at the bar’s surface as Payton peered at him. But through peripheral vision and some very fast clacking glances, he realized that the remaining five men were looking back at Payton while he looked at each of them. He ran through the exercise again. Yep. Same thing. While his abrupt eye movements caught the vestiges of each of the other five’s look as they broke it off, he never caught a singled-out man looking at him when he swung his gaze to focus on one. An odd telepathy seemed to play between them, eyeball cat and mouse.

Payton took another sip of beer and studied the cover of the book lying on the bar. He could feel all twelve eyes on him at once now, and he flicked his stare at them in the mirror. None of them were looking at him. But the instant his eyes went back to his book, he felt – he knew – their collective attention. He stroked the condensation on the side of his glass absently, and he cleared his throat. But he said nothing.

“Mister, is that a furniture book you’re reading?”

The words caused Payton to look back at the mirror, and he saw that all six men were looking at the reflection of his book. He turned to the speaker, on his right.

“Yeah. It’s a furniture book.” Payton now looked at the man square on, and noticed that he seemed older than he’d thought originally. But the eyes were kind, shy.

“Reckon why you’re reading a furniture book?” The question came from behind him, from the man sitting on his other side. Payton turned back so that he could look at the man’s face and also watch the mirror. The man had the same eyes, but was a little younger than the other one.

“Well, I refinish furniture and I upholster it, too. Weld a little, do a little woodworking and stained glass work.”

The men made a collective noise, like dry leaves being blown out of a pile. The man on his right spoke again.

“That right? We just came from a funeral for a uncle of ours. He’uz a upholsterer, too.”

Payton nodded. “Hey, that’s great. I mean, it’s terrible about your loss. I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s great that I’m not the only one around here who fixes up old chairs and sofas.”

The men all chuckled and took sips of their beers in a way that looked choreographed. The movement bothered Payton.

The man on his right took up again. “We went to his wake, and then we went down to the burning barrel at the bottom of his back yard and we burned some cull wood and passed a bottle around. But it was too cold out there, even with the fire, so we came here.”

Payton smiled, trying to hold the man’s eyes. “Yeah, I thought I smelled smoke when y’all came in.” The man’s eyes changed, just the tiniest fraction. Hardened. Payton looked back at the mirror and saw that the other five were all smiling down into their beers. When he looked at the man on his right again, the eyes had softened. Something like camaraderie was there in the look.

“Reckon you wouldn’t be interested in none of the furniture the old man left, would you? Unfinished stuff, I mean. It’s mostly real old.”

Payton, ever aware of his lean bank account, considered. “Well, I might be, you know. What kind of furniture?”

“Chairs, mostly. I think there’s a hassock and a bench or something, too, but it’s mostly chairs.”

Payton took a large swallow of his beer. “And what do you think you’d want for the lot of it?”

Another collective murmur from the other men. Payton checked the mirror. Eyes down, all around.

The man shrugged. “Ain’t really mine to say, to tell the truth. My Aint Mackie’s his widow. She’d be the one to price you out for it.”

Payton’s rising enthusiasm for the idea began to cool. Yeah, and she’ll be a hard bargainer, and I’ll get taken, and this will be no deal at all. “Well, I wouldn’t want to bother her about it. Maybe she’ll want to keep it.”

The man shook his head. “No. She was saying at the funeral that she hoped someone would cart it all away. Guess it would remind her too much.”

“Well, I guess it could. My name’s Porter, by the way. Payton Porter.”

One of the other men dropped his beer glass and the noise made Payton jump. The bartended came over with a look. He got the man another beer and began cleaning up the mess. The man to Payton’s right tapped the bar, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Man, that’s something. Porter’s my uncle’s name. It’s his first name.” He picked up his glass. “Or was.”

“Oh.”

“So what do you think? You want to take a look at the stuff?”

“Sure. That sounds like an idea. Do you have a number where I could – “

The man held up his hand. “I’d just as soon we do this sooner rather than later. My aint is planning to spend a month with our other aint, and by the time she gets back, she may decide to burn the whole lot of it.”

The other five murmured, their eyes still on their beers or their hands.

The man’s hand came down and extended across to Payton. “My name’s Tom Soames, Mr. Porter. I’m glad to know you, and I sure wish you’d come take a look at this stuff.”

Payton looked into Soames’ eyes for a beat, considering. “Do you think your aunt would take a check?”

“With a photo ID, I imagine she would.”  The other five mourners chuffed out a short laugh in unison, startling Payton and the bartender. The bartender was eavesdropping.

Payton drained his beer and shrugged. “Well. What the hey. Guess it couldn’t hurt to take a look.”

“Now you’re talking.” Mr. Soames reached for his wallet, a very long black affair. “Let me get that.”

Payton started to protest, but Mr. Soames patted his shoulder and smiled. Payton could smell the smoke on him. He said, “That’s very kind of you.”

“Think nothing of it. Enjoy meeting new people. And if you get rid of that furniture for our aint, I’ll consider you a friend.”

Out on the street, Payton tucked his book into his coat pocket and pulled on a pair of gloves. “Where are you parked? I’ll follow you.”

In twenty minutes, outside of town, the Soames brothers’ car turned up a rutted red clay road. Payton was nervous about his battered Ford being able to pull such a steep hill on wet dirt. Within minutes, the road ended at a gate. The Soames brothers got out of their car, and Payton got out of his.

“What’s wrong?”

Mr. Soames shook his head. “Nothing wrong. Uncle Porter never cut a road up to the house. Never owned a car, so he never figured he needed one. Walked everywhere he went, unless one of his kids or one of us gave him a ride. It’s not far.” He opened the gate and motioned Payton inside. Payton looked back at his car, started to return to it and lock up, then shrugged and went on in.

As they climbed together, the other Soames boys introduced themselves to Payton with single syllables. Bill. Hank. Trey. Floyd. Sam. Gish. Tom chatted a bit, pointing out trees and animal sign and landmarks on the steep grade. By the time they came into the clearing that served as the house’s front yard, Payton was winded and had removed his gloves. Sweaty hands.

The house was obviously pre-World War II, and probably built by the old uncle. It looked to be a collection of add-ons. Ugly thing, thought Payton. The yard was grown over, briars and nandina hedges muddled into a pitiful pasture.

The smell of woodsmoke was stronger inside the house than it had been on the brothers’ clothing. Didn’t he say they’d been outside at a burning barrel? Smells like a burning barrel in here, sure enough. Payton stood in the front room while the Soames brothers split up and went upstairs, down-cellar, and into adjacent rooms. In a minute, Tom Soames returned, waving Payton toward him with his large hand.

Payton stepped through into the next room and was startled to see three women. Each had her hair up in a gray bun, and each wore a plain house dress and an apron. One woman tended a sputtering fire in the corner, one sat at a low table, and one stood next to what appeared to be an oven mounted in the plaster wall. All three had red eyes, and all three were looking at Payton in a frank way. Country people, he thought.

“Aint Mackie, this is Mr. Porter. Payton Porter.”

All three women drew a breath as Tom spoke. The one standing by the wall took a step forward and inclined her head. “Porter, is it?” She began to weep, and she was utterly silent about it.

Payton was unsure of what to say, and unsure of who was who, but he wanted to say something. “I’m very sorry about your loss, ma’am.”

He’d guessed correctly. The woman smiled through her grief. “Thank you, Mr. Porter. You’re kind.”

Tom spoke up again. “We was telling Payton, Mr. Porter, about Uncle Porter’s upholsteryin’, and we mentioned his unfinished furniture.”

We? thought Payton, suppressing a smile.

The old woman dried her eyes with her apron. “I expect we should talk about that before we decide anything.”

Payton nodded, and he heard murmurs of assent nearby. He turned and saw that the other five brothers had entered the room behind him. Aunt Mackie spoke up again.

“Well, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things.”

She stepped to the oven in the wall and tugged at the handle. As it opened, Payton realized that it was not an oven.
A large tray slid out. The motion was heavy but smooth. Payton looked closely through his surprise, and saw that the tray was made of concrete. Old-timey concrete, like sidewalks used to be made of. With tiny pebbles and glasslike beads imbedded in the surface. The tray was easily seven feet long and almost four feet wide, and had a generous, contoured lip. How in the world could that thing fit in there? Why doesn’t it break off, the way it hangs there? How much does it weigh?

Sitting on the tray was a coffin. Just like in the old Hammer horror movies with Christopher Lee, Payton thought. The coffin was a six-sided, vaguely diamond-shaped, vaguely sinister box. It was covered in what appeared to be blue leather. With large buttons symmetrically placed on its surfaces. The kind of buttons you put on a recliner or a sofa.

Payton noticed that when the drawer slid all the way out, the coffin jumped slightly. When it did, he saw that the lid fitted down into the coffin, like an ice bucket’s lid fits into the bucket. No hinges. No locks. No snaps.
Tom stepped forward and lifted the lid from the coffin. It appeared to weigh no more than a kite. And Payton felt two pairs of hands take hold of him from behind. When he started to turn his head, another hand dug into the back of his neck and aimed his gaze back at the coffin. Payton’s heart felt like an earthquake of ice in his center.

Lying in the coffin was an old black man. Payton could see pink spots on his cheeks and on his hands. What’s that called? Vitiglio? Something like that? He looked closer. The pink spots appeared in random spatter patterns, like acid thrown onto a darker surface. Is that a black man? Or -

Hard hands pushed him toward the casket. Fighting now, Payton was so frightened, he didn’t think he could live anymore. But he continued living, and the hands continued pushing. He was right up next to the coffin now, and Aunt Mackie was whispering something to the figure in it.

The old woman who had been sitting at the table appeared at Payton’s elbow, and she took his right hand in her hands. He tried to pull it away, but a terrible strength met his efforts. She drew his hand down, down, until it almost touched the dead man’s hand. The woman moved his hand, guiding him, and made him stroke the mottled skin of the hand beneath his. Revulsion boiled up in him. The hand beneath his felt like Vienna sausages. Taut. Slick. And warm.

Payton squeezed his eyes shut, praying to a God he had ignored for years. And then he heard a faint sound. He opened his eyes and looked down at the dead man. He noticed something else. The man’s head was abnormally small. Not quite shrunken head small, but very small. And misshapen. Payton looked closer. The skin around the man’s jawline was folded and creased in fairly regular spacings, and seemed to be tucked (Stapled? Tacked?) under the man’s jaw. Just like naugahyde in a cheap chair seat. The folds and the size gave the impression of a bobble-headed doll from a souvenir stand.

The man in the coffin opened his eyes and turned his head to look at Payton.

Low, phlegmy words came from the man’s mouth. Old Porter’s dead mouth. Payton couldn’t make out the words, and he shook his head in refusal and in horror. The hands on his body began bending him at the waist, bending him over old Porter. The mouth opened again, and this time Porter heard something that sounded like “Cover me.”

Payton dropped all his weight, trying to snake out of the grips of the Soames brothers. But they held, relentless and silent. And pushed him closer to old Porter.

The man lifted a hand in slow motion toward Payton’s face. Payton watched it come, screamed and screamed and screamed. But the hand never touched his face. He opened his eyes in time to see the speckled hand touch his own hand, which was still being held by the old woman. Old Porter’s index finger stroked Payton’s finger with appreciation, with tactile intelligence. The eyes gleamed in the small head, and the lips slid over ancient dentures in the last smile any man would want to see in this world.

“Cover me.”

Payton felt himself yanked backward, forced down,  a foot kicking at the crook of his knees. One of the brothers was bending across him, pushing him lower. Part of Payton’s mind went away and he heard himself ask, “What do you do for a living?”

The smoke-stinking man barked a laugh and grinned. “You don’t need to be askin’ me anything like that, Mr. Payton Porter.” Then he shoved Payton all the way to the floor. Payton felt something hard in his ribs. He lifted his head and looked. The old woman who had been tending the fire was standing above him, pressing a shotgun into his side.
Payton heard the gurgling voice from the coffin one more time.

“Cover me.” And then something that sounded like “Furniture man.”

Payton thought he heard a dove outside the window just before the buckshot dug into him and took him into another place.

~ copyright 2007 by Wheeler MacPherson

Stomping Towards Whitsunday

Last Sunday, Mrs. MacP and I took an afternoon drive through the mountains and fields in our region. We passed the local strawberry farmer’s fields, acres of bountiful green-and-red shaggy treasure troves. Following the curves and dips, we noticed how many people had snowball bushes (I think they’re officially called viburnums?) in their front yards, and we decided to obtain and plant a couple of these beauties. Had we seen any little grandma types out in their yards, we would have stopped to chat and ask if we could take a cutting. But the only folks we saw out in front yards were the younger people coming to visit the little grandma types.

In a heavily-wooded holler, we passed a single-wide trailer, neat and well-kept, with flowers on the deck and a stone donkey in the yard. There were several cars and trucks in the front and people of all ages were streaming towards the little trailer, obviously intent on sharing Mother’s Day with the little lady of the metal manor. One of the visitors was a huge slab of tattooed beef in a too-tight t-shirt, Duck Dynasty beard on his face and a rebel flag bandana on his head. It occurred to me that most passers-by would make fun of the trailer and of men like this fellow. It also occurred to me that these rural folk were paying their mother more honor than any twit standing in line at Hallmark to buy an overpriced piece of folded paper with glitter and little bows and some dumb-ass “poem” with a bible verse appended. God bless my people.

We stopped for dinner (lunch to you 21st century Yankees) at an immaculate little diner and ate and laughed and people-watched for a while. Mrs. MacP declared it to be one of her favorite Mother’s Days. She’s always been generous in that fashion.

***

Some things never change. I’ve been reading a very interesting journal that Mrs. MacP bought for me at an antique shop. It’s called Mexico As I Saw It, by Mrs. Alec Tweedie, published in 1911. On her way to her lengthy travels in old Mexico, Mrs. Tweedie stopped in Galveston, Texas, just days after the horrific hurricane that devastated that grand old port city in 1900. The storm claimed more than 8000 souls and did unspeakable damage, both to the city’s structure and to the morale of the citizens who lived there.

Mrs. Tweedie’s writing is taut and descriptive, particularly her narrative about the miseries suffered by the survivors of the hurricane. Her words also reminded me of certain storms in recent years and their attendant horrors:

“As each corpse was found, all clothes and valuables were gathered together, put in a little bundle, numbered,and officially kept with a label bearing the date and an account of its disposal attached. This was a splendid scheme for identification; but it led to many sad results. People who had searched for days and weeks among the debris for their beloved ones went to the ofice to examine these little bundles, and many a heart-breaking scene ensured as some lone survivor found the records of a dear one’s death in that pathetic little collection. Thousands of articles have never been identified — indeed, only about half of those eight thousand dead was it possible to trace by name at all. Whole familes were swept away, and no one survived able to tell who they had been. After the storm subsided on Sunday afternoon, every able-bodied man was pressed into the service of burying the dead and clearing the town. Their shrift would have been short had they refused. Some of the niggers, who rifled the dead, were shot in the act, and that put a stop to theft…”

***

For those of you with an investigative bent, you might want to check something out. I sometimes keep NPR on in the background when I’m working on some mindless project. The popular show “All Things Considered” has theme music that has always bothered me, for reasons I have not been able to suss out. Until recently.

The year after the movie “Jaws” came out, my beloved mother bought me the vinyl soundtrack album for Christmas, knowing how much I loved orchestral music. The cost to her was dear that year; it was the only Christmas gift she was able to afford. Those poverty-choked years are a source of grim pride for me, but I’m already way off topic. I listened to the “Jaws” soundtrack over and over, embedding its music in my bones, bones that had never been near the ocean or sharks or naked swimming girlies. Over the years, I lost or discarded that old album, and the music, fading in memory, sank down as deep as a reef in me.

Last week, I was listening to NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and the theme music came on, and I stopped what I was doing, motionless as Mrs. Lot. The theme was note-for-note identical to the leitmotif in a tune on the “Jaws” soundtrack. John Williams wrote a chart called “Promenade (Tourists on the Menu)” for one of the scenes in the film. Listen to it, and then (if you can find it anywhere) listen to Don Voegeli’s “All Things Considered” theme and tell me someone didn’t plagiarize Mr. Williams’ work. Consider the gauntlet dropped.

***
I’ve ranted in the past about the so-called “vocal fry,” that verbal hellishness afflicting mostly young women, a hellishness in which a speaker lets her voice drop down into a guttural trail-off. I hate it. It drives me batshit crazy. Almost every female I know under the age of 40 does it. I want to maim all of the vocal fryers I know. I also want to present a large cash prize to the young lady who did this video.

But there’s an equally maddening vocal affectation out there. I can’t find any mention of it anywhere, so I’ve taken the liberty of giving it a name I created. Maybe there’s some money to be made in naming vocal phenomena. Anyway, the affectation of which I speak is what I call “the infantile hiccup.”

The infantile hiccup occurs when someone (again, usually a young female) drops the t or the d from the middle of a work. For example: Rah-in (rotten) or “kih-in” (kitten) “sweh-in” (sweating) “dih-ent” (didn’t). Mrs. MacP knows a woman in her forties who employs the infantile hiccup. Mrs. MacP has asked me, in her coy, blue-eyed way, if I know anyone who might be willing to beat this woman into jelly below the ribcage with a bed post.

Listen for it. Listen for it and hate with a white-hot hatred. Listen and decide how you can act. Now. Someone has to stop what they’re doing to our mother tongue.

***

This shallow, vapid age has produced other things that grate upon my soul’s nerves. I encountered one such thing the other day, not for the first time.

A coworker told me of spending the past weekend on the couch and in the bathroom, suffering from a violent double-ended stomach virus. When the coworker finished the tale, I shrugged and said, “I’m sorry.”

My coworker’s response? “It’s not your fault.” Delivered in a puzzled, confused tone.

So then I had to instruct this wayward soul – as I have had to instruct so many others – that in English, when one commiserates by saying, “I’m sorry,” one is not effing apologizing. One is merely expressing sorrow or regret for the other person’s circumstances.

Surely I’m not alone in grieving for the shallowness and self-centeredness intruding on every aspect of life today.

***

I sat down tonight to write something with some depth and some meaning. I’ve failed, but I’ve enjoyed writing a few words to y’all, my dear readers. Rest well, and I’ll try it again over the weekend.

~ Wheeler