Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, August 2002
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Your average obituary was a disgrace in its sterility," says Finus Bates.

When he writes obits for his small weekly in the Mississippi town of Mercury, he always tries to capture "something notable, or even simply funny or unusual, about that person's life."

Finus, a spry, 89-year-old newspaperman and morning radio show host, is the heart and soul of Brad Watson's The Heaven of Mercury (W.W. Norton, $23.95). He has the leanings of an Irish poet who has figured out what life is all about, but only after many false steps.

As Finus comes to realize, everyone in Mercury is connected by a fine web, including the "half-wild" people who live in the ravine on the edge of town, among them a wizened herbalist whose work is deeply intertwined with the white community.

Just as an insect that lands in the outermost edge of a web sends a tremor that reaches every silky thread, so do the most private moments between the people in this community ripple outwards and shake each other.

It was such a moment in 1917 that forever changed the course of Finus' life. He was hiding in a buttonbush near the Chunky River when he saw young Birdie Wells turn a naked cartwheel.

Upon landing she gave a little yelp of surprise, and then laughed out loud, spreading her arms for imaginary applause. Birdie's face seemed so free of all self-consciousness and open, in a way he'd never seen before, to all the possibilities of her beauty. And never before that moment had he really understood beauty.

For the rest of his life, Finus will love Birdie Wells.

As fate would have it, they marry badly. Finus describes his union with the grim-faced Avis Crossweatherly (who accompanied Birdie on that fateful day and quietly glimpsed Finus in the bushes) as "a long journey through a tangled wood, all as if in a semi-conscious dream, a pretension of life."

Birdie marries Earl Urquhart, an enterprising shoe salesman with incredibly stinky feet -- a man who lacks Finus' imagination and self-doubts. Over the course of many years and infidelities, Earl gives Birdie a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, but little companionship. When Earl's father, who preys sexually on the young and helpless, rapes a young house servant, Birdie's life becomes even more tragic after the girl seeks deadly revenge.

As Finus and Birdie grow older, they lose family members and gradually become shadows of their young, vibrant selves. Life slips away, the remaining days filled with luminous dreams of youth, until the final visit with Parnell Grimes, the town's undertaker.

To Parnell, death is simply a gentle passage to the other side with himself as the provider of balm (hence the word "embalming"). But as a boy growing up in the family funeral home, he has a rather profane encounter with death that will leave a strong permanent mark on him. After he steals an intimate moment with the lifeless body of a young classmate, "the dead girl" rises and walks out the front door of mortuary.

In the mist of the bare light before dawn she became naught but a diminishing figure wrapped in a white sheet, her dark hair and bare white feet exposed, a slip of leg when she took her steps, wavering, like a child drunk or a poor corpse wandering toward its gloom as a ghost, until she disappeared in the faint light, a wisp becoming one with the misty fog, and he closed the door quietly, leaned against it trying to catch his breath, and then stole up the stairs and crawled back into his bed and lay there for what seemed like hours until he heard his parents stirring.

As his life draws to a close, Finus understands the power of death to bring Birdie and himself back together. Not the kind of death that leads to the pearly gates, but the new world of spirit and energy which slips back into "the vast, articulate space between beautiful worlds."

Brad Watson's 1996 collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, received praise for its crisp prose and bizarre touches. In this first novel, he creates a vivid mythology of a small southern town that moves to a strange, electrifying beat. Think of it as an Irish blues, the literary equivalent of Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," as something that goes beyond the literal - and way beyond the pale of most southern fiction.

***

A.G. Harmon's A House All Stilled (University of Tennessee Press, $29.95) describes the coming-of-age struggles of a lonely adolescent boy who is growing up in the cracks of a bitter divorce in rural Mississippi.

Against the better judgment of his schoolteacher mom, 10-year-old Henry lives with his porn-addled father and alcoholic grandfather. Even though he loves to read and has the potential to be a good student, Henry finds himself drawn deeper into the gnarly world of his father and grandfather, a world of ugliness and confusion that threatens to overtake him.

Harmon describes an dark place in the human psyche, but he does so with a compelling lyricism, especially concerning the mystery of the grandfather's love for sacred harp music.

Nothing irked Cox more than to hear Tollet drooling off some old song, using shape notes instead of words, the way country churches used to. But though Tollet cowed about and caved in to Cox on everything else, he insisted on singing his way. It was the only thing he would fight about anymore. His bottom lip pushed out slightly.

"You don't use words when you sing sacred harp - 'least not for the first line. Everybody knows that. Everybody does."

Harmon is the winner of the 2002 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, sponsored by the Knoxville Writers' Guild and the University of Tennessee Press.

***

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe (MacAdam/Cage, $25.00) presents an anthology of 30 short stories from a who's who of mostly contemporary Southern writers.

Some of the authors who chipped in stories (Tom Franklin, Frank Turner Hollon and Suzanne Hudson) were attending an annual literary conference in Fairhope, Ala., when they embraced this publishing project. Later, they were joined by writers such as Alabama native Brad Watson (whose story about the dead girl is included here), George Singleton, Silas House and Pat Conroy.

Hudson contributes one of the collection's more rollicking stories in "The Fall of the Nixon Administration." It's about a long-suffering daughter who watches her eccentric mother fall madly in lust for a "a descendent of the mouth breathers who live out the Pipeline Road."

First of all, he moved in with her after just two movie dates and one dinner date to Rosie O'Grady's in Pensacola. Swept her right off her chubby little size five feet (mine are size nine; she refers to them as "Jesus-Christ-walk-on-water skis.") I believe the off-color line he wooed her with was, "Baby, you sure do make my rat crawl."

The stories, edited by Sonny Brewer of the Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope, provide a good sampler of what's cooking in the South.

Also check out this new novel by a regional writer:

Sleep No More by Greg Iles. The latest mystery-thriller by the author of Dead Sleep. This one is set in steamy Natchez, Miss., and involves a kinky love triangle between a married man, a sexy real estate agent and his former obsessive girlfriend, who isn't about to let her own murder stop her from spirit from entering other selves only to pursue the man of her dreams. Talk about your fatal attractions...

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An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, August 25, 2002.