Storyteller Art |
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A series of short stories about growing up in the Mississippi Delta
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Paw Paw's GoatsIf God started talking to someone from the Mississippi Delta, wouldn't they be black? The thought keeps me leaning toward some sort of sanity, but I'm not entirely sure. My grandfather's goat pen was all that separated our house from the Greenville sewage works. The city built the sewage works on land they condemned by imminent domain over the wishes of my grandfather, the owner. The city had promised that it wouldn't stink, but it always did. The goat pen was in a low narrow pasture that started at the welding shop behind his house and ran behind our house to where the bayou started. The pasture was actually an arm of the old bayou back when the water table was higher. And when it rained heavily. Mostly it was dry. In fact it got drier every year as I was growing up. Bone dry. My grandfather let the old goats keep
breeding, and they ate up every scrap of green, everything but the old wrecked
cars and engine blocks, the rusted-out tractors and that kind of stuff.
The entire goat pen was dead, brown and rusted. On the days when my grandfather burned shop trash in the rusted 55-gallon drums, it really looked like hell on earth. Smelled like it too. There were plastics of all description from all the junk in the shop, so the smoke was black and burned the eyes with all its toxins. Something else suddenly occurs to me about the sewage works, something ironic, something I never even considered while I was growing up: We all had septic tanks out there. Or open
cesspools. My grandfather's house, his brother's, the houses and
trailers of all their grown-up kids too, including the house we lived
in. All of my relative's homes had septic tanks or open cesspools
and were not connected to the city sewage works.
At school, I was constantly picked on
for how I smelled just because they could all see the sewage
plant from the highway. I began to bath compulsively. I hated
that flimsy little fence more than the concrete ponds of excrement behind
it. My father was a welder for a pipeline
company. He drank about five or six or so beers in the
afternoon after work. He drank through dinner, and then he went to
bed right after whether it was still daylight or not. He always went
to bed by seven at the latest and was up at the crack of dawn for
work. He had grown up farming on rented lands in rented houses with
all my great uncles (my grandfather's 13 brothers), most of whom had grown
up tenant farming the Delta and the bottom lands of Yalobusha county
before most of Mississippi had electricity. Eventually she would nag and yell, and then suddenly he would yell back, and then they would yell at each other until he had slammed out the back door and walked out to lean on his truck and stare at the highway. The drinking became worse after my father had the spell with Hepatitis. He didn't drink more, or that much more, as best I can recall. It just made him more glazed over, more... See, that's what scares me. I just sit down and start listing basic things about growing up, and it sounds like a story you would write if you were trying to capture the essence of the Delta. It didn't seem to have that kind of significance at the time. It just seemed gross, just a whole load of shit I had to put up with. But now it all seems to be filled with archetypes and even calculated stereotypes, as if the biographer were just trying to fabricate something from a checklist. I imagine seeing God and learning He is a black man. "God," I say, "Did you really do all that stuff or was I just crazy?" "Yep" He says. "But I'm not black," I say. "Nobody's perfect," He says. |
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