He stepped off the porch and with a lazy spit in the clematis headed off towards the car.  On arriving, he had been half-tempted to leave it idling in the drive so she would understand just how brief he intended this visit to be.  The cylinders on that thing knocked something awful and he’d have to see to them sooner or later, but the damn thing was about to fall off its wheels as it was and he couldn’t afford to put any more money into it, especially with poultry prices sinking further each month.  He laid vengeance aside and turned the ignition off and let the old engine get as cold as you please.  Besides, these visits were never as brief as one intended.

His mother was a hard old woman and her small home smelled perpetually like stale coffee and the musty, medicated reek of the ungraciously old.  He blamed the smell principally on the lack of ventilation.  She kept the place shut tight, window and door, all through the summer because she got chills, even in the Early County heat.  She did nothing easily, and dying was no exception.  The old girl had been hanging on for more than a year now, well past when the doctors had said that she would ease on out of this world, but that was just like her.  Utterly without consideration.

At least once a day, Everhardt Painter, the only child of Bernadine and Joseph T., 22 years married, inveterate smoker, henpecked, bad feet, plaid shirt, and co-owner of a struggling poultry supply company paid his daily obeisance to his aged mother.  He preferred “aged” to “aging” for no other reason than that he hoped she was about done with it.

The Biscayne (black) started with a cough and backed out of the drive, its tires crunching on the chert road.  A recent lack of rain had rendered the road a dusty mess, and the small white house disappeared from view in less than 50 yards.  It was hot, the windows were down, and the smoke from his cigarette hung mingled in the fine brown dust as he sped back toward home.

He was in no hurry to get there and took the longest route possible, following a meandering road, little more than ruts, around some anonymous farm pond (he never had been sure which farm it went with) and an impossibly small block house belonging to a black family, several of whose children ran across the patchy brown yard in various states of undress.

When he arrived home, he climbed the creaking back steps and sat in the swing a bit.  He steadied himself with another cigarette.  He didn’t really want it and its burn was hateful to his parched throat, but he wanted less to go inside and confront the weight of his wife’s working day, which she had no doubt kept warm for him from the moment she got home and began work on whatever God forsaken casserole she was making tonight.

“Evert! Do you want bread or not?”

He said nothing and took a last long drag off his cigarette. He often wondered just when it was that his name had been shortened from the polysyllabic to an expedient slur.  Over the course of decades it had no doubt decayed without notice, and he was left with the ungracious diminutive.

“Reckon so.”

He rose and deposited his Red Wings just outside the arc of the screen door.  The kitchen smelled like cooking beef and he greeted his wife with a cold kiss on the cheek.  Without looking up from the skillet, she asked, “How’s your mama?”

“Hateful as ever.”

She no longer chided him for saying things like that and merely began spooning something that he assumed was canned tomato sauce over some chopped up peppers and onions in a broad white dish.  Cathy was a firm believer in the veneration of ancestors, no matter how shitty they had been on their way to old age.  To her, old folks were a treasure to be handled gingerly and their every request should be taken seriously, no matter how bizarre.  She regularly visited the nursing home with her church group and returned swelled with pride at having accommodated some old coot’s whims for another fruit cup or God knows what else.

Dinner was a plodding affair.  As usual, it featured the interrogation of their eldest son about the finer workings of his school day, to little avail.  He was at the particular age where he believed that the nuances of his social circles were too impossibly complex to explain to his parents.  He was also lamentably dim.  Everhardt had been forced to concede this fact when he had missed repeating the eighth grade by a very narrow margin.  He had swallowed the shame of the idea immediately and wondered openly if it wouldn’t do the boy some good, but Cathy wouldn’t hear of it and took several long meetings with teachers and counselors, ultimately emerging with the understanding that he would move on to high school by the grace of a few favors and a promise from the boy to do better.  Everhardt blamed Cathy’s side of the family, a genetic conflagration of the incurious and mentally torpid, and he had once said as much during a moment of stress regarding the boy’s flagging grades.   He was sure she had yet to forgive him.

For all her failings, Cathy had the decency not to inquire about how the business was doing.  She knew it was standing on one leg, and that that leg was her husband’s.  Walker Bird, her husband’s partner, seemed to regard Early Broiler Supply less as a business and more as a refuge from his wife and daughter.  Bird was currently paying for the privilege, as the business was losing money despite the fact that they were the largest poultry farm supplier in the county.  Bird never figured into their dinner conversation because he never did or said anything noteworthy.   He merely sat in his small and ill-kept office, drinking coffee until noon and big sweating glasses of iced tea until four, at which time he switched to heavily iced whisky.  He did no work, at least none visible to the naked eye, and somehow managed to make the slim local paper last all day.

After a dinner whose high point was Cathy’s animated retelling of a potentially catastrophic bookkeeping error at the auto dealership where she worked (as the bookkeeper), Everhardt retired to a small room he had built on to the garage.  It contained little more than a desk chair that hadn’t swiveled for a decade or better, an old and drably institutional metal desk, and a small brown motel fridge full of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  And a jar of peanuts.

It was here that he pursued his only hobby.  An amateur genealogist, he stayed up late pursuing the narrative of his own parentage with few resources save an abiding interest in his own past and the will to pester his relatives out of half-remembered anecdotes.  He had meticulously catalogued photocopies of the inside front covers of family bibles, birth records, hand written accounts of phone conversations on yellow legal paper, and old photos.  In his poorly equipped study, he had built a narrative for himself and was drawing close to a roughly finished version of his genealogy dating to 1840.

He was mostly proud of the distance between himself and his pioneering forbears.  That his family didn’t come from potato famine stock or the detritus of the Georgia penal colony (God forbid) was an immeasurable comfort.  Everhardt had little interest in the curiosities among his ancestry, the mad old former sheriff, the uncle who was the first dry cleaner in Alabama, and the pioneering Scotsman who had foolishly laid a plantation in the rocky foothills north of Fort Payne and then became a born again Pentecostal and gave all his land to his slaves and lived out his days as an itinerant preacher.  The slaves knew better than to farm in that poor soil and sold their tracts for what little they could get for them, lighting out in every direction with their few possessions in tow.

Madness didn’t interest him, or Confederate valor, or maiden aunts starting schools for the deaf.  It was aristocracy he was after, and the holy roller Scotsman was as close as he had come so far.  He had climbed around his family tree for better than 6 years and had laid hold of more than a few rotten branches.   He had also stumbled across a pair of sisters who seemed to have had a small fortune, its origin a mystery.  One, Evyline, wrote terrible poetry, almost all hideously sanguine stuff about the Crucifixion.  According to his uncle, she married a “vegetable eating queer” out of St Louis and died young of the croup, back when people still died of that.  The other, Anne, married late to a Methodist minister.  Both built fine homes across the road from one another, and neither had children.

It was the mystery of their fortune, small though it may have been, that consumed him so.  He did not suspect there would be any left for him or anyone else, of course, but where had it come from?   They were the only daughters of a fat old postmaster who had retired just after the War.  He had done little for the Confederacy and could, according to his contemporaries, barely be relied upon even to get the mail from one point to the next.  Still, he had married the youngest sister of Everhardt’s great granddaddy and seemed to be the scion of whatever bequest that had allowed his daughters the luxury of building fine homes and marrying foolishly.

It had been some time since Ann’s house had been torn down to make room for the state highway, but Evyline’s house remained.  More than once, and often after too many beers, Everhardt had crept through it, flashlight in hand, looking for something cartoonishly obvious like a loose floorboard, but found nothing.  The house had sat empty since 1952, nearly 15 years, since Evyline’s husband’s nephew, down from St. Louis, had used the place as a sort of winter home.  He was a wealthy enough man, something to do with sheet metal, and stayed there infrequently, less than 3 months out of the year.  They had met a few times, him and Everhardt, and he was a nice man if somewhat clueless about the nature of his inheritance.  He had died at the disappointing age of 66 and since then the house had had no occupants.  Everhardt had been curious about it for so long that once when he was in Fairfield to get a new tag for his car, he had inquired with the Probate office about the owner of the house and land.  He was surprised to find out that it had belonged to Bernadine Bell since 1922, a year before she married J. T. Painter and three years before she gave birth to Everhardt.

It had been damn near 5 years since he had been waiting for her to die, and he hated to think that his story would be the sort wherein a son sells his mother’s things and decamps for greener pastures. Nevertheless, she had kept herself shut up in that musty little house and him with it for ages.  Why had she lived there in that leaky little place when she could have enjoyed the high ceilings of Evyline’s house?  He had always assumed that the nephew had inherited it, but realized now that he was only renting it from his mother, if she had even asked for rent.  It would have been easy enough to move the whole family there more than a decade ago when that nephew died and he and Cathy were struggling to build a small farm house for their growing family, but Bernadine had said nothing.   Since then, the house had fallen farther into disrepair.   When he drove by last, the side porch was sagging between its columns and the backyard was littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, the telltale signs of high school revelry.

By the time he had reread the probate records over and over, as though one more glance would illuminate something in the austerely functional document that he had missed the first fifty times, it had gotten late and Everhardt was drunker than he meant to get.  He crawled in beside Cathy, somehow under covers despite the heat and humidity, and drifted uneasily to sleep, naked save a pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts that clung to his sweaty thighs.  Tomorrow’s poultry prices would be even lower and his business would be that much closer to ruin.

* * *

In the dark, silent morning he walked, yawning, off the porch in his old jeans and stained t-shirt, carrying a flashlight and brown paper grocery bag.  It was still before sunrise, but the air was Alabama warm and promised to be humid.  He stepped slowly through the first broiler house, long and mostly still, collecting the dead from the matte of chicken feed and dirt.  The other hens milled around, unaware or uncaring that their fellows had died during the night.  Some even perched on the dead carcasses, an act with which Everhardt had never quite come to terms.  They died for a myriad of reasons; age or sickness mainly, but there were a few robust specimens whose death was a mystery.  They had lived their entire lives in the broiler house, and when they died they became no more than a part of the ground underfoot.

This morning he collected nine in his grocery bag and carried it out to the rough edge of his field road.  He laid the bag gingerly on the ground, for even dead hens deserve a little respect, and set the bag alight with his cigarette lighter.  He watched as it caught and then piled some dry straw on top so it wouldn’t burn itself out.  He turned and made his way quickly toward the house before his nostrils caught the smell of burning feathers.

The screen door needed oiling fiercely and creaked as he entered.  Cathy and his son were still asleep as he slipped off his jeans in the draftless dark.  He started coffee in the percolator and woke his son roughly with orders to shower and to comb his hair.

The boy’s suit hung on his door, freshly pressed and hardly worn.  Everhardt’s suit wasn’t much different.  He only had the one, an all-purpose gabardine affair in a deep charcoal that served for funerals, weddings, and whatever else might arise.  He had always been a little sad that he was a one-suit kind of man.  His forbears had worn them exclusively and rough though they may have been conveyed a kind of quiet dignity which his jeans and plaid shirts (cigarettes in the front pocket and wilting in the humidity) could never hope to attain.

He stood in front of the long dresser, its mirror tilted slightly downward to accommodate Cathy’s stature, and tied his tie in quick, deliberate movements.  As he was beginning the second attempt at a half-Windsor, Cathy raised herself onto her elbows and looked sleepily at Everhardt’s reflection.

“I put the flowers in the refrigerator.”

She gave the sharp inhale that she always gave when she was about to swing her considerable hips toward the bed’s edge and plant her feet on the floor.  Everhardt had seen the ritual a thousand times and allowed it to play out behind him as he affixed a silver tie bar to the placket of his shirt.  Into it he wedged a black tie with tiny white polka dots.  In his son’s room the boy was tying his shoes.  Everhardt roughly adjusted the knot of his son’s tie and pulled his collar down in the back and walked out as the boy gave himself a last look in the early sunlight.

In the car it was silent, owing less to any reverence for Decoration Day than to the boy’s sleepiness.  He had never complained about the early hours inherent to farm life, but he had never been the sunniest personage before about nine a.m.  The boy also had never developed a taste for coffee, an anomaly that secretly worried Everhardt, but he operated well enough in the pre-dawn hours to avoid his father’s ire.

The sun, no bigger than a half-dollar, hovered over the lid of his trunk as he drove west.  The church was the sort of rustic, whitewashed frame affair that adorns postcards sent by traveling Yankees home to their families as evidence of contact with genuine Southern rurality.  To the initiated, it was hot, stifling, and roughly furnished as it had been since before the War, a small white outpost of religion in the wet and whisky-running pine forest.  Fortunately, there was no need to go inside just yet.  He and the boy lifted the flowers from the broad back seat.  He was never more conscious of his heavy and ungraciously calloused hands than when he gingerly carried Cathy’s flowers to the cemetery.  He so rarely needed to be careful during his working life, but the flowers and the occasion, coupled with the sense of holy propriety that came with donning the suit, left him highly conscious of his own oafish incongruity.

Along the red dirt road were parked a number of vehicles, most of them black and rusting but freshly washed, in a reverent row leading to the cemetery.  Younger men parked down the road in the deference to the old and infirm, for which they reserved the spots closest to the cemetery.

Decoration Day was Everhardt’s only holy day.  He had never been a religious man beyond the necessary gestures of Southern life, but Decoration was altogether different.  It was tangible, observable; to butt up against one’s ancestors, to read his own name among the stones was a powerful thing.  He greeted the attendees warmly, a trembling handshake from old but alert Mr. Porter, and a ginger hug for Miss Upton, half-blind but immaculately dressed as always.   His son dutifully answered summons to “come here and hug my neck” from the old ladies who found him handsome and affable. He grinned sheepishly as the men queried him about the coming football season in which he would be a centerpiece.  The boy listened respectfully as Everhardt walked among the graves and gave brief explanations of each name and family.  Luster.  Lybrand.  Evans.  Rogers. Goggins.  McClendon.  Osborne.  Cash.  Each one warranted a small line, some mundanity about who had been the first in the county to plant peanuts or who had fallen drunk off the old railroad bridge and died young.  At certain moments, his son managed to seem genuinely interested, a highly respectable effort for a teenager to muster.

People lingered and caught up, exchanging news of friends and far-flung relations.  The men lamented chicken and hog prices, and the women worried over an infant not likely to live out the year.  They dispersed slowly, graves decorated, into farm trucks that growled slowly to life.  Everhardt and his son sat in the Biscayne and waited for their turn to emerge onto the highway back toward home.  It was past eight now, and Cathy was cooking breakfast in her dressing gown when they arrived.

Everhardt ate quickly, changed into his workaday plaid and denim, and lit a cigarette on his way to the car.   The shorter route to his mother’s house was still a ponderous one, weaving between valleys and avoiding the rougher but shorter red clay road that had washed out months ago.  The county had made no overtures to fix it besides nailing yellow detour signs to trees along the approach and erecting a flimsy barrier from railroad ties and scrap lumber.

She listened to a breathless and excitable Baptist preacher every Sunday, and because she was increasingly deaf, did so at a torturous volume.   Everhardt could hear sinners being excoriated with verses from the Old Testament before he had even shut off and exited his car.   Just as he did every Sunday, he entered shouting “Mama!  Are you in here?” knowing fully well that she was and always would be, positioned immovably in a threadbare recliner and sound asleep, indifferent to the sermon and insensible to her son’s ritual of care and worried resentment.

“We’re going to do something about that clematis today, Mama.  It’s ruining your siding.”  She blinked sleepily and her chest rose and fell sharply in a gesture he decided to interpret as assent, and he exited the way he had come in, off to retrieve a bow saw from his trunk.

We need both regular contributors and occasional essays.  We’re looking for regular (at least monthly) contributors in the following areas:

• Art
• Book Reviews
• Literature (fiction and poetry)
• Food and Drink
• Society and Culture

Brannon’s artist profiles and my reviews and essays aren’t going away.  We’re just growing and we have a readership that wants more than my weekly updates.  If you have your finger on the pulse of some piece of the Southern puzzle, let me know.  Even if you don’t see your specialty here, try me.  If it’s interesting, we’ll publish it.  Want to write 250 words on Southern cheese?  I love it.  500 words on how your local watering hole is a perfect microcosm of Southern culture?  Send it over.  A photograph or a series of photographs that you’re particularly proud of and illustrate something interesting?  Yes please.  In short, give us your best and help contribute to a growing Southern institution!

Email me at ryan@yellowhammerpress.com with column suggestions, contributions, or any other feedback you’d like to give.  Happy New Year!

I’m thinking about you.  Our readers, our fans, our friends.  In 2010, you’ll see a different Yellowhammer Press.  More content, more contributors, more artists, and a few surprises.  More interviews, certainly.  Our readership is delightfully broad and disarmingly enthusiastic.  When I hear from you (and I love hearing from you), it’s always something wonderful.  For those of you who have stuck with us and helped us grow in 2009, I promise you a vastly improved 2010.  I hope each and every one of you has a wonderful holiday season.  Stay tuned.  It’s only going to get better.

Yellowhammer Press is in the middle of moving (our house, not our website) and will return on Monday.  Dock Boggs will keep you company until we return.   Thanks for your patience!

-YHP

• Columbus, MS photographer Birney Imes has made a career out of capturing elements of life and vibrancy in the impoverished Mississippi countryside.  Perhaps most famous are his series of Juke Joint photos.  One of his pieces graced the cover of a Lucinda Williams record. My personal favorite is a photo called “Blume With Chicken,” but I can’t find it anywhere at the moment.  Ah well.

• Trailer Bride, a Chapel Hill band whose mordant, serpentine hillbilly gothic sound has a firm place in my heart, hasn’t released a record since 2003, but lest we forget their exquisitely bleak portrayal of rurality, here’s a damn fine reminder: