Heartland E-Book

Patrick McCabe

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 446

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Seven men wait in Mervyn's Mountain Bar, awaiting the arrival of Tony Begley and his six-inch boning knife, Sweety. Ray 'Ringo' Wade hides above them in the rafters, silent and consumed by shame as Jody, the only friend he's ever known, lies beaten and bound in the outhouse, waiting to meet his maker at the hands of the bar's raucous inhabitants. The reason for this bloody retribution? Ray and Jody went and jacked over the one and only William Walter Monroe – the man who took them in, for better or worse, and single-handedly moulded Glasson County into a place people could be proud of. To a man, they bear the mark of Cain, and the acts of the past are never far from the present. Insulated from the world by his shaky delusion, Ray Wade recounts the tale he has no choice but to live with. A backwoods sinfonia of rough poetry and black comedy about the love we give and the horror we visit upon one other – and ourselves.

Leseprobe

Praise for Patrick McCabe

The Butcher Boy

‘The most astonishing Irish novel for many years, a masterpiece’

– Sunday Independent

‘An insidious, funny, breathtakingly horrific novel set in small-town Ireland, switching from mischief to madness as an adolescent obsession turns Dennis the Menace into Jack the Ripper.’

– The Observer

‘Compelling, unashamedly horrible, memorable and sensitive’

– Times Literary Supplement

‘An almost perfect novel … A Beckett monologue with plot by Alfred Hitchcock … Startlingly original.’

– The Washington Post Book World

‘Stunning … part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield, part Hannibal Lecter.’

–The New York Times Book Review

‘Brilliant, unique. Patrick McCabe pushes your head through the book and you come out the other end gasping, admiring, and knowing that reading fiction will never be the same again. It’s the best Irish novel I’ve read in years.’

– Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

‘A chilling tale of a child’s hell … often screamingly funny … the book has a compelling and terrible beauty.’

–The Boston Globe

‘Lyrical and disturbing, horrific and hilarious.’

– The New York Times

Breakfast on Pluto

‘Dysfunctional Ireland in all its glories is here, with humour of the blackest hue, madness and violence, hopelessly randy priests, dodgy politicians, a grand gallery of misfits culminating in McCabe’s hero in Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick ‘Pussy’ Braden, the transvestite prostitute from the village of Tyreelin … Wild, hilarious, merciless and fiendishly clever’

– Ronan Farren, Sunday Independent

‘He is the fortunate possessor of a savage and unfettered imagination; his books … dissect life’s miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel’

– Erica Wagner, The Times

‘It finds humour in places that other writers are afraid to look for it’

– David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

‘This is a savagely funny and authentically tragic novel of an Ireland in unhappy transition and beneath McCabe’s perfectly delivered black comedy lies an angry heart’

– GQ Magazine

‘Without drawing breath, McCabe mixes camp comedy with brutality, making Breakfast on Pluto both funny and deeply shocking’

– Maxim

‘Told with irresistible zest, brio and gaiety … McCabe’s brilliant, startling talent is to make enchantingly dashing narratives out of the most ghastly states of mind imaginable, and to induce compassion for lives which seem least to invite it … He is a dark genius of incongruity and the grotesque’

– Hermione Lee, The Observer

The Dead School

‘McCabe can make you howl at the darkest antics … He never sets a foot – or syllable – wrong. His novel is death on a laugh-support machine. Stupendous.’

– Scotland on Sunday

‘Raphael, the great headmaster, is a marvellous creation … McCabe has a charm as a storyteller which is all his own’

– Sunday Telegraph

‘Exhilarating. Reading the distilled gouts of consciousness which pour from the minds of these characters is like being trapped on a big dipper with articulate maniacs … Horribly funny’

– The Times

‘An appallingly funny story … horribly memorable’

– Times Literary Supplement

Winterwood

‘A true original’

– John Banville

‘This is McCabe’s greatest work … A sustained achievement of often dazzling brilliance … Winterwood is that rarest thing: a novel dealing with humanity at its most twisted and bleak, but one that leaves the reader feeling curiously uplifted. And that’s because we realise that we’ve been standing in an illuminating beam whose source is, and can only be, truly great art’

– Irvine Welsh, The Guardian

‘A masterpiece’

– The Observer

‘He is the fortunate possessor of a savage and unfettered imagination; his books dissect life’s miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel’

– The Times

‘An eerily kaleidoscopic mix that reads like a modern rendering of Poe’

– Daily Telegraph

‘Winterwood is a masterpiece, even though the word is a little overused, especially about contemporary fiction’

– Adam Phillips, Observer Books of the Year

‘Winterwood is as close as you could get to understanding the nature of evil, as close as you would ever want to get’

– Irish Sunday Independent

Hello Mr Bones / Goodbye Mr Rat

‘Stark, fierce, and wonderful … McCabe is a master of both the demented narrative and demented narrator. Beneath the ghosts and ghoulies, however, lies a compassionate exploration of the aftermath of psychological damage.’

– Claire Kilroy, The Guardian

‘A rewarding experience which sees the master of the Irish gothic genre return to his best form in years.’

– JP O’Malley, The Observer

‘Both bits of Hello and Goodbye are exuberant and witty and Goodbye Mr Rat deserves to rekindle his former glories.’

– Paul Dunn, The Times

‘McCabe is especially good at conjuring up the menace of psychopaths who perpetrate acts of barbarism under the spurious guise of ideologies.’

– John Boland, The Independent

‘[McCabe] is expert at making the darkest deeds funny, forcing us to laugh at the worst things in the world. He writes like an Irish Lenny Bruce, riffing at warp speed, swerving from one time to another and one place to another and strewing the landscape with allusion … and somehow it all makes sense … The stories McCabe tells have a terrible beauty.

– The New York Times

Heartland

Heartland

Patrick McCabe

HEARTLAND

First published in 2018 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Hall Office Park

Stillorgan

County Dublin

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Patrick McCabe, 2018

The moral right of Patrick McCabe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84840-660-5

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84840-692-6

Epub ISBN: 978-1-84840-661-2

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-662-9

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance with any real person is coincidental and unintended.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For David Monagan, with thanks.

Contents

Chapter 1  The Cockloft

Chapter 2  The New Arrival

Chapter 3  The American Eagle

Chapter 4  Snow In July

Chapter 5  Uncle Wylie’s Wrecking Yard

Chapter 6  Kentucky Fry

Chapter 7  Some Velvet Morning

Chapter 8  Good Times

Chapter 9  Secrets, Songs and Shadows

Chapter 10 The Story of Mickey Wrong Moon

Chapter 11 The Glasson County Accident

Chapter 12 The Wonderful World of Jim Reeves

Chapter 13 The Indian in the Caravan

Chapter 14 The Wildwood Flower

Chapter 15 The Secret Life of Oranges

Chapter 16 I’m Mr Bonny

Chapter 17 The Way It Used To Be

Chapter 18 In the High Country

Chapter 19 El Brindis Del Paso

Chapter 20 The Memory of an Old Christmas Card

Chapter 21 The Tackle Harvest

Chapter 22 The Glasson County Electrisms

Chapter 23 A Life, Shredded

Chapter 24 The Mountain Throwback

Chapter 25 The Wayward Wind

Chapter 26 The Bones of Lake Wynter

Chapter 27 A Delta Dawn in Dreams Embroidered

Chapter 28 These Are My Mountains

Chapter 29 Five Little Fingers

Chapter 30 The Arrival of  Tony Begley

Chapter 31 Moonlight and Roses

Chapter 32 El Dorado

Chapter 33 A Tiger by the Tail

Chapter 34 The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill

Chapter 35 Welcome to My World

Chapter 1

The Cockloft

Sneeze you’re a stiff – couldn’t have been simpler.

The story, if that’s what you want to call it – ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ would be my own preference – took place some time ago in Ireland, deep in the midlands and a long way from the sea.

Quite exactly when don’t make a whole lotta difference.

I can’t say for certain how long I’d been lying there – all I remember is swinging around when I heard my name, and must have passed out after that.

When I came to finally my head was splitting.

I’ve really gone and screwed it now, I said.

The pub underneath had once housed hens and livestock – and, to tell the truth, it didn’t look like a whole lot had changed.

The attic itself was a narrow slanting space running all the way along the length of the barn.

Through the chink in the floorboards it wasn’t easy to make them out, shuffling and muttering and arguing, but there could be no mistaking the compact sinewy build of ginger-haired Red Campbell – in his late forties, with those long tapered sideburns coming down to meet a small frizzy thatch of beard, making wild, unexpected swipes at the furniture as he pulled out a match and sparked up another rollie, clearing his throat and heaving harshly into the grate.

–You know what, I’ve been thinking, I heard him declare softly, as he exhaled an abundant lungful of smoke, lately I been figuring that maybe, you know, autumn is a good time to die. When the brown brittle leaves are just on the point of falling – you reckon?

He tilted his head slightly and I heard him whisper my name.

–I’m afraid that he’s been an unobliging feller, Ringo Wade. Now why’d he have to go and do such a thing? Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if that sonofabitch ain’t so very far away at all, with them rattler eyes o’ his all bright and fixed. Same as always, no-good fuck …

He swung sharply on his heel, inhaling a series of rapid-fire drags.

As the stoop-shouldered figure of Sonny Hackett stepped from the shadows, his chain-smoker’s face lined like a biscuit – so tall and thin he’d have had to stand in two places to make a shadow.

With his gleaming, jet-black hair slicked back as he thrust his brooding aquiline countenance forward and sat down in silence, straddling a grey plastic chair.

Continuing to say nothing.

But you knew at any time that he was capable of flaring up.

Which, as a matter of fact, was what he did now.

With absolutely no hint of warning, shooting unexpectedly to his feet, his clenched fist smartly thumping the hollow of his hand.

–What the fuck’s keeping them? he spat sourly. What in the hell can be keeping them till now? Those lousy unreliable fu— !

He didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

But just stood there, almost ill-looking, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Red Campbell was pissing out defiantly into the night.

–Man, that’s good! he groaned with immense pleasure. Bates fucking Banagher, that does.

I followed its trajectory as he swayed beneath the moon, slamming the door with a deft flick of his heel.

A wisp of straw was tormenting my right nostril as I stiffened.

–Two in the head is what the sumbitch deserves, grunted Red Campbell – to no one in particular, it seemed.

–And that is what he is going to get, he added.

A gutful of jungle juice rose sharply to my throat – as I watched the back door open and the two McHales coming tumbling in, in their grey trackies and white high-back trainers – a pair of sad baby-faced blue-eyed farmboys whose father had left them way too early and whose mother was in a state of long-time depression.

For just a split second, I could have sworn I’d seen them both lift their heads as well.

But it was nothing, just another predictable episode of paranoia.

As a shower of balls came crashing down the pool table, and both McHales stood arrogantly along its side, chuckling provocatively as they wielded their cues.

With their identical faces displaying traces of hastily wiped machine oil.

–Move over, bro, said Shorty, short and chunky with a malnourished podgy face, swaggering past, absently chewing on a hoodie toggle.

As his twin did his best to steady the cue-rest, laying sprawled across the wide expanse of baize.

–These two fellers are made of strong stuff, growled Sonny, just like their father before them, eh boys?

–That’s right Mr Hackett, The Runt McHale called over, brazenly gratified, our old man was a hero back in the troubled days. We heard all the stories. He was a top man, right Mr Hackett?

–You had better believe it, boys. When things got rough and the cause needed men, your old pop was always there. That’s something that can never be taken away. And I can see by the cut of you, that you two bucks are made from the very same stuff. Cut from the same cloth, you boys are. I can tell. We all can.

–When this is all over, when we get this job done, me and this brother o’ mine here – we are heading straight over to the States. We’re going to see our Uncle Wylie. You wanna know about him, Mr Hackett? Well then I’ll tell you. He’s a road warrior, that’s what he is. Man you had better believe it – motherfucking speed king, woah boy, no prisoners … !

He swung around to see if anyone might happen to be prepared to disagree, raking his fingers through his highlighted quiff, windmilling the cue-stick as he breathlessly continued:

–You see that Uncle Sam? You wanna know about him, Mr Hackett? Way back up in them hills they got themselves snake handlers, coon dogs, and all the sumbitch moonshine you can drink. And if’n you wanna know how we come to know that – then just call up our father’s brother on the phone. Yep, you go right ahead – just call up Uncle Wylie.

–That’s right, agreed his brother, they got themselves wind in the pines out there, and all the liquor a feller can drink. Now get that ass right on out of here and let me in there in front of you, bro, for I want to pot that sweet there waiting blue …

–Aye, our fella, you strike that ho’ and make sure and sink her down …

–Ah shore as hell will, brother o’ mine, this very second I’ll drop her plumb …

And that exactly was what young Shorty McHale proceeded to do.

–Yep, when all o’ this is over, friends, The Runt resumed, the two of us are gonna go to Amerikay – over to see that crack-cat Uncle Wylie, and along with him tear up the dirt at every goddamn stock car meet in the place. Right, our boy?

–You got it, fella – you got it in one, affirmed Shorty, beaming.

As another ball ker-plunked, sinking into the depths of the north-eastern pocket.

–Good call, hollered The Runt, giving his twin a hearty clap on the back.

As everyone else present looked on in silence, seeming content to remain that way for what might be left of the game.

As, high up among the brooding rafters, I hauled in another hesitant, tremulous breath – stiff as a board on the straw-strewn floor – and never once taking my eyes off the door.

–How much you reckon Uncle Wylie is going to pay us? I heard Shorty inquire.

But never got to hear what his brother’s answer might be.

Because just at that precise moment the pub door swung open and the stout, bearish figure of Big Barney Grue came barrelling in, dressed in a heavy coat and muffler.

Dragging something, with great ceremony, after him – tossing it in front of him like a wet sack of grain.

–Evening ladies, Big Barney beamed, tipping down his baseball cap just so.

As the only friend I’ve ever really had in the world did the best he could to escape – groaning for a bit, and after that not making a sound.

Yes, Jody Kane – my soul-brother comrade, for years down the line.

And this was how I’d shown my appreciation.

–Breed gon’ die! Sonny Hackett sneered, loudly clacking his tongue against his teeth.

–Adios, Jody boy! It sure has been nice knowing you, fucker … !

Chapter 2

The New Arrival

Hughie Munley was short, a little baby-faced banty of a man in his fifties, friendly as tap water – with a head bald as a duck egg and a habit of showing the point of his tongue through prominent teeth whenever he smiled.

A medallion gleamed underneath his open shirt.

El Paso, read the lettering woven in the shape of a bridle.

‘Wee Hughie’, as they called him, was generally regarded as funny – with the only problem being that, soon as he got going, he would talk the legs off a stove.

But a straight arrow, nonetheless.

Always ambling and angling, and hoisting up his britches, fixing to get into the company whatever way he could, with that trademark brawny handshake and distinctive aw-shucks grin.

–Man could I use me a shot of your best jungle, he hollered, as up rose swiftly a bottle of colourless liquid, with Mervyn, behind the counter, grinning from ear to ear.

–’Bout time you’d arrive, Mr Munley, if you don’t mind me saying so, because some of your companions they were starting to just get that little bit worried – ain’t that the case? Wouldn’t you say that’s true? Wouldn’t you say, fellers, that that, perhaps, might be the situation?

The nerves in my stomach were all but shot to pieces, watching Hackett as he stood in the centre of the room.

‘Sunny’ Sonny, in his worn black Wranglers and Cuban-heeled boots had to have been close on six-foot-four – and with them spindle shanks, he might have been a scorpion walking.

He looked like hadn’t shaved for days.

–Yep, he nodded, I really must say that I got to admit that I, for one, am in agreement with that there statement. No, in my mind ain’t no dispute about that at all. So thank you for that, good brother Mervyn.

The barman smiled as he stood back a little, folding his arms.

As Sonny Hackett raised his glass and sighed.

‘Sunny’ Sonny – no description could ever have been more inappropriate.

–Cheers, you fucks, Sonny growled as he emptied another shot, man does that bug-juice taste sweet or what …

Then he suggested it was time to inspect the new arrival.

As Red Campbell stood looming over Jody, temporarily removing his greasy camo cap and running tobacco-stained fingers through a rug of tight, greasy copper curls, gravely stroking a spry thatch of chin beard as he flicked a ball of saliva past the new arrival’s ear.

–So, he snorted, seems like we got ourselves a brand-new guest. You reckon that I maybe got that right?

–Correct, replied Sonny.

–Abso-one-hundred-per-cent-lutely, nodded Hughie.

With the two palefaced twins just standing there louchely in their loose-fitting tracksuits, holding a cue apiece, on either side of the pool table.

–Not that it ain’t like we been waiting long enough, hollered Campbell as he wrenched a brace of fantails from the tyre-circled dartboard.

It was all I could do not to throw up whenever I saw Jody’s face – bruised beyond all recognition.

–Jesus fuck! I heard him plead. Is there anyone out there please who can help me?

–You know what I think I hate more than anything? announced Campbell. Folks as get above their raising. I mean, look at this specimen right here, fellers. Born a gypsy in the open air under canvas and somehow still can’t learn how to know his place. It’s a disappointment, that’s what it is.

–Help me, Jody repeated, please for the love of God!

No one said anything.

As, behind the counter, Mervyn Walker, the proprietor, gave a little weary sigh, absentmindedly humming a soft little tune.

Chapter 3

The American Eagle

There was no excuse sufficient – every last thing was down to me – no debate or equivocation.

The hell with you, Ray Wade, I spat, only for you this nightmare would never have taken place.

Might never even have begun.

I had arranged our rendezvous for the One Tree Crossroads – with the New York tickets bought and paid for, long since.

But by going back to the attic, still so roasted I couldn’t remember where I’d left the bonds, I’d gone and fucked whatever chance we might have had.

Yep, Brother Wade, you’ve gone and done it now, I said.

Now I was history.

Dead meat as soon as Tony Begley arrived.

With the thing about Begley being – he actually liked it, what it was he was known for.

Ending people’s pain, as he described it.

Especially whenever he felt justified in his actions.

Which he certainly would now.

I found myself on the point of weeping as I heard a sudden noise below and the tiniest of cries escaped my lips.

That’s it then, I said, I’m finished now for sure.

But nothing happened.

Maybe if I hadn’t known what it was they were capable of.

But that was the problem, because I very much did.

Oh yes. Knew only too well.

Because, once upon a time, we had all worked in the factory together.

Back in the ‘old times’ when the troubles were at their height, and bodies turning up in a condition similar to that of Jody’s would have been a routine occurrence.

Yes, way back when – when we’d all been employed on the killing floor of Glasson Meats, apart from the twins who had the good fortune not to, as yet, have managed to get themselves born.

Me and Jody would have been fifteen at the time.

I shivered a bit as I looked down at Mervyn – standing behind the counter, tall and erect – seeming inscrutable as he stared at something far away. With those long arms folded, impassive, as always, with the bearing of an American eagle.

He was odd, all the same, that old Mervyn Walker.

There was just something about him that …

Then I heard Red Campbell guffawing.

–Thought you had it all figured out, didn’t you Jody? You and Wade – thought you could just up and leave the sinking ship. But we’ve been ahead of the pair of you all along. You see, we been watching old Ringo – and you too, Jody. We followed you all the way, right out as far as the One Tree Crossroads. And we got you fair and square – with the only pity being that we didn’t lay our hands on that other backsliding no-good. But don’t worry, we’ll get him. We’ll get him all right. All it is is a matter of time. That’s all it is, gypsy boy – just a sweet little matter o’ time.

The clock ticked and the fire burnt low.

The bar was the same as many another mountain establishment.

With a couple of high stools scattered here and there – and, in the corner, a massive oaken table.

Sawdust covered the greasy black and white tiles.

A couple of pictures hung sideways upon the wall.

A football team.

A butcher’s calendar depicting a blocky heifer turning incuriously towards the camera.

And a dusty Woolworth’s portrait of a little toddler holding a bear – sitting on a potty with a silver-blue tear in his eye.

–It’s bye bye, I’m afraid, Jody Kane, I heard Red Campbell whisper softly, releasing an extended plume of smoke. By the time Mr Begley gets through with you, I’m afraid you ain’t gonna be around no more. Ain’t that the case, wouldn’t you say, Mr Grue?

Big Barney came lumbering over, hitching up his trousers over his built-for-diesel girth, his three hundred pound bulk bursting out of a red and black lumberjack shirt, eyes blazing above that rusty foot-long straggly beard.

Standing directly above Jody Kane, wheezing as he tugged nervously at his whiskers, speaking in a voice close to falsetto.

As he grabbed Jody roughly and yanked back his head, sweeping his fingers through his mop of bloodied black curls.

–I guess, said Barney, yep I guess I got to say that you’re right. That you are exactly one hundred per cent right there, ol’ Red, and I reckon too that that old Tony he ain’t gonna be long. No sir, not long at all.

–Never mind all that, barked Hackett, losing patience, for it seems to me that you fellers are starting to fall in love with the sound of your own voice. Way too much speechifying already. So take that sumbitch out to the shed – and leave him there – because I’m just about through having to look at him!

–Fourth pocket, shouted Shorty.

Ker-plunk went the yellow.

As they made their way towards the outhouse with their quarry, from deep within its bowels, I heard the most abject howl.

One which filled me full of self-loathing – how could it not?

As a matter of fact, even now, all these years later, as I sit here alone in the dim light of a single bulb penning these words on a rickety old wooden table, even yet I can feel my face burning. With the shame spreading out, right across my neck and shoulders, I swear.

Still clinging to the hope – that, maybe in the long run Jody Kane did forgive me.

Because I’d do almost anything if that could possibly happen. And which is why, no matter where I go, or in what condition I find myself – I always make sure to carry this bundle of letters with me.

I’ve got a couple of them here in front of me right now as I write.

This particular one dates from the very late nineties. I happened to be going through it earlier on – just to refresh my memory and help me with all of my recollections – as I do my best to get them down on paper.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, to tell the truth.

I just can’t describe how good it makes me feel. So hopeful, you know?

213 Cypress Grove

Sweetwater, Georgia 15309

USA

March 18 1998

Dear Ray,

I guess when you open this and realise that it’s me that you’re gonna be surprised after all this time.

And, to be honest, I got to admit that the truth is, Ray, that you’re far from being the only one.

For after I left Glasson County, in the aftermath of what happened to us both that terrible night, every time I thought of it I found myself getting all tore up inside, the way any reasonable human being ought to when they cast their mind back to that hellhole and what was done.

And by nobody more than you yourself, Ray, I’m sorry to have to say – and which is the reason all these years why I’ve carried so much bitterness in my heart.

But things change, don’t they, and I’m proud to tell you that since coming out here to Sweetwater, fortune has smiled on me and I’m now, in spite of any past transgressions, welcomed in a manner you would expect to be exclusively reserved for close kindred.

With the sweetest wife you could ever dream of looking after me – and who keeps on insisting she loves me, although sure as hell I can’t for the life of me figure that.

For, after shipping for the last time out of Glasson County, I didn’t feel like I’d ever come back to myself again and that, when all was said and done, I was worth less than nothing.

To tell you the truth, what had happened was I’d become what you could only call a drifter, rambling in a daze from one drinkwater town to another.

Before finally landing here in Georgia – in what can only be described as God’s own private kingdom, where they still got themselves a claim on their own souls and where the talk, I guess you’d say, is kind of slow and syrupy, like molasses in the wintertime. They like their sour mash and football here, let me tell you, and they got no objection to chasing after the odd judy maybe. The town we’re living in is a good way off the beaten track – with a body shop, a pool hall, a honkytonk and a livestock sale barn. Most folks work either on the land or in the textile mill, which has been there, they tell me, since Old God’s time.

And which I know you’d love – and maybe, at least I’m hoping, after you receive this letter there might be some way we could patch up all our old differences. Yeah, once and for all lay to rest them ghosts, all the memories of that dreadful night. There really are some great people, Ray, and whose company I know you would enjoy and get to love. Hell, in that old Courthouse Square, whenever they get started, I swear to God, it’s all the old times and the code of the hills just like we ourselves have lived by and know. In a country where history runs so deep you could almost cut it up with a chainsaw. In the Courthouse Square, you can still hear some of the old timers wail at the destruction reaped by Sherman’s March to the Sea. Maybe with one small difference, though, and that is that these people, Ray, more than anything what they hold dear is family and you ain’t gonna find so many Sweetwater fellers cutting loose so much and howling at the moon over a grievance or some battle long ago, chaining themselves to the jug and the Mason jar. But that ain’t to say that they don’t know how to enjoy themselves, for that they sure can do. With their country dinners at noon and evening suppers of chicken fried steak, milk gravy and black-eyed peas. And when the sun goes down there’ll be a little drinking and conversing but after they’ve sipped their share and are kinda tired, it’s then that the bandstand will become a pulpit, and the pages of the most important thing to them all are turned – and that’s the Good Book, Ringo Wade. Yes, they gladly turn em, one by one. Just like I do myself these days, because if I’ve learned anything since coming here – yup, if I’ve picked up anything during my time with all o’ these decent here people – it’s that we’re all sorry bastards but that God above loves us, each and every one, Ray Wade.

What you got to remember, too, and maybe most of all, is that these Sweetwater folks have got their pride and don’t take too kindly to folks as maybe got a tendency to maybe undervalue ’em. What they’ll always tell you is that the Yankee just don’t get it – even yet, with too much reason still binding his head and allowing him little space to record and recognize the value of southern intuition. Because here we prize the imagination and the dream, they’ll tell you – here in Sweetwater, God and romance will always be in the ascendant.

And if anyone figures that ain’t the case then they ought to come down some Saturday to the Courthouse Square and seat themselves on the bench beside that old bronze Confederate general. And watch how, out of nowhere, if even the slightest slur is cast, how right out of nowhere a Cain-raising fury can erupt like a thunderstorm. So you got to be on your guard just in case things like that happen. But then, we got some experience of that, don’t we Ray? And how a perceived injustice can set alight a ring of the most furious fire.

I don’t mind telling you that my partner Greta Mae, the love of my life, is a genuine, high-toned Christian woman – can you believe that she goes to church every Sunday, and that I go along with her and her father Otis, whose folks originally come from Africa. Otis will often tell me that, for him, stepping back into the past is like a dream world that once was real and now is gone. Where you find yourself remembering the old people you used to talk to and you wish you could talk to them again, he’ll often say. People don’t seem to sit on the courthouse benches the way they used to, he said to me only yesterday. That’s because all the old men who used to sit there and talk are probably dead. People are too busy these days. Life tends to move faster now. With it being a long way from the slumbering little village he was born and raised in – where life was lived out in the soft light of a tree-shaded street on a summer afternoon, to the soft clip-clop of horses, the drone of bees and cicadas, the clink of ice in the lemonade pitcher, the creak of the porch swing. And, further out in the country, you can find the farms and the cows and the vegetable gardens, boats in the racks of pickups, watermelon stands in summer, coonhounds in pens.

A time of pause and prosperity, he calls it, Ray. When even Old Glory was contemplated in a more relaxed way, with time devoted to lying beneath a shade tree, watching the cottony clouds drift in the hot blue sky. ‘But though a lot of things are gone,’ he says, ‘and you can see this every morning of the Sabbath, if you’ve a mind to go along to our little White Church in the valley – one thing around here remains stubbornly firm and solid, Jody my new friend – and that is the ideal of family as identity. Because that’s the unshakeable country belief – that, simply by being born into the family, love and self-esteem are simply and unequivocally conferred upon you. And, by extension, one’s home town is a community to which one belongs by birth. Simply by your very presence, you belong – thereby having something larger than yourself to which to cling. You try to tell the younger folks about your own childhood but it’s like another planet to them.

So you can see where it might come from, Ray Wade my friend, what you might call my ‘new persuasion’. Or ‘conversion’, if you got yourself a mind to go that far ha ha. And which is something that I know you and me would have laughed at in the past. But when you been running all over hell’s half-acre like we have in our time, maybe eventually you get to see – you come around to a different way of viewing things. You and me we got lots to talk about regarding that subject, Ray. And that is what we are gonna do just as soon as you get yourself on that plane and make your way out here to see us. Because everyone here would, really and truly, love to meet you. I’ve told them everything, Ray, you know? About the orphanage and our time there. You just wouldn’t believe how much she understands – that’s why I want you to meet her so much. Because she, and the people around here, they get it, you know? Especially about folks like us, Ray – you and me.

Especially that it’s all about forgiveness in the end.

And if we don’t have that, we have nothing.

I hope you don’t find this too forthright or intrusive, old buddy, but I been in touch with one or two people, and they been tell me that you been hitting the hooch mighty hard in recent times – is that, in fact, the case?

Anyhow, I know you’ll tell me in your own good time – that’s if you decide that it’s any of my business, Ray. But what definitely is my primary concern is seeing that things get fixed up between you and me. And if we can somehow do that, return you and me to the days when we was true, gentle partners – fellers who would do most anything for each other – before the shadow of misfortune fell.

Because I won’t lie – I still get the sweats and the horrors when I think about what they did to me.

But that’s all history now and there ain’t no point in going over much more of that old ground.

It’s beautiful here, Ray, it truly is a sweet and bonny land. You can see the blood orange sun going down behind the hills as I sit here composing these few words on the front porch.

I’ll be maybe writing to you again after this – that’s if I hear from you, which I really hope I do.

Because I still got some problems with my nerves, I guess you might call it, and can often find that setting my thoughts and emotions down on paper like this, that it kind of helps me in a way I can’t really say.

Like the old songs, maybe, that we all used to listen to before it all turned into an early-morning vision of hell. You know the kinda tunes I’m talking about, Ray – Merle Haggard, maybe – but that ol’ Hank most of all, at least as far as I’m concerned. Because, the way I see it, there ain’t nobody who’s come as close to mapping out that territory of pain and desperation. Showing you to a place where it’s OK to say: I’m broke, and I don’t mean money. A place of emotional release is what I mean, a spiritual pilgrimage. Where you can just let it go and give it permission to pour right out of you – in a torrent, know what I mean?

I knew what he meant, all right – and still do.

Anyhow, Ray, the letter continued, I hope when you get this that all is coming together in your life and that you don’t mind me saying this couple of things. It’s just that we’ve a lot to talk about, you and me – and I don’t, like a lot of people, want to do the fool thing and leave it too late.

So long then, partner – I’ll be in touch with you again real soon.

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you out of the blue.

But it’s been a long time, Ray, ol’ pardner.

So that was it. That was what that old Jody had to say. That was the first of his many welcome letters. I got them all tied up together, for safe keeping.

And, like I was telling you, no matter where I went or in what dire circumstances I might happen to find myself, I always made sure to have those envelopes close to my heart.

If that sounds strange, like something you’d expect from lovers or something, then that’s OK – but that’s not how it was between me and Jody.

And if you happened to see me weeping when I was reading them, then the reason for that is because I was ashamed – of failing him.

Not just him, in fact, but everyone.

Which is what I’ve been feeling for most of my life, at least until recently.

When things started improving dramatically, I somehow found the courage to look directly into my soul and get it all down among these pages – like Fr Conway says, warts and all.

Talking about my drinking, it’s like staring down the lens of a telescope and viewing this wild, unkempt creature – coming stumbling past, waving his arms like some deranged Willie Nelson in a long duster coat, talking to himself, just like I used to, slugging from a bottle, stumbling onward, day to day, in an inebriated haze of abdicated responsibility.

All of which, thank God, has changed.

But I couldn’t have done it on my own.

No way – not a chance.

Without the assistance and support of a couple of very special people, I’d never have had a chance of making it through.

And it’s thanks to them, I think it’s fair to say, that I’m capable of saying these things at all – and am not in some long-stay institution or other.

Or worse.

Because, for the best part of the late nineties and early noughties, it really and truly was very bad.

I did have a sort-of relationship with a woman. But no matter how we tried, me and that old Angie Brody, we just couldn’t make it work.

You’re not thinking about me, I remember her saying, out of the blue, one night.

And again – many times.

You’re thinking about her, aren’t you Ray, you’re thinking about the singer. She’s still there inside your head.

You don’t have to lie.

I heard you calling her name in your sleep. Dawn, you said.

Even though she played you, just like she did everyone in that dumb fucking valley that you come from – even in spite of all that, I swear to God you’re still thinking about her. I can’t believe it. After all this fucking time, it’s still true.

No, I protested.

After all this time, and everything we’ve been through, she’s still there inside you – working your mind. Playing you, Ray. Because she was good at that, wasn’t she? she said bitterly.

No, I insisted, you’ve got it way wrong. Because that just isn’t the way it is, Angie.

She hadn’t even bothered to answer.

She’d also begun warning me too – about my drinking, I mean.

But as soon as she found out about the affair I’d been having – just a brief fling with someone whose name I can scarcely remember – after that, there could be no going back.

She announced I had given her no choice and showed me the door.

I’ve still got her picture – convinced that one day, out of nowhere, she’ll arrive back.

Ray, she’ll say.

And I’ll say: Angie.

But that’s not actually going to happen, is it?

And deep down I know it.

For nothing, as we know, cuts deeper than betrayal.

I’ve never met anyone with such an open and generous nature – the exact opposite of me, more or less.

The problem with you, Ray, is that you got a good face but a bad heart, she always used to say.

And I got to admit that she used to look so lovely, my Angie, in her red bandeau and figure-hugging denims.

But not anymore.

Not since I’d given myself away in my sleep.

Into that velvet dawn we’ll ride, I’d moaned, apparently.

Speak her name, Angie had bitterly demanded the following day, go on – say it to me here, right here and now. In the cold light of day, declare her name like you did last night. Say: Dawn.

But of course I couldn’t.

And just stood there, looking dumb and hangdog-stupid.

It’s just a pity it wasn’t me you were talking about, were her last words to me before I left. Because for a while I did sincerely think we had something that just might be worth salvaging, Ray.

But not now, she said.

Not now, Ray Wade. So go – and don’t look back. Don’t even fucking think about it, looking back.

And it wasn’t so very long after that that my life slipped completely off the rails and I found myself surrendering to the hooch, full time.

Straying through the bars and anonymous dives of every distant small town, lying sprawled across the counter as I raved and rambled to myself, hurling it down as fast as I could.

But it doesn’t work, does it?

Because it just sits there, waiting, doesn’t it – your heartbreak.

Knowing that, inevitably, you’ll always come stumbling home.

One of the first things I wrote in the pages of this ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ – which, as I say, is how I prefer to describe it – somehow it turned into the strangest kind of … I don’t know, odd dark fairy tale or something.

And which, whenever I showed its contents to my faithful supporter Fr Conway he observed that – incoherent though it might be in places – in its own crude way it exposed certain things. And which was why I ought to keep on going.

A kind of ‘emotional espionage’ is how he likes to describe it.

Anyway, this weird kind of fairy tale I was telling you about – it was kind of based on the memory I had of everyone who was there that night in Mervyn’s Bar.

Only it was a long time before any of that had happened, when they were gathered together for an occasion of great celebration – way back when the very first ballroom opened in Glasson County. Heartland, it was called.

Where they were all awaiting the arrival of its owner, the legendary William Walter Monroe.

The one and only WW.

With them all as excited as kids, and now again keeping their eyes on the door. Only this time, as I say, in anticipation of an evening of tremendous pride and happiness. For they, more than most, had reason to be grateful to WW for all he’d done. Having given them all employment when the meat factory eventually had closed. Red Campbell’s job was tending bar, Wee Hughie was now the full-time booking agent for Monroeville Promotions, with Sonny and Big Barney his proud appointed ‘chucker-outers’.

He sure did figure on himself having a good team, WW had always been fond of saying.

–Hometown boys, just the same as myself! he would declare, fingers drumming exuberantly on his lapels.

And it was true.

For, he too, in his youth, had hustled pool and shot the breeze and, indeed, raced cars whenever he got the chance.

Yep, a whoopin’ and hollerin’ upcountry feller like themselves – someone no one could ever have credited with meeting his end, like he did many years later, in a shocking and unexpected manner, at the end of a rope under a sourapple tree.

Not in their wildest fevers could any of them have imagined that ever happening.

But there it was – with the corpse of WW Monroe attired, as always in his Stetson and bootlace tie, only now with eyes bulging and his tongue protruding vilely, with his hand-tooled boots suspended six inches from the ground.

To make matters worse, it was his wife Connie who had made the appalling discovery.

It was also rumoured that his right-hand man Tony Begley had been next on the scene, having by chance been visiting at the time – standing enjoying a smoke as he gazed out across the splendour of Kentuckyland, when he heard the scream.

No one could have foreseen such an unwarranted and lamentable end.

Because it just wasn’t the sort of thing a person the like of WW ever did, irrespective of any downturn there might have been in his fortunes.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone did – not when they’d only just left their wife sitting there contentedly in the drawing room approximately one half-hour before.

No matter what they might try to say, me and Jody knocking over his precious treasury bonds, dumb though it had been, it had nothing to do with WW’s financial and emotional collapse – or very little.

But someone had to take the blame.

So the brutal, savage drinking had begun almost immediately after WW’s funeral.

As they all sat, stunned, underneath the motionless, unlit glitterball, facing each other and staring dazedly at the mural of Old Glory, with Elvis in his leathers jacknifing on the wall opposite.

Sonny Hackett was staggering around like a blind dog in a meathouse, just about managing to speak and no more.

–I know there’s them that didn’t like WW, he thundered, and that they resented his swagger and the habit he had of lording it some. That’s because some folks they just can’t handle how well the man has done ever since leaving these watery hills and hollers. But he’s come back to live amongst us, ain’t he – and I got to say that, to me, he ain’t ever been nothing only courteous and attentive. You hear?

–Polite, that’d be him, Wee Hughie Munley agreed, that’d be Mr Monroe OK, and there ain’t a soul around here can disagree.

Sonny Hackett, simmering, leaned against the bar counter and snarled:

–Anyone hereabouts as ever says a word against him, I’ll drop them. Drop the bitches right where they stand. You think I wouldn’t? For Heartland and the upcountry code … yeah.

Once upon a time there was a tumbledown shack just lying there by the roadside – until a certain WW had transformed it into what could only be called some kind of magnificent temple. But not remaining content with that – he had been possessed of the impertinence to mount an enormous confectionery-pink fibreglass heart, hoisted on metal supports on top of the roof, with magnificent effrontery shedding its romantic glow all across the wooded slopes and shallow lakes and little mountains of Glasson County.

Because lighting was important, WW had always insisted, especially for half-blind bitches such as us as has spent way too long, maybe centuries, in the dark.

From now on, he announced one night, us’n’s ladies is a-gonna be in the pink.

An idea which, he’d gone on to explain, derived from the entertainment world of the nineteen-thirties, when pink lighting had been used in clubs and glamour spots to give skin tones a healthy and attractive glow.

Who would ever have believed it possible?

In a ‘nowhere place’ the likes of Glasson County?

As the elaborately animated sign surmounting the entrance – The Heartland Ballroom – seductively flicked its lights on and off.

With the giant rooftop heart revolving in its radiant blush-pink glory.

Just as it had been doing that same night long ago, in the early seventies, when they had all been sitting there waiting in the back bar of Heartland, excited by the prospect of their new boss’s appearance, for the purpose of congratulating them for having made the first night of Heartland such a success.

Big Barney Grue – eyes blazing, whiskers flaring – saw no option but right there and then to stand out on the floor and, rotating his fists, threaten there and then to take on all comers.

–Any man-fucking-jack, that is, who is dumb enough to have the nerve to run down any of us what comes from Glasson County.

As they cheered him on, and he stomped the floorboards, fists still flying.

–Because we all know what them city boys they say about us. A gang of thieves and outlaws defying the laws of their country – that’s all they ever had to say about us. That was before Mr Monroe come home. Yes, that was before the first block of Heartland ever was laid. But now things are different. Me and you, we gonna show ’em, Big Barney, Mr Monroe says. And we will. We – goddamn it! – we sure as hell will!

But all of that now was history – all of twenty years ago, and more.

And now Mr Monroe, that old WW, he was dead.

Well, of course he was. For they’d all just watched his coffin being lowered, right up there on the hillside in that garden of stone lying in the shadow of Glasson Mountain.

And which was why it was proving so hard for any of them to be there, there in that same back bar, the site of so many possibilities long ago.

Having arrived there immediately after the ceremony – like all of them had been drawn there in some inexplicable trance, just sitting there in a kind of daze.

Red Campbell had looked up as though he were ashamed.

As Wee Hughie came over and generously replenished his glass.

–Someone has got to pay for this, said Sonny, for I’m not sure I can bear this pain.

–Someone, vowed Red, has got to make this cruel day right …

Big Barney Grue’s lips were moving all right, but he couldn’t have told you what they were saying.

Or even if they’d said anything.

–Someone, repeated Sonny, you believe me, someone is gonna have to pay this check.

And, just at that moment, he lifted a bottle and drained its entire contents by the neck, momentarily experiencing a dramatic vision of the recently deceased WW Monroe – having, astonishingly, without any form of warning at all, suddenly appeared there in the ballroom’s back bar.

Quite alive, oh yes. More alive than ever, in fact.

No mistake about that.

Striding, or so it seemed, right through those swinging double doors, laughing and hollering in the company of his loyal and trusted lieutenant, Tony Begley.

Before swinging right across to ‘talk turkey’ to his ‘favourite barman’, the one and only Red Campbell, as he gave Wee Hughie his great big broad twinkling smile.

–Hell, Hughie, whooped the businessman, if you don’t look like that old bluebird of happiness has this very second arrived at your front door.

Before standing in front of them, with his fingers drumming on his lapels as usual, and suddenly appearing almost twenty foot in height. Or, at least, that was how it had seemed to Sonny Hackett – with a kind of peace and contentment about him.

Of achievement, maybe.

Or satisfaction, Sonny thought to himself.

Now that his life’s dream of Heartland had been realised, with many more equally magnificent ballrooms to come, he had assured them.

–With a spectacular restaurant service, three or four weddings on weekends, and live music several nights a week. So, hold your head up here, sweet little Glasson County, for you just fell in the shithole and come right up with the gold watch and chain – right Tony?

Tony Begley stepped forward into the light, smartly dressed for the opening in country-club casual, dark-coloured slacks with an untucked sports shirt smoothed out over a ballooning stomach, and high-sided elasticated brown boots.

–They’re done laughing at the country boys, he continued with some insouciance, they’ve done their share of patronising us fellers.

–Damn right, agreed Sonny, you sure have got that one right, Tony Begley. Good on ya, buddy!