Late City E-Book

Robert Olen Butler

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A visionary and poignant novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the trenches of the Great War to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the following decades, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus. Sam grows up in Louisiana with a harsh father, who he comes to resent for both his physical abuse and what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army while underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him survive the War, but prevents him from contending with its emotional wounds. Back in the US, Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam's at almost every turn. As he contemplates his relationships - with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son - Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years in this heart-rending novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Leseprobe

Praise for Robert Olen Butler

Perfume River

‘Butler’s Faulknerian shuttling back and forth across the decades has less to do with literary pyrotechnics than with cutting to the chase. Perfume River hits its marks with a highstakes intensity… Butler’s particulars on the two brothers’ marriages are comprehensively adroit… Butler’s prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don’t extend just to his characters’ traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he’s addressing… “You share a war in one way,” Robert thinks. “You pass it on in another.” Perfume River captures both the agony and subtlety of how that happens’ – New York Times Book Review

‘This novel confronts the long aftermath of the Vietnam War… Butler roves gracefully… across the perspectives of many characters, showing particular tenderness in his depiction of Robert’s wife, Darla, and her attempt to harmonize conflicting parts of her husband’s life’ – New Yorker

‘Movingly portrays a family still torn apart by a war that ended 40 years earlier’ – Sunday Times

‘Perfume River is a highly accomplished novel. Butler’s prose is polished and supple, his elegant voice capable of shifting from academia to the “whoosh… and blare” of combat, then to the lush immediacy of Vietnam’ – Spectator

‘The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain revisits the Vietnam War in this contemporary novel about a family still wrestling with the conflict… Butler shifts POV seamlessly among his believably complicated characters’ – Newsday

‘No synopsis can convey the deceptive richness of Butler’s storytelling. The writing style, precise and beautiful, discloses more than the simple surface action of any one passage… Butler moves seamlessly between points of view, sometimes within the same paragraph… [A] deftly slipsliding narrative… Butler greatly enlarges our sense of what the Vietnam War cost to a generation… [A] quietly bristling book… Perfume River tells a human story that sums up an entire era of American life’ – Miami Herald

‘The strength of this novel is its shifting point of view. Butler moves easily among his characters to create a composite portrait of a family that has been wrecked by choices made during the Vietnam War’ – San Francisco Chronicle

‘In Perfume River, Butler continues in his sensitive, highly nuanced, roaming style to explore the repercussions the [Vietnam] war has had on its American veterans, their families and their relationships. Eloquent… once again, Butler has written a meaningful novel for the Vietnam War generation. And for their children and grandchildren’ – St Louis Post-Dispatch

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

‘The book has attracted such acclaim not simply because it is beautifully and powerfully written, but because it convincingly pulls off an immense imaginative risk… Butler has not only entered the significant and ever-growing canon of Vietnam-related fiction (he has long been a member) he has changed its composition forever’ – Guardian

‘Deeply affecting… a brilliant collection of stories about storytellers whose recited folklore radiates as implicit prayer… One of the strongest collections I’ve read in ages’ – Ann Beattie

‘A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is remarkable… for how beautifully it achieves its daring project of making the Vietnamese real’ – New York Times

‘Butler writes essentially, and in a bewitching translation of voice and sympathy, what it means to lose a country, to remember it, and to have the memory begin to grow old. He writes as if it were his loss, too’ – Los Angeles Times Book Review

‘Robert Olen Butler is a poet who writes prose fiction; but more important is the beauty he saw rise from a tragic war. There is no American writer I know of who writes with more compassion and understanding than he’ – James Lee Burke

‘Butler’s achievement is not only to reveal the inner lives of the Vietnamese, but to show, through their eyes, how the rest of us appear from an outside perspective’ – Chicago Tribune

Christopher Marlowe ‘Kit’ Cobb series

‘A thriller of great depth and intelligence’ – Sunday Times

‘Written in a hard-boiled, staccato style, Paris in the Dark is an intelligent, stylish thriller, and so atmospheric that the pages reek of Gitanes and coffee’ – Times

‘A morally complex and beautifully written thriller with a delicately portrayed love story at its heart. A cut above’ – Mail on Sunday

‘A riveting thriller with impressively well-developed characters and such rich historical detail that is hard to put down’ – Daily Express

‘As well as being a top thriller, Paris in the Dark oozes the atmosphere of the city at that time – you can almost smell the Gauloises, not to mention the tension and fear’ – Sunday Sport

‘A genuine and exhilarating success’ – Times Literary Supplement

‘The Hot Country draws on many elements of the traditional adventure yarn, including disguises, fist fights and foot races, double agents and alluring young women who may be honey traps or spies… though in prose that has been written with serious attention… this first report makes you want to read on into the war correspondent’s second edition’ – Guardian

‘An exciting story… The Hot Country is a thinking person’s thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah’ – Washington Post

‘A historical thriller of admirable depth and intelligence’ – BBC History Magazine

‘High-spirited adventure… great writing’ – New York Times

‘Mr Butler does a terrific job of depicting both the journalist’s facility for teasing information from his subjects and the spy’s incessant fear of being discovered. There’s something almost magical about the way the author re-creates this 1915 milieu…’ – The Wall Street Journal

‘Exciting… the period details are spot on… This tale of shifting allegiances and worldwide consequences enthralls’ – Publishers Weekly

For Spencer Wise

There’s a copydesk in my brain, with a gooseneck lamp and a pot of rubber cement and a coffee mug full of Dixon pencils.

Let’s edit this at once: Not precisely my brain. I am separated even from that, it seems. Ironically so, as I feel a clarity inside me now that I haven’t felt for a long time.

The copy chief is at the desk as well, hunched there, composing a headline for the story that now is unfolding not in my brain but somewhere else. He hands it to me. Triple deck:

Mountebank Wins,

Editor-in-Chief

Begins to Die

I’ve been watching. For years I’ve been watching the television screen floating near the ceiling, beyond the foot of my bed. Tonight they thought I was asleep for good. Accompanied by a solitary figure in the darkened room, vague to me, sitting on a chair at my bedside. The screen lit before both of us has also just gone dark.

Where I lie, the time is a quarter to two in the morning on November 9, 2016.

But at this moment I am somewhere else.

My copydesk editor is having his little joke. Walter Mandel. From the Chicago Independent. Dead long ago, I know. Both man and newspaper. Though somehow I am not surprised that it’s Walter who has turned his mare-gray eyes and his ocean-wave mustache toward me, the latter masking beneath its surface what I take to be a sly smile.

I look at the first sentence of the story: ‘Ten minutes after Donald J. Trump was declared president of the United States, the last living veteran of World War I began to die in a nursing home in Chicago, Illinois.’

This I take to be true. The event on the television and the last living veteran of the Great War in his nursing home, certainly. That’s me, or so I’ve been told, the last one. That’s where I am. And that’s what the United States of America has suddenly become. I have to believe the news hook as well. It’s high time I began to die.

And another thing I believe is that I am about to hear the voice of God. I believe it with an instinctive assurance that is no doubt straight from Him.

‘Samuel,’ He says in a mellifluous tenor voice.

For a moment I try to convince myself it’s Walter. But it clearly is not. Walter has vanished. The voice has come from the dark.

But God apparently has taken Walter’s chair at the copydesk. He edits that last thought of mine: ‘From the dark matter,’ He says.

This recent scoop about infinitesimal stuff teeming in the void has been lingering in the news, and in my mind. I say to God, ‘Does all that have something to do with you?’

‘I have no comment,’ He says.

‘I have no newspaper,’ I say.

He humphs. Gently. ‘I’m the interviewer for now,’ He says. ‘I want you to talk to me, Samuel. About your life. On the record.’

‘Can I ask another question first? Off the record?’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘What the hell just happened?’

‘You have begun to die,’ He says.

‘I don’t mean that,’ I say.

‘Oh, you mean him,’ God says. ‘You tell me.’

‘Tell you what? I have no idea.’

‘Neither do I,’ He says. ‘But that’s how I chose to make you humans. Full of surprises.’

I feel a sudden draft from the dark. A sigh, I assume.

And then He says, ‘So talk to me, Sam. Who are you?’

This gives me pause. I’ve been expecting to die for quite a while. Since I turned a hundred, certainly. I was pushing 116 till a couple of minutes ago, which has for some time been daily surprising the hell out of me. But I haven’t been particularly religious for many decades, in spite of spending plenty of this-nation-under-God time in pews as a boy, reading and retaining verses. But that passed soon enough. So at no time have I been expecting a Judgment Day, if that’s what this is. ‘May I ask one more question?’

‘Yes.’ This time the sigh is in His tone.

I pause ever so slightly.

‘Yes, I’m omniscient,’ He says.

Which, indeed, is the answer to my most current question, the one that arose in me in that pause as soon as I asked the question about asking a question.

He says, ‘Now you can ask the previous one. The important one.’

‘Do I need to speak it?’

‘Yes, you need to speak it. Not that it’s strictly necessary. But it’s part of the process. Trust me.’

I feel the urge to chuckle.

‘Go ahead and let it out,’ He says. ‘I’ll share the irony with you.’

I chuckle. In God we trust. Now the Man Himself feels He has to solicit my trust so I can tell Him my American story.

The Man Himself.

Man.

Another digressive question comes to mind.

‘I’m gender fluid,’ He answers.

For a guy born in 1901, this was another difficult concept that had lately floated from the screen at the end of my bed. One I have struggled to understand.

‘Look,’ God says, ‘don’t concern yourself with pronouns. Think of me the way you need to think of me. Now ask your real question so we can get on with this.’

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Are there consequences?’

‘To the telling of your life? No.’

I wait for more. Nothing is forthcoming. No consequences to the telling. But how about to the life itself?

He reads my mind.

‘Ambiguous?’ He says. ‘Yes, I admit it. But you’ll find I’ve always been ambiguous with humanity. You surprise me. I surprise you.’

‘It’s your surprises I’m worried about,’ I say.

‘I want you to tell me your own story. As it comes to you. Like brainstorming.’ God pauses. He edits Himself. ‘No, that will lead you astray. Think of it as dreamstorming.’

That sounds like what I used to do as a young crime reporter in Chicago. Out by the lake or in a tenement or on a back path in Grant Park. At the crime scene. Before figuring out the lede and putting it all in logical sequence for the bulldog edition, I’d fill my notebooks with the bloodstains or the weeping in the corner or the oblivious wind in the trees. The stuff that felt like how it all really was, and like the story I was going to write was true enough but artificial somehow.

‘You were a good newsman,’ God says. ‘Just tell it to me straight from your notebook. But I will give you this much guidance. A commandment, if you will, which you all are always so eager to get from me. I want you to live your stories just as they felt in their own moment, with the next day’s news yet to happen. Given that, don’t be surprised if your memory consistently fails you about how things turn out. You will inhabit your past as you lived it, without knowing the future that will come of it. And until you and I are nearly finished, you may not recall the outcomes even as you lie here having already lived it all. So I’m giving you a commandment to be patient.’

God falls silent.

I accept all that. It sounds familiar. God runs the show. His creatures set their own agendas. Especially under the present circumstances, however, I hanker for a little direction from Him.

And God says, ‘You want a commencing direction, Sam? Okay. See your earthly father… Start with him.’ So I try.

I find a time gone by. A century gone.

But I’m not looking at Papa’s face, though I’m walking beside him, right enough. We’ve just stepped out of the general store and turned north on the wood-plank sidewalk that runs along the main street parallel to the river. He has made it a point to take me for what he calls a sweets run, him being under instructions from Mama, who is doing up jams and running out of sugar and needing cane, not beet, for land’s sake. So we each have a kraft bag, he with ten pounds of cane sugar, and I with Necco wafers and sorghum drops.

This is the town of Lake Providence, the parish of East Carroll, the state of Louisiana. I’m not looking up at Papa but at a chestnut horse hitched at a post along the way. He’s fluttering his nostrils in my direction, making the sound of a whopping-big cat purring like he knows me, which he does.

The sun is halfway down from noon and it’s hot, and on this particular day the farthest I’ve been from Lake Providence is the forests of oak and gum and pecan west of town along the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway track, and sometimes I’ve been with Papa on the oxbow lake, also called Providence, the place full of cypress stumps that I always fancy to be steeple caps of wizards waiting to rise from the water one of these days. Rise and do what, I’m never sure. And sometimes I have climbed to the crown of the levee and stood to watch the Mississippi flowing wide and muddy from way up north and on past to New Orleans and into the Gulf, and already I’m starting to think about leaving.

I turn my eyes from the river to the dark where God is lurking.

‘You’re not looking at him,’ God says.

He’s right.

I return to Lake Providence.

We’re still treading the planks and I give my father an upward glance, past his shoulder, ready to find his eyes. But he seems intent on something up ahead. So I turn to the horse who knows me, and he stops his purring as I pass and gives me a snort. I think to address him, to ask him if he’s God standing there in this memory of more than a hundred years ago trying to keep me on track.

But it’s Papa who does that now – keeps me on track – by slowing and letting his free hand fall gently on my shoulder to hold me fully beside him, and I look ahead to see what he sees.

A man and a boy are walking toward us, filling the navigable center of the sidewalk. They’re still a little ways away, but I know why it’s an issue. It’s Louisiana and it’s 1908 and they are colored. A father and son in patched-all-over overalls. The boy is about my age, about my size, a milk jug for filling in his hand. His eyes are fixed on the spot on the sidewalk where he will step next, and I look to his papa. He’s got a brace of mink skins over a shoulder and his eyes are just now moving from my father’s to mine, very briefly, and then back to Papa’s.

The colored man and his son keep on coming this way.

Papa stops and I stop.

I look up at him. He’s focused straight ahead, but I can imagine the double crease that has just appeared on his brow, between his eyes. That crease, when directed at me, always gets my full and fearful attention. And it is about to have the same effect on this man and his boy. Or so I assume at the time, that it’s my papa’s severe expression that commands what happens next.

The father also slows and his restraining hand falls to his son’s shoulder, gently, and even at the time when this is all going on, long ago, I am struck by how these two papas have done that same gentle thing to their sons, just the same. His father’s touch brings the colored boy’s eyes up and straight to mine.

I give him a look and he gives me a look and it’s like we recognize what creatures we each are and what our fathers need to negotiate, but also that there is nothing he and I could ever put into this look between us other than: Well,Idorecognizeyou, generally speaking, and sure enough, there you are. Only that.

We all four of us are dead stopped now.

My papa lets this be for one breath, and another, and the colored papa is doing the same.

Then mine says, ‘You’re a trapper, I see.’

‘That I am, boss,’ the colored papa says, and that last word does not come out of him like he’s being submissive. But not sneering either. More like familiar, casual.

My father says, ‘You a new fellow in Lake Providence?’

‘New to your eyes, maybe,’ he says. ‘I don’t of a usual walk this street, but I am just looking to make a simple trade at the store for some basics.’

‘That’s it then. You’re new to the street.’ And with a serious, slow dip in his voice, he somehow makes it clear he’s notsaying, That’s why you’re new to my eyes, but rather he’s saying, Then to get through this situation without a big fuss, let’s just assume you don’t yet realize that you and your boy are to yield the way to the whites in Lake Providence, Louisiana.

I can tell the colored father knows what Papa is really saying because he turns his face from us and looks down at his son, and he does this slow and keeping quiet, and you know he’s sad for his son to be facing this situation and he’s wondering how to teach him the rules of Lake Providence, Louisiana, in 1908 without losing his own dignity or putting a crack in his son’s spirit, choices that colored fathers might rightly have expected to cease being necessary forty-some years ago. Before this particular colored father was even ever born.

But the boy is looking at me and seems oblivious. And I’m looking at him and probably seeming just as oblivious. Which is probably what I am. At the time, I didn’t know all this nuance was going on. I guess that’s a thing God is letting me understand now in the retelling of it as I die.

And the colored father says, ‘Boy, slide off this here planking so these folks can find their way on by.’

I feel my father tense up just a little. How this man put it to his son is the reason. What was clear underneath those words. Boundaries being set to the spirit of what they were doing. Boundaries set by a colored man. That is evident to me now. So Papa is tensed up. He’s got cane sugar and I’ve got a bag of penny candy and he’s got his views, but for whatever else I’m picking up about my father, I see those views of his have their own boundaries. He doesn’t make a fuss. He just stays tense while he waits for the colored man and the colored boy to slide on off the sidewalk.

Which they do.

And they collect themselves out in the street.

And they spectate as we move on by.

My papa waits till we are out of earshot to break the silence between us. ‘These ones born since all the trouble are incubator chickens. Raised without a mama to tell them who or where they are. Specially these trapper boys. All they have to measure themselves by are trees and animals.’

And he says no more till we are approaching our house and the road beneath our feet is dirt and he stops us. He nods for me to hold my ground as he takes my bag of penny candy and steps away, and he puts it over on the verge of grass and sets his bag of sugar next to it. Then he takes up a water oak switch off the ground and heads for me and I worry.

But no. Surely no. The thing in his hand is stiffer than a switch. A thing meant for a true beating. Beatings that have persuaded me in the past. Persuaded me that I earned them because I came to accurately know when to expect them. And I know that today, so far, I have not earned a stiff-wood beating.

He stops before me.

He says, ‘Now, boy, listen close. First let me make something clear. Have you ever heard me speak of those breed of folks by using a slang word?’

‘No, sir, I have not.’ Though it is also true I clearly know what breed of folks he’s referring to.

‘Nor will you ever. Nor have I allowed you to use slang words about them.’

This is true. I nod in affirmation.

‘They are coloreds,’ my papa says. ‘This is a simple fact. Like we are whites. All of us are made by God in these bodies, as Henry is made in his body, as Whimsy is made in hers, as a mountain lion is in his and a deer buck in his and a wolf. You understand?’

‘Yessir,’ I say. Henry being our dog. Whimsy our sometimes cat, feral but ours at her whim. I have heard all this before from my father. But this is his way. What someday, as a cub reporter in Chicago, I will learn to put at the bottom of stories – the background from previous stories – my father has a habit of putting before the lede.

For which I wait.

He lifts the stick.

I struggle not to flinch.

He turns his back to me.

I am, as I suspected, off the hook.

I can see he is stretching out his stick hand before him and touching it down. And then he moves his whole body to the right, starting to walk around me, drawing in the dirt as he goes.

He returns to where he began and stands at my side.

My papa and I are in the center of a circle.

‘We got no choice in this life,’ he says. ‘We are here to figure out one thing. Who are we? Where do we belong? There has to be a circle around us. Because we ain’t everywhere. And we ain’t everybody. We all understand that, deep down. Sometimes who’s in that circle with you is clearly for the best. Sometimes it’s regrettable. But you have to figure out where it must be drawn.’

And he stops talking. He tosses the stick outside of the circle.

We just stand there. I’m expected to ponder.

I do ponder. But at the time, as a boy, I’m just calculating: once that circle became what it was, the stick went out. So what about my bag of penny candy sitting over on the grass? It ain’t where I am. It ain’t me. Have I lost it?

And Papa asks, ‘You understand?’

I feel him looking down at me.

I do not look up.

Whatever I’ve been picking up on through this whole thing and whatever I’ve not, whatever I’m not understanding then and whatever I will not fully understand – if at all – even all these years later, I do recognize what I need to say at that moment. So I say it. ‘Yessir. Yes, sir. I understand.’

But I say it with my eyes averted from him, as if speaking to the circle in the dirt.

I was a stupid boy.

I may be a stupid old man.

I have still not looked into my father’s face. A realization that turns me to the dark.

I wait for a rebuke from God. I almost say, Am I reading your mind now? Almost. I do not.

But God replies nevertheless. ‘There’ve been legions who believed they could do that.’ He pauses. Makes a vocalized snicking sound – weary disapproval. Then: ‘But at least in this case…’

‘You’ve told me twice already,’ I say.

‘… you read my mind,’ He says, oozing the words to make their sarcasm clear.

I turn to my father.

We stand at the edge of a clearing in the woods south of the lake. I am lowering my boyhood rifle from my shoulder, a Winchester ’90. Twenty-two caliber, for me to kill anything small we happen upon. My father is beside me. I sense him there. But all I see of him, out of the corner of my eye, is the barrel of his own Winchester, dipped downward. A Model 1894 Special. Thirty-two caliber, to kill anything big. We have the killing covered. A fine circle around the two of us, to my boy’s mind.

I will look into his eyes now, as I have indeed just killed something. Of course I will look. Their gaze in this moment is what I have killed for.

I turn to him.

He turns to me.

I have my father’s eyes, my mother says. The same dark blue. Gun-barrel blue.

Those eyes of his hold fast upon mine.

And I find myself seeing something in them. And I find myself believing it. A fierceness. But a tenderness as well. How do I see those contradictory things? Things that are abstract to speak of but are, in fact, minutely, complexly of the senses? Somehow. Somehow I do. There is something in the shaping of them or the casting outward of an internal light or a latent weltering in their depths, things manifest to see but unnamable, that say, You are my son and you have done good. That say, You have encountered a small living thing of flesh and bone and blood and fur or feather, a small thing unable to do you or me any harm, and perhaps we will eat it but that isn’t really necessary; you have encountered this creature and because you understand that you are stronger than it is and that you have this weapon, you therefore have mortal dominion over it; and so you have shattered its body and taken away its life, which affirms who you are, and I am proud of you for that, my son, for that I love you.

‘Oh, fuck.’

I say this aloud.

But not to my papa, who vanishes with those two words.

‘“Oh, fuck” you say?’ God’s voice.

I look in His direction.

‘Sorry,’ I say, diverted now to the matter of my profanity before the Creator, curse words being a habit I acquired in my seventies.

‘Oh please,’ God says. ‘Who do you take me for? Profanity has nothing to do with words. Talk to me about your fucking heart.’

And I am standing on the levee. I am still a boy.

The river flows before me, familiar as my coonhound.

I must have come here to cast my mind once more upon the current and glide away.

And I realize someone is nearby.

I turn. He is turning to me as well.

The colored boy from the sidewalk.

He rolls his shoulders. Like the levee has no rules of race.

I agree.

I nod at him to say so.

He hesitates.

He nods in return.

‘You got a name?’ I ask.

‘Course I do,’ he says.

We let that be for a few moments.

‘So do I,’ I say.

He humphs.

The boy has his daddy’s spirit, I think. My own daddy would not like that. Papa would expect me to walk on away from this boy. Or maybe more likely expect me to tell him to go.

But I say, ‘Ain’t seen you here.’

‘Likewise,’ he says.

I may even have gone hunting with Papa since me and this boy confronted each other with our fathers. Maybe even gone hunting and Papa gave me that look I will remember someday as I’m dying. Anyway, I think to say to this colored boy, ‘You go hunting with your pa, do you?’

The colored boy says, ‘If you mean them skins, he trap ’em.’

‘I know you don’t shoot a mink,’ I say. ‘Hurts the pelt.’

The boy nods.

We fall silent.

Then he asks, ‘You go trapping with your pappy, do you?’

‘We just shoot things,’ I say.

We don’t speak for another few moments. The boy seems to be contemplating me and the situation. He reminds me of how his papa was, in town. In the way of thinking carefully about what’s next while standing at the edge of a circle drawn around white people.

Then this boy says, ‘Cyrus Dobbs.’

He has done some thinking that I didn’t rightly expect, and it takes me a moment to catch up. His name.

‘Cyrus Dobbs,’ I say.

‘Cyrus been given me, but Dobbs was a name we got from the man owned my granddaddy. Not rightly our name, seems to me.’

‘Then what is?’

‘Don’t have a clue.’

‘Sam,’ I say. ‘That’s mine. Sam Cunningham.’

Another silence, and I am thinking how no one owned my granddaddy. This boy Cyrus is probably thinking the same thing about me. Which makes the silence drag on out. Makes it hard to have anything else to say, seeing as how things are.

Hard to tell how I’m picking up on what we’ve both been mulling over. Same way I read my daddy’s face in the woods, maybe. But I know. And I know Cyrus Dobbs knows.

We both turn back to the river. Then I am on to my own thoughts. How my granddaddy was sure enough owned by somebody, for a few years at least. The Confederate army owned him body, brain, and soul.

Eventually my mind comes back to the colored boy. I wonder if he is up here on the levee thinking like me on one other matter: getting away someday from Lake Providence. So I turn to look at him again and his back is to me and he is already fifty yards or so on along the levee, heading off with a firm stride.

The light on the levee fades now with that colored boy’s leaving and it vanishes and I am in the dark again, though God doesn’t pipe up right away. And I think, more than a century later: They owned him for more than a few years. The Confederate army owned my granddaddy from the war onward, to his dying day.

‘Do you remember my granddaddy?’ I ask in the direction of God.

No answer.

I keep asking. ‘When he stood or lay or stomped around before you, pissed as hell about the act of dying not being what he expected?’

Nothing.

‘Do you remember him? Ezra Theophilus Cunningham?’

‘I remember them all,’ God says in a weary voice.

‘Dare I ask?’ Meaning Heaven or Hell for Granddaddy.

‘No,’ God says.

‘I’m not surprised,’ I say, taking this to be an answer.

‘Don’t jump to any conclusions,’ God says. ‘Has any of this so far gone the way you thought it would?’

Then a cloud. A seething cloud. My mother’s form dark within. With light pouring from a window. Our kitchen in Lake Providence. Her back to me. Steam, I suppose, from pots on the cast-iron stove, where she stands. I think of the sugar Papa and I sought, the jams she was making, but that’s simply me trying to impose my sense of order on these visions, a continuity, and I know that’s a mistake. There seems to be so much steam and she is large within its cloud. I am very small. This is another time. Earlier. Through my child’s eyes.

I watch her. I wait. She does not turn. She seems unaware of me. Her shoulders move at her work. Her hands are out of my sight, before her.

And a rushing now. From behind me and past me, a vast dark form striding into the cloud. My father. His back eclipses hers and his voice bellows. I can’t make out the words, but I know their meaning. My mother has offended.

And now it is night.

I am alone in my room and his voice again, down the hall. And my mother’s voice beneath, making a sound I sometimes hear from my own mouth. And I wonder, Does he have a stiff-wood branch in his hand? For her as well? I sit up in my bed. I think to rise, to go to see. At least to my doorway. To what end? He has rightful dominion over us both. Instead I lie back, I shroud my head with the sheet.

And I am in this bed another time and my head is uncovered and it is fiercely full of fire, and the muscles, the sinews, the very bones of my body, are minced fine with pain and my mother’s hand is on my cheek and then on my forehead, and now her hand is upon my chest and spreads a quickly expanding chill there, and the chill rises into my nose – menthol and eucalyptus – my head fills with the cold flame of Vick’s Croup and Pneumonia Salve.

‘There,’ she says, low, almost a whisper, leaning close, a secret. ‘Good Doctor Vick goes across the ocean to Japan just for you, for a special mint leaf. Does it feel nice?’

‘Yes, Mama,’ I whisper in return.

‘It will help you,’ she says.

‘Am I going to die?’ I ask her.

Her hand ceases its rubbing. But it stays where it has ceased, in the center of my chest. She is collecting herself. She is waiting until she can answer without weeping, without letting even a hint of tears taint her words. And finally she says, ‘No, my darling. You will live to be an old, old man.’

Even as a child I quailed at her hesitation. I knew she was afraid for me. Perhaps that hand on my chest was feeling my heart, was waiting for it to stop.

What am I looking at through all this? Not her face. Vaguely the room, a low lamp she has placed on a dresser, lighting a patch of the far wall, a corner of the ceiling. I try now to turn my eyes to see hers. But I cannot move my eyes away from a meaningless patch of light.

Still I try. In vain. Until what I see is only darkness.

‘Help me,’ I say into the dark, assuming God is there.

He does not answer.

The darkness persists.

I say, ‘I want to see my mother’s eyes.’

Nothing from God.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘You were pushing me about Papa’s eyes.’

And God says, ‘You creatures there below never were very good at figuring out divine plans. Even small ones.’

I feel myself dumbly staring into the dark.

‘This you want for yourself,’ He says, like He’s telling me something I should already know.

I’m still feeling dumb.

He says, ‘So?’

Okay. Okay. It’s up to me.

I close my eyes.

I open them.

I’m standing at the kitchen window. She’s crouched on the ground outside, beside a cast-iron kettle. She’s facing me but her kerchiefed head is down. She’s dry-plucking mallards. Her hands are moving quick but gentle. The feathers are going into the kettle. The dead birds, adorned as they were in life, are piled on one side of her. The plucked birds are on the other. The air around her is filling with woolly down and she is focused on this work of her hands, her assigned role in our hunt.

Lift your head, Mama. Look up, Mama. See me at the window.

She does not.

I wait.

And the fog is thickening and Mama fades within it and I still have not seen her eyes.

It’s been a hundred years. More. But it’s my mama. I can’t have forgotten them.

‘It’s you holding her away from me,’ I say to God, even though the fog of feather down is still before me, too dense now even to make out her shape.

I turn my face from the window, to my mother’s stove again, in this little dream. Surely all of this is a dream. But no. It’s just me dying. And it’s Mama’s stove. Cold now. Empty. She’s in the yard plucking fucking ducks and I can’t see her.

Of course not. Of course not. I was a little boy. I loved my mother and she did her work. A mother’s work. She pressed away my fever with her hand. She put her hand on my chest to save my life. She whispered to me when that’s what I needed. But that was all temporary. Surely I had to become a man. I became a man. Surely that line was already drawn around me.

I look back through the window.

And my father is standing there.

My mother is gone.

My father’s eyes are upon me.

But they are not fierce.

It is my papa, waiting calmly for me to come join him.

Which is what I want. In this boy’s body, standing in our kitchen a century ago, this is what I want. I want a papa. And this man is my papa. My only papa. I want to be his boy, want to be his big boy, want to be his son. I want to be loved by my papa, want to be a good boy in his eyes, want to be a fine young man. I want to be fit to be his son. I want to earn another day without a beating. Because the beatings when they come are my own fault. That much I have learned even if I haven’t learned how to avoid them.

And now Papa is gone.

The yard is empty.

Then the yard is gone.

And the room is dark. My room at the nursing home. But the door is open, and the night corridor lighting has moved in like ground fog, bearing loud talk from down the hall. The voices of people I am familiar with.

I sit up in my bed.

Have I stopped dying?

I find myself standing in the open doorway. Suddenly. Unsupported. I’m still dying, I suppose.

A reasonable supposition, as I am now standing in the corridor a couple of steps short of the front desk. The clock on the wall behind the desk says it’s nearing 2:00. I have not focused on the words roiling before me, but I hear enough to know the subject. The new president of the United States has lately been declared. It is once again – or perhaps still – the moment, according to the story in the Chicago Independent, that I first began to die.

Behind the desk is Nurse Bocage, a tall Black Creole woman, an immigrant from my once home state, her hair lately done into cornrows with a bun at the back. At this moment she is taller seeming than usual, as she has drawn herself fiercely upright.

Facing off with her, at the other side of the desk but staying beyond her reach, is Duke, the guy from maintenance, a welterweight white man with cauliflower ears.

I do not understand his being here at this hour. Perhaps something has broken down. From Nurse Bocage’s point of view, of course, something has. From Duke’s point of view, the Maintenance Man in Chief has arrived.

These two are slugging it out with combos and flurries of words, slippings and bobbings and clinchings of words. Swamps and great agains; morons and racists. I do not allow the words to shape into actual sentences in my head. The voices pound on as mere sound, a thing I find I can manage as I stand unseen among them. A privilege of dying, I assume.

And a nurse assistant called Peaches, of her own special in-between color, is leaning on the desk just beyond Nurse Bocage. She always has a soothing voice for an old man’s ear but carries it in a body with a man’s wide shoulders and thick arms, looking like she could go ten rounds with Duke and give him all he can handle.

And there’s one other figure. A tall, slender man standing in the center of the common room beyond the desk. I see him in profile as he watches the muted television. He has a sizable bun of hair at the back of his head, like a woman, like Nurse Bocage. A man clearly of color, though somewhat mutedly so, someone the likes of whom my mother preferred to call ‘high tan.’ He’s dressed in the home’s pale blue scrubs. Nurse Bocage’s new licensed practical nurse, no doubt, her last LPN a woman having gone off to take care of children at the Shriners Hospital.

Abruptly the words cease.

But I’m still standing near these people.

Head nurse and maintenance man – Black woman and white man – are staring at each other as if waiting for one of them to step off the sidewalk and let the other pass.

And Nurse Bocage says, low, almost to herself, ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But Mother of God. How did we come to this?’

Duke opens his mouth, but before a sound can emerge, she says, ‘Do not attempt to answer that question.’

Duke snaps his head in my direction, as if it were me who’d told him to shut up. I think for a moment that he sees me. But his eyes don’t register my presence. I am invisible to him, to all of them. Duke’s mouth has crimped tight. He’s looking inward, where he’s fuming.

And I am in my bed, in the dark.

I ask, aloud, ‘So am I dead now? Am I a ghost? Returned to the crypt after a little foray into the flow of time I’m no longer part of ?’

‘No. No. And no,’ God says. ‘Respectively. You floated off on your own.’

‘On my own?’

‘It’s what’s next in the tale of your life, is it not? Striking off on your own? Away from the papa whose worthy boy you ached in vain to be?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And yes.’ Then I snag on that last one for a moment. But: ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Respectively.’

Then we wait, God and I. He for what is next, no doubt. I to pause for the passing wish that I could just die and get it over with. But that is the wish of either a man who expects streets of gold or a man who expects final comfort in simple oblivion. I am neither such man.

I am a newsman. Even now. Though I am having trouble recovering my surest newsman instincts when it comes to the story of my American life. But I was a nascent newsman even when I was first ready to strike out on my own. And Papa was a banker. The Planters & Merchants Bank of Lake Providence. He was a smart banker and he recognized the need for news. So we always had a newspaper on subscription through our postmaster, a real daily up from New Orleans. I spent a childhood reading the daily newspaper as if it were my Brothers Grimm or tales from Oz.

I am sprawled on the front-room floor with a newspaper before me and it’s all mine now, Papa having read it and folded it in half and placed it in my hands with a nod. It’s the Times-Picayune and I’m thirteen years old and it’s April 1914 and I’ve read it all, every story, every advertisement, every want ad, not yet dreaming that this would become my life, the making of a daily newspaper, but I’m seeing it all through those young eyes, between childhood and manhood, seeing both ways at the same time, as a recent boy, as a nascent man.

And now I become self-conscious as I inhabit that boy-man lying on his father’s hardwood floor, still three months away from the start of the Great War. I know I will dote on headlines throughout my boyhood, and so the pages of the Times-Picayune riffle forward and back and forward again.

Army of Invasion Sails To-Day for Mexico Funston Commands Infantry Brigade Sent to Vera Cruz, and the American oil fields of Mexico are made secure and Colquitt Orders Militia to Border but the anti-American Mexican president, General Huerta – how unlike our Princeton professor of a president he is! – is quaking in his boots, and Jeff has the comic strip to himself and has cast off his top hat and is dressing up as a bluejacket to go off to war, till Mutt shouts in from the other room that the Mexican sharpshooters are picking off the American troops from the housetops of Vera Cruz and Jeff dumps his uniform in the trash, and President Resents Negro’s Criticism Refuses to Be Cross-Questioned About Racial Segregation in Government Offices, Wilson enforcing anew the policy of segregation in the Capitol ‘for the comfort and best interests of both races’ and my papa is pleased with his man Wilson on both actions, and Hair Fell Out by Handfuls but after the prolonged, sleepless, scalp-itchy assault of baldness Cuticura Soap Healed All – I will discreetly fold the paper to highlight this ad for Papa to cure the horse’s hoofprint of hair on the top of his head – and Christy Mathewson twirls a two-hitter to beat the Brooklyn Superbas, and appearing at the Orpheum Theater are the Dancing Girls of Delhi who will dance in my head, vague but alluring, for days, and Wilson Refuses Women’s Plea for Aid in Struggle asserting that his refusal was final as the issue had not been addressed in the Democratic Party platform when he was nominated two years ago, and on the Latest Shipping and River News page is the ad for Cunard Fastest Steamers in the World with a photo of the S.S. Lusitania, its four stacks pluming coal smoke, and for months the ship will race through my head, precise and thrilling, and 3,000,000 Have Left Russia to Come Here most of them in the last seven years, and Many Mexican Refugees Visited the Maison Blanche Yesterday the Canal Street department store stressing in a newsy advertisement that it welcomed the refugees gladly and would provide clothing or other things and the ad headlines its way immediately onward with the declaration that Of No Less Interest Is the Display of Summer Dresses with an accompanying line drawing of a beautiful woman standing in profile, hair in a pompadour, wearing a summer dress of frills and ruffles and insertions, a woman who would also provide fuel for heated thought for a long while, and down Canal Street is the chance to Show Your Colors a Large Stock and Complete Assortment of United States Flags Sold at Reasonable Prices, and a Mississippi man retrieves his fourteen-year-old bride who ran away with a traveling carnival show and a Mexican refugee is murdered in the Quarter and a Negro is lynched and another is lashed as Friends of Postal Clerk Use Force to Instill Respect for White Woman, and Mutt in the final panel of the day’s cartoon punches Jeff in the eye – in a frequent running gag of a climax – leaving his friend on the floor with stars circling his head, and this episode of Mutt and Jeff brings me back to the recent episode from which I now extract another thing to dwell on, which I do, off and on, for many months, the news of Mexican sharpshooters attacking our American invaders from housetops, and I have already won my papa’s rare and precious praise for my shooting skills, and I begin to imagine myself wearing the bluejacket of an American marine and rushing up to a rooftop in Vera Cruz with my Winchester Model 1894 Special and one by one methodically killing all the Mexican sharpshooters who would oppose our country’s fighting men.

And that nurtured fantasy begins to inform my solitary climbs to the top of the levee to think my usual thoughts up there, until three years later, almost to the day, these headlines: Wilson Calls Country to Arms by Signing War Bill. After keeping us out of the Great War for all that time, President Woodrow Wilson and the US Congress finally declare war on the Imperial German Government. And elsewhere on the front page: First Call to Be for 500,000 Men Between 19 and 25.