A Miracle of Catfish (2 page)

The experience of working with Larry Brown over the course of his all too short writing career was a high point of my own career in publishing. He was a writer who started from scratch and taught himself not only how to write about what he knew but how to write literature in the process. As he expressed it so clearly in a speech delivered to the
Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, a year after publication of his first book:

It took a long time for me to understand what literature was, and why it was so hard to write, and what it could do to you once you understood it. For me, very simply it meant that I could meet people on the page who were as real as the people I met in my own life . . . Even though they were only words on paper, they were as real to me as my wife and my children. And when I saw that, it was like a curtain fell away from my eyes. I saw that the greatest rewards that could be had from the printed page came from literature and that to be able to write it was the highest form of the art of writing . . . I don't think it was meant to be easy. I think that from the first it was meant to be hard for the few people who came along and wanted to write it, because the standards are so high and the rewards so great.
^*

Larry Brown's determination, his relentless hard work, his unswerving respect for his art, and his honesty in exposing the depth of human emotion paid off. His characters — those real people — live on, just as he intended.

For me, and I hope for you, it doesn't really matter that
A Miracle of Catfish
wasn't quite completed. What he meant it to say is as clear as can be.

Shannon Ravenel
January 2007

* “A Late Start,” a talk given at the Fifth Biennial Conference on Southern Literature, April 8, 1989, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The author was especially grateful to Paula Klepzig Brown for sharing her knowledge of the specifics of Tourettes syndrome.

A MIRACLE OF CATFISH

THE NOVEL'S SETTING, HAND DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR.

The blessed shade lived on the ridge. The white oaks stood with their green tops hanging thick under the sun, and a big old man in faded blue overalls walked in the June heat beneath them. He crunched lightly, ankles deep in dry brown leaves, feet wary for copperheads the same color. He was mopping at the sweat on his brow with his forearm, and he was holding his hand out to bash at the webs of spiders that hung in his path. There was a glade carpeted with lush beds of poison ivy, quiet gardens, no place for a nap. A fox squirrel went up a tree and flowed his tail like water over a limb and then lay down on top of it, his legs hanging, his head low to the limb. An unseen little buddy. An old white-faced boar squirrel with a nut sac that laid out behind him like two pecans in a bag. A breeze lifted and blew a cool wind that for a moment stirred his eyelashes. He twitched his parti-colored nose. He probably appreciated the breeze in some squirrel way.

The old man looked around. There were two sloping walls of trees, a natural place to build a pond. Cortez Sharp could see it plain as day. He'd been seeing it for a while. He wondered if Lucinda would want to take that retard fishing after he got the pond built. And some catfish in it. Course it'd take a while to get them up to eating size. Not a year probably. He didn't think it took them that long to get them up to eating size at the catfish farms down in the Delta. He'd go buy some catfish feed at the Co-op. He'd seen it before, in the stifling heat of the tin-roofed warehouse, stacked in fifty-pound bags on pallets beside fertilizer and seed. Each bag had a picture of a catfish on it. He saw one of those boys who worked in the Co-op's warehouse kill a big woodchuck in there with a shovel one day and then he stretched it out bloody on a pallet with its stained yellow buck teeth showing and Cortez didn't think woodchucks even lived in Mississippi. Was a woodchuck a groundhog? What was that thing about if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Probably came in on a load of feed from somewhere up north. Maybe late in the evenings when it was cooling off he could do it. Throw it out there on the water
like raindrops. He'd have a special bucket just for that. Or maybe a steel garbage can. Have a lid for it. Keep the fire ants out of it. He wondered if that retard of hers even knew how to fish. He wondered how big the fish would get if he just kept on feeding them instead of catching and eating them. He could catch and eat a few of them. Just not all of them. Leave a few in there to see how big they'd get. What if they got to weighing ten pounds? If he kept feeding them and they kept growing they would. What if they got to weighing twenty? What if they got up to thirty? What would that feel like on a rod and reel? He might have to go get a new one. They might break his old one. Shitfire. They might break a
new
one. Wouldn't that be something? What if they got so big they were uncatchable? How fun would that be?

Standing there in the baking woods he looked around again. Why did she want him? What good was he? Cortez just didn't understand it. He knew they slept together. Hell, lived together. He was tired of worrying over it. There wasn't anything he could do about it anyway. She evidently saw something in him. He guessed he could show the dumb son of a bitch how to catch a fish. Maybe that wouldn't be too complicated for him. But that retard sure had him a dirty mouth.

He stood there for a while, […]
^*
and then the old man turned and went away […]. The squirrel lay on his limb and listened to him go, then jumped to another tree, and another, and another, and soon he was just a faint trembling high in the leafy treetops as he gamboled his way into the woods to be unseen again for a while. Maybe. There were hawks in the woods, and when their shadows came sailing by he sought the undersides of branches where perhaps he wouldn't be taloned to death, then fed in bloody pieces to thinly feathered hawklets with hooked beaks that lived in high nests made from big sticks in trees like these. Meat-eaters that grew and finally flew. On gloomy and rainy winter days they gripped with their talons their high and swaying limbs, as the wind riffled the tiny spotted feathers on the backs of their necks, as they coldly surveyed the naked gray oaks of their range and then spread their wings to cruise the pine-covered ridges that lay before them to the ends of the world.

* Throughout, “[…]” indicates that a passage has been cut by the editor.

Soon a yellow D9 Cat, wrenched and welded together by beer-drinking, polka-dancing union members up north, arrived, and then there was no more silence in the simple woods. This American juggernaut crawled with steel treads churning over a hill jetting black smoke, and its progress could be gauged by the shaking treetops with their rafts of dark green leaves waving and then bending before it, like masts in a wild sea, and then slamming to the ground. In this way, tearing and shoving, the machine made its way into the glade of poison ivy and began to push down white oaks and bulldoze them into a pile. The soft earth that had lain hidden beneath rotted leaf mold for millenniums was torn up and printed with dozer tracks and shown to the unflinching sun, where it lay curled and cracked and began to dry and flake and be clambered upon by red fire ants. The sun was hot and the day went on. Things formerly in the shade now got some light. A box turtle moved away dryly rustling, scaly clawed reptilian feet digging for purchase in the dead leaves, bright fingers of yellow stippling its round brown shell. A clan of local crows flew in and lit and walked around on some limbs and started saying in their crow language,
What the hell's up? Anything to eat?

The dozer dude ate his lunch. Fried chicken, cold biscuits, some olives in a plastic bag. A nicely folded paper towel. A homemade fried apple pie crimped around the delicately crusted edges with a fork as evenly as teeth on a gear. Then a good nap beneath the shade of a giant bur oak with a black Cat cap with the yellow letters over his face. The crows sat and jeered and watched him from their limbs.

You think we ought to sneak in on the ground for them scraps? He ain't got no gun. Least I don't see one
.

Naw, man, he may be just playing possum. They do that sometimes. That's how my uncle got killed. My mama told me. Fell for one of them owl decoys and a good mouth caller. Let's just watch him for a while
.

I think he done eat it all anyway. What was it? Fried chicken?

Yeah. Fried chicken. Wing and a leg and a thigh
.

That's another bird, too. I mean if you think about it. Seems kinda cannibalistic if you know what I mean
.

I ain't related to no chicken, but I can see that other biscuit from here
.

Well, if you so badass, why don't you just fly your black ass on in there and get it?

I could if I wanted to. I'm swuft
.

In your dreams maybe
.

I caught a rat other day. Beat a hawk to it
.

A hawk would whip your young ass
.

I can dive-bomb like a freight train
.

Well, do it, punk. Fly on in there and get that biscuit
.

I think I'll just wait till the time's right
.

That's what I figured. Set up here in a tree and talk shit like a juvenile
.

Later on in the afternoon diesel smoke drifted again through the woods, and deer at their grazing in sun-dappled and beech-shaded hollows stopped and smelled it, and their little spotted ones stopped and smelled it, too. It seemed to alarm them a bit. They were used to smelling honeysuckle, cedar, tender shoots of grass, acorns, somebody's nice patch of purple hull peas if they could find it. For which they'd often get the hell shot out of them with 00 buckshot. Maybe Brenneke rifled slugs. Depending upon whose place they were on, maybe even machine-gun slugs. They trotted off toward a trail that led into the forest, single file, tails down, not scared, just moving away to somewhere else, picking up a few more ticks. The bucks' horns were just bulbous branches full of blood at this time of year. They lived there and they weren't about to move just because somebody was building a pond. A regular drinking hole in the woods was actually a pretty good idea.

Jimmy's daddy was lying in the hot gravel in front of his trailer with his head beneath a 1955 Chevy two-door sedan with a wrench in his hand, studying the rusty undersides of it. Saturday. Everybody gone. Shopping in Tupelo with the kids. Nice and quiet. The radio was going through the window of the trailer. Mainstream country. Lots of commercials for car lots and mobile homes. The Shania Twain they were still playing was six months old. Like maybe the station couldn't afford any more records. But he knew better than that. On a busy street where clouds floated across the face of a glass-paneled tower in Nashville, there was some guy sitting in an office drinking good Kentucky bourbon with a pile of demo tapes on his desk, and he was the one who decided who got on the radio and who didn't. This one was in, that one was out. Rusty had told him all about it. If you wanted to get into country music, the deck was already stacked against you. Unless maybe you were Garth Brooks. Hell. Even if you
were
Garth Brooks.

This car was special. It was unique as far as cubic inches. Most of the V8-equipped '55s came out with 283s in them, but this was one of the rare ones with a 265-horsepower 265. You didn't see a lot of them. You could still get parts for it. Water pumps. Rebuilt generators. Tie-rod ends. He reached his finger out and touched a black spot of oil. He pulled his finger back and looked at it. On it was a black spot of oil.

He wiped it on his jeans and reached up with the wrench for one of the rust-frozen nuts that held what was left of the manifold gasket between the rust-flaked exhaust manifold and the rusted exhaust pipe, a gasket that was ruined with heat, crumbling apart, leaking exhaust, and making a lot of noise but probably increasing his horsepower half a horse or a horse or a horse and a half since putting headers on one everybody said would give it about five. He knew it would come off a lot easier if he had some WD-40 to put on it, painted blue-and-white spray can, take the little red plastic straw off the side where it was taped to the can, stick it in the nozzle where you could pinpoint your spray and spray
the threads, watch it foam whitely, inhale that high giddy petroleum aroma and know it would help, let the thin greasy liquid soak deeply into the threads and penetrate the rust and help his wrench to free it. But Johnette had used up his last can trying to get some charcoal going in the grill — stoned again — and he hadn't thought to run by AutoZone yesterday to see Rusty and get some more. He needed some better tools, too, by God, just for this car. Not this piece of shit off brand stuff from years ago at Otasco he was still using. Something that wouldn't slip on a nut and bust your knuckles. Johnette was still on his ass over paying eighty-five hundred dollars for the car, just about draining the savings, but most of what had been in savings had been off his settlement on his and Rusty's wreck from when they ran into all those chicken coops in the road and wrecked his Bronco, so it was his money anyway. What he needed to do was just tell Johnette that he needed the shit, and go on up there and get it. Stick it on a credit card just like she did whenever she went to Tupelo and wanted a new lamp. Pay for it later. But have the use of it now. She didn't wait for what she wanted. Why should he? This car was like a free car. It didn't really count. It was like a gift. But it wasn't going to pass inspection being so loud. Unless maybe Rusty knew somebody who'd slip it through and give him a sticker. They wouldn't slip it through at Gateway, that was for sure. They checked everything on one out there. Exhaust system, headlights, windshield glass, taillights, brake lights, ball joints, turn signals, horn, tire tread. He didn't know what the big deal was. He thought it sounded good loud. But they wouldn't pass it loud. And they had all the power when you went out there. When you slipped yourself into their domain. And you had to deal with it. On the other hand they were bonded. They could get in a lot of trouble doing strangers favors.