Pick-up Sticks

By Brooks Tigner

Think the #MeToo, #HeToo problem new?  Think again. 

Cross "The Help" and "Ordinary People" on steroids and you get this ominous family tale from the Great Society era of the '60s. Its claws sink in slowly, but they lacerate the wounds America suffers today.

Mixing sweat-inducing scenes with laugh-out-loud passages, Brooks Tigner's Pick-up Sticks compels the reader towards its fatal but poignant conclusions about race, class and abuse. A first retroactive "WeToo" novel:

       A widow with a five-year old boy in 1964 had little chance of getting hitched again in small-town Texas, but Cathy got lucky: she married a doctor and thus replaced the father figure her son Carey had lost the year before. Or so she thought.

       He had a big house with a full-time maid, Cilla, and handyman Lamar, her son, who kept the yard impeccable between his other odd jobs.

       Sev was sophisticated, cultured, disciplined, hard-working. And self-medicating: a darkening habit - feeding other, darker ones - whose tentacles spread out in sinister ways to envelope Lamar, others across the county's impoverished black community and, ultimately, Carey himself.

       Only Cilla is witness to the evolving malaise. But it is Felicia, Lamar's girlfriend, who pieces it all together. She pays a high price for it, but is by no means the only who gets the short end of the stick...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tunnel's End Press
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780998108704

Brooks Tigner

Brooks Tigner is a career journalist and editor born in Texas but based in Brussels where he has reported on the EU and NATO for the past 30 years. His writing got a truly early start when, at age nine, he and neighborhood kids produced a (somewhat) weekly newspaper for several summers, flogging it to parents and whatever luckless stranger would pay a nickel for it. It was better than selling lemonade on a blazing hot sidewalk. Though Pick-up Sticks is his first novel, its deadly serious themes gestated for many years in his imagination, awaiting a convergence of America’s woes – economic, racial and sexual (#MeToo, #HeToo) – for readers to more readily ingest this retroactive story set in America's Great Society era. That convergence is now upon us. By contrast, his next book will be a social comedy set set among czar-nostalgic White Russians in 1980s New York. Readers can send comments, reviews or feedback to [e-mail] or -- to get a free sample chapter from Pick-up Sticks -- visit the author's website at www.brookstigner.com 

Book preview

Pick-up Sticks

By Brooks Tigner

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Copyright © 2018, 2021 Brooks Tigner

All Rights Reserved.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9981087-0-4

First edition - revised

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Visit the author’s website at www.brookstigner.com

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Cover concept: by author

Cover execution: Masoud Fahti

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Published by:

Tunnel's End Press

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

To

those

who

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forget...

but remember.

Table of Contents

Polished onyx

Creosote

Nigger Run

Drifting Christians

Pork Links

If Momma Was Married

Chrysalis

Hospitallers

Pointers

Turpentine

Placebo

Cabrito

Indecent Supposure

Chattel

House of Cats

Pronouncing Classes

A Question of Balance

Leakage

Long Live Henry

Chunk Ice

Fighting Pines, Fighting Pains

Wart Gods

A la crotte forcément

Hard Mints

Moon Slick

Snowflake

Ball the Jack

Venus Mugged

Faultlines

Yield the Night

Epilogue

Polished onyx

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February 1970.

The scalloped handle glinted in his fingers as Lamar watched himself in the mirror, raking the bristles slowly over his burred hair. A few dark coils fell in the sink; one or two remained on the brush.

He laughed out loud to the empty house at the thought of a yard nigger using a white man’s sterling silver hair brush. His mamma’s set, no less. He reached for the expensive Italian cologne – he wanted some of that – and slapped it on one jowl, then the other.

Lamar Cale had high round cheekbones, flawless teeth, antelope eyelashes, a trim torso. At 31 years old, his skin was uniformly dark and smooth. Polished onyx, no rubble, no blotches. Lamar’s mother had a church word for him, her cherubim, a little joke that always poked at him the wrong way for some reason.

Sev had another word for him: his yard jockey. Why, all he needs is some red livery and a bill cap, he drawled, and we could put him out front with a ring in his hand.

The oft-told joke drew indulgent smiles from Sev’s friends. Even Lamar could smirk at it, though no one knew he’d heard the joke. He took it as a backhanded compliment to his totemic good looks.

He drew the brush languidly across his scalp once more and put it back with care in its place on the tray next to the matching silver hand mirror. Then he straightened the towel on its rack, snapped the light switch off, got dressed and walked from the bedroom to the hallway and kitchen.

Pausing a moment, he lifted a pear from the colander in the sink, dried it on a kitchen towel and exited through the utility room, letting the screen door bang loudly behind him.

Creosote

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June 1969.

Jesus Christ! Help me pull it out, Ernie! Pull!

I’m pulling Carey. It ain’t budging. You gotta let go!

Carey Wattson hung upside down from a small pine trunk slung across the wastage pond, his arms and left leg gripping the log. His right leg was stuck down in thick, black sludge halfway up the calf.

The other boy straddled the trunk near him, leaning sideways to pull up on his pants leg.

"Damn, Carey. Why’d you go so fast across the log? You know bark’s rotten and slides off."

Just pull, Ernie.

I can’t pull any more or I’ll slide in. It’s chipping off under me too. Your shoe’s not budging. You gotta let it go. Get your foot out of that stuff Carey! Ernie screamed.

Damn, damn, Uncle Sam, he muttered, relaxing the ankle. As his knee rose up from the goop with a little sucking sound, Ernie grabbed his shirt and hauled him topside onto the log. They peered down at the waning depression in the opaque pool. Vapor wisps snaked across the surface in the dawn’s expanding heat. Even the sock was sucked off. Carey had half a notion to fish for the shoe with a stick before it was too late. Then again, what for?

Oh man, said his friend. Look at your foot.

Viscous black-brown slime oozed down his lower leg in little rivulets, dripping and stretching in slow motion off his cuff and toes into the smooth black surface. The old paint pants didn’t matter. The new shoe did.

What does creosote do to your skin?! asked Ernie.

How in hale do I know? he retorted, feeling a flush of panic rise up his chest. But I sure can’t have my foot looking like a ‘phone pole. Lemme have your T-shirt, Ernie.

My shirt? Use your own.

"Look Ernie: I’ve just lost a brand new tennis shoe. How am I going to explain that to Mom – or to Sev?! I can’t ruin a shirt, too. Tell your mother you left yours in the baseball lot."

Reluctantly, the other boy peeled off his shirt. Carey wiped away the muck, but the incontrovertible evidence of their sojourn into the forbidden territory was plain to see: skin dyed a warm chocolate brown.

Three years earlier Carey and friends had appropriated the grounds of the Milken Creosote Company by stealth. They’d already explored all the other parts of their sylvan domain – everything except the forest’s far eastern edge, the one bordering the isolated industrial site.

He and Steve Collins were the first to cross the no-man’s land of dying loblolly pines – a wide phalanx of rotting trunks, marshland, and sour soil – flanking the earthen dikes that shored up the black ponds of sludge at the plant’s rear. Only many years later did it occur to him why every tree below the dikes was dead.

The imprisoned liquid had a matt, unearthly stillness to it, drawing no reflection, letting none escape. Narrow footpaths, broken by metal sluice gates here and there, jagged around the rectangular reservoirs, a checkerboard in black. But no one tended the dikes anymore and the weedy pathways had long since fallen into disuse. The area was as lifeless as its abandoned cargo. And, by collective parental agreement, strictly off-limits to the neighborhood children.

The plant’s front gate was, nominally, the only way into the place. A high chain-link fence topped in barbed wire encircled the grounds on all sides except for the reservoirs, where the owners figured the goo and marshy dead-lands beyond would form their own barrier.

But the reservoirs were easily crossed and the Milken Creosote Company’s stab at security was perfunctory at best: the front gate was left wide open during the work week, and only half-closed during weekend shifts when the plant’s watchman, a retiree, snoozed away the hours in a little hut next to the entrance. The chance of detection was minimal and, even if the old man spotted something, the children early on devised a rapid escape by toppling dead pines across the dikes. Scampering over them was risky but faster than zigzagging around the ponds’ edges. By the time the watchman negotiated the last footpath, the intruders had retreated deep in the woods beyond.

Once the taboo of entering the plant was broken, Carey and team spent each summer from ‘66 on exploiting the place’s crumbling infrastructure and disused supplies. The site was split into its various work areas by low wooden fences, easily scaled. Movement between them was camouflaged by jumbles of empty barrels strewn carelessly across lumberyard, mixing sheds, railway siding, and supply warehouse.

The sawmill was an essential target, its discards converted into elaborate tree houses. Another useful discovery was the creosote dipping area and its row of squat open-topped tanks. Fifteen feet high and twelve across, the circular steel structures dated from the plant’s founding prior to War One and had been used to treat ties for the local railway, a line of business long since dried up, like the drums themselves. Abandoned after War Two, they were now in advanced states of decay, though shreds of their original tarpaulin covers still clung to the rim tops. Each had a hinged, manhole-sized plug at ground level, rusted shut, and a steel rebar ladder welded to the outer wall that curved invitingly over the lip and down to the tank floor: an irresistible rallying point. The behemoths’ location near the front gate made their use all the more daring, though the boys wisely huddled inside the one drum whose swiveled plug was rusted open, obviating any risky climb over the ladder.

It was there during their third summer of raids that Carey, Steve, Jesse-Ken and Ernie Coleman, his closest friend, waited in the pre-dawn hours on a Saturday morning in June for Stewart Kaszenski. Lumber discards and a coil of chicken-wire were the objectives.

Where is he? whispered Jesse-Ken, his stomach grumbling. I’m starving.

Quit your moaning, Jesse, said Ernie. He’ll come. No one’s missed a breakfast raid yet.

Well he better not, said Jesse-Ken. He’s bringing the bread.

Y’all shut up, hissed Carey, cocking an ear close to the plug hole. I think I hear gravel. Blow out the candle.

The boys peered through the plug hole to the still-dark lumberyard. Beyond it lay the black reservoirs and the woods they had crossed minutes earlier. The setting moon imparted a soft pewter cast to the angular machinery around them. Dew from the humid East Texas air gathered on the plug’s rim.

The idiot’s got his flashlight on! cried Ernie. What in Sam Hill’s he doing?!

Carey bolted through the hole, gazelled over the lumber fence and disappeared across the gravel toward the sweeping light.

A few minutes later he tumbled back in, pulling Stewart behind him. Blood ran down the boy’s face.

What the hell Kaszenski!? You shoulda cut your light right after the dikes, said Steve.

I know, but I –

Back off guys, intervened Carey. A wire caught his glasses when he cleared the first fence. He needed the light to find them. It’s ok, Stewie. You got a bad scratch on your cheek. Put some water on it: here.

The others stared at him while he wiped away the trickling blood. Listen, it wasn’t my fault. My little sister must’ve fiddled with the alarm clock last night and it went off late. I ran as fast as I could through the woods and tried to catch up by doing the warehouse fence double-time.

Next time just crawl through it like normal, ok? said Steve. Jeez.

Jesse-Ken looked at the boy’s crumpled knapsack. I hope you didn’t squash the bread, Stewie. Can we eat now? Who’s got the jelly?

The group ate in silence, peering occasionally up to the tank’s rim to gauge the dawn. There had to be just enough light to negotiate the creosote paths with arms fully loaded.

Y’all finished? I think we ought to move out now, said Steve.

Nah, it’s still too dark, said Jesse-Ken, halfway through a third sandwich. You can hardly make out the sawmill.

Steve shoved him with his foot. Hurry up, Pig. We’re all finished. The other boy punched back, launching a group tussle.

Pinning Jesse-Ken to the tank floor, Steve raised a canteen above the boy’s face. Should I? he asked the others. Ernie nodded, saying: Yeah. Let him have –

His words disappeared in a sheet of cold water sluicing over them all from the tank’s rim.

Screaming, they dove as a pack for the plug hole and tore across the gravel yard toward the sludge pools. Scaling the lumberyard fence, Carey glanced back to see a head silhouetted above the tank. Were there others?!

Bucket in hand, the aging colored watchman slowly descended the tank’s ladder.

Won’t need to come in this early on a Saturday again, he thought. A whole two damn years of patrols without getting anywhere near enough to catch ’em. Always heard the crunch of his boots. But not this time. Crouching at the top of that ladder in the pre-dawn, bucket in hand, had been worth the wait.

Not that it really mattered, he reminded himself, figuring that whatever bits and pieces they pilfered – well what the owners didn’t know wouldn’t hurt ‘em. They made up for it in his meager wages.

The boys scrambled through the last small fence. Only the black pools separated them from the forest. Splitting up, they spread out across the grid way of paths.

It had to be the watchman, shouted Stewie.

There might be others. Everybody to the main tree house! Carey yelled, stopping abruptly. He had reached last reservoir. Ahead lay the two choices: long right-angled jag through the weedy paths around the pond’s edge, or short dash across the pine trunk lying over the sludge. The first rays of the sun slanted over the trees behind them. They were now in full view.

He struck across the trunk in large strides. Two yards from the end a panel of bark sheared away and plunged into the pool, carrying his right foot with it. Only the agility of a boyhood spent in treetops stopped him from toppling into the soup. Grappling his other limbs to the trunk, he corkscrewed down around it, etching long scratches into his arms.

That’s it: trapped. And soon to be caught.

Ernie!!

But his friend had already turned back from the woods, inching along the log toward him.

* * *

How am I going to get home? said Carey, sitting with the others in the forest. I gotta get this stuff off fast.

Refusing to sacrifice another item of clothing, Ernie cajoled the others to part with a sock each. Three layers would be enough to cushion a foot against the burrs and pine cones of the forest floor.

Your foot dudn’t look so good, huh? said Steve.

And what about our things?! piped in Jesse-Ken. Do we go get them or just leave all that stuff there?

Jesse-Ken: just shut up. Stewie said, jolting the others with an uncharacteristically stern tone. Can’t you see this problem – our problem – is way bigger than any of that? Everyone’s going to know we were there. We got to have a plan, figure out what to do.

No we don’t all have a problem, not if he gets this stuff off his foot, Stewie, Jesse-Ken shot back. "And if he don’t blow it for the rest of us. Right, Carey?"

But Carey had already shifted ahead, mulling what it could bring. Knowing what it would bring. The controlled reprimand. The polite measured voice belying cold, seething looks. Banishment to his room. Downstairs, the bedroom door shutting, the shouts and muffled pleas. His mother, pale and blotch-faced, trudging up the stairs to mete out his punishment. No TV. Or swimming. Perhaps again no friends overnight for a month.

What do you say Carey? said Stewie, jabbing his shoulder.

What I say is: I have to go. Right now. Anyone got a pocket knife on them? he replied, pinching his soiled pants leg. This has got to come off.

Twenty minutes later he emerged from the forest where it met the far dead-end of his street. It was a short journey from there to home. He cut across a corner of the Kaszenskis’ backyard, and slinked between the other suburban lots.

Nearing his house’s corner lot, Carey crouched behind the next-door neighbor’s hedge and nestled against the clapboard house’s raised foundation. Through the leaves he had a view across the yard to their kitchen door where Sev would exit at nine-forty-five for his Saturday morning round of house calls. He leaned back against the foundation’s cement blocks, feeling their faint glow of heat from the day before, and waited. Someone cranked up a lawnmower in the distance.

A voice spoke out from the screened porch above.

Opal Lott, etched glass of port already in hand, was sitting a few feet behind his head. She’d watched his furtive progression all the way down the street to her yard.

What kind of piccaninny get-up you wearin’, Carey? she called out peremptorily from her rocking chair, peering down at his rolled up pants cuff, shoeless foot and sap-stained shirt.

I got my shoe stuck in one of the creosote ponds, Opal, he whispered. But please don’t tell my folks. I already got enough problems to handle right now.

S’that why you got so many socks on your foot? she asked, leaning forward to press her face against the screen.

Yes’m.

She sniffed an imagined odor in the air. Better get it off. It’s pretty strong stuff, she said, leaning back in her rocking chair. You know, my husband, Jeston Jr., once got it on his forearm but missed a spot he didn’t see for the whole work day. Burned his skin close to two weeks after that.

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Opal knew a thing or two about creosote.

Pappy, her husband’s daddy, founded the Milken Creosote Company just before the Great War in order to suck off some of the region’s emerging oil wealth.

Before then Milken was barely more than a pig farmers’ pit stop, as Carey’s mother likened it. There were few places, in fact, more isolated or inured to culture in turn-of-century Texas than the little towns and villages of its central eastern piney woods belt. The smallest hamlets – there were hundreds of them – were little more than random collections of sagging white frames scattered along the road.

However tiny, however insignificant, though, each spit of a human settlement there had its name...sometimes dignified, often corn-pone folksy: Cut’n’Shoot, Tomball, Old Dime Box, New Dime Box, Magnolia, Coldspring, Sourlake, Mexia, Humble, Grapeland, Lovelady, Italy. The nominative resplendence extended to the State’s counties, too: Glasscock, Throckmorton, Stonewall, Swisher, Titus, Zapata, Zavala, Lavaca, Brazoria, Cottle, Yoakum, Dimmit and Deaf Smith.

Milken’s own town center, if it could be called that, lay slightly to the west of Highway 75, a two-lane affair laid over an old cattle trail that burrowed south through 200 miles of theoretically undulating pine forest from Dallas to the perspiring rice fields of the coastal plain. Except for the railway line next to it, Highway 75 back then was about the only artery to civilization, connecting all points local to I-45 and the great outer world which, for Milken, was Houston.

It was easy to miss the approaching signs of a town in east Texas. Just a few hints of human habitation along the road: a barbecue shack, maybe a beauty parlor sign hanging off a pipe-hinge, or some of those fat white cylinders of butane gas nestled in overgrown lawns, like giant ant-eggs extruded from the gas utility’s umbilical cord.

The breakfront of dark tangle wood on either side of the road only gradually gave way to the town, stringing out the process like an after-thought. Trailers and wood frame houses first, then an occasional brick home or grocery store. Then the town mansion set back from the street and, suddenly, downtown’s awn-shaded sidewalks and pressed-tin facades. The standard Texas municipal mix lolled along the shoulders of Highway-75-now-turned-Main-street: a marble Beaux Arts bank, some rickety feed stores, perhaps a modest Carnegie library and plenty of hamburger joints, their tarmac aprons warped in the heat. And, of course, far more grease-splotched filling stations than any such settlement could possibly need.

Behind this thin commercial crust, Milken feathered out in a shallow grid of residential side streets. Like all southern places in the Sixties, it was rigorously demarcated by color, black folk sequestered on one side of Main Street’s axis or at an end of it, whites clustered along the other. No visible Hispanics.

A granite or sandstone courthouse might face the highway but probably lay a block or two away like Milken’s, where dog-eared cafes and once-proper stores were crammed around it to form a square. Milken’s sole claim to its bigger-than-usual speck on gas station roadmaps was, precisely, its courthouse, the seat of unresplendent-named Cocharan County.

The original courthouse, built in 1891, was torn down a few years before the crash of ‘29 to make way for the march of modernity – after a fire in the basement spread a bit too quickly to the records department on the third floor. The subsequent seven-story structure and its diluted Art Deco embellishments embodied the struggle between local architect who sought innovation and town council that wanted authoritative projection, the latter deemed necessary since the new courthouse basement would also house the county jail. Architect lost and the result was Rockefeller Center Redux, a chiseled behemoth with metal-clapped corners and dark plastic panels slung under each window, like bags under the eye.

A sim-phony in limestone, Opal later agreed with the other council members. Architect immigrated to Houston.

Milken had plenty of money for such an indulgence. Its growth far exceeded the general stock market booming the rest of the country after the war since its economy was double-fueled by the discovery of oil and gas in the meadows of Cocharan County. Animal farmers who could hardly read were catapulted into sumptuous wealth. Pasture land was cleared for brick homes – Roman villas, English manors, Tara mutations – each set back from the roadside at a respectable distance. About where the feed troughs stood before, said Cathy. Milken millionaires became some of Neiman’s best customers in Dallas.

Thus, Pappy Lott was well positioned in 1918 to exploit the surging post-war demand for termite-proof lumber for oil riggings, commercial buildings, split-rail ranch fences, telephone and electricity lines, cattle guards, county bridges and especially railway ties. His little creosote operation incorporated and grew in six years from two corrugated tin huts and a single dipping tank to 15 acres of industrial plant, the direct benefits of Cocharan’s black gold. And some greenbacks slipped judiciously into the right palms. Knowing who to know, and when to shut up, in the county was what enabled the Lotts and other local clans to rise to middling wealth on the back of the region’s far richer oil families.

For reasons Carey never fully understood, there always floated a dust of allusion about Pappy Lott and the ‘27 courthouse fire, rumors Opal vigilantly quashed forty years on as dirty gossip. She knew how to keep people in their place.

So what you gonna do now, Carey? Sit there all day? she guffawed, rocking back to slurp some more of her heart medicine.

Carey didn’t like much about Opal; he felt perennially scrutinized in her presence. But her voice was fascinating, foreign by local norms. Opal’s refused to unfurl in the usual way as gushing Southern drawl or bony Texas twang. On her tongue, the twang combined with a throaty vibrato, producing a voice that was deep-pitched but, oddly, piercing at the same time. It was backwoods coloratura with an edge, a kick. Like a contralto with a warbling smoker’s voice.

I’m waiting for Sev to leave first, he whispered insistently. Before she could respond, he swiveled around in her direction, figuring if he faced her directly, the woman would lower her voice.

His eyes met the porch at floorboard level. Beyond the screen were goitered feet, jammed into flat-heeled, navy blue pumps. The rest of Opal’s body was also a matter of jamming: thighs into girdle, fingers into rings, haunches into rocking chair. He glanced momentarily at the chair’s armrest and its overhang of Opal flesh, marbled rolls of Silly Putty. Underneath the woven cane seat, little beige buttons of fat-filled cloth pressed through the octagonal holes.

Opal, do you think you could help me with some scissors?! he asked, wary of the response. No one at the dipping tank had thought to bring a pocket knife.

Carey, you know how hard it is for me to get up and about, don’t you?

Yes ma’am. That was that.

Besides, she lied, I just sat down before you came into my yard. I’d give you some scissors, but they’re for my sewing and you are gonna get creosote all over them.

Yes ma’am. I’ll just wait here, he said, turning back to watch the kitchen door. Opal poured herself another glass of Mogen David and chatted idly, waiting to see how he would pull this one off.

The mid-morning sun drew sweat down his left shoulder and ribcage. He pushed his bandaged foot into the shade of the privet bush, causing a little tornado of gnats to rise above it. She warbled something about the creosote factory and little boys; he nodded the back of his head.

Almost an hour passed before Sev emerged, late, from the kitchen door at ten o’clock. Knowing she’d be there, he glanced across the yard in Opal’s direction, waved a hand at the porch and made for the carport.

Mornin’, Sev! she hollered back through the screen.

He revved up his white Toronado and backed it evenly down the long driveway, slowing at the sharp dip in the curb where it met the street. After raising the electric windows, he drove away.

So how much longer you gonna wait? Coast looks clear to me, she said.

Thanks for not saying something, Opal.

Not saying ‘anything,’ she retorted in a flat manner, twirling the port glass between her thumb and index finger. Why would I say anything? I’m enjoying this as much as you. Opal was on her fourth port – two glasses beyond and two hours before the noon guideline laid down at Sev’s half-joking suggestion. ("It’s prescriptive," she warned morning visitors, pre-empting any arch of inquisitive eyebrow.)

She screwed the metal top back on the jug of port and set it down on the floorboards.

Well, I’m fixin’ to go in, she puffed, rolling forward from the chair. Sure is starting to get hot out here. Don’t wait to get that stuff off of you, Carey, or you’ll be sorry.

Yessum. I won’t. See you, Opal, he said, and turned back to stare through the hedge.

After a slow knee-bend to hike up her weight, the old woman shuffled through the front door into the house. Pausing a moment in the middle of the living room, she moved over to the air conditioner and adjusted the thermostat. Outside, the window unit shook noisily into operation and began blowing a stream of hot, dry exhaust air over Carey’s head. He stood up, stretched his limbs. Then, squeezing through a part in the hedge, he ran across the lawn and slipped through the kitchen door.

Opal leaned away from the window and slid her hand down to the thermostat, fiddling with the control panel again.

The machine shuddered still.

Nigger Run

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Alone in the car, Sev always drove with the windows down, air conditioning at full blast, arm draped out the window: a sybaritic waste of the dashboard’s cold currents mingled with the summer furnace of Texas. Add music on lonely country lanes and the mixture was exquisite.

His was the first car in Milken with a built-in 8-track tape player. This morning it would be Offenbach. He shoved in the tape and cranked up the volume to better make out the lyrics.

Sev drew in the finer pleasures of life with the self-satisfaction of knowing how to enjoy them, a talent, he knew, that set him apart from the local milieu. Not a native Milkenite, Eugene Lucius Sevigny hailed from Louisiana and an old French family whose roots stretched back to the region’s first Arcadian settlers and beyond to Canada and France. It was documented.

When the occasion arose, he let drop the oblique reference to his mother’s family tree and links to Lafayette’s circle, a fact discreetly proffered to those who might inquire about the unusual family name. With this came a casual but careful stress on the proper – French – pronunciation of Sevigny. It took a good 10 years after his arrival in Milken in the 1950s to get the surname circulating more or less the way he wanted. But he conceded defeat from the start with Lamar and Milken’s other black denizens, the same as his mother had with the coloreds back home; Sevinny was their nearest and only concession to linguistic correctness. White friends and acquaintances settled on the easier solution by avoiding the word altogether. So Sev he became, which was alright since he disliked his first name.

Born in Baton Rouge, he was raised in comfortable, cultivated circumstances, the only child of indulgent parents. Though spoiled, he was bright and precocious, finishing high school at sixteen and a half. To his mother’s deep disappointment, he spurned Louisianan colleges, choosing instead Ole Miss for undergrad. The school’s football mania was off-putting but it offered a welcome change of social topography and weather from the swamps of Baton Rouge, while not being too far from home