Blossom

By Donigan Merritt

David Early discovers that his father has died when a hopeful letter sent after a 20-year estrangement is returned marked, Deceased: Return to Sender.
Going home to the town from which he escaped under threats of death two decades before involves him in uncovering a brutal secret his father had kept since Davids childhood, a time when the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement began to expose the hatreds and ancient bigotries that were still seething beneath the bucolic crust of Blossom, like some malevolent force focused on David Early, who as a young student was the first white person in the town to march with blacks in protest.
Blossom was just another of those junk-cluttered, ramshackle, un-consciously ugly, roadside hamlets lost deep within the evergreen forests of southern Arkansas like atolls in a great green sea, islands in the pines, one of those curious, mysterious southern towns that appear and disappear around curves in washboard roads like dead skunks in ditches. But it is only there that David can find redemption for mistakes he never knew he made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463441388

Donigan Merritt

Donigan Merritt has an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has published seven previous novels since 1982, including "Possessed by Shadows" (Other Press, 2005) and "The Common Bond" (Other Press, 2008). He currently lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Book preview

1

Henry David Early Jr. returned to Blossom on the 11th of June, 1985, just short of twenty years after being run out of town. He entered Evergreen County on a narrow, shoulder-less, cracked and buckled highway through the border town of Springhill and its massive wood pulp paper mill; a continual rotten egg stink, an odor so foul and sulfurous that it could make a hog butcher vomit.

There was nothing between the state border and Blossom except occasional swatches of tar-papered shotgun shacks, leaning this way and that way, set just back from the road on bare, iron red patches of dirt, and scattered among the tall, regal, evergreen trees like crusty scabs on chlorophyll skin: Psoriasis of the earth. People living out there in the woods maybe had a little piece of earth to work, or maybe drove a truck for some logging outfit, or maybe cleaned houses and did laundry, or maybe just made do with that little bit the welfare doled out. Occasionally those shanties had rusting old tub washers on warped plank porches, but more than a few of the often rotund colored women who ruled those shacks still laundered in black iron caldrons in the yard, using stirring poles like a canoe paddle, swamp witches of the laundry. A poverty so abject it seemed a fabrication, a theme park: the Disneyland of degradation.

When he was eight years old, riding along the same road with his father in a trembling old Ford pickup truck, and passing those shacks, Henry David Early Sr. said in response to a curiosity from his son, That’s how the coloreds choose to live, Davy. David would occupy himself for quite a while with the mystery of such a choice, wondering what secret there was in the lives of colored people choosing to live that way. He had in those days come to believe that it was impossible to choose bad over good if you knew the difference; you chose something because you knew it’s good, so choosing bad was simply a mistake of judgment or evaluation. It didn’t make sense the other way, to choose something that was bad for you on purpose. If someone chose to live in a fallen down old shack out in the boondocks, then there must be something good about it, some reason they wanted to choose that way of life. Maybe the true value could be seen in how effectively they kept the goodness of their choice a secret. He outgrew that theory.

When the settlement of shacks began to peter out, there was again nothing but forest; Blossom appeared suddenly from it. After a sharp curve, the northbound highway straightened out at a Quonset hut cabinet maker’s shop with a faded red slide-top Coca Cola machine by the front door and heaps of wood scraps piled out back, like an anticipatory funeral pyre. A scrawny and splotched old white man wearing coveralls without a shirt, sat in a cane chair and leaned against the wall by the door with a soft drink bottle in his hand. Across the road, a flaking green and white stucco DX gasoline station crumbled with neglect. After that, a row of cracking clapboard houses, some upgraded a decade ago with aluminum siding after a pretty good door-to-door salesman passed that way, were still just one or two steps up from the destitute shanties pockmarking the highway into town. Another house, clearly once something of a mansion, now displayed a sign advertising night crawlers for sale. Some yards were little more than junk dumps, with old cars and other mechanical relics strewn about. A paint-peeling, pea-green, vinyl-shingled shack had a sign painted broadly on one wall offering for sale smoked Buffalo River catfish. A billboard listed the churches and service clubs in red letters across a big white magnolia flower. Across the highway, another billboard directed any passersby to Boll Weevil Western Wear on the courthouse square. When the road straightened out of the long curve, pines began sharing the landscape with oak, birch, walnut, pecan, mimosa, and sycamore. Within just another block or two the houses were brick and sprouted bright long lawns, many two story, a few with columns on the porticoes in that old southern way of antebellum pretense.

It wouldn’t take long to drive all the way through town, around the square, past the brown brick Ben Franklin store, concrete banks with imitation marble facades, two doughnut bakeries, both with curved Formica counters and cracked red leatherette stools, ramshackle auto repair and muffler shops, aluminum sided burger joints with intermittent neon signs, a few hopeful yet forlorn motels, half a dozen cinderblock gas stations, about one every two blocks, and then out the other side, moving on past the cemetery where David Early’s father was recently buried, finally back into the pines, heading on toward the next county, where beer and liquor could at last be purchased, because Evergreen was a dry county and had been since before the war.

David Early drove directly to the cemetery.

Winston Caviness watched the car pull in from a dirt-specked window in the caretaker’s shack. He had worked there for decades. David remembered the old guy from when his grandmother died in 1951. He was seven, his first funeral. Now Caviness had to be in his eighties, his paltry white skin sagging like a hound dog.

The old man stayed put until David parked and got out of the car, then he sauntered into the sunlight, acting like he only intended to inspect the graveyard, a stone farmer. He surveyed a moment, then sat down on a ragged woven cane chair and propped his mud caked timber boots on a rusting five gallon Esso oil can. Small darting wasps worked on a dirt dabber nest at a corner of the roof.

Deigning finally to take notice of the visitor, Caviness acknowledged David’s approach with a nod, his eyes squinting, waiting.

I’m looking for Hank Early’s grave. Henry David Early.

Yep, Caviness said. Y’all see that there live oak?

David looked in the direction indicated by the old man’s gaze.

Yonder, he emphasized, raising and dropping his arm in a slow orchestral motion.

More than anything else, and there were many competing odors coming from his body, Winston Caviness smelled like the Red Man chew puffing out his right cheek and staining the corners of his lips. When he leaned over and spat, the wad clumped up on the sun-baked, cracked, red dirt like a hot marble.

Thanks, David said, and started off.

Hey, y’all Hank’s boy, taint ya?

Yes, sir, I am. David turned around.

I never seen y’all to the funeral.

He eyed David. Like firing off a hex.

I didn’t know until it was already over.

Yeah, uh huh. They weren’t too many what showed up, no. Ten or a dozen, not a counting the diggers and the driver from old Parker’s parlor. I seen some buried out cheer with a hundurt to watch.

Well… . What could he say?

Ever body liked your old man, though. I ain’t saying different.

Yes sir. I know.

Just go to show. It do. People is like that. When you up, they all loves you. When you down, they suddenly got bizness to tend to. Your pap deserved more than he ended up his earthly days with.

Caviness grunted and backed up a couple of steps like a slow-motion sand crab, then turned around and scuttled back into the dank sanctuary of the shed.

Early-summer sun cooked the lime green grass. A breeze, hot and heavy from the south, rose and fell like air urged from an erratic fan. David walked over the grave before noticing it. There was no headstone, just one of those small, free, Veterans Administration plaques stuck into the ground, the grass still brown and dying from the damage of digging six months ago. He had to squat down to read the inscription: Henry David Early, Sr., Corporal, US Army, WW II, August 10, 1922—December 15, 1984. David was surprised that his father had not left money for a headstone.

It was sudden. Like throwing up beer. He began to cry for the first time over the father he had not seen or heard from even once in twenty years. Tears fresh and odd and brand new. One dropped to the back of his hand and rested there like a sun-lit dew drop on a dry leaf. If the reconciliatory letter David sent from his home in Costa Rica a few months ago had not been returned with DECEASED: RETURN TO SENDER stamped on the envelope in cracked, red block print, David wouldn’t even know that his father was dead.

David walked away from the grave and straight out of the cemetery to the car, embarrassed that old man Caviness might have seen him break down.

2

Henry David Early and Thelma Jean Craft Early adopted their son, naming him after his new father, in August, six months after his birth at the Little Rock Baptist Hospital in 1944, one week after Hank, now Hank Sr., turned twenty-two years old, and his wife of three years turned twenty-one.

Hank was in the army then, and had spent nearly all the three years of his married life stationed at Camp Robinson in Little Rock, where he was a motor pool mechanic. After Hank made corporal and could live off base, Thelma moved up from Blossom and took a job clerking at Walgreen’s, where she got to wear a pale green uniform with white wing collars that flattered her pale skin. They had an airy two-room garage apartment just three blocks from the base, where, in spite of the desperate days of World War II, they lived a rather routine and not unpleasant life. Thelma changed the drab window curtains with yellow flowered cloth ones she got on the employee discount. The small kitchen had a brand new toaster, a gift from the 1st National Bank when they opened a savings account; Thelma learned to decorate toast with a variety of foods, especially eggs, when they could get them, but more often a gravy mush with small chunks of hamburger meat that Hank called SOS: shit on a shingle.

Hank Early had the stocky build of a football tackle, which he had been in high school. He had to quit high school in his senior year to take a job at the ice plant, after his father was killed in a timber accident. Hauling blocks of ice gave him an almost bear-like appearance, accentuated by coal black hair matted across his whiskey barrel chest.

Thelma Jean Craft, a year younger than her future husband, picked him out as the man for her when she was sixteen years old and she happened to catch a surprising glimpse of him coming from the shower in the boys gym, where she had gone looking for her father, the school custodian. Hank was the first full grown naked male who was not kin she had ever seen, real or depicted, and in her embarrassed shyness, she believed that obligated them to marry.

Thelma, two inches taller than the new object of her previously unfocused desires, was a slim, lanky, pretty girl, all arms and legs like a spider, which became her nickname in school, came from the farming village of Waldorf, population one-hundred-forty-something, six miles up the road northeast of the metropolis of Blossom, population some few thousands by 1937.

Her pursuit of Hank Early was not insignificant, but also quite unnecessary. Hank was smitten with her at first sight; she made sure of it by letting that first consequential glimpse be up her dress, all the way to the white triangular paradise of her panties.

They married on Labor Day in September of 1941, waiting long enough for Thelma to pass her eighteenth birthday, and moved in first with Hank’s widowed mother. The Friday before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hank’s mother gave him the money from her husband’s insurance settlement to buy a small brick house on North Street, where he would have settled with his bride to make their life together, had he not gone into the army, Christmas week of 1941.

Thelma got pregnant on Christmas Eve of 1943, on their way home to the garage apartment after attending a holiday party across town with some of Hank’s platoon from the motor pool—they were company B, and Thelma sometimes called Hank her boogie woogie bugle boy from company B. Filled with youth, spirit, and gin, in the taxi home Thelma plopped herself onto Hank’s lap, opened his zipper and pulled out his coming attraction, then inserted it with some urgency into the space available, while holding aside the elastic leg band of her white panties.

It was such a wild and brave thing to do that she knew Hank’s sperm and her egg must have found unification at that moment.

She guessed she was pregnant by the second week of February, but at the same time began suffering terrible gas pains in her stomach. Maybe it was an ulcer, she thought. The base doctor, an osteopath, told her to have a glass of alka-seltzer before bed, and lay off the barbeque chicken. Thelma followed his directions faithfully, and stopped drinking gin for a while, as well.

A week after that, standing at the sink washing the dinner dishes, with Hank in his undershorts settled on the long vinyl sofa with the Stars and Stripes, Thelma grabbed her abdomen with both hands, cried out sharply once, and fainted dead away. An ambulance from the base took her to the Baptist Hospital, where Thelma went into emergency surgery to save her life from the internal bleeding caused by a burst fallopian tube, where the fetus had made the fatal choice to take root and grow.

As a result of the usual incompetence of ignorance, Thelma, who had just miscarried, was placed in a four-bed room that included a very pregnant teenager about to give birth. Sally, the only name she offered, had just turned fifteen years old, and the father of her baby, her eighteen-year-old next door neighbor in nearby North Little Rock, was killed during the battle of Tarawa at the end of last November, and by then Sally was showing. Thelma thought the story was heart-breaking, the poor kid. She didn’t know which was worse, losing a baby but keeping your man, or losing your man and keeping the baby.

You gonna keep it? Thelma wondered.

Sally said she thought the cramps were starting up again. I ain’t gonna keep it, she answered. My momma and my daddy done said no, no way, not never, and if I want it I can just move out and don’t show my face around there no more.

What’s gonna happen to it, then? Thelma asked.

He’s ah gonna… he’s ah he… he’s ah gonna go down to the Baptist Orphan Home by Monticello.

Y’all think you gonna see him?

Don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. It ain’t for me to say. If I is awake after, maybe. But I think I’d just as soon be asleep, you know? Since because ah how it feels already.

I’d be curious myself, Thelma said. I mean, anyway.

Ain’t it funny, though, Sally turned her head to see Thelma on the next bed, I mean, how yours go out ah the world and mine’s ah coming in at the very same time.

Yeah, that is funny.

I didn’t mean funny that way, I hope you know.

I know what you mean. Like it’s odd or strange.

What y’all think about souls? Sally asked.

Souls? What you mean souls?

You know. Souls, like we all got a soul, what God give us that when we die it go up to heaven and lives with God and all the angels.

I know what a soul is.

I think about things like that sometimes, when I’m on my own with myself. I mean. Okay, I know souls come from heaven, but is there ah know’d number? Does God make souls to send down when he needs one? Or maybe… I have wondered about this when I’m on my own… there is just some certain number of souls available, and when a person dies and his soul goes up, is that soul used again in a new person? I just wondered what you think of that? ’Cause I heard they’s some religions believing something like that.

Well, the truth is, I never have thought much about such a thing. What do y’all think?

I think this baby is starting to want to come out and get his soul.

Sally’s face contorted and she started moaning. Thelma called out for the nurse.

While the nurse checked Sally’s dilation and pronounced her baby was not ready to come out yet, Sally turned toward Thelma, tears in her eyes.

You got nobody here to be with you? Thelma asked.

Sally shook her head. She was full on crying now.

Well, yes you do. ’Cause my husband Hank is due here directly, when he finishes at the base… about now. He’s gonna be with you, right here by your bed, until you have that baby. So don’t you worry about being alone in here.

You do that for me? Your own husband?

Well, you know, it’s not like he’s the father, I hope. Thelma laughed heartily, hoping it would stop Sally’s crying. He’s just gonna be here, and he can talk to you. Hank’s a good talker when he’s in the mood for it. Now I admit he ain’t often in the mood for talking, but I’ll be here in this bed, too. So, Sally, you ain’t gonna be alone for this.

You do that for somebody you don’t even know?

Hey, I bet you’d do exactly the same for me.

I would. I truly would. I think you are a fine woman.

Thelma did feel like a woman compared with the fifteen year old pregnant girl in the next bed; after the miscarriage, she felt truly old.

Y’all know what I was saying about souls before?

Uh huh.

Y’all know what I’m ah thinking right now?

"No, I don’t.’

I’m ah thinking the soul that was going to your baby is gonna go into mine instead, and that’s why y’all got put in that there bed next to my bed, and why y’all are being so good to me, and all.

That idea struck Thelma mute, stopped her cold. Sally bent her knees and cried out with new contractions. At that moment, Hank Early, having changed out of fatigues and into his khakis, came into the room with a handful of wild flowers.

Oh darling, come here, come here, Thelma said.

I got you some flowers, honey.

Never you mind the flowers, just come here close.

Hank lay the flowers on the bedside table and leaned over his pretty young wife, close to her face. What’s the matter, Thelma honey?

Hank, you see that young girl about to be having her baby?

Hank looked over toward Sally and smiled, nodding a hello, but Sally was too busy moaning with the contractions to notice.

Honey, I want you to go over there right beside her bed and take care of her until she gets taken away.

Take care of her? What do you mean? I don’t know nothing about things like this.

Take care of her just like the way you’d be here taking care of me if I was where she is. Hank, she ain’t got nobody, she’s all by herself, and that ain’t right. So you go over there this minute and take care of her.

I don’t know how to take care of her.

Hank was dumbfounded, mystified. He stood up straight, but did not leave Thelma’s bedside.

All you got to do is stay right by her and say soothing words, and you can hold her hand, that’s all right, and well, Jesus Hank, just be there. Look at her. She’s darn near a baby herself.

All right, I guess, if that’s what you want.

That’s what I want, Hank, so get over there right now.

So Hank went over to Sally’s bedside and introduced himself and asked her name and how she’s feeling, and after a minute, when she cried out loud enough to scare him, he took her hand. The doctor came in and checked her dilation, and decided she might as well go on to the delivery room. Hank walked along with her, beside the gurney, holding Sally’s hand all the way, stopping only at the double doors when they took her inside.

Hank, Thelma said when he came back, come here, bend yourself down here and give me a kiss.

Hank did. It wasn’t so bad, he said. Long as she don’t up and die, or something.

Corporal Henry David Early, I am going to love you for all my born days. Now, let me tell you what I want us to do. I want us to go down to the orphan place in Monticello and get that baby, Sally’s baby.

You want to do what?

Hank, that baby is ours, he has our baby’s soul, and we are gonna get him. You promise me that.

Thelma had almost died from the ectopic pregnancy, maybe just an hour from it had she not gotten to surgery. Hank was going to promise her anything.

3

In the autumn of 1944, six month old, newly named, Henry David Early, Jr., was brought by his new mother to live in Blossom, Arkansas, the administrative seat of Evergreen County, a cluster of unrepentant bigots and hypocritical Bible-thumping backwoods Baptists stuck way down in the bottom left-hand corner of a state which was in all important aspects officially the second most primitive in the union, having been saved from rock bottom by Mississippi.

It was a place constituted by the omnipresent smell of pine, much more than the sweet, sticky smell from the flowering magnolia trees planted on the courthouse square, after which the town was named. Pine not only scented the air, it consumed the senses, thick enough to leave its pungent residue on skin, conspiring to make human relationships particularly sticky, invading mouths to cause a slurring of words and a slowing of speech, so that almost everyone sounded more or less ignorant, even to themselves. All that pine odor, acrid as cheap gin, made the air seem so disinfected that you might almost believe there was some natural immunity to the inevitability of sin, although sinning was as abundant among them as the pines.

Advertisements for anything a Baptist would object to were not accepted by the local newspaper, and although they had a premature vision of what sex might be like from dogs coupling gregariously in front yards and on town sidewalks, they were led to believe that sex of any kind, saving for ordained marital procreation, did not exist in polite society. That did not hinder each new generation from tumbling directly into coupling. Parked on logging roads cutting through pine thickets, boys discovered that syrupy flattery and ardent confessions of eternal love was all it took to heat up the back seat of the car, in spite of persistent predictions of damnation for taking part in the unmentionable.

Blossom had two sit down movie houses, the Diamond and the Rex, and two drive-ins, the Moonlight and the Starlight. In the colored neighborhood there was a storefront shop showing eight millimeter reels on a draped bed sheet; in a room out back customers encountered racier offerings. Blossom had two banks on opposite corners of the square and three restaurants downtown. The Willow Restaurant sat across the street from the Texaco station Hank Early would lease in 1946. Hank would drink ten or fifteen cups of coffee a day in there. White men did business, made deals, and passed along rumors in the Willow.

Southerners in places like Blossom held no special loyalty to companies. A man neither bought his gasoline nor had his car washed and serviced at the Texaco simply because it flew the bright red Texaco star. He went there because it was Hank Early’s place of business, because Hank was a friend and a neighbor. In the south of that time, a man’s loyalty was only given to another man, not to a thing. Things came and went, but a man was always there. They lived and died with the same people, the same unchanging population. From his father’s father to his father and to him, and on through his son and son’s son, there existed a line of male humanity unchanging and dependable. In Evergreen county and places like it, a man, black or white, carried with him as a crown or a crutch, a cultural heritage more powerful than any institution, be it Texaco, the state, the nation, the church, the law, or even in the crunch, God. When you knew the father, you knew the son, and you would know his son’s son. All trust, all honor, all business, all the values of life were rooted in that knowledge of a man and his place in the great southern scheme of things. It all floated through the social landscape on a thick river of Willow Restaurant coffee.

Whites up front, coloreds out back.

People in Blossom, white people in Blossom, believed they lived in the tiny, unobtrusive center of the universe, presuming that everyone worth knowing resided in the area bounded by their limited physical travels. Although they could get radio stations from Chicago, Nashville, Memphis, and Del Rio, people in those places were likely to be as odd as extraterrestrials. It was an undeniably egocentric and insular vision of the world, not even progressive enough to be provincial.

Blossom boomed during the war years. Oil and gas fields discovered just east of town in 1938, just in time for the needs of war, fueled most of Blossom’s new wealth, timber the rest. A few people got very rich, very fast. Hank Early had not the education, the abilities, the imagination, nor the good luck to get rich, but in a few years of hard work he saved enough to get a lease on the Texaco station on the prime corner of Main and Jackson Streets, and later buy a small tree farm south of town. He added the L-shaped extension to the rectangular red brick house where David would grow up.

David Early never quite belonged there, did not fit into the great southern scheme of things, the ways and traditions. He was not born of the blood, although his parents tried to pass that world on to him. Maybe the wisest thing Hank and Thelma did for Davy, intending to protect him from the standard schoolyard taunting, was to make him aware of the conditions of his appearance in the world, and to do this before he would understand what it meant to be adopted, so it would be a natural aspect of his world before he could be made to feel awkward about it.

When visitors came to their house and young Davy was produced for introductions, Thelma would say, Tell them what kind of baby you are. Davy’s practiced answer was, I’m an adopted baby. Their visitors were always pleased with this announcement, making a fuss over the boy because of it. Although it was some years before Davy understand what the word meant, he had no doubt that his condition was special indeed.

Knowing this all along gave Davy a layer of protection from the taunts of normal children. When he reached the age of understanding where the concept of adoption meant something to him, Thelma told him that so-called normal children had joined their families entirely by accident, that their parents had no choice but to accept them, pigs in a poke. Her Davy, on the other hand, was chosen, was particularly and singularly desired. Davy felt a little sorry for those poor normal children, whose parents were stuck with them, no matter what.

Maybe because there were no secrets from the start, David did not develop much interest in searching for his biological origins; he just wasn’t curious enough to pursue that particular narrative line. Thelma only told him that a fine and very pretty young woman and a hero of the war joined for his biological beginning, but that his soul came directly from the uniting in matrimony of Hank and Thelma Early, his only true and real parents.

In the world of David’s childhood, there were all the distractions a boy could want. There were ponds full of perch and bass, and creeks where a patient boy could harvest a bucket full of crawdads on a hot Saturday afternoon. His backyard was the size of a football field, lined with pine trees that dropped enough dry needles to build forts from them, where the boys of the neighborhood could stave off attacks from Japs, Krauts, and Commies, usually all at the same time. He had a good Schwinn bicycle, a Gibson Mockingbird guitar, decent fishing gear, a shotgun, a Zenith radio in his room. There was in the den a tiny black and white DuMont television set housed in a cabinet the size of a medium refrigerator. He would lie on his side on the floor in front of it, head propped on his bent arm until it went numb, paralyzed with embarrassing desire for Annette Funicello’s munificent chest.

After all, Blossom was just another of those junk-cluttered, ramshackle, unconsciously ugly, roadside hamlets lost deep within the evergreen forests like atolls in a great green sea, islands in the pines, one of those curious, mysterious southern towns that appear and disappear around curves in washboard roads like dead skunks in ditches.

That bucolic and peaceful appearance existed only along its thin crust. The population of some seven or eight thousand was split about sixty/forty between white people and black people, in favor of the former, and most people of the former just did not think to suspect what torments might be festering within the volcanic mysteries lurking below the thin mantle.

Children lived in personal bubbles and other lives floating by different from one’s own were perceived to contain

Reviews for Blossom

[dchaikin_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

52. Blossom by Donigan Merritt (2011, 394 pages, read Nov 30 – Dec 7)Desire. There is a meaning there that is almost ruined by the word itself. It’s a feeling, a need, a transient state, although one that can last a long time. Desire comes from something we want but only because we don’t have it, like hunger. The fulfillment destroys its existence.This is what I was thinking about through the early part of this book, which is a little odd because while this book certainly explores desire in this way, it’s only one theme, maybe a sub-theme. This book is about the Deep South, small town Arkansas in the 1960’s and again in the 1980’s, about long memories and our inability to escape our personal histories, about racism (from a white perspective), about coming of age, and adolescent love and sex. Henry David Early, Jr. ran out of Blossom, Arkansas in 1965, abandoning his foster father, his college degree and his girlfriend, disappearing completely. He returns 20 years later, in 1985, only after finding out about his father’s death about six months before. My pondering of desire came about as Davey reflects on his memories and as he observes the Blossom of 1985. Eventually the book evolves out of this and into something more of a plot and the book begins to fail, or at least develops a weak spot. There is an inherent weakness in writing sympathetically about the black experience in the south from a white perspective. The black characters tend to lose their flaws, and fail to materialize into personalities of depth. But, I shouldn’t dwell on this, the book moves on.This is the third book I’ve read by Merritt, who I originally discovered through LibraryThing.com’s Early Reviewer program. It was eagerly anticipated by me and maybe ten and half other people. He’s a small hidden gem with very clean clear prose that encourages minds like mine to wander and reflect as characters reflect. I find it mentally cathartic.