Ambivalences of Color and Other Stories

By Robert T. Sorrells

No available information at this time. Author will provide once available.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532032738

Robert T. Sorrells

Robert T. Sorrells is a fiction writer whose stories have been published in a number of magazines including Penthouse, Playgirl, and American Review. A book of his short stories was published by the University of Arkansas Press, and he has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories series; Tennis and the Meaning of Life: a Literary Anthology of the Game; Full Court: a Literary Anthology of Basketball; and the LSU Press anthology Southern Writing in the Sixties. His story A Fan of the Game brought Sorrells a PEN/NEA Syndicated Fiction Award, and he also has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His non-fiction work has included writing brochures for Vanderbilt Universitys $30,000,000 capital gifts campaign; being commissioned to write a history of Clemson Universitys Experimental Forest; writing and narrating programs for a land-use film for the state of South Carolina, as well as working as an editor for Clemson Universitys Publications and Graphics Department, and writing articles for the Mayo Clinics Volunteer News quarterly magazine. Sorrells has taught English and writing at Murray State College (University), Clemson University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Arkansass MFA (Master of Fine Arts) Program. Sorrells received a Bachelor of Arts from Vanderbilt University in History, a Master of Arts from Vanderbilt University in English; a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop at The University of Iowa.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Robert T. Sorrells.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-3272-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-3273-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913840

iUniverse rev. date: 09/25/2017

Contents

Ambivalences of Color

The Pecan Grove

Old Men Dreaming

Perfect Ponies

Rising Like a Ramp to Heaven

Saying Goodbye

Enoch

Bring Back the Cuckoos, Oh My Love

Tennessee State Fair: Nashville, 1950

There Was Silence

Visiting Rights

Grandpère’s Christmas

Good Children

Hold Me

Hunting

The Art of Living or Life Must Go On or Feeding the Sacred Flame

About the Author

In Memoriam

Jim Whitehead

Bill Harrison

Verlin Cassill

Miller Williams

Barry Hannah

In the beginning was the word. . .

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer, and if this answer rings in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong simple ‘I must’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity….

Rainer Maria Rilke

From

Letter to a Young Man

Vintage Books

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The Stories

Ambivalences of Color

The Pecan Grove

Old Men Dreaming

Perfect Ponies

Rising Like a Ramp to Heaven

Saying Good-by

Enoch

Bring Back the Cuckoos, O My Love

Tennessee State Fair : Nashville, 1950

There Was Silence

Visiting Rights

Grandpère’s Christmas

Good Children

Hold Me

Hunting

The Art of Living

Ambivalences of Color

I liked to sit in our unlighted living room at early dusk and look out through the windows while the winter sky’s pale tints slid, then plunged toward deeper, more somber tones. On those days—especially in December when the air was as crystalline as crackling ice—the changes in color could run through the high thin clouds faster than thought.

But then she would come into the room and speak. She would say something like, Why are you sitting here in the dark? as she turned on the large floor lamp.

I had long ago stopped answering, because it never seemed to make any difference. Perhaps it simply made no sense to her. She needed light, I didn’t. At least, we didn’t need the same kind of light.

Awed by the constantly shifting gradient of the sky, I would feel the weight of inevitability drain from me, feel washed by a balm of time, overwhelmed yet again, ecstatic as the shades and moods flowed through me like magic, with breath-taking speed one moment, and almost unbearable stasis the next.

She, on the other hand, lived in the sudden eruption of a fierce brightness that sharply dispelled any quiver of ambivalence about how gray was needed to turn the gentle pinks and greens into intensities of violet. Soft shadows, to her, always equivocated, like a faint cough of apprehension.

It’s dark in here, she said as a matter-of-fact observation.

It isn’t dark, I replied. Not quite. You just don’t ever give your eyes time to adjust.

Dark as pitch, she said, as she plopped to the sofa with the evening paper.

Look out the window, I said.

She looked over at me.

"Out the window," I repeated.

Ummm, she said, glancing toward the window.

"Ummm, what?" I asked.

Pretty, she said, looking back down at the print on the page. Really beautiful.

Then why don’t you look at it? I asked, knowing that by then it was nearly all gone.

I’m sorry, she said. Do you want me to go into the breakfast room to read?

It was always like that. If I said Yes, then I was forcing her out of the living room—which was hers, too, after all. But if I said No, as I always had, then she would come in again the next night and the next, as she always had, turning on the light, even when she knew I was there, staring out at the sky, at the sunset, at the transforming touch of quiet mystery.

We’re terribly different, I said softly.

She looked up at me, questioning, her eyes then turning quickly to hurt, her face suddenly sagging to its age, vulnerable as a butterfly caught in the unforgiving bill of a whip-poor-will.

It was the first time I had ever said that aloud.

Terribly different, I repeated even more softly, looking down at the back of my slightly mottled hands to notice again how long my aging skin held its shape if I squeezed it up into a ridge.

The Pecan Grove

Sometimes Cottle could do strange things. Sometimes he could wear another person, put them on just like a T shirt so they were right next to his skin, could feel their dreams as truly as if they had been his own.

He was shuffling through the pecan grove again, noting somewhere in his head that he hadn’t been out there for a couple of years. Simply hadn’t been walking that way. Or, he mused, maybe it was just because they had a little more money and the simple pleasure of bringing in a modest crop of his own was gone, lost, it seemed, like so much else.

Shuffling lightly beneath the trees so he wouldn’t crunch the pecans that might be hidden beneath the fallen leaves, sensing the pressure on the sole of his foot that would tell him there might be a nut there, Cottle recalled the embarrassment he had caused when he collected bottles that had been chucked out car windows. He had paid for his morning paper with those bottles, courtesy, he always felt with a certain ambivalent tinge of bitterness, of the exorbitantly wasteful shrug of the town’s young people.

When the paper was a dime and the bottles fetched three cents, he would take three of them and a penny up to the 7-11 behind their apartment and get a paper. The clerks hated him. At first they really didn’t understand what he was doing. He’d show the three bottles by raising them over his head then lowering them into the return bin by the door. Then he’d get a paper from the rack, lay his penny on the counter, and start to walk out. They really didn’t understand at first.

But once they did they got antagonistic. So then he cashed in the bottles by making them count out the nine cents into his hand. He’d add the penny with an elaborate flourish, and end by slapping the nickel and the five coppers down on the counter, taking a paper, and stalking out. Later, the bottles brought a nickel each, so he only needed two for the paper—until it went up to fifteen cents. By the time it got to twenty cents he wasn’t collecting bottles any more. And by then there were only machine sales for the paper anyway.

He embarrassed his friends, too, though. When they saw him on his rounds, they knew what the clanking in the grocery sack was: Ole Cottle stooping to pick up pocket change for a beer. Or a candy bar, maybe. Always the paper.

They didn’t do that. Not even their kids did that. Not even their kids had to do that for a few of life’s little extras. And at parties he embarrassed them. When they started talking about how poor they were, Cottle, smiling ingenuously, would suggest they could always sell one of their two or three cars. Once, not long after they had come back from their disastrous year away, a friend even told him about getting a good deal on a Cadillac. Said it was only eight thousand dollars. Cottle had smiled graciously and said, That’s how much we grossed last year. Or near tax time the cocktail conversations got around to how heavy the burden was, how hard it was for them to squeak by on what, it turned out, was often three times as much as Cottle and Helen had.

Yet he never felt that he or any of the family was deprived. Then, he finally started to understand why the 7-11 clerks hated him and why he embarrassed so many of his friends: He was their conscience. Nobody likes that. Too, he scared them. His being there reminded them that the Great Wheel of Fortune turns, and if it turns on Ole Cottle, then it can turn on them, too.

And he was an embarrassment because now he represented—with his serious bottle collecting year round, and his serious pecan gathering in the late fall and his serious truck gardening during the summer—he represented people they didn’t very often see, and, many of them, people they thought about even less often than that.

And there was something else, something that was sadly, uncomfortably near to the heart of the unmasked hatred of the 7-11 clerks. Them he understood better, or at least sooner: that he went on and stooped to do what they didn’t dare allow themselves to do, because they were too close to having to do it.

The others, though, he came to perceive as always turning from him just slightly because he dared stoop in their presence, and did it, furthermore, without any seeming embarrassment—his stooping, his scavenging, his rag-bagging around town being a constant reminder to them of his freedom. They were the ones who were bound; tied; shackled mortgage, third car, and mind to a system that didn’t care whether they were there or not. They all knew they could be replaced within forty-eight hours, as one of their department heads had once smilelessly reminded them, without one student missing a single lecture. And replaced, furthermore, with people who had better degrees, more publications, and greater desperations than their own. They saw him and tasted fear on the back of their tongues as he strode through town. They saw him and felt that slightly acrid gorge of envy rising in their throats, but swallowed because they wouldn’t dare spit it out.

Cottle felt the pressure of a hard wad under his foot. Gently rolling it out from under the leaves, he saw it was a pecan still in its green husk. He bent over and picked it up, struck, as always, at how like coconuts they were, growing like them in husks, and at how much better they taste when they ripen on the tree. He liked to imagine there was a sound when the husk burst, splitting at the tip into four sections, like a flower opening. Now and again he did hear the solid plock as ripened pecans dropped to the ground.

But most people can’t wait for the natural aging and fall of the fruit. So they come to the groves armed with sticks, or cast about on the ground for fallen limbs that will do, and throw them as hard as they can up into the tree to knock the nuts down.

He used to love to watch the variations of the basic technique. Some used great long limbs to cut as wide a swath as possible through the leaves. Others would use a three-to-four foot length of lumber with a stout rope tied around the middle. A good throw would catch the lumber in a branch. Then the rope could be yanked over and over, shaking the tree vigorously. When the nuts fell, it was a hail of thuddled bumps. At best there would be three hunters: one to knock the fruit down, the others to watch where they all fell and to gather them up.

Once he saw an enterprising old lady in a black dress, stockings, hat, and a fur wrapabout pay a child to climb up as far as he could and shake the tree for her. Squealing together, he shook while she reaped. It was worth the dollar to the boy to perch twenty feet above the common herd.

Some came in packs with carefully folded grocery bags, aiming to fill them up. He always suspected them of collecting for resale. Others, more casual, kicked about the grass and took what they could find that had already fallen.

He looked at the husk in his hand. It had barely started to split open. He reached into his pocket and took out a pen knife, opened it, and carefully sliced the husk at its seams. His mouth watered in anticipation of the acidic smell of the juice that would come from the husk of a nut still so fresh. The juice would stain his fingers, like nicotine from his cigarettes used to do.

He got out the pecan and flicked the husk away. The shell was a very light tan unlike the riper fruit whose shells were dark—not like blackstrap molasses, but like deeply tanned leather with a curious trace of gray in it, and even darker streaks running its length. Those were the best ones: heavy from the fruit inside, yet light to the heft, too. And the shells were so smooth. …

He put it in his pocket, stood very still for a few minutes scanning the ground carefully. If it had been that green, still, it had probably been knocked down rather than naturally fallen. Likely there would be more nearby. He saw one. He shuffled slowly over to it, picked it up, examined it carefully for worm holes, and slipped it into his pocket.

The hunt went on. But you have to be careful, Cottle cautioned, talking to himself, explaining things to himself as though he were a stranger. You can’t just tramp about, because you’d be too likely to crush good nuts into the ground. And you have to make sure there aren’t any worms. And you have to make sure—especially if you were tossing a stick—that you kept both it and the falling nuts in view. Best to keep the stick in sight and trust your ears to lead you to the pecans.

He had loved coming out—except for the dogs, sometimes—because it was the only place in town he knew of where things slowed, where people were both intensely concentrating, and totally oblivious; where to hurry was understood to ruin; where speed was unwanted; where everybody wanted the same thing; and where—in spite of the occasional efficiency monger or pig—most people were helpful—even generous, if a bit standoffish.

Harvesting pecans in such a place is essentially a solitary venture. But eventually everybody came: blacks, whites, students, faculty, needy, non-needy. Everybody came to the late autumn ritual, slowing themselves to a shuffle for a quarter of an hour, or an hour, or more.

He saw a woman walk past two pecans. She hadn’t seen them. He followed, hoping she wouldn’t turn around. He got them. One had a worm. The other was all right. Then he saw another. Two. Three. Fourfive. He got them all and more until his khaki pockets and wind-breaker were loaded up.

He started home, feeling that he had been mean to the woman who had not seen the first two nuts. Her attention had gone over to her small children. He could have called to her, but hadn’t. Pecan hunting was like that, though. You got along with your fellow hunters, even felt a kinship with them. But it was still a loner’s task.

• • •

Back home Cottle opened a beer then dumped his harvest on the kitchen table.

. . . had felt mean just like he had pleasured himself those several years back when he knew he was making friends uncomfortable. He had found himself deliberately sticking the needle into some of them, deliberately displaying himself as the down-and-outer who had taken on added depth of character, greater breadth of understanding …

He drank another beer, then took a shower.

He still enjoyed needling them. But it was different, because he had carved his own place in town. He had come to be just a part of the scene: walking, usually, slowly circling the aisles of the grocery stores, smiling, chatting up friends and acquaintances; gossiping, conducting minor business of the day at the Post Office; writing letters to the newspapers. Just another flat on the stage of life there in town, and become, because ignorable, familiar—like the long, tall black man whose legs had always slowed him down, but who eventually had to use a cane to walk ever so slowly; or Deadeye, the black whose booze-rotted brain was still good enough to let him earn a living doing odd jobs. Thoroughly ignorable.

He flopped down on the sofa with another beer.

Had he wanted to hurt them, to be ugly to them, to put them on some kind of indefensible spot? The world is full of gadflies, he mused. Had he come to that, then? Another gadfly stinging people who had done nothing to him, had been only good to him?

He coughed, shivering at the approach of winter and Christmas, thinking, then, of his mother and other Christmases.

• • •

For so many years it had been the same. Each year he left school to go home to Memphis. Each year he and his mother had kept Christmas together: gotten the tree, decorated it, done their shopping, set out last minute surprises for the next morning, gotten up with their stockings, eaten breakfast, then opened their presents under the tree.

It was all so familiar from his childhood, yet so different after his father had died, his brothers and sister grown and gone, long since keeping their own Christmases with their own families, growing into their own traditions.

Cottle felt sad when he looked at his mother putting up the good show. It wasn’t the small stacks of gifts, though that was always a reminder of how many fewer people there were in their world—certainly in hers. But he knew the time would have to come when he’d call her on the phone or write her the letter saying, he wouldn’t be home for Christmas that year.

The thought of not being home wasn’t a particular sadness to him. When he didn’t get back it would be because he had a family of his own, or because he needed to be somewhere else. As it turned out he was in the Army his first Christmas away.

Rather, sneaking looks at her as she slowly undid a package, he felt an overwhelming sadness as he pictured her alone: no husband, no children, few really close friends. Then how long would she keep up the bother of a tree? The music box record they always played? A sad and sterile phone call with everyone sounding too cheery is all that would be left. It would be cold, no big meal, no energy of bodies to charge the apartment. And even if she spent the rest of her Christmases with one then the other of them, wherever they were, it wouldn’t be the same, because it wouldn’t be her place. She would always be the guest. She would always be some-body’s mother-in-law.

But the truly awful part of Christmas always came in the afternoons when they drove—had to drive—over to Little Rock to see his grandmother who lived with his mother’s sister and her husband. Both of them had begun to hate that trip. It had become so obligatory. But there was no way out.

Then he would wonder: Was it such an awful thing, after all? One night a year to drive two and a half hours to see the grandmother you virtually never otherwise had to be around, the grandmother who used to make you so mad when you were a child because she pinched you all the time even when she knew you couldn’t stand it? Was that so awful? At least my mother didn’t have to keep her the rest of the year. My aunt, after all, was willing to do that. Was it so awful to see your aunt and her husband one night a year, even if you finally had come to find her tedious more than sad and him silly more than clever? Was it all that awful? To swap some presents, to stretch out the day’s giving and maybe even some joy just a touch longer. Was that so awful?

Well, his mother would sigh, her gaze lingering on him for just a second, lingering as she looked past him out into the living room.

They made certain their brief lists of the presents they had gotten were complete for the thank-you notes, gathered the things together, tidied up, finished dressing, got the Little Rock presents stuffed in the big department store bag, looked around their own snuggery, and left.

He drove. He hated that drive from Memphis to Little Rock. There was no other way for it but to go through West Memphis, Arkansas, on the Memphis-Arkansas bridge. It wasn’t too bad when you were over the River. At least that—like the ocean—was always a sight. But the west Memphis approach was awful: narrow, crowded, and fast, a wonderful three-foot high concrete divider to separate the east-and west-bound traffic, a divider like the Suck in the Tennessee River there at Chattanooga pulling you into it. And West Memphis itself: one huge speed trap with the traffic judges damn near sitting at card tables by the side of the road.

Then on through the flat delta land, depressing: awful, awful, awful. He was always stunned by the shacks, by the squalor and just plain dirt poorness of the black tenants who lived in them. And it was always worse coming back the next day at dusk.

On … on … on down that highway that finally and gradually rose into some hills. Never through Easter where now-a-days he only went to bury people: grandmothers, fathers, uncles …

That’s the way it usually was. But there were other years that were better, the few times his uncle would come up to Arkansas from Louisiana. Those were good Christmases.

Then it would be hugs and kisses, have a beer, fix a drink, swap the presents. With his uncle Nuck and Aunt Fret there, there was always an energy that glowed, beat slowly and heavily like the heart of a long distance runner at rest. It was always warm where his uncle was.

Listening to the conversations—his mother and uncle flirting, his aunt’s hysterical laugh, her husband telling his long, never-quite-funny stories, Cottle would start seeing them all in colors and images and sounds. His uncle was golden, brown, warm, and quiet, with the kind of voice little children can go to sleep to when they’re finally put to bed. His aunt, his mother’s sis-ter, was a sewing machine needle flitting from side to side, hunning in a higher and higher pitched whine—fiddle-de-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee—like a mechanical Scarlet O’Hara gone mad. She was electric green, her spaghetti- and beer-heavied body pirouetting, still sadly trying to insist on girlhood.

One of those years his uncle presented Cottle and his mother with a hand-delivered extra—a bottle of wine, apple wine, Ozark apple wine bought from a