King of Coosa

By George Wayland Taylor

Life challenges Catherine as Alzheimer’s disease steadily robs her of memory and her very being. Uncertain of how to remain true to herself, she passionately retrieves and relives the fullness of life in lucid moments. Imagination and reality are both her allies and severe contenders as two close friends aid her. All that she has known and experienced helps her hold her ground, so she and her son David are never far removed from the enticing atmosphere of their Deep South natural world. David expands the tale as he struggles to find meaning against a keen awareness that his work demeans him daily. Uncertain and unwilling to conform to life’s demands, he searches for ways to leave his predicament and still maintain his family life and sense of place in the world. In the 1990s with family and companions, he moves through Tuscaloosa County and the Black Belt of West Alabama to engage himself and others. Will he be able to build something new? 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977264442

George Wayland Taylor

Born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, George Taylor has lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with his wife since 1984. He is retired from teaching Spanish at the University of Alabama. Aside from extensive travel and time in the Spanish-speaking World and elsewhere, he relishes the life, culture and regional stories of Alabama.

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King of Coosa

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 George Wayland Taylor

v3.0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022916635

Cover Photo © 2023 www.gettyimages.com. All rights reserved - used with permission.

Article acknowledgement: The Tuscaloosa News, Monday, March 29, 1993. Worker killed at meat plant. The Associated Press, Selma.

Outskirts Press and the OP logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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1

Brilliant. Today I am brilliant. Yes. I shine, young and aglow. After morning coffee, an early breakfast, I can see the day ahead as sunshine growing through the window, all through my every, strong thought to make for something truly memorable. If only for this one day, my life must stand out clear like the new oak leaves waving me a cheery greeting from the side yard. Not any ordinary time, today becomes life concentrated with the amazing focus I have coming to me this morning, a rainbow beam shooting through my magnifying glass. Oh, what a rare gift all too wonderful to believe or claim as my own!

All’s brilliant, sparkling, like fresh morning dew on the Betty Prior rose bushes in my front yard. So not a moment to lose, I must be quick, make every single second count, for I can never figure out when that suffocating, dank curtain will fall, too heavy to bear. The strong net will fall, entrap me, the victim moldering. And I will be nothing, again. Will be. Nothing. Soft feathered prey caught in relentless jaws. Can sense that time to come when there’ll be no escape. Right now I won’t. No, can’t dwell on the hideous void that’s bound to invade, hold me hostage. Any time now the snare. No one can know when. But my story lives for this single day, maybe the entire day, and imagine that! Maybe a few hours, and when I lose it all for sure, to be ravaged again, it doesn’t matter for now.

A powerful empress in sunlight, for this one day, Great Catherine, Empress of the Russias to survey all, rule, yes, control through endless horizons. I am she. But what makes me think of Great Catherine? What makes me think of anything? There’s the mystery! Total and complete. The mystery trapped within this body of mine.

Even more, today is all my time, flung far back to past years and then projected in leaps forward to strange, new imaginings. Oh, I can fly back to realms I once somehow reached. Again I dance so lightly around the Maypole, garlanded with flowers, can bound off to rediscover all that was dismally lost, oh, how fearfully gone, so pathetically lost, and yet next I go soaring off to discover what can be. Reborn for the day am I, out of the dark asylum. My heart has become red clover and wild flowers bobbing in the breeze, waving their jubilation in the sunny meadows of the Black Belt. A new, sharp, divine instrument of clarity, living willfulness. That I am. Yes!

So what shall I choose for my point of departure? What’s to make the best beginning for today’s trip? There’s so very much to choose from that it’s bewildering. No, I must not say that, mustn’t use words like bewildering, confusing, perplexing. I won’t use words, thoughts, signs that track the dark road down, down with no end known. Not to say such things. Today is the time to be strictly positive. So what’s my choice among so many memories to fill out in the last detail? A dance around the Maypole one bright spring day to celebrate rebirth? A dance till midnight? A tea dance? That’s the one! Yes, a tea dance!

Not just any, but the very first one on a dark, rainy day early in March before the longer daylight hours had come. We danced one late afternoon in that dark-paneled room with its gray, polished soapstone floor, yet we made it light, filled it with bands of crepe paper in an array of pastel colors, violet to daffodil, much like the colors of our dresses. Streamers arched from the ceiling and draped on tables laden with sweet fruit punch, brightened with a few green sprigs of mint. The mild winter had kept it green for us. We sipped tea, ate dainty party sandwiches, cookies, mints and more refreshments than I could ever remember.

And, oh, the dresses that had given our mothers sore fingers in exchange for their hours of attention, then also sashes, crinolines to the extent that we could afford in those days of scarcity. But still my parents managed new shoes for me. Dancing in my new patent leather shoes, I won’t forget that as another proud notion.

What a wonderful occasion. The boys wore suits in darker colors to contrast with us, for they were not yet ready to greet that spring day with more festive attire, but that was back in the days when they wouldn’t have anyway. A little drab or not, they were still on the way to becoming handsome when all of fourteen and fifteen. Maybe sixteen. I forget. I do, so much. I believe that was our age. Mine and his. Tom, Thomas! No doubt, he was someone else that day from the usual sight of him in the neighborhood. I could tell in the feel of his smooth cheek on mine before he was old enough to grow a man’s rough cheek, but his voice had already changed to a man’s. What a surprise it was to Father to hear him for the first time over the telephone before he identified himself. Why, even Father grudgingly confessed he sounded as much like a thirty-year-old man or more. Of course, he had already made himself properly known by full introduction to Father at the door and by Father’s searching questions in our living room weeks before.

All that despite the fact that we were families knowing each other for years, but that was not the point for Father to convey. He needed to make his presence stand before Tom as an example to live up to as long as any young boy was spending time with me, his daughter. That first formal appearance for Tom left him so anxious, and me too, nearly as nervous as I was at the dance, waiting to receive my dance card and wondering whose names would appear in some mother’s fancy script as the most dedicated, intense manipulation of the entire event. Every one of us knew almost the entire range of possibilities, but I ached to be certain about which particular boys they would be with their arms around me. And would there be one or two dances left blank on the card for free choices?

The lemons. That’s how it was done. The boys who wanted to break in for a dance each had a lemon to pass to the boy who was bound by the rules of the occasion to politely relinquish his partner. Or, at least, so thought our mothers. Sometimes with a small pocket knife they would start eating part of the lemon or squirt the juice in another boy’s face when the chaperones were distracted from their charge. Tom didn’t have a trace of lemon on his breath. Instead he had the light smell of fruit punch and mint on his lips as he whispered, and I did too, the lyrics pouring forth from records of romantic songs deemed fitting for the occasion. We knew so many wonderful ones in those days and committed them to memory. My one bright treasure of today. Memory.

I’m sure there’re a few other particles to recall. Let’s see, there must be. But it’s not coming to me anymore. Guess that’s all for now. And I’ve come to accept that happening to me. Also come to realize there are different kinds of intelligence. Some of them never appear on the surface for others to see. That’s my condition day in and day out. If summer comes, if I can get as far as into summer. Is it possible? And who knows how deep a stupor will trap me then?

I try to remember every season in her distinctive ways. The camellias, queen of the winter flowers, have their spent blossoms fall to the ground, and most fade to soft brown, while some others decay black in the quiet little pools born from winter rains. Then a very few of the black ones take on an iridescent sheen in those cool waters. Little winter rainbows in the dark petals. My memories are like them, few and iridescent.

Oh, no, please don’t take my gaze from the few bright memories. I can’t help what I’ve become, don’t want to leave those past days, happy, healthful, but I see someone, I don’t know who, persuading me back to the here and now. No, it’s more like inflicting a bitter medicine for me to choke on. No matter how old, the child within never forgets cod liver oil. Now I can detect the culprit. An attendant in the hall peeking through the doorway. And that’s not the worst of it, for I feel, oh, how I do feel, like a flood from the depths, a call about to come out from me.

Ca… Ca… Call Ol… Ol.i..ver.

Oliver. Not again? Ma’am, please. Remember? We’ve told you any number of times before. Not the slightest idea. We don’t know who Oliver is to call him for you.

No, no. Me, Oliver, Mary. Mrs., …. meee. Yes, Oliver.

"I’m so very sorry. We don’t know what you mean by that name.

Oh, Oli…. Oliver!

There, there, ma’am. Calm down, you’ll be all right soon. Can I get you anything?

Oliver. And Ty, too.

No, it’s hopeless, can’t say any more to her. Nothing to anyone here. Besides, she’s new here, didn’t call me by name like the others. But still, her gentle pat did light for a moment on my forearm, so frail, and now she’s gone for me to be left alone again to my dumb mumblings. Those few dreadfully awkward sounds that somehow manage to escape.

It’s gotten so I don’t like one hand of mine to touch the other, much less want someone else to touch me, because so often they are both so cold, even when it’s almost too warm in the room. They have a feel about them that’s too much like the touch of death, so I resist, recoil from having my own hand, my own flesh touch this arm, this old face.

Oh, God, if that isn’t something terrible, and pitiful too, then I don’t have the slightest mind as to what is. Being this way now makes me think how I was recklessly passionate in past years when I bestowed touches with careless, joyful abandon, on myself and all others, no matter who they were, close, known thoroughly, or even nameless to me since names don’t have to matter. But mine does to me.

Hate my name. These people here and throughout town, too, they just don’t know everything there is to a name like mine. And I am mad! Mad. Angry at this vicious betrayal, denial of all I have been, losing all I know myself to be.

Wandering without a path over a strange land, and no guide in sight, awfully close to becoming that desperate, exiled prophet. That’s who I seem to be, when God spoke to Jonah about the wilting shade shrub. Do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he was bold, yes, bold toward God to reply, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.

Testy too much of the time, that’s what I am, but despite it all, for reasons unknown to me, I hang on to life in my despised Nineveh, this narrow room. Angry, God, angry! And me being this way, it’s as if I’ve learned nothing over the long, long years, for I do not do well to be so angry. No, I do not.

Still, all this is worse than death. Hands, mouth, bladder, every decrepit member of my body gone recklessly out of control, all atremble, so I don’t know what I’m doing out of bed, in this chair, feel as weak as a sick kitten, but my mind is volcanic, surging, wholly passive, nearly dead. What’s really true is that my imagination is boiling over like subterranean geysers trapped in the earth, hidden at fathomless depths, but most of that’s all in my hapless, meandering imagination, mere vapors.

What I really do know lies in this my town, wanders in the River and through this land that’s been my one home, beloved, outrageously, beyond all accounting. So much of that comes circling around, again and again, so whatever the ailment and its untold damage, those particles of my life still flow back to keep me company. This part, that part, a yellow hackberry leaf floating, touching a green one, as yet another decaying one drops from the surface to sink below to join soft, waterlogged branches.

They circle their long, long, tough, scaly bodies through Oliver Pool, where that lost helter-skelter fleet makes up the graveyard of the Black Warrior, down where hellbenders and snapping turtles scavenge about. No one knows for sure, never did, never will, but even if she weren’t there at first, that’s where the currents laid her to rest, the only place she must be. Nowadays, in between the times the huge coal and timber barges curl the surface with their wakes, in between, the waters seem so dead still that no one’s to know what could be stirring beneath. Only they, with their long snouts, hundreds of pointed teeth, see what’s down there long forgotten by all of us drifting on land. Should say we all forgot except me, so there’re still some things held tight to my memory, but not much that most people would count for being worth the remembering; that’s no matter, every shred has its worth to me.

Oh, those alligator gars keep on roaming deep, silent in the dark waters of the Black Warrior. I can see them there for sure. Bottom feeders someone told me long ago, yes, down there sluggish, circling around the moldering ruins encased in thick mud, decaying and with God only knows what kind of filmy, thick water plants and bullfrogs. When I had gar balls, they weren’t half bad, actually good. When? There’s no telling, no one left to be my companion to remind me when. They’re all gone or won’t claim past friendship, won’t show up here to visit, reminisce. That outing so long ago could’ve been in Columbus with Mississippi acquaintances or maybe back here in Alabama, a visit somewhere in the vicinity of Aliceville, so they’d be gar coming from the waters of the Tombigbee. How can any fish so big, so primitive, taste good? Most people say they don’t, not worth the trouble to try to make appetizing.

Sometimes I think Florie is the only one to keep life appetizing for me in these timeless, tasteless days. My dearest friend Florie comes as a big, lumpy bundle of local lore, full of everything that’s happened in the area. She grew up in West Blocton, a coal miners’ town, and proud of that she is, but her family moved away after the great fire devastated her hometown a couple of years before the Depression really set in. She told me as many as thirty-seven stores and twenty-one houses blazed up in ruin, including her home and the old opera house. Now, how can I recall things like those numbers when I can’t remember so much as what I had for lunch? Well, as often as she loves to repeat everything, there’re some facts that won’t seem to take leave of this strange mind of mine. Or maybe I’m taking to inventing them from the first figures, the first inklings that drift into mind. Or maybe she left only moments ago, did she? And by some miracle I remember.

Just as she keeps telling me, West Blocton never did recover to what it had been before the fire and it became all the more beholden to the coal companies. Even though the coal company employed far fewer miners through the Depression than in the peak years of the twenties, it remained the one big reason for the town to exist. The Depression came on early to so many rural places, then stayed and stayed, a constant, drab, unwanted companion. Oh, Florie, you are my one cherished companion! Now where was I? Somewhere. Yes, off and out into the county. This one or a neighboring one. Well, things picked up again during the war, but long before then and for the rest of her life, Florie’s been in Tuscaloosa County with only rare, cautious forays beyond Alabama, like many of us in our generation.

To this day I can’t imagine how these younger folks manage to travel at what seems to be their slightest whim while never really belonging to any one place. They take it as some sort of birthright of theirs to be on the go, what they’re naturally due as the regular pursuit of happiness in any way they see fit. But then again, they take all life in a similar fashion, foreign as it will stay to me. Foreign, like all those new deluxe places in Birmingham that people described to me before I came here.

Talking about young and old, this dear friend of mine takes the prize as far as years go, well beyond mine, or at least I think so. She won’t remind anyone by how much, but it slips out through her old stories. While she’s nearly as deaf as any old woman can be coming through here, and so not used to hearing others, by the same token, she doesn’t expect me to say the least thing for her to listen to. That makes Florie my very best visitor, full of stories for me to lounge in, like a sponge in a warm bath, never wanting to dry out, and somehow she understands that I’m taking it all in when I nod but don’t have anything to say in reply.

Right serious, she is, though I will say lighthearted too, about everything past, throughout this entire area. It’s her true passion. Although Florie’s right willing to concede that West Blocton, Red Eagle, Primitive Ridge and the rest of Bibb County have no great claim on real significant happenings, at least as other people see them, she can find some wonderful things there among kin and friends left behind in childhood, but visited often and never forgotten. Then if she doesn’t go straight on to range beyond, all the way back to ancestors in South Carolina long ago, well, I’m not myself if she doesn’t.

She has been my guardian angel in this my endless, dark season of unknown dimensions, trackless distances carelessly heaped on me, truly an angel because we’ve spent hour upon hour, day upon day, retrieving all those past times. And understanding my memory’s fast disintegrating, she repeats often, not minding it, in fact foolishly relishes endless repetition something like some silly schoolgirl. Together we’re giddy children, little girls eager to hear familiar tales all over again for countless retellings, but never exactly the same, for each time there’s at least a hint of some new twist, some added ornamentation, a particle or two different, new swoops of icing on the cake, which makes it fun for her since she can recall the new touches. I can’t.

At the end of nearly every visit, I somehow muster the effort to say some kind of thank-you with a sincere tremble, a light grasp of her wrist, so it doesn’t matter to us that the words don’t come to me. She knows what it means to me, telling me so many in her generation have left her here alone. And I’m some years younger to her. Imagine! How many I can’t recall.

It wasn’t so long ago, I don’t believe, maybe, that I felt younger, too. I still had my strength then; oh, yes, I was strong enough to wheel a shovel in my yard even though my forgetfulness was turning worse, so I buried them to make a small graveyard because I knew they’d be discovered in the trash, and I was smart enough to bury them right next to the compost pile so as not to draw suspicion to a new area of diggings. They were badly charred, so scorched, burnt, and to think they’d been so much a part of my life for years. I wanted to keep doing the things I had been doing so long, but if my children discovered them, they would have banished me from my own home, although it finally did turn out that way, it would have been much sooner, and it was hard enough to rid myself of the smoke, smell and soot that lingered in the house it seemed forever. They became terribly, outright suspicious when I opened up the house in the fullness of midsummer heat and then also had the air-conditioning going full blast. Just why, Mama? You’ve never, never done anything so foolish! But smart as I like to think they are, they failed to find the hard evidence buried in the soil, the scorched pots and pans that made me so ashamed of my condition, forgetting the most basic things, really bedrock elemental, when the gas stove was on or not.

I loved my home, still do, but never did worship it like some. I mean, didn’t ever intend to set my kitchen up as some sort of showplace where I could install myself as high priestess of culinary arts and sacrificial practices. I see that as a kind of idolatry, while instead I love my home for all that it made itself in our lives through more seasons than I can recall. And that’s something making me entirely different from those women I’ve seen from time to time over the years, the ones who leaf through countless pages of bright, glossy magazines and stop to adore slick home photographs, to revere them as icons reflecting what they think is a nearly sacred existence in their costly appearance.

For the longest time I was so falsely led to think it was a strictly Southern malady, and wholly incurable, but after seeing architectural and design magazines in swanky doctors’ offices, I can indeed attest that it exists everywhere, sad to say.

At a diocesan convention in Anniston, I do believe, once a priest reminded us that an icon is a window to open onto the eternal, held open to meditate on the everlasting, even a sacred vision capable of changing us. Well, as for me, those windows come much more often in the form of faces, arms and hands reflecting lives desperately, painfully sparse, and then full, cluttered all at the same moment. So to my way of thinking, any house has its worth in how it can tell the story captured in those faces, and I have heard far better stories in some very simple houses.

Dearest Nettie, your home is one of those. And don’t we love it so. To my deepest distraction. And you know what, Nettie? When there are such dear people like you, I just don’t know why so many white people manage to live all by themselves in their own world. Too many of them do now, and too many separated themselves off in past generations, oh yes, including the times of my younger years, and look what a mess that came to be for us all. It was enough to have made me want to be born much later than I was.

Well, no point in thinking about things that give us no leeway for choice. Not a smidgen of chance in choosing our time. Nowadays it’s the whites stuck in the suburbs who separate themselves off from the rest of us. But at least now there’s more choice for everyone. I mean to say everyone except me, held down in this small room. As nasty a Nineveh as Jonah would ever want to avoid. Even so, there’s one small window I have to fling open to reach the wider world, only this one comes in the form of sound, not sight. My radio is the path I take to escape suffering these tight bounds. I’d go mad without it. And it helps me bring forth a whole array of fading pictures from my home where I used to listen to radio programs to while away the time at chores that never ended. But like everything, all that busywork changed, mainly my dimming capacity to do it.

With less and less that I could do, Nettie and I would spend more and more time listening to the programs while she busied herself about the house. If ever I knew anyone of steady habits, Nettie was the one. She was of the old school, would keep the fringes of all the rugs combed out perfectly straight, always had that comb in her pocket, and did her work in a white starched uniform complete with cap neatly pinned in place. I can honestly say we were both of the old school, but then together we made ourselves a brand-new school, for we started to learn from each other all sorts of things we didn’t know before, back in the days when that kind of companionship was so much more confined. This new school of ours happened in our last years together while I still had my mind sharp and decided that some things just weren’t worth the effort or time, such as pristine housekeeping, and other things like friendship were worth more time. Even so, Nettie and I never did get to the point where I could convince her that, just maybe, dust can be a protective coating for the furniture. But she finally did get to the point where she couldn’t do as much, like such things as climbing up on high stools or outside ladders for heavy-duty cleaning, so I took it upon myself to convince her that, after all the years we had spent doing that kind of foolishness, it was far and away time to let up on it and just be ourselves for who we are. We decided she could concentrate her efforts in the two other homes she helped to keep up. Between the radio programs and our plain talk, we covered a world of things before I started fading. That’s how we schooled ourselves into new ways.

In fact, so much so that Nettie said one day she would come dressed in African colors since it wouldn’t be all that hard to find something flossy, just right, since she knows a refined woman from Nigeria studying at Stillman College, and maybe at the university too. A lady pursuing a business degree, she told me, and made it quite plain, let me know she was beginning to reach her maturing years, quite a bit older than the typical college student.

Well, I waited and waited some more, and she never did show up in the bright colors, light, gauzy fabrics, made so fair for hot days and nights, what I had grown to expect some unknown day. I would ask her from time to time and she would say some day, some day. I told myself that after so many years of bland habits, we can’t expect to turn ourselves into exciting tropical birds overnight, or maybe never at all, so I had well-nigh brushed aside the chance to see Nettie that way, when, surprise of all my surprises, she chose that day to appear so colorful as the very last day I had in my home, a sudden, last-ditch effort for us to recall our happy days there together.

Yes, finally she had consorted with her Nigerian friend and had come decked out in saffron yellow, green and orange. The bespeckled dress reached to her ankles and was so light it rippled like a color-filled breeze. But more than that, her lovely head and hair dazzled us beyond the fairest description. Nettie had a broad yellow cloth tied into her hair, which shows a touch of gray nowadays. Lustrous, smooth and crisp, it must have been a taffeta that had captured the best sunbeams of our lives into one broad length. The cloth had firm body to it so that its small triangular projections gave her a kind of unique halo appearing like several little wings. Bless her heart, she had her way of telling me our thoughts and fantasies can still fly no matter how sorry we look on the outside.

And later that day they took me to this place. By the time I reached this wrenching tear from home, I had all but lost that once powerful command of my tongue for saying much of anything worthwhile, really next to nothing at all left, so I broke out in the biggest smile possible to show Nettie. It was the only happy thing I could manage all that week. All the rest came to tears.

But before that final day, with my own house turning into such a mess—dust draped from high, out-of-reach curtains to darkest corners, worse than my brother’s place by far, or so I imagined—I was spending vast gobs of time as a recluse when she wasn’t there, me not wanting visitors to see it, and whatever little precious time was left over, a recluse looking aimlessly for misplaced, forgotten things. My life got to the point of just too much for me to hide, pots, pans, vacant wanderings through my once familiar town now appearing so strange, changed, ambling past yards and through yards at peculiar moonlit hours, teacups in the clothes dryer, buttered toast spread with jam in the linen closet. Now how does that happen to me? Curious, misplaced names falling from my dry lips not fitting loved ones known many years, suddenly unknown by name, the hot, spreading brown spots on contrary clothes I could no longer manage to iron right, starting to almost burn before my face, then, most hateful of all, the endless folding, refolding, refolding laundry through practically the entire morning. It was never done. All got beyond me, beyond my capacities, my energy, causing a kind of fevered battle fatigue in a campaign where my own home became the terrible war zone. Really, can anyone believe? I still can’t, so with all that grief, they made me come here to pretend this was a new home, to provide the best care they said, care they just weren’t able to give anymore, but it seems to me they had an equal need for them to hold me in some sort of ordered life. That’s more the truth, and I won’t argue against that reason because I desperately long for more order in this mushrooming confusion. Lord, I crave it. Complications keep spawning new ones, like more snakes than the Coosa River has. No one, but no one wants to believe what’s true, that life, my very own life, can be drawn down into disaster. I am disaster.

My mental turmoil and unsettledness led me to set up routines others found hard to accept me doing. They tried to limit the time I spent with any one task but usually gave up after such stubborn persistence on my part. Sweeping was one of those things I did to find solace in real physical activity even though it seemed too much of the same thing to my family and friends. I would do it to a quite respectable amount through the house but liked to sweep the front walkway most of all, for that would keep me outside in the fresh air. My broom and I together became a most familiar sight to everyone passing by at all different hours, so it was no secret that I favored the dark hours for sweeping too.

Tidying up the front yard was another of my constant attentions. I’m sure people used to wonder why I’d spend so much time picking up magnolia leaves one by one. What is it that makes some people take out their brutish anger on helpless trees and plants? For the love of everything, I don’t understand. Much to my sorrow I have known of people, curses on them, who have cut down their magnolia trees because they didn’t want to be put to the trouble of constantly clearing away the large, fallen leaves, litter they consider those leaves, especially since they fall throughout the year, and one by one. Well, I have news to declare for such people; I consider it a privilege to care for living things. And a very fine privilege at that. Not only a pleasure to relish, but I could show each leaf to be different from the other, and in the yellows fading to brown, I could still, if only given the chance, trace the cycle of life back to supple branches and glistening green.

I have lived in constant amazement by what I could find within a stone’s throw of my door. Abundance so incredible that I can’t hold my breath separate from its rich fragrance. Probably those same people who cut down trees would want to be rid of oldsters like me as well. There’s so much they don’t know, and one thing is this: When the world loses old people like me who notice and delight in all these things, then it…really…is…a loss.

I was once so choosy, yes, down to the smallest detail, would select a particular small spoon, one engraved with my mother’s initials, for instance, and then hunt out a certain teacup, bright blue or pearly eggshell white or glowing yellow, perhaps, each item for a certain occasion so that every single thing had its place, its own time to become cherished, observed ceremoniously, and now, now! What’s there to say? Nothing. It’s all been said, and now it’s gone away. Why it’s all I can do to think spoon, and only sometimes can I do that, but can’t say spoon, nor even hear spoon. I mean I can hear the sounds that make the word spoon, but can’t recognize what those sounds come to mean, and only in these strangely rare, lucid moments, like now, can I explain all this to myself, make it a precious, rational dialogue deep within me, instead of the night terror surrounding me most the time.

I lived a proudly ordered, disciplined life for years and still try to find and grow a few kernels of it. In fact, this is my true daily effort. My one and only raison d’être. I call it The Discipline and make it the focus of my every day, a supreme and total effort to remember a point here, a point there of all that my life’s been and everyone else’s that has touched mine for this three-quarters of a century I’ve called my own. This body of mine has failed in its ordinary functions, so I sit here with only this one possibility. It is my all in all to carry me through for whatever is left, who knows how long; it can’t bother me anymore. I won’t let it.

Sometimes a flash of a thought will come cascading through, like sunshine on rain-soaked leaves, like sunlight on running water, and then it’s gone, lost. All lost, like the whitewaters, the rapids, the splendid rocks and spring lilies on the Black Warrior; they were all flooded away when they built the locks, dams, far too long before I was born for me to pleasure in them.

2

White-headed women throughout our town, nearly as much as their men, old friends of mine for years, still do, I guess, out of nothing less than petrified, ingrained habit, once again become appendaged to profound afternoon amnesia before their television apparatuses. They remain sunk into easy chairs for endless eating, gazing. Neglected stores, streets, yards, our town parks, the Quadrangle, all those buildings and grounds show without the least embarrassment their empty solitude. They stand abandoned in the silence imposed by this overpowering spectacle. All human dialogue languishes, then stops altogether, replaced by shouts. Dialogue becomes stolen away by the one bright, enthralling scene. From the opened windows of my house, I can hear the strong, clear-voiced announcer declaring bold pronouncements. The rippling, crescendoing cheers pour like confetti through the warm, often enough, hot, fall air from that high, brash temple of our times, considered no less than an eternal monument here. Nowhere else could it be than from Bryant-Denny Stadium’s Saturday afternoon football games, where ongoing chants stream onto my once tranquil backyard. Roars of approval, jeers of eager scorn invade, settle upon my every rose and chrysanthemum petal. Cheers roll over those long-settled graves and mature, watchful trees I used to visit so regularly in Evergreen Cemetery, where our loved ones lie, but not Evelyn and Charles. No, the River took them away as one thing I can never forget. A tranquil time of refuge was my visit to the graves, but on Saturdays they slip away into a disturbed stillness so very close, just across the street from the stadium, turned into that brazen creature of countless members convulsing in vibrant tension.

From there to my home, I hear a color, banner-draped, yes, even a palpable delirium, visible, and transporting young souls to breathe only for the one present moment, to breathe in a tightness that infiltrates the air, to know only the panting for each bright second, measured into long white stripes and then forgotten for the next singular instant, and then onto the next. Oh, I see, hear this delirium rising from the ecstatic field, intended only for those young bodies moving proud, sweat glistening, strong.

No, they do not, cannot understand the sheer luxury of dismissing past and future for the thrill encapsulated in the one now. They do not understand the glowing pain of irretrievable, real loss because their every single thought and move slip with the smoothest, synthetic, uniform ease effortlessly through their heads, from their firm lips and through their agile limbs. It’s all too simple, easy material, slick fabric for them. Ah, brave youth, I still adore you, with a passion you cannot see. I do. Brave you are, but listen to me, I am braver yet. You cannot grasp how I forget more and more, and though I surely do, still I manage to call forth this brave, tough, frail struggle to hold to each memory possible to make me unwilling to relent, surrender a shred, not relinquish an inch on the shining field of memory while facing an angry, determined foe ready to celebrate permanent, total victory, to crush me into the ground. Yet somehow I must play on.

And, yes, once I did play with all the pulsing, rushing energy I could command to move my body with all a girl’s and a woman’s grace. Those times were numerous enough, but more especially I now conjure up that one marvelous appearance, coming into surprisingly clear focus. I have no earthly idea how the confused vapors of my mind steam out these memories so I can smell them fresh like dinner on the stove. How can it be that I forget what I just had for lunch, and then be struck back into intelligent responsiveness, even enthralled by something from forty, sixty years back? And what’s more, another lifetime ago, never recalled through entire generations till now. How can it be? Those long generations filled with dirty, greasy dishwater ready to do their sticky hindrance to keep my lost memories from coming alive, floating to the surface—how is it possible? But now fresh again, at least for the moment! How delicious a treat!

Marvelous I made that soaring entrance, but it did not take long for my parents to bring out the consequences as punishment, and fully deserved. Though I was proud to say I came out less bruised in spirit than in body, but did I care? Certainly not, for I knew I could do what I wanted and it would be flying, and not like flying out of a tree house where there were only playmates to see, but instead leaping into the very center of things with a whole audience to view, having them fixed on me, just me, as much as eyeing any spectacular scenes on the big silver screen. So I slip away from my seat while Mama and Aunt Susanna are lost in rapt attention, waiting for the climax of the feature presentation, and I seek the way out and upward, climb the steps trembling in anticipation, my right arm in an arm of my mother’s coat, my left in an arm of my aunt’s coat with the other two tied together at my back to fashion a great cape spreading out with soft, batlike wings. This time I have it all planned, clutch Mother’s big black umbrella—now there’s a real hard decision to come by, to use it or not, but use it I will—and move upward toward the balcony area, where Blacks were confined back then, and begin to race through the dark, but leave the door open to send a shaft of light to spotlight my rush forward down the steps of the aisle, with only a slight awareness of the competing attention from the flickering images on the movie screen that I see for the first time from the balcony as I straddle the rails in front of the first row of seats, open the umbrella and stand on the edge for only a moment to catch my breath, stand to form my silhouette in the path of the projection light so everyone turns to see me before I declare in my bold voice to one and all at the picture show, Everyone, look at me, I can fly! and I do, soon to bound upon the upholstery of two empty seats below to make my full debut in the Saturday matinee. The two coats soften the fall against the seats, so I don’t feel all that much dazed. I am exhilarated as the commotion begins around me and all the lights go on and then Mama and Aunt Susanna stand over me, worried, and mortified too.

The punishment came as a number of hours confined to my room, alone and without dinner, but soon afterwards I was favored by the best possible, direct intervention from a higher authority, my dear grandmother, who said in no uncertain terms that Christmas vacation was not the time for prolonged discipline over a silly, childish impulse soon to be forgotten. She said she was certain that each and every time ahead, I’d settle for quiet sitting throughout it all, the serials, cartoons and feature. But maybe the serials and cartoons appeared some years later. Who knows, anyway? I can’t remember, but at this point it really doesn’t matter at all.

Oh, I loved the times free from school, and despite being upset too much of the time over my name, I had magic spilt deep and broad throughout my childhood, girls and boys in gay tumults of laughter and giddy confusion.

It’s been a long time, I don’t know how long, since I’ve heard such strong-willed laughter. I guess it must’ve been when that grandson of a friend of mine drank too much champagne at his sister’s wedding reception. Oh, it was pealing laughter, strong, but lighthearted too. He and his friends joined in a thick little cluster to spill forth their merriment. It was so contagious that I caught it immediately and it would not let go of me. Young people are so delirious, so captivated within the wide bounds of self, oblivious to all beyond a tight circle of friends, smiling brothers and sisters cast in like appearance, alter egos, delirious, delicious. Now they are totally lost to me. And so is the merriment. The laughter gone, gone.

Except for the very young, and I’d have to say somewhere in the range of two or three years old. If a little one that age were to come visit me, he’d see me a kindred spirit not too different from himself and would accept me as I am. I know that for a fact because a while back, some visitor had a child that young who wandered in here on his own after his mother had