by Odie Lindsey
Turning back onto Highway 1, she passed the small state parks around the Indian mounds. She thought to pull in and consider the grassy, lovely hillocks—but didn’t.
In Vicksburg, she stopped at a Wendy’s. Over a value meal with Biggie iced tea, it came to her that she had to see the coast. Deana had once described the phosphorus in the ocean, and how at night, every now and again, it sparked from your body as you swam. Or no. Actually, Colleen couldn’t remember if Dean had been talking about the Gulf waters, or maybe the Florida Atlantic, or . . .
“Oh hell, Deana,” she said way too loud, and then apologized to the family in the next booth.
Sitting and chewing her value meal burger, Colleen adjusted her exit strategy for the last time. Realizing that the only way to see the Mississippi coastline was to head east, not west, she decided to drive back toward Jackson, then Meridian, and to damn near Alabama, before cutting down the back roads to explore the breadth of the state’s far boundary, and toward its tiny heel of shoreline.
She arrived at Pascagoula on fumes of exhaust, and exhaustion, and she vowed to hit the road west the next morning. At the very least, she knew the coastline interstate would chug her back through Texas (which could be doubly interesting, she thought, if it went anywhere near Dallas.) (It did not.)
She cruised Highway 90 along the shore, the dipping sun a cascade over steely water and white sand beaches. Tall columns of starlings twisted up like tornado spires. She cruised past antebellum mansions and postmodern high-rises, by weather-razed bungalows and post-Katrina condo boxes—side by side, mismatched, erected hodgepodge according to which structures had or had not survived the last hurricane. Now and again, she was distracted by the gloss and fire of neon from a massive casino hotel, and the draped vinyl banners that advertised three-for-one drinks and sluttish payouts. She looked left, to the water, and to the waning sunlight in the grainy hydrosphere. A mile or more out was a staggering wall of clouds, clouds like a continent, like some great looming Dover. These, too, were subject to the changing light, though they never moved closer to shore. She followed the silhouettes of brown pelicans in formation, gliding just above the surface of the amber tide, toward a stray pile or buoy or nearby marsh, to nest until daybreak.
The cars parked by the beach were rusted beaters, by and large, and/or beaters disguised by bright paint jobs. Their owners slung all manner of fishing accoutrement, plastic bucket, tackle box, and cooler. Sea rods flung from the sides of a wooden pier like conductor’s batons. The water transformed in spectrum, orange-lit to amber, crimson to purple, steel to blue, to bluer still.
A roadside marker proclaimed the drag to be the DR. GILBERT R. MASON SR. MEMORIAL HIGHWAY. Colleen had no idea of who Dr. Mason was, nor did she care to find out. She was, however, tempted by the promise of a roadside seafood joint and the crowd gathered inside, communal under stark fluorescence.
She spotted a wooden sign that noted VACANCY and WATER VIEWS, then hit the brakes and pulled into the cluster of rental cottages adjacent the highway. She noted the newness of the construction: new hedges, new asphalt lot, new bright yellow parking lines.
No history. No problem. She booked a room for the night, then unloaded the car. She left the urn in place, covering it with an old T-shirt. As she walked toward the cottage door, her shoulders and back burned and her knees felt like sopped sponges.
Inside, she threw the air conditioner on high, splashed her face with cold water, then paced over to the mini-fridge. Kneeling in front of it, she whispered, “Come on, now, please,” then mouthed a silent hallelujah when she found it contained service. Grabbing two light beers, she went out the screen door of the bungalow and onto the small wooden deck. She closed the blackout curtains behind her, and sat in a banded patio chair.
The coastal wind was salted and thick. The deck was ringed by tall shrubs, so she couldn’t see the ocean while sitting. Above her, just off the cusp of fingernail moon, was a large star. A planet, she supposed, though she really didn’t know. She could look it up, sometime.
Colleen listened to the flow of cars along the beachfront road, and the crumbling lull of the waves. She pulled a second chair over and put her bare feet in the seat, and she wished, and for a streaking instant felt, that she was out in the dark water, blind to all beneath, treading alongside Derby.
She downed the first beer in two huge gulps. When the wind shifted in a certain direction, she could hear a small party in the distance. She wondered if sometime her whole family, whatever that might look like, could gather here over a holiday.
The lamplight of the room seeped through the cracks in the curtains. She opened the second cold beer, took a sip, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Colleen understood at that instant that she did not know many things, and that she would only ever uncover a filament of truth. She knew that she loved the twins, even if she couldn’t stay with them right now. She knew that of all the things or places that might unfold, whether Menlo Park or Mars, she would for damn sure take her children to the Jim Henson Museum in Leland, Mississippi. Sometime. She knew that a version of her husband was in an urn in the car, but did not know how long she would carry him. She knew that this broken state, her homeplace, was at once somehow beautiful, though she could not yet explain her relationship to it. She knew the feel of the salt air collecting on her skin, matting her hair. She knew the sound of the surf crushing sand in the distance.
She knew that she wished to do better, to be better. This, at least, she knew.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my family, Lindsey and Whiting and De Masi and DeLoca. Thank you, love you.
To Bill Clegg and Jill Bialosky, with reverence for your belief, your insight, and your relentless coaching-up. (No small tasks, these.) To Drew Weitman, without whom this book would not be.
To my writer-reader-feedbacker pals: Kyle Beachy, Margaret Patton Chapman, Kelly*Luce, Robert Rea. To Chris Bower, forever on deck. To Lynelle Keil and the folks who read all those early scraps.
To Nancy Russell.
To Alice Randall, Mary Miller, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Michael Waters. To Kate Daniels, Ted Ownby, Allan Hunt, Sara Levine. To Justin Quarry, George Livingston, Doreen Oliver. To Jack McGrath and family.
To Lee Eastman, for insight into art-making. To Stephen Hendee, for art-making, and insight into propane grill catastrophe. To Amy Martin, a mold cracker among moldy crackers.
To Vince Springer, the only person other than my dad whose Happy Veterans’ Day means the world. To Mary Gauthier, a comrade in the combat that is art.
To the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and the MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. To the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, whose partnership with the NEA in support of veteran artists was pivotal to this book, and to the creative work of so many.
To Nashville, Austin, Oxford, Chicago, Louisville, Durham . . . and the friends there I long to see. Whether we are an hour or year removed, missing you keeps my pulse up. Per tutti i miei amici a San Terenziano, Comune di Gualdo Cattaneo, Umbria. Per Paolo Battaglia e la sua famiglia.
To the crew at W. W. Norton, editorial to design, sales to social media, and to the folks on the clock at National Book Co., Throop, PA.
To the booksellers. I miss being one of you, and won’t forget what you do.
To the soldiers. I don’t miss being one of you, and won’t forget what you do.
A NOTE ABOUT REFERENCES
This novel holds dialogue with a years-long blur of reading, listening, watching, reflecting. A very few sources of note:
The Mississippi Encyclopedia, eds. Ted Ownby, Charles Reagan Wilson, Ann Abadie, Odie Lindsey, James G. Thomas Jr. (University Press of Mississippi, 2017).
Dixie’s Daughters by Karen L. Cox (University Press of Florida, 2003).
Making War at Fort Hood by Kenneth T. MacLeish (Princeton University Press, 2013).
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer (University of Illinois Press, 1995).
Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World by Robbie Ethridge (UNC Press, 2004).
The Strawberry Plains Oral History Project, 2003–2005, interviews recorded by Brooke Butler, Phil Ensley, Robert Hawkins, and Allison Trappenstedt (University of Southern Mississippi, Joseph Anderson Cook Library Archives).
“Some Go Home” by Jerry Jeff Walker, Bein’ Free (ATCO Records, 1970).
also by ODIE LINDSEY
We Come to Our Senses: Stories
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Odie Lindsey
All rights reserved
First Edition
“Wings of a Dove,” written by Bob Ferguson, as recorded by Ferlin Husky (1960). Used with permission of Husky Music, Inc.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Jacket design: Sarahmay Wilkinson
Jacket images: (lighter) wakila / Getty Images; (strawberry) mashabr / Getty Images
Book design by Fearn Cutler de Vicq
Production manager: Beth Steidle
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Lindsey, Odie, author.
Title: Some go home : a novel / Odie Lindsey.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019052107 | ISBN 9780393249521 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393249538 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3612.I53568 S66 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052107
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS
