Sweet and Low

by Nick White

  Rusty searched the front of the bus until he found the Catwoman comic wedged under the gas pedal. He looked it over: The raven-haired Selina Kyle had found herself in the jungles of South America, fighting drug lords with her usual mix of stealth, sass, and double-jointedness. The coach had put on his polo and was shoving his feet into his New Balances when Rusty stepped off the bus.

  The weedy ditch felt soggy beneath Rusty’s feet, a loud sucking sound with each step.

  “I think they may try to fire me over this,” the coach said. He stumbled to his knees when he tried to walk over to Rusty. The ground made more ugly noises as he straightened back up. “Second thought, I think I may just quit.”

  Rusty climbed the small bank and stood on the edge of the interstate. Bits of sunlight burned through the remaining overcast. Birds wheeled around in the big sky, crazed by the stillness left after the storm. Not a single car coming in either direction. That was the Delta for you: so empty it could convince you it was big. He rolled up the Catwoman and peered through it. The Lady Tigers were about half a mile away, toting their bats in case of trouble. But Rusty knew there wouldn’t be any. They would probably confuse the hell out of whoever was working the Space-Way until DeDe explained everything. First to the Space-Way attendant, then to whomever she got on the pay phone. When Rusty got home tonight after being checked out by the hospital, he wouldn’t begin with the wreck. He would cut to the quick: the baby. Why didn’t anybody tell me? he would ask his mom. He tried imagining her answer, but none came.

  “Rus?” The coach had managed to make it up the ditch somehow and stood beside him. “We got to think about what we’re gonna tell them. What we’re going to say.”

  Rusty kept looking at the Lady Tigers. The Delta was flat enough that he could watch them walking away for a long time. He dropped the comic and stretched out his palm. Like this, in forced perspective, he held the Lady Tigers in his hand.

  “You wrecked us, but my ass is the one on the line, you see.” The coach picked up the comic and swatted at Rusty’s hip. “We need to be friends on this. Stick together. You know what I mean?”

  Little by little, the Lady Tigers shrank. He regretted not learning all their names. Maybe there was still time. At school, around town. But he couldn’t exactly picture them hanging out with him after this. Carrie-Anne. He knew that name. Sister. Well, he knew that one too. The coach kept on talking, and Rusty didn’t listen to a word of it. He wanted to hold the team, all of them, in his palm for as long as he could, as they continued to get smaller and smaller until, at last, they were no more.

  THE CURATOR

  We’re headed to the cemetery behind St. Peter’s, to the gravesite of the Author. Even now, hordes of his devoted readers still pilgrimage to this little town in Mississippi and pay their respects at his grave. Many of them carry some form of dark liquor along with them, carefully placing the half-empty bottles of Wild Turkey and Maker’s Mark around the enormous tombstone, the gesture a kind of offering to him, the Author, who had become, toward the end of his life, notorious for his drunken antics. Since we decided on making the trip at the last minute, however, we come empty-handed. No one remembers who suggested we come, but here we are, the four of us, off to see the Author, long dead these many years.

  St. Peter’s is a short walk from the bookstore; that is if you know the way to go. And we do. We’ve all lived here for some time. We cut diagonally across the town square, the dimly lit fronts of local department stores and cafés and pharmacies all hushed and empty at this hour, then we make our way down Old Timothy Street’s cobbled pavement, passing the narrow Victorian houses with their large old-timey windows and low-ceilinged porches, and on up, farther still, we climb the little hill toward the First National Bank. Here, we take a left on Church Street where we can, at last, see St. Peter’s steeple, a sharp, burnished needle pressing above the trees. On the tip of the steeple: a gold cross. From this distance, the cross appears delicate, vulnerable to the elements—almost as if a strong gust could come barreling through from the north at any moment and send the gleaming fixture cartwheeling across the heavens. I mention something like this to the others, but they ignore me. It’s that kind of night.

  We walk in pairs, two men following two women. The men are writers. One’s successful, and one isn’t. (I’m the unsuccessful one.) Ahead of us, the women stride arm in arm headlong into the dark, their slim bodies illumined by a fat moon. Grasshoppers sing softly beside us, invisible in the tall grass. The women speak in hushed voices like old friends, sisters even, and kick away pinecones that clutter about their ankles on the sidewalk. They are working things out between themselves, I know. One of them—the brunette—is married to the successful writer, and the other one (incidentally, I’m in love with this one) is sleeping with him. Everyone knows, of course: Tonight, there are hardly any secrets left among us worth telling one another.

  * * *

  —

  THE AUTHOR WAS BORN a bastard in this town at the dawn of the last century, a time when Mississippi had started to regain some of the vitality it lost during the Civil War. The Author’s town bustled with new life and optimism back then: The university had doubled in size since its founding fifty years before, and established families from Jackson and Natchez and as far away as Nashville settled around this growing seat of education, building grand houses in the style of Queen Anne Victorian, and none of them were grander than the Cartwright house. It was built a block and a half away from the town square, near Mr. Cartwright’s pharmacy, and became somewhat famous for having the largest bay windows in the state.

  A year before the Author’s birth, the Episcopalians finished the construction of St. Peter’s. The man who would become the Author’s father, a rowdy steeplejack from Cincinnati, fastened the cross to the church’s steeple sometime in the summer of 1898. That fall, a slight romance developed between Mr. Cartwright’s daughter, a naïve debutante, and this selfsame steeplejack. Mr. Cartwright didn’t think much of the match. He envisioned, like many fathers of that time and place and station in life, his daughter marrying a banker or a doctor or—at the very least—a pharmacist like him. Despite Mr. Cartwright’s objections, the relationship continued, often in secret, and soon the girl found herself “with child,” as they used to say back then.

  Overwhelmed at the prospect of becoming a father, the steeplejack caught the first train to Texas. Some scholars conjecture that he worked the rest of his days in an oil field near Dallas, but that’s pure speculation. In any event, no one heard from him again, and the Cartwright girl gave birth to the child out of wedlock, a great shame to her family. She didn’t live long after, a rare case of toxicity setting in soon after the baby’s first cries; the local newspaper called her death “merciful” and “proper” considering the circumstances. According to most of the Author’s biographies, his grandparents, the austere Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright, treated him kindly, and he enjoyed a reasonably pleasant childhood with them, learning to read at an early age and spending most of his days, quiet and alone, prone in the expansive bay window of the Cartwright house, watching passersby and reading the likes of Hawthorne and Melville and—his favorite—Mr. Henry James.

  By the time he was twenty, both of his grandparents had been entombed in the cemetery behind St. Peter’s—where he himself would one day rest—and most of his other relations had scattered. Wayward and untethered to anyone or anything, he traipsed up and down the Eastern Seaboard before finally sneaking into Canada and joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force for the last year of the Great War. (The United States Army having soundly rejected him because of his flat feet.) After bravely fighting the kaiser, he spent the remaining years of his twenties in France.

  During this time, his artistic inclinations seriously took root; here, in the City of Light, he transitioned from private journaling to penning brief vignettes about life in Mississippi. These were hard little gems of truth, his early work. He showed his
writing to other American artists living there at the time, but they, as a whole, were not a very encouraging bunch and never accepted him into their ranks. Gertrude Stein, for example, found his accent too thick and cumbersome and his manners too boorish and his taste altogether questionable. “The man writes what he thinks he should write,” she wrote in a letter, the one and only time she mentioned the Author by name, “instead of what he wants to write. He is, in a word, befuddled.” His closest ally in France, a writer from the Middle West, advised him after a long night of drinking to return home and allow that setting—those people, their dark and funny ways—to nourish his creativity. The Author listened, and once back in Mississippi, he cloistered himself in the Cartwright house like a monk and wrote. Eventually, he published. His novels sold poorly and made little racket in the world, bewildering the finicky New York critics who deemed his style “experimental” and “cerebral” and his complex story lines completely “incomprehensible.” Then, a year after his marriage to a woman who worked in the town’s public library, the Swedes bestowed upon him an auspicious literary award, which garnered him almost instant international acclaim. The award surprised no one more than the Author himself. Now critics took a second, more thoughtful, look at his work, declaring him a “genius,” and his reputation began to grow, as did his misanthropic tendencies.

  * * *

  —

  BRADLEY HOLCOMB—he’s the successful writer on our walk tonight.

  Late thirties. A professor at the university in town. Popular among his students—especially the girls. Always dresses in some kind of flannel even in the summertime when the heat is so thick it has texture and personality. Because of his voluptuous eyebrows and protruding jaw, he appears, most of the time, to be brooding or deep in thought. He’s from Virginia, and his accent, slight and noticeable only when he reads aloud, invites easy friendship and is not—as in my case, with my own muddy Delta twang—a joke. Earlier, before our walk to the cemetery, Holcomb read from his latest novel at a party in town celebrating its publication. The woman who’s currently sleeping with him owns the bookstore that hosted the party.

  Her name is Maggie.

  Today, before Holcomb’s reading at her bookstore, she confessed to loving him. I was there helping her and her small staff arrange things for the upcoming event; mostly, I was an extra hand to set up folding chairs and move tables and string up clear Christmas lights in the trees in the backyard. “It’s sickening, the way I want him,” she said, when we had finished the preparations and were having lunch alone in her office. I told her I understood, that I felt the same way about her. At this, she laughed, tilting her head back, exposing a white cream of skin under her chin. Physically, Maggie’s remarkable: wild sprays of coppery hair, boyish hips, a face speckled with freckles, like a robin’s egg. I’ve studied this face; I know it intimately. I know, for instance, that she rarely smiles because her teeth crowd and jut over one another in her small mouth, each tooth a slightly different shade of white. By all accounts, Maggie should be homely, but she’s not. And on those rare moments when she does smile (or, as was the case at lunch, laugh), the effect on me is profound. Her provocative and unusual features—all co-opting together—turn her exotic, electric. How could you not love a woman like this?

  After laughing at me for admitting my love, something she’d known about for some time and chosen to ignore, she said flatly, “You’re hopeless.”

  I said, “We both are.”

  She squinted. “Touché.”

  During the reading, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She sat in the first row, her profile barely visible, and wept—a wet, gentle sort of weeping. Her tears glittered on her cheeks like liquid crystal, and I wanted to lick them from her face and then take her away from this place, from her bookstore and all these people who had gathered here tonight to honor the libertine writer Bradley Holcomb. Bradley Holcomb! He didn’t deserve her. I sat behind the crowd of admirers, in the back with Holcomb’s wife at my side. I met her for the first time that night. She clutched my arm the whole time her husband read. After he finished, Maggie, dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin, stood and led the crowd in an enthusiastic round of applause.

  As the others around me clapped, I remained stock-still, and Holcomb’s wife leaned over, and whispered, “That girl—she’s really quite beautiful when in pain, no?”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE URGING OF HIS EDITORS, the Author went to Europe to accept his big award from the Swedes, which came—he was delighted to learn—with a substantial cash prize. On returning to town, he sold his childhood home and bought thirty acres of land, mostly undeveloped, just south of the square. The spacious two-story house on the property was one of the few Greek Revivals not burned when General Andrew Jackson Smith went rampaging through the state, and came complete with servants’ quarters and a horse stable and an outside kitchen. It’s said that his wife, who came from humble means, had taken a shine to the place during her girlhood, and he bought the house for her as a belated wedding gift.

  Not much is known about his marriage, but some biographers indicate that the relationship was somewhat tumultuous, even violent. He kept odd hours—a night owl who slept well into the afternoon—and he was known for talking to himself and making detailed outlines of his novels’ plots on his bedroom walls with heavy charcoal sticks (he and his wife slept in separate bedrooms, another indication of their troubled life together).

  Universities and libraries around the country called on him to speak, to give readings, but the Author rarely went. He preferred his privacy, working on his house and grounds instead. He lined his driveway with an alley of tall cedars and planted a large vegetable garden in the back and took a special pride, it was said, in tending to his only horse, an old Appaloosa named Bathsheba. His wife rarely ventured into town, and most of the townsfolk who interacted with her found her disagreeable, altogether too snobbish for the mechanic’s daughter they knew her to be. Meanwhile, outside of town, around the country, a generation of emerging writers read his work, were inspired by it, and attempted to imitate the leafy Southern voice he had perfected in his prose.

  However famous he became, the town always regarded the man as something of an oddity. Few in town read his stories and novels, and those who did were baffled or bored. They referred to him as, quite simply, the Author, and usually the utterance of this nickname was accompanied by an exaggerated eye roll or a huffy sigh. (Later, of course, his fans took to calling him the Author as a term of endearment.) Something happened between him and his wife a few years after he won the award, and the couple separated—although they never officially divorced. After his wife packed up and moved to New Orleans, he became a public nuisance. His relationship with the bottle became legend during this time in his life. Riding Bathsheba, he stalked the township at night and either yelled bleak obscenities or recited the poems of Keats and Wordsworth and Coleridge for all to hear. Years passed, and his behavior only worsened. The police arrested him on numerous occasions for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. Some members of city hall talked about committing him to Whitfield, the sanitarium near Jackson, but before anything official could be done, the Author was caught in a flash flood one night and drowned. It was 1964.

  After his death, the town and the university suffered through a hard time with integration and the civil rights movement and looked for ways to remedy its troubled public image. As they saw it, the Author, who had been buried there, represented an opportunity. They pooled their money, wrote grants, asked for donations, and bought his home from his wife and transformed the great house into a museum. The university, at the behest of the mayor, began holding weeklong conferences on the Author and his work every year in August, attracting scholars from around the world to their hamlet. And, in 1975, the board of trustees at the university commissioned an iron statue of him and erected it near the humanities department on the drill field. Often the re
cipient of bird scat, the statue, I’m assured by scholars, looks nothing like the real man: It’s a thinner version with an amused face and a cocky stance, a pipe perched snugly between his smiling lips. The Author himself rarely smiled.

  * * *

  —

  MAGGIE AND HOLCOMB knew each other for slightly more than a year before they started the affair. The way Maggie tells it, the wife—Gilly—knew about it almost from the start. “They are very open with their desires,” Maggie told me. Adding, “Very French, if you ask me.” Holcomb’s attractive, in a rugged, sordid kind of way, so I understand the physical draw, but what moved Maggie to love him, or at least tell me she did, I can scarcely say. Her heart seemed so unyielding to me in this regard that I assumed all men were unlikely to snare her affections.

  However irrational it may sound, I cared for Maggie almost immediately. Couldn’t help myself. We met my second week in town. I had quit my job teaching high school after my first year proved disastrous and drove two hours east to settle here because I believed the atmosphere of the place, its “rich literary tradition,” as the brochures called it, would be conducive to my desire to become, once and for all, a writer. Maggie was throwing a party at her bookstore—she’s always throwing parties, it seems—this one was to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the bookstore’s grand opening—and I was working part-time at the public library and had somehow been included in the invite with the rest of the employees.

  I biked to her bookstore after work. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the bookstore was in the old Cartwright house, the Author’s childhood home. It was a prime location for such a store too, nestled between a popular bed-and-breakfast and a café renowned for its molasses pies. Two gauzy willows drooped on either side of the entrance, obscuring most of the house’s beautiful frontage—including those lovely bay windows—from the street view. The heavy tangles of the willows pulled at my dress shirt as I stooped to pass under them and open the double front door to the glory inside.