In a Hollow Space

A Hollow Space 
By Elodie Pritchartt

"The big sweetgum by the front gate finally died." 

Every death affected him these days, animal or vegetable. 

"Oh, really?" I answered, still unaware of its significance in the scheme of things. 

"I took the tractor and went down to the gate to cut it down the other day." 

He crushed a pecan with a hammer. Shells skittered across the counter and spilled onto the floor.

"I hooked a cable onto it, up high so I could pull it down, you know?"

I nodded, having seen it done many times before. "

And then I went to cut a vee out so it'd fall the way I wanted it to. It's a big tree." 

I shuddered. He had no business pulling down trees like that sweetgum. He was eighty-two, and still doing the work of a younger man. But to tell him otherwise would be cruel. Better to let him die quick and violent than to take away his power. 

I remembered the time we brought the pony into town in the back of the Scout. The pony wouldn't budge. He was a stubborn brute with a mean streak. Finally, he reached down and picked up its front hooves and put them on the tailgate. Then he squatted down behind its hindquarters and lifted while we children watched, astonished, as muscles strained and bulged and 600 pounds of horse was heaved bodily into the truck bed.

Those boys are men now. They still talk about it in tones of marvel and wonder. 

"Well, when I started making the cut, I got about six inches in, and realized it was hollow. So I worried that it might not fall the way I wanted. I called Power & Light and told them they’d better send some people out to cut it down. It could fall the other way and bring down those lines out on the road. You know?"

I nodded, quiet."It was the weekend. So I left it hooked to the tractor 'til they came out on Monday. They brought a crane and cut it off at the top, got it down to a manageable size. Then they said, 'Let's go ahead and pull it down with the tractor.' So we pulled it over. It broke about halfway up the trunk. And you know? It was the strangest thing." 

"What was?"

"When it broke, the front half of the trunk fell off, but left the rest of the tree standing. And inside the trunk, about six feet up, was a horseshoe hanging on a nail."

"You're kidding." 

"No. You should've seen the look on the faces of those men. That tree had to be over a hundred years old. And it was solid, all the way around. No knotholes, nothing. And six inches thick. "

I had to see. Before we left the house, he put the cat outside. 

“Oh, no,” he said as he opened the door. “There’s a dead chipmunk out here. One of the cats probably killed it.”

“He's brought you a present.”  I smiled. He didn't. 

“I wish they wouldn’t. They’re cute little things and I hate to see them dead.” 

It surprised me to see him so upset over a chipmunk. I could remember when we were little, and he’d come home with a deer he’d killed. He’d hang it from the rafters in the barn, make a cut all the way around its neck and set a hook into the skin. He’d attach a chain to the hook and attach the other end to the bumper of the Scout. Then he’d back the Scout up, pulling the skin clean off the deer. It was quick and bloody with a thick, coppery smell that hung in the air. He didn’t give it a second thought. 

Now he spent his days putting out salt licks and corn, and chasing off anyone who dared try to poach a deer, in season or no. It was late afternoon and the light was slanting at sharper angles, sending shadows out across the field. We stopped by the workshop in the woods.

"See that metal post right there?" 

"Yes." 

"Okay, now look over there."

He pointed to another post some distance away. 

“Those two posts are forty feet apart. If you take a string and tie it between the posts and measure 20 feet, that's where you'll find the water line for the house. I know because it broke one time and I had a heck of a time trying to find it. When I did, I made sure to mark it. I couldn't mark the exact point because it's in the roadbed, but you measure, and that's where it is. I'm probably the only person who knows that."

He sighed and his shoulders seemed to sag.

"You’re going to need to know these things when I’m gone.”

I nodded but couldn’t speak. 

“You know, when people die, it really doesn't matter who they were or what they did. They're only remembered by the few people who knew them, and once those people are gone, you’re forgotten. It's like you were never here at all." 

I knew he was right. I’d thought it, myself, on occasion. We spied two deer eating acorns under the oaks before they saw us and fled for the woods. 

"Brandon died day before yesterday."

“Oh, no. ” 

Brandon was the golden retriever he’d rescued a couple of years ago. He couldn’t stand seeing a dog without a home and he now had a pack of about 14 dogs. At least two or three times a day, they’d gather in the front yard. One would begin with short, high yips and within a moment the others would join in, howling and yipping at ghosts.  Brandon had been a steady quiet, companion who never complained. 

“Remember how he chased after the car the last time you were here? A few days later he just lay down and died. He seemed just fine, and then he died.”

I wondered how old he'd been.  We stopped beneath the oaks from which the deer had fled. He showed me how to tell the difference between a buck and a doe.

“The scat the doe leaves looks like little round balls, like pebbles. See?” 

I looked.

“Now, look over here. This is a buck.”

Several mounds of scat, larger than the first, like little mushrooms bloomed beneath the tree among the acorns and the leaves. I thought about all the lessons I’d missed by moving so far away. 

By the gate, the trunk still stood as he'd left it. I looked down into the hollow. Twisted through the trunk was some ancient barbed wire that emerged again on the outside of the tree.

"Only thing I can figure," he said, "is somebody hung that shoe on that fence a hundred or more years ago, and the tree just grew around it." 

He reached in and pulled out the shoe where he'd hung it. 

"Well, I'll be," I said, shaking my head. I wondered why the shoe hadn't become embedded in the tree. Who had put that shoe on the nail? How long had they been gone? Does anyone remember them? I tried to remember when barbed wire was invented. How many people had come and gone since that day? 

I remembered the arrowheads we'd found in the lakebed a few years before, just feet from that spot. 

"I'm tired," he said. "I don't know why I'm always tired lately." 

We started back to the house so he could lie down for awhile in the cool of the evening.

The Forest in Fall

She walks in dappled brown.
The trees, emboldened in
their bare embrace,
reach down, carress
her freckled frown
from their anchored
heights to touch her face

A pile of tiny bones,
ivory needles in forgotten
threads.  Small
among the roots and 
acorns put away,
peek out and shudder.
Hides itself away.

Circled round like fiddlefern,
tiny boxes -- vertebrae --
soft as chalk
and fragile whisper
under baby's breath,
"Don't leave."

She kneels, blinded by the dapples
darting through the trees
that sigh and shiver.
Enchanted by its size,
she lies beside it gently
Closes her eyes and smiles.

Cherry Grove

Cherry Grove: A Ghost Tale

All around the old place,

the dead visit. The

day he opened up the trunk

of that sweetgum tree,

and before we saw the

horseshoe hanging inside,

something brushed against

my face. I heard a nickering

far away, and the smell of oiled

leather and candlewax.

A few days later Lloyd

found an anvil half

inside an oak tree, back

by the old barn. It was ten

feet up that tree, and

the color of storm clouds

when the air smells like metal

and electricity breaks

it right in two. They say

a shipwright lived

there once. I know.

I've heard him hammering.

That was before the rumor 

of the slave revolt across 

the road. Nineteen men killed, 

tortured, all for the sake 

of a child's tale. A child

named Obey. No excuses.

The crape myrtle we cleared from

the back forty bled claret-

colored sap, and stuck inside

one old, stubborn knot

was a skeleton key.

The silver lying all around,

tarnished forks and bone-

china plates. Papa said

she burnt that house a’purpose,

took the tram to the train

and left town. Nobody

Ever saw her again.

But to be frank, I don't

believe it.

I saw her walking in the fog

one morning, early. Picking bones,

rearranging bricks,

breaking twigs over and over.

She saw me too.

We've been talking

back and forth, she and I,

between the branches.

~ Elodie Pritchartt

More on South-West by a Yankee - Treatment of Slaves 1835

A description of Natchez, written in 1835 by Joseph Holt Ingraham.
Offered without comment:

"Many of the planters are northerners.  When they have conquered their prejudices, they become thorough, driving planters, generally giving themselves up to the pursuit more devotedly than the regular-bred planter.  Their treatment of the slaves is also far more rigid.

Northerners are entirely unaccustomed to their habits, which are perfectly understood and appreciated by southerners, who have been familiar with Africans from childhood; whom they have had for their nurses, play-fellows, and "bearers," and between whom and themselves a reciprocal and very natural attachment exists, which on the gentleman's part, involuntarily extends to the whole dingy race, exhibited in a kindly feeling and condescending familiarity, for which he receives gratitude in return.

On the part of the slave, this attachment is manifested by an affection and faithfulness which only cease with life.  Of this state of feeling, which a southern life and education can only give, the northerner knows nothing.  Inexperience leads him to hold the reins of government over his novel subjects with an unsparing severity, which the native ruler of the domestic colonies finds wholly unnecessary.

The slave always prefers a southern master, because he knows that he will be understood by him.  His kindly feelings toward and sympathies with slaves as such, are as honourable to his heart as gratifying to the subjects of them. He treats with suitable allowance those peculiarities of their race, which the unpracticed northerner will construe into idleness, obstinacy, laziness, revenge, or hatred.

There is another cause for their difference of treatment to their slaves.  The southerner, habituated to their presence, never fears them, and laughs at the idea.  It is the reverse with the northerner:  he fears them, and hopes to intimidate them by severity."





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Southwest by a Yankee

Cocodrie Bayou

I drive through miles
of cotton fields.
White tufts erupt
from bolls
like butterflies
from cocoons.

The Louisiana
delta spreads out,
offers herself
like a lover
with secrets.

She sings primitive
salutations to the sun,
gospels of slaves.

On one side, the fields;
on the other, dark, wooded swamp.

Palmettos punctuate the gloom.
Cypress and still water.

Mounds built by Indians
who weren't from India,
after all, remind me.


This place is ancient.

My father brought me hunting here.
His father brought him.
I miss them.

It seems so
long ago, but it is only an
instant, and I am
just passing through.

I am a storm in summer,
all rush and splash, bluster
and boom,
sudden but brief, leaving only
vapor when I'm gone.

Elodie Pritchartt
09/25/12

Fake News by Vernon Rust

Vernon Rust

There are writers, and then there are storytellers.  Vernon Rust KNOWS how to tell a story, and his memoire, Fake News is filled with them.  Good stories, and true:

"WHEN I WOKE UP IN HOSPITAL, I COULD'NT move my arms or legs.  Oh, I wasn't paralyzed or anything . . . I was in four point restraints flat to the bed on my back.

OBVIOUSLY a victim of mistaken insanity...as this only happens to crazy people, and after all, I, Vernon Rust of mediocre and fleeting songwriter fame, was a lot of things...but insane?

Insane? Mentally incompetent? Honestly?

That's just CRAZY talk! (however, several Doctors and judges seemed convinced enough otherwise to keep me a month or so, ...just to make sure)"

When a book starts like that, I've just GOT to read on.  And I did, almost in one sitting.

I discovered Vernon on a friend's Facebook page.  He was telling one of his impossibly good stories.  So I started following him, and was lucky enough to score a reader's copy of his book.  His stories are gritty and funny, and Rust makes no attempt to whitewash his past, which is punctuated with abusive fathers, illicit drugs, country music stars, rock-and-roll, creative genius, true love, financial highs and lows that are as high and as low as you can get.

Through it all, Rust maintains an optimism, a sense of humor and the wisdom that only one who has lived it all can have.  Rust is a country-music songwriter, and this book is a country-music masterpiece.  I recommend this book unreservedly.  Read it.  You’ll like it.  I promise. To purchase Fake News, go here.

To hear Vernon perform his songs, go here.

Southwest by a Yankee

Painting: Circa 1835 Natchez on the Hill by James Tooley

So a couple of days ago, I typed "Natchez" into the search engine on eBay and came across a two-volume book written in 1835 called Southwest by a Yankee by Joseph Holt Ingraham. It's a description of New Orleans and Natchez, and it's really quite wonderful.

So I wrote my friend Mimi Miller, who heads the Historic Natchez Foundation and told her of my find. She replied that Joseph Holt Ingraham wrote her absolute favorite description of Natchez in that selfsame book.

I'll make a few blog posts as I'm reading along. I honestly think that the closest thing to immortality is in writing your thoughts and leaving those behind. I feel as though I'm inside the writer's experience. It's wonderful. A trip through space and time.

So, for my first share, I give you Ingraham's observations of fellow travelers on a steamboat headed from New Orleans to Natchez.  He was talking about con men, who cruised the river, never on the same boat, lest they be recognized.  Then his attention was drawn to a pious woman:

  "Even the sanctity of the Sabbath is no check to this amusement:  all day yesterday the tables were surrounded with players, at two of which they were dealing "faro;" at the third playing "brag."  And this was on the Sabbath!  Indeed the day was utterly disregarded by every individual on board.  Travelling is a sad demoralizer.  My fellow-passengers seemed to have adopted the sailors' maxim, "no Sunday off soundings."  Their religion was laid by for shore use.  One good, clever-looking old lady, was busily engaged all the morning hemming a handkerchief; when someone remarked near her, "This time last Sunday we made the Balize."

"______ Sunday!  to-day Sunday!" she exclaimed, in the utmost consternation, "Is to-day Sunday, sir?"

"It is, indeed, madam."

"Oh, me!  What a wicked sinner I am!  O dear, that I should sew on Sunday!" ---- and away she tottered to her state-room, amidst the pitiless laughter of the passengers, with both hands elevated in horror and ejaculating,  "Oh, me!  What a wicked sinner!  How could I forget!"



All I can say is I LOVE it!